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Frankfurt School: Did Herbert Marcuse advocate sexy science?

By Bruce Miller

A commentary on The Erotic Attitude Toward Nature and Cognitive Existentialism by Dimitri Ginev

November 21, 2010

Frankfurt School: Did Herbert Marcuse advocate sexy science?


Dimitri Ginev suggests in the opening paragraph to his article The Erotic Attitude Toward Nature and Cognitive Existentialism Telos 152 (Fall 2010) that Herbert Marcuse advocated something that sounds like a sexy science:
In his celebrated critique of technological rationality, Herbert Marcuse pleads for a new science in which an erotic attitude toward nature would permit the entities of the natural world to transform in such a manner that they become free to be what they are. Following this line of reasoning in Eros and Civilization, he reaches the conclusion: To be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. In addition, the erotic attitude will reveal aesthetic qualities inherent in nature. This view implies a revolutionary change not only of sciences social status but also of its cognitive structure, including the norms of objectivity of scientific research. The objectivity of the modern natural sciences is intimately related to the degradation of nature to a matter for instrumental manipulation, subjected to mathematical laws. Marcuse is striving for a new objectivity of scientific research that would attribute an objective status not only to the external world of instrumentally manipulable things but to the cultural reality of ethical, aesthetic, and political values as well. On his account, sciences status quo, in which each research process serves the tenets of technological rationality, accepts only the value of control as an unquestionable value. It makes a catchy opening for an article. Which is why I used it in the opening to this essay and the title, just as he did. But Marcuse in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) wasnt talking about having belly-dancers present during lab experiments. And Ginev apparently realizes this. Because skipping to the last paragraph of his article he concludes: The point I would like to stress is that the approach to the earth as a living planet launches those conceptual and methodological transformations of science, which were once addressed by Marcuses ideas for an erotic attitude toward nature. Marcuses utopian belief in new science seems to begin a transformation into reality when situations in scientific research generate possibilities of radically non-instrumental inquiry. By disclosing new contexts of asking natural entities about their authentic normality, the forgotten dialogue with nature gets its chance to be reanimated. [my emphasis] In between, there is discussion of various issues getting from one point to the other just cited. On part of the discussion Ill admit I dont have a sufficiently informed opinion. Im not familiar enough with Maurice Merleau-Pontys theory that Ginev describes as holding that the starting point of the dialogue with nature is every external perception that is immediately synonymous with a certain self-perception of the perceivers body. This Ginev cities in support of intriguing statements like these: The dialogical relationship to natural reality is a dimension of our primordial mode of being-in-the-world.

The bodily experience grounds the primary interaction with nature just because it is not only centered in itself but also projected outward from itself toward objects that, in their totality, are experienced as nature. It is a dialogue with nature (as a particular variety of immediate natural objects) within the totality of Nature opened up by the bodily experience whereby the corporeity becomes an ingredient of that totality. These observations have to do with defining human perception and describing how it works. As physical beings, we humans are products of biology and our perception of the exterior world is shaped by the totality of our physical response to it. But Im not sure Marcuses view of human perception would quite fit with this currently academically faddish viewpoint. Marcuse was influenced by Heideggers existentialism and Husserls phenomenology. But his main outlook was heavily rooted in Hegels thought, which emphasized the mutual interaction and dependence of Subject and Object in the process of perception. The perceptual theory Ginev sketches in those passages sounds like a far more subjectivist one, in which human perception of the external world is not only self-limiting but even self-referential. One of Marcuses major philosophical themes was his critical rejection of positivism and the narrow empiricism on which it is based. And his viewpoint was heavily shaped by Freudian psychoanalytic thought, which recognized that individuals invest external objects with significance based on personal feelings and unconscious associations. But he was also a Marxist materialist with heavy Hegelian leanings. So its hard to imagine he would have embraced a theory of perception that tends so heavily against the notion that people can perceive external material reality in some kind of meaningfully accurate way that is not fundamentally selfreferential. Going back to the opening quotation, it is taken from Eros and Civilization. In that work, Marcuse is taking one of Sigmund Freuds most controversial ideas, the death instinct, and using it in a philosophical sense. The books theorizes about the struggle in society between Eros the instincts of love and compassion and solidarity broadly associated with the erotic drives and Thanatos - the destructive drives, the death instinct. The chapter from which the sentence Ginev quotes is called, The Images of Orpheus and Narcissus. In it, he uses images from Greek mythology to contrast the performance principle, represented by Prometheus, and the pleasure principle, represented by Orpheus and Narcissus. (The reality [performance] principle and the pleasure principle were generally accepted in orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis; the death instinct was scarcely accepted by even Freuds most orthodox followers, including Ernest Jones.) The full paragraph is as follows (my emphasis in bold; quote from 1962 Vintage edition): The Orphic and Narcissistic experience of the world negates that which sustains the world of the performance principle. The opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome. Being is experienced as gratification, which unites man and nature so that the fulfillment of man is at the same time the fulfillment, without violence, of nature. In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are - beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, "objectively." "Le monde tend la beaut." [Gaston Bachelard: The world tends toward beauty.] In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature

