Transcript
I'm very happy to welcome you tonight to the James J. Reeb Memorial Lecture and to extend on behalf of the seminary a very warm welcome to the family of James Reeb, to his wife, to his daughter and son, Anne and Stephen, to his mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Reeb, and to his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Cable. The Reeb family has traveled from Casper, Wyoming to Princeton for this occasion, and it means
a very great deal to me personally and to all of us to have them here with us tonight and to welcome them. Mr. and Mrs. Cable are neighbors who meant very much to the James Rebs when they were in seminary. Let me read a statement of dedication that was prepared by Dr. Lefferts A. Letcher. At the time, the plaque was installed in front of the campus center. James Joseph Reeb was born in Wichita, Kansas on January
1, 1927. After completing high school and serving for a year in the United States Army, he graduated from St. Olaf College. He received the BD degree from Princeton Seminary in 1953. He was successively chaplain of the Philadelphia West Branch YMCA, assistant minister, then associate minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. He then became community relations director of the Boston Metropolitan Housing Program of the American Friends Service Committee in 1964-65. James Reeb,
from early boyhood, devoted himself increasingly to understanding and serving the friendless and the underprivileged, victims of poverty, race prejudice, and inner-city decay were particular objects of his long-standing concern. When he saw on television the brutal beating of civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama, he was deeply stirred. The next day, he responded to the call to join them in their march for human dignity and the citizenship. By his tragic death in Selma on March 11,
1965, this quiet, conscientious man became a symbol seen around the world of the struggle for racial justice in the United States. His sacrifice strengthened the resolution of the nation that the evil which he fought must be ended. May the death of James Reeb and the plaque on the campus center which commemorates it always remind Princeton Seminary that the fight against evil in ourselves and in our society involves the dedication of everything we are and everything we
have. And then the text which is found on the plaque, greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. The committee of alumni seeking the Reeb Memorial Lecturer for 1970 turned to an alumnus of Princeton Seminary in the next class. Jim Reeb's class was 1953. The Reverend Father Paul Verghese is a member of the class of 1954. Dean Verghese was born in India, spent the first two and a
half decades of his life there in study and serving a part of that time in the vocation of a journalist. Studied in the United States where he won three degrees at Goshen and Princeton and Yale. Studied also in Oxford. He has done two stints of service in Ethiopia. Has served as the associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. I remember the leadership which he gave to the council at the assemblies in New Delhi in
1961 and in Uppsala in 1968. He returned to his native Kerala where he is head of the theological seminary of his church which is one of the Verghese is one of the outstanding leaders of the Christian world today. And as I say it was natural that this committee would turn to this courageous Christian leader to be the Reeb Lecturer in 1970. It's a joy to welcome Father Paul Verghese back to Princeton tonight and to present him.
His topic will be thoughts on liberation, James Reeb and Herbert Marcuse. Dr. Verghese. President McCord, Reeb family and friends. It is indeed a special honor you have done me in asking to deliver a James Reeb Memorial Lecture. I have few qualifications to merit this honor. I knew him but not well. For a year that is 1952-53, my first and his last at Princeton Seminary, we were school grades. But he was then a married student living
off campus whereas I lived in Brown Hall. I did take a few senior courses in my first year and so we might have been in some classes together. There were some things in common between us. Neither of us believed that the Westminster Confession or any confession for that matter including the Nicene Creed could be the basis or content of faith. We both looked for a faith that made it possible for us to care for our fellow
man without anxiety or aggression. But we were moving in two different directions in reaction against a faith that failed to call forth love. He grew towards a rejection of church dogma and even of faith in a personal God perhaps. For me, the movement was in the other direction towards a rediscovery of the authentic Christian tradition in which theology played but a supportive role in which statements about God had to be qualified with the basic assertion of
the unknowability of God and where man's growth into the fullness of God's image in freedom, love, wisdom and power was the central concern. We were both scandalized by the plight of the black man in this country. For James Reeb, his direct involvement was to come later. For me, I had already worked for three years as a Negro pastor, had known the frustrations and aspirations of the poorer Negroes as well as the callous indifference of the richer
ones. I had been kicked out of buses in Atlanta, Georgia and out of restaurants, lunch counters and hotels in the north. In the summer of 1960, I was with the leaders of the sit-in movement in Nashville, Tennessee. James Reeb became involved in the civil rights movement much later, but when he did so, it was with an abandon and commitment that puts me to shame. I have never had to face Alabama state troopers on Route 80.
