L’ESPRIT UTOPIQUE COMME DIMENSION DE L’HOMME COMPLET. PLAIDOIRIE POUR UNE TRANSCENDANCE PROFANE
THE UTOPIC SPIRIT AS A DIMENSION OF THE COMPLETE MAN. ADVOCACY FOR A LAY TRANSCENDENCE

Summary/Abstract: In his famous essay, The One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse spoke of the most frequent form of alienation typical of the « late capitalism »: the atrophy of one of the two dimensions of a fully humanized human being: the capacity to imagine an alternative reality which transcends what is given and presents itself as a project of a better and shinier reality, of a more inhabitable world. If contemporary man confines himself to the other dimension, i.e. the capacity to adapt to the existing reality, he gets closer to animalism than to humanity. The consumer society nourishes the need for transcendence in the oneiric and in imaginary needs, but atrophies man’s appetite to improve reality - including social organization; it transforms peoples of citizens in masses of consumers. In this paper, we propose an epistemological explanation of the disappearance of the need for transcendence in post-modern culture as well as a way to recover the capacity of active dreaming, of promoting and triggering change. The complete man lives, thinks and dreams between two existential poles: Sein §i Sollen, in default of which it is impossible to think the regional ontology of the human, i.e. the particularity of human existence: the capacity to transform the “must be” and “it is likely to be” in “it is”. As such, human being may be defined as Jean-Paul Sartre put it: “a project-being”. From here, a series of educational consequences unfolds, inventoried in the last part of this paper.

• Details
• Contents