Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Herbert Marcuse
New York: Vintage Books. 1955.
Where to begin? This book was hard to read and theoretical. Many of the indictments of civilization and society seem to be true. Civilization and society are repressive. They seek renunciation from individuals and performance, rather than the development of the potentialities of their personalities. Even sexuality is repressed, being made productive by being procreative. Reason is constraining and therefore repressive. Labor, alienated labor, labor which is repetitive, takes up too much time to leave individuals time to develop their full potentialities. Individuals are mere changeable functions to be used in the service of civilization.
The book offers an alternative view of society in which instincts are not repressed, in which the energy from the instincts is not sublimated to labor but spreads to the full development of the individual's potentialities. To accomplish this view of civilization, the first thing to be eliminated is meaningless labor to meet basic needs. The culture of scarcity must be supplanted by a culture of plenitude. Only if people have met their basic needs and have no fear of losing those basic needs can people be said to be truly free.
The book even suggests that the death wish is an instinct, that the concept of death is repressive, causing the individual to accept death as inevitable and therefore losing the desire to live fully. The author suggests that death is like Nirvana, freedom from anxiety and pain. He sees the self-fulfilled life as simply passing from the state of life to the state of death when ready.
The details of how to move from a repressive civilization and society to complete freedom to use the energy from the instincts to develop complete human potentialities are not clearly expressed. Such complete freedom would seem to result in chaos, every person doing what he or she wants to do with no reason, law or culture to repress, restrain or renounce.
A lot of truth about present-day society; but the alternative, realistically, does not seem possible. Something to think about.
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