Marcuse treated premature and agonized death as civilization’s greatest indictment

Evidence

Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty or seventy, and dying a `natural’ death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization … It takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2138

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on ritual sacrifice and death, and to critical-theory treatments of death. — connects to: Marcuse rejected the innate death instinct in favor of life-preservation failing against circumstance — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 379
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense claim: the very idea of natural death is itself transformed by civilization’s repressive order, indicting civilization for deaths that need not have happened.

Broader Connections

• Marcuse rejected the innate death instinct in favor of life-preservation failing against circumstance #expands (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 379