One-Dimensional Pessimism:A Critique of Herbert Marcuse
Graubard, Allen
HERBERT MARCUSE'S One Dimen sional Man appeared four years ago. Since then, it has been widely, and on the whole, favorably reviewed, read, and discussed. Accepted by many as the...
...What we need and Marcuse doesn't supply is a sense of the interplay between scientific ideas, technological developments, and the beliefs and values of man, as this interplay works itself out in history...
...One-Dimensional Man is an attempt to give a "total" analysis of our society, encompassing all major aspects of thought and action...
...that the examples or particular realizations of the general category are the defining, essential ones...
...One could apply this sort of critique to Kant or Descartes with the same result...
...Al though we are supposedly given a contrast ALLEN GRAUBARD between "good" logic and "bad" logic, at no point is the formal study of "logic," as in Aristotle or Frege, distinguished from the idea of "logic" as referring to coherence and consistency of thought and communication...
...Is it really all so clear...
...that it leaves language in "the repressive context of the established universe of discourse...
...The claim here is that "high culture," by being absorbed by the system which uses it as a commodity, loses its essential function of being sublimated protest...
...But, given the frustrations of a commitment to a vision of radical social change, the frequent failure to accomplish small goals—let alone the great transformations which are the ultimate motivations of hopefully "radical" projects like organizing a community union project in the Newark ghetto, being a SNCC worker in Mississippi, or forming a draft resistance movement—how can one avoid moods of deep pessimism...
...In this manner, further submission is generated...
...In philosophy of this sort, questions of language are in general questions of meaning, and, as Cavell emphasizes, are simultaneously questions about the "world...
...What about everything else— the social institutions, character structures, beliefs, vested interests, which characterized the society within which science developed...
...that the lives of many people, both in the U.S...
...This is a very substantial claim, but Marcuse does little to substantiate it...
...Take the analysis of Time language: the reader's mind is "overwhelmed," the structure is "indivisible and immutable," the whole is "solid and overpowering," the effect is "magical and hypnotic...
...For Marcuse this means that scientific rationality determines a society of technological domination in which everything, including man, is treated "functionally" and "instrumentally...
...But the activity of science arose * It is interesting to note that this approach toscience and its philosophy is almost identical with that given by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, a book which in many ways resembles One-Dimensional Man...
...Marcuse's discussions of particular topics are designed to illustrate and substantiate this general theme...
...To ask the question this way is to see immediately that blaming or exonerating science is unhelpful at best...
...These realizations are expounded in terms of particular examples, often extreme examples, the worst aspects of whatever activity or category is being considered...
...Better, it would appear, the old McCarthyite terror or worse, outlawing of student protests, police censorship of political publications...
...the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests— to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible .. . The intellectual and emotional refusal "to go along" appears neurotic and impotent...
...Even in the "bourgeois" press, Marcuse has made it...
...THIS WHOLE SECTION should be read against the background of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, an essay that developed at greater length the utopian concepts which constitute Marcuse's vision of a "good" future...
...But in the other sense, and it is this sense I associate with the best possibilities of analytical philosophy, there is no limit except meaningfulness (and establishing this is a problem, not an assumption to begin with...
...That the number of such radicals may be small does not settle the question of what can be meant...
...The whole spectrum of possibilites is swallowed up in the "catastrophe of liberation...
...However, Marcuse does assure us that if such scraps appeared in Hegel, "they would be revealed as inappropriate or even false examples...
...Without a proper "dialectical" sense of the debates, such use of quotes gives only an arbitrary picture of Marcuse's own construction, especially misleading if it can be assumed that most readers don't know much about quantum mechanics or special relativity theory.* The key claim is that science "develops under the technological a priori which projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organization...
...The old agents of history may disappear or be absorbed, but what will the new social and psychic strains and discontents be like in the prosperous, postindustrial society and how will the discontent, dissatisfaction, and alienation be made politically relevant, at least potentially...
...The thesis is that technological society has made it possible to incorporate the proletariat into the system, in fact as well as in consciousness, by means of the welfare state...
...It is based upon a fundamental ambiguity of Marcuse's analysis which emerges most clearly in his polemic against analytical philosophy...
...The author, however, does not seem to feel that there is anything more to be learned or that what might be discovered could make a difference in one's understanding...
...Marcuse attempts to illustrate the thoughtimpeding style of this language in terms of advertisements for luxury fallout shelters, RAND Corporation "war game" instructions, specimens of political huckstering, news-column heads, and a passage from Time...
...Discourse is deprived of the mediations which are the stages of the process of cognition and cognitive evaluation...
...This would be necessary if one wanted to show how "formal logic" is a narrow and essentially conservative mode of thinking, a "logic of domination," "non-transcendent in its very structure...
