Reconciliation with nature

Technological domination is neither extrinsic to technology, nor inevitable wherever technology is employed. Design is the mediation through which the potential for domination contained in scientific-technical rationality enters the social world as a civilizational project. Capitalism realizes that potential by extending it without limit to every aspect of nature and human beings: “When technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality—a world.”⁶⁸ The break with that world does not immediately transform science, although in the long run it may have consequences for the scientific conception of reality. However, the break does require an immediate engagement with technology.

Although Marcuse treats it as a revolutionary task, that engagement does not await the revolution. It began long ago as excluded actors protested the side effects of the dominant designs. Such protests were commonplace in the labor movement as it grappled with the threats to health and safety caused by the industrial revolution. The theory of reification illuminates this experience and links it to contemporary protests around such issues as environmental pollution. Resistance from below provides the impetus to revise technical assumptions and designs. These considerations belong to a dialectical critique of technology that is neither irrationalist nor technophobic.⁶⁹

Struggles over technology and other rational systems intrinsic to modernity promise the resolution of the antinomies not through a conceptual innovation but rather through the practical transformation of the relation of human beings to each other and to nature. Note that it is not a question of “attitude” Marcuse would have dismissed a merely subjective reconciliation. The focus on design differentiates his solution from such unconvincing notions as Heidegger’s “free relation” to technology, or the many appeals to voluntary simplicity emanating from a certain wing of the environmental movement. The point is not just to change attitudes toward technology or material goods in general, but to reconstruct the industrial system in accordance with different values. This is the concrete “liberation of nature” in which philosophy of praxis culminates.

Here in summary are the main points of Marcuse’s position. Horkheimer and Adorno would have agreed with most of them.

1. Exper ience of nature is historically shaped. The nature revealed under the technological a priori is not the last word on the truth of being, but may be transcended in another a priori.

2. The technological a priori of modern societies reveals only an aspect of experienced or lived nature. That aspect has become the basis of science and technology and also of a cultural system that suppresses or derealizes other aspects.

3. A nature understood on restricted instrumental terms stands opposed to human beings who fear and dominate it. This is the origin of the philosophical antinomies of matter and spirit, fact and value, necessity and freedom.

4. Other aspects of lived nature include aesthetic beauty and potentialities. These aspects of nature are “objective” in the sense that they belong to the object of human perception. They are not subjective illusions.

5. These aspects are revealed to sensation informed by the erotic and imaginative faculties. These faculties belong to a fully developed reason, as opposed to the restricted instrumental rationality of modern societies.

6. The differentiation of these faculties from rationality is an effect of scarcity in class society. Technological advance has made this differentiation obsolete, even dangerous, since reason uninformed by eros and the imagination is an increasingly destructive and self-destructive force.

7. A free society in which erotic and imaginative faculties flourish would encounter a different nature from the restricted one of today. Human beings would be at home in that nature to a far greater degree than they are today.

8. Such a society would interact with nature through a different technology that was more respectful of nature’s potentialities and limits. This technology would still serve human needs, but it would do so less destructively.

9. Human liberation and the liberation of nature go together. These two forms of freedom are not identical. They still presuppose a relationship of differentiated subjects and objects, but in a liberated society they will be able to achieve a harmonious relationship.

10. The failure of restricted instrumental rationality is increasingly obvious and may (but need not) lead to a revolt in favor of new social forms based on cooperation, solidarity, and respect for nature.

 

1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

2 For more on the relation of Marcuse’s thought to Aristotle, and to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005).

3 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 141.

4 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 150–1. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 211–15.

5 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 153.

6 Herbert Marcuse, “Re-Examination of the Concept of Revolution,” in A. Lothstein, ed., All We Are Saying (New York: Capricorn Books, 1970), 280.

7 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, quoted, 153–4.

8 Ibid., quoted, 157.

9 Ibid., 158.

10 Ibid., 160.

11 Ibid., 164.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., xvi.

14 Ibid., 168.

15 Herbert Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society,” in D. Kellner and C. Pierce, ed., Herbert Marcuse: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 136–7.

16 Herbert Marcuse, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man” in D. Kellner, ed., Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 117–18.

17 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 259.

18 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” in D. Kellner, ed., Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s (London and New York: Routledge 2005), 174.

19 Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 61.

20 Ibid., 60.

21 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 12.

