Marcuse's Theory: A Preliminary Sketch
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.[1]
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 his thought to the very end.
This background sets the stage for a discussion of Marcuse's theory of technology. His approach is not so different from that of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Heidegger. Marcuse was a colleague of the first two, a student of the third, and deeply influenced by classical philosophy as well. He too is concerned about the triumph of apparently normless means over ends, of domination over every other value. He too worries that our drive toward power is objectified in a system and no longer restrained by an ethically informed logos.
But unlike these contemporaries, Marcuse is a utopian thinker. He conceives of a redeemed technological rationality in a liberated society, much as Plato, at the end of the Gorgias, imagines a reformed rhetoric that would serve good ends. Heidegger's utopian impulses were safely checked after the mid 1930s, and Adorno and Horkheimer seem to have lost not only hope but even the capacity to imagine a better future during World War II.[2] Marcuse followed a different trajectory. His writings from the 1950s on increasingly attempt to articulate a vision. Eventually this utopianism enters into his conception of instrumental rationality itself where it is formulated as a positive technological alternative. The old objective reason with its substantive value content that was defeated by the positivist heritage of the Enlightenment is revived in a new form as an answer to the triumphant liberal technocracy of the post-war period.
The most important vestiges of Heidegger’s influence 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 the 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 production is obvious.
However, in contrast to Heidegger, Marcuse emphasizes the implicit normative
structure of production which he generalizes to being as a whole. As we will
see, Hegel’s influence is at work in this difference in emphasis. Of course
neither Heidegger nor Marcuse suggest a return to the objective essences of the
Greeks. But they do regard
The Greek conception of the thing, substance, was not static. It included an inherent movement toward higher forms. All being aspires to its end, to a perfected form which realizes its potentialities. In fact the Greek word "dynamis," "potential," already implies a kind of energy and striving. These higher forms could be identified by a special kind of abstractive intelligence that stripped away contingent features (Marcuse, 1964; 125-126). The struggle of being for form is negatively evident in experience itself, in the suffering and striving world the internal tensions of which reason analyzes. For the ancient Greeks reason is the faculty which distinguishes between true and false not only in the realm of propositions but also in the realm of being itself. The rational judgment of such being therefore implies an imperative: the is is also an ought.
This ontological conception of reason explains the notion of techne. The role of the arts is to bring existence to its essential form. Implicit in every art is a finality which corresponds to the perfection of its objects. The art of government aims to make men just; the art of education strives to develop the rational faculty that is the human essence. No such finality is implicit in modern technology which emerged through the destruction of technai, inherited crafts based on traditional values.
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. Modern technical or formal reason aims at classification, quantification, and control. Because it recognizes only empirical existence as real, it admits no tension between true and false being and makes no distinction between preferences and potentialities. What ancient ontology takes for an intrinsic finality--the perfected form of things, the logos of a techne--is now treated as a mere personal choice. Modern reason flattens out the difference between the essential potentialities of things and merely subjective desires. It declares its "neutrality" over against the essences toward which these earlier technai were oriented. Arbitrarily chosen values and essences are placed on the same plane and no ontological or normative privilege attaches to the latter. It is this abstention from essentializing that gives reason its peculiar positivist self-understanding as a form of thought purified of social influences.
For example, an analysis of the state conducted on classical terms would relate it immediately to ethical ends, such as justice. The modern approach focuses exclusively on the machinery of coercion and propaganda without regard for the purpose of the whole. Politics is about who gets what and how they get it, not about the realization of a norm. But how can the end of government, justice, be placed on the same plane as the will to power of a Callicles? A bias reveals itself in this equivalence, a bias which is all to the benefit of Callicles whose ambition is now taken no less seriously than a true public purpose since both are regarded as merely subjective. It is this abstention from any judgment as to what is accidental and what essential that is the original violence of modern reason, which places it in the service of the status quo.
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.
The class system perpetuates itself in this situation because it rests on suppressing the potential for a humane and egalitarian social order made possible by technological advance. This is the crux of Marcuse's social critique: advanced society is, in a certain sense, technically outmoded by its own achievements. It is capable of "pacifying" existence but artificially maintains competition as the basis for inequality and domination. As Marcuse put it in his last speech on ecology, radical political struggle today consists in "existential revolts against an obsolete reality principle." "The specter which haunts advanced industrial society today is the obsolescence of full-time alienation" (Marcuse, 1992: 37, 35). Insofar as domination is built into the inherited structure of society, Marcuse argues, technological rationality contributes to maintaining and reproducing it.
The world of work is the chief domain in which the "continuity of domination" is secured. If workers' self-government and self-actualization are treated as subjective preferences rather than as a human and social potentialities, they lose the normative force to counter capital's drive for profit and efficiency. Self-government and self-actualization on an assembly line remain the merest fantasies while real products roll off the line and prove its worth. This is what Marcuse meant when he wrote "Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture" (Marcuse, 1964: 158).
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. He acknowledges as much in a short article written in 1958
that offers a kind of prospectus of One-Dimensional
Man (Marcuse, 1989: 123-124). 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 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?
Implicit in Marcuse's critique is a modern revival of the classical conception of techne. Technology is to be reconstructed around a conception of the good, in Marcuse's terminology, around Eros. The new technical logos must include a grasp of essences, and technology must be oriented toward perfecting rather than dominating its objects. Marcuse thus demands the reversal of the process of neutralization by which formal rationality had been split off from substantive rationality and subserved to domination.
But much as we might like to revive the ancient concept of techne, it rests on an outdated ontology with socially conformist implications. The standards in terms of which potentialities were assigned to things in antiquity were community standards, accepted uncritically by philosophers. For example, it seemed obvious that "man is a rational animal" in an aristocratic society which valued contemplation over work. Greek philosophy betrayed an unconscious fidelity to historically surpassable limitations of its society (Marcuse, 1964: 134-135). Modern philosophy cannot proceed in this naive fashion but demands universal and verifiable grounds.
Marcuse accepts the modern view that essences can neither be based on tradition and community standards nor speculatively derived in an apriori metaphysics of some sort. But what he calls "one-dimensional thinking" plays out that modern skepticism by rejecting the idea of essence altogether and remaining at the empirical level. It thereby avoids tradition-bound conformism and outdated metaphysics but only by treating the logic of technology as an ontological principle. It can recognize inherent potentialities no more than can technology and so offers no guidance to technological reform. How then can technology be informed with essential values? To what can Marcuse appeal for criteria? What, for example, are the grounds for preferring enhanced freedom on the workplace to class domination?
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.
Ancient philosophy joined Logos to Eros, theoretical abstraction to striving toward the good. But it lacked historical self-consciousness. The temporal dynamic it found in things was specific to an individual or species. Each type of thing had its own essence, and, although these essences were objects of striving, they themselves did not exist in time. Hence ancient philosophy arrived at a static conception of essences as eternal ideas. The fixed nature of its essences corresponds to its own lack of historical self-consciousness, its inability to conceive of becoming as the fundamental ontological determination.
Today such an unhistorical conception of essence is unacceptable. We have learned that human beings make themselves and their world in the course of history. Not just individual things are caught up in time, but essences as well. If we are to revive the language of essence today, its conceptualization must therefore be historical. Accordingly, Marcuse reconstructed both Logos and Eros as historical categories, reinterpreting the observable tensions in reality as part of a larger historical process.
Marcusean historicism is rooted in the materialism and anti-utopianism of the Marxist tradition. Dialectics, as a logic of the interconnections and contexts revealed in historical strife, offers a modern alternative to ancient dogmatism. Its regulative concepts, such as freedom and justice, are not ideals in the traditional sense because they have no fixed meaning. The content of universals such as these derives from tensions in reality rather than from a preconceived speculative notion or an uncritically accepted social consensus. They are not exhausted by any particular institutional arrangement, but always point beyond toward as yet unrealized potentials (Marcuse, 1964: 133ff). The function of philosophy as knowledge transcending the given, is now fulfilled by these critical or "substantive" universals.[3]
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 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 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. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore Marcuse’s innovative
interpretation of Hegel which forms the basis for his critical theory of
technology.
From Aristotle to Hegel via Heidegger and Lukács
Marcuse wrote two books on Hegel. The first one, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of
Historicity, was submitted as a thesis to Heidegger in 1930 and published
in 1932. Heidegger’s opinion of this work is unknown as he does not appear to
have read it before Marcuse was forced into exile. The second Hegel book, Reason and Revolution, was published in
1941 while Marcuse was in the
There is, however, much to be learned from Marcuse’s thesis, both about Hegel and Marcuse himself. However, decoding Marcuse’s message is not simple. Not only is the writing difficult, the constraints of a thesis dictated the omission of references to two important sources. Marcuse obviously cannot cite the disreputable Marxist Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness was known to him and cited in other essays of this period. The significance of Lukács for Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation must be guessed in the absence of any references. However, once one starts guessing, interesting connections appear. One of the central categories of Lukács’ early Marxism is production, not just economic production but the production of history. This is the category under which Lukács explains the dereification of society through revolutionary action. Historical production is a unique practice of self-making which Lukács describes as the unity of theory and practice, that is, a form of self-consciousness.
Hegel’s dialectic is insistently invoked as the basis for
this Marxist account of the revolution. As we saw in the previous chapter,
production is also a central category for Aristotle and hence for early
Heidegger as well. But in Marcuse’s thesis Heidegger is mentioned only briefly in a
preliminary acknowledgement which reads as follows: “Any contribution
this work may make to the development and clarification of problems is indebted
to the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger.
This is emphasized at the beginning instead of being indicated
throughout with special references” (HO, 5). This note invites us to read Hegel's Ontology as a
Heideggerian text but does not explain how we are to do so.
Heidegger’s influence is indeed subtly present throughout the thesis. It is unreasonable to expect more. Marcuse could hardly present Heidegger with a historical thesis in which Hegel was turned into a Heideggerian. Heidegger has unkind things to say about attempts to identify his thought with that of his illustrious predecessor in his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology from the period when Marcuse must have been composing this book (HPS, 144-145). Nor would it have been seemly for Marcuse to present himself as Heidegger’s champion in opposition to Hegel. There are three more plausible links to Heidegger.
