© Radical Philosophy Review Volume 16 number 1 (2013): 99–107DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201316112

Critiques of Judgment: A Kantian Reading of Marcuse

Stefan Bird-Pollan

Abstract: I argue that Marcuse follows Kant’s critical distinction in mapping three basic forms of judgment: cognitive, moral, and aesthetic, all united by the underlying structure of purposiveness. Marcuse argues in Eros and Civilization that psychoanalysis has falsely identified repression as moral judgment with material need. With the gradual disappearance of material need, however, the authority of repression disappears, creating the possibility for freedom. However, the vacuum left by moral authority is replaced by cognitive and aesthetic judgments seeking to take morality’s place.

1. Introduction: The Idea of Critique

Marcuse’s insistence that “is” and “ought” must remain in an antago-nistic relation is the foundation of his whole Critical Theory. Mar-cuse’s Critical Theory, however, is for the most part an exploration

of how these two terms receive a false reconciliation in society. This issue comes to the fore if one understands the analysis in terms of Kant’s differ-ent types of judgments as Marcuse does.1 Though the conflict between is and ought is most often understood as belonging to moral judgment, there is always a tendency in the two other types of canonical judgments—cogni-tive and aesthetic—to blur the distinction. This occurs for cognitive judg-ment when the facts of the world are simultaneously construed to be what ought to be. In aesthetic judgment, the conflation between is and ought occurs when what carries with it an objective claim about how the world

1. In this context, Marcuse writes, “The critical analysis of society calls for new categories: moral, political, aesthetic.” Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 7.

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should be—the semblance of the morally good produced in the artwork—is relegated to mere subjectivity and therefore becomes simply agreeable. I argue in this paper that Marcuse’s social theory is based on a critique of each of these judgments as they occur in current society in order to recover the inherent mind-world tension that makes critical thought and ethical life possible.

This critique is meant to uphold an idealism of the right sort, which Marcuse understands as follows: “If Reason is the common denominator of subject and object, it is so as the synthesis of opposites. With this idea, ontol-ogy comprehended the tension between subject and object; it was saturated with concreteness. The reality of Reason was the playing out of this tension in nature, history, philosophy.”2 I take this to be a statement of idealism that avoids either Berkeleyan idealism or vulgar materialism, which each seeks to reduce the mind-world relation to a fundamental category of mind or world rather than maintaining the tension between the two. It is this ten-sion that Critical Theory takes itself to be upholding in its analysis of society.

I argue in this paper that Marcuse follows Kant in understanding the basic tension between mind and world as manifested in three phenomenal-ly distinct types of judgments: the cognitive judgments, moral judgments, and aesthetic judgments.3 Each has its own proper realm and function, and it is the task of critique to maintain the appropriate distinction between mind and world within these judgments as well as between these different types of judgment. This is important because, as Kant frequently empha-sizes, reason has a tendency to overreach, seeking its own unconditioned conditions.4 Hence, it is only possible to maintain the tension between mind and world within each type of judgment if we recognize at the same time that any answer given by a particular form of judgment will itself necessar-ily be partial. The task of critique is to restrict the results of reason’s own reflections to their proper sphere.

However, while all three types of judgments are in a structural sense equally significant, moral judgment holds the place of primus inter pares simply for the reason that we are fundamentally agents, needing to do things to stay alive. Cognition understood as systematic thought serves this function. This claim follows from Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of the prac-tical and has significant ramifications for the project of critical theory, not

2. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 152.

3. See Immanuel Kant, introduction to Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), secs. 3–4.

4. Kant writes that pure reason “requires the absolute totality of conditions for a given conditioned, and this can be found only in things themselves.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107.

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only in the sense that moral judgment must be preserved in a form that does not hypostasize its results according to a pre-given ideology, but also in the sense (which may amount to the same) of maintaining moral judgment’s autonomy vis-à-vis the other forms of judgments that seek to usurp its au-thority, each casting themselves as the proper domain of practice.5

This is obviously an enormous field of analysis and has occupied not only the careers of Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno, and the other first-generation critical theorists but also those of Weber, Scheler, and others. In this paper I can only indicate, however schematically, the trajectory Mar-cuse’s critique takes in the effort to break free of the false interpretation of moral judgment as linked to his analysis of the totalizing tendencies of both cognitive and aesthetic judgment.

