More precisely: Who is the most loathsome philosopher in his or her personal life?
Let me set the bar high by naming my top two candidates.
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fathered several children and had them abandoned to orphanages, and of whom David Hume wrote in a letter to Adam Smith: “Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.” (David Hume, letter to Adam Smith, October 8, 1767 [Correspondence, 135])
2. Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi and who, his lover Hannah Arendt said, “lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.”
I am open to other suggestions.
Some follow up questions. When one disagrees profoundly with an intellectual’s philosophy, as I do with Rousseau’s and Heidegger’s, is it legitimate to look for a connection between the philosophical and the personal? Or can deep philosophy vary completely independently of personal behavior? Is ad hominem ever a legitimate argument strategy? One should expect integrity, especially from philosophers — i.e., that they will live what they teach and teach what they live — but we also know that hypocrisy is widespread. Should it matter now that influential philosophers were personally immoral, or do only their ideas and arguments matter now?
Intriguing sideways connection to Heidegger and militarism: Warby also reviews Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War, “a study of how Zen Buddhism became deeply complicit in Japanese militarism,” just as Heidegger’s mystically-charged writings became complicit in German militarism. Warby there points to this piece by Professor Jeremiah Reedy, who reports: “a German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of [Daisetsu Teitaro] Suzuki’s books [on Zen Buddhism]: ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.’”
Following up on an earlier post about Only a God Can Save Us, here in four parts is my 40-minute interview with van Davis about his documentary on philosopher Martin Heidegger and his involvement with National Socialism:
The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976.
At Rockford College we are hosting a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we will have a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David Sytsma and Jules Gleicher of the Rockford College history and political science departments, respectively, and myself as moderator.
Heidegger is one of the most influential of all twentieth-century philosophers, yet he was also a strong supporter of National Socialism in Germany. Is there a connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism or is the coincidence accidental? More generally, is there a connection between philosophical theory and political practice? Heidegger died in 1976 — what should we think of his never recanting his support for the Nazi movement even after the end of World War II and the Holocaust?
Time and place of the showing: March 4, 3 p.m., Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, Burpee Center, Rockford College (campus map).
From the film’s website:
“Only A God Can Save Us”
Length: 118 min.
Shot in 16mm, mini DV
Country of Origin: Germany
Shot in: USA, Germany, France, Holland
Persons featured in film:
Kardinal Karl Lehmann, Bishop of Mainz
Alfred Denker, Heidegger Biographer
Hugo Ott, Freiburg University
Victor Farias, Free University of Berlin
Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University, USA
Richard Wolin, City University of New York, USA
Ted Kisiel, Northern Illinois University, USA
Rainer Marten, Freiburg University
Emmanuel Faye, University of Paris
Bernd Martin, Freiburg University
Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, USA
Jürgen Paul, Dresden University
Silke Seemann, Freiburg University
Rangvi Wesendonk
Axel Graf Douglas, Schloss Langenstein
Some of the topics covered in the documentary:
1. Heidegger’s concept of Being and the “turning” from Dasein to Sein
2. His humble beginnings and staunch Catholic education.
3. The Rectorship and his denunciation of teachers such as Nobel Prize winner Staudinger. His enthusiasm for Gleichschaltung of Frieburg University.
4. His highly manipulative love affair with Hannah Arendt.
5. His relationship to Edith Stein.
6. His refusal to give a word of reconciliation to Paul Celan who visited him in his hut at Todtnauberg.
7. The denazification process and his refusal to recant his support for Hitler.
Kant’s legacy to the next generation is a principled separation of subject and object, of reason and reality. His philosophy is thus a forerunner of postmodernism’s strong anti-realist and anti-reason stances.
After Kant, the story of philosophy is the story of German philosophy. Kant died early in the nineteenth century, just as Germany was beginning to replace France as the world’s leading intellectual nation, and it was German philosophy that set the program for the nineteenth century.
Understanding German philosophy is crucial to understanding the origins of postmodernism. Continental postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida will cite Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel as their major formative influences—all of them German thinkers. American postmodernists such as Rorty emerged primarily from the collapse of the Logical Positivist tradition, but will also cite Heidegger and pragmatism as major formative influences. When we look to the roots of Logical Positivism we find cultural Germans such as Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle. And when we look at pragmatism, we find it to be an Americanized version of Kantianism and Hegelianism. Postmodernism is thus the supplanting of the Enlightenment with its roots in seventeenth century English philosophy by the Counter-Enlightenment with its roots in late eighteenth-century German philosophy.
