Sunday, June 7, 2020

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.

16 comments:

  1. I preached this virtue to my philosophy professors for several years. Analytic fellow travelers every one, they laughed at me.

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  2. My metaphysics professor once said, as we were tasked with reading Collingwood's Essay on Philosophical Method, that "Too much clarity can be obfuscating." I found this ironic, since this professor was patently unable to finish making a point for having to over-explain everything to delirium.

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  3. I think that Marcuse refers to people like his colleague in the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who is famously unclear. As Marcuse explains in his BBC interview with Brian McGee, Adorno is trying to think through new concepts and thus, his language is necessarily unclear since words to explain such concepts do not exist in ordinary language. The Frankfurt School assumes, I believe, that ordinary or normal language is the product of social conditions, capitalist social conditions in our case, and thus, finding a new, preliminary and inevitably unclear language (because we are used to the clarity of capitalist common sense) to explain social conditions is needed.

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  4. Why "unclear?" I would think "simplified" would better characterize a demand that a number of people, each with varied and different specific concerns, could get behind. Nothing unclear about "black lives matter" in this instance and an explanation as to why a number of people with different specific concerns could endorse is its very clarity.

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  5. "Unclear" no, Manichean, yes. I understand the need for 'strategic essentialism' in mobilizing people under modern conditions (massive population, mass stupefaction, twitter, etc)

    But there are distinctions: the "1% " slogan of Occupy Wall Street had potential because it linked to substantial realities. But it has to be said, even that didn't help form a meaningful coalition or achieve much in the way of policy change other than rhetoric. But the current protest movement is more reminiscent of millennial movements throughout history: a nebulous, intensely moralistic narrative (white supremacy directs all things)which demands 'spiritual' sacrifices and penance from the white privileged, but notably not a heavy progressive income tax or UBI, etc (see Adolf Reed).

    Note the Messianic glee on the pages of the New York Times recently. Is it really too cynical to point out that a narrative ("white supremacy is the cause of all bad things") now supported by 90% of America's elite institutions (corporate, media, academic)is probably not a narrative that will effect positive long term change. It deflects and distracts from questions of economic privilege and of course sets up opportunities for jobs ("bias training" etc) which will be taken up by middle class professionals.

    More speculatively, I wonder whether a history of Millennial and Utopian movements could be written that reflects the unspoken manipulation of elites, who prefer Manichean, holistic, spiritual demands to pragmatic demands based on human basic needs. One might start with the Boxer rebellion in China where the Manchu elites cleverly rode the Millennial fury of the peasantry into preserving their legitimacy.

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  6. "The present king of France is bald" is famously used in Russell's "On Denoting." Did it also appear in one of Quine's papers?

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  7. I am not sure, but Quine used it in class.

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  8. 1. Yes the example (famously) originates with Russell. Indeed, he makes an anti-Hegel joke. (Given that there is no King of France, what truth value should we take the sentence to have. Were we to list all the bald people we should not find the King of France on that list. Nor on the list of non-bald people. The Hegelians, loving a synthesis, would say that he wore a wig. (the joke goes something like that.)). The analysis Russell gives is that the truth conditions implicit in the little make-a-list procedure just above are the wrong truth conditions for the sentence. The correct analysis yields has it that the truth conditions of the 'The present King of France is bald' are: There is a King of France, only one, and he is bald. And that sentence is false. One of the beauties of that analysis is that it is continuous with the analysis of other operators (namely, the quantifiers) and, consequentially, it can handle ambiguities of scope. (as in his other much repeated examples: I thought your yacht was longer than it is; and George IV wished to know whether Scott is the author of Waverly.

    2. I think "unclear" is the wrong word.

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  9. Quine mentions the king of France in "On What There Is" (Chapter 1 in From a Logical Point of View), in discussing Russell's theory of descriptions, and the "old Platonic riddle of nonbeing," AKA "Plato's beard."

    (Or see here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_What_There_Is)

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  10. I remember Dr. Wolff giving a short version of the 'uclarity' story in his Marx, Mannheim, and Freud seminar at UMASS in the fall of '77(?). At the time, I was blissfully unaware of the substance of the whole British analytic thing. After mulling the statement over for many months, I came to understand Marcuse's statement to be a provocative restatement of The Frankfurt Institute's non-identity theory.

    In the first few pages of Negative Dialectics Adorno claims that the concept never exhausts the thing conceived. Hence, non-identity. As Adorno puts it, "The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder..." Clarity invites one to think that the thing has been completely understood, i.e., subsumed by the concept (and that would be the fatal conceit of Idealism). Thinking that one has understood something is to invite the experience of the thing biting one in the butt.

    All of this may be totally unrelated to Marcuse's point in uttering a phrase designed to needle a young Kantian, but it worked for me.

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  11. Hence Sartre's remark (somewhere - the Flaubert study?)on the "murderous gaze of analytical reason".

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  12. Christopher, Did Adorno also resolve how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

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  13. Jerry, Oddly enough, I don't think he did. But since you appear to have an interest in the question, ask the Pope. He spends his summers in your town. Just make sure he is sitting down when he answers so you're sure of its veracity.

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  14. jgkess@cfl.rr.comJune 9, 2020 at 4:57 PM

    "Too much clarity can be obfuscating"? Shouldn't we rather say that too much "striving" for clarity (in the absence of compelling argument or evidence) is what more often makes for confusion? Rhetoric and dialectical reasoning are always to be preferred to pre-mature attempts clarity.

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  15. I always enjoy it when you bring up this "lesson", not so much for its substance (it has rung false to me every time you've discussed it) but because I get a kick out of your stories of brushes with famous thinkers. Keep up the stories! Thank you!

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  16. From Kant's first Critique, First-Edition Preface:

    "Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. On the other hand, if we have in view the comprehensibility of a whole of speculative knowledge, which, though wide-ranging, has the coherence that follows from unity of principle, we can say with equal justice that many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear. For the aids to clearness, though they may be of assistance in regard to details, often interfere with our grasp of the whole."

    P.S. An unrelated gem from Bertrand Russell:

    "When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection." (1957 interview with Irwin Ross.)

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