"One-dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse

Can radical individualism and negativism lead us to a multidimensional society?

My key takeaways from one of the most incisive philosophical tomes I have ever read.

---

One-Dimensional Man, written by Herbert Marcuse in 1964, was highly influential among young radicals in the late sixties and seventies, who saw the book as a critique of existing forms of thought and behaviour. This book is a dense, troubling account of how industrial rationality perpetuates destructive tendencies and intensifies one-dimensional thought and politics.

Though Marcuse identified with the "New Left", he critiqued both capitalist and communist systems as equally totalitarian. One-dimensional Man is, therefore, an analysis of containment and social contradictions, and the forces of negation that make true liberation impossible.

Though he doesn’t offer alternative models, Marcuse advocates for "negative thinking," a critical standpoint that seeks alternative modes of thought and behaviour by distinguishing between "existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality".

Freedom’s bondage:

Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society that yielded higher stages of society. Such freedoms were essential for free enterprise and were designed to replace obsolescent material and intellectual culture with more productive and rational ones.

The final form of such a society is freedom from want, where economic freedom becomes freedom FROM the economy – from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle of existence, from earning a living. An individual in such an advanced society will no longer be compelled to prove themselves on the market as an economic subject. The very structure of human existence will be altered.

However, such propositions are often labelled unrealistic in contemporary industrial society, not because of their utopian character but because of the strength of the forces that prevent their realisation. Our current notion of liberty is often linked to free enterprise. Freedom of enterprise is built on necessity. Therefore, freedom FROM enterprise is considered an impossibility. Worse, the freedoms offered by modern capitalist societies have become instruments of domination, keeping individuals in bondage to the system.

On Containment of Social Change:

Advanced industrial societies 'contain' social change by integrating opposites and reconciling forces that previously opposed the system. This containment has altered social critique and critical analysis to a high level of abstraction. Established society represses any calls for change by using "the good way of life" that economic-technical coordination brings: a "comfortable, smooth, reasonable democratic unfreedom," where individuality is suppressed.

Manipulation of Needs:

Marcuse argues that though the technological order satisfies basic needs, it propagates new, false needs, perpetuating "toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice". These needs are often determined by external powers over which the individual has limited control. What makes liberation difficult is that the definition of true and false needs is largely subjective. It is up to a truly free individual to decide what constitutes a true need. Yet most individuals are not truly free, and as long as they are indoctrinated, their answers to what constitutes true needs cannot be considered their own.

Industrialisation of labour:

Individuals in advanced societies have identified themselves entirely with the existence imposed upon them. Where most industrial workers once stood apart from their tools and machines, now an increasingly white-collar workforce cannot comprehend the buttons they push in a largely abstracted economic machine. An ironsmith once had full autonomy over what he produced and was paid per item of his creation. Today, a salaried manager’s time is yoked to her organisation, paid by the hour for stupefying work largely beyond her control.

Industrialisation places its harness on all of us by introducing the concept of "measurement of work" – that only what can be measured is of value. This operationalisation, therefore, denigrates anything outside of this slim definition of "operational value," including creative work and the unpaid labour of homemaking and caretaking. Even within organisations, workers are imposed KPIs and metrics which ignore the labour required to foster learning and facilitate collaboration. Recent attempts at operationalising human-centred management paradoxically achieve the opposite response by becoming another tool of manipulation.

The total effect is that the ordinary worker becomes an agent in her own enslavement. We live in a world of greater access to consumption, yet all the things available today hide the fact that the decisions over our lives (and our deaths) and personal and national security are made in places over which individuals have no control. We may appear to be free, yet we are sublimated slaves. "We exist as instruments, even if, as instruments, we can choose our material and intellectual food".

The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness

"Happy Consciousness" is a state of mind in which individuals believe the system is rational and delivers the goods satisfying our (true and false) needs. It reflects a new conformism that is a facet of technological rationality.

This conformism sustains a society that reduces irrationality and prolongs life, but it also repels connections to society's unhappy base, such as guilt and crime. The inner dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. This inner dimension is where the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home. "Progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life".

The concept of Reason in Western philosophy has evolved into a logic of domination, which is rooted in the union of theory and practice, thought and action. This formal logic, which underlies both ancient and modern thought, is a tool of domination intended to impose a universally valid order on the world. It has been used to justify various forms of control and oppression throughout history. The scientific spirit has weakened the antagonism between subject and object, leading to a one-dimensional scientific universe where nature is "objectively of the mind."

The individual's social position and relation to others appear to be determined by objective qualities and laws. When technological reality becomes the dominant system, humans and nature become objects of organisation, and technological rationality becomes a political process.

The othering of Metaphysics

In technological societies, spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are negated by becoming ceremonial parts of practical behaviourism.

One of the worst symptoms of modern rational thinking is the relegation of such 'irrational' principles into a separate dimension, protecting the normal universe of discourse from being disturbed. This separate dimension is granted a lower truth value, labelling spiritual ideas as 'poetic' or 'metaphysical' truth. This approach effectively isolates critical ideas, preventing them from challenging the dominant philosophy and regular discourse.

Towards the pacification of existence

Marcuse’s final chapter is a dense and deep enquiry into the qualities of a post-industrial society. He suggests that society reaches a crossroads at a sufficiently advanced stage when most vital needs are satisfied with minimal labour. At this point, technological progress transcends the realm of necessity and "life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means". Marcuse calls this stage the pacification of existence – where humanity’s existence is no longer organised by vested interests in domination and scarcity.

On "negative" thought

Contemporary industrial civilisation has reached the stage at which "the free society" can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties. This is not because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too significant to be confined within the traditional forms. New modes of realisation are needed, corresponding to society's new capabilities. Such new modes can be indicated only in negative terms because they would amount to the negation of the prevailing modes.

Marcuse muses on philosophy’s dialectical thought, as seen in Plato and Aristotle. This approach involves taking on a subversive character that contradicts the given reality and seeks to realise the essential potentiality of human existence through the subversion of the established order.

The Great Refusal

One-dimensional Man continues to confound and fascinate me. Marcuse's courage here is in unabashedly calling out the many hypocrisies of contemporary society while not falling for the rationalistic trap of providing a clear answer. He doesn’t attempt to describe any one of the new modes he envisions for society, which will inevitably become another tool for domination.

Marcuse instead calls on our collective yet individuated imaginative faculties towards an entirely altered society, where irrationality becomes the home of the really rational, where ideas that promote the "art of life" dominate political discourse. In such a utopia, the romantic space of imagination doesn’t need to prove itself. Imagination and Reason are no longer considered separate.

This is only possible through a struggle for individuality, which lies in the abstract character of refusal to conform, belong, and be contained. The "Great Refusal" by oppositional groups can ultimately create the tensions required for the shift away from one-dimensional thought.

"The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal."