"Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth. Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesAcademics from GermanyImmigrants to the United StatesSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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pp. 56-57
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
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Herbert Marcuse
1898 – 1979
deutsch-amerikanischer Soziologe und Philosoph
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