Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Rationality
German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1798-1979) was a notable critic of modernity. He perceived a certain contradiction or crisis that has always been brewing at the core of modernity – of the modern Western world having been rationalized, technologized, and bureaucratized. (See http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/modernity/ for a more thorough treatment of “modernity”.) Modernity grew out of the 18th century Enlightenment’s ideals to free the human mind from adherence to prejudice, superstition, church dogma, and monarchical tyranny. According to the eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), daring to think for oneself or daring to use one’s own reason was the fundamental principle of the Enlightenment. The patrons of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire (1694-1778), firmly held that the new individuals of the age of science are equipped with reason and theories that can be put into practice in order to reform or remove the corrupt social and political institutions. The grandiose vision of the Enlightenment was to reconstruct the human world – through the use of reason, science, and technology – in order to serve the natural law of “progress”: that human reason can discover scientific truths about the natural world and human nature, and turn these bodies of knowledge into practice in forms of technology and social reform for the benefit of humanity. The Enlightenment excelled the rise of science, technology, secularization, industrialization, and capitalism to demystify the world. However, according to Marcuse, the attempt to make the world transparent to rational human reason was pregnant with a crisis, a paradox. The paradox of the Enlightenment project is that it has had inadvertent consequences: dogmatic scientism, totalitarianism, and irrationality.
The more science did housecleaning of the traditional religious views, the more technology innovated machines to make human life convenient, and the more industrialization and capitalism implemented the technological innovations to mechanize productions – the more convoluted and complex our lives became. Furthermore, the more refined and less dogmatic science became and the more people became convinced that science in service of technology can change us and our world for the better – the more dogmatic people became about science and its findings, for they neither have the time nor the knowhow to scrutinize them. Hence, this attitude, abreast of the idea of “progress”, gave birth to “scientism”: the belief that the investigative methods of science are justifiably applicable to various areas of human life. Here, of course, Marcuse’s point is not to depreciate the instrumental value of science, but to point out its limitations and ramifications.
According to Marcuse, we have constructed a human intellect powerful enough to unravel the mysteries of the natural world, but any intellect that powerful has a tendency to be tyrannical! While it is true that science and technology have helped us to procure the knowhow to deal with certain areas of human life (such as medical pathology and cure), it may not be a fair assessment that the progress of the Enlightenment project has made us less fearful and unsecure in the face of the modern predicaments and uncertainties. We are still wrestling with the problems of poverty, hunger, unemployment, healthcare, drugs, population control, racial conflicts, political uncertainty, economic inflation, recession, energy, water, and global warming. What is paradoxical about the Enlightenment’s tenacious confidence in human reason is that it has turned into a force of mystification of the human world. For instance, how is it that the Germans – who highly excelled themselves above many other people in science, technology, arts, literature, philosophy, civics, and industrialization since the dawn of modernity, and became an epitome of civilization – how is it that such people, who have given Goethe, Beethoven, and Einstein to the world, also gave birth to Nazism, brutality, and Auschwitz? They built a human intellect firm enough to withstand excruciating challenges and to ennoble man’s spirit, yet this intellect became totalitarian. How so?
Marcuse construed instrumental rationality (also called instrumental reason) as a major cause underlying the crisis in the heart of modernity. Instrumental rationality, as a specific mode of human reason, is principally predicated on the value of efficiency (in terms of time, cost, and procedure) in relentlessly reaching its individuated goals, which are not critically evaluated in terms of moral, social, economic, political, and/or environmental considerations. In other words, instrumental reason – governed by a specific set of values that define its unique functions, operations, and goals – is a particular kind of human reason that is instrumental toward producing a specific, isolated result that is often shortsighted toward its far reaching moral, social, economic, political, and/or environmental consequences. In a sense, instrumental reason’s objectivity renders it insensitive to moral, environmental, or other concerns for the sake of focusing solely on the result it persistently pursues.
Generally, instrumental reason is employed, in various ways, in the spheres of science, technology, economics, labor, legislation, and politics. In the context of modern societies, the bigger an organization is, the more it is instrumentally rationalized or bureaucratized. In addition, instrumental reason is highly informative toward our daily decisions and activities. In the U.S., almost all workplaces, particularly large business organizations, instrumentally rationalize their business and how they treat their employees. Often, this kind of mentality divests the employees of their individualities and brings them to conformity or drives them up the wall. As Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (1875-1961) stated in his essay “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”: “Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall.”
The present problem of “global warming” may serve as an unforeseen ramification of instrumental rationality, as an unintended consequence of instrumental reasoning within the spheres of economics and politics. Capitalists, motivated by profit, have instrumentally rationalized means of production (such as air-polluting factories), producing goods (such as automobiles) that have contributed to emission of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone) into the atmosphere, and hence, possibly causing global warming. Use of reason or rationality as a tool toward an isolated end – that is blind to moral, social, and environmental considerations – can be quite destructive.
According to Marcuse, because the Enlightenment focused upon reason as individuated efforts of individuals within various social groups, it did not foresee that the overall effects of reason might be irrational. For instance, after eight hours of work, workers make individual, rational decisions to leave work around 5:00 P.M. However, the collective result of such singular, rational decisions produces an irrational outcome: heavy traffic and headache. Economy is full of such paradoxes. The global stock market crash of 1987 (known as the “Black Monday”) is said to had been caused by individual computers – each making a rational decision based on available data – all working together crashed the market. In this sense, instrumentally rationalizing the constituent parts of a system in isolation from one another can bear irrational consequences. Individual, rational decisions of a people can lead to irrational results. As another more contemporary example of such irrationality, the modern cult of body worship (i.e., the obsession with weight loss) might be an irrational result of people instrumentally reasoning about their health and/or social relationships!
For Marcuse, the point is not to abandon instrumental reason, but to lay bare its one-dimensional nature. Human reason has other dimensions besides this. The challenge is to find a balanced approach to reason. Instrumental reason, sharply focused on its isolated ends, is blind to surrounding circumstances. Instrumental rationality is partly a result of individuals isolating themselves from each other more than ever in a society where social bonds are disintegrated and the disgruntled members of the society are pessimistic and mistrustful of each other and their social, economic, and political institutions which are out of touch with the people. (See http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/individualism/ for a more thorough treatment of “individualism”.) In the context of the hyper-complexity of our contemporary society and given that its constituent parts are inextricably intertwined, mere instrumental reasoning amounts to a Russian roulette. And, the more complex the social, economic, and governmental entities become, the more they need to bureaucratize, proceduralize, and instrumentally rationalize their operations – which, in turn, can lead to more complexity and irrationality. While the Enlightenment demythologized the world in a certain sense, it carried myth along with itself. It did not kill myth, but perhaps created new ones: progress and scientism. The crisis at the heart of the Enlightenment seems to be fundamentally a crisis of human imagination and thought.
Dear reader, this article by itself may not make full sense. Therefore, I strongly suggest that for a better understanding of this article see my previous articles listed below:
1) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/individualism/
2) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/modernity/
3) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/the-sickness-unto-death/
4) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/becoming-humanly/
5) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/critical-theory/
6) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/the-disappearance-of-human/
7) http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/disappearance-of-the-social/
(Dear reader, please feel free to make a critique of this article. I look forward to learning from you!)
Omid Maleki
