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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2004EssayA fresh look at Marcuse's 'Ontology'by Russell Rockwell Raya Dunayevskaya, to a greater extent than any other commentator, forcefully argued that Hegel's Subjective Logic (Volume Two of SCIENCE OF LOGIC) addressed issues relevant for confronting the myriad social crises underlying the capitalist world regime. It is at our own peril if we fail to try to come to terms with that LOGIC, especially its final section on "The Idea." This is because the problem Hegel addresses there is the dialectical relationship between what is POSSIBLE in terms of freedom, on both the individual and social levels, and what is ACTUAL, that is, the actual thought of the time and the actual history in the making. Hegel's discussion ranges from the most abstract level--the unity or difference between cognition and life--to the most concrete--the unity or difference between philosophy/theory and social practices. Hegel, in the end of his system in the LOGIC, demonstrates that there is no impenetrable barrier between individual realization of knowledge and freedom, on the one hand, and the supra-individual--the social--on the other. In fact, in the last sections of the LOGIC Hegel very explicitly describes precisely HOW the individual grasps the social and molds it such that it is the basis of the very possibility of each individual's freedom. The German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse was among the few Marxists, besides Dunayevskaya, who believed Hegel's LOGIC was indespensible for developing the dialectic in thought for achieving freedom by overcoming capitalism. We can discover in two of Marcuse's readings of Hegel's texts separated by almost a decade that Marcuse approached and then retreated from the idea that insufficient development of dialectical philosophy was the missing link in revolutions against capitalism. But dialectical philosophy, Dunayevskaya believed, made Hegel a contemporary in revolutionary struggles, and where revolutionaries ignored or even rejected such philosophy, successful revolutions were impossible. TWO BOOKS, TWO DECADES Marcuse published two books on Hegel in the years 1932 and 1941. (The span between those years was the period of Marcuse's closest, most direct collaboration with other members of the so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.) At least among Marxists, his 1941 REASON AND REVOLUTION: HEGEL AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL THEORY, written during his exile in New York City, has received far more attention than his 1932 HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF HISTORICITY. One factor contributing to this was that only in 1987 did HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY appear in English translation whereas REASON AND REVOLUTION appeared in English in 1941. The translator Seyla Benhabib's substantial introduction to HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY indicates that the work has relevance for development of the Hegelian foundations of Marxism. She writes that though the Hegelian foundation of Marxism is not directly addressed in the work, that topic constitutes an "oblique intention" of HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY. On the other hand, Georg Luk·cs, in an earlier period, wrote in THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON, that in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY Marcuse attempted to appropriate Hegel's LOGIC for an "irrationalist" tradition, and in doing so severed the Hegel-Marx relationship. Douglas Kellner, while not as strident, does not see the connection of HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY to Marxism. In his major 1984 work, HERBERT MARCUSE AND THE CRISIS OF MARXISM (which appeared a few years before the English translation of HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY) he wrote that "Marcuse's systematic interpretation of the basic categories of Hegel's ontology [in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY] is probably OF PRIMARY INTEREST TODAY TO HEGEL SCHOLARS" (p. 76, emphasis added). To be precise, Kellner indicated that the relevance of HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY for the development of SOCIAL THEORY is restricted to a section on "The movement of essence in its 'two-dimensionality,'" arguing only that it shows that Marcuse's later concept of "one-dimensional thought," which he developed in ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN (1965), reflects a reading of Hegel's distinction between "appearance" and "essence." It is important to recall with respect to this claim that the concepts of appearance and essence are most fully developed in the FIRST part of Hegel's LOGIC, which Hegel called the Objective LOGIC, not the Subjective LOGIC, which Dunayevskaya found most relevant for discovering the missing link for successful revolutions against capitalism. Since REASON AND REVOLUTION, written in English ten years after HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY, WAS directly and explicitly about Hegel's relationship to Marxist social theory, it is important to ask what in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY did Marcuse NOT carry forward to REASON AND REVOLUTION? WHAT'S IN LOGIC'S FINAL SECTION? While we will touch on Chapter 3 on the Absolute Idea, we will focus on the Chapter 2 subsections, "The