From psychology to ontology

Marcuse’s late conception of nature is ambiguous. He seems to hover uncomfortably between psychology and ontology. In Eros and Civilization he regards the nature of lived experience as the object of the erotic “drive” in the Freudian sense. But too strict an adherence to Freudian psychology would undermine Marcuse’s philosophical argument with empiricism and naturalism. Experience does not have ontological significance from a psychological standpoint. Drives in Freud are subjective objects of study, not “ontological affirmations of being (nature),” as Marx claims.²⁹ As a natural science, psychology implies a transcendent nature, indifferent to the projection of our feelings and fantasies. But Marcuse remarks that “it seems permissible to give [Freud’s] conception a general ontological meaning.”³⁰ This unusual interpretation of Freud implies phenomenological themes Marcuse only alludes to, but which are essential to his argument.

Marcuse’s philosophy of nature is of course rooted in Hegel and Marx as well as phenomenology. As he wrote in one early text, Hegel “is concerned … with the process of reification and its transcendence as the basic happening of human life, which Marx then represented as the basic law of historical happening.”³¹ Marcuse’s philosophy of praxis continues the tradition by dereifying nature, uncovering its essential implication in human existence obscured by technological rationality. These themes are developed in Marcuse’s early writings, especially in his first book on Hegel, although without the reference to Freud; they provide the bridge between psychology and ontology in his most daring late works.

For eros to acquire ontological value, “life” must be considered as a form of being “revealing” nature in something like Heidegger’s sense of the term, rather than as just another natural object. In his Hegel thesis Marcuse interprets Hegel’s concept of life in terms that echo Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. His argument can be read without reference to Heidegger, but in a thesis dedicated to Heidegger, written by his assistant at the time, it is difficult not to see an attempt to reconstruct Hegel’s concept of life in quasi-phenomenological terms. Marcuse implicitly returns here to Heidegger’s own early term for what will later be called “Dasein,” namely, “factical life.” Life in this phenomenological sense is not independent of the environment with which it engages but establishes its identity through that engagement. “Being-in-the-world” refers to a structure of meaning that grounds the reified opposition of subject and object in a prior unity.³²

Interpreting Hegel, Marcuse writes, “The world in which Life unfolds exists only as its world.”³³ “At one and the same time therefore, the world is the ontological ‘presupposition’ of Life as well as the externality and negativity in which Life has ‘lost’ itself!.”³⁴ In Hegel the activity of the living being is a transformation and appropriation of nature. Nature is not an indifferent obstacle in this conception but forms the subject’s essential milieu. Through its free activity in this milieu the subject realizes itself. In Hegel’s remarkable phrase, it comes to be “at home with itself in its other.”³⁵ The opposition of subject and object is thus grounded in “an ontological relation, one that holds among beings themselves … This bond precedes all knowledge and in fact makes factual knowledge possible.”³⁶ In sum, a world is revealed in the unity of subject and object that transcends their division in inauthentic objectivistic accounts of experience. That world is not factically present but underlies cognition. Epistemology is thus subordinated to ontology. Truth is not first produced by a method but inhabits experience itself prior to any cognitive labor.

Shortly after finishing his Hegel thesis, Marcuse had the opportunity to read Marx’s newly published Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Here Marcuse found his interpretation of Hegel confirmed and radicalized.

Man does not have objects merely as the environment of his immediate life activity and does not treat them merely as objects of his immediate needs. He can “confront” any object and exhaust and realize its inner possibilities in his labour. He can produce “in accordance with the laws of beauty” and not merely in accordance with the standards of his own needs. In this freedom man reproduces “the whole of nature,” and through transformation and appropriation furthers it, along with his own life, even when this production does not satisfy an immediate need. Thus the history of human life is at the same time essentially the history of man’s objective world and of “the whole of nature” …³⁷

In the later work, these themes are taken up through the reinterpretation of Freud. Freud’s theory of the erotic provides the basis for a radical reinterpretation of aesthetics. The erotic drive is not merely psychological but has an ontological correlate in the beauty of lived nature. This correlation is necessary for experience to play a role in Marcuse’s critique of technological rationality and its “one-dimensional” ontology. Erotic experience in this sense is not merely subjective; it has the scope of a Heideggerian “attunement,” a mode in which reality as a whole is given.³⁸

