Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press, Boston. 1955.
This book is dense with psychological terms, some of which I will attempt to define here. I do not pretend to fully understand them, nor do I have the ability to synthesize them into a coherent overall message. I nevertheless sense that Marcuseâs work directly addresses the main themes of this website.
Many of these terms come from Freudâs âBeyond the Pleasure Principle,â 1920. Eros and Civilization is largely Marcuseâs response to this work, as well as Freudâs later trilogy âThe Future of an Illusion,â âCivilization and its Discontents,â and âMoses and Monotheism.â
Pleasure Principle: The immediate, often unconscious satisfaction of instinctual desires. The driving force of the Id. The basic desire for pleasure over pain, or immediate pleasure over delayed pleasure.
Reality Principle: The ability of the ego to control/delay pleasure (immediate gratification) in the interest of the long term health of both the individual and the community. It is, according to Freud is the very precondition of the progress of civilization. It can be understood as reason over passion, rational over emotional.
Performance Principle: Work in a capitalist society extends itself beyond what is required for the satisfaction of the worker to what will maximize profit for the capitalist. The âpre-established functionâ of the worker is to produce commodities and maximize profit for the capitalist. Being used by the apparatus requires conformity with the apparatus. This is what Marcuse means by the performance principle. Members of society must perform according to the dictates of their pre-established function. This performance requires the restriction of the libido. The worker must be manipulated in such a way so that these restrictions seem to function as rational, external objective laws which are then internalized by the individual. The desires of the individual must conform to the desires of the apparatus. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/)
According to Marcuse, it is the dominant form of the reality principle in modern, industrial, capitalist society. We delay/constrain our basic individual needs to secure the constant growth of progress/civilization/the Whole, or rather, we are persuaded to do so/duped into doing so by the corporate/advertising/entertainment conglomerate.
Nirvana Principle: the tendency for the quantity of energy in the mental apparatus to reduce to zero, or the principle of the mental apparatus âof extinguishing, or at least of maintaining at as low a level as possible, the quantities of excitation flowing into it,â or a tendency expressing âthe effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension due to stimuli.â Related to Thanatos. the death instinct. Borrowed from the Buddhist concept of Nirvana - the extinction of the cycle of desire, suffering, and sense of individual self, to a place of transcendent rest.
Basic Repression: the type of repression or modification of the instincts that is necessary âfor the perpetuation of the human race in civilizationâ (Marcuse 1955: 35). At this level repression does not lend itself to domination or oppression. That is, the repression of the immediate satisfaction of the Id instincts when it benefits greater society, as determined by the ego.
Surplus Repression: âthe restrictions necessitated by social dominationâ (Marcuse 1955: 35). The purpose of surplus repression is to shape the instincts in accordance with the present âperformance principleâ which is âthe prevailing form of the reality principle.â Surplus Repression is alienated labor. While there is a certain amount of work necessary for the maintenance of life, âsurplus workâ maintains the institution, the bureaucratic machine, the capitalist system which must be in a constant state of growth to continue, but it does not maintain the individual. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/)
The three main components of the Psyche/Personality, as developed by Freud -
Id: âunorganized impulses of the instinctsâ
Ego: âconscious awareness, the âIâ, the mediator between Id and Superegoâ
Superego: âinternalization of cultural rules/morals, the conscience, our multiple social personalitiesâ
Some basic psychoanalytical terms (these occur mainly unconsciously/without conscious awareness) -
Sublimation: Diverting (Id) impulses into more socially acceptable behaviors/goals, which is the continuous work of the ego, allowing for culturally acceptable behavior and for the progress of higher civilized states
Introjection: Replicating traits or behaviors of others/the outside world in order to better âfit in.â Leads to the formation of the Superego. Similar to Incorporation - uniting with the whole. Similar to Internalization, which involves more conscious awareness.
Identification: Assimilating attributes of another, as in an influential model. Most common is children behaving like the same sex parent
Psychoanalytical terms borrowed from Ancient Greece -
Eros: Life force, creativity, love, the will to live
Thanatos: Death instinct, impulse to destroy/conquer/subdue
Logos: the Reason/Rationality that organizes/governs the universe. Original, etymological meaning âword, account, opinion, speech.â
One other note:
Upon reading through this book, you will see that Marcuse was writing too early in the world of anthropological research to understand the problem of the Western/Euro-centric view of primitive peoples, as shown by his repetition of combining the word âmatureâ with the word âcivilizationâ as well as the word âimmatureâ with âprimitive.â
The fallacy that primitive peoples are/were somehow backward, and not yet sufficiently evolved to the wonderful heights of civilization - of nuclear war, genocide, of arbitrarily bureaucratic political and corporate organizations, of the systematic and calculated design of socioeconomic inequality, of alienated and regimented education and labor, of the mass malaise of marketing and entertainment industries, etc - is of course, a central theme of this website.
This is an unfortunate leftover from Freud, and early anthropologists - that the development of an immature child into a mature adult can be equated with the development of immature primitive peoples into mature modern peoples. The fact that modern peoples have killed off most primitive peoples was supposed to be proof of the superiority (i.e. maturity) of modern peoples. After all, we had to justify their murder and general disappearance from the earth by convincing ourselves of their backward, ungodly ways, in relation to our enlightened, divinely sanctioned destiny. Modern anthropology has dispelled this myth, hopefully completely. And one of the chief aims of this website is to show how absurd that old myth is, and how it makes more sense to stand it completely on its head. We appear to be âdevolvingâ into immaturity as a species, as implied, for one, by the wanton destruction of our home. The more disjunct our relationship with Nature becomes, the more diseased, both biologically and emotionally, our species becomes.
Perhaps what Marcuse misses in his anthropological correctness, he gains in his Chomsky-esque prophesizing of the problems inherent in the techno-industrial-marketing-entertainment machine. If Marcuse is a generation behind himself anthropologically, he is at least a generation ahead with social issues.
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Political Preface 1966
(xii) As the affluence of society depends increasingly on the uninterrupted production and consumption of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of production, the individuals have to be adapted to these requirements in more than the traditional ways. The âeconomic whipâ even in its most refined forms, seems no longer adequate to insure the continuation of the struggle for existence in todayâs outdated organization, nor do the laws and patriotism seem adequate to insure active popular support for the ever more dangerous expansion of the system. Scientific management of instinctual needs has long since become a vital factor in the reproduction of the system: merchandise whichhis to be bought and used is made into objects of the libido; and the national Enemy who has to be fought and hated is distorted and inflated to such an extent that he can activate and satisfy aggressiveness in the depth dimension of the unconscious. Mass democracy provides the political paraphernalia for effectuating this introjection of the Reality Principle; it not only permits the people (up to a point) to chose their own masters and to participate (up to a point) in the government which governs them - it is also allows the masters to disappear behind the technological veil of the productive and destructive apparatus which they control, and it conceals the human (and material) costs of the benefits and comforts which it bestows upon those who collaborate. The people, efficiently manipulated and organized, are free; ignorance and impotence, introjected heteronomy is the price of their freedom.
- âintrojected heteronomyâ - governed by external forces, conformity
- Fromm, Escape From Freedom
(xiv) Liberation of the instinctual needs for peace and quiet, of the âasocialâ autonomous Eros presupposes liberation from repressive affluence: a reversal in the direction of progress.
(xv) No philosophy, no theory can undo the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects.
(xvii) The body against âthe machineâ - not the mechanism constructed to make life safer and milder, to attenuate the cruelty of nature, but against the machine which has taken over the mechanism: the political machine, the corporate machine which has welded blessing and curse into one rational whole.
(xvii) Historical backwardness may again become the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress in another direction. Technical and scientific overdevelopment stands refuted when the radar-equipped bombers, the chemicals, and the âspecial forcesâ of the affluent society are let loose on the poorest of the earth, on their checks, hospitals, and rice fields. The âaccidentsâ reveal the substance: they tear the technological veil behind which the powers are hiding. The capability to overkill and to overburn, and the mental behavior that goes with it are by-products of the development of the productive forces within a system of exploitation and repression; they seem to become more productive the more comfortable the system becomes to its privileged subjects. The affluent society has now demonstrated that it is a society at war; if its citizens have not noticed it, its victims certainly have.
(xix) The spread of guerrilla warfare at the height of the technological century is a symbolic event: the energy of the human body rebels against intolerable repression and throws itself against the engines of repressionâ¦their freedom is the contradiction to the overdeveloped societies.
(xx) There is no reason why science, technology, and money should not again do the job of destruction, and then the job of reconstruction in their own imageâ¦The strange myth according to which the unhealing wound can only be healed by the weapon that afflicted the wound has not yet been validated in history: the violence which breaks the chain of violence may start a new chain.
(xx) .it is not a bad life for those who comply and repress.
(xxii) In the course of automation, the value of the social product is to an increasingly smaller degree determined by the labor time necessary for its production. Consequently, the real social need for productive labor declines, and the vacuum must be filled with unproductive [or destructive] activities. An ever larger amount of the work actually becomes superfluous, expendable, meaninglessâ¦the system has to provide for occupation without work; it has to develop needs which transcend the market economy and may even be incompatible with it.
(xxiv) Today, the opposition to war and military intervention strikes at the roots; it rebels against those whose economic and political dominion depends on the continued (and enlarged) reproduction of the military establishment, its âmultipliers,â and the policies which necessitate this reproduction. These interests are not hard to identify, and the war against them does not require missiles, bombs, and napalm. But it does require something that is much harder to produce - the spread of uncensored and unmanipulated knowledge, consciousness, and above all, the organized refusal to continue work on the material and intellectual instruments which are now being used against man - being used for the defense of the liberty and prosperity of those dominate the rest.
(xxv) Their (youth) protest will continue because it is a biological necessityâ¦But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.
Preface to the First Edition
(1) The traditional borderlines between psychology on the one side and political and social philosophy on the other have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era: formerly autonomous and identifiable psychical processes are bing absorbed by the function of the individual state - by his public existence. Psychological problems therefore turn into political problems; private disorder reflects more directly than before the disorder of the whole, and the cure of personal disorder depends more directly than before on the cure of the general disorder. The era tends to be totalitarian even where it has not produced totalitarian states.
Introduction
(3) Freudâs proposition that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts has been taken for granted⦠[According to Freud], Free gratification of manâs instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress. âHappiness,â said Freud, âis no cultural value.â Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as full time occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expression, is culture.
The sacrifice has paid off well: in the technically advanced areas of civilization, the conquest of nature is practically complete, and more needs of a greater number of people are fulfilled than ever before. Neither the mechanization and standardization of life, nor the mental impoverishment, nor the growing destructiveness of present day progress provides sufficient ground for questioning the âprincipleâ which has governed the progress of Western civilization. The continual increase of productivity makes constantly more realistic the promise of an even better life for all. However, intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom. Throughout the world of industrial civilization, the domination of man by man is growing in scope and efficiency. Not does this trend appear as an incidental, transitory regression on the road to progress. Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs are no ârelapse into barbarism,â but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology, and domination. And the most effective subjugation and destruction of man by man takes place at the height of civilization, when the material and intellectual attainments of mankind seem to allow the creation of a truly free world. But Freudâs own theory provides reasons for rejecting his identification of civilization with repression.
(8) âCivilizationâ is used interchangeably with âculture,â as in Freudâs Civilization and Its Discontents.
- anthropological faux pas
Part One: Under the Rule of the Reality Principle Ch 1. The Hidden Trend in Psychoanalysis (11) Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservationâ¦the uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinctâ¦Civilization begins when the primary objective - namely, integral satisfaction of needs [pleasure principle] - is effectively renounced.
- Freud an unfortunate disciple of Hobbes on this. âcivilizationâ and âprogressâ may be a result of repression of the instincts, but âculture,â of course, is not.
(12) All psychoanalytical concepts (sublimation, identification, projection, repression, introjection) connote the mutability of the instincts. But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their needs and satisfaction is a socio-historial world.
- assuming that these Freudian concepts have complete âreality.â
(12) transformation of pleasure principle into reality principle corresponds with: immediate satisfaction to delayed satisfaction; pleasure to restraint of pleasure; joy (play) to toil (work); receptiveness to productiveness; absence of repression to security; unconscious processes to conscious processes.
(13) But the unrestrained please principle comes into conflict with the natural and human environment. The individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible. And after this experience of disappointment, a new principle of mental functioning gains ascendancy. The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but âassuredâ pleasure. Because of this lasting gain through renunciation and restrain, according to Freud, the reality principle âsafeguardsâ rather than âdethrones,â âmodifies,â rather than denies, the pleasure principle.
- interesting justification for the evolution of humans into techno-industrial modern life. Immediate satisfaction of (primal) instincts cannot last, or have lastingly positive effects on society, therefore, restraining them is what creates a reasonable society, modern society, techno-industrial society, that is, what we presently happen to find ourselves in. dubious.
- why is the force of âinstinctual gratificationâ destructive? Where is this posited in Freud and where is accepted elsewhere? Why is it accepted?
(15) If absence from repression is the archetype of freedom, then civilization is the struggle against this freedom.
(15) The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the great traumatic event in the development of man - in the development of the genus (phylogenesis) as well as of the individual (ontogenies). According to Freud, this event is not unique but recurs throughout the history of mankind and of every individual. Phylogenetically, it occurs first in the primal horde, when the primal father monopolizes power and pleasure and enforces renunciation on the part of the sons. Ontogenetically, it occurs during the period of early childhood, and submission to the reality principle in enforced by the parents and other educators. But, both on the generic and on the individual level, submission is continuously reproduced. The rule of the primal father is followed, after the first rebellion, by the rule of the sons, and the brother clan develops into institutionalized social and political domination. The reality principle materializes in a system of institutions. And the individual, growing up within such a system, learns the requirements of the reality principle as those of law and order, and transmits them to the next generation.
The fact that the reality principle has to be re-established continually in the development of man indicates that its triumph over the pleasure principle in never complete and never secure. In the Freudian conception, civilization does not once and for all terminate a âstate of nature.â What civilization masters and represses - the claims of the pleasure principle - continues to exist in civilization itself. The unconscious retains the objectives of the defeated pleasure principle.
- âprimal hordeâ a convenient mythical/theoretical invention of modern justification. see note at top concerning the fallacy of equating the âimmaturityâ of early humans with the immaturity of childhood
- âhas to be re-established continually,â how is this different than any cultural mores??
(16) Repression is a historical phenomenon. The effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed not by nature, but by man. The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization. But ever since the first, prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions. It is this mental dynamic which Freud unfolds as the dynamic of civilization.
- what a devastating critique of civilization itself, whether or not Freud intended it that way.
- played out most obviously in nazism, fascism, but also in the world of the corporate/entertainment complex that controls our western faux-democracy.
(16) According to Freud, the repressive modification of the instincts under the reality principle is enforced and sustained by the âeternal primordial struggle for existenceâ¦persisting to the present day.â Scarcity (Lebensnot, Ananke) teaches men that they cannot freely gratify their instinctual impulses, that they cannot live under the pleasure principle. Societyâs motive in enforcing the decisive modification of the instinctual structure is thus âeconomic; since it has not means enough to support life for its members without work on their part, it must see to it that the number of these members is restricted and their energies directed away from sexual activities [pleasure principle] on to their work.â (A General Introduction to Pyschoanalysis, 1943).
