§7 Eros and Self-Determination
The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.
—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Thus far we have focused primarily on figures indebted to the pragmatic and existential traditions, so the reader may wonder why Marcuse, a critical theorist deeply indebted to Freud, is being introduced at this juncture. There are several compelling reasons. First, Marcuse’s work is sufficiently informed by Hegel and existentialism to make transcendence a central motif. For Marcuse, the ability to contradict the status quo, to negate the given, is a mode of transcendence, one that makes self-determination possible. Second, for most of Marcuse’s career he struggled with the implications of Freud’s determinism, seeking to show how reading Freud in a dialectical fashion could make self-determination a possibility. In the previous chapter we addressed an approach to the sociology of ideas whose deterministic implications might undermine the model of self-determination developed earlier in this book. In this chapter we find Marcuse grappling with a singular challenge to self-determination, namely, how Eros, a potential source of transcendence, may pose an insuperable threat to a free civilization that nurtures self-determining subjects. Third, Marcuse’s solution to this threat, as I will argue, requires that he take a turn toward Hegel and the existential, which he does. As a matter of fact, his invocation of the “project” and “determinate choice” can be read as an attempt to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. It can also be read as an attempt to reconcile existential and pragmatic sensibilities, without requiring an acceptance of a Freudian interpretation of Eros. Unfortunately, Marcuse never turned directly to pragmatism. Had he done so, I believe that his work would have been less susceptible to the charge of aestheticism, although I make no attempt to prove this claim here.
In the penultimate chapter of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse is quite succinct regarding the threat posed by Eros to “the idea of a free civilization,” one that allows for transcendence of the given and self-determination. He declares, “The mere fact that, in the choice of its objects, the sex instinct is not guided by reciprocity constitutes a source of unavoidable conflict among individuals—and a strong argument against the possibility of its self-sublimation” (226). At least two points appear to follow: reciprocity would reduce conflict, and it is not only the death instinct and surplus repression that make a free civilization problematic but the nature of Eros itself. Paradoxically, one of the major arguments of the book—that the death instinct can and should be neutralized in order to strengthen Eros—becomes questionable if Eros is itself a source of unavoidable conflict. In order to grapple with the latter challenge, Marcuse takes an interesting tack. He suggests that Eros may be most fully realized when it encounters internal limitations and boundaries, which are utilized to intensify and broaden the range of the erotic. These claims are linked to notions of self-determination and sensuous rationality. But his approach to the challenge at hand appears to leave Marcuse in a bind. What would be the ground for limiting Eros if not a form of determinate negation (which could be tied to Thanatos), or learned behaviors, that is, modifications of behavior that prevent immediate responses to certain stimuli? The latter strategy, however, invokes a behavioral sensibility that is typically viewed as unacceptably positivistic by Marcuse, whereas the former raises basic questions about how determinate negation would actually function in this context.
In this chapter I explore two avenues for interpreting Marcuse’s attempt to avoid the sabotage of a “free civilization” and self-determination by Eros: Hegel’s dialectic of limit, which Marcuse addresses in Reason and Revolution, and determinate choice and the project, which Marcuse fastens on in One-Dimensional Man. These discussions will highlight the relationships and tensions between Marcuse’s dialectical method, which depends on determinate negation and contradiction, his claims regarding Eros’s capacity for self-limitation, and his emphasis on determinate choice and the project in One-Dimensional Man. I offer a possible solution to Marcuse’s dilemma regarding Eros by focusing on his notion of determinate choice. In doing so, I read Marcuse (to some degree) against Marcuse by appealing to his affinity for the existential (and existentialism) in order to undermine his commitment to Freud and the deterministic implications of the latter’s thought.
Near the close of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse introduces the notion that Eros may be a source of lasting conflict. Although this notion certainly doesn’t take readers totally by surprise, given that the instinctual does not readily heed reason and lacks self-restraint, the nature of the threat posed by Eros presents a unique challenge to Marcuse’s project.