...Without these mediations language tends to express and promote the immediate identification of reason and fact, truth and established truth, essence and existence, the thing and its function...
...the capitalist development has altered the structure and function of these two classes f bourgeoisie and proletariat] in such a way that they no longer appear to be agents of historical transformation...
...It reappears strikingly in his somber conclusion...
...Using as background this conception of the welfare state as a stable form of oppression, Marcuse describes the concomitant cultural integration under the heading "The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation...
...And what is his evidence for characterizing linguistic analysis as adhering to "philosophical behaviorism...
...For now even the most materially oppressed groups will be brought into the system...
...This "total empiricism" restricts the meaning of concepts to the representation of particular operations and behavior...
...why take time listening to music and going to see movies when every minute our government is committing murderous atrocities...
...Finally, the argument misleads by not matching our sense of the ambiguity of our situation, its confusing "two-dimensionality": as regards our political possibilities, the art we respond to, the dynamic of science, the meaning of sexuality...
...The governor, his function, his physical features, and his political practices are fused together into one indivisible and immutable structure which, in its natural innocence and immediacy, overwhelms the reader's mind...
...See, for example, Noam Chomsky's brilliant and scathing review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, and Charles Taylor's recent The Explanation of Behavior, a subtle attack on behaviorism in psychology written by an analytical philosopher who was a leading figure in the English New Left of the late 1950's...
...that it surrenders to "ordinary language...
...this domination, characteristic of "technological rationality," destroys the possibility of transcending the domination...
...The metaphor of "onedimensionality" expresses the disappearance of fundamental oppositions in our society, those oppositions which can be indicated by such traditional pairs as "fact-value," "isought" "reality-appearance," "potentialactual...
...Admittedly, erotic energy is freed in contemporary society...
...It has been a crucial factor, of course, in the material and ideological transformation of the West, and now, increasingly, of the entire world...
...The effect is again a magical and hypnotic one...
...Marcuse uses the term "operationalism," as expounded by the physicist P. W. Bridgman, to characterize the identification of a concept with a set of operations...
...Since then, it has been widely, and on the whole, favorably reviewed, read, and discussed...
...The book is an essay in philosophical sociology, an attempt to grasp the essential defining characteristics of a form of society by means of an analysis of its ideology...
...The dimension which is dissolving is that of man's perception of the injustice, irrationality, and oppression which characterize the actual existence of all historical societies...
...These questions are hard to formulate in a clear way appropriate to the ambiguity of our situation, just as it is hard to explain the meaning of the unexpected phenomenon of the transformation not of "high culture" which Marcuse fastens on, but of mass culture in the form of, say, the Beatles or Bob Dylan or the movies...
...Marcuse's discussion of linguistic philosophy raises the general question of ideological analysis, as much by what it doesn't say as by what it does...
...Marcuse's critique of linguistic analysis completely ignores the questions raised by this schema of ideological analysis...
...Marcuse's reputation in Europe is tremendous, as attested to by a news item in the New York Times last summer which described the tumultuous reception he received from crowds of Berlin students...
...If we take examples of ideological analysis like Mannheim's study "Conservative Thought" or Sutton's The American Business Creed, we find an analysis of "ideological productions" related to the individuals who produced them or adhere to them...
...But then every other life activity except direct political action or critique would fall under a similar criticism...
...exceptions are not analyzed...
...Po litically, the effect of this development has been to destroy the basis of revolutionary protest, to damp down social conflict to the point where historical agencies of social change disappear...
...As usual, we find the monolithic tone—Linguistic Analysis believes this and Linguistic Analysis makes it impossible to do that...
...My feeling is that Marcuse is expressing his anger and frustration at the apparent impotence of thought to break through, to bring about the necessary radical changes in consciousness he sketches in the concluding section on "The Chance for Alternatives...
...One concern, among others, is getting clear on how we use words and thus on the conditions and problems of meaning and understanding...
...This last phrase is basic to Marcuse's critique and appears frequently throughout the book...
...The unqualified nature of this style incorporates fundamental ambiguities, empirical and methodological...
...Marcuse extends this cultural analysis to the "closing of the universe of discourse...
...And it is simply not the case, as Marcuse dogmatically states, that "to begin with, an irreducible difference exists between the universe of everyday thinking and language on one side, and that of philosophic thinking and language on the other...
...According to Marcuse, such philosophy permits no negativity toward the existing practices of society...
...Science has not led to domination, even to a particular form of domination...
...We are given descriptions of particular uses of propaganda as exemplifications of the general category of "the language of the society," a particular view of modem atomic physics as the philosophy of science, a particular style of philosophy now dominant in England and important in America as the philosophy of "advanced industrial society," a particular approach to method in social science ("functionalism" and "behaviorism") as the social science of the society, and so on...
