October 31, 2025 • 41 mins
🎓 Karin Beindorff im Gespräch mit Alfred Schmidt (1931-2012). Der Philosoph und politische Theoretiker Alfred Schmidt lehrte an der Universität Frankfurt a.M. Seine Forschungsgebiete waren u.a. die Kritische Theorie. In diesem Gespräch berichtet Alfred Schmidt über Leben und Werk Herbert Marcuses (1898-1979). Alfred Schmidt hat mehrere Bücher Herbert Marcuses ins Deutsche übersetzt und kannte ihn persönlich. Herbert Marcuse, Mitglied des Instituts für Sozialforschung, (wiki) wurde in Berlin geboren, migrierte 1932 in die USA nahm 1940 die amerikanische Staatsbürgerschaft an. Er veröffentlichte seine Bücher in Englisch. Herbert Marcuse gilt als einer der einflussreichsten politischen Theoretiker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein Einfluß auf konkrete Formen des Widerstands gegen den widererstarkten Faschismus haben nichts an Aktualität eingebüßt.
/🎓 Karin Beindorff in conversation with the philosopher Alfred Schmidt (1931-2012). The philosopher and political theorist Alfred Schmidt taught at the University of Frankfurt am Main. His areas of research included critical theory. In this conversation, Alfred Schmidt talks about the life and work of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Alfred Schmidt translated several of Herbert Marcuse's books into German and knew him personally. Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Institute for Social Research, (wiki) was born in Berlin, emigrated to the USA in 1932, became an American citizen in 1940, and published his books in English. Herbert Marcuse is considered one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. His influence on concrete forms of current resistance against resurgent fascism has lost none of its relevance.
/🎓 Karin Beindorff s'entretient avec le philosophe Alfred Schmidt (1931-2012). Le philosophe et théoricien politique Alfred Schmidt a enseigné à l'université de Francfort-sur-le-Main. Ses domaines de recherche comprenaient la théorie critique. Dans cette conversation, Alfred Schmidt parle de la vie et de l'œuvre d'Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Alfred Schmidt a traduit plusieurs livres d'Herbert Marcuse en allemand et le connaissait personnellement. Herbert Marcuse, membre de l'Institut de recherche sociale (wiki), est né à Berlin, a émigré aux États-Unis en 1932, a obtenu la nationalité américaine en 1940 et a publié ses livres en anglais. Herbert Marcuse est considéré comme l'un des théoriciens politiques les plus influents du XXe siècle. Son influence sur les formes concrètes de la résistance actuelle contre la résurgence du fascisme n'a rien perdu de sa pertinence.
📚 Veröffentlichungen von Alfred Schmidt u.a. / publications a.o. / publications entre autres: - Alfred Schmidt: "Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Karl Marx." Frankfurt am Main 1962. - Alfred Schmidt: "Zur Idee der Kritischen Theorie. Elemente der Philosophie Max Horkheimers." München 1974. - Alfred Schmidt: "Geschichte des Materialismus." Posthum Hrsg. von Klaus-Jürgen Grün & Oliver Hein. Leibzig 2017.
📚 Veröffentlichungen von Herbert Marcuse u.a. / publications a.o. / publications entrte autres: - Herbert Marcuse: "Vernunft und Revolution." Suhrkamp Verlag tb, Berlin 2020.
- Herbert Marcuse: "Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud." Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2024.
- Herbert Marcuse: "Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse." Gesprächsteilnehmer: Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Tilman Spengler, Silvia Bovenschen, Marianne Schuller, Berthold Rothschild, Theo Pinkus, Erica Sherover, Heinz Lubasz, Alfred Schmidt, Ralph Dahrendorf, Karl Popper, Rud
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:33):
It was less his personal appearances than his books that brought the immigrant living and teaching
in the USA into greater public interest as a significant figure of the protest movement at the end of the 1960s.
Marcuse was born in 1898 as a child of a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin.
(00:54):
The experiences of the enlightened Jewish bourgeoisie with the false promises of social equality
likely contributed to his aversion to any mindless participation, to any adaptation.
Even as a young man, Marcuse was interested in the political currents of the time and engaged practically.
But like other intellectuals of the time, he sought answers to the questions raised by the failed
(01:18):
revolution after the defeat of the monarchy, primarily in philosophy.
In 1934, he had to leave Germany.
He went to New York, where he became a member of the Institute for Social Research, working
with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
Herbert Marcuse is one of the co-founders of critical theory.
As the revolt of the students in the 1960s announced a resistance against the total character
(01:42):
of the achievements of advanced industrial societies, Marcuse hoped for the practical effectiveness of critical theory.
His previously written books such as Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, but also the
one on the social theory of Soviet Marxism gained a peculiar new relevance.
(02:03):
Marcuse, who had become a US citizen in 1940, traveled to Germany, taught, discussed, and supported whatever critical potential unfolded.
He shared the view with many that the resistance against exploitation and repression, even to
the point of organized mass murder, did not exclude violence.
However, for him, a revolution without the participation of a large majority was inconceivable.
(02:27):
The violence of the self-proclaimed avant-gardes had nothing revolutionary for him, but that
did not prevent his opponents from denouncing him as a desk murderer and the father of terrorism.
Among the best connoisseurs of Marcuse's works is Alfred Schmidt, who is a professor of philosophy
and sociology in Frankfurt am Main, holding the very chair that was occupied by Max Horkheimer
(02:49):
upon his return from exile.
Alfred Schmidt, who once referred to Marcuse as an indestructible romantic, has translated many
of his books from English.
When Marcuse died in 1979, Schmidt wrote in his obituary in the FAZ that the political explosive
power of his thinking was due to the older layers of his work shaped by academic philosophy.
(03:12):
In the following conversation with Alfred Schmidt, I first asked him what he meant by this somewhat paradoxical thesis.
In 1968, Marcuse was the celebrated teacher and mentor of the New Left.
His name was repeatedly mentioned in the daily press in connection with the student protest movement.
(03:38):
His reception came late and then very hastily, I would say.
At that time, in my article in the FAZ, I aimed to at least indicate to readers that there was
something unhistorical in this rapid reception of Marcuse.
(04:03):
I wanted to point out that Marcuse had already been intensely engaged with the subjects that
would later make him famous in the late 1960s for several years prior.
Marcuse was a thinker who always started from a very careful conceptual self-understanding.
(04:32):
His closeness to political practice has often obscured this.
Interestingly, as I understood it at the time, he primarily emerged from his reception of life-philosophical
historicism, Dilthey, Husserl, and then also Heidegger, and later the reception of Sartre.
(04:56):
But he was also involved in the discussions about the young Marx around 1930.
Georg Lukacs' famous work, History and Class Consciousness from 1923, was essential for him,
but also Karl Korsch's work Marxism and Philosophy.
(05:17):
One can say he was familiar with the founders of Western Marxism, but also with the academic philosophy of his time.