The worst I had to face was half a busload of pale-faced men and women who glared and shouted rude words at me. I have been viciously hit on my head with a stick. The worst I have experienced is a white hand pulling me out roughly from my bus seat and shouting at me to go behind. James Reeb died in a cause that is greater than that of Negro civil rights. He died that men may become
free and live in conscious dignity. He died in the hope of changing the picture of man's future, drawn by George Orwell. I quote him, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. It is not a picture of the future, friends. It is more a picture of the present and of the past. There is a boot on the face of man now. To lift that boot is part of
our task to build a tomorrow which is more human. But the harder part of our task for tomorrow is first to help the man on the ground get up and eat and then to help him recover his face and his dignity. We must also attend to the man with the boot to help him to be rid of his guilt and of his aggressive and acquisitive urges. It is in this context that I want to speak about
Herbert Marcuse, the prophet of liberation. Since I shall not refer very much again to James Reeb, let me use this occasion to pay tribute to his memory, to his suffering and death in the cause of a better tomorrow for man. May God grant rest to his soul and reward him with the brightness of the countenance of God on the last day. Professor Herbert Marcuse of San Diego University is both a miracle and a paradox. At 70,
he could still be the idol of the younger generation, the spokesman of their deepest aspirations. An intellectual of the classical German type, he can still communicate with ordinary people. His knowledge of the fields of philosophy and psychology, of political science and of theology, can only be termed encyclopedic. He is both ex-Marxist and ex-Freudian, but not by any means in a reactionary sense. He has been called a corruptor of the youth and an agent of
the CIA. His life has been threatened by John Burchards and he has been by striking Italian students. But Marcuse is a grand intellectual and the apostle of freedom. His recent work, an essay on liberation, is a tightly packed argument against contemporary civilization, an argument which he began developing in his heroes and civilization and in his better known one-dimensional man. A short general statement of his position is presented in French in La fin de l'utopie,
Paris 1968. His basic argument can be summarized only at great peril of oversimplification. He agrees with Freud that our civilization is built on the basis of the repression of the basic human instincts, hence the desperately acquisitive and aggressive tendency of our civilization. Aggression in Vietnam, oppression of the black race and economic exploitation of the whole world are but symptoms of a deeper disease which cannot be cured except by changing the repressive basis of social organization. That
is basically the thesis of Marcuse. So far he is simply developing Freud, but here he parts company with the master. Freud would say that no civilization is possible without repression, that is, subjection of the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Marcuse on the other hand believes that a non-repressive civilization is within the limits of possibility. Of course the present civilization would have to be demolished before a non-repressive one can take its place. He believes
that work itself can be converted into play, that domination can be totally abolished, that a morality can be based on gratification rather than renunciation. Only such a civilization, according to him, will promote non-repressive, non-aggressive human relationships. According to Marcuse, corporate capitalism is the major instrument of our civilization. Through an extensive economic and military machine, corporate capitalism not only subjects its own population to its activity of production and consumption, it also builds up a new
colonial empire through which it controls and dominates four continents. Marcuse's essay on liberation is dedicated to the young militants in America and elsewhere who have dared to challenge the frightening might of capitalist domination in the world. Marcuse wants to give a biological or rather somatopsychological basis to socialism. He argues that it is the consumer economy and the capitalist politics of Western civilization which have made man what he is today, insular, one-dimensional, aggressive, acquisitive. Man has
to be changed physically and psychologically in order that a new civilization may emerge. Man must develop a new sensibility by which he can touch his neighbor without aggressiveness and guilt. The new sensibility would also struggle against violence and exploitation wherever it finds these in society. Man must also liberate himself, according to Marcuse, from the tyranny of science and technology in order to live in a more gay and joyous relation to all reality. Logic and therefore science
and technology based on it overemphasizes the male principle of aggressive domination. We need to shift the balance to the female principle of receptivity, beauty and policy, according to Marcuse. Marcuse wrote his book before the events of May 1968 in Paris. There the revolting students practiced what Marcuse preached. They used words to speak a new language, the language of the heart, the language of poetry, to speak about human reality in human language. Only when the aesthetic controls
