Marcusean Dialectics on the Ontology of a False Condition
Part I: A review of Matthew Taibbi’s critique of Marcuse
Part II: A review of Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's Anti-Marcusean Polemic
It took a tremendous about of
malicious willful ignorance, and journalistic skill to write about the
Frankfurt School and Marcuse and not mention fascism except to mock and ignore
Marcuse’s arguments. I want to critique Matt Taibbi’s essay on Marcuse and
explain how his distorted views really originated from at least two sources.
Matt, writes his entire essay in a deliberate misreading of
Marcuse’s essay titled, “Repressive Tolerance (1965) that presents
criticism of the modern American media establishment applying propaganda
techniques on a mass scale to vitiate (render ineffective) any social
movements to change the status quo, and yet still maintain the
illusion of a democratic free state. When Marcuse wrote “Repressive
Tolerance” the U.S. was engaged in the height of cold war propaganda during
1965 as the Vietnam War expanded.
The contrived image constructed of
Marcuse in Matt’s recycled criticism is completely based on ignoring Marcuse’s
point that he is critiquing not free speech, but propagandistic pseudo-free
speech that is used to suppress actual discourse of
alternatives for organizing modern society. Matt uses the term “tolerance”
throughout his essay, but never addresses the “repressive” aspect of pretended
democratic tolerance. Marcuse is very clear on this point, but Matt never
once addressed the first word of the essay’s title: “repressive.” Matt’s essay
is based on ignoring this equivocation between authentic tolerance as opposed
to fake tolerance renders his entire criticism a “straw man
argument.” Marcuse wrote: "...what is proclaimed and practiced as
tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the
cause of oppression (Repressive Tolerance, p. 81)(pdf.)."
The Perverted
Tolerance Thesis
Marcuse dedicated the essay “Repressive
Tolerance “ to his students written in a way as to provoke his
students into thinking through the dialectical relationship between the
conceptual antipoles of tolerance and intolerance for a better understand
of paradigmatic framing.
An expert on Marcuse’s work and
philosophy professor, Dr. Pelias, noted that Marcuse’s last paragraph of Repressive
Tolerance summarized his argument and read it here: “Who is Afraid of Herbert
Marcuse?” I want to provide the full text that has been
ignored throughout Matt’s essay (bold italics added):
"However, the alternative to the established process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance. To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this petitio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society. The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority—minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression (Repressive Tolerance, p. 122)."
Matt writes: “(One noticeable human tic in the otherwise unrelenting metronome of Marcuse’s prose — the man writes like a car alarm left on — is a weird overuse of the word vitiate).” “Vitiate,” is exactly the correct word since it accurately describes all efforts to change the status quo (voting for example) as ineffective, but maintains the appearance, but not the reality of a democracy. Repressive tolerance does not outlawed free speech, but rather makes speech ineffective. Money is power and is viewed as free speech by US law. Note that Matt buries Marcuse’s argument by encouraging the reader to ignore this important term. The formulation of distractions is an important tactic in Matt’s political writing as I will show.
Matt wrote of Marcuse’s essay:“Repressive Tolerance is a towering monument to the possibilities of nonsense in the academic profession. The essay’s 10,000 words, alternately hilarious and breathtaking, are circular thinking and the absence of self-awareness raised to the level of art. We don’t often encounter an author capable of denouncing “the tyranny of Orwellian syntax” while arguing in the same breath, literally and without irony, that freedom is slavery.”
No it isn’t: climate change denial is
the towering monument to nonsense. The theme of Orwellian language is found in
another text by Marcuse titled, “One-Dimensional Man”(1965)(pdf.)(here on ODM) and is the ideological
foundation from which “Repressive Tolerance” is derived. In ODM Marcuse
provides an analysis of Orwellian language describing how “contradiction” is
hidden in propagandistic language to manipulate public opinion. One way to read
“ODM” is to understand it as an philosophical update of George Orwell’s
dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty Four,”(1948 ). Marcuse provides substantial
philosophical grounding for how language, concepts, and beliefs are manipulated
to control the perception of social reality. “Freedom is slavery,”
represents Orwellian language just as the slogan “Work is Freedom” that
the Nazis hung over the concentration camp entry gates of Auschwitz. For the
prisoners at Auschwitz work is death.
Matt writes: “In other words,
real freedom doesn’t exist in the balance between the many individual liberties
doled out to persons and institutions alike in societies like ours, but only in
the post-revolutionary “created” society of absolute freedom as imagined by the
author, a utopia Marcuse tabs the “pacification of existence.” (The ostensibly
antiwar leftist’s use of that term just as America was beginning its
“pacification” campaign in Vietnam is another of the essay’s quirks)…
Therefore, Marcuse wrote, any existing rights and freedoms “should not be
tolerated,” because “they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of
creating an existence without fear and misery.”
This is another rhetorical
slight-of-hand Matt uses to smear Marcuse by turning against him the Orwellian
language he taught his students to recognize. “Pacification” was an
Orwellian term that the US military used to conceal the fact that it had
unleashed all of it modern conventional weaponry on an industrial scale bombing
a nation of barefooted rice farmers who did not want themselves or their
children to be colonial slaves forever. Marcuse defined what he meant by “pacification’:
“Pacification of existence” means the development of man's struggle with
man and with nature, under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and
aspirations are no longer organized by vested interests in domination and
scarcity - an organization which perpetuates the destructive forms of this
Struggle (ODM, p. 17)." Matt is untrustworthy to accurately describe and
interpret Marcuse’s work. Again, he ignores the “existing rights and
freedoms” are pseudo rights and freedoms granted by caprice and permission.
In America one has all the rights
guaranteed by the US Constitution--until you need them. All of our rights have
long been…vitiated. For example: Yale psychiatrist, Dr. Bani Lee, was fired for calling Trump and his followers
mentally ill. Florida database researcher, Dr. Rebekah Jones, was arrested at her home for refusing to falsify
public health Covid data. Florida state workers are banned from using such terms
as “climate change,” and “global warming,” and “sea-level rise.”
Should we tolerate the free speech of corporate personhood when it claim
smoking is healthy, or climate change is not real, or from corrupt government
officials falsely report, “Covid is just the flu.” Without truth there is
no freedom; otherwise, how can one make a judgment to chose? And remember the
famous command from one of our American pseudo-patriots of the fascist
party: “Flood the zone with shit!” The “zone”
is the public channels of communication:
“The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”--Henry Wallace (pdf.) FDR's vice president.
The Logic of Contradiction
Matt Taibbi continues; “After
completing the first stage of this Orwellian pole-dance, Marcuse marches up and
down the runway, flinging paradoxes left and right. Not only is freedom in
reverse by Fox News to explain its infamous “Fair and Balanced” motto: “More
representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality
servitude, but tolerance is intolerance! Democracy is totalitarianism! Equality
is inequality! For the latter formulation, he used an argument that would be
later deployed.”
This is a bullying method: mockingly
using Marcuse’s own insights against him as though Marcuse is unaware of
Orwellian contradictions; as if Marcuse is blind to his own analysis of
Orwellian logic, then launching a false equivalence argument-- but it is
Marcuse’s insightful reductio ad absurdum argument of
Orwellian irrationality.
Here is an example of Trump’s
bullying method: “Are we going to ‘transfer’ you? No! Of course
not! ...but it is possible…..but not by me….maybe someone else…but that’s crazy
too….but I heard it has happened.” It’s cheap criticism, and I
expected better. Another rhetorical method is to take both sides of an issue by
acknowledging contradictory statements such as Trump has done: “Covid
is just the flu!” and “Covid is deadly,” then choose whatever
position is convenient. To Wall Street he says, “Covid is deadly,” but
to the citizens, “It’s just the flu.”
Here is another example quote of the use of both tactics, false equivalence and contradiction with confusing distraction added to slander Marcuse: “Summing
up: violence is always violence, as a matter of ethics. However, since ethics
are not ethical, not only is violence not violence, but non-violence is
violence, when practiced by the oppressed against the oppressor. This is the
mentality behind last summer’s firing of analyst David Shor for re-tweeting a
study suggesting nonviolent protest is effective, as well as the bizarre mania
for calling things that were actually violence not violence (e.g. “mostly
peaceful” protests, etc), while things that manifestly are not violence, like
grade school teasing or cultural appropriation, are regularly described using
the word.”
The following three sample propositions help show the underlying logical structure of his anti-Marcusean essay:
“Violence is violence as a matter of ethics.”(∀x) (Vx ⊃ Vx) ⊃ Ex
“Ethics are not ethical.”
(∃x) (Ex * ~Ex)
“When violence is practiced by the oppressed against the oppressor, then non-violence is violence.”
(∀x) (Ox ⊃ Px) ⊃ (~Vx ≡ Vx)
Definitions:
Ethics ≡ Ethical(∀x) = for all x
(∃x) = for some x
⊃ = Logical operator for implication: If, then.
V = either, or
≡ = equivalent truth value
~ = not
E = ethics; ethical
V = violence
O = oppressor
P = oppressed
x = variable
These statements are either tautologies that are necessarily true, or contradictions that are necessarily false so that any conclusion whatsoever can be reached by them.
Contradictions in formal logic are undesirable because they allow any conclusion whatsoever to be derived as in the following proof:
Definition:
Ay = “Any conclusion whatsoever”
1.) (∃x) (Ex * ~Ex)
2.) Ey * ~Ey (Premise: 1, Existential Instantiation)
3.) Ey (Premise: 2, Simplication)
4.) Ey v Ay (3, Addition)
5.) ~Ey (2, Simplification)
6.) Therefore: Ay (4, 5, Disjunctive Syllogism : “Any conclusion whatsoever”)
Marcuse’s philosophical tools are Aristotelian deductive
bivalent logic, and the logic of the whole and parts (universal and particular);
but additionally, Hegelian dialectical logic for comprehending movement in
dynamic historical change---the truth is the whole. Marcuse methodologically
studied contradiction in language, thought, and existence, As a philosopher, he
changed some of this beliefs like any honest thinker must. I have been studying
Marcuse (a particularly difficult philosopher to read) since the late 1970s
looking for incoherencies in his own thinking, and have not found any the kind
claimed in Matt’s article. Marcuse once wrote, “If man has learned to see and
know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemology is in
itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology (ODM, p. 129),” but this isn’t a
contradiction. However, I can say from personal experience that Matt Taibbi
isn’t the first person to misread a philosopher.
Of course, Marcuse uses the term violence to describe war, but like any author the specific context and use must be identified. Marcuse told Roger Rapoport of the Los Angeles Times, on July 27, 1969 that he never advocated violence, destruction of university property, nor advocated specific tactics as a teacher.
“...but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity
, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of
the negative.”
--Hegel, Phenomenology, para. 19.
Marcuse, like all philosophers, not
only write using words in their ordinary colloquial senses, but also in a
technical philosophical sense that can be traditional, or unique to the author;
for example, the terms “positive” and “negative,” appear often in
his writing, but not only in the sense of “affirmation” and “denial.” “Positive”
in philosophy historically means “actual,” or the “empirical” and the
“indicative.” “Negative” in philosophical usage means “potential,” the
“normative,” [is/ought] the “possible,” or “transcendental.” Critical
philosophy is negative philosophy that views potentiality (i.e., the purposeful
or teleological) as higher than the actual as did Aristotle.
Positive philosophy is about the actual such as the scientific paradigm
of atomistic mechanical empiricism. Marcuse did not invent this
terminology to be deceptive, or evil, but inherited this language from the
historical cannon of Western philosophy. Some propagandists and polemicists
have a field day with these equivocations separated from their historical
context to construct straw man arguments. “Negative” is not used by
Marcuse to mean, “uncool.”
Some Journalists
are Overpaid Entertainers, but some are merely
overpaid.
(∃x)[(Jx * Ox)
* Ex] * (∃x)(Jx * Ox)
The author’s criticism must continue
to ignore Marcuse’s perverted tolerance thesis to coherently maintain an
incoherent straw man argument: “As for the question of exactly how
conditional one’s rights should be, Marcuse insisted that ‘extreme suspension
of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the
whole of society is in extreme danger.’ This sounds reasonable until you read
on: ‘I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it
has become the normal state of affairs.’ ”
Marcuse was far ahead of his time
when we look through his historical life experience and the repressive patterns
of totalitarianism he witnessed emerging that are even clearer today. Marcuse
is urgently warning that capitalism has morphed into totalitarianism if we
glace at our even recent American history. Emergency? What emergency?
COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program)
operated from 1956-1971 conducting illegal activities to harm the lives of
targeted Americans viewed leftist, or even mildly progressive. In May of 1964
Henry Dee and Charles Moore, were hitchhiking in Meadville, Mississippi, and
kidnapped, tortured, then murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and some
local law enforcement members. Their badly decomposed bodies are found by
chance in July during the search for another group of missing activists Chaney,
Goodman, and Schwerner; President Kennedy had already been murdered in a mafia
involved assassination while the U.S. government cast suspicion upon the
political left by identifying the assassin as a lone “Marxist” agent; Klansmen
were murdering civil rights workers and regularly acquitted, or not prosecuted;
the Vietnam war was raging; the mafia was deeply involved in law enforcement
and government clandestine activity against “communism; 400 to 1,000 students
march through Times Square, New York, with another 700 in San Francisco as the
first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War as the war was
expanding to the North; August 7, The United States Congress passes the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution, giving U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers
based on a lie. And this trend of abusing the public trust is still running
today; recently Trump bragging of the ambush and extra-judicial murder
of Michael Reinoehl by
U.S. law enforcement falsely claiming there is an “antifascist” group when the
term only reflects a general anti-authoritarian sentiment according to Homeland Security.
And I remember that the movie Mary
Poppins was released 1964 and America was nothing like Mary Poppins’
world as Matt seems to reminisce. The rest of that decade was an extremely
violent time; even more than now. Senator Robert Kennedy was later
assassinated, after Martin Luther King was assassinated from funds publicly
collected by the KKK. And the historical trend continues on to W. Bush’s and
Obama’s caged “free speech zones.” The
author is leaving out an awful lot of historical context that make his
complaints absurd. So Marcuse would say in response:
" 'Different opinions' and 'philosophies'
can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational
grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who
determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which
the ideologists have proclaimed the "end of ideology,’ the false
consciousness has become the general consciousness from the government down to
its last objects...The conditions under which tolerance can again become a
liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly
serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves
to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better
forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted (Repressive
Tolerance, p. 110-111; bold & italics added)."
The Anti-Marcusean Script in a Can
Matt reminisces further: “Marcuse remember had just finished a book explaining that revolution was obviated in a society where civil liberties were ‘too significant to be confined by traditional forms,’ and whose ‘capacity to spread comforts’ inspired widespread ‘voluntary compliance’ with its more. Now, that same society was described as presenting such ‘extreme danger’ to the citizen that suspension of all civil rights was necessary.”
The author is failing to provide meaningful context to Marcuse’s statements and entire work. Marcuse is a neo-Marxist addressing the Frankfurt School's question of why the working classes in modern societies had not moved beyond capitalism. Edward Bernays’ Manhattan marketing firm’s embracing of Freudian insights into consciousness supplied Marcuse the needed paradigm to explain how fascism overtook Germany during the 1930s, and how capitalism represses working class consciousness seeking economic change, and freedom. This process of formulating a new synthetic unity is named, “paradigm induction” which is a re-seeing, or re-interpretation of phenomena. Marcuse understood through painful experience the power of capitalism to manipulate consciousness as demonstrated by Edward Bernays’ successful marketing methodologies (see, The Century of the Self; full video). I will explore further Marcuse’s purpose in adopting the Freudian paradigm in part two of this essay. Other philosophers such as Bernard Stiegler, and numerous other French critical theorists have since developed Marcuse’s theoretical synthesis into critiques of “technology, time, individuation, consumerism, consumer capitalism, technological convergence, digitization, and Americanization” that go far beyond One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization.