...My feeling is no, but I feel hesitant and defensive about it...
...The same dialectical situation of ALLEN GRAUBARD accepted position and critique applies to anthropology, sociology, and political science as well...
...The note of pessimism struck is so profound that to be critical is to appear superficial, unaware of the despair which must accompany true insight...
...Logic," in this general sense of deductive logic or rules of inference, seems to exist in all languages and in all societies...
...This unique closing-off of possibility, this destruction of an entire dimension of human existence cannot but be the most frightening and depressing development in man's history...
...Then the realization of the general category for advanced industrial society is described in terms of the root metaphor of "one-dimensionality...
...Terms designating quite different spheres or qualities are forced together into a solid, overpowering whole...
...Pleasure is allowed, but only in acceptable forms which dissolve those claims that are unreconcilable with the established society...
...The claim is that, in crucial ways, this philosophy represents a radical break with all previous philosophy, even with the "two-dimentional" empiricism it evolves from...
...like logic, it is part of the general framework in which we think and act...
...HOWEVER DIFFICULT THE LANGUAGE Often is to those who are not at ease in Marcuse's Hegelian idiom, the general thesis and over all structure of the argument are quite clear...
...His despair and anger translate themselves into the depressing sense that thought itself is becoming impossible...
...and whereas a blatantly oppressed and despised Negro population was by its very existence, if not in its consciousness, a threat to the system, a Negro population with apparent political power and opportunities for seeking significant economic advance will lose this existential aspect of "negativity...
...Are we to take it that the language of nineteenth-century bourgeois-feudal Germany, the "prevailing universe of discourse," is best represented by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
...The tacit amendment to such characterizations is that neither the author nor the radical reader is included in "the reader" or "the people" (even if one sometimes looks, with anger and disgust, at an issue of Time, or if one owns a car and a stereo...
...that these positions are not merely dominant but actually definitive of the activity for this society because they are truly the expression of the form of Reason which is embodied in advanced industrial society...
...There is good rhetoric here, but not much more...
...THE EXAMPLES Marcuse cites to illustrate his claims are from Wittgenstein and Austin, the two major figures of postwar British philosophy...
...If not, why this particular sort of comparison...
...Values would be translated into needs which would develop on the basis of "non-repres sive sublimation...
...The vision of pessimism may express part of our mood, as in the Beckett novels which Marcuse commends, but offered as multi-dimensional analysis it can be numbing...
...Similarly, such methodologies in social science continue to receive effective criticism...
...But the real help we need is not in giving nightmares an intellectual structure...
...What would be exceptional and uniquely "one-dimensional" is the disappearance of an opposition...
...by changing consciousness within the affluent society, for example...
...The alienation, the embodying of the tension between the actual and the possible, beauty as the promesse de bonheur—these essential characteristics of all art are disappearing...
...Why then does Marcuse pour so much scorn and ridicule on this little-known part of the academy, so out of proportion as a target, given the subjects of the other parts of the book...
...The concepts which comprehend the facts are losing their authentic linguistic representation...
...Marcuse's mode is to specify the ideology of the society as a whole in terms of particular realizations of general categories...
...But ironically, Miss Arendt writes from a profoundly conservative antirevolutionary perspective while Marcuse is revolutionary and Utopian...
...Marcuse's view would clearly be that my comments are totally superficial...
...The quote is not explicitly related to the discussion of technological rationality in the midst of which it appears...
...No real argument justifying the "essential" constructions is, in fact, given (just as there is no argument to support the claim that the Nazi death camps are the quintessential image of the society we live in...
...Should the movement be one of resolute opposition, gathering in and giving activity and space to those who become conscious of their alienation, thus hopefully building an area of "negativity" in American society which could become relevant in future situations the nature of which we can't yet clearly conceive...
...The instruments of productivity and progress, organized into a totalitarian system, determine not only the actual but also the possible utilizations...
...This perception was always accompanied by a vision of a better, truer, freer existence...
...The subjects are no less than science and philosophy in general and specifically in our society...
...What we find instead is another instance of the fallacious kind of argument used throughout the book...
...Recently a weighty Festschrift for Marcuse appeared, and in March a frontpage review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section proclaimed him as "the foremost philosopher of the New Left...
...How these doctrines were proclaimed we are not told...
...Similarly for the quote from Austin on the basis of which a reader might think that Austin had written an essay on ways of being hesitant or on the taste of pineapples...
...These include the development of socialism, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory...
...They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and its quantitative extension...
...In this way, Marcuse has been able to construct a frightening metaphor of bleak pessimism...