human creativity can science and technology come into their own as truly liberating forces, said the students in Paris. Marcuse welcomes black power and the Vietnam revolt as healthy subversive forces which can undermine the present sick civilization. Marcuse criticizes Marx for insisting that only a particular class can be the agent of social change. The old Marxist model for revolutionary change through the organized effort of the working class to seize power in the course of a mass upheaval
may still have some validity for the third world, says Marcuse, but these working classes themselves in the West are now under the of Western corporate capitalism and its neo-imperialism and therefore you cannot bank on them to lead the revolution. Therefore the more decisive revolution according to Marcuse may come from the growing movement of protest which is not based in any particular class or country. The peculiar feature of this new protest is that it is not
willing to accept the classical Marxist alternative to capitalism. Collective ownership, collective control, and collective planning of the means of production and distribution are all necessary elements in the creation of the new society, but it is not simply a question of abolition of poverty and creation of a just international society. Bureaucratic socialism, even where it guarantees economic justice, may be very much dehumanized as in the Soviet Union, though not in the same measure as corporate capitalism. Marcuse
demands a cessation of the productivity race between the West and the East in Europe and America. What he demands is a new society and a new man with a new body and a new mind. He demands a utopia where work becomes play, the ugly is transformed into the beautiful, noise and hurry give place to calm and poise, fun is substituted by joy and servitude by freedom. If I were to summarize Marcuse, one could say there are
three key words in Marcuse's thinking, rupture, transcendence, and play. The new man and the new society cannot come in natural continuity with the present civilization in its capitalist socialist form. It involves a radical break with the present. That is what he means by rupture. By transcendence, he means that man must enter that which is beyond history by a radical transformation of the self. It is a qualitative jump closely related to the idea of rupture. Man must
dare to enter utopia, but this is not the utopia envisioned by the socialists. That is why he calls his French work the end of utopia. Yet man must dare to create a new world in freedom and spontaneity where there is neither aggression nor acquisitiveness. Thought itself would be changed in Marcuse's new utopia into something necessarily positive, depoliticized, free, unstructured, spontaneous. And here comes his third concept. The ultimately characteristic act of man is play, not work. The
total automation of social labor is incompatible with capitalism, which insists on the creation of more and more goods to satisfy more and more false needs of man. It is also contrary to Marxism, which believes that labor is the creator of all value. Marcuse says we are afraid to make total automation the goal of our society because we are unwilling to make the qualitative jump from work to play as the basic activity of man. Now, that much
for a summary of Marcuse, and I hope I am fair to him. It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of intellectual life in America that there has been no adequate response to him from American intellectuals, but in his own native Germany he has been taken quite seriously. Last year, Jürgen Habermas of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt published and edited and published a collection of essays in honor of his 70th birthday called Antworten of Herbert
Marcuse. Habermas is a thinker of the same school of Frankfurt which produced thinkers like Marcuse. Habermas attacks Marcuse from a more classical socialist position. He is one of the outstanding critical thinkers of Europe, they say, perhaps the most outstanding one, Jürgen Habermas. I have not read much of his work, but his study of bourgeois society called Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit and his critical analysis of post-Karnian philosophy called Erkenntnis und Interesse as well as his restatement of
classical socialism called Theorie und Praxis have been regarded by some reviewers as the most substantial socio-philosophical thinking to come out of Central Europe. Now Habermas accuses Marcuse of being an ontologist of the Heideggerian school. Habermas criticizes him for taking man in isolation from social and historical reality and taking him as a kind of Dasein in the world. Another attempt at criticism of Marcuse's ideas has come from another reputed sociologist, Hans Heinz Holtz, who has published
