Marcuse's Consideration Of True And False Needs example essay topic

Modern capitalist society is the target of severe criticism in Herbert Marcuse's book, One-Dimensional Man. As one would hope, Marcuse's intent is not merely to point out the shortcomings of the present system. He further hopes to encourage change in the most basic features of society, and with the intent to effect change arises the question of what goals the proposed change is directed towards. Primary among his goals is the 'development and satisfaction of human needs and faculties' (xl ). Which of the wide range of human faculties are worthy of development? This question obviously requires value judgments to be made; any answer will be highly subjective or very complex, and probably both subjective and complex.

Instead, this paper will focus on the second problem raised by Marcuse's goal: the identification of human needs to be satisfied. In particular, we will examine his own standards for determining what human needs must be satisfied by a rational society. Marcuse assumes that not all of what have been called 'needs' at one time or another are real necessities that a rational society need consider. Certain 'vital needs' are beyond doubt, however. Those are the needs of human biology without which life cannot continue, and such needs seem clearly to be objectively determined by biological factors. The sheer misery that infects human life when adequate food, water, and protection from the elements are not available in itself would seem to give sufficient reason for a rational society to concern itself first with providing everyone with those bare necessities.

It is generally taken for granted that human beings have needs beyond the mere sustenance of biological life. Some of those proposed needs border on the biological, such as 'the need for health care. ' At the other extreme are needs with no physical component at all, such as 'the needs for spiritual sustenance. ' How does Marcuse propose we evaluate these less objectively evident contenders?

Overall, he takes an attitude of skepticism towards them. Marcuse writes that 'human needs, beyond the biological level, have always been preconditioned' (4). The key concept in this sentence is 'conditioned'; the conception of needs of this type are the result of social conditioning of the individual. Marcuse contends that the controlling agents of this conditioning are 'the prevailing societal institutions and interests' within a society' (4). Because they are imposed on human mentality rather then inherent in the human condition, the needs which arise within an individual in this way are not truly necessary. Marcuse's term for these unnecessary needs is 'false needs.

' It seems a feature of his definition that 'false needs' are distinguished by their being imposed on the individual by social interests beyond her own control. To this definition Marcuse adds the contention that such needs are invariably harmful, a point which requires empirical support. He writes that these conditioned needs are 'the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice' (5). How does this happen? One can view Marcuse's account of the harm arising from the creation of false needs as a direct reponse to an anticipated objection by an adherent of liberal political theory. The liberal theorist might argue that providing certain basic freedoms, perhaps a right to self-determination, must be the primary goal of society.

This goal must take precedence over other aspects of human life, and the liberal theorist might even argue that bodily sustenance is worthless without basic freedoms. Marcuse's argument in opposition to this possible view is the idea that 'freedom from want' is 'the concrete substance of all freedom' (1). This 'freedom from want' could be understood as a freedom from the pursuit of the bare necessities of survival. Certainly, the degree of autonomy an individual is able to attain will suffer if she is constantly forced to attend to the inflexible demands of her own subsistence. This suggests quite plausibly that satisfaction of vital needs is a prerequisite for an individual's attainment of any level of freedom. Such a consideration is certainly relevant to a society in an early stage of capitalism or industrialization, where satisfaction of vital biological needs cannot be counted on.

However, Marcuse makes it clear that the focus of his argument is on advanced capitalist society, and on another type of 'freedom from want' entirely. He is suggesting that the individual be 'liberated from the work world's imposing up on him alien needs and alien possibilities' (2). The 'wants' that block freedom here are the false needs introduced into human life though conditioning by entrenched interests in society. Pursuit of these 'unnecessary needs' damages the individual's chances for self-determination. Marcuse acknowledges that socially conditioned (false) needs do serve a certain function in society. They include such familiar desires as the wish to relax, to have fun, to consume goods and services, and to conform to the dominant standards of society; satisfaction of these desires makes human life more pleasurable.

Marcuse stresses the fact that the enjoyment gained in this way is only temporary, and is overshadowed by the more damaging effects of false needs on society. Individuals' attention to and satisfaction of false needs 'serves to arrest the development of the ability... to recognize the disease of the whole [society] and grasp the chances of curing the disease' (5). The 'disease' here is the dominance of false needs, the falseness of which is hidden behind the ecstasy of their satisfaction. So one harm caused by false needs is the pacification of the populace, preventing them from acting to eliminate false needs.

But why must false needs be eliminated? The most convincing argument Marcuse offers for the contention that false needs are harmful to society is the point that satisfaction of one person's false needs may prevent others from satisfying their vital needs. The anti-hunger organization Oxfam America has contended that starvation could be eliminated worldwide for the amount of money which Americans spend on beer alone every year. One can imagine Americans protesting that existing demands on their financial resources prevent them from rendering large-scale food aid to the rest of the world. If true, this situation would be a perfect example of false needs impeding the satisfaction of vital needs. If America's socially-conditioned false need for beer was eliminated, enough money would become available to allow everyone in the world to receive a basic level of nourishment.

In consideration of cases like this, Marcuse writes that eliminating the false needs of an individual is in the interests of 'all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction' (5). A biologically satisfied but falsely needful individual also happens to gain from a freedom from false needs, even if the satisfaction of those false needs keeps that individual in a state of happiness. The cost of those false needs to the individual herself is largely measured in lost freedom, as described above. The more she is manipulated by externally imposed needs, the less autonomy she possesses.