2. Moral Judgment: The Critique of Freud’s Concept of NeedIn Eros and Civilization, Marcuse presents a critique of the concept of need as it has colonized moral judgment. The general argument, which Marcuse poses in terms of Freud but which he might also have discussed with refer-ence to Marxism, is that a certain materialist conception of human nature has been allowed to take over the parameters of moral judgment, artificially restricting the scope of human activity.6

Materialism, in both its Freudian and Marxist versions, is the culprit in the sense that the new material sciences have sought to deduce the necessi-ty of certain structures of authority from what its practitioners understand to be the basic physical conditions of the human body.7 In this way, scarcity and the struggle for resources are taken to provide a fundamental model for human interaction. Such struggle requires that laws be imposed that limit the fundamental drive for each person to protect him or herself and enforce mutually beneficial cooperation.

Freud too, according to Marcuse, buys into this model of scarcity. The main point, then, is that Freud conceptualizes the ego’s authority over the id as based on a certain conception of physical need or bodily integrity that authorizes reality to curtain fantasy. This leads to a dialectic between reality

5. Ibid., 119–21.6. The general point for Marcuse is that even critiques that aim to liberate us from

bourgeois ideology are in constant danger of themselves lapsing into reification. The critique of theories is thus presumably also applicable to feminist, race, and gender theory. Certain types of postmodern thought might also be seen as lapsing into Berkeleyan idealism on this account.

7. This point can be seen quite clearly in Hobbes’s natural philosophy, for instance, in which he argues that bodies are constructed around a basic conatus, which produces conflict both in the physical and the human world. Thomas Hobbes, “Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body,” in Metaphysical Writings, ed. Mary Whiton Calkins (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989).

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principle and pleasure principle which follows the Hobbesian model of self-preservation and in which the ego seeks to limit the release of psychic ten-sion and hence the experience of pleasure in order to maintain control over the body.

For Marcuse, the main problem with this model is that “the effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive control is imposed not by nature but by man.”8 That is, to conceptualize the struggle between the reality prin-ciple and the pleasure principle as essentially economic, as Freud does in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, is to have uncritically ontolo-gized a historically transmitted supposition: “Freud considers the ‘primor-dial struggle for existence’ as ‘eternal’ and therefore believes that the plea-sure principle and the reality principle are ‘eternally’ antagonistic.”9 This is not to say, of course, that there is no need for the ego to maintain any type of control over the id. Rather, we simply do not know what sort of control is actually warranted. Hence, it is not necessarily the case, as Freud several times remarks, that “homo homini lupus.”10

Marcuse’s point is simply that with the gradual erosion of material need—that is, with the gradual technological advance that moves society from scarcity to overproduction in the material realm—those political sys-tems that seek to authorize themselves by appealing to need run into diffi-culty. They do so because the forms of social repression that had previously appeared to be essential for survival—the subjugation of sexual desire to physical survival—seem no longer to be legitimate since the mechanization of the production of goods allowed more and more time away from work and hence an increase in leisure time.11

To put it in Kantian terms, mechanized production made possible the division of life into public and private spheres (here, perhaps counterintui-tively, the private sphere is the sphere of work and the public that of per-sonal freedom) where citizens distinguish between need and freedom, only that freedom is construed now not only as protesting against the govern-ment’s actions but also as seeking sexual fulfillment (in the broader sense of

8. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 16.9. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 17.10. For instance, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 21: 111.

11. Industrial capitalism is able to achieve this by way of technology that “operates against the repressive utilization of energy in so far as it minimizes the time necessary for the production of the necessities of life, thus saving time for the development of needs beyond the realm of necessity and of necessary waste.” Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 93.

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the term, perhaps).12 The hope is that need and freedom can exist in tension without each seeking to colonize the other.

3. Social Implications of the Disappearance of NeedAlas, just as the French Revolution gave rise to the Terror, so too did the sexual revolution give rise to an erosion of liberty in which the two dimen-sions of the public and the private merge into one dimensionality. The proxi-mate cause of this merging is the “man”: “the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve.”13 However, and this is the point of the idealist analysis, the fusion of public and private, freedom and nature, into one is itself brought about by reason’s tendency to seek the unconditioned for all of its conditions—in other words, by reason’s tendency to seek a unified or total explanation for its authority.

This translates into the historical point, made both by Marcuse and Horkheimer-Adorno, that the advent of liberalism, the era of personal free-dom, is based on the denial of the physical world which gave rise to its very (social) possibility.14 Hence, moral judgment, the mediation between what is and what ought to be, between nature (misconstrued as brute need) and freedom, is left aimlessly dangling, because nature is forgotten in the haste to leave false need behind. And with this shift, moral judgment, as the search for a better concrete social organization, is relegated to the sidelines. It is into this vacuum that the other two types of judgments—cognitive and aes-thetic—now step.

