Episode 155 - Closer Look: Marcuse, One Dimensional Man Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] David: The podcast where your two favorite philosophers put the work of other philosophers in contact with everyday life.

[00:00:26] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:27] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:29] Ellie: And David, today we are doing our second of this new form of episode. We recently have started integrating into our regular feed, which is called a Closer Look, where we focus on one particular text for the entirety of an episode. As our longtime listeners know, usually our episodes are topics based and we pepper in discussions of a few different texts at minimum.

And we have recently started with our new series Closer Look to have one of every four episodes be this new format. So we talked about Foucault last time. Now we're gonna be talking about the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his text One-Dimensional Man.

[00:01:10] David: Yeah, this is a great little text and, for those of you who haven't read it, it was hugely influential when it came out in the 1960s.  Marcuse is a figure who is associated with the student movement in the 1960s with the new left in the United States. And  Marcuse is a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a group of Jewish thinkers from Germany who were writing in the early to middle of the 20th century, trying to understand how capitalism has changed since the time of Marx and what possibilities for freedom and liberation might still be on the table for contemporary subjects.

And the text that we are reading today, one dimensional man, became the text that introduced critical theory, Frankfurt style to an American audience, more so than any other text. And it was so popular that in the first five years after it was published, it sold a hundred thousand copies.

You know, like all the students were buying it up, people in all kinds of organizations were having reading groups about it. Because  Marcuse, I think, gave voice in this book to something that a lot of leftists in the United States were feeling, and that they finally saw, articulated in a concise, understandable, but also rigorous philosophical fashion in these pages.

[00:02:32] Ellie: A hundred thousand copies a girl can dream. It is impossible to overstate the cultural impact that this book had. And so I think a lot of people might not have heard of this particular text. You might not have even heard of Herbert  Marcuse, but this was one of the most important books of the 1960s. It's published in 1964 and it was swiftly taken up by the new left critics of political movements in the mainstream, whether conservative or liberal, like it was really, and even the new left is basically critical of all forms of political organization at the time.

And so this book's uptake was major sixties counter cultural vibes. It largely consists in a critique of what we might retrospectively understand as 1950s conformity. By the late 1960s and early seventies, it was one of, if not the most influential social theory of its day.  Marcuse himself joined this group, the Frankfurt School, just before they were exiled.

So David, as you mentioned, the Frankfurt School was comprised mainly of a group of Jewish philosophers, and so they had to leave Frankfurt with the rise of Hitler. And after some time in Switzerland, they then ended up in the US. So  Marcuse himself lived in New York, he lived in California, he lived in DC and had a big impact even during World War II on sort of counterintelligence efforts, helping the US government understand what was going on in Germany.

He also has had a big influence indirectly on philosophy since through the fact that he was the teacher of Angela Davis. But interestingly, his own teacher, his most famous teacher was Martin Heidegger. And so  Marcuse studied with Heidegger, but then broke with him once Heidegger aligned himself with the Nazi party.

[00:04:20] David: I don't think I've ever told you this, Ellie, but one of my very earliest presentations at a professional conference when I was a graduate student was on  Marcuse's early attempt to reconcile Heidegger and Marx. He wrote a book called Heidegger and Marxism where he basically says, look, there are two great thinkers that we need to terry with.

One of them is Marx because of his liberatory project, and the other one is Heidegger because of his existentialist philosophy. And so early on he saw himself as reconciling the two and sort of saying that they are more compatible than they might seem. But of course, Heidegger's embrace of Nazim of course, made that position for him as a Jewish scholar, untenable.

And so he ends up breaking from him.

[00:05:02] Ellie: And even from a philosophical perspective,  Marcuse said, you know, there wasn't really anything in being in time that would've suggested Heidegger's later turn towards national socialism. But when you go back and read the text, there are certain themes within it. The theme of kind of not falling prey to the main viewpoints that are held within a given society at a given time, that sort of seem like they're part of this conservative, proto fascist ideology. Right. That then manifests in national socialism.

[00:05:31] David: So  Marcuse leaves Germany in 1934. He publishes this book exactly three decades later in 1964. And interesting little fact that I just discovered five years after the publication of this book, he is publicly condemned by Pope Paul VI because you know of his writings on like revolution, marxism arrows is a really important term for him. So like our animalistic sexual instincts. And so you can see how rather than diminish students' interest in  Marcuse's work, this condemnation by the Pope sort of made him a superstar. And so maybe it's time to transition then to the content of the book.

[00:06:17] Ellie: Today we're talking about Herbert  Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man.

[00:06:21] David: In what ways is our society's picture of freedom an illusion?

[00:06:26] Ellie: How do mainstream ways of thinking and speaking, including in philosophy, reflect the realities of capitalist control?

[00:06:33] David: And are there ways of overcoming the flattening of values in our culture?

[00:06:40] Ellie: As always, for an extended version of this episode, ad-free community discussion and more subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

One of Marcuse's main contentions in this book is that even though our lives have gotten smoother with the rise of many of the creature comforts that we tend to associate with modernity, that doesn't make them freer.