Matt’s critique of Marcuse is actually an expert propaganda piece and has a definite logical structure. Any fact, or interpretation in Marcuse’s favor is mocked by mere association with emotionally suggestive words. This tactic is directed at Marcuse’s strong points such as his antifascist critique contributions to the Frankfurt School study of authoritarianism. Propositions draw mental pictures and he writes to construct biased pictures of Marcuse without any substantial critical argument. His polemic is just a series of bullying conjunctions that are legitimately related historically to Marcuse’s research: Nazism, Heidegger, Nazism, Marxism, Nazism, Frankfurt School, Nazism, intolerance, Nazism, sexual moral panic, Nazism, violence, Nazis, Marcuse. This simple method of association works best without historical context or any real reasoning, only conjunctions; the lack of reasoning is what makes this tactic effective especially for the distracted casual reader. Making these associations is easy, but concealing this tactic requires real talent which is done by breaking up the contextual information and scatter throughout the essay as fragments that are themselves surrounded by another distracting cluster of associations. The author can claim he provided relevant information, and yet still continue the ad hominem attack. It is impossible for even the experienced reader of Marcuse to immediately address the historical contexts of these clustered associations and maintain reading coherence. I would classify this essay as what philosopher Jacques Ellul called agitation propaganda; although, its origin is from sociological propaganda. His critique of Marcuse is written to ensure the reader’s reception is always in a state of distraction.
Shoveling Coal for Satan
An expert on Marcuse’s work and esteemed philosophy professor, Dr. Michael Pelias, asked in his reading group, “Why is Marcuse selected for attack at this time rather than Adorno since both were members of the Frankfurt school?” I believe Matt is working off an old script, maybe unknowingly, with customized ready-made ad hominem attacks against Marcuse.
This anti-Marcuse polemic did not have to engage in any original critical thinking about Marcusean concepts because the script has been floating around since 1968 when Harry L. Foster, judge-advocate of the San Diego county extremist right-wing organization of the American Legion contacted California State Senator Jack Schrade and Assembly Representative John Stull (in whose district the University of San Diego was located where Marcuse was teaching) to do a full scale investigation of the professor. Judge Foster read a single hit piece on Marcuse from the San Diego Union. Matt’s critique is simply repeating these same talking points provided to Foster, the University of California regents, and Governor Reagan for a witch hunt (with actual torches) that removed Marcuse from his teaching position by charging him with “corrupting the youth.” I think they missed the Socratic irony.
Here are some of the talking points collected from seven different media articles around 1968:
“It was claimed that Marcuse’s work served ‘as an action manifesto for the street brawler,’ or was ‘a neo-Sorelian exhortation to violence’; he allegedly advocated tyrannical rule by ‘a small elite of individuals who have learned to think rationally’, and who would then withdraw toleration from all who ‘oppose what the new ruling class regards as progressive’. From St Paul’s, Pope Paul VI struck a different note, denouncing ‘the theory that opens the way to license cloaked as liberty, and the aberration of instinct called liberation’, while Pravda [A Soviet Russian newspaper] was no less ardent in defending its faith against the ‘false prophet’ ("Marcuse and the Art of Liberation," Kātz, Barry (1982) Verso press, p. 173; bold & brackets added)." Even the Pope was offended by Marcuse!
The critique continues with the
following quote with the first two paragraphs giving with a
pretty good summary of Marcuse’s stance:
- “To be fair to Marcuse, he was trying to argue that the “one-dimensional” society was “radically evil” because it created a kind of totalitarianism of the consumer instinct, in which the individual becomes one with the state through his worship of product, learning to understand happiness only as something that can be bought. While the supreme beneficiaries of this paradise of buying increase their wealth and political control, the state drops bombs abroad, and at home abuses prisoners, minorities, and the “unemployed and unemployable.” Meanwhile, the tyranny of affluence leads to:
- “The systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence…’
- I think most of us can agree that “radical evil” is a term that fits many parts of the American experience, from Tuskeegee to the moonscaped hamlets of North Vietnam and Cambodia to the Covid-racked prisons of today. Surely also we are exhibiting the symptoms of a deeper sickness when we plop our kids in front of screens to make them wanters-of-things, to save time while we adults chase the affluence dragon.”
Marcuse’s theme of “affluence and consumerism” could have been partly inspired by a Harvard professor’s book published in 1958 by economist John Kenneth Galbraith titled, “The Affluent Society.”(pdf.) that also describes the power of an advertising marketing industry to create an imbalanced hyper-consumerist, hyper-exchange culture, and not of the commodities one would expect from an affluent society.
The author’s “being fair” isn’t being fair. Without an explanation of Marcuse’s methodological use of paradigms (Kantian criticism, Hegelian dialectics, Freudian psychoanalysis) this criticism sounds absurd which is the point. Words such as “totalitarian,” “radical evil” and “past” (found in this review’s title quote) are euphemisms for fascism since Marcuse was an immigrant and need to use an Aesopian language common to the Frankfurt School to avoid severe censorship which throwing around the word “fascism” would bring. The author is purposely blind to this dimension of Marcuse’s life experience of witnessing the Nationalist Freikorps’ (that day’s version of the Proud Boys) two purges of the anti-war Spartacus League resulting in over five thousand deaths; the formation of a blood and soil cults of origin in the form of the “National” Socialists (Nazis); the public trials of the House of Un-American Activities looking for communists within government while Marcuse was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS that later became the CIA) and later in the State Department; his censoring and leaving Brandeis University in 1969; In 1970 Marcuse realized free speech in America meant the Ohio National Guard could collectively punishment university war protesters by randomly shooting into a crowd killing four students and wounding nine others who were all in good standing with Kent State University and up-standing conscientious American citizens to this very day; hung in effigy in San Diego and dismissed from his teaching position by extremist right-wing Governor Ronald Reagan. I appreciate the real risks Marcuse took to warn of a rising pattern of fascism. The author mentions Tuskeegee, Vietnam, and Covid, but seemingly doesn’t see any connection to the recent and ongoing fascist insurrections of today. By embracing a contradiction, one can claim both sides of an opposing argument, or worldview.
How to eat a bowl of thumbtacks
“Reading Marcuse is like eating a bowl of thumbtacks.”
--Matt Taibbi
I have no counter-argument except eating a bowl of thumbtacks is only one-half the process—digestion is the other.
The critical
essay continues: “People who do intellectual work should feel a
responsibility to make sure the words they use at least roughly correspond to
their ostensible meaning, but like a lot of German intellectuals, Marcuse had
been mired in dialectical comparisons for so long that his sense of proportion
was fucked beyond recognition. The man cited aggressive driving in arguing an emergency so dire that a suspension of all civil liberties was warranted.”
We discussed the terminology and language used by philosophers. The above paragraph explains some errors in reading Marcuse, which is not unexpected especially when a
philosopher is using language to examine language as its object. Like Heidegger,
Marcuse sometimes uses ancient Greek words like eros (love,
or desire) and logos, which you will see, is difficult to define even for the
Greeks. Marcuse uses terms in the ordinary sense such as “aggression,” but also
in a Freudian sense of sublimation (subjective
repression of expression). Violence can be committed without aggression like a
drone operator dropping bombs from thousands of feet on a village of occupied
huts. Trump is responsible directly and indirectly of more than one million
Americans dead, but Trump showed no aggression at all saying, “It’s just the
flu!”: this is the kind of nihilistic bureaucratic-administrative violence that
most frightened Marcuse—the complete objectification of human beings, and being.
While re-reading One Dimensional Man I still discover
overlooked insights of Marcuse’s critique. A wise philosopher noted that
books are like people: it takes years to know them.
Matt further writes: “There’s a reason some German scholars are said to prefer reading Clausewitz in English, because it’s clearer. With Marcuse, the translation doesn’t help. He was the real-world embodiment of Orwell’s utopian linguists who were impatient to rid the world of all those annoying words for shades of difference. Once you have a lock on “good,” why bother litigating degrees of its opposite? Bad is bad. He thought in binary pairs, and freely conflated concepts like inadequacy, misgovernment, and indifference with cruelty, repression, persecution, and terror, a habit of mind that’s inspired a generation of catastrophizing neurotics who genuinely don’t know the difference between disagreement and an attempt on their lives.”
The catastrophizing neurotics
now have assault rifles with regular police and paramilitary escorts. Marcuse
thought in dialectical terms to capture movement between
antipoles that binary bivalent thinking lacks: this is why he is a neo-Marxist.
Matt is borrowing Marcuse’s own insights into Orwellian language found in One-Dimensional
Man where contradictions are hidden in nouns, sentences and acronyms
(which the anti-Marcusean critique avoids mentioning). Matt abuses
language in order to demonstrate that Marcuse abused language; making him like
the man that was so fearful of “antifa” that he burned his own house
down to prove they existed. (The right-wing created term “antifa” refers
to an ubiquitous leftists political homunculus without
using the rather embarrassing word, “fascist” which names themselves).
Marcuse wrote of Orwell:
"Thus,
the fact that the prevailing mode of freedom is servitude, and that the
prevailing mode of equality is superimposed inequality is barred from
expression by the closed definition of these concepts in terms
of the powers which shape the respective universe of discourse. The result is
the familiar Orwellian language ("peace is war" and "war is
peace," etc.), which is by no means that of terroristic totalitarianism
only. Nor is it any less Orwellian if the contradiction is not made explicit in
the sentence but is enclosed in the noun. That a political party which works
for the defense and growth of capitalism is called "Socialist," and a
despotic government "democratic," and a rigged election
"free" are familiar linguistic--and political--features which long
predate Orwell (ODM, p. 88; italics added).”
The author
repeats his denial of the perverted tolerance thesis to the
reader throughout his essay seeking assent by repetitious psychological
reinforcement: “The argument-from-emergency ties in with one of
Marcuse’s most quoted passages: ‘Liberating tolerance, then, would mean
intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from
the Left.’ This is another precursor to the Roger Ailes/Fox formulation that
leftism is so hegemonic that one needs to pull the steering wheel of society
hard to the right just to move in a straight line. (Both arguments are absurd).
Marcuse famously believed toleration of competing views repeated the error of
Weimar Germany, where “if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn, mankind
would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”
One way to
describe the rise of the Cult of Irrationality (Karl Mannheim)
is its allegiance to the tactic of “malicious ignorance” (i.e., deliberately
not wanting to know, aka., to be woke). Marcuse clearly defined
tolerance on the first and last page of Repressive Tolerance: it is
a false simulated chattering tolerance designed to jam the
channels of communications and preserve the status quo. "In
other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at
the beginning of the modern period-a partisan goal, a subversive liberating
notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as
tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the
cause of oppression (ODM, p. 81; italic added)." Marcuse is describing propaganda posing
as tolerance to preserve the mechanisms of repression.
In one last
argument to examine Matt writes: “Back in the sixties, Marcuse was
denounced by Pope Paul VI while establishment political figures decried his
support of groups like the SDS, the Weathermen, and the Black Panthers. He was
seen as a thorn in the side of the status quo. Today Marcuse is the
status quo.” In a video interview with R.J.
Eskow (@ 41
min. 30 seconds) Matt said, “The thing
that is important is his [Marcuse] total disregard for the things we most
cherish in this country which are individual rights and freedom."
The status quo is US law enforcement standing with right-wing
armed fascist paramilitary gangs brandishing weapons of war and engaging in
long normalized eliminationist speech (see, “Eliminationism
in America": Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X).
I always enjoyed Matt Taibbi’s journalistic style because of his entertaining style (I don’t know if he is overpaid however) and interpreted his satirical writing as indirectly (or even directly) inspired by George Orwell and Herbert Marcuse since both authors focused on the corruption of language by totalitarianism to construct a false reality. Matt is really good at this kind of political-cultural critique and read him to get a better picture of reality, to read him for his insights such as the perverted social communication channels that functions more like an metaphysical bizzaro disinformation anti-media machine on the World Wide Web; an political economy organized exclusively for monopolist profit legislated through undemocratic monetarist policies (i.e., create inflation on the front end only to fight it with unemployment and austerity on the back end) with demonic enthusiasm that cyclically reproduces scarcity, uncertainty, and psycho-spiritual-physical misery; the idolatrous Wall Street Socialists who do not value anything except the symbols of wealth instead of the processes of actual human prosperity; the vanishing of the private life replaced by the pseudo-existence of an avatar surveilled by the “administrative-bureaucratic apparatus which organizes, manages, and stabilizes” totalitarian Neo-liberalism.
Matt’s critique of the mainstream media and Wall Street is very much consistent with the spirit of Marcusean criticism of a society shaped into a false condition where the “dice is loaded”: “…to express and define that-which-is [what is actual] on its own terms is to distort and falsify reality. Reality is other and more than that codified in the logic and language of facts. Here is the inner link between dialectical thought and the effort of avant-garde literature: the effort to break the power of facts over the word, and to speak a language which is not the language of those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the facts. As the power of the given facts tends to become totalitarian, to absorb all opposition, and to define the entire universe of discourse, the effort to speak the language of contradiction appears increasingly irrational, obscure, artificial (RR, p. x; brackets & italic added)."
For Marcuse “…the
language of contradiction,” is a method
for exposing the ideological rationalizations of capitalism to make slavery,
ignorance and poverty acceptable modes of human being.
Critically changing one’s worldview is a sign of a great philosopher,
and authentic thinker; Immanuel Kant, “awakened from his dogmatic
slumber” and wrote, “The Critique of Pure Reason”; Hegel changed his
early views and wrote “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (Not love, but
the Logos drives history); Wittgenstein moved from the logical
positivism of the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” to a mysticism of the
ordinary; Heidegger made his “turn” (Kehre) going beyond the mechanical
logic of Husserlian phenomenology built into Being and Time to
…a poetic dwelling. Revelation is restructured Reason (Socialist Theologian
Paul Tillich).
Part: II
Anti-Marcusean Script II
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Marcusean Phenomenology of Repression
While researching this review of Matt Taibbi’s criticism of Marcuse, I was surprised (honestly) to discover a second anti-Marcusean script that has been floating around the ether for the last fifty-two years! Plenty of time to do damage. Even more surprisingly it was written by a well-known name in philosophy--Professor Alasdair MacIntyre! I recently wrote a 24,000 word critique titled, “Postmodern Socrates on Virtue” of MacIntyre’s 1981 book, “After Virtue.” So there must be a part II continuation of this review at least for completeness.
I want to say out front my general opinion of MacIntyre’s critique of Marcuse’s dialectics in a book title, “Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic by MacIntyre (1970),”(pdf.)(here on referred to as HEP) of about one hundred pages so the reader can more easily follow my objections to specific quoted passages. The most important thing to remember is that this second critique of Marcuse is composed of expositions and polemics—two different steps. His short expositions of both Hegel and Marcuse are out-standing, excellent: one of his many talented skills is philosophical exposition. I noticed his ability to summarize a philosopher’s work in After Virtue (1981) with a critique of Kierkegaardian subjectivity. This was his anti-Kierkegaardian period dating back to at least 1964.
The polemics that follow his expositions, however, are weak that exhibit inflexible Cold War conspiratorial anti-communist thinking. Most importantly, remember while reading that MacIntyre assumes through out his polemic that Marcuse must agree with Marx on every issue otherwise he is a fraud. On the other hand, if Marcuse agrees with Marx then he is a Soviet Stalinist in an attempt to impale Marcuse on the tautologous horns of a false dilemma. Below is MacIntyre’s argument pattern to help recognize the book’s entire underlying structural logical form:
Definitions:
F= Marcuse is a fraud
A = Marcuse agrees with Marx
~A = Marcuse disagrees with Marx
⊃ = If, then (conditional implication)
v = Either, or (disjunction)
/:: = Therefore
The entire polemical book in Sentential Symbolic Form:
1.) A ⊃ S2.) ~A ⊃ F
3.) ~A v A
/:: S v F
I thought this looked familiar: the argument form is known as a “Constructive Dilemma,” but one can slip between
the horns of the false dilemma (S and F)
because there are other alternatives other than Marcuse being a Stalinist, or a
fraud which we will discuss later. And we can take the dilemma by the
horns by showing that at least one or both of the conditionals
(premises 1, and 2) are false. Premise 3 is a tautology (necessarily true) as
with the phrase, “either it is raining or not raining”--a nice touch by the
Professor. A constructive dilemma is a valid (consistent) argument,
but all the premises must be true, otherwise, his anti-Marcusean inferences
are unsound as is the case for all valid
deductive implicational argument forms.