become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks - but moves them to partake in joy. Marcuse is not specifically referring to science here. He is not suggesting that lions are going to start lying down with lambs this side of the New Jerusalem. What he is describing here is a mythological illustration of the pleasure principle. In Eros and Civilization, he points to the possibility that human society can experience a drastic and constructive change in the relative dominance of the pleasure principle and the performance principle, the latter being Marcuses construction of Freuds reality principle. And he is making what he himself saw as a radical criticism of existing societies (including those that in 1955 were part of the socialist camp). But he isnt arguing that the reality/performance principle will go away. Although the use of only overstates the case, Ginevs summary of Marcuses view of existing science is fair: that it accepts only the value of control as an unquestionable value. Fair, but not necessarily as clear as it might be. Then again, Marcuses framing of his arguments are often complex and rarely easily accessible to the general reader. So translating them into more clear form is a tricky business. If Marcuses observation on the Narcissus/Orpheus consciousness Being is experienced as gratification, which unites man and nature so that the fulfillment of man is at the same time the fulfillment, without violence, of nature sounds like a statement of ecological awareness, thats a reasonable inference. Marcuse later developed the ecological implication of the arguments he made in Eros and Civilization. And he welcomed the development of the environmental movement in the following decades.

The bulk of Ginevs article is devoted to elaborating how his concept of cognitive existentialism can overcome the limits of objectivist assumptions in scientism by using hermeneutic phenomenology within the context of constitution. These are concepts Ginev elaborates in his works such as A Passage to a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science (1997) and The Context of Constitution: Beyond the Edge of Justification (2006). It is beyond the scope of this post to go more deeply into them, but hermeneutic interpretations of the scientific enterprise and the role of constitution in it have long been familiar concepts in the philosophy of science. But his attempt to connect his advocacy of a more holistic approach to science seems to miss the key content of Marcuses criticism of scientific theories such as positivism. Given argues that his own approach understands scientific research as providing general knowledge based on empirical results that must be decontextualized from its original experimental setting to function as general or abstract knowledge. And also provides an understanding of the process of how that knowledge is recontextualized to be used in other ways. But Ginevs constructions as presented in this article doesnt seem to escape the confines of empiricism, despite all the postmodern trappings. The criticism of modern science that

Marcuse and others of the Frankfurt School elaborated was inextricably linked to social theory. They argued that the development of science, both in terms of its broad theories and the technological applications, is inevitably shaped by the investment priorities of a given society. Scientific and technological investments on behalf of the military produced scientific discoveries and technological applications useful for killing people. Investments in medical research are more aimed at find ways to cure diseases and fix injuries. But even there, the particular forms the research takes will be shaped by the structure of society. It has often been observed that the relatively privileged position of men in American society influences the amount of research dollars devoted to male sexual dysfunction as compared to similar afflictions that primarily occur in women. But they also emphasized the interrelationship between Science in its theoretical aspects and society, particularly but by no means exclusively in social theory. Henryk Grossmann, in an article published in 2/1935 number of the Frankfurt Schools flagship journal Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen Philosophie und die Manufaktur, discussed the interaction between mechanistic philosophies of nature and the cosmos and their acceptance in the developing capitalist societies that were placing a growing importance of manufacturing and mass production. Ideas provoked and enabled changes in society, and changing social priorities and interests created an intellectual environment in which those new ideas of nature and the cosmos were more accepted and encouraged. Marcuse and others of the Frankfurt School were concerned about the way an inherent conservatism had become accepted in the theoretical structure of science to a large degree, particular in positivist approaches to hard sciences as well as the social sciences. Understanding the critical implications of actual scientific developments like psychoanalysis, not only for abstract science and technology but for the actual structure of social relationships could encourage the transformation of society in more humane ways. To use the language of Eros and Civilization, it could encourage a society in which the pleasure principle would be emphasized to a far greater degree, the performance principle less. Here is how Marcuse put it there: In the present period of civilization, the progressive ideas of rationalism can be recaptured only when they are reformulated. The function of science and of religion has changed as has their interrelation. Within the total mobilization of man and nature which marks the period, science is one of the most destructive instruments destructive of that freedom from fear which it once promised. As this promise evaporated into utopia, scientific becomes almost identical with denouncing the notion of an earthly paradise. The scientific attitude has long since ceased to be the militant antagonist of religion, which has equally effectively discarded its explosive elements and often accustomed man to a good conscience in the face of suffering and guilt. In the household of culture, the functions of science and religion tend to become complementary; through their present usage, they both deny the hopes which they once aroused and teach men to appreciate the facts in a world of alienation. Where religion still