- Compare to endless studies of nature based societies, âwhy plant crops when everything we need is here in the jungle.â Or âthe plains and the buffalo provided everything we need.â Myth of scarcity, myth of subsistence - another theoretical leap posited by civilization-apologists. See Stone Age Economics, In Search of the Primitive, Wandering God, Donât Sleep There are Snakes, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, The Forest People, etc. In nature-based societies, where âeverything is provided,â it follows then that repression of the instincts is not necessary, therefore there is no need to âprogressâ to âcivilization.â Yet, see next quote below, (17).
- Many nature-based societies have no word for âwork.â According to Freud, they would then also be without âculture.â
- If these myths of scarcity and myths of progress and myths of âworkâ needed to âtameâ our otherwise destructive instincts are at the foundation of Freudâs theories, then donât the theories crumble at the realization of the invalidity of the myths??
- Thoreau, âI donât need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me.â
(17) The notion that a non-repressive civilization is impossible is a cornerstone of Freudian theory.
(20) Freudâs analysis of the development of the repressive mental apparatus proceeds on two levels:
(a) ontogenetic: the growth of the repressed individual from early infancy to his conscious societal existence. (b) phylogenetic: the growth of the repressive civilization from the primal horde to the fully constituted civilized state. The two levels are continuously interrelated. The interrelation is epitomized in Freudâs notion of the repressed in history: the individual re-experiences and re-enacts the great traumatic events in the development of the genus, the instinctual dynamic reflects throughout the conflict between individual and genus (between particular and universal) as well as the various solutions of this conflict.
- Eliade and Campbell-like. Instead of religious ritual (which Freud would denounce as childish), Freud posits individual psychological traumas as re-enactments of historical ones.
Ch 2. The Origin of the Repressed Individual (Ontogenesis)
(24) Freud cannot escape the suspicion that he has come upon a hitherto unnoticed âuniverse attribute of the instincts and perhaps organic life in general,â namely, âa compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external distributing forces,â a kind ofâ¦âinertia inherent in organic life.â (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933).
(29) The death instinct is destructive not for its own sake, but for the relief of tension.
(29) The id is free from the forms and principles which constitute the conscious, social individual. It is neither affected by time nor troubled by contradictions; it knows âno values, no good and evil, no moralityâ¦it does not aim at self preservation: all it strives for is satisfaction of instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle.â (New Introductory Lectures, and An Outline of Psychoanalysis).
- too easy to project this kind of psychological being onto âprehistoricâ human life (culture), and not anthropologically valid.
- if it were true, then how did âprehistoricâ humans achieve âself-preservationâ for 99% of our evolution, and how do animals continue to achieve it?? âSelf-preservationâ and âinstinctual needsâ may not be so mutually exclusive.
(30) Under the influence of the external world (the environment), a part of the id, which is equipped with the organs for the reception of and the protection from stimuli, gradually developed into the ego. It is the âmediatorâ between the id and the external world. Perception and consciousness are only the smallest and âmost superficialâ part of the ego, the part topographically closet to the external world; but by virtue of these instrumentalities (the âperceptual-conscious systemâ) the ego preserves its existence, observing and testing the reality, taking and preserving a âtrue pictureâ of it, adjusting itself to the reality, and alternating the latter in its own interest. Thus the ego has the task of ârepresenting the external world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id, blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces, could not otherwise escape annihilation.â (New Introductory Lectures). In fulfilling this task, the chief function of the ego is that of coordinating, altering, organizing, and controlling the instinctual impulses of the id so as to minimize conflicts with the reality: to repress impulses that are incompatible with the reality, to âreconcileâ others with the reality by changing their object, delaying or diverting their gratification, transforming their mode of gratification, amalgamating them with other impulses, and so on. In this way, the ego âdethrones the pleasure principle, which exerts undisputed sway over the process of the id, and substitutes for it the reality principle, which promises greater security and greater [longer lasting] success.â
- âcould not otherwise escape annihilation,â how then do animals, which are presumably all âid,â escape it??.many species for much longer than humans have avoided it??
(31) .in this way, the ego retains its birthmark as an outgrowth of the id. In relation to the id, the processes of the ego remain secondary processes. Nothing elucidates more strikingly the dependent function of the ego than Freudâs early formulation that all thinking âis merely a detour from the memory of gratification.â (The Interpretation of Dreams). The memory of gratification is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driving power behind the process of thought. Because the reality principle makes this process an unending series of âdetours,â the ego experiences reality predominantly as hostile, and the egoâs attitude is predominantly one of âdefense.â
- If all wild animals and if 99% of human evolution thrived without the ânecessary precondition of progress/civilization, namely the repression of the id/pleasure principle instincts, then doesnât it follow that it is the product of this repression, the work of the ego, the work of the reality principle, namely civilization, that is the actual threat to the human organism, and not, as Freud claims, the id/instincts??.
- In short, we were doing fine for hundreds of thousands of years, and it is only in the last couple hundred, since the techno-industrial machine (mechanical separation from nature), but also since agriculture (domesticating/manipulating plants and animals, 10,000 yrs ago) and modern science (intellectual separation from nature, 400 years ago) that our habitat, therefore our species is on the whole threatened with global environmental breakdown. Yet we ascribe the word âprogressâ to this.
(32) In the course of the development of the ego another mental âentityâ arises: the superego. It originates from the long dependency of the infant on his parents; the parental influence remains the core of the superego. Subsequently, a number of societal and cultural influences are taken in by there superego until it coagulates into the powerful representative of established morality and âwhat people call the âhigherâ things in life.â Now the âexternal restrictionâ which first the parents and then other societal agencies have imposed upon the individual are âintrojectedâ into the ego and become its âconscience;â henceforth, the sense of guilt - the need for punishment generated by the transgressions or by the wish to transgress these restrictions - permeates the mental life. âAs a rule the ego carries our the repressions in the service and at the behest of its superego.â (The Ego and the Id). However, the repression soon become unconscious, automatic as it were, and a âgreat partâ of the sense of guilt remains unconscious.
(32) This development by which originally conscious struggles with the demands of reality (the parents and their successors in the formation of the superego) are transformed into unconscious automatic relations, is of the utmost importance for the course of civilization. The reality principle asserts itself through a shrinking of the conscious ego in a significant direction: the autonomous development of the instincts is frozen, and their pattern is fixed a the childhood level.
(34) Freudâs generalization: that a repressive organization of the instincts underlies all historical forms of the reality principle in civilization. If he justifies the repressive organization of the instincts by the irreconcilability between the primary pleasure principle and the reality principle, [then] he expresses the historical fact that civilization has progressed as organized domination.
- S Diamond, âCivilization originates in repression at home and conquest abroad.â
(35) The Freudian terms [repression and reality principle], which do not adequately differentiate between the biological and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts, must be paired with corresponding terms denoting the specific socio-historical component. [Therefore]:
(a) surplus repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the âmodificationsâ of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization. [namely, the work of the pleasure principle being transformed/mitigated into the reality principle]. (b) performance principle: the prevailing historic form of the reality principle [which is alienated labor. The techno-industrial-capitalist machine grows only with institutionalized/surplus repression, which is lived by the individual as alienated labor.] Behind the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot), which means that the struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay. In other words, whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the procurement of the means for satisfying needs. For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is âsuspendedâ and pain prevails [the pain of âwork.â]. And since the basic instincts strive for the prevalence of pleasure and for the absence of pain, the pleasure principle is incompatible with [âcivilizedâ] reality, and the instincts have to undergo a repressive regimentation.
- the grand irony is that civilization itself creates this scarcity, as it seems to seldom exist in nature-based societies, and yet Freud projects it onto ânatureâ itself, unfortunately following the Hobbesian tradition. see (36) below.
- Thoreau: âwhy work at something that you donât want to do just to buy things that you donât need?â
(36) However, this argument, which looms large in Freudâs metapsychology, is fallacious in so far as it applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually is the consequence of a specific organization of scarcity, and of a specific existential attitude enforced by this organization. The prevalent scarcity has, throughout civilization (although in very different modes), been organized in such a way that it has not been distributed collectively in accordance with individual needs, nor has the procurement of goods for the satisfaction of needs been organized with the objective of best satisfying the developing needs of the individuals. Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals - first by mere violence, subsequently by a more rational utilization of power. However, no matter how useful this rationally was for the progress of the whole, it remained the rationality of domination, and the gradual conquest of scarcity was inextricably bound up with and shaped by the interest of domination. Domination differs from rational exercise of authority. The latter, which is inherent in any societal division of labor, is derived from knowledge and confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for the advancement of the whole. In contrast, domination is exercised by a particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged position. Such domination does not exclude technical, material, and intellectual progress, but only as an unavoidable by-product while preserving irrational scarcity, want, and constraint.
- difference between communal living and capitalist/individualist/competitive living.
(40) Throughout the recorded history of civilization, the instinctual constraint enforced by scarcity has been intensified by constraint enforced by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity and labor; the interest of domination added surplus-repression to the organization of the instincts under the reality principle. The pleasure principle was dethroned not only because it militated against progress in civilization but also because it militated against a civilization whose progress perpetuates domination and toil. Freud seems to acknowledge this fact when he compares the attitude of civilization toward sexuality with that of a tribe or a section of the population âwhich has gained the upper hand and is exploiting the rest to its own advantage. Fear of a revolt among the repressed then becomes a motive for even stricter regulations.â (Civilization and Its Discontents).
(44) Civilization plunges into a destructive dialectic: the perpetual restrictions on Eros ultimately weaken the life instincts and thus strengthen and release the very forces against which they were âcalled upâ - those of destruction.
(44) â¦the specific reality principle that has governed the origins and the growth of this civilizationâ¦we designate it as performance principle in order to emphasize that under its rules society is stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its members.
(45) The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposed a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social labor now reproduces society on an enlarged scale and under improving conditionsâ¦and it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienationâ¦labor time, which is the largest part of the individualâs life time, is painful time, for alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle.
(46) Repression disappears in the grand objective order of things which rewards more or less adequately the complying individuals and, in so doing, reproduces more or less adequately society as a whole.
(46) Under the rule of the performance principle, body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labor; they can function as such instruments only if they renounce the freedom of the libidinal subject-object which the human organism primarily is and desires. The distribution of time plays a fundamental role in this transformation. Man exists only part time, during the working days, as an instrument of alienated performance; the rest of the time he is free for himself.
(45 note) The irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labor (performance principle) and Eros.
(47) The basic control of leisure is achieved by the length of the working day itself, by the tiresome and mechanical routine of alienated labor; these require that leisure be a passive relaxation and a re-creation of energy for work.
- the purpose of recreation then, is to reboot/re-energize in order to be able to perform more work; to re-create work time/energy.
(48) Not until the late stage of industrial civilization, when the growth of productivity threatens to overflow the limits set by repressive domination, has the technique of mass manipulation developed an entertainment industry which directly controls leisure time, or has the state taken over the enforcement of such controls. The individual is not to be left alone. For left to itself, and supported by a free intelligence aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against it ever more extraneous limitations and strive to engulf an ever larger field of existential relations, thereby exploding the reality ego and its repressive performances.
(51) The entire progress of civilization is rendered possible only by the transformation and utilization of the death instincts or its derivatives. The diversion of primary destructiveness from the ego to the external world feeds technological progress, and the use of the death instinct for the formation of the superego achieves the punitive submission of the pleasure ego to the reality principle and assures civilized morality. In this transformation, the death instinct is brought into service of Eros; the aggressive impulses provide energy for the continuous alteration, mastery, and exploitation of nature to the advantage of mankind. In attacking, splitting, changing, pulverizing things and animals (and, periodically, also men), man extends his dominion over the world and advances to ever richer stages of civilization.
- Id satisfies its death instinct by the publicly accepted/encouraged domination over nature and oppressed/militarily weaker communities.
- both the death instinct and life instinct are satisfied by the process of destroying nature and recreating her into our own image, that is, converting natural resources into creations/monuments of progress, which we (unconsciously) understand as extensions of ourselves (E.T. Hall) - houses, cars, tall buildings, televisions, computers, etc. The alternative to this, of course, would be the primitive, nature-based societies which represent 99 % of human evolution, who, comparatively to modern western man of progress, do not aim to dominate, subdue, recreate nature.
(53) âIn the construction of the personality the destruction instinct manifests itself most clearly in the formation of the super-ego.â (The Psychoanalysis of the Total Personality, F Alexander). To be sure, by its defensive role against the âunrealisticâ impulses of the id, by its function in the lasting conquest of the Oedipus complex, the superego builds up and protects the unity of the ego, secures its development under the reality principle, and thus works in the service of Eros. However, the superego attains these objectives by directing the ego against its id, turning part of the destruction instincts against a part of the personality - by destroying, âsplittingâ the unity of the personality as a whole; thus it works in the service of the antagonist of the life instinct. This inner-directed destructiveness, moreover, constitutes the moral core of the mature personality. Conscience, the most cherished moral agency of the civilized individual, emerges as permeated with the death instinct.
(54) It is in this context that Freudâs metapsychology comes face to face with the fatal dialectic of civilization : the very progress of civilization leads to the release of increasingly destructive forces.
Ch 3. The Origin of Repressive Civilization (Phylogenesis)
(55) The superego is the heir of the Oedipus complexâ¦the âtrauma of birthâ releases the first expressions of the death instinct - the impulse to return to the Nirvana of the womb.
(57) Self-consciousness and reason, which have conquered and shaped the historical world, have done so in the image of repression, internal and external. They have worked as the agents of domination; the liberties which they have brought (and these are considerable) grew in the soil of enslavement and have retained the mark of their birth. These are the disturbing implications of Freudâs theory of personality. By âdissolvingâ the idea of the ego-personality into its primary components, psychology now bares the sub-individual and pre-individual factors which (largely unconscious to the ego) actually make the individual: it reveals the power of the universal in and over the individuals.
This disclosure undermines one of the strongest ideological fortifications of modern culture - namely, the notion of the autonomous individual.
- dependent origination, doctrine of no self (anatta).
(58) The mature ego of the civilized personality still preserves the archaic heritage of man.
(59) No part of Freudâs theory has been more strongly rejected than the idea of the survival of the archaic heritage - his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind from the primal horde through patricide to civilization.
(60) The memory of prehistoric impulses and deeds continues to haunt civilization: the repressed material returns, and the individual is still punished for the impulses long since mastered and deeds long since undone.
- âprehistoric impulsesâ are assumed to be negative??
- does the passage of time guarantee âmaturityâ?? myth of progress.
(60) If Freudâs hypothesis is not corroborated by any anthropological evidence, it would have to be discarded altogether except for the fact that it telescopes, in a sequence of catastrophic events, the historical dialect of domination and thereby elucidates aspects of civilization hitherto unexplained. We use Freudâs anthropological speculation only this sense: for its symbolic value.
- false premises cannot produce true conclusions. âsymbolicâ theoretical foundations cannot produce everyday, concrete existence.
(60) In Freudâs construction, the first human group was established and sustained by the enforced rule of one individual over all others. At one time in the life of the genus man, life was organized by domination. And the man who succeeded in dominating the others was the father.
- Good hypothetical psychology does not make good anthropology
- Freud blames the violent dominance of modern civilization on âprimitive instinctsâ. (see note under pg 31). Did âprimitive instinctsâ create agriculture, science, and the âtechno-industrial hordeâ??
(62) The father establishes domination in his own interest, but in doing so he is justified by his age, by his biological function, and (most of all) by his success: he creates that âorderâ without which the group would immediately dissolve.
