Toward a Concrete Philosophy

Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School

Mikko Immanen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501752490, 9781501752377
• eBook ISBN: 9781501752384
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: German History

Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, Immanen argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity.

Our knowledge of Adorno's "Frankfurt discussion" with "Frankfurt Heideggerians" remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment's idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer's enthusiasm over Heidegger's legendary post–World War I lectures and criticism of Being and Time have escaped attention almost entirely. And Marcuse's intriguing debate with Heidegger over Hegel and the origin of the problematic of "being and time" has remained uncharted until now. Reading these debates as fruitful intellectual encounters rather than hostile confrontations, Toward a Concrete Philosophy offers scholars of critical theory a new, thought-provoking perspective on the emergence of the Frankfurt School as a rejoinder to Heidegger's philosophical revolution.

PART I

WHO OWNS THE COPYRIGHT TO THE PROBLEMATIC OF “BEING AND TIME”?

Marcuse, Heidegger, and the Legacy of Hegel

1

THE UN-HEIDEGGERIAN CORE OF MARCUSE’S MOST HEIDEGGERIAN TEXT

The Lukács Question

Decisive was the failure of the German revolution, which my friends and I experienced … with the murder of Karl [Liebknecht] und Rosa [Luxemburg]. There seemed to have been nothing one could have identified oneself with.… Then all of a sudden there appeared Being and Time as a truly concrete philosophy. There was talk of “Dasein,” of “existence,” of “das Man,” of “death,” of “care.” That seemed to concern us.

—HERBERT MARCUSE (1978)

While living in Swiss exile as the newest member of the Frankfurt School in the spring of 1933, the German Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse was nothing but shocked when learning that his former supervisor, Martin Heidegger, had joined the Nazis. In 1928–1933, Marcuse had worked with Heidegger on his habilitation thesis on Hegel and used Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, to rehabilitate ossified Marxist theory as an existentially engaged “concrete philosophy” in several of his articles. Marcuse’s first political experience, as part of the failed socialist revolution in Germany after World War I, is crucial in understanding why a Marxist like him could become enthusiastic about Heidegger. Of upper middle-class origin from Berlin, Marcuse had joined Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacist movement, which pushed for radical democratic socialism based on worker councils. After the leaders of this pivotal anti-Bolshevist force were murdered by right-wing troops in 1919, Marcuse lost his only connection to leftist politics. While he abhorred Bolshevist authoritarianism, the social democrats’ support for the war in 1914 and their complicity in crushing the Spartacists made him critical of the moderate left. Besides his political disillusionment, Marcuse was critical of the parties’ crude economist understanding of socialism and their naive belief in progress and automatic evolution from capitalism to socialism. After the stillborn revolution, Marcuse spent the subsequent years in an “inner emigration” studying literature, philosophy, and political economy in Berlin and Freiburg where he earned his doctorate in 1922. Instead of pursuing further academic studies, he worked the next five years as an antiquarian book dealer in Berlin. Then, in 1927, his life took a new turn. After reading the just-published first part of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Marcuse decided to return to Freiburg to continue his studies in philosophy.¹

Since Marcuse’s world fame in the 1960–1970s, scholars have disagreed over whether his Freiburg writings are better defined as Heideggerian or Marxist. Those who label the young Marcuse as a Heideggerian complain that his critique of capitalism, instead of drawing on Marx’s mature critique of political economy, receives its thrust from abstract, and potentially irrational, Heideggerian meditations on authenticity.² In contrast, those who cast Marcuse as a Marxist claim that despite his fascination with Heidegger’s existentialism, Marcuse’s “concrete philosophy” differs considerably from the former.³ I would readily concede to the former group of scholars that in his Freiburg writings, Marcuse remains, for better or worse, a philosopher; his goal is to reconstruct the philosophical premises of Marxism, not to practice actual Marxist analysis of capitalism. But I am in perfect agreement with the latter group of scholars and their emphasis on the crucial differences between Marcuse’s and Heidegger’s philosophical positions; despite clinging on to Heidegger’s vocabulary, at the most fundamental philosophical level Marcuse was more Marxist than Heideggerian. Yet, I believe that the historical picture of Marcuse’s early encounter with Heidegger is more complex than the either/or question of Marx or Heidegger.