And his reception of Marx should arise from the intellectually given debates of the time.
(05:42):
In this respect, it was not a contradiction for him to profess socialism on one hand, while
on the other hand, very decisively studying the philosophy of Heidegger, as it had something
to do with the historical possibilities and necessities, as he believed.
We should perhaps delve a little deeper into this connection, both regarding Marcuse's educational
(06:07):
history and his biography, Mr. Schmidt.
Marcuse's first political experiences, if I remember correctly, took place in the Social Democratic
Party, which at that time was somewhat different from today.
He left it very quickly, namely after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
He attributed a certain degree of guilt to the SPD for this assassination.
(06:29):
He was briefly a soldier, was a member of a soldiers' council in Berlin, his birthplace, but
he also quickly left that, as officers were also promoted there.
That was something he did not consider right at that time.
So, he shared the hope for a revolution in 1918-19, a revolution that ultimately failed, one must say.
(06:52):
In what context do these biographically political experiences that Marcuse had relate to the intellectually emerging interests?
Because he then begins to study philosophy and German studies.
Yes, I believe you have already hinted at the crucial point.
As is rare with a philosopher, certain life and historical circumstances are intertwined with his intellectual interests.
(07:22):
By the way, even in later times, he always placed emphasis on practice in sudden turns of historical development.
He did not always remain there, but I believe he was very keen, after his first experiences
(07:44):
after the world war and in this late phase of the Weimar Republic that followed, to communicate about his philosophical tasks.
And I mentioned earlier that conceptual self-clarification played a significant role, and I
(08:05):
suspect that he initially achieved this indeed with the help of Heidegger's work.
Interestingly, Marcuse earned his doctorate in German studies.
His beginnings are not actually of a philosophical nature, but rather aesthetic beginnings.
(08:27):
He wrote his doctoral thesis on an artist novel.
Yes, the German artist novel, which deals with quite a significant period, from Sturm und Drang
to Thomas Mann, published in 1922.
But what is interesting for us here is the role of art; it releases creative, transformative forces.
This later became binding for him as well.
(08:51):
He says with Hegel, the novel arises when the world has already become prose.
This means that when a rift has emerged between the artistic and the objective world, thus the
theme of alienation, reclaiming life, and then the idea of understanding the present philosophically in terms of history.
(09:13):
The theory of the novel by Lukacs from 1916 was very important here.
Here, an attempt was made to discuss the epic form, the novel form as a philosophical theme of history.
And this has also remained binding for him later.
(09:36):
By the way, Adorno also drew from that famous early work of Lukacs in our century.
Marcuse then returned to Berlin after he obtained his doctorate.
He worked there in a bookstore.
However, he returned to Freiburg at the end of the 1920s.
(09:57):
He had already been somewhat under the influence, one might say, of Husserl, but especially of Heidegger.
Now Marcuse, like many intellectuals of his time, read Being and Time in 1927, and was thus
very influenced by this book.
This is, I believe, hardly comprehensible for many today, this enormous influence that Heidegger's
(10:19):
book Being and Time exerted.
Perhaps you can say a little about why someone like Marcuse was also affected, of whom we already
know that at this time he certainly saw himself politically more as a leftist.
Perhaps I may begin with a small anecdote that Horkheimer told me.
He attended a lecture by Edmund Husserl in Freiburg in the morning, where it was said that philosophy
(10:42):
is a very strict science.
In the following event, Martin Heidegger said that philosophy has nothing to do with science at all.
And I believe that there is something contained in this that may have captivated the young Marcuse,
the longing for a philosophy that does not speak of empty and dead concepts, but of the concreteness of living life itself.
(11:10):
Now then, to Being and Time.
Here it was therefore the concept of historicity as the condition for the possibility of substantive history.
Heidegger distinguished mere history, the stacking of past facts, from that history which we
(11:30):
ourselves are, by, so to speak, storming forth and acting directly from the life situation.
No, here there was also an affinity for the Marxian concept of practice for Marcuse, and hence
those essays they hinted at, the Heidegger-Marxism of Marcuse's early work from 1928 to 1933
(11:57):
presented in a series of essays.
And here one can see how difficult it was for Marcuse to engage with the appropriation of Marx's teachings.
The interest was not so much in an objective analysis of the course of history, but more in
understanding the immediate, as Sartre would later call it, the situation.
(12:22):
Thinking in situation, thinking in existence.
The original meaning of scientific socialism also seemed to be given to Marcuse in the economic-philosophical
manuscripts of the young Marx from 1844.
They seemed to contain the original meaning of Marxian doctrine.
(12:47):
The philosophical critique and foundation of political economy was here the theory of revolution.
Labor, objectification, alienation, property had a human core.
The economic categories were merely the reified surface of life.
(13:08):
Underlying them was the reality of historical struggles, of real people, of embodied humans.
Essential here is Feuerbach's sensualism and the concept of labor from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
We will continue shortly with the interview.
(13:29):
Like us if you like it.
(13:58):
But the important thing here, also in the Paris manuscripts, was human sensuality, the subversive
potential, the place of nature in the theory of revolution, which was given in corporeality and human sensuality.
I mention this because it would later gain a sharper emphasis in connection with the reception of Freud much later.
(14:27):
Perhaps I will also mention Korsch and Lukács, who founded the so-called Western Marxism.
All of this must be said here because it was very different from the canonization and dogmatization
of Marxian doctrine that then took place in Russia.
And Marcuse always followed his own path in the appropriation of Marx.
(14:52):
In 1957, Marcuse analyzed the social theory of Soviet Marxism. You yourself, Mr.
Schmidt, later translated the book into German.
The result of this analysis was not very pleasant for the doctrine, one must say.
Can you describe the relationship of the Marxist philosopher Marcuse, the leftist activist,
(15:13):
who later became a leftist in quotes, to real socialism a bit, his interest in it?
Yes, first of all, I mean this is really a solid political science study.
At that time, it was quite common to write critical books about Soviet ideology, but usually from one's own perspective.
(15:39):
From the perspective of a classical democracy, from the perspective of a Christian denomination, or from whatever perspective.
Marcuse's approach was original in that he took the Soviet authors at their word with a deliberate naivety.
(15:59):
That is to say, I adhere to their self-understanding, as they present themselves as interpreters of Marx's doctrine.
And I now note to what extent what is happening in Russia and what is conceptually reflected
in the Soviet works can actually be understood in the sense of Marx's intention.
(16:23):
And what he then did was, I believe, already of interest in political semantics.
He analyzed very well the ritualized, reified language of official Marxism and clarified, for
example, that the concept of a revolutionary proletariat in the old Marxian sense had meanwhile become a mythological concept.
(16:50):
In light of the reality of the Eastern conditions, it became a dream, in view of the real situation
of the working class in the West, indeed a mythological concept.
