Heidegger and Marcuse: The
Catastrophe and Redemption of Technology
“The fully enlightened
earth radiates catastrophe triumphant.”
Adorno and Horkheimer (1972: 3, trans. modified)
Andrew Feenberg
We are several hundred years into the project of Enlightenment,
initiated in the 18th Century by thinkers who believed in progress. We are the
heirs of that project, which freed science and technology for the adventure of
modernity. This has made all the difference. No doubt human nature remains the
same as always, but the means at our disposal are now much more powerful than
in the past. Quantity has changed into quality as innovations alter the basic
parameters of human action. New dilemmas emerge in a society reconstructed
around these new technical means.
Two philosophers have reflected most deeply on this situation. Martin
Heidegger invites us to study technology as the core phenomenon of modern life.
Where most philosophers either celebrate technical progress or worry about its
unintended consequences, he identifies the culture of modernity with the spirit
of technology. The limits and aporia of technology give rise to general
catastrophe. Heidegger’s student, Herbert Marcuse, reformulated the philosophy
of technology in the framework of a radical social theory and projected
solutions to the problems Heidegger identified. For Marcuse technology is a
still in evolution; it is not a fixed destiny as it is for Heidegger. The
promise of technology remains to be fulfilled in a future stage of that
evolution.
Together, these two philosophers offer the deepest insight into the
catastrophe of Enlightenment and the possibilities of redemption. This is a
paper about their thought and its continuing relevance. However, I should explain
at the outset that my interest is not primarily historical but philosophical. I
hope to show how the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse can serve in contemporary
debates about technology and modernity.
The argument of this paper is framed by the distinction between the
Greek notion of techne and the modern idea of technology.[1] Techne
describes the traditional value-charged craft practice of all premodern
societies. Craftsmen serve functional needs while also conforming to the
broader ethical and aesthetic values of their society. By contrast, modern
technology has freed itself in large measure from the valuative commitments of
its society. Where the craftsman of the past built his society in making the
product of his craft, modern technology destroys its social world to the extent
of its technological success. The modern world is a place of total mobilization
for ends that remain obscure. It is the apparent “value freedom” or
“neutrality” of technology which Heidegger and Marcuse identify as the source
of the uniqueness and the tragedy of modernity.
Heidegger’s approach is based on a specific interpretation of this
contrast between ancient techne and modern technology. In ancient
Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is a puzzling combination of romantic
nostalgia for this idealized image of antiquity and deep insight into
modernity.[2]
His originality lies in treating technique not merely as a functional means but
as a mode of “revealing” through which a “world” is shaped. “World” in
Heidegger refers not to the sum of existent things but to an ordered and
meaningful structure of experience. Such structures depend on basic practices
characterizing societies and whole historical eras. These constitute an
“opening” in which “Being” is revealed, that is to say, in which experience
takes place. The “world” in this sense is neither an independent reality nor a
human construction. Rather, human being and Being interact in a mysterious
dialectic of activity and receptivity which occupies the place in Heidegger’s
thought usually filled by notions such as consciousness, perception, or
culture. It is in this context that we are to understand Heidegger’s claim that
different technical practices reflect different “worlds.”
Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” is one of the
founding texts of philosophy of technology. It is as difficult as it is
important. Some of the difficulty is due to Heidegger’s innovative terminology.
He believes that modern languages have been colonized by the technological mindset.
To avoid prejudging the answer to the “question,” he therefore introduces a
meta-language freed from the telltale marks of modernity. This is supposed to
make possible an unprejudiced analysis and comparison of different eras in the
history of technical making.
Other difficulties arise from Heidegger’s treatment of the concept of
essence which plays three related roles in the essay.[3]
First, Heidegger assures us that “the essence of technology is by no means
anything technological,” a puzzling statement on the face of it (Heidegger,
1977: 4). Second, premodern craft is said to actualize the essence (eidos)
of its objects (Heidegger, 1977: 7, 160-161). Third, the “saving power” of
technology, discussed at the end of the essay, is somehow related to the loss
of essence in modern times (Heidegger, 1977: 30-32). Unraveling these
difficulties suggests an original interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy of
technology.
