Perceiving possibilities for freedom enables breaking with existing patterns.

Evidence

This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals’ full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one’s own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 13

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that perceiving self-determination enables breaking with the given world connects to the attention-economy thesis that recovered agency over one’s own needs is a first political act. — connects to: Possibilities often reveal themselves only through the very act of realizing them — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 246; Motives are constituted by projecting beyond a situation toward change — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1072; Surveillance, data farming, and revived conflict renew the case for existentialist freedom. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 97 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Objective possibility constitutes freedom but requires knowing and wanting #expands (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1285
• Human freedom to begin new things resists the tyranny of logical deduction #corroborates (0.80)
• Freedom depends on overcoming negativity and constraint #complicates (0.78) — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 147
• Individual freedom is grounded in meanings others have already established. #qualifies (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 75
• Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 289
• Freedom grows by ceding outward conformity while guarding an inner core #contradicts (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 736
• A new conformism built from below on production enables genuine freedom #qualifies (0.75)
• Freedom arises when necessity manifests its inner identity, not by its removal #complicates (0.72)