So I find that he achieved a high degree of objectivity in his presentation, including the Soviet ethics.
There was a new rationality after the revolution and in what categories this was represented.
(17:16):
There is also more political and factual criticism that emerged from this initially very academic
approach, examining the fundamental categories of the self-understanding of the Soviet ideologists,
than if he had, as was generally customary at the time, brought some already finished standpoint
(17:37):
from the outside to these matters.
It has earned him a heartfelt enmity, like many other things he has written.
Let's first go back to the end of his time with Martin Heidegger.
Mark Huse wrote his habilitation thesis in 1932, if I see that correctly, which dealt with Hegel's ontology.
(18:01):
As a theory of historicity.
This was still very much in line with these early efforts to gain an immediate understanding
of existence in historical becoming.
Heavily influenced by Dilthey as well, and he states it quite openly in the preface that what
is presented here as crucial for the unfolding of the questions addressed is owed to my teacher Martin Heidegger.
(18:26):
Apparently, he lived in good agreement with him at that time.
I believe we need to talk again about immigration.
So the fact that the working class did not behave as the subject of the revolution as some theorists
had imagined, and thus fascism could not be defeated in Europe, led in particular Jewish intellectuals,
(18:48):
but not only as Jews often, but often also as leftists, to think about immigration, to have to go into immigration.
Max Horkheimer recognized this very early and, it must be said, equipped the Institute in time
with foreign positions so that this immigration also became possible.
Marc Huse himself emigrated in 1932.
He was initially in Geneva and then in Paris.
(19:10):
In 1934 he came to New York and joined the Institute there.
He became a full member of the Institute for Social Research, which had found refuge at Columbia University.
One could call it that, yes.
How did this immigration, Mr.
Schmidt, affect the development of Marc Huse's thinking?
He was now a German philosopher in the USA.
(19:31):
It actually only surfaced much later what must have occupied him for years.
So with Marc Huse, I actually do not see the specifically Anglo-Saxon influences that did reach
some German philosophers after the Second World War.
(19:54):
One can see this in the much later work on the one-dimensional man.
He attempts to provide something like a comprehensive overview of the state of consciousness
in the USA, whereby it is essentially the analytical and linguistic schools, also pragmatism,
(20:16):
that are being discussed here.
One can strongly feel the distance here.
I believe this must be emphasized here, whether he has fully absorbed the American way of life.
He certainly appeared to us later as an American in his external demeanor.
(20:38):
That's how I experienced him as well.
He also became an American in 1940 and started writing his books in English very early on. That's correct.
I think this must be emphasized here, which Horkheimer and Adorno did not do, not to mention Bloch. That is completely correct.
But how far this somewhat relaxed way of presenting oneself has gone, he surely absorbed during those years as well.
(21:02):
But in his thinking itself, I would argue, he has remained determined by German idealism.
And it's no coincidence, he then writes a book about Hegel in 1941.
So this is one of the first major works published in America, Reason and Revolution, where he
(21:24):
tries, quite differently than in the earlier Hegel book, to enlighten the American, let’s say,
Anglo-Saxon public that Hegel does not simply belong to a decline narrative of the German spirit,
which starts with the authoritarian and anti-Semitic aspects of Luther, goes through Hegel and
(21:46):
Bismarck, and continues to Nietzsche and Hitler, but at that time he was very keen on bringing
Hegelian philosophy, especially in its political and historical significance, to the side of
liberal, democratic, and enlightened thinking.
And one can see from this very serious interest in Hegelian philosophy what the spirit of the
(22:10):
institute may have been, because without the approval and encouragement of the institute members,
he certainly would not have written this Hegel book.
So I believe he remains true to the German or let’s say Western European traditions.
So in external demeanor, certainly an American, whether in his inner thinking he also thinks
(22:35):
in Anglo-Saxon categories, that is the question.
It is very difficult to judge that from the outside.
I only know that when I was once with him in some venue and a Wurlitzer organ was played, he
hurriedly left the place with me.
We had to leave a venue in Frankfurt three times at noon because of the unbearable noise of
(22:58):
some country music or something like that, which he apparently did not like at all.
From that, one could tell he had very clear aversions, idiosyncrasies, or whatever you want to call it.
I don't want to draw any too hasty and premature conclusions from this, but it did seem to him
to be a symptom of an order of things that was not his.
(23:20):
Let's put it carefully this way.
So indeed a very European condition.
Yes, I actually want to imply all of that.
As a supplement to the book you just mentioned, it is called Reason and Revolution in German,
and it has also been translated by you.
Perhaps we should also mention that in the USA, in immigration, Mr.
Schmidt, another theoretical pillar was added, namely psychoanalysis, which had already been
(23:45):
received differently in the USA than Freud had once thought.
Completely different strands of psychoanalysis developed there, and Marcuse engaged very strongly with these contradictions.
Yes, one can speak here of a philosophical-historical interpretation of Freud's drive theory.
One of his most original achievements surely, in the book Errors and Civilization.
(24:11):
The book has been published in German under several titles.
It was then published under the title Drive Structure and Society, I believe in 1965, by Surkamp,
and under that title, it was also publicly discussed.
So he wanted to decipher Freud, and that was only possible if he distanced himself from so-called
(24:33):
culturalist schools of neo-Freudian revisionism or better yet, rejected them.
What does culturalist mean here?
He specifically wanted to justify Freud's disparaged biologism.
The neo-Freudian revisionists believed that it was important to complement and improve Freud's teachings with sociologizing additions.
(25:03):
However, according to Marcuse, such additional orientation is not necessary.
The theory of society can learn from Freud how much the pressure of a culture equally penetrates
the psychological somatic layers of the person.
(25:26):
By shifting the debate from the unconscious to the conscious, from the biological to cultural
factors, the revisionists have severed the roots of society in the psychosomatic basis of the individual.
However, they only discuss society at the level at which it presents itself to the individual
(25:51):
as a fixed, packaged, neutral environment, without even questioning its origin and legitimacy.
The body is the place where it becomes visible what sovereign culture does to people.
In this respect, the so-called biological Freudianism, which he has always emphasized vigorously,
(26:17):
is of extraordinary importance for social theory.
The psychoanalytic revisionists remain within the framework of existing institutions, where
values and views are stuck, and they restore that idealistic morality and religion, the critique
of which is partially inherent and partially explicitly stated in Freud's work.
(26:43):
It is a conformism in the adornment of psychoanalytic vocabulary.
And now it is about Freud's meta-psychological works.
And Marcuse's suspicion is that the revisionists reject Freud's meta-psychology not only because
it goes beyond the realm of clinically observable and therapeutically usable, but because in
(27:10):
this meta-psychology, humanity is represented in terms that reveal the explosive, the explosive foundations of culture.
And here, of course, Freud's 1930 work, 'The Discomfort in Culture,' must certainly be mentioned.