Why does Heidegger deny that the essence of technology is
technological? With this provocative statement, he distinguishes an
instrumental account of technology from an ontological account. The former
concerns the function of technology in fulfilling human desires, while the
latter focuses on the role of the technological spirit in structuring a world
shaped through and through by the exigencies of planning and control. The
instrumental account is not wrong, but it is internal to modernity and cannot
explain why its promise has gone awry. Only an ontological account illuminates
the nature of modernity and its catastrophic outcome.
The ontological account of technology is not really about technology in
the usual sense of the term, i.e. devices and their uses. Rather, it is a
chapter in the history of Being. In premodern times, the world consisted in
independent things, Aristotelian substances, each with a unique essence. These
are the things that enter the process of craft production as form and material
for human actions that actualize slumbering potentials objectively present in
the things themselves. But the modern technological “revealing” sweeps all this
away and leaves only a collection of fungible stuff available for human
ordering in arbitrary patterns. The danger of technology is not so much its
threat to human survival as the incorporation of human beings themselves into
this “enframing” as mere raw materials alongside things. Lost in this leveling
is not just human dignity, but also awareness of the unique role of the human
being as the site of experience, the locus of world-shaping encounters with
Being.
Despite Heidegger’s apparent nostalgia for the premodern past, he never
suggests a return to a naive acceptance of objective essences (Heidegger, 1977:
30). Instead, he looks forward to a new era in which new gods will enable human
beings to reclaim their place in a world no longer shrouded in a technological
order. This advance he attributes in part to technology itself, which is
supposed to harbor a “saving power” that may someday serve as the catalyst for
a new revealing.
In what does this saving power consist? Again, the text is obscure. I
conjecture that it is the very deconstruction of essences that promises
deliverance from technology. The concept of essence, Heidegger argues, refers
to what is permanent and enduring. But just insofar as essences are dissolved
in the acid of modernity, the role of the human being in “revealing” the world
comes to the fore. It is not nature alone, physis, which reveals Being;
human being too is involved. The belongingness of human being and Being in the
making of worlds is the only constant that remains, and recognition of this
fact is finally possible in modern times. Indeed, while shrouding Being in the
technological enframing, modernity also contains the “other possibility…that
[man] might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing”
(Heidegger, 1977: 26; See also, 28-29, 40-41). Heidegger’s own
philosophy is this recognition. Thus the outlines of another modernity take
shape, a modernity based on a new concept of essence as coming into being, the
revelation of what is.
Unfortunately, the nature of this new era remains completely obscure.
Heidegger neither describes it nor prescribes a path to reach it. This
abstention has impressed some readers with his profundity, while others have dismissed
Heidegger’s blurry vision as a dangerous mystification. I would like to try a
different approach, a kind of immanent critique and synthesis of Heidegger’s
reflections on technique. He would no doubt have rejected my interpretation,
but it bridges the gap between his thought and that of his student, Marcuse,
who also entertained an apocalyptic vision of a post-technological era but went
beyond his teacher in sketching a hopeful future. The point of this exercise is
to show that implicit in Heidegger’s own theory are the elements of a more
concrete critique of technology and projection of its promise than he himself
developed. Freely interpreted, Heidegger thus remains an interesting source for
contemporary philosophy of technology.
Let me begin this (no doubt blasphemous) reconstruction of Heidegger’s
position by abstracting from the explicit historical narrative in which he
situates technique in order to unfold an implicit narrative that unifies his
text. From that angle, his story looks like this. The ancients understood the
importance of Being as the source of meaning, and the moderns the role of human
being in its essential activity. But each age misunderstood its own deepest
principle. The ancients confounded Being with the essences of particular beings.
