Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcusewas a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the universities of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his Ph.D. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim, Inge Neumann, and Erica Sherover. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, historical materialism and...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 July 1898
CountryGermany
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.
Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.