...TO A GREAT EXTENT this Marcusean pessimism is related to a romantic involvement with the image and rhetoric of the great revolutionary moment, the kind of apocalyptic transformation where one can see with satisfying certainty the success of one's efforts in reaching the deepest goals of the radical vision...
...What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day...
...I don't mean to say hurrah for science...
...This is the most "ideological" of the analyses, for Marcuse assumes that "it is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society...
...Making the relevant substitutions in the Marcusean argument, we come up with: "Kant devotes much acumen ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM and space to the analysis of '5+7==12'" (a piece of second-grade arithmetic...
...Thought and social structure are mediated by a theory of some sort—crude self-interest theories, Marxist theories of class interest, "strain" theories of the sort prominent in American social science...
...This kind of thought emphasizes the necessity of changing the apparent reality in order to bring into being a truer, more rational, and hence more real reality...
...The very society which has, in Marxian terminology, produced the material means for the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, has accomplished this in such a manner as to perpetuate "domination...
...and in the countries with which it is involved, are twisted and their potentialities distorted by the prevailing values and practices of this affluent society...
...The explication of concepts in terms of functions is said to result in a one-dimensional language of "magic-ritual formulas...
...What can be said in "ordinary language" is that this society is lousy in many ways...
...but finally, if offered as description and explanation, it fails...
...FOR MARCUSE, the "one-dimensional thought" toward which science has led is seen most clearly in the "positive thinking" of "one-dimensional philosophy...
...and for many scientists and philosophers, such extreme behaviorism as Marcuse constructs is a thoroughly refuted position...
...I think this might be called "loading the comparison...
...That philosophers discuss academic topics at all instead of attacking current political and social arrangements might seem to present a problem, given Marcuse's conception of philosophy...
...that it is immoral to waste vast resources in maintaining irrational and oppressive institutions while most of the world starves...
...that there could and should be more beauty and truth and justice in the world...
...or why a certain philosopher's statement, say W. V. Quine's personal and controversial formulation that "objects continue to persist only as `convenient intermediaries,' as `obsolescent cultural posits,'" is to be taken as properly and essentially characterizing the general terms "physics" and "modem philosophy of science...
...The kind of position here taken by Marcuse makes profundity a little too easy and smothers analysis...
...The kind of "scientism" with its proclaimed "value neutrality," which characterizes much work in social science, often cloaks ideological support for the system in the guise of "scientific objectivity," as Marcuse shows in unmasking some examples of such work...
...It implies that, as always, those who are willing to go beyond generally accepted arrange ALLEN GRAUBARD ments and values will be in a minority and can have no guarantee that their vision will win out...
...It is one of intelligence and insight...
...Even those seemingly favorable signs, like the civil-rights movement, must be seen as part of "the catastrophe of liberation," as signs of how totalitarian the society is becoming...
...To put Wittgenstein down by mentioning a sentence he uses as an example really smacks of philistinism and is unworthy of Marcuse...
...The question should not be how science has maintained domination, which would have been better maintained by "non-science," but why didn't the development of scientific thought, by and of itself, lead to the free society...
...This is a rather damning indictment, and one would have expected some sense of context, at least to be told what the analyses mentioned were used for...
...In the sphere of sexuality also, apparent progress is seen as really a worsening of the situation...
...In this sense, "logic" is a "linguistic universal...
...This philosophical ideology, the "school" of linguistic analysis, is claimed to be a travesty, a pseudophilosophy, at best inconsequential, at worst tragically dangerous...
...But Marcuse is clearly not interested in this nor in recognizing how such stuff could have ever been considered as possibly fruitful philosophical activity...
...What is ignored is the actual meaning of these changes to the people who experience them as real improvements, however meager they seem in the light of the Utopian vision of the end of all psychic repression and the transformation of man's instinctual structures...
...But Marcuse does not demonstrate this, and the book misses what would be helpful and revealing in this context, namely a sense of the dialectic of the disputes and radical critiques being made within the disciplines...
...That hardly anyone in his most thoughtful moods could desire such a situation seems obvious...
...Social and institutional questions are not raised...
...industrialization would take new forms...
...IN A BROADER AND VAGUER SENSE of "behaviorism" and "positivism" than Marcuse's, there is such a predominance in American social science...
...No empirical basis for such claims is given, no qualifications are offered...
...A discouraging projection of despair built up by bad argument doesn't touch these questions...
...But this implies that the works themselves must be treated with appropriate subtlety and even sympathy...
...As usual, such general description of what Art or Philosophy has always been are at best dubious...
...Without these social groups, determined in their very existence by the nature of the society which brought them into being, can any change come...
...though such vision was Presented necessarily in a disguised and sublimated form...
...This universe includes radical ideas and radical actions, as well as conforming behavior and television commercials...