The moderns confused the essential role of humanity in the process of revealing
with technical command of nature. Stripped of these misunderstandings and
adequately comprehended, this previous history opens us to what Heidegger
claims is “a more original revealing, and hence...the call of a more primal
truth” (Heidegger, 1977: 28). “The
Question Concerning Technology” thus culminates in a kind of posthistorical
totality, a synthesis of ancient and modern through self-consciousness.
But this is a familiar figure of thought that goes back to Hegel: the
“end of history” as history aware of itself. The young Marx repeats this figure
in the notion of communism as a “dream” from which the world need only awaken
to possess its reality. The implicit structuring of Heidegger’s essay around
the figure of self-consciousness suggests a way of reading Heidegger against
the grain of his own self-understanding.
Most readers who are not confirmed Heideggerians are bothered by the
arbitrariness of his version of history and the thinness of his response to the
challenge of technology. At most Heidegger’s historical examples, such as the
Greek chalice or the dam on the
In fact the sharp division between ontological eras Heidegger describes
is not accurately reflected in an equally sharp division between historical
eras. Delineated most abstractly, his contrast between ancient craft and modern
technology rests on a difference in emphasis between receptivity and activity
in technical practice. Ancient craft receives and welcomes the self-manifesting
product. The chalice brings itself into being according to its time honored
form through the mediation of the craftsman. Modern technology actively levels
down and orders its raw materials in systems. Plans and projects devised by the
technologist are imposed on the world as the
However, this difference is only one of emphasis: all technical
practice involves both receptive and active moments. Craft actively “gathers”
the idea and material of its product, and technology receives its call to order
the world from Being. These are the subordinate moments in the dialectic of
receptivity and activity. These subordinate moments recognize the creative
dimension of craft, which requires skill and effort to realize an ideal form
the craftsman does not himself invent in a material he has not made. Similarly,
the modern technologist willfully dominates his projects and materials far more
thoroughly than the craftsman ever did. But he does not dominate his own
commitment to domination, which is his way of being in the world and thus a
function of Being rather than of will (Heidegger, 1977: 19). So far Heidegger.
Once again the historically informed reader is likely to be
dissatisfied with this analysis. Notice the sketchiness of Heidegger’s
description of the subordinate moment in each era. It is hardly plausible to
confine the active dimension of craft to gathering and the receptive dimension
of technology to the call of Being. In fact, many technical activities in
ancient times, such as mining, look a lot like modern technology, if on a
smaller scale. And the creative moment
of modern technology looks a lot like craft activity, if in such thoroughly
modern contexts as the Internet.
This fairly obvious point suggests a less obvious one. Rather than
separating the attributes of premodern craft and modern technology as Heidegger
does, let us combine them in a richer description of technical action. This description
would locate the attributes he identifies with craft alongside the attributes
of modern technology as two complementary dimensions of technique in all
historical eras. Emphases among these dimensions may shift, accounting for
epochal changes in technology from one era to another, but only a theory taking
all aspects of technical practice into account can make sense of the actual
history. And only such a theory can explain how a more self-conscious relation
to technology can result in beneficial changes in technology itself and not
merely in the subjective attitude toward it.
I have developed such an account in what I call “instrumentalization
theory” of technology (Feenberg, 1999: chap. 9). This theory is anticipated by
the overall structure of Heidegger’s essay if not by his actual argument. Let
me offer one example of the kind of transformation that can be operated on
Heidegger’s discourse with fruitful results.
