The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
distinction between happiness and duty. Although he gave a certain weight to both, by the time capitalism had become sufficiently advanced, the precedence of duty to the totality over personal gratification had grown to such an extent that the latter was almost completely neglected. To compensate for the repression of genuine individual happiness, mass diversions had been devised to defuse discontent.71 Much of the Institut’s later work on the “culture industry” was designed to show how effective these palliatives were.
But even allegedly revolutionary movements, Horkheimer contended, had perpetuated the characteristic bourgeois hostility to happiness.72 The fourteenth-century Romans under Cola di Rienzi, and the Florentines in the time of Savonarola, were two clear examples of revolutionary movements that ended by opposing individual happiness in the name of some higher good. Even more strikingly, the French Revolution and especially the Terror illustrated this theme. Robespierre, like Rienzi and Savonarola, confused love for the people with ruthless repression of them. The equality brought by the Revolution, Horkheimer noted, was the negative leveling produced by the guillotine, an equality of degradation rather than dignity. In the twentieth century a similar phenomenon had appeared in fascism. The Führer or Duce expressed in the extreme the typical bourgeois combination of romantic sentimentality and utter ruthlessness. The ideology of duty and service to the totality at the cost of individual happiness attained its ultimate expression in fascist rhetoric. The revolutionary pretensions of the fascists were no more than a fraud designed to perpetuate the domination of the ruling classes.
In contrast to the bourgeois ethic of self-abnegation, Horkheimer upheld the dignity of egoism. During the Enlightenment, Helvetius and de Sade had expressed a protest, however distorted, against asceticism in the name of a higher morality. Even more forcefully, Nietzsche had exposed the connection between self-denial and resentment that is implicit in most of Western culture. Where Horkheimer differed from them was in his stress on the social component in human happiness. His egoistic individual, unlike the utilitarians’ or even Nietzsche’s, always realized his greatest gratification through communal interaction. In fact, Horkheimer constantly challenged the reification of individual and society as polar opposites, just as he denied the mutual exclusivity of subject and object in philosophy.
The Institut’s stress on personal happiness as an integral element in its materialism was further developed by Marcuse in an article he wrote for the Zeitschrift in 1938, “On Hedonism.”73 In contrast to Hegel, who “fought against eudaemonism in the interest of historical progress,”74 Marcuse defended hedonistic philosophies for preserving a “moment” of truth in their stress on happiness. Where they traditionally went wrong, however, was in their unquestioning acceptance of the competitive individual as the model of highest personal development. “The apologetic aspect of hedonism,” Marcuse wrote, is to be found “in hedonism’s abstract conception of the subjective side of happiness, in its inability to distinguish between true and false wants and interests and true and false enjoyments.”75 In upholding the notion of higher and lower pleasures, Marcuse was closer to the Epicurean type of hedonism than to the Cyrenaic, both of which he treated at length in the essay. (He was also in the company of an unlikely ally in the person of John Stuart Mill, who had made a similar distinction in his Utilitarianism.) As he explained, “Pleasure in the abasement of another as well as self-abasement under a stronger will, pleasure in the manifold surrogates for sexuality, in meaningless sacrifices, in the heroism of war are false pleasures, because the drives and needs that fulfill themselves in them make men less free, blinder, and more wretched than they have to be.”76
But, as might be expected, Marcuse denounced the ahistorical belief that the higher forms of happiness could be achieved under present conditions. In fact, so he argued, hedonism’s restriction of happiness to consumption and leisure to the exclusion of productive labor expressed a valid judgment about a society in which labor remained alienated. What was invalid, however, was the assumption that this society was eternal. How historical change would come about was of course difficult to predict, because “it appears that individuals raised to be integrated into the antagonistic labor process cannot be judges of their own happiness.”77 Consciousness was therefore incapable of changing itself; the impetus had to come from the outside:
Insofar as unfreedom is already present in wants and not just in their gratification, they must be the first to be liberated—not through an act of education or of the moral renewal of man but through an economic and political process encompassing the disposal over the means of production by the community, the reorientation of the productive process toward the needs and wants of the whole-society, the shortening of the working day, and the active participation of the individuals in the administration of the whole.78
Here Marcuse seemed to come perilously close to the stress on objective social development, which more orthodox Marxists had maintained, but which the Institut had attacked by emphasizing the subjective element in praxis. In fact, to digress momentarily, the key problem of how change might occur in a society that controlled the consciousness of its members remained a troubling element in much of Marcuse’s later work, especially One-Dimensional Man.79
Whatever the means to achieve true happiness might be, it could only be reached when freedom was also universally attained. “The reality of happiness,” Marcuse wrote, “is the reality of freedom as the self-determination of liberated humanity in its common struggle with nature.” And since freedom was synonymous with the realization of rationality, “in their completed form both, happiness and reason, coincide.”80 What Marcuse was advocating here was that convergence of particular and general interests usually known as “positive freedom.”81 Individual happiness was one moment in the totality of positive freedom; reason was the other.
The Frankfurt School’s stress on reason was one of the salient characteristics of its work.82 Here its debt to Hegel was most clearly demonstrated. Horkheimer’s third major objection to Lebensphilosophie, it will be recalled, was that its overreaction to the deterioration of rationality had led to the rejection of reason as such. As Horkheimer would repeat over and over again during his career, rationality was at the root of any progressive social theory. What he meant by reason, however, was never easy to grasp for an audience unschooled in the traditions of classical German philosophy. Implicitly, Horkheimer referred more often than not to the idealists’ distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason). By Verstand, Kant and Hegel had meant a lower faculty of the mind, which structured the phenomenal world according to common sense. To the understanding, the world consisted of finite entities identical only with themselves and totally opposed to all other things. It thus failed to penetrate immediacy to grasp the dialectical relations beneath the surface. Vernunft, on the other hand, signified a faculty that went beyond mere appearances to this deeper reality. Although Kant differed from Hegel in rejecting the possibility of reconciling the world of phenomena with the transcendent, noumenal sphere of “things-in-themselves,” he shared Hegel’s belief in the superiority of Vernunft over Verstand. Of all the Institut’s members, Marcuse was perhaps most drawn to the classical notion of reason. In 1937, he attempted to define it and turn it in a materialist direction in the following way:
Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under the name of reason it conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason. . . . As the given world was bound up with rational thought and, indeed, ontologically dependent on it, all that contradicted reason or was not rational was posited as something that had to be overcome. Reason was established as a critical tribunal.83
Here Marcuse seemed to be arguing for an identity theory, which contrasted sharply with the Frankfurt School’s general stress on nonidentity. In fact, in Marcuse’s writings the aversion to identity was far fainter than in Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s.84 Still, in their work as well, the sanctity of reason and the reconciliation it implied always appeared