(63) In Freudâs construction, this hatred [of patriarchal suppression] culminates in the rebellion of the exiled sons, the collective killing and devouring of the father, and the establishment of the brother clan, which in turn deifies the assassinated father and introduces those taboos and restraints which, according to Freud, generate social moralityâ¦civilization begins only in the brother clan, when the taboos, now self-imposed by the ruling brothers, implement repression in the common interest of preserving the group as a whole. And the decisive psychological event which separates the brother clan from the primal horde is the development of guilt feeling. Progress beyond the primal horde - i.e., civilization - presupposes guilt feeling: it introjects into the individuals, and thus sustains, the principle prohibitions, constraints, and delays in gratification on which civilization depends. (Moses and Monotheism).
(64) The rebellion against the father is rebellion against biologically justified authority.
- therefore, engendering authority based on reason/law, etc, i.e. âcivilization.â
(67) .polythesim cedes to monotheism, and then returns the âone and only father deity whose power is unlimited.â Sublime and sublimated, original domination, becomes eternal, cosmic, and good, and in this form guards the process of civilization. The âhistorical rightsâ of the primal father are restored [through the monotheistic God]. (Moses and Monotheism).
(69) Freud thought that he had found traces of the patricide and of its âreturnâ and redemption in the history of Judaism, which begins with the killing of Moses. The concrete implications of Freudâs hypothesis becomes clearer in his interpretation of anti-semitism. He believed that anti-semitism had deep roots in the unconscious: jealousy over the Jewish claim of being the âfirst born, favorite child of God the Father.â (Moses and Monotheism).
(71) It took centuries of progress and domestication before the return of the repressed was mastered by the power and progress of industrial civilization.
- when was this??
(72) Freudâs thesis in The Future of Illusionâ¦stressed the role of religion in the historical deflection of energy from the real improvement of the human condition to an imaginary world of eternal salvation. He thought that the disappearance of this illusion would greatly accelerate the material and intellectual progress of mankind, and he praised science and scientific reason as the great liberating antagonists of religionâ¦Within the total mobilization of man and nature which marks the period [of present civilization], science is one of most destructive instruments - destructive of that freedom from fear which it once promised.
Ch 4. The Dialectic of Civilization
(78) Freud attributes to the sense of guilt a decisive role in the development of civilization; moreover, he establishes a correlation between progress and increasing guilt feeling. He states his intention âto represent the sense of guilt as the important problem in the evolution of culture, and to convey that the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.â (Civilization and Its Discontents).
(78) We have briefly reviewed the prehistory of the sense of guilt; it has âits origin in the Oedipus complex and was acquired when the father was killed by the association of the brothers.â They satisfied their aggressive instinct; but the love which they had for the father caused remorse, created the superego by identification, and thus created the ârestrictions which should prevent a repetition of the deed.â (Civilization and Its Discontents). Subsequently, man abstains from the deed; but from generation to generation the aggressive impulse revives, directed against the father and his successors, and from generation to generation aggression has to be inhibited anew.
- and sublimated into socially justified war, oppression etc??
(80) As the father is multiplied, supplemented, and replaced by the authorities of society, as prohibitions and inhibitions spread, so do the aggressive impulse of its objects. and with it grows, on the part of society, the need for strengthening the defenses - the need for reinforcing the sense of guilt.
(81) Civilization is first of all progress in work - that is, work for the procurement and augmentation of the necessities of life. The work is normally without satisfaction in itself; to Freud it is unpleasurable, painful. In Freudâs metapsychology there is no room for an original âinstinct of workmanship, âmastery of instinct.â
- itâs common for primitive/nature-based societies to have no word for âworkâ
- âworkâ and âlaborâ is renunciation of what we would naturally prefer doing (direct participation in cycles/rituals of community), therefore constant denial/repression of natural instincts (chiefly the instinct to âbeâ in a meaningful community.)
(83) Culture [civilization] demands continuous sublimation; it thereby weakens Eros, the builder of cultureâ¦Civilization us thus threatened by an instinctual de-fusion, in which the death instinct strives to gain ascendency over life instincts. Originating in renunciation [of âprimitiveâ instincts] and developing under progressive renunciation, civilization tends toward self destruction.
(85) The development of technics and technological rationality absorbs to a great extent the âmodifiedâ destructive instinctsâ¦Technics provide the very basis for progress; technological rationality sets the mental and behaviorist pattern for productive performance, and âpower over natureâ has become practically identical with civilization [progress in civilization].
- Lewis Mumford, Edward T Hall
(85) To be sure, the diversion of destructiveness from the ego to the external world secured the growth of civilizationâ¦Nature is literally âviolated.â
- Bacon, Descartes, and the violent theoretical beginnings of modern science. Carolyn Merchantâs Death of Nature.
(87) The fact that the destruction of life (human and animal) has progressed with the progress of civilization, that cruelty and hatred and the scientific extermination of men have increased in relation to the real possibility of the elimination of oppression - this feature of late industrial civilization would have instinctual roots which perpetuate destructiveness beyond all rationality. The growing mastery of nature then would, with the growing productivity of labor, develop and fulfill the human needs only as a by-product: increasing cultural wealth and knowledge would provide the material for progressive destruction and the need for increasing instinctual repression.
(88) Freudâs three sources of human suffering: âthe superior force of nature, the disposition to decay of our bodies, and the inadequacy of our methods of regulation human relations in the family, the community, and the state.â (Civilization and Its Discontents).
(89) For Freud, is progress in civilization progress in freedom?
We have seen that Freudâs theory is focused on the recurrent cycle âdomination-rebellion-domination.â But the second domination is not simply a repetition of the first one; the cyclical movement is progress in domination. [also progress in rebellion?? why not??] From the primal father via the brother clan to the system of institutional authority characteristic of mature civilization, domination becomes increasingly impersonal, objective, universal, and also increasingly rational [ârationallyâ justified], effective, productive. At the end, under the rule of the fully developed performance principle, subordination appears as implemented through the social division of labor itself (although physical and personal force remains an indispensable instrumentality). Society emerges as a lasting and expanding system of useful performances; the hierarchy of functions and relations assumes the form of objective reason: law and order are identical with the life of society itself. In the same process, repression too is depersonalized: constraint and regimentation of pleasure now become a function (and ânaturalâ result) of the social division of laborâ¦the individualâs instincts are controlled through the social utilization of his labor power.
(92) The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalized repression since its inception, weakens as manâs knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil. The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources, but to the manner in which they are distributed and utilized.
- nature is better âcontrolledâ when society works with it, rather than against it.
(93) But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. If society cannot use its growing productivity for reducing repression (because such usage would upset the hierarchy of the status quo), productivity must be turned against the individuals; it becomes itself an instrument of universal control.
(98) At its peak, the concentration of economic power seems to turn into anonymity: everyone, even at the very top, appears to be powerless before the movements and laws of the apparatus itselfâ¦The masters no longer perform an individual function. The sadistic principals, the capitalist exploiters have been transformed into salaried members of a bureaucracy, whom their subjects meet as members of another bureaucracy.
(100) In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations - and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue - which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.
The ideology of today lies in that production and consumption reproduce and justify dominationâ¦The individual pays by sacrificing his time, his consciousness, his dreams; civilization pays by sacrificing its own promises of liberty, justice, and peace for all.
(101) The discrepancy between potential liberation and actual repression has come to maturity: it permeates all spheres of life the world over. The rationality of progress heightens the irrationality of its organization and directionâ¦The difference between war and peace, between civilian and military populations, between truth and propaganda, is blotted out.
(102) It is with a new ease that terror is assimilated with normality, and destructiveness with construction. Still, progress continues, and continues to narrow the basis of repression. At the height of its progressive achievements, domination not only undermines its own foundations, but also corrupts and liquidates the opposition against domination. What remains is the negativity of reason, which impels wealth and power and generates a climate in which the instinctual roots of the performance principle are drying up.
The alienation of labor is almost complete. The mechanics of the assembly line, the routine of the office, the ritual of buying and selling are freed from any connection with human potentialities. Work relations have become to a great extent relations between persons as exchangeable objects of scientific management and efficiency experts. To be sure, the still prevailing competitiveness requires a certain degree of individuality and spontaneity; but these features have become just as superficial and illusory as the competitiveness to which they belong. Individuality is literally in name only, in the specific representation of types (such as vamp, housewife, Ondine, he-man, career woman, struggling young couple).
- Sartreâs âwaiter who plays at being a waiter.â Modern societyâs demand for inauthentic behavior/existence.
(104) Happiness involves knowledge: it is the prerogative of the animal rationale. With the decline in consciousness, with the control of information, with the absorption of individual into mass communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all the others in a state of anesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded. And since knowledge of the whole truth is hardly conducive to happiness, such general anesthesia makes individuals happy. If anxiety is more than a general malaise, if it is an existential condition, then this so-called âage of anxietyâ is distinguished by the extent to which anxiety has disappeared from expression.
- the anxiety of progress, the hollowness of an unending goal, requiring unlimited and constant growth, in linear time.
Ch 5. Philosophical Interlude
(109) As the scientific rationality of western civilization began to bear its full fruit, it became increasingly conscious of its psychical implications. The ego which undertook the rational transformation of the human and natural environment revealed itself as an essentially aggressive, offensive subject, whose thoughts and actions were designed for mastering objects. It was a subject against an object. This a priori antagonistic experience defined the ego cogitans as well as the ego agens. Nature (its own as well as the external world) were âgivenâ to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and even violated - such was the precondition for self preservation and self development.
The struggle begins with the perpetual internal conquest of the âlowerâ faculties of the individual: his sensuous and appetitive faculties. Their subjugation is, at least since Plato, regarded as a constitutive element of human reason, which is thus in its very function repressive. The struggle culminates in the conquest of external nature, which must be perpetually attacked, curbed, and exploited in order to yield to human needs.
(111) The Logos shows forth as the logic of domination. When logic then reduces the units of thought to signs and symbols, the laws of thought have finally become techniques of calculation and manipulation.
- abstraction, objectification, depersonalization are necessary conditions for domination, oppression.
- Edward Saidâs Orientalism, âthe Other.â Sartre, Chomsky, etc.
(118) Western Philosophy ends with the idea with which it began. At the beginning and at the end, in Aristotle and and in Hegel, the supreme mode of being, the ultimate form of reason and freedom, appear as nous, spirit, Geist. At the end and at the beginning, the empirical world remains in negativity - the stuff and the tools of the spirit, or of its representatives on earthâ¦Between the beginning and the end is the development of reason as the logic of domination - progress through alienation.
- âSomething about the drama of annihilation seems to grip us.â Morgan Freeman, The Story of God.
(120) With the triumph of Christian morality, the life instincts were perverted and constrained; bad conscience was linked with a âguilt against God.â In the human instincts were planted âhostility, rebellion, insurrection against the âmaster,â âfather,â the primal ancestor and origin of the world.â (The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche). Repression and deprivation were thus justified and affirmed; they were made into the masterful and aggressive forces which determined the human existence. With their growing social utilization, progress became of necessity progressive repression.
(121) Nietzsche exposes the gigantic fallacy on which Western philosophy and morality were built - namely, the transformation of facts into essences, of historical into metaphysical conditions. The weakness and despondency of man, the inequality of power and wealth, injustice and suffering were attributed to some transcendental crime and guilt; rebellion become the original sin, disobedience against God; and the striving for gratification was concupiscence.
Moreover, this whole series of fallacies culminated in the deification of time: because everything in the empirical world is passing, man is in his very essence a finite being, and death is in the very essence of life. Only the higher values are eternal, and therefore really real. the inner man, faith and love which does not ask and does not desire. Nietzscheâs attempt to uncover the historical roots of these transformations elucidates their twofold function: to pacify, compensate, and justify the underprivileged of the earth, and to protect those who made and left them underprivileged. The achievement snowballed and enveloped the masters and the slaves, the rulers and the ruled, in that upsurge of productive repression which advanced Western civilization to ever higher levels of efficacy. However, growing efficacy involved growing degeneration of the life instincts - the decline of man.
- will to power in Nietzsche instead of âwill to pleasureâ
- why is âeternalâ equated with ârealâ?
(122) As long as there is the uncomprehended and unconquered flux of time - senseless loss, the painful âit wasâ that will never be again - being contains the seed of destruction which perverts good to evil and vice versa. Man comes to himself only when the transcendence has been conquered - when eternity has become present in the here and now. Nietzscheâs conception terminates in the vision of the closed circle - not progress, but the âeternal returnâ:
âAll things pass, all things return; eternally turns the wheel of Being. All things die, all things blossom again, eternal is the year of Being. All things break, all things are joined anew; eternally the house of Being builds itself the same. All things part, all things welcome each other again; eternally the ring of Being abides by itself. In each Now, Being begins; round each Here turns the sphere of There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the part of eternity.â (Thus Spake Zarathustra).
The closed circle has appeared before: in Aristotle and Hegel, as the symbol of being-as-end-in-itself. But while Aristotle reserved it to the nous theos, while Hegel identified it with the absolute idea, Nietzsche envisages the eternal return of the finite exactly as it is - in its full concreteness and finiteness. This is the total affirmation of the life instincts, repelling all escape and negation.
(124) We have suggested certain nodal points in the development of Western philosophy which reveal the historical limitations of its system of reason - and the effort to surpass this system. The struggle appears in the antagonism between becoming and being, between the ascending curve and the closed circle, progress and eternal return, transcendence and rest in fulfillment. It is the struggle between the logic of domination and the will to gratification. Both assert their claims for defining the reality principle. The traditional ontology is contested: against the conception of being in terms of Logos rises the conception of being in a-logical terms: will and joy. The countertrend stoves to formulate its own Logos: the logic of gratification.
- Eliadeâs The Myth of Eternal Return, cyclical, âprimitiveâ time vs linear time of modern civilization. Edward T Hallâs Beyond Culture.
(125) When philosophy conceives the essence of being as Logos, it is already the Logos of domination - commanding, mastering, directing reason, to which man and nature are to be subjected.
Part II: Beyond the Reality Principle
Ch 7. Phantasy and Utopia
(151) The historical factor contained in Freudâs theory of instincts has come to fruition in history when the basis of Ananke (Lebensnot) [Gr. necessary laws of nature, scarcity] - which, for Freud, provided the rationale for the repressive reality principle - is undermined by the progress of civilizationâ¦The reconciliation between pleasure and reality principle does not depend on the existence of abundance for all. The only pertinent question is whether a state of civilization can be reasonably envisaged in which human needs are fulfilled in such a manner and to such an extent that surplus repression can be eliminated.
Such a hypothetical state could be reasonably assumed at two points, which lie at opposite poles of the vicissitudes of the instincts: one would be located at the primitive beginnings of history, the other at its most mature stage. The first would refer to a non-oppressive distribution of scarcity (as may, for example, have existed in matriarchal phases of ancient society). The second would pertain to a rational organization of fully developed industrial society after the conquest of scarcityâ¦Under primitive conditions, alienation has not yet arisen because of the primitive character of the needs themselves, the rudimentary character of the division of labor, and the absence of an institutionalized hierarchical specialization of functions.
- âprimitive beginnings,â of course, more properly means 99% of human evolution, which isnât actually a âbeginning.â If you watched the first 100 minutes of a 101 minute movie, you wouldnât say you watched the beginning
- civilization implies population explosion, therefore control/oppression of excess communities, why is this progression considered âmature.â
(152) Since the length of the working day is itself on e of the principal repressive factors imposed upon the pleasure principle by the reality principle, the reduction of the working day to a point where the mere quantum of labor time no longer arrests human development is the first prerequisite for freedom. Such reduction by itself would almost certainly mean a considerable decrease in the standard of living prevalent today in the most advanced industrial countries. But the repression to a lower standard of living, which the collapse of the performance principle would bring about, does not militate against progress in freedom. [see Fromm].
