Form, technique and liberation: Schiller’s influence on Marcuse’s philosophy of technology

Introduction

In the second half of the 20^th century, faced with the impasses of reason and signs of exhaustion from the Enlightenment project, authors from the most varied backgrounds turned to the aesthetic tradition, seeking to reformulate founding principles in the fields of epistemology, ethics and politics. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who for some time was part of the Frankfurtian project of Critical Theory and became known for his Freudian-Marxist analysis, was one of these thinkers. To formulate his philosophical project, Marcuse turned to the aesthetic contributions of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and, consequently, of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), to radicalize the aesthetic project from the end of the 18^th century and to transplant it into the philosophical problems of his time. In this article we will discuss the nature of this appropriation and the ways in which Marcuse read Kant and Schiller to compose a theory of technique whose foundation is aesthetic. ^[2]

In the first section we will show the function of aesthetic judgment in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). From Kant’s critical project, we will highlight some fundamental contributions that were integrated into Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and, later, into Marcuse’s writings on technology. This part is fundamental, because Schiller serves as a bridge to contemporaneity in that he is directly influenced by Kant’s aesthetic analyses, and interprets them within a context of social transformation, seeking to highlight the importance of beauty and play in human enhancement and ennoblement. In the second section we will shift our focus to Marcuse’s philosophy. First, we will try to demonstrate how, from the idea of an aesthetic dimension, Marcuse almost entirely absorbed the contributions of Kant and Schiller, radicalizing them and thinking about them within a critique of contemporary capitalism and demonstrating the importance of aesthetics as an alternative to the impasses of reason. We will address Marcuse’s theory of technology, analysing two key moments in its development. From here, we will try to show how Marcuse envisions the project of a new form of technology capable of liberating nature, one whose conditions of possibility lie in the assimilation of an aesthetic dimension inherited from the philosophies of Kant and Schiller.

Kant and Schiller: between beauty and freedom

In the first paragraph of the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), Kant writes that, “in order to decide whether or not something is beautiful,” it is necessary to relate the representations of such an object “by means of the imagination” and the “feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (Kant, 1790a, p. 89; AA V, § 1, p. 203). ^[3] It is a matter of presenting what the author calls judgment of taste, that is, the reflexive and aesthetic judgment, which is distinct from determining judgment. The latter, as we know from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), occupies a central role in the activity of understanding [Verstand] and in its cognitive access to the world, because it allows for the application of rules that categorize the particular, or, in other words, it allows the understanding to subsume the particular into the universal by applying concepts to it (AA V, “Introduction” IV, p. 179). In this sense, determining judgment is fundamental for conceptualizing representations of experience, making it an auxiliary of reason, “which seeks a systematic, nomological grasp of the empirical world” (Kukla, 2006, p. 7). It is important to differentiate between these two types of judgment because the introduction of aesthetic judgment is at the origin of three important contributions from the Third Critique that left their mark on the works of Schiller and Marcuse, namely the experience of beauty, the regulatory purposiveness of nature, and the free play that is established between understanding and imagination in their appreciation of beauty in nature.

Let me first address Kant’s thoughts on the beautiful. An important part of Kant’s reflection on beauty begins with aesthetic judgment. This is not an epistemological judgment that promotes knowledge of the natural world through the cognitive process of conceptualization, but a judgment whose origin lies in the feeling of inner sense, and according to which the manifold of nature is not constrained by the imposition of a concept (AA V, § 15, p. 228). Rather, it comes about through an agreement between the multiplicity of sensory representations and understanding (Dumouchel, 1999, pp. 227 ff). It is in this way that the particular meets the universal. “In the judging of a free beauty (according to mere form),” states Kant, “no concept is presupposed.” (Kant, 1790a, p. 114; AA V, § 16, pp. 229–230). Thus, the feeling of beauty is evoked by the harmonious encounter between the sensory and the intelligible, providing a reconciliation of both without any concept or universal imposed on the manifold. For Kant, this experience provided by aesthetic judgment allows one to think of nature as if it signalled meaning. This occurs when the pure form of the representation of nature, in its multiplicity, sets into motion the faculties of the mind— imagination and understanding—in such a way that what is experienced is not necessarily knowledge, but the pleasure of agreement between our experience of nature and our mental faculties (Negri, 1968, p. 22).