22 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 68–9.

23 Ibid., 69.

24 Ibid., 66; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 100, 107.

25 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 66.

26 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 50. Note that the success of Steve Jobs in aestheticizing electronic gadgets does not refute Marcuse’s thesis but rather confirms it, as can be seen from this passage.

27 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 73. See also Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), Chapter 8.

28 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 3. No. 9 (1992).

29 Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C.A. Watts, 1963), 189.

30 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 125.

31 Herbert Marcuse, “Zum Problem der Dialektic I and II,” in Herbert Marcuse Schriften, vol. I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 440.

32 The ontological concept of life in Hegel, Heidegger, and Marcuse is developed more fully in Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse, Chapter 3.

33 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans. S. Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 156.

34 Ibid., 158.

35 G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 175. Hegel’s conception of the lifeworld relation is confirmed at the objective level by modern biology. Biological organisms do not relate externally to a generalized nature but internally to the specific niche within which they function and thrive and which is shaped in turn by their activity. Organisms are thus not independent things; the correlation of species powers and needs with features of the natural environment refutes individualistic ontology. The human technical relation to nature completes the integration of organism and environment by modifying both.

36 Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 162.

37 Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 97.

38 “Wer in den Kategorien der Freudschen Trieblehre, aus denen Marcuse eine marxistische Geschichtskonstruktion entwickelt hat, wer in seiner neuerdings wieder hevorgekehrten Anthropologie die überlagerten Kategorien von Sein und Zeit nicht einmal mehr ahnt, ist vor handfesten Mißverständnissen nicht sicher.” “Whoever cannot again notice the underlying categories of Being and Time in Freud’s categories of the drive theory, out of which Marcuse developed a Marxist historical construct, or in his recently reconstructed anthropology, will run the danger of serious misunderstandings.” Jürgen Habermas, Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 10–11.

39 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 218.

40 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 72–4.

41 Ibid., 73–4.

42 Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 75.

43 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 32.

44 Ibid., 31. The “gaya scienza” mentioned here refers to Nietzsche’s book of that title (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft) but perhaps also to Emerson’s lecture on “The Scholar” from which Nietzsche took his title: “I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries & unpublished beauties, heralds of civility, nobility, learning & wisdom; affirmers of the One Law, yet as ones who should affirm it in music or dancing.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, Vol. 10, 262.

45 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution, 69.

46 Ibid., 70.

47 Ibid.

48 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 107. Quoted in Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 66.

49 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 87.

50 Quoted in Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 67.

51 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 31.

52 Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010), Chapter 4. I have developed this argument in an “instrumentalization theory” that explains the correlation of causal dimensions of technology with dimensions of meaning and identity.

53 For more on this subject, see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 8.

54 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 231–2.

55 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 24. It is interesting to find the concept of translation in something very close to the sense it has in science and technology studies today in these old texts of Marcuse. For the most similar type of translation Latour calls “delegation,” see Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in W. Bijker and J. Law, ed., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992).

56 Augustin Berque, Médiance: de milieux en paysages (Paris: Reclus, 1990).

57 HCC, 10.

58 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 20.

59 Marcuse, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man’,’ 117–18. See also “Cultural Revolution,” in Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 138–9.

60 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 164–6, 229–31. For a rather different discussion than mine of Marcuse’s views on science, see C. Fred Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature (Tampa, FL: University of Florida Press, 1985), 59–64.

61 It may be objected that the distinction between science and technology this implies has been outdated by the new “technoscience.” Like Heidegger, Marcuse seems to have adopted something like that notion even before it was formulated by constructivist science and technology studies. There are certainly domains in which the distinction is difficult to make but these domains are still fairly marginal to the central productive activities of modern societies. It would be a mistake to confound science and technology while we can still make a meaningful distinction between research in fields such as computer science and engineering and the production that goes on in computer and construction companies. For a variety of contemporary views, see Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder, and Gregor Schiemann, ed., Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

62 See for example Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature.

63 Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 88.

64 This neutrality is implicit in the very nature of quantification. Hegel writes, “Magnitude is that characteristic wherein, while no harm appears to be intended, a Determinate Being can be seized, and whereby it can be destroyed.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1., trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 391.

65 See Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 9.

66 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 234.

67 Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society,” in Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 57.

68 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 154.

69 For an introduction to such a philosophy, see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapters 1 and 4.