...For example, in the discussion of "functional," "operational," and "behavioral" language referred to, Marcuse wants to characterize the "prevailing modes of speech" as making the expression of opposition impossible...
...Does the sentence "My broom is in the corner" carry written on it that it will always and in all circumstances be an inappropriate or a false example...
...Does Marcuse mean that any attempt to criticize society is considered meaningless by the linguistic philosophers...
...A critical aspect of this a priori sociology can be brought out by noting an ambiguity ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM in the reference of crucial terms, a tacit amendment to the "total" claims of Marcuse's syntax...
...The discussion depends upon unexamined ambiguities in the use of "logic," "contra diction," "real," and other related terms...
...At the conclusion of the book, Marcuse writes: The enchained possibilities of advanced industrial society are: development of the productive forces on an enlarged scale, extension of the conquest of nature, growing satisfaction of needs and faculties...
...This is the way history must work...
...The national traditions of English philosophy and its relation to linguistic analysis are not discussed...
...But this sort of predominance is not startling to a radical, especially one who is conscious of Marx's contributions to the theory of ideology...
...HERBERT MARCUSE'S One Dimen sional Man appeared four years ago...
...But in my view it is a great disappointment...
...This "two-dimensionality" involves the notion of "another logic," "another universe of discourse...
...In the derogatory sense of "established universe," to be within it or to accept it uncritically is to lose the possibility of being negative, radical, critical, original, and so is to be "one-dimensional...
...But Marcuse also says: "the new touch of the magic-ritual language rather is that people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly...
...For example, he says "Wittgenstein devotes much acumen and space to the analysis of `My broom is in the corner.'" A lengthy quote from Austin's essay "Other Minds" is added...
...What drives the discussion along is the repetition of the root image, the emotional appeal of extreme and powerful examples, and crucial confusions between empirical and conceptual questions involved in notions like "prevailing universe of discourse and action," and "possibility of transcendence...
...Since Marcuse's discussion of science and its philosophy is so inadequate and mistaken, the claimed connection between science in general and domination is left completely undemonstrated...
...This project would seem to entail a subtle and accurate description and analysis of linguistic philosophy...
...The vision is that the "project" of scientific rationality would surpass its present structure and direction, and would become "metaphysical" again...
...If rising standards of living, the elimination of sheer material oppression, the development of a semi-welfare state, the liberation of sexuality, etc...
...THE DISCUSSION OF "GOOD" THOUGHT is the context for an analysis of the nature of science and its philosophy...
...Society conditions a population to support its own irrational domination while thinking itself to be free and rational...
...At another point, Marcuse says: "The people recognize themselves in their commodities...
...What follows is the disappearance of meaningful protest as a society develops which instills the false needs it then satisfies...
...Descartes devotes much acumen and space to describing the melting of a piece of wax...
...I think that there is a difficult and important task to be done in the analysis of thought-styles and emphases and their relation to more general social circumstances (and analytical philosophy is a good case to work on...
...From such a stance all qualifications can seem unessential, petty, ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM and superficial...
...The thesis is as follows: The advance of modem post-Galilean sci ence and the technology based upon this science have made possible an industrial so ciety that is able to achieve a tremendous and constantly increasing productivity...
...But Marcuse conceives of the "sexual revolution," the "desublimation," as worse than the former repression since the greater liberty involves a contradiction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs . . . it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression— one might speak of "institutionalized desublimation...
...and that Marcuse, for all his intelligence, passion, and commitment, does not help, is the measure of the book's failure and my disappointment...
...I do think the camps were exceptionally monstrous and I don't think they are, even "in a sense" the "quintessence" of the society I am plunged into daily (or Professor Marcuse either...
...First, a characterization of the general category—Art, Philosophy, Science, Language—is stated...
...The world of the concentration camps .. . was not an exceptionally monstrous society...
...This metaphor expresses Marcuse's sense of the frightening uniqueness of advanced industrial society...
...What is the implication of the fact that we are not included—we have seen through it, we fight against it, write critical books, publish magazines, organize "free universities...
...Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," Philosophical Review, April 1965...
...Which isn't to defend the goodness of this society unless one's position is so "profound" that "not as bad as Auschwitz" is considered a positive defense...
...We may not reach the understanding we need, but if we do, it will be with a little help from our friends...
...Why is it that the others don't (can't, won't...
...In various forms it is the recurrent nightmare of an automated, sterile, passive "brave new world...
...By denying this felt ambiguity within our own lived experience and by assuming an almost a priori pessimistic knowledge of the state of "the people," the meaning of increasing prosperity and welfare, the possibilities of art and sexuality, Marcuse has translated a justified sense of staggering and sometimes unique difficulties of successful "transcendence" and opposition into an unjustified vision of an almost complete conceptual impossibility...