A second important aspect from the Critique of the Power of Judgment is what Kant called the purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] of nature. Since aesthetic judgments give us access to a representation of particular forms in nature, this allows us to think of living organisms as if they were organized according to a purpose. This is because the unveiling of natural beauty [Naturshönheit] in the experience of nature does nothing else than indicate a form of systematicity, that is, it incites a feeling that nature functions as if it were guided by a purpose. Thus, nature ceases to be just a mechanism and is seen as a whole that is organized like a work of art (AA V, § 23, p. 246; cf. Guyer, 2006b, p. 163). ^[4] A third contribution is the idea of free play between the faculties of the mind, between imagination and understanding. With this, Kant seeks to show that in aesthetic judgments the imagination is not constrained by any particular concept, and can thus freely produce representations (cf. Guyer, 2006a; Breitenbach, 2019). Thus, the pleasure that is experienced in the face of natural beauty arises from this aesthetic dynamic between the two faculties, that is, when the imagination works on representation, it schematizes without concept, and in this way tries to grasp what is depicted (Höffe, 1992, p. 219).

These three characteristics are at the basis of Friedrich Schiller’s reflections in his letters that were later published in 1795 under the name of On the Aesthetic Education of Man. As part of his effort to understand the impasses of his time, Schiller starts from an aesthetic-anthropological reflection that sees human nature as being divided into two main drives (Beiser, 2005, p. 130 ff). According to his historical perspective, society has favoured the supremacy of one drive over the other, that is, the supremacy of reason over sensitivity, leading towards an alienation of nature (see Kain, 1982; Maesschalck, 2012, p. 7 ff.). Thus, Schiller’s work in aesthetics is driven by a desire to harmonize these two opposing forces of our inner nature. The sensory drive [sinnliche Trieb]—also referred to as Stofftrieb, due to its direct connection with our sensitivity, and therefore with the materiality of reality— “binds the ever-soaring spirit to the world of sense, and summons abstraction from its most unfettered excursions into the Infinite back to the limitations of the Present”, binding humanity to the materiality of the sensory phenomenon (Schiller, 1795a, XII, p. 81; NA XX, p. 344). The second, called the formal drive [Formtrieb], is derived from the unchanging part of human nature. It seeks to impose the eternity of forms on experience in such a way that “annuls time and annuls change,” and it “wants the real to be necessary and eternal, and the eternal and the necessary to be real.” This is the drive that seeks, categorically, to secure the conditions of human autonomy in the world (Schiller, 1795a, XII, p. 81; NA XX, p. 346). In the face of such opposition, the task of education and culture would not be to eliminate one drive at the expense of the other, but rather to prevent the imposition of one drive on the other (Schiller, 1795a, XIII, p. 87; NA XX, p. 348).

This two-poled modulation is what Schiller called play drive [Spieltrieb], and is central to his thesis on ethical transformation throughout the different domains of human life. Inspired by the idea of the Kantian play, the play drive “deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power” and “brings them into harmony with the ideas of reason,” and at the same time “it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion” and “reconcile[s] them with the interests of the senses” (Schiller, 1795a, XIV, p. 99; NA XX, pp. 354–355). Beauty is therefore produced when a person’s characteristics come together, for it is the result of reciprocal action between one’s basic impulses. In this way, human morality is developed when aesthetically-driven action manages to reach an equilibrium between reality and form. This occurs because, from the free interplay between these two poles, a person not only imposes her morality, but seeks to stimulate life in things that surround her and free the objects present in her sensory world, expanding and improving this same sensitivity. From Schiller’s perspective, this constitutes a sort of improvement and ennoblement of reality, because through the free play between the impulses, the aesthetic subject does more than merely ennoble herself, she imprints autonomy and freedom onto or her environment. The subject sets free “everything around it, even the lifeless” (Schiller, 1795a, XXIII, p. 167; NA XX, p. 386). It is, of course, a matter of continuing to bring the forms of freedom to the things of experience, and exercising freedom in the world, not in a practical or instrumental way, but in such a way as to ennoble also the universe of matter. As we will see below, Schiller’s formulations of ethical conduct and the ennoblement of matter would allow Marcuse, years later, to conceive a new possibility of interaction between subject and nature, and consequently to re-envision technology.