The argument that makes liberation conditional upon an ever higher standard of living all too easily serves to justify the perpetuation of repression. The definition of the standard of living in terms of automobiles, television sets, airplanes, and tractors is that of the performance principle itself [alienated labor]. Beyond the rule of this principle, the level of living would be measured by other criteria: the universal gratification of basic human needs, and the freedom from guilt and fear - internalized as well as external, instinctual as well as rational. âTrue civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turntable. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin,â (Baudelaire) - this is the definition of the progress beyond the rule of the performance principle.
(155) No matter how rich, civilization depends on steady and methodical work, and thus on unpleasurable delay in satisfaction. Since the primary instincts rebel âby natureâ against such delay, their repressive modification therefore remains a necessity for all civilization [again, many nature based societies have no word for âwork.â].
In order to meet this argument, we would we have to show that Freudâs correlation âinstinctual repression - socially useful labor - civilizationâ can be meaningfully transformed into the correlation âinstinctual liberation - socially useful work - civilization.â We have suggested that the prevalent instinctual repression resulted, not so much from the necessity of labor, but from the specific social organization of labor imposed by the interest in domination - that repression was largely surplus repression. Consequently the elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate, not labor, but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor. If this is true, the emergence of a non repressive reality principle would alter rather than destroy the social organization of labor: the liberation of Eros could create new and durable work relations. Discussion of this hypothesis encounters at the outset one of the most strictly protected values of modern culture - that of productivity. This idea expresses perhaps more than any other the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus designates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals - in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need - the ore productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.
- when does the meaning of âsocial needâ dissipate into âcontrollerâs need.â At some point the âproductive apparatusâ is productive only for the ownerâs bank account, and no longer for âsocialâ functions - for benefitting society, ie 'the 99%.'
The very word [productivity] came to smack of repression or its philistine glorification: it connotes the resentful defamation of rest, indulgence, receptivity - the triumph of the âlower depthsâ of the mind and body, the taming of the instincts by exploitative reason. Efficiency and repression converge: raising the productivity of labor is the sacrosanct ideal of both capitalist and Stalest Stakhanovism. The notion of productivity has its historical limits: they are those of the performance principle.
- the apex of industrial productivity, whether capitalist or (totalitarian) communist, ends with alienated labor. Therefore, it is unsustainable.
Ch 8. The Images of Orpheus and Narcissus
(160) The attempt to draft a theoretical construct of culture beyond the performance principle is in a strict sense âunreasonableâ [as if there is no âcultureâ in societies that have no alienated labor!]. Reason is the rationality of the performance principle. Even at the beginning of Western civilization, long before this principle was institutionalized, reason was defined as an instrument of constraint, of instinctual suppression; the domain of the instincts, sensuousness, was considered as eternally hostile and detrimental to reason (Aristotle, Platonic Idealism, etc).
- Marcuse here uses the beginnings or civilization, which is the beginning of the glorification of reason, to justify Freudian reason.
- D Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous.
The categories in which philosophy has comprehended the human existence have retained the connection between reason and suppression: whatever belongs to the sphere of sensuousness, pleasure, impulse has the connotation of being antagonistic to reason - something that has to be subjugated, constrained.
- but of course, reason and the foundations of science, deduction, induction, taxonomic organizing, are impulses too.
(161) The culture of the performance principle makes its bow before the strange truths which imagination keeps alive in folklore and fairy tale, in literature and art; they have been aptly interpreted and have found their place in the popular and academic world. However, the effort to derive from these truths the content of a valid reality principle surpassing the prevailing one has been entirely inconsequentialâ¦The insistence that imagination provide standards for existential attitudes, for practice, and for historical possibilities appears as childish fantasy. Only the archetypes, only the symbols have been accepted, and their meaning is usually interpreted in terms of phylogenetic [development of species] or ontogenetic [development of individual] stages, long since surpassed, rather than in terms of an individual and cultural maturity.
- i.e., Jung did not replace Freud, and Joseph Campbell was just getting started (Hero with a Thousand Faces first published in 1949).
(161) Prometheus is the archetype-hero of the performance principle. And in the world of Prometheus, Pandora, the female principle, sexuality and pleasure, appear as curse - disruptive, destructive. âWhy are women such a curse: The denunciation of the sex with which the section [on Prometheus in Hesiod] concludes emphasizes above all else their ecumenic unproductively; they are useless drones; a luxury item in a poor manâs budget,â [Norman O Brown, Hesiodâs Theogony]. The beauty of the woman, and the happiness she promises are fatal in the work-world of civilization.
If Prometheus is the culture hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression, then the symbols of another reality principle must be sought at the opposite pole. Orpheus and Narcissus (like Dionysus, to whom they are akin: the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason) stand for a very different reality. They have not become the culture heroes of the western world: theirs is the image of joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and end the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature.
(166) The love of Narcissus is answered by the echo of nature. Narcissus appears as the antagonist of Eros: he spurns love, the love that unites with other human beings, and for that he is punished by Eros. As the antagonist of Eros, Narcissus symbolizes sleep and death, silence and rest. In Thacia, he stands in close relation to Dionysus. But it is not coldness, asceticism, and self-love that color the images of Narcissus; it is not these gestures that are preserved in art and literature. His silence is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is contemptuous of the love of hunters and nymphs he rejects one Eros for another. He live by an Eros of his own, and he does not love only himself (he does not know that the image he admires is his own). If his erotic attitude is akin to death and brings death, then rest and sleep and death are not painfully separated and distinguished: the Nirvana principle rules throughout all these stages. And when he dies he continues to live as the flower that bears his name.
(170) The Orphic-Narcissistic images are those of the Great refusal: refusal to accept separation from the the libidinous object (or subject). The refusal aims at liberation - at the reunion of what has become separated. Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator: he establishes a higher order in the world - an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force, but by songâ¦But he is torn to pieces by the crazed Thracian women.
(171) The Orphic Eros transforms being: he masters cruelty and death through liberation. His language is song, and his work is play. Narcissusâ life is that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation. These images refer to the aesthetic dimension as the one in which their reality principle must be sought and validated.
Ch 9. The Aesthetic Dimension
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(172) Obviously, the aesthetic dimension cannot validate a reality principle [bah!]. Like imagination, which is its constitutive mental faculty, the realm of aesthetics is essentially âunrealisticâ: it has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being ineffective in the reality. Aesthetic values may function in life for cultural adornment and elevation or as private hobbies, but to live with these values is the privilege of geniuses or the mark of decadent Bohemians.
(187) Civilization has subjugated sensuousness to reason in such a manner that the former, of it reasserts itself, does so in destructive and âsavageâ forms while the tyranny of reason impoverishes and barbarizes sensuousness. The conflict must be resolved if human potentialities are to realize themselves freely.
- Schillerâs third impulse, the play impulse, must reconcile the sensuous impulse with the form impulse (reason)
(187) Man is free only where he is free for constraint, external and internal, physical and moral - when he is constrained neither by law nor by need. But such constraint is the reality. Freedom is thus, in a strict sense, freedom from the established reality: man is free when the âreality loses it seriousnessâ and when its necessity âbecomes lightâ (leicht).
- Fromm
(188) In a genuinely humane civilization, the human existence will be play rather than toil, and man will live in display rather than need.
(189) Only when the âconstraint of needâ is replaced by the âconstraint of superfluityâ (abundance) will the human existence be impelled to a âfree movement which is itself both end and means.â Liberated from the pressure of the painful purposes and performances necessitated by want, man will be restored into the âfreedom to be what he ought to be.â But what âoughtâ to be will be freedom itself: the freedom to play. The mental faculty exercising this freedom is that of imagination. (Schiller, The Aesthetic Letters).
(190) [In the aesthetic experience, manâs] existence would still be activity, but âwhat he possesses and produces need bear no longer the traces of servitude, the fearful design of its purposeâ; beyond want and anxiety, human activity becomes display - the free manifestation of potentialities.
At this point, the explosive quality of Schillerâs conception comes into focus. He had diagnosed the disease of civilization as the conflict between the two basic impulses of man (the sensuous and the form impulses), or rather as the violent âsolutionâ of this conflict: the establishment of the repressive tyranny of reason of sensuousness. Consequently, the reconciliation of the conflicting impulses would involve the removal of this tyranny p that is, the restoration of the right of sensuousness. Freedom would have to be sought in the liberation of sensuousness rather than reason, and in the limitation of the âhigherâ faculties in favor of the âlower.â In other words, the salvation of culture would involve abolition of the repressive controls that civilization has imposed on sensuousness. Ch 10. The Transformation of Sexuality into Eros
(203) The reactivation of prehistoric and childhood wishes and attitudes is not necessarily regression; it may well be the opposite - proximity to a happiness that has always been the repressed promise of a better future. In one of his most advanced formulations, Freud once defined happiness as the âsubsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money was not a wish in childhood.â (E Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud).
(209) âThe difference between a neurosis and a sublimation is evidently the social aspect of the phenomenon. A neurosis isolates; a sublimation unites. In a sublimation something new is created p a house, or a community, or a tool - and it is created in a group or for the use of a group,â (Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture).
(218) Work as free play cannot be subject to administration; only alienated labor can be organized and administered by rational routine. It is beyond this sphere, but on its basis, that non-repressive sublimation creates its own cultural order.
(221) To link performances on assembly lines, in offices and shops with instinctual needs is to glorify dehumanization as pleasureâ¦To say the job must be done because it is a âjobâ is truly the apex of alienation, the total loss of instinctual and intellectual freedom - repression which has become, not the second, but the first nature of man.
In contrast to such aberrations, the true spirit of psychoanalytic theory lives in the uncompromising efforts to reveal the anti-humanistic forces behind the philosophy of productiveness:
âOf all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse it was always advertised to be by our remote ancestorsâ¦Our children should be prepared to bring their children up so they wonât have to work as a neurotic necessity. The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. Is is an attempt to make oneself feel valuable even though there is no particular need for oneâs working. (C.B. Chisholm, âThe Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress,â in Psychiatry, V IX, n 1, 1946).
- B Russellâs In Praise of Idleness, Weberâs The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Ch 11. Eros and Thanatos
(222) All the technological progress, the conquest of nature, the rationalization of mind and society have not eliminated and cannot eliminate the necessity of alienated labor, the necessity of working mechanically, unpleasurably, in a manner that doe not represent individual self-realization.
However, progressive alienation itself increases the potential of freedom: the more external to the individual the necessary labor becomes, the less does it involve him in the realm of necessity. Relieved from the requirements of domination, the quantitative reduction in labor time and energy leads to a qualitative change in the human existence: the free time rather than labor time determines its content. The expanding realm of freedom becomes truly a realm of lay - of the free play of individual faculties. Thus liberated, they will generate new forms of realization and discovering the world, which in turn will reshape the realm of necessity, the struggle for existence.
(227) Pleasure contains an element of self-determination which is the token of human triumph over blind necessity:
âNature does not know real pleasure but only satisfaction of want. All pleasure in societal - in the unsublimated no less than in the sublimated impulses. Pleasure originates in alienation,â (Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment).
What distinguishes pleasure from the blind satisfaction of want is the instinctâs refusal to exhaust itself in immediate satisfaction, its ability to build up and use barriers for intensifying fulfillment.
(231) Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure. Time has no power over the id, the original domain of the pleasure principle. But the ego, through which alone pleasure becomes real, is in its entirety subject to time. The mere anticipation of the inevitable end, present in every instant, introduces a repressive element into all libidinal relations and renders pleasure itself painful. This primary frustration in the instinctual structure of man becomes the inexhaustible source of all other frustrations - and of their social effectiveness. Man learns that âit cannot last anyway,â that every pleasure is short, that for all finite things the hour of their birth is the hour of their death - that it couldnât be otherwise. He is resigned before society forces him to practice resignation methodically. The flux of time is societyâs most natural ally in maintaining law and order, conformity, and the institutions that relegate freedom to a perpetual utopia; the flux of time helps men to forget what was and what can be: it makes them oblivious to the better past and the better future.
- Paul Shepardâs âmanagerial diseases.â The awareness of what is (potentially) coming effects the (potentially pleasurable) awareness of what is now, (The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game).
(236) Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion.
The new cultural politics seeks to shut down debate and close minds.
With the rise of the new intolerance, American public life appears to be trying to exemplify Henry Adamsâs claim that politics is âthe systematic organization of hatreds.â A vast theoretical and rhetorical infrastructure supports contemporary rage chic. If we hope to understand and eventually defuse the politics of polarized anger, looking to the intellectual sources of this anger is a key step. Herbert Marcuse â academic, political revolutionary, and psychological theorist â holds an important place in the genealogy of outrage culture.
An immigrant from Germany who taught at a number of American universities, Marcuse was a member of the Marxist-influenced Frankfurt School, which wanted to deconstruct Western liberal capitalism. Though he opposed Fascism and contributed to the war effort during World War II, Marcuse believed that the industrialized capitalist democracies of the mid-20th century were themselves fundamentally repressive. He became one of the leading gurus of the New Left, the angry and at times violent Sixties radicals who were in many ways the progenitors of the current âprogressiveâ power elite. Prominent New Leftists associated with Marcuse included the radical academic Angela Davis, and Michael Lerner, a former SDS member whose âpolitics of meaningâ became a Hillary Clinton catchphrase during the Nineties. Marcuseâs students (and students of his students) can be found throughout American higher education today.
Much of modern âpolitical correctnessâ is really a New Left cultural politics that has made an uneasy peace with material prosperity.
If the agents of the new intolerance ever get around to âdeproblematizing,â as they would put it, Mount Rushmore, they might consider adding the visage of Herbert Marcuse to the crags of the Black Hills. Much of modern âpolitical correctnessâ is really a New Left cultural politics that has made an uneasy peace with material prosperity. (The trajectory of Al Gore â from youthful critic of consumerism to gray-haired centimillionaire â is instructive here.) Marcuseâs work is much more sophisticated and rigorous than the tweets of many of todayâs outrage activists, but that only makes it more important to engage with his ideas in order to comprehend the foundations of the Newer Leftâs cultural crusade â and to see why this crusade fundamentally fails.
A founding document of the new intolerance, Marcuseâs 50-year-old essay âRepressive Toleranceâ levies a radical attack on the conventions of liberal democratic civilization. The main thrust of âRepressive Toleranceâ is as follows: The whole of society shapes what is politically possible for each of us, so any discussion of politics must attend to society as a whole. However, from Marcuseâs perspective, Western society as a whole is thoroughly corrupted. His catalogue of horribles includes the âsystematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence,â and many other things. Marcuse saw Western society as racially polarized, socially segregated, and economically divided. From his perspective, America in 1965 was addicted to war, exploitation, and cultural/sexual oppression. (In his 1955 Eros and Civilization, he considered the breaking of all sexual norms to be a key component of toppling the Western status quo.)
Unlike many of his disciples, Marcuse was frank about what this intolerance would mean: âLiberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.â
Marcuse argued that, because of the radical repressiveness of Western society, a tolerance for all viewpoints actually contributed to social oppression. A pervasive network of assumptions and biases implicitly privileges the viewpoint of the powerful, so that seemingly âequalâ presentations of opposite opinions actually end up benefiting the viewpoint of the powerful. He offered the example of a magazine running a piece criticizing the FBI along with one praising the FBI. Fair and balanced? Not so fast, Marcuse said: âthe chances are that the positive [story] wins because the image of [the FBI] is deeply engraved in the mind of the people.â Because of social programming, the inhabitants of a given society automatically favor certain values. The ideological playing fieldâs lack of levelness means that seemingly equal presentations of ideas are not really equal.