Heidegger describes modern technology as decontextualizing and reducing
its objects to raw materials and system components. In this it supposedly
differs from the techne of the ancient craftsman. The craftsman is described as
gathering the ethical and aesthetic considerations which grant the craft object
a meaning and integrate it to society. But in the real world of technical
practice, these attributes of technique are complementary rather than
characterizing different eras. Heidegger does not tell us how the materials
with which the craftsman works are supplied but surely that involves processes
of decontextualization and reduction such as are involved in mining the silver
for the chalice he offers as an example. Similarly, he does not seem to be
aware that the decontextualized and reduced materials of modern technology are
reconstructed in accordance with ethical and aesthetic norms to conform to
social requirements, but this too is surely an essential part of technical
making in every era including our own. Combining the two descriptions, we
conclude that decontextualizing and reducing on the one hand, and ethical and
aesthetic mediation on the other characterize all technical making. On this
basis we can achieve a more adequate understanding of both craft and modern
technology.
But this is not just an analytic problem in technology studies. The
modern “constitution,” as Latour calls it, conforms with Heidegger’s truncated
vision of technology in treating valuative mediations as extrinsic to a
purified objectivity, more or less equivalent to the technical sphere
(Heidegger, 1977: 142). This is what it means to claim that technology is
value-free. Although we can show that
this supposed value freedom is at least partially illusory, it continues to
have real significance in the world. As Heidegger and Marcuse argue, modern
technology is in fact “free” with respect to many traditional values and humane
considerations, but it is not therefore merely instrumental. Or rather, insofar
as through it instrumentality characterizes the general relation to reality, it
carries a particular world in itself, a world in which control and domination
are the highest values. Where it differs most fundamentally from ancient techne
is in its ignorance of its own value ladenness. A different self-understanding
would open up possibilities of radical technological reform.
The attitude toward this prospect is the most important point on which
Heidegger’s position contrasts with that of his student, Herbert Marcuse. There
is a clear similarity between their critiques of modern technology, but not in
their politics. After Heidegger’s Nazi phase, he seems to have withdrawn
completely and awaited a spiritual renewal. Marcuse was a Marxist of sorts,
even while studying with Heidegger, and for him politics was a means of radical
civilizational transformation. Given this fundamental difference between them,
just how profoundly was Marcuse influenced by Heidegger? This is a difficult
question because political antagonism led to the suppression of references to
Heidegger in Marcuse’s later work, with the exception of some very critical
remarks in interviews and a single quotation in One-Dimensional Man
(Olafson, 1988; Marcuse, 1964: 153-154). Nevertheless, I will argue that there
is a deep connection between these two thinkers. While he is not a
crypto-Heideggerian, Marcuse is indeed addressing questions posed by Heidegger
and offering an alternative solution. That solution involves the transformation
of modern technology into a new techne. The modern techne would
once again incorporate ethics and aesthetics in its structure and reveal a
meaningful world rather than a heap of raw materials.
Marcuse’s career as a philosopher begins with articles that attempt a
synthesis of Heidegger and a Marxism strongly influenced by Lukács’s early
writings. But Marcuse is already discontent with what he perceives as the abstractness
and ahistoricism of Being and Time.[4]
For Marcuse, political positions are not mere opinions which philosophy can
ignore, but modes of being in the world. Authenticity is not the Heideggerian
return of the individual to himself from out of alienation in the crowd, but
must reflect the social character of existence, the fact that the world is a
shared creation. Marcuse’s early existential Marxism thus culminates in a call
for a philosophy that unifies theory and practice in a critical encounter with
its time and the issues of the day (Marcuse, 1978: 398ff).
This existential politics once adopted remains integral to Marcuse’s
thought for the remainder of his long career. The structure of the world in
something close to Heidegger’s sense is at stake in all serious political
struggle. But Heidegger’s terminology, such categories as existence, Dasein,
authenticity, quickly drop by the wayside. Instead of developing an existential
analytic of political engagement along Heideggerian lines as he first proposed,
Marcuse turns to Marx and Freud. Under the influence of the Frankfurt School,
which he joins between the wars, Marcuse develops the notions of technological
rationality, one-dimensionality, and a historicized version of instinct theory
that offer sociological and psychological alternatives to Heidegger, who
disappears as a reference. But as we will see, vestiges of Heidegger’s ontology
persist in the background.
