HERBERT MARCUSE: ART, ALIENATION AND THE HUMANITIES: ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF A CRITICAL THEORY OF CULTURE AND EDUCATION

This investigation into the philosophical foundations of the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse pursues the advantages of multi-disciplinary approach to his work. It is an effort that consolidates the perspectives of historical theory, philosophy, German literature, and, especially, educational studies, and which links Marcuse's aesthetic and socio-philosophical concerns to classical theories of mind and learning in the West. Its particular contribution to the re-examination of the theoretical foundations of Marcuse's scholarship currently underway is to trace the art-alienation-humanities matrix of ideas that pervades the corpus of his research. It establishes that Marcuse finds the very world of philosophy itself to be constructed in the humanities, and that he identifies the aesthetic imagination as the basis of a dis-alienating educational knowledge.; Marcuse urges education and art as countermovements to alienation: the humanities, despite a history of quietism and affirmation, are thought able to teach intervention towards justice and human gratification. They are thought able to renew the senses and evoke an aesthetic ethos that may reshape material society in a life-enhancing manner. Marcuse also finds, however, that education and art actively contribute to alienated forms of social existence, albeit in an elevating and emancipatory, rather than oppressive, mode. By tracing the dual themes of "Art Against Alienation" and "Art As Alienation," in conjunction with Marcuse's fundamental concern for issues in the philosophy of education, this study discovers and documents the symmetrical infrastructure that supports and defines Marcuse's understanding of the aesthetic-educational nature of critical theory.; This investigation maintains the thesis that Marcuse was much less affected by Marx's concept of alienation than by the cultural critique of German idealist philosophy, and demonstrates that the tradition of Western Marxism operates with a concept of human nature taken out of the materialist context of Marx's notion of alienation. It concludes that Marcuse's overall approach was decisively shaped by Dilthey's theory of the humanistic disciplines (the Geisteswissenschaften), as well as the cultural philosophies of Lukacs, Heidegger, Schiller and Nietzsche.