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In the light of this situation, Marcuse made a rather cunning inversion (one that has been aped countless times since by cultural organs across the United States): The fact that society is so radically unequal means that we should be intolerant and repressive in the name of tolerance and liberty. He rejected what he termed âindiscriminate toleranceâ â a tolerance that accepts all viewpoints â in favor of âliberating toleranceâ or âdiscriminating tolerance.â Unlike many of his disciples, Marcuse was frank about what this intolerance would mean: âLiberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.â When many in the media junked the Bush-era refrain, âDissent is patriotic,â and began to suggest that dissent during the Obama administration was a product of some unhealthy motivation (especially racism), they were putting into practice Marcuseâs theory of âdiscriminating tolerance.â
Elsewhere in âRepressive Tolerance,â Marcuse outlined some of the other âapparently undemocraticâ tactics that partisans of a true democracy should use. This passage is worth quoting at length, not only because of its explicitness but also because of its prescience:
They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior â thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly âdeterrents,â of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc.
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Marcuseâs case for repression â of thought, conscience, speech, and science â in the name of the ârightâ ideas has apparently persuaded many powerful American cultural organs today. Prominent public figures call for the criminal prosecution (even, potentially, imprisonment) of those who dare to question anthropogenic âclimate changeâ; a person who publicly dissents from some prevailing orthodoxy is to be assailed by online mobs and demonized by major media voices; and government agencies target dissenters with impunity (whether by leaking damaging information about them, unleashing the IRS, or using other means).
Following Marcuseâs lead, our current PC politics is simultaneously collectivist and personal. It is collectivist insofar as belonging to certain collective identity groups grants one ethical privileges denied to others. But PC politics is also personal in that the new intolerance exacts a tremendous personal price from dissenters. It is not enough to argue with ideas: Those who espouse heretical ideas must be destroyed; they must lose their jobs, their reputations, and their places in the public square. The notion of âshamingâ to the point of personal destruction seems a principal modus operandi of PC politics.
As a corollary to its collectivist emphases, PC politics also attempts to eliminate the space for ethical debate through fetishizing the idea of identity. One of the major innovations of current advocates of âdiscriminating toleranceâ is the attempt to classify alternative ethical approaches as exercises in animus rather than good-faith attempts to find the truth and to live well. Thus, dissent from the sexual ethics du jour (and the mandarins of the new intolerance have used sexuality as a cultural battering ram) is viewed not as an alternative account of how we should direct our erotic energies but instead as atavistic bigotry. Classifying as bigotry the teachings of, say, the Catholic Church places them beyond the realm of respectable argument. However, trying to silence debate with the cry of âShut up, you despicable bigotâ does not stop with the Catholic Church, owners of small businesses, or the Republican party â as some on the Left are now finding to their chagrin.
In recent months, leftist writers have expressed increasing worry that the mobs of intolerance could target members of the Left. In January, Jonathan Chait wrote a major story for New York magazine warning about the excesses of PC culture. While many on the Left attacked Chait for daring to utter these thoughts (and perhaps thereby illustrated the accuracy of his concerns), others agreed with him about the intellectual dangers of the new rage. Edward Schlosserâs recent viral essay âIâm a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Meâ describes some of the ways in which the new intolerance suppresses the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. Writing from a center-left perspective, Kirsten Powers offers, in The Silencing, a book-length inquiry into the excesses of the far Left. (Guy Benson and Mary Katharine Hamâs The End of Discussion covers this topic from the Right.)
Left-wing cultural politics can dissolve into a (metaphorical) circular firing squad.
The possibility that left-wing cultural politics can dissolve into a (metaphorical) circular firing squad is not some bizarre perversion of âdiscriminating toleranceâ but is a logical extension of it. Under the paradigm of âdiscriminating tolerance,â only âthe Leftâ is allowed freedom of expression, which causes this kind of tolerance to be highly unstable in practice (and likely in theory, too). After all, who defines what âthe Leftâ is? For a broad-minded democratic politics, who defines the Left remains an interesting intellectual exercise, but the stakes are far more immediate for practitioners of âdiscriminating tolerance.â For them, defining the Left and the Right determines not just who has political power but who is even allowed to express political opinions.
Marcuse was aware of the need to establish criteria for who is and who is not tolerated. However, his answer in many ways came down to the refrain adopted by many in the âreality-based communityâ: because science!He found that deciding who gets to speak is ânot a matter of value-preference but of rational criteria.â He insisted multiple times that it is possible to determine empirically exactly what counts as sufficiently âprogressive.â Those who are sufficiently ârational,â Marcuse implied, ought to use their power to harry, suppress, and attack those who are not similarly elevated.
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It is telling here that âRepressive Toleranceâ combines two of the central tendencies of the contemporary Left: incendiary cultural politics and a technocratic presumption of certainty. One of the foundational myths of the modern âprogressiveâ culture war is that âprogressivesâ have determined the course of moral history and therefore have the right and the duty to crush any dissenting âreactionaries.â The PC culture war applies to cultural affairs the technocratic will to power: Cultural mandarins in universities, think tanks, and the legacy media will decide how we should speak and how we should conceive of ethics, and the benighted citizenry should follow their enlightened commands.
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Technocratic principles reinforce this cultural zealotry. Marcuse chose the rhetoric of science instead of âvalue-preferenceâ because value preferences are up for debate â science isnât (well, science! as a political totem isnât up for debate; real science is all about debate). And the goal of PC politics is to shut down debate.
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With this machinery of pseudo-science, PC cultural politics has, like Frankenstein, created a monster it cannot control. Originally, many on the Left used âdiscriminating toleranceâ to harangue those accursed cultural and political conservatives, but political debates are intramural as well as intermural. Factions jockey for power within a given political group, and various factions within the Left can and do use weaponized intolerance against one another. PC politics pits feminist against genderqueer activist, ethnic group against ethnic group, and one economic class against another. The politics of terror is inherently unstable, because every group and every ambitious person within each group will have an incentive to excommunicate others from respectable society. Moreover, the powerful as well as the weak can carry the banner of selective intolerance, so that cultural politics often leads not to rigorous critique but instead to the greedy consolidation of power.
This fundamental incoherence casts light on how modern PC culture manages to be both extremely bland and excruciatingly paranoid. For instance, campus angst activists seek to turn our universities into zones where everything from Ovid to Huck Finn is verboten. Social shaming sites like Your Fave Is Problematic inveigh against dreadlocks, literalize satire, and tremble at cross-cultural tattoos. The fact that some believe that Your Fave Is Problematic may be satirical only further illustrates the dead end of shame culture; even outrage advocates canât quite tell where parody begins and ends for their politics.
People across the political spectrum have increasingly come to recognize the narrow-minded viciousness of the new politics of intolerance, shame, and opprobrium.
If everything but self-important criticism becomes problematic, we are left with either an all-against-all culture war or endless cultural Muzak. Elevator music has no profanity, does not offend, and demands little attention. But a musical universe incorporating Mozart, Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, and Regina Spektor is far richer and more exciting. Since, in a PC world, the virtuous have the right to make the fallen shut up, and those who run afoul of the ever-shifting standards of the righteous risk having their lives destroyed, a roving fear anesthetizes culture and leaves us with tedious sermons rather than serious artistic creation or searching cultural dialogue. Cultural philistinism is not the sole province of the Left, of course, but left-wing philistines have had more cultural influence than right-wing ones in recent years.
Postmodern âdiscriminating toleranceâ makes our public affairs more acrimonious because it suggests that an authentic debate is illegitimate. This kind of politics asserts that history has only one direction (ever to the left) and that the only valid kind of conversation is one that goes in that direction. But a one-way conversation isnât really a conversation, and the attempt to flatten the richness of human life to a single directional arrow leads to a caricature of justice.
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People across the political spectrum have increasingly come to recognize the narrow-minded viciousness of the new politics of intolerance, shame, and opprobrium. A shift to a more inclusive and expansive kind of tolerance could be a way out of the cul-de-sac of political rage. This alternative cultural politics would recognize human partiality and inherent dignity. It would say that we should be free to challenge opinions and values, but that we should be wary of visiting punishment on individuals because of their opinions and values. Inclusive tolerance would invite rigorous debates about ethics and human nature as a way of enriching our understanding of ourselves.
This alternative approach has a long pedigree in the Anglo-American tradition. The 17th-century Puritan Roger Williams, for instance, appealed to the idea of tolerance out of a respect for human limitations and a recognition of inherent individual dignity. In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Williams argued that each person has the right to follow his or her own creed and that using force to compel individual conscience was a form of âsoul rape.â Because we do not have absolute knowledge of Godâs plan and because of the inherent value of each person, Williams called for a broad cultural tolerance, in which all creeds would be welcomed into the public square. This tolerance would not be moral nihilism (it is not, after all, denying the legitimacy of moral truths) but rather the cultivation of a sense of modesty and mutual respect.
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This form of tolerance would not resolve our public disagreements for us. Questions about economic structures, sexual ethics, personal identity, and political participation would remain very much up for grabs. Rather than the authoritarian imposition of self-righteous assumptions, inclusive tolerance would pave the way for a more integrated and enriched public square. Because it is based on the inherent legitimacy of the individual, this mode of tolerance would not lose its way in the fray of collectivist identity politics. Inclusive tolerance supports a personâs freedom of conscience not because that person belongs to a given group â but because he or she breathes.
The Left has no monopoly on weaponized intolerance, and the recent heightening of cultural intolerance is another instance of the way that those who thirst for power also often crave the ability to ward off critiques of their use of power. As the history of the 20th century shows, programmatic perfectionistic agendas often try to crush those whose ideas complicate the pristine vision of utopia. A politics of tolerance would recognize the messiness and imperfections of our lives in this world, but it would also allow us to search for and to defend virtue, justice, and happiness.
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â Fred Bauer is a writer from New England. He blogs atA Certain Enthusiasm, and his work has been featured in numerous publications.
Marcuse The End Of Utopia Summary Meaning
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In this concise and startling book, the author of One-Dimensional Man argues that the time for utopian speculation has come. Marcuse argues that the traditional conceptions of human freedom have been rendered obsolete by the development of advanced industrial society. Social theory can no longer content itself with repeating the formula, 'from each according to his ability..more
Published June 1st 1971 by Beacon Press
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It's odd to read this now - it's been on my shelf for over 20 years - because so many of the ideas expressed here by Marcuse in 1969 are being widely discussed and learned afresh by a new generation of activists, albeit shorn of the Freudian twist that the Frankfurt School gave to Marx. Every generation, it would seem, has to experience its own disillusionment and generate its own Marcuses/Castoriadises/Milletts. This is both reassuring, in that each generation appears to succeed in doing so, an..more
Sep 04, 2018Tyler rated it really liked it
Shelves: marxism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology
'The search for specific historical agents of revolutionary change in the advanced capitalist countries is indeed meaningless. Revolutionary forces emerge in the process of change itself; the translation of the potential into the actual is the work of political practice. And just as little as critical theory can political practice orient itself on a concept of revolution which belongs to the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, and which is still valid in large areas of the Third World.' (79) I..more
Sep 13, 2013Ferda Nihat Koksoy rated it it was amazing
ÃZGÃRLÃK ÃZERÄ°NE BÄ°R DENEME
Ãtopya olarak suçlanan Åey artık 'yeri olmayan' ve tarihsel evren içerisinde yeri olmayacak olan Åey deÄil, meydana gelmesi yerleÅik toplumların güçleri tarafından engellenen Åeydir. Sorun, bireyin ihtiyaçlarını baÅkalarına zarar vermeden nasıl karÅılayacaÄı deÄildir; aksine sorun, kendine zarar vermeden, köleliÄinin devam etmesini saÄlayan sömürücü aygıta olan baÄımlılıÄını kendi arzuları ve doyumları aracılıÄı ile yeniden üretmeden ihtiyaçlarını nasıl karÅılayacaÄı so..more
Apr 14, 2017sologdin rated it it was ok
Opens with the premise that opposition to capitalism globally is met with âthe sustained power of this dominion: its economic and military hold in the four continents, its neocolonial empire, and, most important, its unshaken capacity to subject the majority of the underlying population to its overwhelming productivity and forceâ (vii). One effect of capitalist capacity for violence is the keeping of the socialist bloc on the defensive, âall too costly not only in terms of military expenditures..more
May 14, 2017Shahin Ghaeminejad rated it liked it · review of another edition
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Two quick thoughts: May 21, 2019Marie ⨠(Ladyvontais) rated it did not like it
1) It's been a while since I read One-Dimensional Man, but I feel like this accessible, ~60 page essay contains all the basic principles outlines in the longer book. So, if you wanted a quick introduction to Marcuse, you could read this essay and cover a lot of ground (although..maybe the essay just seemed like a breeze to me because I already had ODM in the cobwebs of my brain somewhere.) 2) Marcuse's critique of middle- and working-class complacency felt.. way too relevant..more
Shelves: marxism, theory, philosophy, politics, germany, united-states
Still not a Marxist. Some interesting things to think about, but ultimately, ascribing all evils to capitalism grows old and tired for evil is present before capitalism as much criticism as it deserves, the language games are also employed by Marxists, and this materialist self referential idea of 'life ought to imitate art' made way more sense in Wilde than in rehashed failed ideologies. Marxists shall never get out of the materialist trap, huh? Jun 11, 2018Emad Attili rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2018-reads, best-of-2018, literatrue-criticism
Though it was a very short read, but I think it was one of the most important books Iâve read till now. Also, I think itâs important to read this book after reading One-dimensional Man. I guess it wouldnât be the last book I read for Marcuse. I really like him! ..more
Jul 30, 2018Arno Mosikyan rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism: the rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future.
At this stage, the question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence..more
In 1969, Herbert Marcuse predicted America's efforts to assist Saddam Hussein in Iraq 1982 and countless other dictators or military agents which were given our aid in order to suppress uprisings by the populaces of third world countries. He predicts the mental sickness which has become prevalent in our society. Marcuse seems to predict the local, youth-oriented, grassroots support for a more progressive way comparable to the campaigning done for Barack Obama. This essay reads less like an essay..more
Sep 15, 2015Arjun Ravichandran rated it did not like it
Herbert Marcuse is a profound thinker, but a terrible writer. I can almost hear the clumsiness of his original German as he meanders through this well-meaning text. There is one point which he makes rather convincingly ; viz, exploitation and oppression have not lost any of their reality, except that they have been internalized and are replenished by the new needs and wants that consumerist society artifically inculcates within us thanks to its irrational and wasteful production. This is a point..more
Excellent essay on the future and nature of political resistance. I was impressed by how relevant Marcuse's critique is, and how the issues of capitalism he was describing in the late 60's are just as relevant (if not more so) today. I'm not sure his exploration of art and aesthetics was particularly useful or relevant to this essay, but fascinating none the less. The only references I found a bit dated were the constant referals to events from the May rebellion of 1968.
For further reading on si..more
My copy is full of mariginal notes and underlined passages. -- In a non-exploitative society, all work would be instinctually directed toward the sensuous and toward the benefit of all mankind. 'For the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.'
Fun read. Kind of amusing that americans never really caught on that Freud's Id and pleasure principles were the divine force and the superego was the devil.
