Table Of ContentP H I L O S O P H Y,
P S YC H O A N A LY S I S A N D
E M A N C I P AT I O N
COLLECTED PAPERS OF HERBERT MARCUSE
EDITED BY DOUGLAS KELLNER
AND CLAYTON PIERCE
Volume One
TECHNOLOGY,WARANDFASCISM
Volume Two
TOWARDSACRITICALTHEORYOFSOCIETY
Volume Three
THENEWLEFTANDTHE1960s
Volume Four
ARTANDLIBERATION
Volume Five
PHILOSOPHY,PSYCHOANALYSISANDEMANCIPATION
Volume Six
MARXISM,REVOLUTIONANDUTOPIA
HERBERT MARCUSE (1898–1979) is an internationally renowned philosopher,
social activist and theorist, and member of the Frankfurt School. He has been
remembered as one of the most influential social critical theorists inspiring the radical
political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Author of numerous books including
One-Dimensional Man,Eros and Civilization,and Reason and Revolution,Marcuse
taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis University, and the University of California
before his death in 1979.
DOUGLAS KELLNER is George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at
UCLA. He is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture,
including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, Media Culture,and Critical
Theory, Marxism and Modernity. His Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, co-
edited with Stephen Eric Bronner, and book Media Spectacle,are also published by
Routledge.
CLAYTON PIERCE is a research assistant professor in the department of Education,
Culture, and Society at the University of Utah. His books include On Marcuse:
Critique, Liberation, and Reschooling in the Radical Pedagogy of Herbert Marcuse
(with Douglas Kellner and Tyson Lewis) and Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (with
Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, and Daniel Cho). He has published also in
Educational Theory and Policy Futures in Education.
PHILOSOPHY,
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
EMANCIPATION
H E R B E R T M A R C U S E
C O L L E C T E D PA P E R S
O F H E R B E RT M A R C U S E
Vo l u m e F i v e
E d i t e d b y
D o u g l a s K e l l n e r a n d C l a y t o n P i e r c e
This edition published 2011
by Routledge
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©2011 Peter Marcuse
Selection and editorial matter © 2011 Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce
Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation: An Introduction
©2011 Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, and Clayton Pierce
Marcuse as Philosopher ©2011 Andrew Feenberg
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number:97154404
ISBN 0-203-83870-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978–0–415–13784–3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–83870–9 (ebk)
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and
Emancipation
DOUGLAS KELLNER, CLAYTON PIERCE, AND TYSON LEWIS 1
I Philosophical Interventions 76
Theses on Scientific Philosophy 76
Schiller’s Humanism 78
Review of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 80
Critique of Dewey’s Theory of Valuation 87
Idealism and Positivism 92
II Psychoanalytic Interventions 101
AReply to Erich Fromm 101
Theory and Therapy in Freud 106
Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis 109
The Ideology of Death 122
III From Ontology to Technology 132
From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of
Industrial Society 132
IV Philosophical Reflections on Science and Technology 141
World without Logos 141
The Malcontent in the Affluent Society 143
Anthropological Perspectives of a Technological Epoch 145
vi Contents
On Science and Phenomenology 145
The Responsibility of Science 155
V Philosophy in the Contemporary World 160
On the Position of Thinking Today 160
Overcoming Domination 164
Peace as Utopia 166
The Relevance of Reality 172
The Role of Religion in a Changing Society 182
VI Conversation with Marcuse in Psychology Today 189
Revolutionary Eroticism, the Tactics of Terror, the Young,
Psychotherapy, the Environment, Technology, Reich 189
VII Late Philosophical/Political Reflections 206
Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society 206
Children of Prometheus: 25 Theses on Technology and
Society 222
Critical Philosophy: A Personal Perspective with Dr. Herbert
Marcuse 226
Afterword
Remembering Marcuse
ANDREW FEENBERG 234
Index 242
I N T R O D U C T I O N
H e r b e r t M a r c u s e , P h i l o s o p h y,
P s y c h o a n a l y s i s a n d E m a n c i p a t i o n
D o u g l a s K e l l n e r, C l a y t o n
P i e r c e , a n d Ty s o n L e w i s 1
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, Volume 5 of the Collected
Papers of Herbert Marcuse, presents for contemporary readers Marcuse’s
unique syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical social theory,
directed toward human emancipation and social transformation. Within
these disciplines, Marcuse critically engaged disparate currents ranging from
Heidegger and phenomenology to Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and Freud to create
unique philosophical perspectives and analyses, often overlooked in favor of
his social theory and political interventions with the New Left, the subject
of previous volumes.
The collection assembles significant, largely unknown, texts from the
Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, important, and in some cases
unknown, critiques of positivism and idealism, Dewey’s pragmatism, and the
1 For editorial advice and help with sources we would like to thank Peter-Erwin
Jansen and Charles Reitz, who also provided significant editorial help in shaping the
final version of this Introduction.
2 Introduction
tradition of German philosophy; philosophical essays from the 1930s and
1940s that attempt to reconstruct philosophy on a materialist base;
Marcuse’s unique attempts to bring together Freud, philosophy, and critical
social theory; philosophical reflections on death, human aggression, war,
and peace; and his later critical philosophical perspectives on science,
technology, society, religion, ecology, and human emancipation.
