FREUD AND CULTUR E
125
of the instinctual life. Similarly, both men assign entirely different
meanings to the crucial concepts believed to lead beyond a lienation.
For example, "freedom" in Fromm refers to a highly sublimated and
special kind of "inner" freedom as it did, say, for Spinoza. Marcuse
uses the term with reference to the instincts unfolding without repression
by social customs and norms. Again, "love" in Marcuse's vocabulary
designates Freud's Eros with a full and unequivocal recognition of the
manifold sexual components of the instinct. Fromm uses the word again
in a highly attenuated, aim-inhibited sense: "productive love" is a com–
posite of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge-but does not in–
clude sex.
It
is well to remember in philosophical con troversies
4
that
two writers can use the same words and speak an entirely different
language.
Yet, despite these differences, Marcuse's essay marks another at–
tempt to resolve the ambiguity which Freud read into the history of
human culture. Marcuse, too, is a utopian thinker; he, too, envisages
a realm of freedom in which the most distinctive features of Freud's
thought, the precariousness, openness, insecurity, and tragedy of man's
fate in culture, are laid to eternal rest. In contrast to Fromm and other
nco-Freudian writers, however, Marcuse embarks upon such a utopian
blueprint by accepting two basic premises of Freud's own analysis of
culture: ( 1) the biological theory of instincts; (2 ) the nature of culture
as an instrument of repression.
If
there is to be a leap into freedom,
it must, therefore, be envisaged as the transcendence of the concept
of culture in general, as a repudiation of
all
historical manifestations
and justifications of repression, domination, and exploitation of man
in society.
Such a project is " in a strict sense 'unreasonable'." It involves two
assumptions: first, that we revise the prevailing concept of reason;
secondly, that we assign to Freud's analysis of culture only an historical
validity. The ordinary meaning of reason in science and society is for
Marcuse, as it was for Scheler, a form of
H errschaftswissen .
Its primary
function has been to gain mastery over nature and man; hence, it is
a type of rationality which is itself subservient to the ideas of conquest,
domination, and repression. In the n ame of freedom, therefore, it must
be opposed by a different kind of reason, which Marcuse finds in art.
Next, he believes that Freud's pessimistic diagnosis of culture reflects
an historical, not a universal necessity. To be sure, every major civiliza–
tion seems to exhibit the same pattern of authority, repression, and
4 See note, p. 123.