Marcuse’s concept of lived nature and its beauty must overcome the transcendence of the nature of natural science if it is to have this ontological significance. He must validate experienced nature by incorporating it into the historical process, in opposition to the ahistorical construction of external nature in the scientific worldview. At the same time, he must not invalidate scientific and technological knowledge that he concedes are essential for any modern society, including a socialist society. Although Marcuse’s remarks are all too brief, he has such a theory. In One-Dimensional Man he distinguishes the physical structure of matter from the historical form it acquires as object for a subject, but he concludes that “the two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are interrelated in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the historical aspect can never be eliminated so radically that only the ‘absolute’ physical layer remains.”³⁹

This passage maintains the distinction between natural science and history within a fundamentally historical ontology. Agreeing with Hegel and the early Marx, Marcuse argues that all forms of knowledge and experience are essentially social, rooted in the “we” of society rather than the “I” of a pure epistemological subject. There is thus no pure thing-in-itself or nature totally unconnected to humanity. This view, widely shared in one form or another in Marcuse’s early milieu, guarantees experiential knowledge against naturalistic reduction to psychology.⁴⁰ The historical standpoint is ontologically fundamental. No “view from nowhere” threatens to reduce it to an accident of biology.

The early Marx anticipates Marcuse’s historicist ontology with his concept of the irreducibly meaningful character of experience. But in contrast with phenomenology (and on this point he follows Marx, not Heidegger), Marcuse also recognizes that access to meaning is contingent on the evolution of needs. Technical advance does not merely serve preexisting needs, but produces new needs corresponding to the development of human faculties and capacities. These new needs introduce a higher dimension of fulfillment by relating human beings to the meaning of their experience, to music rather than sound, to a home rather than shelter, to a meal rather than sustenance.

The restriction of human development by capitalism motivates the revolution. At the everyday level of human life, this is about poverty and the damage it causes. But once subject and object are redefined as life and world, the revolution is an affair of reason: the world does not yet but must someday correlate adequately with its living subject. The unity of subject and object is thus not merely a speculative concept but becomes a historical demand. All this is explained in Marx’s Manuscripts, discussed here in Chapter 2. Marcuse comments, “It is only the Marxian conception which, while preserving the critical, transcendent element of idealism, uncovers the material, historical ground for the reconciliation of human freedom and natural necessity; subjective and objective freedom.”⁴¹

That “material, historical ground” is the dereification of reified capitalist society. Reification as Marcuse uses the term—and here he follows Lukács—is not just a mental attitude but is also a cultural pattern affecting institutions and technologies. Marcuse calls it “one-dimensionality” in his later work, but he already distinguishes a second “dimension” in his Hegel thesis to refer to the level of essential potentiality in contrast with the empirical facts.⁴² Dereification is the establishment of that second dimension in consciousness and as an active force in social life.

This is not merely a local event. Reification is the form of a rational culture, a culture that proves its superiority to earlier cultures based on myth by discovering the truth of nature and revealing the human basis of history. This is the progressive conception of Marxism, which sees in capitalism a universal if limited achievement. As I argue in Chapter 6, dereification follows reification in transcending any particular culture to achieve a certain universality. Just as reification reaches out to encompass the entire globe in rational structures, so dereification follows it and reveals the human potentialities it suppresses. Revolt thus gives insights of general validity no less than science, technology, and economics. This dialectic is implicit in Marcuse’s concept of aesthetic “form as one of the necessities of being, universal beyond all subjective varieties of taste, affinity, etc.”⁴³

In recognition of its universality, Marcuse proposes that the aesthetic imagination should be included among Kant’s transcendental forms of experience. As such it would be coextensive with the objectified world of space, time, and causality on which science and technology are based and not a mere psychological or sociological phenomenon.

The great conception which animates Kant’s critical philosophy shatters the philosophical framework in which he kept it. The imagination, unifying sensibility and reason, becomes “productive” as it becomes practical: a guiding force in the reconstruction of reality—reconstruction with the help of a gaya scienza, a science and technology released from their service to destruction and exploitation, and thus free for the liberating exigencies of the imagination. The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man. Such a world could (in a literal sense!) embody, incorporate, the human faculties and desires to such an extent that they appear as part of the objective determinism of nature.⁴⁴

This is what allows Marcuse to claim in his essay on “Nature and Revolution” that there is an “existential … truth in things, in nature.”⁴⁵ This “truth” is existential in the sense that it is experiential rather than scientific. The fact that experience is always our experience and not that of an imaginary pure rationality means its anthropocentric character is unsurpassable. But it is not a mere psychological construct. Rather it is the condition of another kind of knowledge different from scientific knowledge.

