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An esoteric examination of the statement “Judged in light of their essence and idea, men and things exist as other than they are; consequently thought contradicts that which is (given), opposes its truth to that of the given reality” reveals Marcuse’s notion that rationality produces the dualisms between subject and object, individual and community, reason and instinct, society and nature. The notion of dualisms is ever-present throughout Marcuse’s works.
To truly conceptualize the philosophical implications of this statement, it is prudent that we begin with an operational definition of existence and expound on the contradictory nature of existence and essence. This definition goes beyond One Dimensional Man and is most concretely addressed in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. In the chapter entitled “The concept of essence”, Marcuse defines the philosophical construct of the essence as the abstraction and isolation of the one true form of existence from a multitude of changing appearances, and the subsequent transformation of this fragment into an object of authentic knowledge (Marcuse, 1968, 43-44).
Essence is therefore the substitution of the part for the total, and the declaration that this partial alone, this presumed to be a timeless and eternal entity, exists as the whole. It is with Descartes that the concept of essence, first explicitly formulated in Plato’s theory of Ideas, enters for the first time the sphere of transcendental subjectivity.
Descartes’ theory is anchored in the universally valid reality of the individual consciousness, the observation that the essence of all things lies in the freedom of the thinking individual, the ego cogito. The new autonomous ego is presented with the task that had been up to this point metaphysically hypostasized in the doctrine of the essence: “realizing the authentic potentialities of being based on the discovery that nature can be controlled.” (Marcuse, 1968, 47).
Descartes’ philosophy attempts to provide the theoretical preconditions for the practical liberation of the individual subject, the freeing of this subject to such an extent as to allow him/her to enter the world and shape it consciously according to his/her will. His was a philosophy “using which, knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” (Descartes, 1973, 103)
According to Marcuse, however, this newly empowered individual quickly encounters a seemingly insurmountable contradiction – as soon as the ego sets out to shape its life it finds itself subject to and constrained by the unalterable laws of the newly emerging commodity market. Whereas the free individual’s first step appears dictated by his/her reason, all subsequent ones appear dictated by the conditional logic of commodity society (Marcuse, 1968, 49).
The old medieval relations of visible dependence are replaced by opaque and unknowable relations of dependence, objective empirical reality presenting itself to the individual as a mere externality unconnected to the actor’s authentic potential and essence. The individual, seemingly unconnected to the world, realizes that this disjunction militates against his/her asserting him/herself using conquering and shaping externality. An externality is beyond the individual’s control.
The reason is thus forced to stop at the status quo and become a critique of pure thought. Since the individual is no longer capable of conquering the world, he/she comes to worry only about conquering him/herself. If we are to preserve the concept of human freedom, the essence of the individual must lie in the autonomous world of consciousness. Freedom thus comes to have meaningful potential only as pure knowledge, the reason is incapable of expressing itself in the rational domination and shaping of objects by free individuals. Concrete human relations (e.g. work relations) are henceforth no longer essentially related to the individual’s potentialities.
Transcendental subjectivity, Marcuse maintains, reaches its apex in the development of twentieth-century phenomenology. Phenomenology’s attempt to reorient philosophy as a rigorous science is the culmination of a thought that anchors the absolute and universal certainty of knowledge in the ego cogito. It also represents, however, the liquidation of the critical element we find present in transcendental thought from Descartes to Kant.
According to Marcuse, Husserl’s critique of Descartes begins with the observation that Descartes erred in viewing the individual ego as the world’s primary existing particle, deducing the rest of the world from this. But Cartesian philosophy is linked with the progressive trends of the bourgeoisie only at the point where the ego is conceived of as being this existing particle. Only an ego as something existing as a first principle can provide us with a critical standard of real knowledge and serve as an organon for the ordering of life. Here there is still a connection between consciousness and empirical existence: the goal of consciousness is the ordering of the world. Phenomenology, however, wants to deal with essence only within a sphere of transcendental consciousness purged of all facts intending Spatio-temporal existence.
The concept of essence is relevant only within the dimension of pure subjectivity that remains a residuum after the phenomenological “annihilation of the world” (Marcuse, 1968, 56). Once the connection between rational thought and the world has been cut, the “interest of freedom” disappears from philosophy (Marcuse, 1968, 57).
Not only does phenomenology eliminate empirical facts in their empirical relevance from the philosophical field of study, leaving behind only facts of consciousness, but the essential content and organization of these facts of consciousness are themselves further diminished in their being indistinguishable from one another in terms of their essential validity. All contents of consciousness are equally “exemplary”: “Essence results as the invariant within the infinitely manifold variations which representational acts undertake with regard to their object.” (Marcuse, 1968, 58).
Freedom becomes a mark of pure fantasy, as the free arbitrariness of ideational possibilities of variation. The constant, identical, and necessary is no longer sought as the existence of beings but as what is invariant in the infinite manifold of representational modifications of ‘exemplars’. The possibility is no longer a force straining toward reality; rather in its open endlessness, it belongs to mere imagination (Marcuse, 1968, 59). The absolute unboundedness of phenomenology functions to eliminate the critical tension previously present in the relation between the essence of the ego cogito and factual existence. The negation of this tension dooms phenomenology to a mere descriptive operation: it can aim only at escribing that which already is, not that which could or should be.
To sum this up, the inadequacies and internal contradictions exposed through the critique of the concept of essence are not intended to provide a theoretical justification for the indeterminate negation of the concept. Marcuse wants not to eliminate the concept of the essence but to transform it. Essence is no longer to be considered an object of traditional or transcendental philosophy, but of critical theory. The critical theory makes philosophy superfluous as an independent scientific discipline dealing with the structure of reality through its recognition that historical relationships can be altered and transformed by real individuals who move in a world ungoverned by an immutable and transcendental structure of existence.
References
Rene Descartes. Discourse on Method. (Edinburgh: William Blacked and Sons, 1973).
Herbert Marcuse. “The Concept of Essence” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
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