Idea of the True" and "The Idea of the Good." Hegel uses the terms "theoretical Idea" and "practical Idea" interchangeably with the terms "Idea of the True" and "Idea of the Good," respectively. In fact, Hegel's intricate definition of the Absolute Idea (quoted in part in the section following this one) is issued as the last paragraph of The Idea of Cognition (Chapter 2), but is concisely restated in opening Chapter 3, titled "The Absolute Idea." There Hegel calls the absolute idea an "identity of the theoretical and practical idea." He writes: "Each of these by itself is still one-sided, possessing the Idea itself only as a sought-for beyond and an unattained goalÖthe absolute IdeaÖcontains WITHIN ITSELF the highest degree of opposition...possesses PERSONALITYÖbutÖnot exclusive individuality, but explicitly UNIVERSALITY and COGNITION" (SCIENCE OF LOGIC, Miller trans., 1969, p. 824, emphasis added). This passage suggests that Hegel's Absolute Idea--the dialectic of the Idea of the True and the Idea of the Good--theorizes the overcoming of the DOMINATION of the individual by the social as the negation of an existing set of conditions oppressive of the individual. MARCUSE'S MISREADING Traditionally commentators have derived Marcuse's position on this subject from interpretations of REASON AND REVOLUTION. In exploring this issue, we can identify a key element in that text, which others seemed to have missed. Marcuse writes: "Hegel expressly declares that the practical idea, the realization of 'the Good' that alters external reality, is 'higher than the Idea of Cognition, ... for it has not only the dignity of the universal but also of the simply actual.'" (p. 162-163) Hegel's full sentence ACTUALLY READS, "the Idea of the Good is higher than the Idea of Cognition ALREADY CONSIDERED" (my emphasis). What is The Idea of Cognition that Hegel had "already considered"? That would be "The Idea of the True." Therefore clearly Hegel was saying that the Idea of the Good was "higher than" the Idea of the True, NOT higher than the Idea of Cognition generally. BOTH (idea of the true and idea of the good) were MOMENTS of the Idea of Cognition. The PHILOSOPHIC CONTENT of Marcuse's error was that, IN Hegel, the Idea of Cognition (dialectic of the true and the good) denotes a MODE OF INQUIRY, or knowledge-seeking. The absolute Idea, in contrast, is personality (an actual person) AND universality, in other words, a society or set of social relations, the basis of which is individual personality that recognizes its own possibility in the knowledge and freedom of everyone else. This is a good place to read from Hegel's last paragraph of the Idea of the Good, the subsection that immediately precedes the LOGIC's final chapter on the Absolute Idea. Right here, on the threshold of the Absolute Idea, where for the first (and in fact only) occasion he actually DEFINES the Absolute Idea, Hegel at times almost seems to be describing a process of social revolution. Hegel begins by describing the dialectic of the newly liberated individual (as in the French Revolution) as it begins to come to terms with the reality that, no matter how great the individual and its rights and liberties are, the totality of these diverse rights and liberties call forth a supra-individual context that is just as real and cannot be ignored. Hegel writes: "When external actuality is altered by the activity of the objective notion and its determination therewith sublated, by that very fact the merely phenomenal reality, the external determinability and worthlessness, are removed from that actuality..." (p. 823). The "external reality" (feudalism's suppression of individuality and freedom) was modified by the French Revolution's assertion of individual rights. The objective world (political, economic, social, and cultural) is changed, but more importantly HOW it functioned and reproduced itself (its very determination) has been overcome. While far from complete, the LOGIC of this new beginning suggests that the individual is no longer formed by external and alien forces but rather, as Marx put it later, is "its own end." Following from this Hegel next describes a series of negations in which the notion of individual freedom is "no longer merely in the active subject, but as equally an immediate actuality." In other words, the social totality is conducive to individual freedom, rather than its barrier as under feudalism. Hegel concludes: "[W]hereas in questing cognition [knowledge-seeking] this actuality appeared merely as an objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion, here it appears as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Notion. This is the absolute Idea" (p. 823). The objectivity of the social world, which is a result of the series of negations Hegel describes, is the freedom and the knowledge (of this world) of all individuals. WHERE 'ONTOLOGY' GOT IT RIGHT In contrast with the mistaken reading of the Idea of Cognition, which led to using an ellipsis to incorrectly elevate the Idea of the Good over the Idea of Cogntion in REASON AND REVOLUTION, we turn to Marcuse's earlier work, HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY. In HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY Marcuse asks, "Is there a higher truth of life which does not suffer from the deficiency of cognition? Indeed this is the "practical idea" of action, the Idea of the good." Yet Marcuse follows Hegel's text closely enough to conclude that the