Science or technology

Philosophy of praxis has a critical relation to science and technology from the beginning. But at the same time it resists the unqualified rejection of reason characteristic of much romantic thought. Nevertheless, its critique of scientific abstraction and the dehumanizing effects of industrial technology seems anti-modern and technophobic. This leaves philosophy of praxis vulnerable to the charge of “romantic irrationalism.” There are real difficulties involved in constructing a “dialectic of Enlightenment” that does not recapitulate the errors of conservative cultural critique. The vagueness of the Frankfurt School critique of science and technology leaves room for doubt. This issue is part of a larger one that concerns the politics of rationality in modern society.

This conundrum already makes its appearance in Marx whose critique of science and technology under capitalism leads not to a return to traditional sources of authority or to romantic passion but to the demand for a new science and technology. Lukács and the Frankfurt School offer more moderate but still highly speculative discussions of the prospects of rationality under socialism. Can we find a better grounded solution today on the basis of our much more sophisticated sociological understanding of science and technology?

Lukács exemplifies the treatment of science and technology within philosophy of praxis. He criticizes the quantification of being under capitalism. All the phenomena of scientific and technical progress, economic markets, the transformation of the labor process, bureaucratization of the economy and the state, are tied together by a reifying logic stemming ultimately from the fetishism of commodities. He claims that the quantitative methods of natural science applied to society yield reactionary ideology, but he admits that applied to nature they contribute to scientific progress.⁵⁷ Properly understood, society is subject to a qualitative historical account based on a functional hermeneutic in which the economy plays a central role. He never explains how the two contradictory sides of this equation might come together in a socialist technology, both scientific and social, both quantitative and qualitative. The lacuna is critical for the Frankfurt School. If technological domination is conceived as the simple realization of the quantifying procedures of science, then the transcendental argument would seem to exclude socialism insofar as it too relies on technology.

Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to solve this problem in Dialectic of Enlightenment through distinguishing the instrumental uses of rationality from the faculty of reflection. They argue that universal quantification betrays the real power of thought. “The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure.”⁵⁸ The expulsion of essences through the reduction of things to their measurable aspects leaves thought helpless to criticize (“measure”) the world. Science is thus complicit with capitalism. This complicity involves more than supplying capital with machines; it also corrupts experience itself. Abstract labor and the fetishism of commodities become touchstones of experience, stripping it bare of normative qualities. The elimination of a proper “measure” deprives the individuals of a basis on which to resist conformity to society’s demands. The true purpose of technology, the preservation and enhancement of life, is lost.

As we saw in the last chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that modern scientific-technical rationality is both committed to domination by its quantifying reduction of the real, and destined to serve humanity as a whole through its objective form as machinery. The mutilated capacity for reflection must be recovered to realize this destiny. Only in reflection can human beings recognize their natural limitations and thereby moderate their struggle to dominate nature and each other. To save Enlightenment from itself they must overcome the damage capitalism has inflicted on experience and reason. A reflective humanity can orient the struggle toward its proper goal.

This argument is merely hinted at in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno seem to have no idea what a successor technology would be like. What is more, they do not explain what positive motive could move masses of people to reflect, nor what reflection would reveal to them beyond their own limits. Perhaps the implausibility of such a development explains the growing gap between Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophy and their politics, culminating in their violent rejection of the New Left.

The New Left was received very differently by Marcuse. His transcendental framework led to a far more radical conclusion than the bare emphasis on reflection in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The movement instituted a new a priori of experience that would not only release the critical power of reflection but also lead to the transformation of technology. This would be a “two-dimensional” experience responsive to the potentialities of people and things. In effect, he developed a substitute for the original Marxist theory of class consciousness and on that basis conceived a unity of theory and practice once again.

Marcuse’s appropriation of phenomenology for Marxism is thus central to his argument and enables him to develop a positive concept of revolution incorporating technology for the first time. Here is how he describes that concept in an unpublished late essay:

Only if the vast capabilities of science and technology, of the scientific and artistic imagination direct the construction of a sensuous environment, only if the work world loses its alienating features and becomes a world of human relationships, only if productivity becomes creativity, are the roots of domination dried up in the individuals. No return to precapitalist, pre-industrial artisanship, but on the contrary, perfection of the new mutilated and distorted science and technology in the formation of the object world in accordance with “the laws of beauty.” And “beauty” here defines an ontological condition—not of an oeuvre d’art isolated from real existence … but that harmony between man and his world which would shape the form of society.⁵⁹

The vision is exciting, but is it coherent? Marcuse has no more explanation than do Horkheimer and Adorno for how a quantifying science and technology would be appropriated in the context of the socialist transformation he projects. This is a damaging inconsistency in the Frankfurt School’s critique. It is already visible in Lukács’s theory of reification that is the source of all such critiques.

Marcuse wavers between two strategies for overcoming this difficulty, the re-enchantment of nature through the transformation of science, and the institution of respect for nature through transformed technology. The latter strategy resolves the antinomies practically, independent of the evolution of science. Either or both of these strategies can succeed in fulfilling the requirements of the philosophy of praxis but they are not equally plausible and Marcuse does not distinguish them clearly.

Marcuse mentions the transformation of science briefly in One-Dimensional Man. The emergence of an “aesthetic Lebenswelt” holds the promise of a new science that will assimilate the aesthetic qualities that emerge in the full experience of nature. The new science will discover value in the very structure of its objects. The antinomies will be resolved through a representation of nature in which their opposed poles are reconciled, subject with object, value with fact.

In a confusing passage, Marcuse attributes qualities such as beauty, that today’s science does not recognize, to the nature of a future natural science. But he immediately rejects the idea of a return to a “qualitative physics” and so undermines this notion even as he evokes it. In any case he imagines the transformation of science as the long-term consequence of a new mode of experience rather than as a political task of the revolution. Science might gradually evolve in new directions through genuine discoveries stimulated by life in a liberated society. But no one can anticipate, much less dictate, the science of the future.⁶⁰

The alternative to the theory of the new science is the reconstruction of technology on the basis of experiential knowledge. Technology would be reshaped by respect for the potentialities of human beings and things. This evolution would release the aesthetic imagination from its marginal role under capitalism to a central place in the design of technology.⁶¹ Here the antinomies are not resolved by a changed representation of the world but by a new practical relation to the world. The philosophical significance of the revolution would depend not on a new science but on a technology shaped by the new a priori of experience.

Unfortunately, Marcuse does not distinguish between the emergence of new scientific concepts and methods and new technical codes and designs. He leaves the impression that socialism awaits an unimaginable cognitive advance—a new science of nature—rather than much simpler technical changes well within our reach today. Not surprisingly, this theory has met with a generally skeptical response.⁶²