It is not the conflict between instinct and reason that provides the strongest argument against the idea of a free civilization, but rather the conflict which instinct creates in itself. Even if the destructive forms of its polymorphous perversity and license are due to surplus-repression and become susceptible to libidinal order once surplus-repression is removed, instinct itself is beyond good and evil, and no free civilization can dispense with this distinction. The mere fact that, in the choice of its objects, the sex instinct is not guided by reciprocity constitutes a source of unavoidable conflict among individuals—and a strong argument against the possibility of its self-sublimation. (226)
Marcuse then goes on to pose a question and offer a possible solution to the dilemma of an Eros that is inherently uncontrollable and therefore a threat to civilization.
But is there perhaps in the instinct itself an inner barrier which “contains” its driving power? Is there perhaps a “natural” self-restraint in Eros so that its genuine gratification would call for delay, detour, and arrest? Then there would be obstructions and limitations imposed not from the outside, by a repressive reality principle, but set and accepted by the instinct itself because they have inherent libidinal value. (226)
Freud, we are told, understood the value of such restraint because “‘unrestrained sexual liberty from the beginning’ results in lack of full satisfaction” (226). Marcuse cautions that we must be careful not to let the forces of repression misuse the latter insight to justify the denial of instinctual gratification. Nevertheless, he does not want to let the notion that Eros may be able to limit itself slip away, because “‘natural obstacles’ in the instinct, far from denying pleasure, may function as a premium on pleasure if they are divorced from archaic taboos and exogenous constraints. Pleasure contains an element of self-determination which is the token of human triumph over blind necessity” (227, emphasis added). And he goes on to say,
What distinguishes pleasure from the blind satisfaction of want is the instinct’s refusal to exhaust itself in immediate satisfaction, its ability to build up and use barriers for intensifying fulfillment. Though this instinctual refusal has done the work of domination, it can also serve the opposite function: eroticize non-libidinal relations, transform biological tension and relief into free happiness. No longer employed as instruments for retaining men in alienated performances, the barriers against absolute gratification would become elements of human freedom; they would protect that other alienation in which pleasure originates—man’s alienation not from himself but from mere nature: his free self-realization. Men would really exist as individuals, each shaping his own life; they would face each other with truly different needs and truly different modes of satisfaction—with their own refusals and their own selections. The ascendancy of the pleasure principle would thus engender antagonisms, pains, and frustrations—individual conflicts in the striving for gratification. But these conflicts would themselves have libidinal value: they would be permeated with the rationality of gratification. This sensuous rationality contains its own moral laws. (227–228, all but final emphasis added)
The passages I have been citing are found on little more than two pages of Marcuse’s text. I find them extraordinary, and I am tempted to respond by exclaiming, “Hallelujah!” but I am afraid that this would not be especially helpful. My problem here is that I simply cannot understand from the arguments thus far offered in Eros and Civilization how Eros’s capacity for self-limitation arises. While I can certainly imagine a behavioral explanation, that is, people learn over time what sorts of restrictions and activities conduce toward an increase of pleasure, I cannot understand how from Marcuse’s Freudian assumptions he can be make this claim. Notice that he is not claiming that the ego or the superego is responsible for this (self-)limiting of Eros but that the instinct refuses to exhaust itself by setting up barriers, which reflects a “sensuous rationality.”
