Chapter eight The Last Philosophy of Praxis marcuse’s phenomenology

In this chapter I will bring the story of the Frankfurt School and philosophy of praxis to a conclusion. I first discuss phenomenological themes in Marcuse linked to his startling conception of a liberation of nature. The chapter continues with a discussion of the ontological significance of Marcuse’s concept of nature, and concludes with remarks on the relation of science and technology in critical theory.

Despite differences in terminology, sources, and politics, Marcuse’s argument is similar in many respects to Adorno’s, but he emphasizes alienation rather than commodity fetishism as the underlying problem of advanced industrial society. This ties his argument more closely to Hegel, whose dialectic of master and slave is the original formulation of the concept of alienation. Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic of essence resembles Adorno’s concept of non-identity but it is also shaped by this theme from the Phenomenology. Adorno would surely have rejected the teleological concept of history it implies. The significance of this difference becomes clear in the 1960s.

Chapters 5 and 6 of One-Dimensional Man present a remarkable synthesis of phenomenology and Marxism.¹ Marcuse’s argument can be clarified by reference to four main sources: Lukács’s concept of reification, Heidegger’s critique of technology, Husserl’s late discussion of science and the lifeworld, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of the impoverishment of experience under capitalism. The problem Marcuse poses is how to explain the connection between capitalism as a system of domination and scientific-technical rationality. Chapter 5 contrasts premodern ontology with modern science. Chapter 6 then explores the connection between science and technology and concludes with a discussion of their political role under capitalism.

This problematic is first articulated from within Marxism by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. He signals the congruence of modern scientific modes of thought and the structure of everyday experience under capitalism. He describes the reified form of objectivity of experience through which it loses its human qualities and comes to resemble the “facts” of natural science. As we have seen in Chapter 4 of this book, the “form of objectivity” is a neo-Kantian version of Kant’s a priori preconditions of experience. But in contrast with the neo-Kantians, Lukács argues that reification derives from the commodity form rather than from the structure of consciousness.

Marcuse sketches a history of rationality as a succession of such a priori preconditions. In ancient Greece, reason encountered a world of independent things, each with a meaning and purpose. For the Greeks, exemplified by Aristotle, these things are “substances.” As such they are more than the sum of their mechanically related parts. They have an inner core that holds them together in the face of change. This core combines logos and eros. Things exhibit both rational structure and orientation toward a “desired” end, their telos. Aristotle introduced the word “essence” to talk about this core. It is the dynamic center of the thing’s being that drives it toward perfection. Here “is” and “ought” are harmonized in the notion of potentiality. As potentiality, value belongs to the objective world; it is not reduced to a subjective preference as in the modern projection of being.

The Greek conception is realized practically in technē, the knowledge associated with craft production and artistic creation. Like natural objects, artifacts have an objective essence, but unlike natural objects they cannot realize that essence through an inner dynamic. They require the help of a craftsman. Technē thus incorporates the ends as well as the means, the final cause as well as the matter, form, and skills of the maker. This is “objective rationality” in Horkheimer’s sense.²

Today we no longer believe in teleological substances; instead, scientific reason offers mechanical explanations of a purposeless nature. The things of experience are broken up into measurable components, functional units awaiting transformation and recombination. The relations between these components are explained causally, as a kind of machinery. This new concept of reason is the a priori of science, the precondition of its mode of experiencing and understanding the world. Marcuse follows Hegel in claiming that the domain of history responds to a different logic in which potentiality still has a place. He does not envisage a return to the Greek world. That is neither possible nor desirable. But he does attempt to reconstruct the idea of potentiality in modern terms as the relation between value and fact in social life. “Logical truth becomes historical truth. The ontological tension between essence and appearance, between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ becomes historical tension and the ‘inner negativity’ of the object-world is understood as the work of the historical subject.”³ This historical reconstruction of the concept of essence provides a standard for the critique of modern society and especially its science and technology.

In his 1930 book Hegel’s Ontology, Marcuse argues that reality has two “dimensions,” empirical existence and the essence of the phenomena, their potentialities striving toward realization. As a historical thesis this implies a progressive vision in which the potentialities are expressed in social struggle. But, in One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, Marcuse argues that advanced capitalist society restricts thought and action more and more to the first dimension. This “one-dimensional society” tends to reduce everything to its empirically given form, suppressing the second dimension of essential potentiality. Thus what Adorno calls “identifying thought” prevails. It blocks recognition of the inadequacy of the available satisfactions and the dangers of unreflective technological advance.

Like Adorno’s distinction between ordinary and “emphatic” universals, Marcuse’s distinction between formal and substantive universals corresponds to the two dimensions.⁴ Formal universals classify objects in accordance with quantity and quality. They refer to the empirical, the factual. Substantive universals such as freedom and equality point beyond the facts toward their potentialities. These potentialities are not unreal but are implied in the manifold connections and the history of the phenomena, their constellations. The objects of everyday experience reveal themselves as incomplete, as still fraught with possibilities. Knowledge of this second dimension depends on the imaginative power of the human mind which transcends the given toward its essential meaning. The validation of the transcending content of the substantive universals today is based on the actual technical potential of the production system, which could provide a better and freer life under a different political and economic dispensation.