Furthermore,
MacIntyre is resistant to crossing multidisciplinary lines in theoretical
thinking and investigations; narrow-mindedness toward Kuhnian, or Neo-Kantian
idealism and paradigmatic induction; yet, attempts to interpret Marcusean
negative dialectics exclusively through the paradigm of the
Vienna School of logical positivism. What could go wrong? Marcuse is portrayed
as a conspiratorial deviant lone gunman unconnected to the Frankfurt School of
Social Research and high on occult Marxism looking for a fix. MacIntyre
classifies Marcuse a “pre-Marxist” and questions him as if he came from
somewhere between the earth and the moon.
At
strategic points MacIntyre injects simple questions for reflection such as
“What is truth?” and “What is historicism?” as a filibustering
distraction for the reader. But don’t be distracted. For these and
other epistemological questions I will provide links to short summary essays
about the basic schools of thought on these questions for further study later.
And
I just want to point out that HEP is an anti-Marcusean critique written just as
Richard Nixon became president in his first term, and one year before the
famous anti-socialist, anti-democratic Powell Memo was
published whereby the Nixon appointed Supreme Court Judge recommended
corporations “Reclaim America” by entering directly into every level of
American life: media, education, politics, church—to
espouse the virtues of free market capitalism, or Neo-liberalism. Also, After
Virtue was published just as Reagan became president in 1981. Both
works smack of sociological propaganda (also called “horizontal
propaganda”) that is designed for the long term to integrate and unify public
opinion by reinforcing social conformity to cultural norms and attitudes. And
now I will review the specific texts by MacIntyre to support my generalizations
of his critique.
MacIntyre divides his anti-Marcusean polemic into eight chapters centered around books authored by Marcuse: Eros and Civilization (1955), Reason and Revelation (1955), Soviet Marxism (1958 ), One-Dimensional Man (1964), An Essay on Liberation (1969). Marcuse’s “Critique of Pure Tolerance”(1967) is a short essay and reviewed by MacIntyre in his book. Since Matt’s article focused on “Pure Tolerance,” I will start with MacIntyre’s last chapter on tolerance (so we can blame all this on Matt), and then offer addition commentary on he rest of his book that will by highly abstract.
MacIntyre’s Interpretation of the “Critique of Pure Tolerance.”
MacIntyre has many major and minor counter-arguments against Marcuse. In the interest of brevity, I cannot swat all the flies in the marketplace of ideas, so I will just single out the biggest ones. He starts out with a concise summary on Marcuse’s viewpoint on tolerance (all MEP quotes are in italics): "In his essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’2 Marcuse argues that the tolerance of the advanced industrial democracies is a deceit. The expression of minority views is allowed just because it cannot be effective; indeed the only types of expression it can have render it ineffective. The major premise of his whole argument is once again that the majority are effectively controlled by the system and so molded that they cannot hear or understand radical criticism. It follows that the people have no voice and the alternatives are not between genuine democracy and the rule of an elite, but between rival elites, the repressive elite of the present and the liberating elite of the Marcusean future. Freedom of speech is not an overriding good, for to allow freedom of speech in the present society is to assist in the propagation of error, and “the telos of tolerance is truth (MEP, p. 100)."There is a subtle shift in the first sentence summary exposition of the perverted tolerance thesis and then in the same paragraph ignored the thesis he just explicated to describe Marcuse as an elitist wanting to abolish free speech so the “woke” Marcuseans can dominate society. The elitist trope is built on the equivocation of the meanings of “democratic tolerance” and “perverted tolerance” that create an imbalance of power. Marcuse wanted to restore balance in public debate. The casual reader would miss this shift in meaning and then fall into the next trope on elitism:
“The truth is carried by the revolutionary minorities and their intellectual spokesmen, such as Marcuse, and the majority have to be liberated by being reeducated into the truth by this minority, who are entitled to suppress rival and harmful opinions. This is perhaps the most dangerous of all Marcuse’s doctrines, for not only is what he asserts false, but his is a doctrine which if it were widely held would be an effective barrier to any rational progress and liberation (Ibid., p. 100)."
Initially, this paragraph is exposition, and then the elitist argument is presented. Any worldview that claims insight could by definition be called "elitist," including empirical-positivistic science, and Christian Aristotelian-Thomist Realism. MacIntyre’s reasoning is not unlike an Academic Skeptic arguing that knowledge is impossible to only then advance the thesis that knowledge is possible—that of academic skepticism. All theories of salvation are elitist. The elitist argument is a red herring: the scent that throws the hunter’s dogs off the fox’s scent.
“Give me back my broken night; my mirrored room; my secret life,
it's lonely here…
there's no one left to torture.”
-Leonard Cohen, lyrics of “The
Future,” (1992)
Marcuse believed there could be no real social change until there is a new human sensibility. We have to liberate ourselves from ourselves before we can liberate ourselves from repressive administrative institutions. The person of absolute refusal is one having new sensibilities that brings about a total break with repressive-conformist society and its misanthropic values to achieve a “transvaluation” of values, "for the abolition of a society which condemns the vast majority of its members to live their lives as a means for earning a living rather than as an end in itself." Ideological norms of a fundamentally repressive production society will become de-legitimized. This transvaluation discards the ‘Performance Principle’ that according to which “everyone has to earn his living in alienating but socially necessary performances, and one's reward, one's status in society will be determined by this performance (the work-income relation)." Only a new sensibility based on universal human needs can supersede the ideology of repressive self-sacrifice, and the domination of technical instrumental-rationality through the bureaucratic-administrative state, which legitimizes the status quo of social reality.
The term “one-dimensional man” implies there are other dimensions to human being. Such a new human being is one,“...who rejects the performance principles governing the established societies; a type of man who has rid himself of the aggressiveness and brutality that are inherent in the organization of established society, and in their hypocritical, puritan morality; a type of man who is biologically incapable of fighting wars and creating suffering; a type of man who has a good conscience of joy and pleasure, and who works collectively and individually for a social and natural environment in which such an existence becomes possible (see quotes: Liberation from the Affluent Society).”
Marcuse claims this viewpoint is not existentialism: “It is something more vital and more desperate: the effort to contradict a reality in which all logic and all speech are false to the extent that they are a part of the mutilated whole….the dialectical contradiction [against the status quo] is distinguished from all pseudo- and crackpot opposition, beatnik and hipsterism (RR, p. xi; bracketed text added).”
Professor MacIntyre warns of
Marcuse’s hatred of free speech tolerance and is a danger to academic freedom: "These
assaults upon rational inquiry in the interests of the established social order
have to be resisted. The new Marcusean radical case against tolerance makes
those radicals who espouse it allies in this respect of the very forces which
they claim to attack, and this is a matter not just of their theory but also of
their practice. The defense of the authority of the university to teach and to
research as it will is in more danger immediately from Marcuse’s student allies
than from any other quarter— even although Marcuse himself has on occasion
exempted the university from his critique. (MEP, p. 104).”
The professor’s criticism claims
Marcuse’s radicalism will destroy free inquiry in education. Fifty-two years
have passed since HEP was written. Does this mean we can blame Marcuse for
Neo-liberal economist Dr. Larry “Still-not-in-prison” Summers, and
former President of Harvard for the monetization and ongoing privatization of
public education in America and even around the world? Does the professor mean
that Marcuse is the blame for that grunting, wheezing, farting, galoot, William
Bennett, the acting Secretary of Education (when he’s not screwing in Las
Vegas) for Ronald Ray-Gun? I think not. Let us hear the opinion of the
President of Ireland, Dr. Michael D. Higgins, on the state of university
education in Europe and around the world in a call for a new paradigm shift in
education. Dr. Higgins mentions in his speech Adorno, and Marcuse! Noam Chomsky
is a conference participant: "On
Academic Freedom" - President of Ireland Dr. Michael D. Higgins' Address
to the Scholars at Risk Ireland/All European Academies Conference.
Professor MacIntyre continues to deny the perverted tolerance thesis and attempts to categorize Marcuse as a dogmatic Soviet Marxist (Stalinist) since he wrote a book on the Soviet Union: "The use of state power to defend Marxism as the one set of true beliefs in the Soviet Union produced the atrophy of Marxism and the irrationality of Soviet Marxism (MEP, p. 105)." MacIntyre does not mention Marcuse’s prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union calling it a third rate welfare state. "The majority was in the Soviet Union the passive object of re-education in the interests of its own liberation. What Marcuse invites us to repeat is part of the experience of Stalinism (MEP, p. 105)." A lot of anti-Marcusean propaganda is built on denying the perverted tolerance thesis.
Earlier in MacIntyre’s polemic he accuses Marcuse of being an inferior “pre-Marxist” based on the unspoken false assumption that Marxism is a single intractable static monolithic ideology existing somewhere floating between the sun and moon among the Platonic forms. The disjunctive argument assumes that Marcuse is either a fraud, or a Stalinist while ignoring the numerous other studied schools of Marxism such as Gramsci, Luckacs, Lenin, Della Volpe, Colletti, Althusser, Trotsky, Mao, and Sartre (to name a few). For MacIntyre there is only one sect of Marxism just like there is only one sect of Christianity—this is hardcore Cold War propaganda being served to the reader. The truth is Soviet Russia was no more Marxist than America is Christian.
MacIntyre ends his last chapter characterizing the Frankfurt School scholar as a crackpot: “The philosophy of the Young Hegelians, fragments of Marxism, and revised chunks of Freud’s meta-psychology— out of these materials Marcuse has produced a theory that, like so many of its predecessors, invokes the great names of freedom and reason while betraying their substance at every important point (MEP, p. 106)."
MacIntyre counter-argues with his corrupted freedom and reason thesis by rejecting any synthesis of Marxist critique of political economy with the proven insights of Freudian psychology (Bernays) to create a phenomenology of repression. What terrorizes the anti-Marcusean critics is th e construction of a new phenomenological-existential-Marxist paradigm. Disturbingly, the doctrinaire scholastic professor rejects any effort of theoretical paradigm induction, or cross-disciplinary academic interactions Marcuse attempts.
Marcuse commented in October 1968 to a BBC audience on the Pure Tolerance controversy: “I believe that we have discriminating tolerance here already, and what I want to do is redress the balance (Katz, p. 172).”
MacIntyre’s Opening Criticisms
"Marcuse’s
position in the attempts of radical intellectuals to expand and strengthen the
Marxian theory is interesting…he was one of the first to call attention to the
writings of the early Marx as a source of the basic presuppositions of Marxism,
but he seemed to think…that it needed a phenomenological-existential foundation
which he believed Heidegger could provide.”
--D. Kellner (Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, p. 59 (pdf.).”
MacIntyre tells us that although Marcuse did not choose the status of a prophet, he did choose to be a “persistent critic of modern thought and of its relation to modern society.” Eleven years later MacIntyre published his famous work, “After Virtue” in 1981 which is a critique of “modernism,” or “postmodernism” (the two terms are used interchangeably): since then, his work has been appropriated by other authors who spun-off a collection of particularly stupid and deviant narratives of postmodernism. Marcuse was ahead of his time, while MacIntyre will ask repeatedly how does Marcuse know what is truth, and all the derivative questions on methodology. And then, shockingly, he states, “It will be my crucial contention in this book that almost all of Marcuse's key positions are false (MEP, p. 2).” As discussed in part I, Marcuse employs a number of logics and methodologies that make no sense unless the reader has a basic grasp of the various schools of epistemological paradigms and versions of historicism. MacIntyre asks the reader a simple question concerning truth, not for the student’s edification, but to bog them down: “But if truth is relative to time and place, how can we judge between theories which belong to different times and places? The need for an impersonal, nonrelative concept of truth is clear (HEP, p. 15).” MacIntyre leads the reader into thinking Marcuse and Hegel are “relative idealists,” instead of “absolute idealists” who believe there is only one reality, because there is only one universal Geist (Mind, or Spirit), or Reason.
There are at least three paradigms of truth, and three paradigms of logic. Epistemology can be categorized into
two general schools of thought: Realism and Anti-Realism. And there are at
least seven different schools of historicism ( ie.,
is history teleological?). These “drive by questions” could be used as
distractions, or even be legitimate questions, but most readers move on. Within
symbolic logic “truth” is only a principle for organization (for
consistency) such as exemplified in Wittgenstein’s truth-tables:
“T” is for true, and “F” is for false. However, we could also use machine
language such as the symbol “1” for “T” and “0” for “F”. And what of dialectical truth
and falsity?
“The bud
disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the
former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom
is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit
emerges as the truth of it instead.”- (Phenomenology, para. 2).
In MacIntyre’s case the questions are
ambiguous. He wrote (All of MEP quotes are in italics): “I am under an
exceptional obligation to portray what Marcuse says faithfully. I have
therefore tried to separate out sections of exposition from sections of
criticism. In distinguishing Marcuse's thought chronologically I have
followed Marcuse himself; excepting only for his early doctoral work on Hegel
and his contemporaneous writing on Marx, which I have not noticed separately
from his later expositions. Marcuse as a young academic was very much
a product of the German academic and philosophical tradition, admiring and
learning from, for example, Heidegger at Freiburg. How could it have been
otherwise? But Marcuse acquired his own specific doctrine precisely
as and because he turned away from and against that tradition of thought…(MEP,
p. 2; bold added)."
During 1919-1920 Marcuse had many
friends who were avant-garde literary figures: Walter Benjamin, playwright
Walter Hasenclaver, poet Adrian Turel, and philosopher Georg Lukacs while he
was writing History and Class Consciousness (see, Katz, p.
33). But doesn’t Marcuse’s work also reflect the many other themes and
methods of the Frankfurt School of Social Research so that Marcuse isn’t really
a lone wolf? Later on page 75 MacIntyre accuses Marcuse of being a conformist.
MacIntyre noted that he followed
Marcuse’s work chronologically “excepting only his early doctoral work
on Hegel and his contemporaneous writing on Marx.” This is because “Reason
and Revolution”(1941)(pdf.)(here after RR) is a foundational work
for all other writings and interpretation by Marcuse of Hegel and Marx. MEP
only mentions RR four times. MacIntyre is asking methodological
questions the answer of which are in his own expositions of Marcuse and Hegel.
While good on expositions in general, he is lost on Marcuse’s interpretation of
Hegel. For example, take that slippery term “negative” we discussed in the
Hegelian sense of “negation,” but in Marcuse’s RR it means possibility in
opposition to actuality—the fulcrum of Marcusean criticism of a false
condition. MacIntyre only uses this term five times in his
polemic: as “negative feelings,” “Soviet negative aspects,” “pessimism,” and
only once as “creativity.” RR shows that Marcuse’s understanding of Hegel is
based on this key notion of negativity. Consequently, some critics
have huge blind spots of Marcuse’s treatment of Hegel and Marx for this
reason. Reason and Revolution is the code--the
Rosetta Stone--for interpreting Marcuse.
The introductory text continues: “The phenomenologist's account of possibility was, in Marcuse's view, necessarily a mere reproduction at another level of a world of actuality presupposed by his whole mode of operation. Husserl claimed it as a merit for phenomenology that it aimed to be descriptive in its method. Marcuse saw it as condemned to being merely descriptive. While maintaining the distinction between essence and existence, phenomenology had in fact deprived this distinction of its most important function…If phenomenology was thus written off, positivism received even shorter shrift. In Husserl's claim to be descriptive, Marcuse saw the baneful influence of positivism on phenomenology, for he took it to be positivist (MEP, p.7; bold added)."
