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In both respects, Marcuse believes such an "unreasonable" project
would provide genuine liberation-as against the pseudo-freedom of the
inspirational schools of psychoanalysis-and the basis for resolving, once
and for all, the fateful ambiguity of culture and man which Freud
postulated on the grounds of the irreconcilable conflict between happiness
and guilt.
IV
These ideas, obviously, represent an original and challenging
contribution to the body of psychoanalytic thought. They also raise a
great many questions; e.g., about the function of art, the nature of
instincts, the interaction of culture and personality, and so on. We
cannot discuss these problems; but we may ask in conclusion: Does
this ideal of a libidinal aestheticism achieve the objective of solving
the cultural equation which Freud believed to be insoluble? It is, I
think, doubtful that it does; or insofar as it brings about a resolution
of the ambiguity inherent in Freud's analysis of culture, it does so by
shifting the problem to another level. For the problem apparently solved
within the context of Freud's dichotomy between the instincts and their
historical vicissitudes, between the pleasure principle and a culturally
conditioned reality principle, reappears, I am afraid, as the dilemma
between historical reality and utopia. All human and cultural reality
is under the governance of time. Utopias being "timeless" constructions
cannot incorporate this temporal dimension into their own system.
Worse: they cannot establish a meaningful connection between their
own system beyond time and the social reality in time. They cannot
and do not answer the fatal question: what difference will the passage
of time make to the realization of the utopian ideal? In short, any
utopian vision is tainted by the spot of the transition period; and the
damned spot will not rub off-not even with the help of art. Maybe
time does come to a stop in the "timeless" images caught in aesthetic ex–
pression; but in this respect, at least, art reveals its illusory nature; for
we cannot reify the eternal moments of art and incorporate them into
the historical and social world which is always subject to changes in time.
Thus it is inevitable that in Marcuse's essay, as in any utopian con–
struction, the human dilemma reappears in the form of the irreconcilable
gap between the historical situation, on the one hand, and the leap
into freedom beyond history, on the other. In the concrete terms of
our own situation, this means that the liberation of Eros would and
must take place under the conditions of a highly advanced technological