a book called Utopie und Anarchismus, which is entirely about Marcuse. His accusation is also that Marcuse regresses into a romantic, cultural and apolitical interpretation of the revolution. Both Habermas and Marcuse insist that the present structures are corrupt, especially in the West, but Habermas and Holtz, as critics of Marcuse, would say that Marxism, dynamically reinterpreted, is adequate as the structure for building up the new society. Habermas would of course want such socialism to be undergated by a
systematic philosophy in the classical tradition. Marcuse, on the other hand, would not want to formulate clearly the structure of the new society. He would concentrate on two factors mainly. First, liberation from the colonial and oppressive imperialism of corporate capitalism. That is one. Second, changed attitudes in the can be worked out only after the qualitative change in man has already taken place. In his negative critique of the establishment, Marcuse speaks also for the new left, but most
new leftists find him unsatisfactory and inadequate in his positive formulations of a new society. Marcuse speaks more authentically for the hippie generation when he talks about liberation from the repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle and demands that work be substituted by play, repression by expression. My own critique of Marxism would be from a basically phenomenological perspective in terms of my understanding of what freedom and liberation really mean. Marcuse's understanding of liberation as freedom
is itself based on a defective understanding of the notion of freedom. We in ex-colonial countries have only begun to learn that liberation is the easier part of freedom. We have thrown off the political aspect of the colonial yoke and are only now finding out that we are still unfree. We continue to be under the domination of a world economic structure controlled by western corporate capitalism which uses our to exploit us. But even if we were
to be liberated from this economic domination by the west and by capitalism, we would still not be quite free until we have achieved sufficient power to realize our own freely chosen goals. That is the harder part of freedom, the acquisition of adequate power and the capacity to choose your own goals and to achieve them. Such power should include not only scientific and technological competence but also cultural autonomy and creativity. This positive aspect of freedom, namely the
capacity to choose one's own goals and to achieve them, is the aspect that Marcuse does not give enough attention to. He takes only the aspect of liberation but does not take the constructive element sufficiently seriously. Here Marcuse and the new left, especially the revolutionists, you know I make a distinction between revolutionaries and revolutionists. Most of the people I know are revolutionists, that is they talk about revolution, they don't mean it. Mostly these revolutionists refuse to give
even a sketch of the kind of society they would like to achieve. They insist that a clear formulation of the goals of the new society would be a betrayal of the revolution in that it would lead to unnecessary controversies which would impede the more urgent task of overthrowing the establishment. While it may be practically impossible to sketch out in detail the original for a complete blueprint of the society of the future, it may still be necessary
to chalk out in sketchy outlines some of the essential elements which simply have to go into the new structure. Here we come across a popular fallacy which opposes freedom to structure. This false opposition between freedom and structure, I submit, comes from a double misunderstanding of freedom. First there is the tendency to put more weight on freedom from than on freedom for, as I have said. The second aspect of the fallacy derives from the basically individualistic framework
in which we understand freedom. I think Marcuse himself falls into both these traps. Freedom is a key concept in Eastern Christian theology because for us the character of God is freedom and the character of man who is made in the image of God is also freedom. Freedom is the basic category in which we understand both God and man. But this word is a very complex word. It has a very rich meaning. The word Eleftheria or Eleftheros
has many synonyms in Eastern patristic thinking. I could mention some of the aspects of freedom just briefly as the Eastern Christian understands them. First there is apatheia or freedom from compulsive inner passions which overcome and is part of freedom. The capacity to control your own emotions, your own passions so that you are in control and possession of yourself in life. Be freedom from death and corruption. That is also part of freedom. You are not really free
if ultimately death is going to conquer. Secondly, freedom of the intelligence or the capacity to behold truth. Our fathers called it Theoria which is the capacity for vision which is also part of human freedom. You are not free until you are able to have this vision of reality which is accurate and which is illuminating. And then freedom from guilt or a clear consciousness is also a part of genuine authentic freedom because you are not really free