That last sentence is difficult to read, but there were some good points in the paragraph such as Marcuse’s criticism of Husserlian phenomenology as a failed “escape into a mirror “ turning Husserlian phenomenology into what Adorno called the “empiricism of the Platonic forms”—a neutered ahistorical positivistic quietism that strips concepts of their historical meanings for pure logical form (for details see, “Adorno’s Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology”). This is not Marcuse’s mug of beer! MacIntyre just mentioned “negative” philosophy, but is now puzzled why Marcuse would write off positivism. Do you see the disconnection? The polemic fails to live up to it’s own exposition. This happens repeatedly. Marcuse’s distinction between the potential and actual is not an occult doctrine, but fundamentally Aristotelian presented by MacIntyre so vaguely the reader might think Marcuse was a other worldly utopian Platonic objective realist—the worst possible interpretation of Marcuse. Of course, Marcuse didn’t embrace positivism because he viewed it as a methodology used to “vitiate” negative thinking--to neutralize the capacity to imagine an alternative organized social life in an ideologically constructed one-dimensional paradigm. MacIntyre holds pieces of the puzzle, but will not put them all together: he provides some missing pieces of the puzzle at some points in his critique for completeness while strategically withholding other pieces that might support Marcuse.
MacIntyre is handing out paper-thin
slices of Marcuse’s phenomenology of repression. I wrote the following
paragraph on this topic in another past essay to provide a contrast:
“But does Husserl’s new way of thinking--intuition of essences—achieve what Adorno calls the ‘breakout’ from natural-scientific reductionism by using conceptual classification to discover essences? Adorno’s judgment is Husserl’s ‘breakout’ attempt is a failure. Foster summarizes Adorno’s reasoning as ‘Husserl’s failure to overcome the natural-scientific reduction: ideal objects [abstracted essences] turn out to be the same brute facts shorn of their experiential significance (Roger Foster, p. 99; brackets added).’ Adorno therefore considers these essences as ‘empty abstractions.’ Husserl’s essences ‘will simply replicate the ossified, isolated facts that pass for genuine experience in empiricist naturalism (Ibid., p.104).’ Husserlian phenomenology failed because it ‘used concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts.’ Adorno described Husserl’s failure as an ‘escape into the mirror’ (Negative Dialectics, Adorno, p. 51).’ Later, Adorno claims Heidegger makes this same error of escaping into the mirror with phenomenological fundamental ontology, but with less success in Roger Foster’s reasoned analysis….(see, “Adorno: The Recovery of Experience,” by Roger Foster).”
On pages 6-7 of MEP there is some excellent expositions of Marcuse’s criticism of Husserlian phenomenology and its weaknesses; however, his opening criticism is presented within a confused meaningless context so the reader is unlikely to detect his biased incomplete narrative. The fog machine will indeed give the general idea of some kind of destructive schism with other thinkers MacIntyre strongly disagrees—when your opponents are engaged in a suicidal schism don’t interfere! Marcuse, Husserl, Adorno, and even Heidegger together agree more than MacIntyre is attempting to portray. There are other examples, and a reason for this kind of interpretation of Marcuse.
Are we being too severe with
MacIntyre’s polemic? It turns out my criticisms are milder, but consistent with
other reviewers of MEP. Professor Douglas Kellner is the author of “Herbert Marcuse And the Crisis of
Marxism (pdf.)(Here on CM) wrote in a short
footnote the following summary of MacIntyre’s “hatch-job” on Marcuse:
“MacIntyre totally ignores
Marcuse’s early writings and deep immersion in Marx during his formative
period, emphasizing instead his study with Heidegger (for whom, he falsely
claims, Marcuse wrote his doctoral dissertation). MacIntyre’s account of
critical theory is extremely superficial, and his ‘summaries’ of Marcuse’s
books are simple-minded, reductionistic and uniformed. Most of the book is an
attempted hatchet-job on Marcuse, and whatever valid criticisms
MacIntyre may have are lost in hyperbole (‘almost all of Marcuse’s key
positions are false’, p. 7), supercilious attacks on Marcuse (see, for example,
p. 61, where he claims that Marcuse’s critique of Soviet Marxism is ‘senile’),
or idiotic counter-examples (see his astounding attempt to ‘refute’ Marcuse’s
theses on technological rationality by citing the ‘accidental’ character of the
Vietnam war and the ‘myth of American imperialism’, pp. 70ff). Throughout his
‘faithful... exposition’ (?!) (p. 7), MacIntyre obsessively remarks that
Marcuse is ‘pre-Marxist’ (pp. 22, 40, 54, 61). I [Kellner writes]
hope that my study discloses the perverseness of MacIntyre’s ‘interpretation’,
which shares the worst features of Soviet tirades against Marcuse’s ‘non-Marxism’.
For a sharp attack on MacIntyre’s book, see Robin Blackburn’s review in Telos,
6 (Fall 1970) pp. 348-51 (see Douglas Kellner, “Herbert Marcuse And the
Crisis of Marxism"(1984)(pdf.); p. 445; bracket & bold
added)."
Christian socialist theologian Paul
Tillich (he’s everywhere!) wrote his surmise of Marcuse’s book, Reason
and Revolution: “ ‘This book is an extremely valuable interpretation of
Hegel’s philosophy in its social and political significance and consequences,
and constitutes a monumental introduction to the method of socio-historical
criticism, to the method of ‘critical theory” as developed by Max Horkheimer
and the Institute of Social Research’, Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science, vol. IX, no. 3 (1941) pp. 476-8. Tillich presents a sympathetic
account of the book and regrets only that R&R does not contain a fuller
account of Hegel’s philosophy of religion and aesthetics, claiming that ‘Even a
critical social theory cannot avoid an ‘ultimate’ in which its criticism is
rooted because reason itself is rooted therein’ (p. 478 ). Tillich also raises
the provocative question, ‘Is positivism as such or only a special type of
positivism reactionary?’(p. 478 )(CM, p. 418 )."
Resources
for Reading Marcuse
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the
people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”
—Abraham Lincoln
{(∃x)[Px * (∀y)(Ty ⊃ Fxy)] * (∃y)[Ty * (∀x)(Px ⊃ Fxy)]} * (∃y)( ∃x)[Ty * Px *
~Fxy]
Symbols:
Px = ‘x is a person’
Tx = ‘x is a time’
Fxy= ‘you can fool x at time y’
(∀x) = ‘for all variables x’
(∃x) = 'for at least one variable x'
⊃ = Logical operator for conditional: If, then.
* = Conjunction ‘*’ ‘and’
~ = Negation, 'not'
I remember first reading Marcuse’s
ODM, and Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness in the late seventies,
and not understanding most of what they wrote; one major reason is that I never
read Hegel. Hegel is a famous German absolute idealist, but he was also a philosophical
theologian and this mixture of thinking captured my interest. An
understanding of Hegel also helps reading Marx, and Kierkegaard. I do not want
to rule out any other good books about Marcuse, but here are some very readable
secondary resources that reinforce one another in helping to get a clearer
understanding of Marcuse’s overall philosophy and primary texts:
“The Dialectical Imagination: A
History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923 to
1950 “by Martin Jay (1973)(pdf.)
is a complete historical overview of the famous members of the institute such
as Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, Adorno and many others. Martin’s expositions on
the Frankfurt School have great summarizing insights into the many interconnecting
philosophical topics in their historical context.
“Herbert Marcuse and the Art of
Liberation,” by Barry Katz (1982) is a biography of Marcuse and goes into
depth recounting his life struggles in Germany and America including his early
intellectual influences that shaped his political and philosophical evolution,
which surprisingly emerged from a love of aesthetics and in an effort to negate
the diremption between politics and art.
“Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis
of Marxism,” by Douglas Kellner (1984)(pdf.
)(CM) is a 500 page deep philosophical dive into Marcuse’s interpretation of
Hegel and Marx with critical reviews of such topics as (but not limited to)
Phenomenological Marxism, critique of bureaucratic-communist ideology; critique
of science and technology in capitalism; historicity and dialectic methodology;
and Marcusean aesthetics.
“Reason and Revolution,” is
a good text to learn critical theory and his own interpretations of Hegel,
Marx, and Kierkegaard. Also, there are additional coherent criticisms than we
have covered of Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel discussed in Kellner’s fifth
chapter of CM. Another valuable resource for an introduction to Hegel is
Frederick Copleston’s, S.J. History of Philosophy, Vol. 7; Modern Philosophy:
from the Post-Kantian Idealism to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (pdf.)(original pagination p.159; or,
pdf. pagination is p. 646). The separate volumes in that pdf are
difficult to find (volumes 1,4,5,6 are missing) so here are the pdf page
numbers for volumes
2,3,7,8,9:
- A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME II: Medieval Philosophy (pdf. page 2)
- VOLUME III Late Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy (pdf. p. 315)
- VOLUME VII: Modern Philosophy: From the Post-Kantian Idealists: Marx, Kierkegaard (pdf. p. 734), & Nietzsche (pdf. p. 561)
- VOLUME VIII: Modern Philosophy: Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America. (pdf. p. 817).
- VOLUME IX: Modern Philosophy: From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Levi-Strauss (pdf. p. 1112)
Also, see philosophy professor Dr. Gregory B. Sadler
progress into his mind-boggling eight-year marathon video lecture series on all
eight hundred and one paragraphs of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of
Spirit,” and nailing every one down with concise analysis and insightful
commentary. I’m all caught up on his Hegel lectures! Also, Dr. Sadler has a
massive video library including his series of Philosophy Core Concepts
that can provide a strong foundation for further study of the literary cannon
of Western philosophy.
"I shall raise four initial questions. The first arises from the issue which I have just raised. Marcuse at various points both in his early and later writings refers to criteria of truth which he rejects. What is Marcuse’s own view of truth? (MEP, p. 14)." MacIntyre raised the question of truth earlier and I provided links to other essays describing the different schools of thought. Marcuse would begin his lectures with the statement “Political economy is assumed!” In other words, Marcuse is concerned with how capitalism has learned to prevent social change, but doesn’t question Marx’s fundamental analysis of how capitalism works, or that it is destructive to rational human beings any more than professor MacIntyre would question the fundamentals of Aristotelian virtue ethics while addressing ethical questions. We discussed the three different logic(s) applied in his critical philosophy: Aristotelian logic, dialectical logic, and the logic of the universal and the particular. And again MacIntyre fails to associate the notion of negativity with positivism when he asked for a definition of truth. Marcuse accepts the dichotomy between the subject and object; facts and meaning; being and thought.
I have good news! MacIntyre has since
1970 embraced Kantian categories when he wrote: “What I learned from
[Alfred] Kuhn, or rather from Kuhn and Lakatos read together, was the need
first to identify and then to break free from that framework and to inquire
whether the various problems on which I had made so little progress….”--Alasdair
MacIntyre (pdf.) 2006.
But then philosopher Peter Lipton wrote, “Kuhn, however, is Kant on wheels (pdf.).”
Hopefully, MacIntyre has not become a Neo-Kantian backslider!
The question directed toward
Marcuse’s expositions is “What is true (for Marcuse)?” The truth is the whole.
Marcusean phenomenology of repression and the critique of a false condition
are describing a particular shape (Gestalt) of distorted
historical consciousness in modern industrial capitalism. The “facts” are only
pseudo-facts because facts are not the only issue: we must also ask, “What is
the order of facts?” Kant wrote: “Concepts without
content are void, intuitions (sense-perception) without conceptions are blind.”
Marcuse applies the most extreme version of scientific empiricism to
his dialectical historical analysis: Hegel’s method—phenomenology! And
like Hegel, Marcuse describes a specific epochal mode of
consciousness letting the critical reader follow along, and hopefully
grasp the logico-historical paradigmatic development of a
concept, or notion such as Freedom, Truth, and Justice. Analysis and
commentator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (pdf.), J.N. Findlay, writes of this
literary “Phenomenological ‘We’ ” in the forward of the Phenomenology:
"It is we, the phenomenological students of the shapes of Spirit, who see
the logical connections between them, and therefore also for phenomenological
purposes the order in which they must be arranged (Ibid., p. viii).”
Thus, the first question concerning
truth is related to MacIntyre’s second question: "My second critical
question is: how does Marcuse justify his highly selective version of the
history of culture? This question can be broken down into parts. First, how
does Marcuse justify his highly selective version of the history of
philosophy?…[Secondly] his general history of culture is even more so (MEP, p.
15).”
Marcuse tells his students: “The
teleological character of history (if indeed history has such) can only be a
conclusion from an empirical study of history and cannot be assumed a
priori…We must proceed historically empirically---an odd approach for an
idealistic philosophy of history (RR, p. 225)." Neither Marcuse, nor Hegel
are anti-empiricist: both adopted the phenomenological description of
appearances as their methodology. Marcuse, like Hegel, allows
the reader to judge the truth of his historical analysis: "The laws of
history have to be demonstrated in and from the facts thus far, Hegel's is the
empirical method. But these laws cannot be known unless the investigation first
has the guidance of proper theory. Facts of themselves disclose nothing; they
only answer adequate theoretical questions. True scientific objectivity
requires the application of sound categories that organize data in their actual
significance, and not a passive reception of given facts. 'Even the ordinary,
the ‘impartial’ historiographer, who believes and professes that he maintains a
simply receptive attitude, surrendering himself only to the data supplied him
is by no means passive as regards the exercise of his thinking powers. He
brings his categories with him, and sees the phenomena . . . exclusively
through these media.' 5 But how does one recognize the sound categories
and the proper theory? Philosophy decides (RR, p. 225)." Marcuse
is very Neo-Kantian in his analysis of modern capitalism; however, it is
Hegelian phenomenology that provides empirical content so that
his concepts are not empty.
During the 1970s at this stage of his
philosophical development MacIntyre would not acknowledge the Neo-Kantian
concept of relative categories, or “paradigms” (he claimed to have embraced Kuhnian
paradigms decades later); otherwise, he could not play the part
of the blind vulgar empiricist while Marcuse is viewing society through an
alternative paradigm which may give rise to dangerous insights. “Dialectical
logic is critical logic: it reveals modes and contents of thought which
transcends the codified pattern of use and validation (RR, p. xii).” It is the
negative logic of imagination that MacIntyre’s
convenient faux positivism is attempting to defeat.
MacIntyre complains that Marcuse’s
historicism is biased and incomplete: “The omissions are evident. Locke
and Berkeley, Diderot, Helvétius, and d'Alembert never appear, Hume scarcely
ever; Spinoza and Leibnitz get very short shrift; Nietzsche is in, but not
Schopenhauer; Schlick but not Mach. Why is this important? The answer is that
by omitting so much and by giving a one-sided interpretation of those authors
whom he does invoke, Marcuse is enabled to exaggerate, and in some instances to
exaggerate grossly, the homogeneity of the philosophical thought of a given
age. (MEP, p. 15)."
Marcuse is not addressing some of the
alleged missing philosophers directly, or individually by name (the
“miscellany of historical facts”), but as representational epochal
paradigms that comprise certain historical eras such as Kantian Transcendental
Idealism incorporating and moving beyond the epistemologies of the empiricists
and the rationalists (i.e, Locke, Hume, Descartes). Marcuse teaches historical
materialism by demonstration. For example, see in Reason and Revolution the
section titled, “Philosophy of History,” pp. 225-248 (pdf.); also, (“The
Foundations of the Dialectical Theory of Society,” p. 258 ). For
comparison, see Marcuse on “Kierkegaard” on pp. 262-267.
