Miłosz dedicates an entire chapter of his Visions from San Francisco Bay to Herbert Marcuse. The chapter begins with a quote from One Dimensional Man
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“ The quantification of nature, which led to its explication in terms of mathematical structures, separated reality from all inherent ends and, consequently, separated the true from the good, science from ethics … Then the precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.”
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Miłosz originally published the polish version of the Visions from San Francisco Bay in 1969, they are reflections on a particularly significant period in American history which he happened to have spent at University of California, Berkeley. He notices that Marcuse was especially popular among young Americans, struggling with identifying the source of their discontent
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“It is very difficult to live feeling that reality is covered by a veil or multitude of veils that one tries to draw aside in order to get at something “firm” – but the veils are invisible, moving, slippery; they elude names because their perversity is so great that they are transformed as often as they are named. Comedy and terror flow over them in waves of images of the absurd. Under such conditions, not far from schizophrenia (one of whose symptoms is that a schizophrenic may see a tree but it is not completely real; a real tree is expected to appear any moment, but it never quite does), Marcuse comes forth and says: This happened because you are unfree.”
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The description of our socialization and knowledege as a source of bondage, as well as the call towards ‘negation’ as a path towards freedom is reminiscient of another sage teaching around California during this time, Jiddu Krishnamurti.
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“The tyranny oppressing you does not have any command center in any palace or castle, no one has planned it and it need not resort to orders and prohibitions. But the control which is exercised over you is total, for you have been transformed from within – your mind, your emotions, your desires do not belong to you, they have been imposed by society’s rituals. If you want to be free, the first step must be the realization that any of your reflections on daily life, on man, are not independent, since the material at your disposal, the material of your perceptions and ideas, is not your own as you believe. It is not with the world that you are communicating but with your own civilization, which disguises itself and passes itself off as the world. So let conciousness discover how and by what means you are manipulated. That can be done.
The instrument of control employed by the collective is language – spoken, written, pictorial. The information that language transmits can be evaluated with relative ease, but the dislocations of meaning brought about in language by the elimination of certain expressions, the inverting of concepts, even through syntax, are much more difficult to perceive. Marcuse considers the analysis of language to be the principal task, although he seems not to have any doubts about the somewhat daunting dimensions of such an enterprise. He attacks language that breaks the reality we perceive into fragments of “facts”, since that language fully supports a cow-like view of the world – we don’t know what a cow staring at a passing automobile thinks, but we sense that it is something on the order of a pure statement: it’s there, nothing more than that. According to Marcuse, there is a close connection between the colloquial language that fashions everyone imperceptibly and the limitations of the philosophers it has also fashioned.
To the delight of his young readers, Marcuse concentrates his attack on positivist philosophy, powerful in American universities, and especially despised by the students. For that philosophy renders any longing for a coherent world view impossible and derides that longing as well. “Values detached from objective reality become subjective,” to use Marcuse’s words, and what is subjective is not considered philosophical. The young turn away from such linguistic games, which they find sterile – a healthy impulse on their part, for what sort of philosophy would investigate a valueless, cow-like world? But they are then condemned to dangle in the void of their own subjectivity, an all-consuming relativism from which neither hallucinogens nor Eastern religions will save them. According to Marcuse, however, positivist philosophy is not an innocent exercise practiced by armchair sages. In agreement with science in a common contempt for Eros – values, detached and banished – it strives to perfect the language of technological domination
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source: Visions from San Francisco Bay, (1985 translation by Richard Lourie) p.187-
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Miłosz admits a common tradition and ‘early acquired habits’ with Marcuse, the conviction that a marriage of Logos and Eros is necessary to understanding the human condition. However, Miłosz also struggles with the contradiction in Marcuse, “To consider the citizens of any country, as Marcuse does, depraved creatures, blameless idiots but idiots nonetheless, is to condemn oneself to intellectual arrogance”.
[Edited from Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Jan 16, 2007]