so long as these guilt and related feelings are driving you against your will to certain kinds of compulsive actions. Now I don't want to go on developing that but another aspect of freedom the positive aspect of freedom in Eastern patristic thinking is the capacity to create. This is what characterizes God's freedom. He can say let there be light and there is light. That is freedom. I'm also free to say let there be light but there is
no light. That's the difference. And you are really free only when you can choose something and by choosing realize that which you choose. In other words the capacity for creating something which you have conceived as the good is part of freedom. So it means becoming spontaneously creative not caused by some external force to be creative. You must yourself become the initiator of a new causal chain. If somebody else is pushing you to be creative that doesn't
really make you free because you are not the originator of that which you create. And so that aspect of freedom as spontaneous uncaused uncompelled creativity is also extremely important in our understanding of freedom. I think the image of freedom in Marcuse is a little bit limited. It is a negative and primarily individualistic understanding of freedom. If I may say in our Christian tradition and especially in the Eastern tradition and I think also in some parts of
the Western tradition there is a demand upon man by his very creation quite apart from his vocation in Jesus Christ. By the very fact that he has been created he is called upon to be master of himself and of the universe. But this mastery, this demand to become like God, sovereign, free, creator of the good, loving and wise, strong and powerful. This is the basic vocation of man as man whether he be Christian or not. It
is this more positive notion of freedom as self-control, authority and the capacity for spontaneous creativity that seems to need greater emphasis in our own time. The second fallacy I have mentioned is that of individualism in thinking about even creativity or freedom. Even creativity is not an individual operation necessarily. Structure is one of the ways in which men can relate to each other to coordinate creativity for greater efforts to create the good in forms which are
beyond the power of individual men to create. In other words structure is not an enemy of freedom but a servant of freedom. We need to learn to think not merely in terms of freedom of the individual from structures but having free structures under the control of corporate society which society can freely use to create new forms of good without being overpowered by the structures themselves. Even in the matter of the state, what is the state for?
Is it to regulate the conflict of individual's freedom with the freedom of his neighbour? In a sense yes you can say I am free to swing my hand wherever I like but am I free to swing my hand if it ends up on the face of my neighbour? That is supposed to be the place where the state comes in to see that one man's freedom does not become another man's enslavement but that is still taking individual
freedom as the fundamental reality and then trying to understand the state on that basis. But I would like to see the state itself as an instrument of corporate freedom. Freedom means not simply freedom from oppression, exploitation and enslavement but also the capacity for a whole society to stand up in dignity and to be the free creator of the good. This is true both for individuals and for societies. Societies themselves have to be redeemed from whatever is
holding them enslaved, from the military machines and from the crushing cruelty and cupidity of corporate capitalism as well as from ideologies and apprehensions that prevent men from being spontaneously creative. But it also means the capacity of societies to create new structures in order to create new forms of the good. Structures are the means by which large aggregates of human beings relate to each other on a long-term basis for a given purpose. The purpose of these
structures should be to achieve maximum possibility of spontaneous creativity for the society as a whole as well as for its individual members. But these very structures, unless constantly watched, become powerful and domineering and the pressure of radical evil in the world and in man transforms these very structures into instruments of oppression and unfreedom. Thus there is a dialectic between freedom and structure. There is almost a struggle as to who is the master. It then becomes necessary
that the struggle for the liberation of man should go through two phases. One, the breaking down of the oppressive alienated runaway structure and two, the building of new creative structures fostering human freedom both collectively and individually. The first of these operations is called revolution and the second, utopia. But revolution and utopia are two phases of one single process rather than two separate stages in a program. It is the vision of utopia that must be the motor
of revolution. But here there are two problems at least. First, if utopia means merely a list of demands to be presented to those in power, then those in power can always effect a compromise, mute the revolution and then go on to new forms of oppression and exploitation. That's what happens in our societies. Everybody says, oh, what the hell do you want? Tell us. Then when you tell us, well, let's see how much we can give you.