That knowledge arises as a “synthesis, reassembling the bits and fragments which can be found in distorted humanity and nature. This recollected material has become the domain of the imagination, it has been sanctioned by the repressive societies in art.”⁴⁶ The existential truth so understood is not only propositional but also constitutes the “horizon of experience under which the immediately given forms of things appear as ‘negative,’ as denial of their inherent possibilities, their truth.”⁴⁷

Experience thus has a normative character. We do not perceive the world as scientific reason apprehends it, as a meaningless order of primary qualities in abstract space and time. The “secondary qualities” belong essentially to the sensed world, and these include the objects of lived “judgments” of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, experienced directly in the act of sensation. These qualities reveal the potentialities of nature, “what perhaps it would like to be.”⁴⁸

With these remarks Marcuse echoes Adorno’s concepts of constellation and non-identity. But, unlike Adorno, Marcuse envisages struggle to realize those “inherent possibilities,” the “truth” of things. Experience offers a non-scientific knowledge that is also a force, driving history toward higher levels of freedom. The negative becomes positive in this struggle.

Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the actual human condition in the given society, and the ‘‘given’’ possibilities to transcend this condition, to enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts ‘‘positive’’: oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is “contained” in the present.⁴⁹

In Lukács, dereification is confined to suppressed humanity, but Marcuse’s implicit ontology does not allow for a separation of the human and the natural: the “aesthetic Lebenswelt” is a “being-in-the-world.” His existential truths are attributed to an aesthetic faculty that transforms not only human life but nature itself. Human beings can, in Marx’s astonishing phrase, “form things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”⁵⁰

These reflections help us to understand Marcuse’s hyperbolic claims for technological change. Perhaps the most astonishing of these claims is his revival of the surrealist notion of “hasard objectif” in An Essay on Liberation. This is the notion of a transformed world in which “human faculties and desires … appear as part of the objective determinism of nature—coincidence of causality through nature and causality through freedom.”⁵¹ This dualistic conception of liberation maintains the unity in difference of nature and society. It once again poses the problem of the relation between reified rationality, in the form of science and technology, and the concrete content of lived experience.

Socialist technology lies at the intersection of two disparate sources, the scientific understanding of nature in terms of causality, and respect for human and natural potentialities, formulated as meanings. This intersection takes the form of what I have called a “technical code.”⁵² Such codes translate between the two worlds of reason and experience. They represent social demands in the form of technical specifications. Meanings encountered in experience gain technical salience through such translations. Technology is not autonomous but essentially imbricated with society through this process.

The sidewalk ramp is a good example. Until it was introduced, disability was a private problem. The interests of the disabled were not represented in the design of sidewalks that obstructed their movements at every crossing. The “universal” rationality of sidewalks was “particular” in its exclusion of the disabled. But once society accepted responsibility for the free movement of the disabled, the design of sidewalks translated the new right. This recognition takes the form of a design specification representing the disabled. The sidewalk becomes more “universal” in responding to an enlarged range of interests, a range more nearly corresponding to humanity as a whole.⁵³

Something like this concept of technical code is implicit in Marcuse’s discussion of capitalist technology, which he argues is designed for domination. One-Dimensional Man makes a similar point explicitly in relation to socialism.

The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks—the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization.⁵⁴

An Essay on Liberation draws out the ontological implications of this conception: “Technique, assuming the features of art, would translate subjective sensibility into objective form, into reality.”⁵⁵ Thus not only are meanings embodied in technology, but lived nature is itself reshaped in response to its technical mediation. As Augustin Berque has shown, there is no better illustration of this than the production of landscape in the course of history.⁵⁶ The technical work of traditional agriculture not only yields food but also a meaningful organization of space. Socialism must do the same for industry with respect to the whole material base of modern civilization.

Marcuse’s concept of nature lies at the core of his philosophy of praxis. The revolution takes place not only in society but in things as well. The historically charged categories of critical theory operate to resolve the philosophical antinomy of humanity and nature, frozen in place by both naturalism and idealism. The contraries are reconciled through the transformation of the technology that binds them together in a unity.