ABSTRACT
Ecology, environmentalism, or analyses of nature become very useful foci for questioning advanced capitalism when talking about the relationship with the life and death instincts, particularly the nature of social needs, and political agendas embedded in culture Turning to the aesthetic dimension allows one to talk about this system of urban development or that mode of industrial production as destructive strategies that self-serving elite interests use to define and satisfy false needs. Counterpoised to distorted ways of life, the aesthetic dimension can also propound alternative utopian visions of living. In many ways, Herbert Marcuse comes quite late in the 1960s to what has been developing as the modern American environmental movement, but one cannot really dissociate much of what he has written from the movements ecological critiques. Indeed, there is an unusually deep concern with the environment and technology in Marcuses writings, whether one looks at Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, or even his very early works.