One could say that Marcuse's entire interpretation of Freud aims to show that Freud is not right in this respect.
(27:38):
This means that the death drive does not have to triumph over the life drive, Eros.
By pushing into the biological layers, Freud is able to capture cultural suppression unadulterated.
And here comes the keyword materialistic.
(28:00):
Freud thinks materially by equating the energy of the life drives with libido and aiming for
real satisfaction, instead of merely spiritual or transcendent.
There has indeed been some criticism not only of Freud's biological perspective but also of Marcuse's biological perspective.
(28:21):
Among other things, Jürgen Habermas pointed out in a conversation with Marcuse that he believes
Marcuse has a very naturalistic concept of reason, simply because he claims that reason, as
he defines it, is inherent in human drive structure.
Do you share this criticism from Habermas?
No, and not because it presupposes an understanding of Freud that I do not share.
(28:50):
According to Habermas, as far as I can see, it is probably about the thesis that Freud was subject to a self-misunderstanding.
He argued from a medical-scientific perspective, but in truth, his psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics.
If you will, it is more of a humanities discipline than a natural science.
(29:14):
This thesis of Freud's self-misunderstanding must be known here to understand that it is also
coherent when Habermas argues this way.
As for Marcuse himself, I would say that these are old life-philosophical relics in him.
The concept of life, even with Dilthey, with Georg Simmel, Vollenz, and Nietzsche, oscillates
(29:38):
strangely between biological and spiritual.
It is indeed a shimmering concept.
And it is probably, as Habermas has rightly seen, something like a vitalistic metaphysics, ultimately contained in Marcuse's thinking.
So wrapped in Marxism and existentialism.
(30:00):
But it is already such a, I believe it has been correctly observed, also the idea with Schopenhauer,
that in the human brain the will, this drive, this a-logical drive that pulses through the universe, slowly ignites a light.
So the origin of the I from the it, this genetic idea that the spirit has also emerged naturalistically among other things.
(30:31):
It is also something social and historical, of course.
But Marcuse would probably have represented it that way.
And in this respect, both are illuminating, what Marcuse has answered him and what Habermas has presented against him.
Both are coherent in themselves, if one keeps the premises in mind.
Well, in the 1960s, a protest movement began to emerge in industrial countries, or one might
(30:56):
say that protest movements began to form, as they were partly very different.
Marcuse welcomed this in contrast to some other critical theorists in many aspects, and partly supported it quite strongly.
What does this opposition movement mean for his work? Did it influence him?
(31:17):
I believe that the resistance against the existing order, even in this form, as it was not provided
for by Marxist theory, has indeed impressed him.
There is an interesting letter from 1877 by Marx, where he writes that the silly stuff that
(31:41):
Russian students are doing is worthless in itself, but it is a symptom of the intellectual,
political, and economic decline in which Tsarism finds itself.
So as a symptom of the times, Marcuse may have initially interpreted these things as well.
However, he probably also understood that they had taken on their own quality and significance.
(32:05):
One must also derive this sympathy for the student revolt from the very clear insight that the
concept of the revolutionary proletariat, as it still appeared in the ritualized vocabulary
of the Stalinists, no longer had a real basis.
He himself says that what Marx envisioned under socialism is, given the current conditions in
(32:32):
the East, just a dream.
Conversely, in the advanced industrial societies, the reality of the working class is to be
seen in such a way that these old Marxist terms have become a kind of mythology.
So the question was already important for him; I may put it rather loosely (32:48):
who will now step
in as a substitute for the necessary world change?
It was the struggles in the Third World, the very painful and difficult processes of decolonization, for example.
But there were also certain problems that became visible at the universities, which probably
(33:13):
also prompted him to take these matters more seriously than some other academic contemporaries.
I believe that is probably a very important point.
On the other hand, what he observed there also came from his old longings for the embodied individual
and their experience of the world, approaching the big questions of politics, history, and so on.
(33:41):
This was again that existentialist perspective, understanding oneself in existence, and I believe
that from there probably came the sympathies for the new radicalism; it was not a chemically
pure socialist radicalism, considering what was happening in those wild years, with Trotskyists, anarchists, and such.
(34:10):
It was by no means a dogmatically closed intellectual front.
What united these various people was a deep discomfort with the world as it was.
Additionally, there was the unfortunate war of the USA in Vietnam, which must not be forgotten,
and the specific experiences of Marcuse with the American civil rights movement, whose categories
(34:35):
have sometimes been transferred a bit too quickly to the Western European context.
I believe that one must keep this in mind a little to properly assess such a wild writing as
'Essay on Liberation,' one of his last works.
What has always seemed a bit unfortunate to me is that these thoughts of Marcuse, which relate
(35:00):
to this other kind of anthropological thinking, might have also found their place in a theoretical
reflection, independent of the contemporary historical, immediate occasions.
But I think it must be clearly stated that an actually academic reception of Marcuse's work has not taken place.
(35:23):
Especially regarding the late phase of his thinking, I find this regrettable.
The art movement in the 1960s is probably the most read book or indeed the most read book by
Marcuse, 'One-Dimensional Man.' This concept of 'One-Dimensional Man' has also become a fixed
phrase or almost a kind of cliché.
(35:46):
This book analyzes, as Marcuse himself wrote, the total character of the achievements of advanced
industrial societies, analyzing a system in which the production apparatus tends toward the
totalitarian and has forced people, without terror, as Marcuse has repeatedly emphasized, into total adaptation.
Why is this book so successful?
(36:09):
Does it relate to what they describe as discomfort in the world, that this has been formulated there?
Well, the term that comes from Whitehead's work, 'The Great Refusal,' which Marcuse adopts,
certainly expresses such a state of mind, an immediate state of mind of the people. Great refusal.
Great refusal or denial, depending on how it is translated.
(36:32):
On the other hand, this book certainly contains a real aporia, a real unresolved contradiction.
It is equally strong in analyzing that the world is changing, as Horkheimer calls it, more and
more into a managed world, namely it is being created into a system of seamless control, but
(36:56):
a rule that no longer necessarily has to be felt as physical pressure or terror.
One could ironically say that alienation has become enjoyable.
Many people feel quite comfortable and validated in it, so on one side, there is objectivism,
the hard wall of reality that we face and cannot interpret away, and on the other side, the
(37:23):
rebellious life drives of individuals, that is, this subjectivism.
These two facts, the hopelessness and yet the rebellion, also the title of one of his latest
writings is of interest, Counter-Revolution, but it does not stand against the revolution, but only against the revolt.
(37:44):
The title already reveals that he could not or did not want to see this equally on both sides
of the relationship, not on the same level.
And here, I believe, the concept of technology plays a significant role, technology in American terms.
Here, technology has become a totalitarian design, a world design, so to speak.
(38:09):
Here I see Heidegger at work again, in the thinking of Marcuse, namely a world of total availability
and the question of whether this total availability through technology can be politically utilized
or not is completely nonsensical. That is already politics.
