From Spengler to Marcuse: Fantasy and petty bourgeois consciousness

These were some notes I made a few years ago in preparation for a monograph on the 20th century US writer H.P. Lovecraft.  I never had the time to work on that project, alas, but the notes still seem pretty useful.  They cover petty-bourgeois fantasies, reactionary and ultra-left, as a response to the stultification suffered by that intermediate layer within capitalist society after each of the world wars.

JR

 

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Faustian Man in The Decline of the West

 

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....Spengler ....perpetual war of the gods (ideals or

values)....And both the gods and their dispute are ruled by fate

and certainly not 'science'..."
....annexing the philosophy of history to the philosophy of life....
....with Henri Bergson....Spengler's concept of

culture...."coming into existence"....a product wholly

determined by its origins.
....generalises the philosophic mood of the early German

Romantics....sarcasm, the ironic mood to the tragic, the Divine

Comedy to the Divine Tragedy and a pan-tragic view of life.
....difference between Werden ["coming into existence"] and

Gewordenes [a product wholly determined by its origins].
....Werden and Gewordenes [=] (the act of creation and its

product)
....a permanent rupture between becoming and being, which

renders every act of creation tragic. ....product of Werden is to

take up arms against its suffering parent to become its

primordial antithesis, relentless negation—in short, its very

destruction.
.... two " primary facts of consciousness"—"self" (eigentliches)

and "other" (anderes).
....contains the profound antithesis between life and death

itself.
....human soul is no more than the awakening of the cosmic

soul from the unconscious, vegetative state, the triggering of

the contradiction between its primal urge to life (cf. Bergson's

"elan vital") and all that would thwart it.
....proto-sense of longing (Urgefiihl der Sehnsucht), together

with all the other new cultural prospects, stirs within that soul in

its sudden awareness of solitude.
....soul's congenital Angst thus takes on a dual aspect: the

horror inspired by the irreversibility of one's individual fate is

expressed in the concept of time, whereas that instilled by the

world without, by an inescapable, implacable opposition, by the

categorical negation of that same drive, works through the

medium of extension ultimately fixed in the concept of space.
....Truth, Beauty and the Good are united in a single—and most

singular—function, that of exorcising the other or, as Spengler

so eloquently puts it, tossing the veil of Maya over death, the

true end of the life drive in any form. The truth of mathematics

and the other sciences, the good of religion and ethics, the

beauty of art (philosophy, mathematics, religion and ethics too)

align in the common (false!) effort to conceal reality from the

human soul, to distract it from the true countenance of death, a

Gorgon's head turning all who look upon it to stone.
....resurrected the ancient god Chronos, devourer of his own

children....bloodthirsty god of time sprung from the loins of

cosmic Life to exploit the human soul dominates Spengler's

system. He was to be loved and prayed to, if only for want of

any other deity. Each of his children—culture and the historical

forms of human existence—was granted 1,100 years. Within

this span all cultures were to complete their life

cycle—childhood, youth, maturity and old age— and then

vanish forever into the belly of time. This is the highest purpose

of every culture: the obvious lack of any purpose whatsoever.

Thomas Mann with his "Uber die Lehre Spenglers" (1924):
".... hostile attitude to the future, disguised as scientific

implacability.
"....arrogance, the contempt Spengler shows for all things

human. I
"....hyena-like prophecy."

....the smug conceit which, in lusting after treachery, haughtily

sides against spirit and man with nature, in whose name he

speaks of merciless laws and considers himself marvellously

staunch and noble.  The same could be said of the

extra-personal trend in bourgeois philosophy of the twentieth

century, represented in the 1960s by LeviStrauss, Lacan and

Foucault.

 

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....Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse shared the existentialists'

antipathy for the mass-society generated by that order, but

parted company on the question of individuality. As they saw it,

the individuality and individual freedom promoted by the

existentialists were historically unsound (das Selbst having

suffered its final defeat), hence theoretically false and politically

pernicious.
.... Dionysian, impersonal orientation best expressed by

Marcuse, who let the Neo– Marxist secret of secrets slip. At

the same time, this particular brand of Neo-Marxism and

bourgeois thought in general experienced a rise in left-wing

Freudian motifs placing an absolute pleasure-principle foremost

in the concept of man.
....Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm....anticipated

....Readjusting the working model of man to Freud's

pleasure-principle....
....coincided with state-monopoly capitalism's evolving into

consumerism.
....Freud's leftist followers may be considered the ideologists of

the consumer-society—the unwitting ideologists, that is, for

they believed their goals to be radically anti-bourgeois (a

paradox affecting so many ideologists, in Marx's sense of the

word).
....rally all social forces who took consumerism to represent the

revolutionary negation of state-monopoly capitalism, an assault

on its last stronghold—Western culture. Such are the origins of

New-Left extremism and its bohemian-lumpen brand of

rebellion.

 

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Fantasy Turned Against Individuality

....faculty of fantasy, seen as the focal point of all forces not

subject to the all-powerful reality-principle.... forces Freud

considered untouched by the reality– principle
....a position equal to that occupied by the pleasure-principle

and its nemesis, the reality-principle....
....fantasy opposed to the shabby reality of exploitation

something far more fundamental, the memory of a "lost age"

when the pleasure-principle claimed man's jubilant submission

to his own instincts. Fantasy, in other words, has forced reality

time without number to face the opportunities it has not lost but

merely let slip into "nocturnal consciousness", to contemplate

freedom from oppression.

[Marcuse]....
...."Imagination"....life of the individual was.... image of the

immediate unity between the universal and the particular under

the rule of the pleasure-principle.
....subsequent history of man is characterised by the

destruction of this original unity: the position of the ego.
.... lost age of the pleasure principle....unity of the universal and

the particular, a unity tantamount to the latter's dissolution in

the former, a generic, impersonal, collective whole.
.... position assumed by the ego....tenuous, "sinful", morbid and

morbific—quite close, in fact, to that expounded in Dialektik der

Aufklarung and linked thereby to the metaphysical axioms of

the Philosophy of Life movement.
....principiam individuationis [principle of individuation],

descendent from the reality-principle, which motivates the

"repressive use of instinct".
....individuationprinciple....like its antecedent, the reality–

principle, deflects them [each instinct] from their goal at the

mid-point of an advance powered wholly on their own, inner

energy.
....fantasy.... functions as a "fundamental, independent mental

process [with] a truth value of its own", and without regard for

how the reality-principle and the repressive mentality will react.
....[fantasy's]....ideal, Utopian, utterly unattainable aspect that

Freud valued.  ....Marcuse....[insists, opposed to Freud] 

fantasy and Utopia must be fought for at their most fantastic

and Utopian.
....[Regression from Freud on the part of Marcuse]....has the

distinctly neurotic features of infantile escapism....
.... erotic taboos broken in dreams, the involuntary infantile

reflexes of adults and children are seen to uphold the truth

rejected by the repressive mentality, thus restoring to man in

his maturity the lost age of childhood.
....far-reaching implications....infantile folly....deliberately

cultivated by les enfants terribles, particularly those on the New

Left. If Marcuse is a case in point, though, their fathers in

theory were not immune themselves.

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