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Introduction: What Is Heideggerian Marxism?
- University of Nebraska Press
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Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page xi / / 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 [-11], (11) Lines: 315 to 359 ——— 9.48601pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-11], (11) Introduction What Is Heideggerian Marxism? Richard Wolin The relatively late and then very rapid reception of Marcuse’s work has allowed a historically inaccurate image of him to emerge: the older strata of his development remain unrecognizable. Marcuse’s 1932 book, Hegel’s Ontology, remains essentially unknown. I suppose that one would find few among Marcuse’s contemporary readers who would not be completely surprised by the Introduction’s concluding sentence: “Any contribution this work may make to the development and clarification of problems is indebted to the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger.” I don’t know what Marcuse thinks about this sentence today; we have never spoken about it. But I think that phase of his development was not simply a whim. Indeed, I believe that it is impossible to correctly understand the Marcuse of today without reference to this earlier Marcuse. Whoever fails to detect the persistence of categories from Being andTime in the concepts of Freudian drive theory out of which Marcuse [in Eros and Civilization] develops a Marxian historical construct runs the risk of serious misunderstandings. Jürgen Habermas (1968) Since Habermas first wrote these words some thirty-five years ago, more information concerning Marcuse’s youthful Heideggerian allegiances has come to light. But confusions and misunderstandings persist. By collecting the philosopher ’s early, proto-Heideggerian writings in one volume, we hope to shed additional light on what remains a fascinating and underresearched chapter of twentieth-century intellectual life: an encounter between two schools of thought—philosophical Marxism and fundamental ontology—that soon proceeded in opposite directions. In retrospect it is clear that Marcuse’s political worldview was shaped by the key events of his youth: the traumas of world war and, above all, the Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page xii / / Heideggerian Marxism / Herbert Marcuse xii Introduction 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 [-12], (12) Lines: 359 to 365 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-12], (12) failure of the German Revolution of 1918–19. At the age of twenty Marcuse was elected as a Social Democratic deputy to one of the Soldier’s and Worker’s Councils that mushroomed throughout Germany during the climax of World War I. He resigned, he later claimed, when he noticed that former officers were being elected to the same bodies. He bid an unsentimental farewell to Social Democratic politics following the vicious murders of Spartakus Bund leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by Freikorps troops acting at the behest of the newly installed Social Democratic government in January 1919.1 During the early years of the Weimar Republic Marcuse underwent a type of self-imposed “inner emigration.” After completing a dissertation in 1922 on the German artist novel, which was heavily influenced by the early aesthetics of Georg Lukács, he returned to his native Berlin to work in an antiquarian bookshop .2 During this time, he compiled a detailed Schiller bibliography, steeped himself in the early Marx, and read two classic texts of Hegelian Marxism that would have a profound influence on his future philosophical development : Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, both of which had appeared in 1923. Later in the decade there occurred a publication “event” that lured Marcuse back to the university: the 1927 appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time. At the time Germany’s philosophy seminars were still dominated by staid and familiar prewar approaches: neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, and positivism. For the younger generation, however, the horrors of World War I represented a point of no return: the worldviews and perspectives that had predominated prior to 1914 seemed entirely delegitimated. As Marcuse noted time and again, Heidegger’s thought seemed to offer something that the conventional academic “school philosophies” lacked: a “philosophy of the concrete.” Reflecting some fifty years later on the excitement generated by the publication of Being and Time, Marcuse observed...