{"id":1720,"date":"2003-05-31T05:16:00","date_gmt":"2003-05-31T05:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/~frers\/cgi-bin\/blosxom.cgi\/socialsci\/030530.html"},"modified":"2010-01-24T13:50:41","modified_gmt":"2010-01-24T12:50:41","slug":"some-musings-on-marcuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/?p=1720","title":{"rendered":"Some musings on Marcuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week, the reading digest for our Kolleg were two chapters from Herbert Marcuse&#8217;s <em>One Dimensional Man<\/em>. I was quite excited about reading Marcuse for the first time. I first encountered him in my late-adolescence Fromm reading in about 1993 and since then I read most of the major works written the good old Frankfurt posse. Since the One Dimensional was written after the <em>Eclipse of Reason<\/em> and after the <em>Dialectics of Englightenment<\/em> I expected it to at least add something to, if not &#8216;transcend&#8217; these dark, beautiful, and bold analytic masterpieces of social and philosophical critique. People whispered something about a positive solution sketched out in this text. <em>Eros<\/em> should be part of it, I heard.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I was disappointed. The way in which he portays technology, the way in which he puts the potential for change into the development of technology. A technology that&#8217;s reaching it&#8217;s highest level and then changes to something radically different, left me without agents, but with a lot of techne and greek classicism. What&#8217;s even more dissappointing, he left me desolately looking for the role which <em>Praxis<\/em> plays in his theory. Perhaps the chapters we read (5 and 9, I think)  didn&#8217;t cover the right ground in this regard. But I fear that I didn&#8217;t just miss it. Without a solid and sympathetic understanding of Praxis, of the interactions between people and their environment, it seems to be almost impossible to bring to life a positive imagination of what life and society could be like. A positive imagination that doesn&#8217;t strive for perfection, instead encompassing the shortcomings of human actions, motives and utopias, that&#8217;s what I want.<\/p>\n<p>To my personal enjoyment I might  add that I think that Fromm, who is often stigmatized for catering to a &#8216;late-adolescent&#8217; audience, does a better job in the positive imagination business. Perhaps Marcuse should have added more Meister Eckehardt to his somewhat hidden Heideggerisms ;-)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, the reading digest for our Kolleg were two chapters from Herbert Marcuse&#8217;s One Dimensional Man. I was quite excited about reading Marcuse for the first time. I first encountered him in my late-adolescence Fromm reading in about 1993 and since then I read most of the major works written the good old Frankfurt [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[472,473,471,475,474,73],"class_list":["post-1720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-science","tag-enlightenment","tag-erich-fromm","tag-herbert-marcuse","tag-martin-heidegger","tag-meister-eckehardt","tag-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1720"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userpage.fu-berlin.de\/frers\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}