Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse

Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse

Author:Herbert Marcuse [Marcuse, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9656-7
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1972-01-20T16:00:00+00:00


III

Although the historical concept of nature as a dimension of social change does not imply teleology and does not attribute a “plan” to nature, it does conceive of nature as subject-object: as a cosmos with its own potentialities, necessities, and chances. And these potentialities can be, not only in the sense of their value-free function in theory and practice, but also as bearers of objective values. These are envisaged in such phrases as “violation of nature,” “suppression of nature.” Violation and suppression then mean that human action against nature, man’s interrelation with nature, offends against certain objective qualities of nature—qualities which are essential to the enhancement and fulfillment of life. And it is on such objective grounds that the liberation for man to his own humane faculties is linked to the liberation of nature—that “truth” is attributable to nature not only in a mathematical but also in an existential sense. The emancipation of man involves the recognition of such truth in things, in nature. The Marxian vision recaptures the ancient theory of knowledge as recollection: “science” as the rediscovery of the true Forms of things, distorted and denied in the established reality, the perpetual materialistic core of idealism. The “idea,” as the term for these Forms, is not a “mere” idea, but an image illuminating what is false, distorted in the way in which things are “given,” what is missing in their familiar perception, in the mutilated experience which is the work of society.

Recollection thus is not remembrance of a Golden Past (which never existed), of childhood innocence, primitive man, et cetera. Recollection as epistemological faculty rather is synthesis, reassembling the bits and fragments which can be found in the distorted humanity and distorted nature. This recollected material has become the domain of the imagination, it has been sanctioned by the repressive societies in art, and as “poetic truth”—poetic truth only, and therefore not much good in the actual transformation of society. These images may well be called “innate ideas” inasmuch as they cannot possibly be given in the immediate experience which prevails in the repressive societies. They are given rather as the horizon of experience under which the immediately given forms of things appear as “negative,” as denial of their inherent possibilities, their truth. But in this sense, they are “innate” in man as historical being; they are themselves historical because the possibilities of liberation are always and everywhere historical possibilities. Imagination, as knowledge, retains the insoluble tension between idea and reality, the potential and the actual. This is the idealistic core of dialectical materialism: the transcendence of freedom beyond the given forms. In this sense too, Marxian theory is the historical heir of German Idealism.

Freedom thus becomes a “regulative concept of reason” guiding the practice of changing reality in accordance with its “idea,” i.e., its own potentialities—to make reality free for its truth. Dialectical materialism understands freedom as historical, empirical transcendence, as a force of social change, transcending its immediate form also in a socialist society—not toward ever



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