Heidegger and Marcuse
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 decisive philosophical issue of our time. Most philosophers either celebrate technical progress or worry about its unintended consequences, and so conceive society as separate from technology, which holds either a promise or a threat for the future. Heidegger, on the contrary, defines modernity itself as the prevalence of technology. Technical achievements and failures are unimportant since our very dependence on technology gives 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 Enlightenment remains to be fulfilled in a future stage of that evolution through a deep transformation of technology.
Together, these two philosophers offer the deepest insight into the danger of technology and the possibilities of redemption. This is a book about their thought and its continuing relevance. However, I should explain 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.
It is important to mention this limitation at the outset since both Marcuse and Heidegger are controversial figures. Marcuse is remembered as the guru of the New Left, the darling of 1968, a drastic foreshortening of a career which extended over more than fifty years of intense philosophical activity. Heidegger, of course, is the philosopher who betrayed his tradition and his calling by becoming a Nazi and recognizing Hitler as his "führer," never renouncing his error publicly even after the War. And Heidegger is also, in the view of many, the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century.
Here there will not be much discussion of these contentious issues. Others have explored every aspect of the Heidegger case. The conclusion I have reached from studying their views is that while Heidegger's thought could be accommodated to certain aspects of Nazism, especially to its eschatological mood and elitist spirit, only an astonishing insensitivity could have blinded him to even more important incompatibilities. How he could have ignored the philosophical implications of Hitler's biological racism is as astonishing as his indifference to its evil. But then he was hardly alone in combining academic brilliance and moral blindness. In any case, I do not dismiss Heidegger's philosophy as "Nazi" ideology, and thus continue to study it for its contributions to our understanding of technology.
This was also the view of Herbert Marcuse in the period of
his apprenticeship to Heidegger. Like Heidegger's other Jewish students, who
included Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith, Marcuse never noticed
Heidegger's political leanings until the surprise announcement that he was to
become the first Nazi rector of the
Despite my intention to focus on philosophical issues, this book is bound to annoy certain of my readers. In the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical theory, Heidegger is the very devil. Adorno could think of nothing worse to say of Marcuse than that he was a secret Heideggerian, and Habermas articulated his deep uneasiness at the extreme negativity of Adorno's negative dialectics by hinting that its conclusions resembled Heidegger's. On the other side of the fence there are few Heideggerians who have shown an interest in Critical Theory. In that tradition the problems of political and economic domination that concern these Marxist philosophers are generally dismissed as merely "ontic."
I intend to ignore all these danger signs on my path and forge ahead following my own inclinations. These lead me to study aspects of the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse remote from the political debates that surround them today. The argument of this book is framed by Heidegger’s distinction between the Greek notion of techne and the modern idea of technology. Where the ancient craftsman built his world in making the product of his craft, modern technology destroys the world to the extent of its technological success. Greek philosophy analyzed being on the model of techne, and, Heidegger argues, technology has become the model for understanding being in modern times. Heidegger sees no way back to the world of the Greeks, no way to recover ancient technê in a modern context. His late speculations on what he called the "new beginning" are much celebrated by postmodern commentators. But these speculations on what might follow the passage through modernity are so vague and abstract the commentators cannot agree on what they mean, much less make a convincing case for sharing Heidegger's hopes.
Marcuse left Heidegger's teaching behind in 1933, when he
went into exile and joined the
This is the hypothesis which I will work out in the pages that follow. I begin with a reconsideration of the place of Aristotle and Hegel in the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse. I do not agree with the commonplace view according to which Marcuse dropped Heidegger to take up with Hegel. This view is contradicted by the fact that Marcuse presented Heidegger with a doctoral thesis on Hegel's Ontology in 1932, a thesis which is couched in Heideggerian terms. How can this be explained?
Those who remember Aristotle from college days as one of the more boring assignments, too close to common sense to generate much excitement, will be surprised to learn that his thought was absolutely crucial for both Heidegger and Marcuse. Heidegger's admiration for Aristotle is frequently noted but rarely analyzed in the detail it requires. This is an admiration Heidegger shared with Hegel, whose interpretation of Aristotle he regarded as a landmark in the development of modern thought. But Heidegger's Aristotle is practically unrecognizable: the Greek philosopher is transformed into an existential ontologist avant la lettre. Aristotle’s greatest achievement, according to Heidegger, is his analysis kinesis, movement, but movement in a sense no earlier interpreter of Aristotle ever conceived. It is the movement of “factical life,” later called “Dasein,” that Aristotle is supposed to have grasped for the first time. Marcuse's innovative reinterpretation of Hegel is a study of this very same problematic of "movedness" or "motility" (Bewegtheit) central to Heidegger's own early philosophy. I will argue that Marcuse's turn to Hegel is not a turning away from Heidegger but an attempt to work out the implications of Heidegger's startling analysis of Aristotle in terms of Hegel's dialectic. Marcuse's thesis opened a possible path from Heidegger's early work toward a radical reevaluation of modernity and its prospects which Heidegger of course chose not to follow.