Marcuse’s exposition on Kierkegaard shows his philosophical distance from
MacIntyre who misreads Kierkegaard (see my comments: “The Straw Man Critique of
Kierkegaardian Subjectivity”). Marcuse’s Neo-Marxist-Neo-Hegelian methodology
requires both the form of Reason (logic) and the empirical content
of history (phenomena). Marcuse writes: “The Logic [Hegel’s]
had demonstrated the structure of reason; the Philosophy of History expounds
the historical content of reason. Or, we may say, the content of reason
here is the same as the content of history, although by content we refer not
to the miscellany of historical facts, but to what makes history a rational
whole, the laws and tendencies to which the facts point and from which they
receive their meaning (RR, p. 239; bold italics and brackets
added).” Hegel indirectly described some of the very same listed philosophers
as representing modes of consciousness such as sense
certainty (empiricism), or force and understanding (rationalism)
in his Phenomenology without mentioning their names. Both
Hegel and Marcuse think in paradigms.
MacIntyre continues: “My third critical question concerns Marcuse's correlation of philosophical doctrines with political and social commitments: how is this correlation established? Certainly not by any actual correlation between a philosopher's doctrines and his commitments on such matters. Marcuse sees phenomenology and empiricism as doctrines characteristic of a world passing into totalitarianism, and in his early writings what Marcuse means by totalitarianism is the authoritarianism of Fascism and Nazism. But in fact the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were radicals and socialists, anti-Nazi to a man, and the political record of the phenomenologists was also good. (Edith Stein, Husserl's secretary, became a nun and died in a concentration camp.) Heidegger and Gentile were, in fact, highly exceptional figures. How, then, is Marcuse justified in treating them as representative ones (MEP, p.16)?"
MacIntyre must be referring to the classical Marxist view that the proletariat would be the political catalyst for socio-economic transformation. In his later development Marcuse became suspicious of methodological phenomenology and empiricism due to their central notions of sense-certainty (positivism) and eternal essences (Husserlian eidetically reduced essences) that renders them easily adaptable to totalitarian thinking. MacIntyre is not asking the correct question about the limitless number of individual personal biographies and combinations of worldviews. Such correlations would be highly personal to each individual. How could anyone predict a priori theologian Paul Tillich would become a Christian socialist? However, Marcuse did make this prediction correlating doctrine and practice: “If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth (ODM, p. 129).” If Marcuse knew the correlations between a person’s doctrines and practice, he would not needed to join the Frankfurt School to research the question of why the modern proletariat is so passively conformist. MacIntyre will not put anything of Marcuse together for the reader, and should instead consider the more relevant question Tillich asked: “Is positivism as such or only a special type of positivism reactionary?” Most likely, Heidegger and Marcuse would agree that it is not positivism (phenomenology, nor technology) in itself that is a hazard, but the socio-politico-ideological “Enframing” [paradigm] that directs the telos of modern techne (τέχνη).
“The fourth critical question is: how does Marcuse’s view stand in relation to classical Marxism? We cannot assimilate Marcuse’s thought too easily to Marxism even at this stage of his development (MEP, p. 17).”
The Marcusean Neo-Marxist project is to investigate the anomaly (a modern consumerist vitiated proletariat), which the classical Marxist paradigm did not anticipate. He does not accept the doctrine of historical progress a priori: he accepts the same “categories of dialectics” of Hegel and Marx; he accepts the Marxist theory of labor; his Marxist theory of revolution is taken from Hegel’s notion of Reason, and Marx’s theory of alienated labor; Marcuse accepts Marxist critique of capitalism and its collapse; but, rejects “revisionism” of Marxist materialist dialectics (see details, CM, pp. 143-44). However, Marcuse does have criticism of classical Marxism and Hegel; “I believe it is the idea of Reason itself which is the undialectical element in Hegel’s philosophy (RR, p. xii).” In fact, classical Marxist historical materialism has always been from the very beginning a critique of Hegelian idealist philosophy, just as the Christian Kierkegaard critiques the systematic Professor---Hegel. MacIntyre’s questions are framed to completely suppress this simple historical insight into the relation of Marxism to Hegelian idealism. MEP actually misinforms, and misleads the beginning reader of critical theory.
MacIntyre’s Review of Marcusean Interpretations of Marx and Hegel
“Because bourgeois political economy does not have human beings
and their history in its conceptual scheme, it is in the deepest sense not a
‘‘human science’’, but is a
non-human science of an inhuman world of things and commodities.”
--Marcuse in "Studies in Critical Philosophy, 1973; p. 9.
Finally, after all that preparation MacIntyre now looks at Marcuse’s interpretation of Marx and Hegel: "Hegel began by accepting from Kant this central insight—that we take the world to be as it is because the structure of thought imposes a structure on it—but then he wished to quarrel with the Kantian position in two respects. For Kant, there was a distinction to be made between reality-as-we-apprehend-it and reality-as-it-is, between things-as-perceived and things-in-themselves. The latter are and will be unknowable. But, argued Hegel, if they are unknowable we cannot know of them and we cannot know that they are; hence we must conclude that reality simply is reality-as-we-apprehend-it. There is nothing beyond and outside experience. But Hegel did not further conclude that claims which have hitherto been understood to concern realities that cannot be experienced—God, the minds of others—are all false; rather we must understand these claims instead as claims about the character of certain features of the world as we experience it (MEP, p.23)."
MacIntyre has introduced into his
polemic the Kantian notion of the noumenal, which I discussed in
the essay, “Is Kant’s concept of the noumena coherent
and necessary for knowledge?”, and turns out that reality is not so
“simple.” We cannot say anything “beyond” experience, but this
does not mean Kant rejects the concepts of God, Freedom, and immortality for he
wrote: “I therefore had to annul [aufheben] knowledge in order to make
room for faith. And the true source of all the lack of faith which conflicts
with morality-and is always highly dogmatic-is dogmatism in metaphysics, i.e.,
the prejudice according to which we can make progress in metaphysics without a
[prior] critique of pure reason (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. W.S.
Pluhar, 1996; p. 31; pdf. p. 91; second bracket added)(pdf.)." In
other words, Kant had to first write the Critique of Pure Reason,
so that he could have the space to write Critique of Pure Practical
Reason, (or, ethics).
Hegel is a consistent anti- dualist who questioned the division of phenomena (appearance) and noumena (unreified reality). For the comparison of some philosophers and their differing views of noumenality between antirealist epistemologies and realism see the essay “Realism/Antirealism Scheme in “A Thing of This World” (2007) by Dr. Lee Braver.” We can classify as antirealist the philosophers Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and most modern epistemologists—even some of those who object to antirealism. I argue that although some philosophers many deny noumenality they continue to embrace its paradigmatic function as the concepts of limitation and existential possibility. MacIntyre has thrown these difficult epistemological questions at the reader like a plate of spaghetti leaving them to untangle and clean up the mess.
The polemic then alternates back to
exposition: "The Phenomenology of Mind is many
things. It is a history of philosophy in which Hegel not only reviews the main
philosophical positions of the past but attempts to depict exhaustively the
range of philosophical positions which are possible. (And how extraordinarily
impressive his attempt to carry out this impossible task is, is shown by the
way he anticipates philosophical positions which were only to be worked out in
the future by his successors and critics. There are, for example, recognizable
sketches of Kierkegaard's existentialism and Russell's logical atomism, and
refutations of them too.) But since for Hegel the thought-forms which the
philosopher discerns are those which inform civilization and not merely
philosophical theorizing, the Phenomenology situates the
history of philosophy within a history of the human spirit. Art, politics,
religion all pass in review. The pattern which informs all of these is one that
Hegel elaborated in the course of reflecting upon the contrast between the
ancient Greek city-state and the Germany of his own age (MEP, p.24)."
Again, MacIntyre’s exposition here is excellent! However, Marcuse is using the same phenomenological methodology as Hegel, Sartre, and Heidegger. MacIntyre presents excellent expositions of some areas of Marcuse and Hegel’s work, but he withholds applying Hegelian concepts to Marcuse’s critique of capitalism that results in a dyslexic interpretation of Marcuse. Many of the questions directed toward Marcuse can be found in MacIntyre’s own exposition of Hegel, Husserl, and Kant. The reason for this is these philosophers, and others are simply being used as a truncheon against Marcuse thereby missing important methodological understanding.
Marcuse’s own exposition of Hegel reads: “The Phenomenology of Mind in this way leads up to the Logic. The latter unfolds the structure of the universe, not in the changing forms that it has for knowledge that is not yet absolute, but in its true essence. It presents 'the truth in its true form.’3 Just as the experience with which the Phenomenology began was not everyday experience, the knowledge with which it ends is not traditional philosophy, but a philosophy that has absorbed the truth of all previous philosophies and with it all the experience mankind has accumulated during its long trek to freedom. It is a philosophy of a self-conscious humanity that lays claim to a mastery of men and things and to its right to shape the world accordingly, a philosophy that enunciates the highest ideals of modern individualist society (RR, p. 97).” The Phenomenology is the history of this long trek to freedom; it is the story of the road to experience…”to Calvary,” as Hegel once said.
MacIntyre continues: “But if Marcuse
carries over into his analysis of Marx's mature writings Hegelian ideas that do
not properly belong there (some Hegelian ideas do properly belong there; Marx
did retain, even if he also modified, the notion of alienation, contrary to the
view of such interpreters as Lewis Feuer), he at the same time oddly ascribes
to Marx a break with Hegel that Marx did not make (MEP,
p. 36)."
This paragraph is a setup by
MacIntyre to begin another parallel effort not for the search for truth, but to
introduce schisms, real or invented, into Marcusean Marxism. Whenever one
objection (misinterpreting Marx) is addressed, another argument, like
overlapping roof tiles, is introduced. In this case, the overlapping
criticism is Marcuse including a Freudian psychoanalytical paradigm for
interpreting the young early Marx. (Note: Skinnerian Operant Behaviorism was
the dominant school of psychology in the US during the 60s, and 70s with
Freudian psychology being nearly universally rejected by academia).
“Marcuse was
far more receptive to twentieth-century philosophy than were the
[Frankfurt] Institut's other philosophical thinkers.”
--Martin Jay, DI, pdf. p. 54.
Kellner writes of how Marcuse
understands his own academic work: "...this project took the form of work
on the foundation of the Hegelian-Marxian philosophies and dialectical method,
and criticisms of current forms of social theory and philosophy from a Hegelian
standpoint. Many of the thirteen essays published between 1928 and 1933
criticize contemporary interpretations of Marxism which Marcuse believes
deflect it from its revolutionary goals and undermine its philosophical
foundation (CM, p.72)."
The Neo-Marxist Marcuse saw that classical Marxist scholarship, which focused on Capital, lacked the individual subjectivity found in Marx‘s early humanist writing, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (pdf.). These early undiscovered manuscripts by Marx were first published in 1932 by magazine contributors J. P. Mayer and Sieffried Landshut by a philosophical magazine Neue Blatter [New Page] started by theologian Paul Tillich [There he is again!] in 1930 who already suspected the vulgar “materialist” interpretation of Marx may not be wholly accurate. The Nazis shutdown the journal numerous times, and closed permanently it in 1933. Marx’s 1844 manuscripts were not published into English until 1956 when Cold War propaganda already stereotyped Marxism as vulgar materialism and this continues even today. Both Marcuse and Tillich believed it was a mistake not to assimilate existentialism into modern interpretations of Marxism. Marcuse is attempting to break that Cold War stereotype by reintroducing existentialism back into the so-called materialist reading of Marx along with Freud’s concept of the unconscious. Kellner writes of Marcuse’s revisionism: "Marcuse’s position in the attempts of radical intellectuals to expand and strengthen the Marxian theory is interesting. On the one hand, he was one of the first to call attention to the writings of the early Marx as a source of the basic presuppositions of Marxism, but he seemed to think, on the other hand, that it needed a phenomenological-existential foundation which he believed Heidegger could provide (CM, p. 59; brackets added).”
What is
Marcuse’s “break” between Marx and Hegel that MacIntyre absolutely
rejects?
“I have already noticed that Marcuse connects freedom and happiness intimately. He argues that the Hegelian progress of reason is not a progress to happiness and says, obviously correctly, that Marx took human needs far more seriously than Hegel did. But he then passes from asserting that for Marx a truly human and free society would be one in which each would have the possibility of realizing his potentialities (and that this is what Marx means by freedom) to asserting that ‘mankind becomes free only when the material perpetuation of life is a function of the abilities and happiness of associated individuals."2 And he characterizes part of the difference between Hegel and Marx by saying that 'the idea of reason has been superseded by the idea of happiness' (MEP, p.36)."
Marcuse introducing subjectivity (i.e., happiness, unconsciousness, existential alienation) into Marxism is the theoretical change that MacIntyre wants to confuse the read about. Any interpretive breaks with Hegel and Marx are to be expected by a Neo-Marxist just as the young Marx reinterpreted and moved beyond the Hegelian system. Anyone who studies and embraces Hegelianism could also be categorized as “pre-Marxist”—including the early young Marx himself! See how absurd MacIntyre’s criticism is? His polemic could be directed at any theorist whose mission is to critically revise a theoretical paradigm. One horn of MacIntyre’s dilemma is formed by defining Marcuse as “pre-Marxist” for making revisions that deviate from contemporary orthodox interpretations of Marx and Hegel; the second horn is Marcuse accused of being sympathetic to totalitarian Stalinism. Must there be only one school of Marxist interpretation so that anyone can be deemed either a heretic or dogmatist? Marcuse is indeed formulating a revised Hegelian Marxism. The ultimate epistemological problem is not that we don’t know reality; but rather, we can know reality in so many different ways. A systematic science does not just need logic and methodology: a scientific discipline needs multiple logics and methodologies. MacIntyre is extremely resistant, intolerant, and dogmatic to any alternative interpretations, or expositions of classical Marxism.
Is Marcuse still a “pre-Marxist” if
he disagrees with Hegel? Hegel--desperate for some kind of legislating body to
protect “human freedom of property, freedom of the person, freedom of trade
and profession, free admission to all offices of state, and equality before the
law”--initially had hope for the French Revolution, but was disillusioned
with the “Reign of terror,” and Napoleon’s eventual fall from power (see, Hegel and the French Revolution).
Hegel wrote to a friend about his feelings toward contemporary politics of his
day saying, “Pray and curse!” Some readers of Hegel today can identify with his
despair. Marcuse in general accepts the majority of Hegel’s philosophical
system to modernize its categories, but criticized Hegel’s politics as
contradictory, and a “betrayal” of Hegelian “categories of emancipation” (see,
CM, p. 144). Kellner acknowledges there are problems with Hegel’s later political
philosophy, and believes Marcuse was too uncritical of both
Hegel, and Heidegger (see details CM, p. 144-45). Regardless, Kellner still
considers Marcusean phenomenological existential Marxism as philosophically
very close to classical Marxism. Kellner has listed an number of coherent and
substantial criticisms of Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel and Marx, but none
can be categorized as a fatal error in my view (see MC, p. 142-48 ).
Marcusean
Freudo-Marxist Anthropology of Liberation
"By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with the restricted experience.”– Marcuse (ODM, p. 187)
MacIntyre wrote the following criticism of Marcuse synthesizing Freudian and Hegelian-Marxist theories: "I have in the course of the preceding argument picked out certain positions which distinguish Marcuse from other writers in the Hegelian and Marxist traditions to which he owes so much. More especially I have suggested that in making "man" rather than "men" the subject of history he is at odds with Marx, and that in making "happiness" a central goal of man's striving he is at odds not only with Hegel, as Marcuse himself recognizes, but also once more with Marx…Not all, of course; Trotsky was profoundly interested in psychoanalysis, but what seems to have engaged his interest was primarily psychoanalysis as a method of therapy rather than Freud's metapsychological theory. For Marcuse it is all too characteristically the other way round… in the end the evidence for the truth or the falsity of psychoanalytic claims must be found. Marcuse is as impatient of the empirical here as he is elsewhere (HEP, p. 44)."