This world design is already political in itself, so we have this peculiarity here, on the one
(38:34):
hand almost in the sense of the dialectic of enlightenment.
We are certified an impossibility of change.
But at the same time, it is said that it was not as urgent as it is today.
But there he can actually only refer to the life drives, the rebellious life drives, the sensual,
(38:55):
that which does not fit into the ruling rationality and may be more reasonable than the reason of this rationality.
Marcuse's analysis of the one-dimensional world, Mr.
Schmidt, leads me to my last question, for of course this analysis also raises the question
of the role of the political intellectual.
The historical task of social theory was the program of critical theory and is the program of
(39:19):
critical theory, as far as it still exists.
That sounds today, where social theory, cautiously put, has somewhat fallen by the wayside,
compared to the times we just spoke of.
It seems somewhat anachronistic to say such a thing.
Where do you see the historical task of social theory today?
Yes, initially the theory of society, as conceived by Horkheimer and Adorno, was distinguished
(39:45):
from the individual scientific sociology.
From the outset, historical-philosophical, moral, utopian hopes, evaluations, and partisanships
were clearly included in the theory of society.
Those were still good times when one could demonstrate the economic core of the prevailing conditions with great zeal.
(40:14):
In the state of so-called globalization, where actually all cultural areas are brought under
market conditions without hesitation and without feeling guilty, and where competitive behavior
is even desired, within the scientific disciplines themselves.
(40:34):
Today it is difficult to be a critic of ideology.
And I think Max Horkheimer has actually described very beautifully the everlasting task of critical theory.
It is about understanding the present as history, as a historical process that unfolds before
(40:55):
our eyes, in which we ourselves participate.
I believe that is an important point.
The theory is the attempt to understand the current state of the world as history.
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:33):
It was less his personal appearances than his books that brought the immigrant living and teaching
in the USA into greater public interest as a significant figure of the protest movement at the end of the 1960s.
Marcuse was born in 1898 as a child of a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin.
(00:54):
The experiences of the enlightened Jewish bourgeoisie with the false promises of social equality
likely contributed to his aversion to any mindless participation, to any adaptation.
Even as a young man, Marcuse was interested in the political currents of the time and engaged practically.
But like other intellectuals of the time, he sought answers to the questions raised by the failed
(01:18):
revolution after the defeat of the monarchy, primarily in philosophy.
In 1934, he had to leave Germany.
He went to New York, where he became a member of the Institute for Social Research, working
with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
Herbert Marcuse is one of the co-founders of critical theory.
As the revolt of the students in the 1960s announced a resistance against the total character
(01:42):
of the achievements of advanced industrial societies, Marcuse hoped for the practical effectiveness of critical theory.
His previously written books such as Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, but also the
one on the social theory of Soviet Marxism gained a peculiar new relevance.
(02:03):
Marcuse, who had become a US citizen in 1940, traveled to Germany, taught, discussed, and supported whatever critical potential unfolded.
He shared the view with many that the resistance against exploitation and repression, even to
the point of organized mass murder, did not exclude violence.
However, for him, a revolution without the participation of a large majority was inconceivable.
(02:27):
The violence of the self-proclaimed avant-gardes had nothing revolutionary for him, but that
did not prevent his opponents from denouncing him as a desk murderer and the father of terrorism.
Among the best connoisseurs of Marcuse's works is Alfred Schmidt, who is a professor of philosophy
and sociology in Frankfurt am Main, holding the very chair that was occupied by Max Horkheimer
(02:49):
upon his return from exile.
Alfred Schmidt, who once referred to Marcuse as an indestructible romantic, has translated many
of his books from English.
When Marcuse died in 1979, Schmidt wrote in his obituary in the FAZ that the political explosive
power of his thinking was due to the older layers of his work shaped by academic philosophy.
(03:12):
In the following conversation with Alfred Schmidt, I first asked him what he meant by this somewhat paradoxical thesis.
In 1968, Marcuse was the celebrated teacher and mentor of the New Left.
His name was repeatedly mentioned in the daily press in connection with the student protest movement.
(03:38):
His reception came late and then very hastily, I would say.
At that time, in my article in the FAZ, I aimed to at least indicate to readers that there was
something unhistorical in this rapid reception of Marcuse.
(04:03):
I wanted to point out that Marcuse had already been intensely engaged with the subjects that
would later make him famous in the late 1960s for several years prior.
Marcuse was a thinker who always started from a very careful conceptual self-understanding.
(04:32):
His closeness to political practice has often obscured this.
Interestingly, as I understood it at the time, he primarily emerged from his reception of life-philosophical
historicism, Dilthey, Husserl, and then also Heidegger, and later the reception of Sartre.
(04:56):
But he was also involved in the discussions about the young Marx around 1930.
Georg Lukacs' famous work, History and Class Consciousness from 1923, was essential for him,
but also Karl Korsch's work Marxism and Philosophy.
(05:17):
One can say he was familiar with the founders of Western Marxism, but also with the academic philosophy of his time.
And his reception of Marx should arise from the intellectually given debates of the time.
(05:42):
In this respect, it was not a contradiction for him to profess socialism on one hand, while
on the other hand, very decisively studying the philosophy of Heidegger, as it had something
to do with the historical possibilities and necessities, as he believed.
We should perhaps delve a little deeper into this connection, both regarding Marcuse's educational
(06:07):
history and his biography, Mr. Schmidt.
Marcuse's first political experiences, if I remember correctly, took place in the Social Democratic
Party, which at that time was somewhat different from today.
He left it very quickly, namely after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
He attributed a certain degree of guilt to the SPD for this assassination.
(06:29):
He was briefly a soldier, was a member of a soldiers' council in Berlin, his birthplace, but
he also quickly left that, as officers were also promoted there.
That was something he did not consider right at that time.
So, he shared the hope for a revolution in 1918-19, a revolution that ultimately failed, one must say.
(06:52):
In what context do these biographically political experiences that Marcuse had relate to the intellectually emerging interests?
Because he then begins to study philosophy and German studies.
Yes, I believe you have already hinted at the crucial point.
As is rare with a philosopher, certain life and historical circumstances are intertwined with his intellectual interests.
(07:22):
By the way, even in later times, he always placed emphasis on practice in sudden turns of historical development.
He did not always remain there, but I believe he was very keen, after his first experiences
(07:44):
after the world war and in this late phase of the Weimar Republic that followed, to communicate about his philosophical tasks.
And I mentioned earlier that conceptual self-clarification played a significant role, and I
(08:05):
suspect that he initially achieved this indeed with the help of Heidegger's work.
Interestingly, Marcuse earned his doctorate in German studies.
His beginnings are not actually of a philosophical nature, but rather aesthetic beginnings.
(08:27):
He wrote his doctoral thesis on an artist novel.
Yes, the German artist novel, which deals with quite a significant period, from Sturm und Drang
to Thomas Mann, published in 1922.
But what is interesting for us here is the role of art; it releases creative, transformative forces.
This later became binding for him as well.
(08:51):
He says with Hegel, the novel arises when the world has already become prose.
This means that when a rift has emerged between the artistic and the objective world, thus the
theme of alienation, reclaiming life, and then the idea of understanding the present philosophically in terms of history.
(09:13):
The theory of the novel by Lukacs from 1916 was very important here.
Here, an attempt was made to discuss the epic form, the novel form as a philosophical theme of history.
And this has also remained binding for him later.
(09:36):
By the way, Adorno also drew from that famous early work of Lukacs in our century.
Marcuse then returned to Berlin after he obtained his doctorate.
He worked there in a bookstore.
However, he returned to Freiburg at the end of the 1920s.
(09:57):
He had already been somewhat under the influence, one might say, of Husserl, but especially of Heidegger.
Now Marcuse, like many intellectuals of his time, read Being and Time in 1927, and was thus
very influenced by this book.
This is, I believe, hardly comprehensible for many today, this enormous influence that Heidegger's
(10:19):
book Being and Time exerted.
Perhaps you can say a little about why someone like Marcuse was also affected, of whom we already
know that at this time he certainly saw himself politically more as a leftist.
Perhaps I may begin with a small anecdote that Horkheimer told me.
He attended a lecture by Edmund Husserl in Freiburg in the morning, where it was said that philosophy
(10:42):
is a very strict science.
In the following event, Martin Heidegger said that philosophy has nothing to do with science at all.
And I believe that there is something contained in this that may have captivated the young Marcuse,
the longing for a philosophy that does not speak of empty and dead concepts, but of the concreteness of living life itself.
(11:10):
Now then, to Being and Time.
Here it was therefore the concept of historicity as the condition for the possibility of substantive history.
Heidegger distinguished mere history, the stacking of past facts, from that history which we
(11:30):
ourselves are, by, so to speak, storming forth and acting directly from the life situation.
No, here there was also an affinity for the Marxian concept of practice for Marcuse, and hence
those essays they hinted at, the Heidegger-Marxism of Marcuse's early work from 1928 to 1933
(11:57):
presented in a series of essays.
And here one can see how difficult it was for Marcuse to engage with the appropriation of Marx's teachings.
The interest was not so much in an objective analysis of the course of history, but more in
understanding the immediate, as Sartre would later call it, the situation.
(12:22):
Thinking in situation, thinking in existence.
The original meaning of scientific socialism also seemed to be given to Marcuse in the economic-philosophical
manuscripts of the young Marx from 1844.
They seemed to contain the original meaning of Marxian doctrine.
(12:47):
The philosophical critique and foundation of political economy was here the theory of revolution.
Labor, objectification, alienation, property had a human core.
The economic categories were merely the reified surface of life.
(13:08):
Underlying them was the reality of historical struggles, of real people, of embodied humans.
Essential here is Feuerbach's sensualism and the concept of labor from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
We will continue shortly with the interview.
(13:29):
Like us if you like it.
(13:58):
But the important thing here, also in the Paris manuscripts, was human sensuality, the subversive
potential, the place of nature in the theory of revolution, which was given in corporeality and human sensuality.
I mention this because it would later gain a sharper emphasis in connection with the reception of Freud much later.
(14:27):
Perhaps I will also mention Korsch and Lukács, who founded the so-called Western Marxism.
All of this must be said here because it was very different from the canonization and dogmatization
of Marxian doctrine that then took place in Russia.
And Marcuse always followed his own path in the appropriation of Marx.
(14:52):
In 1957, Marcuse analyzed the social theory of Soviet Marxism. You yourself, Mr.
Schmidt, later translated the book into German.
The result of this analysis was not very pleasant for the doctrine, one must say.
Can you describe the relationship of the Marxist philosopher Marcuse, the leftist activist,
(15:13):
who later became a leftist in quotes, to real socialism a bit, his interest in it?
Yes, first of all, I mean this is really a solid political science study.
At that time, it was quite common to write critical books about Soviet ideology, but usually from one's own perspective.
(15:39):
From the perspective of a classical democracy, from the perspective of a Christian denomination, or from whatever perspective.
Marcuse's approach was original in that he took the Soviet authors at their word with a deliberate naivety.
(15:59):
That is to say, I adhere to their self-understanding, as they present themselves as interpreters of Marx's doctrine.
And I now note to what extent what is happening in Russia and what is conceptually reflected
in the Soviet works can actually be understood in the sense of Marx's intention.
(16:23):
And what he then did was, I believe, already of interest in political semantics.
He analyzed very well the ritualized, reified language of official Marxism and clarified, for
example, that the concept of a revolutionary proletariat in the old Marxian sense had meanwhile become a mythological concept.
(16:50):
In light of the reality of the Eastern conditions, it became a dream, in view of the real situation
of the working class in the West, indeed a mythological concept.
So I find that he achieved a high degree of objectivity in his presentation, including the Soviet ethics.
There was a new rationality after the revolution and in what categories this was represented.
(17:16):
There is also more political and factual criticism that emerged from this initially very academic
approach, examining the fundamental categories of the self-understanding of the Soviet ideologists,
than if he had, as was generally customary at the time, brought some already finished standpoint
(17:37):
from the outside to these matters.
It has earned him a heartfelt enmity, like many other things he has written.
Let's first go back to the end of his time with Martin Heidegger.
Mark Huse wrote his habilitation thesis in 1932, if I see that correctly, which dealt with Hegel's ontology.
(18:01):
As a theory of historicity.
This was still very much in line with these early efforts to gain an immediate understanding
of existence in historical becoming.
Heavily influenced by Dilthey as well, and he states it quite openly in the preface that what
is presented here as crucial for the unfolding of the questions addressed is owed to my teacher Martin Heidegger.
(18:26):
Apparently, he lived in good agreement with him at that time.
I believe we need to talk again about immigration.
So the fact that the working class did not behave as the subject of the revolution as some theorists
had imagined, and thus fascism could not be defeated in Europe, led in particular Jewish intellectuals,
(18:48):
but not only as Jews often, but often also as leftists, to think about immigration, to have to go into immigration.
Max Horkheimer recognized this very early and, it must be said, equipped the Institute in time
with foreign positions so that this immigration also became possible.
Marc Huse himself emigrated in 1932.
He was initially in Geneva and then in Paris.
(19:10):
In 1934 he came to New York and joined the Institute there.
He became a full member of the Institute for Social Research, which had found refuge at Columbia University.
One could call it that, yes.
How did this immigration, Mr.
Schmidt, affect the development of Marc Huse's thinking?
He was now a German philosopher in the USA.
(19:31):
It actually only surfaced much later what must have occupied him for years.
