{"agent_id":"marcuse","agent_name":"Herbert Marcuse","slug":"the-heideggerian-marxism-synthesis-1928-1933","label":"The Heideggerian-Marxism synthesis (1928-1933): was the early attempt to ground historical materialism in Heideggerian categories of *historicity* and *concrete philosophy* a philosophically productive synthesis whose 1933 break with Heidegger over Nazism does not retroactively invalidate the work, or a youthful exploration that the move to the Frankfurt Institute decisively superseded?","topic":"The Heideggerian-Marxism synthesis (1928-1933)","question":"Was the early attempt to ground historical materialism in Heideggerian categories of *historicity* and *concrete philosophy* a philosophically productive synthesis whose 1933 break with Heidegger over Nazism does not retroactively invalidate the work, or a youthful exploration that the move to the Frankfurt Institute decisively superseded?","position":"The 1928-1932 essays attempted to ground historical materialism in Heideggerian categories — *historicity* as the temporal structure of human existence, *concrete philosophy* as the demand that thought be situated in the historical moment of its production, the *radical act* as the existential ground of revolutionary praxis. The synthesis was philosophically productive. *Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity* (1932) read the *Science of Logic* through Heidegger to recover the dialectic as a movement of historicity in Being itself, not as the formal-logical exercise the neo-Kantian reception had reduced it to. The discovery of Marx's *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts* of 1844 in 1932 displaced Heidegger as the philosophical lodestar — \"New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism\" (1932) is the announcement of the Hegelian-humanist Marx the Frankfurt Institute would develop. The break with Heidegger came in 1933 over Nazism. The 1947 letter to Heidegger — written from Washington after the war, holding him to account for the rectoral address and his failure to publicly disavow National Socialism after 1945 — formalized the break that the philosophical work had already begun. Heidegger's politics did not retroactively invalidate the philosophical work the early synthesis had done. What survived into the later work — the *Great Refusal* contains elements of the *radical act*; the late aesthetic dimension preserves the categories of *concreteness* and *historicity* the early essays developed — was always Marxism's own resource that the Heideggerian apparatus had helped articulate, not a covert Heideggerianism.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The 1928-1932 essays attempted to ground historical materialism in Heideggerian categories — *historicity* as the temporal structure of human existence, *concrete philosophy* as the demand that thought be situated in the historical moment of its production, the *radical act* as the existential ground of revolutionary praxis.","n":[1]},{"t":"The synthesis was philosophically productive. *Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity* (1932) read the *Science of Logic* through Heidegger to recover the dialectic as a movement of historicity in Being itself, not as the formal-logical exercise the neo-Kantian reception had reduced it to.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The discovery of Marx's *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts* of 1844 in 1932 displaced Heidegger as the philosophical lodestar — \"New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism\" (1932) is the announcement of the Hegelian-humanist Marx the Frankfurt Institute would develop.","n":[2]},{"t":"The break with Heidegger came in 1933 over Nazism.","n":[]},{"t":"The 1947 letter to Heidegger — written from Washington after the war, holding him to account for the rectoral address and his failure to publicly disavow National Socialism after 1945 — formalized the break that the philosophical work had already begun.","n":[3]}],[{"t":"Heidegger's politics did not retroactively invalidate the philosophical work the early synthesis had done.","n":[]},{"t":"What survived into the later work — the *Great Refusal* contains elements of the *radical act*; the late aesthetic dimension preserves the categories of *concreteness* and *historicity* the early essays developed — was always Marxism's own resource that the Heideggerian apparatus had helped articulate, not a covert Heideggerianism.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"The 1928-1932 essays collected in *Heideggerian Marxism* (Wolin & Abromeit eds., 2005): 'Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism' (1928); 'On Concrete Philosophy' (1929); 'On the Problem of the Dialectic' (1930-31); 'New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism' (1932); 'On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics' (1933); 'German Philosophy 1871-1933' (1934). The 1932 Habilitation *Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity* (Beacon 1987, trans. Benhabib). The 1947-48 *Correspondence with Martin Heidegger* (in *Collected Papers Vol. 1*, ed. Kellner, 1998, ch. 10 'Heidegger and Marcuse: A Dialogue in Letters'). The 1977 'Heidegger's Politics: An Interview' (in *Heideggerian Marxism*). Reception: Richard Wolin's *The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger* (1990) and *Heidegger's Children* (2001) raising the question whether Heidegger's politics retroactively invalidate engagement with his philosophy; Douglas Kellner's *Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism* (1984) Chapters 1-2 reading the period as continuous with the later authorship; Sidney Lipshires's *Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond* (1974) on the early period; Andrew Feenberg's later commentaries on the technology-critique inheritance from the early period.","works":["The 1928-1932 essays collected in *Heideggerian Marxism* (Wolin & Abromeit eds., 2005): 'Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism' (1928)","'On Concrete Philosophy' (1929)","'On the Problem of the