Herbert Marcuse analyzes contemporary society and determines that it is irrational. This is the society that is highly technologized, systematically structured, and firmly manipulated. As a result, the citizenry adheres to false consciousness: thought, hope, and aspiration of a people have been surrendered in favor of a well-ordered life. It is a repressive society. Man appears in this society as the "one-dimensional man".

The one-dimensional man has lost his intellectual, political and cultural freedoms. His individuality is repressed, his exploitation is disguised, and the dimensions of possible human experience are severely limited. The repressive society is an institutionalized manipulation of man's needs and desires. These false needs are the sources of human misery, suffering, and injustice. It is a society of domination, of alienation. Scientific and industrial progress, academic and social behaviorism, theoretical and practical reason are all in league with one another. Man is swallowed by a grand conspiracy. He is no longer aware of the contradictions in reality and nature.

Contemporary society, where there is lack of freedom, is the same society that the "new consciousness" is reacting against. Thus, Marcuse wants a more human and rational society.

The one-dimensional man is both the product of a repressive society and its hope for change. The transformation of society means a quantitative to qualitative leap in the economic and social development of man.

Transcendence in Marcuse's thought is the attempt to resolve the problems of one-dimensional man within a repressive society. It means the possibility of the amelioration of human life. Marcuse speaks of the possibility of qualitative change "as the possibility of transcendence." Transcendence is defined as those "tendencies in history and practice which, in a given society, `overshoot' the established universe of discourse and action towards its historical alternatives, that is, its real possibilities." (p. 10) By the use of the concept of transcendence, Marcuse resolves the problems inherent within the irrational and dehumanized society.

As in Marx, the liberation of the working class must be the action of the working class itself. But the consciousness of the worker has been manipulated by the vested interests in society. Marcuse suggests modes of resolution of the dilemmas of one-dimensional man. These resolutions constitute what he means by transcendence, such as "artistic alienation", the "transcendent object", and "pacification of existence".

(1) Marcuse allows for an artistic alienation (or "aesthetic incompatibility") within the technological society. The artist is someone conversant with a pre-technological society, that is, a world "in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and labor were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. . ." Man then and the artist now has the pleasure to think, to contemplate, to feel.

The artist is the witness to the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence; the artist is the bearer of the consciousness of the incompatibility between the authentic humanity of the individual and the repressive character of the developing society. He is also the consciousness of the post-technical culture where there is free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life.

Marcuse is also troubled because literature and the art no longer disturb the established society. Society has absorbed or deleted the artistic dimension by "assimilating its antagonistic contents". The "new totalitarianism" (advanced technological society) allows for "harmonizing pluralism" (unity in diversity) in which contradictions "peacefully co-exist in indifference".

Disruptive voices are those of Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, etc. These are disturbers of the peace; they portray the place of contradiction and ambiguity in human life. Art has/must have the estrangement-effect as its answer to the threat of behavior manipulation. It shows the negative in the midst of the false harmony imposed by repressive society (negation of negation). Art is the medium for opposition and negativity; art is rational, it is free expression.

Artistic alienation is a form of Marcuse's "Great Refusal". It offers a glimpse of the transcendence, even if that glimpse is confused and vague. But the glimpse is itself the reality: the underlying conflict residing in the heart of the system. Art reveals the internal contradiction within society; no society is so omniscient or omnipotent to suppress the expression of contradiction. Tragedy and romance, in their expression of the human drama, cannot be managed by technology.

(2) Marcuse formulates a concept of the transcendent project which speaks of the "truth value of different historical projects". The idea is to develop criteria for selecting one "qualitative historical alternative" from all those available to man. Such criteria must refer to the historical realization of specific way/form of human existence.

The established society of course has its truth value. But over and against the established society there are other historical possibilities or "projects" -- and among them those that would eventually change the established one completely.

Marcuse maintains the following criteria to evaluate the objective historical truth of the "transcendent project", i.e., the alternative historical options: (p. 175)

(3) Pacification of Existence offers still another approach to transcendence. This means "the development of man' struggle with man and nature, under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer organized by vested interests in domination and scarcity." Pacification of Existence refers to those empirical criteria which judge historical alternatives in a qualitative way, that is, concrete indices for what it means to exist humanely and rationally within a new society.

Pacification of Existence is an anticipated objective, a promise of human fulfillment, but does not yet have a historical concretion. At its simplest level, it relates to the possibility of ameliorating the human condition, i.e., of making it possible for man to live a life of freedom and with dignity. At its advanced level, that technological progress would serve in the struggle for the pacification of nature and society toward the promotion of what Marcuse calls "the art of life".

Science and technology must therefore develop a political consciousness; they must free themselves from all of the particular interests that impede the satisfaction of human needs. They must serve to effect the historical alternative and to bring about the desired qualitative leap. "Pacified existence" thus becomes the end of science and technology. Pacification presupposes the mastery of nature, the reduction of misery and suffering, the end of the brutalization of man.