Marcuse makes it clear that the harm suffered by the person whose ability to satisfy her basic needs is jeopardized by another party's satisfaction of false needs is the more serious harm. He writes that 'the only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction are the vital ones - nourishment, clothing, lodging' (5). One might ask why the satisfaction of these vital needs for one person necessarily obligates another person to help satisfy those needs. The answer is that the welfare of the general population is central to Marcuse's conception of a rational society. His view includes the position that 'the universal satisfaction of vital needs and, beyond it, the progressive alleviation of toil and poverty, are universally valid standards' (6). While a libertarian social theorist such as Robert Novick might object to involuntary transfers of property that might take place as means to attaining this goal, the appeal of a society where no one lacks the basic necessities of life is difficult to deny.

Philosophy 310 lecture presented the demand for general satisfaction of vital needs as part of Marcuse's distinction between true and false needs. One person's need cannot be true if it interferes with another person's satisfaction of her vital needs. This characterization invites immediate objection. It seems bizarre that the 'truth' and 'falsity' of one person's needs should be dependent on (and variable according to) the needs of another. Furthermore, which needs are true and which are false would vary according to where one sets the boundaries of a society. Imagine that Singapore can provide for the vital needs of all its citizens, and can give them all cellular phones as well.

No one starves, so the need for cell phones is not considered false. However, this true need for a cellular phone becomes false as soon as we expand boundaries of the society under consideration to include not only Singapore, but also Sudan with its rampant famine problem. Why would Marcuse adopt such a strange conception of truth? After careful examination of the assigned readings, I have concluded that interference with the vital needs of others is not one of Marcuse's standards for a false need. He contends that false needs do tend to have this effect because of the over consumption they encourage.

Still, what makes a need false in the first place is its imposition on the individual by conditioning and indoctrination. Are basic physical needs the only true, i.e. innate, needs that human beings possess? Such a contention implies that people should not pursue the satisfaction of any other needs, and this conclusion would be difficult to accept. It would amount to a demand that society allow people to do nothing more than seek food, water, shelter, and clothing, all at minimal levels. These are fair standards for treatment of dairy cows but unsatisfactory for a society of human beings. Surely people need something more.

But what more do they need? Marcuse denies that he or any other single authority has the right to declare what else is a true need for individuals. That right rests with the individuals themselves. Individuals are not able to determine their true needs in all circumstances, however. Mere acceptance of certain needs by an individual does not guarantee that those needs are true. After all, individuals are usually under the influence of societal conditioning.

Marcuse gives the Marxist concept of alienation as an example of this misleading acceptance of false needs. He writes that under the conditioning of a capitalist society, 'the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence' (11), to the point where the social practices that create alienation seem rational. Marcuse writes, 'In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer' (6). When are individuals free to determine their true needs? Marcuse has already held up false needs as the major impediment to freedom, which would lead us to the unhelpful conclusion that an individual can only decide her true needs if she is no longer subject to the mental influence of false needs.

That statement sounds like a Catch-2: an individual can only determine which needs are true if false needs have been removed, but we cannot identify false needs to remove them unless the individual has determined which needs are true. There is a way out of this loop. We may not be able to distinguish false needs per se, but we know what makes them false: conditioning and indoctrination by entrenched interests within society. If we remove these influences on the individual, she will be free to discover her true needs. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to identify conditioning influences.

One might imagine that they are visible as features of late capitalism; television commercials would be a classic example of such a feature. But Marcuse has said that needs beyond the biological 'have always been preconditioned,' and that this conditioning occurs within any society in any historical period (4). Most societies in most historical periods have lacked television commercials. In those cases, all conditioning and indoctrination must have taken place through common social practices. Completely removing all societal influence on a person's conception of her needs can only be accomplished by removing that person from society, since it can be easily argued that ideas of what a person needs are inextricable from the most basic social practices. Marcuse could answer that he is not suggesting that all of an individual's false needs and outside influences must be removed for her to be able to identify any of her true needs.

He has written, 'All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions' (7). The more the individual is distracted by various needs, the less chance she will have to question them. By convincing an individual to doubt (at least temporarily) some of her non-physical 'needs,' especially those that tend to consume her life, one can encourage her to apply her own volition to determining which needs are her true needs. The more the hold of accepted needs on an individual can be shaken, the more the overall composition of her needs will shift towards the true. This description of a way of identifying an individual's true needs avoids the suggestion that one would need to remove an individual from society completely in order to free her from the influence of conditioning and enable her to freely decide on her true needs. However, whatever choice the individual makes must still have existing social practice as its primary influence.

Any possible needs the individual might consider - artistic expression, athletic cultivation, organic farming, spiritual oneness - will be limited by the individual's social context. There are only two ways to remove this 'conditioning' completely. One could prevent individuals from living in a society at all, or else one could eradicate all conception of non-physical needs from society, reducing the lives of its members to dairy-cow mental status. Neither alternative appears to be a healthy change to society, even compared to the non freedom of late capitalism.

What has Marcuse shown? In the absence of any sources for non-vital needs which are not social in origin, his suggestion that all needs of the members of society should be purified of conditioning and indoctrination is probably unrealistic. However, his account can provide support for a more modest attempt at social reform. Such a change would include a conscious attempt to eliminate needs which originate from identifiable sources of societal conditioning, and which an individual would rather eliminate upon reflection. For example, one can easily imagine someone realizing that her desire for Gap pants originated in advertisements, and deciding that she did not want this need impressed on her by the advertising industry. This incremental elimination of false needs would go at least partway towards Marcuse's ideal of liberation through the consciousness of one's own servitude.

The resources freed up by individuals' abandonment of unwanted false needs could then be used towards satisfying the vital needs of others. This result is less complete of an improvement than Marcuse is arguing for; however, it is probably the greatest shift in individuals' conception of their own needs that can be accomplished given the inherently social nature of non-physical needs. Even with its ambitions diminished in this way, Marcuse's consideration of true and false needs shows how there is room for movement toward 'the optimal development... of all individuals, under the optimal utilization of the material and intellectual resources available to man' (6). All citations from: Marcuse, Herbert.

One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.