"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." from his Minima Moralia is known as Adorno's most famous maxim: "There is no correct living in false [living]." The sentence is elliptical, the last in the 18th mini-essay 'Asyl für Obdachlose' (Asylum for Homeless [People]) of Part 1 of the book. One interpretation of the maxim is that it concerns how "private life" (Privatleben) in a "social order" (Gesellschaftsordnung) mediated by "private property" (Privateigentum) is forced to be led 'falsely'.
But the situation is more dire: es gibt kein wahres Leben im verstellten — there is no true living in an untrue world in which the phenomena are fundamentally distorted or hidden altogether. The ambiguity of the phenomena allows the mind, i.e. our historically shared mind, to be caught in a thoroughly topsy-turvy world. The inversion and the resulting blindness are painless, the delusion near-perfect.
Freedom is fused and confused with subjugation. A veneer of freedom covers up a relentless global law of movement in a medium that remains, even today, invisible (thus 'untrue') for the mind. It is insufficient to speak merely of private property and the freedom individuals enjoy exercising their private property rights, and then point out the many kinds of exploitation that private property ownership enables. One has to ask what the essence of private property is.
There is a fundamental difference between the correctness of facts and the truth of phenomena. Understood philosophically, Adorno's maxim can be paired with another one reminiscent of Hegel: "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre." ("The whole is the untrue." Part 1, 29 last sentence) The essence, itself remaining hidden, shows itself on the surface of the whole in correct facts that cover up its truth. One indication of this inversion is Adorno's famous term "Verblendungszusammenhang", in which 'Verblendung' means 'blindness' or 'delusion'. The definition of this term given in Duden reads:
"der Zusammenhang zwischen gesellschaftlichem Sein u. daraus sich bildenden falschen Vorstellungen vom Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft"
"the connection between social being and false ideas about the essence of bourgeois society arising therefrom"
This provokes the question: What is the truth of our social being in today's society? Or: what is the truth of our mode of sociation in this historical form of society that goes under various names, including modern industrial society, liberal democracy or bourgeois-capitalist society?
And the "false ideas"? Above all, that in our painless blindness we con ourselves that we're free in (what remains of) the so-called Free World. Free, above all, as individual players to engage in the competitive gainful game — either as winners or as losers, blind to the law of movement of the global Medium and its sweet poison seeping into every last existential cranny.
It's not just that we are desubjectified as mere cogs in the 'capitalist machine' and could one day overcome our 'objectification' to become the collective subject in charge of social material production and reproduction. It's that we have to question and recast who we are from the ground up, eschewing worn-out, pat, traditional answers. No freedom without truth, which has to be wrested from distortions through to utter hiddenness.
Further reading: Theodor W. Adorno Minima Moralia Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1951/1980.
Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.
An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.
Capitalocene & The global law of movement.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
