Merton and Marcuse

Thomas Merton, “Prophecy, Alienation, Language” in The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Ave Maria Press, 1992

Marcuse is not a catholic, but he’s a kind of monastic thinker.  His idea of freedom is the kind that we’re constituted for.  (114)

The basic problem of living in an alienated society.  (116)

We’re called to religious life because otherwise we’re not free to act from our deepest center, to follow the deepest needs of our life. A person who is aware of that is is hurting on account of that has a genuine vocation. That’s why we exist.  We’re suppose to provide a place where people can find something that they cannot find elsewhere.   (117)

(Marcuse) calls his book One-Dimensional Man, and he’s talking about life in an advanced, industrial society that has one dimension.  By this he means a society where everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator and everybody fits into that.  Things are organized so that you can fit in easily and even happily. The person who fits in painlessly, who reads Time and Life, who does all the approved things, watches all the approved programs, answers the Gallup poll, and is content doing these things is “one-dimensional.”  When everybody fits into this mold, then everything will work smoothly, everyone will make lots of money, the products will go round, the Gross National Product will go up, everybody will pay their taxes, blacks will keep their mouths shut, and we will win all our wars.  (117-118)

.... we haven’t been freed up to develop interiorly.  (118)

One of the things that people do not want is to be one-dimensional, they don’t want to be forced into a mold.   “Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and to hate what others love and hate, belong to the category of false needs.”  Marcuse is making the point that what makes us conform to this kind of society is not at all a question of a Hitler-like dictatorship, which we don’t have, but a question of needs.  Our society makes people need things and need them so badly that everything is put aside for the sake of fulfilling these needs.  Mostly these are needs for certain types of consumer goods.  (119)

To change we would have to do without a lot of things.  (120)

Religious people have to be aware of these false needs. (120)

What’s happening in language today?  When we are exposed, without a discerning faculty, to just the ordinary talk that goes on, to what comes over the mass media, we lose our ability to have any kind of accurate perspective on what’s happening.  You think you are informed, but you’re living in an imaginary world.  (120)

... narcissistic ... what a closed circle always is ....

Now, an essential thing about a prophetic vocation is awareness of factors behind the facts.  (122)

George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984 are about a one-dimensional society. That’s the kind of society we’re in now.  (123)

To live prophetically, you’ve got to be questioning and looking at factors behind the facts.  You’ve got to be aware that there are contradictions.  In a certain sense, our prophetic vocation consists in hurting from the contradictions in society.  This is a real cross in our lives today.  (123)

Our silence comes from deep reflection and honest suffering about the contradictions in the world and in ourselves (124)

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Beacon Press, 1964, 1991

... chief characteristic of this new mode of thought and behavior is the repression of all value, aspirations, and ideas which cannot be defined in therms of the operations and attitudes validated by the prevailing form of rationality.  The consequences is the weakening and even the disappearance of all genuine radical critique, the integration of all opposition in the established system.  (xii)

... an advanced state of conformity in which the production of needs and aspirations by the prevailing societal apparatus integrates individuals into the established societies. (xii)

....powers of reason and freedom are declining.  (xxiv)

“one dimensional” as conforming to the existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society.(xxvii)

“one dimensional man” has lost or is losing, individuality, freedom, and the ability to dissent and to control one’s own destiny. The private space, the dimension of negation and individuality, in which one may become and remain a self, is being whittled away by a society which shapes aspirations, hopes, fears, and values, and even manipulates vital needs.  (xxvii)

... the price one dimensional man pays for satisfaction is to surrender freedom and individuality.  (xxvii)

“One Dimensional Man” does not know its true needs because it needs are not its own — they are administered, superimposed, and heteronomous; it is not able to resist domination, nor to act autonomously, for it identifies with public behavior and imitates and submits to the powers that be.  Lacking the power of authentic self-activity, one dimensional man submits to increasingly total domination.

A comfortable, smooth ... unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization .... suppression of individuality (1)

... manipulation of needs by vested interests.  (3)

...most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.  (5)

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level homes, kitchen equipment.  (9)

Life as an end is qualitatively different form life as a means.  (17)

Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond society, has become technically impossible (71)

There is a pervasive unhappiness and the happy consciousness is shaky enough - a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.  (76)

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.  Sexuality is no exception.  (WTM - We are all means without an ontology)  (78)

....”The community is too well off too care”  John K. Galbreath, American Capitalism, 1956  (85)

It is the word that orders and organizes, that induces people to do, to buy, to accept. (86)

... the prevailing mode of freedom is servitude.    (87)

Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of “mediation” which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of given facts.  Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed.  Both come to life again, but where as in reality, a former recurs in ever new forms, the latter remains hope and in the personal events which reappear in the individual memory, the fears and aspirations of mankind assert themselves - the universal in the particular (98)

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.  (123)

Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth?  It is the master of pure contemplation [Theoria], and the master of a practice guided by theoria ... i.e. the philospher-statesman.  To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone (WTM, Thomas Merton)       (126)

Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.  (134)

Who is the patient? .... according to Freud, the patient’s disease is a protest reaction against a sick world in which he lives. But the physician must disregard the “moral” problem. He has to restore the patient’s health, to make him capable of functioning normally in his world.  (183)

... the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder, to think, to know himself ... and his society.  Deprived of false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC’s again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.  (245)

We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images.  (250)

Thomas Merton, This is God’s Work, in Thomas Merton in Alaska, 1989

Never has the world been so violent and in many respects so insane, and so given to pressure and agitation and conflict.  Although men have made brilliant technological advances, they cannot handle them or use them for good.

