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Stemming from this, Marcuse is separated from the "dialec–
tical" position at two important points. The absence of an empirical
and transcendental subject
within
society as a basis for reason poses
the problem of reason's empirical or transcendental character. And
just as it did for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism, the
absence of an
internal
progressive force created for Marcuse the
problem of an external one. On neither of these two points are
Marcuse's texts completely unequivocal. It does seem clear, however,
that the need for coherence has forced him to the idea of an indi–
vidual subject (even to an intelligible or transcendental one) and
to the idea of a dictatorship (albeit transitional and pedagogical) of
philosophers and wise men. In an article published in 1948, Marcuse
criticized
Being and Nothingness
for its confusion between the on–
tological and the empirical conceptions of the individual subject,
without questioning the idea of a subject as such. And in 1965 he
added a paragraph subscribing to the views of Sartre, who has be–
come the theoretician of a "radical conversion" and a "morality of
liberation."
Similarly, in a 1954 afterword to
Reason and Revolution,
he made the same point: "The Marxist idea of the proletariat as
the absolute negation of capitalist society brings together in
one
concept the historical relation between the realization of liberty and
its necessary conditions. In a rigorous sense liberation
supposes
liberty;
it cannot
be
realized unless it is the work of free individuals and is
carried forward by them - by individuals free of need and free of
interests of domination and oppression." He ends with the following
lines: "The idea of another form of reason and liberty, such as had
been envisioned as much by Idealism as by Dialectical Materialism,
again appears utopian; but the triumph of the repressive forces
which oppose progress doesn't diminish the truth of this utopia. The
total mobilization of society against definitive liberation of the indi–
vidual, which constitutes the historical content of the present period,
shows to what point the possibility of this realization is reaL"
On the question of the conditions of transformation one idea
recurs in Marcuse's writing:
The frustrations and deflections of the satisfaction demanded by
the general will need not necessarily be somber and inhuman, nor
