The Rationality of Philosophy^†

^†This previously unpublished lecture of fourteen pages, hand titled “Inaugural Address, UCSD February 1966,” is maintained in the Herbert Marcuse Archive at the Archivzentrum of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. Lektorieren provided by Peter-Erwin Jansen. Thank you to Peter Marcuse for permission to publish this document.

Introduction

This never-before published lecture of Herbert Marcuse speaks to an issue that is interwoven throughout his entire oeuvre: the role of philosophy in social transformation. This is perhaps a surprisingly thorny issue, with many practitioners of philosophy smoothly gliding into the situation he describes in One-Dimensional Man, of plain-language (read: banal) word games.¹ Marcuse repeatedly reminds us of Marx’s insight that the job of philosophy is to change the world; the question for Marcuse is what are the prospects for how that might happen. This question is not only practical, but in a one-dimensional society with its lack of opposition, also a question of what is possible. These two prongs are related, since the possible is only so when predicated on what is practical. This lecture is an attempt to address that real-world question of the role of philosophy by offering a two-part appraisal: a method of critical philosophy and a justification of that philosophy. This introduction serves as a guide through Marcuse’s line of argument.

For Marcuse, a philosophical method must be essentially concerned with the prospect of human freedom. This is because the desire for freedom (of thought, and subsequently, action) is essential to engaging in philosophical thought in the first place. The desire for freedom, for that which might be otherwise and the chance to make it so, highlights for Marcuse what philosophy is not. In the lecture, Marcuse points out that philosophy is neither common sense nor purely descriptive in the scientific sense. Philosophy is not common sense, because the desire for a qualitatively better world requires transcending the common sense of a given situation, and the scientific description of which can only reinforce the status quo. Instead, philosophy should integrate the contextual experiences of peoples’ lifeworlds as social beings. The logic behind this claim is that this is the basis of philosophic thought in the human condition; the urge to think otherwise comes from a negation of the context of the established facts of common sense. Philosophy that operates under the pretense of using common sense to apprehend an external world in order to make sense of the current context (that is, make the world conform to the established facts), is the same process of how one-dimensional thought obfuscates the human/nature dialectic. If philosophy is only descriptive or a repackaging of common sense, then social progress is not possible because thought does not attempt to supersede the established reality, and in one-dimensional fashion, can only affirm it. This is the philosophical consequence of Marcuse’s concepts of the affirmative character of culture, and the unhappy consciousness.² The well-worn example of “there is no alternative” as a neoliberal slogan is not only practical, saying that state socialism is no longer a viable alternative to market society, but suggests that alternatives to market society are simply unthinkable.

For Marcuse, philosophy needs to be negative, in the sense that it should serve to transcend the given facts of a specific context, and moving philosophy away from a value-free instrumental rationality and the cul-de-sac of common sense means that philosophy must reorient how it understands truth. Truth is not a cataloging of empirical findings, but rather a philosophy of freedom finds root in articulating the potentials of emancipated people and therefore requires: (1) establishing the potential of emancipated human beings based on the contextual actualities of those human beings; (2) formulating praxes whereby that emancipation might take place, to move from the actual to the potential; and (3) an ability to judge those praxes in light of social context. Rooting the possible in the actual avoids the pitfalls of utopianism, and can train the philosopher’s inquiry to focus on concrete steps to achieve these goals.

Philosophy is therefore “unscientific” inasmuch as it deals with teleological questions, and entertains notions of values, the good, the beautiful. In other words, it is unscientific to the extent that it is political. Marcuse gives a brief survey of the history of philosophic thought as a negative force that makes meaning of the world, and makes judgment about what we do in the world. If philosophy is value-free, it is not political, and cannot serve as a negative force to the established facts. If philosophy does not serve as a negative force, then it serves as an affirmative voice, and becomes one-dimensional.