In fact, Marcuse is really invested in pointing out that contemporary industrial society, regardless of the form of government under which it proliferates, tends to be totalitarian. What he means by this is that contemporary industrial society operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

And so basically what we take to be our interests, our values, our feelings, our wants, even our needs don't just spring from some core authentic source, but in fact are manipulated by vested interests. We might think about corporate interests, right? And so when I get that Instagram ad and then suddenly I'm thinking, ooh, I want that pair of shoes, and I could offer reasons for why I want that pair of shoes.

They're cute, they're my favorite color, they're, you know, good quality. Whatever I might say about that, actually. Where is that need coming from? That need is coming from the vested interests that are instilling that need within me.

[00:08:06] David: I want to point out that when we think about totalitarianism, we often begin by thinking about a form of government, right? We think about like who's in power, what are the mechanisms through which they are exercising control over the population? But totalitarianism is also precisely about what you're just talking about, Ellie. It's about the indirect or direct manipulation and control of needs.

And Marcuse introduces a classic Marxist distinction, which is the distinction between real needs and false needs. He also sometimes calls the first category vital needs. So there are things that are objective needs for humans, right? We need food, we need shelter, we need social contact. That's different than false needs, like, you know, your need for those shoes or my need for an iPhone. And the problem is that the distinction between real needs and false needs is not always evident to us. You know, we just experienced our needs as needs. Like, yes, I need shoes because they're kind of clothing, but they need to be Nike or they need to be this brand, or whatever.

 And so part of the task of critical theory as Marcuse understands it, this is the project, the philosophical project is casting some suspicion on our own experience of our needs so that we can learn to differentiate that which is sort of vital for human existence, for good living. And that which is in fact an expression or a result of the new forms of control that are characteristic of a totally administered society, which is the society that we live under.

[00:09:35] Ellie: Yeah. And the Frankfurt school sometimes has a for being a batch of curmudgeons, and you can see that come out a little bit in some of what he describes as false needs. False needs include the need to have fun, the need for relaxation time, you know, this idea of kind of downtime, the need to relax.

 If you think about our paradigmatic ways of relaxing, you might think about going to a resort, okay, well that costs money.

And why does that appeal to us? Because we've seen a lot of advertisements for the Sandals Beach resort and so on and so forth, right? And what is our kind of need for Netflix and Chill? I was gonna say, where is that coming from? That doesn't actually even really matter here, although the answer is it's coming from corporate advertisers. But the relevant question really is who is that serving? It's serving Netflix.

[00:10:29] David: Yeah, no, that's right. And I think maybe the better term than like leisure here is entertainment. Because we live in a culture of affluence where we experience leisure largely through the entertainment industry, right? Like we want to be entertained when we're not working. And we believe that that is genuine restorative, restful time, even though in fact it's just another form of consumption.

And I think this is where we can introduce one of the concepts that floats around in this book, which is Marcuse's notion of the happy consciousness, right? That in an affluent society where we have to some extent satisfied our need to be free of want, you know, like we don't want to need things, we want to have our needs satisfied, but an affluent culture that has satisfied all our needs puts us in a state of passive receptivity that is almost largely hedonistic, where we're just like taking in pleasures through entertainment and through the consumption of commodities that according to Marcuse, turn us into quietistic subjects, right? Where we no longer turn a critical eye on the society that we live in, precisely because we think, Hey, this society is giving me everything that I want. So why would I think about the irrationality, the contradictions, the limitations of the existing social order?

[00:11:49] Ellie: Yeah, and we'll be theorizing explicitly in this episode sort of what effects that has, the absence of critical thinking and what that actually means. But I think as you're talking about the sort of establishment of that, David, through the construction of this particular view of leisure time, I'm reminded of something that Marcuse talks about, which is the whittling down of private space by technological reality.

And so if you think about the kinds of things that we do during our leisure time. They can largely be boiled down to a few activities. One thing I think is really striking nowadays relative to previous decades, is just how few different kinds of activities we tend to engage in. We watch TV and you might say, well, yeah, but we're watching different channels, watching different movies, watching different shows.

We're watching YouTube. Or maybe let's not even say watching tv. Let's, let's broaden it out from there. We're watching, we're watching screens. We're also shopping. We're sometimes listening to music, right? Certainly some of us are still reading, but if you think about just, I don't know, A few decades ago, even, even when Markus was writing this, although a lot of people in the US where he was based at this time had individual televisions in their home, there was a much wider spectrum of things that people were doing in their leisure time, whether that's like sporting activities or social clubs, games. Yeah, reading. I don't know. All kinds of different things.

[00:13:21] David: Yeah, but I, so I want to add maybe a little bit of a distinction here, or maybe, I don't know if it's a distinction or a clarification because what you said makes it seem almost as if at the time Marcuse is writing that that private space is kind of intact and we've lost it since

[00:13:35] Ellie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:13:36] David: With the screenification of the world.

[00:13:38] Ellie: I know. You're so right.

[00:13:39] David: but he says it's already happening in his time. By the 1960s, that private space, which let's just call it the mind or like human thinking, which is the fountain for negative thinking in the sense of critical thinking, is getting crushed by new forms of social control. And in the opening section of the book, he talks about how social control mechanisms no longer exist sort of out there in the external world.