First, there is the form of the work. Marcuse’s Hegel analysis is methodologically similar to Heidegger’s contemporary readings of Aristotle and builds on Heidegger’s conclusions. Just as Heidegger developed his ontology out of his interpretation of Aristotle, so, Marcuse claims, “Hegel acquires the ontological framework of his analysis through an examination of Aristotle’s work” (HO, 18). Thus insofar as Marcuse applies Heidegger’s historico-ontological approach to the study of Hegel, he continues the research into Aristotle and attempts to attain the level of questioning at which his teacher aims. Marcuse’s Hegel thesis sets out to free Hegel from the overlay of commentary based in this case not just on a scholastic tradition but on Hegel’s own late self-interpretation which distorted and diminished his original contribution.
Second, Marcuse goes back to Dilthey to reevaluate his concept of life, which had a significant influence on the development of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. Hegel will then be shown to have anticipated Heidegger in this Diltheyan interpretation. "In unprecedented fashion from the beginning, Hegel replaces the transcendental I of cognition with the full concrete I of life, with the 'whole of human nature,' with the 'totality of our being' (Dilthey)" (HO, 245). This enlarged concept of the subject, like Heideggerian Dasein, can enter into the movement of being rather than simply observe it as a cogito.
Third, Marcuse interprets Hegel in terms of the Heideggerian
concept of revealing. It is well known that for Hegel, being is contradictory,
divided in itself, and therefore in perpetual process. Marcuse reads the
Heideggerian revealing into this notion of self-division and the associated
notion of self-development. For Hegel as for Heidegger being appears in producing itself.
In this chapter, I will test a hypothesis about Marcuse’s Hegel thesis based on conjectures about the presence of these influences on his text. The hypothesis concerns Marcuse’s implicit account of the relation of Hegel’s historical dialectic to the production model of being in Aristotle, its Heideggerian repetition, and related concepts in Marxism. I will first state the hypothesis as briefly as I can, then develop it through an account of the structure and key concepts of Hegel’s Ontology, and finally I will discuss the relation of Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation to contemporary Marxist theory.
Heidegger has already demonstrated the promise and limits of the Aristotelian Metaphysics, both of which it owes to its historical situation at the beginning of the West. He shows that in orienting metaphysics toward production, Aristotle opened the way to the understanding of being and he identifies anticipations of his own doctrine in Aristotle. Recall that Heidegger reinterprets Aristotle’s objectivistically developed idea of production as the source of his own phenomenological analysis of worldhood. Many of the details of Aristotle’s analysis are lost in the phenomenological repetition, but Aristotle’s discovery of revealing through the participation of human Dasein is preserved and sharpened, taking into account the dissolution of fixed essences in modernity. Later Heidegger will relate the breakdown of ancient essentialism to technology but in the early Heidegger this connection is not yet clear. In any case, the new theory of revealing was worked out in detail in Being and Time and in courses which Marcuse no doubt attended. Now, in Marcuse’s thesis, Hegel’s dialectic is shown to bear fruit precisely insofar as Hegel too can be read as offering a modern repetition of Aristotle.
For Marcuse Aristotle is the key to Hegel, but as we will see it is a very strange Heideggerian Aristotle. Of course we are not concerned here with either the real historical Aristotle, nor even with the fidelity of Marcuse to Hegel or Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretations. What is significant is the way in which concepts from Heidegger’s Aristotle enter into Marcuse’s work and dominate his interpretation of Hegel. The similarities that emerge from this comparison are striking. The difference, of course, is also significant: Hegel is already a modern thinker and unlike Aristotle can speak to us directly. We can engage with Hegel as a contemporary in the (unmentioned) version of his dialectic found in Marx and Lukács.
In Reason and Revolution Marcuse makes the bold claim that “Hegel simply reinterpreted the basic categories of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and did not invent new ones” (RR, 122). He asserts that the central Aristotelian category at the basis of Hegel’s Logic is kinesis, “motility,” (Bewegtheit), the very same category on which Heidegger focused. “The presentation of the Idea of Being as motility lies at the core of Hegelian ontology” (HO, 173). It is this focus which “allows Hegel to revive the great discoveries of Aristotelian philosophy by removing the cover which tradition had spread over them. Aristotelian philosophy is set once more on its true path: proceeding from the negativity and dividedness of being (the dichas of the categories, morphe and steresis—on dynamei and on energeia…as the basis of its motility.… progressing until that most actual form of motility and the most actual being—noesis and noesos” (HO, 43). Marcuse identifies this duality at the heart of Aristotelian being with the bifurcation of being in Hegel, the internal contradictions that drive the dialectic.
The appearance of the word "ontology" in the title of Marcuse's early Hegel book is also significant. Just as Heidegger claimed that Aristotle addressed the "question of being," so Marcuse claims that Hegel’s philosophy "is governed by the question of Being, and in the final analysis, by the question of the most authentic form of beings" (HO, 248). After completing the course on Aristotle discussed in the previous chapter, Heidegger proceeded to offer a course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He concludes that Hegel's phenomenology is "the fundamental ontology of absolute ontology….To put the same thing in historical terms, we can say that since antiquity -- in Aristotle no less than in Plato…-- the being of beings is determined as eidos, idéa, idea, and thus related to seeing, knowing, and logos. Therefore, philosophizing as inquiry into the being of beings is idealism, a title which should not be taken as the label of an epistemological orientation and viewpoint, but as a designation for the basic approach to the problem of being" (HPS, 141-142).
Following this approach, Marcuse analyzes Hegel's thought as an ontology in Heidegger's sense of the term. In that sense, ontology concerns the meaning of being. Roughly defined in terms of one of its chief attributes, this ontological approach is a transcendental account of prior conditions. These are the general background conditions which make empirical facts possible. As in Kant particulars such as this or that thing or spatial location must be explained through the conditions making possible thinghood or spatiality. This results in a peculiar doubling of terms, for example, transcendental space is a "form of intuition" which makes possible particular empirical perceptions of space. We have seen something similar in Heidegger, in the case of technology, which appears twice in his theory, once as mode of revealing and the second time in the form of particular devices that enact that mode of revealing. In Marcuse's interpretation of Hegel this doubling occurs with the concept of history. What Marcuse calls "historicity" is the mode of being of the happening of events in time. Historicity grants the meaning of historical happening and is therefore, in Heideggerian terms, its ontological condition.
As we have seen the Greeks answer the ontological question with the original doubling of essence and existence. To be is to be revealed in the sense of being in a world as such and such. Being is what is brought forth, made manifest, and this implies having a meaning, which in turn implies the existence of Dasein as that being needed by being for beings to belong to a world. Dasein thus appears for Heidegger to be a very special kind of being in a necessary relationship to being itself. We will see that Marcuse identifies equivalents for these various Heideggerian concepts in Hegel. Hegel, in Marcuse's account, also attempts to understand how a world can form and reveal itself. And like Heidegger Hegel’s concept of subjectivity covers the whole range of human possibilities, life itself, and not merely thought. Again, like Heidegger, Hegel does not rely on pregiven essences as did the Greeks. His idea of essence takes into account the modern discovery of indeterminacy in history. Marcuse follows up on these Hegelian innovations in search of a strong normative conception that, paradoxically, does not depend on some sort of final goal established in nature, tradition, or religion.
Despite the similarity of all this to the Heideggerian view, there is an essential difference. In Heidegger, the contingency of the relation of Dasein to world is never overcome. At most Dasein’s resoluteness enables it to be itself in the face of its “thrownness.” Just as Dasein in Heidegger falls into a world, so in Hegel Spirit “'falls' into otherness,” but unlike in Heidegger it “overcomes this through 'labor,' and thus returns to itself. This whole process, which constitutes the Being of spirit, does not happen to spirit or take place with it; rather it is grasped and comprehended by spirit and is carried out and sustained via this cognition” (HO, 222). The process of revealing in Hegel is already concrete, as labor and self-recognition in the object of labor. It is also social insofar as spirit is the life of a people and not just of an individual. Historicity is thus alienation and return from alienation to a mediated unity with the other.
According to Marcuse, this Hegelian historicity sets the agenda for later approaches to understanding history. "The self alienation of consciousness and its actuality, the disappearance of what it originates from, its imprisonment in the objectified world, the 'desire' to sublate and to take back this alienation -- these are precisely the categories through which the specific historicity of human life is treated in post-Hegelian discussions on the subject of 'history'” (HO, 298). With these remarks, Marcuse comes as close as he can to alluding to the contemporary Marxist version of Hegelian dialectics in Lukács.
Heidegger and Lukács have much in common and this explains how Marcuse could attempt to mediate between them in his interpretation of Hegel. Both are opposed to the naturalistic, positivist and neo-Kantian methodologies so influential in their day, the one in opposition to fellow philosophers, the other in the Marxist inspired socialist movement. Both sense the profound crisis of European civilization in their time as philosophically pertinent and attempt to develop a concrete historical ontology based on human finitude as a response to the crisis. For Marcuse, both contribute to a rational foundation for revolutionary opposition to capitalism and its culture. At the core of this contribution is the concept of historicity which Marcuse reads back into Hegel as the heart and soul of the dialectic. The historical ontology underlying the dialectic can link philosophical reflection to concrete social struggles. But this requires a restorative operation in relation to Hegel comparable to Heidegger’s restoration of Aristotle and directly related insofar as Hegel was profoundly influenced by Aristotle.
As Marcuse explains it, the dialectic is a continuation and modification of the original Aristotelian position. The Marxist implications of his emphasis on production are obvious. That his Hegel interpretation leads to a concept of history with a certain similarity to Lukács’s is no coincidence but is a remote consequence of Aristotle’s original productionist foundation of metaphysics. Once again we are confronted with the ontic-ontological status of the human practice of making, although it is of course not Lukács but Marcuse who could have formulated the matter in this Heideggerian language. In sum his thesis is a Heideggerianized reading of Hegel’s Aristotelianism, and as such aims to provide the basis for a reconstruction of Marxism as a fundamental ontology.