At the end of his lecture, Marcuse notes that he has both indicted and defended philosophy, but the indictment was in its defense. This means that Marcuse finds philosophy inadequate to its task, for the reasons discussed above. The indictment of philosophy comes from a scientific encroachment of instrumental rationalizing of the lifeworld, and the retreat of philosophic thought away from real-world problems. That indictment calls forth a reanimation of philosophy as a political realm of contestation of values, potentialities, and new modes of life. The justification for this kind of philosophy, for Marcuse, is a result of employing his method of philosophy. We need a critical philosophy of freedom because philosophy as it is currently does not offer visions of better worlds, nor how to get from where we are now to where we would like to go. We must, in other words, engage in a philosophy of freedom in order to rescue philosophy generally, so that it may live up to its potential.

The Rationality of Philosophy

Rationality:

•	To designate the way in which philosophy selects, approaches and analyzes3 its problems.
•	To present the justification of philosophy—its right to continue to function as a branch, not only of the academic establishment but also of the “culture” of our time.

This second sense of rationality implies that philosophy today is in need of justification.

Two preliminary remarks:

I speak of philosophy as such; in reality: only various (and even conflicting) schools, methods, truth. But: the common denominator in all of them, sufficiently substantial to contrast all philosophy with that which is not philosophy.

I do not define philosophy in terms of a special field of investigation, special region of objects: everything can become the legitimate object of philosophy but in becoming object of philosophy, its objectivity is radically changed: it is no longer that which it was to common sense in the scientific experiment, in a sociological field study.

Philosophy suspends and even subverts common sense as well as scientific experience, substituting a very different experience, namely: philosophy experiences all facts, cases, relations in the context of the human condition; and it experiences the given facts in the logic of a fundamental dichotomy, contradiction in the human condition: that between the potential and the actual, expressed as conflict between essence and appearance, universal and particular, idea and reality, substance and accidence,⁴ a contradiction which is demonstrable in the universe of the given facts, “empirically.”

Thus philosophy is first defined by a specific experience,

•	Not of “something” but of objectivity itself.
•	Defined by a specific consciousness; the unhappy consciousness.

It is not a personal but rather a historical, objective unhappiness in which the need, the compulsion to think philosophically, arises. To be sure the philosopher is first an individual human being in his own individual, personal situation. At this level the need to think philosophically may be a personal one: a job within the establishment social division of labor.

But: the personal situation is what it is under the impact of his “time,” his Lebenswelt⁵ which is man’s Lebenswelt: the human condition in the historical continuum. Consequently, the philosopher does not choose his approach and his problems arbitrarily. His material is given to him as that of his Lebenswelt. And in this Lebenswelt is reflected in different historical forms and stages, the fundamental dichotomy in the human condition: the conflict between the potential and the actual.

This is the general formula for a banal truism. They are always good things which may be possible but which are not translated into reality: “one cannot have everything.” Such “philosophy” is the mark of the happy consciousness which is a mutilated, abstract consciousness. The world is what it is (and only what is is!), is everything that is the case: let’s make the best of it!

In contrast, philosophy denies that the established facts are all the facts. Moreover, to philosophic experience the facts are negative in that they deny, distort the real possibilities of man. Those which if translated into reality, would free the human existence from prevailing ignorance, serv […]⁶ it […]⁷ falsehood. Consequently, “truth” is in the potential rather than the actual and is not only an order of thought, a quality of propositions but also an order of thought, a quality of practice.

It follows that the philosopher learning, knowing and analyzing the established facts must transcend them, dissociate himself from them, “judge” them in the light of the potentialities which they deny or distort; and he finds these potentialities demonstrable in the analysis of the facts: provided the analysis is not from the beginning prejudiced in the direction of a specific idea of “exactness” and “purity.”

