Abstract

For Marcuse, a well-known figure of the influential Frankfurt School, earlier philosophical attempts to develop a promising account of desire were inadequate, not because they failed to appreciate what desire might mean in one’s life, but rather because their thinking of desire has always necessitated reason as a kind of universal judge. Against this trend, Marcuse argued for the identity of reason and freedom, and necessary connection between these two and desire. I want to argue in this paper that Marcuse was right in searching for new and better lines of argument for liberating potentials of desire or Eros, but he was not right in his celebration of Freud as a true father of the view that desire may establish itself in such a way that repressive instruments can no longer function and alienate individuals.