Marcuse’s theory of technology

While Kant’s aesthetic reflections were involved with a critical and transcendental project of conceiving human autonomy within the Enlightenment project, and while Schiller sought to construe aesthetics as a pedagogical path for a social transformation in the midst of the terror that followed the French Revolution, Marcuse, for his part, radicalizes Schiller’s argument, finding in aesthetics a potential escape hatch from the mid-20^th century detachments of practical and instrumental reason. The Marcusean proposition of a new form of technology is the result of a critique of the current state of productive society, which the author called affluent society. One of the central aspects of Marcuse’s diagnosis was to demonstrate the level of contradiction within this society. This contradiction is due to the fact that, no matter how well the technological productivity of industrial societies has been able to get around the problem of scarcity, it does so through an intensification of superfluous production, and through a deepening of instinctual administration. This thesis, establish in the 1950s, was one of the main variants of so-called Freudo-Marxism. It is based on Freud’s idea that the civilization process was only possible thanks to a process of libidinal repression which, by privileging reason and work throughout history, allowed the emergence of organized societies that enjoy otherwise inaccessible technological and productive advances. According to Marcuse’s argument, this repressive process has become obsolete, since alienated labor would no longer be necessary in the current technological and productive human stage. Contemporary technology, in part due to its automation, would thus allow for liberation from the obligation of work, thus leaving humanity free to carry out activities whose purpose would be the realization of its potentialities (Marcuse, 1955, p. 177).

This diagnosis developed in Eros and Civilization—a book that spread Marcuse’s work across both the USA and Europe—is the culmination of a long critical study, led by some of the intellectual forefathers of critical theory, dedicated to the social role of technology. ^[5] For these intellectuals—heirs to the classical German philosophical tradition of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx—technique, technology, and all of the by-products of human labour are aspects of the subject’s self-positioning, that is, the ways in which subjectivity objectifies itself and manifests itself in the materiality of the natural world (Castoriadis, 1973, p. 297). Its centrality stems from the fact that it is through technique that the subject transforms the reality of nature and, in doing so, kicks off a dialectic process that likewise involves his own transformation. This process is a crucial for studying and understanding human history and social organization, and was an important focal point of the Social Research Institute during the 1940s, when it was exiled to the USA. It was at this time that the theme of technology became part of Marcuse’s philosophical project, which pursued its development up through his last writings.

In Marcuse’s reflections on technology, two moments stand out. The first appears in the 1941 article “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”, whose diagnosis nevertheless remains quite close to the Marxian analyses of technology within the social productive apparatus (Abromeit, 2010, p. 89). In this article, while developing a diagnosis of contemporary industrial society, Marcuse advanced the thesis that, under the domain of a competition-oriented productive apparatus—“institutions, devices and organizations of industry in their prevailing social setting”—societies have imposed new standards of judgment, transforming autonomous and individual rationality into technological rationality, a rationality enforced by technological processes themselves (Marcuse, 1941, p. 417). Marcuse thus sees technological and machine development as a natural tendency of human development, but one whose instrumentalization by the political context has produced serious repercussions: the endless creation of new demands and desires, the intensification of exploration and extraction processes, and, at the same time, the determination of productive ends by the machines themselves, intensifying not only the dynamics of human alienation ^[6] but also the way in which this alienation occurs. The fatal consequence is that such processes determine technological achievement according to criteria other than the preservation of life (Axelos, 1961, p. 81). This diagnosis does not mean that technology is necessarily devoted to human domination, but it does try to demonstrate that, on the other hand, the liberating potential of technology is blocked by modes of production themselves (cf. Feenberg, 2013). It is in this sense that one can conclude from Marcuse’s first reflection that technology appears as a liberating force whose powers of realization are neutralized by the productive apparatus (Raulet, 1992, p. 123), thus resulting in an instrument of repression. This argument comes up again, in the first half of the 1960s, in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man:

Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. […]. Technological rationality thus protects rather than cancels the legitimacy of domination, and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a rationally totalitarian society (Marcuse, 1964, p. 162).

