Joseph Trullinger

In this paper I have two aims: 1) to demonstrate the mistakenness of Marcuse’s negative reading of Novalis in his dissertation on The German Artist Novel, and 2) to reconstruct how Marcuse’s utopianism would benefit from something like Novalis’ theory of Eros as divine. Because Novalis is tackling the theory of the drives that animates the central letters of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, and because Marcuse is dealing with a similar problematic in Freud’s theory of the struggle between Thanatos and Eros, Novalis proves to be a useful figure for illuminating overlooked possibilities for reconciling that problematic. I argue that Novalis puts forth a kind of “theology of Eros” that-as an elaboration of Schiller’s idea that “energetic beauty” follows from the play drive-allows an organism to perpetually progress in desire toward an ideal without exhaustion. This then allows us to conceive of Eros as similarly keen and self-evolving without devolving into self-denial. Such a conception would correct Marcuse’s metaphysics of mortality that undercuts his politics of life-affirming Eros.

In this paper I analyze the importance of Kant’s account of principled solitude at the end of § 29 of the Third Critique. The scant attention paid to this passage by the scholarship has mistaken it to mean that solitude is a misanthropic attitude, a misreading that serves a prevailing interpretation that Kant elevates communal interaction as the solution to moral turpitude. In reality, Kant holds that solitude can afford an individual liberation from the competitive obsession with others that characterizes vice. Whereas misanthropic recluses withdraw from society out of hatred, fear, or indifference toward people, the virtuous solitary withdraws from their company in order to acquire a morally principled attitude of self-possession. By carefully delineating the development of this view in Kant’s lectures and critical works, as well as by laying out the essence of Kant’s notions of philanthropy and misanthropy, I construct an account of how solitude can perform this philanthropic function.

This paper argues for the legitimacy of daydreaming as an important condition of a liberatory political vision, using a Marcusean framework to supplement and extend the critique of productivism recently made by Kathi Weeks. By differentiating free time from mere pastime, I show that daydreaming not only builds our political imagination, but it also reminds us of the value of unproductive free time. Situating Marcuse within a survey of the role of play and leisure in Aristotle, Schiller, and Marx, I show how Marcuse’s theory integrates neglected historical possibilities for reconceptualizing leisure as a right and not a luxury.