Then you strike a compromise and you are still in control. The other man has come as a beggar and got something because he's strong. But still you are in control. Now that is the problem about defining utopia as a set of demands to be given to those in power. This is what is basically wrong with trade unionism or syndicalism. Secondly, and this is more complicated, the two phases of the operation seem to be based on conflicting
principles. Revolution demands the use of force against the will of those in power in order to unseat them. In other words, denial of freedom of the establishment to go on being in power belongs to the essence of revolution. Whereas in utopia, the guiding principle is the freedom of all persons and of society as a whole. Thus, in the interests of utopia, which means the freedom of all, the masses have to be organized to deny freedom to
the establishment and to overthrow it by force, which is contrary to the very idea of freedom, which is the guiding principle of utopia. Now this is the conflict between revolution and utopia. Utopia is based on love. Revolution is based on hatred, even if that hatred is motivated by love for the oppressed. Now the Old Testament enjoins both of these on man to love the good and to hate the evil. That is why the psalmist can say
about evildoers with a sense of achievement, I hate them with a perfect hatred. That's Psalm 139:22. They knew that God loves the righteous and hates the wicked. But when you come to the New Testament, there is a new mood. Repay no man evil for evil. Avenge not yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. Be subject to the authorities for all authorities from God. He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed. Love
your enemies. Be good to the just and the unjust. There you are. You haven't got a clear cut direction there. The question before man is this. Utopia is the kingdom of God, continually receding, of course, but it's there. In order to usher in the kingdom of God, are we justified in using methods which are contrary to that kingdom? Can we liberate by unliberal methods? Here a simple biblicism cannot provide us with the answers. There are whole
host of points to be taken into account, but I shall mention three. In the Bible itself, there is, of course, the example of Christ overthrowing the bankers' counters. That was a very violent and revolutionary act against an evil establishment. B, there is the fact that the liberal approach to liberation often ends up in the establishment of a very oppressive and conservative group in power, with the liberals salving the conscience of the nation with a little bit
of ineffective critical writing and demonstration. See, there is the powerful argument that there is violence deeply entrenched in society, destroying the dignity of man, and by refusing to overthrow this violence by forceful and revolutionary means, the liberals are unwittingly supporting the violence that is endemic in society. The accusation is that the liberals themselves are alienated from the exploited masses and are themselves the beneficiaries of the exploitative system, which they so loudly denounce, but which they are
unwilling to overthrow. All these three arguments, which one could develop further, provide justification for the revolutionary stance and commitment. But there is another aspect to the problem about which East European Marxists are becoming more and more exercised. This problem may be briefly stated as the nemesis of hatred. Hatred is not something which we can summon and dismiss at will. Once you begin to hate the evil establishment and steel yourselves to use violent and cruel methods of
unseating those in power, you develop habits and attitudes in which you may use the same methods against all your opponents when you are in power in utopia. In other words, the revolutionary methods used for the first phase of liberation have an inescapable and significant impact on the nature of utopia itself. Eastern European communist leaders are complaining that Marxism Leninism does not provide them with the basis for dealing with the nemesis of hatred, which is the states,
and also the fact of guilt, which leads to alienation even among revolutionary leaders. So any theology of revolution that does not take fully into account these two related problems of the nemesis of hatred and the inevitability of guilt will be basically defective. But neither of two problems should be used as adequate reasons for ruling out revolution as part of the means for the liberation of man. What we need further honest discussion on seems to me to
be the nature of the dialectic between revolution and utopia in the struggle for liberation. I must conclude with a summing up of some of the issues raised by Marcuse and his critics in relation to revolution and liberation. First, to me, Marcuse himself seems alienated from the stark realities of poverty, exploitation, and the mass murder of human dignity that is going on in our contemporary societies. He knows a little bit about American cruelty in Vietnam, but he
seems almost ignorant of the kind of world in which the rest of us live, and he has no sensitivity for it. While attacking the bourgeois ideology and mentality, he himself writes as one who lives in bourgeois comfort in a comfortable academic world. In thinking about a new humanity, he seems to say that this is something to be created in an advanced technological society even while two-thirds of the world is living in abject poverty. Is this
possible or desirable? Can we create a non-repressive civilization in one part of the world without waiting for the economic emancipation and cultural growth of the rest of the world? The Black Power movement in America started out as a national movement, but at least the Black Panther Party has realized that this is no longer possible. In a new statement written by the National Office of the Black Panther Party, which you can find in their leaflet called
Guardian Panthers, February 1970, we find the following affirmation. The Black Panther Party stands for revolutionary solidarity with all people fighting against the forces of imperialism, capitalism, racism, and fascism. Our solidarity is extended to those people who are fighting these evils at home and abroad because we understand that our struggle for our liberation is part of a worldwide struggle being waged by the poor and the oppressed against imperialism and the world's chief capitalist, United States of America.