Marcuse was way too modest when, in a late recollection of his debt to Heidegger, he said that “there were relatively few reservations and relatively few criticisms on my part.”⁴ Indeed, John Abromeit rightly notes that Marcuse’s approach to Heidegger’s thought was always merely instrumental. I would, however, modify the chronology given by Abromeit, as well as by Gérard Raulet, of the development of Marcuse’s stance toward Heidegger. Despite stressing Marcuse’s criticism of Heidegger, they see this criticism as really beginning only after Marcuse’s disappointment with Heidegger’s new publications in 1929—a disappointment that allegedly caused Marcuse to turn to Hegel as a philosophical supplementation to Marxism.⁵ I argue, instead, for the continuity of Marcuse’s early writings; his distance from Heidegger is already evident in his first, and allegedly most Heideggerian, article from 1928, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism.” What my seemingly minor modification amounts to is the claim that Marcuse’s habilitation thesis, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, written in 1929–1930, should not be seen as a break from Heidegger to Hegel but rather as the culmination of the effort begun in 1928 to give Being and Time a Hegelian-Marxist twist—an effort, moreover, that did not go unnoticed by Heidegger. The decisive philosophical turning point in Marcuse’s stance toward Heidegger, sealed politically in 1933, happened only in 1932 with the appearance of Marx’s Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts) from 1844. These youthful speculations on human essence and alienation disclosed a truly philosophical Marx, and “from that point on the problem of Heidegger versus Marx was for me a problem no longer.”⁶

What was it, then, that Marcuse had been looking for in Heidegger’s thought before 1932 and then found in Marx himself? In my view, Marcuse was from the beginning interested in articulating what I would call the “ontology of labor,” the philosophical insight that social-historical institutions, such as capitalism, are not quasi-objective nature-like phenomena but human products. If these institutions seem to be operating behind the backs of individuals, this is because human beings have lost control of their own creations. As a philosophical paradigm, the ontology of labor holds that emancipation presupposes self-consciousness of this state of affairs—that human beings are not just objects but also potentially subjects of history. Labor here means, then, an ontological category and only secondarily an economic one related to the production of goods. Apart from the nascent intellectual subculture of Hegelian Marxism, inaugurated by Georg Lukács’s 1923 Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), this philosophical depth-dimension of human praxis had been ignored by official Marxism, which believed in the inevitable collapse of capitalism.⁷ From his first article onwards, I contend, Marcuse sought just this ontology of labor, not an “ontology of mortality,” as I would call Heidegger’s own position. Heidegger sees the human being as being-toward-death, thrown into historical occurrences forever beyond its control. By rejecting the ready-made truths of one’s historical heritage and those of the conformist social world, the individual can lead, momentarily at least, an authentic life. Notwithstanding Marcuse’s fascination with these “un-bourgeois” traits of Heidegger’s thought, he used Being and Time only instrumentally for his own purpose to rejuvenate Marxism as radical democratic socialism.⁸

An important, if also confusing, aspect of Marcuse’s Freiburg writings is that before the 1932 publication of Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, known also as the Paris Manuscripts, he could not yet be sure who owned the copyright to the ontological idea of labor—hence the perplexing mix of Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, and Lukács in his writings. On the basis of Marx’s writings available before 1932, it was not clear that Marx’s critique of political economy had grown on such an ontological foundation. One could ask: had not Lukács provided this foundation in History and Class Consciousness, which speculated, almost ten years before the appearance of Marx’s manuscripts, on the connection between Marx and Hegel? Although, as we will see, Marcuse embraced Lukács’s book, he apparently thought that it lacked a phenomenological analysis of the human being. Only with the appearance of Marx’s quasi-ontological meditations on alienated and non-alienated labor, won in a struggle with Hegel, could Marcuse convince himself that Marx was the inaugurator of the ontological idea of labor and that it was no longer necessary to look for philosophical implements for Marxism outside of the Marxist tradition.

In the absence of such an ontological foundation in the late 1920s, however, Marcuse turned to Heidegger. Like so many of his contemporaries, Marcuse was impressed by Heidegger’s radical pathos. Yet, I believe he was more intrigued by what he saw as the yet unfulfilled promises of Being and Time. Marcuse thought that in certain places, Being and Time toed the line between heroic individualism and a genuine understanding of social being, between an ontology of mortality and that of labor. Moreover, in the absence of the eagerly expected second part of Being and Time (which never appeared), Marcuse could entertain hopes that Heidegger had not yet made up his mind about the ultimate meaning of his philosophical breakthrough. To his disappointment, in 1929, he was forced to concede that Heidegger’s next publications—Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics)—moved toward increasingly metaphysical speculations.

In 1929, Marcuse began working on his habilitation study on He...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Who Owns the Copyright to the Problematic of “Being and Time”?
• Part II: The Frankfurt Discussion
• Part III: The Young Horkheimer on Heidegger
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index