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

essence gives way to a more developed notion of appearance, where there is no ‘higher’
notion of essence left, for Marcuse, the reified conceptions of appearance and essence
collapse into appearance, but only relative to the higher concept of the human essence.
Marcuse’s conception of the dialectic of appearance and essence is in the end
more akin to Marx’s conception than to Adorno’s. In fact, Marcuse’s view is basically
the view Marx expressed in the 1944 Manuscripts: Marcuse’s construction of the
concept of the human essence is reminiscent of Marx’s conception of ‘species being.’
Consider, moreover, that Marcuse argues that his construction of the positive conception
of the human essence, including as it does the way human beings could be in a future
rationally planned society, is justified by two things: universality and objectivity. First,
he claims that the concept is universal in the sense that it incorporates the interests of all
human beings, whether they would admit to it or not, since its content expresses the
nature of the human being. And, second, he claims that it is objective because it is based
on real possibilities (tendencies that demonstrably exist already in the present), selected
in accordance with the ‘universal interest’ of freedom – although Marcuse grants that
objectivity will not be confirmed until society is actually transformed into the ‘rationally
planned’ order that he advocates. 178
materialist concepts all contain an accusation and an imperative] (Ibid., 37, cf. English translation in
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFlyBooks, 2009), 63).
178 Marcuse says that the goal of critical theory is a rationally planned society that fulfills human
potentialities. Such a society would integrate particular interests into a concrete universality because they
would fulfill the “essence of the individual” [Wesen des Individuums] (“Zum Begriff des Wesens,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. V (1936): 30). “Am Ende des Weges, wenn die bisherigen
gesellschaftlichen Gegensätze in einer solchen Allgemeinheit überwunden sind, schlägt die ‚Subjektivität’
der Theorie in die Objektivität um: in der Gestalt eines Daseins, wo die Interessen der Einzelnen wahrhaft
bei der Gesamtheit aufgehoben sind” (Ibid., 30). English translation in in Negations: Essays in Critical
Theory (London: MayFlyBooks, 2009), 57: “At the end of the process, when former social antagonisms
have been overcome in such a community, the ‘subjectivity’ of materialist theory becomes objectivity – in
the form of an existence where the interests of individuals are truly preserved in the community.” The
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