Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
71
B. The Expression and Neutralization of Conscience'
The internal-individual and external-social
divergences in the theories of Fromm and Marcuse are more clearly revealed as each thinker treats the problem of
conscience and repression. Implicitly, Fromm tends to argue that the workings of conscience amount to a project in self-
suppression; that is, man intentionally excludes certain im pulses from consciousness in order to protect and preserve
his rational existence. If conscience is true to itself, it
will reject the influence of irrational external authority.
If it is not genuine, it will adopt that authority due to
some internal fear or other weakness within the individual.
Meanwhile, Marcuse doubts whether there can be any meaning
ful expression of conscience in a world so dominated by so
cial repression. In effect, he claims that the function of
conscience has, for all intents and purposes, been thorough ly neutralized within the institutional structure itself. In his psychology of ethics, Fromm distinguishes be
tween authoritarian and humanistic conscience. The authori
tarian conscience is the "voice of an internalized external
authority, the parents, the state, or whoever the authori-
ties in a culture happen to be."28 This kind of conscience
is analogous to the Freudian superego which regulates a
28Fromm, Man for Himself, pp. 143-144.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
72
moral system of fear and hope, punishment and reward. It is
a deficient form of conscience because of its reliance on ex
ternal authority; e.g., its dominant tendency to satisfy the idealized expectations of others (ego-ideal). The conscience of the authoritarian person is marked by an inability to
achieve productive potentiality; i.e., it offers no actual
internal fulfillment. On the other hand, the humanistic
conscience is the genuine expression of man's integrity, the "reaction of our total personality to . . . our individual
29 existence." J Above all, it allows one to feel that he has realized significant human needs through the internal "voice
of our true selves which summons us back to ourselves, to
live productively, to develop fully and harmoniously—that is, to become what we potentially are."^ In a word, both
types of conscience issue from self-suppression. However,
the humanistic is considered more authentic simply because, unlike the authoritarian, it faces up to its existential
situation with a sense of inner strength. "If the conscience
29Ibid., p. I58. •^Ibid., p. I59. Fromm would not himself character ize this state of affairs as one of merely spiritual "feel ing"; however, until he establishes an appropriate nexus with external restraint, there appears to be little theoret ical foundation for his belief that the humanistic conscience does in fact fully realize its needs—whatever that might mean. On Fromm's evidence, one can only presume that such realization may be effected in the mind, or spirit. Fromm also continues to postulate a "true" self as a separate en tity. One might ask of Fromm: what does it mean to be a "false" self?
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
73
is based upon rigid and unassailable irrational authority,
... man, then, becomes completely dependent on powers out
side himself and ceases to care or to feel responsible for his own existence."-' Once more, the stoic Fromm has neg
lected to come to terms with larger external social
repression.
From Eros and Civilization (1955) to One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse appears to become increasingly pessimis tic about the viability of conscience. In the latter work,
Marcuse contends that societal compensations have so assimi
lated man's conscience that his capacity for autonomous mor al judgment has been effectively eroded. "Loss cf
conscience due to the satisfactory liberties granted by
an unfree society makes for a happy consciousness which fa- cilitates acceptance cf the misdeeds of this society.""52 In
essence, Marcuse claims that the eternal Freudian struggle
between Eros and Thanatos has been socially camouflaged; in
its place, men now attribute their problems to so-called neurotic disorders.33 Marcuse fears that such an attitude
employs adjustment-psychology as a cure for human ills
3 Ibid., p. 167- For Fromm, the guilty conscience arises out of an unsuccessful attempt to break the hold of authoritarian conscience. Ibid., pp. 155-158. In the end, then, the individual is viewed to be responsible for his own guilt. 3Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 76. 33Ibid., p. 77-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
74
while leaving their deep-seated social causes untouched. Fromm himself characterizes alienation as the maladie du sie'cle; he believes that a concerted regulation of one's internal will should prepare one to meet this serious chal lenge. According to Marcuse, in the hands of Fromm and other Neo-Freudian revisionists, "social issues [thus] become spiritual issues, and their solution becomes a moral task."34 Fromm continues to count on a strong and healthy (i.e., humanistic) conscience to set moral standards for
a surface modification of the social environment. Marcuse would argue that such a mission merely plays into the hands of the status quo; it allows man to feel that he is creating the conditions of freedom while actually tightening the pow erful, though less transparent, social fetters around him. Paradoxically, it seems that Fromm has fallen prey to that very "anonymous authority" which he warns against. He re gards such disguised authorities as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, and public opinion as more dan gerous than overt authority; for, "in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible."3-' But
Fromm fails to see the social context of his own admoni tions. In Marcuse's eyes, the established social system it self nullifies the influence of individual conscience: "The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the
3 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 241. 3^Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. I67-I68.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
75
effective agent ... to which their personal thought and
action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer,
the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent-. Con science is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things."36
C. The Family as Mediator Between the Individual and Society
In much the same fashion that Marcuse argues that
the function of conscience has been cancelled cut, he al
so contends that society has all but abrogated the role of
the family. In contradistinction, Fromm holds to the tradi tional image of the family as the "psychological agent of society" which transmits the spirit of its culture or class to the child.3' As a matter of fact, Fromm objects, in principle, to the very influence which Marcuse claims has lost its effect; viz., patriarchal authority. For Marcuse,
•^Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 79. Beyond Fromm, Marcuse goes to the depth-dimension cf Freudian psychology to explain how the social system has subtly and smoothly commandeered man's destructive instincts to its own advantage: Assuming that the Destruction Instinct (in the last an alysis: the Death Instinct} is a large ccrrpcne.nt of the energy which feeds the technical ccnquest of man and nature, it seems that society's growing capacity to manipulate technical progress also increases its capacity to manipulate and control this .instinct., i.e., to satisfy-it 'productively. ' Then social-ccr.esion would be strengthened at the deepest instinctual roots. Loc. cit.
*"37Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 287.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
76
dominant social forces, e.g., the mass media, technocracy, and bureaucratic-capitalistic organization, have tended to replace the father figure:
The superego is loosened from its origin, and the traumatic experience of the father is superseded by . more exogenous images. As the family becomes less de cisive in directing the adjustment of the individual to society, the father-son conflict no longer remains the model-conflict. This change derives from the fundamen tal economic processes which have characterized, since the beginning of the century, the transformation of "free" into "organized" capitalism. The independent family ... [is] being absorbed into large-scale impersonal groupings and associations. At the same time, the social value of the individual is measured primarily in terms of standardized skills and qualities of adjustment rather than autonomous judgment and per sonal responsibility.38
It is this direct social identification (mimesis)
which leads Marcuse to believe that familial mediation has lost its force. Instead, superego control has shifted to a more anonymous, more powerful, source; i.e., the dominant public sector. This agency exerts far greater, and more subtle, pressure on the individual. Because its repression is administered less perceptibly, the child is in a particu larly poor position to withstand its assault. In this socio-historic, surplus-repressive conversion of the family's basic biological function, the child must suffer the conse quences, the most disastrous of which is the inability to resist. For he cannot adequately guard against that which
^Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 87.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
77
he can neither see nor understand. Moreover, the once guid ing hand of father is now as helpless as his son's.
At the same time, Fromm significantly reinterprets the Oedipus complex, the instinctual foundation of famili al influence in Freudian theory. The Oedipus myth becomes,
for Fromm, a mere attitudinal situation within the framework of interpersonal relationships, rather than a deep-rooted sexual phenomenon: "the myth . . . [is] a symbol not of the
incestuous love between mother and son but of the rebellion of the son against the authority of the father in the patri archal family."39 However, Fromm reveals his analysis to be guided more by moral mission than social critique: "Man
himself can save mankind ... [and] the importance of man ... is part of the principle of the matriarchal world." 40 In essence, Fromm views the Oedipus complex as a matriarchal expression of the human "struggle for freedom and indepen dence" against the patriarchal "thwarting of the child's
39Fromm, The Forgotten Language, p. 202. According to Fromm, one's tie to the mother figure is purely "affec tive" or "emotional"; it represents a bond of security rather than a sign of sexual craving. Cf. Richard Heffner, ed., "Interview with Erich Fromm," McCall's, Vol. XCIII, No. 1 (October, I965), 217-218. Fromm, The Forgotten Language, p. 212. Fromm makes a further moral elaboration on the Oedipus myth: "It may be assumed that Sophocles intended to convey the idea that the patriarchal world was triumphant, but that it would be defeated unless it adopted the humanistic principles of the older matriarchal order ... with its emphasis on man's greatness and dignity." Ibid., pp. 223, 229n.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
78
expansiveness and spontaneity." His idealization of this psychological crisis is largely oblivious to external fac tors of repression. Ironically, there is but a short step from matriarchal protection to a search for security with in one's society—the very kind of "escape from freedom" which Fromm always warns against but seldom prepares for. In Marcuse's critical social theory, the Oedipal situation, negated within the context of repressive real
ity, is no longer the "central cause of the discontents in hp civilization [nor] the central obstacle for their removal."
Indeed, Marcuse claims that changing socio-historical
contingencies have nullified its former biological effect.
Thus, for Marcuse, external determinants are seen to estab
lish a strong, yet subtle, social control over familial
direction.
Marcuse points to a pervasive "strengthening of extra-familial authority" as the primary reason for the dethronement of the father figure. Such a development is another example of the transition from basic repression (bi ological patriarchal control) to surplus repression (socio- historical control). The effect of this transformation is to solidify, rather than dilute, the less than obvious force
of social domination:
41Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. I78. 42 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 186.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
79
Precisely insofar as the family was something private it stood against public power or at least was differ ent from it; the more the family is now controlled by public power, that is, the more the models and examples are taken from outside it, the more unified and unin terrupted becomes the "socialization" of the young gen eration in the interest of public power, as a part of public power.43
In the final analysis, Marcuse characterizes the Freudian conception of family structure as "obsolescent." He claims that a larger social domination has taken its place. No longer does the child have as live an opportunity to prepare his ego directly and rather autonomously; that is, to engage in free, concrete learning experiences with
his father. Instead, children are prepared for more imme
diate identification, or mimesis, with the social system, "a ready-made world in which they have to find their way." Particularly in progressive, child-centered families, the
dialectic of domination takes a subtle turn for the worst;
for a conflict-free child is unwittingly absorbed and com mandeered into acceptance by such extra-familial agents as television and peer groups. In Marcuse's words, his weak ego will be "ill equipped to become a self with and against others, to offer effective resistance to the [surplus- repressive social] powers that now enforce the reality
Marcuse, "Freedom and Freud's Theory of Instincts," in Five Lectures, pp. 14-15. "Political collectivization has its counterpart in the neutralization of the psychic struc ture ... the unification of the ego and the superego through which the ego's free confrontation with paternal au thority is absorbed by social reason." Ibid., p. I7.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
80 principle."1^ Marcuse relies on Freudian instinct theory to unrav el the paradox of the dialectic of domination: "In a re pressive civilization, the weakening of the father's role and his replacement by external authorities must weaken the libidinal energy in the ego and thus weaken its life in stincts." -* In terms of forced labor and the atrophy of one's mental and physical strength for life, Marcusean thought offers an interesting account of social transition. When the child worked for his family, as its economic instru ment, he served a necessary, more biological, function; i.e., survival. As a component of a larger social structure, he is assimilated by a system which he feels adequately rewards him for his hard labor while actually being surplus-repressive of him. However, the worker does not comprehend the reality of this pervasive social repression. Unlike the child in the family situation, he less clearly discerns his unfreedom and,
therefore, is less likely to resist it.
In essence, Marcuse claims that surplus repression
has made both the Oedipal complex and the family structure increasingly irrelevant. In the process, it has denied the
Marcuse, "The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man," in Five Lectures, p. 50. For a comprehensive, yet lively, account of social and historical changes in atti tudes toward children, see Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, I962T ^Marcuse, "The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man," in Five Lectures, pp. 5O-5I.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
81
basic "infantile desire for the archetype of freedom: free dom from want." Once again Marcuse retains the instinctual basis of Freudian theory while at the same time stressing its implicit sociological dimension. Whereas Fromm depicts the Odeipus complex and family conflict as a fight for individual independence against personal authority, Marcuse character izes both as a protest against that "painful, repressive freedom" which is engendered by the very social forces which Fromm accepts on one hand and ignores on the other. 46 That is to say, given the assumptions that he ac cepts, Fromm ignores the very ideological bondage which he helps to create. As a result, he gives tacit approval to the "unhappiness of freedom, of its separation from satis faction. "^ This seems to be the case because, like Freud, Fromm purchases security at the expense of fuller freedom. Throughout his work, he unknowingly submits to that same so cial ideology which he seeks to criticize. It is in this sense that Fromm practices an adjustment-psychology which actually reinforces social repression. A critique of Fromm's central notion of "social character" affords a telling example of his own absorp tion in repressive ideology. By his definition, social character is that "essential nucleus of the character
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 246-247. ^Ibid., p. 246.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
82
structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common hp to that group." On closer analysis, "social character"
constitutes a mere collection and assimilation of individual characters; as such, it is, at bottom, a secondary and deriv ative concept. 9 In essence, Fromm's "social" psychology amounts to an individual psychology which adds on the sur face trappings of larger social analysis. Even in his dis
cussion of social character, Fromm seems primarily interested in how the individual interprets his own existence within any given character structure. If one cannot live within its re
strictions, he should "rise" above it, as if in a transcen
dent, or spiritual, realm. Though Fromm asks man not to
conform to idolatrous demands or social expectations, he charts no viable path leading out of any actual confronta
tion with repressive reality.
hpFromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 277- The formation of social character thus involves an "adaptation of human needs to the particular mode of existence of a given soci ety." Ibid., p. 278. At this point, Fromm's reference to human malleability becomes more explicit. That is, he be lieves that man can and must be shaped to a significant ex tent; for "by adapting himself to social conditions man develops those traits that make him desire to act as he has to act." Ibid , p. 283. In this case, Fromm is speaking x>f the "average" human character. He leaves a distinct boun- • dary of freedom for those "stronger" (elite?) men in society who can "transcend" its brutalizing external repression. From this, it seems obvious that Fromm is led to a subjec- tivistic view of freedom and repression; i.e., one is free if he feels free and one is not repressed if he does not feel repressed. %/alter F. James, "Karen Horney and Erich Fromm in Relation to Alfred Adler," Individual Psychology Bulletin, Vol. VI (1947), 112.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
83
Unlike Marcuse, who weighs the powerful primary ef fects of the wider, more amorphous, institutional structure, Fromm is content to speak in terms of more specifiable groups and interpersonal relationships; e.g., the family it self and its members. In a word, Fromm fails to measure the full impact of social repression. Though he admits that the family must reflect its larger society, he still hopes that a relatively few individuals, neurotic by societal standards, might muster sufficient inner resources to transcend social repression. Through such transcendental aims, Fromm dis closes the naive idealism and unfounded optimism of his ba sically moral project. Within that implicit ideological frame of reference, he can even offer this unsociological advice in concluding his Escape from Freedom: "We find . that for everybody who is powerless, justice and truth are the most important weapons in the fight for his freedom and growth."50 Thus, while adopting the stoic premises of Freudian thought, Fromm attaches a "humanistic" cover to conceal a more subtle, yet harsh, superego. To unveil it would be to reveal that substantial degree of internalized social repression which Fromm must consign to each indivi dual. According to Marcuse, he does so not out of necessity, but as an unwritten consequence of his own moral and ideolog
ical crusade.
^Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 289-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
84 In sum, Marcuse and Fromm tend to disagree radically in much of their interpretation of internalized social re pression as generated from psychoanalytic theory. Fromm continues his essentially stoic denial of the depth and di mension of external social restraints. Furthermore, he ig nores the most uncomfortable features of Freudian psycholo gy; e.g., the dualism of life and death instincts and the explicit construction of a severe superego. In their place, Fromm offers a prospect for humanity which borders on spiri tual reverie. For he presumes to protect man within the context of a cheery matriarchal structure which is largely apart from material and social reality. In his ethical- idealist system, Fronm substitutes a "true" humanistic con science for Freud's strict taskmaster. In the process, Marcuse would claim that Fromm willy-nilly weakens man's de fense against actual social repression. According to Marcuse, most such repression is unseen as well as unnecessary; i.e., it is surplus. However, he in sists that it has to be uncovered and understood in order to be surmounted. In his idealist transcendence of the realm, of conflict, Fromm attempts to dispense with the deepest compli cations of the real world. In contradistinction, Marcuse re lies on his dialectic to disclose a pattern of growing, and increasingly needless, repression throughout civilized his tory. On one hand, Fromm is satisfied to adjust the indivi dual's attitude to surface relationships with authority. On
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
85
the other, Marcuse seeks to liberate man's instincts for erotic development. At the same time, he intends to de flate those destructive impulses which he views to arise
from socio-historic forces—forces which, however potent, are not necessarily beyond man's rational control.
The purpose of the next chapter will be to consider how the theorists draw a conceptual link between repression and rationality. For example, when would-they argue that it is rational to restrain, repress, or regulate one's behav ior? Particularly in terms of their social theory and rein- terpretation of psychoanalytic theory, what indeed is rational and what is irrational? In light of the expected consequences for the individual and society, what can and should be repressed or permitted expression? When, if ever, are instinctual desires justifiably superseded by larger competing human interests? Certain cultural demands conduce men to accept "rational" replacements for direct and immedi ate gratification. The most notable example of the latter substitute gratification is sublimation, a subject which will be discussed at some length in the chapter to follow.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
86
CHAPTER IV
REPRESSION AND RATIONALITY
In an attempt to reconcile many of the sub-problems
related to the concept of repression as used by Fromm and Marcuse, this chapter examines how the theorists link "ra tionality" to concepts related to libidinal energy and so
cial restraints. The concept of rationality would seem to
be a base for a possible mediation of the conflict of par
ticular individual desires and general societal interests. As a primary arbitrator of creativity and stability, ration ality, particularly via the notion of "sublimation," appears to be at the core of any such compromise of these seemingly competing demands. Sublimation refers to that psychic pro cess by which original libidinal energy is directed toward
aims which are conducive to the maintenance and growth of
culture. Forbidden (id) instincts, whether creative or not,
are channeled according to the needs of cultural stability.
These natural drives, once sublimated, may be deemed worthy
of social acceptance; e.g., when the artist emotes his sa distic impulses in a scene of harrowing, yet contained, vio
lence. Such individual psychic release leaves the social
order intact. However, ipso facto, sublimation entails some
form of personal repression; for, in essence, it denotes the deflection of free instinctual activity into socially useful (ego) and permissible (superego) endeavor.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
87
Does either theorist effectively free his concept of sublimation from connotations of repression? To what extent is it "rational" to constrain erotic life in order to ful fill cultural needs? How can man's consciousness and ra tionality generate individual and social change? Do social conditions themselves significantly influence any potential
transformation of repressive reality?
In Freudian psychology the "ego" is that concept which refers to the rational organizing mechanism of the personality. Regulated by the reality principle, the ego is either already conscious or can be made readily conscious. Serving a self-preservative and integrating function, the ego ideally insures an harmonious interaction between one's internal will and the external world. Originally part of the id, the ego becomes its primary executive agency due to its own habitual contact with the outside environment. That is, unlike the id, the ego acts as an examiner of reality.
Its essential aim is to elicit that pattern of behavior ap propriate to the "normal" and "mature" adult person. Never theless, the ego is strongest and most effective when it is "syntonic," or compatible, with both the id and superego. Rather than being in direct opposition to the other elements of the personality structure, the well functioning ego is their rational, largely conscious, mediator.
Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, chs. 1 and 8.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
88
Though Freud himself appears committed to rationali ty and the "protection" of consciousness, there is enough ambiguity in his theory to lend support to either a conser vative or radical interpretation of the psychological bases
for human action. Freud's most classic statement of his therapeutic mission is contained in this oft-repeated passage from New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: "[My] intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can ap propriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego
shall be." In The Future of an Illusion, Freud points to an optimum realization of self-control through rationality. It can and will be argued that Fromm tends to follow a path
of stoicism and Enlightenment which forms one essential part of Freudian theory. At the same time, Marcuse's notion of a new "rationality of gratification" entertains a more radical
conclusion; on its terms, the seemingly opposing interests
of the ego and the id become mutual forces for liberation. 4
p Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanaly sis," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXII, 80. 3See generally Freud," The Future of an Illusion. Cf. Fromm, Beyond the Chains oTlllusion; and Sigmund" Freud's Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959K In both ot these works, Fromm emphasizes Freud's ability to rid man of his illusions; i.e., to develop consciousness and rationality.
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 205. Cf. Freud, "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XX,
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
89
A. Fromm: From Illusion to De-Repression
The problem of repression and rationality is, for Fromm, an exercise in transcendent self-examination. "Know thyself: the very root of freedom can be found in this
classic Greek sentence. Self-knowledge has always meant a surpassing of our limitations ... a way to become the man whom we potentially are."5 The explicit goal of Frommian psychology is to locate that personal authenticity which
will allow the individual to realize his essential nature. In psychoanalytic terms, it seeks to detect rationalizations
so that one can discover truth and falsehood within him self. It is important to recognize that Fromm continues to rely on man's internal capacity to cope with repression. From Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950) to Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (I96O), Fromm speaks of inner spiritual re sources as wellsprings for human activity. With Buddha as
well as the ancient Greeks, he firmly believes that ration al wisdom stems from a developmental growth in self-awareness. According to Fromm, the "most revolutionary change"
in modern times lies in man's consciousness of illusion and irrationality in the world around him. In a word, men are
97. According to Freud, there is little ground for positing an inherent opposition between ego and id. -'Fromm and Xirau, p. 15.
Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 77-78.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
90
to be commended for opening their eyes to social repres
sion. However, Fromm quickly clarifies the real focus
of his call for reform: man should, above all, change
himself. Instead of elaborating a consistently criti cal social analysis, Fromm condemns those persons who "refuse to apply rational and critical judgment to [them
selves]." Thus, Fromm tends to absorb another trouble some social concern under the panoply of an individual
moral question. Fromm claims to follow Marx in contending that "re pression is essentially the result of contradictions between
the need for the full development of man and the given social
structure—hence the fully developed society in which ex ploitation and class conflict have disappeared does not need
o ideologies and can dispense with repression." Contrary to
Freud, Fromm argues that repression decreases in the course
of social evolution. However, he leaves curious gaps in de
tailing how man can step from present reality to any prom
ised Utopia. No such gaps appear to exist in Fromm's own
mind because he largely denies the severity of socio-
historical repression. A philosopher of hope and Enlight
enment, the stoic Fromm exhorts men to use their reason in
order to assure the gradual growth of humanity. What is
7Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, pp. 123-124.
o Ibid., p. I53. Oddly, Fromm avoids the more un pleasant aspects of Marxian analysis; e.g., the necessity of saltatory change through violent social revolution.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
91
particularly peculiar about Fromm's solution is that it runs directly counter to his more sociological and historical critique in Escape from Freedom (1941): "The social proc ess, by determining the mode of life of the individual, that is, his relation to others and to work, molds his character structure."9 Most of Fromm's subsequent writing indicates a con sistent willingness to count on an exertion of internal will
to control adverse social circumstances. In Man for Himself (1947), Fromm insists that "the productive person who trusts his reason ... has the will to act virtuously." At bottom, a character structure which assumes a significant area of au tonomy is seen as a reliable safeguard against repressive
socio-historic conditions. "We are, indeed, able to change
and to influence forces inside and outside ourselves and to
control ... the conditions which play upon us. We can
foster and enhance those conditions which develop the striv ing for good and bring about its realization." Fromm thus seeks an essentially rational and moral resolution of socio-historical complexities. His social theory is girded by an underlying ethical imperative: ex
istential dichotomies and contradictions drive men to
9Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 102. Fromm actual ly begins his transition from social analysis to moral ex hortation in the concluding sections of Escape from Freedom. Much of his later work is guided by a moralist zeal for so- cial reform rather than the more scholarly objective of so cial critique.
Fromm, Man for Himself, p. 233-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
92
struggle and achieve even in the face of repressive reality. For productive men, reason will win out. For Fromm, cultur al transformation requires only renewed "seriousness and dedication" from rational men; and any regression from man's evolutionary state of progress becomes tantamount fo an "es cape from freedom." Knowledge and rational control provide the keys to Fromm's escape from the shackles of repression. He travels the path of reason in his analysis of both individual and social change in Freudian and Marxian theory. One of Fromm's major concerns in Beyond the Chains of Illusion (I962) is to credit Freud for his discovery of individual rationaliza tion, and Marx for his unearthing of social ideology. In both cases, men are taught to intuit the difference between
"true" and "false" consciousness; in turn, they become aware
of "reality":
11Fromm, The Sane Society, pp. 71, 344. Cf. John H. Schaar, Escape from Authority: The Perspectives of. Erich Fromm (New York: Basic Books, 1961), pp. 52-59- Schair-ar gues that Fromm establishes a moral-biological standard which requires man to maintain a progressive evolutionary development if he wants to avoid pathological reversion. Cf. also Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 213: "Eros, penetrating into consciousness, is moved by remembrance; with it he protests against the order of renunciation." Un like Marcuse, Fromm fails to comprehend the possible revolu tionary effect of regressions; e.g., unconscious memory traces, the archaic heritage, and the return of the repressed.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
93
For both [Marx and Freud], truth is the essential medi um to transform, respectively, society and the indivi dual; awareness is the key to social and individual therapy. Marx's statement, "The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions," also could have been made by Freud. Both wanted to free man from the chains of his illusions in order to enable him to wake up and to act as a free man.12
To a considerable extent, Fromm spiritualizes Marxi an socialism by stressing its rational goals. According to
Fromm, the ultimate aim of Marxism is to unfold man's pro ductive potentiality. Rational control of one's faculties presumably permits one to "grow up," to become an "indepen dent and free man." 3 The essence of socialism is likewise found in men's ability to function "rationally"; i.e., under their own "free," "associated," and "productive" control.14 By maximizing strong and productive ego development,
Fromm is able to idealize and minimize the importance of pow er and power structures. As Fromm refuses to take heed of
social and political repression, it is the innocent indivi dual who pays the price in these instances. For Fromm dis tinguishes between the realms of Caesar and God by claiming that the latter offers more spiritual and, therefore, real
12 Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, pp. 16-17.