Once this background has been developed, I will turn to Marcuse's later work which appears now in a rather different light. Many things that have puzzled and sometimes outraged commentators since the 1960s come into focus as reflections of continuing Heideggerian influences. It would be too much to say that he is a crypto-Heideggerian, but Marcuse is indeed addressing questions posed by Heidegger and offering an alternative solution. This is especially apparent in the existential demands of Marcuse's politics, his "two-dimensional" ontology, and his approach to art and technology. These issues will be developed at length in the later chapters of this book.
Technê and the Good
The issues raised in this book concern our future. We are well aware that we are a technological society, essentially so, and not just because we use so many devices but also in our spirit and our way of life. But only recently has this awareness reached the humanistic disciplines, marking a momentous change. It is strange that the 20th century, the century of astonishingly rapid technical advance, should have produced relatively little philosophical reflection on technology. Dewey is the only figure of the stature of Heidegger to concern himself extensively with this theme. When Heidegger and Marcuse wrote about technology, it was still possible and indeed more than possible--intellectually respectable--to ignore technology. Their path breaking reflections went beyond the boundaries of conformist thought in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Now all that is changing; indeed, it must change for these fields to retain any significance. Today one need not search far or deep to encounter the question of technology: the front page of the newspapers reminds us constantly of what is at stake in the management of its hazards and promise. The humanities have begun to recognize this in what will no doubt be a long process marked by resistances.
Surprisingly, these modern resistances to the question
concerning technology, particularly strong in philosophy, were not shared by
the Greeks. I will be returning to their insights frequently throughout this
book. How did they pose the question? We can begin to uncover their outlook by
reviewing Plato’s original discussion of techne in one of his greatest dialogues,
The Gorgias. It is worth spending
some time with this text as we start out since it offers a kind of template of
all the basic issues with which we will be concerned.
The relation of technique to values appears as a problem for the first time in the Gorgias. In this dialogue, Socrates debates the nature of the techne, or "art," of rhetoric. He distinguishes between true arts that are based on a logos, and what the English translation calls mere knacks, empeiriae in Greek, that is, rules of thumb based on experience but without an underlying rationale (Dodds, 1959: 225).
For Plato, such a rationale or logos necessarily includes a reference to the good served by the art. Knowledge of the logos of the art thus involves a teleological conception of its objects, a normative idea of their "essence," conceived as the fulfillment of their potentialities. If the art is shipbuilding, its logos will not only instruct the builder in putting together boards in some sort of arrangement, but will also guide him in making a ship that is strong and safe. The doctor's art includes not only various notions about herbs but also a curative mission that governs their use.
In this, these arts differ from a mere knack of combining pieces of wood or herbs without an underlying order and purpose. Technical logic and objective finalities are joined in true arts while knacks serve merely subjective purposes. But because we are prone to accept appearances for reality, and pursue pleasure instead of the good, for each art there is some knack that imitates its effects and misleads its victims. Gymnastics correlates with cosmetics, which gives the appearance of health without the reality. Rhetoric, the power to substitute appearance for reality in language, is the supreme and most dangerous knack. In a debate on shipbuilding or medicine, the orator will silence the expert every time. Means triumph over ends. The only way for the individual to protect himself is through knowledge, which distinguishes appearance from reality and identifies the logos of each art. Knowledge is thus essential to the pursuit of the good.
Callicles is the most
articulate advocate of the knack of rhetoric in the Gorgias. He has an unlimited appetite for power and pleasure which
he serves through his mastery of the tricks of language. That such ambition was
not merely a personal idiosyncrasy is clear from a reading of Aristophanes,
Thucydides and other contemporary authors, all of whom denounced the moral
degeneration and egoism of the imperialistic
It is worth reviewing the argument with Callicles briefly as Socrates' refutation of his views sets the stage for modern debates over technology and values. Callicles intervenes in the middle of the dialogue. He argues that the justice Socrates makes so much of is more useful to the weak than the strong. The strong can impose their will without the help of the law. As a mere special interest of the weak, justice has no claim on them. Natural justice consists quite simply in the rule of the stronger over the weaker and is diametrically opposed to conventional justice.
Callicles analyzes the earlier debates on these terms. In all of them Socrates has caught the defenders of rhetoric in contradictions. These defeats, Callicles asserts, were due to a trick, namely, playing fast and loose on both sides of the line between the natural goals rhetoric can achieve, such as domination and pleasure, and the merely conventional values of morality and aesthetics.