We, the Black Panther Party, understand that the most effective way that we can aid our Vietnamese brothers and sisters is to destroy imperialism from the inside, attack it where it breeds. Now, that is a different way of approaching it with a full awareness of the solidarity with all the poor and the oppressed of the world. Thus, the Black Panther Party breathes the air of genuine proletarian internationalism, while Marcuse seems to speak from a post-affluent society.
Marcuse holds but little attraction for those who feel part of an international struggle for justice and peace in the world. The basic criticism of Marcuse, leveled by his colleagues in Germany, that he remains outside the political struggle and seeks a cultural romantic revolution without an economic and political revolution for the liberation of man seems thus justified. The second critique of Marcuse is closely related to the first and has also been raised by Habermas and Holtz. Marcuse
takes man as an ontological object, a design in the world, rather than as a historical and social reality. He is therefore too individualistic and existentialist in his basic orientation, even when speaking about man's relation to his fellow man. He does not give enough attention to the problem of structures in their historical and dialectic perspective, nor does he show us how the famous qualitative jump from here to Utopia is to be achieved. I would have liked here
to point your attention to an interesting debate that is now going on in France, but since I don't have the time, I'll abbreviate this part, which for me is the most fascinating debate, which the Anglo-Saxon world doesn't seem to take much notice of yet. This is a debate between Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean-Paul Sartre in France going on for the last two years on existentialism and structuralism. There is a new movement of thought, especially
in France, coming from anthropologists and ethnologists, which says that it is possible for man to study the science of structures in such a way that we can predict with absolute accuracy whatever possibilities of structure exist for any society at any given time, and then you can compute the advantages and disadvantages of the half a dozen different alternatives that you have, and then you can choose the best. It's absolutely scientific, they claim. Now Sartre is saying that
such an absolutely scientific approach to structures will imprison man within itself, and there is a very interesting debate going on, a debate which in my mind goes back a hundred years to the time of Kierkegaard, when the same debate was carried on in Russia between two great literary figures, Chernyshevsky, who wrote a book called What is to be Done, in which he described how by science and technology we can build the utopia, and then Dostoevsky, in
response to Chernyshevsky, wrote his Notes from the Underground, in which he says, when you have built your beautiful utopia, then one man with a sour face will stand up and look at this beautiful paradise that you have built and will say, it looks so wonderful, let's smash the whole thing. In other words, Dostoevsky was saying that man can never be made the adjunct structure, however perfect it is. Man has to continue to have the capacity to
change these structures and to shape them according to his own plans. And this debate is still going on, and I think it is a debate that we must take rather seriously. Now a final point, and then I conclude. I admire your patience. A final point by way of conclusion. Most of us live in a measure, and that includes me, in a measure of bourgeois comfort, and the call of freedom disconcerts us. For freedom's call, questions are
love of security, comfort, and ease. And can Christians afford to be secure, comfortable, and at ease in a society which is basically unjust, exploitative, oppressive, violent, cruel, destructive of the dignity of man? Are we not put to shame by the fact that the call for liberation is always to come from outside the church and has to be basically anti-church? The French Revolution, the first genuine outburst of freedom, the church opposed, and it opposed the church.
Of course, later they came to terms in the Second Vatican Council, I thought. The Bolshevik Revolution, another outburst of freedom, however distorted and unfree it may have later become, also evoked a negative response from the church. Because of the church's bourgeois love of comfort was threatened. And now there are the revolutions of the blacks and the students. Are we still going to be threatened by these and set up defensive arguments, or can we see in them
the call to freedom coming from Christ and from the Holy Spirit? It is significant that Eldridge Cleaver was a dope peddler and a rapist. Why did an oppressed and hounded man have to go to the depths of evil in order to find his freedom? I would say because in the churches which claimed the monopoly of freedom and goodness, there was no room for a man who genuinely sought freedom and the good. I regard, and I say
it not with any sense of rhetoric and not for the sake of applause, I regard the Black Power movement as the most significant harbinger of the liberation forward James Reeb and Martin Luther King longed and suffered and died. If it has to be led by men with hatred as their power, with the willingness to shoot and kill as their shock technique, that is only an indictment of our society, not of the movement. So long as we
Christians continue to love our comfort and our ease, rather than heed to the call for the liberation of man, we shall remain unfaithful to the one who came to set us free. The boot of the oppressor is still on the face of man. Shall it go on forever?