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which the speakers and idolaters of "ordinary language" try to repress.
Such a critique is reasonable enough ; but Marcuse's peculiar way
of making it exposes some of his most serious limitations. Throughout
the book he equates this functionalist relativism, this cult of ordinary
language, with the "radical empiricist onslaught" of logical positivism.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The whole elan of
logical positivism lay in its brutally rigorous expose of the hidden
prejudices, fallacies and contradictions in all current modes of thought,
in "ordinary language" most of all. Its moving spirits-Carnap, Schlick,
Neurath, Ayer-were deeply radical, politically as well as philosophical–
ly: in limiting meaningful discourse to what could be verified empirical–
ly, in rigidly distinguishing value judgments from statements of fact,
in trying to develop a logically perfect language, they hoped to prevent
obfuscation and manipulation forever-to keep a spade from being
called anything but a spade, or murder from being disguised as
pacification. The cult of ordinary language arose after the Second
World War out of an explicit and extreme reaction to the program of
logical positivism. The positivists had tended toward a crude, iconoclastic
reductionism that threw out established forms of discourse far too
facilely (see the first edition of
Language, Truth and Logic-and
the
adjustments Ayer later made); ordinary-language analysis, in the name
of "the complexity of actual language," restored everything exactly as it
was, with no questions asked-except about the questioners themselves.
The program Marcuse puts forth calls for
analyzing ordinary language in really controversial areas,
recognizing muddled thinking where it
se·ems
to
be least mud–
dled, uncovering the falsehood in so much normal and "clear"
usage. Then linguistic analysis would attain the level on which
the specific social processes which shape and limit the universe
of discourse become visible and understandable.
Now what he wants here is actually a synthesis that will fuse the
critical rigor and vigor of the positivists with the phenomenological
subtlety of the linguistic analysts.
If
he were consistent in his Hegelian–
ism, he would develop his program as the logical fulfillment of the
promises of both. Indeed, several philosophers in the analytic tradition
have recently been coming around on their own to just this sort of view.
But by lumping these two schools of thought together-as continental
thinkers often do, raising snobbism to the level of ideology-Marcuse
misses the dialectical relation between them, and so neglects the vast
potentialities they present for critical thought.
If
he looked more
closely at what his fellow-philosophers were actually doing, another