Author: M. Farahi Tojegi
A Brief Overview of the Frankfurt School (Part 11)
A Brief Overview of the Frankfurt School:
Herbert Marcuse was born on July 19, 1898, in Berlin into a Jewish family and passed away 81 years later in the city of Starnberg. At the age of 19, this German writer entered the University of Freiburg to study sociology and philosophy and, at the same time, joined the Social Democratic Party. In 1932, he began his collaboration with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and shortly afterward became one of its most widely read authors. A year later, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power, he, along with other members of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, was forced to move to Switzerland.
On the eve of World War II, Herbert Marcuse emigrated to the United States, where until 1951 he worked as head of the Central European Division at the U.S. Department of State, conducting research on fascism. During the 1960s and 1970s, due to his critical theories about the communist ideology of the Soviet Union, he became known as one of the theorists of the New Left, and his works gained popularity among revolutionary students in Europe. In the mid-decades of the 20th century, he taught at leading American universities such as Harvard and Columbia, and in the final year of his life, he returned to his birthplace, Germany.
Herbert Marcuse, whose doctoral dissertation was based on the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel, later became fascinated by the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. He reflected his analytical theory of these two great thinkers in his book Eros and Civilization. For this reason, he has been called a Hegelian-Freudian Marxist who managed to present a psychoanalytic interpretation of Marxism. This German writer held a critical view of capitalism, particularly in its cultural and social dimensions, and believed that the expansion of consumer goods production in the post-World War II years signified an encroachment upon both nature and society.
Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School in 1932. In his youth, he was influenced by the German academic tradition, which, in his view, outwardly sought the truth but inwardly defended the status quo. His opposition to the Nazi Party laid the groundwork for his critique of rationalism. He argued that rationalist philosophies, such as positivism, only dealt with the surface of phenomena and lacked the ability to express their true essence. Moreover, in his book One-Dimensional Man, he discussed the rationality of technology, maintaining—along with other members of the Frankfurt School—that mastery over nature through technology creates a new form of domination over humanity. In his idea of technological rationality, he resembled Max Weber. Marcuse paid less attention to cultural and social factors in the formation of social systems and instead regarded technology as the main force shaping modern society and determining its structure.
Marcuse began his intellectual journey by criticizing contemporary philosophy. In this respect, he criticized three elements of European philosophical thought:
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In his view, formal or Aristotelian logic has no intellectual utility in the modern world.
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Linguistic philosophy, by focusing on ordinary language, has no significant scientific or theoretical value.
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Positivist philosophy, due to its close link with technology and the capitalist system, serves merely as a tool for exploiting human beings.[1]
Therefore, he believed it was necessary to lay the foundation for a new philosophy that could recognize and interpret the modern world. He also opposed positivist social sciences by presenting a dialectical social theory. In this regard, similar to Horkheimer, he argued that the tendency of positivist philosophy was to equate the study of society with that of nature, turning social study into a purely scientific endeavor aimed at discovering rigid social laws—whereas the issue of transforming the social system was reduced to the outcome of these rigid laws.[2]
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References:
[1]. Azad Aramaki, Taghi. Sociological theories. Tehran, Soroush: 1997, first edition, p. 142.
[2]. Batomor, Tom. The Frankfurt School. Translated by Hossein Ali Nozari, Tehran, Nay Publishing House, first edition, 1997, p. 13.
