Under the influence of Hegel, Marcuse explained the concept of essence in terms of the role of potentiality or “real possibility.” Essences are the highest realization of what appears imperfectly in the world. Thus essences are in some sense ideals, but not for that matter merely subjective. Essences are objects of striving of the things themselves, in modern terms, of human beings and societies in the course of history. In this reinterpretation of Greek ontology, the concept of truth applies not just to propositions but to things, which can be more or less true to their essential nature.

Marcuse followed Heidegger in arguing that meanings are neither things nor thoughts but a third ontological order. But unlike Heidegger, he understood this order as dynamis, force or tendency in the things themselves. Marcuse argued that the Greeks misread such tendencies in terms of the culturally relative assumptions of their time. We cannot return to such a naïve relation to culture. The modern discovery of the constructive power of the subject stands in the way. This constructive power is now exercised not only in the spiritual domain of culture but materially, through technology, which transforms the environment according to human plans and purposes. Modern society dismisses the essences of antiquity as obstacles to the free exercise of human powers. Technical means are normatively neutralized and stripped of any relation to an objective truth of the object they create. The norms under which technology now stands are not intrinsic to its operations as cultural imperatives once were, but extrinsic demands of the powerful and, ultimately, of capital as a dynamic force.

This formulation recapitulates the basic point of Heidegger’s critique of technology, i.e. the radical deworlding accomplished by modernity which shows up in the reification of society to which the individuals are called to submit. The new conformism consists not in obedience to a leader or to customs but more fundamentally in submission to the “facts of life” interpreted as the one and only possible organization of a modern society. In so adapting the individuals fall into the objectivistic worship of the given which authentic decision must resist.

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