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Part I: Interpreting Marx and Heidegger in Our World
The author
thinking about Marx and Heidegger during a visit to East Berlin in 1972. Chapter I. The Alternative of Marx and HeideggerThe reasons for my
decision to write on Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger together are numerous.
Throughout my study of philosophy, the two major tendencies in continental
thought, Marxism and existentialism, have been rivals for my interest. Marx
and Heidegger are clearly the founders of the two schools and to my mind they
remain the most profound representatives. It was thus natural that I should
take the opportunity of researching a dissertation to come to grips with the
philosophical alternative they present. My personal
inclination is not, however, merely subjective; it is an expression of the
objective conditions in society and in the philosophical tradition. There are,
that is, good reasons for someone critical of today’s society to be repelled
by the inherent conservatism of Anglo-American philosophy and to be attracted
to Marx and Heidegger. Both Marx and Heidegger, for all their criticisms of
Hegel, retain the central insight of dialectics: that the facts are not simply
given, but are mediated in ways which can only be comprehended with the help
of theory. A philosophy which does not take this seriously is ill-equipped to
deal with deceptive reality. To turn to Marx or
Heidegger as to a dogma is, however, to destroy them. Not only does the
originality of their thought demand an intellectual struggle that critically
overcomes the habits of common sense, but the weaknesses which have become
apparent in their systems necessitate creative development of these systems.
Internal requirements of the two philosophies, as well as their deficiencies,
call for a confrontation between them which could serve to clarify and
strengthen each of the alternatives, if not to synthesize them. The present
introductory chapter and the subsequent review of previous debates between the
two positions outline these needs, anticipating the material which follows in
the actual interpretations. A basis for
comparison of the two approaches exists in terms of the common search for
essences hidden in appearances. The differences between the essential concepts
they form and emphasize suggest, then, that Heidegger can be understood as a
rethinking of Marx, who too narrowly based his analysis on the economic realm.
On the other hand, the lack of historical content in Heidegger’s concepts
needs to be remedied through a study of Marx’s method of
historically-specific concept formation. Although a review of previous
attempts at interpreting Marx and Heidegger from each other’s perspective
reveals that there has been little success to date in this enterprise,
previous misunderstandings can generally be attributed to national and
international politics, and it can be hoped that a more fruitful dialogue is
now possible. Chapter I concludes
with a summary of the themes and considerations which are raised in Part I and
which determine the outlines of the subsequent interpretations of Marx and
Heidegger. Chapters II and III expand upon the comparison of Marx and
Heidegger by reviewing Heidegger’s critique of Marx and Adorno’s Marxist
critique of Heidegger. These chapters thereby uncover internal arguments why
Heidegger should have paid more attention to Marx and why Marxists must come
to terms with Heidegger’s thought. Interpretation for TransformationThere is today a need
for interpretation of the world. Marx and Heidegger share with Freud the
belief that it is possible with the help of a theory to understand someone’s
ideas, behavior and self better than he understands them himself. The
motivations consciously debated by the agent may well be screens against true
perception or at best interpretations of his situation which are not
necessarily privileged over the analysis of his situation by other people. The
idealistic presupposition of the transparency of the cogito to the ego
has been rejected by these post-Hegelian outlooks. The subject, who has been
raised in a family, mediated by social conditions, and “thrown” into the
world, must interpret his own consciousness, activity, and Being just as an
observer must, namely from a perspective which may well be more limited by
ignorance of various factors and by being more caught up in self-concealing
conditions than an observer with a developed theory – even though the
subject has been exposed to more of the empirical facts. This is not a merely
scholastic question of epistemology. The self-perception of the subject
situated naturally (i.e., without the objectifying alienation of theoretical
analysis) in his family, society and world is in fact subject to systematic
distortions of which he remains unaware. The normal psychic dynamic of family
life is predicated upon its sublimation into the unconscious; the invisible
hand of bourgeois exchange society could not be effective without commodity
fetishism; and the reliability of the world presupposes that we are
“fallen” in it and do not recognize its “worldhood” or “worlding,”
its Being. Both Marx and
Heidegger situate Hegel’s dialectic of essence and appearance in the
contemporary world. Marx argues that capitalist society is pervaded by a
“fetishism of commodities,” that is, that the essential social
relationships which structure society and the lives of its members appear, if
at all, in the illusory form of characteristics of physical objects, of the
commodities produced. Any evaluation of capitalist society in terms of its
appearances alone, without the assistance of a theory which interprets and
demystifies the appearances will necessarily be apologetic – at most
liberally reformist – covertly and dogmatically endorsing the mystifying
ideology of capitalism. A theoretical interpretation of the essences as
illusion, on the other hand, allows for a critical grasp of their
contradictory nature and reveals potentials for qualitative transformation. Similarly, Heidegger
argues that Western thought is guilty of a progressive “forgetfulness of
Being” such that the ontological categories through which we understand
reality distort our relationships to ourselves and other beings. What is
needed is a meta-ontology, a theory which deals with the deceptive character
of contemporary appearances. Thus, common to Marx and Heidegger, but not to
the competing philosophic approaches of the twentieth century, is the belief
that appearances by themselves are illusory, the insight that this illusory
character is historically situated, and the conviction that philosophy’s
task is to break through such illusion. This shared conviction provides a
basis for the following interpretations of Marx and Heidegger and for their
comparison. The central methodological problem for both thinkers is
accordingly the question of how to derive the appropriate theoretical essence
from the given appearances, from the ideologies and the phenomena. The
different approaches to a shared project determine contrasts between Marx and
Heidegger which are clear in their respective conceptual frameworks, or
rather, in the way in which they try to avoid imposing conceptualizations
external to their subject matter. Marx and Heidegger
each formulate an essential concept. Marx raises the question, What is truth?
