Jump to content

Eros and Civilization: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
add content
Line 51: Line 51:
Stirk reexamined the book by drawing on scholarship on the relationship between reason and instinct. He argued that Marcuse's views were a utopian theory with widespread appeal, but that examination of Marcuse's interpretations of Kant, Schiller, and Freud showed that they wrere based on a flawed methodology. He also maintained that Marcuse's misinterpretation of Freud's concept of reason undermined Marcuse's argument, which privileged a confused concept of instinct over an ambiguous sense of reason.{{sfn|Stirk|1999|page=73}} Holland discussed Marcuse's ideas in relation to those of the cultural anthropologist [[Gayle Rubin]], in order to explore the social and psychological mechanisms behind the "sex/gender system" and to open "new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors' applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations" of Freud's writings.{{sfn|Holland|2011|pages=65–78}}
Stirk reexamined the book by drawing on scholarship on the relationship between reason and instinct. He argued that Marcuse's views were a utopian theory with widespread appeal, but that examination of Marcuse's interpretations of Kant, Schiller, and Freud showed that they wrere based on a flawed methodology. He also maintained that Marcuse's misinterpretation of Freud's concept of reason undermined Marcuse's argument, which privileged a confused concept of instinct over an ambiguous sense of reason.{{sfn|Stirk|1999|page=73}} Holland discussed Marcuse's ideas in relation to those of the cultural anthropologist [[Gayle Rubin]], in order to explore the social and psychological mechanisms behind the "sex/gender system" and to open "new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors' applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations" of Freud's writings.{{sfn|Holland|2011|pages=65–78}}


Chodorow wrote that Marcuse, along with Norman O. Brown, provided the most important expression of a view that accepts "the late drive theory" and maintains that theories such as Neo-Freudianism and [[ego psychology]] undermine "psychoanalytic insight into the drives, repression, and the unconscious." She argued that Marcuse's interpretation of Freud was questionable, that his social theory was a "profoundly limited" and "radical individualist" view that considered social relations an unnecessary form of constraint, that he failed to explain how social bonds and political activity are possible, and that his theories involve a "problematic view of women, gender relations, and generation."{{sfn|Chodorow|1985|pages=271–319}}
Chodorow wrote that Marcuse, along with Norman O. Brown, provided the most important expression of a view that accepts "the late drive theory" and maintains that theories such as Neo-Freudianism and [[ego psychology]] undermine "psychoanalytic insight into the drives, repression, and the unconscious." She argued that Marcuse's interpretation of Freud was questionable, that his social theory was a "profoundly limited" and "radical individualist" view that considered social relations an unnecessary form of constraint, that he failed to explain how social bonds and political activity are possible, and that his theories involve a "problematic view of women, gender relations, and generation." She maintained that the form of psychoanalytic theory Marcuse endorsed undermines the social analysis he advances in his works, and that ''Eros and Civilization'' shows some of the same features that Marcuse criticized in Brown's ''[[Love's Body]]'' (1966).{{sfn|Chodorow|1985|pages=271–319}}


Alford noted that Marcuse, like many of his critics, regarded the book as his most important work. He credited Marcuse with providing a "wide-ranging revaluation of narcissism" that shows it to be a "potentially emancipatory force", and compared Marcuse's views on this topic to those of [[Béla Grunberger]] and Janine Chassesguet-Smirgel. However, he argued that developments in the theory of narcissism since the book's publication made it necessary to reevaluate Marcuse's views. He maintained that Marcuse misinterpreted Freud's views on the process of sublimation, and that aspects of Marcuse's "erotic utopia" seemed regressive or even infantile, as they involved instinctual gratification for its own sake. He observed that Marcuse's book had been criticized both for expressing views too similar to Freud's and for diverging too far from Freud. Though endorsing some of Chodorow's criticisms of Marcuse, he denied that narcissism serves only regressive needs.{{sfn|Alford|1987|pages=869–890}}
Alford noted that Marcuse, like many of his critics, regarded the book as his most important work. He credited Marcuse with providing a "wide-ranging revaluation of narcissism" that shows it to be a "potentially emancipatory force", and compared Marcuse's views on this topic to those of [[Béla Grunberger]] and Janine Chassesguet-Smirgel. However, he argued that developments in the theory of narcissism since the book's publication made it necessary to reevaluate Marcuse's views. He maintained that Marcuse misinterpreted Freud's views on the process of sublimation, and that aspects of Marcuse's "erotic utopia" seemed regressive or even infantile, as they involved instinctual gratification for its own sake. He observed that Marcuse's book had been criticized both for expressing views too similar to Freud's and for diverging too far from Freud. Though endorsing some of Chodorow's criticisms of Marcuse, he denied that narcissism serves only regressive needs.{{sfn|Alford|1987|pages=869–890}}