So with Marc Huse, I actually do not see the specifically Anglo-Saxon influences that did reach
some German philosophers after the Second World War.
(19:54):
One can see this in the much later work on the one-dimensional man.
He attempts to provide something like a comprehensive overview of the state of consciousness
in the USA, whereby it is essentially the analytical and linguistic schools, also pragmatism,
(20:16):
that are being discussed here.
One can strongly feel the distance here.
I believe this must be emphasized here, whether he has fully absorbed the American way of life.
He certainly appeared to us later as an American in his external demeanor.
(20:38):
That's how I experienced him as well.
He also became an American in 1940 and started writing his books in English very early on. That's correct.
I think this must be emphasized here, which Horkheimer and Adorno did not do, not to mention Bloch. That is completely correct.
But how far this somewhat relaxed way of presenting oneself has gone, he surely absorbed during those years as well.
(21:02):
But in his thinking itself, I would argue, he has remained determined by German idealism.
And it's no coincidence, he then writes a book about Hegel in 1941.
So this is one of the first major works published in America, Reason and Revolution, where he
(21:24):
tries, quite differently than in the earlier Hegel book, to enlighten the American, let’s say,
Anglo-Saxon public that Hegel does not simply belong to a decline narrative of the German spirit,
which starts with the authoritarian and anti-Semitic aspects of Luther, goes through Hegel and
(21:46):
Bismarck, and continues to Nietzsche and Hitler, but at that time he was very keen on bringing
Hegelian philosophy, especially in its political and historical significance, to the side of
liberal, democratic, and enlightened thinking.
And one can see from this very serious interest in Hegelian philosophy what the spirit of the
(22:10):
institute may have been, because without the approval and encouragement of the institute members,
he certainly would not have written this Hegel book.
So I believe he remains true to the German or let’s say Western European traditions.
So in external demeanor, certainly an American, whether in his inner thinking he also thinks
(22:35):
in Anglo-Saxon categories, that is the question.
It is very difficult to judge that from the outside.
I only know that when I was once with him in some venue and a Wurlitzer organ was played, he
hurriedly left the place with me.
We had to leave a venue in Frankfurt three times at noon because of the unbearable noise of
(22:58):
some country music or something like that, which he apparently did not like at all.
From that, one could tell he had very clear aversions, idiosyncrasies, or whatever you want to call it.
I don't want to draw any too hasty and premature conclusions from this, but it did seem to him
to be a symptom of an order of things that was not his.
(23:20):
Let's put it carefully this way.
So indeed a very European condition.
Yes, I actually want to imply all of that.
As a supplement to the book you just mentioned, it is called Reason and Revolution in German,
and it has also been translated by you.
Perhaps we should also mention that in the USA, in immigration, Mr.
Schmidt, another theoretical pillar was added, namely psychoanalysis, which had already been
(23:45):
received differently in the USA than Freud had once thought.
Completely different strands of psychoanalysis developed there, and Marcuse engaged very strongly with these contradictions.
Yes, one can speak here of a philosophical-historical interpretation of Freud's drive theory.
One of his most original achievements surely, in the book Errors and Civilization.
(24:11):
The book has been published in German under several titles.
It was then published under the title Drive Structure and Society, I believe in 1965, by Surkamp,
and under that title, it was also publicly discussed.
So he wanted to decipher Freud, and that was only possible if he distanced himself from so-called
(24:33):
culturalist schools of neo-Freudian revisionism or better yet, rejected them.
What does culturalist mean here?
He specifically wanted to justify Freud's disparaged biologism.
The neo-Freudian revisionists believed that it was important to complement and improve Freud's teachings with sociologizing additions.
(25:03):
However, according to Marcuse, such additional orientation is not necessary.
The theory of society can learn from Freud how much the pressure of a culture equally penetrates
the psychological somatic layers of the person.
(25:26):
By shifting the debate from the unconscious to the conscious, from the biological to cultural
factors, the revisionists have severed the roots of society in the psychosomatic basis of the individual.
However, they only discuss society at the level at which it presents itself to the individual
(25:51):
as a fixed, packaged, neutral environment, without even questioning its origin and legitimacy.
The body is the place where it becomes visible what sovereign culture does to people.
In this respect, the so-called biological Freudianism, which he has always emphasized vigorously,
(26:17):
is of extraordinary importance for social theory.
The psychoanalytic revisionists remain within the framework of existing institutions, where
values and views are stuck, and they restore that idealistic morality and religion, the critique
of which is partially inherent and partially explicitly stated in Freud's work.
(26:43):
It is a conformism in the adornment of psychoanalytic vocabulary.
And now it is about Freud's meta-psychological works.
And Marcuse's suspicion is that the revisionists reject Freud's meta-psychology not only because
it goes beyond the realm of clinically observable and therapeutically usable, but because in
(27:10):
this meta-psychology, humanity is represented in terms that reveal the explosive, the explosive foundations of culture.
And here, of course, Freud's 1930 work, 'The Discomfort in Culture,' must certainly be mentioned.
One could say that Marcuse's entire interpretation of Freud aims to show that Freud is not right in this respect.
(27:38):
This means that the death drive does not have to triumph over the life drive, Eros.
By pushing into the biological layers, Freud is able to capture cultural suppression unadulterated.
And here comes the keyword materialistic.
(28:00):
Freud thinks materially by equating the energy of the life drives with libido and aiming for
real satisfaction, instead of merely spiritual or transcendent.
There has indeed been some criticism not only of Freud's biological perspective but also of Marcuse's biological perspective.
(28:21):
Among other things, Jürgen Habermas pointed out in a conversation with Marcuse that he believes
Marcuse has a very naturalistic concept of reason, simply because he claims that reason, as
he defines it, is inherent in human drive structure.
Do you share this criticism from Habermas?
No, and not because it presupposes an understanding of Freud that I do not share.
(28:50):
According to Habermas, as far as I can see, it is probably about the thesis that Freud was subject to a self-misunderstanding.
He argued from a medical-scientific perspective, but in truth, his psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics.
If you will, it is more of a humanities discipline than a natural science.
(29:14):
This thesis of Freud's self-misunderstanding must be known here to understand that it is also
coherent when Habermas argues this way.
As for Marcuse himself, I would say that these are old life-philosophical relics in him.
The concept of life, even with Dilthey, with Georg Simmel, Vollenz, and Nietzsche, oscillates
(29:38):
strangely between biological and spiritual.
It is indeed a shimmering concept.
And it is probably, as Habermas has rightly seen, something like a vitalistic metaphysics, ultimately contained in Marcuse's thinking.
So wrapped in Marxism and existentialism.
(30:00):
But it is already such a, I believe it has been correctly observed, also the idea with Schopenhauer,
that in the human brain the will, this drive, this a-logical drive that pulses through the universe, slowly ignites a light.
