Abstract. In this article Through Sartre and Marcuse: For a Realistic Utopia I propose the “realistic utopia” as a moral and political paradigm that can orient us towards a satisfactory life in our own society, I analyze the status of a realistic utopia, the chances to build it and whether the movements of protest of nowadays (often juxtaposed with those of the ’68) are credible subjects for its realization, or not. This is the reason why it is important pass through Sartre and Marcuse. They were two of the ’68 inspiring figures, but we have to untie their thought from the exclusive reference to that period and vogue, because still today they can provide us the conceptual tools to comprehend, and therefore shape, the world in a realistic utopian way.
Keywords. Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, realistic utopia, protest movements.
Nowadays we are immersed in a global cultural and economic crisis. Several movements of protest are been born in front of them (e.g. the socalled Indignados or Occupy Wall Street), sometimes organized also in parliamentary formations, which give rise to a global contestation that is often compared to the movements of the 1968. However, notwithstanding the deep cultural, social, political, economical differences between these two periods, in order to try to understand if and in which measure this confronting is possible, we have to analyze the conceptual tools proposed in the ’68, seeing if they are still suitable nowadays, and also if the old and current movements of protest have really grabbed the conceptual content of that thought. For analyze that conceptual background, we will take here in consideration the thought of two of the maîtres-penseurs of that time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse.
As is known, the main slogan of the May ’68 was “power to the imagination”: the idea that the empowered imagination would make possible a glimpse of authentic freedom; an idea leaded forward through existentialist and Marxist conceptual tools[2]. However, the Modern development across all the Western world, latter increasingly extended up to almost coincide with the entire globe (and in all cases, affecting the entire globe), of the capitalist mode of production and consumption and, especially and proper nowadays, the explosion of the technological rationality, about which still remain lighting the analyzes of the first School of Frankfurt and of Martin Heidegger[3], show how the imagination is resulted useful for industrial, technical, entertainment-based applications than for a liberation of man, for the socalled system than for its alternatives.
Under this regard it seems to me that it still remains to meditate accurately on the legacy of two famous sentences, one by Marcuse and one by Heidegger. That of Marcuse: «A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress», and that of Heidegger: «the essence of technique is nothing technical»[4].
