It is a special honour you have done me in asking me to deliver the James Reeb Memorial lecture. I have few qualifications to merit this honour. I knew him, but not well. For a year, i.e. 1952-53, my first and his last at Princeton Seminary, we were schoolmates. 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 other 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 fellowmen 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. For me the movement was 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 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 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 bus-load of paleface men and women who glared and shouted rude words at me. I have never 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 human dignity. He died in the hope of changing the picture of man's future drawn by George Orwell: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." (1)

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 a 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. And we must also attend to the man with the boot to help him too to be rid of his guilt, and of his aggression 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 seventy 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 sociology can only be termed, encyclopaedic. He is both ex-Marxist and ex-Freudian, but not by any means in a reactionary sense. He has been called a corrupter of the youth and an agent of the C.I.A. His life has been threatened by John-Birchers and he has been heckled 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 Eros and Civilization and in his better known One Dimensional Man. A short general statement of his position is presented 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 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.

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, i.e. 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 abolished, that a morality can be based on gratification rather than renunciation. Only such a civilization 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 it not only subjects its population to its own 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 somato-psychological 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 neighbour without aggressiveness and guilt. The new sensibility also struggles against violence and exploitation wherever it finds these in society. Man must liberate himself 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 poesy.

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.

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. But these working classes themselves are now under the domination of western corporate capitalism and its neo-imperialism.

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 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.

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 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, de-politicized, free, unstructured, spontaneous. And here comes his third concept. The ultimately characteristic act of man is play, not work. The total automation of social labour 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 labour is the creator of all value. 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.

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 Juergen Habermas edited a collection of essays in honour of his 70th birthday: Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse. (2) Habermas is a thinker of the school of Frankfort (Institute for Social Research) which produced thinkers like Marcuse. Habermas attacks Marcuse from a more classical socialist position. His study of bourgeois society (Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit) and his critical analysis of post-kantian philosophy (Erkenntnis und Interesse) as well as his restatement of classical socialism (Theorie und Praxis) have been regarded by some reviewers as the most substantial socio-philosophical thinking to come out of central Europe.(3) Habermas Marcuse of being an ontologist of the Heideggerian school. Habermas speaks of the old rational heritage being disintegrated through the dialectical interplay of such standpoints as positivism, pragmatism and historicism. These schools have virtually canceled each other out. Only dialectical materialism stands as a still valid philosophical approach. Yet another attempt at criticism of Marcuse's ideas have come from Hans Heinz Holz (Utopie und Anarchismus, Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Kohn, 1968). 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 Holz 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 undergirded 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; second, changed attitudes in the relation of human beings to each other and in their approach to work. Everything else can be worked out only after the qualitative change in man has already taken place. In his negative critique of the Establishment, he speaks also for the New Left. But New Leftists find him unsatisfactory and inadequate in his positive formulations of a new society. Marcuse, however, speaks also 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 Marcuse would be from a basically phenomenological perspective. 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 had 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 capitalists to exploit us. But even if we were to be liberated from this economic domination by the west, we would still not be quite free until we have achieved sufficient power to realize our own freely chosen goals. 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 national goals and to achieve them, is the more difficult part of attaining freedom.

Here Marcuse and the New Left, especially the revolutionists among the latter, refuse to give even a sketch of the kind of society they would like to achieve. They insist that such formulation 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 blue print 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 very popular fallacy which opposes freedom to structure. This false opposition 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. 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, a key concept in Eastern Christian theology, is a word which has a large number of synonyms in Greek. The word eleutheria itself means ‘not enslaved‘. But its synonyms in Eastern Patristic thinking include (a) apatheia or freedom from compulsive passions which overcome and enslave our will, (b) freedom from death and corruption, (c) freedom of the intelligence or the capacity to behold Truth (theoria), (d) freedom from guilt or a clear conscience (parrhesia). There are four other adjectives which are synonymous with eleutheros which are adoulotes which means unenslaved, adespotes or not having a master, autokrates or sovereign and autexousios i.e. having authority in oneself. To be free thus for the Eastern Christian is much more than being liberated. It means becoming spontaneously creative, i.e. to be the originator of the good and the beautiful without being constrained externally or internally to do so. This notion of freedom which has at its heart the image of man as a corporate king over the whole cosmos is a far cry from the notion of man popularized by Augustinian thought in the west. Augustine's image of man sees him as a sinner, broken, repentant, miserable, begging for pardon and mercy, with nothing good in himself, totally dependent on God alone for grace and mercy. The only freedom that Augustine could grant even to the
saved man was simply freedom in the bosom of God like a little baby secure in its mother's arms.

In Eastern Christian thought, at least in classical patristics, there is a demand imposed upon man by his very creation, to become like God -- Sovereign, free, creator of the good, loving and wise, strong and powerful. It is this more positive notion of freedom as self-control, authority and the capacity for spontaneous creativity that needs greater emphasis in our time. In this positive understanding of freedom, science and technology brave their own important roles to play as the means by which man gains control of external reality.

The second fallacy is so universal that even the Christian church in the East has fallen a prey to it. If freedom means spontaneous creativity, then such creativity needs not always be that of individuals in isolation. Structure is one of the ways in which men relate to each other to co-ordinate creativity for greater efforts to create the good, in forms which are beyond the power of individual men to create. 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.