Now science too starts with questioning and transcending the immediately given facts; science too subverts common sense. But the scientific method establishes its truth by excluding, reducing or translating a whole dimension of experience: that of the non-quantifiable, that of “values,” goals, ends. The philosophical analysis is a qualitative one. It considers the secondary as well as the primary qualities, values as well as facts (as facts!); goals as well as data. By virtue of this character the philosophic analysis is a “finalistic” one. It is not scientifically neutral. It has a specific Telos. For philosophy, too, truth is the Telos of its effort, but this truth is the right theory of man and nature as the theory of the human universe and the philosophical quest is for the conditions under which man can best fulfill his specifically human faculties and aspirations. These conditions are objective ones because there is such a thing as “man” being a (potentially) rational animal finding himself under circumstances of nature and society which are general at various degrees and which allow the development of general concepts with general validity. This is the basis for philosophy’s claim to have its own objective truth. And now I shall try to show how this truth and the philosophic method of verification differ from the scientific method.

I said that philosophy has the same objects, the same field as the other sciences. For example: nature as the totality of things appearing in space and time. The scientific approach to nature is guided by the projection of nature as quantifiable totality to be expressed in mathematical propositions. The human person enters only as observer and as such a rather disturbing though perhaps unavoidable factor. The philosophical approach does not project nature as quantifiable totality; it does not reduce or translate it into primary qualities. It takes nature as that which it is in unpurged experience: field of struggle for survival but also of mastery, fulfillment, beauty and terror.

•	As dimension of material things in space and time.
•	As dimension of life.
•	As aesthetic dimension, as historical dimension.

In the philosophical conception of nature, primary qualities have no privileged status before secondary qualities: color is color and not light waves, et cetera, a forest is a forest and thus essentially different from its chemical and other components. In short: nature is taken as objectivity for a subject which as human being has its human Reason; its ends, values, sufferings, its hopes.

Now it is clear that if such “unscientific” suspect “subjective” items are given the status of facts to be interpreted “objectively” subject to “true” or “false.” Then the rationality of philosophy must be “unscientific” because these “value-facts” cannot be translated into statements of mathematical exactness and the subjective factor cannot be eliminated from them and should not be eliminated because it is part of the objective truth. The rationality of philosophy is indeed “unscientific” and inexact—as is the human reality!

The philosophical method includes such “inexact” faculties as the imagination.

Kant, not really a very wild philosopher, defined the imagination as the “central faculty of the mind”: a source of a priori, universally valid knowledge. Imagination is the faculty of retaining and identifying representations of objects which are not immediately present. Thus imagination not only makes unified experience of a unified universe possible, it also projects on the basis of remembered facts and “experimenting” with their real possibilities, new and other ways of rationally ordering the human reality, man and nature. Imagination in the rational faculty of freedom!

Today the fundamental original relation between philosophy and freedom, philosophical and free thought, seems hard to grasp. But freedom was a philosophical “fact” long before it was claimed as a political goal:

•	As the capacity to distinguish essence and appearance.
•	To define a thing as what it is.
•	To judge things according to what they are thus defined! “Free” is first the being which can form concepts of things and consequently project and define their possibilities, project and define their transformation.

Logic itself was such a first transformation,

•	Developing the correct forms of thinking.
•	Defining “true” and “false” as conditions of all valid theory and practice.

Structurally freedom of thought precedes freedom in practice. Man must be free to project ends before he can set out to achieve them and this projection in order to be “valid” must be based on the (true) concept of things.

Thus the rationality of philosophy⁸ involves human freedom as essential factor. And therefore philosophy can never imitate or attain the “pure” exactness of the exact sciences. Philosophy as the rationality of freedom,

•	Projects rather than defines.
•	Asks the right questions rather than gives the right answers (which can be given and tested only in the historical practice).
•	Is ambiguous and ambivalent and “open” as is human freedom within and against the determination of nature. But philosophy has its own exactness which distinguishes it from all vague and confused thinking, namely the philosophical propositions and the analysis arriving at them must be at every step logically consistent (although the philosophical logic is not identical with formal and symbolic logic) and they must be verifiable by (possible) experience.

