Herbert Marcuse's essay "Zur Kritik des Hedonismus" in the 3/1938 number of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung is available in an English translation by Jeremy Shapiro as "On Hedonism" 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 translations here are Shapiro's.
Marcuse’s essay discusses the philosophy of hedonism with special emphasis on the traditional opposition between sensuality and reason in philosophy. As he puts it:
In the antithesis of reason and sensuality (or sensuousness), as it has been worked out in the development of philosophy, sensuality has increasingly acquired the character of a lower, baser human faculty, a realm lying on this side of true and false and of correct and incorrect, a region of dull, undiscriminating instincts. Only in epistemology has the connection between sensuousness and truth been preserved.The philosophy of hedonism began with the Greek philosophical schools of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and that of Aristippos (c. 435-366 BCE), the latter known as the Cyrenaic school after the Cyrene, the Libyan birthplace of Aristippos. Aristippos was a disciple of Aristotle and apparently a bit of an entrepreneur, because he became the first of his master’s disciples to require a salary to teach philosophy to others.
Hedonism is considered a variety of Eudaimonism, ευδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which in Greek meant something like "good spirit" or "happy spirit". Ευδαιμονία also meant simply "happiness". Eudaimonism in classical Greek philosophy was the notion that happiness was the highest good and was very common among the classical philosophers. But happiness was understood primarily as an inner condition and ordered within an ethical structure. Aristotle said that ευδαιμονία was "activity in accordance with virtue".
The happiness of having a good spirit was a contrast to the guilt-ridden sense of the human state of being that Christianity manifested in many form, from St. Paul to Kierkegaard and beyond. This high valuation of happiness is a major aspect of Greek philosophy that Friedrich Nietzsche made his own, which he contrasted with the gloomy spirit of Christianity.
Hedonism was a variation of eudaimonism, which emphasized the individual’s achievement of pleasure. Marcuse quotes Diogenes Laërtius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers) defining the thought of the Cyrenaic school:
Our end is particular pleasure, whereas happiness is the sum total of all individual pleasures, in which are included both past and future pleasures. Particular pleasure is desirable for its own sake, whereas happiness is desirable not for its own sake, but for the sake of particular pleasures.But the Epicurean version of the philosophy emphasized both the achievement of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. As Marcuse explains it:
The undifferentiated gratification of whatever wants are given is all too often obviously followed by pain, whose magnitude is the basis for a differentiation of individual pleasures. There are wants and desires whose satisfaction is succeeded by pain that only serves to stimulate new desires, destroying man's peace of mind and health.It is this Epicureanism of which Thomas Jefferson spoke when he wrote that the elderly are natural hedonists, i.e., seeking to avoid the pains that come with old age.
Hedonism is popularly identified with egotism and frivolous self-indulgence. But it is also a serious philosophical trend, which greatly influenced the utilitarianism of the classical liberal thinkers Jeremy Bentham ("the greatest good for the greatest number") und John Stuart Mill. Still, Marcuse reminds us that the Greek philosophy of hedonism did develop in a particular society: "Radical hedonism was formulated in the ancient world and draws a moral conclusion from the slave economy. Labor and happiness are essentially separated. They belong to different modes of existence. Some men are slaves in their essence, others are free men." (Paragraph corrected 04/07/2015 to add the world "influenced.")
A defining characteristic of the Frankfurt School was their application of the findings of psychoanalysis to social and political theory. The pleasure principle and the reality principle are two key aspects of Freud’s understanding of the functioning of the mind. The id operates on the pleasure principle seeking the immediate satisfaction of desires. The ego balances the demands of the id against the reality principle imposed by the demands of the world and internalized in the specialized part of the ego that Freud called the superego.
The Frankfurt School, and Marcuse in particular, believed that the existing order of society demanded too much suppression of the pleasure principle for the sake of existing social relationships. The reality principle is not an absolute. It includes the demands of the existing society in which the individual grows up and lives. They believed that the tradeoff most individuals are forced to make between the pleasure principle (which also includes the satisfaction of basic needs like hunger and shelter!) and the reality principle were far too heavily weighed toward the latter.
One can see the "On Hedonism" essay as reflecting that viewpoint and placing it in a philosophical framework. And he draws on contemporary psychology in the essay: "Nowhere does the connection between the devaluation of enjoyment and its social justification manifest itself as clearly as in the interpretation of sexual pleasure."
