LESSONS MARCUSE TAUGHT ME

I first met Herbert Marcuse in the fall of 1960.  He was teaching at Brandeis, and his closest friend was Barrington Moore, Jr., a senior member of Harvard’s Russian Research Institute.  Barry and I were co-teaching a Sophomore tutorial in Harvard’s newly created Social Studies major, and Barry decided I ought to meet Marcuse, so he invited me and my then girl friend, later wife, Cynthia to dinner.  I was twenty-six, Herbert was sixty-two, and we were from two utterly different worlds.  At some point, the conversation turned to analytic philosophy, for which Marcuse had rather dramatic contempt, and he seized on a sentence from one of Willard Van Orman Quine’s essays, “The present king of France is bald,” as evidence of the fecklessness of contemporary American philosophy.  I undertook to defend my colleague and former teacher, pointing out that Quine was attempting by that simple example to introduce some clarity into an old ontological problem that had troubled great medieval thinkers.  In response, Marcuse said, or at least it sounded to me as though he had said, that in Philosophy unclarity is a virtue.

Now, Marcuse had a rather thick German accent, and I could not be sure I had heard him correctly.  “Did you say that in Philosophy unclarity is a virtue?” I asked.  “Yes,” he responded.  Incredulous, I pressed on.  “You are saying that in Philosophy, it is a virtue NOT to be clear?” I asked, being as clear myself as I could be.  “Yes!” he said, with a malicious grin.  In the end, Marcuse decided I was all right when he discovered that I was about to publish a book on Kant, the Gold Standard among German intellectuals of that time.  It was not until four years later, when Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, that I discovered what he had been talking about.

It seems that Marcuse did not properly distinguish between Analytic Philosophy and Operational Sociology, an understandable error for a Hegelian Marxist to whom they must have seemed equally exotic [rather like how a Martian might view English and Chinese.]  Marcuse spends some time in One-Dimensional Man discussing a study carried out in the ‘40s of worker discontent in a Western Electric Plant.  The investigators set about translating the generalized worker protests into operationally specific concerns.  They made two discoveries:  First, what looked like common complaints around which the workers were unified could be disaggregated into an array of particular concerns by particular workers that were not in fact broadly shared; and Second, astonishingly, the mere paying of attention to each worker’s individual concerns, quite apart from actually doing anything about those concerns, had the effect of improving production in the plant.  As Marcuse summarizes the findings, “the methodological translation of the universal into the operational concept then becomes repressive reduction of thought. [Page 108]

All of this came to mind as I watched the TV coverage of the huge street protests now continuing for a second week.  A detailed investigation of the concerns of each of the protesters would undoubtedly reveal a broad array of specific complaints – an act of unprovoked brutality by this police officer in this city at this time and place, a different act of brutality by a quite different policy officer in a completely different time and place, the intolerable burden of student loans on one young man or woman here, the impossibility of finding a job with decent wages and benefits for another young man or woman there, the loss of pension benefits by a senior citizen somewhere else.  And so on and on.

Undoubtedly, a deep analysis would reveal that the countless concerns and complaints are structurally connected in such a fashion that satisfactorily addressing each of them would require fundamental systemic changes in American economy and society.  But as that analysis was being laid out in books and journal articles, the crowds would drift away and the moment would be lost.

Far better to write BLACK LIVES MATTER in bright yellow letters as high as a DC street is wide, far better for young men and women to chant as they march, NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!!

Sometimes, in politics as in Philosophy, unclarity is a virtue.