Marcuse’s second key reflection on technology takes some important steps towards a programmatic project. From the end of the 1960s, Marcuse becomes focused on considering technology as a fundamental tool for human transformation. Marcuse starts from the same critical diagnosis, but, faced with the destructive aspect of technology, he does not seek to reestablish a pre-technological society. On the contrary, Marcuse begins to see technology as a partner in achieving the abolition of alienated labour. In this new dynamic Marcuse sketches out a form of technology capable of establishing a non-destructive and non-instrumentalizing relationship with nature. At this point, Marcuse’s argument reinforces the artistic aspect of technique and technology, calling for a return to its aesthetic origin. This means that technological production incorporates the notion of beauty (Marcuse, 1969, p. 24). This is the main argument of the book An Essay on Liberation (1969), whose originality lies in the understanding that only a technology capable of releasing nature from its current state of instrumentalization can, consequently, release the human being. That is why the ground of what Marcuse calls “technology of liberation” seeks to incorporate the values and forms inscribed in nature, seeking to open the way for a technology and science that protect and enrich life, and which are realized by “playing with the potentialities of form and matter”. Thus, the qualities of form would shape the new technological apparatuses and become what Marcuse called social productive forces [gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft] (Marcuse, 1969, p. 24).

This new perspective on the liberating aspects of technology is only possible thanks to the incorporation of concepts inherited from Kant and Schiller’s studies. It is based on the idea that a new sensitivity must permeate human productive activities, since only it can establish a new science, a gaya scienza (Marcuse, 1969, p. 19; Kellner, 1984, p. 338 ff). In other words, a new relationship between humanity and nature can only be forged from a technology whose objectives are not based merely on material exploration. For such a technology to be possible, according to Marcuse, it is necessary to take the operative potential of human sensitivity seriously in order to contain the excesses of reason and to incorporate, in all creative and productive activity, aspects and values that are intrinsic to natural forms themselves. If we remember the aspects of Kant’s and Schiller’s philosophy mentioned in the previous section, we will see that the notions of beauty, of nature’s purposiveness and of free play are operative in the idea of a new technological achievement (Marcuse, 1972, p. 77). They are listed in Marcuse’s writings in order to substantiate the incorporation of aesthetic and artistic aspects within modes of production and new technologies, with the aim of promoting life. As a result of these characteristics, technology would operate from a search for beauty and natural forms, incorporating them as design data and as purpose, in order to produce new practices whose result would not only be a domination of nature, but a “pacification of existence” (Feenberg, 2002, p. 94).

Conclusion

Technology plays a transformative role within the idea of society that emerged with critical theory. Based on a diagnosis of social contradiction within the current modes of production, Marcuse’s critical theory sees technology as a tool capable of definitively implementing modes of life that can overcome scarcity without consequently intensifying the processes of repression and extraction that have accompanied the technical and technological processes until now. Technology must therefore cooperate in the “reconstruction of the environment of life,” and for this to happen, it must “be grounded in an experience of nature as a totality of life to be protected and ‘cultivated’ ”. (Marcuse, 1972, p. 61). This makes Marcuse a pioneer in his theoretical attempts to reconcile technological development and ecology. ^[7]

What we are trying to demonstrate is that, for the realization of such a technology, Marcuse undertakes an anthropological reflection, seeking to conceive new arrangements between our instincts and faculties through the philosophies of Kant and Schiller. This search for the human aesthetic dimension is what, according to the author, would avoid the excesses of instrumental rationality in the formation of future technological projects, thus incorporating aesthetic and sensitive dimensions that would fundamentally transform the ends of technology. This would result in technology focused on the promotion of life, which is therefore not based merely on quantitative and logical aspects of the human cognitive framework, but which draws its originality from beauty and from forms found in nature.