They have been interjected, they have been internalized. So that even when I spend time by myself thinking, thinking about the world, which is rare, you know, for most people like to just have time to think and what do I think about the world? What's my worldview? What we end up doing is we just end up parroting internally the things that have been fed to us by this thing that Adorno and Horkheimer will call like, the culture industry.

And he says it's more than interjection. Actually interjection doesn't even begin to capture the severity of the phenomenon, of the extent to which the administration of human life is crushing even my mind. Because when we talk about interjection, we make it seem as if I'm taking the social control mechanisms and making them a part of my inner mental reality. He says, in fact, they have colonized. My inner mental reality, and I think this is actually, this is my interpretation, but I think this is where the title of the book comes from.

That normally there are two dimensions to human life. There is the external and the internal, and they are in dynamic relationship when things are going well. But now, when those external control mechanisms have completely taken over my mind and there is no place where I can go to criticize them from, that's the one dimensionality of human experience. I become one dimensional when even my mind is just a reflection of the existing order.

[00:15:39] Ellie: Yeah, that's right. And point well taken about how I was going back to some nostalgic prior period that was already actually Marcuse, if not at most the period at which Marcuse was writing. But I think that betrays. My general view of this book, which is that it is like by and large, way more relevant today even than it was when Marcuse published it in 1964.

But yeah, you're right. Already at that time he was very concerned by the whittling down of private space, by technological reality. And I think my point there was just really that with fewer and fewer options for variegated activities, we also have a whittling down of this sort of inner dimension of the mind.

But you're right, that, you know, even if we had a bunch of different activities to choose from, and I do think it's fair to say that there were more of those that at least, not to choose from necessarily, but that people actually participated in a number of decades ago, that doesn't mean that we're really cultivating the kind of approach that's needed to question the status quo.

And so. I would say you're definitely right that the one dimensionality that Marcuse is talking about is the one dimensionality of just like accepting the status quo, having no space to distance oneself from and therefore critique it. But I don't think it's as simple as the two dimensions being the external and the internal.

I think we would wanna put it in more general terms. That is one of the ways that we can think about this two dimensionality, but I think there are others as well. Negative and positive is one, right?

[00:17:08] David: Yeah. Other people have said culture versus civilization. So there are different ways of caching out what the dimensions in question are, but when I read this stuff about how there is no inner psyche anymore for most contemporary subjects, it made me think about it in terms of this collapse of the mental by the social, which is, it is just one way of reading that.

[00:17:32] Ellie: Yeah, and I think part of Marcuse's point is that this doesn't seem to be such a collapse. It actually presents itself as greater and greater freedom. And so he says what happens with the sort of advance of capitalist society is that we get more and more the appearance of freedom because like for instance, we have, you know, 30 different peanut butters we can choose from at the grocery store as opposed to just one.

But what that's really doing is implanting false needs in us. That implantation of false needs serves as a distraction. It actually, he goes so far as to say, is a warfare against liberation. And so it's not just that like 30 strains of peanut butter isn't really as exciting as it seems. It actually is part of this totalitarian tendency, and as you put it before it serves to stymie potential genuine criticism of the society.

If you're just like, oh, you know, this peanut butter is not as good as the other one, then you're distracted from actually making more substantive criticisms. And so one of the main takeaways I think, especially from the early part of this book, is that what seemed to be alternatives actually are not alternatives.

And I wanna move away from peanut butter, which is a superficial example of this here, to talk about how he thinks that even seeming alternatives to the status quo don't really tend to serve as critique of the status quo. He mentions, for instance, and this is like a very sixties set of examples, he says there's a great deal of sort of spiritual alternatives to the status quo.

So in response to the consumerism.

[00:19:14] David: I was wondering if you were gonna pick up on this and wanna talk about it. glad you did.

[00:19:17] Ellie: Yeah, of course I would. The former church girl. So he says there's seeming alternative to the consumerism of mid-century life, which comes in the form of these spiritual movements. So there is a great deal of worship together this week. Why not try God, zen existentialism, and beat ways of life, et cetera.

But such modes of protests and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They're rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism. It's harmless negation. And so basically things like zen and existentialism are offered up to us as what nowadays I think people would call just further lifestyle choices, and they don't actually serve to contest the status quo.

[00:20:05] David: Yeah, well they are given to us as commodities, right? That we choose one, and then when we are done with it, we toss it and we go to the next one. So I'm a Buddhist today and I am a Catholic tomorrow, and then the next day I'll try some generic Pan-Asian restaurant. And think that I'm gonna find some kind of fulfillment spiritually in this contact with difference.

But in the same way that these alternatives to the existing social order are not really alternatives. He says the things that we fight for in the present to improve our lives are also traps, right? Like the freedoms that we want to secure for ourselves are not freedoms. And that's partly because an administered society has a distorted understanding of language where the things that we think are freedoms are actually the opposite.