In the concrete, pacification of existence implies refusal to any form of brutality, disobedience to tyranny of the majority, disgust for the perpetuation of repressive society, commitment to protest, willingness to compromise and to cheat the cheaters. In other words, it is the self-determination of the individual, who freely seeks his own human objectives. Self-determination (freedom) means not being prompted to behave in a particular way because of socially imposed needs.

(1) Marcuse has in mind outsiders and outcasts to compose the dramatis personae of the revolutionary force which will bring about the radical change in society. They are those who exist outside the democratic processes; they lead intolerable lives; they are exploited and persecuted. They are opposed to the system but not themselves within the system. They refuse to play the game; yet Marcuse points to them as the agents of change in a repressive society.

This is rather naive. Marcuse recognizes that the protests of the discontented and the oppressed may not lead to any substantial change in the body politic; but he depends on those who have pledged themselves to the "great refusal" as the agents of the future revolution. But what kind of revolution? Who are the dramatis personae of the revolution? How do the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the exploited grab political power for themselves from those who already possess it? And what are the means for such a revolution? Is it a political challenge to the established status quo? Or is it a violent and armed revolution? Or is it a non-violent and peaceful revolution aimed at a change in man's spiritual and moral nature? How will it take place and who shall share in the task of reshaping history? Marcuse does not tell us.

How can the oppressed poor organize themselves into a revolutionary force and threaten the status and stability of the wealthy capitalistic class? How can they gather a sufficient force to become politically visible? How can one group of oppressed unite with another group to begin and make substantial inroads into the political power structure? Marcuse does not tell us.

The oppressed form the negative consciousness which challenges the established order. But how are the negative oppressed masses transformed into a revolutionary power? If the consciousness remains in the realm of consciousness, then Marcuse is asking us to conceive of a spiritual revolution and not a political one, that is, a revolution of one's heart and not of one's head. If this is so, then he is a naive as the NC.

Marcuse's kind of revolution Marcuse lacks the following elements: a common ideology regarding the means and objectives of revolution; cadres

of individuals disciplined in revolutionary methods and pledged to give their lives to the cause of radical change; a union of many groups of the oppressed, the poor, the slum dwellers, tribal groups, etc.

Marcuse has some kind of notion of the Marxist notion of inevitability of revolution. But no revolution will take place without an organized attempt to grab power from the powerful. Groups of malcontents on the periphery of political power will remain there until they decide to effect some sort of organized protest. The form and extent of the protest is the content of revolution.

What about the much-publicized EDSA revolution? It was no revolution at all. There was just a change of hands in holding the repressive political power. There was no qualitative leap.

(2) To categorize all political activity as part of a grand conspiracy to maintain the repressive society is a simplistic analysis of what is actually going on. To believe that most of it is harmless activity, channeled through institutionalized democracy, including the so-called democratic liberal's efforts, may be an accurate estimation of the technological society. But not all of it can be characterized in so simplistic a manner. There are authentic revolutionaries within the democratic system, and not all of them are misguided idealists who have not recognized the manipulation of their consciousness by bureaucracy. The conspiracy against freedom is insidious, but not omnipresent. The military-industrial complex is capable of controlling human experience, but it is not omnipotent. Freedom has the remarkable capacity to emerge from the shattering challenge to its uniqueness and to continue to live, to protest and to blossom into new forms of personal and social experience.

Marcuse tells us in his notions of transcendence that technological society is unable to fully control the desire of man to be free. His notions of transcendence could be a functional society. Marcuse may exaggerate in the ability of modern society to control man; but he errs in seeing little hope for man within that society. Man has a remarkable capacity to refuse to be subjected to totalitarianisms of all kinds, even the technological society that Marcuse describes.

Man's freedom will always emerge from the established society and it will always threaten the autonomy and stability of that society. But it must challenge the status quo in aggressive political ways. Marcuse hardly ever demonstrates how that is possible without destroying the political system entirely. He does not show, however, how it will be politically destroyed. Marcuse has abandoned the democratic ways of effecting social change but offers no alternatives (except the spiritual ones). Liberation comes not from the abandonment of power but from the realization of power. Real revolution is always effected by political agents who bring about a radical reorientation of the political structures.

(3) Marcuse's notion of transcendence as the possibility of historical alternatives is functional only when man is permitted to act upon the stage of history, consciously and deliberately, with the intention to alter the course of that history. Unless Marcuse allows for that possibility, then his conception of revolution is as utopian as his conception of society as monolithic. Man, indeed, has to be free to determine his own destiny. But for such an objective to be real, man must become a historical actor, who intends by and for himself to alter historical events. Then it is not "society" that he objects to, but those concrete social expressions of totalitarianism within his society that he intends to uproot. That is a task which becomes political: to manipulate and destroy when it is strategic to do so those instruments of political power which destroys man's freedom.

It is unrealistic to think of the inevitability of revolution, and it is not constructive to believe in the ubiquity of evil. Marcuse's simplistic notions of good and evil, of society and revolution, do not do justice to concrete historical realities. They obfuscate the issues and do not provoke oppressed men to do battle against the oppressors.