One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Marcuse has discussed capitalism and technology as forms of domination, and in this chapter he links these two systems to the modern reverence for supposedly objective science and its domination of humans and nature.

First, Marcuse draws from Gyorgy Lukacs’s theory of reification (or “thingification”). Lukacs argues that the natural world has been “thingified” and that the meanings and purposes within the life forces of the world are not viewed relationally. Scientific reasoning—and the scientific method itself—assumes that the natural world is composed only of facts to be understood and thus can be fully known through scientific study. The scientific method itself relies on reification, making “things” out of relations and deadening the living.

Science’s approach to the world is grounded in capitalism’s commodification of the living world. Elements of nature are presented within scientific discourse and methodology as “things” to study, and relations in the natural world, including those between sentient beings, are presented as mere machinery, with subjectivities denied. Modern science, in this presumption, pursues “knowledge” by way of the quantification of the “specimens” or “things” of study. Science, then, is not separated from advanced industrial society at all and thus “neutral” but, like everything else (thinking, politics, discourse, culture, sex) is part of this system. Unlike the past functioning of higher art discussed in Section 1, however, scientific reification has never been radical. The quantifiable “truth” of science has always been part of the fabric of modernity and advanced industrial society, and has thus never required integration into that system.

Marcuse relies on philosopher Edmund Husserl to then explore the “lifeworld” of those who enact scientific methods. The lifeworld is the lived experience of each subject, and scientists bring with them a specific way of seeing and thinking that has been determined by capitalism, which quantifies the world so that “extractions,” for both study and profit, can be secured. Science is not “objective,” as we are so often assured; quite the opposite, scientific enterprises are enslaved within and can only project the organizing principles of advanced industrial society.

To make the contours of this scientifically thingified world clearer, Marcuse returns to the classical Greek world, as described in Chapter 5. In classical philosophy, the natural world is composed not of things or quantifiable units but of substances that have their own purpose and, in this sense, subjectivity: Each substance has its own intrinsic meaning rather than one imposed on that substance. Each substance aims toward a goal, or telos, that is unique to the “essence” of the substance, according to Aristotle. This essence is what organically drives toward the telos, which allows for that thing or being to reach its full potential. For an Aristotelian to say that man is a “rational being,” for example, is not to say that men behave rationally but to say that men have the potential to be rational. Potential is embedded in the world, and substances are defined by their potential to become their full being rather than through a quantification that “takes” from them with no concern for their essence or full potential being.

Continuing to examine the ways that the ancient world is superior to advanced industrial society, Marcuse briefly examines ancient technics. The Greek word techne refers to the production of arts and crafts. Like natural objects and subjects, human-created artifacts in the classical Greek world are also approached as having an essence. These objects, however, are not able to realize their telos independently but require a craftsman or artist to facilitate this realization. This is the opposite of advanced industrial society’s subservience to technics.

Marcuse is not arguing that we should or can “return” to classical civilization. He does, however, think that the unification of substance and potential is a more humane way of living than the lifeworld of advanced industrial society that thingifies the world. The result of this thingification is that, conceptually, the world is deprived of its essences and lives, so that it can, literally, be objectified, exploited, and commodified. Science does not act independently of capitalism or technology and is, in fact, extremely dangerous because it proclaims its independence from any life worlds except those of a “neutrality” that is a lie. Returning to the title of this chapter, this is “positive” thinking that refuses to be critical, as it exerts the “logic of domination.”

This chapter moves from how thinking has been quashed as a result of modernity’s privileging of the supposedly neutral scientific approach to a more specific critique of Anglo-American, academic, analytic philosophy. Marcuse’s big argument in this chapter is that academic philosophy has stepped in to protect the scientific totalitarianism that prevents real thinking and ethical engagement with the world.

Marcuse concludes by insisting that academic philosophy is only interested in what is academically controversial rather than what is truly controversial and might generate important dialectical thinking in the tradition of Plato. Academic philosophy that does not meet the standards of analytic, “scientific” philosophy is dismissed as “mystical” and nonsensical, as if the analytic method is the only means by which the good and truth can be reached.

Marcuse’s point here is not to dismiss analytic philosophy wholesale. Rather, he cautions that the insistence that everything must meet the standards of analytic philosophy in its insistence on a supposed logical transparency bludgeons other ways of doing philosophy and subjects them to ridicule. Marcuse sees analytic philosophy not seeking the good or the truth in academia, but instead becoming an end in itself, so that the analytic and scientific method is the answer. Thus, any other method is immediately tossed out, especially philosophy that is critical of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy, moreover, is not able to address all philosophical questions. The relation between analytic philosophy and the hard sciences is one that Marcuse is deeply concerned about, as the sciences, as he discusses in Chapter 6, occupy ideological positions that support the status quo under the guise of a neutrality that all understand is never to be questioned.

Marcuse sees Western philosophy, with Socrates as its “founder,” as inherently transgressive and two-dimensional. However, the way philosophy is practiced in academia today is not: Instead, what poses as philosophy is one-dimensional and positive (by which Marcuse means not critical). Philosophy is meant to always question, while analytic philosophy approaches the sciences as offering “truth” and then proceeds from there, rather than questioning the very process by which the sciences arrive at this supposed truth. Thus analytic philosophy and the sciences collude in assuming a “neutral” foundation that then objectifies and analyzes the parts, leaving the foundation to speak for itself, which enables oppression. Academic philosophy has lost the very vocation of philosophy, which is to be “the gadfly,” as Socrates was, which comes with great risk and ridicule rather than easy acceptance.