They're forms of servitude. So he gives the examples of something like freedom of thought, right? Like, we want freedom of thought. I want to be able to not be persecuted for the things that I think, unfortunately, freedom of thought can make it seem as if I can find freedom, genuine freedom as a human subject inside my head, independently of the material conditions under which I toil.

Similarly, we want freedom from want. I don't wanna be hungry, I don't wanna be exposed to the elements. Unfortunately, that makes it seem as if we have to accept the status quo that provides those needs for us and comforts us and gives us affluence, and that's how we end up in the position of the happy, contented, quietistic consciousness.

Finally, there is another example that he gives in this discussion of freedom, which is freedom of enterprise, this is central to our way of thinking about political economy, but what is freedom of enterprise? It's the idea that we should be free to choose whatever line of work we want, and that presupposes that we need to and want to work, and that we cannot imagine life without work rather than imagining a world in which we are not enslaved by the work imperative.

And that's the transfiguration of meaning that, that he's really worried about that things that we call one thing are actually the opposite.

[00:22:22] Ellie: And I'm glad you raised the point about work because something that deeply concerns Marcuse in this book is the way that what Marx identified as an antagonism between two classes, namely the workers and the capitalists, has started to fall away in contemporary society, such that the working class no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society.

And so in the 19th century, in the sort of Marxian framework, the proletariat would give the lie to society's self understanding as say, free. And Marcuse suggests that with the increasing democratization of a lot of the creature comforts, and I think certainly here he's thinking about what we would, you know, consider to be quote unquote first world countries.

We could definitely limit that to the US even, because you know, that's a context in which he's first writing this. That extension of those creature comforts to people from other classes, whether it's actually an extension or not. And I certainly don't think Marcuse could have anticipated the vast wealth inequality that has just skyrocketed in the US in the decades since he wrote this text.

The working class no longer has the power to really challenge established society because it's not, its contradiction. And so I think the most pessimistic element of this book is his concern that there aren't really social forces, material social forces through something like this class contradiction, this class antagonism that can challenge the existing order.

We're just like moving in a more and more one dimensional direction.

[00:23:56] David: Yeah. And that democratization of affluence and comfort is both things at once. It is a reality because yes, there is a change in the standard of living for a lot of people relative to the past. But on the other hand, it's also an illusion. And it's an illusion that is maintained by the media and the ideological function that the media is meant to play because the media is a false equalizer.

And he has these examples where he says, because when we watch tv, we watch the same TV as the rich. It makes us believe that we have the same kind of life as the rich. Or he says, we watch a movie, or we watch a documentary and we see a black person. And owning a Cadillac. And so we believe that there is no longer an association between race and poverty.

And so it is true that quality of life has improved for the lower classes, but that is also partly a lie that we've been fed. And as a result, it seems like the proletariat doesn't have much of a motivation to see itself as the negation of the whole, and therefore, as needing to sort of step up to this historic mission of overturning this mode of production.

One dimensional man is not a one dimensional book. In fact, it's divided into three sections. And there's a reason why I'm saying this, Ellie.

[00:25:25] Ellie: Okay.

[00:25:26] David: Part one is one dimensional society. That is his diagnosis of the social conditions under which modern subjects live. We talked about that already. Part two of the book is called One Dimensional Thought, and here Marcuse reflects on how our life under a society of one dimensionality, turns us into one dimensional being such that we lose the capacity for what he calls negative thinking.

And negative thinking sounds negative, but it's actually quite a good thing in the eyes, not just of Marcuse, but of all members of the Frankfurt School, because negative thinking is that which allows us to think against the grain, to think against the actual, to think about the possible, the hypothetical, the utopian.

And so the negative is in fact what makes possible something like hope for freedom and a yearning for liberation. Now in part two, one dimensional thought, Marcuse argues that one way in which society limits and whittles down our capacity to think is by constraining the way in which we relate to language.

In particular, society tries to limit the meaning of concepts in such a way that we think that concepts find their realization in the current organization of society, right? So think about the concept of freedom. Society will tell us you're already free. So just look around you and see where your freedom is already provided for you.

Or think about the concept of justice. Justice is already available. You just need to figure out where it is around you. And so there is a sense in which the scope of language and its possibilities is restricted to the actual, to that which already is. And if that's the case, then there is no need to transcend to go beyond that which is already in existence.

[00:27:28] Ellie: It's funny because as you say this, I'm thinking about like some of the stuff that we tend to do on the show, which is like, oh, well how do people usually use this term? And I've really made my peace with that. I think there's a time and a place for a lot of different kinds of thinking, but I'm very aware of the fact that what we do here in this space is not so much negative thinking and that Marcuse's curmudgeon is gonna have questions for us, but luckily we may not have to answer those questions because he has a very specific target in mind for a lot of his remarks on this.

And that is analytic philosophy, which is the kind of philosophy that really proliferates in Anglo-American academic context starting in the 20th century. And so I'm like, oh, let's, let's shunt our possible implication in this. Like I said, I've thought about this a lot and I'm pretty comfortable with it in certain ways because again, this isn't to say that like anything that falls into Marcuse's critique is therefore worth condemning. It's just to say it's worth critiquing. It's worth showing how it partakes in certain forces that it may or may not be aware of. And so, I don't know. I feel like a lot of times when I teach 20th century critical theory, I'm cautious to spell out for my students the difference between a critique and a condemnation because even though Marcuse like is very curmudgeonly at times, which I love, he's not necessarily condemnatory of all of these things, but he's just really encouraging us to think about things in a different way.

