Herbert Marcuse's notion of Technology and its importance for the contemporary Filipino family

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instrument for control and domination.”
1
  
Hence, technology as a mode of 
production, changes the social relationships among individuals.  Specifically, it 
changes the relationship among members in a given family.  Indeed, technology 
conceived as an instrument for control and domination promotes chaos rather than 
harmony, confusion rather than understanding. 
 While technology promotes abundance in life as well as progress in society, 
one cannot deny the fact that it also destroys life.  Worst of all, technology 
snatches the person’s uniqueness and leaves the latter helpless amidst the almost 
unbearable constant and speedy change in society.  Humans in the age of 
technological advancement are suffering from terminal uniqueness.
2
  But humans 
are not the immediate victims of the devastating effects of technology for they 
view modernization as a blessing.  The person who enjoys the fruits of technology 
cannot immediately find in it the veiled face of depersonalization.  Cars, cell 
phones, appliances, and automation in general are what persons want. 
 Behind all these facts, behind the rigid change in society, there appears the 
most vulnerable social group wherein the technological processes have a direct and 
immediate impact — the family.  Corporations, industries, human beings are but 
some factors of change.  Corporations and industries shape the economic aspect of 
the society and human beings (i.e., scientists, technical workers, machine 
operators, etc.) somehow determine the mode of production and the fate of 
                                                
1
 Lewis   Mumford,     Technics      and     Civilization     (New   York:   Herder,  1936)  
quoted 
in   Herbert   Marcuse,  “Some Social   Implications  of  Modern  Technology”,  Technology,  War  
and Facism,ed. Douglas Kellner, Vol.1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 39. 
 
2
 The world is becoming more and more corporate.  For this reason, humans no longer 
cared about their obligation towards their fellow humans.  Instead, they exhaust all possible means 
in order to satisfy their personal interests.  This attitude of humans towards technology is termed by 
Lewis Mumford as an “objective personality”, i.e., when one who has learned to transfer all 
subjective spontaneity to the machinery which he serves. See Marcuse, Technology, 44. 
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technology.  Of all the social groups, the family, that is, the basic unit of the 
society is the most helpless and vulnerable to technological control. 
 The once intact and autonomous families are now, in the age of 
technological advancement, becoming dependent on what the society can offer.
3
  
The speedy development of technology that brought drastic changes in the 
technical phases of social life result to an unsettled differences of husband, wife 
and children.
4
 
 The dawn of modernization brings changes in the once adored and honored 
family.  Technical ways of production cause uncertainty and confusion in the 
relations among members of the family.  Husbands, wives and children begin to 
have irrational differences that are difficult to settle.  In one way or the other, 
therefore, technology is hostile to the integrity of the family.  Michelle Mairesse 
once said: 
Deprived of the communal lands that yielded fuel, game, and 
pasturage, poor agricultural families, children included, labored in 
mines and factories up to eighteen hours a day at bare subsistence 
wages.  Hunger and misery were so widespread that the government 
grudgingly and gradually enacted a series of reforms to avert a 
revolution.
5
 
 
 What Mairesse describes is valid only in her own times.  Today, family 
labors not only to answer hunger and misery but also to meet the standard of living 
set by the technologically dominated society.  An eldest son or daughter, for 
example, is forced to leave school for work hoping to double the income of the 
                                                
3
 Families in this age of technological advancement are no longer the ones who determine 
their demands; rather, it is the society (i.e., the “crowd” in Kierkegaard’s terminology) who 
imposes these demands.  When the trend of the society is “high-tech” appliances, everybody feels 
obliged to follow. Hence, the irrational society characterized as the “slave” of technology becomes 
the irrational standard of one’s needs. 
 
4
 Edward   Everett   Walker,   Walter   Greenwood   Beach   and   Olis Glen Jamison, 
American Democracy and Social Change (Boston: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 162. 
 
5
 Michelle     Mairesse,   “Lewis   Mumford’s   Green   City,”   [article on-line];  available 
from http://www.hermes-press.com/machgard.htm; 08 March 2004. 
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family in order to meet the demand of modern society.  There are even some 
workers who clamor for an increase in salary not primarily because of the unjust 
computation of wages; rather, such clamor is due to the insufficiency of their 
income for the “gadget.”  Evidently enough, families in the age of technological 
advancement begin to have “false needs.”
6
 
