Wonder what he's up to. I don't think he's tweeted for two years now. Whenever he disappears a rumour goes round he's being tortured in a Chinese gulag.
In fact here is the introduction for all to read. Unfortunately it is rotated you have to go to your local library and print it out. Mark it up and scan it in with your marginalia so we can compare notes
There's a whiff of Gnosticism in this. Maybe I'm misreading him, but Marcuse seems to be saying thought is negation and the world is false, so by thinking we tear down the false world.
I think its more that the merely given, what “is,” is false in its one-sidedness. The preface is pithy, though, the argument really gets broken down in the book. I’m going to reread it
For Hegel, world history is driven by ‘world-historical individuals’; so-called ‘great men’ such as Socrates, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon. They alone are able to influence the tides of history and drive forward the self-consciousness of freedom. In a letter written to his friend Friedrich Niethammer in 1806, Hegel described Napoleon with adulation as ‘a world soul on horseback’. However much these world-historical individuals are inclined to pursue their own interests, they are unknowingly used by spirit to move towards the realisation of its own self-consciousness. Hegel refers to this as the ‘cunning of reason’.
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