Heideggerian Marxism

Glossary

Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page 177 / / Heideggerian Marxism / Herbert Marcuse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First Page] [177], (1) Lines: 0 to 38 ——— 6.98601pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [177], (1) Glossary John Abromeit Aufhebung/aufheben: sublate. Rather than attempt to distinguish which of the three meanings of the German verb “aufheben” (“lift up,” “negate,” or “preserve”) was predominant in each particular usage, as some translators have done, we have opted to translate the term with “sublate” throughout, and leave it up to the reader’s discretion to decided which meaning(s) are intended. Bestimmung/Bestimmtheit/Definition: determination/determinacy/definition . We have translated “Bestimmung” and “Bestimmtheit” as “determination ” and “determinacy” to preserve the distinction among the three terms, which is crucial in the dialectical tradition, particularly since Hegel. Marcuse’s frequent use of the concept of Bestimmung in is line with this tradition, insofar as he shares Hegel’s rejection of the possibility of fixing the meaning of concepts once and for all in a static “definition.” Accordingly, Bestimmtheit implies that which exists in the immediacy of the present, that which is merely a moment in a larger underlying process. Bewegtheit: motility. We have followed Seyla Benhabib’s translation of this term as “motility”1 in order to preserve the crucial distinction between “Bewegtheit ” and “Bewegung” (“movement”; see the entry below for Geschehen). Along with “happening” and “historicity,” “motility” is one of the most important concepts Marcuse appropriates from Heidegger at this time. It signifies the uniquely and ontologically historical existence of authentic Dasein. Most importantly, it signifies a particular relationship to time. In Being and Time Heidegger goes to great lengths to demonstrate that human Dasein is primarily a temporal, not a spatial, being. He argues that the Cartesian understanding of time is based on an abstract and quantitatively measurable conception of space as res extensa.2 The dominant concept of time in modernity is based on the quantitatively measurable movement of an object through this abstract Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page 178 / / Heideggerian Marxism / Herbert Marcuse 178 Glossary 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [178], (2) Lines: 38 to 62 ——— 14.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [178], (2) space. But this understanding obscures the more fundamental temporality and motility of Dasein. Heidegger traces this fatefully reductionist interpretation of time all the way back to Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, in which time is also interpreted on a model of quantifiably measurable movement in space— what Heidegger calls Jetzt-Zeit (literally, “now-time”). Heidegger writes: EversinceAristotlealldiscussionsoftheconceptoftimehaveclung inprinciple to the Aristotelian definition; that is, in taking time as their theme, they have taken it as it shows itself in circumspective concern. Time is what is “counted”; that is to say, it is what is expressed and what we have in view, even if unthematically, when the travelling pointer (or the shadow) is made present. When one makes present that which is moved in its movement, one says “now here, now here, and so on.”These “nows” are what get counted. . . . The world-time which is “sighted” in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the “now-time.”3 When Dasein’s complex relationship to time and history is construed in this manner, as quantifiable movement through abstract space, its unique ability to act resolutely based on its highest possibilities and to project these possibilities into the future is fundamentally lost; in other words, its historically mediated and self-reflexive motility is reduced to the passive movement of a mere thing. Marcuse was well aware of parallel analyses in the Marxist tradition of the rise of an abstract conception of time, and its link to the problems of alienation and reification4 but no one in the Marxist tradition had yet attempted, in the manner of Heidegger’s existential analytic or his analysis of historicity, to provide a detailed, positive demonstration of what a nonreified relationship to time and history would look like at the level of the concrete individual. Marcuse believed that Heidegger had, on this particular point, moved beyond the...