13Ibid., pp. 35-37. Ibid., pp. 180-181; and Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 60.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
94 direction for human conduct. 5 In light of the destructive events of the twentieth century, it is remarkable—and strange—that Fromm can still afford such a picture of real ity. However, in view of his assumption of man's primary potentiality for goodness, it is easy to see how he can for get the power of daemonia. From his basically Apollonian perspective, Fromm allows few creative channels of release
for Dionysian impulses. Fromm's disparagement of the realities of power
leads him to characterize Marxism as a stoic search for
salvation of the soul. Quite glibly, Fromm mixes rationali ty with spirituality; in his vision, Marx ascends to the same intellectual heaven as that inhabited by the likes of Buddha, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. In the process, Marxian
socialism is reduced to "a resistance movement against the
5Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, pp. 156-157, 180. In an age of despair, Fromm assuages man's desperate feelings. For example, he asserts that "nothing is more characteristic of Western history than the principle of hope." Ibid., p. .165. Fromm's most recent attempt at socio-political analysis, aptly entitled The Revolution of Hope (1968), further illustrates his penchant for uncorrobo- rated pictures of reality. One is tempted to ask: does Fromm create his own illusions? For an affirmative answer . to that query, see A. I. Titarenko, "Erich Fromm in the Chains of Illusion," Science and Society, Vol. XXIX, No. 3 (Summer, I965), 319-329. As E. Z. Friedenberg observes, "In reading Fromm, as in reading Buber, one is sometimes a little troubled by a feeling that the psychological and moral systems they have erected . . . suffer a certain loss of authority and detail of feeling from their comparative exclusion from the tragic events of our time." Friedenberg, 306.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
95
destruction of love in social reality."17' Frommian Marxism becomes a kind of mystical existentialist protest which re
lies on an extreme exertion of internal will at the expense of wider socio-historical change. "Marx's socialism is the realization of the deepest religious impulses common to the great humanistic religions of the past ... [i.e., an ex- pression of] concern for man's soul."18 Indeed, for Fromm, humanistic religion itself evolves out of that spiritual struggle for freedom and autonomy which powerless minori- ties wage against dominant and oppressive external authority.19
7Paul Tillich, Protestantische Vision (Stuttgart: Ring Verlag, 1952), p. 6, as quoted by Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 59. Fromm interprets Marx to mean that "only •love' ... makes man truly believe in the reality of the objective world outside himself." Ibid., p. 32. ^Ibid., p. 63. In Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 93n., Fromm considers mysticism among the highest forms of rationality. In Marx's Concept of Man, p. 64, he refers to Marxist socialism as "rational mysticism." Cf. F. Bart- lett and J. Shodell, "Fromm, Marx and the Concept of Alien ation," Science and Society, Vol. XXVII, No. 3 (Summer, 1963), 321-326, for an incisive critique of Fromm's distor tion of Marxian philosophy. Bartlett and Shodell also con tend that Fromm's moral ascetism produces grave discrepancies in his Marxian analysis. For example, Fromm cites Marx's wholesale attack on the classical economists by prefacing it with his own thoroughly un-Marxian assertion: "Marx recog nized that the science of capitalist economy is a truly mor al science." Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 36. In this way, Fromm "tends to tip the balance away from social strug gles, from having to come to grips with the practical neces sities involved in transforming capitalism into socialism." Bartlett and Shodell, 325. 19Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 52.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
9S
Critical analysis reveals that Fromm merely pretends to follow Marx's attempt to show how man creates himself within a socio-historic context. For, unlike Marx, he pos its a belief in an inherent human "essence." Granted, with Fromm, Marx does "first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch."20 However, this appears to be simply a procedur al device of Marxian methodology. In substance, to admit to a belief in human nature is not necessarily to imply a commitment to an inherent essence in man. Rather, Marx seems to emphasize the significance of change in social con ditions as the sine qua non in man's existence. Fromm stresses a well-known quotation from Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach": "the essence of man is no abstraction in- herent in each separate individual. 91 In a rather un- scholarly omission, Fromm neglects the very next sentence of Marx's work: "In its reality it [any alleged essence] is the ensemble (aggregate) of ... social relations."22 While leaving man basically to his own resources, Fromm has denied the decisive impact of social influences and socio political repression. He fails to consider how social
20Marx, Capital, I (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906), p. 668, as cited in Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 25- 2lMarx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 198, in Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 25- 22Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 198. Cf. Bartlett and Shodell, 324.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
97 forces can generate profound irrationality throughout the
fabric of institutional life. Inasmuch as Fromm tends to ignore larger social and political realities, he can comfortably plan to reform soci ety along the "sane" lines of a "revolution of hope." In The Sane Society (1955), he conceives of an evolutionary growth in human history which entails a progressive unfold ing of man's potentialities. In addition to this view of Enlightenment, Fromm postulates that the "main passions and drives in men . . . are definite and ascertainable." That is to say, there is a rational and universal set of criteria for psychic stability, which Fromm defines as "normative
humanism":
There are right and wrong, satisfactory and unsatisfac tory solutions to the problem of human existence. Men tal health is achieved if man develops into full maturi ty according to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Mental illness consists in the failure of such development.23
Such standards for a "sane society" seem within the hopeful grasp of the Frommian man because he assumes that his essential self can transcend a corrupting civilization. His humanistic conscience can presumably rise above any
23Fromm, The Sane Society, p. 14. In the tradition of Neo-Freudianism and the "cultural school" of psychoanaly sis, which includes K. S. Sullivan and Karen Homey, Fromm also aims to go "beyond merely enabling man to submit to the restrictions of his society . . . [in order] to free him from its irrational demands and make him more able to devel op his potentialities and to assume leadership in building a more constructive society." Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Develoroent (New York: Hermitage House, 1951), p. 152. Marcuse, ar:CT.g others, argues that Fromm is actual ly practicing a psychology of adjustment. Cf. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 237-239- See Chapter III, supra.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
98
illness in society merely by seeming to criticize it. 24 However, this Idealist and transcendental negation of the social order may actually tend to affirm its "rational" guidelines. As Marcuse points out, Transcendental philosophy arouse[s] the belief that the realization of reason through factual transformation [is] unnecessary, since individuals could become ra tional and free within the established order. ... In a world without reason, reason is only the semblance of rationality ... This semblance is generated by the in ternalization of idealism. Reason arid freedom become the tasks that the individual is to fulfill within him self, and he can do so regardless of external conditions.25
Fromm's entire "revolution of hope" rests on man's capacity for "psychospiritual renewal" within a society he himself describes as "sick" and "dehumanizing." Though Fromm establishes a dichotomy between "survival" and "trans- survival," his distinction amounts to an exercise in psy chologizing rather than a fundamental fulfillment of social change. As part of his own "orientation and devotion" to Enlightenment, Fromm is concerned about increased opportuni ties for human perfectibility as abundance replaces scarci ty. For him, the notion of "trans-survival" is useful in persuading man that the normative conditions for humanistic social planning are not beyond rational recall within the
94Fromm, The Sane Society, p. 233- 25Marcuse, "Philosophy and Critical Theory," in Negations, p. 137. Cf. also Marcuse, "The Affirmative Char acter ot Culture," in ibid., pp. 88-133-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
99
existing technological system. That is, if man focuses upon his "higher" cultural values in the course of social reform, the "sane society" is within sight. In the meantime, Fromm does not really question the insidious, perhaps paralyzing, effect of social unreason. Given the societal context that
Fromm accepts, it is indeed debatable whether his humane ideals can be practiced with any efficacy or meaning. Iron ically, while condemning all forms of ideology and rational ization, Fromm implies that man should repress his awareness of present socio-political irrationality in order to prepare for the future. For Fromm, reality has clearly given way to stoicism and Enlightenment.2 In practical terms, Fromm's main interest in prepar ing for his revolution of hope is to insure a minimum of
public manipulation. He seems to think that man's essential self, with its concomitant rationality, provides an adequate barrier to social repression and social unreason. Rational
communication with others is seen as a suitable mechanism
for social reconstruction. This would consist of active participation in face-to-face groups, access to information, and direct decision making on a decentralized basis.27 Fromm
Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, pp. 70-77, 98-99, 136-137. 27 Ibid., pp. III-II3. Fromm's concern for communi cation and participation is reminiscent of similar interests in the political thought of John Dewey. "That the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales." John Dewey,
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
100
puts a heavy premium on "grass-roots activity and responsi bility" in seeking to convert "alienated bureaucracy" into
"humanistic management." He also warns that men must be
Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., I925), P- 166. On Marcusean analysis, it would appear that Fromm and Dewey fail to come to terms with political real ities of a wider institutional magnitude. Both tend to view conflict situations as manageable struggles "between groups and other groups, between some individuals and oth er individuals." Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1932), p. 359. By - avoiding the broader effects of the total social apparatus, their public struggles are neutralized within the whole. Those who participate in public questions come only to feel that they are in control of conflict situations; ac tually, they themselves are integrated into the whole. For a more sympathetic appraisal of the scope and method of Deweyan social theory, see William 0. Stan ley, Education and Social Integration (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1953), especially chs. 10 and 11. pft Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, pp. 98-99. Fromm's proposal resembles that of educational theorist Kenneth D. Benne, who has designed a plan for maximal worker input into decision making for a factory system in Bethel, Maine. Both Fromm and Benne appear to adhere to an adjustment psychology which merely manipulates human relations without substantially transforming those social conditions which might actually be eliciting repressive be havior. Indeed, their method reminds one of group therapy, a kind of social engineering which could easily work to ab sorb individual differences. Benne, for instance, writes of the "neglected factor" of human relations in the following manner: "Sat isfaction is possible only through participation in group life by means of roles associated with positions in vari ous social systems. In this way an individual becomes a member of various groups and of the larger society of which these are a part. Thus, he satisfies his biological needs as well as his need for security, for belongingness, for recognition, and for response from others." Kenneth D. Benne and Bozidar Muntyan, Human Relations in Curriculum Change: Selected Readings with Especial Emphasis on Group Development (New York: Dryden Press,' 1951), pp. 10-11. Cf. also Benne, "Democratic Ethics and Human Engineering," in ibid., pp. 3O7-3I6.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
101
more alert, and less passive, in directing the consumption patterns of a marketing society. 297
However, Fromm does not appear to avoid the subtle
manipulations which he claims to guard against. In his ef fort to realize the sane society and the revolution of hope, Fromm perhaps submits to an established ideology which equates "participation" with control. His social and po
litical goal in The Sane Society is to activate the prin ciple of "communitarian socialism," which he defines as an
industrial.organization in which "every working person would
be an active and responsible participant, where work would
be attractive and meaningful." Fromm specifically plays
down the role of ownership and control: "The failure . . . of Marxist Socialism lies precisely in . . . [its] overesti- mation of property rights and purely economic factors." In
stead, he cites G.D.H. Cole's vision of a "self-governing
community of workers" as his own ideal. In other words,
Fromm discards Marx's emphasis on power and control for a gradual Utopian socialism characterized by participation and the "sharing of experience." Men are made to feel satisfied
even though they have no actual control over their social
situation. .Once again, one is tempted to conclude that Fromm wishes them to repress that reality.3
9Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, pp. 98-99. 3 Fromm, The Sane Society, pp. 283-286, 361. Cf. G.D.H. Cole and W. Mellor, The Meaning of Industrial Freedom (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1918), pp. 3-4. On Fromm's Utopian model, such functions as work,
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
102
The means to Fromm's Utopia are by no means without
repressive repercussions. In The Revolution of Hope, Fromm suggests a National Council which he calls the "Voice of Amer ican Conscience." The object of this group is to "delib
erate and issue statements" articulating the "humanist aims
which are the basis for the humanization of technological society." Presumably, the weight of its thinking could not reasonably be denied by any "rational" and "humanistic" per son; and "the truth and rationality of [the] contents [of
its thought] would win attention from at least a large sec tor of the American public." Fromm also proposes a decen
tralized chain of such councils and clubs in order to generate discussion of practical questions on local levels.3
fiarticipation, and the "sharing of experience" become social- y advantageous (ego) and socially acceptable (superego) activities. In the process, their libidinal ground seems to be dangerously eroded. Similarly unaware of its potentially detrimental consequences, Dewey also emphasizes the "sharing of experience." Cf., for example, Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1927), pp. 151-159, 166-184. 3 Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, pp. I57-I69. Cf. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure"] trans. Edward Shils [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., T9"40); and Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace.and Co., 1936). Fromm's elitist proclivities, seem ingly similar to Mannheim's, are actually far less sophisti cated. Unlike Fromm, Mannheim does not reduce basic irra tionalities of social life to simplistic moral solutions. Fromm is content to accept his own moralism,' regardless of its consequences for social existence.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
103
The fact that Fromm again confuses the issues of
participation and control, social adjustment and social change, is evidenced immediately. He merely further con duces men to accept the assumed "rational" dicta of society by allowing them to feel that they have a determining ef fect on political outcomes. Moreover, he performs this ser
vice with all the gusto of an obtrusive elitist. Men can be made "reasonable" even if they cannot control their affairs. To keep men from feeling alienated and from submitting to the "solace of constant indignation as a substitute for be ing alive,"3 Fromm advises them to follow him and a select
circle of fellow humanists who have, as it were, "seen the light."
Thus, it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that Frommian individualism could lead to severely repres sive social and political practice. Sir Isaiah Berlin per ceptively points to a similar tendency in the social theories
of Kant and Rousseau; those who posit a belief in rational self-direction often leave a deadly gap in moving from moral
to political philosophy, claiming that
[One} cannot consult all men about all enactments all . the time . . . If I am a legislator or a ruler, I must assume that if the law I impose is rational (and I can only consult my own reason) it will automatically be
•^Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, p. 165- As will be shown by Marcuse, consciousness of one's alienation and "in dignation" over adverse social conditions .may well be a first step in ridding man of his chains.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
104
approved by all the members of my society so far as they are rational beings. For if they disapprove, they must, pro tan to, be irrational; then they will need to be repressed by reason: whether their own or mine can not matter, for the pronouncements of reason must be the same in all minds. I issue my orders, and if you resist, take it upon myself to repress the irrational element in you which opposes reason. My task would be easier if you repressed it in yourself; I try to edu cate you to do so.33 In "Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism," a lengthy es say which appeared in i960, Fromm lets down his political guard long enough to reveal his own idea of rational educa tion for self-suppression. His concept of conscious "de repression" necessitates a considerable amount of concerted sublimation. Following Freud, Fromm characterizes "de repression" as that process by which the unconscious is made conscious. He claims to broaden Freud's more limited at tempt to absorb the id into the ego. Indeed, Fromm ampli fies Freud's conception of ego development by spiritualizing and moralizing any distinctions between consciousness and
unconsciousness:
The unconscious is the whole man—minus that part of man which corresponds to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. . . . Making the unconscious conscious transforms the mere idea of the universality ot man
33Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), PP- 152-153-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
105
into the living experience of this universality; it is the experiential realization of humanism.^>4
On Fromm's terms, socio-historical transformation becomes relatively unimportant. It is individual character change toward humanism which assumes added significance. "Accom plishment of true insight is indissolubly connected with a change in character;" that is to say, "characterological transformation is a condition for salvation."3-' Fromm coalesces his stoic and Enlightenment resources behind the authorities of psychoanalysis and Zen, thereby heightening his unusual admixture of rationalism and mysti cism. Relying upon Freud and Suzuki, Fromm's concept of de repression consists in spontaneous, conscious enlightenment. Through sublimation, man should repress those daemonic strivings which are incompatible with the structure and growth of rational authority and humanistic conscience. Fromm formulates no viable outlet for the impulses of the
3 Fromm, "Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism," in Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, and Richard DeMartino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper and Row, I960), pp. 106-107. 35Ibid., p. 121. Fromm's stress on internal will, rather than external conditions, is manifested in his cita tion of D. T. Suzuki, a major interpreter of the teachings of Zen Buddhism: "The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of one's being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external." D. T. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Lon don: Rider, 1949), p. 44, as quoted in Fromm, "Psychoanaly- sis and Zen Buddhism," p. 118.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
106
id; he asks man only to listen to his inner voice, to tran scend the limitations of his instinctual sphere and corrupt society. Man will not feel repressed if he comes to know himself and acts on his own rational authority. He will sublimate, yet still feel free.-7^ In the final analysis, Fromm substantially relin quishes the rights of the id for the requirements of both the ego and the superego. His solution to the problem of repression and rationality seems to be just as harsh as Freud's. The major difference between Freud and Fromm ap pears to be that whereas Freud at least makes men aware of
his restrictive intentions, Fromm allows them to believe that individual reason and morality can withstand any reper cussions of reality, however repressive. For Fromm is pri marily concerned about "the right way of living;"37 i.e.,
^According to Fromm, the methods of psychoanalysis and Zen dovetail to the extent to which each "directs atten tion to that perception which is distorted ... [and] leads to a recognition of the fiction within oneself." Fromm, "Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism," p. 139- To this end, the ideal psychoanalyst and the Zen master are representative examples of "rational authority." Fromm also sees a cccrnonality between Judeo- Christian and Zen Buddhist morality which can be described charitably as a combination of stoicism and personal en lightenment. Fromm exalts the willingness "to make oneself empty," which means the "openness to receive." He equates this with the Christian aphorism, "to slay oneself and to accept the will of God." Ibid., pp. 94-95- Less charitably, therefore, Fromm might be accused of committing mankind to pain and suffering. 37Petuchowski, 549.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
107
the rational and ethical functioning of ego and superego processes. His interest lies in building a strong, self- responsible person—one who can effect change in himself.38 In actuality, Fromm perhaps provides only preachment rather than protection, an array of false hopes instead of a con
crete commitment to social change.
B. Marcuse: From Social Unreason to New Rationality
Marcuse's analysis of rationality and repression be gins with the assumption that society has been made thorough ly irrational and repressive. The object of Marcuse's critical social theory is to transcend the phenomenological parade of facts and events which he claims has permitted ad vanced Western civilization to extoll "progress" while actu ally acting to contain social change.39 In essence, Marcuse attempts to abstract an alleged revolutionary chain of ideas which issues from Hegel, leads to Marx, and eventually comes
to rest in Freud. In the end, Marcuse intends to merge the
^Fromm describes his own psychoanalytic method as one which stresses the individual's willingness to suffer, to develop self-reliance. The effect of this stoic Volun tarism is to "create a determination on the patient's part to overcome his problem." Fromm, in Evans, pp-. 5I-52. 39Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. x-xii. For a broad survey of the history ot the idea of progress in West ern thought, including that of Fromm and Marcuse, see W. Warren Wagar, Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972).
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
108
forces of Logos and Eros in an intellectual progression from social unreason to a new "rationality of gratification." According to Marcuse's restatement of Hegelian phi losophy, reality is molded out of the fundamental integrat ing function of reason. "The life of reason appears in man's continuous struggle to comprehend what exists and to transform it in accordance with the truth comprehended." Truth is apprehended only once the potentialities inherent in reality become actual. In dialectical thought the spe cific becomes comprehensible only as it is understood by the general. Mere isolated facts and phenomena compose an in complete, indeed a distorted, picture of reality. The ca pacity for reason improves as experiential data pass to higher planes of judgment and synthesis; that is, as man progresses in history. "Reason is ... essentially a historical force. Its fulfillment takes place as a process in the spatio- temporal world, and is, in the final analysis, the whole history of mankind."
^Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 10, 24-25. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Reas-n In History: A General Introduction to" the Philosophy oFHistory. trans. Robert S. Harcman (Inai- ahapolis: Bobbs-Memll Co., 1953).- P- H: "The sole thought which philosophy brings to the treatment of history is the simple concept of Reason: that Reason is the law of the world and that, therefore."in world history, things have come about rationally." For Marcuse's first scholarly treatment of Hegel, see Marcuse, Hegel's Ontblogie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit(Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann Verlag, 1932).