practical Idea is not ultimately higher than cognition (rather it is itself a mode of cognition). In HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY, Marcuse writes: "So long as the "good" to be realized through the practical Idea is considered a "subjective purpose" alone which is not implicitly contained in objective actuality but which first must be embedded in it, then action is just as deficient as knowledge, but in the opposite sense" (p. 169). Finally Marcuse sums up Hegel's overall assessment of the idea of the true and the idea of the good thus far by dividing Hegel's Idea of Cognition into "pure" and, apparently, "unpure" moments. This conclusion which appears earlier in Marcuse's philosophical development is nonetheless superior to Marcuse's LATER version in REASON AND REVOLUTION. The earlier HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY states: "Pure cognition [Idea of the True] views its world as the other which is implicitly true, thereby misunderstanding the subjectivity of objectivity, whereas action [Idea of the Good] treats the world as empty receptacle for the actualization of its subjective purposes, thereby misunderstanding the objectivity of subjectivity" (p. 169). Finally, Marcuse quotes from the following passage from the LOGIC which contains the heart of Hegel's argument: "[E]xternal reality for the will [characteristic of the practical Idea or action] does not receive the form of a true being; the Idea of the good can therefore find its integration only in the Idea of the true [theory or the theoretical Idea]" (LOGIC, p. 821). As just discussed, remarkably enough Marcuse did NOT incorporate THIS development in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY into his presentation of the Idea of the Good in REASON AND REVOLUTION. More significantly, Marcuse does not note EITHER REASON in AND REVOLUTION or in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY the next sentence in Hegel's LOGIC: "But it [the practical idea] makes this transition [to an identity of the true and the good] through ITSELF" (p. 821, emphasis added). In other words, a new society, a post-capitalist one, free of social domination, includes a movement from below that "takes over" the idea of freedom as its own. There are several more examples of Marcuse's deeper and more extensive discussion of the last section of Hegel's LOGIC in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY, more extensive than in REASON AND REVOLUTION. It is clearly motivated by the question of how Hegel's LOGIC might contribute to social change. For Marcuse this did indeed mean the abolition of capitalism. Though still analyzing the chapter on the Idea of Cognition, Marcuse describes Hegel's Absolute Idea in the LOGIC where it is developed as the dialectic of the theoretical and practical ideas to be "an action that knows and a knowledge that acts" (p. 170). However only when Marcuse is some way into a careful analysis of the Absolute Idea chapter itself does he explain that cognition by itself cannot reach its truth (and we know from what's described above that this is equally true of both the theoretical and practical ideas). Marcuse explains that each idea (the practical and the theoretical) presupposes a pre-found world upon which it is dependent--each exists by a negativity it has not grasped to be its own. Marcuse concludes in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY: "the Idea of the good can therefore find its integration only in the Idea of the true [theory]." (He didn't even mention it again in his analysis of Hegel in REASON AND REVOLUTION.) This means that development of dialectical philosophy is essential for abolishing the oppressive society and establishing freedom. In fact, in the past several decades we have seen a tremendous diversity of new subjects of revolution and creative revolutionary movements, none of which have nevertheless succeeded in abolishing capitalism. Many of these movements have turned into their very opposites. It is clearly time to focus on the possibility that the concrete missing link for attainment of true social liberation is development of dialectical philosophy itself. Development of dialectical philosophy is the key to the success of present and future social movements. Perhaps most significantly, Marcuse, neither in REASON AND REVOLUTION nor in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY, noted Hegel's own conclusion on this issue: the practical idea makes the transition (to an integration of the good and the true) THROUGH ITSELF. The sequence of Marcuse's subtly changing interpretations of Hegel's philosophy summarized here contained strong implications for revolutionaries who are oriented and motivated by dialectical thought. Unfortunately, for Marcuse (and many of his followers) they pointed a path away from dialectics of philosophy and action as the ground for social revolution. In THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY Dunayevskaya wrote that with the Subjective Logic we reach, "that which in philosophic terms is oldest, most written about, and purely intellectualistic; and, from a Marxist point of view, least written about, most 'feared' as idealistic, unreal, 'pure' thought--in a word, a closed ontology. And yet it is [the Subjective Logic] that develops the categories of Freedom and, therefore, should mean the objective and subjective means whereby a new society is born." |
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