However, “experience,” not in the reduced, purified sense of observing, measuring, computing that which is or occurs, but “experience” in the full sense of knowing what is happening and what did happen to man, to his needs and faculties, his fears and his hopes. This experience gives rise to the three basic philosophical questions:

What can I know?

What shall I do?

What can I hope?

The “I” in these questions is never merely the contingent individual nor do “can” and “shall” merely refer to his personal situation. They refer to objective possibilities open to man as rational being in a given historical situation.

In other words: the words with which I began philosophy analyzes the actual in the light of the potential which is demonstrable in the actual as its real possibilities in terms of Reason and Freedom.

As the guiding philosophical concepts Reason and Freedom are identical:

•	Reason: the intellectual faculty to understand the facts and the factors which make the facts.
•	Freedom: the faculty to think and act in accordance with his knowledge recognizing the “negativity” of the given facts and of overcoming it in the ever renewed search for a more rational order.

Freedom of thought begins as critical philosophical thought and at all decisive stages in the development of thought. Philosophy meant a liberation of thought from irrational, enslaving facts and conditions.

Examples:

•	Presocratic thought: two-pronged attack on the tyranny of common sense and mythology, culminating in the discovery of the Logos as the true way of thinking and being in contradiction to common sense and immediate experience. The senses which perceive only particular facts falsify reality. The truth becomes accessible only in reversing sense perception: the forms of things: the origin of scientific thought in philosophy!
•	Middle Ages: the slow and painful fight to free thought from dogmatism culminating in the destruction of metaphysics by the nominalistic schools: birth of empiricism; the “experiment.”
•	Descartes: the human commitment to doubt, the absolute need to question, to suspend faith in the given facts. “Truth” is vested in the free thinking Ego.
•	Kant—Hegel9: the Copernican revolution in philosophy: objects must conform to our knowledge. Objectivity is constituted by subjectivity. Whatever rational order and necessity exist in the world are by virtue of the theory and practice of the rational subject.
•	Hegel: only the historical practice of man is translating the ideas of Reason and Freedom into reality.

I stop this brief historical survey at this point of the development because what follows is the retreat rather than the progress of philosophy in the historical effort.

We may—we must ask the question: did philosophy achieve what it set out to achieve, namely to prepare the intellectual (and “political”) ground for the realization of Reason and Freedom?

Looking at philosophy today, philosophy (at least in its most prevalent and fashionable schools) seems to have very little to do with the idea and function of philosophy as I presented them. The rising tide of authoritarianism seems to affect philosophy too:

•	Withdrawal from social and political problems.
•	Occupation with subtle (and harmless) banalities.
•	Suffering (or rejoicing) the illusion of mathematical purity and exactness at the price of abstracting from the substance: the human condition which is the referent of all philosophic truth and falsehood.

The separation of science from philosophy bears fruit and is paying off once it was the prerequisite of all progress, liberation of the mind from a stagnant and repressive system, from irrational ends and illusory causes.

For science this meant freedom for the pursuit of truth [which means]¹⁰ the understanding and transformation of nature with no other than “technical” limitations. But it also meant freedom from all “values” other than those of the scientific method itself and freedom from responsibility for the “unscientific” human condition.

For philosophy the separation from science meant decline to the status of perhaps interesting and elevating but rather unreal speculation or decline to a merely analytical effort carefully avoiding that synthesis which, according to Kant, is the very core of philosophical rationality.

Now we have gotten used to the idea that “values” are unscientific, a matter of personal or group preference to be discussed rationally only in terms of subjective preference and what is involved in it and that the “ought” must in principle be divorced from the “is.” But truth itself is a value (even a biological one: for the preservation and protection of human life) and the “is” itself as the “copula” in true propositions implies a judgment (in the literal, juristic sense) namely that the truth ought to be found, demonstrated and acted upon. Truth is an end-in-itself only as end of humanitas itself not as ever larger and ever more exact knowledge but knowledge which may lead to a more rational human existence in a more rational world. Divorced from this ground truth becomes indeed “neutral” but a neutral instrument which lends itself to all sorts of extraneous ends.