Kant is central to that story. By the time of his death Kant’s philosophy had conquered the German intellectual world,[22] and so the story of German philosophy became the story of extensions and reactions to Kant
Three broad strains of post-Kantian philosophy emerged. What shall we do, members of each strain asked, about the gulf between subject and object that Kant has said cannot be crossed by reason?
1. Kant’s closest followers decided to accept the gulf and live with it. Neo-Kantianism evolved during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century two main forms had emerged. One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund Husserl was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism. Structuralism was a linguistic version of Kantianism, holding that language is a self-contained, non-referential system, and that the philosophical task was to seek out language’s necessary and universal structural features, those features taken to underlie and be prior to the empirical, contingent features of language. Phenomenology’s focus was upon careful examination of the contingent flow of the experiential given, avoiding any existential inferences or assumptions about what one experiences, and seeking simply to describe experience as neutrally and as clearly as possible. In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have.
Structuralism and Phenomenology came to prominence in the twentieth century, however, and so my focus next will be on the two strains of German philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For those two strains, Kant’s philosophy set a problem to be solved—though one to be solved within the constraints of Kant’s most fundamental premises.
2. The speculative metaphysical strain, best represented by Hegel, was dissatisfied with the principled separation of subject and object. This strain granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it metaphysically by identifying the subject with the object.
3. The irrationalist strain, best represented by Kierkegaard, was also dissatisfied by the principled separation of subject and object. It granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it epistemologically by irrational means.
Kantian philosophy thus set the stage for the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the nineteenth century.
References
[22] See, e.g., Wood, in Kant 1996, vi; also Meinecke 1977, 25.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
We do not do ourselves any favors by not understanding Nazism thoroughly or by being satisfied with superficial explanations. It took a world war to stop National Socialism in the twentieth century. War is brute force. Brute force rarely changes anyone’s minds about anything, and it alone does not destroy the underlying causes that motivate conflict. To use a crude analogy: If two neighbors are having an ongoing argument about a series of issues, and one neighbor hits the other and knocks him unconscious—that ends the argument but it does not solve their problems. The source of their argument is still there and it will re-surface.
The same holds for the underlying causes of National Socialism and its differences with the liberal democracies. The liberal democracies were able to knock out the Nazis in World War II, though it was a close call—but the underlying arguments are still with us.
The differences between National Socialism and liberal democracies are profound and involve entirely different philosophies of life. National Socialism was the product of a well-thought-out philosophy of life, the main elements of which were originated, crafted, and argued by philosophers and other intellectuals across many generations.
The Nazi intellectuals were not lightweights, and we run the risk of underestimating our enemy if we dismiss their ideology as attractive only to a few cranky weirdos.[43] If your enemy has a machine gun but you believe he only has a pea shooter, then you are setting yourself up for failure. And if we remind ourselves of the list of very heavyweight intellectuals who supported Nazism—Nobel Prize winners, outstanding philosophers and brilliant legal thinkers—then it is clear that these were no pea-shooters and that we need heavyweight intellectual ammunition to defend ourselves.
In the case of other major historical revolutions, we are more familiar with seeing the significance of philosophy. When we think for example of the causes of the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China, we naturally think back to the philosopher Karl Marx. When we think of the causes of the French Revolution, we think back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When we think of the causes of the American Revolution, we naturally think back to the philosopher John Locke. The same holds the causes of National Socialism—although since the Nazi regime went so horribly wrong, there is perhaps some reluctance to name names. Yet naming names is sometimes crucial if we are going to get to the historical heart of the matter. What philosophers can we cite in the case of the Nazis? Several names are candidates: Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, even elements from Karl Marx.
But in connection with the Nazis, perhaps the biggest and the most controversial name regularly mentioned is that of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nazis often cited Nietzsche as one of their philosophical precursors, and even though Nietzsche died thirty-three years before the Nazis came to power, references to Nietzsche crop up regularly in Nazi writings and activities. In philosopher Heidegger’s lectures, for example, “Nietzsche was presented as the Nazi philosopher.”[44]
In his study, Adolf Hitler had a bust of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1935, Hitler attended and participated in the funeral of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In 1938, the Nazis built a monument to Nietzsche. In 1943, Hitler gave a set of Nietzsche’s writings as a gift to fellow dictator Benito Mussolini.[45]
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was also a great admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Goebbels has the title character Michael die in a mining accident—afterward three books are found among his belongings: the Bible, Goethe’s Faust, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
So who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
References
[43] Recall Albert Speer on “the event that led me to [Hitler]”—a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin: Speer expected it to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).
