Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is best known for his 1965 work "One-Dimensional Man". Marcuse's work was influential in the development of critical theory and post-structuralism and his ideas have been influential in the development of the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s.
What is the most famous quote by Herbert Marcuse ?
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
— Herbert Marcuse
What can you learn from Herbert Marcuse (Life Lessons)
- Herbert Marcuse believed that individuals should strive to make the world a better place by challenging oppressive social norms. He argued that individuals should strive to be critical and to question the status quo in order to bring about positive change.
- Marcuse also argued that individuals should strive to be aware of their own personal biases and to be conscious of how their actions can affect the world around them. He believed that individuals should strive to be self-reflective and to think critically about their own beliefs and values.
- Finally, Marcuse believed that individuals should strive to be tolerant of those with different beliefs and opinions, and to be open to new ideas and perspectives. He argued that this kind of open-mindedness is essential for creating a more equitable and just society
The most reckoning Herbert Marcuse quotes that are guaranted to improve your brain
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Herbert Marcuse inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Herbert Marcuse.
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.
The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship.
Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
The people recognize themselves in their commodities;
they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!
Critical quotes by Herbert Marcuse
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.
Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
Quotations by Herbert Marcuse that are dialectical and revolutionary
The intellectual is called on the carpet.
.. Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).
The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.
To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.
By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
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.
The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.
However, if "free choice" means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.
The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.
In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.
This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance;
it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.
The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable
Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.
Entertainment and learning are not opposites;
entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.
To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.
Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.
Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason