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guilt; but these characteristics, according to Marcuse, are still historical
accidents because he attributes them to the special conditions which
have so far prevailed in the evolution of human culture: the necessity
to master a recalcitrant nature and the necessary sacrifices imposed upon
the reluctant instincts to perfect a system of security against want and
fear. The moment these special conditions cease to operate it may be
possible to reverse the inexorable march of unreason through history.
This moment has arrived. Our culture has reached a level of tech–
nological perfection and material abundance which, as Marx predicted
long ago, would enable us to suspend and supersede the repressive, irra–
tional solutions of the fateful "dialectic of civilization." It has put within
our grasp the prospect of a "free" and "rational" society-even though
this prospect must appear utopian and unreasonable from the perspective
of the ideas of freedom and reason developed by a repressive culture.
Since the leap into freedom is not forthcoming, there must be
special conditions at work which prevent it. Marcuse singles out two
such conditions, which he calls surplus repression and the performance
principle, respectively. By "surplus repression" he means the social re–
strictions and forms of exploitation necessitated, not by the natural
struggle for survival, but by the historical struggle for power and
domination in society. By the "performance principle" he means the
type of work necessitated, not by need and use, but by the competitive,
acquisitive features of a capitalistic economy. Marcuse concludes that
Freud's analysis of culture is predicated upon a misreading of the reality
principle in the light of surplus repression and excess performance. More
precisely, it is a correct reading of the historical record, but a false
extrapolation from it. According to Marcuse, the historical curse can
at last be lifted from man's soul because surplus repression and the
performance principle are no longer necessary for survival and social
adaptation.
Unlike Fromm, Marcuse does not see the vague breaking of a
new dawn in political economy or religion, but in the aesthetic dimen–
sion. His prophets are Novalis, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Rilke, Valery,
and all the others who have chosen art as a way of life. It is their
vision which has always held a mirror up to human nature-and shown
it to be disfigured by a repressive, irrational reality. Marcuse invokes
the mythical figures of Orpheus and Narcissus as archetypes for the
aesthetic vision and as perennial reminders of "The Great Refusal"
to serve reality and reason at the price of libidinal freedom and pleasure.
Freud himself had specifically excluded "fantasy" from the universal
reign of the reality principle in the adult ego; but, on the whole, he