A to the point look a modern capitalist society and the possible. From the book: Jun 02, 2012B-MO rated it really liked it
'Marx rejects the idea that work can ever become play. Alienation would be reduced with the progressive reduction of the working day, but the latter would remain a day of unfreedorn, rational but not free. However, the development of the productive forces beyond their capitalist organization suggests the possibility of freedomwithin the realm of necessity. The quantitative reduction of necessary labor could turn into..more
Shelves: culture-and-politics, political-stuff
Brilliant Essay. Although parts were so easy and straight forward, others were SOOOO dense!
I felt like I was reading a primer for occupy movement as I read the final chapter. The book gave me a ton of rhetorical ammo for use in criticizing USA Democrat and Union supporters for their being counter revolutionary :) and in doing so illustrated how bourgeoisie democratic capitalism is the most resilient form of oppression ever to have existed! I very much enjoyed reading a neo-marxist/socialist the..more
'The end does now justify the means: actions cease to be crimes if they serve to preserve and extend the 'Free World.' Conversely, what the Enemy does, is evil; what he says--propaganda. This a priori linguistic defamation hits first the Enemy abroad: the defense of his own land, his own hut, his own naked life is a crime, the supreme crime which deserves the supreme punishment. Long before the special and not-so-special forces are physically trained to kill, burn, and interrogate, their minds a..more
Feb 22, 2009Milo rated it really liked it
Interesting guy. This is the first book I've read by him, but I'm fascinated enough now to move onto 'The One-Dimensional Man,' which I hear is arguably his best work.
This was a quick read in the philosophical sense, but I very much enjoyed it. Kind of like a how-to on rebellion against capitalism. I was a bit wary on his arguments for 'beauty,' however, as I find beauty to be highly subjective. I can't imagine a possible way of collectively (and thereby objectively) collaborating together on a..more
Read this for my critical theory of technology class. Reads like it is definitely the 60s. The ideas of technologies of self-fulfillment and elimnation of labor drudgery read like a lot of the stuff that inspired the bay area counterculture, but unlike that libertarian crew, this one is based on neo-marxism and a realization of class awareness against a diffuse system of power.
Short and pretty readable if you're interested in philosophy.
The essay manages to detect a modest number of potential contradictions within the socialist political activity practiced under corporate capitalism.
At some specific points Marcuse seems to take a primordial form of psychoanalysis a priori, which I think, from time to time renders his decomposition fairly elementary. Nonetheless, a portion of his statements are still acceptable and practicable.
I like his reasoning (I've always had a sympathy for the Marxist critique of bourgeois society) but I have to disagree with his final rejection of the bourgeois-democratic process. However malignant it may have become under the all-powerful shadow of corporate earth, it's still the best thing we have.
Oct 28, 2009Tim Eby-mckenzie rated it it was amazing
Read this puppy in college. Still have the physical copy on my shelf among fav-reads. Very insightful look into the concept of freedom. Implications for the political realities of today? What about the life of faith? Very well worth the read.
Oct 31, 2016pplofgod rated it it was ok
Shelves: marxism, political-philosophy, social-theory, anarchism, meh-books, philosophy
Weak. Reeks of typical 1960's 'liberation of desire' crap.
Dec 21, 2015Michael rated it it was amazing
Lovely read. Marcuse anticipates the demise of corporate capitalism and the birth of a truly free society. The language is artful and compelling.
Like others here I found the second chapter dealing with aesthetics largely impenetrable. Otherwise very readable and thought provoking although not entirely convincing for me at least.
May 31, 2011Jen rated it it was amazing
so relevant so necessary
Marcuse is the shit. . . .
May 20, 2016Zeke Jakub rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Great read.
Marcuse was a great thinker and challenged every aspect of modern contemporary thought and philosophy, should be regarded as required reading.
1950s
I need to stick to my resolution of reading Freud and more aesthetic philosophy before I read critical theory.. besides that barrier this was pretty good.
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German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the 'Father of the New Left', his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse was a major intellectual influence on the New Left and student movements of the 1960s.
âAt this stage, the question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude? Theâ
âa political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. Such a practice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.â More quotesâ¦
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; second edition, 1966) is a book by the German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse, in which the author proposes a non-repressive society, attempts a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and explores the potential of collective memory to be a source of disobedience and revolt and point the way to an alternative future. Its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The 1966 edition has an added 'political preface'.
One of Marcuse's best known works, the book brought him international fame. Both Marcuse and many commentators have considered it his most important book, and it was seen by some commentators as an improvement over the previous attempt to synthesize Marxist and psychoanalytic theory by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. It helped shape the subcultures of the 1960s and influenced the gay liberation movement, and with other books on Freud, such as the classicist Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959) and the philosopher Paul RicÅur's Freud and Philosophy (1965), placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry. It has been suggested that the work reveals the influence of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Marcuse has been credited with offering a convincing critique of Neo-Freudianism. However, critics have accused him of being utopian in his objectives and of misinterpreting Freud's theories. Critics have also suggested that his objective of synthesizing Marxist and psychoanalytic theory is impossible.
Summary[edit]
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Marcuse reinterprets Freud's theories about the instincts.
In the 'Political Preface' that opens the work, Marcuse writes that the title Eros and Civilization expresses the optimistic view that the achievements of modern industrial society would make it possible to use society's resources to shape 'man's world in accordance with the Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death.' He concludes the preface with the words, 'Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.'[1] Marcuse questions the view of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, that 'civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts'. He discusses the social meaning of biology â history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that 'advanced industrial society' (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society 'based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations'.[2]
Marcuse also discusses the views of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller,[3] and criticizes the psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose psychology he describes as an 'obscurantist neo-mythology'. He also criticizes the neo-Freudians Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Clara Thompson.[4]
Publication history[edit]
Eros and Civilization was first published in 1955 by Beacon Press. In 1974, it was published as a Beacon Paperback.[5]
Reception[edit]Mainstream media[edit]
Eros and Civilization received positive reviews from the philosopher Abraham Edel in The Nation and the historian of science Robert M. Young in the New Statesman.[6][7] The book was also discussed by Susan Sontag in The Supplement to the Columbia Spectator.[8] Later discussions include those in Choice by H. N. Tuttle,[9] R. J. Howell,[10] and M. A. Bertman,[11] and by the art critic Roger Kimball in The New Criterion.[12]
Edel credited Marcuse distinguishing between what portion of the burden repressive civilization places on the fundamental drives is made necessary by survival needs and what serves the interests of domination and is now unnecessary because of the advanced science of the modern world, and with suggesting what changes in cultural attitudes would result from relaxation of the repressive outlook.[6] Young called the book important and honest, as well as 'serious, highly sophisticated and elegant'. He wrote that Marcuse's conclusions about 'surplus repression' converted Freud into an 'eroticised Marx', and credited Marcuse with convincingly criticizing the neo-Freudian psychoanalysts Fromm, Horney, and Sullivan. Though maintaining that both they and Marcuse confused 'ideology with reality' and minimized 'the biological sphere', he welcomed Marcuse's view that 'the distinction between psychological and political categories has been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era.'[7] Sontag wrote that together with Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Eros and Civilization represented a 'new seriousness about Freudian ideas' and exposed most previous writing on Freud in the United States as irrelevant or superficial.[8]
Tuttle suggested that Eros and Civilization could not be properly understood without reading Marcuse's earlier work Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932).[9] Howell wrote that Eros and Civilization had been improved upon by C. Fred Alford's Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory (1989).[10] Bertman wrote that Eros and Civilization was exciting and helped make Marcuse influential.[11] Kimball identified Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man (1964) as Marcuse's most influential books, and wrote that Marcuse's views parallel those of Norman O. Brown, despite the difference of tone between the two thinkers. He dismissed the ideas of both Marcuse and Brown as false and harmful.[12]
Socialist publications[edit]
Eros and Civilization received a mixed review from the Marxist writer Paul Mattick in Western Socialist.[13] The book was also discussed by Stephen J. Whitfield in Dissent.[14]
Mattick credited Marcuse with renewing 'the endeavor to read Marx into Freud', following the unsuccessful attempts of Wilhelm Reich, and agreed with Marcuse that Freudian revisionism is 'reformist or non-revolutionary'. However, he wrote that Freud would have been surprised at the way Marcuse read revolutionary implications into his theories. He noted that Marcuse's way of overcoming the dilemma that 'a full satisfaction of manâs instinctual needs is incompatible with the existence of civilized society' was Marxist, despite the fact that Marcuse nowhere mentioned Marx and referred to capitalism only indirectly, as 'industrial civilization'. He argued that Marcuse tried to develop ideas that were already present in 'the far less ambiguous language of Marxian theory', but still welcomed the fact that Marcuse made psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism reach the same desired result. However, he concluded that Marcuse's 'call to opposition to present-day conditions remains a mere philosophical exercise without applicability to social actions.'[13]
Whitfield noted that Marcuse considered Eros and Civilization his most important book, and wrote that it 'merits consideration as his best, neither obviously dated nor vexingly inaccessible' and that it 'was honorable of Marcuse to try to imagine how the fullest expression ofpersonality, or plenitude, might extinguish the misery that was long deemed an essential feature of the human condition.' He considered the book 'thrilling to read' because of Marcuse's conjectures about 'how the formation of a life without material restraints might somehow bemade meaningful.' He argued that Marcuse's view that technology could be used to create a utopia was not consistent with his rejection of 'technocratic bureaucracy' in his subsequent work One-Dimensional Man. He also suggested that it was the work that led Pope Paul VI to publicly condemn Marcuse in 1969.[14]
Reviews in academic journals[edit]
Eros and Civilization was reviewed by Paul Nyberg in the Harvard Educational Review.[15] In the American Journal of Sociology, the book was reviewed by the sociologist Kurt Heinrich Wolff and later received a mixed review from an author using the pen-name 'Barbara Celarent'.[16][17][18]
Celarent considered Eros and Civilization a 'deeper book' than One-Dimensional Man (1964) because it 'addressed the core issue: How should we live?' However, Celarent wrote that Marcuse's decision to analyze the issue of what should be done with society's resources with reference to Freud's writings 'perhaps curtailed the lifetime of his book, for Freud dropped quickly from the American intellectual scene after the 1970s, just as Marcuse reached his reputational peak.' Celarent identified Marx's Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867â1883) as a source of Marcuse's views on production and labor markets, and described his 'combination of Marx and Freud' as 'very clever'. Celarent credited Marcuse with using psychoanalysis to transform Marx's concept of alienation into 'a more subtle psychological construct', the 'performance principle'. In Celarent's view, it anticipated arguments later made by the philosopher Michel Foucault, but with 'a far more plausible historical mechanism' than Foucault's 'nebulous' concept of discourse. However, Celarent considered Marcuse's chapter giving 'proper Freudian reasons for the historicity of the reality principle' to be of historical interest only, and wrote that Marcuse proposed a 'shadowy utopia'. Celarent suggested that Eros and Civilization had commonly been misinterpreted, and that Marcuse was not concerned with advocating 'free love and esoteric sexual positions.'[17]
Discussions in Theory & Society[edit]
In Theory & Society, Eros and Civilization was discussed by the philosopher and historian Martin Jay,[19] the psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow,[20] and C. Fred Alford.[21]
Jay described the book as one of Marcuse's major works, and his 'most utopian' book. He maintained that it completed Marcuse's 'theory of remembrance', according to which 'memory subverts one-dimensional consciousness and opens up the possibility of an alternative future', and helped Marcuse advance a form of critical theory no longer able to rely on revolutionary proletariat. However, he criticized Marcuse's theory for its 'undefined identification of individual and collective memory', writing that Marcuse failed to explain how the individual was in 'archaic identity with the species'. He suggested that there might be an affinity between Marcuse's views and Jung's, despite Marcuse's contempt for Jung. He criticized Marcuse for his failure to undertake experiments in personal recollection such as those performed by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, or to rigorously investigate the differences between personal memory of an actual event in a person's life and collective historical memory of events antedating all living persons. Jay suggested that the views of the philosopher Ernst Bloch might be superior to Marcuse's, since they did more to account for 'the new in history' and more carefully avoided equating recollection with repetition.[19]
Chodorow considered the work of Marcuse and Brown important and maintained that it helped suggest a better psychoanalytic social theory. However, she questioned their interpretations of Freud, argued that they see social relations as an unnecessary form of constraint and fail to explain how social bonds and political activity are possible, criticized their view of 'women, gender relations, and generation', and maintained that their use of primary narcissism as a model for union with others involves too much concern with individual gratification. She argued that Eros and Civilization shows some of the same features that Marcuse criticized in Brown's Love's Body (1966), that the form of psychoanalytic theory Marcuse endorsed undermines his social analysis, and that in his distinction between surplus and basic repression, Marcuse did not evaluate what the full effects of the latter might be in a society without domination. She praised parts of the work, such as his chapter on 'The Transformation of Sexuality into Eros', but maintained that in some ways it conflicted with Marcuse's Marxism. She criticized Marcuse's account of repression, noting that he used the term in a 'metaphoric' fashion that eliminated the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, and argued that his 'conception of instinctual malleability' conflicted with his proposal for a 'new reality principle' based on the drives and made his critique of Fromm and Neo-Freudianism disingenuous, and that Marcuse 'simply asserted a correspondence between society and personality organization'.[20]
Alford, writing in 1987, noted that Marcuse, like many of his critics, regarded Eros and Civilization as his most important work, but observed that Marcuse's views have been criticized for being both too similar and too different to those of Freud. He wrote that recent scholarship broadly agreed with Marcuse that social changes since Freud's era have changed the character of psychopathology, for example by increasing the number of narcissistic personality disorders. He credited Marcuse with showing that narcissism is a 'potentially emancipatory force', but argued that while Marcuse anticipated some subsequent developments in the theory of narcissism, they nevertheless made it necessary to reevaluate Marcuse's views. He maintained that Marcuse misinterpreted Freud's views on sublimation and noted that aspects of Marcuse's 'erotic utopia' seem regressive or infantile, as they involved instinctual gratification for its own sake. Though agreeing with Chodorow that this aspect of Marcuse's work is related to his 'embrace of narcissism', he denied that narcissism serves only regressive needs, and argued that 'its regressive potential may be transformed into the ground of mature autonomy, which recognizes the rights and needs of others.' He agreed with Marcuse that 'in spite of the reified power of the reality principle, humanity aims at a utopia in which its most fundamental needs would be fulfilled.'[21]
Discussions in other journals[edit]
Eros and Civilization was discussed by the philosopher Jeremy Shearmur in Philosophy of the Social Sciences,[22] the philosopher Timothy F. Murphy in the Journal of Homosexuality,[23] C. Fred Alford in Theory, Culture & Society,[24] Michael Beard in Edebiyat: Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures,[25] Peter M. R. Stirk in the History of the Human Sciences,[26] Silke-Maria Weineck in The German Quarterly,[27] Joshua Rayman in Telos,[28] Daniel Cho in Policy Futures in Education,[29] Duston Moore in the Journal of Classical Sociology,[30] Sean Noah Walsh in Crime, Media, Culture,[31] the philosopher Espen Hammer in Philosophy & Social Criticism,[32] the historian Sara M. Evans in The American Historical Review,[33] Molly Hite in Contemporary Literature,[34] Nancy J. Holland in Hypatia,[35] Franco Fernandes and Sérgio Augusto in DoisPontos,[36] and Pieter Duvenage in Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe.[37] In Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie, the book was discussed by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Kerstin Stakemeier.[38][39] In 2013, it was discussed in Radical Philosophy Review.[40] It received a joint discussion from Arnold L. Farr, the philosopher Douglas Kellner, Andrew T. Lamas, and Charles Reitz,[41] and additional discussions from Stefan Bird-Pollan,[42] and Lucio Angelo Privitello.[43] The Radical Philosophy Review also reproduced a document from Marcuse, responding to criticism from the Marxist scholar Sidney Lipshires.[44] In 2017, Eros and Civilization was discussed again in the Radical Philosophy Review by Jeffrey L. Nicholas.[45]