The most important of these vestiges shows up in Marcuse’s theory of
the two “dimensions” of society. Although his presentation of this concept in One-Dimensional
Man references many sources other than Heidegger, on examination it reveals
a remarkable resemblance to the argument of “The Question Concerning
Technology.” In fact Marcuse describes a sort of “history of Being” that
parallels Heidegger’s account in his famous essay.
Marcuse notes that for the Greeks truth was not merely propositional,
but involves the disclosure of being. Truth and falsehood thus apply in the
first instance to things before applying to statements. A “true” thing is one
that manifests its own essence. But since essence is never fully realized, it
actually negates every contingent realization in the imperfect objects of
experience. The “is” always contains an implicit reference to an “ought” it has
failed to some degree to achieve. This “ought” is its potential, which is
intrinsic to it and not merely projected by human wishes or desires (Marcuse,
1964: 124-125, 133-134).
The similarity between this description of the Greek concept of truth
and Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient craft is obvious. However, in
contrast to Heidegger, Marcuse appears to have generalized the implicit
normative structure of craft to being as a whole. Of course neither Heidegger
nor Marcuse suggest a return to the objective essences of the Greeks. But they
do regard
By contrast, Marcuse argues, modern technological rationality
liquidates all reference to essence and potentiality. The empirically observed
thing is the only reality. And just because it is wholly defined by its
empirical appearance, the thing can be analytically dissected into various
qualities and quantities and absorbed into a technical system that submits it
to alien ends. Things no longer have intrinsic potentialities transcending
their given form, but are simply there, unresistingly available for human use
(Marcuse, 1964: 146-148). Means and ends, realities and norms belong to
separate realms, the one objective, the other subjective.
Nineteenth century positivism glorified the one, while romanticism
exalted the other. But in the 20th Century the subjective world no longer
escapes operationalization. It too is brought under control through mass
communications, management techniques, and psychological manipulation. Human
beings are incorporated into the system as just one more item among the
fungible stuff that makes up the social apparatus. A one-dimensional world
emerges in which critical reason is easily dismissed as unmotivated neurotic
discontent. Indeed, a few marginal critics may even be functional for the
system, proving the full extent of its liberalism by their ineffective
complaints.
So far Marcuse’s theory recapitulates Heidegger’s contrast of ancient techne,
based on the realization of essential potentialities, and modern technology
which “enframes” nature and society in a rationality of calculation and control.
It is in their solutions that the difference between them appears. For
Heidegger, philosophy can only reflect on the catastrophe of modernity, but
Marcuse goes beyond earnest contemplation of the present to project a concrete
utopia that can redeem Enlightenment. Despite the enframing, critical reason is
still capable of formulating transcending demands for a better society.
But Marcuse has accepted enough of Heidegger to make this positive turn
extremely problematic. A redeemed technology would respect the potentialities
of things and recognize the creative human role in the shaping of worlds. These
claims correspond roughly to Heidegger’s notion of a new era in which Being and
human being stand in a self-conscious balance. But for Marcuse, respect for
things requires more than a change in attitude; it would also have to transform
the bad technological practices of modernity (Marcuse, 1964: 231). Marcuse’s
new techne would enhance life rather than inventing new means of
destruction. It would be environmentally aware and treat nature with respect
(Marcuse, 1992). Recognition of humanity’s place in the order of revealing
requires valorizing the sensibility and imagination through which the
potentialities of things are manifested. A receptive--Marcuse calls it a
“feminist”--subjectivity would animate the new techne, replacing the
aggressive subject of technological rationality (Marcuse, 1974). Can we make
sense of these hopeful projections?
The core of the problem is once again the concept of essence. Like
Heidegger, Marcuse dismisses any return to Greek metaphysics. But unlike
Heidegger, he refuses to reduce all essential thinking to the contemplation of
the process of revealing. Instead, he seeks to reconstruct the concept of
essence historically. This involves him in astonishing encounters with Hegel,
Freud, and the artistic avant gardes of the early 20th century.
