Marcuse False Need Theory And Its Contemporary Significance

Human need plays a decisive and pivotal role in our lives. From the view of human’s natural attributes, continuity of human life is based on continuous supplement of various external energies; such the need for energy supplement constitutes the most primitive demand of human. Human’s needs and desires, purpose, emotion also exceed the scope of survival instinct, and become the internal driving factors of human activity.Science and technology haven’t been gradually considered as critical factors to well-being of human society as the outbreak of World War Ⅱ and continuous economic crisis in capitalist society. Highly-developed material civilization and seriously spiritual degeneration constitute two extremes of advanced industrial society. Although material living is enriched, the human spirit is very empty. Under highly developed technical background, superficially people’s living standard has been greatly improved, and science and technology are highly attended to a certain extent. As a new form of governance, science and technology "manipulate" human and remove their original nature, therefore they evolve to one-dimensional men. False need of human appear in developed industrial society, which is characterized by extremely rich material wealth but extremely insufficient spiritual civilization, resulting in disappearance of real demand, therefore what human-being could do is to only obey the rules under control of science and technology. In consideration of the inevitability of developed industrial society’s manipulation on human, the paper’ proposes comments and reviews to Marcuse’s false need theory in end, and criticizes the above abnormal phenomenon of advanced industrial society from a new perspective. In present research, the author analyzes Marcuse’s false need theory within the overall framework, by carefully understanding the original work, comprehensively applying literature research method, interpretation method, as well as history and logic integrated method, and attempts to find theories and methods worthy of reference and concerning, thus to provide the recommendations for development and construction of contemporary Chinese society. Marcuse’s focus on humanity is an important idea throughout this paper.