There are now several historically distinct layers of theory and language involved in our account. It is important not to be confused by the hermeneutic complexity that results but to keep the focus clearly on the uppermost, e.g., the modern, layer. In this and the following sections I will be explaining Hegel’s relation to Aristotle as Marcuse interprets it. As with my account of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, the main point is not whether these modern thinkers got Aristotle right, but their appropriation of his insights. Marcuse’s Hegel thesis introduces a further complication since he assumes an interpretation of Heidegger and Lukács in interpreting Hegel. Again, the point is not Marcuse’s success in understanding these thinkers but his appropriation of their thought for his own purposes.
Before entering into a detailed consideration of Hegel's Ontology, I
would like to discuss the strategy of my reading. At first glance Marcuse's
book looks like a fairly standard commentary on Hegel. The terminology is
largely Hegelian and the exposition follows the order of several major Hegelian
texts. However, on closer examination oddities appear. For example, terms such
as "bringing forth" and "being" are introduced more or less
in their Heideggerian meaning. Marcuse has a lot to say about the concept of
“totality,” a key Hegelian terms which figures prominently in Lukács’s History
and Class Consciousness. Marcuse's references to Aristotle recall
Heidegger's course on the Metaphysics which Marcuse attended while he
wrote his thesis.
Still, making the connections is not always easy. The
language of the thesis is to a great extent Hegelian, as is Lukács’s language,
but as we will see the most important link between them, the concept of
self-consciousness, is not worked out explicitly in the thesis. Reading Hegel's Ontology through
Heidegger is still more difficult. Properly Hegelian terms must be
translated into Heideggerian language in order to provide such a reading. That
procedure violates the text in important respects. For example, Hegel's whole
developmental logic must be ignored but it is the structuring principle of
Marcuse's reading. What can justify such a violation of the authors’ intent? I
think we must imagine how Marcuse's book would have been read by himself and
his colleagues, students of Heidegger. Every allusion that could be connected
to Heidegger's thought would certainly have been so connected. In other words,
the book was not written for naive readers or Hegelians but for Heidegger and
those around him. If we read it in that light it will reveal remarkable
secrets.
Marcuse’s thesis begins with a consideration of Hegel’s notion of being as bifurcated or split at its very basis. This notion is often explained in terms of the idea that being harbors contradictions in itself. Contradictions between what and what? Every interpretation of Hegel addresses this question in one way or another. The Aristotelian basis of Marcuse's answer involves the appropriation of such metaphysical concepts as kinesis, limit, dynamis, and energeia in the context of Hegel's distinction between the levels of existence or being-there, roughly equivalent to simple thinghood, and "essence" which is a more sophisticated concept of reality encompassing substance and life, the human world. At the level of essence, beings exist in a self relation such that they can encompass and master their own transformations and the environment in which they exist. This level of being which Hegel analyzes in his “objective logic” corresponds, of course, to the Aristotelian analysis of substance. In the following exegesis I will first discuss the “Key Concepts” of Marcuse’s analysis of thinghood and substance in terms of its Heideggerian background. But Hegel’s dialectic does not stop there. It continues and achieves its highest form in the “subjective logic” of life and knowledge: substance as subject. At these levels being not only preserves itself in the midst of change, it stands in essential relations with its environment, both as doer and knower. These categories are developed in terms of notions of activity and totality influenced by current Marxist theory, especially the writings of Lukács. I will address this level of being in the course of the discussion of the second set of “Key Concepts” corresponding to the subjective logic.
Most readers are frustrated and confused by Hegel’s extremely abstract mode of expression and by the description of the bifurcations characteristic of ordinary things in the same terminology used to describe life and knowledge. The organization of the system around the supposed “movement” of concepts is also disorienting. Marcuse's interpretation suggests a somewhat different way of looking at Hegel's accomplishment. The point is not to attribute human attributes such as reflection to things or to set lifeless concepts dancing. Rather, Hegel is attempting simultaneously to acknowledge the fragmentation characteristic of what Lukács would call “reified” modernity while uncovering a deeper necessity and harmony, a totality in something like the Greek sense we explored in the previous chapter. How these contradictory impulses can be reconciled is the central mystery of Hegel’s thought. In the rest of this chapter I will attempt to explain Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation in some detail. I will do my best to clear up the confusing terminology, but cannot promise miracles.
Key Concepts I
Common sense holds that empirically existing things are all that is. This view, which Aristotle criticized in his discussion of the Megarians in the Metaphysics, leaves out of account the internal dynamics of becoming through which things are "brought forth," the “how” of the thing. Hegel begins where Aristotle left off with the explanation of these dynamics. He interprets the difference between dynamis and energeia very loosely as a “bifurcation” in being. He calls the empirically existing thing “existence” or “being-there” (Dasein). It realizes in actuality the dynamis implicit in its being. This dynamis contains the potentialities or "truth" of the thing. Hegel calls it "in-itselfness." What the thing is in itself always transcends its existence.
The bifurcation of being consists in the split between in-itselfness and being-there. Hegel calls this bifurcation the "negativity" inherent in being. Beings are not only divided in themselves, they are in motion due to the tension their inner division creates. Thus the bifurcation means that being is never simply itself, but always "in another," involved in the process of transformation that moves it forward. "Being has the fundamental character of being 'split' into two: it is in being other, as equality-with-self and transformation. It carries its negativity within itself, and is negativity in its innermost essence. This fundamentally split and dual character of being is the ground of its motility, of its happening" (HO, 42). Thus, "The first phenomenon encountered in the course of the ontological interpretation is that of being as motility (Bewegtheit) and its basis, namely, the absolute difference between in-itselfness and existence (Dasein)” (HO,181 ). This motility is the Aristotelian kinesis which, as in Heidegger’s interpretation refers to change in general.
But if being is divided, fraught with negativity and condemned to constant movement, then the question arises how any sort of unity can hold the fragments together. Hegel's concept of motility addresses the problem of achieving or maintaining unity in the midst of change. This unity is actuality as energeia but as in Heidegger’s Aristotle, so in Marcuse’s Hegel, actuality is not simply "there" but is itself a type of movement. "Actuality constitutes itself through a distinctive mode of motility; actuality can be only as motility” (HO, 103). Hegel calls this unity of motile, bifurcated being, “being-by-oneself-in-otherness.” This is the encompassing term for energeia and dynamis in their necessary relation, “the being for oneself (energeia) of in-itselfness (dynamis) ” (HO, 148). "Existing in the condition of negativity, being 'must posit the unity that is contained within it', must absorb each negativity into itself as its very own, sublate it, and must relate itself to itself through it. Thereby it must win the unity of its existence, and preserving this, it must unfold itself out of it. Hegel names this grasping of negativity through its comprehension, the 'negative relation to self.'” (HO, 176).
The split in being is thus not a simple fact; it is an active self-relation, a for-itselfness. Marcuse calls the category of for-itselfness "the most comprehensive in the entire logic" (HO, 179). Note the presence of the term "self" in this account. Marcuse describes the stages of motility in terms of the concept of selfhood as an inner division that unifies itself. Things too can have a self in this sense, at least formally, since they unify a manifold of determinations. Although the concept of selfhood is not confined exclusively to human beings, human selfhood most clearly exemplifies the unifying process. The negative relation to self which is at the basis of our being is also at the basis of the unity of things. "In this sense it means simply that process of 'negative relation to self' through which unity is constituted, and which implicitly is contained in the movement of the existing thing without manifesting itself as such a relation therein” (HO, 179).
Hegel's system is a hierarchy of types of being, each of which corresponds to a type of motility. Marcuse describes in some detail several accounts of this hierarchy the most elaborate of which has four levels (HO, 175ff). These go from the simplest "immediate being" all the way to the absolute. In the next sections I will explore the levels of being in more detail and show how Marcuse goes beyond Heidegger to extract the foundations of a radical political theory from the higher levels of Hegel's dialectic.
At the lowest level of “determinate" or "immediate" being, things appear to be self-subsistent and independent of other things. At this level things do not have a necessary relationship to other beings, their own process of change, or the accidents of their own being. They simply are without an "interior" or some sort of relation to their own "self." This level of being corresponds to the notion of objective thinghood comprehended superficially by the “understanding” or common sense. However, within it there already appears a first division between its possibilities and its given form.
It is easy to verify this in everyday experience. No matter how cursory and uninformed our perception of things, no matter how simple the things, they lie under a horizon of possibilities. The simplest object could be other than it is and this "otherness," although it may be vague and undefined, belongs to its nature as much as its positive qualities. “Immediate being appears in its determinacy as the mediation of its intrinsic being, but this latter transcends its determinacy and reaches over to its own potency and possibility. It determines itself 'as the other of itself'. In this 'difference' between its in-itselfness and its immediacy lies the 'drive' of its movement which leads beyond immediacy. Being sets itself in movement” (HO, 175).
The second level is the elementary process of change of the determinate being of level one. Once being is set in movement things lose their integrity and solidity. This division in determinate being is not yet the complex self-production of an essentially grounded being which can maintain itself through change. Instead, in changing it loses its identity. Its in-itselfness places it into relation with that which succeeds it in the process of change. "The Being of immediate beings constitutes itself first and foremost through movement which is the complete perishing of the individual something, the going beyond its own limit that is its in-itselfness, thus the movement of going beyond its own self. The ‘end’ of individual beings is incorporated within their being in such a manner that the latter is first fulfilled when they reach their end. The individual being is finite” (HO, 54).
Again, common sense understanding tells us that ordinary beings are constantly changing from one thing into another. This process of change appears external to the things themselves, something which befalls them from without. Yet it must be explained in terms of the possibilities contained in the things. The log which burns in the fireplace generating smoke and heat is transformed according to its own nature. Its existence is annulled in the process but not arbitrarily. Viewed in this light the world consists in a vast system of possible exchanges and transformations. Beings are not independent of each other but are bound together in essential relations.