[44] Rohkrämer 2005, p. 181.
[45] During WWI, the German government printed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and gave them to soldiers along with a copy of the Bible.
Political tools such as physical force and authoritarian laws are necessary tools for a dictatorship, but long-term control of a people also requires control of their minds. The Nazis recognized this and made re-shaping Germany’s educational system a priority. They already had a good head-start.
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, about 2.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party. Seven percent of the Party’s members were from the upper class, seven percent were peasants, thirty-five percent were industrial workers, and fifty-one percent were from the professional and middle class. Surprisingly, in the latter group, the professional and middle class, the largest occupational group represented was elementary school teachers. Hitler and the Nazis thus already had a core group of committed followers in a position to help them shape the minds of the next generation.
The general purpose of education
The Nazis had a particular kind of youth in mind. As early as 1925, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf: “the folkish state must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary.”[28]
Come 1933 and power, Hitler repeatedly made it even clearer what kind of healthy bodies he wanted the educational system to produce:
“My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes … That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication … That is how I will create the New Order.”
Intellectual training was less emphasized than physical training, but it was not omitted. Students were trained in Nazi ideology, studied German history from a National Socialist perspective, learned political activism, and trained themselves to develop a selfless, obedient, duty-oriented moral character. The curriculum was revised, textbooks re-written, and teachers trained as servants of the cause. Early in the Nazi reign, teachers were declared to be civil servants and required to join the National Socialist Teachers League, swearing an oath of absolute fidelity to Adolf Hitler.
The Hitler Youth
In addition to transforming the formal school system, the Nazis put great emphasis on the Hitler Youth organization. The Nazi Party’s youth organization had been formed in 1922, early in the party’s history, and acquired its Hitler Youth name in 1926. The purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train a cadre of devoted young followers outside the formal school system. Once the Nazis came to power, the formal German school system and the Hitler Youth became complementary training and indoctrination programs.
Boys could enter the program when they were age six, though official training began at age ten. All members of the Hitler Youth swore this oath: “In the presence of this blood-banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am ready and willing to give up my life for him, so help me God.”[29]
Full membership and systematic training began at age fourteen and included the ability to take a physical beating without whining. Brutal fighting sessions among the boys were common and encouraged. As Hitler had put it in Mein Kampf, “But above all, the young, healthy body must also learn to suffer blows.”[30] If a boy was unable to withstand the pain or pressure, he was embarrassed in front of his peers. Those who succeeded, though, received accolades, a sense of belonging to a great cause, and useful symbols of their status, such as a special dagger.
Parallel programs existed for girls. The League of Young Girls was established for girls ten to fourteen years of age. The fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old girls’ group of the Hitler Youth was the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls. From seventeen to twenty-one years of age, young Aryan women were members of Faith and Beauty. Instruction focused on home, family, and the duty to bear children. The girls’ training was similar to the boys’, including wearing military-style uniforms, engaging in soldier-like activities, and learning Nazi ideology and activism.
Although the youth were encouraged to question their parents and their non-Nazi teachers, within the Hitler Youth absolute obedience was demanded. Despite this, membership in the Hitler Youth was appealing to many young Germans. Summer camps and parades were regular activities for the Hitler Youth. There was also the feeling of camaraderie and the sense of developing a sense of self-discipline, loyalty, and honor. Membership came to be considered to be a badge of honor—and, as the Nazi Party came closer to achieving power, membership even became a status symbol.
In 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, the Hitler Youth had 107,956 members—or five percent of the German youth population. Within a year, membership had swollen to well over two million members.
In 1936, membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory. All other youth groups had ceased to exist, been absorbed into the Hitler Youth, or abolished. And by 1939, the year that World War II was to begin, membership in the Hitler Youth reached almost eight million members.
The universities
The Nazis had also achieved great success with older students, those of university age.
