Herbert Marcuse Quotes about Reality

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

Reality, Ontology, Logic

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

Herbert Marcuse

Art, Reality, Law

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.

Herbert Marcuse

Past, Reality, Culture

Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.75, Routledge

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.

Herbert Marcuse

Reality, Order, Degrees

Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.145, Beacon Press

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.

Herbert Marcuse

Reality, Doe, Ends

Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.168, Routledge

Where these reduced (operational - E.W.) concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false concreteness - a concreteness isolated from the conditions which constitute its reality. In this context, the operational treatment of the concept assumes a political function. The individual and his behavior are analyzed in a therapeutic sense - adjustment to his society. Thought and expression, theory and practice are to be brought in line with the facts of his existence without leaving room for the conceptual critique of these facts.

Herbert Marcuse

Reality, Expression, Practice

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

Herbert Marcuse

Philosophy, Reality, Intellectual

"One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 134-135), 1964.

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).

Herbert Marcuse

Art, Fate, Reality

Herbert Marcuse (2007). “Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.62, Routledge

Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the "faithless faith" in the reality whose victims they are.

Herbert Marcuse

Block, Reality, Thinking

Herbert Marcuse (1964). “One dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society”

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

Herbert Marcuse

Ignorance, Reality, Names

Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.62, Beacon Press