Freedom and Truth According to Herbert Marcuse.
An analysis.
The following quotations are from
Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse.
There is a sense in which truth is the end of liberty, and liberty must be defined and confined by truth. Now in what sense can liberty be for the sake of truth? Liberty is self-determination, autonomy--this is almost a tautology, but a tautology which results from a whole series of synthetic judgments.
So, according to Marcuse, TRUTH is "defined and confined by liberty" which is "self-determination, autonomy."
Let's move on:
It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do, what to suffer and what not. But the subject of this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual as a human being who is capable of being free with the others.
So now we are told that liberty does not pertain to "the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual as a human being who is capable of being free with the others."
Got it? Liberty is not for any private individual, except insofar as he is "a human being who is capable of being free with the others."
It is a notion of freedom that is inseparable from the collective freedom/autonomy of society.
Note that ultimately this implies that truth is "defined and confined by" the liberty/autonomy of the collective, too.
Moving on ....
And the problem of making possible such a harmony between every individual liberty and the other is not that of finding a compromise between competitors, or between freedom and law, between general and individual interest, common and private welfare in an established society, but of creating the society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiate self-determination from the beginning.
So the
problem of truth is the problem of
making liberty possible. And the problem of making liberty possible is the problem of being "intolerant of repressive tolerance."
In this sense, truth is revolutionary action for the neomarxist.
(Note: "Repressive tolerance" is tolerance for freedoms insofar as they serve to perpetuate oppression or servitude. And wherever constitutional freedoms are compatible with oppressive institutions (and we are told they are) constitutional freedoms must be opposed by revolutionary action.
That's why we can't allow "free speech" when it enables oppression. This is the philodoxy behind what we call "political correctness."
It's the rational basis for regulation of any speech, such that now you can be "cancelled" for politically incorrect speech and we see that bureaucracies and government institutions have to speak about men having babies. This is the philodoxical source of the obsession with controlling speech by today's regulators.
However, keep in mind it is not just individual freedoms that must be regulated for the sake of "true freedom." The freedoms of societal institutions must be regulated, too, whether government or public, whether private or corporate.
Let's keep moving on ...
And the direction in which it must be sought, and the institutional and cultural changes which may help to attain the goal are, at least in developed civilization, comprehensible, that is to say, they can be identified and projected, on the basis of experience, by human reason.
The direction in which
truth moves must be sought in cultural and institutional changes with the goal of attaining freedom/autonomy.
(Truth is a moving process, just like in Hegel's system. Freedom/autonomy is the ultimate truth for all Hegelian, Marxist, or Neomarxist systems.)
The goal of obtaining this freedom/autonomy "can be identified and projected, on the basis of experience, by human reason."
So this goal of freedom has nothing to do with "transcendent" truth. It is "identified and projected, on the basis of experience, by human reason" alone, because it is "defined and confined" by an entirely human notion of liberty. Yet it is identified with truth. Truth is identified both with the ultimately indefinable goal of collective freedom and with the revolutionary action needed to attain it (within the historical process, of course.)
"Theory and practice" (perception of truth and the action needed to attain it) are always mystically fused in neomarxist thought.
Let's keep moving on ...
In the interplay of theory and practice, true and false solutions become distinguishable--never with the evidence of necessity, never as the positive, only with the certainty of a reasoned and reasonable chance, and with the persuasive force of the negative. For the true positive is the society of the future and therefore beyond definition arid determination, while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted.
There are true and false solutions. True solutions are
actions that are conducive to the attainment of freedom, autonomy. False solutions are actions which are not conducive to freedom, autonomy.
(The talk of positive and negative states comes straight from Hegelian dialectics.)
The "existing positive" (the current society) must be "surmounted" by revolutionary activists to achieve the "true positive" (the society of the future.)
Also, the truth is conveniently beyond any "definition or arid determination" because it's always in the future. However ...
... the experience and understanding of the existent society may well be capable of identifying what is not conducive to a free and rational society, what impedes and distorts the possibilities of its creation. Freedom is liberation, a specific historical process in theory and practice, and as such it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood.
Now the meaning of truth is further clarified to mean whatever actions are conducive to achieving freedom/autonomy "within a specific historical process in theory and practice."
The ironic thing is we now have the goal of an indefinable freedom for everyone (Utopia) that also happens to require the bureaucratic control/regulation of all institutions and governments at every level by bureaucratic neomarxists.
Funny how that works out, isn't it?
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publica ... ltext.html