Callicles' analysis is astute. For example, Polus is asked if it is better to suffer than to do an injustice, to which he answers that it is better to do injustice, i.e., less painful. But then Socrates asks him if it is not uglier to do injustice, a consideration drawn from the realm of aesthetics which Callicles regards as conventional. When Polus gives the conventional answer, agreeing with Socrates that doing injustice is uglier, he suddenly finds himself claiming that one and the same thing, unjust action, is better (by nature) and worse (by convention.) But, Callicles argues, nature and convention are opposites. Any argument that mixes the two will be inconsistent. And so Callicles constrains Socrates to answer according to nature, giving up any direct appeal to moral or aesthetic values.
Callicles then defends a hedonistic doctrine according to which the good is the purely subjective sensation of pleasure, a natural value. On these terms there is no gap between the appearance of the good and its reality. No science of the good is required to "know" that one is having a good time! But without a distinction between appearance and reality, the Socratic distinction between techne and empeiria collapses: rationality, the logos, is irrelevant to the pursuit of the good defined as a mere feeling each can verify for himself.
The following chart sums up Callicles' analysis with, in brackets, a fourth good added by Socrates in the course of the discussion:
NATURE
PLEASURE (hedone) [USEFULNESS (ophelia)]
\ /
\ /
\ /
THE GOOD
/ \
/ \
/ \
BEAUTY (kalon) JUSTICE (dike)
CONVENTION
Socrates agrees to Callicles' strictures and the argument proceeds from there. In one important passage Socrates shows Callicles that the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure leads to harm. This is not a Puritan argument: Socrates does not claim that pleasure is actually bad in itself. Instead, he argues that pleasure is not the highest value but is pursued "for the sake of the good" (Plato, 1952: 72). In this passage Plato identifies the good with "ophelia," usefulness, another natural value, and so the contradiction into which Callicles now falls--affirming that pleasure both is and is not the good--cannot be blamed on any tricky play on the differences between nature and convention.
After this decisive refutation, Socrates returns from natural goods to the ethical and aesthetic values temporarily bracketed at Callicles' request. In the famous myth which concludes the text, Socrates dismantles Callicles' distinction between nature and convention. Rhadamanthys judges the dead and punishes each soul that suffers from "distortion and hideousness by reason of the irresponsibility and licentiousness, the insolence and intemperance of its acts" (Plato, 1952: 104). Divine justice is meted out according to aesthetic criteria--"distortion and hideousness"--but there is no question of conventional appearances prejudicing the eye of the judge. The aesthetic reference is ontological; it measures the "naked" soul's actual reality. Such an ontological conception of aesthetics was perhaps more accessible to the Greeks than to us as they commonly referred to persons and their actions as beautiful or ugly for their moral qualities (Dodds, 1959: 249-250). The aesthetic in this sense refers to how the individuals define themselves through their actions--as virtuous, a thief, generous, a liar, etc. The act of self-definition itself is a function of rational self-control (or the lack of it) in terms of ethical and aesthetic standards.
The Tyranny of Reason
Modern readers may have difficulty taking the conclusion of Plato's dialogue seriously. The earlier shift in the argument from ethics and aesthetics to the conflict between hedonistic and functional goods appears to place it on a purely rational plane we can more easily accept. Since such things as health are counted among functional goods, there is plenty for techne to do even without guidance from contentious ethical and aesthetic standards.
But just how modern is even this phase of Plato's argument? In one sense his idea of techne seems obvious. Technologies are in fact subordinated to purposes which appear in the technical disciplines as a guide to resources and procedures. Many of these purposes derive from considerations such as health and safety that have an objective rationale. A software engineer working for Rolls-Royce Aircraft explained to me that 10 percent of his time was spent writing software and 90 percent was spent testing it to for safety. Plato would no doubt approve: the logos is at work at Rolls-Royce.
Yet we moderns can no longer generalize from such examples as Plato did. For every benevolent aircraft designer, there is a bomb builder somewhere. We can still relate to Plato's emphasis on the need for a rationale, a logos, but we're not so sure it necessarily includes an idea of the good. In fact we tend to think of technologies as normless, as serving subjective purposes very much as did Plato's knacks. What has happened to disconnect techne and value in modern times?
The foremost theoretician of our modern view is Max Weber. Weber distinguished between "substantive" and "formal" rationality in a way that corresponds in one significant respect to Plato's distinction between techne and knack. Substantive rationality begins by positing a good and then selects means to achieve it. Many public institutions are substantively rational in Weber's sense: universal education is a good which determines appropriate means, that is, classrooms and teachers. Formal rationality is concerned uniquely with the efficiency of means and contains no intrinsic reference to a good. It is thus value neutral, like the Platonic empeiria. Modernization consists in the triumph of formal rationality over a more or less substantively rational order inherited from the past. The market is the primary instrument of this transformation, substituting the cash nexus for the planned pursuit of values. Bureaucracy and management are other domains in which formal rationality eventually prevails.