I am discussing the rationality of philosophy: I do not know whether science today is moving the world toward Reason and Freedom but I believe that philosophy today must lose its good conscience, abandon its sophisticated puritanism, and its anemic concept of reality and remember the twofold roots and the twofold function of philosophic thought: man as rational animal [which means]¹¹ political animal.

This basic definition (which defines the theory as well as the practice of man) has guided philosophy from the Greeks to Hegel. It posits the Logos at theoretical and practical Reason in one. Man is the thing that thinks and thus the only thing capable of knowing the truth and living in accordance with it. But man is also the only thing that can fail to know the truth and that can live in falsehood. And man thinks and acts in truth and falsehood only as a social being. The Polis enters even into his most abstract and pure concepts not as an external force (concern of the sociologist, et cetera) but as the very soil on which his thinking arises and moves.

Philosophical thought (like any other scientific thought) certainly can and must transcend this soil and framework but this transcending abstraction does not leave the political concreteness behind. It takes it along as material to be comprehended and transformed by critical thought.

By virtue of this internal connection between philosophy and the social reality philosophical thought is implicitly political thought although in a sense very different from all sociological interpretation. This does not mean that the philosopher should again become politically active in the affairs of his city—state. He would cut a strange figure in what is politics today!

What I mean is rather that pure theoretical philosophical thought if it is sustained without compromise as the effort of autonomous thinking generated by the unmutilated experience of the given facts will in its own course of analysis help to break the tyranny of the given facts over the mind of man and confront the philosopher with the necessity to test theoretical Reason and intellectual Freedom (capitals!) by contrasting these high ideas with the conditions under which man lives and is supposed to think and act and hope… that is, contrasting the ideas with the real, the social reality.

That is to say: the philosophical concepts must preserve the tension between idea and reality, theoretical truth and empirical fact and they must elucidate what is wrong with the facts in terms of their distance and conflict with Reason. Thus it appears that the involvement, the commitment of philosophy to its Lebenswelt is not a direct, immediate one; perhaps one can even say that philosophy is the less authentic the more directly it is engaged, existential, political! Thought remains the only legitimate domain of philosophy but thought which is saturated with the material reality (which is the historical reality). Thought which tries to comprehend this reality in is indissoluble materiality without reducing it to words or speech or behavior or meaning and without subordinating the truth of theory to the authority of established practice but also without forgetting that (authentic) theory itself involves practice.

This brief (and prejudiced!) discussion of philosophy as the critique of theoretical and practical Reason may allow an answer of the question: does philosophy still have any justification (other than in terms of jobs in the academic division of labor)?

The question is suggested on two grounds:

(1)	The progress in science which seems to have preempted the field of philosophy.
(2)	The remoteness of philosophy from the contemporary predicament of man.

Re (1): science cannot have preempted the field of philosophy because both have the same field in essentially different modes of projection and verification. Science can correct and invalidate certain philosophical notion (the way it invalidated Aristotelian physics) but this does not cancel or invalidate the problems raised and discussed by A[ristotle]. Moreover, science cannot answer any of the basic philosophical questions because these questions are ultimately “teleological” ones: they refer to the goals and values open to man as a historical being. Thus, they also involve the “good” and the “beautiful.”

Re (2): I said that the involvement of philosophy is never a direct one. So it is not the personal commitment of the philosopher which is at stake, nor the lack or inadequacy of a social or political philosophy, but rather the dominant “methods” of philosophy which seem to bypass the possibility of developing adequate critical concepts of reality. This “bypassing” manifests itself in two apparently opposite forms:

•	In the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: by orienting its concepts in the established universe of discourse and behavior without transcending it toward the constitutive factors behind the facts.
•	In the “mathematization” of philosophy: the fallacy of misplaced abstractness.
•	Inasmuch as it abstracts from the concrete without ever regaining it in its “concept.”

