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VALUES ARE INSEPARABLE FROM ACTION
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- VALUE OF FREEDOM IS IMPORTANT TO AN ADVANCED SOCIETY
VALUES ARE INSEPARABLE FROM ACTION1. MORAL VALUES EQUIVALENT TO POLITICAL ACTION Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p. 10. Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a disposition of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unites” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings--a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation. 2. MORALITY IS INFUSED INTO ORGANIC BEHAVIOR Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p. 11. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only interjected--it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the interjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society. In this way, a society constantly re-creates, this side of consciousness and ideology, patterns of behavior and aspiration as part of the “nature” of its people and unless the revolt reaches into this “second” nature into these ingrown patterns, social change will remain “incomplete,” even self-defeating.
Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p. 62. To the degree to which the rebellion is directed against a functioning, prosperous, “democratic” society, it is a moral rebellion, against the hypocritical, aggressive values and goals, against the blasphemous religion of this society, against everything it takes seriously, everything it professes while violating what it professes.
Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, 1964, p. 144. In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.). 2. VALUE OF OBJECTIVITY IS THE RESULT OF DOMINATION Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, 1964, p.144. To be sure, the “objective order of things” is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality--that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale. 3. VALUES ARE NOT OBJECTIVE Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, 1964, p. 147. Outside this rationality, one lives in a world of values, and values separated out from the objective reality become subjective. The only way to rescue some abstract and harmless validity for them seems to be a metaphysical sanction (divine and natural law). But such sanction is not verifiable and thus not really objective. Values my have a higher dignity (morally and spiritually), but they are not real and thus count less in the real business of life--the less so the higher they are elevated above reality. VALUE OF FREEDOM IS IMPORTANT TO AN ADVANCED SOCIETY1. INSTITUTIONS MUST EMBRACE VALUE OF FREEDOM Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p.4. The advent of a free society would be characterized by the fact that the grown of well-being turns into an essentially new quality of life. This qualitative change must occur in the needs in the infrastructure of man (itself a dimension of the infrastructure of society): the new direction, the new institutions and relationships of production, must express the ascent of needs and satisfactions very different from and even antagonistic to those prevalent in the exploitative societies. Such a change would constitute the instinctual basis for freedom.
Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p. 27-28. By virtue of these qualities, the aesthetic dimension can serve as a sort of gauge for a free society. A universe of human relationships no longer mediated by the market, no longer based on competitive exploitation or tenor, demands a sensitivity freed from the repressive satisfactions of the unfree societies; a sensitivity receptive to forms and modes of reality which thus far have been projected by the aesthetic imagination. For the aesthetic needs have their own social content: they are the claims of the human organism mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment which can be created only in the struggle against the institutions which, by their very Functioning deny and violate these claims. 3. HUMAN FREEDOM IS BASED IN INDIVIDUAL SUBJECTIVITY Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, STUDIES IN CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1972, p. 217. I suggested that the essence of human freedom is in the theoretical and practical syntheses which constitute and reconstitute the universe of experience. These syntheses are never merely individual activities (acts) but the work of a supra individual historical Subjectivity in the individual--just as the Kantian categories are the syntheses of a transcendental Ego in the empirical Ego. I have intentionally used the Kantian construction of experience, that is to say his epistemology rather than his moral philosophy, in order to elucidate the concept of freedom as historical imperative: freedom originates indeed in the mind of man, in his ability (or rather in his need and desire) to comprehend his world, and this comprehension is praxis in as much as it establishes a specific order of facts, a specific organization of the data of experience.
Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p.9. The relaxation of taboos alleviates the sense of guilt and binds (though with considerable ambivalence) the “free” individuals libidinally to the institutionalized fathers. They are powerful but also tolerant fathers, whose management of the nation and its economy delivers and protects the liberties of the citizens. On the other hand, if the violation of taboos transcends the sexual sphere and leads to refusal and rebellion, the sense of guilt is not alleviated and repressed but rather transferred: not we, but the fathers are guilty; they are not tolerant but false; they want to redeem their own guilt by making us, the sons, guilty; they have created a world of hypocrisy and violence in which we do not wish to live. Instinctual revolt turns into political rebellion, and against this union, the Establishment mobilizes its full force.
Herbert Marcuse, Former Professor of Philosophy-University of California at San Diego, AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION, 1969, p. 19. For freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility--the demands of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil. But this GAYA SCIENZA is conceivable only after the historical break in the continuum of domination--as expressive of the needs of a new type of man.
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