Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Herbert MarcuseThe truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Herbert MarcuseOne can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge [โฆ]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophyโand this is the crucial pointโinto the concrete distress of human existence.
Herbert MarcuseHypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
Herbert MarcuseThe so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of oneโs own destruction, has become a โbiologicalโ need.
Herbert Marcuse