Well before Hitler came to power, Nazi student groups existed at universities all over Germany. Before 1933, it was common for students to come to classes wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands, and in many cases it was the most intelligent and idealistic university students who were the most activist and outspoken supporters of National Socialism.
The students also had many allies among their professors.
When the National Socialists took power, they prohibited all Jews from holding academic positions—this resulted in the firing of hundreds of tenured Jewish professors, including several Nobel Laureates. To their credit, many other professors resigned in protest or emigrated. But such professors were in the small minority.[31]
A large majority of university professors remained on the job, either silently accepting the new regime or even actively supporting it. In 1933, for example, 960 professors, including prominent figures such as philosopher Martin Heidegger, made a public proclamation of their support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime.[32]
References
[28] Hitler 1925, p. 408.
[29] Quoted in Shirer 1962, p. 253.
[30] Hitler 1925, p. 410.
[31] “But in numbers the émigrés were not to be compared with the leading figures in every field of intellectual endeavour who hailed the advent of National Socialism and pledged support to its Führer with every evidence of enthusiasm” (Craig 1978, p. 639).
[32] Shirer 1962, p. 251. Rohkrämer notes the following: “Association with National Socialism was also widespread among philosophers. While twenty philosophy professors were forced out of their positions, about thirty joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and almost half became party members by 1940” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 171). On Heidegger in particular, given his high profile in the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, “‘Martin Heidegger? A Nazi, of course a Nazi!’ On a purely factual level, this exclamation by Jürgen Habermas is fully correct. Contrary to what Heidegger and Heideggerians have long maintained, historical research has demonstrated beyond doubt Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for National Socialism. Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis before 1933, he actively maneuvered to become rector, he publicly joined the Nazi Party on May Day, and the ceremony around his Rectoral Address included Nazi flags and the singing of the ‘Horst Wessel Song.’ While Jews and political opponents were removed from the university (like his teacher Edmund Husserl) or even forced to flee the country (like his intimate friend Hannah Arendt), Heidegger showed his enthusiastic support for the destruction of the Weimar Republic and for the new regime. He praised the Führer principle for the university sector, while striving to attain such a position for himself. In speeches and newspaper articles he identified himself with Hitler’s rule, going so far as to state in autumn 1933 that ‘the Führer himself and alone is and will be Germany’s only reality and its law.’ He not only approved in principle of the Nazi cleansing, but also tried to use the new regime to destroy the academic careers of colleagues, for example by initiating a Gestapo investigation” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 172-173).
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression
Marcuse had long labored in the trenches of academic philosophy and social theory before coming to fame in America in the 1960s. He studied philosophy at Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger, later becoming an assistant to both. His first major publication was an attempt to synthesize Heideggerian phenomenology with Marxism.[25]
His powerful allegiance to Marxism combined with his Heideggerian distrust of Marxism’s rationalistic elements led Marcuse to join forces with the nascent Frankfurt School of social thought. The Frankfurt School was a loose association of mostly German intellectuals centered at the Institute for Social Research, led from 1930 on by Max Horkheimer.
Horkheimer had also been trained in philosophy, having completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Kant in 1923. From that work Horkheimer moved directly to concerns with social psychology and practical politics. In the late 1920s, while Marcuse was working on his theoretical integration of Marx and Heidegger, Horkheimer was reaching some pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of practical political change.
Setting before himself the question of why the German proletariat were not revolting, Horkheimer offered a breakdown of the politically relevant units, arguing that each was incapable of achieving anything significant.[26] Naturally enough, Horkheimer began his analysis with the working classes, dividing them into the employed and the unemployed. The employed, he noted, are not too badly off and seem content enough. It is the unemployed who are in the worst shape. Their situation is also getting worse, for as the mechanization of production increases, unemployment also increases. But the unemployed are also the least educated class and the least organized, and that has made it impossible to raise their class consciousness. A clear sign of this is that they waver between voting for the Communists, who are blindly following Moscow, and the National Socialists who are, well, a bunch of Nazis. The only other socialist party is the Social Democrats, but they are much too pragmatic and reformist to be effective.
So, Horkheimer concluded, the situation is hopeless for socialism. The employed are too comfortable, the unemployed are too scatterbrained, the social democrats are too wishy-washy, the communists are too obediently following authority, and the National Socialists are un-discussable.