And so for that, before we actually talk about the content of this critique, I just wanna note that his view of critical theory is that critical theory analyzes society with respect to its capabilities for improving the human condition. And so what might seem pessimistic or curmudgeonly is actually ultimately coming from a deeper sort of optimism, which is the idea that there can be an improvement of the human condition. I think David will come back to that point later.

But what he's interested in here is the way that critical or social theory he uses those somewhat interchangeably here is concerned with historical alternatives that haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces. And he worries that our philosophical ways of thinking in mainstream Anglo-American context just don't really give space for that.

They don't give space for negativity. And part of this is because of the obsession with formal logic. So formal logic tends to operate using a propositional mode. Say S is P. Marcuse says, when we offer philosophical propositions in that manner, we are sort of just limited to the existing reality. There's no room for negativity or absence there.

And something that's been on my mind quite a bit in recent months due to some like sort of dust ups on social media around continental versus analytic philosophy is the analytic philosophers demand for clarity for an expression that perfectly encapsulates the state of affairs that it's attempting to convey, right?

As though language could just perfectly package reality and have a one-to-one correlation. And I'll just say here, 'cause we're gonna get into some kind of philosophical debates around this, that I think this also has implications for expression in general. It's not just like some sort of philosopher's, nerdy, you know, civil war.

[00:30:56] David: Yeah, no, I'm glad you said that last point because he is giving us this detailed critique of analytic philosophy, but it's because he sees analytic philosophy as giving us a crystallized form of something that's much more general. So here we see something in like an academic register that's actually happening on a large social scale in different ways. And so it is almost like a microcosm for something larger. And so let's not lose track of that.

So what is his critique of analytic philosophy? He argues that analytic philosophy has a number of shortcomings that essentially render it apolitical and that make it complacent, and therefore an ally of totalizing society that seeks to administer every aspect of the human condition.

So in particular, he identifies two shortcomings with the style of philosophy. The first one is its anti speculative or anti metaphysical orientation. So if you know anything about analytic philosophy, maybe you know that most analytic philosophers believe that the task of philosophy is just to clarify the concepts that are generated by the natural sciences and help us sort of polish the scientific worldview with the aid of linguistic analysis.

So the scientists tell us what is real, and then we, with our philosophical chops go on to provide conceptual tweaking and clarification to make sure that the concepts are in good form. But that's very different than the vision of philosophy that we get from other philosophers, right? Like Hagel, where philosophies function is to think beyond what is real.

It is to think about metaphysics, it's about what is beyond physics. And there is this sense that if you're talking about anything that is not real in an empirical sense, you are saying nonsense. And that's something that Marcuse is strongly rejecting because how do you criticize the real if you can't take some distance from it and think about that, which is beyond it.

[00:33:09] Ellie: Yeah, he suggests that some philosophical truths can best be encapsulated through contradiction, and so they actually don't conform to the language of formal logic. And even beyond the formal logic question here, he also thinks there's a problem with philosophy that attempts to be rooted in ordinary language.

And so one of the core ideas that emerges in 20th century analytic philosophy is the idea that ordinary language is really the main realm of philosophical discourse, or it should be the main realm of philosophical discourse. When we get caught up in jargon in technical terms, we end up coming up with concepts that are completely removed from everyday life and that actually are sort of metaphysical ghosts.

They're just illusions. And so if we ground philosophy in ordinary language, then our philosophy is going to be more concrete, more accurate. And Marcuse takes pretty serious issue with this because he thinks that there's an irreducible difference between the universe of everyday thinking and language, and that of philosophical thinking.

Common sense is worth being skeptical about. And similarly, ordinary language, which tends to be the kind of language in which we express common sense, is suspect. If you're looking for exactness and clarity and philosophy, you're not gonna find it in the simplest of all possible sentences in a kind of ordinary language model.

He describes this as pressing thinking into a straight jacket of common usage, and that is another form of just this positive thinking used in a technical sense because it prevents us seeking solutions from what's already there, and it prevents us from the hypothetical. This goes back to what you were saying, David.

It prevents us from recognizing hypotheticals, counterfactuals different possibilities by just emphasizing like, well, what is maybe either empirically verifiable or if not empirically verifiable, then rooted in ordinary language.

[00:35:11] David: I want to stay with this reference to clarity a little bit longer, because I see Marcuse as making two different arguments about clarity, both of which I really like. One is this idea that, look, clarity does not mean simplicity. Sometimes phenomena are complex and require a complex explanation, which is why maybe a dialectical metaphysical understanding of reality better helps us account for reality in its historical unfolding than a more analytic, simplified approach.