To be fair to Marcuse, I must qualify my last statement about the superego, for after the passages just cited, he provides an account of the superego in which it is not the unambiguous representative of the reality principle. We learn that the superego may be able to form an alliance with the id, “defending the claims of the id against the ego and the external world” (228). Marcuse then speculates about a libidinal morality that can be understood in terms of a superid. The latter is wrapped up with a pregenital morality shaped by identification with the mother. But this discussion does not appear to provide a “mechanism” by which Eros can limit itself. Rather, it leads to the possibility that there may be a narcissistic-maternal unity that we wish to reestablish, one in which “the ‘maternal’ images of the super ego convey promises rather than memory traces—images of a free future rather than of a dark past” (230–231).1
Marcuse then moves on to make some interesting and compelling observations about time, forgetfulness, memory, and the manner in which the conflict between life and death diminishes as the Nirvana principle takes center stage. This discussion, however, only highlights the problem with which we began, because with the convergence of the pleasure principle and the Nirvana principle, “Eros, freed from surplus repression, would be strengthened, and the strengthened Eros would, as it were, absorb the objective of the death instinct” (235). This certainly would be a positive outcome in terms of neutralizing aggression, but in terms of our original problem—that Eros is not guided by reciprocity and leads to conflict between individuals—it appears the situation may have become even more dangerous, or at least potentially more dangerous. If Eros becomes too dominant, if its expression is not sufficiently checked, then it threatens to undermine civilization for the reasons Marcuse spelled out earlier in the chapter.
It does not appear that Marcuse worked out a “mechanism” for Eros’s self-limitation, or if he has, I have not been able to locate it in his reflections in Eros and Civilization. His explanation for the self-limitation of Eros in terms of a superid is simply undeveloped and unconvincing. If we assume that Marcuse did not work out a Freudian or Freudian-inspired account of the self-limitation of Eros, and we want to be generous readers of his text, then we should assume that he must have been drawing on some other source in order to defend the possibility. In fact, Marcuse’s speculations gain a degree of coherence when they are framed in terms of his understanding and familiarity with Hegel’s dialectic of limit. Marcuse often utilizes a dialectically inspired heuristic to address a problem at hand, without making explicit the fact that he is doing so or the details of the process. In the case under consideration, this proclivity may be leading him to make claims about the “self-determination” of Eros, which he cannot adequately defend on the basis of a libidinal morality and a superid. Standing behind these claims are basic insights into how the dialectic operates, which Marcuse applies to Eros, as if Eros were a subject that could indeed limit itself. An alternative way of stating this is that Marcuse joins at the hip the subject’s capacity for self-determination and Eros’s alleged capacity for self-limitation. This move is in many ways a classic Hegelian one, in that “things,” concepts, or forces and their relations can be viewed as self-positing because of their relationship to the development of the subject or spirit.
Although the details of Hegel’s dialectic of limit are beyond the scope of this chapter, Marcuse’s account of the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic in Reason and Revolution (hereafter cited as RR) provides insights salient to the topic at hand, the self-limitation of Eros. We learn that things may be said to have certain qualities because they have limits, and the latter are to be understood in terms of negation. “Every qualitative determination is in itself a limitation and therefore a negation” (RR,132). But things do not remain static. They undergo transformation. Marcuse emphasizes the manner in which the inherent potentialities of a thing, the proper nature of a thing, come into conflict with “the actual state or condition of the thing” (134), which Marcuse refers to as its talification. He tells us that “since the thing is conceived as a kind of subject that determines itself through its relations to other things, its existent qualities or talifications are barriers or limits (Grenzen) through which its potentialities must break. The process of existence is simply the contradiction between talifications and potentialities; hence, to exist and to be limited are identical” (135–136).2 And he goes on to cite a famous passage from Hegel, which I quote in part. “When we say of things that they are finite, we mean thereby ... that Not-Being constitutes their nature and their Being. Finite things are; but their relation to themselves is that they are related to themselves as something negative, and in this self-relation send themselves on beyond themselves and their Being.... The finite does not only change.... [T]he hour of their birth is the hour of their death” (136). So we can say that “things” are defined by their limits, and they have a negative relation to themselves because as limited (finite), they are negated and superseded. The latter can be viewed as either the destruction (death) of the thing or the realization of its inherent potentialities.