"In the totalitarian era, the therapeutic task of philosophy would be a political task, since the established universe of ordinary language tends to coagulate into a totally manipulated and indoctrinated universe."--(ODM, p. 203)
MacIntyre is critical of Marcuse for
not having an ideological czar. Yet, if Marcuse never deviated from Marx, or
Hegel he would be deemed a cult disciple: it's a cheap argument which can only
be made by removing the context, and purpose of Marcuse’s studies of Freudian
psychoanalysis. Remember, during the 60s and 70s Skinnerian Operant Behaviorism
dominated American psychology university departments because it was considered
more “empirical,” and not completely “subjective” such as the Freudian
psychoanalysis was thought to be. MacIntyre is jumping on the empiricist bandwagon
in the same way decades later he jumped on the Kuhnian bandwagon. Again,
Marcuse like any critical thinker does not have to mimic the philosopher they
are studying—the assumption that one must is disturbingly narrow-minded.
Marcuse’s contribution to the Frankfurt School was to develop a
Hegelian-Marxism that was not solely centered on the empirical (positivistic)
proletariat of reified consciousness, but also applied Kantian
criticism (although through a Hegelian lens) that focused on a negative
critique of possibility (or transcendence) and
the reality changing logic of domination in the false paradigm
of a totalitarian universe.
"Of the
major figures connected with the Institut, only Marcuse attempted to articulate
a positive [empirical] anthropology at any time in his
career...Critical Theory consistently resisted the temptation to describe ‘the
realm of freedom’ from the vantage point of the ‘realm of necessity.’ “--(DI,
pdf. p. 49; brackets added).
Speaking of truth: the subject is not an object. Understanding human being is not the same as studying inanimate objects; consequently, methodologies and criteria of truth must be applied differently with other systematic disciplines. Philosopher Michael Foucault illustrated this point by deliberately selecting for research the history of mental illness, and sexuality precisely because these are not objects. Yet, MacIntyre demands empirical evidence from Marcuse as if he is fixing bicycles and toasters. Marcuse already had his empirical proof of the effectiveness of Freudian psychology when he observed its applied principles with the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, and in the form of propaganda broadcasted by the new medias of radio and film. Freudian psychoanalyst Edward Bernays, a cousin of Sigmund Freud, produced propaganda for the US to recover from a worldwide economic depression; to mobilize for war against the Axis Powers; and then the post-war development of scientific consumer marketing techniques based on the same psychoanalytic principles with mind-boggling success.
Psychoanalysis is the subversive psychology that American ideologists did not want to be general knowledge of the public. Psychologist B.F. Skinner was much better for American academia for research into stimulus-response training of pigeons to guide missiles used in the Vietnam War to bomb half-naked barefooted rice farmers. Marcuse knew Freudian principles were real, that is, they worked: however, he wanted to know how they worked. MacIntyre doesn’t supply any larger historical context with his anti-Marcusean polemic; otherwise, his objections would sound nonsensical. The Frankfurt School is mentioned only as a curriculum vitae entry three times within the whole of MEP! Instead, he focuses his ad hominem on Marcuse himself as a German Marxist immigrant who was an OSS official in the de-Nazification of post-war Germany (see CM, p. 149).
“…neither his desires nor his alteration of reality are henceforth his own: they are now ‘organized’ by his society. And this ‘organization’ represses and trans-substantiates his original instinctual needs.”--Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 14-15 (pdf.).
As an expert on the Hegelian dialectical method, all Marcuse really needed from Freud’s “thermodynamic, hydraulic” model of instinctual energy was a revisionist concept of the repressed (sublimated) consciousness, and then he could formulate on his own the remainder of a new anthropology of liberation. Marcuse wasn’t just sitting around smoking a cigar and pulled Freud (there are many Freuds) out from his…back pocket. Marcuse was not a lone wolf. Other philosophers were studying Freudo-Marxism like French thinkers Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guttari, and Lyotard. Kellner reports that Adorno and Horkheimer were not as interested in socialism as Marcuse and were not a great help to Marcuse (CM, p. 425). Marcuse had attended Marx-Freudian debates in 1920 and later read Wilhelm Reich’s work “Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).” (For expositions and criticisim on the French Freudo-Marxists see Dr. Michael Pelias’ lectures to his students and clinical psychologists: “Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus - Part 1”).
Since Classical Marxism lacked a
systematically defined philosophical anthropology of human subjectivity, a new
Freudian-Marxist synthesis could provide the basis for a Marcusean anthropology
of liberation. There were some elements of Freudian psychology that needed to
be rejected such as the belief repression is necessary for
human civilization to exist. Also, Marcuse embraced Freud’s understanding of
the link between repression of memories and of neurosis which
on “… weakening the life instincts would increase aggression and violence.”
(see, Chris Hedges interview of author Eurydice of “Satyricon USA” for a possible Marcusean
interpretation of sexual sublimation-desublimation). Emerging out of new forms
of administrative domination is an ersatz consciousness of a
false social condition.
There are many other minor arguments in MacIntyre’s polemic against Marcuse’s Freudian Marxist synthesis, but they can be reduced to the counter-argument line of the polemist’s unwillingness to accept any theses of the Frankfurt school and choose instead to focus on the straw man arguments of whether Neo-Marxist Marcuse is strictly faithful to Hegel and Marx. Of course a Neo-Marxists varies from classical Marxist philosophy by definition! MacIntyre is arguing a tautology: orthodoxy is not heterodoxy.
"Marcuse’s version of Marxism is false to Marx not only in its content but in its whole treatment of the relationship between Marxism and social reality. When Marcuse indicts Soviet Marxism for its disagreement with what he takes to be Marxism, he supposes that the history of the Soviet Union in its negative aspects is to be explained without reference to Marxism. Marxism remains as a theory pure and uncontaminated, providing a standard by which Soviet reality can be judged. Marcuse’s account of the Soviet Union is thus at the opposite pole from the views of those who suppose that it is from Marxism that all the evils of Soviet reality spring and who see in the transition from Marx through Lenin to Stalin an entirely unproblematic development. But if this latter view is clearly absurd— Marx was throughout his career a radical democrat, who believed that all that was wrong with the liberties of bourgeois parliamentary regimes was that their enjoyment was effectively restricted to a minority— it will not do to treat Marxism as a theory that can be evaluated apart from its historical fate. To do so would in any case be completely contrary to Marxism (MEP, p. 64; bold added)."
The “No True Marxist Would” Argument
This is MacIntyre’s weakest chapter. He scatters epistemological questions concerning historicism and Marcuse’s interpretation of Marx throughout this chapter: the answers he seeks can be found in Reason and Revolution. I seriously doubt MacIntyre even read RR, and is instead relying on his interpretations of Hegel and Marx to critique Marcuse—it could be done without reading RR, but not well at this granular level of analysis. Again, MacIntyre pushes his “no true Marxist would” argument hard in this chapter about Soviet Marxism by dogmatically assuming that any deviations from Marx or Hegel are serious errors that define Marcuse a “pre-Marxist,” and his analysis completely derelict: otherwise, Marcuse is a fraud. Actually, more substantial criticisms of Marxist philosophy originate from Marxists theorists themselves on such topics as historical materialism, historical teleology, alienation, Freudian psychoanalysis, and even critical theory itself. Rather than responding to each of MacIntyre’s criticisms, I want to offer some counter-arguments to MacIntyre’s critique of Soviet Marxism (1958 )(pdf.)(here on, SM) authored by Marcuse commissioned by the United States OSS, and later the US State Department. As a critical theorist, Marcuse, is often accused of being both a heterodoxical revisionist, and an orthodox doctrinaire on the same issues! This is especially true of his research on the Soviet Union’s political and ethical tenants that angered the Pope, Pravda, and acting Provost of the University of California.
"Disenchantment
of the concept is the antidote of philosophy.It keeps it
from growing
rampant and becoming an absolute to itself."
--Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 13 (pdf.).
From 1948 to 1951 (during the time Joseph McCarthy was investigating Americans with demonic enthusiasm for merely saying the word communism), Marcuse—a real Marxist by Republican Joseph McCarthy’s (Fascist-WI) standard—was promoted in the Intelligence Research of the State Department as Acting Chief of the Central European Branch. Marcuse wrote a 532-page analysis in 1958 of the Soviet Union for the Division of International and Functional Intelligence entitled “The Potentials of World Communism,” and later declassified in May 1978.
The focus for Marcuse’s research of the Soviet Russian State was the “Bureaucratic-Administrative” character, and practices of Soviet Marxism. And the funny thing is, Marcuse later applied the same methodological categories of Marx and Hegel to American capitalism as with the Soviet Union. His critique of Soviet Marxism turned out not to be too dissimilar from his critique of American Capitalism. Marcuse’s critics always try to bury the lead; especially when it suggests that the Soviet bureaucratic-administrative state is in many ways structurally indistinguishable from the American bureaucratic state of total administration. Marcuse concluded the Soviet Union’s “bureaucratic communism” was merely a corrupt third-rate welfare state that would collapse in forty years: the fall of the Soviet Union is usually dated around 1988. The American military-congressional industrial complex eager to profit from the Cold War military build-up around the world wanted to hear a scarier narrative about the threat of a world dominating communist state: that the Stalinist Soviet Union was a massive military leviathan that threatened world domination. This impression of Russia still exists today. The Russian economy is about half a trillion dollars smaller than Italy’s. Marcuse’s report was promptly ignored and was among the first Marxist philosophers (Karl Korsch in the1920s was earlier) to criticize Soviet Marxism (for details see, “Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism” by Douglas Kellner, Chapter 7; pp. 197-275)(pdf.).
“It follows
that, by the present time, to be faithful to Marxism we must cease to be
Marxists; and whoever now remains a Marxist has thereby discarded Marxism…It
follows further that there are no neo-Marxists—whatever men may think themselves.”
--MacIntyre (HEP, p. 66)
The one issue that most out raged Marcuse’s critics--once they figured it out--is his criticisms of Soviet Marxism applied equally as well to American capitalism, or what is known as “post-industrial convergence theory”: "SM is also important for interpreting Marcuse’s thought because it reveals parallels between his theories and critiques of the Soviet Union and advanced capitalist societies. These similarities raise the question of the extent to which Marcuse’s theory of ‘advanced industrial society’ and ‘one-dimensional society’ are versions of ‘post-industrial convergence theory’, which maintains similarities between capitalist and Communist societies by virtue of a similar technological base and a similar mode of social organization and control (CM, p. 199).” Long before Howard Beale, Marcuse saw the face of God.
But later, Marcuse seemingly backed away from the convergence theory and wrote: "It remains to clarify a point that has caused much misunderstanding, due, in fact, to my inadequate treatment. The book recurrently stresses certain tendencies that make for assimilation, and perhaps even convergence of Western and Soviet society ... I would like to dissociate myself from this position, while maintaining my emphasis on the all-embracing political character of the machine process in advanced industrial society. It is precisely this ‘total’ character of the machine process, which limits the tendencies towards assimilation and convergence between Western and Soviet society (in terms of time as well as structure) and generates very different potentialities of development…(CM, p. 205).”
"From the
standpoint of the employee, it is coming to make less and less practical
difference to him what his country’s official ideology is and whether he
happens to be
employed by a government or commercial corporation….”
—Arnold J. Toynbee, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1958
I do not believe Marcuse’s misunderstanding excuse, but I do believe that his treatment of convergence theory was deliberately incomplete—a proto-critique—since his goal is to apply the same kind of analysis of modern American capitalism which he would later title, “One-Dimensional Man." These “machine processes” shape culture as the economic base is reflected into the superstructure (what is produced by the base) of society. The convergence meme between the USSR and the US really needed further examination by an economist. I think Marcuse left the convergence meme for others to develop—which is what actually happened. Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith authored The New Industrial State (1967)(pdf.); Chapter 9: “A Digression on the Firm under Socialism.” Galbraith later incorporated the convergence theory in the video series, “The Age of Uncertainty”(1977)(pdf.) in Chapter 9: “The Big Corporation” (video) discussing the similarities of the highly planned modern collectivist hierarchical bureaucratic stock-selling public corporation, and models of some kinds of socialist collectivist production.
The key point of the convergence
thesis asserts instrumental rationality common to both socialist and capitalist
cultures organizes society according to the needs of the machine subordinating--and
even determining--human needs: "Domination in Soviet Communist society is
constituted both by what Marcuse calls ‘the new rationality’ and
by the Soviet bureaucracy.’ The ‘new rationality’ utilizes
technological rationality to organize both industry and society. The
rationality of modern machine industry demands ‘attitudes of standardized
conformity and precise submission to the machine which requires adjustment and
reaction rather than autonomy and spontaneity’…If nationalization and
centralization are coordinated so as to erect a gigantic apparatus that
dictates to and controls its citizens and workers in all spheres of life…(CM,
p. 202; bold added)." The French critical theorists use the term
“apparatus” in the same sense as “paradigm,” or “Enframing,” (Dr. Pelias’
insight). The new technological rationality is the justification that maintains
what Heidegger called the “standing reserve,” that includes all produced
commodities, but also non-material (spiritual) resources such as the
trans-epochal cultural stock of knowledge. By reason of how industry
technologically organizes and reproduces itself, the entire culture comes under
domination by a new paradigm of machine efficiency that
encompasses human consciousness with the values of individual standardization
and total conformity: “Through the means of mass communication, they transmit
the objectives of the administration, and the underlying population responds
with the expected behaviour (SM, p. 92)." It is easy to forget that
Marcuse is describing Soviet Socialist society. Marcuse describes a political
economic paradigm that is rationally organized, but missing the categories of
human emancipation as “the whole is the truth, and the whole is false.” There
is nothing outside the paradigm even if the paradigm is false.
Highly efficient systems have no resiliency, and are subject to systemic collapse (Dr. J. Vervaeke). Within Soviet Communism exploitation is “streamlined,” which is one of Marcuse’s favorite terms such as in “streamlining domination.” Marcuse writes:
“The fundamental difference between Western and Soviet society is paralleled by a strong trend toward assimilation. Both systems show the common features of late industrial civilization—centralization and regimentation supersede individual enterprise and autonomy; competition is organized and "rationalized"; there is joint rule of economic and political bureaucracies; the people are coordinated through the "mass media" of communication, entertainment industry, education. If these devices prove to be effective, democratic rights and institutions might be granted by the constitution and maintained without the danger of their abuse in opposition to the system. Nationalization, the abolition of private property in the means of production, does not, by itself, constitute an essential distinction as long as production is centralized and controlled over and above the population (SM, p. 81; bold added).” In both Soviet Communism and American capitalism no person has political rights---only administrative permissions granted by bureaucratic necessity to achieve greater efficient exploitation, or just by mere caprice. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse used the term “streamlining” three times (p. 42, 52, 257; in pdf. pagination). Anti-Communist Cold War Warriors loved Marcuse’s preaching about the faults of Soviet Communism until they realized the communist shoe also fit the capitalist’s foot—now, Marcuse’s criticism of Soviet Marxism became too inter-meddling.
MacIntyre’s Criticism of One-Dimensional Man
"One-Dimensional Man [1964]
marks a sharp break in Marcuse’s thought, even though the substance of his
thesis about Western industrial society is already to be found in Eros
and Civilization [1955], and that about Soviet society in Soviet
Marxism [1958]. What is new is twofold: his virtual relinquishing of
any distinctively Marxist— as against Hegelian— categories, and his pessimism
(HEP, p. 69; brackets added).”
There is a lot packed in that one
sentence. ODM was not a sharp break in Marcuse’s thought: it is the culmination
of his life’s philosophical work—everything else is just theoretical detail. I
provided the publication dates of the three books listed: ODM was the last book
Marcuse wrote which incorporated the analyses of the other two studies.
The pre-Hegelian trope is repeated along with equivocations on
the word “pessimism,” which can mean “negative,” or “fatalistic.” Marcuse means
“negative” (ideal possibility) as the antithesis of “positivism” (actuality):
“The progress of cognition from common sense to knowledge arrives at a world
which is negative in its very structure because that which is real opposes and
denies the potentialities inherent in itself—potentialities which themselves
strive for realization. Reason is the negation of the negative (RR, p. x).”