On these terms change reveals that the implicit or true being of the being is another being rather than a further development of itself. At a higher stage of development being will preserve itself in the midst of change but here things perish in revealing their truth, that is, in going beyond their limit to be what they “truly” are, namely, something else. “What immediately happens to the something in its being-for-another is not an alien, external occurrence. On the contrary, this constitutes the being-there of the something. Through it, its in-itselfness fulfills itself as determination. Its own being 'sends it beyond' its respective determinateness as its limit” (HO, 59).
Change at this level is interpreted through the Aristotelian category of steresis or privation. The inability of beings to maintain themselves beyond a specific “limit” is defining for this lowest level of being. Marcuse writes that at the stage of immediate being, “The in-itselfness of the something is a specific form of impotence (powerlessness.)….Precisely because of its powerlessness immediate being is at the mercy of the motility of its being: it can neither sustain itself in the course of this movement nor can it keep it within its bounds. Its in-itselfness changes with every determinateness that impinges upon it” (HO, 50-51). Being’s powerlessness is the fact that its movement is its death. The being-in-itself of immediate being is that into which its “powerless” being is transformed. The living thing, understood not in terms of its inner dynamic but as a mere succession of states, offers a clear illustration of this concept of powerlessness. Perishing is a necessary aspect of life. The seed perishes in becoming the plant; the leaf withers with the seasons and new leaves grow.
The concept of powerlessness resembles Heidegger’s analysis of Aristotelian bearance, the particular type of steresis in which beings go over into something else. But as with Aristotelian steresis, the passage to another is not arbitrary but reveals the truth of the original being that dies in changing. The similarity to the notion of matter in Aristotle is also clear. Just as matter achieves its end in taking on form, so beings realize their potential in the process of change even as they lose their identity in becoming another. Hegel extends the notion to encompass all change from one thing into another understood at this level.
Like Heidegger, Marcuse identifies peras and telos, the categories of finitude. "The limit is the 'principal' (L. I, 115, arche) of beings themselves (the Aristotelian category of telos)” (HO, 54). But this finitude in Hegel is a new kind of infinity, the infinite movement that belongs to the essence of being. It is not an endless progress which Hegel would interpret as a bad infinity, but an internal movement of self realization. “Infinity is only the most consistent expression for the absolute and universal immanence of motility; it is the ‘unrest of self-movement’ within the being of beings…” (HO, 60). Marcuse explains this Hegelian conception of finitude as a philosophical atheism. “For the first time the concept of finitude is removed from the theological tradition and placed on the ground of pure philosophical ontology. It is no longer the finitude of being as ens creatum in contrast to a creator God that is meant here. The finite is not contrasted to anything else, not even to the infinity of beings themselves, which Hegel dismisses precisely as the ‘bad’ infinity. From this point on, Hegel opens the wholly new dimension of the universal historicity of beings and clears the way for understanding the essence of the historical. The process of happening of finite beings is not a development toward some previously determined or undetermined goal. It is not at all a happening to and from. It is a pure happening in-itself, immanent to beings themselves. The finite being does not have a history; it is history. The history of humans is only a specific mode of this universal process and is to be understood only in unity with it” (HO, 55).
This conception of finitude implies no reference to an infinite God and so appears to contradict Hegel’s own frequent references to the divinity. Surely the concept of the absolute represents a final end of some sort. Marcuse argues that the deeper import of Hegel’s dialectic contradicts these usual interpretations and self-interpretations. If history is really to be ontologically fundamental, the happening of being cannot have a predetermined goal but must be "a pure happening in itself”. Human history is a specific realization of this historical character of being. But this means that there can be no end of history, no final reconciliation, no ideal the realization of which would interrupt the ceaseless movement, the restlessness of being.
In what does the universality of this process consists? Does it embrace nature as well as human history? This is a tricky question which Marcuse addresses rather obscurely in his thesis. He notes that for Hegel nature is both absorbed into life as a moment in its self-development and remains independent of life as its presupposition and basis. The dialectic of determinate being described above would presumably correspond to this relatively independent status of nature. But just how independent is it? Hegel does not want to grant its independence full ontological status. Nature is only a moment in the process of self-development of spirit. Its mere externality is overcome as it enters history. Spirit “is nature as well as self-consciousness, and…through its own history transforms an intrinsically ahistorical nature into unity with history. This is accomplished in that Spirit recognizes and comprehends nature as a form of its existence and lets it become its ‘world’” (HO, 313). This still leaves in suspense the question of what nature was before it was so generously incorporated into spirit as world. As we will see, Marcuse clarifies this ambiguous statement of the case in his contemporary Marxist writings.
Marcuse is famous for having written a book entitled One-Dimensional Man. What is less well known is that he introduced his notion of dimensions in this early Hegel thesis. The two dimensions are essence and immediate determinate being, being-there. With this concept of dimensions Marcuse addresses the problem of the eidos which lies at the center of Heidegger's Aristotle interpretation. In Marcuse's account Hegel, like Aristotle, offers a solution to the Platonic split between the eidos and actual being. Marcuse writes that the “two dimensions…are not isolated and self-subsistent worlds that need to be brought subsequently in relation; they are dimensions of being which are from the beginning ontologically dependent on one another, and which only continue to exist through each other and which only move themselves within their conflictual unity” (HO, 75). The two dimensions, essence and existence co-exist necessarily in the self-manifesting of essence in existence. They cannot be thought independently of each other and their unity is the motility of being.
This, then, will be level three at which the possibilities of things are their own, rather than another's. At this level, the self-relation of the thing is active, unifying it around what it can become instead of passing over into another as its possibilities are realized. The thing “posits” itself as a unity in its multiple determinations and encounters with other things. It can do this only through realizing its in-itselfness in its existence, achieving actuality. Hegel’s concept of actuality as “equality-with-self-in-otherness” or being-by-oneself-in-otherness refers to the fact that beings sustain themselves through change as always themselves and yet other in the many different ways in which they evolve, relate to their causes and effects, and separate themselves from themselves in various processes of self-definition and self-awareness. This concept, Marcuse argues, derives directly from “the Aristotelian categories of dynamis and energeia” (HO, 42).
Actuality involves a specific temporality, a connection to that which it has always already been, its essence. Marcuse uses a Heideggerian neologism to explain his interpretation of this temporality of essence. The essence is not behind appearances, nor is it a pure ideal, but rather it "prevails" in the order of appearance. In Heidegger's terms, "it ‘essences’ in them—west in ihnen’” (HO, 77). Beings “essence” in passing from one realization to the next. The essence is the unity of the various manifestations which it generates. Substance and accident are related essentially because the substance is the totality of accidents, not something behind them. It is not a mere sum but a whole governed by a dynamis which Hegel calls “actuosity.” Being is thus self-generating and self-unifying in essence. Marcuse concludes, "Essence has no independent being 'alongside' existent things; it always only exists as what 'has proceeded from negativity and inwardness,' and the 'being thrown into the externality of being' (L, II, 97)” (HO, 81).
For Hegel, the concept of essence is fulfilled in life, which masters itself and its environment and so reproduces itself as what it is through a process of development. “Hegel names this grasping of negativity through its comprehension, the 'negative relation to self.' First, through this relation does being become an entity which exists 'for itself,' that is, a 'subject, person, a free being'” (HO, 176). But even beings which are not conscious can participate in this third stage of development implicitly, without knowing that they do so, as does for example the Aristotelian substance.
Hegel understands substance in terms of two related ideas: potentiality and movement. Being “is never simply and immediately what it can and ought to be, but finds itself and moves itself within the difference of in-itselfness (potence) and existence.” (HO, 91-92). Nothing simply is; whatever is is a movement between its given form and its potentiality. The concept of potentiality or possibility refers to what any actual being truly is in itself. “[T]he possible is the in-itselfness of the actual…” (HO, 95). Actuality lays out the “horizon of possible determinations” and realizes one among them in every particular case (HO, 93). The notion of potentiality Hegel invokes here is derived directly from Aristotle. It refers to the force of the thing which holds it together as it realizes itself, becomes what it can best be. Essence as potentiality is thus striving and struggle and not simply an ideal form.
Substance now stands in normative subordination to its own potentialities. What a being is at any given moment is in question in terms of what it should become in conformity with its essence. The normative moment that was always present in the notions of dynamis and energeia now comes to the fore. When Hegel says that the actual is the rational and the rational the actual, he is not merely describing the existing state of affairs. He is making a demand. Untrue being must give way to true being. The revealing of the true being is a process of development. However, this interpretation opens up new problems. The modernized idea of energeia is no longer bound to a pregiven eidos but creates itself. This self-creation is teleological without a telos, aims at an end which it itself creates. This is freedom in the modern sense without the arbitrariness and externality associated with the materialist account. As for the Greeks, so for Hegel, a kind of harmonistic necessity binds beings to what they can become, but this necessity is no longer pregiven. A totality continues to exist, but now its logic must be discovered in its development rather than positing that development in terms of the eidos. This is the work of history.
Hegel avoids regression to ancient dogmatism by deriving essence from the tensions in appearance and between things. Essence is both the internal relation of the thing in itself to its determinations, and the external relation of the thing to the other things with which it necessarily coexists. Essence is relatedness and the development which proceeds out of relatedness. “Existence, as designating the Being of things which are, has proved to be a structure of relationality in a double sense: first, as the behavior of individual existents toward every factual determinacy of their thereness (sich-verhalten; self-related activity); second, as the ontologically appropriate universal interrelationship among individual existents, through which alone they are what they are. The essence of existents is contained within the process of development of this relationality” (HO, 90). Hence, “All of what I can become as this determinate individual is already there, not in the sense of a mystical predetermination, but in the sense that my concrete person depends on the ‘existing multiplicity of circumstances’ out of which and within which alone it becomes what is possible for it” (HO, 94-95).
