The 23 best sentences of Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (Berlin, 1898 - Starnberg, 1979) was a German philosopher and sociologist, a key figure among the thinkers who made up the Frankfurt School.
A contemporary and friend of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Herbert Marcuse was also in contact with Max Horkheimer after the rise of the National Socialist party to the power of the German nation. In those years of genocide, Marcuse went into exile in Switzerland and later in France, where he was also in contact with Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno.
Later, already in the United States, he served as a philosopher and professor at Harvard, where he wrote and dissected the movement hippie and the different social changes of the time.
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Phrases and famous quotes of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse opposed capitalist society . One of his works is still studied by Marxist and post-Marxist theorists: The one-dimensional man (1964).
In this article we are going to know the best famous quotations and phrases of Herbert Marcuse, to get closer to his thought of what was nicknamed "the father of the New Left".
1. Under the rule of a repressive totality, freedom can become a powerful instrument of domination.
A paradox that continues to occur in many societies in the 21st century.
2. The freedom of politics would mean the liberation of individuals from a policy over which they have no effective control. In the same way, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, the abolition of public opinion together with its creators.
A critique of the control of public opinion exercised by the mass media.
3. Literature and art were a rational cognitive force that revealed a dimension of man and nature that was repressed and rejected in reality.
In this sentence, Herbert Marcuse explains the psychological background of the human need to transcend life through art.
4. 'Romantic' is a condescending defamation term that is easily applied to avant-garde positions.
When a thinker gets out of the orthodox channels of power, he is branded as romantic.
5. Can we really differentiate between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as means of manipulation and indoctrination?
Another famous quote that puts in question the objective of the media.
6. Domination has its own aesthetic and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetic.
A phrase that sums up the deception of some modern democracies.
7. The social organization of the sexual instincts makes taboos like perversions practically all their manifestations that do not serve or prepare for the procreative function. Without the most severe limitations, they would counterattack to sublimation, on which the growth of culture depends.
A famous quote about the sexual instincts that Sigmund Freud himself could have signed.
8. The free election of masters does not suppress masters or slaves. Choosing freely among a wide variety of goods and services does not mean freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of effort and fear, that is, if they sustain alienation.
A critique of capitalism and its appearances.
9. The more important the intellectual, the more compassionate he will be with the rulers.
The financial and economic elites tend to elevate those indulgent thinkers with their bad practices.
10. All liberation depends on the awareness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hindered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions that, to a great degree, have become proper to the individual.
On freedom and one of its possible impediments.
11. An absence of comfortable, soft, reasonable and democratic freedom, a sign of technical progress, prevails in advanced industrial civilization.
A perfect x-ray of the limits of freedom based on consumption and apparent comfort.
12. Entertainment and learning are not opposed; Entertainment can be the most effective way to learn.
Without emotion or motivation, meaningful learning can not exist.
13. Only thanks to those without hope is hope given.
A paradox that warns us that only those who cling to freedom will be able to achieve it.
14. The judgment that affirms that human life deserves to be lived, or rather that it can be and must be done.
A phrase to free interpretation.
fifteen.Technology as such can not be separated from the employment that is made of it; The technological society is a system of domination that already operates in the concept and construction of techniques.
The use and abuse of technology and its implementation in production are key elements when it comes to rethinking the future of humanity.
16. By censoring the unconscious and implanting consciousness, the superego also censures the censor, because the developed consciousness registers the bad act prohibited not only in the individual but also in his society.
A famous quote that tells us about the id, the self and the Freudian superego.
17. The reality principle is materialized in a system of institutions. And the individual, growing within such a system, learns the requirements of the principle of reality, such as those of law and order, and transmits them to the next generation.
The infrastructure of society determines what we consider acceptable and common.
18. The libido is diverted to act in a socially useful way, within which the individual works for himself only as long as he works for the apparatus, and is engaged in activities that do not generally coincide with his own faculties and wishes.
On libido and how our belief system influences our carnal desires.
19. The restoration of the rights of memory is a vehicle of liberation. Without the liberation of the repressed content of memory, without the liberation of its liberating power; non-repressive sublimation is unimaginable (...) Time loses its power when memory redeems the past.
On the historical memory and the unconscious mechanisms that it is able to repair.
20. While the struggle for truth "saves" the reality of destruction, the truth endeavors and compromises human existence. It is the essentially human project. If man has learned to see and know what he really is, he will act according to the truth. Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
A famous quote by Herbert Marcuse about the truth, in the middle of the post-truth era.
21. Closed language does not demonstrate or explain: it communicates decisions, failures, orders. When defined, the definition becomes "separation of the good and the bad"; it establishes what is right and what is wrong without allowing doubts, and a value as justification for another. It moves through tautologies, but tautologies are terribly effective "phrases". They express the judgment of a "prejudged form"; pronounce sentences.
About language and how it determines our scale of moral values about things.
22. The unidimensional individual is characterized by his delirium of persecution, his paranoia internalized by means of mass communication systems. The very notion of alienation is indisputable because this one-dimensional man lacks a dimension capable of demanding and enjoying any progress of his spirit. For him, autonomy and spontaneity have no meaning in his prefabricated world of prejudices and preconceived opinions.
An extract from his best known work.
23. Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the duration of its application, not to the expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.
Ethics and morality were two key elements in Marcuse's philosophical study.
