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The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

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
Basis
Bases
Defeat
Create
Existence
Humanized
Purpose
Apparatus
Nature
Defeats
Humane

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The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes separation of good from evil it establishes unquestionable
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Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
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The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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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.
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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 happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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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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This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.
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There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
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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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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.
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By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
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Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
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Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
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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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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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Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
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The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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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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