Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

166 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
To approach this subjectivity, to uncover it, is to be intimate with history, with our concrete
personal histories in all their subtleties and dimensions. Marcuse’s turn back to psychology as
well as hermeneutics is most important for our purposes here in educational psychology: the
remembrance of concrete personal history, the understanding of our own psychologies, of the
nature of our internal laws, is decisive in demystifying our “reality”; reification is forgetting.
Authentic art, in this sense, transcends social constrictions of language, thought, and form, even
as it is overwhelmingly composed of their presence.
From authentic art emerges a new rationality, a new sensibility. Marcuse sounds these lifelong
themes for the last time here, in Aesthetic Dimension: the need for liberatory imagination, for the
subrogation of aggression and destruction to creativity, to life instincts; the place and necessity
of the intellectual, and artist, in negating established “reality.” In (once again) exploring the role
of art and the artist, Marcuse underlines the need for true democratization, and generalization of
creativity. Art so represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the
individual, in rational society.
It is difficult to imagine a more important figure in the development of the postformal movement
than Herbert Marcuse. Not only did he, with the Institute for Social Research, provide the decisive
critical strength for a final philosophical break with the repression of formal ways of thinking,
but Marcuse in particular provided the imagination for an alternative rationality and “reality,”
based on reconciliation rather than domination and duality. Not only was his work decisive for
philosophy and politics, Marcuse’s project is most fundamentally a project about authentic and
concrete human existence, beyond our contemporary logocentrism and habits of representation
and reflection. No reification was exempt from his critical lens, except perhaps a deeply felt
humanism, and faith in the power of the mind to break through obstruction and clear the ground
for truth. Marcuse challenged every category of thought and culture dialectically, declaring quite
early in his career his intention to carry out a negation of the present order. His was a philosophical
approach, but not the approach of an abstracted intellect; Marcuse provided guidance throughout
his career to the development of his individual students as well as to the growing youth movement
and the social and political New Left. His was a project about the disenfranchised, the outcast,
and the consciousness not yet integrated into the greater order as the keys and catalysts for a
revolution in society.
Marcuse died on July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke while on a visit to Germany.