Hegel’s dialectic is in fact an attempt to achieve the very
reconstruction of essence Marcuse requires. Hegel’s Logic dissolves the
traditional distinction between essence and appearance in the dynamics of their
relation. Things do not have fixed essences separate from their manifestations
because things are not themselves stable and fixed. Rather, they belong to a
field of interactions which establishes their inner coherence and their
boundaries. These interactions are a source of tensions which drive things
forward toward their developmental potentialities. For Hegel, potentialities
are inscribed in things but do not constitute them as independent substances as
Aristotle believed. Instead, something in the constellation of their present
connections gives a direction to their development. But what is this something?
Why is development development rather than mere random change?
This question, so far as it concerns Hegel, is usually answered by
reference to the “Absolute,” which is supposed to be the end toward which all
things tend. This is a theological interpretation of Hegel of no conceivable
use to Marcuse. Once again I see a connection to Heidegger in Marcuse’s
innovative appropriation of Hegel for a radically future oriented ontology.
Heidegger’s Being and Time describes Dasein, human being, as
fundamentally engaged with the question of its own being. This question cannot
be answered by reference to objective facts or metaphysical notions of human
nature, but must be resolved through choices and actions in the world.
Heidegger’s existential account of the human substitutes time and movement for
the atemporal essences that haunted philosophical speculation from Plato on,
hence the title of his book.
Marcuse’s first book on Hegel was written as a doctoral dissertation
for Heidegger (Marcuse, 1987). In it Marcuse refers to Hegel’s concept of life,
obscured in the Logic by the emphasis on the Absolute. Life in Hegel’s
early work is a process of movement, negating and accommodating
an environment. The choice of life as a fundamental ontological theme makes
sense of the emphasis on interconnectedness and process in the dialectics of development.
The life process has a direction: life seeks to preserve and further itself.
Yet it is not confined by a predetermined end but invents its future as it
moves. This is of course eminently true of the life process of modern human
beings and their society. In Marcuse’s reading, Hegelian life, like
Heideggerian Dasein, discovers its meaning ahead of itself as a
conditioned choice, not behind as a determining cause. It is negative, not
positive.
The concept of life advances Marcuse toward his goal
of reconstructing the concept of essence, but like Heidegger's conception of
Dasein, it remains too abstract to specify a politics. The gap is filled later,
after he joins the
Marcuse is enough of a Marxist to believe that the affirmation of life
cannot remain an attitude but must be incorporated into the material base, and
that base is now technological. But modern scientific-technical rationality no
longer makes any distinction between essential potentialities and accidental or
destructive dimensions of objects. How can we revive this distinction today
without regressing to the metaphysical notion of atemporal essences?
Marcuse does not hesitate to turn to an unscientific source for an
answer to this question. That source is the aesthetic sensibility and
imagination overflowing the boundaries of conventional art in accordance with
the most ambitious manifestoes of the artistic avant gardes of the early 20th
century. Under the sign of aesthetic discrimination, the affirmation of life
guides technical practice toward the choice of peace and harmony in the order
of nature and human affairs (Marcuse, 1969: 24). There is a receptive aspect to
this process: the imagination does not merely create its objects ex nihilo but
responds to the demands of nature, of what lies at the limit of human power
(Marcuse, 1972: 67-69). Specific possibilities which contribute to the
affirmation of life constitute the modern equivalent of the essential, and call
forth the technologies appropriate to their realization (Marcuse, 1964:
239-240). The submission of technology to these “essences” gradually reshapes
it into an instrument of liberation, suited to a free society. Technology comes
to resemble techne but in a modern context where judgments are based not
on metaphysical assumptions but on human experience.
