Quote

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.

Herbert Marcuse

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Herbert Marcuse
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 19
Died: 1979
Died: July 29
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Berlin
Germany
Critical
Unified
Oppositional
Organization
Rationality
Dialectical
Importance
Transcendent
Operational
Elements
Serves
Absorbs
Negative
Discourse
Behavioral
Language
Vehicle
Subordination
Reason
Vital
Coordination
Anti
Functional

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Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
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The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
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Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.
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Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
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The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
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If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
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Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
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The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
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Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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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.
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Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
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However, if free choice means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.
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