So that's one that clarity may not be found where you think it's found. But the second one is that even if we agree that an analytic approach to philosophy, which just tries to clarify concepts that are empirical without going beyond the real, even if we agree that it gives us a clear description of reality, he says, is clarity and exactness the only goal of philosophy? Is that what philosophy aims for? Did anybody at any point in history go into philosophy because they're like, you know what I really want to be able to say at the end of my life? That I gave an exact definition of a term in an article or in a book.

He says, no, the function of philosophy is to change human life for the better it is to promote justice. It is to get us closer to the objective of freedom. And in a sense it is to point out the irrationalities in our current mode of life. And in order to do that, you have to again, think against the grain of reality. And that is what analytic philosophy on his view is unable to do. And he cites a number of analytic philosophers who straight up say that the function of philosophy is to be quietistic relative to the status quo.

He points to a quote from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein says, philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. It has to just describe ordinary language usage, but it doesn't explain it, and it doesn't actually change anything.

[00:37:22] Ellie: And Wittgenstein is famous for espousing a therapeutic view of philosophy according to which philosophy should be a sort of therapy for our misunderstandings. Whether those are metaphysical concepts like the soul, you know, I think a therapeutic analytic philosopher would say, well, maybe we just need to kind of move away from this abstruse talk of soul.

 Related to what you were just saying, this apolitical orientation of the analytic conception of philosophy as therapy is deeply worrisome to Marcuse. For one, I mean, is it really possible to be apolitical? I think his answer would be no. In fact, what appears to be apolitical is actually just reinforcing the capitalist status quo.

And so he thinks of analytic philosophy's approach to formal logic as very much being an expression of the commodity form of capitalism. But he says that in its apolitical orientation, this method actually does something worse than simply perpetuate the status quo. Although it certainly does that. It's very method he suggests, shuts off the concepts of a political analysis.

Our words, for instance, have historical meanings. The concept of soul doesn't just emerge as either a descriptor of something real or as just an illusion, and therefore we should stop using the term, but rather critical analysis uncovers the historical meaning. So soul, how did that function in maybe futile society in medieval Christian society, how has that then been developed into the present day?

What function does it have now? And when we investigate the historical meanings of words, we reveal to ourselves the way that those words mask their own historicality and take on a reified form, a commodified form reification referring to the establishment of something as a thing.

[00:39:18] David: In connection to this point about history, there's also the point about context because analytic philosophy tends to look at language and at ideas and at concepts in a dehistoricized and decontextualized fashion. So let's just like pick out this word and analyze it linguistically without really paying attention to how it has moved over time. As you said, Ellie liked with the concept of the soul, but also without understanding the function that that concept and its many meanings might play in relation to social reality. So we have to understand the meaning of words in relation to our material circumstances.

And he says in page 185 of this book, well, what is that larger context that determines the meaning of words and ideas? He says, this larger context of experience, this real empirical world today is still that of the gas chambers and concentration camps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of American Cadillacs and German Mercedes of the Pentagon and the Kremlin of the nuclear cities and the Chinese communes of Cuba of brainwashing and massacres.

So, even in your treatment of the most seemingly apolitical words, you have to pay attention to how they move through a political space. And that's what the method of analytic philosophy is sort of unable to do largely because it has this therapeutic function. And that might sound really good. You know, we all want therapy.

God knows I need more of it in my life. But the problem with therapy as he understands it, is that the function of therapy is to make you adaptable to the status quo, right? You've done well by a therapeutic standard if you can adapt to the world as it is and live comfortably in it, right? If you can be happy with your lot in life, therapy has by a large extent succeeded because therapy doesn't lead you to become a revolutionary.

Therapy leads you to conform. And he says, in a sense, this is kind of, they're already in Freud a little bit like the idea that you fix people to be normalized and to conform to social expectations. But at the very least, he has this like throwaway line where he says, , at least Freud realized that the reason people are fucked up is because the world is fucked up.

Analytic philosophy doesn't even recognize that the world is fucked up. It just tries to make us all conform to common use and empiricism without any critical angle.

[00:41:52] Ellie: I think what you just said about therapy though is maybe a little unfair to Marcuse because he doesn't wanna do away with the therapeutic function of philosophy. He wants us to reconceive it, and so the criticisms that you just had of therapy, I think would be limited to a specific individualizing mode of therapy for Marcuse, because he talks about there being a real therapeutic goal of philosophy.

But this real therapeutic goal is political and so philosophy's real therapeutic goal can only be achieved to the degree that philosophy frees thought from being enslaved by the established universe of discourse and behavior, which is basically the power of negative thinking, right? This distancing, this critical theory that is the real therapeutic goal of philosophy.

And so the issue is really the individualization and the apolitical character of the Wittgenstinian view of therapy.

[00:42:49] David: And I think this is what he would call the great refusal, right? Like the negation of what is.

[00:42:58] Ellie: David, we started to do these closer look episodes as a way of doing a fun, deep dive on a text. I say fun, hopefully it's fun for you guys. It's very fun for us. And one of the things that we definitely emphasize to people in our first one of these, the Foucault episode, is that this isn't a stand-in for doing the reading yourself, but we're hoping it can provide kind of a nice companion.