From Heidegger to Lukács
Heidegger's early analysis of production in Aristotle was formative for his conception of worldhood. However, worldhood has an ambiguous status in Heidegger's work. On the one hand, Dasein is being-in-the-world, inconceivable out of connection with its environment. On the other hand, the truth of Dasein's being is discovered in the breakdown of its world. Anxiety, dread, boredom, living-toward-death are all stances through which the individual gains access to the complete groundlessness of worldly existence. In the later Heidegger productionism is treated negatively, as the fundamental error of Western metaphysics. Thus although Heidegger begins his analysis with production, it ends in existential and eventually quasi-religious themes far removed from these beginnings.
Hegel offers a strangely similar spectacle. The master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology places work at the center of the theory. Its generalization as an ontological model suggests that all meaning and truth arise in a productive relation to reality. However, like Heidegger, Hegel abandons these productionist beginnings and his theory concludes in the ether of the absolute, a purely cognitive relation to reality which Hegel himself compares to the self-thinking thought of the Aristotelian God.
Heidegger is critical of Hegel’s notion of a cognitive absolute, which he sees as a typical Cartesian evasion, substituting epistemology for more fundamental ontological issues. Marcuse shares this critique, but he draws very different conclusions from it. He identifies an ambiguity in Hegel’s system. There are two different ways of interpreting the division of the system into levels of being. These levels may form a hierarchy of distinct types of being, with the living and knowing subject at the top, or they may merely describe different ways of understanding being, different categorial schemes. In fact, the system seems to include both: the levels of determinate being and substance can describe anything at all from different viewpoints, but life and knowledge are specific types of being. One way of resolving the ambiguity is to consider each level a broader context which embraces the lower levels. For example, the process of change described at level two is explained more profoundly in terms of the concept of essence introduced at level three. In the usual understanding of Hegel, the knowing subject provides the ultimate context, the absolute which embraces all being-there and substance in its truth. But this absolute is a form of knowledge. Can a contingent human knowledge form a necessary context of being itself? This is precisely the idealistic move Heidegger rejects.
Where Heidegger interpreted Hegel’s thought in its entirety through this problematic move, Marcuse distinguishes two closely related approaches in Hegel, one of which defines the absolute as life while the other defines it as knowledge. Only the former can support a true “fundamental ontology” oriented toward history as life process. This is because life implies world, world in Heidegger’s sense. The unity of the living thing and its world can be conceived phenomenologically as an ultimate context embracing all levels of being. Even the nature of the natural sciences can be founded in the world, if not reduced to it. All forms of knowledge can take their place within life. Cognition understood in this way as a life function necessarily involves a people and a history. Thus historicity lies at the center of the theory so understood.
However, Hegel also describes life on the terms of cognition. This inverse perspective dissolves life in the absolute and eliminates history. Hegel's phenomenology attempted to combine these two incompatible perspectives and to reconcile life as historicity and the absolute as a form of cognition beyond history. "As soon as cognition is defined as life, history follows; as soon as life is defined as cognition, however, historicity is pushed away from the history of life. The truth of life is then defined in relation to an absolute and thereby unhistorical mode of knowledge. The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s first and last attempt to unite as equally fundamental both motives and to construct the historicity of absolute spirit on the basis of history. We can describe this attempt with a brief formula: to show how life, as historical, carries within itself the possibility of its own ahistoricity and how it actualizes this possibility in the course of history” (HO, 227). In Hegel’s later work, life is displaced more and more by an ahistorical, cognitive absolute.
Where Hegel went wrong was in taking the dialectic for an all encompassing system culminating in absolute knowledge. This self-interpretation contradicts his own most original discoveries in his early work up to Phenomenology and The Logic. Hegel’s vulnerability to this unfortunate self-interpretation Marcuse traces back to his attempt to apply the dialectic to nature, to “absolutize historicity,” which leads to a “flattening” of the dialectic (OPD, 21). The blurring of the boundaries between nature and history risks tilting the whole enterprise away from practice toward theory. This, Marcuse argues, is what eventually happens in Hegel’s later work and in the tradition of interpretation derived from it. At this point, Marcuse’s concerns converge directly with Lukács’s own restoration of the dialectic in the Marxist tradition. For both the principal problem is to uncover the dynamic theory of historical agency implicit in the Hegelian dialectic. It is precisely this aspect of the dialectic which cannot survive its extension to nature through which it becomes either a regressive emanationist metaphysics or a merely methodological prolegomena to the positive sciences.
Marcuse and Lukács argue that only human history is fully dialectical (HCC, 24, 206-207). Lukács does not articulate the boundaries of history and nature. But he is at least clear that applied to physics and chemistry, as Engels suggested, the dialectic is reduced to a crude allegory of knowledge. Thus there can be no dialectic of the “nature in itself” studied by natural science. For Marcuse history also excludes nature in this sense, but it explicitly includes the whole range of relationships and objects touched by human activity such as nature as landscape, environment, and materials. As he explains in a contemporary essay, the historical dialectic, applies to all human “creations, deeds and learning, but also nature as an occupied living space and as a power to be used” (OPD, 21). These have a dialectical form explored in the “objective dialectic” of thinghood, the lower levels of the dialectic which correspond more or less to the Aristotelian concept of production. On these terms the dialectic is not a metaphysical or methodological principle but the actual moving force of history, within which human beings are situated as potential agents of radical change, historical “producers.”
According to Lukács, being is essentially historical. History cannot be reduced to nature nor is it a merely regional form of being. History remains ontologically fundamental insofar as our world, everything we can know and deal with, is historical. Furthermore, the thesis that being is historical blocks any transcendental move to a suprahistorical ego or atemporal categories. Being cannot be grasped outside of an active involvement in history as there is no external place to stand. The most fundamental such involvement is economic production in which the working classes have always been engaged. However, only under capitalism are workers able to comprehend the social world they create through their labor. In so doing they discover that they have objectified themselves in the world in an alienated fashion which Lukács describes as reification.
Reification is the appearance of historical processes and human relations in the form of thinghood. The concept derives from the Marxist notion of the fetishism of commodities interpreted in terms of its Hegelian roots as a “form of appearance,” a modality of essence. In this sense reification is the sociological equivalent of the objectivistic and mechanistic empiricism criticized equally by Hegel and Heidegger. And as in their thought, so in Lukács reified appearances mask a more fundamental “totality,” or “being-in-the-world in which subject and object, Dasein and being, are unified rather than split apart in an eternal antinomy. It is only on the ground of this prior unity that the bifurcation between them can open up. Labor, disalienated through revolution, will restore that unity at the level of self-consciousness.
So far, Lukács’s theory has a certain similarity to Hegel’s dialectic, and even to Heidegger’s concept of worldhood, as Lucien Goldmann has pointed out. However, unlike in Hegel and Heidegger, Lukács’s critique of reification has revolutionary political implications. It does not lead beyond history but to the next stage of history. Since the working class is the basis of history, its consciousness that it is such is itself historical and can have historical consequences. The revolution disalienates history through dereifying capitalist society and exposing all the hidden social processes and human relations that underlie its thing-like form. Then and only then can human action return to itself not as an alien power but as an expression of the actor. The form of this unity of actor and object, the totality, is not merely a theoretical postulate but is also a real historical force.
This Lukácsian dialectic lies in the background of Marcuse's explanation of Hegel's concepts of life, work, and the absolute. However, Lukács is the great structuring absence of the book. The fact that Marcuse cannot mention Lukács or suggest a Marxist alternative to Hegel creates problems for the reader. The discussions of the higher levels of Hegel’s dialectic remain so abstract it is hard to imagine how they would have been interpreted by a Marxist schooled in Lukács at that time. But this is what we must now learn to do if Marcuse’s book is to make sense as an expression not only of his scholarly interests but also of his political convictions.
Key Concepts II
Marcuse's originality lies in the attempt to pursue the productionist argument to its logical conclusion, that is, to develop an ontology based on the model of production that does not flinch at the last moment and turn to a contemplative foundation. This links his position to Aristotle, Heidegger, and Hegel, but it also carries him in a very different direction first explored by Marx. It was Marx who interpreted Hegel’s notions of labor and history in terms of a theory of class struggle and revolution. In addition to the master-slave dialectic, on which he comments as early as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx built explicitly in Capital on Hegel’s doctrine of essence, which we have seen is a historicized transformation of the Aristotelian interpretation of being in terms of the structure of craft.
Marcuse worked out the shift from Aristotelian technę to Hegelian history through the analysis of Hegel’s concept of life, which replaces craftsmanship as the basic model of being. Hegel understands productive activity as a diremption within life. Life requires a world in which to deploy itself. The living subject “makes” this world and in confronting it confronts itself. This world is not nature in the sense of the natural sciences. Rather, it is what correlates with the tendencies of life, its needs, movements, perceptions. In modern terms, we could call the world life’s “niche,” that segment of reality to which it necessarily relates.
The living thing exists in relation to an objectivity which it creates or appropriates. This objectivity is necessary to the existence of the self. But life is not knowledge but activity. "The ontological relation of life to the totality of beings must not be distorted into the epistemological relation of consciousness to objectivity" (HO, 232). Activity involves two phases, a phase of “objectification and deobjectification, falling into otherness and reabsorption back into being for self, a process of externalization and unification. This process was concretely defined as activity, namely, as the exhibiting and producing of itself through conscious activity which is necessarily a 'transaction with and transformation of' beings’” (HO, 296). The world is incorporated into the self in the essential movement of life. "Driven by this need, individual Life now turns against its objectivity in order to 'overpower' it and to 'appropriate' it. This is a process of infusing with life the external world that opposes life. Worldly objects are made to 'correspond' thereby to life (habitability, ability, enjoyability, usefulness, applicability are not simply present as aspects of life but are posited with life itself and find completion in its movement). The object is overwhelmed to the point where the living individual 'deprives it of its particular nature, converts it into a means for itself, gives its own subjectivity as its substance'” (HO, 158).