These philosophical themes are connected to genealogical lines of develop-
ment that appear as one assesses Marcuse’s intellectual and political
growth, which help define his unique critical theory project. The task we
undertake in the Introduction to this volume is to make prominent these
threads of Marcuse’s critical theory that play a major role in his theoretical
synthesis. We see Marcuse as moving beyond traditional approaches to
philosophical and social problems in a highly productive and relevant
manner. Struggling against the conceptual and political limitations of various
thinkers and movements, Marcuse developed a synthetically robust and
historically attuned critical theory capable of confronting the multifaceted
problems facing contemporary civilization as it continued to produce
damaged conditions for human and non-human life under capitalist
organization.
In this sense, Marcuse’s Marxist reworking of Heideggerian inter-
pretations of being and historicity, the development of a Freudian critical
theory of the psyche and society, and critiques of intellectual movements
such as idealism, positivism, and pragmatism should be understood as
philosophical endeavors interested in constantly reevaluating the capabilities
of critical theory for developing a metacritique of human domination
that ultimately aimed at human emancipation. The subject–object relation,
the psyche/society/nature dialectic, and perhaps most importantly, the
effects of science and technological rationality on human life are just some
of the examples of philosophical and social problems that Marcuse
reinterpreted in novel ways within his constantly evolving critical theory of
society.
In sum, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, and Freud appear as privileged inter-
locutors because they open up the path for reconceptualizing the strengths
and weaknesses of critical theory in light of historical tendencies. Primarily
a philosopher, Marcuse demonstrated that philosophy could concern
itself both with the crucial political issues of the day and with traditional
philosophical problems and prospects for human emancipation. The
Introduction to the volume will situate Marcuse’s engagement with phi-
losophy in the context of main currents of twentieth-century philosophy and
the development of his own philosophical perspectives. Marcuse’s enduring
philosophical contributions will be presented, along with the intense
controversy over his work and its continuing relevance for challenges of the
contemporary moment.
Introduction 3
HERBERT MARCUSE’S POLITICAL AND
PHILOSOPHICAL ADVENTURES: AN INITIAL OVERVIEW
In 1922 Marcuse summarized his early life in the Lebenslauf (biography)
required as part of his German doctoral dissertation Der deutsche
Künstlerroman(The German Artist-Novel):
Iwas born on July 19, 1898 in Berlin, the son of the businessman Carl Marcuse
and his wife Gertrud, born Kreslawsky. I attended the Mommsen Gymnasium
and from 1911 the Kaiserin–Augusta Gymnasium in Charlottenburg until
my summons to military service in 1916. After completing my final examina-
tion (Reifeprüfung), I entered Reserve Division 18 (Train-Ers.-Abtg. 18)but
remained in the homeland on account of my poor eye-sight and was transferred
to the Zeppelin Reserves (Luftschiffer-Ers.Abtg. 1)where I received permission
and the opportunity to visit lectures. After my release in the Winter of 1918, I
studied regularly for four semesters in Berlin and four semesters in Freiburg,
first Germanistik, and then modern German literary history as my main subject
(Hauptfach) and philosophy and political economy as minors (Nebenfach).
I attended the lectures of Professors Roethe, Geiger, Herrmann, Schneider,
Heusler, Hübner, Witkop, Schultz, Heiss, Brückner, Dessoir, Riehal, Stumpf,
Troeltsch, Cohn, Geyser, Husserl, Eberstadt, Schumacher, Diehl, Mombert.
I partook in seminars offered by Professors Herrman, Roethe, Schneider,
Hübner, Kluge, Witkop, Schultz and Dessoir. I am particularly obliged to
Professor Witkop for decisive influence.2
Marcuse has always insisted that his childhood and upbringing was that of a
typical upper-middle-class German youth.3He claims that his Jewish family
was well integrated into German society and that he never felt any acute
alienation because of his Jewish origins.4 While it is tempting to try to find
clues to the later man and thinker in his early biography, Marcuse himself
2 Herbert Marcuse, Lebenslauf,appended to his doctoral dissertation, Der deutsche
Künstlerroman(Freiburg i. Br., 1922); reprinted in Schriften 1 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1978) p. 344 (hereafter S1).
3 Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, December 28, 1978, La Jolla, California;
see also Sidney Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond
(Cambridge,MA: Schenkman, 1974) p. 1. Biographical information is based on
research and interviews done by Douglas Kellner for Herbert Marcuse and the
Crisis of Marxism.Berkeley and London: University of California Press (USA) and
Macmillan Press (England), 1984, as well as decades of research by the editors in
the Herbert Marcuse archives and other published sources on Marcuse and the
topics addressed. There is still no definitive biography of Marcuse’s life and work.
4 Conversation with Marcuse, December 28, 1978, La Jolla. Marcuse also told
Helmut Dubiel that he had rarely actively experienced anti-Semitism in Germany.
See Helmut Dubiel and Leo Löwenthal, Mitmachen wollte ich nie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1980) pp. 27ff. Consequently, like Marx, Marcuse was never especially
interested in the “Jewish question,” as were other Jewish Marxists like Max
Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. Nonetheless, Marcuse’s Jewish
origins may have helped produce alienation from bourgeois society, which may help
explain his sharp critiques of bourgeois society and search for an alternative model