4. Cognitive Judgment: The Realm of Instrumental ReasonFreedom from nature is the goal of scientific inquiry in the sense that it seeks to make nature subject to our control. Liberalism is the belief that value pluralism, the decline of a unified moral code, can be underwritten by the universality of cognitive judgments in which the fungibility of objects of exchange unifies society. The use that we can make of each other rather than the respect we owe each other is seen as what holds society together. Free-dom is understood as the ability to make stuff, and this freedom is thought to become ever more complete with the discovery of each new detail of the

12. For Kant’s account, see Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy.

13. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 93.14. For Horkheimer and Adorno’s account, see Theodor W. Adorno and Max

Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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physical world. Modern science thus substitutes itself for morality as a sys-tematic practical approach to the world. This is the birth of materialism as a form of practice.15 Marcuse warns, “When technical progress cancels this separation [between mind and world], it invests the image with its own log-ic and its own truth; it reduces the free faculty of the mind.”16

However, in Marcuse’s analysis, and as Kant had already noted at the beginning of the first Critique, “the inherent limit of the established science and scientific method [is that it] extends, rationalizes, and insures the pre-vailing Lebenswelt without altering its existential structure—that is without envisioning a qualitatively new mode of ‘seeing’ and qualitatively [producing] new relations between men and between man and nature.”17 The point is that the liberation from material need effected by the sciences leaves us dis-connected from nature and hence rudderless with regard to the constraints of real freedom. For real freedom concerns not merely material relations but also human relations that we have not in virtue of our physical constitution but by dint of our moral capacity. While science helps us deal with others as physical bodies, it cannot tell us how to deal with them as persons—be-ings who must at all times also be treated as ends in themselves. Those who believe that the facts speak for themselves have simply abdicated their re-sponsibility to contemplate the world as it should be. That people regularly do just that is evidence, for Marcuse, of the fundamentally reified conscious-ness of liberal society.

5. Aesthetic Judgment: The Cultural RealmThe fact that cognitive judgment tends to overstep its grounds has more of-ten been observed than that aesthetic judgment does.18 Just as in the case of cognitive judgments, aesthetic judgments initially function as a critique of the hegemony of moral judgment and only become hegemonic themselves when they find no opposition in moral practice—that is, when the image of

15. One thinks here of St. Simone and Comte as well as of early socialists and all those who took their inspiration from the late rather than the early Marx, from Lenin to Althusser.

16. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 249.17. Ibid., 165.18. This worry is, however, clearly operative in writers as diverse as Edmund

Burke and Walter Benjamin, both of whom worry about the aestheticization of the political. See Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk Im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 1: 471–508; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

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the harmony between mind and world, which beauty represents, is taken to be real rather than an invitation to contribute to this unfinished project.19

Of the three types of aesthetic judgments, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the sublime, only the latter two are capable of any sort of critical import because only they are able to set up a conflict between the mind and the material world.20 What Kant calls the judgment of taste—that is, the judg-ment of the beautiful—arrests us in our tracks, taking us out of the realm of both the practical or moral and the cognitive, forcing us to “linger in our contemplation of the beautiful, because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself,” as Kant puts it.21

The threat to productive activity and the critique of that productive ac-tivity both turn on the fact that the judgment of taste takes us out of our ordinary search for knowledge and estranges us from our practical activity. By constructing a world of self-sufficient norms which entrances us, aes-thetic judgment both alienates us from the world we live in and numbs us to our suffering at the hands of the world by giving us pleasure. An aesthetic experience is critical to the extent that it preserves the tension between the pleasure it produces and the distance it reveals between a harmoni-ous world and the present one. In order to provide this critical distance or semblance of the good, there must be something to provide a semblance of, however. Here nature still figures into the aesthetic judgment. Marcuse holds out great hope for the critical function of aesthetics. He writes, for in-stance, “The more blatantly irrational the society becomes, the greater the rationality of the artistic universe.”22

Under liberalism, however, nature has been banished, so the judgment of taste, which depends for its objectivity on having an unmoving nature in view, sinks to the level of the agreeable. The agreeable is an aesthetic judg-ment that is merely the experience of gratification—a type of pleasure that is bodily and therefore subjective and does not make universal demands, like the beautiful. The agreeable is the experience of absolute passivity since the pleasure we experience prompts us merely to seek more pleasure rather than asking us to reflect on how this pleasure reflects the underlying struc-ture of the whole as tension between mind and world.

