Reason and Revolution

Herbert Marcuse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134971329
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This classic book is Marcuse's masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day. Marcuse brilliantly illuminates the implications of Hegel's ideas with later developments in European thought, particularily with Marxist theory.

PART I

The Foundations of Hegal’s Philosophy

Introduction

1. THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL SETTING

GERMAN idealism has been called the theory of the French Revolution. This does not imply that Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel furnished a theoretical interpretation of the French Revolution, but that they wrote their philosophy largely as a response to the challenge from France to reorganize the state and society on a rational basis, so that social and political institutions might accord with the freedom and interest of the individual. Despite their bitter criticism of the Terror, the German idealists unanimously welcomed the revolution, calling it the dawn of a new era, and they all linked their basic philosophical principles to the ideals that it advanced.

The ideas of the French Revolution thus appear in the very core of the idealistic systems, and, to a great extent, determine their conceptual structure. As the German idealists saw it, the French Revolution not only abolished feudal absolutism, replacing it with the economic and political system of the middle class, but it completed what the German Reformation had begun, emancipating the individual as a self-reliant master of his life. Man’s position in the world, the mode of his labor and enjoyment, was no longer to depend on some external authority, but on his own free rational activity. Man had passed the long period of immaturity during which he had been victimized by overwhelming natural and social forces, and had become the autonomous subject of his own development. From now on, the struggle with nature and with social organization was to be guided by his own progress in knowledge. The world was to be an order of reason.

The ideals of the French Revolution found their resting place in the processes of industrial capitalism. Napoleon’s empire liquidated the radical tendencies and at the same time consolidated the economic consequences of the revolution. The French philosophers of the period interpreted the realization of reason as the liberation of industry. Expanding industrial production seemed capable of providing all the necessary means to gratify human wants. Thus, at the same time that Hegel elaborated his system, Saint-Simon in France was exalting industry as the sole power that could lead mankind to a free and rational society. The economic process appeared as the foundation of reason.

Economic development in Germany lagged far behind that in France and England. The German middle class, weak and scattered over numerous territories with divergent interests, could hardly contemplate a revolution. The few industrial enterprises that existed were but small islands within a protracted feudal system. The individual in his social existence was either enslaved, or was the enslaver of his fellow individuals. As a thinking being, however, he could at least comprehend the contrast between the miserable reality that existed everywhere and the human potentialities that the new epoch had emancipated; and as a moral person, he could, in his private life at least, preserve human dignity and autonomy. Thus, while the French Revolution had already begun to assert the reality of freedom, German idealism was only occupying itself with the idea of it. The concrete historical efforts to establish a rational form of society were here transposed to the philosophical plane and appeared in the efforts to elaborate the notion of reason.

The concept of reason is central to Hegel’s philosophy. He held that philosophical thinking presupposes nothing beyond it, that history deals with reason and with reason alone, and that the state is the realization of reason. These statements will not be understandable, however, so long as reason is interpreted as a pure metaphysical concept, for Hegel’s idea of reason has retained, though in an idealistic form, the material strivings for a free and rational order of life. Robespierre’s deification of reason as the Être suprême is the counterpart to the glorification of reason in Hegel’s system. The core of Hegel’s philosophy is a structure the concepts of which–freedom, subject, mind, notion–are derived from the idea of reason. Unless we succeed in unfolding the content of these ideas and the intrinsic connection among them, Hegel’s system will seem to be obscure metaphysics, which it in fact never was.

Hegel himself related his concept of reason to the French Revolution, and did so with the greatest of emphasis. The revolution had demanded that ‘nothing should be recognized as valid in a constitution except what has to be recognized according to reason’s right.’¹ Hegel further elaborated this interpretation in his lectures on the Philosophy of History: ‘Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e. in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. Anaxagoras had been the first to say that Noũς governs the World; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that Thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.’²

In Hegel’s view, the decisive turn that history took with the French Revolution was that man came to rely on his mind and dared to submit the given reality to the standards of reason. Hegel expounds the new development through a contrast between an employment of reason and an uncritical compliance with the prevailing conditions of life. ‘Nothing is reason that is not the result of thinking.’ Man has set out to organize reality according to the demands of his free rational thinking instead of simply accommodating his thoughts to the existing order and the prevailing values. Man is a thinking being. His reason enables him to recognize his own potentialities and those of his world. He is thus not at the mercy of the facts that surround him, but is capable of subjecting them to a higher standard, that of reason. If he follows its lead, he will arrive at certain conceptions that disclose reason to be antagonistic to the existing state of affairs. He may find that history is a constant struggle for freedom, that man’s individuality requires that he possess property as the medium of his fulfillment, and that all men have an equal right to develop their human faculties. Actually, however, bondage and inequality prevail; most men have no liberty at all and are deprived of their last scrap of property. Consequently the ‘unreasonable’ reality has to be altered until it comes into conformity with reason. In the given case, the existing social order has to be reorganized, absolutism and the remainders of feudalism have to be abolished, free competition has to be established, everyone has to be made equal before the law, and so on.