By contrast, science works exclusively with formal universals. It projects a world of quantitative determinations, dissolving the object as a substantial reality. In eliminating the dimension of essence, science exposes the object to mechanical explanation and technical manipulation. It does not recognize potentialities but only the empirically given facts. In practice it serves those with the power to establish the facts and reinforces their power.

Science has two essential features, quantification and instrumentalization. It does not address experience in its immediacy but transforms everything it encounters into quantities. Since quantities are alien to values, this stance eliminates purpose from the world. This is the basis of the value-neutrality of science, its indifference to the good and the beautiful in the interests of the true. But values do exist and require some sort of locus. Hence, correlated with the quantified reality of science there is an inner world of subjective feelings in which everything associated with value takes refuge. This inner world is excluded from the objective world science explains, hence also from the domain of rationality.

The scientific world, now stripped of any valuative features and disaggregated, is exposed to unrestrained instrumental control. Within the context of research this instrumentalism appears innocent enough. Science learns by manipulating its objects in experiments. The prior quantification of the objects makes it possible to draw precise conclusions from these manipulations. But the innocence of science is lost when the possibilities of instrumental control are exploited on a much larger scale by technology.

Like Heidegger, Marcuse concludes that the technical applicability of science is no accident. A technological project lies at its basis. “The science of nature develops under the technological a priori which projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organization.”⁵ The unity of science and technology lies in the fact that the quantifiable reality of science is an instrumentalizable reality for society. What for science is a measurable object of experiment and explanation is raw material for production in society. In both cases the a priori concept of the object precedes and makes possible its appropriation by rational theory and practice.

Marcuse’s critique of science and technology reverses the Marxist thesis according to which socialism will free the technical forces of production blocked by outmoded capitalist relations of production. Marcuse insists instead that the existing technology dominates both human beings and nature. The forces of production themselves must be reconstructed on the basis of life-affirming values. Their mere growth is not progressive. A social revolution must interrupt the “continuity of domination” now installed in the very structure of the machines. This requires

a break with the continuity of the technical apparatus of productivity which, for Marx, would extend (freed from capitalist abuse) to the socialist society. Such “technological” continuity would constitute a fateful link between capitalism and socialism, because this apparatus has, in its very structure and scope, become an apparatus of control and domination. Cutting this link would mean, not to regress in the technical progress, but to reconstruct the technical apparatus in accordance with the needs of free men.⁶

Marcuse’s critical strategy is complex. On the one hand, while he never calls into question the cognitive value of natural science and technology, he argues that they have been incorporated into the capitalist system and are part of its apparatus of exploitation and alienation. But he also believes that science and technology are historically contingent and that they may be transformed in the future. Thus the critique is not entirely negative. On the other hand, Marcuse’s critique extends beyond actual science and technology to the a priori cultural form that determines them. This technological a priori operates throughout social life, determining the experience of objects generally, even those remote from scientific and technological intervention. This aspect of the critique is to some extent independent of the first.

Marcuse cites several passages from Heidegger’s writings in support of his concept of the technological a priori. Heidegger explains that the “essence of technics”—Marcuse’s a priori—is a project of mechanization. “Modern man takes the entirety of Being as raw material for production and subjects the entirety of the object-world to the sweep and order of production … the use of machinery and the production of machines is not technics itself but merely an adequate instrument for the realization of the essence of technics in its objective raw materials.”⁷

In Heidegger the essence of technics is a dispensation of being, but Marcuse argues that it has a social basis in capitalism. He quotes Horkheimer and Adorno, who trace its source to the capitalist transformation of labor: “By virtue of the rationalization of the modes of labor, the elimination of qualities is transferred from the universe of science to that of daily experience.”⁸ Marcuse draws on phenomenology to analyze this “transfer.”

Modern science is adjusted to the requirements of a “universe of self-propelling, productive control.”⁹ It is not the goals of science or its particular theories that are so determined but the structure of scientific rationality. “The projection of nature as quantifiable matter … would be the horizon of a concrete societal practice which would be preserved in the development of the scientific project.”¹⁰ How has this come about? Marcuse rejects a causal explanation and turns instead to Husserl’s analysis of the relation of science to the lifeworld.

The concept of “lifeworld” refers to everyday experience. Husserl understands experience not in terms of the famous sense data of empiricism but as a system of meanings immediately available to consciousness and enacted in ordinary practice. In Heidegger a similar concept is called simply “world.” For both these phenomenological thinkers, science derives ultimately from a life-worldly basis. The a priori form of the scientific enterprise, its concepts and methods, are not the autonomous creations of pure reason they appear to be but are based on aspects of everyday experience in this phenomenological sense. But unlike Husserl and Heidegger, Marcuse argues that experience is traversed by social contradictions.