Dialectic' (1930-31)","'New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism' (1932)","'On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics' (1933)","'German Philosophy 1871-1933' (1934). The 1932 Habilitation *Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity* (Beacon 1987, trans. Benhabib). The 1947-48 *Correspondence with Martin Heidegger* (in *Collected Papers Vol. 1*, ed. Kellner, 1998, ch. 10 'Heidegger and Marcuse: A Dialogue in Letters'). The 1977 'Heidegger's Politics: An Interview' (in *Heideggerian Marxism*)"],"reception":"Richard Wolin's *The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger* (1990) and *Heidegger's Children* (2001) raising the question whether Heidegger's politics retroactively invalidate engagement with his philosophy; Douglas Kellner's *Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism* (1984) Chapters 1-2 reading the period as continuous with the later authorship; Sidney Lipshires's *Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond* (1974) on the early period; Andrew Feenberg's later commentaries on the technology-critique inheritance from the early period.","status":"The standing question is whether the early synthesis should be read as the legitimate philosophical formation of a Marxist whose break with Heidegger over Nazism was clean (Kellner's reading; the Wolin / Abromeit defense in publishing the 2005 anthology), or as a philosophically compromised period that the move to the Frankfurt Institute in 1933 decisively superseded (the older Anglophone reading that treated *Reason and Revolution* as the first \"mature\" work). The contested ground in the contemporary scholarship is whether Richard Wolin's *Politics of Being* line — which holds that Heidegger's 1933 turn raises hard questions about anyone who continued to draw on his philosophy after 1933 — applies to a Marcuse who in fact broke with Heidegger over precisely the politics Wolin foregrounds. The position is the modal- philosophical reading: the early work stands as Marcuse's own, acknowledged as part of the corpus, with the political break formalized and held to.","era":"1898-1979","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Introduction: Herbert Marcuse and the Vicissitudes of Critical Theory","page":"pp. 3–4","canonical":"","quote":"At the same time that he was writing essays synthesizing Marxism and phenomenology, Marcuse The text stressed the importance of the categories of life and history in Hegel and contributed to the revival of interest in Hegel that was taking place in Europe. In 1932, as the Nazis came to power, the situation in Freiburg became precarious for Marcuse.","label":"Introduction: Herbert Marcuse and the Vicissitudes of Critical Theory, pp. 3–4"},{"n":2,"work":"Heideggerian Marxism","page":"p. 87","canonical":"","quote":"Perhaps this provisional review of the *Manuscripts* will suffice to show the inadequacy of the familiar thesis that Marx developed by moving from providing a philosophical to providing an economic basis for his theory.","label":"Heideggerian Marxism, p. 87"},{"n":3,"work":"Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity","page":"pp. 11–12","canonical":"","quote":"The Hegel-Marx question is not explicitly addressed, although I hope that this interpretation will throw some new light on this connection. Neither does this work contain a critical discussion of Heidegger nor is it intended to do so.","label":"Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, pp. 11–12"},{"n":4,"work":"Heideggerian Marxism","page":"pp. 87–88","canonical":"","quote":"Rather, Marx goes back to the problems at the root of Hegel's philosophy (which originally determined his method), independently appropriates their real content, and thinks the philosophy through to a further stage.","label":"Heideggerian Marxism, pp. 87–88"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"eros-and-civilization-1955-and-the-freudian-marxist-synthesi","label":"*Eros and Civilization* (1955) and the Freudian-Marxist synthesis: do *surplus repression*, the *performance principle*, and *repressive desublimation* legitimately translate Freud's instinct theory into a critical-theoretical anthropology of liberation, or does the 1955 synthesis depend on uncritical acceptance of Freudian instinct theory and a mythopoetic Eros that the orthodox-Freudian, post-1970s feminist, and orthodox-Marxist receptions all show to be untenable?"},{"slug":"one-dimensional-man-1964-and-the-closure-thesis","label":"*One-Dimensional Man* (1964) and the closure thesis: does the diagnosis of advanced industrial society as a one-dimensional system that has integrated the working class, contained Eros and Logos, and produced one-dimensional thought close off the possibility of revolutionary transformation, or is it a tendency-diagnosis whose post-1965 architecture (*Essay on Liberation*, *Counterrevolution and Revolt*) shows the closure permeable and whose 1980s confirmation (the neoliberal rollback) vindicated the thesis Marcuse's critics had attacked?"},{"slug":"repressive-tolerance-1965-and-the-great-refusal","label":"*Repressive Tolerance* (1965) and the Great Refusal: is the defense of *liberating tolerance* — asymmetric in favor of suppressed positions and against established militarism, racism, and imperialism — the politically explosive authoritarianism that the 'guru of New Left violence' reception identified, or the precise structural argument that 'pure tolerance' under conditions of structural violence is itself asymmetric and that the *Great Refusal* of the marginal outsiders is the revolutionary mode advanced industrial society makes the only available one?"},{"slug":"the-aesthetic-dimension-1978-and-art-s-autonomy","label":"*The Aesthetic Dimension* (1978) and art's autonomy: is the late defense of art's autonomy and the *transcendence of class through form* — against orthodox-Marxist aesthetics that demanded class-bound programmatic content — the recovery of the utopian dimension that *ODM*'s pessimism had foreclosed and that critical theory required, or a retreat from political engagement into Schillerian-Idealist aestheticism that the rest of the authorship's commitment to revolutionary transformation cannot sustain?"}]}