It may seem at first that when Marcuse speaks about the boundaries that Eros may be able to erect for itself, they cannot be the kind discussed by Hegel. After all, it would appear to be a peculiar sort of Eros—an instinct that “seeks” union or even fusion—that would depend on negation as a principle for self-limitation.3 However, if we assume that Eros shares with other finite things, concepts, or “forces” a need for a limit, then there would appear to be no great mystery in thinking of Eros in terms of negation. Marcuse would have taken the notion of determination through negation for granted, and we will return shortly to why this notion may be of assistance in understanding the relationship between boundaries and the self-limitation of Eros. Before doing so, we might once again note just how peculiar Marcuse’s claims are about the self-limitation of Eros. On the one hand, Eros requires a limit insofar as it resembles other finite forces or powers; on the other, Eros does not appear to honor limits. It knows no bounds. The nature of this instinct is to overcome otherness and not heed limits, to gratify itself even if the price is conflict. For these reasons Marcuse worries about Eros and why the idea of its self-limitation would be so appealing. Yet he doesn’t want to fall into the trap of simply praising Eros for its self-limitations, for glorifying the latter could end up serving the forces of repression. So we are offered two reasons in Eros and Civilization for why self-limitation is a good idea: it will lead to more intense and heightened gratifications, and it will create an opening for free self-realization. However, as noted, no satisfying mechanism for how Eros can self-limit is offered even though this activity appears to be crucial for human flourishing. Perhaps employing dialectical language may prove to be of some assistance after all.
In order to fully express itself, to intensify itself, Eros must not only be able to overcome what is different from itself and press toward unity. It must also be able to become alienated from its own immediate selfexpression so that it does not become a victim of its own auto-affective nature. The immediate needs to be mediated. Eros must be limited; negation must be present. If an appeal to dialectical language appears to be unduly speculative at this juncture, I offer the following. After Marcuse tells us in Eros and Civilization that “Pleasure contains an element of self-determination which is the token of human triumph over blind necessity” (227), he quotes Horkheimer and Adorno from the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Here is Marcuse’s translation of their words from the German. “Nature does not know real pleasure but only satisfaction of want. All pleasure is societal—in the unsublimated no less than in the sublimated impulses. Pleasure originates in alienation” (227, emphasis added). Marcuse then asserts, “What distinguishes pleasure from the blind satisfaction of want is the instinct’s refusal to exhaust itself in immediate satisfaction, its ability to build up and use barriers for intensifying fulfillment” (227). In these remarks Marcuse has distinguished pleasure from the mere satisfaction of want, invoked the societal nature of pleasure, and affirmed that pleasure originates in alienation.4
In terms of how helpful the dialectic may be in understanding Eros, Marcuse’s own language is telling. He is prepared to invoke the notion of alienation in the context of discussing “the instinct’s ... ability to build up and use barriers for intensifying fulfillment.” The alienation that he refers to here is certainly not the capitalist-specific alienation of Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844. One would be on good ground in arguing that what we have here is a notion of alienation tied to the concept of negation in the dialectic. If alienation is basic to pleasure or Eros, then it is not a large step for someone schooled in dialectical modes of thought to assert that Eros is not unitary but “contains” negation. In this regard Eros can be spoken of as alienated from itself insofar as it is not a sheer immediacy. Once Eros is viewed as “containing” negation, then Marcuse’s claim that a sensuous rationality exists becomes more plausible. Eros’s “rationality” is manifest in its capacity to be intensified through the presence of limits.
However, this can’t be the whole story, for there is a big difference between the presence of negation or a limit, and the active and reflective movement of self-limitation. Asserting that finite things or forces require and relate to barriers, negations of themselves, is quite different from claiming that they engage in the activity of creating limits for themselves, which appears to entail a kind of reflexivity. And here is where a notion of the subject becomes crucial. Thus far we have only provided a necessary condition for self-limitation, the presence of negation “within” Eros, and not a sufficient condition. Once again, I suggest that we look at Marcuse’s language. What appears to be taking place is that resources that should be credited to a subject, a conscious or potentially conscious agent of self-transformation and self-determination, are being ascribed to the instinct of Eros itself. Notice in this regard how Marcuse explicitly ties alienation to self-realization by declaring, “No longer employed as instruments for retaining men in alienated performances, the barriers against absolute gratification would become elements of human freedom; they would protect that other alienation in which pleasure originates—man’s alienation not from himself but from mere nature: his free self-realization” (227). Containment of Eros makes self-realization possible, but not simply containment from the “outside,” so to speak, in the form of an oppressive superego, but a “self-determining” containment from “within.”