He writes that the lifeworld is a “specific mode of ‘seeing’ … within a purposive practical context.”¹¹ Under capitalism the context is the project of the domination of nature. “Individual, non-quantifiable qualities stand in the way of an organization of men and things in accordance with the measurable power to be extracted from them. But this is a specific, socio-historic project, and the consciousness that undertakes this project is the hidden subject of Galilean science.”¹² That subject is the capitalist class, or, in another reading of Marx, capital itself.

The concept of “project” Marcuse introduces in this passage derives from Sartre who employed it to emphasize the freedom of the subject to choose its path in life.¹³ A project is not a particular plan of action; it is what Heidegger calls the “projection” of a world, that is, an ordering of experience around a certain way of being in the world. Particular plans become possible only within a project-projection of this sort. In Sartre and Heidegger these terms are ontological categories of individual existence but Marcuse historicizes them as civilizational categories referring to the freedom of whole societies.

On this account capitalism is more than an economic system; it projects a world in the phenomenological sense of the term. The congruence of science, technology, and the form of experience is ultimately rooted in the logic of capitalism. Existing science and technology cannot transcend the capitalist world. Rather, they are destined to reproduce it by their very structure. They are inherently conservative, not because they are ideological in the usual sense of the term, nor because their understanding of nature is false, but because they are intrinsically adjusted to serving a social order that ignores potentialities and views being as the stuff of domination. Thus “technology has become the great vehicle of reification.” ¹⁴

The development of this argument is anticipated in a précis of One-Dimensional Man that Marcuse wrote while teaching in France in the late 1950s. This text contains once again a significant reference to Heidegger, but not just to the late Heidegger, famous as a critic of technology. Marcuse also goes back to Being and Time for a conception of technology as intrinsically oriented toward human needs. He writes,

A machine, a technical instrument, can be considered as neutral, as pure matter. But the machine, the instrument, does not exist outside an ensemble, a technological totality; it exists only as an element of technicity. This form of technicity is a “state of the world,” a way of existing between man and nature. Heidegger stressed that the “project” of an instrumental world precedes (and should precede) the creation of those technologies which serve as the instrument of this ensemble (technicity) before attempting to act upon it as a technician. In fact, such “transcendental” knowledge possesses a material base in the needs of society and in the incapacity of society to either satisfy or develop them. I would like to insist on the fact that the abolition of anxiety, the pacification of life, and enjoyment are the essential needs. From the beginning, the technical project contains the requirements of these needs … If one considers the existential character of technicity, one can speak of a final technological cause and the repression of this cause through the social development of technology.¹⁵

This is a peculiar passage, a kind of metacritique posing as an interpretation. It translates Heidegger’s existential analysis of worldhood as a system of instrumentalities based on a generalized concept of “care” into the historically specific concept of technicity. Heidegger’s “care” has become the orientation toward human needs intrinsic to instrumental action as such, including modern technology. But service to human needs has been blocked by capitalism. Thus Heidegger’s ontology of instrumental action unifying human being and world in terms of unspecified possible ends has become a normative account of the failure of capitalist technology to realize quite definite ends! Marcuse sets up the contrast between a truncated technological a priori aimed exclusively at domination and an alternative a priori that would fulfill the telos of technology in the creation of a harmonious society reconciled with nature. Technology is not neutral but ambivalent, available for these two different developmental paths.

Compressed in these few lines is the move Marcuse made in the early 1930s from Heidegger to Marxism via Hegel and Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844. In the Manuscripts, Marx describes the ontological unity of man and nature in terms of labor. Translated into Heideggerian terms, this would be equivalent to being-in-the-world as the ontological condition realized in everyday instrumental action. But Marx’s notion has a normative character Heidegger’s does not. The fulfillment of rich and complex human needs through the application of human capacities and powers in labor contrasts with the impoverishment and alienation of capitalism.

In Heidegger’s case there is, to be sure, what Marcuse calls a “final technological cause” but it is left completely vague, relative to the contingent project of Dasein. That vagueness would seem to be the condition for its ontological significance, whereas, from a Heideggerian standpoint, Marcuse’s turn toward need appears merely ontic. Why, given these differences, did Marcuse retain this curious reference to Heidegger?

As we will see later in this chapter, Marcuse follows Marx in attributing ontological significance to need. Furthermore, Heidegger’s concept of a transcendental project is useful for grounding the opposition of capitalism and socialism in a historicized theory of the a priori preconditions of experience. Marcuse claims that the capitalist project of technological domination of nature is historically contingent. Another world is possible.

But for this other world to enter history it must be reflected in the actions of an agent. Now that the proletariat no longer plays that role, whole swaths of Marxist theory are obsolete, especially the idea of class consciousness central to Lukács’s version of the philosophy of praxis. Marcuse substitutes the idea of a radical transformation of experience for that outmoded idea. The form of objectivity of a capitalist society is reflected in a truncated experience, but a richer experience is adumbrated in art and the oppositional movements. “The leap from the rationality of domination to the realm of freedom demands the concrete transcendence beyond this rationality, it demands new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, touching things, a new mode of experience corresponding to the needs of men and women who can and must fight for a free society.”¹⁶ The new mode of experience would mediate between the existing society and a new society based on a harmonious relation to nature.