Don’t personally blame Marcuse for dialectical language—blame German Idealism!
Critical “negation” is a much richer
concept than is being portrayed: it is the basis of his liberation theory.
Marcuse wrote: “Dialectical thought does not invent these contents;
they have accrued to the notions in the long tradition of thought and action.
Dialectical analysis merely assembles and reactivates them; it recovers tabooed
meanings and thus appears almost as a return, or rather a conscious liberation,
of the repressed! Since the established universe of discourse is that of an
unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever
liberation it may bring is a liberation in thought, in theory. However, the
divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of the
unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to
prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to
develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task
(RR, p. xii)."
Also, Marcuse clearly rejects Freudian
pessimism that asserts repression is necessary for civilization: ”To
counter Freud, Marcuse argues that Freud’s own theory shows that socialization
and repression are historically specific and subject to social formation (CM,
p. 157).” Kellner described MacIntyre’s polemic as a hatch-job: it
would be very difficult to understand Marcuse after reading this “exposition”
written by a highly educated and intelligent American scholar.
For Marcuse, Marxism has in common the same ontological categories (i.e., Freedom) as Hegel's emanationist (“to flow from”) ontology of the idea manifested as Reason, Spirit, and human history descending from heaven to earth; for Marx (and Marcuse), the idea emerges (to rise up from) earth and ascends to heaven, writing, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven (Karl Marx, The German Ideology,1845).” Marcuse tells us “Since we no longer have that fluent access to these concepts which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still had, I shall try to sketch Hegel’s conception in more familiar terms (RR, p. viii).” Here I must make the same point again that Marcuse is a neo-Marxist translating—not relinquishing--these categories to critique the one-dimensional, life denying, conformist logic of a repressive administration. MacIntyre continues:
"He says that ‘the most telling evidence’ for his view can be obtained by simply looking at television or listening to AM radio for one consecutive hour for a couple of days, and refers to a range of authors from Congressional committees to Vance Packard. But there is no attempt to use evidence in a rigorous way, and perhaps this is scarcely surprising, since in the 1960 preface to Reason and Revolution Marcuse wrote of what he called ‘the power of the given facts’ that ‘this power is an oppressive power.’ But the given facts still have to be described correctly. Does Marcuse do this? (MEP, p. 71).”
"This
intellectual dissolution and even subversion of the given facts is the
historical task of philosophy and the philosophic dimension. Scientific method,
too, goes beyond the facts and even against the facts of immediate experience.”
--Marcuse (ODM, p. 190)
Again, the Hegelian concept of negativity is being ignored. Notice MacIntyre’s tunnel vision directed solely at Marcuse giving the false impression Marcuse is lone wolf, out of the Marxist pack, a loose cannon, got weird views: "He asserts...he is concerned...he says...he calls…." The narrative here is all about Marcuse's craziness--and nobody else. MacIntyre is always looking for a schism whether existing or illusory. For example he writes, "He [Marcuse] argues that the Hegelian progress of reason is not a progress to happiness and says, obviously correctly, that Marx took human needs far more seriously than Hegel did (MEP, p. 36; italics added)." The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin) rejected the Enlightenment concept of historical teleological progress in this age “after Auschwitz.” Professor of History, Martin Jay, noted, "Marcuse also shared Horkheimer's and Adorno's rejection of the assumption that socialism was a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. Like them, he sounded a note of skepticism about the connection between human emancipation and the progress of technology and instrumental rationalism (“The Dialectical Imagination,” Martin Jay, 1973; p. 57)(pdf.)."
Five Really Dumb Arguments
Notice that we really have not dived
into ODM in great detail because the methodological questions that MacIntyre is
keeping alive acts as a fog machine to postpone closer examination. Professor
Noam Chomsky speaks of just this kind of “censorship by concision,” that
prevents giving background information for critical thought so that the main
stream media only wants conformist ideas: “ You don’t want people who have to
give background because that would allow critical thought. What you want is
completely conformist ideas, You want just repetition of the propaganda line,
the party line. For that you need ‘concision’ (“Chronicles of Dissent,”
by D. Barsamian interviewing, 1992, p. 245) (pdf.).” This is the
problem with Marcusean dialectics: it cannot be summarize in a few sentences.
MacIntyre closes his polemic on ODM’s
critique of contemporary society with five really weird agnostic (but
vaguely familiar) arguments concerning American society mentioning
totalitarianism, the threat of Nazism, government welfare, education, and the
Vietnam War. MacIntyre is slipping us a Mickey better known
as Austrian Macroeconomic Agnosticism and the thesis is the
free market is too complex for government to interfere or regulate. Secular
agnosticism is a convenient secular metaphysical justification that requires
citizens to not have empathy for other human beings--in other
words, do nothing for the public welfare. Wapshott writes of this quietest duty
to do nothing: “Keynes believed it was a government’s duty to do what it could
to make life easier, particularly for the unemployed. Hayek believed it was
futile for governments to interfere with forces that were, in their own way, as
immutable as natural forces…Hayek eventually came to the conclusion that
knowledge about how exactly an economy worked was difficult if not impossible
to discover and that attempts to form economic policy based on such evidence
were, like a barber practicing primitive surgery, likely to do more harm than
good (Wapshott, Nicholas, “Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern
Economics,” 2011, Norton. pp. 43-44)(pdf.).”
For example 1: “In
his writings of 1934 Marcuse argued that liberalism had as its natural
successor totalitarianism. In 1960 he took the prevailing social order of the
advanced countries to embody just such a totalitarianism. He was thus prepared
to characterize in the same terms Hitler’s Germany and the United States of
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon— or at the very least he was committed to hold that
there were strong and growing tendencies in the United States which may be
characterized in key respects as resembling Nazism. But the totalitarianism of
the present is expressed not in political dictatorship but above all in the
elimination of a culture which embodies ideals subversive of and alternative to
the status quo (MEP, p. 76)."
President John F. Kennedy was shot
down in the streets of Dallas like a dog. No correct answers were ever given by
the US Government to the American people on this murder that involved the CIA working with US and Cuban mafia figures. The Warren Commission reported that the
assassin was a “Marxist” thereby throwing suspicion on American progressives
and leftists as disloyal. The American Oligarchy’s long history of utter
contempt of American citizens, and truth itself, is staggering. Richard
Nixon was involved with the mafia since he managed crap games at carnivals as a
youth, and then eventually became an attorney for the Cuban mafia. President
Johnson murdered millions of Vietnamese rice farmers, and American soldiers in
a completely voluntary war. When asked by a journalist why America was bombing
Vietnam, and Cambodia beyond the scale of even WWII, President Lyndon Baines
Johnson of the United States of America pulled out his penis and said, “That’s
why!”
2. The Professor
wrote: "In assimilating Nazi Germany to such societies as those of
North America and Britain today, Marcuse can only assist in obscuring the small
but genuine threat from the neo-Fascist right that does exist in those
societies (MEP, p. 77)."
Poor (ἀπορία), Alasdair
MacIntyre.
3. On education and the economy: “Followers of Marcuse often claim, for example, that the higher educational system has the function of producing and processing those whom the economy needs. Nothing could be further from the truth. In every advanced industrial society higher education has been expanded and the job structure enlarged and changed; but the relation between the two has been weakened, not strengthened, for the two expansions have simply not stood in any determinate relationship (MEP, p. 79)."
In 1972 when the mafia lawyer, President Richard Nixon, met with the RED CHINESE COMMUNIST CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG to ship the entire American industrial manufacturing base to Communist China in a massive corporate scheme to laundry their profits through proxies to avoid paying American taxes. The American Oligarchy and what is left of the conservative middle-class cheered the trade agreement! It is no wonder the relation between higher education and job structure has weakened. And once again Marcuse was right about the possible assimilation and convergence of two economic systems into a hybrid of centralized economic and political bureaucracies…Mr. Beale! Unlike many American government politicians, the very successful Wall Street Socialists are very serious students and listen carefully to Marxist economists.
4. “But the degrees to which different sectors are affected, the rates at which they expand, and the directions in which they expand are quite different. The result is not the highly integrated and well-coordinated system portrayed by Marcuse, but rather a situation in which there is less and less coordination between different sector (MEP, p. 79)."
This is MacIntyre’s apologetic for
Friedrich von Hayek’s Laissez-Faire market selective agnosticism and
it really took off in the 1970s as American oligarchs secretly embraced fascist
Neo-Liberalism and de-industrialized America. It is persons in authority and
held in high esteem that helped make corporatism the economic reality of today
in America: recessions, inflation, unemployment, massive financial fraud,
chronic long-term homelessness, unnecessary austerity imposed on the poor, and
massive wealth hoarded by the billionaire class. Who could of known?
5. Curveball writes: “The paradigmatic
example of political accident is the Vietnam war. The myth of American
imperialism in Vietnam is the product of a collaboration between the sternest
critics of the war and its sternest supporters. (MEP, p. 80)."
The Vietnam War was based on lies of
an attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. American oligarchs wanted control
of the colonial slaves the French once exploited and it took millions of
dollars, thousands of man-hours of planning, murder, torture clouded by a
tsunami of sophisticated crafted propaganda still believed day.
Noticed what has occurred once again
in all the chapters we have covered so far: in each case MacIntyre’s polemic
stays focused on the broadest epistemological-methodological questions so that
rarely does a discussion about Marcuse actually get down to the text itself.
This is one reason Marcuse is not well known, and is instead a target of
endless tropes. The core insight of One-Dimensional Man is
really in the first main division titled “One-Dimensional Society” pages
19-123; give special attention to the subdivisions “The Closing of the
Political Universe,” pages 19-56 and “The Closing of the Universe of
Discourse,” pages 84-123.”
So far I have commented on all eight chapters of MacIntyre’s polemic except for MEP, chapter seven, “One-Dimensional Man: The Critique of Modern Philosophy that is meant to address ODM section “7. The Triumph of Positive Thinking: One-Dimensional Philosophy.” Once again MacIntyre heads to the hills of epistemological and methodological questions; however, this time his strategy goes horribly wrong even though the questions are indeed about epistemology, language, and logic. In the next section, we will discuss meta-logic.
MacIntyre’s Criticism of
Marcuse on the Paralysis of “One-Dimensional Thought.”
“The suspicion is thus engendered that not only Marcuse but also Adorno and Horkheimer actually do not know any logic, and it is certainly the case that, if they do know any, all three have taken some pains to conceal their knowledge of the subject which they are professedly criticizing.”—MacIntyre, MEP, p. 88
“Frege’s…discovery of quantification, the deepest single technical advance ever made in logic….”—Michael Dummett, Professor of Logic, University of Oxford
"There
are three foci for Marcuse's discontent with recent philosophy: its uses of
formal logic, its preoccupation with language and above all with ordinary
language, and its philosophy of science (MEP, p. 85)." This is an accurate summary of Marcuse’s criticism
of contemporary philosophy. However, I will let MacIntyre dig a deeper hole for
his polemic before presenting my counter-arguments.
MacIntyre
objects to Marcuse’s view of logic: “…Marcuse's treatment of logic thus
rests upon two closely linked ideas, that there was a point in human history at
which thought was subordinated to and organized by the laws of logic, and that
we can contrast thought prior to such subordination and organization with
thought subjected to this control. Both these ideas are mistaken (MEP, p. 85;
brackets added)."
This
is a straw man version of Marcuse’s position on epistemology. Like Husserl,
Marcuse rejects logico-mathematical
psychologism. MacIntyre is mistakenly assuming that logic has an essence
that only needs to be empirically discovered, like the 49er Miners searching
for gold.
“What
logic does is to articulate and to make explicit those rules which are in fact
embodied in actual discourse and which, being so embodied, enable men both to
construct valid arguments and to avoid the penalties of inconsistency…if it is true
that either James did come home or John went to the cinema, and that James did
not come home, then it is true that John went to the cinema... For the laws of
logic are rules accord with which is necessary if consistency is to be preserved
and contradiction to be avoided. Marcuse takes it to be some kind of special
doctrine of formal logic that “contradictions are the fault of incorrect
thinking. It is perhaps the case that we owe it to formal logicians that we are
as well-informed as we are about the nature of and the penalties to be paid
for contradiction (MEP, p. 86; bold text added)."
MacIntyre is teaching basic deductive reasoning to impress the reader, which I attempt to do sometimes. Here is his example argument in symbolic form:
[(H v C) * ~H] ⊃ C
1. H v C
2. ~H _____________________
/:: C (1, 2 Disjunctive Syllogism)
C = James when to the cinema
⊃ = If, then
~= Not
/:: = Therefore
The Metalogic of Contradiction
"Your
neural pathways end up being reshaped by the paradigm that you live
inside...."
--Economist
Steve Keen in interview.
However,
there is a contradiction even in categorical predicate logic itself that
MacIntyre seems to have forgotten because we are only speaking of “things,” or
the arithmetic of cookies and pebbles. What will happen if we apply
symbolic categorical predicate logic to “non-objects” or abstract hyper-objects
that are not simply things, but are attributes of attributes? Professor
of Economics, Dr. Steve Keen has studied in depth this relationship of abstract
attributes to abstract attributes in Neo-Classical economics that attempts to
treat macroeconomics as “applied microeconomics.” The false assumption is that
the lower level (micro) can rebuild the higher level (macro) because, “The
ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the
ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe…Instead, at
each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the
understanding of the new behaviors (Anderson 1972, p. 393 quoted by Dr. Keen;
bold added).” Professor Keen gives a fascinating lecture on this epistemological
reconstruction fallacy, and a chance to witness some pretty impressive
symbolic logic in the process: see the beginning of lecture “Macroeconomic Dynamics and
Energy In Minsky Poznan Summer School 2022” for the above details
mentioned.
“[Logic]…the arithmetic of
cookies and pebbles.”—Gottlob Frege
The
following proof is known as “Russell’s Paradox” after Bertrand Russell’s discovery of a
contradiction in quantification predicate logic that he, Frege, and
Wittgenstein helped formulate. There are numerous complex versions of Russell’s
Paradox (in this context “paradox’ is a euphemism for “contradiction”), but the
following example is the version easiest to grasp in my opinion. The symbolism
scheme can be found in Irving Copi’s textbook “Symbolic logic” fifth edition,
1979; p. 153 (pdf.).
Copi provides a minimum of symbols so the reader is left to figure out how they
fit together and translate into ordinary language. This is the way the logical
sausage is made (For fuller details, and my conclusions see “Bertrand Russell's Critique of Fregean
Logico-Mathematical Objects.”).
Definitions:
‘s’ = Socrates
~ = negation
≡ Equivalent truth-value of proposition.
F = Predicate variable for the concept of an “attribute”
(F) = “all attributes.”
FF = Predicable class attributes**
I = Impredicable variable class attribute *
IF = Impredicable class attributes
II = Impredicable class attributes
(∃F) = This is a special symbol to mean “At least one attribute.”
(∃F)Fs means, “some attribute” as in writing, “Socrates has some attribute.”
*We need a symbol for this proof to represent “impredicable attributes” of classes. For example, the class of pebbles is not itself a pebble. The class of pebbles does not share any attribute of any of its members (pebbles) so the class is defined as “impredicable” represented by the symbol “II”. Impredicable class attributes are ordinary classes.
"The 'class' of all dogs does not bark."--Unknown
**On the other hand, there are some unordinary classes that share predicable attributes the same as its members such as the class of all abstract ideas, which is in itself abstract. Predicable class attributes are defined as “FF”. Predicable class attributes are abstract attributes of attributes.
Russell’s Paradox is the following:
1.) IF ≡ df ~FF
Impredicable class
attributes are now defined (≡ df) as
non-predicable class attributes.
2.) (F)(IF ≡ ~FF)
All
impredicable class attributes (ordinary classes) are defined as non-predicable
class attributes.
