Herbert Marcuse (Berlin, 1898 – Starnberg, 1979) was a German philosopher and sociologist, a key figure among the thinkers who made up the Frankfurt School.
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 power in the German nation. In those years of genocide, Marcuse went into exile to Switzerland and later to France, where he was also in contact with Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno.
Later, in the United States, he worked as a philosopher and professor at Harvard, where he wrote and dissected the movement hippie and the different social changes of the time.
Famous phrases and quotes from the philosopher Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse opposed capitalist society One of his works continues to be studied by Marxist and post-Marxist theorists: The One-Dimensional Man (1964).
In this article we are going to learn about the best famous quotes and phrases by Herbert Marcuse, to get closer to his thoughts on the one who 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. Freedom from politics would mean the liberation of individuals from a politics over which they exercise no effective control. Likewise, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, the abolition of public opinion along with its creators.
A criticism of the control of public opinion exercised by the mass media.
3.References:
and art were a rational cognitive force that revealed a dimension of man and nature that was repressed and rejected in reality.
In this phrase, Herbert Marcuse explains to us the psychological background of the human need to transcend life through art.
4. ‘Romantic’ is a condescending slur term that is easily applied to avant-garde positions.
When a thinker leaves the orthodox channels of power, he is labeled a romantic.
5. Can we really differentiate between mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as means of manipulation and indoctrination?
Another famous quote that questions the objective of the media.
6. Domination has its own aesthetics and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
A phrase that sums up the deception of some modern democracies.
A famous quote about sexual instincts that Sigmund Freud himself could have signed.
A critique of capitalism and its appearances.
9. The more important the intellectual, the more compassionate he will be towards the rulers.
The financial and economic elites tend to elevate those thinkers who are indulgent in their bad practices.
10. All liberation depends on the awareness of servitude, and the emergence of this awareness is always hindered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions that, to a high degree, have become the individual’s own.
About freedom and one of its possible impediments.
11. A comfortable, smooth, reasonable and democratic absence of 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 cannot exist.
13. Only thanks to those without hope is hope given to us.
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 should be lived.
A phrase open to free interpretation.
15. Technology as such cannot be separated from the use 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 rethinking the future of humanity.
16. By censoring the unconscious and implanting consciousness, the superego also censors the censor, because the developed consciousness registers the forbidden evil act not only in the individual but also in his society.
A famous quote that tells us about the Freudian id, ego and superego.
17. The principle of reality is materialized in a system of institutions. And the individual, growing up within such a system, learns the requirements of the reality principle, such as those of law and order, and passes them on to the next generation.
The infrastructure of society determines what we consider acceptable and common.
About libido and how our belief system influences our carnal desires.
19. The restoration of memory rights is a vehicle of liberation. Without the release of the repressed content of memory, without the release of its liberating power; non-repressive sublimation is unimaginable (…) Time loses its power when memory redeems the past.
About historical memory and the unconscious mechanisms that it is capable of repairing.
20. While the struggle for truth “saves” reality from destruction, truth compromises 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 itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
A famous quote by Herbert Marcuse about truth, in the midst of the post-truth era.
21. Closed language does not demonstrate or explain: it communicates decisions, rulings, orders. When you define, the definition becomes “separation of good and bad”; establishes what is right and wrong without allowing doubt, and one value as a justification for another. It moves through tautologies, but tautologies are terribly effective “phrases.” They express the judgment in a “prejudged way”; they pronounce sentences.
About language and how it determines our scale of moral values about things.
22. The one-dimensional individual is characterized by his delusion of persecution, his internalized paranoia through mass communication systems. Even 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 excerpt 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.
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