This paper considers the way Herbert Marcuse’s re-formulation of the instrumental reason as a technical reason can be understood as an intensification or acceleration of some of the themes presented by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectics of Enlightenment. By reading Marcuse´s The One-Dimensional Man in dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, the paper explores a thesis that Marcuse draws on concepts from Heidegger, especially Ge-stell and Bestand, in his notion of the “technical reason” and “technological rationality” to think and think beyond modern technology. By positing modern technology as the focal point of the instrumentalization of reason, Marcuse sheds light of historical and contemporary problems with human thinking. The staging of this conversation with Marcuse and Heidegger that never really took place allows the paper to fully explore and understand Marcuse’s invoking of the aesthetical dimension, as well as his re-appropriation of Freudian terminology, as a model to re-establish negative thinking as a necessary counteraction to the one-dimensional positive thinking that is dominating private and public sphere.