Thus the activity of making a world takes a more literal form in the concept of labor as objectification developed in the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology. Life involves desire and labor which are forms of activity in which it brings forth itself and its world. The intrinsic contents of the self are objectified in the world through labor. Life is thus a concrete process of revealing, the highest and fullest revealing. The mediation of things takes place through labor by which self-consciousness animates them and by which thinghood achieves its fullest actualization. The object as indifferent barrier, as the “negative” other of life, is overcome. "Labor is at the same time the fundamental relation of self-consciousness to thinghood, whereby the pure negative objectivity of the latter is sublated and animated. Thinghood first attains its subsistence through this affirmation... " (HO, 257). Life is the true meaning of being insofar as it is the master of its own possibilities and exists through knowing and freely disposing of itself. "Self-consciousness had recognized that the world constituted only the cycle of its activity and that essentially it had to manifest and prove itself in the world. It recognized that actuality is in essence an object of 'work'" (HO, 276).
Work takes on an extended sense in Hegel and refers eventually not merely to the making of artifacts but to all forms of objectification, including the creation of institutions and culture. The structure of productive activity in the narrow sense becomes the model for the production of institutions and historical development generally. This concept of the objectification of the life of community through work was “perhaps Hegel's greatest discovery” (HO, 246). This is the essential concept of historicity which does not simply explain change, but which is the basis for an account of the worldhood of the world in terms of human activity. “The world subsists and is real only through the knowing and acting self-consciousness whose ‘work’ it is” (HO, 300).
Hegel’s historical production is thus similar to Aristotle’s techne in that it involves a constructive engagement with things by which they enter a world, and similar to Heidegger’s revealing, in that this engagement is understood as ontologically fundamental in constituting the world from the standpoint of the “factical life” through which it takes place. “The Being of life shows most explicitly that the self-actualization proper to life presents the true meaning of being. The actuality of life is full effectivity, a process of displaying and exposing one's possibilities outside oneself" (HO, 253). But still more important are the connections between this interpretation of Hegel’s concept of life and Marxism, particularly the Marxism of Lukács. These connections become obvious in Marcuse’s contemporary essays. He writes, for example, that the master-slave dialectic “means the process of reification and its transcendence as a basic occurrence of human life, which Marx represented as the basic law of historical development” (OPD, 36). Echoing Lukács’s concept of transforming practice, Marcuse writes that life “can only fulfill its essence if it mediates all its immediate existence (which, measured against its actual possibilities is essentially an ‘otherness,’ ‘loss of its self’) with its self-being and changing this existence makes it its own, ‘adapts itself.’ Only in this change through the process of negation does the living Ego remain like itself in otherness” (OPD, 35). I will return to this theme in the conclusion of this chapter.
Hegel’s concept of the absolute is ambiguous, emphasizing life as practical engagement in the earlier works and theoretical abstraction in the later ones. Marcuse’s analysis of the absolute preserves the earlier priority of life against Hegel’s tendency to reduce it to a stage in the development of the absolute as knowledge. This puts him at odds with the mainstream of Hegel interpretation which takes off from Hegel’s distinction of philosophical wisdom and practical life. Philosophy comprehends the necessity underlying the dichotomies of practical life and thereby transcends them. But practical life itself proceeds without needing to possess this wisdom. The naive individual who attends church or sees a great work of art is in the presence of the meaning of practical life in a pre-theoretical form. The philosopher alone raises these representations of meaning to their concept in self-consciousness.
The absolute so conceived unifies all being in itself through knowledge. The human being knows itself and its world as its own and so is not dispersed in the multiplicity of beings, nor compelled by them to “work” for its own survival, but subsists among them in its unity and freely affirms their difference from itself. It is at home in them as the realization of the conditions of its own selfhood. “Hegel's intention is to attain an 'absolute' meaning of being in relation to which all that is can be understood in its mode of being without presupposing, however, a generalized unitary ontological meaning from the outset.” Such a generalized unity would be Schelling’s identity of subject and object which Hegel dismisses as the “night in which all cows are black”. “On the contrary, the plurality of all oppositions among beings should be preserved in and be a part of this meaning. This meaning of being should at the same time provide the possibility of overcoming the fixed oppositions of subjectivity and objectivity, consciousness and 'being' through an originally unified principal which would allow us to understand this duality in its proper unity as proceeding from itself" (HO, 22).
This extremely abstract formulation can be concretized and made understandable through examples drawn from ordinary human experience. At the risk of banalizing Hegel's insight, consider the notion of challenge. A challenge is not simply an obstacle although it may at first appear such. Unlike the object of work, the challenge is not overpowered and transformed, it is “met.” Nor is meeting a challenge the annihilation of the challenge as such. To meet a challenge is to encounter the apparent obstacle as an opportunity for growth, self-development. The challenge must therefore be respected in its right to challenge and not evaded simply to achieve a goal. Indeed, the true goal can only be reached by maintaining the challenge in its challenging nature. The challenge is ours and yet to be a challenge it must be other. In meeting the challenge appropriately the individuals meet themselves as they would hope to be. Then they have transcended “the fixed oppositions of subjectivity and objectivity” while preserving “the plurality of all oppositions among beings.” In terms of the mainstream cognitive interpretation of the absolute, we could say that the self-conscious understanding of the growth process is not necessary to growth but can be known by the philosopher in a wisdom which recollects growth in its truth in the eternal “afterwards” of knowledge.
In interpreting his doctrine in this way, Hegel places the self-consciousness of life beyond life. But this seems to imply an accidental relation between knowledge and its objects which the absolute was precisely supposed to transcend. The moment of realization, like the emergence of the philosopher from Plato’s cave, is incommensurable with life and its endless flow. History, as the flow of life, “ends” in a knowledge which transcends it. This timeless knowledge can then also encompass timeless nature as well and so achieves completion. Yet history must continue, as perpetual temporal movement if not as destiny. Hegel interpreters have never agreed on how to make sense of the combination of an atemporal knowledge that seems to inaugurate a stage of history beyond history, and a concept of being as essentially bound up with time.
If we do not believe a cognitive absolute of this sort can play the role of ultimate context of being, but insist on a living absolute actively engaged with being in a world, then we are on a difficult path. Pure knowledge easily encompasses all being, nature and history, object and subject, fact and value, but life appears to be limited to one side of the dichotomies. Marcuse’s solution to this dilemma is to assume that the encounter of life with being is no contingent relationship of subject with object but has an essential character. For Marcuse’s Hegel, life is neither a cogito nor an object of knowledge. It is rather a universal mediator, incorporating everything into its process. Life thus cannot be understood as a subject standing over against objects. In its transcendental function, life creates a world on the one side and a living being in that world on the other side. Subject and object emerge from this common source. Hegel’s term for this underlying unity is “totality.” "The totality is that being which lies at the ground of all beings, which is present in them, and which gives unity to the multiplicity of all that is” (HO, 22).
How is this conception of totality related to knowledge, which is surely an aspect of the absolute in any interpretation? Marcuse gets from a concept of the absolute as knowledge to this alternative by emphasizing the structure of knowing rather than its content. The emphasis now is not on what is known but on knowing itself as a specific way in which life is, what Marcuse calls a form of motility. Here the absolute is understood in terms of the “being of knowledge in the totality.” Knowledge is not considered in an epistemological light, but rather ontologically. Knowing is a mode of being of its object rather than an accidental relation to its object. As “possessing the structural unity of self sameness in otherness, knowledge is the … the highest form of being" (HO, 264). Knowledge is not just an accumulation of things known but is a model for being as a whole because it has the structure of a totality that does not annul the difference between its moments. This mode of being exemplifies the principle of being-oneself-in-otherness. Knowledge unifies, allowing plurality to exist while holding all its objects together in consciousness. So, Hegel’s absolute is not a detached knowing, the object reduced to the subject, but rather knowledge as a model of the kind of unity that can be attributed to being in its multiplicity and internal opposition. "The 'principal' of absolute synthesis which is not 'merely a form of knowing but also a form of being' is the 'one true reality' (ED, 236). Its occurrence is that of the totality" (HO, 36).
Let us return again to the example of challenging to clarify this abstract formulation. What Marcuse would want to emphasize in analyzing this example is the fact that life, as essentially a process of growth, encompasses the challenge and the challenged in a single system. The system is not truly complete so long as it is unself-conscious. Of course challenges are constantly met in unself-conscious practical life. However, the stage of the absolute is reached only where the individuals recognize this condition as a necessity of their being and of the being of the challenge itself. In self-consciousness, we not only meet the challenge and grow but affirm growth as the motility corresponding to challenging as such. The challenge no longer appears as an accident from which growth proceeds accidentally, but as essential to the human condition. The knowledge of this is itself a dimension of growth, true maturity. If I do not understand how meeting challenges has made me what I am, I have not fully grasped the challenge that now stands before me. Indeed, it may appear to me as a mere obstacle to be overcome rather than as an opportunity to transcend myself and I may attempt to evade it. Hence self-consciousness is essential to the “working” of challenging considered in its systemic unity. This is unity through difference transcending the opposition of subject and object, theory and practice.
Such self-consciousness displaces the center of my being toward the system. I am no longer a worker attacking a thing to be worked on, a life confronting an environment, an ego facing an other, or rather, I am that ego but also the other insofar as I accept and affirm myself in my role in the system. In this sense life is the unity of subject and object, not the subject opposed to the object or independent of it in pure knowledge. Life is not a specific type of thing in the world, but a way in which the world exists and shows itself, in Heideggerian terms, “being-in-the-world” itself.
The similarity between this account of Hegel’s concept of life and the relation of Being and Dasein in Heidegger is striking. In the background stands Aristotle once again. Like Heidegger Marcuse wants to argue that being “reveals” itself in the relation of dynamis to energeia. The movement of actualization is also an appearing. Marcuse attributes to Hegel the same insight and argues that it is this insight which enables Hegel to recover the inner truth of Aristotle's philosophy. Hegel interprets Aristotle's concept of energeia as “a showing of itself as exposing, revealing, and displaying itself” (HO, 253). “Essence is a showing, revealing, and manifesting of itself. 'Essence must appear' (L, II, 101)” (HO, 81).
