Marcuse "A Note on Dialectic"

I updated a past post that was very bad. This explanation comes from a stronger base of understanding. 1/28/11

Marcuse turns to Hegelian dialectics in this essay in order to explain their philosophical strength against scientific rationalism and the tyranny of quantitatives. Marx drew from Hegel for this term and method, which Hegel in turn recovered not from thinkers such as Kant or Hume, but from the ancient Greeks. If you've ever read a dialectic from Plato or Socrates, you may know how it works. One speaker presents an argument, and another speaker (such as a Cynic or a Skeptic) refutes the argument. The dialogue between these two is a dialectic. By the end of the dialectic, the two opposing viewpoints should reconcile into some sort of hybrid argument. For Hegel this is thesis+antithesis=synthesis. Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind and Marx's historical dialectic approach the idea of dialectics in a different, but related way. For Hegel, one form of a thought reaches a threshold at which it negates itself, and then the original form and negation resolve into a synthesis, and the mind moves along through history while impacting the consciousness and material world. For Marx, the forms of material production,¹ which are modulated through economics, have a dialectical impact on social formation and cultural production. As history progresses, materialism affects society and thought, which, in turn, affects materialism.

Marcuse notes that the scientific world has become immune to dialectical thinking, preferring the steady flows of postivism verses the give and take of negation and dialectics. Marcuse's argument is that Hegelian dialectics recognize that objective reality is only a realization and contingent on the subject. Progress in dialectical thinking is therefore very much different then the progress of science, which seldom questions its fundamental objective substance and operative foundations. Dialectics always calls these into question; it must as this is how negative thinking works. "Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts..." (The Essential Frankfurt Reader: 447). This process of thinking, Hegel's ideal of Reason (not to be confused with scientific reason) allows us to unchain our minds from the facts of reality and therefore free us to other objective possibilities. The world suddenly becomes undefined and capable of being constituted by anything else.

The crux of the argument is that Hegel's Reason was unchanging and absolute. Marx saw Hegel's Reason as reaching its own stage of historical negation, where forces oppressed by the established epistemologies of reason needed to move Reason forward by bringing it down to earth. By grounding thought in materialism, Reason can move into a new historical stage in which it may be used to subvert the repressive powers of reified power structures, just as it had, in the past, been used to subvert thought and discourse.







¹ As Erich Fromm has explained in this introduction to Bottomore's "Selected Writings," for Marx materialism is not realism or naturalism, but is the field and conditions of actual production.