As way out of the morass, the Frankfurt School’s members began to explore the idea of adding a more sophisticated social psychology to Marxism’s economic and historical logic. Traditional Marxism emphasized the inexorable laws of economic development and de-emphasized the contribution of human actors. Given that those Marxist laws seemed rather more exorable in their non-development, the Frankfurt School suggested that history is as much made by human actors, and especially by how those human actors understand themselves psychologically and their existential situation. Incorporating a better social psychology into Marxism would hopefully explain why the revolution had not happened and suggest what would be necessary to make it happen.
For sophisticated social psychology the Frankfurt School turned to Sigmund Freud. Applying his own psychoanalytic theories to social philosophy, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argued that civilization is an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies. Bio-psychologically, human agents are a bundle of aggressive and conflicted instincts, those instincts constantly pressing for immediate satisfaction. Their constant immediate satisfaction, though, would make social living impossible, so the forces of civilization have evolved by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilization is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id. The battle between the id and civilization is ongoing and occasionally brutal. To the extent that the id wins, society tends toward conflict and chaos; and to the extent that society wins, the id is forced into repression. Repression, however, merely forces the id’s energies underground psychologically, where those energies are unconsciously displaced and often forced into irrational channels. That displaced energy, Freud explained, must discharge itself eventually, and often it does so by bursting out neurotically—in the form of hysterias, obsessions, and phobias.[27]
The task of the psychoanalyst, then, is to trace the neurosis back through its irrational, unconscious channels to its origin. Patients, however, often interfere with this process: they resist the exposure of unconscious and irrational elements in their psyches and they cling to the conscious forms of civilized and rational behavior that they have learned. So the psychoanalyst must find a way to bypass those surface, blocking behaviors, and to strip away the conscious veneer of civility to probe the seething id below. Here, Freud suggested, the use of non-rational psychological mechanisms becomes essential—dreams, hypnosis, free-association, slips of the tongue. Such manifestations of irrationality are often clues to the underlying reality, for they slip past the patient’s conscious defense mechanisms. The well-trained psychoanalyst, accordingly, is the one who is able to spot the truth in the irrational.
To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism. Capitalism, we know from Marx, is definitely based on exploitative competition. But modern capitalist society is taking a technocratic form, directing its conflictual energies toward creating machines and corporate bureaucracies. Those machines and bureaucracies do provide for the average member of the bourgeoisie an artificial world of order, control, and creature comforts—but at a very high cost: capitalism’s people are increasingly distant from nature, decreasingly spontaneous and creative, increasingly unaware that they are being controlled by the machines and the bureaucracies, both physically and psychologically, and increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.[28]
The Frankfurt School portrait of capitalism, Marcuse explained, is what we find realized most extremely in the most advanced capitalist nation, the United States.
Consider Joe Sixpack. Joe works as a low-level technician for a television-manufacturing company, part of a huge telecommunications conglomerate. Whether he has a job tomorrow depends on Wall Street speculators and the decisions of a corporate head-quarters in another state. But Joe does not realize that: he simply goes to work each morning with a slight sense of distaste, pulls the levers and pushes the buttons as he is told to do by the machine and the boss, mass-producing televisions until it is time to go home. On the way home he picks up a six-pack of beer—another mass-market product of capitalist commodification—and after supper with the family he plops down in front of the television, feeling the narcotic effect of the beer kicking in while the sitcoms and commercials tell him that life is great and who could ask for anything more. Tomorrow is another day.
Joe Sixpack is a product. He is a constructed part of an oppressive and dysfunctional competitive system—but one that is overlain with the veneer of peace and comfort.[29] He is unaware of the gap between the appearance of comfort and the reality of oppression, unaware that he is a cog in an artificial technological system—unaware because the fruits of capitalism that he produces and thinks he enjoys consuming are sapping his vital instincts and making him physically and psychologically inert.
Thus Marcuse had an explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for why capitalism in the 1950s and early 1960s seemed to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when, as every good socialist knew, it could not really be—and for why the workers were so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically.