He describes the applicability of the hedonist philosophy to Frankfurt School critical theory as follows:
Hedonism embodies a correct judgment about society. That the receptivity of sensuality and not the spontaneity of reason is the source of happiness results from antagonistic work relations. They are the real form of the attained level of human reason. It is in them that the extent of possible freedom and possible happiness is decided. If this form is one in which the productive forces are disposed of in the interest of the smallest social groups, in which the majority of men are separated from the means of production, and in which labor is performed not in accordance with the capacities and needs of individuals but according to the requirements of the process of profitable production, then happiness cannot be general within it. Happiness is restricted to the sphere of consumption.But that consumption can also provide pleasure in a way that reinforces the existing order, with the old techniques of bread and circuses updated by developing technology:
There are many ways in which the ruled strata can be educated to diversion and substitute gratification. Here sports and a wide variety of permitted popular entertainment fulfill their historical function. In authoritarian states sadistic terror against enemies of the regime has found unforeseen modes of organized discharge. At the movies the common man can regularly participate in the glamour of the world of the stars and yet be aware at the same time that it is only a film and that there, too, there is splendor, bitterness, trouble, guilt, atonement, and the triumph of the good.He continues directly to say:
The labor process, in which the laborer's organs atrophy and are coarsened, guarantees that the sensuousness of the lower strata does not develop beyond the technically necessary minimum. What is allowed beyond this as immediate enjoyment is circumscribed by the penal code.Marcuse would modify though not abandon this viewpoint in the later context of the post-Second World War "affluent society."
This 1938 essay also finds in hedonism a kind of utopian criticism of society, which Marcuse expresses as follows:
The designation of happiness as the condition of the comprehensive gratification of the individual’s needs and wants is abstract and incorrect as long as it accepts needs and wants as ultimate data in their present form. For as such they are beyond neither good and evil nor true and false. As historical facts they are subject to questioning as to their ‘right’: Are they of such a sort that their gratification can fulfill the subjective and objective potentialities of individuals? For many forms of want characteristic of the prevailing human condition, this question would have to be answered in the negative in view of the already attained stage of social development. For the latter makes possible a truer happiness than that which men attain for themselves today. Pleasure in the abasement of another as well as self-abasement under a stronger will, pleasure in the manifold surrogates for sexuality, in meaningless sacrifices, in the heroism of war are false pleasures because the drives and needs that fulfill themselves in them make men less free, blinder, and more wretched than they have to be. They are the drives and needs of individuals who were raised in an antagonistic society. To the extent to which they do not completely disappear in a new form of social organization, modes of their gratification are conceivable in which the most extreme potentialities of men can really unfold happiness. This liberation of potentialities is a matter of social practice. What men, with their developed sensuous and psychic organs and the wealth created by their work, can undertake to attain the highest measure of happiness rests with this practice. Understood in this way, happiness can no longer or in any way be merely subjective: it enters the realm of men’s communal thought and action. [my emphasis]Formulations like these – "modes of gratification ... in which the most extreme potentialities of men can really unfold happiness" - are part of what makes Marcuse’s work so
He goes on to discuss the dilemma of how unjust societies shape the wants and perceived needs of individuals in a way that raises a real issue, but also suggests that utopian edge to his thought, which he recognizes in this passage by invoking the “realm of necessity”:
That the true interest of individuals is the interest of freedom, that true individual freedom can coexist with real general freedom and, indeed, is possible only in conjunction with it, that happiness ultimately consists in freedom – these are not propositions of philosophical anthropology about the nature of man but descriptions of a historical situation which humanity has achieved for itself in the struggle with nature. The individuals whose happiness is at stake in making good use of this situation have grown up in the school of capitalism. To the high intensification and differentiation of their abilities and of their world corresponds the social shackling of this development. Insofar as unfreedom is already present in wants and not just in their gratification, they must be the first to be liberated – not through an act of education or of the moral renewal of man but through an economic and political process encompassing the disposal over the means of production by the community, the reorientation of the productive process toward the needs and wants of the whole society, the shortening of the working day, and the active participation of the individuals in the administration of the whole. When all present subjective and objective potentialities of development have been unbound, the needs and wants themselves will change. Those based on the social compulsion of repression, on injustice, and on filth and poverty would necessarily disappear. There may still be the sick, the insane, and the criminal. The realm of necessity persists; struggle with nature and even among men continues. [my emphasis]He describes his view of tragedy in history in a way that celebrates the constructively non-conformist, also one of the most attractive features of his work:
For Hegel, then, the struggle for the higher generality, or form of society, of the future becomes in the present the cause of particular individuals and groups, and this constitutes the tragic situation of world-historical persons. They attack social conditions in which – even if badly – the life of the whole reproduces itself. They fight against a concrete form of reason without empirical proof of the practicability of the future form which they represent. They offend against that which, within limits at least, has proven true. Their rationality necessarily operates in a particular, irrational, explosive form, and their critique of decadence and anarchy appears anarchic and destructive. Individuals who hold so fast to the Idea that it permeates their existence are unyielding and stubborn. Common sense cannot distinguish between them and criminals, and in fact in the given order they are criminals like Socrates in Athens. [my emphasis]Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, hedonism, herbert marcuse
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