Inter pares. – [Latin: among equals] In the realm of erotic qualities, a revaluation seems to be occurring. Under liberalism, well into our day, married men from high society who were unsatisfied with their strictly brought up and correct spouses absolved themselves in the company of female artists, bohemians, sugar babies [ süsse Mädeln: sweet maidens] and cocottes. With the rationalization of society this possibility of unregimented happiness has disappeared. The cocottes are extinct, the sugar babies probably never existed in Anglo-Saxon countries and other lands of technical civilization, while the female artists and those bohemians who exist parasitically in the mass culture are so thoroughly permeated with the latter’s reason, that those who flee in longing to their anarchy, to the free accessibility of their own use-value, are in danger of waking up to the obligation of engaging them as assistants, if not at least recommending them to a film-executive or scriptwriter they know. The only ones who are still capable of something like irrational love are precisely those ladies who the spouses once fled on excursions to Maxim’s [Maxim: famous restaurant in Paris]. While they are as tiresome to their own husbands, due to the latter’s fault, as their own mothers, they are at least capable of granting to others, what all others have withheld from them. The long since frigid libertine represents business, while the proper and well brought up lady represents yearning and unromantic sexuality. In the end, the ladies of society garner the honor of their dishonor, in the moment when there is no more society and no more ladies. 13 One should never stint on deletions. Length doesn’t matter and the fear that there isn’t enough there is childish. One shouldn’t consider anything worth preserving, just because it’s written down. If several sentences seem to vary the same thought, this usually indicates several variations of something the author has not yet mastered. In that case one should select the best formulation and work on it further. The toolkit [ Technik] of an author should include the capacity to renounce productive thoughts, so long as the construction demands it. The wealth and energy of these latter ultimately come to benefit suppressed thoughts. Rather like the banquet-table, where one shouldn’t eat every last crumb or drink to the dregs. Otherwise one might be accused of stinginess. Far from the firing-line. –Reports of air raids seldom fail to mention the names of the firms which manufactured the aircraft: Fokker-Wolf, Heinkel, and Lancaster appear where one once talked about cuirassiers, lancers and hussars. The mechanism of the reproduction of life, its exploitation and annihilation, is immediately the same, and industry, the state and advertising are fused accordingly. The old exaggeration of skeptical liberals, that war is merely a business, has come true: the power of the state has given up even the appearance [ Schein] of independence from particular profit interests and puts itself into the latter’s service, which it always did in reality, now ideologically as well. Every glowing mention of the chief firm involved in the razing of cities enhances its good calling, for whose sake the best contracts for the reconstruction are doled out.

In Hegel, self-consciousness was the truth of self-certainty, according to the words of the Phenomenology [ of Spirit], the “native realm of truth.” No sooner had they ceased to understand that, than the bourgeoisie were self-conscious at least in the pride that they owned property. Today self-conscious [in English in original] means only the reflection on the ego as an embarrassment, as the innervation of powerlessness: to know, that one is nothing.Adorno doesn't have the illusion that rightist leaders could be converted to join the conversation. That thought would certainly have made the generation that experienced World War II frown. Instead, he recommends clearly pointing out the consequences of far-right politics, theirdestructive aspects and consequences. Most of all, he wants youth to draw away from these movements — and that, in retrospect, was something that worked quite well at the time. True Love is no longer within Maslove's old Hierarchy of Needs. Because Moralia must now be Minima.

The others with whom we share our lives, on the other hand are VALUABLE to us. Through them we Regain Value - OBJECTIVELY... He wants to clearly reveal the impasse of modern man. But he has proved to me that my way of overcoming that impasse in myself has worked. Skepticism against the oft-cited objection, that a text, a formulation would be “too beautiful.” The reverence for the matter [ Sache: thing, philosophic matter], or even for suffering, can easily rationalize the resentment against those who find, in the reified shape of language, the traces of something unbearable, which befalls human beings: debasement. The dream of an existence [ Dasein: existence, being] without shame, to which the passion for language clings, even though the latter is forbidden to depict the former as content, is to be maliciously strangled. The author should make no distinction between beautiful and factual [ sachlichem: factual, objective, realistic] expression. One should neither entrust this distinction to concerned critics, nor tolerate it in oneself. If one succeeds in completely saying what one means, then it is beautiful. The beauty of expression for its own sake is by no means “too beautiful,” but ornamental, artsy, ugly. Yet whoever leaves off from the purity of the expression, under the pretext of unswervingly stating the facts, thereby betrays the matter [ Sache] too. The book takes its title from Magna Moralia, a work on ethics that was traditionally attributed to Aristotle, though modern scholarly consensus attributes it to a later, though sympathetic, writer. According to scholar Peter E. Gordon, Adorno felt tremendous guilt at "the very fact" that he had escaped the Nazi regime and survived. "The book's subtitle is a record of this unhealed wound, a bitter confession that even to write about individual experience suggests a complicity with 'unspeakable collective events'." [4] Book overview [ edit ]

The silent din, long familiar to us from our dream-experiences, blares in our waking hours from the newspaper headlines.

The immediate occasion for writing this book was the fiftieth birthday of Max Horkheimer on February 14, 1945. The composition transpired in a phase in which, due to external circumstances, we had to interrupt our common work. The book wishes to proffer thanks and fidelity, by refusing to recognize the interruption. It is testimony to a dialogue interiéur [French: internal dialogue]: there is no motif herein, which does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to the person who found the time for formulation.That the prayer for our daily bread has, in view of the existence of bread factories, become a mere metaphor and simultaneously lucid despair, says more against the possibility of Christianity than all the enlightened critiques of the life of Jesus. Even the most impoverished person is capable of recognizing the weaknesses of the most powerful; even the dumbest, the mental errors of the most clever. In the memory of emigration, every German venison roast tastes as if it was freshly felled by the Freischuetz. But only our MAXIMA MORALIA - our commitment to real human kindness - will give us Love again, and only through the Grace of God. If that, for you, calls for a kinda Situation Ethics, so be it, but let's weigh that fluffiness on the balance!