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
109
Thus, for Marcuse, Hegel is more than a thorough going idealist; he establishes an ideational stage for rational socio-historic transformation. In Hegel's view, "man has set out to organize reality according to the demands of his free rational thinking instead of simply accommodating his thoughts to the existing order and the prevailing values." As an agent of history, reason un dermines the status quo so long as the latter remains
irrational: "'Real' comes to mean not everything that actually exists (this should rather be called appearance), but that which exists in a form concordant with the standards of reason." The Hegelian dialectic, in its "spirit of contradiction," demonstrates the inadequacy of the pres
ent social order; it summons man to fill the gap between the world as "is" and as "can be."41 Marcuse enlists Hegelian dialectic as an instrument to bridge the gap between thought and reality. At bottom,
Tiarcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 6, 11. In deemphasizing Hegel's Idealism, Marcuse fails to con sider seriously Hegel's ultimately spiritual aims. Hegel himself characterizes world history as "the manifesta tion of the Divine, the absolute process of Spirit in its highest forms." Hegel, Reason in History, p. 67- For a balanced perspective on Marcuse's relative neglect of Hegel's religious orientation, see Karl LSwith, "Review of Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. II, No. 4 (June, 1942), 560-563- It would seem that Marcuse's intention to avoid Pope's poetic justification of the status quo, "Whatever is, is right," may be behind his slighting of Hegelian spiritu alism. In other words, Marcuse's treatment of Hegel appears to be ideological as well as philosophical.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
110 that gap shows itself to be a manifestation of historical development; for human knowledge is historically condi tioned.112 As man uses his rational will and knowledge in the course of history, contradictions become more readily comprehensible. For Hegel, human growth culminates with the fulfillment of what is possible within contradictory forces. Pointing toward Marx, Marcuse contends that growing intel lectual and material resources increasingly allow man to ex punge irrationality from existence. That is to say, though Marcuse accepts the basic structure of Hegelian theory, he recognizes that it is not quite amenable to praxis. However, Marcuse does notice a direct line of thought joining Hegel to Marx. Social unreason unfolds it self in the general concept of alienation and the sub category of alienated labor. In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel posits an existential conflict between self- consciousness and awareness of external reality. This conflict, which he terms "alienation" (Entfremdung), forces one to the realization that "the world of objects, original ly the product of man's labor and knowledge, [has] become
42Marcuse, "Notes on the Problem of Historical Laws," Partisan Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (Winter, 1959), 122 127*7 Cf. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 149: es sence is'. .. as much historical as ontological. The es sential potentialities of things realize themselves in the same comprehensive process that establishes their existence. The essence can 'achieve' its existence when the potentiali ties of things have ripened in and through the [historical] conditions of reality. '
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
Ill
independent of man and [has] come to be governed by uncon
trolled forces and laws in which man no longer recognizes his own self." 3 On Marcusean analysis, socio-historic and surplus-repressive pressures have thus replaced basic and necessary realities. Marcuse uses Hegel's notion of Entfremdung to illustrate, first, how the history of man has been synonymous with the history of alienation and, sec
ond, how that irrational configuration of events can eventu
ally be dissolved and negated:
The institutions man founds and the culture he creates develop laws of their own, and man's freedom has to comply with them. He is overpowered by the expanding wealth of his economic, social, and political surround ing and comes to forget that he himself, his free de velopment, is the final goal of all these works; instead he surrenders to their sway. Men always strive to perpetuate an established culture, and in doing so perpetuate their own frustration. The his tory of man is the history of his estrangement from his true interest and, by the same token, the history of its realization. The concealment of man's true inter est in his societal world is part of the "cunning of reason" and is one of those "negative elements" without which there is no progress to higher forms.44
•^Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 23- Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (Lon don: George Allen and Unwin, 19olT,-pp. 251 ff- Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 246. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: The Colonial Press, 1899), p. 55= "What Mind really strives for is the realization of its notion; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation from its own essence." Al ready, Marcuse acknowledges a transition from Hegel to Marx in his intuitive conception of "true" interest and need.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
112
Marcuse argues that Hegel is well aware of the socio-economic and political forces which tend to allow man to forget, or repress, himself. Hegel cites the bourgeois property system as a prime agent of personal and political disintegration. He maintains that its "social institutions had distorted even the most private and personal relations between men," including that of love. "Abstract labor" transforms work pursued originally for individual gratifica tion into general and mechanical commodity production and exchange. At the same time, property magnifies the inequal ity of men and wealth. Enlarging upon Hegel, Marcuse claims that the individual becomes powerless before the blind (surplus-repressive) necessity of such an anarchic social structure. With Hegel, he contends that work should ideal ly represent both the general interests and needs of the community and the concrete wants and desires of the individual.115
-'Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 34, 57-58, 77-79, 205-206. Furthermore, Marcuse recognizes that Hegel presages Marx's notion of utilizing mechanization and tech nology as means for man's eventual liberation from toil and drudgery. For Hegel sees that the machine process, as con stituted, subordinates the individual to abstract labor. Since there are contradictions inherent in that process, there is a need to transcend to a higher stage of recon ciliation; i.e., a closer integration of personal as well as societal interests. Marcuse carries Hegel one revolutionary step further: "It means, moreover, that the inherent poten tialities of men and things cannot unfold in society except through the death of the social order in which they are first gleaned." Ibid., p. 148.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
113
In the end, however, Marcuse admits that Hegel never really explodes the irrational contradictions of the status
quo. Indeed, throughout his philosophic opus, Hegel insists upon the inevitability of a progressive development of ra
tionality in society and the State. At its heart, Hegelian
discourse remains ontological; in its conclusions, it inte grates antagonisms: "Every conflict implies its own solu
tion . . . The mind, despite all deviations and defeats, despite misery and deterioration, will attain its goal, or rather, has attained it, in the prevailing system." In a word, Hegel has not effectively disengaged himself from the
Idealist tradition of stoic and transcendent freedom.
Marcuse seeks to go beyond Hegel's basically philo- • sophicaL categories by adopting Marx's social and economic
schemata. Though Hegel criticizes the existing social or
der, his analysis comes to be absorbed within that order.
With Marx, Marcuse hopes to negate and abolish established
systems of thought and action. His mission is built upon a
three-pronged Marxian attack: to turn Hegel's Idealism on its head, to expose the "poverty of philosophy," and to transform social life at its roots. According to Marx and
Marcuse, it is the existence of the proletariat which "con tradicts the alleged reality of reason, for it sets before
46Ibid., p. 93. Karl Lowith strikes a perceptive contrast between Hegel and Marx: whereas Hegel allows "rea sonable" contradictions into his system, Marx seeks to abol ish contradictions on the ground of their essential irration ality. Lbwith, 562-566. Marcuse agrees with Marx.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
114
us an entire class that gives proof of the very negation of reason." Philosophic proofs are no longer necessary; in deed, they may have become surplus-repressive: "History and social reality themselves ... 'negate' philosophy. The critique of society cannot be carried through by philosophi cal doctrine, but becomes the task of socio-historical practice." 7 The Marxian concepts of alienation and consciousness provide the sharpest tools for Marcuse's effort to unearth social unreason and repression; for both "denote the total frustration of human faculties."48 Marx's 1844 Manuscripts serve as telling testimony of man's ubiquitous alienation— from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his fellow men, and from himself. 9 Marcuse follows Marx in
7Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 258-261. Mar cuse's philosophical reasoning is itself excessively convo luted. However, Marcuse refuses to appeal to common sense or empirical validation because he claims that both consti tute deficient modes of analysis when viewed through the scope of dialectical logic. This presumption permits Mar cuse to circumvent many substantive issues of verification and justification. For a similar argument against Marcuse, see Robert W. Marks, The Meaning of Marcuse (New York: Ballantine Books, 197077 " ^Robinson, pp. I72-I76. 49Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, p. 103. For a comprehensive account of the problem of alienation, especially as it con cerns Hegel, Marx, and Fromm, see Richard Schacht, Alienation (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970), chs. 2, 3, and 4.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
115
his belief that man will attain toward rational self-
determination only as the prevailing mode of alienated la
bor is abolished. Thus, with Marx, Marcuse pinpoints labor
relations, beginning as early as the first family structure, as the original source of all alienation.5^ Unlike Hegel, who complements Classical Liberalism in merging property with personality, Marx and Marcuse complete its logical di alectical negation: "the possession of property by one per son necessarily entails its non-possession by another."-3 The aim of Marxian-Marcusean analysis is to make men con
scious of such fundamental unfairness; i.e., to draw upon
their sense of alienation as a way of achieving social
change. From Reason and Revolution (1941) to One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse focuses upon the stimulation of conscious
awareness as a cardinal condition of socio-historical
transformation. Revolution first necessitates an adequate
level of material and intellectual culture; the realm of
abundance must supersede the realm of scarcity. However, that objective totality must also be "seized upon and di rected by a conscious activity that has in mind the social ist goal."-'^ Consequently, Marcuse explicitly employs
^Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 273-287- 5 Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 109- -^Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 318. In the contemporary society Marcuse describes, Marx's classic
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
116
consciousness of alienation as a positive ideological weapon against repression: "[Any significant] change would presuppose that the laboring classes are alienated from this universe in their very existence . . . so that the need for qualitative change is a matter of life and death. Thus, the negation exists prior to the change itself."53 Paradox ically, alienation becomes a positive force by acting to ne gate the negative in social existence.5 At the same time,
revolutionary agent, the working class, has already been in tegrated into the system. According to Marcuse, the prole tariat "is no longer qualitatively different from any other class and hence no longer capable of creating a qualitative ly different society." Marcuse, "Socialism in the Developed Countries," International Socialism Journal, Vol. II, No. 8 (April, 1965), I56. Recognizing this co-optation, Marcuse attempts to coalesce isolated disaffected forces, e.g., stu dent and other minority groups, in an effort to stir a radi cal consciousness throughout society. See Marcuse,- An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, I969). Chapter V of the dissertation discusses some possible implications of this movement. 53Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 23- Ideological argument is essential to Marcuse's Marxian analysis: The fundamental relations of the Marxian categories are not within the reach of sociology or of any science that is pre occupied with describing and organizing the objective phenomena of society. They will appear as facts only to a theory that takes them in the preview of their negation. According to Marx, the correct theory is the consciousness of a practice that aims at changing the world. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 321. For Marcuse, the aim of philosophy seems to be revolutionary rather than strictly clarificatory: "Intel lectual dissolution and even subversion of the given facts is the historical task of philosophy and the philosophic di mension. ... Its ideological effort may be truly thera peutic—to show reality as that which it really is, and to show that which this reality prevents from being. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 185, 199- 5^In contradistinction, Fromm's concept of aliena tion is rooted in various forms of negative separations, the
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
117
however, Marcuse's notion of the necessity of awakened con
sciousness ushers in a temporary, yet repressive, elitism.
In Marxian terms, an intellectual vanguard serves the moral
ly catalytic function of creating a new social order out of a new, presumably more rational, consciousness.-'
Marcuse argues that the use of Reason is essential
to individual and social growth. In this sense, it serves
as an analogue of basic repression. However, the histori
cal function of Reason has been predominately surplus-
repressive; that is, "to repress- and even destroy the urge
to live ... or to postpone and put an exorbitantly high price on the fulfillment of this urge." Libidinal sources
have not satisfactorily joined forces with Reason because
the latter has been effectively usurped and conditioned by repressive societal identification (mimesis). When one im
mediately identifies with his social apparatus, he begins to
most important of which seems to be separation from one's self. Schacht, pp. I3O-I3I. For Fromm, alienation sug gests disequilibrium, something which must be overcome by man himself. He therefore recommends a psychic repression of those strivings which fail to harmonize one's basic char acter structure. Thus, in Frommian analysis, alienation be comes a negative force against social change. See Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p. 189; and The Sane Society, pp. 111-114.
55In a Le Monde interview Marcuse admits, "It is useless to wait until the masses join the movement. Ev- erything has always started with a rebellion by a small handful of intellectuals ." Marcuse, as quoted by Yury Zhukov, "Taking Marcuse to the Woodshed," Atlas, Vol. XVI, No. 3 (September, I968), 34. See also J. L. Ferrier, et, al., eds., and H. Weaver trans., "Marcuse Defines His New Eeft Line," The New York Times Magazine, October 27, 1968, 29 ff.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
118
treat it as an independent giant. In the process, his own wishes and desires become repressed: he introjects the 56 needs and wants of the social structure as his own. The prospect of melding individual freedom (pleasure principle) into the reason of a truly rational society (real ity principle) is not disagreeable to Marcuse. Rather, he is bothered by the irrationality of a technocratic social system which actually contains social change and needlessly closes new dimensions to self-determination in the name of Reason and Progress. In fact, Marcuse views excessive social ad ministration as tending to reconcile all opposites, no mat ter how obscene; e.g., the Welfare and Warfare State. The general impact of such repressive socio-historic Reason and Progress is to submit man to distorted
facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of pro ducing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individual's recognition that it contains no facts which do not com municate the repressive power of the whole. If the in dividuals find themselves in the things which shape
-^Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 10-11, 228. In principle, if not in form, Marcuse concurs with Whitehead's proposition: "The function of Reason is to promote the art of life. ... [Reason is- the] direction of the attack on the environment [which derives from the] threefold urge: (1) to-live, (2) to live well, (3) to live better." Alfred North" Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, .1959), pp. 5. 8. as quoted in loc. cit. At the same time, by embracing the entire institutional social structure, Marcuse shows- his theory to be more thoroughly comprehensive than that of those from whom he has learned; e.g., C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, William H. Whyte, and Fred J. Cook. See ibid., p. xvii.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
119
their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.57
Due to this "one-dimensional" world of unreason, men's rational options become unnecessarily restrictive:
"choices are limited to 'reasonable' choices and ... rea sonable choices are prescribed within or at least in terms eg of one universe of discourse."-^ Marcuse characterizes technological Reason as an omnipresent "logic of domina tion." The values and goals of technology circumscribe personal independence; the "objective order of things" be comes the order of the day.59 Guidelines for decision mak ing are prearranged and beyond man's notice as "scientific- technical rationality and manipulation are welded together
57Ibid., pp. 11, 48-55. See also Marcuse, "The End of Utopia," in Five Lectures. In Eros and Civilization, p. 153n., Marcuse points to a singular exception to the rule of mimesis. He cites Hanns Sachs' attempt to demonstrate how the substantial libidinal reservoir within ancient Greek civilization prevented any immediate adaptation to a machine technology. According to Sachs ' account, the Greeks pos sessed the requisite rationality for technological progress. However, at the root of their existence, they were perhaps aware of the surplus-repressive potentiality of such prog ress. See Sachs, "The Delay of the Machine Age," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. II (1933), 420 ff. ^Joseph C. Flay, "Alienation and the Status Quo," Man and World, Vol. II, No. 2 (May, 1969), 248. 59Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 144. Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964) for an excellent survey of how technology has developed into an institutional frame of at tention—one which conditions human value orientations as well as strategies for social planning.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
120
into new forms of social control." Technological Reason also rationalizes unfreedom, allowing it to appear "neither as irrational nor as polit ical, but rather as submission to the technical apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the pro ductivity of labor.""1 Because technological Reason pro tects, rather than arrests, the legitimacy of social domination, freedom from alienation amounts to a pseudo- problem in Marcuse's eyes. That is to say, one is less re pressed if he is alienated from, rather than adjusted to, a needlessly repressive social situation. The ultimate move is to abolish that situation, to alter and negate repressive reality—indeed, by the truly rational use of technology. Without a consciousness ignited by alienation, the first step toward that Utopia could never be taken. Ironically, then, Marcuse seeks to generate meaning from the meaning-
lessness of alienation.
