I have been rereading Herbert Marcuse’s One – Dimensional Man in preparation for teaching it in my
upcoming course at UNC Chapel Hill. I have not read it in many decades and had forgotten how difficult it is, how obscure. At the same time, I believe I can
see why it was so appealing to young radical students in the late 60s and early
70s. My job is going to be to make it relevant to students some of whose parents
had not yet been born when it was published in 1964.
This promises to be a very challenging experience and I am looking forward to it.
6 comments:
Can Marcuse explain the Trump phenomenon using repressive desublimation?
The book gets harder as it progresses. Chapters 7 and 8 requiere a lot of philosophical background.
I still don't understand them entirely and certainly didn't when I first read them in the late 60's.
Marcuse's Essay on Liberation is easier going if you're facing students without the necessary philosophical background.
s.w. you may find these interesting (helpful?)
https://jacobin.com/2021/12/herbert-marcuse-new-left-marxism-materialism-socialism
https://jacobin.com/2021/02/herbert-marcuse-matt-taibbi-frankfurt-school
Anonymous,
Thank you.
Your mini-turorial on Marcuse was great, perhaps my favorite. I hope your course musings find their way into this blog.
I have taught One-dimensional Man by Marcuse twice at UPEI in the context of a course called 20th Century French and German Philosophy (4th year undergraduate course). In my second attempt, I used 4 textbooks: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; One_dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse; Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault; and Between Naturalism and Religion by Jurgen Habermas. Most of these texts turned out to be too hard for my students, except for Foucault who was perhaps too easy.
There is a useful anthology of Marcuse's work called The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse (2007, Beacon Press), edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss. It contains a useful introduction by the editors, ""Introduction; The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse" (about 35 pages long). A video clip of Andrew Feenberg on his book tour by the University of California TV network is available at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFbypIr4RmQ&ab_channel=UniversityofCaliforniaTelevision%28UCTV%29
Marcuse does not make much sense to students without a background context in Hegel, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. But the general message of resistance through ideology critique and counter-cultural protests or monkeywrenching the system of established power comes through to students. They agree that the so-called "free world" is dominated by unfreedom, and that rationality has become utterly irrational. Marcuse writes: "The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence" (ODM, p 4). Marcuse's methods are obscured perhaps by some of the jargon that he invented or assimilated from German philosophers, which he balances with some more transparent ordinary language philosophy style in promoting his reasonable liberation alternative.
There are some interviews with Marcuse also on YouTube, such as this one from the 1970s with Brian Magee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqC1lTAJx4&ab_channel=ManufacturingIntellect
Raymond Geuss thinks that some jargons are much worse than others. He argues that Habermas did not learn to restrain his jargon tendencies and his communicative ethics is a failed jargon. Marcuse overcame some of his jargonism after becoming an American citizen and professor associated with the 1960's counter-cultural movement, but liberation in 2022 needs the words of an emerging generation to characterize it concretely.
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