...It is in beginning to answer questions about the ALLEN GRAUBARD politics of the "totalizing" and "post-totalized" society...
...Only "dialectical thought," he seems to be saying, retains the tension between "is" and "ought" (and of the other oppositions mentioned at the beginning of this article...
...An incisive and original discussion of community organizing in Studies on the Left led off by announcing that One-Dimensional Man was to be assumed as the theoretical underpinning for the detailed and specific analysis which followed— though the philosopher's theory could be taken to be sometimes downright incompatible with the authors' practice...
...It would seem ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM to follow that peace movements, SDS, leftwing magazines and books can be taken most sigmlicantly as signs of the increasing power of the system, ways of letting-off steam, part of the society's fooling itself into thinking it is free and open whereas the true reality is otherwise...
...Neither writer will thank me for this comparison...
...What should one say...
...For precisely the differences and qualifications it overlooks are essential for understanding our situation, especially if understanding is related to decision and action...
...What exactly is meant by "debunking...
...We want our freedoms and rights, and we think it is worthwhile to work for simple material gains, however small, for people whose lives are ground down by poverty...
...Is there any range between being hypnotized and "not believing...
...At one point, Marcuse inserts a quote from Ionesco, without comment, though clearly with approval...
...But inappropriate or false examples of what...
...This core ambiguity causes much of Marcuse's critique to miss the mark...
...The author explicitly puts forward his examples as illuminatingly representative, although little argument is offered other than the feel of how, being extreme examples, they appeal to and reflect our fears...
...Clearly the work has wide appeal...
...Even more important...
...The art, the politics, the language, the social science, the philosophy are onedimensional...
...Since we are never told what Wittgenstein uses it as an example of, how are we to know even that he takes it to be a true example, in the sense that a truly profound philosopher would show it to be false...
...The claim is that "clean bomb" and "harmless fallout" are "only extreme creations of a normal style...
...But isn't the question itself wrongly posed...
...The line taken is the familiar one that science took man out of nature, separated value and fact, destroyed a nature conceivable in terms of "final causes," dissolved matter into abstract equations...
...The ambiguity between the conceptual and the empirical accounts both for the power of Marcuse's vision to express despair and for the confusions of his analysis...
...This style is carried through even in the more rhetorical passages, as in Marcuse's statement that the face of our time is seen in the novels of Samuel Beckett...
...that it doesn't subvert the given facts, as true philosophy should...
...Marcuse tells us that "silly scraps of language that sound like baby talk" guide the analysis of such philosophers...
...Unfortunately, this section is the weakest part of the book...
...The last step in the argument is to leave the reader to try to discover what on earth could have been in the minds of these so-called philosophers...
...The quality of the despair can be related to Marcuse's Marxian framework...
...The discussion of the essential nature of philosophy and its origins among the Greeks is extremely compressed, and, for me, almost impossible to follow with any confidence...
...Marcuse considers this type of "operationalism" and its counterpart "behaviorism" to be the "predominant trend in philosophy, sociology, and other fields...
...Bridgman's views, along with the logical positivist position of which they were the most extreme expression, have been subjected to quite devastating critiques, both from within and without the "neo-positivist" tradition...
...But my feeling is that much of the appeal of the book stems from Marcuse's evocation of this mood of blanketing and apparently omniscient pessimism, his rooting the frustrations of failure in an impressive if obscure philosophical frame which projects a society that makes "transcendence" in any area impossible...
...Or should attempts be made to work at least partly within the established institutions of the society, to attempt to affect, even if only marginally, the actual and potential destructiveness of American power, and to help in the totalizing process which is going on and will provide the context for a possible new politics...
...From a brief analysis of Time-ese, from the evidence of syntax...
...It identifies as its chief concern the debunking of thanscendent concepts...
...It is not the case because I grew up and live in a "universe of everyday thinking and language," and it is by means of this language, used subtly, intelligently, and critically, that I learn valuable new concepts and new possibilities of meaning, including "philosophic" meaning...
...This form of argument comes out quite clearly in the use of examples...
...An example can serve to show how the tone of the book can evoke such feelings...
...For Marcuse, the disappearance of the possibility of realizing this vision (for all the reasons that the book notes) provides a simplifying if despairing canon of historical interpretation...
...This society is not exceptional in having key institutions like universities dominated by trends and approaches that are ideologically tied to and supportive of the status quo...
...The intent is to characterize good philosophy as "two-dimensional," dialectical, contradictory, able to come "to grips with reality," in Marcuse's phrase...
...The sliding between the statistical and conceptual connotations of this key phrase has been noted several times before...