I said that the philosopher does not choose arbitrarily his approach. I believe that the unreal purity of philosophy in both forms is philosophy’s defensive reaction against overwhelming (and negative!) power of the established reality which seems to condemn all critical theoretical understanding to ridicule.

Now what does all this add up to?

Has philosophy ever played the (political, historical) role which I attributed to it? It has been said that the two perhaps most sweeping changes in the history of the West were initiated by philosophy, namely the transition from the Greek city state to the multinational empire of Alexander and since the end of the nineteenth century the worldwide movement toward a global society without conflicting classes. Without sharing the philosophical “hybrid” which makes philosophy responsible for these changes I should like to point up the (big) kernel of truth in it:

(1)

By the time of the Macedonian Conquest Greek philosophy had discovered and developed conceptual thinking, that is general concepts as the intellectual instruments for understanding reality not only as a world of facts but also of real possibilities: discovery of the (true) universal in (and above) the particular things and conditions and culminating in the concept of man as man. This intellectual development transcended the narrow confines of the city state undermined the validity and the rationality of its institutions and contained the idea of a multinational empire an idea which in conjunction with the material forces of the period could be translated into reality. Thus it was not the (directly) political philosophy of Plato’s Republic nor Aristotle’s Politics which provided the ideational model for the historical change but rather the internal theoretical development of philosophic thought.

(2)

The debt which Marx owes to Hegel is all too familiar. Sufficient to point out that here too it was the apparently most abstract, most speculative, most philosophical and least political aspect of Hegel’s philosophy which came to provide the ideational model, the intellectual weapon for a critical and general concept of reality and for the theory of social and political change.

Conclusion

Philosophy indeed cannot change the world but it can comprehend it in a more radical manner than any other science. Inasmuch as philosophy is based on unpurged, unmutilated experience and inasmuch as philosophy is capable of aiming at the totality of facts,

•	that is, The facts as well as the factors behind them.
•	The potential as well as the actual.
•	The rationality of the “ought” as well as the “is.”
•	The “ought” and the “potential” not as moral or transcendental obligations but as “real” historical possibilities and imperatives!

Let me repeat my confession:

I have presented the ideal rather than the real, the potential rather than the actual philosophy, but I have taken the “ideal” from the real historical achievements of philosophy. I admit again that present day philosophy seems rather removed from his historical ideal but I started out by saying that my talk would be indictment as well as defense!

And the indictment was in defense of philosophy.

Notes

^† This previously unpublished lecture of fourteen pages, hand titled “Inaugural Address, UCSD February 1966,” is maintained in the Herbert Marcuse Archive at the Archivzentrum of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. Lektorieren provided by Peter-Erwin Jansen. Thank you to Peter Marcuse for permission to publish this document.

¹ The whole of Chapter 7 of One-Dimensional Man takes up the descent of analytic philosophy into meaningless word games, but when noting the “academic boredom” of these word games, Marcuse makes the keen insight that ironically, empirical philosophy is unempirical because its tortuous abstraction can never adequately describe the situation at hand adequately in the plain language it requires (p. 182).

² These insights are a continuation of the work Marcuse began in the 1930s in the piece, “The Affirmative Character of Culture.”

³ All underlining original in Marcuse.

⁴ All passages in italics are handwritten additions by Marcuse.

⁵ “Lebenswelt” is always in German.

⁶ Letters are missing.

⁷ Not readable.

⁸ Starts with this handwritten sentence by Marcuse.

⁹ Marcuse mentioned Kant and Hegel together. Then Hegel again as the new paradigm of historical practice.

¹⁰ Equal sign in the script.

¹¹ Equal sign in the script.