If you do want to read it, maybe it'll kind of expose you to some of the key ideas. And I also find myself loving podcasts where people just talk about a book, whether or not I have read it. One of my favorites is if books could kill. In any case, I'm curious to hear you say something now about like what your view on this is, because we really had a super fun time doing the Foucault one, but we also left feeling like we were craving a little bit more room in the episode to talk about like our takes.

And so we can get into more concepts from Marcuse if we wish. But I think at this point I'd really like to hear your read on this text.

[00:43:59] David: One thing that I really like from this text is its analysis of the way in which our desires feed the very capitalist machine that leads to our subjugation. And we didn't talk about this explicitly in the earlier sections of the episode, and that's his concept of repressive desublimation, which is his way of capturing the way in which capitalism makes us desire things that rather than activating the higher faculties or leading us to create things that produce meaning for us, rather make us like throw ourselves into the consumption of things that are satisfying almost in a hedonistic, low level sense. And so we get caught in this trap of satisfaction. And I think that is a really good way for thinking about not just the 1960s, but about 2020s, right?

That one of the most difficult things for us to see about ourselves is, the constructed nature of our desires. 'Cause again, as I said before, we experience our desires as our desires. And it's really hard to divest yourself from a desire that you already have, even after you've already intellectually grasped that that desire is neither a vital nor an important need for you.

And so that I like about the book.

[00:45:18] Ellie: Okay. And maybe on that note, we can just say something quick about sublimation, since this is repressive desublimation. Sublimation, a term popularized by Freud. Nietzschians will tell you that Nietzsche first came up with it and Freud cribbed it from Nietzsche and never gave him credit, but sublimation, and you can tell me David, if this is like a precise enough definition or not, since you know Freud better than I do, is basically the channeling of drives or instincts into things that are not directly expressions of those drives or instincts.

For instance, channeling, what might nakedly appear to be a base instinct, and so if you create a gorgeous abstract painting, it doesn't immediately express an erotic desire, but it's a sublimated version of that. Right. It's like a kind of transmutation of a basic drive.

[00:46:14] David: A transubstantiation transmutation, you know, you can use a number of terms here, but it suggests that we can channel our animal energies, these forces that search from within to achieve great ends, to write a great novel, to sing, to perform on theater and that that transformation is sort of the root of all creative activity, which is why in a sense, uh, you know, the most creative humans are also the most repressed because they are able to channel all this energy that's coming up from below in the direction of these kind of high art achievements.

And so if sublimation is a movement upwards, then desublimation is a movement downward where repressive de sublimation would be us taking like those human energies and channeling them not to, you know, like to doing great things that have meaning. But rather we channel them to like watching the next Netflix series, buying the next pair of Nike shoes, going to the mall for hours and window shopping for things that we don't need.

[00:47:25] Ellie: the perfect tweet instead of writing your masterwork.

[00:47:28] David: Yes, exactly the tweetification of desire. But there is the additional observation that comes from Marcuse, which is that it's not just that we are doing these things that are of quote unquote lower value from a creative, philosophical perspective, but that we are doing these things that are the source of our very repression, right?

And so it creates that loop where we come to desire the very source of our subjugation, and we no longer know how to get out of that cycle. And so I think that's why the book was so appealing, not only for Marxists, because of the critique of capitalism, but also to people directly involved with the sexual liberation movement, many of whom were Marxists, of course, but not all, because it really paid attention to these sexual dimensions of the human experience.

[00:48:18] Ellie: I am curious what you think about this in relation to the attention economy. Which one hears about so much today? I'm thinking about the more and more bite-sized versions of content that we have today, and how many people are talking about the effects that's having on our attention span, as well as just the sheer intensification of consumerist tendencies over and beyond creative or even productive tendencies. Right. And one thing, this is like a bit of a stretch, but one thing that that brings to mind for me is something that we had an episode on a while back, which is outsourcing of thinking to chatbots like chat, GPT.

Because for instance, when you get a plagiarized essay from a student and by a plagiarized, I just mean it was like written by an LLM. The student is not producing what they're meant to produce. They are actually consuming the output of somebody else. And it's specifically like countless other humans over time whose work have been often illegally channeled into this chat bot.

\I guess there it's like we so often critique productivity culture, but productivity would be better than this. And certainly creativity would be better than either.

[00:49:32] David: Yeah. I mean, but it's still compatible with productivity since you can produce a lot. But, so in connection to your first question about something like scrolling on social media and just consuming, you know, image after image on a screen. I think the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment is really important here because maybe we think we draw pleasure from social media and from this constant repetitive activity that is deadening.

And in a sense, we are right. We do experience that as pleasurable. But we do not experience it as enjoyable. And the difference there is that pleasure is just about the satisfaction of an immediately perceived need, whereas enjoyment entails psychological and spiritual growth over time. In fact, most of us agree that doom scrolling is not enjoyable when we reflect back on it, but it just in the moment, it's a dopamine hit over and over again.

Now, in connection to your second question about the use of LLMs here, the way I think about this and the way I talk about it with my students is that. This is where we see the danger of our culture's fetishization of comfort, which is at the center of a culture of affluence, right? When you have a lot of resources and a lot of commodities to make people feel comfortable, we come to believe that comfort is the end all, be all of human existence.