Marcuse projects a possible evolution of modern technology by which it
would internalize the ethical and aesthetic dimensions it has increasingly
ignored in modern times. This projection presupposes the inherent compatibility
of technical practice and ethical and aesthetic practice. As we have seen,
Heidegger’s sharp distinction of ancient craft and modern technology excludes
such a reconciliation of the realms of practice. But the free reformulation of
his position sketched previously opens the door to a solution such as Marcuse’s
and can be applied to concretizing it further. And in fact we can find evidence
of the viability of such a solution in various fields of technical endeavor
such as medicine and architecture, which have never been completely
“modernized” on the “value-free” pattern both Heidegger and Marcuse deplore.
As Marcuse sees it, the demystification and critique of this supposed
“value-freedom” is the theoretical preliminary to the reinvention of
technology. Technology must appear as a civilizational project and not as an
expression of pure rationality in order to be brought under the aegis of humane
values. Implicitly in Heidegger, explicitly in Marcuse, liberation is a
function of the self-consciousness of the technical subject, that is, we
moderns. Once the question of technology is posed on these terms, it is
possible to answer it in a constructive manner.
Marcuse’s political resolution of the Heideggerian crisis of modernity
is open to many kinds of objections. Perhaps the most damaging is the claim
that reliance on aesthetics introduces rather than resolves conflict given the
wide divergence of taste in modern society. Why, it may be asked, look to
aesthetics, as contentious a realm of opinion as one can imagine, when a
rationally grounded ethics offers a better chance of achieving consensus?
Furthermore, ethics seems more directly relevant to the problems of modernity
which have less to do with ugliness than with cruelty and indifference to human
needs.
The implicit Heideggerian background of Marcuse’s thought helps to
understand his peculiar emphasis on an aesthetic alternative to modernity as we
know it. In that Heideggerian context, ethics cannot redeem modernity because
the problems are not due to personal or even social decisions an ethic could
inform. Rather, as the critique of technology argues, they result from the
systematic ordering of individuals, nature, and society in a framework of planning
and control. That framework, indifferent to intrinsic potentialities and
meanings, devastates the earth and the human essence along with it. Heidegger
proposes no ethical alternative. Perhaps he felt that ethics can only intervene
aposteriori with warnings and limitations, but the harm lies in the most basic
practices founding our way of life. To formulate the problem in terms of
“values” that might be entertained by the enframed subject would simply
reproduce the technological attitude. Changing those practices requires
existential change in what it is to be a human being in this society, not
better judgments about right and wrong. Heidegger argues that until modern
times, art had the power to inspire or channel such change. At the end of “The
Question Concerning Technology” he hints that it may someday recover that power
(Heidegger, 1977: 34-35).
This reconstruction of the Heideggerian position strangely resembles
Marx’s critique of the all encompassing market and the challenge it poses to
ethical reform (Vattimo, 1985: 25-27). But Marx’s confidence in a revolutionary
alternative was of course not predicated on art but on the notion that workers’
pursuit of economic self-interest would transform them into individuals capable
of appropriating and acting on the scientific critique of capitalism. What
happens when that confidence is lost, when economic self-interest is no longer
allied with critique but with conformism instead? At that point the revolutionary
can turn to irrational sources of change such as nationalism or “new gods,” as
does Heidegger, or revise the concept of self-interest to enlarge its range
beyond the economic sense it has in Marx. Marcuse exemplifies the latter
alternative which he pursues by restoring the claims of the imagination to a
share in the rational comprehension of reality. This is where aesthetics comes
in.
We can approach Marcuse’s aesthetics from two different angles.
Aesthetic radicalism has philosophical roots in Kant, Schiller, and the early
Hegel. Marcuse attempts to concretize the implications of this tradition for
contemporary society by relating it to such familiar concepts as “quality of
life,” invoked by thoughtful critics of consumerism and the protest movements
of the 1960s and ‘70s. There is an extraordinary tension between these two
aspects of the Marcusean aesthetic. His willingness to work with that tension
may appear either heroic or foolish from a contemporary perspective. I prefer
to think of it as a promissory note for a renewal of radical critique, a
premature response to the dilemmas of technological advance.
