Symbolic Structure and Utopian Model

In the already mentioned development of utopia from the construction of the state supported by a collective to the progressive liberation of the individual within a social system, i. e. to the assertion of the individual wish against the collective wish, contains both the danger, seen by Schwonke, of a flattening of utopian thinking to a mere expression of an unreflected “longing for comfort, enjoyment, extraordinary adventures”, to an approximation to magical wishful thinking, and the chance, emphasized by Marcuse, of the ‘liberation’ of a human subject, who has come of age, from hitherto unreflectedly assumed ‘factual constraints’. In the sense of the Enlightenment intention, the desire articulated in utopias must therefore be mediated with rational reflection, without thereby losing the thrust of the tension of need.