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PARTISAN REVIEW
ogy, where a purely philosophical critique will get by . Even
Eros and
Civzlization,
a much greater book, disintegrates into a paraphrase of
Schiller and other poets and philosophers when it comes to deliver its
own message, to tell us how a new life can be lived.
This sort of abstraction and distance from society is traditional
in German
Kulturkritik
and metaphysics, the very mode of philoso–
phizing Marx sought to overthrow. In Marcuse's case it was surely
compounded by a felt distance from "the American way of life,"
including the university scene. Both
One-Dimensional Man
and
Eros
and Civtlization
are full of comments that tacitly apply with special
force to the alienating circumstances of the ftfties. He sees the age as
one in which' 'the social controls have been introjected to the point
where even individual protest is affected at its roots . The intellectual
and emotional refusal 'to go along' appears neurotic and impotent."
An even more personal comment, especially
if
we recall Marcuse's
controversial academic career, occurs later in
One-Dimensional Man,
in the course of his lively and ingenious assault on Anglo-Saxon
"ordinary language" philosophy, whose methods he compares
to
those of the congressional committees:
The intellectual is called on the carpet . What do you mean when
you say ... ? Don't you conceal something? You talk a lan–
guage which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the
man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not be–
long here .
There is a strain of hedonism in Marcuse which must have found
America's Puritan work ethic particularly jarring. For Marcuse all
labor is alienated labor; satisfaction comes only through erotic activ–
ity, leisure, or play . Nothing in Marcuse is so distinctly unmarxian as
this refusal to envision the possibility of satisfaction through work,
through unalienated labor.
It
takes us back instead to the utopian
speculations of the early Marx, as in the famous attack on the division
of labor in
The German Ideology,
in which he sees communism as
a society' 'which makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, ftsh in the afternoon,
rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind,
without ever becoming hunter, ftsherman, shepherd or critic. ' ,
