254
LUCIEN GOLDMANN
need reason necessarily be authoritar1an. Nevertheless, the question
remains: how can civilization create freedom without being pre.
vented from doing so, given that an absence of freedom has
be.
come an element and indeed the nucleus of the psychic apparatus?
And if this is not the case, who has the right to establish and
impose objective scales of value?
From Plato to Rousseau, the idea of a pedagogic dictatorship
exercised by these who are generally thought to have acquired a
knowledge of the true good is the only answer. This answer
has
been forgotten. Sipce then, knowledge concerning the creation of
a humane existence for all men has no longer been limited to
a
privileged elite, the facts have become too evident, and the indio
vidual consciousness would understand them without difficulty if
it were not methodically prevented and turned aside from doing
so
(Eros and Civilization).
Though characteristically ambivalent, the passage is coherent.
The pedagogical dictatorship is the only honest solution.
If
it has
been forgotten it is not because knowledge is not accessible to
all,
but because in modern society it is accessible only to rational con·
sciousness and not to empirical consciousness, which is kept from
the truth by social repression. The only thing we can count on
is
the pedagogical dictatorship of the philosophers, even though it
is
only temporary and transitional.
Thus Marcuse arrives at a position both opposed and related
to Heidegger's. Opposed, because Heidegger's reactionary theory of
elites reserved the consciousness of Being for the philosopher, the
poet and the statesman, who were radically opposed to the inauthentic
mass (the study of which is for sociology and positivist psychology)
- a theory which was a philosophical justification for a permanent
dictatorship of leaders and elites. Marcuse's progressive philosophy,
however, maintained the accessibility of liberty and universal knowl–
edge to all men, and opposed the very idea of an elite. Still, there
are similarities. For, in contrast to Marx's and Lukacs's monism,
which brought together in a single concept the relation between
freedom and necessity, Marcuse arrived at a radical version of
Heidegger's dualism. Marcuse's rested on a sharp but not dialectical
opposition between oppression and liberty, the existing and the ideal,
the empirical and the rational, the given and the utopian - a
duality which despite his democratic spirit forced him to entertain the
idea of a dictatorship of the wise.
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