Abstract
Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution found a rich reception in the 1960’s field of Hegel/Marx commentary. This rereading challenges Marcuse’s reduction of Hegel’s dialectical logic to a logic of negation. It describes weaknesses in Marcuse’s Hegel paraphrases, and argues that Marcuse’s bold leap to a Revolutionary logic rejects Hegel’s method: turning instead to Kant’s transcendental logic, and leading his readers into an antinomy of hope and despair.
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Notes
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). The original 1941 edition (Oxford University Press) was reprinted in 1954 with a brief post-War comment, which was omitted from the 1960 reprint.
See Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy, Book III, Part II, Chapter 22 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967) (originally published 1945).
See J.N. Findlay’s 1959 lecture, which marks the first positive turn, “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel,” reprinted in Findlay, Language, Mind and Value (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), pp. 217–31. Also in 1959, Findlay published his influential book-length study, Hegel: A Reexamination (London: Allen & Unwin).
In English this view was advanced by German and Austrian exiles. See, for example, Eric Voegelin’s later essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” in J. T. Fraser, F. Haber & G. Muller (eds.), The Study of Time (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1972), pp. 418–51; Peter Viereck, Meta-Politics: The Root of the Nazi Mind (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964) (originally published 1941).
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945). A rejoinder to Popper appeared in Walter Kaufmann, "The Hegel Myth and Its Method," in Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), chap. 7.
See, for example, Shlomo Avineri, “The Hegelian Origins of Marx’s Political Thought,” Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 21 (1967), pp. 33–56. Avineri would soon publish monographs on Marx (The Social and Political Philosophy of Karl Marx [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968] and Hegel (Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972]). For Hegel alone, a new interpretation was available in J.N. Findlay’s 1959 work (see above, note 3). Also on academic bookshelves was a loose, humanistic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by Berkeley professor Jacob Loewenberg, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1965). English readers were beginning to discover earlier French commentaries. For an overview of these influential re-purposings of Hegel, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). When I had the opportunity to study Hegel, Marx, and Husserl with both Avineri and Findlay in the late 1960’s, Marcuse’s popular book was not on their reading lists.
Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York: Humanities Press, 1950).
Reason and Revolution, p. vii.
Ibid., pp. 62–90.
Ibid., pp. 121–68.
Ibid., pp. xiii, 131.
Ibid., pp. 122–23, 147.
Ibid., pp. 48, 113.
Marcuse cites Hegel’s apothegm that classical liberalism worshipped the abstraction, only to be undermined by the concrete. Ibid., p. 397.
Ibid., pp. 113–14.
Ibid., p vii.
Ibid., p. xi.
Ibid., p. xiv.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Reason and Revolution, p. xiii. For a dialectical perspective on Kuhn’s transitions, see Rüdiger Bubner, Modern German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 134–38.
Marcuse had previously written about Hegel in his Habilitationschrift, Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989) (originally published in 1932; English translation 1987).
While this dramatic turn is anticipated in the early discussion, the text as a whole makes this turn somewhere around p. 183 (Reason and Revolution).
Suggested at ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 87.
Husserl’s methods were part of Marcuse’s academic education. The key sources on phenomenology as a descriptive flow of scrupulously regarded concepts (Wesensschau) are Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1913; English translation 1931), preceded by two volumes of Logische Untersuchungen (Leipzig, Verlag Von Veit, 1900; Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1901; English translations 1970).
Marcuse embeds his understanding of this method in his paraphrase of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; see Reason and Revolution, p. 94. For Hegel’s rejection of Anschauung as a constituent part of dialectical reasoning, see Die Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967), Vol. II, p. 472 (hereafter cited as WdL).
Reason and Revolution, pp. 129–30.
Ibid., p. 150.
See ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 321.
Richard H. Gaskins, “The Structure of Self-Commentary in Hegel’s Dialectical Logic,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 30 (1990), pp. 403–17.
Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), p. 44 (hereafter cited as PhdG).
Hegel summarizes the two-phased dialectical movement in WdL II, pp. 494–500.
See especially WdL II, pp. 259–60 (where Hegel dismisses “empty negativity”).
Reason and Revolution, p. 15.
Indeed, Marcuse attributes some basic tenets of later Lebensphilosophie to the youthful Hegel, ibid., p. 37.
See Max Horkheimer, “Die Aktualität Schopenhauers” (1961), translated as “Schopenhauer Today,” in Robert K. Wolff and Barrington Moore, eds., The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 124–41.
After many anticipations, that moment arrives on p. 273 (ibid.) and following pages.
Ibid., pp. 316–17. Marx had famously avoided saying much about post-capitalist society, stressing instead the arduous and uncertain process of transformation. Marcuse nonetheless understands that process as reaching a goal, after which the dialectical imperative seems to drop away, to be replaced by the “rational spontaneity” of liberated human beings, and by a new regime of social planning (ibid., pp. 318–19).
Speaking of Marcuse’s colleague Theodor Adorno, philosopher Rüdiger Bubner identifies a similar move as a fundamental weakness of the “negative dialectic” approach. “The enterprise of a strictly negative dialectic seems to me fundamentally a failure….The attempt to apply dialectical methods and then to suspend them at one point…and then to call a sudden halt in a decisionistic fashion, falls short of being philosophically persuasive, however emphatic the protestations that may be made that precisely in this lies the higher wisdom” (Modern German Philosophy, above note 20, p. 180).
See Reason and Revolution, pp. 321, 279.
Marcuse thought he found this famous Kantian tribunal lurking in one part of Hegal’s Logic—in the Doctrine of Essence (Ibid., p. 149), the same place where some later commentators have likewise planted a Kantian point of transcendental leverage. See, for example, Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,” in Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 95–156.
See WdL II, pp. 429–31.
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Gaskins, R. Marcuse’s Hegel: Hope and Despair in the Logic of Negation. Soc 55, 361–366 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-018-0269-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-018-0269-3