I am now almost halfway through One – Dimensional Man and the experience of re-reading it is fascinating for me. It is very dense, rather obscure, quite difficult, and will be an extraordinary challenge for my students. I am not sure when I read it the first time, but I rather think it was shortly after 1964, when it appeared. I can tell us both by the nature of my comments and by the nature of my handwriting which was then very small and very precise. A second set of comments in a much thicker pen and larger handwriting is scattered throughout the book. The first set are skeptical, even mocking, and were clearly written at a time when I was quite unsympathetic to what Marcuse was saying. I am not going to conceal these comments from the students – I am going to read them to the students and then explain how my understanding of Marcuse evolved. What is most striking to me is the difference between the world as it was when he wrote the book and the world as it is now almost 60 years later.
If you include the work of Adam Smith, which I will talk
about in my third lecture together with that of David Ricardo, the works and ideas
discussed in the course span almost 250 years.
This will give me an opportunity to show the students the relationship
between what an author think and the way the world is when he or she is
writing. This is not, by and large, something that philosophers talk about very
much but it is essential in understanding their works and nowhere more so than
in the books we shall be reading. (Needless to say, this is true not only of
Smith and Ricardo and Marx and Freud and Marcuse but also of me.)
When I thought up this course it was something of a jeu d’esprit
but I now realize that I have some very serious things that I want to try to
communicate to the students. Will I succeed? That has been a question with which I
have wrestled my entire life. I hope so.
6 comments:
Sounds like a slapper of a course - your students are in for a ride.
Indeed, I'm sure it'll be great. I'd love to see some examples of the comments you wrote in the book. :)
It would be really interesting to see your original comments on the book and then for you to explain how and why your reading of Marcuse has evolved.
I agree. what is your take on marcuse and the Frankfort school'?
Your post has set me thinking and remembering for quite a spell. I'm pretty sure I've read all of Marcuse's books in English (except Soviet Marxism), and so I found myself wondering why he never made much of an impact on me. I'm thinking now that it was because by the time I started reading him (around 1980), his work already seemed, if not completely superseded, then perhaps 'out-radicalized'. I mean that by that time Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death and a fortiori Love's Body seemed more illusion-shattering than Eros and Civilization; Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (very big in my circles by the early 1980s) seemed more incisive than One-Dimensional Man (and came with the aura of Situationist quasi-artistic interventions); and Adorno's philosophy of art, represented at that time mostly by the (weak) first translation of Die Philosophie der neuen Musik, seemed quite pointed and penetrating in comparison with the woolier formulations in Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension. Generally Marcuse seemed like a relic, a thing of the late 1960's, along with perhaps R. D. Laing and Paul Goodman (that's of course unfair to each of them in many ways; I'm just reporting a local Zeitgeist).--In any case, I'm going to grab my old copy of One-Dimensional Man right now and try to catch up.
This may be the first time I've seen Norman O. Brown mentioned on this blog.
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