Dear Lee Goodfield,

Thank you for sending me a copy of your MA thesis.
I enjoyed reading it, from beginning to end.
It gave me some insight into the background of Eric's eloquent
attacks on my comments to the Kierkegaard list.

I agree with you about the alienation that afflicts
modern society. But we differ concerning the pathophysiology
of the problem, its etiology, and its treatment. You,
if I understand correctly, view it like Marcuse, as the
consequence of historical development in some manner gone
awry. I look at it from the viewpoint of a physician
who is every day confronted with the defects that inhere
by nature in the human body and in the human mind.
I ask myself and I ask you, given the patent imperfections
of the human body and its vulnerability to disease and accident,
if the human body is imperfect in its own way, and if the
human mind is subject to its own diseases, why should anyone
except a quack or a witch-doctor claim that human society might
be perfect if only it would swallow Ludwig Marcuse's or
Erich Fromm's or, or that matter Karl Marx's magic remedy?

The political sociologist might well take to heart and try to
emulate the great achievement of civilized, i.e. Hippocratic
medicine: the understanding that a person who vomits or has
diarrhea, who coughs up bloody sputum, whose skin breaks out
in weeping eruptions and whose eyes are swollen shut, is not
by virtue of any of these symptoms, - or all of them, -
possessed by an evil spirit; nor is he "morally corrupt",
whatever that might mean. The prerequisite of being a
physician at all is to accept the imperfections of human
nature without moralizing. That should also be the
prerequisite for the study of human society.

What the Hippocratic author said about physicians applies,
I think, with even greater cogency to political scientists:

      "Now I approve of theorising also, if it lays its
       foundation in incident and deduces its conclusions
       in accordance with phenomena. For if theorising lays 
       its foundation in clear fact ... the intellect ...
       leads us afterwards into truth. But if it begins, not
       from a clear impression, but from a plausible fiction,
       it often induces a grievous and troublesome condition.
       All who so act are lost in a blind alley. Now no harm
       would be done if bad practitioners received their due
       wages. But as it is, their innocent patients suffer,
       for whom the violence of their disorder did not appear
       sufficient without the addition of their physician's
       inexperience. I must now pass on to another subject."
                 Hippocrates Precepts I, 16-30, translated by
                 W H S Jones (Loeb Classical Library,
                 Hippocrates I, pp 313-314

If not now, then perhaps at some future date, you will
find yourself in agreement with the observation that the
sweeping historical judgments made by Lukacz, Horkheimer
and Marcuse implicitly rely on an idealistic (Hegelian)
self-confidence regarding the adequacy of our conceptual
summaries of vast epochs and areas of history.  In this
instance the argument of the analytic logical school of
philosophy to the effect that statements so abstract and
broad about events so remote are difficult to interpret and
are even harder to believe, is somewhat persuasive to me.
It also seems incongruous to me to try to impeach idealism
with idealistic assumptions, as Marcuse seems to me to have
done.  Nor does it seem to me that Marcuse's dialectic leads
anywhere except perhaps to expressionistic literature,
such as Eric's, the aesthetic value of which is not to be
underestimated.

The pathos of Marcuse's and his philosophical colleagues, and
of Freud's criticism of contemporary civilization harks back
to Nietzsche and his rejection of Christianity. Nietzsche's
resentment is understandable as that of a Lutheran pastor's
son rebelling against his family's values. Those of us not
similarly handicapped can perhaps entertain a more
dispassionate view of history.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com