Revision as of 04:37, 29 December 2017

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Cover of the first edition
AuthorHerbert Marcuse
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSigmund Freud
PublisherBeacon Press
Publication date
1955
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages277 (Beacon Press paperback edition)
ISBN0-8070-1555-5
Part of a series on the
Frankfurt School
Major works
Notable theorists
Important concepts
Related topics

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; second edition, 1966) is a book by the German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse, in which the author proposes a non-repressive society and attempts a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud; it has been suggested that the work also reveals the influence of Martin Heidegger. Its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The 1966 edition has an added "political preface".

Eros and Civilization is one of Marcuse's best known works, and the book with which he achieved international fame. Both Marcuse and many commentators on his work have considered it his most important book. It helped shape the subcultures of the 1960s and has been compared to books such as Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959) and Paul Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy (1965). Marcuse has been credited with offering a convincing critique of Neo-Freudianism, but also criticized for misinterpreting Freud.

Summary

Marcuse discusses the social meaning of biology — history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".[1] He contends that Freud's argument that repression is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken, as Eros is liberating and constructive.

Marcuse starts with the conflict described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents — the struggle between human instincts and the conscience of repression (superego), which is self-repressing trying to follow the society's mores and norms. Freud claimed that a clash between Eros and civilization results in the history of Man being one of his repression: "Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts." Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress — but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness.[2] "Progress", for Marcuse, is a concept that provides the explanation and excuse of why the system has to continue; it is the reason the happiness of people is sacrificed (see also "pleasure principle").

Marcuse argues that "the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle [life without leisure]) and Eros (pleasure principle [leisure and pleasure]), but between alienated labour (performance principle [economic stratification]) and Eros." Sex is allowed for "the betters" (capitalists and others in power), and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the "poor" and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives: it could replace "alienated labor" with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in "a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".[2]

Marcuse's argument depends on the assumption that instincts can be shaped by historical phenomena such as repression. Marcuse concludes that our society's troubles result not from biological repression itself but from its increase due to "surplus repression" which is the result of contemporary society.[2] Marcuse also discusses the views of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller.[3]

Reception

Mainstream media

Eros and Civilization received positive reviews from the philosopher Abraham Edel in The Nation,[4] and the historian of science Robert M. Young in the New Statesman.[2]

Edel credited Marcuse distinguishing between what portion of the buden repressive civilization places on the fundamental drives is made necessary by survival needs and what serves the interests of domination and is now unnecessary because of the advanced science of the modern world, and with suggesting what changes in cultural attitudes would result from relaxation of the repressive outlook.[4]

Young called the book important and honest, as well as "serious, highly sophisticated and elegant". He wrote that Marcuse's conclusions about "surplus repression" converted Freud into an "eroticised Marx", and credited Marcuse with making a "devastating attack" on the views of the neo-Freudian psychoanalysts Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Though maintaining that both they and Marcuse confused "ideology with reality" and minimized "the biological sphere", he welcomed Marcuse's view that "the distinction between psychological and political categories has been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era."[2]

Socialist publications

Eros and Civilization received a mixed review from the Marxist writer Paul Mattick in Western Socialist,[5] and was also discussed by Stephen J. Whitfield in Dissent.[6]

Mattick credited Marcuse with renewing "the endeavor to read Marx into Freud", following the unsuccessful attempts of Wilhelm Reich, and agreed with Marcuse that Freudian revisionism is "reformist or non-revolutionary". However, he wrote that Freud would have been surprised at the way Marcuse read revolutionary implications into his theories. He noted that Marcuse's way of overcoming the dilemma that "a full satisfaction of man’s instinctual needs is incompatible with the existence of civilized society" was Marxist, despite the fact that Marcuse nowhere mentioned Marx and referred to capitalism only indirectly, as "industrial civilization". He argued that Marcuse tried to develop ideas that were already present in "the far less ambiguous language of Marxian theory", but still welcomed the fact that Marcuse made psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism reach the same desired result. However, he concluded that Marcuse's "call to opposition to present-day conditions remains a mere philosophical exercise without applicability to social actions."[5]

