Implicit in Marcuse's critique of technology 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, potentialities, 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.
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 It thereby avoids tradition-bound conformism and outdated metaphysics but only by treating the logic of technology as an ontological principle.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?
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. Marcusean historicism is rooted in the Hegelian and Marxist tradition as interpreted by Dilthey and the early Marxist Lukács. Dialectics, as a logic of the interconnections and contexts revealed in historical strife, offers a modern alternative to ancient dogmatism and modern positivism. 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.
Marcuse’s first book on Hegel, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, was submitted as a thesis to Heidegger in 1930 and published in 1932. In it Aristotle is presented as 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.
Marcuse asserts that the central Aristotelian category at the basis of Hegel’s Logic is kinesis, translated as “Bewegtheit” or “motility.” This is the very same category on which Heidegger focused in Aristotle. Marcuse writes, “The presentation of the Idea of being as motility lies at the core of Hegelian ontology”. 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”. Marcuse identifies this duality at the heart of Aristotelian being with the bifurcation of being in Hegel, the internal contradictions that drive the dialectic.
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.
For Marcuse’s Hegel too production is central. It manifests being in the form of actuality 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. 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”. 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, 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 encounter 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".
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 is also critical of Heidegger’s own withdrawal from concrete history to which, by contrast, Hegel’s dialectic leads in Marx. Rather than dismissing Hegel as Heidegger is sometimes tempted to do, Marcuse distinguishes two closely related approaches in Hegel’s thought, 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 foundation embracing all levels of being. 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 its potentialities are not confined to a predetermined end. Rather, it invents its future as it moves. This is of course eminently true of modern human beings, the actions of which are self-conscious and deliberate.
Marcuse concedes that 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. 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. 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.
Lukács’s principal insight is the concept of reification, the restructuring of social relations as things and relations between things. The concept derives from the Marxist notion of the fetishism of commodities interpreted critically in Hegelian terms as a “form of appearance,” a modality of essence. Reified thought is the sociological equivalent of the objectivistic and mechanistic empiricism criticized equally by Hegel and Heidegger. And as in their theories, 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 through the self-consciousness appropriation of social reality by the proletariat.
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 which is, after all an academic thesis presented to a very conservative faculty. 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 incredibly 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 very intense political convictions.
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," possessed of unrealized possibilities and involved in the process of transformation that moves it forward. 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 the fragments can be held together. Hegel's concept of motility addresses the problem of achieving or maintaining unity in the midst of change. This unity is actuality, energeia, but as in Heidegger’s Aristotle, so in Marcuse’s Hegel, actuality is not simply "there" but is itself a type of movement. Hegel calls this unity of motile, bifurcated being, “being-by-oneself-in-otherness.” "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”.
The split in being is thus not a simple fact; it is an active self-relation, a for-itselfness. 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.
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 things, 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." However, even at this level a first division appears between their possibilities and their given form.
Once being is set in motion by possibility, things lose their integrity and solidity. The are not yet capable of the self-production of an essentially grounded being which can maintain itself through change. Instead, in changing beings got beyond their “limit,” the Aristotelian peras or telos, and lose their identity. Their in-itselfness places them into relation with that which succeeds them in the process of change. 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.
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.)”. 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 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.
Marcuse explains this Hegelian conception of the limit of being as a new kind of finitude that implies a radical 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.” 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. Essence then can no longer be taken for granted as an atemporal meaning and purpose but is also thrust into history.
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 of being in this early Hegel thesis to explain the relation of essence to immediate or determinate being. 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.
At the level of essence in Hegel’s dialectic, the possibilities of things are their own, rather than another's. 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. 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.
But this means that what a being is is always in question in terms of what it should become in conformity with its essence. The normative moment present in the notions of dynamis and energeia now comes to the fore. 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. This self-creation is teleological without a prior 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. 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.
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. This is eminently true of the living human being. 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”.
The dialectic of essence underlies the shift from Aristotelian technę to Hegelian historicity. Life is a self-production based on the construction and realization of its own potentialities. Hegel understands this 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 its own potentialities. 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 activity of making a world also 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. It is through labor that self-consciousness animates things and by which thinghood achieves its fullest actualization. The object as indifferent barrier, as the “negative” other of life, is overcome.
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 historical creation. Marcuse writes that this concept of the objectification of the life of a community through labor was “perhaps Hegel's greatest discovery”. 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”.
This interpretation of Hegel’s concept of life has similarities to Marxism, particularly the Marxism of Lukács, as is clear 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”. I will return to this theme in the conclusion of this chapter.
There is also a striking similarity between this account of Hegel’s concept of life and the relation of Being and Dasein in Heidegger. 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”. “Essence is a showing, revealing, and manifesting of itself. 'Essence must appear'”.
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. Marcuse writes, “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’”. Following Heidegger, Marcuse describes this appearing as an event. The unifying activity of life is what allows the world "to happen as the world". The happening of the world -- Heidegger calls it the "worlding" of the world -- is the ultimate motility.
