Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Herbert Marcuse 165
An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)—helping to articulate
a politics for the New Left emphasizing the power of the outcast and disenfranchised in general.
His case is not for the working party per se to gain power, but that the decisive factor is the
discontent, the great refusal of the nonintegrated individual. The radical intellectual is again key
to the opening of the social imagination, just as the radical act is requisite for the liberation of the
individual, the opening to true needs.
This concern with needs was to characterize Marcuse’s later philosophy, particularly in An
Essay on Liberation. In Marcuse’s view, happiness is not ancillary, but central, to freedom.
Freedom, in turn, necessarily involves the meeting of our true needs. Without such freedom, real
happiness is impossible for human beings. Still, it is necessary to note, particularly for those
who would like to see, and have seen, Marcuse as an apologist for “free” sexuality and the
“me” generation, that Marcuse is arguing against a purely subjective and selfish happiness in
his argument for the meeting of human needs. He argues that happiness is inherently connected
to the transformation of social conditions and individual consciousness, that there is a clear
distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures obscured (and inverted to a great extent) by
contemporary culture: more and more, we recognize ourselves in our commodities; we define
ourselves by what we own, what we have, and what we need to get. True needs are essential to
human survival and development; false needs are superimposed on us and serve the interests of
repressive social forces. Technology, in Marcuse’s philosophy, plays a crucial role here: rather
than being directed toward the maximization of profit (in all its forms), technology could (and
perhaps ought) to be directed toward the satisfaction of true needs.
Like very few others thinkers, Marcuse was willing to embrace a notion of social transformation
that includes the sensual, sensuous, and receptive as the foundation for our society, morality,
rationality. It is again necessary to note as a response to vocal (though ultimately misinformed)
critics that Marcuse’s vision involves not the unbridled genital expression of our libido, but a
nonrepressive sublimation of the sex instincts, the “eroticization of the entire personality,” the
freedom to truly play. Sexuality is, Marcuse argues (again similar to Wilhelm Reich in this),
transformative and vital. Its free expression leads not to a progression of lewd, lascivious acts, but
rather their minimization. Opening taboo to the light would incorporate these impulses (now only
allowed “neurotic” expression in general society) into constructive society; it would transform
so-called perversion into creativity. Marcuse did not advocate orgasmic expression (like Reich) as
the key to liberation and social transformation, but rather the liberated Eros that would ultimately
express across the levels of our human existence. In a rational world, sexuality, in Marcuse’s terms,
would cease to be a threat to culture and instead lead to culture-building; the human organism
ought to exist not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as the subject of self-realization and
social transformation together in the meeting of true needs.
What opens the space for this new imagination was a major focus in Marcuse’s last book, The
Aesthetic Dimension: A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978). In a turn back to the beginnings of
his writing and work (his 1922 dissertation on the German artist-novel), he argues for authentic art
(as literature, primarily) as the authentic radical act. Similarly to the way he treats fantasy in Eros
and Civilization, Marcuse argues for authentic art as integral to the Marxist social revolution; art
(and again, literature especially) provides and catalyzes the imagination and consciousness for true
revolution. True, authentic art breaks through mystification, through solidified reality. In effect,
authentic art moves us in our hermeneutic experience beyond, opening spaces in the imagination
for emancipation. This theme of emancipation, liberation, or revolution, of demystification, is
part of the inner logic of authentic art, rather than its explicit style or content.
Marcuse’s exploration in Aesthetic Dimension emphasizes his lifelong argument: the decisive
fact of progression and evolution, over and against repression and fascism, is the liberated subjectivity
of individuals, present to true needs, intelligence and passion, imagination and conscience.