Frankfurt School, 1936: Herbert Marcuse on the concept of Essence (really wonky)

The Manifestation of Herbert Marcuse

Most of the English abstracts of articles I've seen in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung are not very good at all. But the one provided for "Zum Begriff des Wesens" (The Concept of Essence) by Herbert Marcuse in the 1/1936 number is not bad, and I’m going to use it here to help summarize this article. Because this is probably the most difficult of all the articles I've encountered so far in ZfS. The philosophical concept of Essence is not often a topic for discussion in opinion columns or Sunday-morning talk-shows. From the abstract:

During the last decades the concept of essence has been widely discussed in the various attempts to seek a new foundation for philosophy. Both the phenomenology of E[dmund] Husserl and the theory of essence of M[ax] Scheler and his followers were devoted to discovering through their theories of reality the unconditioned and exact knowledge of eternal verities. This attempt characterizes modern theory of reality as the last stage of bourgeois thought which began with Descartes.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is considered the founder of the school of philosophy known as phenomenology. Christian Beyer in his entry on Husserl in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes:

In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl considerably refined and modified his method into what he called "transcendental phenomenology". This method has us focus on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the "natural attitude" (which is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to "constitute themselves" in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Max Scheler (1874-1928) was a phenomenological philosopher and sociologist heavily influenced by Husserl – as was Marcuse himself. After converting from Judaism to Catholicism in 1920, Scheler's thought tended more toward Catholic mysticism and the philosophies of Friedrich Schiller and Arnold Schopenhauer.

From the abstract:

The article endeavors to interpret the various conceptions of essence as specific stages of the historical development of that thought. With the rise of modern society the demand was made that the essential verities justify themselves before the critical and autonomous reason of the individual, whereas contemporary theory regards them as objects of an intuition and believes that reason has to accept them in the way in which they manifest themselves. The critical and rational tendencies in the theory of reality are abandoned, reason becomes receptive and heteronomous. This abdication of autonomous critical reason mirrors the adjustment of philosophy to the anti-rational ideology of the new form of authoritarian state. In the last phase of development the theory of reality turns out to be political mythology. [my emphasis]

This reflects a persistent concern of the Frankfurt School, especially in the context of the rejection by Nazi ideology not only of socialist thought but of essential elements of classical liberalism, as well. The Frankfurt School was also heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic thought, so they were conscious of the importance of unconscious and irrational drives in human affairs. But like Freud himself, they insisted on the essential importance of reason to understand and direct humanity. Nazi ideology to a large degree specifically rejected reason itself, glorifying instead race, nation and heroic warrior myths.

As Freud wrote in Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1928; English translation from The Future of an Illusion James Strachey translation 1961):

Wir mögen noch so oft betonen, der menschlidie Intellekt sei kraftlos im Vergleich zum menschlichen Trieblehen, und Recht damit haben. Aber es ist doch etwas Besonderes um diese Schwäche; die Stimme des Intellekts ist leise, aber sie ruht nicht, bis sie sich Gehör geschafft hat. Am Ende, nach unzählig oft wiederholten Abweisungen, findet sie es doch. Dies ist einer der wenigen Punkte, in denen man für die Zukunft der Menschheit optimistisch sein darf, aber er bedeutet an sich nicht wenig. An ihn kann man noch andere Hoffnungen anknüpfen. Der Primat des Intellekts liegt gewiß in weiter, weiter, aber wahrscheinlich doch nicht in unendlicher Ferne.

[We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes. The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one.]

Further from the abstract:

Positivism represents the undialectical opposition to this theory of reality. It wishes to remove completely the concept of essence from science, but thereby arrives only at an indifferent levelling of all facts. The idea of reality as opposed to appearance contains the positive elements of a critique of reality and of the process of realization of the essential potentialities of man and things. They are preserved in the dialectical conception of reality. [my emphasis]

This argument about "reality as opposed to appearance" is an important one for understanding the Frankfurt School's general perspective, though even Marcuse didn't always put it in the less-accessible form it takes in this essay. In the Hegelian philosophy, which is Marcuse's point of reference here, Essence is different from Appearance (or Manifestation). In one of Hegel's descriptions of Essence, from the Wissenschaft der Logik, it is the "unendliche Bewegung des Seins" (the unending movement of Being).

To use an example which hopefully won't do too much violence to the concept, we could take a tree; Hegel actually liked tree examples. A tree develops from a seed to a sapling to a fully-grown tree that produces its own seeds, has green leaves in the spring and summer, brown leaves in the fall and no leaves in the winter, and eventually dies out. Its physical manifestations, the ones that can be observed by the senses and measured by instruments, are its trunk and branches, the leaves in their various stages of existence, and so on. Those are the physical realities of the tree at any given moment. But none of those appearances are in isolation the tree itself. The tree – its innermost reality, its Essence – is composed of the moments in the entire arc of its development. The real tree, the Essence of the tree, is the whole thing – its "unending movement" in the process of its development – and not its physical reality (Appearance) at any given moment.

This is basic to the criticism of both phenomenology and positivism that Marcuse makes in this essay. The job of philosophical thought includes looking beyond the Appearance – he would might prefer to say behind the Appearance – to see the Essence, the inner reality, the possibilities and limits of its development.

Actually, he likely saw it in a somewhat different way, in which Essence and appearance are not so rigidly separated but dialectically connected. Hegel wrote in Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften §131: "Das Wesen ist daher nicht hinter oder jenseits der Erscheinung, sondern dadurch, daß das Wesen es ist, welches existiert, ist die Existenz Erscheinung." (The Essence is not therefore behind or beyond the Appearance, but rather because the Essence is that which exists, the Existence is the Appearance.) Essence is not identical to Appearance, in Hegel's concept, but it is part of Appearance. In one of the quotations from the essay, Marcuse uses this Hegelian framework when he talks about "'essence', i.e. the concept of the real content of an appearance."