19. Marcuse writes: “Only in the ‘illusory world’ [of art] do things appear as what they are and what they can be.” Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 54.

20. Marcuse’s own account of the importance of Kant’s aesthetics appears in chapter 9 of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Here Marcuse places more emphasis on Schiller’s appropriation of Kant than on Kant himself, however.

21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 68.22. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 239. See also Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, xi.

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For Marcuse, the problem can be seen clearly in the totalizing nature of normative discourse which is to be found, for instance, in advertising, which plainly deals with aesthetic images and rhetoric. The key point in terms of the analysis of aesthetic judgment here is that political or advertising dis-course is not meant to be value-free but rather is meant to be normative in the sense of communicating the necessity of certain rules to the people without reference to universality. The standard of advertising and political discourse is that it is agreeable in the sense that it gratifies us, without, how-ever, offering us an explanation of why this is so. It provides a sufficient rea-son for action without providing a rational one, just as a cookie’s sweetness is a sufficient one for me to eat it without cohering with my rational concep-tion of myself as a healthy person. The aesthetic judgment of the agreeable simply compels us to seek more of the same subjective satisfaction.

Thus, while judgments of taste refer their proposed solution to a di-vided world, a world in which things are not as they should be, the sort of normative discourse seen in advertising or political speech glosses over the gap between is and ought: “In exhibiting its contradictions as the token of its truth, this universe of discourse closes itself against any other discourse which is not on its own terms.”23 There is no argument against the fact that the cookie gives me pleasure. And the insistence that gratification be the only possible standard ensures that no other sort of discourse holding itself to a more universal or intersubjective standard can be employed. In aes-thetic judgment, the agreeable—not the beautiful—has become the symbol of the morally good.

6. Marcuse’s ProposalIn what remains, I would like to give a brief sketch of the role Marcuse envi-sions for moral judgment freed of the ideological baggage of materialism. I take this to be reestablishing the fundamental tension between mind and world. The best approximation of this account is still to be found in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse’s most thoroughgoing meditation on the conditions for a free society. Marcuse opens Eros and Civilization by making two important claims about Freud, and by extension, Western political philosophy in gen-eral: “First, Freud’s theoretical conception itself seems to refute his consis-tent denial of the historical possibility of a non-repressive civilization, and, second, the very achievements of repressive civilization seem to create the preconditions for the gradual abolition of repression.”24 The second claim is substantiated by a countercurrent in Freud’s writing, according to which “Freud’s metapsychology is an ever-renewed attempt to uncover, and to question, the terrible necessity of the inner connection between civilization

23. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 90.24. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 5.

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and barbarism, progress and suffering, freedom and unhappiness.”25 That is, the dialectic between past and present is set free by the psychoanalytic method, according to which the past, represented by the id, can be used as a critical standard by which to measure the unfreedom of the present, and will eventually “shatter the framework in which [Eros and Thanatos] were made and confined.”26 This is possible, as we have seen, by revealing the authority of the ego to be a historical feature of primitive life that extended itself beyond its material usefulness in an effort to maintain its authority. A critique of morality, as the rule of the ego, therefore becomes necessary. Marcuse organizes his rebalancing of Freud’s materialism into an idealism by distinguishing between biological and sociohistorical vicissitudes of the instinct.27

Marcuse’s larger argument is that modern industrial capitalism, by re-lieving some of the pressures of economic necessity, might permit a reduc-tion in both the surplus repression and the performance principle, which in turn would allow for a greater degree of individual freedom. More im-portantly, this might also allow for a more dialectical relation between indi-vidual libidinal demands and their cultural expression.

In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse puts it thus: “Prior to all ethical be-havior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a ‘disposition’ of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve ‘ever greater unities’ of life.”28 Capitalism gives us the material tools to overcome it by re-alizing that material need has been significantly alleviated. It is up to society, however, to recognize that its fundamental disposition to unity is a possibil-ity which it must take up in a way that preserves the continued actuality of this disposition rather than reifying our disposition into some concrete notion of the good. — • —

25. Ibid., 17.26. Ibid., 19.27. Marcuse proposes two new terms that will allow him to do this: the first is

“surplus-repression,” which is meant to distinguish basic repression (the repression necessary to maintain the integrity of the subject) from repression as domination in the sociohistorical context. The second term is “performance principle,” which is the current historical form of the reality principle, the way necessity is dealt with. Ibid., 97.

28. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 10.