According to Hegel, the French Revolution enunciated reason’s ultimate power over reality. He sums this up by saying that the principle of the French Revolution asserted that thought ought to govern reality. The implications involved in this statement lead into the very center of his philosophy. Thought ought to govern reality. What men think to be true, right, and good ought to be realized in the actual organization of their societal and individual life. Thinking, however, varies among individuals, and the resulting diversity of individual opinions cannot provide a guiding principle for the common organization of life. Unless man possesses concepts and principles of thought that denote universally valid conditions and norms, his thought cannot claim to govern reality. In line with the tradition of Western philosophy, Hegel believes that such objective concepts and principles exist. Their totality he calls reason.

The philosophies of the French Enlightenment and their revolutionary successors all posited reason as an objective historical force which, once freed from the fetters of despotism, would make the world a place of progress and happiness. They held that ‘the power of reason, and not the force of weapons, will propagate the principles of our glorious revolution.’³ By virtue of its own power, reason would triumph over social irrationality and overthrow the oppressors of mankind. ‘All fictions disappear before truth, and all follies fall before reason.’⁴

The implication, however, that reason will immediately show itself in practice is a dogma unsupported by the course of history. Hegel believed in the invincible power of reason as much as Robespierre did. ‘That faculty which man can call his own, elevated above death and decay, … is able to make decisions of itself. It announces itself as reason. Its law-making depends on nothing else, nor can it take its standards from any other authority on earth or in heaven.’⁵ But to Hegel, reason cannot govern reality unless reality has become rational in itself. This rationality is made possible through the subject’s entering the very content of nature and history. The objective reality is thus also the realization of the subject. It is this conception that Hegel summarized in the most fundamental of his propositions, namely, that Being is, in its substance, a ‘subject.’⁶ The meaning of this proposition can only be understood through an interpretation of Hegel’s Logic, but we shall attempt to give a provisional explanation here that will be expanded later.⁷

The idea of the ‘substance as subject’ conceives reality as a process wherein all being is the unification of contradictory forces. ‘Subject’ denotes not only the epistemological ego or consciousness, but a mode of existence, to wit, that of a self-developing unity in an antagonistic process. Everything that exists is ‘real’ only in so far as it operates as a ‘self’ through all the contradictory relations that constitute its existence. It must thus be considered a kind of ‘subject’ that carries itself forward by unfolding its inherent contradictions. For example, a stone is a stone only in so far as it remains the same thing, a stone, throughout its action and reaction upon the things and processes that interact with it. It gets wet in the rain; it resists the axe; it withstands a certain load before it gives way. Being-a-stone is a continuous holding out against everything that acts on the stone; it is a continuous process of becoming and being a stone. To be sure, the ‘becoming’ is not consummated by the stone as a conscious subject. The stone is changed in its interactions with rain, axe, and load; it does not change itself. A plant, on the other hand, unfolds and develops itself. It is not now a bud, then a blossom, but is rather the whole movement from bud through blossom to decay. The plant constitutes and preserves itself in this movement. It comes much nearer to being an actual ’subject’ than does the stone, for the various stages of the plant’s development grow out of the plant itself; they are its ‘life’ and are not imposed upon it from the outside.

The plant, however, does not ‘comprehend’ this development. It does not ‘realize’ it as its own and, therefore, cannot reason its own potentialities into being. Such ‘realization’ is a process of the true subject and is reached only with the existence of man. Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for he alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of ‘notions.’ His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason. We encounter here the most important category of reason, namely, freedom. Reason presupposes freedom, the power to act in accordance with knowledge of the truth, the power to shape reality in line with its potentialities. The fulfillment of these ends belongs only to the subject who is master of his own development and who understands his own potentialities as well as those of the things around him. Freedom, in turn, presupposes reason, for it is comprehending knowledge, alone, that enables the subject to gain and to wield this power. The stone does not possess it; neither does the plant. Both lack comprehending knowledge and hence real subjectivity. ‘Man, however, knows what he is,–only thus is he real. Reason and freedom are nothing without this knowledge.’⁸

Reason terminates in freedom, and freedom is the very existence of the subject. On the other hand, reason itself exists only through its realization, the process of its being made real. Reason is an objective force and an objective reality only because all modes of being are more or less modes of subjectivity, modes of realization. Subject and object are not undered by an impassable gulf, because the object is in itself a kind of subject and because all types of being culminate in the free ‘comprehensive’ subject who is able to realize reason. Nature thus becomes a medium for the development of freedom.

The life of reason appears in man’s continuous struggle to comprehend what exists and to transform it in accordance with the truth comprehended. Reason is also essentially a historical force. Its fulfillment takes place as a process in the spatio-temporal world, and is, in the last analysis, the whole history o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Part I The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy
• Part II The Rise of social Theory
• Conclusion The End of Hegelianism
• Bibliography
• Index
• Epilogue