It has been traditional to see the freedom of the individual as being in conflict with the freedom of other individuals, and the state as being necessary to make sure that one man's freedom does not interfere with that of another man. I am free to swing my hand in any direction I like; but my neighbour's freedom demands that my swinging hand does not end up on his face. Thus individual freedom is regarded as the primary reality, and the state being necessary only to guarantee the maximum of individual freedom for each man.

But today we are beginning 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 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 might of 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 forms of the good. Structures are the means by which large aggregates of human beings relate to each other on a long-term basis. 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 transforms these very structures into instruments of oppression and unfreedom. It then becomes necessary that the struggle for the liberation of man 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 process rather than two separate stages in a programme. It is the vision of utopia that must be the motor of revolution. But here there are two problems.

First, if utopia means merely a list of demands to be presented to those in power, they can always effect a compromise, mute the revolution, and then go on to new forms of oppression and exploitation. This is what is basically wrong with syndicalism or trade unionism.

Secondly, 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 the 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.

Utopia is based on love, revolution is based on hatred, even if that hatred is motivated by love for the oppressed. 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" (Ps. l39:22). They knew that God loves the righteous and hates the wicked.

But in 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 authority is from God. He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed . . . Love your enemies. Be good to the just and the unjust." (Romans 12, l3 and Mt 5)

The question before man is this. Utopia is the kingdom of God. 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 a whole host of points to be taken into account.

(a) In the Bible itself there is the example of Christ overthrowing the banker's 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.
(c) 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 are alienated from the exploited masses and are themselves the beneficiaries of the exploitation 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 even 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 and the fact of guilt which leads to alienation even among revolutionary leaders.

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 these 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. 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 (including scientific-technological) growth of the rest of the world? The Black Power movement in America started out as a national movement. But at least the Black Panthers have realized that this is no longer possible. In a new statement written by the national office of the Black Panther party (Guardian/Panthers, February l97O, page 1) 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 world-wide struggle being waged by the poor and the oppressed against imperialism and the world's chief capitalist, the 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."

Thus the Black Panther party breathes the air of genuine proletarian internationalism while Marcuse speaks 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 Holz. Marcuse takes man as an ontological object-- a dasein in the world, rather than as a historical and social reality. He is too individualistic and existentialist in his basic orientation even when speaking about man's relation to his fellowmen.He does not give enough attention to the problems of structures, in their historical and dialectical perspective. Nor does he show how the famous qualitative jump from here to utopia is to be achieved. There can be no genuine liberation of man without his being able to control the structures that regulate his life as a corporate entity. Here the interesting debate in France between the structuralists under the leadership of Claude Levi-Strauss and the Existentialists with Jean-Paul Sartre at their head is of eminent interest to all concerned with the liberation of man. Lévi-Strauss, like his counter-part Noam Chomski in this country, thinks that fundamental structures for language, or for human social organization are given, and of but limited variation. It is possible, the structuralists claim, to study scientifically, with absolute objectivity, the limited number of alternative structures open to any given human society at a given historical point in its development. It is up to that society to make the decision, again with scientific objectivity, to choose the particular structure that offers the maximum advantage, and then to build that structure.

While the existentialists say, with Kierkegaard "Truth is subjectivity." The structuralists say "Truth is objectivity." By a study of the patterns of culture developed in the past by human society, it is possible to work out a strict science of structures. By sheer objective measurement and computation we are able to choose the right kind of structures. This ambitious claim of French ethnologists and anthropologists does not seem to be receiving much attention in the Anglo-Saxon world. Jean Piaget has recently published an introduction to Structuralism, and a more objective introduction by Yvan Simonis was published in 1968, under the title Claude Levi-Strauss ou la "Passion de l'inceste". I have a feeling that this Structuralism also belongs to the malaise of western civilization which is morally tired. Can we hand over all our moral choices to a computer? Can we build that perfect technological society where all evil and the possibility of evil has been banished? Have we yet resolved the Russian debate of the middle of the last century between two contemporaries of Kierkegaard-- Dostoevsky and Chernishevsky? The latter feels that science and technology can build the perfect structure and the perfect society, (Chernishevsky, What is_Io Be Done?) while Dostoevksy in his Notes from the Underground speaks about the man with the dour face who would want to assert his basic freedom by smashing the perfect structure which takes away his freedom to be evil.

I wish I had time to develop that question still further. But I want to go beyond Marcuse and Habermas to say man is both a structure-creating and structure-inhabiting animal, and also a person who is capable of standing alone in dignity, defying all structures and all external constraint. Man is both a dasein-in-the-world a la-Heidegger, and a social being a_la Marxism. Marcuse and the Marxists must get together to give us a more inclusive programme of liberation.

A final point by way of conclusion. Most of us live in a measure of bourgeois comfort, and the call of freedom disconcerts us. For freedom's call questions our 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 face that the call for liberation has 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 later came to terms with in the Second Vatical Council. The Bolshevik Revolution, an outburst of freedom, however distorted and unfree it may have since become, also evoked a negative response from the church because its 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, or can we see in them the call to freedom coming from Christ and 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 the Black Power movement as the most significant harbinger of the liberation for which 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 in the face of man. Shall it go on forever?


Notes

1. Duncan Howlett, No Greater Love-—The James Reeb Story, Harper & Row, 1966.

2. Suborkamp Verlag l968
3. See leading article in the Times Literary Supplement dated 5th June 1969
under the title ‘From Historicism to Marxist Humanism