| Eros and Civilization | |
|---|---|
1974 Beacon Press edition |
|
| Author(s) | Herbert Marcuse |
| Original title | Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud |
| Subject(s) | non-fiction |
| Genre(s) | Philosophy |
| Publisher | Beacon Press |
| Publication date | 1955 |
| Media type | |
| Part of a series on the |
| Frankfurt School |
|---|
| Major works |
| Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason The Fear of Freedom Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere |
| Notable theorists |
| Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas |
| Important concepts |
| Critical Theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism · Privatism Non-Identity · Communicative Rationality Legitimation Crisis |
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud is one of German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse's best known works. Written in 1955, it is a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society, based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960s countercultural social movements.
Eros and Civilization discusses the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. It argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".[1] It contends that Freud's argument that repression is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken, as Eros is liberating and constructive.
Marcuse starts with the conflict described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents - the struggle between human instincts and the conscience of repression (superego), which is self-repressing trying to follow the society's mores and norms.[2] Freud claimed that a clash between Eros and civilization results in the history of humanity being one of his repression: 'Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.'[2] Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness.[2] "Progress", for Marcuse, is a concept that provides the explanation and excuse of why the system has to continue; it is the reason which requires the happiness of people is sacrificed (see also pleasure principle).
Marcuse argues that 'the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle - life without leisure) and Eros (pleasure principle - leisure and pleasure), but between alienated labour (performance principle - economic stratification) and Eros.'[2] Sex is allowed for 'the betters' (capitalists...), and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the 'poor' and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives: it could replace 'alienated labor' with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in "a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".[2]
The argument depends on the assumption that instincts can be shaped by historical phenomena such as repression.[2] Marcuse concludes that our society's troubles result not from biological repression itself but from its increase due to "surplus repression" which is the result of contemporary society.[2] The result is a philosophy that is a merger of Freud and Marx, or what one reviewer called an 'eroticized Marx'.[2]