CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

Marcuse’s builds his conception of the ‘human essence’ in terms of both the
past—preceding conceptions of ‘essence’ in philosophical thought, which, he argues,
always contained a striving toward freedom—and in terms of the future: he looks at
“concrete possibilities” for the establishment of a different social order in which every
human being would have all of her material needs met, in which alienated labor would be
abolished, and in which cultural values would be incorporated in everyday life rather than
confined to ‘leisure.’ He argues that the idea of such a future society is not just an
imaginary utopian thought experiment, since we actually have the concrete means to
make it a reality, means primarily determined in terms of the current level of control over
the forces of nature and of production that Western society enjoys. So, Marcuse asserts,
the concept of the human essence must incorporate the potentialities for a future social
order where social activity is aimed at freedom from need and the actualization of human
potentialities.
Developed in this way, the concept of the human essence stands in opposition to
what human beings actually are like in current society. Marcuse develops the opposition
into a dialectical contradiction: the ‘essence’ of the human being is inadequately
expressed in its current historical ‘appearance’—the existing social order—and that
appearance ought to be transformed in order to express the ‘essence’ better: capitalism
gesellschaftliche Praxis erfolgt eine Umstrukturierung des Wesensbegriffs selbst in seiner Beziehung zu
allen anderen Begriffen: eine Umstrukturierung auf das Wesen des Menschen hin. Die Sorge um den
Menschen tritt in das Zentrum der Theorie; er soll aus der wirklichen Not und dem wirklichen Elend zu
sich selbst befreit werden” (Ibid, 25). [Connecting at its roots the problem of essence to social practice
restructures the concept of essence in its relation to all other concepts by orienting it toward the essence of
the human being. Concern with the human being moves to the center of theory; the human being must be
freed from real need and real misery to the realization of him/herself.” (translation modified)]. Marcuse
argues that this concern with the essence of the human being and the realization this essence gives a
concrete meaning to the tension between essence and appearance (a meaning not present in Hegel, see
Ibid., 23-25).
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