 Now, it is made clear that technology is not always a blessing.  While it 
offers progress as well as convenience, it also provides uncertainty of human 
existence and irrational differences in family relations.  It is for these reasons 
therefore that the researcher undertakes a study on Marcuse’s philosophy of 
technology and its importance for the contemporary Filipino family. 
 Herbert Marcuse was among the thinkers who tried to reflect on 
technology.  In his One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse tries to show us the evil 
effects of technology and how it dehumanizes human beings.  In Technology, War 
and Fascism, Marcuse views technology as a form of social control that dominates 
the contemporary society.
7
 Although the thinker’s philosophy of technology is an 
analysis of the highly industrialized society, still it is applicable in the analysis of 
the contemporary Filipino family since the danger of technology is a universal 
threat.  If families in highly industrialized societies are suffering from the evil 
effects of modernization, families in the developing countries are also suffering the 
same thing.  Thus, this study attempts at understanding the importance of 
technology for the contemporary Filipino family in the context of Herbert 
Marcuse’s philosophy of technology. 
                                                
6
 The term “false needs” denotes the irrational transformation of one’s wants into one’s 
needs. 
 
7
 Marcuse, Technology, 39.  
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Theoretical Background 
 Central to the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse is the claim that modern-day 
technology, as a form of social control in modern-day society, dehumanizes human 
beings.  Hence, most of his works, if not all, move in a direction towards a 
complete liberation of the whole person from all forms of technologically 
systematized social control.  In this regard, Marcuse makes use of Hegelian 
philosophy with a side-glance on Heidegger’s notion of technology.  In an attempt 
to concretize his vision of emancipating humans from technological slavery, the 
philosopher critically investigates the philosophies of Marx and Freud while 
retaining what is best in them.  Thus, it could be inferred that Marcuse’s 
philosophy of person in the context of technology is a by-product of Marxism 
espoused by Freud’s Psychoanalysis.  However, out of this espousal, Marcuse 
draws his original philosophy of person that leads to the conception of a “one-
dimensional man”. 
 Several scholars and writers on philosophy of technology, political science 
and sociology recognize Marcuse as a great theorist.  Douglas Kellner considers  
Marcuse as one of the world’s most important living theorist in the late 1960s and 
early 1970s.
8
  However, the significance of Marcuse’s theories, especially on 
liberation and revolution, declined after his death in 1979.  Such deterioration of 
the philosopher’s importance is not to be understood in the context of the 
                                                
8
 Douglas Kellner is the leading scholar on Herbert Marcuse.  He met the philosopher 
while still a philosophy student at Columbia University in the 1960s.  His dissertation (Herbert 
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism) that is also his first achievement in the field of philosophy 
critically examined Marxism in the light of Herbert Marcuse’s critique on the philosophy of Marx.  
Kellner also contributed much to the creation of the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, 
Germany. Note: See Peter Marcuse, Foreword,Technology, War and Fascism, edited by Douglas 
Kellner, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1998), ix-xii. 
  
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irrelevance of his thoughts to the philosophical trend, especially on postmodern 
history of philosophy; rather, the loosening up of Marcuse’s importance is 
attributed much to its Marxian taste.  Unlike the existential thinkers such as 
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and others who center their thoughts on 
“existence,” Marcuse focuses more on the reconstruction of reason and the 
formulation of utopian solutions to the “sick” society.
9
 
 But the decline of Marcuse’s influence in postmodern history of philosophy 
does not necessarily mean that the philosopher’s thoughts die a natural death.  Few 
years later after his death, Marcusean thoughts gradually gain world recognition.  
The founding of the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, Germany gives way to 
a fuller understanding of the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse.  Through the 
archives, scholars and writers on technology found a unique way of approaching 
technology.   
 There is indeed a continuing relevance of Marcuse’s philosophy in the post-
modern world.  Kellner further says that the texts published in the Marcuse 
archives exhibit Marcuse’s penetrating critiques of technology and analyses of the 
ways that modern technology is producing novel forms of society and culture with 
new modes of social control.  
 In “An Article Review on Marcuse’s ‘The New Forms of Control’,” 
Guadalupe Daniel Garza identifies Marcuse’s social theory with that of Aldous 
Huxley.  “Marcuse’s essay conjures images of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 
in which the government conditions its citizens to relinquish their individuality and 
                                                
9
 Douglas Kellner described this as a dialectical imagination that has fallen out of favor in 
an era that rejects revolutionary thoughts and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction.  
See Douglas Kellner, Introduction, Technology, War and Fascism, Vol. 1 (London and New York: 
Routledge, 1998), xiv. 
 