Hegel’s dialectic culminates in the concept of the absolute. But as I noted earlier, this concept 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 need not 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 through knowledge. The philosopher 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. Yet it does not deny their plurality but rather preserves it even in unifying being with itself.
This extremely abstract formulation can be concretized. 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 belongs to the philosopher who 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 that flow, “ends” in a knowledge which transcends it. This timeless knowledge can then also encompass timeless nature as well and so achieves completion.
If we do not believe a cognitive absolute of this sort can play the role of absolute, but insist with Marcuse on a living absolute actively engaged with being in a world, then we are on a difficult path. Pure knowledge understood as an ultimate self-consciousness can encompass 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. 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.”
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 shifting the emphasis from what is known to knowing as a specific way of being. Knowledge is not considered in an epistemological light, but rather ontologically. Knowing is a mode of being of subject and object rather than an accidental relation of subject to object. Knowledge has the structure of a totality that does not annul the difference between its moments. It exemplifies the principle of being-oneself-in-otherness. 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.
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 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.
It is clear from Marcuse’s other writings in this period that this analysis 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”. 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”. 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”.
There is much that is still implicit or undeveloped in this statement of the case, in particular the relation between dereification and class consciousness as a form of self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense. It was Lukács who introduced this problematic into Marxist circles in this period and Marcuse is clearly drawing on his insights. How much of Lukács’ argument he accepted is uncertain. We know he rejected Lukács’s vanguardism, but this is politically rather than philosophically significant. Lukács's far more important theory of practice illuminates the implicit background to Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel’s absolute as self-conscious life.
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. 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. 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."
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.
Contemplative practice separates theory, in which law is comprehended, from practice in which it is applied. This separation distinguishes it from both technę, in which knowledge of the eidos guides the realization of intrinsic potentialities, and from the “sight” which guides the activity of Dasein in immediate relation to the equipment of its world. In these cases knowledge is a phase of the practical activity, a logos in Plato’s sense, rather than an external value neutral complement to it.
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. In personal life we notice the distinction between beliefs such as self-contradictory notions or self-deceptions that are immediately cancelled by self-consciousness, and other beliefs that are not modified when we become aware of holding them. The social equivalent of the former type 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 has complex ideological roots in the preconceptual structuring of the social as a realm of individual activity on alien objects. But 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.
For reasons explained by Marxist theory, Lukács attributes this transforming power to workers’ self-consciousness. 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 form of objectivity of its object".
In this case 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-consciousness. Self-recognition and disalienation in the social sphere then involves collective self-awareness.
Lukács’s theory of practice can be summed up in three equivalences: 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. 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. 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; 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”. 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 he could assume would be read very differently by Heidegger than by his politically sympathetic colleagues.
Can we go further toward integrating this interpretation of Hegel with Marcuse’s Marxism? The figure of self-consciousness as simultaneously self and social transformation seems to me to underlie all his later thought and to found the early formulations of Critical Theory. Consider, for example, this crucial passage in Horkheimer’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”. This change, which in Lukács is described as the unity of theory and practice, situates revolution in the place of the absolute.
Modernity is haunted by nostalgia for a simpler world. But 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? We left Heidegger in the last lecture struggling to overcome the centripetal force of modernity in a unified conception of being. But the totality lost in the remote Greek past could not be regained either in the depths of Dasein’s being-in-the-world nor in the mythic politics of the Nazi state. Marcuse’s Hegel thesis suggests an alternative path to totality. 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.
Such a conception is incompatible with the conventional understanding of nature in itself as the ultimate reality. Such a nature can perhaps be “revealed” to consciousness and worked on by technique 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. A social epistemology may dereify it, but this dereification is not the self-consciousness of an identical subject-object capable of transforming it. Only a dialectic such as that of Lukács, which excludes nature and interprets being as history, can transcend the antinomies of the contemplative relation to reality that derive from the scientific standpoint.
Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology also abstracts from nature in placing historicity at the center of its interpretation of being and so can be reconciled with Lukács’s version of Marxism in this respect. 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”. 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 certain limitations of their theories. On the one hand, the abstractness of the Heideggerian conception of Dasein and its care is only partially overcome by reference to the Marxist concept of class. Already in the early 1930s it is becoming clear that class struggle does not drive history all by itself. Marcuse attempts to deepen Marxism by going beyond the conventional Marxist theory of class interest to a more radical theory of the alienation of labor, but although this helps, it does not go far enough. 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 either workers’ 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 succeeds all too well in distinguishing nature from history. The social world is a network of people and things in intricate patterns that are not easily unraveled. His theory does not explain how nature and society can be cleanly separated in practice, and not just in theory. Lukács’s 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. But this gap threatens the whole theory. 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? This would certainly take some elaborate qualifications if it is possible at all, 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. Marcuse’s alternative in his later work is to extend the dialectic to technology itself.
Marcuse’s early studies of Aristotle as interpreted by Heidegger enabled him to address this problem. For Marcuse history excludes the abstract nature of the natural sciences but it explicitly includes the whole range of natural relationships and objects touched by human activity such as landscape, environment, and raw 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”. 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. Marcuse reconceptualized technical practice socially 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 lecture.