...as has been conceived in art, philosophy, and religion...
...This implies the disappearance of real forces, of definite social groups whose existence would compel them toward the abolition of oppression...
...One-dimensional society, however wasteful, ugly, oppressive, and crippling for man, seems increasingly capable, by its irrational rationality, of containing social change, and containing it by consent, as it were...
...Nor are the political positions of the people involved...
...The result is a false consciousness, a deceptive "Happy Consciousness," a "preconditioning...
...they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment...
...The refusal to accept the propaganda of the Establishment, the decision to protest and to live in socially and politically disapproved ways are as much a part of the universe of meanings as are the most conformist actions...
...What results is a kind of armchair sociology of knowledge, a truncation of re ality, and a curious ambiguity in the extension of crucial terms...
...it proclaims as its frame of reference the common usage of words, the variety of prevailing behavior...
...He wishes to show how "behaviorism" and "functionalism" characterize the language and thought of our society and destroy the capacity for critical two-dimensional language and thought...
...an indoctrination which securely integrates the society around its productive apparatus and makes impotent or meaning less any protest...
...ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM In an obvious sense—implies Marcuse—this is the best and the worst of times, but the "bestness" is superficial and the "worstness" profound...
...A logical contradiction will be invalid even in a good society, when all social "contradictions" will have been dissolved...
...The passage from Time, also noted as an "extreme example," is analyzed in this manner: A hyphenated attributive construction creates a fixed syndrome: "Georgia's highhanded low-browed governor...
...that it gives a "behavioral explication of meaning...
...Italics added...
...had the stage all set for one of his wild political rallies last week...
...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that by their content transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe...
...My question is—how does Marcuse know so much and so exactly about the reader's responses...
...What is at stake is what we ourselves say and mean, when we talk about pain or love or fear or truth or freedom...
...But these possibilities are gradually being realized through means and institutions which cancel their liberating potential, and this process affects not only the means but also the ends...
...This contemporary version of "the worse, the better" could hardly be more despairing and pessimistic...
...The "dialectic" as a style, a recommendation to conceive the world in terms of conflicting forces, within a context which should always be seen as characterized by possibilities for transformation, is not, therefore, a question of "logic," properly conceived...
...Given the real and pressing needs of theory-hungry American radicalism and the danger of overvaluing any attempt, especially one which seems to be deeply rooted in profound if obscure philosophical traditions, it is worth while even at this time to try to account for both the appeal and the disappointment...
...The vision must neces sarily be sketched programmatically ("lib eration of the imagination," "redefinition of needs"), for there is a real limitation of the established universe of discourse...
...He reaffirms his faith in "critical reason" but finds its powerlessness a source of despair...
...The effect of the empirical claim is really dependent upon the conceptual claim that the "totalizing" syntax is justified...
...These examples are supposed to support Marcuse's claim that this style of philosophy is destructive of philosophic thought, "and of critical thought as such...
...are factors in the conditions making the vision of revolutionary transformation completely illusory, then they are finally bad...
...This subject of "action" and "behavior" is one of the most important areas of dispute within the "style," though if Marcuse's analysis were a reader's only acquaintance with this philosophy, he would not have the slightest idea of the existence or nature of such disputes...
...Science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man...
...T T HE CRUCIAL POINT in Marcuse's attack is the repeated insistence that linguistic analysis makes "negative thinking" impossible...
...But in fact the essay quoted deals with basic problems of epistemology...
...The most detailed critique of the possibilities of the "language" of the society is presented in the central section of the essay, the discussion of "one-dimensional thought...
...There are also striking similarities in the respective analyses of "functionalism" and "behaviorism" and the dreaded but expected "brave new world"-style behavioristic future for post-industrial mass society...
...These individuals are described as members of particular groups, characterized in terms of roles, institutions, and social structure...
...We get little sense of the kind of discussions these quotes may be part of...
...If the difference were truly "irreducible," it would be impossible to explain the meaning of new terms, say "dialectic" or "transcendent...
...What Marcuse hopes to show is that this philosophy reflects the positive thinking of advanced industrial society...
...Professor Stanley Cavell, one of the most provocative interpreters of both Austin and Wittgenstein, characterizes Austin's methods and their effects in the following manner: He asks for the difference between being sure and being certain, but what is uncovered is an initial survey of the complex and mutual alignments between mind and world that are necessary to successful knowledge...
...The argument is not an inductive empirical one, though empirical pronouncements are often made in the course of the argument...
...why produce Moliere comedies or paint abstract canvases when people are starving...
...As it is, Marcuse does not give the slightest hint of the purpose of Wittgenstein's analysis of "silly scraps of language...
...they lack the possibility of transcendence or negation, possibilities always present in previous societies...
