The 23 best phrases 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.

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 nation German. 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, already 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.

Related Posts:

• "75 philosophical phrases pronounced by great thinkers"
• "The 20 best phrases of Henry David Thoureau"
• "75 phrases of Erich Fromm to understand the thought of him"

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 know the best famous quotes and phrases of Herbert Marcuse, to get closer to the thought of him of what he was nicknamed as “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 politics over which they exercise no effective control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of absorbed individual thought now 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 cognitive rational 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 smear term that is easily applied to avant-garde positions.

When a thinker steps out of the orthodox channels of power, he is branded a romantic.

5. Can one really differentiate between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as means of manipulation and indoctrination?

Another famous quote that calls into question the purpose 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 practically all its manifestations taboo as perversions that do not serve or prepare for the procreative function. Without the severest limitations, they would counterattack sublimation, on which the growth of culture depends.

A famous quote about sexual instincts that could have been signed by himself Sigmund Freud.

8. The free choice of masters does not suppress either masters or slaves. Choosing freely from a wide variety of goods and services does not mean freedom if these goods and services services support social controls over a life of effort and fear, that is, if they support the alienation.

A critique of capitalism and their appearances.

9. The more important the intellectual, the more compassionate he will be with the rulers.

The financial and economic elites tend to exalt such indulgent thinkers with their bad practices.

10. All liberation depends on the awareness of bondage, and the emergence of this awareness is hindered always due to the predominance of needs and satisfactions that, to a great degree, have become the individual.

On 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 and motivation, there can be no meaningful learning.

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 human life deserves to be lived, or rather that it can be and should be done.

A phrase for free interpretation.

15. Technology as such cannot be separated from the use made of it; 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 the consciousness, the superego also censures 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.

18. The libido is diverted to act in a socially useful way, within which the individual works for himself only in so much that he works for the apparatus, and is engaged in activities that generally do not coincide with his own faculties and wishes.

About libido and how our belief system influences our carnal desires.

19. The restoration of memory rights is a vehicle for liberation. Without releasing the repressed content of memory, without releasing its liberating power; non-repressive sublimation is unimaginable (...) Time loses its power when memory redeems the past.

On historical memory and the unconscious mechanisms that it is capable of repairing.

20. While the fight for truth "saves" reality from destruction, truth pawns 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 in accordance with the truth. Epistemology is itself ethical, and ethics is epistemology.

A famous quote from Herbert Marcuse about the truth, in full time of post-truth.

21. Closed language does not demonstrate or explain: it communicates decisions, failures, orders. When he defines, the definition becomes "separation of good and bad"; it establishes what is right and wrong without allowing doubts, and one value as justification for another. It moves by means of tautologies, but tautologies are terribly effective "phrases." They express judgment in a "prejudiced way"; 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 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 make no sense 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 expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.

Ethics and morality were two key elements in Marcuse's philosophical study.