So here is the place to lay my cards on the table. Marcuse is going to have to appeal to the subject’s capacity for self-determination in order to rein in Eros in a manner that leads to free self-realization, and this is going to entail a move from “determinate negation” to “determinate choice.” However, before I introduce the latter notion, a summary of some of the basic points discussed thus far is in order. In the context of addressing the barriers that Eros might “contain,” we learned that such barriers are a step toward free self-realization, for they remove us from being subservient to the caprice of nature in the form of the merely instinctual. This claim brought with it a puzzle. If Eros is to limit itself to serve self-realization, it must be able to alienate itself from itself as the merely natural. But if Eros is the merely natural, how then can it create a barrier or limit to its own expression? Marcuse’s tentative solution to this conundrum involved the notion of a superid and a libidinal morality. A more plausible course, given Marcuse’s engagement with the dialectic, is to invoke the power of the negative. If we dismiss behaviorism and its commitment to learned behaviors and their somatic instantiation, which Marcuse appears to do, then what alternative is there to the power of the negative to limit Eros? Perhaps fantasy and art. Yet they too appear to depend on internal, as well as external, barriers insofar as they are modes of sublimation. They too would require the presence of negation. So it appears that Eros must be able to “accommodate” negation, as we have seen.
But even if Hegel’s dialectic of limit can provide resources for understanding how Eros might “contain” negation, or be susceptible to barriers, what still appears to be absent is a way to understand how Eros can be self-limiting, especially if one ties this notion to the self-realization of the subject. It’s one thing to learn that finite things are related to what they are not in terms of a boundary or limit, and quite another to suggest that they can posit this limit for themselves. The latter brings with it a component of reflexivity and self-determination that we typically associate with subjects. Let’s turn to Marcuse’s use of the notion of the “project” to see if we can clarify how Eros might be capable of self-limitation.
I have been arguing that there is a latent or even parasitical use of the dialectic of limit in Eros and Civilization. Determinate negation plays a role in the constitution and life of Eros. The notion of negation and determinate negation is also important in One-Dimensional Man, especially when Marcuse is dealing with the conceptual. Consider the following passage, for example.
The world of immediate experience—the world in which we find ourselves living—must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is. In the equation Reason = Truth = Reality, which joins the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity, Reason is the subversive power, the “power of the negative” that establishes, as theoretical and practical Reason, the truth for men and things—that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are. (123)
Although Marcuse trades on notions of determinate negation and the dialectical nature of reason and history in One-Dimensional Man, he also takes a turn toward the existential. In chapter 8, Marcuse addresses the notion of historical transcendence, and in doing so, he finds that he must shift his language from that of determinate negation to “determinate choice,” which is tied to his notion of the “project.” It is this latter turn that opens a path for a possible way of thinking about how the subject can come to limit Eros, which appears as Eros’s own self-limit.