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act as a single social organism.”
10
  Like Huxley, Herbert Marcuse lucidly 
characterized contemporary industrialized society as machine that controls over the 
lives of persons.
11
  Clearly then, Marcuse strongly criticizes modern technology for 
it signals the emergence of the new forms of social control.  Hence, freedom, in the 
age of mechanization and automation, is not anymore conceived as the ability to 
truly express one’s self.  Rather, freedom is defined in terms of one’s ability to 
prove one’s self in the technologically oriented society.  Garza further explains that 
Marcuse’s essay (i.e., The New Forms of Control) is insinuating that modern 
humans become a “slave to the grind.”
12
  To this, persons are no longer the one 
who determines the fate of technology but it is the other way around. 
 In his article “The Naked Marx,” Robert Young describes Marcuse’s One-
Dimensional Man as an “indictment of the social order of advanced industrial 
societies, where humans are dehumanized by institutions which mystify them and 
contain all social change by means of repressive tolerance.”
13
  Furthermore, Young 
identifies Marcuse as Freud converted into a sort of an eroticised Marxist. He 
contends that, for Marcuse, biological repression as a form of repressive tolerance 
is not itself the problem (as Freud believes it to be) but the problem stems from the 
additional ‘surplus repression’ produced by the specific historical institution of the 
                                                
10
 Guadalupe Daniel Garza, “An Article Review on Marcuse’s ‘The New Forms of 
Control’,” [article on-line]; available from
http://www.tamucc.edu/~whatley/pdm5370/read10c.htm; 07 February 2003]. 
  
11
 Ibid.  
 
12
 Ibid.  
13
 Robert       Young,              “The Naked Marx,”          [article on-line];         vailable       
from  http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psych/staff/rmyoung/papers/papers89h.html; 07 February 2004]. 
 
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technological era.
14
  Here, Marcuse, as Young observes, combines the 
psychoanalytic of Freud with Marx’s theory of surplus value. 
In his article “From 1984 to One-Dimensional Man: Critical Reflections on 
Orwell and Marcuse,” Douglas Kellner discusses the similarities and differences 
between the philosophies of Orwell and Marcuse.  Although both thinkers believe 
that it is possible to uphold socialism and individualism, Kellner claims that the 
two differ in their notion of the form of social control.  While George Orwell 
identifies coercion, overt political repression, or even torture and murder as a form 
of social control; Marcuse, on the other hand, focuses more on the instrument of 
culture, mass persuasion, manipulation, consumerism and controlled 
gratification.
15
  Marcuse, therefore, is attempting to figure out that technological 
advancement is the prime instrument of social control in modern-day society. 
 The fallen-ness of humans in the hands of technological domination is a 
serious situation that needs mature consideration.  Hence, the person’s situation in 
modern-age society characterized as “lost-situation” needs immediate 
emancipation.  The emancipation of persons from technological domination is the 
“calling” of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy.  In “Five Theses to Herbert Marcuse as 
Critical Theoretician of the Emancipation,” Hans Juergen Krahl says that 
Marcuse’s philosophy calls for the emancipation of humans from technological 
domination.  He further says that Marcuse’s concept of emancipation is not merely 
a change of the ownership over things; rather, emancipation means a change of the 
                                                
14
 Ibid. 
  
15
 Douglas Kellner, “From 1984 to One-dimensional Man: Critical Reflections on Orwell 
and Marcuse,” [article on-line]; available from http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell13.htm; 
07 February 2002.  
 
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ownership structures, that is, the control of humans over things, in order to liberate 
human beings from technological domination.
16
 
 The significance of Marcuse’s notion of technology reflects on the works of 
Alan R. Drengson and Albert Borgmann.  Like Marcuse, Drengson and Bormann 
both observe that technology does not always promote the “good life”.  To 
elucidate this matter, let us take a short glance on their philosophies. 
 In “Four Philosophies of Technology,” Drengson notes that technology 
which is originally pursued as an instrument to satisfy desires and needs becomes 
an end in itself.
17
  In an attempt to drive his point, Drengson discusses four 
philosophies of technology, to wit: (1) technological anarchy, (2) technophilia, (3) 
technophobia, and (4) technological appropriateness.  To the first, Drengson argues 
that “all technology and all technological knowledge are good and should be 
pursued.”
18
  It insinuates that technology is a useful tool in promoting the good life.  
Thus, whenever necessary, as in the case of a surgical operation for example, 
technology must be pursued.  However, in a society where irrational technology 
becomes the irrational standard of the person’s way of life, “technological anarchy 
loses its dominant position”.  This situation gives way to the conception of 
technophilia that is defined as the “love of technology.” 
 To Drengson, technolphilia “turns the pursuit of technology into the main 
end of life.”
19
  Technology, which is supposed to be good and beneficial, tends to 
                                                
16
 Hans Juergen Krahl, “Five Theses to Herbert Marcuse as Critical Theoreticians of the 
Emancipations,” [article on-line]; available from 
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/language/translatedPage.php?tt=vrl&text=http%39//www.partisan.net
/archive/1967/266771.html&lp=d_en; 03 February 2004.  
 
17
 Alan R. Drengson, “Four Philosophies of Technology,” Philosophy Today (Summer 
1982): 106. 
  
18
 Ibid. 
  
19
 Ibid., 107.