So the origin of the I from the it, this genetic idea that the spirit has also emerged naturalistically among other things.
(30:31):
It is also something social and historical, of course.
But Marcuse would probably have represented it that way.
And in this respect, both are illuminating, what Marcuse has answered him and what Habermas has presented against him.
Both are coherent in themselves, if one keeps the premises in mind.
Well, in the 1960s, a protest movement began to emerge in industrial countries, or one might
(30:56):
say that protest movements began to form, as they were partly very different.
Marcuse welcomed this in contrast to some other critical theorists in many aspects, and partly supported it quite strongly.
What does this opposition movement mean for his work? Did it influence him?
(31:17):
I believe that the resistance against the existing order, even in this form, as it was not provided
for by Marxist theory, has indeed impressed him.
There is an interesting letter from 1877 by Marx, where he writes that the silly stuff that
(31:41):
Russian students are doing is worthless in itself, but it is a symptom of the intellectual,
political, and economic decline in which Tsarism finds itself.
So as a symptom of the times, Marcuse may have initially interpreted these things as well.
However, he probably also understood that they had taken on their own quality and significance.
(32:05):
One must also derive this sympathy for the student revolt from the very clear insight that the
concept of the revolutionary proletariat, as it still appeared in the ritualized vocabulary
of the Stalinists, no longer had a real basis.
He himself says that what Marx envisioned under socialism is, given the current conditions in
(32:32):
the East, just a dream.
Conversely, in the advanced industrial societies, the reality of the working class is to be
seen in such a way that these old Marxist terms have become a kind of mythology.
So the question was already important for him; I may put it rather loosely (32:48):
who will now step
in as a substitute for the necessary world change?
It was the struggles in the Third World, the very painful and difficult processes of decolonization, for example.
But there were also certain problems that became visible at the universities, which probably
(33:13):
also prompted him to take these matters more seriously than some other academic contemporaries.
I believe that is probably a very important point.
On the other hand, what he observed there also came from his old longings for the embodied individual
and their experience of the world, approaching the big questions of politics, history, and so on.
(33:41):
This was again that existentialist perspective, understanding oneself in existence, and I believe
that from there probably came the sympathies for the new radicalism; it was not a chemically
pure socialist radicalism, considering what was happening in those wild years, with Trotskyists, anarchists, and such.
(34:10):
It was by no means a dogmatically closed intellectual front.
What united these various people was a deep discomfort with the world as it was.
Additionally, there was the unfortunate war of the USA in Vietnam, which must not be forgotten,
and the specific experiences of Marcuse with the American civil rights movement, whose categories
(34:35):
have sometimes been transferred a bit too quickly to the Western European context.
I believe that one must keep this in mind a little to properly assess such a wild writing as
'Essay on Liberation,' one of his last works.
What has always seemed a bit unfortunate to me is that these thoughts of Marcuse, which relate
(35:00):
to this other kind of anthropological thinking, might have also found their place in a theoretical
reflection, independent of the contemporary historical, immediate occasions.
But I think it must be clearly stated that an actually academic reception of Marcuse's work has not taken place.
(35:23):
Especially regarding the late phase of his thinking, I find this regrettable.
The art movement in the 1960s is probably the most read book or indeed the most read book by
Marcuse, 'One-Dimensional Man.' This concept of 'One-Dimensional Man' has also become a fixed
phrase or almost a kind of cliché.
(35:46):
This book analyzes, as Marcuse himself wrote, the total character of the achievements of advanced
industrial societies, analyzing a system in which the production apparatus tends toward the
totalitarian and has forced people, without terror, as Marcuse has repeatedly emphasized, into total adaptation.
Why is this book so successful?
(36:09):
Does it relate to what they describe as discomfort in the world, that this has been formulated there?
Well, the term that comes from Whitehead's work, 'The Great Refusal,' which Marcuse adopts,
certainly expresses such a state of mind, an immediate state of mind of the people. Great refusal.
Great refusal or denial, depending on how it is translated.
(36:32):
On the other hand, this book certainly contains a real aporia, a real unresolved contradiction.
It is equally strong in analyzing that the world is changing, as Horkheimer calls it, more and
more into a managed world, namely it is being created into a system of seamless control, but
(36:56):
a rule that no longer necessarily has to be felt as physical pressure or terror.
One could ironically say that alienation has become enjoyable.
Many people feel quite comfortable and validated in it, so on one side, there is objectivism,
the hard wall of reality that we face and cannot interpret away, and on the other side, the
(37:23):
rebellious life drives of individuals, that is, this subjectivism.
These two facts, the hopelessness and yet the rebellion, also the title of one of his latest
writings is of interest, Counter-Revolution, but it does not stand against the revolution, but only against the revolt.
(37:44):
The title already reveals that he could not or did not want to see this equally on both sides
of the relationship, not on the same level.
And here, I believe, the concept of technology plays a significant role, technology in American terms.
Here, technology has become a totalitarian design, a world design, so to speak.
(38:09):
Here I see Heidegger at work again, in the thinking of Marcuse, namely a world of total availability
and the question of whether this total availability through technology can be politically utilized
or not is completely nonsensical. That is already politics.
This world design is already political in itself, so we have this peculiarity here, on the one
(38:34):
hand almost in the sense of the dialectic of enlightenment.
We are certified an impossibility of change.
But at the same time, it is said that it was not as urgent as it is today.
But there he can actually only refer to the life drives, the rebellious life drives, the sensual,
(38:55):
that which does not fit into the ruling rationality and may be more reasonable than the reason of this rationality.
Marcuse's analysis of the one-dimensional world, Mr.
Schmidt, leads me to my last question, for of course this analysis also raises the question
of the role of the political intellectual.
The historical task of social theory was the program of critical theory and is the program of
(39:19):
critical theory, as far as it still exists.
That sounds today, where social theory, cautiously put, has somewhat fallen by the wayside,
compared to the times we just spoke of.
It seems somewhat anachronistic to say such a thing.
Where do you see the historical task of social theory today?
Yes, initially the theory of society, as conceived by Horkheimer and Adorno, was distinguished
(39:45):
from the individual scientific sociology.
From the outset, historical-philosophical, moral, utopian hopes, evaluations, and partisanships
were clearly included in the theory of society.
Those were still good times when one could demonstrate the economic core of the prevailing conditions with great zeal.
(40:14):
In the state of so-called globalization, where actually all cultural areas are brought under
market conditions without hesitation and without feeling guilty, and where competitive behavior
is even desired, within the scientific disciplines themselves.
(40:34):
Today it is difficult to be a critic of ideology.
And I think Max Horkheimer has actually described very beautifully the everlasting task of critical theory.
It is about understanding the present as history, as a historical process that unfolds before
(40:55):
our eyes, in which we ourselves participate.
I believe that is an important point.
The theory is the attempt to understand the current state of the world as history.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com