*^Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 146. "The tech nological a priori is a political a priori inasmuch as the transformation of nature involves that of man." Ibid., p. 154. ^1Ibid., pp. 158-159. According to Marcuse, scientific-technological rationality represents a de structive logic of domination which, at its core, is expressive of the death instinct or its derivatives. "The diversion of primary destructiveness from the ego to the external world feeds technological progress, and the use of the death instinct for the formation of the superego achieves the punitive submission of the pleasure ego to the reality principle and assures civilized morality." Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 47-48, 78-79.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
121
On Marcusean analysis, such ameliorative programs as normative humanism, a way of life for Fromm, serve only to intensify subtle social unreason. Marcuse describes social ist humanism as a "bourgeois ideology," a movement which still "smacks of repression, though of refined and sophisti cated repression, of internalization, sublimation of freedom and equality."69 Humanism permits man to partake of the false consciousness that he is free when in reality he is repressed. In its idealization of questions of power, it camouflages the harshness of social repression. Instead, hu
manism issues the "repressive idea of the person or person ality who can 'fulfill himself without making excessive demands on the world, by practicing the socially required degree of resignation." 3 Likewise, Marcuse insists that Fromm's sympathy for Zen and existential psychology engen ders a "restricted, mutilated experience ... [which is] distorted . ... by the nexus of the established social uni- verse of experience. DH All such forms of primarily personal enlightenment and transcendence create the illusion of free dom in a totally repressive society.
Marcuse, "The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity: A Reconsideration," Praxis, Vol. V, Nos. 1-2 (1969), 21. 63Loc. cit. Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," Daedalus (Winter, I965), p. 201.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
122
In view of his rigorous criticism of the softhearted posture of Frommian idealism, one would scarcely expect Mar cuse to commit himself to a Utopian vision. An exceptional thinker, Marcuse attempts the unexpected, perhaps, the im possible.65 Turning the table on Marcuse, it will be argued that his plans for a "rationality of gratification" are even more unrealistic than Fromm's rather piecemeal and evolution ary social reform. Particularly questionable is Marcuse's equivocation on his own established criteria for a possible transition from social unreason to a new rationality. In One-Dimerisional Man, he uses the phrase "determinate choice" to fuse his notions of man's self-creation in history and the social conditions under which such freedom may be real izable. Marcuse outlines these conditions as follows:
Determined are (1) the specific contradictions which develop within a historical system as manifestations of the conflict between the potential and the actual; (2) the material and intellectual resources available to the respective system; (3) the extent of theoreti-gg cal and practical freedom compatible with the system.
65See Maclntyre, p. 70, for a perceptive critique of Marcuse's presumed magical ability to transcend the pervasive social control which he himself contends is almost "total. That is, given his own premise of ubiquitous social unrea son, it would be interesting to learn "just how Marcuse ob tains the indubitable knowledge upon which he bases his social theory. Quite miraculously, Marcuse would have had to escape the all-embracing social falsification which he himself accepts as part of reality. But, after all, Marcuse does consider himself a member of the intellectual elite, a moral agent of social change. He may believe that he re quires no additional judge or justification; however, those who judge him justifiably demand that he shed more .evidence and share the burden of proof. 66Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 221-222.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
123
According to Marcuse, these prerequisites are within man's grasp, especially if he can turn technology against itself
and convert it to his own needs; e.g., through automation. However, in those same pages of One-Dimensiona1 Man, Marcuse concedes that aggressiveness "is rampant throughout contem porary industrial society." 7 In fact, in a recent inter view, Marcuse has claimed that Freud's concept of the death instinct provides the most valuable insight into modern so cial problems. ° In other words, Marcuse is left with the perplexing conclusion that man can construct a rational so
cial order out of the controlling determinant of
des truetivenes s. Marcuse's optimistic portrait of man in harmonious
fulfillment of his rational and sensual capacities is con tained in Eros and Civilization. Here Marcuse implicitly unites his Marxian analysis with his critique of Freud. Once the requisite stage of rationality and technology has been attained, Marcuse sees no reason for the existence of surplus repression. In this particular age of abundance, any repression which coordinates men above and beyond that level necessary for the satisfaction of their basic human
67Ibid., p. 78. . Interview with Marcuse (November 15, I965), in Robinson, p. 242. As noted in Chapter III of the disser tation, Marcuse does not agree with Freud's belief in an inherent aggressiveness in men; instead, he contends that human beings have been made aggressive and destructive by the press of dominant social forces.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
124
needs is entirely unwarranted. A post-Freudian civilization is not encumbered by the realm of survival and necessity; er go, it should practice liberation rather than restriction. But the question to be posed to Marcuse is: has he miscon strued the repercussions of the very socio-historical contingencies which he so well scrutinizes? That is, Mar cuse emphasizes the basic impact of the social context in his critique of repression and rationality. It will be shown, however, that his social planning fails to consider fully the implications of his own analysis.
Marcuse enlists aesthetic illusion (Schein) in order
to articulate the irrationality of the present social system and to propagate a potential for new and revolutionary move ment. The myth of Orpheus and Narcissus is used to repre sent joy and fulfillment, as opposed to the Promethean culture-hero of toil, productivity, and progress. "The im ages of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos. They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mas
tered and controlled but to be liberated." For Marcuse, the Orphic-Narcissistic Eros symbolizes a radical transformation
of human life: freedom and contemplation replaces destruc tion and death. It is in this essentially aesthetic dimension that a new reality principle "must be sought and validated."69
-'Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 146-156; and One-Dimensional Man, pp. 238-239.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
125
But it is more difficult to proceed from illusion to reality than Marcuse realizes. He seems unmindful that his grand design must be generated out of the same one- dimensional logic of domination which he condemns, but does not control. At this point, Marcuse is increasingly uninterested in argument and proof; a full-blown appeal to moralizing credos, his very criticism of Fromm, now becomes part of his own flight to fantasy. In some of his inter pretation of Kant and Friedrich Schiller, Marcuse does try to demonstrate how the aesthetic dimension, through imagina tion, can be both a moral arbitrator of judgment between the rational and sensual faculties, and the harbinger of a world in which free play comes to be a viable substitute for forced labor. Marcuse is quick to emphasize the instinctual character of the aesthetic function which is portrayed in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education. At the same time, however, Marcuse is quite disposed to content-less rhetoric; e.g., Kant's aesthetic by some means leads to "purposiveness without purpose" and "lawfulness without law"70--whatever those expressions might signify. As one of
Marcuse's critics has observed,
7°Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 162. See also ibid., pp. 15«-17^; fmmaniipl Kant. Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892); and Friedrich Schiller, The Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters, trans. J. Weiss (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1845).
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
126
Marcuse himself seems to flower in these affirma- . tions. He forgets the dialectic. As if liberated for the moment by his own dream of liberation, he breathes freely, structures his hopes . . . The reader hears the Magic Flute . . . [manifesting the fact] that Marcuse has somehow imprisoned himself in his own scholarship. An affirmation stands or falls by its own persuasive charm, not by its resemblance to a legal brief.71
In his Utopian idea of transforming sexuality into Eros, Marcuse exposes his program to be composed of wishful hope and a disguised preference for reason over sensuality.
While Marcuse stresses the socio-historical vicissitudes of
the instincts, he seems unwilling to adhere to his own ad monitions regarding the efficacy of any free release of sex uality. For he concedes that the social structure is so strong, yet so subtle, that it can allow institutionalized
desublimation and "civilized" satisfaction while masking the actual unfreedom of such activity. In other words, he considers even permissiveness to be a mere Establishment ploy to reduce the socially dangerous tension between the
desired and the permissible; i.e., it represents an attempt to appease man's "unhappy consciousness" against a repres sive society. In the face of such repressive reality, Mar
cuse's alternative is to substitute his own aesthetic and "rational" (illusory) barriers for surplus-repressive
7^iarks, p. 53. •^Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 71-74. Some ex amples of institutionalized desublimation are relaxed laws on pornography, sex and violence in the media, and more open sexual practices in general.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
127 (actual social) barriers; i.e., one should join the "Great Refusal," a denial of society's repressive ground rules.73 But Marcuse is not about to abandon the need for sublima tion; he, too, requires the resistance of some "other" as
an essential medium for the diversion of anarchic libidin- ali energy.'74
Forms of artistic alienation constitute Marcuse's ever so slight variation on Freud's theory of sublimation. According to Freud,
With his special gifts [the artist} molds his fantasies into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a jus tification as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desires to be, without pur suing the circuitous path of creating real alterations in the outer world.75
Marcuse blunts his own quest for social change by more or less adhering to this static line of Freudian thought.
73Ibid., pp. 190, 256-257. 74 Marcuse admits to following Freud's claim that "some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the li bido to its height." Freud, "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," in Collected Papers, IV, 213, as cited in Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pT""2~07. 75'^Freud, "Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, 224. Cf. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., I922), P- 164:"IIn some cases] fancy remains an end in itself. It becomes an indulging in fantasies which bring about with drawal from all realities, while wishes impotent in action build a world which yields temporary excitement."
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
128
Above all, his aesthetic form expresses the Greek ideal of contemplative rationality; e.g., a combination of "play," "detour," and "arrest."76 Ironically, instinctual satisfac tion ultimately relents before the subtle suasion of another kind of idealized reason. As Theodore Roszak puts it:
The Great Refusal which Marcuse sees in visionary art and religion amounts to the rejection of social domi nation in the name of a joy and freedom tragically thwarted by worldly injustice. Marcuse thus comes per ilously close to Freud's most reductionistic interpre tation of art and religion, wherein creativity functions as a bandage of fantasy for the wounded Pleasure Principle.77
Consequently, it is important to notice that Marcuse does not blithely disown the Classical tradition. Indeed, his notion of "sensuous rationality" emphasizes reason at the expense of the senses. .Furthermore, his rationality of gratification is presumed to contain its own moral laws.'78 In essence, Marcuse seeks to renew the Socratic quest: vir tue is knowledge. "If man has learned to see and know what
76Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 207-208. 77Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 120. 78As mentioned in Chapter II, supra, Plato divides the self into "higher" (rational) and "lower" (sensual) cat egories. He also holds that no rational man willingly de sires to do evil; rather, immorality stems from ignorance (appearance). Therefore, once ignorance is lifted and re ality appears, perfected (yet sublimated) rationality could conceivably contain its own morality. See Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956).,
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
129 really is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemol- ogy Is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology."79 In the end, then, sexual liberty is not seen as un restrained; but its "natural obstacles" are viewed as ade quate guarantors of creativity and stability so long as they are "divorced from [irrational] archaic taboos and exogenous constraints."80 However, it is Marcuse himself who goes to great lengths to underscore the inseparability of the sexual and socio-historical components of instinctual drives. Nev ertheless, in the final analysis, Marcuse discards his com prehensive Hegelian monism for a precarious Freudian dualism: a conflict is seen to exist between the relatively 81 independent forces of Eros and external social reality. By his own account, it is futile to expect a self-sufficient Eros to be victorious over so unified, powerful, and histor ically conditioned a force as social repression. But per haps Marcuse prefers to avoid hard factual issues because he, too, is largely immersed in illusion and hope.
C. Conclusion
In conclusion, neither theorist really reconciles the divergent demands of libidinal energy, social restraint,
79Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 125. 80Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 207. 81Cf. Fingarette, 663-
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
130
and rational interest. It has been shown that Marcuse, as
critic, comes closer to a fundamental resolution of the problem of repression. For Marcuse does carefully analyze the social dimensions of irrationality, pointing out many needless (surplus-repressive) effects. Yet, as planner, he
ironically succumbs to his own critique. The criteria of Marcuse's social theory require that the dialectic unfold in the light of realizable and objective possibilities. Howev er, his rationality of gratification is difficult to justify in theory or practice, particularly in view of his own ac
ceptance of the depth of social repression and his own af firmation of the priorities of reason over instinct.
Chapter V will discuss Marcuse's effort to dislodge
himself from this predicament. In order to accomplish that
feat, Marcuse must argue for a radical awakening and
re-conditioning throughout society: an education in
socio-historical transformation as well as social criti
cism. The probable consequences of his educational recom
mendations will be examined in terms of their implications
for a possible liberation or repression of human
potentialities.
By way of contrast, Fromm appears to remain Utopian
in both his social critique and program, though he seems less so than Marcuse the planner. Perhaps this is the case because Fromm by and large accepts the given circumstances
of technological civilization. However, Fromm is more mor
alistic, and equally unrealistic, in his movement from a
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
"sick" to a "sane" society. In spite of his appraisal of the pathological nature of the body politic, he fully ex pects mortal men to use their rational capacities to realize a sizable measure of freedom from repression. In essence, Fromm claims that rationality is an appropriate, almost suf ficient, tool for achieving that goal. However, the ground of his analysis seems baseless, if not "irrational," once one ponders Fromm's own assumptions and premises. In a word, both Marcuse and Fromm find it easier to negate (the role of the critic) than to replace, recon struct, or transform (the role of the planner). To satisfy educational theorists and practitioners, each would seem to have an obligation to justify both of these functions. But, granted, neither Marcuse nor Fromm is in control of educa tional policy. Indeed, it would appear safe to assume that the vast majority of educators tend to oppose the views of each thinker. Therefore, it seems legitimate that Marcuse and Fromm should first erect a set of transcendent needs as an alternative to the present social and educational system. It is these plans and their possible effects which are the object of consideration in the next chapter.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
132
CHAPTER V REPRESSION AND EDUCATION
Traditionally, education in the form of schooling
has tended to reflect the needs and interests of dominant group and institutional forces within any given society. Schooling has by and large acted to transmit the prevail ing culture—its customs, mores, and modes of rationality— to relatively powerless youth. In the words of Emile
Durkheim,
... it is society as a whole and each particular so cial milieu that determine the ideal that education re alizes. Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity; educa tion perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands. ... It [therefore] follows ... that education consists of a methodical socialization of the young generation.!
For John Dewey, too, education enables society to sustain
and perfect its existence:
. . . the natural of native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born. ... [Consequently, society must] en deavor to shape the experiences of the young so that . . . better habits shall be formed, and thus the fu ture adult society be an improvement on their own.2
Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology, trans. Sherwood D. Fox (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, I956), pp. 7O-7I. This interpretation of education may be charac terized as a "reflective theory of schooling." 2Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan Co. I96I), pp. 47, 79. Charles H. Cooley's concept of
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
133
In a more active sense, the institutionalization of educa tion may be looked upon as an instrument of repression and social control which fosters "social order and cohesion by developing within the individual codes of conduct and social values directed toward the maintenance of existing social relationships."3 Freudian theory affirms such a view of education. To insure a "balanced" personality, classical psychoanal ysis requires a taming of the child's assumed aggressive tendencies (id) through an examination of reality (ego) and the guidance of social strictures (superego). Freud him self has written, "Education can ... be described as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure-principle, and
primary-group identification makes the notion of social as similation more concrete: "[In a primary social group] ... one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a 'we'; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which 'we' is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling." Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912), p. 23. 3Joel H. Spring, "Education as a Form of Social Con trol," unpublished manuscript (Cleveland: Case Western Re serve University, 1970), p. 1. On the theme of education and social control, I have been fortunate to share a contin uing dialogue with Profs. Clarence J. Karier and Paul C. Vi olas, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ^In accord with Durkheim, Freud is aware, however, that repression of individual instinctual desires must not be so harsh as to shatter psychic equilibrium. "Without a certain diversity all co-operation would be impossible." Durkheim, Education and Sociology, p. 70.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
134 to its replacement by the reality-principle; it offers its aid, that is, to that process of development which concerns the ego."5 In effect, Freud weights psychic adaptation toward the influence and direction of rationality and social control. Societal security becomes more important than indi vidual satisfaction. Education perforce becomes synonymous
with repression. The aim of this chapter is to consider whether Mar cuse or Fromm attempt to undermine, and therein liberate, any such equation of education and repression. What method of analysis does each use in his educational thought? What might his social theory contribute to educational policy? Finally, what gaps, discrepancies, and deficiencies come to the surface as each theorist shifts from social to educa
tional philosophy?