_____________________________________________________________________
3.) Therefore: II ≡
~II
Impredicable
class attributes are not impredicable class attributes.”
Universal Instantiation , applied to premise 2. By replacing all “F” with “I” in premise 2 resulting in a contradictory conclusion line, 3.
"For the laws of logic are rules accord with which is
necessary if consistency is to be preserved and contradiction to be avoided.”-- MacIntyre (MEP, p.
96).
“Alas, arithmetic totters.”--Gottlieb Frege
The
point of Russell’s Paradox is a contradiction will
sometimes appear when we treat deductively abstract ideas that are “attributes
of attributes” as if they were objects (cookies and pebbles). The
contradiction emerges because some abstracted attributes (ϕx) contain other nested internal
attributes that improperly reference functions (‘all’, ‘some,’ or, ‘not’)
that are not of the same type (`ϕx). Ordinary language refers to functions f(x) and classes
(∪β) differently. One suggested solution was
to eliminate all abstract ideas, which is what some logical positivists attempted to do! Abstract ideas cannot be
eliminated, however. Maybe epistemological positivism, which only accepts the
object, “what is,” as true explains the one-dimensionality of American
academia. Russell’s solution was to symbolically manage differing hierarchies
of attributes, and orders by the Theory of Types, but had
little success do to its overwhelming complexity. Abstract ideas, or hyper-objects
such as the concepts of society, political parties, historical epochs, and
economic production require additional methodologies other than deductive
symbolic logic. To avoid the price of contradiction, we must include the
logics of inductive reasoning; Bayesian logic; Kantian transcendental criticism;
phenomenological existentialism; dialectical reasoning; analogical reasoning;
along with reasoning of the parts and the whole (Universals).
"A
pupil of Duns Scotus demonstrated that—without, incidentally, making use of a
formal calculus— and C. I. Lewis followed him in demonstrating that from a
contradiction any statement whatsoever can be validly derived (MEP, p.
87)."
Another
proof was shown earlier of this very principle regarding Matt’s earlier
proposition “ethics is not ethical.” I did not know the proof’s history, but
only learned it symbolically, or formally as a rule of organization. But wait!
Notice that MacIntyre is giving a historical account of logical
contradiction (MacIntyre is not making an argument for psychologism:
that would be a straw man mischaracterization). Marcuse would agree, but
MacIntyre wrote in criticism of him “…that there was a point in human
history at which thought was subordinated to and organized by the laws of
logic, and that we can contrast thought prior to such subordination and
organization with thought subjected to this control. Both these ideas are
mistaken (MEP, p. 85). MacIntyre points to a historical fact about logic;
yet, he accuses Marcuse of relativism for linking history and logic. Both
MacIntyre and Marcuse reject relativistic psychologism, and both see the
value of understanding historical influences on logical development.
The
Frankfurt School did not view Reason as immune to historical development.
Marcuse has a richer ontological conception of Reason as all the German
Idealists: “Reason comprehends everything and ultimately absolves everything,
because it has its place and function in the whole, and the whole is beyond
good and evil, truth and falsehood. It may even be justifiable, logically as
well as historically, to define Reason in terms which include slavery, the
Inquisition, child labor, concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear
preparedness. These may well have been integral parts of that rationality which
has governed the recorded history of mankind. If so, the idea of Reason itself
is at stake; it reveals itself as a part rather than as the whole. This does
not mean that reason abdicates its claim to confront reality with the truth
about reality. On the contrary, when Marxian theory takes shape as a critique
of Hegel’s philosophy, it does so in the name of Reason (RR, p. xii).”
Remember that MacIntyre is writing without
taking into account Russell’s Paradox and continues to dig a deeper hole
for his polemic: "This entails the falsity of Marcuse’s view of
logic. For the distinction between thought which accords with and thought
which does not accord with the laws of logic is obliterated… There could
not, moreover, be any point in the history of thought at which thought was
subordinated to, organized by, or made subject to the control of formal logic.
The whole metaphor of control is thus out of place, for it depends for its
cogency on just that contrast between thought as yet uninformed by the rules of
logic and thought so informed which the preceding arguments show to be mistaken
(MEP, p. 88 )."
The “laws of logic” are not discovered--they are invented. A single mathematician did not discover the number one, and another discovered years later the number ten, then number seventeen and so on. Mathematicians are inventors of an infinite series of numbers (n + 1). New mathematical objects appeared with “imaginary numbers” a term coined by Descartes, and later conceptually developed by Augustin-Louis Cauchy. Take for example, the invention of the new number known as the fraction (X/Y) was initially viewed as an occult mathematical concept: “In general we find that every new mode of number which mathematical thinking is impelled to form, can always by defined in terms of a numerical system of an earlier kind and replaced in its application by this system.48 This is apparent even in the introduction of fractions, for the fraction—as J. Tannery has stressed--cannot be explained as a union of equal parts of the unit, since the numerical unit as such admits of no division and fragmentation; it must rather be taken as an aggregate (ensemble) of two whole numbers which stand in a determinate relation to each other. Such aggregates then form a new kind of mathematical object, for which equality, the greater or lesser, and the various arithmetical operations of addition, subtraction, etc. can de defined.48 ("The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge," E. Cassirer, 1957; p. 396; bold added )(pdf.).”
“Marcuse says that ‘the sterility of Aristotelian formal logic has often been noted. Philosophic thought developed alongside and even outside this logic.’ But such accusations have been characteristically made in periods when formal logic had degenerated or disappeared (MEP, p. 88 ).”
In another example, Aristotelian logic itself is flawed from an overlooked fine distinction called the Existential Fallacy. This fallacy is committed when one makes a universal generalization, “All trespassers on my property will be prosecuted; therefore, at least one trespasser has been prosecuted.” The premise can be true, but the conclusion could still be false since no one may have trespassed. In other words, the inference is invalid by presupposing existential import—i.e., someone actually trespassed:
1.) (x)(Tx ⊃ Px)
All trespassers will be prosecuted.
/:: (∃x)(Tx * Px)
Therefore,
some of those prosecuted will have trespassed.
Modern
quantification predicate logic has Boolean rules to prevent this fallacious
inference, and this system of symbolization is much more powerful than the old Venn Diagram scheme. Logic is created, not discovered. Logician,
I.M Copi, commented on this issue in his textbook, “Introduction To Logic,”
Seventh edition (pdf.) Macmillan, 1986; pp. 191-92,
341: "On the basis of such objections as these, modern logicians
decline to make this blanket existential presupposition, even though their
decision forces them to give up some of the traditional Aristotelian logic.
In contrast to the traditional or Aristotelian interpretation, the modern
treatment of standard-form categorical propositions is called Boolean,3
after the English mathematician and logician George Boole (1815—1864), one of
the founders of modern symbolic logic (Copi; seventh, p. 192)."
MacIntyre and
the Two Wittgensteins Problem
Toward the end of chapter eight, MacIntyre turns to Marcuse’s criticism of philosophy as taught in American and European academia which means we must briefly examine logical positivism, analytic philosophy, and ordinary language philosophy with special attention given to Ludwig Wittgenstein. I will use the same strategy as before and let MacIntyre dig another hole for his polemic. MacIntyre harshly criticizes Marcuse for his inability to think logically, and invokes his own version of Wittgenstein’s logic as his paradigm. I do not believe either Marcuse, nor MacIntyre understood fully the difference between the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, (1921) and later, of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) published posthumously.
“Since it is
the irrationalism of modern society which Marcuse wishes to unmesh and whose
sources he wishes to identify, his failure to understand the role of logic in
intellectual matters is a symptom of the failure of his whole inquiry.”
--MacIntyre (MEP, p. 90)
While scolding Marcuse, MacIntyre
implies logic has an essence (i.e., that logic is an
unexpressed latent calculus hidden within ordinary language) that only needs to
be discovered (the early Wittgensteinian view). Yet, MacIntyre embraces the
very different anthropological view of language as “meaning
is use,” within a form of life (the later Wittgenstein). All of
this makes no difference to Marcuse’s criticism of academic philosophy for his
complaint concerns how philosophy is taught in
the university system. The Wittgenstein that Marcuse attacks is the early
Wittgenstein associated with the Vienna Circle of logical positivism and is
the typical interpretation taught by and large. Like a boxer, MacIntyre has a
right-handed glove (early positivist Wittgenstein) and a left-handed glove
(later post-positivist Wittgenstein) to criticize Marcuse, but as theories of
language both paradigms are incompatible even for Wittgenstein. One
Wittgenstein is a positivist, and the other is a mystic of the ordinary.
“The Tractatus
was not like a bag of junk professing to be a clock, but like a clock that
did not tell you the right time.”--Wittgenstein
("An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus," G.E.M. Anscombe, 1963, 2nd ed., p. 78 )
Wittgenstein’s mysticism of
the ordinary is completely missing from his philosophy of logic as it
is typically taught in English speaking universities. The reader does not have
to agree with just my viewpoint. Referencing the same encyclopedia that I read
my first article by professor MacIntyre (he has written many articles in that
particular edition), but fortunately he did not author this one on
Wittgenstein. Instead, a former student of Wittgenstein’s, Norman Malcolm,
wrote the article and made the following complaint: “The Tractatus does
not contain, therefore, an empiricist theory of meaning. What it holds is that
to understand any sentence one must know the references of the names that
compose it; that is all…the picture theory is not a verification theory of
meaning. It is ironical that the role of verification in meaning, and
understanding receives much attention in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which
obviously is not positivistic, but none at all in the reputedly
positivistic Tractatus (Encycl., 1967 ed., Macmillan &
Free Press, Vols. 7 & 8; p. 334).” It’s a strange dance.
“Consequently, positivism is a struggle against all metaphysics, transcendentalisms, and idealisms as obscurantist and regressive modes of thought.”--Marcuse (ODM, p. 176)
My experience in academia supports Malcolm’s description. Within academia only the positivistic Wittgenstein is taught which MacIntyre then incorporates as a Straw man into his criticism of Marcuse for misunderstanding analytic philosophy. In one philosophy class, I had an analytic language professor cancel a course on Wittgenstein because some students were interested in Wittgenstein’s mysticism. They walked out of the classroom when he said the topic would not be covered. I should have followed them out. The first I ever encountered Wittgenstein was through reading Marcuse, and I naturally thought Wittgenstein was a Vienna Circle logical positivist, but later I was shocked (as the Vienna positivists were) to discover that Wittgenstein was a radical mystic! I had always been critical of logical positivism; however, Wittgenstein is no analytic philosopher like A.J. Ayer. I totally misread Wittgenstein based on Marcuse’s critique of logical positivism.
I fault Marcuse of not clearly
answering Tillich’s question of whether positivism is inherently reactionary,
and for not distinguishing between positivism of the early
Wittgenstein and his later anthropological materialist approach
to philosophy of language. Actually, Marcuse is philosophically closer to the
later Wittgenstein’s anthropological view of language than MacIntyre! As I
noted earlier, journalist Matt Taibbi is not the first person to misread a
philosopher. However, MacIntyre is another case for he is a product of the
contemporary philosophical academy. This is the context to keep in mind while
reading his anti-Marcusean polemic. Wittgenstein always complained about
Russell, G.E. Moore, and the Vienna Circle misunderstanding his philosophy of
language and logic. He sometimes seemed arrogant, but it turns out he is right.
“To be sure, the talk of x and y is perfectly understandable, and the linguistic analyst appeals righteously to the normal understanding of ordinary people. But in reality, we understand each other only through whole areas of misunderstanding and contradiction.”--A very Wittgensteinian quote by Marcuse (ODM, p. 203)
"Marcuse believes that formal
logic is the logic of the "given reality” or "established reality,”
whereas dialectical logic is committed to opposition to established reality
(MEP, p. 89)." Dialectical logic involves any two antipodal forces
interacting against the other such as being and thought; appearance and
reality; empiricism and rationalism; sacred and secular; infinite and
finite—and yes, the actual and the potential.
He continues: "Marcuse’s
criticism of "linguistic philosophy” is not unaffected by his
misunderstandings of logic. He also makes his own task unnecessarily difficult
(and yet of course much easier) by lumping together the in fact very
different views of Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. A consequence of these
two features of his thought is that he does not notice how the kind of concern
which perhaps does underlie his worries about logic was in fact formulated very
clearly by Wittgenstein. The whole drive of Wittgenstein’s concern in the Philosophical
Investigations is directed to showing that the structure of a language
is very different from that of a calculus. A calculus may be consistent or
inconsistent, complete or incomplete; a language cannot be any of these
things. It is we who are on occasion inconsistent, not the language, or
language. It follows that the rules of a language and what it is to
follow the rules of a language are quite different from the rules of a calculus
and what it is to follow the rules of a calculus (MEP, p. 90; bold
added)."
Macintyre does understand the later Wittgenstein as rejecting the essence theory of logic, but for Marcuse language can be inconsistent, incomplete, and still be meaningful in the realms of art, religion, and ethics for example. Interestingly, Wittgenstein dedicated Philosophical Investigations to the Italian Marxist economist, Piero Straffa, who supplied the communist leader Antonio Gramsci with the supplies he needed to write, “The Prison Notebooks,” while jailed for criticizing Mussolini’s fascist policies. Wittgenstein said Straffa is the person who most influenced him to brake away from the Tractatus essentialist view of logic to a new “anthropological” approach (see details, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty of Genius,” by Ray Monk, 1990; p. 260-61)(pdf.). I believe anthropologists and philologists know all the answers!
“Thus the
poetic language speaks of that which is of this world, which is visible,
tangible, audible in man and nature--and of that which is not seen, not
touched, not
heard.” *--(ODM, p. 70)
*(I know what they told you about Marxists—but they are untruthful!)
"Wittgenstein did not believe,
that is, that philosophy is to be used as an instrument for changing language;
philosophy’s task is clarificatory. Once again it is clear that Marcuse’s
criticism of philosophy rests on his Young Hegelian inflation of the claims of
philosophy. Marcuse tries to make the specific criticism of specific social
orders and an understanding of the task of changing them all part of the content
of philosophy. But in exaggerating philosophy’s claims, he misses what
philosophy can achieve. On this topic too he misunderstands and misrepresents
Wittgenstein (MEP, p. 93)."
MacIntyre repeats himself constantly
with interlocking memes. What is the consequence of his criticism if
categorical logic itself contains a contradiction? Actual use of language is an
invention and so is symbolic logic. MacIntyre acknowledges in his expositions
of the two Wittgensteins of the Tractatus, (formal logic) and the Philosophical
Investigations (ordinary Language), but by philosophical predisposition falls
back to into positivism. However, even in the Tractatus there
is a “loophole,” (poetry, art, spirituality, and philosophy) to say the
unsayable. The cartoon version of Wittgenstein is better suited for MacIntyre’s
anti-Marcusean criticism. Some positivists are too reductionist,
oversimplifying, dogmatic, and even mock Wittgenstein’s mysticism.
"...the verification principle
formulated by members of the Vienna Circle, according to which the meaning of a
statement is the method of its verification. Objections both to operationalism
and to verificationism have been framed which are far more cogent than any
suggested by Marcuse; but such objections are disregarded by him, perhaps
because his fundamental objection to positivism is such that it could hold
against any philosophy of science, especially if it has implications for the
philosophy of meaning (MEP, p. 93)."
Verificationism is a dead
philosophy because it could not verify itself by its own criterion.
The Vienna School of logical positivism forced a strictly positivist
interpretation of Wittgenstein who was a mystic. Eventually, the Vienna School
closed. Some universities would rather teach a dead philosophy to reinforce
the status quo than one that enhances actualization of human
potentiality and the polis. In fact, the modern American university system in
cooperation with the Wall Street Socialist banks gleefully put multiple
generations of student loan borrowers into permanent debt servitude—on the road
to serfdom.
The last few paragraphs of MacIntyre’s polemic end in ad hominem.
END
“Like a soul without a mind, in a body without a heart, I’m missing every part.”