In Heidegger revealing involves the necessary relation of Dasein to being. Combining Hegel and Heidegger, one might say that not only must Being appear, in appearing it requires Dasein -- the subject -- before which to appear. “The true absolute unity, which no longer stands over and against another and which has no other outside it, is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity or of thought and being. It is the unity of the necessary difference. Hegel insists on this original phenomenon: whenever being is encountered, it appears through the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. That is to say, it appears through difference in general and in a condition of bifurcation. Whenever the absolute ‘posits itself in the form of existence, it must posit itself in a duality of form. For appearing and self-bifurcation are one’ (ED, 85)” (HO, 18). Following Heidegger, Marcuse describes this appearing as an event. The unifying activity of life is what allows the world "to happen as the world" (HO, 13). The happening of the world -- Heidegger calls it the "worlding" of the world -- is the utlimate motility.
It is the notion of production that makes this partial identification of Hegel and Heidegger’s positions possible. Marcuse shares with the early Heidegger the crucial conviction that the notion of being is modeled on productive activity in Greek thought and the thought of Aristotle in particular. As in Heidegger the kinesis or Bewegtheit explored in the dialectic is the revealing of being through a process of making. Although Hegel's repetition of Aristotle differs from Heidegger's, it too responds to the breakdown of ancient essentialism while preserving the Aristotelian discovery of revealing. It therefore offers a complementary perspective on the phenomena that concern Heidegger and promises to solve the same basic problems. The idea of explaining Hegel’s bifurcated being on these terms seems original with Marcuse. Heidegger’s own lectures on the Phenomenology do not hint at a similar connection. On the contrary, Heidegger accepts the conventional interpretation of Hegel’s absolute and so asserts that his own position “is the exact opposite of what Hegel tried to demonstrate in his entire philosophy" (HPS, 145).
But despite this disclaimer the similarities also show up in
the understanding of knowledge in Heidegger and Hegel as Marcuse interprets
him. Recall that for Heidegger, knowledge is only possible on the basis of a
prior disclosure of being to Dasein. This disclosure, which we would normally
call “experience,” has the complex structure of revealing described above.
Being-in-the-world is the fundamental unity guaranteeing the knowing subject
access to the known object beyond all Cartesian dualisms. For Hegel “world” is
available for knowledge insofar as it exists as life. Life constitutes an
initial unity of subject and object which makes knowledge possible, that is, it
establishes a homogeneity of subject and object such that they can enter into a
cognitive relation. "Life is the presupposition of cognition but not as
the specific mode of being of a particular existent in the world, but rather as
a mode of being of the world itself. From the start cognition operates within
the unity created by life and world, subjectivity and objectivity….The 'object'
of cognition stands now in the prior relation of adequacy to cognition.
'Intrinsically' it possesses the same mode of being as the subject of
cognition, namely, the mode of being characteristic of life” (HO, 163).
Thus prior to knowing as an epistemological relation, subject and object stand in an ontological relation as beings. “The unity of I and world, or the prior bonding between the subject who cognizes and beings, does not merely result from knowledge; nor is it grounded in the accidental constitution of human knowledge and experience. This is rather an ontological relation, one that holds among beings themselves, one that is true of the ‘thing in-itself’ (Ding an sich). This bond precedes all knowledge and in fact makes factual knowledge possible” (161-162). The relationship involved in knowing is a self-realization of beings in which they are fulfilled. It is not an accidental relation of separate beings but internal to being itself. “The meaning and goal of cognition are understood thereby as a coming-into-truth of Being itself, as a communication of beings with their proper selves” (HO, 163).
From Hegel to Marxism
For Hegel production is an emerging out of implicit being, the in-itself in the sense of eidos or essence. It manifests being in the form of actuality, the for-itself, which involves not only entry into existence but more significantly, entry into a world which has about it the “needed belonging” of life, a living, knowing being, a Dasein in Heidegger’s sense. In Hegel, this producing is the activity of the product itself, i.e. it is historical. Being, in its initial positing, produces itself as an existing being-there and drives itself onward toward further forms of existence. Because Hegel interprets this productive activity as historical, as happening in the events that shape the human world, it involves human action. Marcuse comments, “It is no accident that with the expressions ‘deed’ and ‘activity’ one hears the Greek poięsis, as an ontological category which defines Being as a product, as fabricated, and as ‘prepared.’ This certainly does not imply something produced by an other, being as prepared by humans; it means rather that Being is produced by and through itself” (HO, 79). As we saw with Heidegger, so with Marcuse the structure of physis is explained through poięsis. This surprising identification of apparently opposite modes of activity can hardly be a coincidence.
As for Heidegger, so for Marcuse’s Hegel, there is a dereifying intent behind this conception. The goal is to break through the objectivistic veil to the “things themselves” as they are phenomenologically revealed. At that ontologically fundamental level, things do not stand alone, fixed and frozen in their nature awaiting a purely accidental relation with a cognitive subject. Instead they exist in a dynamic relation to Dasein, which discloses them in its practical life activities. As Hegel puts a similar point, “Life is consciousness and self-consciousness first and only because it is the 'universal medium' and 'fluid substance' of beings.... Life is a mode of being with whose existence all entities become deobjectified, are 'related' to life, and come alive" (HO, 232).
Having reached his own version of this conclusion, Heidegger posits being-in-the-world and analyzes its structure. As we have seen, this structure includes falling into inauthenticity as an intrinsic possibility of Dasein. Thus being-in-the-world is tied to its opposite, the objectivistic view it undermines. Heidegger’s various attempts to escape this pessimistic conclusion are unsuccessful, wavering between individualistic authenticity, Nazi activism and passive waiting for “new gods.” This latter, his final stance, is an odd hangover from the sort of apocalyptic expectations that were common among early 20th century Central European intellectuals but it seems decidedly out of place today.
Marcuse’s Hegelian alternative promises a different way out. The movement of dereification in Hegel is a development out of a contradictory unity, driven by an internal motility from level to level and fulfilling itself at some highest level in the absolute which unifies subject and object, theory and practice. But if the absolute is interpreted as a movement of life rather than as pure cognition, then it must have a historical content. Dereification would then be more than a theoretical transcendence of objectivism, more even than individual authenticity, and certainly other than Nazism and mystical messianism. Its content is identified implicitly with socialist revolution. This historical conception of dereification converges with Lukács’s Hegelian version of Marxism in which the class conscious proletariat stands in for the absolute.
It is clear from Marcuse’s other writings in this period that this analysis of Hegel contains a coded reference to Marxism. The connection is explicit in “On the Problem of the Dialectic.” There he explains that “This ‘Ego’ of human life, to which the dialectic thus ‘returns,’ is not primarily cognitive thought but the full being of life occurring in the real world. The necessity of the dialectic lies in the necessity of this life to be able safely to control the essence of being in all life situations. The ‘dialectic of the self-consciousness’ is not a free floating dialectic of cognition but tied to the concrete being and action of human life” (OPD, 33). This concept of self-consciousness joins theory and practice in a unity. Life “can only fulfill its essence if it mediates all its immediate existence (which, measured against its actual possibilities is essentially an ‘otherness,’ ‘loss of its self’) with its self-being and changing this existence makes it is own, ‘adapts itself.’ Only in this change through the process of negation does the living Ego remain like itself in otherness” (OPD, 35). And Marcuse concludes, “Hegel means the process of reification and its transcendence as a basic occurrence of human life, which Marx represented as the basic law of historical development” (OPD, 36). The key to Marcuse’s extremely abstract presentation of the Hegelian absolute as a dimension of life lies in this notion of dereification. It was Lukács who introduced this problematic into Marxist circles in this period. His theory of practice is essential background to Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation. In the remainder of this section I will sketch that theory as it appears to apply to Marcuse’s Hegel.
Lukács distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of practice, a reified "contemplative" practice characteristic of bourgeois society, and a proletarian transforming practice which "penetrates" its objects. The model of contemplative practice is the relation of the worker to the machine (Lukács, 1968: 89). The machine is self-contained; it has its own logic, the law of its operation; the worker is external to the machine and tends it without actually controlling its autonomous functioning. For Lukács, this type of subject-object relation exemplifies the reified practice of a capitalist society, whether it be entrepreneurial activity, buying and selling on markets, or scientific research (Lukács, 1968: 98). Contemplative practice is thus not simply passive as the term suggests, but technical, manipulative in character. It modifies the world, to be sure, but it leaves its objects essentially unchanged. Indeed, it presupposes the law of its objects which it comprehends and applies according to the Baconian principle that "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Contemplative practice must therefore separate theory, in which law is comprehended, from practice in which it is applied.
Despite the frenetic activity of a technical civilization, its practice does not affect the essence of its objects--their law, only their manifest form, their appearance. Activity at the level of appearance depends on a passive relation to law, which practice merely "contemplates" and does not attempt to change. The activism of the bourgeois subject is based on fatalistic acceptance, "realism," at a deeper level. This realism shows up in the idealistic notion of values as irretrievably cut off from the facts of this world. Philosophy's reified subject-object conception raises this structure to the highest level of abstraction. According to Lukács, when Kant demonstrates that the world of experience is rigorously determined by the laws of physics, he opens that world to unlimited technical progress while excluding in principle any role for values in its development (1968: 160-161).
In contrast to contemplative practice, Lukács introduces the concept of a transforming practice that attacks the laws themselves. It is a non-technical practice that grasps the essence of its objects and changes them at the deepest level. The implicit model of this type of practice is self-consciousness, the essence of the Hegelian absolute. In becoming aware of ourselves, we change what we are immediately. Self-consciousness is simultaneously awareness and action; it transcends the gap between theory and practice characteristic of the reified standpoint. Lukács's innovation is to attempt to conceive of social transformation on this model, as a highly complex and socially mediated expression of self-transformation. Self-recognition and disalienation in the social sphere then involves collective self-awareness. Let me explain more precisely how this can come about.