What is alienation, and what is an alienated person, and what are the results of alienation?  Alienation is the psychological condition of somebody who is never allowed to be fully himself. For example, in the social order a slave is an alienated person because he does not belong to himself. His work is not his own. .... everything he does belongs to somebody else.     .... a person who is never able to be himself because he is always dominated by somebody else’s ideas or somebody else’s tastes or somebody else’s saying that this is the way to act and this is the way to see things.  We live in a society in which many people are alienated in that sense without realizing it. Their choices are made for them, they don’t really have ideas and desires of their own; they simply repeat what has been told them. And yet they think that they are making free choices, and to some extent maybe they are.

What happens to a person in this condition is that, without realizing it, he does not have any real respect for himself. He thinks that he has ideas and he thinks he is doing what he freely wants to do, but actually he is being pushed around, and this results in a sort of resentment, which in turn leads to hatred and violence under a cover of respectability.

[Alienation begins when culture divides me against myself, puts a mask on me, gives me a role I may or may not want to play. Alienation is complete when I become completely identified with my mask, totally satisfied with my role, and convince myself that any other identity or role is inconceivable.  The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division within himself, is already beginning to be free.  But God help him if all he wants is the the mask the other man is wearing, just because the other one does notsem to be sweating or itching.  Maybe he is no longer human enough to itch.  (Or else he pays a psychiatrist to scratch him.) ..... We all have to try to be fifty different people.  We all can refuse some of the more absurd and unacceptable roles, but not many can refuse as much as they would like to, and no one can refuse them all.  <Thomas Merton, Why Aleination is for Everybody in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, New York:  New Directions, 1981>]

Contemplatives are people who escape this alienation. A contemplative is someone who has a direct relationship with God in the depths of his heart and who speaks to God. 

.... man should bow down to no one but God. Man is the son of God; he is in a direct relationship with his Father, and when people break into this relationship, getting in between God and man and trying to take away his freedom, an unhealthy situation results.

We are in the middle, called to peace and love and simplicity, called to this spirit of freedom which we learn to experience in a life of prayer.  Somehow we have to learn to be guided by the Holy Spirit toward this freedom which can hardly be defined. And at the same time we are surrounded by conflict and by criticism.

Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1954

... if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value ... 

But the nature of revolt has changed radically in our times. It is no longer the revolt of the slave against the master, nor even the revolt of the poor against the rich; it is a metaphysical revolt, the revolt of man against the conditions of life, against creation itse.lf.  (8)

We all care within ourselves our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages.  But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.  (10)

If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.  (13)

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.  (17)

What is a rebel?  A man who says no; but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself.  (19)

Rebellion ... is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.  (25)

The dandy creates his own unity by aesthetic means. ‘To live and die before a mirror’ .... was the dandy’s slogan. ... he can only play apart by setting himself up in opposition.  (47)

He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of other’s faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes obscured, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited.  The dandy is, therefore, always compelled to astonish.  Perpetually incomplete, always on the margin of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values.  He plays at life because he is unable to live it.  (48)

One must act and live in terms of the future.  All morality becomes provisional.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their most profound manifestations, are centuries which have tried to live without transcendence.  (114)

He who has understood reality does not rebel against it, but rejoices in it; in other words, he becomes a conformist.  (127)

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. (204)

Every man is a criminal who is unaware of being so.  The objective criminal is, precisely, he who believes himself innocent. (212)

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it.  (229)

To create today is to create dangerously.  (242)

The revolution of the twentieth century believes that it can avoid nihilism and remain faithful to true rebellion, by replacing God by history.  History in its pure form furnishes no value by itself. Therefore one must live by the principles of immediate expediency and keep silent or tell lies. (255)

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found.  We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to find them in ourselves and in others. (268)

.... the only rule of life to-day: to learn to live and to die, and in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.  (273)

Paul Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970>

We have to recover the act of existing, the positing of the self.  Appropriation signifies that the initial situation from which reflection proceeds is “forgetfulness, “  I am lost, “led astray” among objects and separated from the center of my existence, just as I am separated from others and as an enemy is separated from all men.  I do not at first possess myself.  I am absent to myself. (45)

Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Some Lessons in Metaphysics, New York:  WW Norton and Company, 1969>

Man’s situation is always one of disorientation .... feeling lost .... (he) feels himself lost not merely from time to time but all the time.     .... to feel oneself lost implies first the sensation of feeling oneself ... meeting oneself, finding oneself; but by the same token, that self which man encounters on feeling himself consists precisely in a pure state of being lost.  (31)

The world into which man is thrown when he comes out of Paradise is the real world, for it is composed of resistances to man, of things surrounding him that he does not know what to do with because he does not know what aspect of them to study.  Paradise is a magic world ... the real world is ... antiparadise. (102)

I am not hermetically closed, but just the opposite. I am that which things penetrate, which they inundate, so much so that they twist me about, sweep me away, contradict me,  and destroy me, so that in order to affirm myself in their presence, I must struggle to exert myself, must constantly be doing something with or about them in order to escape their hostility. (158)

Nels F.S. Ferre, Evil and the Christian Faith, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947

To become really free we must act in rebellion against others; we must act distinctly as separate individuals; we must sometime or other go contrary to their decisions. This may not eventuate in overt action. It may remain hidden holding-off from others, and an inner judgment of them. Yet unless we exercise our independent judgment, unless we put ourselves in the seat of responsibility; unless we assume the power and the right to decision for ourselves what is right; unless we rebel in this sense against all authority, both individual and collective, we can never become true selves.  To eat of the tree of knowledge is necessary to want to become like God. We must assume God’s place; we must be fully free in our decision if we are to become real individuals. Spiritual and ethical autonomy is a necessary stage to true selfhood.  (33)