5Freud, "Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning," The Standard Edition, of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, 223- According to FreudV children are naturally amoral and anti-social; in ternal restrictions against their pleasure-seeking drives are originally non-existent. Therefore, Freud believes that their impulses must be sublimated and socialized; i.e., made "better" and more "rational" for the sake of civilization and culture. See Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ch. 3. . Cf. also Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, p. 141: "If conditions are right for an educative growth, the snubbed impulse will be 'sublimated.' That is, it will be come a contributory factor in some more inclusive and com plex activity, in which it is reduced to a subordinate yet effectual place."
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
135
A. Marcuse: Social Criticism and Transformation ot Human Needs Since Marcuse has made no systematic analysis of ed ucation, his views on that subject will necessarily be large ly inferred from his broader social theory. (Marcuse's ideas on higher education are explicit and, therefore, will be dealt with more specifically.) What can be generally ascer tained is the methodology and value orientation which Mar cuse would bring to educational decision making. In brief, these may be delineated in terms of a dual objective: the primary necessity of generating a social critique followed by an equally important concern for a radical transformation
of human needs. Presumably, such an educational effort will aid in raising man from repression. However, this remedy suggests the inner weakness of Marcuse's thought: it tends to edu cate "from above." Indeed, Marcuse practices a form of re pression in his own right. His educational vision merely promises praxis and liberation for all; like several Utopian schemes, it actually delivers social control. With Marx, Marcuse would begin his educational deci sion making only after a lengthy survey of the whole social structure—its politics, economics, and culture. Critical reflection is seen as an essential part of praxis; it allows
6Similar to Durkheim's sociological method, Mar cuse's mode of analysis seems to be layered in metaphys ical holism; i.e., particular facts and factors are
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
136
human reason to transcend the limiting nature of purely em pirical, linguistic, or phenomenological analysis. Never theless, the inevitable conclusion of Marcuse's socio- educational critique is implicit in his own Marxian analysis: schooling has become thoroughly politicized; i.e., surplus-repressive. Education preserves a repressive status quo, its class system, sightless leadership, and un necessarily hierarchical social structure. According to Marcuse, the political socialization of children begins in the cradle and proceeds beyond the univer sity. Throughout one's life, the process of mimesis, or im mediate social identification, provides an elaborate system of readily available rewards and subtle, yet powerful, sanc tions. Assimilated by a pervasive logic of domination, the individual is largely oblivious to his actual unfreedom. Consequently, like Marx, Marcuse contends that the negation
meaningful only as they are related to a larger system; e.g., the total societal context. In the political tradition of Plato and Hegel, Marcuse also constructs an organicist so cial theory; i.e., that social activity is based on the rel atively autonomous functioning of the social system rather than that of its individual members. (Marcuse's notion of subjective consciousness precludes a complete embracement of organicism.) , It is, therefore, no accident that Marcuse seeks to defend his holistic orientation against a possible attack from Karl R. Popper, the most notable critic of the totali tarian tendencies in Platonic and Hegelian thought. Cf. Marcuse, "Notes on the Problem of Historical Laws"; and Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vols. I and II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), and The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
137
of false consciousness and the realization of the necessity of change must accompany any growth in objective material conditions.7 The educator must take it upon himself to free men who do not know that they are not free. Unfortunately, Marcuse forgets Marx's saving advice: g "the educator himself must be educated."0 Instead, Marcuse's methodology is conspicuously immune to public testability; in fact, it is unabashedly intuitionistic. While Marcuse main tains that the open use of intuition permits him to mediate concrete experience and sets the stage for a convergence of Logos and Eros, the general thrust of his social theory leads to a thoroughgoing pan-rationalism. In other words, Marcuse, as educator, is attempting to recapture something similar to the Greek ideal of true Forms. That is, he seeks to re create a two-dimensional universe in which appearance and reality can be distinguished by those (presumably like him self) who claim to be close to Truth. "Inasmuch as the struggle for truth commits and engages human existence, it is die essential human project."9 Hence, Marcuse likens
7Cf. Marx's philosophy of education in Maurice J. Shore, Soviet-Education: Its Psychology and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), PP- 20-21. ^arx, The German Ideology, pp. 197-198. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 125- (Italics are added.) See also ibid., pp. 126-127- In his obsession for Truth, Marcuse seems to discount the possibility that man's paradigms of knowledge might undergo continuous change. Historically, the supposed guiding truths of intellectual
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
138
himself to a Platonic guardian, one who would rather be right than free. In the name of Truth, anyone and everyone is subject to repression. Positioning himself as a negativistic depositor of Truth, Marcuse offers an educational program which, while apparently aiming at personal and social freedom, actually becomes counter-productive to that purpose. Throughout his socio-educational thought, Marcuse assumes that his dialec tic acts merely to negate the imperfections and injustices of established practice. This may constitute good dialec tics, but Marcuse presumes that such a theoretical justifi cation gives him the right to act above and beyond the wishes and judgment of others. Indeed, his dialectic is suffi ciently abstract and speculative to allow him to do almost anything he desires. In the realm of pure thought, Mar cuse is an incisive and suggestive critic; however, once he
elites have tended to be disconfirmed. Conveniently, Mar cuse's methodology consciously avoids any appeal to public confirmation. For a general survey of this thesis, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For example, Marcuse rationalizes his justifica tion of violence on the ground that his call for destructive action is only an attempt to close the established chain of violence. Evidently Marcuse believes that the end always justifies the means. See Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, with Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), P- H6. In his critique of the unsociological character of certain radical educational theorists, Mannheim might just as well be speaking of Marcuse: "The revolutionary who is anxious to change society overnight will be only too apt to
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
139
enters the realm of action, his social critique loses its cutting edge and instead becomes a bluntly repressive force. An Essay on Liberation (1969) and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (I969) provide an inferential basis for assessing the ends and means of Marcuse's plan for action. It can and will be argued that Marcuse falls into the same theoretical pitfall which he claims plagues positivist and pragmatic philosophy: an intellectual progression "from contemplative enjoyment to active manipulation and control" and "from knowing as an esthetic enjoyment of the properties of nature ... to knowing as a means of secular control." 12 Marcuse himself is on fairly safe ground so long as he does not try to impose his Utopian formulations on social reality.
focus his attention solely on the total social structure. . . . [He is] disposed to what Hegel would call the 'un happy consciousness'—'unhappy' because the too elevated, too abstract premises inculcated by its artificial educa tion render its owner incapable of mastering the conflicts which are the stuff of real life; he tends to feel at home only when dealing with the possible, the potential, and to discount all reality as a priori bad." Mannheim, Man and Society in an A.^e of Reconstruction, p. 305; and Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 232. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1929), pp. 95, 100, as quoted in Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 167- Cf. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), pp. 213-214. (This book was originally published by Columbia University Press in 1958.) Marcuse contends that the Soviet attack on Dewey is due to his "conformistic ethi cal relativism"; i.e., his inability to transcend beyond the repressive limitations of his society for an "objective" view of future historical possibilities. In Marcuse's eyes, efficiency and workability become Dewey's criteria for knowledge and valuation.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
140
However, once he does so, his formerly transcendent reason becomes absorbed in action, thereby limiting the scope and dimension of free thought and alternative choice and
judgment. In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proposes a Utopi an educational scheme, a plan for qualitative change which necessitates a complete and cataclysmic transformation of human needs. He assumes that Utopian possibilities are now inherent in the technology of advanced industrial society. Surplus repression is no longer legitimate; indeed, there need be no incompatibility between basic repression and an "instinctual basis for freedom." In bold, yet speculative, terms Marcuse postulates a biological foundation for "true" socialism. His intention is to re-condition and re-educate man and society, to alter radically the entire individual
and institutional infrastructure: Freedom would [then] become the environment of an or ganism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for well-being un der domination, no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the estab lished way of life. ... Such a [transforming] prac tice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the poten tial forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.^
•^Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, pp. 4-6._ The means to Marcuse's Utopia are highly suspect. In his utop: anism, Marcuse appears to make a much too facile leap from harsher aspects of reality. First, Malthusian roadblocks, e g , the problem of scarce resources, dwindling food sup- piy* and spiralling birth rates, still obstruct social
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
141
Thus, Marcuse hopes to build a political and moral radicalism which will create socially induced needs condu cive to a truly rational aesthetic sensibility and a "paci fied existence." As social critic, he had assumed that a certain indestructible core of resistance characterizes man's instinctual nature. As planner, Marcuse treats the human being as a mere plastic creature which can be molded
and manipulated:
Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected— it also operates as a norm of "organic' behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and "ignores" and repels others in accord.with the intro jected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.14
change throughout large portions of the globe—especially in the Third World, supposedly one of Marcuse's major foci of concern. Secondly, Marcuse does not fully elaborate the ed ucational implications of the master-slave theme. The slave learns to introject the destructive behavior of his master. Marcuse leaves unsaid the manner in which each of these op ponents "may [in fact] become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world." For more complete and rather contrasting analyses of this dialectical conflict, see Frantz Fanon, Tne Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York"! Grove Press, 1963); and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 11. "Opera- tionalism is indeed an indispensable supplement to want and fear as forces of cohesion." Ibid., p. 84. Ironically, Marcuse nearly accepts the premises of operationalism and behaviorism, a mode of thought which he describes as un necessarily restrictive, indeed repressive, in One-Dimensional Man (pp. 12, 85*-, 156). Cf. Dewey, Democracy and Education, pp. 26-27: "[There are ways] of enlisting the person's own participating disposition in get ting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way."
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
142
With this view of conditioning at his bestowal, Marcuse proceeds apace in his own brand of social engineering. In the process, he makes men his personal marionettes.
While Marcuse employs the prospect of liberation to stimulate men to violent revolution, he enjoys the rarefied air of a more contemplative praxis. As others shed blood and chance the loss of their humanity, Marcuse envisions the
creation of an aesthetic ethos in which "technique would
. . . tend to become art, and art would tend to form reali ty." 5 Here Marcuse blends his Hegelianism with an Aristote lian conception of praxis: potentiality is equated with actuality so long as men act in concord with "true" con sciousness. This view implies a capacity for moral conduct which Marcuse assumes he possesses to a degree far greater than that of most mortals. Yet, oddly enough, one important philosophic truth has escaped Marcuse's seeming ly omniscient purview: there can be no experts on the moral
-'Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 24. For an argument which portrays Marcuse's love of man as abstract rather than concrete, see Maurice Cranston, "Herbert Mar cuse," Encounter, Vol. XXXII (March, 1969), 38-50.
Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1962), |1140a: "Art is identical with the characteristic of producing under the guidance of true reason. All art is concerned with the realm of coming-to-be, i.e., with contriving and studying how something which is capable both of being and of not be ing may come into existence . . . under the guidance of true reason." Marcuse works within an Aristotelian Logos because he wants to master reality. Cf. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p, 101.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
143
matters of the individual. In essence, Marcuse seeks to be a moral educator without fully sharing moral responsibility with those who would act upon his teachings. Since he pic tures himself as guardian, he sees no need to justify such policy to his warriors. When one surveys the revolutionary cadre which Mar cuse musters as a symbolic expression of negation against established social order, he finds Marcuse aligning himself beside a privileged minority; i.e., affluent radical stu dents and a new working class of professional men. For al most the sum total of his educational thought is devoted to purely contemplative praxis on the university level. In light of his educational objectives, it would appear that the other half of his coalition, viz., national and racial minorities, merits only secondary consideration. 17 As Mar cuse recognizes, intellectual education in abstracto can
l7Marcuse, An Essay cm Liberation, pp. 57-60; and "The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition, in Five Lectures, pp. 84-86. For Marcuse, the student movement represents a "militant minority which articulates what is ^ still unarticulated and repressed among the vast majority.^ Marcuse, "The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity, 21. Besides critical learning and teaching (theory), Mar cuse's student opposition partakes of an "existential com munity" (practice^. Marcuse, "The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition," in Five Lectures, p. 88. On the ground of their assimilative, non-negative qualities, Mar cuse had warned against such "ceremonial fads in One-Dimensional Man (p. 14). See Chapter IV, supra. - This may, in part, 'explain why oppressed people are some times hesitant to join ritualistic protests which presume to express their grievances. Especially given Marcuse's re pressive reality, the latter would afford a psychic outlet
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
144
serve as an immensely important critical device in potential
social change:
... if "education" is more and other than training, iearning, preparing for the existing society,:'.it means not only enabling man to know and understand the facts which make up reality but also to know and understand the facts that establish the facts so that he can change their inhuman reality.1°
However, freedom would also seem to necessitate the existence of viable alternatives which allow man to choose how to control his life. There are no simple solutions to that Brobdingnagian task, particularly in the Third World. Intellectual education may offer an essential guide, but there may be affairs of heart and hand in which men may also want to indulge. For example, emotional education is one possible option, though it might yield only internalized freedom. Vocational and technical education has been no toriously misused to keep man in his place. But, as with
for a guilt-ridden majority. They may not necessarily offer end results for a suffering minority, which then becomes a mere means to its magic helper's spiritual ends. ^Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 122. Cf. Mar cuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 61: "[The subverting forces] seek to counteract the deceptive neutrality and often plainly apologetic teaching; and to provide the student with the conceptual instruments for a solid and thorough critique of the material and intellectual culture. At the same time, they seek to abolish the class character of education." Marcuse thus recommends a course of study consisting in critical analysis of contemporary societies and a general survey of the "great nonconformist movements in civiliza tion"; e.g., speculative philosophy and theoretical soci ology, psychology, and political science. Loc. cit.; and Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," p. 200.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
145
intellectual and emotional education, this is a question of
surplus repression, one which men have to resolve; it does
not involve a fundamental law of nature, or basic repres
sion. In principle, however, Marcuse does deny freedom of choice. He permits only one basic alternative; i.e., criti
cal intellectual education. To an intellectual leader like
himself, such practical concerns as vocational and technical education must represent seedy and soiling chores; for he gives them little place in his Utopian designs. " (Yet these matters may be especially vital in the Third World.
To neglect them would seem to invite further external re
pression from social forces already able to exploit mate rial conditions.)
If Marcuse's Utopian possibilities were realized,
automated technology would allow man, if he so desired, to
live in a leisure society and a contemplative universe. In
a surplus-repressive way, Marcuse believes that he must
still re-educate man to accept what he considers to be "de sirable." If Marcuse were true to his own Utopian ideas, he would hold that education itself would be largely unneces
sary in such a Utopian reality, an inevitable inference from
19-'This slighting is directly contradictory to the teachings of Marx, Marcuse's intellectual mentor. Cf. Shore, pp. 58-59: "It is evident that Marx thought of tech nological instruction, both theoretical and practical, as most essential in the new education. Moreover, he believed that 'there can be no doubt' that in the educational move ment following the workers ' seizure of power, technological instruction will become necessitas consequentis."
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
146
his optimism in Eros and Civilization. Rather than partici pate in a liberating education with men on earth, Marcuse
takes an ideational god's eye-view of his pedagogical mis
sion. In a tradition as old as Plato and as recent as Dew
ey, he believes that intellectual education offers the best
20 means for fuller freedom and control. For Marcuse envi
sions himself as a philosopher-king, not as a worker.
Marcuse's sanctuary for reflection is the university,
the one institution which he would protect against any revo- lutionary upheaval.91 Besides the pleasure of his
20Cf. Kingsley Price's lucid account of Dewey's no tion of freedom and control: "To be free is to possess the instruments by use of which we may alter the environment to bring it closer to our needs . . . Knowledge is power, and in the ability to control which power implies lies the only freedom man can exercise." Price, Education and Philosophical Thought (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1962), p. 471. Cf. also Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 250. For Dewey, rational control is the crux of freedom and progress. Man must use his foresight of realizable possibilities and future conse quences in order to shape present activity. At the same time, "morality depends upon events, not upon . . . ideals alien to nature." Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, pp. 311-313. : Despite its theoretical recognition of the basic connection between ends and means, Deweyan instrumentalism, in practice, has not been beyond placing means over ends. For example, see Randolph S. Bourne's trenchant criticism of Dewey's pragmatic justification of World War I in Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1953: The •Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), PP. 186, 205ff., 222-223- 2 1 "I don't think that university administrators should be the prime targets," says Marcuse. "I still con sider the American university an oasis of free speech and .real critical thinking in the society. Any student move ment should try to protect this citadel. It should not fo cus so much on so-called 'free universities' outside the
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
147
self-proclaimed "authoritarian" position as a professor, 22 Marcuse has more substantial theoretical reason for making an exception of the university. Above all, he wants to re new a severely suppressed responsibility of higher educa tion: social criticism.23 According to Marcuse, the critical function of the university has been muted by dis criminatory policies in regard to support and priority. Largely funded by government, foundations, and corporations, research and development is waged in conjunction with bru talizing, rather than humane, interests. Marcuse therefore recommends an uncontaminated "academic reservation" where advanced study can be free of outside pressures, particular- ly from the military. 24
university, but [instead] ... try to radicalize the de partments inside the university." Marcuse, as quoted in Sol Stern, "The Metaphysics of Rebellion: On Herbert Mar cuse," Ramparts, Vol. VI (June 29, 1968), 56- 22Sam Keen and John Raser, eds., "A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse," Psychology Today, Vol. IV, No. 9 (February, 1971), 39- 23For more specific ideas on the responsibilities of intellectuals in social critique, see Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1969); and Theodore Ros zak, ed., The Dissenting Academy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). As will be shown later, Marcuse eventually leaves the "dissenting academy" for entrance into a "partisan camp." 2Varcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 2O5-2O6. Here Marcuse's focus on the powerful triad of government, business, and the military parallels that of C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959J! Ironically, Marcuse's policy
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
148
In an effort to incorporate the Greek ideal of cosmos, Marcuse desires to reestablish the university as a "refuge of mental independence."25 This would entail a pro nounced shift in emphasis in favor of pure theory over ap plied research. Given his assumption that a planned democracy amounts to the most subtly "efficient form of domination over man," Marcuse is understandably worried about the illegiti mate use of technological knowledge by a political system which he considers potentially totalitarian. Seemingly as an alternative to the present system, Marcuse adopts an explicitly non-egalitarian university
proposal might grant the latter an even freer reign than it now possesses; i.e., a diminution of critical checks on its internal activity. (Oddly enough, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man was written under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foun dation.) 25Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 199-200. Cf. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 61: "The groundwork for building the bridge between the 'ought' and the 'is,' between theory and practice, is laid within theory itself." Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 52. On the ex clusion of humanitas" in a Fascist system of higher educa tion, see Frederic Lilge, The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German University (New York: Macmillan Co., I948). In contrast to Marcuse, Fromm, like Mannheim, sees an essential soundness in democratic political structure and, therefore, seeks to preserve it. Cf. Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, ch. V; and Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, p. 353. In the final analysis, Marcuse's concern for the university seems academic: in an actual totalitarian situation, the university would not, in any case, be in a position of control.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
149
structure. Separated from lowly vocational colleges, "elite" universities would stand at the top of his ed ucational system. Dependent upon no private financial sources, these institutions would have to rely on fair and just treatment from the government for their very pro tection and existence. Marcuse admits that such "a condi tion ... has only to be formulated in order to reveal its Utopian character. 7 However, Marcuse expects his Utopia to come to pass. Thus, it is interesting that he ultimately counts on the State to reconcile the perennial problem of
conflicts of interest. (Plato was obsessed by that same problem and resolved it in analogous fashion.) Moreover, Marcuse's proposal might tend to reinforce a structure which he presumably seeks to overturn: a hierarchical model of education based upon a rigid division between the academic (higher) and the vocational (lower). Once hidden in a dark cave, Plato's men of Gold, Silver, and Bronze now appear
just beyond the horizon. 28
27Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," p. 200. Cf. also Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 61. 2 Cf. the classic attempt to harmonize individual interests within State control in Plato's tripartite dis tinction of higher rational wisdom (guardians), intermedi ate levels of willful courage (warriors), and lower appetitive instinct (artisans). Plato's educational recommendations fol low the guidelines implicit in these distinctions. See Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), especially Bk. Ill, §412B to Bk. IV, §445B.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
150
Unless and until society can attain his Utopian aims, Marcuse stands vigorously opposed to democracy (as or-, dinarily conceived) in education. "For the prevailing demo cratic culture fosters heteronomy in the guise of autonomy, arrests the development of needs in the guise of their pro motion, and restricts thought and experience in the guise of extending them everywhere to all." In short, democracy is a sham perpetrated on unknowing, impotent subjects. 297 Accord ing to Marcuse, established democratic freedom functions as a "vehicle of adjustment and confinement." However, it seems equally obvious that Marcuse's notion of intellectual- elite education would also serve to adjust and confine the limits of free choice, thought, and experience. At least
Marcuse is honest and forthright in his allegiance to re pression. Exhibiting an uncommon disrespect for human di versity, he justifies his elitism on the ground that his university system would select "from the school and college population as a whole, a selection solely according to mer it, that is to say, according to the inclination and ability for theoretical thought." In a word, Marcuse accepts the basic assumptions and premises of meritocracy. He also has a quick, if not readily attainable, answer for the question,
9According to Marcuse, "the debunking of ... sham-democracy is a [basic] part of political countered- ucation." Marcuse, "The Left Under the Counterrevolution," The Humanisf, Vol. XXXII, No. 3 (May/June, 1972), 15- (This essay is excerpted from Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, published by Beacon Press in 1972.)
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
151
"What knowledge is of most worth?" Beyond Aristotle and heading toward a revival of Plato, Marcuse reveres a con templative wisdom which would border the power of the divine.30 In light of his distinctions between basic and sur plus repression, Marcuse seeks to remold the foundation of
culture. The latter can be a humanizing and stabilizing (basic) force, i.e., approach true Form, only if it is puri fied of corrosive processes within civilization. Contrary
to C. P. Snow, Marcuse thus suggests a complete separation of the scholarly disciplines. He believes that the sciences
and the humanities have become dangerously assimilated to
each other because of the logic of domination in technologi
cal civilization. This state of affairs has tended to "eliminate the transcendent goals of culture (transcendent with respect to the socially established goals), thereby eliminating or reducing those factors and elements of cul ture which were antagonistic and alien to the given forms of
civilization." In other words, culture has been made un necessarily (surplus) repressive; it has acted to affirm,
rather than negate, established practices of suppression.
In their blind transmission of these dominant social prac
tices, educational institutions, particularly the
3Tlarcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 198-200. Cf. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 61: The development of a true consciousness is still the pro fessional function of the universities." This would seem to be a rather presumptuous, weighty task—even for Mar cuse's intellectual elite.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
152
universities, have abrogated their role as critic. In his Hegelian-Platonic manner, Marcuse exhorts them to refuse to "strengthen the sweep of what is_ over what can be and ought to be, ought to be if there is truth in the cultural
values. ..31 For Marcuse, humanitas once provided the "Archimede an point" of opposition to established repression. However, especially since the era between the two world wars, the hu manities have been relegated to a decorative level of exis tence. "Socially necessary labor" and "socially useful needs and behavior" have been considered more valuable by a technocratic civilization which needlessly obtrudes upon the mental and physical space of its individual members. At the behest of false forms of technological progress and produc tivity, privacy and autonomy have been severely inhibited. Social science, a former ally of humanitas, is now a chief
31M;Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 192-193. Marcuse establishes the following distinctions between civilization and culture (ibid., 192): Civilization Culture manual work inte1lectual work working day holiday labor leisure realm of necessity realm of freedom nature spirit (Geist) operational thought nonoperational thought Cf. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1959). Snow warns against a widen ing chasm between traditional humanistic culture and techni cal scientific culture.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
153
collaborator in repressive scholarship. It fails to tran scend the "established universe of behavior"; indeed, "the
standards of the behavioral sciences are those of the soci
ety to whose behavior they are committed." Within such a social context, any comprehension of "cognitive substance" and "exact truth" becomes problematical—except, of course, for Marcuse.3
The object of cultural forces should be to stand "apart from and against the established reality," to remain alienated from an alienating society. Marcuse argues that the predominant forms of scholarship within academe fulfill only pseudo-intellectual needs. Positivism, behaviorism,
3 Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 194-195. For historical treatments of the interrela tion between social science and business, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power (New York: John Wiley and Sons, I965); and Clarence J. Karier, "Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State," Educational Theory, Vol. XXII, No. 2 (Spring, 1972), forthcoming. Though Marcuse would perhaps object that Mills misses the full degree of its absorption in a repressive society, the following statement does not appear widely di vergent from Marcuse's explanation of the abuses of social science: "The values that have been the thread of classic social analysis . . . are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-existensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period." Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Grove Press, I96I), pp. 129-130. In terms of education, Marcuse would doubtless agree with Chomsky: "The social and behavioral sciences should be seriously studied not only for their intrinsic interest, but so that the student can be made quite aware of exactly how little they have to say about the problems of man and society that really matter." Chomsky, p. 318.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
154
and linguistic analysis (particularly the ordinary-language variety) bespeak a common anti-critical and anti-
transcendental organization of knowledge. Together they act to neutralize the potentially cleansing effect of such nonoperational ideas as Freedom, Equality, Justice, and Individuality. Because the historical validity of humanitas would be dangerously explosive of interests which reflect es
tablished practice, the dominant forces of operationalism forge a united front to insure its denial and suppression.33 In principle, Marcuse is not opposed to scientific
endeavor; in fact, he firmly adheres to a belief in its
ability to abolish scarcity. However, he contends that such a goal is possible only as part of pure scientific inquiry. If repressive societal influences intervene, the pursuit of knowledge is made unfit and unwholesome. (The weight of historical evidence supports Marcuse's claim that truly great scientific discovery derives from pure theory rather than applied research.) But since the direction of scien tific exploration has been controlled by the forces of domi
nation, Marcuse intends to reverse its dialectical course. "What is at stake is not the undoing or the curtailing of
science, but its liberation from the masters whom science itself has helped to set up."3 That is to say, science
33Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 196-197; and One-Dimensional Man, p. I7I. Once again, Marcuse is operating under the influence of Hegelian meta physics: established conditions must not distort potential, more perfect, possibilities.
34J Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 202-203.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
155
must shoulder an ethical obligation for the power it pro duces: "science (i.e., the scientist) is responsible for the use society makes of science; the scientist is respon sible for the social consequences of science."3-' Marcuse argues that the world of science has become integrally in tertwined with the world of politics and its ethics. If culture were comparatively autonomous, i.e., expressive of merely basic repression, science could break those surplus- repressive standards of morality and stand on the ground of the individual conscience of its members. (In an integrated
world which neutralizes individual conscience, the inventor as well as the carrier of napalm feels no moral responsibili ty for his deadly deed.) Before the advent of Utopia, Marcuse relies on
alienated "nonscientific culture," a remnant of humanitas, as a positive feature within repressive civilization. "The
35Marcuse, "The Responsibility of Science," in The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn, eds. Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., I967), p. 439. Thus, Marcuse de nies the possibility of moral neutrality if one seeks to change a repressive society. Scientists should participate in the Great Refusal: "The individual scientist may indeed be powerless to stem the tide of 'scientific' destruction, but he can refuse to lend his hand and his brain to the per fection of destruction, and he can speak out." Ibid., p. 443. If one does not take a stand, his "neutrality" may be interpreted as an implicit affirmation of the status quo. For differing linguistic analyses of the "neutral ity debate" in schooling, compare Jerome Eckstein, "Is It Possible for the Schools to Be Neutral?" and Robert Ennis, "The Possibility of Neutrality," both in Educational Theory, Vol. XXIX, No. 4 (Fall, I969), 337-346; 347-356.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
156
aloofness of unscientific culture may preserve the much needed refuge and reservation in which forgotten or sup pressed truths and images are sustained."3" For Marcuse, the aesthetic dimension of art, literature, and music can still serve a moral as well as clarificatory function. At its best, i.e., on Marcuse's terms, it is multidimensional rather than one-dimensional; rising above the given universe of domination, the "true" aesthetic articulates potential truth and beauty in revolutionary fashion. "Reality has to be discovered and projected. The senses must learn not to see things anymore in the medium of that law and order which has formed them; the bad functionalism which organizes our sensibility must be smashed."37 By using art forms to manipulate consciousness, Mar cuse implicitly restores the educational thought of Plato. In Platonic theory, too, the Muses expose schoolchildren to only "good" forms of music, literature, and art." Just as
Marcuse's notion of mimesis condemns social identifications
•^Marcuse, "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture," pp. 204-205. ^'Marcuse,37 An Essay on Liberation, p. 39. In the end, the Aesthetic Principle must become the Form of the Re ality Principle: "Production would be redirected in defi- .ance of all the rationality of the Performance Principle." Ibid., p. 90. "Plato, The Republic, Bk. Ill, §376E-4l2B. Marcuse seldom acknowledges any Platonic predilections; for, in Eros- and Civilization (pp. 99-100), he insists that Plato's Logos planted the seed for the "logic of domination" in the Occi- - dental world. Plato, of course, also originated the Western dialectic, another instrument which Marcuse uses quite ex tensively for his own purposes of control.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
157
which it deems perverse, the Greek model for mimesis (in dramatic representation) forbids students to portray those "bad" characters which disobey society's gods.39 In brief, Plato and Marcuse presume to know the "good life"; they therefore propose to impose their view on others. This step from thought to action bears the stamp of repression, indoc trination, and authoritarianism. As moral censors, Plato and Marcuse fail to answer a fully justifiable question: who judges the judges, who educates the educators?40 Where
can anyone derive the right to control and mold men?