Shearmur identified the historian Russell Jacoby's criticism of psychoanalytic 'revisionism' in his work Social Amnesia (1975) as a reworking of Marcuse's criticism of Neo-Freudianism.[22] Murphy criticized Marcuse for failing to examine Freud's idea of bisexuality.[23] Alford criticized the Frankfurt School for ignoring the work of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein despite the fact that Klein published a seminal paper two years before the publication of Eros and Civilization.[24] Beard described the book as an 'apocalyptic companion' to Life Against Death, and wrote that between them the books provided 'one of the most influential blueprints for radical thinking in the decade which followed.'[25] Stirk argued that Marcuse's views were a utopian theory with widespread appeal, but that examination of Marcuse's interpretations of Kant, Schiller, and Freud showed that they were based on a flawed methodology. He also maintained that Marcuse's misinterpretation of Freud's concept of reason undermined Marcuse's argument, which privileged a confused concept of instinct over an ambiguous sense of reason.[26] Weineck credited Marcuse with anticipating later reactions to Freud in the 1960s, which maintained in opposition to Freud that the 'sacrifice of libido' is not necessary for civilized progress, though she considered Marcuse's views more nuanced than such later ideas. She endorsed Marcuse's criticisms of Fromm and Horney, but maintained that Marcuse underestimated the force of Freud's pessimism and neglected Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).[27]
Cho compared Marcuse's views to those of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, writing that the similarities between them were less well known than the differences.[29] Moore wrote that while the influence of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead on Marcuse has received insufficient attention, essential aspects of Marcuse's theory can be 'better understood and appreciated when their Whiteheadian origins are examined.'[30] Holland discussed Marcuse's ideas in relation to those of the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin, in order to explore the social and psychological mechanisms behind the 'sex/gender system' and to open 'new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors' applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations' of Freud's writings.[35] Hammer argued that Marcuse was 'incapable of offering an account of the empirical dynamics that may lead to the social change he envisions, and that his appeal to the benefits of automatism is blind to its negative effects' and that his 'vision of the good life as centered on libidinal self-realization' threatens the freedom of individuals and would 'potentially undermine their sense of self-integrity.' Hammer maintained that, unlike the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, Marcuse failed to 'take temporality and transience properly into account' and had 'no genuine appreciation of the need for mourning.' He also argued that 'political action requires a stronger ego-formation' than allowed for by Marcuse's views.[32] Evans identified Eros and Civilization as an influence on 1960s activists and young people.[33]
Hite identified the book as an influence on Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973), finding this apparent in Pynchon's characterization of Orpheus as a figure connected with music, memory, play, and desire. She added that while Marcuse did not 'appeal to mind-altering drugs as adjuncts to phantasy', many of his readers were 'happy to infer a recommendation.' She argued that while Marcuse does not mention pedophilia, it fits his argument that perverse sex can be 'revelatory or demystifying, because it returns experience to the physical body'.[34] Duvenage described the book as 'fascinating', but wrote that Marcuse's suggestions for a repression-free society have been criticized by the philosopher Marinus Schoeman.[37] Farr, Kellner, Lamas, and Reitz wrote that partly because of the impact of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse's work influenced several academic disciplines in the United States and in other countries.[41] Nicholas endorsed Marcuse's 'analysis of technological rationality, aesthetic reason, phantasy, and imagination.'[45]
Evaluations in books, 1955â1986[edit]
Brown commended Eros and Civilization as the first book, following the work of Wilhelm Reich, to 'reopen the possibility of the abolition of repression' in Life Against Death.[46] The philosopher Paul RicÅur compared his philosophical approach to Freud in Freud and Philosophy (1965) to that of Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.[47] Paul Robinson credited Marcuse and Brown with systematically analyzing psychoanalytic theory in order to reveal its critical implications in The Freudian Left (1969). He believed they went beyond Reich and the anthropologist Géza Róheim in probing the dialectical subtleties of Freud's thought, thereby reaching conclusions more extreme and utopian than theirs. He found Lionel Trilling's work on Freud, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), of lesser value. He saw Brown's exploration of the radical implications of psychoanalysis as in some ways more rigorous and systematic than that of Marcuse. He noted that Eros and Civilization has often been compared to Life Against Death, but suggested that it was less elegantly written. He concluded that while Marcuse's work is psychologically less radical than that of Brown, it is politically bolder, and unlike Brown's, succeeded in transforming psychoanalytic theory into historical and political categories. He deemed Marcuse a finer theorist than Brown, believing that he provided a more substantial treatment of Freud.[48]
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre criticized Marcuse for focusing on Freud's metapsychology rather than on psychoanalysis as a method of therapy in Marcuse (1970). He believed that Marcuse followed speculations that were difficult to either support or refute, that his discussion of sex was pompous, that he failed to explain how people whose sexuality was unrepressed would behave, and uncritically accepted Freudian views of sexuality and failed to conduct his own research into the topic. He criticized Marcuse for his dismissive treatment of rival theories, such as those of Reich. He also suggested that Marcuse's goal of reconciling Freudian with Marxist theories might be impossible, and, comparing Marcuse's views to those of Ludwig Feuerbach, argued that by returning to the themes of the Young Hegelian movement Marcuse had retreated to a 'pre-Marxist' perspective.[49]
Phil Brown criticized Marcuse's attempt to 'synthesize Marx and Freud' in Toward a Marxist Psychology, arguing that such a synthesis is impossible. He maintained that Marcuse neglected politics, disregarded the class struggle, advocated 'sublimation of human spontaneity and creativity', and failed to criticize the underlying assumptions of Freudian thinking.[50] The gay rights activist Dennis Altman followed Robinson in criticizing Marcuse for failing to clarify 'whether sexual repression causes economic subordination or vice versa' or to 'connect his use of Freud's image of the primal crime with his ideas about the repression of nongenital and homosexual drives' in Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971). Though influenced by Marcuse, he commented that Eros and Civilization was referred to surprisingly rarely in gay liberation literature. In an afterword to the 1993 edition of the book, he added that Marcuse's 'radical Freudianism' was 'now largely forgotten' and had never been 'particularly popular in the gay movement.'[51]
The social psychologist Liam Hudson suggested in The Cult of the Fact (1972) that Life Against Death was neglected by radicals because its publication coincided with that of Eros and Civilization. Comparing the two works, he found Eros and Civilization more reductively political and less stimulating.[52] The critic Frederick Crews argued in Out of My System (1975) that Marcuse's proposed liberation of instinct was not a real challenge to the status quo, since, by taking the position that such a liberation could only be attempted 'after culture has done its work and created the mankind and the world that could be free', Marcuse was accommodating society's institutions. He accused Marcuse of sentimentalism.[53] The psychoanalyst Joel Kovel described Eros and Civilization as more successful than Life Against Death in The Age of Desire (1981).[54] The psychotherapist Joel D. Hencken described Eros and Civilization as an important example of the intellectual influence of psychoanalysis and an 'interesting precursor' to a study of psychology of the 'internalization of oppression' in the anthology Homosexuality: Social, Psychological, and Biological Issues (1982). However, he believed that aspects of the work have limited its audience.[55]
Kellner compared Eros and Civilization to RicÅur's Freud and Philosophy and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) in Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984). However, he suggested that RicÅur and Habermas made better use of several Freudian ideas.[56] The sociologist Jeffrey Weeks described Marcuse's views as 'essentialist' in Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985). Though granting that Marcuse proposed a 'powerful image of a transformed sexuality' that had a major influence on post-1960s sexual politics, he considered Marcuse's vision 'utopian'.[57]
The philosopher Jeffrey Abramson credited Marcuse with revealing the 'bleakness of social life' to him and forcing him to wonder why progress does 'so little to end human misery and destructiveness' in Liberation and Its Limits (1986). He compared Eros and Civilization to Brown's Life Against Death, the cultural critic Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), RicÅur's Freud and Philosophy, and Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests, writing that these works jointly placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry. However, he argued that while Marcuse recognized the difficulties of explaining how sublimation could be compatible with a new and non-repressive social order, he presented a confused account of a 'sublimation without desexualization' that could make this possible. He described some of Marcuse's speculations as bizarre, and suggested that Marcuse's 'vision of Eros' is 'imbalanced in the direction of the sublime' and that the 'essential conservatism' of his stance on sexuality had gone unnoticed.[58]
The philosopher Roger Scruton criticized Marcuse and Brown in Sexual Desire (1986), describing their proposals for sexual liberation as 'another expression of the alienation' they condemned.[59] In the anthology The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (1987), the anthropologist Pat Caplan identified Eros and Civilization as an influence on student protest movements of the 1960s, apparent in their use of the slogan, 'Make love not war'.[60] In the same work, Victor J. Seidler credited Marcuse with showing that the repressive organizations of the instincts described by Freud are not inherent in their nature but emerge from specific historical conditions. He contrasted Marcuse's views with Foucault's.[61]
Evaluations in books, 1987âpresent[edit]
The philosopher Seyla Benhabib argued in her introduction to Marcuse's Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, an interpretation of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, that Eros and Civilization continues the interest in historicity present in that earlier work and that Marcuse views the sources of disobedience and revolt as being rooted in collective memory.[62] Stephen Frosh found Eros and Civilization and Life Against Death to be among the most important advances towards a psychoanalytic theory of art and culture in The Politics of Psychoanalysis (1987). However, he considered the way these works turn the internal psychological process of repression into a model for social existence as a whole to be disputable.[63] In the anthology Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (1988), the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein described Eros and Civilization as 'perverse, wild, phantasmal and surrealistic' and 'strangely Hegelian and anti-Hegelian, Marxist and anti-Marxist, Nietzschean and anti-Nietzschean', and praised Marcuse's discussion of the theme of 'negativity'.[64] In the same work, Edward Hyman suggested that Marcuse's failure to state clearly that his hypothesis is the 'primacy of Eros' undermined his arguments and that Marcuse gave an insufficiently through consideration of metapsychology.[65]
Kenneth Lewes endorsed Marcuse's criticism of the 'pseudohumane moralizing' of neo-Freudians such as Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, and Thompson in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (1988).[66] Joel Schwartz identified Eros and Civilization as 'one of the most influential Freudian works written since Freud's death' in the anthology Confronting the Constitution (1990). However, he argued that Marcuse failed to reinterpret Freud in a way that adds political to psychoanalytic insights or remedy Freud's 'failure to differentiate among various kinds of civil society', instead simply grouping all existing regimes as 'repressive societies' and contrasting them with a hypothetical future non-repressive society.[67] Kovel noted in History and Spirit (1991) that Marcuse studied with Heidegger but later broke with him for political reasons and suggested that the Heideggerian aspects of Marcuse's thinking, which had been in eclipse during Marcuse's most active period with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, reemerged, displaced onto Freud, in Eros and Civilization.[68]
The economist Richard Posner maintained in Sex and Reason (1992) that Eros and Civilization contains 'political and economic absurdities' but also interesting observations about sex and art. He credited Marcuse with providing arguments that made the work a critique of conventional sexual morality superior to the philosopher Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals (1929), but accused Marcuse of wrongly believing that polymorphous perversity would help to create a utopia and that sex has the potential to be a politically subversive force. He considered Marcuse's argument that capitalism has the ability to neutralize the subversive potential of 'forces such as sex and art' interesting, though clearly true only in the case of art. He argued that while Marcuse believed that American popular culture had trivialized sexual love, sex had not had a subversive effect in societies not dominated by American popular culture.[69] The historian Arthur Marwick identified Eros and Civilization as the book with which Marcuse achieved international fame, a key work in the intellectual legacy of the 1950s, and an influence on the subcultures of the 1960s, in The Sixties (1998).[70] The historian Roy Porter argued in the anthology Debating Gender, Debating Sexuality (1996) that Marcuse's view that 'industrialization demanded erotic austerity' was not original, and was discredited by Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1976).[71]
The philosopher Todd Dufresne compared Eros and Civilization to Brown's Life Against Death and the anarchist author Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960) in Tales from the Freudian Crypt (2000). He questioned to what extent Marcuse's readers understood his work, suggesting that many student activists might have shared the view of Morris Dickstein, to whom it work meant, 'not some ontological breakthrough for human nature, but probably just plain fucking, lots of it'.[72] Posner suggested in Public Intellectuals: A Story of Decline (2001) that the claim of '1960s radicals' influenced by Marcuse that 'sexual promiscuity would undermine capitalism' has been proven wrong by the spread of both sexual promiscuity and capitalism.[73] Anthony Elliott identified Eros and Civilization as a 'seminal' work in Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (2002).[74] The essayist Jay Cantor described Life Against Death and Eros and Civilization as 'equally profound' in his introduction to Brown's The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition (2009).[75]
The historian Dagmar Herzog wrote in Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017) that Eros and Civilization was, along with Life Against Death, one of the most notable examples of an effort to 'use psychoanalytic ideas for culturally subversive and emancipatory purposes'. However, she believed that Marcuse's influence on historians contributed to the acceptance of the mistaken idea that Horney was responsible for the 'desexualization of psychoanalysis.'[76] The critic Camille Paglia wrote in Provocations (2018) that while Eros and Civilization was 'one of the centerpieces of the Frankfurt School', she found the book inferior to Life Against Death. She described Eros and Civilization as 'overschematic yet blobby and imprecise'.[77]
Other views[edit]
The gay rights activist Jearld Moldenhauer discussed Marcuse's views in The Body Politic. He suggested that Marcuse found the gay liberation movement insignificant, and criticized Marcuse for ignoring it in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), even though many gay activists had been influenced by Eros and Civilization. He pointed to Altman as an activist who had been inspired by the book, which inspired him to argue that the challenge to 'conventional norms' represented by gay people made them revolutionary.[78] Rainer Funk wrote in Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas (2000) that Fromm, in a letter to the philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, dismissed Eros and Civilization as an incompetent distortion of Freud and 'the expression of an alienation and despair masquerading as radicalism' and referred to Marcuse's 'ideas for the future man' as irrational and sickening.[79]
The gay rights activist Jeffrey Escoffier discussed Eros and Civilization in GLBTQ Social Sciences, writing that it 'played an influential role in the writing of early proponents of gay liberation', such as Altman and Martin Duberman, and 'influenced radical gay groups such as the Gay Liberation Front's Red Butterfly Collective', which adopted as its motto the final line from the 'Political Preface' of the 1966 edition of the book: 'Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.' Escoffier noted, however, that Marcuse later had misgivings about sexual liberation as it developed in the United States, and that Marcuse's influence on the gay movement declined as it embraced identity politics.[80]
According to P. D. Casteel, Eros and Civilization is, with One-Dimensional Man, the work Marcuse is best known for.[81]
See also[edit]References[edit]
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Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eros_and_Civilization&oldid=898522250'
One-Dimensional Man was published just half a century ago, catapulting a rather obscure professor in his sixties to international fame. In less than five years, over 100,000 copies of the book would be sold in the United States alone, with translations extending the influence of Herbert Marcuse into sixteen foreign languages. He addressed packed auditoriums all over the United States and Europe. At a student-occupied university in France, young rebels put on a kind of teach-in they called a âjournée marcusienne.â In Paris, Marcuse met with Nguyen Than Le, North Vietnamâs chief delegate to the peace talks with the United States. At the University of Rome, students brandished placards proclaiming their allegiance to Marx, Mao and Marcuse. Before the sixties had ended, he was commonly designated as the unofficial faculty advisor to the New Left.