Whitfield noted that Marcuse considered Eros and Civilization his most important book, and wrote that it "merits consideration as his best, neither obviously dated nor vexingly inaccessible" and that it was "was honorable of Marcuse to try to imagine how the fullest expression of personality, or plenitude, might extinguish the misery that was long deemed an essential feature of the human condition." He considered the book "thrilling to read" because of Marcuse's conjectures about "how the formation of a life without material restraints might somehow be made meaningful." He argued that Marcuse's view that technology could be used to create a utopia was not consistent with his rejection of "technocratic bureaucracy" in his subsequent work One-Dimensional Man (1964). He also suggested that it was the work that led Pope Paul VI to publicly condemn Marcuse in 1969.[6]

Academic journals

Eros and Civilization was reviewed by Paul Nyberg in the Harvard Educational Review.[7] In the American Journal of Sociology, the book was reviewed by the sociologist Kurt Heinrich Wolff in 1956,[8] and again by Barbara Celarent in 2010.[9] ("Barbara Celarent" is a pen-name).[10] The book was also discussed by Peter M. R. Stirk in the History of the Human Sciences,[11] Silke-Maria Weineck in The German Quarterly,[12] the historian Sara M. Evans in The American Historical Review,[13] Molly Hite in Contemporary Literature,[14] and Nancy J. Holland in Hypatia.[15] In Theory & Society, the book received discussions from the psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow and C. Fred Alford,[16][17] while in Radical Philosophy Review, it received discussions from Stefan Bird-Pollan,[18] Lucio Angelo Privitello,[19] and Jeffrey L. Nicholas.[20]

Stirk reexamined the book by drawing on scholarship on the relationship between reason and instinct. He argued that Marcuse's views were a utopian theory with widespread appeal, but that examination of Marcuse's interpretations of Kant, Schiller, and Freud showed that they wrere based on a flawed methodology. He also maintained that Marcuse's misinterpretation of Freud's concept of reason undermined Marcuse's argument, which privileged a confused concept of instinct over an ambiguous sense of reason.[11] Holland discussed Marcuse's ideas in relation to those of the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin, in order to explore the social and psychological mechanisms behind the "sex/gender system" and to open "new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors' applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations" of Freud's writings.[15]

Chodorow wrote that Marcuse, along with Norman O. Brown, provided the most important expression of a view that accepts "the late drive theory" and maintains that theories such as Neo-Freudianism and ego psychology undermine "psychoanalytic insight into the drives, repression, and the unconscious." She argued that Marcuse's interpretation of Freud was questionable, that his social theory was a "profoundly limited" and "radical individualist" view that considered social relations an unnecessary form of constraint, that he failed to explain how social bonds and political activity are possible, and that his theories involve a "problematic view of women, gender relations, and generation." She maintained that the form of psychoanalytic theory Marcuse endorsed undermines the social analysis he advances in his works, and that Eros and Civilization shows some of the same features that Marcuse criticized in Brown's Love's Body (1966).[16]

Alford noted that Marcuse, like many of his critics, regarded the book as his most important work. He credited Marcuse with providing a "wide-ranging revaluation of narcissism" that shows it to be a "potentially emancipatory force", and compared Marcuse's views on this topic to those of Béla Grunberger and Janine Chassesguet-Smirgel. However, he argued that developments in the theory of narcissism since the book's publication made it necessary to reevaluate Marcuse's views. He maintained that Marcuse misinterpreted Freud's views on the process of sublimation, and that aspects of Marcuse's "erotic utopia" seemed regressive or even infantile, as they involved instinctual gratification for its own sake. He observed that Marcuse's book had been criticized both for expressing views too similar to Freud's and for diverging too far from Freud. Though endorsing some of Chodorow's criticisms of Marcuse, he denied that narcissism serves only regressive needs.[17]

Evaluations in books

The classicist Norman O. Brown, writing in Life Against Death (1959), commended Eros and Civilization, calling it, "the first book, after...Reich's ill-fated adventures, to reopen the possibility of the abolition of repression."[21] The philosopher Paul Ricœur, writing in Freud and Philosophy (1965), compared his effort to evaluate Freud from a philosophical standpoint to that of Marcuse.[22] The critic Frederick Crews argued that Marcuse's proposed liberation of instinct was not a real challenge to the status quo, since, by taking the position that such a liberation could only be attempted "after culture has done its work and created the mankind and the world that could be free", Marcuse was accommodating society's institutions. Crews found Marcuse to be guilty of sentimentalism.[23] The psychotherapist Joel D. Hencken considered Eros and Civilization an "interesting precursor" to a "study of the psychological processes in the internalization of oppression", but believed that aspects of the work have unfortunately limited its audience.[24]

The sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, writing in Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985), criticized Eros and Civilization, describing Marcuse's views as "essentialist". Though granting that Marcuse proposed a "powerful image of a transformed sexuality" that had a major influence on post-1960s sexual politics, he considered Marcuse's vision "utopian".[25] The philosopher Jeffrey Abramson compared Eros and Civilization to works such as Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy (1965), and Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), writing that they jointly placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry.[26] The philosopher Seyla Benhabib, writing in her introduction to Marcuse's Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), an interpretation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel influenced by Heidegger, argued that Eros and Civilization continues the interest in historicity present in that earlier work.[27]

Kenneth Lewes endorsed Marcuse's criticism of the "pseudohumane moralizing" of neo-Freudians such as Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, and Clara Thompson.[28] Joel Schwartz writes that Eros and Civilization is "one of the most influential Freudian works written since Freud's death", but that Marcuse is unsuccessful in his attempt to remedy Freud's "failure to differentiate among various kinds of civil society", instead simply grouping all existing regimes as "repressive societies" and contrasting them with a hypothetical non-repressive society of the future. Schwartz concludes that Marcuse fails to reinterpret Freud in a way that adds political to psychoanalytic insights.[29] The psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, who notes that Marcuse studied with Heidegger but later broke with him for political reasons, believes that Marcuse's Heideggerian side, which had been in eclipse during Marcuse's most active period with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, reemerged, displaced onto Freud, in Eros and Civilization.[30] The economist Richard Posner writes that the book contains "political and economic absurdities" but also interesting observations about sex and art.[31] The historian Arthur Marwick writes that it was the book with which Marcuse achieved international fame, a key work in the intellectual legacy of the 1950s, and important in shaping the subcultures of the 1960s.[32]

The historian Roy Porter writes that Marcuse's view that "industrialization demanded erotic austerity" was discredited by the philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1976).[33] The philosopher Todd Dufresne compares Eros and Civilization to Brown's Life Against Death (1959) and anarchist Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960).[34] Anthony Elliott writes that Eros and Civilization is a "seminal" work.[35] Jay Cantor calls Brown's Life Against Death and Marcuse's Eros and Civilization "equally profound".[36]

Other views

Rainer Funk writes that the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, in a letter to the philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, dismissed Marcuse's book as an incompetent distortion of Freud and "the expression of an alienation and despair masquerading as radicalism" and referred to Marcuse's "ideas for the future man" as irrational and sickening.[37]

See also

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ Marcuse 1974, p. 5.
  2. ^ a b c d e Young 1969, pp. 666–667.
  3. ^ Marcuse 1974, p. 182.
  4. ^ a b Edel 1956, p. 22.
  5. ^ a b Mattick 1956.
  6. ^ a b Whitfield 2014, pp. 102–107.
  7. ^ Nyberg 1956, pp. 87–88.
  8. ^ Wolff 1956, pp. 342–343.
  9. ^ Celarent 2010, pp. 1964–1972.
  10. ^ Sica 2011, pp. 385–387.
  11. ^ a b Stirk 1999, p. 73.
  12. ^ Weineck 2000, pp. 351–365.
  13. ^ Evans 2009, pp. 331–347.
  14. ^ Hite 2010, pp. 677–702.
  15. ^ a b Holland 2011, pp. 65–78.
  16. ^ a b Chodorow 1985, pp. 271–319.
  17. ^ a b Alford 1987, pp. 869–890.
  18. ^ Bird-Pollan 2013, pp. 99–107.
  19. ^ Privitello 2013, pp. 109–122.
  20. ^ Nicholas 2017, pp. 185–213.
  21. ^ Brown 1959, p. xx.
  22. ^ Ricœur 1970, p. xii.
  23. ^ Crews 1975, p. 22.
  24. ^ Hencken 1982, pp. 138, 147, 414.
  25. ^ Weeks 1993, pp. 165, 167.
  26. ^ Abramson 1986, p. ix.
  27. ^ Benhabib 1987, pp. xxx, xxxiii–xxxiv.
  28. ^ Lewes 1995, p. 130.
  29. ^ Schwartz 1990, p. 526.
  30. ^ Kovel 1991, p. 244.
  31. ^ Posner 1992, pp. 22–23.
  32. ^ Marwick 1998, p. 291.
  33. ^ Porter 1996, p. 252.
  34. ^ Dufresne 2000, p. 111.
  35. ^ Elliott 2002, p. 52.
  36. ^ Cantor 2009, p. xii.
  37. ^ Funk 2000, p. 101.

Bibliography

Books
Journals
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eros_and_Civilization&oldid=817559304"