preserves the uncompromised aspirations for peace and happiness, its illusions [referring to Freuds view of religion] still have a higher truth value than science which works for their elimination. The contradiction that concerned Marcuse and the Frankfurt School is that only such a qualitative change in society could fully reorient Science in that way. But at the same time, such a reoriented scientific thinking would also have to be applied in practice to bring about such a qualitative change in society. Ginevs article doesnt make it clear at all how the insights of his cognitive existentialism into the process of decontextualizing and recontextualizing the results of scientific research address that contradiction. Or even that cognitive existentialism recognizes the dilemmas produced by one-dimensional thinking in the same way that Marcuse did. Ginev makes the valid observation that ecological science has indicated the importance of interrelationships in a way that validates Marcuses arguments. But it validates them not be achieving what Marcuse saw as the need to strengthen the role of the pleasure principle in society relative to the performance principle. Like the science of psychoanalysis, it provides a look at the contradictions in our current mode of existence, such as the economic need to use fossil fuels to satisfy human needs while the use of those fossil fuels are damaging the worlds climate itself in ways that work against human needs. Ginev cites with approval James Lovelocks Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) that elaborates the Gaia Hypothesis, the notion that the Earth itself is a living organism. This approach has won popularity even among some positivist-minded scientists, although more in the form of a metaphor that emphasizes the interconnectedness of environmental phenomena. The idea of the Earth as an actual living organism in itself has obvious appeal to the environmentally-minded, but more literal versions of the notions find their adherents in the esoteric community and among the less scientifically-minded. An interesting literary version of a similar idea can be found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Professor Challenger short story When the World Screamed (1929); also available at Wikipedia. (Conan Doyle was famously attracted to esoteric theories, particularly Spiritualism.) Lovelock himself seems to be a bit of an erratic sort, as manifested in his scientific/ecological observations. He has had nice things to say about climate change denial. (Charles Clover, Grandaddy of green, James Lovelock, warms to eco-sceptics Times of London 03/14/2010) Lovelock has publicly supported the more-than-dubious cause of Scottish nativism. (Mark Smith, Holyrood platform for 'eco-fascist' group aiming to curb population Scotsman 11/17/2010) He has been an enthusiastic booster of nuclear power for years, and has opposed wind energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. (Ted Glick, James Lovelock and the End Times Znet 08/03/2009)

Ill conclude with this formulation of Marcuses argument, as expressed in his OneDimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964): Observation and experiment, the methodical organization and coordination of data, propositions, and conclusions never proceed in an unstructured, neutral, theoretical space. The project of cognition involves operations on objects, or abstractions from objects which occur in a given universe of discourse and action. Science observes, calculates, and theorizes from a position in this universe. The stars which Galileo observed were the same in classical antiquity, but the different universe of discourse and action-in short, the different social reality-opened the new direction and range of observation, and the possibilities of ordering the observed data. I am not concerned here with the historical relation between scientific and societal rationality in the beginning of the modem period. It is my purpose to demonstrate the internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori technology, and the a priori of a specific technology-namely, technology as form of social control and domination. Modern scientific thought, inasmuch as it is pure, does not project particular practical goals nor particular forms of domination. However, there is no such thing as domination per se. As theory proceeds, it abstracts from, or rejects, a factual teleological context - that of the given, concrete universe of discourse and action. It is within this universe itself that the scientific project occurs or does not occur, that theory conceives or does not conceive the possible alternatives, that its hypotheses subvert or extend the pre-established reality. [This essay appeared (in a somewhat snarkier form) at the authors Old Hickorys Weblog on 11/21/2010.] - END -

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