Marcuseâs impact went well beyond the precincts of radical politics. In 1969, Pope Paul VI condemned him by name, blaming Marcuseâalong with Sigmund Freudâfor promoting the âdisgusting and unbridledâ manifestations of eroticism and the âanimal, barbarous and subhuman degradationsâ commonly known as the sexual revolution. The hostility that Marcuse aroused was ideologically ecumenical. In Pravda, Soviet journalist Yuri Zhukov denounced him as a âfalse prophet,â while the apartheid regime in South Africa blocked the importation of all his books.
Back in the United States, leading intellectuals treated him with respect and, sometimes, admiration. In his best-selling 1969 book lauding The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak praised Marcuse as âone of the shrewdest critics of the subtle technocratic regimentation which now bids fair to encompass the whole of our world-wide industrial order.â Lionel Trilling and Alasdair MacIntyre subjected his work to long and careful critiques. His ideas were analyzed (or at least described) in magazines as different as Fortune and Playboy. For the New York Review of Books, David Levine slyly drew and quartered Marcuse, who is shown making an ad-manâs pitch for a box (as though it were cereal or detergent) labeled âRev.â
Hawking a revolutionâwhat he called âthe Great Refusalââmade Marcuse symbolic of the political ethos of the sixties, but his politics were better explained by his experience of living in Weimar Germany. The sense that radical transformation was needed in Weimar Germany was an almost rational response to the economic flameout and moral degradation that followed defeat in the military slaughter that began a century ago. The neo-Marxist Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) was born in that era to diagnose the social circumstances that would soon bring the Nazis to power. In adhering to the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was haunted by the failure of the left to effectively pit the appeal of socialism against the rise of fascism, and he also blamed republican institutions for their complicity in that process of political collapse. One-Dimensional Man was published exactly three decades after Marcuse reached the United States, but it accuses the presumably benign democracies of the postwar West of foreclosing more valuable and humane political options. The Frankfurt School had addressed not only the economic and social ordeal that industrialism had fostered, but also the ideas that were formulated to defend the disparities of class and status. One-Dimensional Man tried to show how ideology concealed the grip of domination and the reality of alienation. This meant that any sort of protest had to begin with a recognition of how spiritually impoverished and politically barren lifeâeven in prosperous Americaâhad become. Marcuse assigned himself the task of telling his readers how little autonomy they really enjoyed, that their economic security was in fact a form of servitude to irrational and impersonal forces designed to maximize productivity at the expense of pleasure.
In the sixties this argument clicked. To be sure, the reason for his iconic impact was somewhat mysterious, even as One-Dimensional Man was flying off the shelves. Marcuseâs main intellectual forbears were not the dreamers and visionaries who populated the heritage of the American left and gave it moral authority. (He was born, after all, into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Wilhelmine Berlin.) Marcuseâs debts were instead charged to the formidable figures of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. His text fails to mention any actual American industrialist or practicing politician, but he does cite Heidegger, Quine, Ryle, and Wittgenstein. No one could accuse Marcuseâs work of being âunder-theorized.â
To the demands that such thinkers made upon young readers should be added the difficulties of Marcuseâs style. It was hardly his fault that he wrote in an acquired language, though that alone does not account for the density and opacity of his prose. In 1938, when the refugee sage Martin Buber delivered his inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one listener remarked: âClearly, he has learned our language. Now he is as obscure in Hebrew as in German.â
Perhaps Marcuse benefited from the presumption in some quarters that a ponderous style is synonymous with wisdom. He learned English well enough to adopt a bureaucratic prose suitable to service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, and, for the rest of the 1940s, in the Eastern European section of the Department of State. The duties of officialdom in Washington, D.C. did not obliterate his allegiance to socialism; Marcuse was a contributor to Dissent in the 1950s, the decade when his systemicâand soon-to-be-resonantâopposition to âadvanced industrial societyâ was fully gestating.
However closely or accurately New Leftists and others might have read One-Dimensional Man, as well as Marcuseâs subsequent works, he was once taken very seriously. He helped to define the zeitgeist in a way that needs to be understood, if not resurrected. But in the decades since the New Left crested and collapsed, has the stature of any intellectual fallen more dramatically than that of Herbert Marcuse?
To be sure, his reputation has not faded into utter oblivion. An International Herbert Marcuse Society still holds biennial conferences, and anthologies and monographs on his work continue to appear. But they are not central to academic discourse and tend to be reviewed only in specialized journals.
In 1987, the social critic Russell Jacoby traced a downward trajectory in the vitality and scope of the American intelligentsia, yet his The Last Intellectuals mentions Marcuse only briefly. Eight years later, One-Dimensional Man did not make the Times Literary Supplement list of the hundred most influential books published since the end of the Second World War. Nor did the TLS cite any of Marcuseâs other worksânot even what he regarded as his âmost important book,â Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (1955), the volume that had presumably irritated Pope Paul VI.
Marcuseâs stature has shrunk even as scholarly interest in other exemplary figures of the Frankfurt School has intensified. Consider Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Each of them dealt directly, explicitly and frequently with cultural questions, and far less with political ones. Yet they have recently been the subjects of massive biographies, which make the case for their continuing salience in grasping the implications of modernity itself. Marcuse is associated with the crisis of Marxism, however, in a way that they are not. The âcrisisâ could be defined as Marxismâs historical entanglement with the tyrannies of Stalinism and Maoism, or its imminent demise given the capacity of capitalism to generate mass acceptance and even allegiance that doomed any hope of systematic change. Even though Marcuseâs dissertation topic had addressed the way that novelists portray artists (the Künstlerroman), his death roughly coincided with the emergence of cultural studies, which marked an abrupt shift in academic fashion.
But his own politics appeared problematic as well. No one personified the international scale of the New Left better than Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the unofficial leader of the French revolt of 1968. In the spring of 2008, he visited the Brandeis campus to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the near disintegration of the Fifth Republic, where he summarized the failures as well as successes of the 1960s by mentioning Martin Heideggerâs two most famous students in the Weimar Republic. âWe read too much Marcuse,â Cohn-Bendit told me, âwhen instead we should have been reading Arendt.â
Once the domination of technocracy was overcome, Marcuse believed, the people would be free to discover their authentic needs.
That lament for a generation invites more than one interpretation. One is the danger Arendt identifies in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): how can the mob profess to represent the masses, when the latterâs anomie and helplessness can make it easily susceptible to ideological righteousness? The chaos resulting from the decomposition of the bourgeois order can lead, she argued, to cruelties unprecedented even by standards of ancient despotism. Marcuse was far less committed to the status quo and far more willing to foresee that the eclipse of the liberal state might be positive, a way to discover and explore the instinctual life of freedom. Power to the people would enable them to snap open the notorious âmind-forgâd manaclesâ that had so horrified William Blake. Once the domination of technocracy was overcome, Marcuse believed, the people would be free to discover their authentic needs. What the people really wanted could not be reduced to the balloting in the Electoral College, or to other civic institutions that presumably recorded and validated public opinion. Yet there is something rather unsavory about Marcuse telling his readers (and their fellow citizens) that they are trapped in the coils of ersatz satisfactions and values, a condition that the author is smart enough to realize.
In 1964 he looked for the agents of change among those without stakes in an âadvanced industrial society.â Three decades after the German proletariat had failed to stop Nazism, Marcuseâs revolutionary faith was limited. It was invested in âthe substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted,â and even in âthe unemployed and the unemployable.â To this rather baggy list, he would add oppositionists who were marked neither by homogeneity nor unity: the middle-class white youth who formed the New Left in Europe as well as the United States; the black underclass in the ghettoes; the National Liberation Front in Vietnam; and the Cuban revolutionaries. Marcuse praised them all for subscribing to what he called âthe Great Refusal.â Scarcely a decade after the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had topped the non-fiction best-seller list with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), Marcuse invoked the virtues of negative thinking, as a counterweight to âthe most efficient system of domination,â which was how he described democracy.
Perhaps that is why his influence even on the left has faded so strikingly. Democracy is something that social democrats and progressives have generally wanted to strengthen, rather than impugn. Nor did other legatees of Critical Theory (like Adorno and Horkheimer, who themselves returned to Frankfurt) share his general support of the New Left. In fact Marcuse resisted the temptation to completely endorse campus radicalism and gingerly opposed direct assaults on the legitimacy of the university, such as the takeover of Columbia University in 1968. He realized that the academy constituted something of an enclave of political criticism, however hesitantly expressed, rather than an example of what required demolition in spasms of revolutionary frenzy.
Most devastating for his reputation as a seer, however, was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from.
Most devastating for his reputation as a seer, however, was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from. Two years after Marcuseâs death, Ronald Reagan would take his first oath of office. But just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee, of the New Right in Europe. He had certainly grasped the significance of the failure of the working class to follow the Marxist script. But he may not have anticipated how effectively politicians like Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Jörg Haider of Austriaâs Freedom Party would appeal to voters in that class.
A failure to foresee Thermidor may have stemmed merely from the habitâcommon to our speciesâof being surprised by the future. But a limitation of Marcuseâs own sensibility can be held accountable as well. To put it simply, he was not good at appreciating the force of political orientations other than his own. Nor did he manage to exhibit empathy for other philosophical perspectives. As Alasdair MacIntyre complained, Marcuse did not conscientiously seek to meet objections to his ideas or to duke it out with serious adversaries. A major exception might be the debate that he inaugurated with Erich Fromm. Conducted in the pages of Dissent soon after its founding, this brilliant exchange considered the applicability of Freudianism to social criticism. On the other hand, Frommâs ârevisionismâ did not require Marcuse to work up much of a sweat. Fromm too had belonged to the Frankfurt School, subscribed to socialism and drew his primary intellectual inspiration from both Marx and Freud.
By taking it for granted that capitalism needed to be eliminated or transcended, Marcuse tended to assert rather than to argue. Prolepsis does not characterize the reasoning that animates his books, which seemed to be aimed at readers who are already convinced of the indictment the author brings against the system. But such a position would become inadequate, even feckless, when it became clear that capitalism showed no signs of collapsing. Since the end of the 1960s, choices have been confinedâmore clearly than ever beforeâto versions of capitalism. Marcuse underestimated its resilience, its success in sweeping away any serious rivals in the course of the half-century since his major influence was registered.
A final explanation for the historical repudiation of Herbert Marcuse confronts the very books that secured his reputation: Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. Certainly their subjects are quite different. The effort to trace the radical implications of Freud inspired the earlier volume, and the relevance of Marx to advanced industrial society marked the work that was published in 1964. The site of one book was the bedroom, of the other the boardroom. Nor are Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man entirely consistent.
For example, Eros and Civilization envisions technology as a catalyst of emancipation, freeing humanity from drudgery and permitting a polymorphous sexuality to pervade utopia. The latter book repudiates technocratic bureaucracy, however, and condemns the exploitation of nature that scientific progress is supposed to achieve. In 1955, Marcuse imagined the triumph of play over work, of emotional fulfillment over economic performance, of Eros as a viable rival to Thanatos. But in 1964 the capacity of capitalism to channel instinctual energy into psychologically satisfying expressions, while suppressing its disruptive power, seemed far too effective to be overcome.
Eros and Civilization appeared when conformist claims were transcendent, in a decade that, in America, began with legal sanctions against Communists, when civil service employment was denied to homosexuals and when patriarchy and domesticity defined the family. Yet Marcuse presented a radical gateway for the pursuit of happiness and the enhancement of freedom. One-Dimensional Man was published two years after the Students for a Democratic Society issued the Port Huron Statement and one year after the publication of The Feminine Mystique. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act accelerated the formal decomposition of white supremacy, and Dr. Strangelove exposed the portentous instability of nuclear deterrence.
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Yet surprisingly the tone of One-Dimensional Man is pessimistic. History seemed to be moving on the side of the âomnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives,â of the âunfreedomâ that the author ascribed to the nation that three decades earlier had given him refuge. Each book happens to go against the grain of the conventional yet defensible view of these decades.
They nevertheless shared a crucial assumption, which is that the West had achieved a permanent level of prosperity. Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man both claim that industrial capitalism had eliminated the constant threat of scarcity and destitution, so that both the psychic requirement of sublimation and economic demand for productivity were almost inevitably to become superfluous. Abundance was making both repression and regimentation obsolete. The vocation of post-Freudian and neo-Marxist radicalism therefore entailed the prospect of erasing the residues of puritan morality as well as the constraints of the Protestant ethic. Capitalism could stimulate impulses toward beauty and pleasure, but Marcuse denied that such drives could be genuinely satisfied. The task he assigned himself was to show that the price that humanity must pay for happiness and autonomy was unnecessary.
In fact, Marcuse considered freedom the predicate of happiness; he doubted that anyone could be truly happy without experiencing the exhilaration of liberty. Anyone can see what is wrong with the dystopia described in a postwar novel like Ray Bradburyâs Fahrenheit 451 (1953), because the inhabitants are not free. It is harder to see what is wrong with another futuristic fiction of the postwar era, like B.F. Skinnerâs Walden Two (1948), which makes freedom not only illusory but incompatible with happiness.
It was honorable of Marcuse to try to imagine how the fullest expression of personality, or plenitude, might extinguish the misery that was long deemed an essential feature of the human condition. Eros and Civilization is not only, as he claimed, his most significant book; it also merits consideration as his best, neither obviously dated nor vexingly inaccessible. Its speculative daring does not rely upon the frayed remains of Freudian psychology but upon reconfiguring its insights. He ignored the scientific and clinical controversies that swirled around psychoanalysis, and could not have been expected to anticipate the feminist objections it would instigate. Instead Marcuse imagined how Freudâs critique of the consequences of repression might be converted into an emancipatory project, with the psyche released from the weight of society. Self-denial isnât ânatural,â Marcuse claimed; it is merely historical. Eros and Civilization is thrilling to read because it conveys a philosophical need to peer over the horizon, to conjecture how the formation of a life without material restraints might somehow be made meaningful.
Marcuse was correct to highlight the unprecedented extension of affluence, within reach of hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the planetâs inhabitants in the twenty-first century. But he did not predict what has become the growing gap that separates rich and poor in the United States, and that has split off the very rich from the middle class as well. The possibility of such divisions reappearing in a fully capitalist world is absent even in his best-known works, which are bound to seem remote from the political dilemmas posed by a restored Gilded Age.
Think of the difference between Charles A. Reich, whose 1970 best-seller, The Greening of America, envisioned a historical transformation into the bliss of Consciousness III, and Robert B. Clean master license key. Reich, who has exposed over the past few decades the excruciating problem of middle-class stagnation, while the concentration of wealth at the top has reached staggering levels bereft of social or economic justification. The Walton family, for instance, is the nationâs most affluent (sitting on an estimated $150 billion); and yet the company that has enriched Sam Waltonâs heirs refuses to pay a living wage to many of its employees.
Such conditions therefore make the circulation of terms like ârepressive de-sublimationâ and âtotal administrationâ seem extrinsic to the current crisisâand criticismâof the American political economy. Insofar as the most pressing challenge that confronts the left today is how to enlist the political will to address the injustice of economic inequality, the intellectual and moral legacy of Herbert Marcuse wonât be due for a revival anytime soon.
Stephen J. Whitfield teaches American Studies at Brandeis University and is the author of Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, among other works.
For another perspective on Marcuse, see Nick Thorkelsonâs comic âThe Fifty-Year-Old One-Dimensional Manâ on our blog.
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