And that by extension, anything that is uncomfortable, that is rooted in tension that costs us must not be worth it. But one important observation from critical theory as a school is that the labor of negative thinking is tension. It is uncomfortable. It's not pleasurable to think about oppression and capitalism and the closing of doors for liberation, but it is something that leads to growth.

And I think when we outsource our cognitive work, you know that work of imagination of thinking of reasoning to a machine. We are choosing comfort over our own humanity, largely because we have been taught that comfort is the ultimate objective that's worth a damn.

[00:51:47] Ellie: I wanna think here a little bit about what we might take away from this text because something surprising, given that this text was taken up by sixties countercultural movements, many of which were extremely optimistic, is that Marcuse himself doesn't offer a ton of room for optimism in this book. And indeed that is something that he's been critiqued for a bit.

There's in particular a critique of Marcuse by Paul Maddock that was written in the seventies where he suggests that Marcuse doesn't really see enough liberatory potential in the working class, and that we should actually still see some more liberatory potential than Marcuse acknowledges and apparently Marcuse himself thought this was a really good critique of this work.

So as I was looking back at the end of the book, because section three you mentioned sections one and two, section three is called the chance of the alternatives. And so Marcuse does pause at some alternatives and I think the most hopeful place in the book that I found comes near the end. It sounds like you and I have the same page numbers, David, so this is 260, if you wanna check it out, is talking about the abstract character of the great refusal. And you know, it's like that doesn't really potentially seem super helpful, but the concrete ground for refusal must still exist. And the unification of opposites in the medium of technological rationality must be in all its reality, an illusory unification, which eliminates neither the contradiction between the growing productivity and its repressive use.

Nor the vital need for solving the contradiction. Okay. That is pretty, I was gonna say abstract, but we're supposedly in the realm of the concrete here. No, but any case that's like a somewhat abstruse formulation, so maybe, let me see if I can break it down. The idea I think is really just that one dimensionality has not truly been achieved.

It actually can't fully be achieved. The unification that one dimensional thinking suggests is an illusion of unification. There is not actually any elimination of contradiction. And so we can use the fact that there still exists a contradiction, whether or not we recognize it in our social ways of thinking or not as fodder for a new order for a change in this order.

[00:54:08] David: Yeah, I mean, I take that to mean simply that we haven't lost the battle, right? There is still a kernel of possibility even in the one dimensionality because there is a second dimension hidden in there somewhere. I do think that it remains quite vague what that shred of hope is, what its basis is. Is it just like our capacity for negative thinking hasn't been entirely extinguished?

I hope so. I assume that he thinks evidence of that is his own work, right? That he is engaging in negative thinking, so are other philosophers. I think a critique that we might want to consider alongside, you know, this maybe charge of utopianism, which is kind of a term that's hovering here in the background, that maybe he's too optimistic, he's too generic in, in his description of the great refusal or what the alternatives

[00:54:58] Ellie: Can I actually just say on that point, I'm like thumbing through my book and I'm realizing, I think I first read this cover to cover in 2020. I read little excerpts of it before, but anyway, I have written in the margins. This chapter isn't good. Some good stuff, but naively optimistic slash simplistic.

That's to his chapter on liberation specifically. So that's just to say I share your view on that.

[00:55:20] David: Yeah, yeah. And, and as you know, I am not somebody who thinks that philosophers need to give concrete guidelines for a step by step, revolution.

[00:55:28] Ellie: Hacks for negative thinking.

[00:55:30] David: Yeah. Even, you know, Marx certainly didn't do that, and I don't think any of these neo Marxists are going to try to do that in a programmatic fashion.

But I do think this creates a limitation for Marcuse's philosophy. And moreover, not only is there this kind of like generic utopianism, I think there is something akin to an underestimation of the forces of capital . I was treating an article on Marcuse that was written by Stephen Whitfield in Dissent Magazine, which is about why Marcuse has sort of lost his fame over time.

He was huge, I mean, huge, huge, huge in the 1960s, and over time he has become less and less relevant and less and less well known. And one reason that he gives, I actually think is kind of spot on for Marcuse specifically, and that is that he really did not consider the blowback that the 1960s student movements would trigger and that the sexual revolution would trigger. He got so caught up in the moment that he wasn't able to maybe think dialectically and historically about the movement as part of a larger historical trajectory. And there's a little paragraph here that I just wanna read where he articulates this criticism of  Marcuse.

He writes most devastating for his reputation as a seer, however, was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from two years after Marcus's death. Ronald Reagan would take his first oath in office, but just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee of the new right in Europe.

He had certainly grasped the significance of the failure of the working class to follow the Marxist script, but he may not have anticipated how effectively politicians like Maurine Le Pen of the national front in France and Jörg Haider of Austria Freedom Party would appeal to voters in that class.

And so he may have not consider the working class to be a locus of liberation, but he actually didn't realize that maybe some right wing ideology would suddenly claim parts of that class. In the wake of these movements from the sixties,

[00:57:57] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content.

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[00:58:21] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.