Marcuse's education for "liberation" thus composes a restrictive social compact: it is limited to those who are, or will be, "in the know." The power of negative thinking is indeed an important and legitimate tool; it sorely needs
to be lifted from repression. However, Marcuse wants to equip each member of his "liberating" forces with essential ly the same intellectual arsenal. As if in a Brave New
39Plato, The Republic, Bk. Ill, §392C-398B. Ironically, Marcuse asks the same question. His answer is that men must be truly free and autonomous before they can be permitted to determine their choices in life. Ipso facto, a small intellectual elite must govern in that indefinite and uncertain period prior to the majority,'s achievement of rational self-determination. In view of his educational theory, Marcuse's definition of "rational" reads like a misplaced participle: the "expression and develop ment of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority." Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," pp. 93, 104-105-. At the top of Marcuse's social and educational hierarchy, privileged cultural figures, "those who are [presumed] able to avoid subjugation," demar cate the boundaries of truth and freedom. Marcuse, as cited in Zhukov, 34.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
158
World, his minions would have "incentives" built into their instinctual structure. In fact, "their sensibility would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful, ... intelligence and stupid ity" ad infinitum. They have no real choice in the mat ter. Far from creating "individuals [who] are liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation,"
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 91. Cf. also Marcuse, "La Theorie des instincts et la socialisation," La Table Ronde, No. 108 (1956), pp. 97-110. — 42Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 252. Ironically, Marcuse's pedagogy might be considered "surplus-repressive," or at least needlessly superfluous, once one ponders the formal and informal education of radical youth. Almost in advertently, educative influences have tended to generate a counter-reaction within this element of youth culture. For example, Kenneth Keniston's notion of "institutionalized hypocrisy" claims that such youth adopt new world-views pre cisely because they are revolted by the false virtues of parents, politicians, and pedagogues alike. The ethos of life itself, not explicit indoctrination, triggers such a response. See Keniston, The Young Radicals: Notes on • Committed Youth (New York"! Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). In light of Keniston's thesis, Marcuse may yet es tablish an accidental chain reaction" of criticism and re sentment against himself. Assuming they have not been hardened by Marcuse's harsh conformism, youth who look into themselves may begin to discover that Marcuse sometimes uses less than "true, good, just, and beautiful" methods to sen sitize others to his ideas. Turning Platonic theory upon itself, unless one has been dulled or deluded (as Marcuse contends most men have been), one might seriously object to an arrogant attempt to impose a new biological foundation upon his human existence. This would be particularly true if there is, as Marcuse the critic believes, an irrepressi ble core of resistance in man's instinctual structure. As a programmer of men, Marcuse casually disregards these ram ifications of his own critique.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
159
Marcuse seeks to create men in his own image. In this di vine dream, he follows a long grey line of Utopian educa tional thinkers from Plato, through William Torrey Harris and G. Stanley Hall, to B. F. Skinner. Marcuse allows hu man beings to create themselves only once his "good society" has become reality. By that time, however, repression may have already come to be a needlessly layered fait accompli. If it be possible, "Repressive Tolerance" affords an even more explicit statement of Marcuse's repressive plan of action. Because he wants to beget a counter culture that can reverse the present repressive inhibition of "true" rational ity; Marcuse justifies his own enjoyment of tit-for-tat in a different direction. .In a sense, he makes the Hegelian no
tion of Aufhebung, i.e., to raise to a higher stage of exis
tence, seem like an intrusive re-direction rather than an
authentic transformation. Ipso facto, on Hegelian theory any counter culture would represent merely an isolated re flection of reality; i.e., an antithesis. As such, it con stitutes only a potentially liberating, yet still distorted, glimpse of the whole. Undaunted, Marcuse proceeds to offer a specifically political' form of indoctrination, which he
terms "countereducation." J It is an effort to purge present and potential rival theses from existence.
Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 112. Thus, Marcuse discards the inner workings of the dialectic when his particular interests are in jeopardy. His maxim, "it is the whole which determines the truth," rings hollow in "Repressive Tolerance." Ibid., p. 83.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
160
According to Marcuse, the classic liberal idea of tolerance amounts to a form of repressive deception. In a society of near total control, a powerless citizenry is mol lified by the belief that it has effective voice in politi
cal determinations. Tolerance is an appearance, not a reality. That appearance allows those in power to soothe public sensibility to the point that self-evidently intolerable acts are made to seem tolerable. "Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good be
cause it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence." In other words, surplus repression takes on the markings of basic repression, false consciousness is
confused with true consciousness.
From this instructive, if intuitive, critique, Mar cuse concludes that any "realization of the objective of
tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing poli cies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or sup pressed." 5 Curiously, however, Marcuse. would faithfully practice only the first part of his preachment. He would
not extend tolerance to those beliefs which he deems worthy
Loc. cit. At the same time, "tolerance is ex tended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery"; e.g., dubious battles against communism or imperialism. Ibid., p. 82. 45Ibid., p. 81.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
161
of repression, regardless cf Aether they are publicly out lawed or suppressed. "Tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation." For example, a Fascist would not be permitted freedom of speech in the Marcusean political system. Prima facie, he does not represent "good" form; consequently, he is silenced to avoid an offense to the ruling gods. Presumably, growth in synthetic knowledge has been preempted by Marcuse's counter culture. 47' On its
Ibid., p. 88. Thus, Marcuse's dictum is more il liberal than "clear and present danger" doctrine. Such ex treme fear of views which cppcse one's own (which may express one's own insecurity.) is evident in recent American educational history. Gecrge S. Counts, William H. Kilpat- rick, and V. T. Thayer, among other liberal educators, en ergetically campaigned to exclude from the teaching profession those with totalitarian, i.e.,'alien, be liefs. Strangely, Counts' era educational criticism pointed toward socialistic solutions. Cf. Counts, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (New York: John Day Co., 1932). See Paul Violas, 'Fear and the Constraints on Academic Freedom of Public School Teachers, 1930-19'60," Educational Theory, Vol. XXI, No. 1 (Winter, 1971), 70-80. 7If Marcuse's elite ever did seize control, the concept of discriminating tolerance could easily be employed as its cajor political weapon. Only those opinions which reflected Marcusean "truths" vould be permitted entry into the new social order. Indeed, as Mosca contends, any elite movement requires a "'universal myth" to imprint its ideas on the mass of men. Furthermore, Marcuse and Mosca insist, and sincerely believe, that such, views (myths) are true. Cf. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, ed. Arthur Livingston and trans. H. D. Kahn (New Yoric: McGraw-Hill, 1939).
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
162
terms, other competing interest groups possess "false" con sciousness. Though his social thought would generally seem
to belie its relevance, in this case at least a counter-
valence theory of politics is used to suit Marcuse's own needs.48 In matters moral and political, Marcuse takes pleasure in making exceptions in his own favor. After all, it is self-evident to Marcuse that his judgment must be more correct than that of a Fascist. While this may be true, it can and will be argued that there seems to be an eery com monality in their views. Marcuse and the Fascist share an absolute negative negation, a mutual kiss of death: each purses the other's lips.
From a psychological and political perspective, Mar cuse appears inordinately absorbed in problems of truth, power, and control. That absorption produces enviable re sults in his role as critic. However, once Marcuse projects his own proposals for power, the expected consequences are frightening. He fails to heed Reich's sobering warning: "[Over] one hundred years after the birth of the truths of
48 Marcuse assumes the "truth value" of his elite to be considerably superior to those of countervailing, more powerful, groups. However, like Mannheim's divers critical elites, Marcuse's faction is definitely not in control. Nevertheless, because Marcuse's unitary elite is so hard and single-minded of purpose, it might actually be less receptive to communication and criticism from the masses. (Marcuse, of course, would argue that the co-opted masses have no really worthwhile opinions anyway.) Cf. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, pp. 81f.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
163
1848, the muck, which goes back thousands of years, still prevails. Power and truth do not go together. This too is. a bitter, unfortunate truth." 9 Marcuse himself seeks rather complete power over social reality. From his criticism, he claims to glean certain truths and plans to use them in his
own form of social control. Though the implicit intention of "Repressive Toler ance" is to transcend the seemingly limiting features of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," Marcuse puts far greater constraints on human behavior than any which could conceiva bly emanate from even a feigned "free market of ideas."
Marcuse concurs with Mill:
Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind haye become capable of being improved by free and equal dis cussion. ... [D]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actu ally effecting that end.50
9Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 328. For Marcuse, "that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge" is a pre-condition of democracy. Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 95. From this premise and on the terms of his own assumptions of_ knowledge and valuation, he justifies his educational dic tatorship: "to the degree to which the slaves have been preconditioned to exist as slaves and be content in that role, their liberation [must] necessarily ... come from without and from above." Marcuse, as quoted in Martin Peretz, "Herbert Marcuse: Beyond Technological Reason," Yale Review, Vol. LVII, No. 4 (Summer, 1968), 525- 5TCarcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 86. Cf. John Stu art Mill, "On Liberty," in Essential Works of John-Stuart Mill, ed. Max Lerner (New York! Bantam Books, 1961), pp. 249-360. Mill's classic notion of individual liberty posits constraints only in those cases where one intentionally^ de sires to harm others. This principle is rendered passe in Marcuse's picture of repressive society.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
164
In fact, Marcuse himself approaches freedom from the vantage point of Classical Liberalism. In his own program, he sets
similar distinctions in levels of freedom. He too rallies the support of only those in the proverbial full "maturity
of their faculties"; i.e., rational and autonomous men.
Accordingly, Marcuse also establishes an internal connection between liberty and truth. Indeed, he contends that "truth is the end of liberty, and liberty must be defined and con fined by truth.,l5^ Thus, for Marcuse, truth is more than the very telos of tolerance: it is the end, liberty is its
means.
The underlying point is that Marcuse seems to employ freedom largely as a psychological vehicle for his overrid ing practical objective: control through Truth. Inasmuch
as he cannot control repressive social conditions, i.e., ac
tually be free, he attempts to control that intellectual in strument (truth) which he believes has traditionally served
to manipulate the limits of freedom in the Western mind.
Consequently, Marcusean thought also contains strong residual
5TIarcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 86. "ibid., pp. 86, 106. Marcuse seeks truth, rather than liberty, because he does not believe that critical thought can save the day for freedom: "Nothing indicates that it will be a good end. ... It is nothing but a chance. The critical theory of society possesses no con cepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future.". Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 257. (These are among Marcuse's last words in that very pessimistic book.)
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
165
elements of German Idealism. Blended with action, it con jures up the "best" and "wisest" of despotic rule,, as por trayed by the oracle in Sarastro's temple: "I cannot wait until all men are wholly rational."53 Truth must be the realistic goal of those who are
committed to freedom. This is the kernel of Marcuse's hid den reality principle: one must sacrifice freedom for greater Truth. Yet rationality holds out the prospect of freedom as only a "chance," "hope," "possibility," or "po tentiality." Moreover, Marcuse's truth seems more irration al than rational: it forbids alternative input, adverse criticism, and public scrutiny of its own internal struc ture. Unlike Mill's more tolerant quest, it never faces the possibility of its own fallibility.5 Marcuse sees his system as nearly totally right, authoritative, and unaccountable. Therefore, on its own logic, Marcuse's conception of reason and education is unnecessarily (surplus)
53Berlin, pp. 153-154. 54For a similar criticism of Marcuse, see Maclntyre, pp. 103-104. Another interesting shift in thought appears once Marcuse abandons his critique for more practical con cerns. In Reason and Revolution, he had gone to great lengths to disprove any connection between Hegel and the rise of Fascist totalitarianism. In A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse commits a form of Hegelian suicide: he breaks his ascent toward synthesis through his own arbitrary abolition of rival theses. Thus, his pragmatic program in tentionally precludes antithetical argument. In his feck less effort to control, does Marcuse, playing a Nietzschean superman in Left-wing Hegelian garb, unconsciously introject the values of those who have at least been more successful in their unchecked leadership?
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
166
repressive. According to Marcuse, Reason has historically
been irrational because of its inability or unwillingness to transcend the limitations of phenomenological events.-'-' Strangely, Marcuse's social and educational thought is even
more restricted; beyond its social critique, it is largely
limited to an adumbration of its own profundities—but, of
course, not its densities. Like a philosopher-king, Marcuse
intimates that his Truth can be prescribed, but not
criticized.
In his intuitionist educational recommendations,
Marcuse merely belabors the obvious and multiplies mistakes beyond necessity. Any reflective theory of schooling, which
depicts the school as a comparatively silent mirror of dom
inant social interests, would tend to assent to his conten
tion that education has become a political matter. However,
Marcuse only adds to that predicament by establishing his own
minority elite as the vanguard of a new political conscious
ness. His alternative is all the more surplus-repressive
because it begins exactly where the present system leaves off: in control by guardians and suppression of dissent.
Only Marcuse and the gods can tell where it will lead, if arid when it will end. In his zeal for double negatives,
-'-'Contrary to Marcuse, Mannheim strives for a com prehensive synthesis in his sociology of knowledge as a way of avoiding absorption in an overwhelming density of events. Moreover, he argues that such syntheses must "continually be reformulated," rather than taken for granted as well nigh ab solute truths. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. I34.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
167 Marcuse attempts to forge an open society by closing his own. He has actually created a partisan camp short on self- examination and admittedly unable to deliver on its promise
of freedom for all.
With these fatal flaws, Marcuse almost seems to imi tate the model of established practice, though in an in verse, more explicitly peremptory, direction. He wants to shift the balance between Right and Left by "restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive in equality of freedom."55 For Marcuse, the Left personifies a potential liberating force in a repressive universe. Yet, as he maintains, "Within a repressive society, even pro gressive movements threaten to turn into the opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game."57 Mar cuse makes his own capricious rules, those which are only presumed to be free of the established ones. Once more, Marcuse believes that dialectical equations justify any ac tion on his part. In the same breath, he is unconcerned about the prospect of educational dictatorship—so long, of course, as his intellectual elite would be in control. "Ed ucational dictatorship ... is easily ridiculed but hard to refute because it has the merit to acknowledge, without much hyprocisy, the conditions (material and intellectual)
-^Marcuse,56 "Repressive Tolerance," pp. 119-120. 57Ibid., p. 83.
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.
Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of material prohibited without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Eigentum des Erich Fromm Dokumentationszentrums. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Veröffentlichungen – auch von Teilen – bedürfen der schriftlichen Erlaubnis des Rechteinhabers.
168
which serve to prevent genuine and intelligent self- determination."5^ Marcuse is no hypocrite: he makes it quite clear that he searches for Truth at the expense of
freedom. If his social analysis is correct, Marcuse breaks
his own rules for truth and freedom. Given his repressive
world, he cannot fully control even his own mental images.
Plato learned a similar lesson once he left the Republic for
the Laws. For him, Syracuse was not like the Academy of
Athens. For Marcuse, earthly frustrations can afford him no
control over Apollo's ear or Zeus' power. In the end, his
mind seems to be part of an homogenous mold, with memorable traces of phylogenetic descent from Plato to Freud.
^Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 40. "The problem is not that of educational dictatorship, but that of break ing the tyranny of [perverse] majority opinion." Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," p. 118. Here Marcuse suggests that he would support an authentic representation of Rousseau's "general will." In the meantime, Mill's notion that "individual mental superiority" justifies "reckoning one person's opin— fon as equivalent to more than one" strikes a sympathetic chord with Marcuse's Platonic pretensions: "'Distinction in favor of education, right in itself [is] supposed to pre serve 'the educated from the class legislation of the unedu cated, ' without enabling the former to practice a class legislation of their own." Ibid., p. 122. Cf. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Chicago: Gate- way Edition, 1962), p. 183, as cited in ibid., pp. 121-122. Marcuse had once been more optimistic. In Eros and Civilization (p. 206), he thought the masses could be taught the difference between rational and irrational au thority, basic and surplus repression, if only they were given the opportunity; i.e., if their consciousness were not "methodically arrested and diverted."
Devitis, J. L., 1972: The Concept of Repression in the Social and Educational Thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, University of Illinois Dissertation 1972, 253 pp.