The category of aesthetics refers us at one and same time to beauty and
to the sensibility, the “aesthetic” in something close to Kant’s sense of the
term. But for Marcuse, unlike for Kant, the aesthetic is historical, reflecting
the specific qualities of perception that can be actualized at a given stage in
human development. What people “feel” in their encounter with the real is
conditioned by what they “are” in their historical moment. This is not a matter
of opinion or taste in the usual sense, but a deeper connection to forces in
reality that resonate in the human psyche and pattern experience in one or
another coherent form. The shape our world takes, what is foregrounded as
significant and what backgrounded as unimportant, is an aesthetic matter in
this historically informed sense.
In the present the aesthetic critique is contentious, to be sure, and
this is often considered an essential consequence of the freedom and diversity
accompanying modernity. If that were true, one would have to seek consensus at
the level of pure procedure, a level so abstract as to be largely irrelevant to
the design of technology. Marcuse is after something much more concrete, not a
vision of pure right, but a substantive alternative to the existing society. He
charges that the principal source of dissensus is the intense struggle of the
established system to contain tendencies toward radical change evoked by its
very success in “delivering the goods.” Reducing the level of competition, aggression,
and social misery is now an objective possibility, but one which contradicts
the basic requirements of the system. Marcuse is nevertheless convinced that
despite the lack of consensus, there is a definite measure of progress
reflecting the conditions for enhancing life. His writings aim to transform our
sensibility in accordance with this vision, to foster a pattern of perception
in which the absurdities and inhumanities of our society are sharply focused
rather than relegated to the background and ignored. These writings are, in
short, aesthetic interventions with political intent.
Marcuse’s faith in the significance of philosophical discussion is not
to be confused with optimism about the ultimate triumph of life over death. The
courage to affirm one’s own individuality and ideas against received opinion is
not a prediction of the future. In the last analysis, the difference between
Heidegger and Marcuse lies in their understanding of the nature of this
authentic self-affirmation. While Heidegger conceived individuality as a
response to inevitable death, Marcuse followed a radical tradition in which
self-affirmation is the individual’s share in the affirmation of life itself.
We can only hope that it is Marcuse’s faith rather than Heidegger’s despair
that is vindicated by history.
References
Adorno,
Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. J. Cummings,
trans.
Feenberg,
Andrew (1999). Questioning Technology. Routledge.
--(2001).
“Techne and the Good: Marcuse as a Philosopher of Technology,” New
CriticalTheory: Essays on Liberation,W. Wilkerson and J. Paris, eds.,
Rowman & Littlefield.
Heidegger,
Martin (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.
Katz,
Barry (1982). Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation.
Kellner,
Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One-Dimensional
--(1966). Eros and Civilization.
--(1969). An Essay on Liberation.
--(1972). Counter-Revolution and Revolt.
--(1974). “Marxism and Feminism,” in Women’s Studies 2, no. 3.
--(1978). Herbert Marcuse Schriften:
--(1987). Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity,
--(1992).
"Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society," Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism, vol. 3, no. 11.
Olafson,
Polt,
Richard (2001). “Potentiality, Power and
Sway: From Aristotelian to Modern Heideggerian Physics?”in Proceedings of
the 35th Annual Heidegger Conference,
Reitz, Charles (2000).
Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert
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Vattimo, Gianni, The End of
Modernity, J.R. Snyder, trans.,
[1] For a fuller development of this distinction, see Feenberg (2001).
[2] For an account of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, see Zimmerman (1990).
[3] For an interesting account of the relation between Heidegger’s notion of essence and technology, see Polt (2001).
[4] For accounts of Marcuse’s early work and his relation to Heidegger, see Kellner (1984), Katz (1982), and Reitz (2000).