Lukács never claims that we can dispense with all contemplative practice and everywhere substitute transforming practice for it. His point is rather that certain contemplative practices are fundamentally modified when their subjects become self-conscious. In the individual sphere we are familiar with this distinction. Most beliefs are not modified when we become aware of holding them, however some, such as self-contradictory beliefs or self-deceptions, are immediately cancelled by self-consciousness. The social equivalent of these latter types of belief is the market. When buyers and sellers act on the market, they form a collective subject which is unconscious of itself. Their practice is determined by the "law" of the market they each use to get ahead, but that law itself is the combined effect of their very attempts to use it. The condition for the emergence of such a system is its fundamental misrecognition by social subjects. This misrecognition consists in the preconceptual structuring of the social as a realm of individual activity on alien objects. This structuring is historically contingent. By coming together, becoming conscious of the consequences of their action, and coordinating it voluntarily, the individuals can overcome its contemplative limitation and the reified form of objectivity of their objects; they can change the "law" of their action and create a different type of social world together.
As a Marxist Lukács projects such radical results only in the case of the capitalist market in labor. Workers "produce" society through their labor and through their participation in capitalist institutions. When they come together, therefore, nothing can stop them from transforming the society they constitute unconsciously qua workers. But the condition of this transformation is self-consciousness, workers' recognition of their own real social role. That recognition then itself constitutes a fundamental social change because it changes what it is to be a worker, from passive, reified social atom to collective agent: "the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object" (Lukács, 1968: 178). Lukács writes,
In the commodity the
worker recognizes himself and his own relation to capital. Inasmuch as he is
incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his
consciousness is the self-consciousness
of the commodity; or in other words it is the self-knowledge, the
self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and
exchange of commodities….
[W]hen the worker knows
himself as a commodity his knowledge is practice. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural
change in the object of knowledge (Lukács, 1968: 168-169).
Lukács's distinction between nature and history must be understood in relation to this distinction between types of practice. Most basically, he is arguing that there is a realm in which transforming practice is possible, in which we can reconstitute our objects by becoming socially self-conscious, and alongside it, there is another realm in which our action will always be contemplative, technical. The first realm is society, the second is nature. Thus for Lukács true transforming practice involves not just an understanding of the epistemological dependency of reified objectivities on society, but an ontological dialectic of the subject and object underlying those objectivities. In the social domain, we are in the strongest sense the object, that is, society, and thus our knowledge of society is self-knowledge and our self-knowledge transformative. In this domain self-consciousness immediately alters the logic of collective action. No comparable change in natural scientific law results from dereifying knowledge in that sphere.
Lukács’s theory of practice can be summed up in three equivalences, between self-consciousness, self-transformation and social transformation. Historically concretized in the idea of proletarian revolution, these equivalences cannot be purely immediate but imply various mediations such as the emergence of political parties, theoretical knowledge, and so on. Nevertheless, the three equivalences lie in the background of these mundane activities and guarantee the possibility in principle of a successful revolution.
This account of Lukács’ theory of transforming practice appears congruent with Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation. Of course in his thesis Marcuse must stop short of explicitly drawing the Marxist conclusions toward which his argument tends. He comes close in many passages of Hegel’s Ontology, but he cannot supply the content that would make of his analysis a Marxist analysis. Nevertheless, consider how he might have concretized these remarks on the concept of labor as the underlying structure of Hegelian historicity: “The fundamental element, common to these categories and which has a wide range of reference is the concept of 'activity'. Activity is the living unity of knowing and acting, whereby knowledge means consciousness of self and action, the actual letting happen of the self. Activity is essentially 'transformation' and 'bringing forth.' Every activity ‘aims at’ a transformation (PhG, 196); it changes something in the one who performs it’; it turns it around in its present condition; it ‘turns it upside down’….The concept of bringing-oneself-forth further specifies that the life process is concretely a self-manifestation, self-risking and self-assertion” (HO, 262). Lukács’s three equivalences clearly haunt this oh so abstract statement of the case. One imagines Marcuse, with his Berliner’s ironic sense of humor, smiling to himself as he constructed sentences which would be read so very differently by Heidegger than by his politically sympathetic colleagues.
Can we go further toward integrating this interpretation of Hegel with Marcuse’s Marxism? Although he never seems to have made the connection explicit, it seems to me that it underlies all his later thought and founds the early formulations of Critical Theory in his and Horkheimer’s work. The figure of self-consciousness as self and social transformation appears, for example, in this crucial passage in the latter’s classic essay on “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “In genuinely critical thought explanation signifies not only a logical process but a concrete historical one as well. In the course of it both the social structure as a whole and the relation of the theoretician to society are altered, that is both the subject and the role of thought are changed” (TCT, 211). This change, which in Lukács is described as the unity of theory and practice, situates revolution in the place of the absolute.
We left Heidegger in the last chapter struggling to overcome the centripetal force of modernity in a unified conception of being, a totality. The totality lost in the remote Greek past could not be regained either in the depths of Dasein as being-in-the-world nor in the mythic politics of the Nazi state. Marcuse’s Hegel thesis suggests an alternative path to totality. It is impossible to return to a Greek notion of totality as objectively given. Now meanings are recognized as human creations. But how then can the gap between the creating subject and the indifferent world be crossed? What is required is a subject that is also essentially an object, a world, and that in deepening its very subjectivity knows itself and transforms itself as such. Such an absolute subject-object would again harmonize existence and idea through self-creation, the ultimate principle of modernity. Hegel offered an approximation to this concept with his notion of the absolute but then veered off into contemplation. Marcuse’s interpretation of the absolute as life corrects the emphasis and steers the dialectic back to the realm of practice.
Here he rejoins Lukács, as we have seen. Lukács’s interpretation of Marxism launched the Hegelianizing approach to revolution that Marcuse tried to combine with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in his early works. The crucial link is the notion that there exists a form of self-consciousness which is both the revelation of a world and the transformation of that world. But such a conception is incompatible with the conventional understanding of nature in itself as the substance of world. Such a nature can perhaps be “revealed” to consciousness but certainly not transformed by self-consciousness. Now it becomes clear why the problem of nature is unavoidable. The nature in itself of the modern sciences is the correlate of a knowing subject abstracted from reality. All the antinomies of modern thought emerge with this construction. Only a Marxism such as that of Lukács, which rejects the dialectics of nature and interprets being as history, can transcend these antinomies.
Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology also abstracts from nature in placing historicity at the center of its interpretation of being and so can be reconciled in principle with Lukács’s version of Marxism. But Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein fails to achieve the level of concreteness implied by the notion of historicity. The historical world cannot be understood without reference to the divisions within the community whose history it is. Marcuse asks, “is the world ‘the same’ for all existence within a concrete historical situation? Apparently not. Not only do we have different meaning-worlds for particular co-existing cultural spheres, but even within these spheres, huge abysses stand out between their meaning, e.g., in terms of existential attitude….At this point the investigation necessarily meets the question of the material constitution of historicity—a breakthrough that Heidegger nowhere achieves or even mentions” (PHM, 18). Marcuse’s synthesis of Heidegger and Lukács must overcome this limitation at the outset by interpreting concrete Dasein socially, in terms of its position in a collectively created social world. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic introduces social division into the motility of history. This then prepares the way to an assimilation of Lukács's historical dialectics.
Marcuse’s early theory is an extraordinary synthesis of Heidegger and Lukács but it also suffers from the flaws in the theories of these two thinkers. On the one hand, the abstractness of the Heideggerian conception of Dasein and its care is only overcome in a very artificial manner by reference to the concept of class in Marxism. Already in the early 1930s it is becoming clear that class struggle does not drive history. Marcuse attempts to theorize the necessity of revolution on the basis of resistance to the alienation of labor, but this turns out not to be an effective historical force, any more than the traditional Marxist reliance on class interest. If revolution is going to unify theory and practice and realize the absolute as a new form of historical motility, another type of motivation will be required. The sources of resistance must be deeper than alienation or interests which the system can mask and manipulate. Marcuse will search for that alternative in Freud and aesthetics in his later work.
Then too, there is a serious limitation in Lukács’s version of the dialectic of the absolute. Lukács succeeded all too well in distinguishing nature from history. His theory does not explain how nature and society can be cleanly separated in practice, and not just in theory. The social world is a network of people and things in intricate patterns that are not easily unraveled. Is it really possible to interpret the coming to self-awareness of a social group engaged in complex technically mediated relations on the model of the immediate unity of subject and object in self-consciousness? The answer to this question is probably going to be negative, and yet we do not want to fall uncritically into acceptance of reification in every domain where complex relations between people and things prevail, as does for example, Habermas. The alternative is to extend the dialectic to technology itself which Marcuse also does in his later work.
Marcuse’s early studies of Aristotle as interpreted by Heidegger enabled him to go beyond Lukács in one important respect. Lukács’s never explained the relation between his idea of transforming practice and the technical sphere. He is clearly critical of the structure of capitalist technology, and so sees technology as part of history rather than nature, and yet he has no positive theory of its transformation. Marcuse found resources in the objective dialectic for addressing this problem. He reconceptualized technical practice in its historical significance through the distinction of technę and technology and argued for the transformation of modern technology into a new type of technę based on the potentialities of its objects.
Marcuse's originality in the Marxist tradition appears in his insistence on filling in these two gaps, the failure of class and the lack of a theory of alternative technology, through the power of the imagination. The organized work of the imagination is aesthetic activity, based on aesthetic experience, and it is therefore to aesthetics that Marcuse turns for this constructive dimension of his theory. I will explain this remarkable revision of Marxism in the next chapter.
[1] For accounts of Marcuse’s early work and his relation to Heidegger, see Kellner (1984), Katz (1982), and Reitz (2000).
[2] On the
refusal of utopian thinking in the
[3] Is this an idealistic regression to what Adorno condemned as "identity" thinking? I do not believe so. The Marcusean universals signify precisely the non-identical, that which resists the forms of the existing society. For example, the "ideal" of freedom, understood as free development of an autonomous subject, simply validates the striving to realize potentialities, if necessary against the established forms, i.e., the identical.