The object-world is thus the world of a specific historical project, and is never accessible outside the historical project which organizes matter, and the organization of matter is at one and the same time a theoretical and a practical enterprise. I have used the term “project” so repeatedly because it seems to me to accentuate most clearly the specific character of historical practice. It results from a determinate choice, seizure of one among other ways of comprehending, organizing, and transforming reality. The initial choice defines the range of possibilities open on this way, and precludes alternative possibilities incompatible with it. (219)
In the middle of this discussion Marcuse must grapple with a challenge: history may not involve determinate choices but only determinate negations. And he asks, “If the historical continuum itself provides the objective ground for determining the truth of different historical projects, does it also determine their sequence and their limits?” (220–221). In other words, when all is said and done, are we left with determinism? After raising the possibility of the negation of a given historical reality through its own potentialities, he goes on to ask, “Is this negation a ‘determinate’ one—that is, is the internal succession of a historical project, once it has become a totality, necessarily pre-determined by the structure of this totality?” (221). And he answers,
If so, then the term “project” would be deceptive. That which is historical possibility would sooner or later be real; and the definition of liberty as comprehended necessity would have a repressive connotation which it does not have. All this may not matter much. What does matter is that such historical determination would (in spite of all subtle ethics and psychology) absolve the crimes against humanity which civilization continues to commit and thus facilitate this continuation. (221)
To counter this deterministic picture, Marcuse then immediately offers an alternative to determinate negation. “I suggest the phrase ‘determinate choice’ in order to emphasize the ingression of liberty into historical necessity; the phrase does no more than condense the proposition that men make their own history but make it under given conditions” (221).
So what then does this have to do with the problem of the self-limitation of Eros? Recall that one of the reasons that Marcuse gave for the importance of Eros limiting itself was to create an opening for free self-realization. He hoped that a way could be found for Eros to limit itself so that nature, in its unhumanized form, would not crowd out human flourishing. In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse worries that changes in history may be viewed as determinate negations within a totality, which do not yield an open-ended dialectic but confront us with the System, which in turn absolves crimes against humanity. Much preferable is the Marxian formulation that “men make their own history but make it under given conditions.” However, it would seem that men can make their own history only if Eros provides enough room for free self-realization, and they can only truly flourish if Eros is allowed to intensify itself through not being immediately expressed. Yet if Eros’s self-limitation depends on a form of auto-affective determinate negation, then we as historical actors are at the mercy of determinate negations that may not be as insidious as those located in Hegel’s System but that surely undermine the human capacity for self-determination. Transcendence and free self-realization cannot be left to the urges of an instinct that mysteriously manages to constrain itself through determinate negations.
Here is my suggestion for acknowledging Marcuse’s efforts in Eros and Civilization, while seeking to move beyond them. I propose that we take the problem of the self-limitation of Eros (or the instinctual) as a stand-in for a host of problems about how to self-limit, and borrow from Marcuse’s insights into the dialectic, determinate negation, determinate choice, and the project. But we then make a move that the Marcuse of Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man would view as problematic. We bring in learned behaviors and habits and combine what we know about how habits arise with Marcuse’s commitment to determinate choice. This does not mean that we opt for a crass decisionism. It means that we take an existential pragmatism seriously. Projects are historical and require the molding and shaping of given conditions, as does Eros itself. Eros, if there is in fact an instinct by that name, is never experienced as first nature, at least not by social and historical beings, as Marcuse was well aware. I suggest that the existential dimension of Marcuse’s thought be combined with a sensitivity to material conditions, but not only material conditions in a Marxian sense, which Marcuse would have readily recognized, but material conditions in terms of habits and learned behaviors. Or if we prefer Bourdieu’s terminology, mutatis mutandis, with the habitus. We can learn, and we do learn, as subjects, when it is profitable to restrict Eros (or the instinctual). The latter is not a separate cosmic principle. It is part of our biological endowment. This endowment is subject to modification in various ways, as Marcuse well knew. Eros (or the instinctual) is constrained not by itself but by a productive conspiracy with (self-conscious) agents who have learned how to produce circumstances that enhance and hinder the expressions of Eros, and they have done so in part by promoting certain habits. Less talk of sublimation and art, and more about the conditions under which determinate choices can help initiate beneficial patterns of behavior, would be of assistance here.
The concluding chapter seeks to give the habitual, the biological, and the existential their due through reinterpreting Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in light of Mead’s work and Jean Baker Miller’s neo-Freudianism.