Marcuse the Marxist was, of course, not an “idealist” in the traditional
philosophical sense of the word, and neither was Marx. But the word “idealism”
goes well together with Marxism, first, as an ironic combination of
seemingly conflicting terms, and secondly, as a perfectly legitimate
combination, considering another meaning of the word “idealism,” as
a patently idealistic quest after the ideal, and, in this sense,
both Marx and Marcuse were indeed idealists. (Also see my Marxian
entries throughout this blog on the subject of Karl Marx’s peculiar brand of
philosophical idealism which has received the rather ambiguous label of
“dialectical materialism.”)
Herbert Marcuse was born in 1898
in Berlin and died in 1979 in West Germany. Having received a PhD in philosophy
in 1922, from the University of Freiburg, he became a co-founder of the Frankfurt
Institut für Sozialforschung. Being Jewish, and astute enough, in
1933, just as Hitler was coming to power, he left Germany for Switzerland, but
he did not stay there, moving to the United States in 1934, where he started
teaching at Columbia University, and became an American citizen in 1940. During
World War II, he worked as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, returning to
teaching in 1951 at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and at UC San Diego, going
back to Germany after his retirement in 1976.
Marcuse exhibits a lot in common
with Adorno (see my next two entries), which connection I may further explore
at some later date. He believed that Western society was unfree and repressive,
that its technology was buying the complacency of the masses with material
goods and kept them intellectually and spiritually captive. To be fair, he was
not too kind to the Soviet Union either, as he was a sworn enemy of any kind of
“frozen” establishment. He was not, however, an anarchist, which raises the
legitimate question: who was he? Perhaps he was a better critic of the existing
forms of establishment than a developer of a better alternative to them. “Es ist eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt sie
immer neu…”
A Closing Thought.
Regarding the “unfreedom” of
Western society, I think that all critics of Western democracy have a legitimate point, but are pushing it too far. According
to Spinoza, and his philosophical authority is quite formidable, there is no
such thing as freedom, and those who think they are free have no understanding
of how unfree they are. Even our freedom of choice is not exactly free. In my
practical definition, political freedom means letting a citizen be – as an
independent thinker, perhaps, without encouragement of free thought, but at
least without coercion to toe the line. In this respect, American society is
free, to which I can testify from personal experience.
The downside of Western freedom
is its insistence on a prefabricated list of multiple choices. You can be
either this, or that, or even far-out that. But you can’t be politically
incorrect, which means that you are not to stray away from what is comme il faut in the range of
acceptable diversity of opinions.
Still, I repeat, it is possible
for an honest person to survive the onslaught of inconveniences involved in the
pursuit of personal independence, provided we are bright enough not to expect
any social benefits from it and do not mind being occasionally kicked below the
belt.
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