In the fields of political and social theory, this relationship of Essence and Appearance implies that no given social or governmental order can be seen as eternal or static. It is always going some development and change. That doesn't mean that nihilism or cynicism is justified. Reason and evidence must be applied to get a realistic understanding of the developments, trends and possibilities in any given situation. The Frankfurt School thinkers argue that much philosophical and scientific theory in the 20th century (and now beyond) function in such a way to eliminate the deeper understanding of the processes being observed. They are especially concerned with its effects in the fields of sociology, psychology and politics. But it is a more general concern about how science and philosophy are done.

The last portion of the abstract:

The second part of the essay attempts to point out the function of the concept of reality in dialectical philosophy, with the help of which it overcomes relativism. The opposition between appearance and reality is here conceived as a historical relationship, in the determination of which enter as integral elements the social interests of the theory. In the course of the historical trend, with which the theory is bound up and which is supposed to abolish the opposition between appearance and reality, the particular interests become truly general, and a new kind of universally valid truth arises. Reality which stands at the center of the dialectical theory and determines all other concepts, refers primarily to the essence of man. Concern about concrete man is taking the place of concern about the unconditioned exact truth of idealist philosophy. In the same way as man's (and thing's) forms of appearance is grounded in the present social structure, likewise the idea of his essence and the process of its realization arise out of this structure, and its realization must be conceived as a historical task. [my emphasis]

Utopian formulations like "a new kind of universally valid truth arises" (quoted here from the unsigned abstract) are part of what makes Marcuse's writing intriguing as well as frustrating. Part of what he refers to here is a standard concept of Marxist theory: the working class in pursuing its own true interests actually represents the interest of the people as a whole ("the particular interests become truly general"). Seen from another angle, one social system develops out of another. Capitalism in Europe developed from within the feudal system. The Appearance of feudal society with a growing capitalist component was one thing. The Essence, however, was the developing capitalist social and political order. When the economic dominance of capitalism asserted itself in national economies, and when its forces produced democratic revolutions like the French Revolution of 1789 or the European Revolutions of 1848, the opposition between the appearance of the old society and their inner reality (Essence) was being abolished. And when society moved to this new, higher level of development, a new set of social and political truth was established.

The essay "The Concept of Essence" appears in an English translation by Jeremy Shapiro in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an authorized SCRIBD edition from MayFly Books and is available as a text or PDF download. The quotations from the essay used below are taken from Shapiro's translation, which begins on p. 56 of the SCRIBD version.

Marcuse describes three different meanings "of the difference between essence and appearance in materialist theory", referring to the Frankfurt School approach that the following year he and Max Horkheimer would christen as "critical theory". He frames the general issues this way:

The tension between potentiality and actuality, between what men and things could be and what they are in fact, is one of the dynamic focal points of this theory of society. ... That appearance does not immediately coincide with essence, that self-subsistent potentialities are not realized, that the particular stands in conflict with the general, that chance on the one hand and blind necessity on the other rule the world – these conditions represent tasks set for men’s rational practice. For the theory associated with this practice, the statement that all science would be superfluous when "the form of appearance and the essence of things immediately coincided" [Ernst Jünger] has a new meaning.

This conflict between Essence and Appearance takes a particular form in advanced capitalist societies:

To the interest governing the materialist dialectic, its object, the totality of the process of social evolution, appears as an inherently multidimensional, organized structure. It is by no means the case that all of its data are equally relevant or 'factual'. Some phenomena lie close to the surface, others form part of the central mechanism. From this distinction results a first and still completely formal concretion of essence as what is essential: in a very general sense, essence is the totality of the social process as it is organized in a particular historical epoch. In relation to this process every individual factor, considered as an isolated unit, is 'inessential', insofar as its 'essence', i.e. the concept of the real content of an appearance, can be grasped only in the light of its relation to the totality of the process. Now the latter is structured in a second way; even though they interact, the various levels of social reality nevertheless are grounded in one fundamental level. The manner in which this occurs determines the whole of life. In the current historical period, the economy as the fundamental level has become 'essential' in such a way that all other levels have become its 'manifestations' (Erscheinungsform). [my emphasis in bold]

Along with the significance of "every individual factor" as "inessential" and of the economy as "essential":

In materialist theory the difference between appearance (manifestation) and essence takes on a third significance, one which permits a further concretion of its object. Basic to the present form of social organization, the antagonisms of the capitalist production process, is the fact that the central phenomena connected with this process do not immediately appear to men as what they are 'in reality', but in masked, 'perverted' form. In the cases of work relations, the divisions of the social and political hierarchy, the institutions of justice, education, and science, the form in which they appear conceals their origin and their true function in the total social process. To the extent that individuals and groups base their actions and thoughts on immediate appearances, the latter are, of course, not 'mere' appearances but themselves factors essential to the functioning of the process and to the maintenance of its organization. Nevertheless, in the course of the process a stage is reached where it is possible to comprehend the essence in the manifestation and to understand that the difference between essence and appearance is a historical constellation of social relationships. [my emphasis]

And Marcuse provides a quote from Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik that emphasizes the need to discern real possibilities that are potential in a given state of being:

Formal possibility is reflection-into-itself (Reflexion-in-sich) only as abstract identity, the fact that something is not self-contradictory. But to the extent that one goes into the attributes, the circumstances, and the conditions of a thing in order to know its possibility, one is no longer restricting oneself to formal possibility but considering its real possibility. This real possibility is itself immediate existence. [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, hegel, herbert marcuse