the Cyrenaic, both of which he treated at length in the essay. (He was also in the company of an unlikely ally in the person of John Stuart Mill, who had made a similar distinction in his Utilitarianism.) As he explained, “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.”76
But, as might be expected, Marcuse denounced the ahistorical belief that the higher forms of happiness could be achieved under present conditions. In fact, so he argued, hedonism’s restriction of happiness to consumption and leisure to the exclusion of productive labor expressed a valid judgment about a society in which labor remained alienated. What was invalid, however, was the assumption that this society was eternal. How historical change would come about was of course difficult to predict, because “it appears that individuals raised to be integrated into the antagonistic labor process cannot be judges of their own happiness.”77 Consciousness was therefore incapable of changing itself; the impetus had to come from the outside:
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.78
Here Marcuse seemed to come perilously close to the stress on objective social development, which more orthodox Marxists had maintained, but which the Institut had attacked by emphasizing the subjective element in praxis. In fact, to digress momentarily, the key problem of how change might occur in a society that controlled the consciousness of its members remained a troubling element in much of Marcuse’s later work, especially One-Dimensional Man.79
Whatever the means to achieve true happiness might be, it could only be reached when freedom was also universally attained. “The reality of happiness,” Marcuse wrote, “is the reality of freedom as the self-determination of liberated humanity in its common struggle with nature.” And since freedom was synonymous with the realization of rationality, “in their completed form both, happiness and reason, coincide.”80 What Marcuse was advocating here was that convergence of particular and general interests usually known as “positive freedom.”81 Individual happiness was one moment in the totality of positive freedom; reason was the other.
The Frankfurt School’s stress on reason was one of the salient characteristics of its work.82 Here its debt to Hegel was most clearly demonstrated. Horkheimer’s third major objection to Lebensphilosophie, it will be recalled, was that its overreaction to the deterioration of rationality had led to the rejection of reason as such. As Horkheimer would repeat over and over again during his career, rationality was at the root of any progressive social theory. What he meant by reason, however, was never easy to grasp for an audience unschooled in the traditions of classical German philosophy. Implicitly, Horkheimer referred more often than not to the idealists’ distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason). By Verstand, Kant and Hegel had meant a lower faculty of the mind, which structured the phenomenal world according to common sense. To the understanding, the world consisted of finite entities identical only with themselves and totally opposed to all other things. It thus failed to penetrate immediacy to grasp the dialectical relations beneath the surface. Vernunft, on the other hand, signified a faculty that went beyond mere appearances to this deeper reality. Although Kant differed from Hegel in rejecting the possibility of reconciling the world of phenomena with the transcendent, noumenal sphere of “things-in-themselves,” he shared Hegel’s belief in the superiority of Vernunft over Verstand. Of all the Institut’s members, Marcuse was perhaps most drawn to the classical notion of reason. In 1937, he attempted to define it and turn it in a materialist direction in the following way:
Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under the name of reason it conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason. . . . As the given world was bound up with rational thought and, indeed, ontologically dependent on it, all that contradicted reason or was not rational was posited as something that had to be overcome. Reason was established as a critical tribunal.83
Here Marcuse seemed to be arguing for an identity theory, which contrasted sharply with the Frankfurt School’s general stress on nonidentity. In fact, in Marcuse’s writings the aversion to identity was far fainter than in Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s.84 Still, in their work as well, the sanctity of reason and the reconciliation it implied always appeared as a Utopian ideal. Jews, after all, may be prohibited from naming or describing God, but they do not deny his existence. In all of the Institut’s writings, the standard was a society made rational, in the sense that German philosophy had traditionally defined that term. Reason, as the passage above indicates, was the “critical tribunal” on which Critical Theory was primarily based. The irrationality of the current society was always challenged by the “negative” possibility of a truly rational alternative.
If Horkheimer was reluctant to affirm the complete identity of subject and object, he was more certain in rejecting their strict dualistic opposition, which Descartes had bequeathed to modern thought.85 Implicit in the Cartesian legacy, he argued, was the reduction of reason to its subjective dimension. This was the first step in driving rationality away from the world and into contemplative inwardness. It led to an eternal separation of essence and appearance, which fostered the noncritical acceptance of the status quo.86 As a result, rationality increasingly came to be identified with the common sense of Verstand instead of the more ambitiously synthetic Vernunft. In fact, the late nineteenth-century irrationalists’ attack on reason had been aimed primarily at its reduction to the analytical, formal, divisive Verstand. This was a criticism Horkheimer could share, although he did not reject analytical rationality out of hand. “Without definiteness and the order of concepts, without Verstand” he wrote, “there is no thought, and no dialectic.”87 Even Hegel’s dialectical logic, which Critical Theory embraced, did not simply negate formal logic. The Hegelian aufheben meant preservation as well as transcendence and cancellation. What Horkheimer did reject was the complete identification of reason and logic with the limited power of Verstand.
Throughout its history, the Institut carried on a spirited defense of reason on two fronts. In addition to the attack by the irrationalists, which by the twentieth century had degenerated into outright obscurantist mindlessness, another and perhaps more serious threat was posed from a different quarter. With the breakdown of the Hegelian synthesis in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new stress on empirically derived social science had developed alongside the increasing domination of natural science over men’s lives. Positivism denied the validity of the traditional idea of reason as Vernunft, which it dismissed as empty metaphysics. At the time of the Frankfurt School the most significant proponents of this point of view were the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who were forced to emigrate to the United States at about the same time.88 In America their impact was far greater than the Institut’s because of the congruence of their ideas with the basic traditions of American philosophy. In later years Horkheimer took pains to establish the similarities between such native schools as pragmatism and Logical Positivism.89
His first major broadside against Logical Positivism came in 1937 in the Zeitschrift.90 Once again his sensitivity to the changing
