One-Dimensional Philosopher

With his kindly Kris Kringle smile, his Katzenjammer accent and his snow-white hair, Professor Herbert Marcuse of the University of California's San Diego campus seems too charmingly ge nial to be a revolutionary. He coos over the fine fur of his rust-colored cat, Freddie, and holds a lifetime membership in the San Diego Zoo, where he affectionately favors owls, elephants and hippopotamuses. Yet whether in Berkeley or Berlin, today's youthful radicals, who are challenging the most basic premises of industrial society, increasingly turn to the writings of the aging (he will be 70 in July) German-born philosopher to find a satisfactory rationale for rebellion.

On their protest marches, the militant student leaders who recently forced the closing of the University of Rome bore a banner inscribed with the three Ms of a new trinity: Marx, Marcuse and Mao. "We see Marx as prophet, Marcuse as his interpreter, and Mao as the sword," said one student-power advocate. On a visit to the Free University of Berlin last summer, Marcuse (pronounced Markooza) drew jammed lecture halls and wild ovations as he spoke glowingly of "the moral, political, intellectual and sexual rebellion of youth."

Agent of Domination. In the U.S., Marcuse's most recent book, One-Dimensional Man (1964) is one of Beacon Press's bestselling paperbacks and a growing campus favorite--even though it is on few required reading lists. Almost as popular is his earlier, Freudian interpretation of social change, Eros and Civilization, which intrigues students seeking an intellectual basis for today's hippie culture. Taking advantage of the rising interest in Marcuse, Beacon Press next month is publishing a collection of early essays called Negations.

What makes Marcuse a guru of the student rebels is his chilling and strident critique of modern industrial civilization, which he sees as an impersonal, all-pervasive agent of domination over the individual. Modern technology, which should be used to free man from oppressive work, Marcuse argues, has overreached itself, turned wasteful and created a massive fusion of interlocking military, corporate and political interests. As a result, he says, the normal channels of protest and dissent are rendered impotent.

General Anesthesia. Marcuse concedes that modern technology provides man with material well-being and even admits that more men may be happier today than ever before--but it is a happiness born of an ignorance ("a state of anesthesia") of what they could become. Men may think they have more freedom and more choices, he says, but the options open to them are not meaningfully different. In this state, man rejects all thoughts that challenge society's rationale--hence Marcuse's definition of man as "one-dimensional."

"The goods and services that the individuals buy," he writes, "control their needs and petrify their faculties. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable gadgets that keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue--which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions."

The "system," Marcuse claims, is wholly irrational. Technological civilization no longer rests on material scarcity and the need for society to force individuals to give up their pursuit of personal satisfaction in order to work and produce much-needed goods. Yet most people still spend most of their time in work that amounts to "exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery"> made more so because the division of labor alienates workers from each other, from their product, and from work itself. Although leisure time is growing, play is advertised and packaged so as to "soothe and prolong stupefaction" rather than stimulate individual consciousness.

Pleasure Principle. Marcuse builds his gloomy assessment of technological society on a creative fusion of ideas borrowed from Freud and Marx. In Freud ian terms, man's instinctual pursuit of "the pleasure principle" (mainly sexual and based in the id) normally gives ground to "the reality principle" as influenced by society's demands (reflected by the superego) and is repressed or compromised within each individual (by the moderating ego). The tragedy now, as Marcuse sees it, is that society, in its wasteful misuse of technology, has imposed what he calls "surplus repression"--controls not really necessary for civilized human association. Among them are pressures to protect monogamy, the hierarchical division of labor, public control over private life. They seem rational, and man absorbs them unconsciously until they become his "own desire, morality and fulfillment."

Building on Marxian theory, Marcuse contends that capitalist society has within it inherently incompatible forces that cannot be contained. But he also acknowledges Marx's failure to foresee that capitalist society could buy off the workers with material goods and prevent their clash with owner-managers by making both classes of society mere tools of technology. His writings admit to the interpretation that he sees a physical uprising as the primary way to overthrow this "oppressive" structure and restore man to new potentialities of freedom.

Lofty Plane. Marcuse is an almost temptingly easy target to criticize. It has been argued that his basic premises were better put by his intellectual masters--and Marcuse's weightier ideas are couched in an abstruse Teutonic style that almost defies readability. Some libertarians complain that he is a potential authoritarian who would suppress any group trying to promote military arms, racial or religious discrimination, even the extension of public service. A more telling commentary is that Marcuse's attack on industrial civilization is put on such a lofty, pan-historical plane that it cannot be applied to any single nation without breaking down in detail. Ironically, Marcuse's concentration on the grand scheme of things dismays some of his would-be New Left followers; at San Diego, campus activists who come to Marcuse for his blessing are often subjected to devastating critiques of their tactics and their goals.

To most criticism, Marcuse smilingly answers that his intellectual opponents are simply one-dimensional prisoners of the system. He denies that his ideas are totally negative--although he sees some philosophic merit in "the power of negative thinking"--and that his world view is too pessimistic. Marcuse, though, feels that he has good reason to be gloomy about modern civilization. Born in Ber lin, he was an associate at Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research during the collapse of the Weimar Republic. "Here we had a democratic government," Marcuse says, "yet the Nazis came to power almost through legal means." Despite his Marxist background, he gave up on Russian Communism as a revolutionary failure long before most U.S. leftists did. Marcuse, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later researched and taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis (he is the nation's foremost expert on Hegel), now thinks that U.S. society, once democracy's great hope, is undergoing "an explosion of insanity."

Inevitable Change. Marcuse has now mellowed to the point that in conversation he is willing to concede that the U.S.. may be able to escape from unfreedom without a violent revolution. "I think that fundamental change in this society is possible," he says. "The conflict between this society's great technical instruments and scientific re sources on the one hand and the waste and destructiveness on the other just cannot go on." Change, he feels, will be forced not only by a modern counterpart of Marx's proletariat--"the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races, the unemployed and the unemployable"--but also by the young, the sensitive, the educated. "I can't imagine," he says, "an intelligent and sincere man who does not feel that opposition to this society is a necessity--not just in political and philosophical terms, but even in moral and biological terms."

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