It gets worse, for to the extent that Joe can even think about his situation, he hears his world described in terms of “freedom,” “democracy,” “progress”—words that have only a faint glimmer of meaning to him, and that have been crafted and fed to him by capitalism’s apologists to keep him from thinking too deeply about his real existence. Joe is a “one-dimensional man” trapped in a “totalitarian universe of technological rationality,”[30] oblivious to the second and real dimension of human existence wherein true freedom, democracy, and progress lie.[31]
Capitalism’s having achieved this cynical state of development, in which its oppression is masked by pious hypocrisies about liberty and progress, is made even more cynical by its being able to neutralize and even co-opt all dissent and criticism. Having created a monolithic technocracy—the machines and the bureaucracies and the mass man and the self-serving ideology—capitalism can pretend to be open to criticism by allowing some radical intellectuals to dissent. In the name of “tolerance,” “open-mindedness,” and “free speech,” a few lonely voices will be permitted to raise objections and challenges to the capitalist behemoth.[32] But everyone knows full well that nothing come of the criticisms. Worse still, the appearance of having been open and tolerant will serve only to reinforce capitalism’s control. Capitalist tolerance, then, is not real tolerance: it is “Repressive Tolerance.”[33]
So was Horkheimer’s early pessimism right? Was the lesson thirty years later still the same—that the prospect for socialism is totally hopeless? If capitalism’s control extends even to co-opting the dissent of its strongest critics, what weapons are left to the revolutionary?
If there is a chance for socialism, then more extreme tactics will be necessary.
Freudian psychology again gives us the key. As with the repression of the id’s energies by the forces of civilization, capitalism’s suppression of the original human energies cannot be totally successful. Freud had explained that the id’s repressed energies will occasionally burst out in irrational, neurotic forms, threatening the stability and security of civilization. The Frankfurt School taught us that capitalism’s orderly technocracy has repressed much of humanity, driving much of its energy underground—but that repressed energy is still there, and potentially it can burst out.
Thus, Marcuse concluded, capitalism’s repression of human nature may be socialism’s salvation. Capitalism’s rational technocracy suppresses human nature to the point that it bursts out in irrationalisms—in violence, criminality, racism, and all of society’s other pathologies. But by encouraging those irrationalisms the new revolutionaries can destroy the system. So the first task of the revolutionary is to seek out those individuals and energies on the margins of society: the outcast, the disorderly, and the forbidden—anyone and anything that capitalism’s power structure has not yet succeeded in commodifying and dominating totally. All such marginalized and outcast elements will be “irrational,” “immoral,” and even “criminal,” especially by capitalist definition, but that is precisely what the revolutionary needs. Any such outcast element could “break through the false consciousness [and] provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation.”[34]
Marcuse looked especially to the marginalized and outcast Left intellectual leadership—especially those trained in critical theory.[35] Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[36]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[37] and who thereby can see through the appearance of peace to the reality of oppression, who have retained enough of their humanity not to have been turned into Joe Sixpack—and above all who have the will and the energy to do anything it takes, even to the point of being “militantly intolerant and disobedient,”[38] to shock the capitalist power structure into revealing its true nature, thus toppling and smashing the system to pieces, leaving the way open for a renewal of humanity through socialism.
Marcuse’s reign as the pre-eminent philosopher of the New Left signaled a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists. “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao” became the new trinity and the slogan to rally under. As was proclaimed on a banner of students involved in closing the University of Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.
Many in the new generation listened attentively and sharpened their swords.
References
[25] Marcuse 1928.
[26] Horkheimer 1927, 316-18.
[27] Freud 1930, esp. Ch. 3.
[28] Horkheimer and Adorno 1944, xiv-xv.
[29] Marcuse 1969, 13-15.
[30] Marcuse 1964, 123.
[31] Marcuse is thus halfway between Rousseau and Foucault. Rousseau (1749): “Princes always view with pleasure the spread among their subjects of a taste for the arts. … The sciences, letters and arts … cover with garlands of flowers the iron chains that bind them, stifle in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people.” Foucault: “What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely ‘justified,’ because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, or order over disorder” (1977b, 210). Also: “If I had known the Frankfurt School at the right time, I would have been spared a lot of work” (Foucault 1989, 353).
[32] Marcuse 1965, 94-96.
[33] The title of Marcuse’s influential 1965 essay.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 2:09 pm. 1 comment
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fathered several children and had them abandoned to orphanages, and of whom David Hume wrote in a letter to Adam Smith: “Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.” (David Hume, letter to Adam Smith, October 8, 1767 [Correspondence, 135])
2. Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi and who, his lover Hannah Arendt said, “lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.” 
Australia’s 