The knack in Plato is subservient to the power drive of the individual subject, Callicles, for example. The will of a purely individual subjectivity can establish no larger order in society as a whole. Callicles' triumph could only lead to tyranny and the anarchic reaction that follows. Value neutrality in Weber implies a similarly subjective purpose, however market and political processes do establish an order of some sort. The question is what is that order? Weber himself was rather pessimistic. He foresaw an iron cage of bureaucracy closing on Western civilization. The logic of the technical means employed in Western society had prevailed over Enlightenment values of freedom and individuality. An order was emerging that lacked any higher purpose or significance, but that was, at least, an order.
In modern times, the terms of Plato's distinction between techne and empeiria are broken apart and recombined. Where Plato had correlated orientation toward the good with rationally elaborated means, and orientation toward power and pleasure with the absence of rationality, now the pursuit of power and pleasure has its own logic as a system of means institutionalized in markets and bureaucracies, and that logic imposes itself independent of human will and any conception of the good. This is the difference between the individual tyranny Plato feared, and the tyranny of rational means that haunted Weber.
Weber's peculiarly modern brand of pessimism reaches its
paroxysm with the
A parallel argument is to be found in Heidegger. Heidegger’s
philosophy of technology is a puzzling combination of romantic nostalgia for an
idealized image of antiquity and deep insight into modernity. 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.”
As noted above, his approach is based on a specific contrast
between ancient techne and modern technology. 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. In ancient
By contrast, modern technology has freed itself in large measure from the valuative commitments of its society. Heidegger’s version of the iron cage is a system of research and development, a technoscience. He argues that reality is fundamentally restructured by this technoscience in a way that strips it completely of its intrinsic potentialities and exposes it to domination in service to human will. The modern world is a place of total mobilization for ends that remain obscure. It is this apparent "value freedom" or "neutrality" of technology which Heidegger and later, Marcuse, identify as the source of the uniqueness and the tragedy of modernity. This is what allows technology to destroy both man and nature. A world "enframed" by technology is radically alien and hostile. Even the modern Callicles is caught in the system he thinks he masters. Technoscience is otherwise dangerous than rhetoric or markets. The danger is not merely nuclear weapons or some similar threat to survival, but the obliteration of humanity's special status and dignity as the being through whom the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings have become mere raw materials like the nature they pretend to dominate (Heidegger, 1977).
Plato would not have been altogether surprised by these diagnoses although the shift in accent, from the abuse of empeiria by its users to the inherent destructiveness of technology itself, is peculiarly modern. This shift results from the fact that technology does not merely manipulate appearances but systematizes reality. In Adorno, Horkheimer, and Heidegger, the question Plato addressed is therefore reformulated. Now we are less concerned with the justification of power than with the sheer challenge of its sublime presence as technology. Our question is: can we live with technology, i.e. with power in its modern form? The ethical problem of right and might is superseded by the ontological problem of the destructive transformation technology operates on both its users and its objects. We are less worried about whether Callicles' descendants have the right to rule us than with whether the world they dominate can survive the means set in motion by their vaulting ambition.
At this point, we seem to have come full circle. Value neutral technology turns out to contain a value in itself after all. As Heidegger expresses it: "The outstanding feature of modern technology lies in the fact that it is not at all any longer merely 'means' and no longer merely stands in 'service' for others, but instead...unfolds a specific character of domination" (Quoted in Zimmerman, 1990: 214). This paradox is already implied in Plato's account of empeiria. Recall that "knacks" are not explicitly oriented toward a good but are "neutral" in themselves. Gorgias says as much early in the dialogue when he explains that the teacher of rhetoric no more than the boxing coach is responsible for the use his students make of their art (Plato, 1952: 15-16). But when Socrates describes knacks such as cookery or cosmetics, it turns out that they are essentially bound up with appearances and hence with various types of seduction and manipulation (Plato, 1952, 26). The knack of rhetoric in particular serves domination as does technology in Adorno, Horkheimer, and Heidegger.
While Plato based his hope on techne, our modern thinkers despair. They have no faith in techne because modern technology has incorporated both logos, rationality, and ophelia, the useful, into a normless system that everywhere prevails over all competing practices. The modern Callicles has triumphed, and our thinkers, whether they be conservatives like Heidegger, or radicals like Adorno and Horkheimer can only appeal to a vague future in which he will somehow come to his senses.