...No complexity or shading of response...
...The analyses in the book are attempts to justify this simplifying pessimism...
...For Marcuse it seems that the answer must be no...
...In One-Dimensional Man, the key concepts are "pacification of existence," "freedom," "liberation...
...In New Left Notes, the SDS internal journal, Marcuse's special philosophical vocabulary appears as unproblematically as if it were part of ordinary language...
...The self-imposed restriction to the prevalent behavioral universe makes for an intrinsically positive attitude . . . the prebound analysis succumbs to the power of positive thinking...
...It can lead to a sense that no action is really relevant or significant in a situation so totally awful and devoid of possibilities...
...At no point does Marcuse clarify the notion of a "logic" or of "laws of thought...
...Obsolescent" is Marcuse's own misinterpretive interpolation...
...and despite the appeal of the tone to many young radicals, the analysis is indifferent between radical perspectives of community organizing and uncompromising opposition and, so to speak, "moderate" perspectives of coalition politics and working within the system...
...In Marcuse's words: ALLEN GRAUBARD Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change—qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human existence...
...Of course there is disagreement even among those who are vaguely called "analytical philosophers" on the worth and implication of the work of Wittgenstein or Austin...
...This is not equivalent to accepting the limiting of "meaningful" to "what most people say" or what is politically or socially acceptable to the majority or to the ruling elites...
...at least this would force some people to face the underlying truth...
...This is the socio-usycholoeical aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence...
...The sociological questions—who reads Time, what variety of responses are there, is there skepticism, does the same "language" and response characterize, say, the New Yorker, Scientific American, Partisan Review, Fortune, and Ramparts—are immediately raised in my mind...
...In Marcuse's words, "Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between `is' and `ought' first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself...
...He wants to demonstrate the internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori technology, and the a priori of a specific technology— namely, technology as a form of social control and domination...
...Why discuss problems of causality in physics when this is the world of Hiroshima and Auschwitz...
...The result is "The Happy Consciousness," "the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods...
...Marcuse's "totalizing" analysis of extreme examples is not a sufficient answer...
...Marcuse's analysis of mathematical physics and the philosophy associated with it is singularly unenlightening...
...We are told what the people think, how Time magazine affects the reader...
...The opposition is ignored and implicitly ruled out of being part of the society, and the ideological and institutional dominance is transformed into a monolithic conceptual bind...
...Can theory, however critical, become practice in some other way...
...It is dogmatically stated, based on a pastiche of quotes from various philosophers and philosophicallyminded scientists...
...The same essays byHeisenberg, giving philosophical interpretationswhich are highly controversial and are in anycase obscurely and inadequately argued, are accepted without question as definitive of modemscience and its philosophy...
...An overriding interest in the preservation of the institutional status quo unites the former antagonists in the most advanced areas of contemporary society...
...The contention is that this philosophy makes it impossible to think critically about our society because of its unquestioning acceptance of "the established universe of discourse and action...
...ONE-DIMENSIONAL PESSIMISM in a society which was characterized by all sorts of tyrannies and domination, and many of the liberating forces of our age are essentially related to ideas of science and the various ways in which these have been interpreted...
...THE FIRST "STUDY" in the book is of "onedimensional society...
...Accepted by many as the long-awaited work that "tells it like it is," Marcuse's essay has assumed near-canonical status among some of the most serious and thoughtful of the New Left...
...The kind of "good" language characterizing the possibilities of previous societies is exemplified for Marcuse by The Communist Manifesto...
...Isn't there anything to be discovered about the nature of compliance and support, the apathy, the areas of dissent...
...Such moods are not, finally, an accurate indication of our complex sense of where we are and what we can do...
...The total statement is tougher, more absolute, more powerful, and more satisfying...
...What is meant by "the variety of ALLEN GRAUBARD prevailing behavior...
...He asks for the difference between expressing belief and expressing knowledge (or between saying "I believe" and saying "I know") and what comes up is a new sense and assessment of the human limitations, or human responsibilities, of human knowledge, and so on...
...But as I have tried to demonstrate, Marcuse's argument fails to support his thesis which, itself, is not interestingly new...
...The massification of culture as a byproduct of democratization and technological advance has undermined the very substance of art, its critical potential, and its alienated truth...
...Why should science have accomplished this...
...Would the God believed-in by religious linguistic philosophers count as a "transcendent concept...
...It claims to unmask hopes for any significant possibilities of change from within the system...
...I don't find these questions silly, but each of us has to find and live out his own answers...
...The established universe of discourse and action" should be taken to mean "what can be meaningfully said and done...
...Marcuse takes as given that linguistic philosophy is a philosophy with clear and definite doctrines...
Vol. 15 • May 1968 • No. 3
