version

Well-known member
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


"The whole is the truth," and the whole is false.

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.
 

dilbert1

Well-known member
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
 

version

Well-known member
hes inarguably A Man of Destiny.

Hard to read about Hegel and Napoleon and not feel some parallels with Trump in the current moment; Trump himself has seemingly made the same comparison.

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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