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effects, by apparently involuntary means. Marcuse thus writes that
"in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology
would have to change their present direction and goals: they
would have to be reconstructed in accord with the new sensibil–
ity--the demand of the life instinct. Then one could speak of a
technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free
to project and design the forms of a human universe without
exploitation and toil. But this
gaia scienza
is conceivable only after
the historical break in the continuum of domination--as expres–
sive of the needs of a new type of man."
We are, again, in the terminologies (and paradoxes) of Emer–
son, Thoreau, Whitman, and later of Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich,
and still later, in decadent form, of the country communes and
Charles Reich, where it is simple-mindedly assumed that a "new"
man does exist and that he has something neatly designated as
"consciousness
III." In
all the earlier writers the idea is accom–
panied with recognition that only sporadically and by great effort
can one achieve anything like a change in consciousness, and Mar–
cuse himself is frequently insistent on the difficulties of giving any
practical or historical dimension to what he calls "the new type of
man." But when he proposes some of these difficulties in
An
Essay on Liberation,
it is only to make them seem like historical
anachro nisms.
"The idea of a new type of man," he continues, "as the
member (though not as the builder) of a socialist society appears
in Marx and Engels in the concept of the 'all-round individual,'
free to engage in the most varying activities.
In
the socialist society
corresponding to this idea, the free development of individual
faculties would replace the subjection of the individual to the
division of labor. But no matter what activities the all-round in–
dividual would choose, they would be activities which are bound
to lose the quality of freedom if exercised
en masse--and
they
would be
en masse
for even the most authentic socialist society
would inherit the population growth and the mass basis of ad–
vanced capitalism. The early Marxian example of the free individ–
uals alternating between hunting, fishing, criticizing, and so on,
had a joking-ironical sound from the beginning, indicative of the
impossibility [of] anticipating the ways in which liberated human