by arguing that capitalist appearances are illusory, fetishized, false. This
alone might qualify him for consideration as a philosopher in the broad sense
of a thinker who stops at no academic borders. Frequently, however, he is
relegated to the ranks of out-moded economists. Worse yet, perhaps, his
thought is accepted as interdisciplinary, and segmented according to the
academic division of labor against which it stands as a forceful
counterexample. A preferable way of understanding the complexity of Marx’s
thought is suggested by Jürgen Habermas’
analysis of emancipatory science as a dialectical unity of interpretive and, explanatory
interests.[1] Speculative
philosophy (of the Hegelian tradition) is concerned to interpret
reality, to provide categories for subsuming reality such that the system of
categories provides a sense or meaning in terms of which reality can be
understood, comprehended, interpreted. Such philosophy is retrospective,
not predictive; it does not make calculations, but interprets the significance
of their results. Non-dialectical philosophy and science are explanatory
in the sense that they construct their concepts operationally, formulate laws
to predict in quantitative terms, clarify logical difficulties and anomalies.
They are thus useful for manipulating events within the given norms, but
inadequate by themselves for criticizing these norms. Because Marx wants both
to comprehend reality critically and to explain its functioning and its
development with an eye to transforming it, his theory must be both
interpretive and explanatory. To understand Marx is
to comprehend the unity of these two aspects of his work. Nevertheless, one
can roughly say that Marx’s theory of value (in Capital,
Volume I) is primarily interpretive (of the essence), while his price theory (Capital,
Volume III) is primarily explanatory (of the appearance). We shall be
concerned with Marx’s interpretive framework, rather than with his
explanatory science. The criticisms which the technical details of the latter
have received by even Marx’s most sympathetic readers is not the least
reason for reconsidering Marx’s interpretive theory in relation to present
society and in comparison to competing philosophies. The mediation of Marx’s
value theory with his price theory – which gives the unity of interests to
his critical theory of society – takes place in terms of the consideration
of more and more economic influences. The starting point for the entire system
is the commodity, cornerstone of
capitalist production. The theory of capitalist society, including the
analysis of fetishism, which is the basis of the critical thrust of Marx’s
system, can be presented by unpacking this abstract concept. For Marx’s
concept of the commodity summarizes the results of years of social research
and theoretical critique which he dedicated to developing his early,
anticipatory social criticisms. Despite the fact that
many social critics today feel that Marx’s systematic focus was too narrowly
economic, surprisingly few alternatives to Marx’s approach have been
developed. Either Marx’s theory is patched up or research into delimited
realms of appearance is carried out with little theoretical guidance. Martin
Heidegger’s thought suggests itself as a broader alternative to Marxism. His
philosophical theory is not only prima
facie comparable to Marx’s, but in many respects
methodologically quite similar. Furthermore, there are historical reasons for
viewing this alternative as a rethinking of Marxism. Heidegger’s mature
thought can well be understood as the attempt to interpret reality, including
its illusory character, more radically than Marx by reflecting upon the
ontological categories at work in capitalist production and more generally in
our modern age. In his theory, the concept of technological
Being plays roughly the same role as that of the commodity in
Marx’s. Two crucial questions in evaluating Heidegger’s alternative to
Marx are: Has Heidegger really thought about Marx adequately, that is, has he
understood the significance of Marx’s accomplishments? Secondly, has
Heidegger really been more radical than Marx or has he in fact fallen behind
Marx’s standpoint philosophically as well as in terms of content? These
questions are to be understood quite apart from the undisputed fact that
Heidegger’s theory is not as fully developed in concrete details as
Marx’s, that Heidegger has, by his own admission, just managed to clear the
ground somewhat. The concepts of a
critical theory of society are perforce radically historical. They display a
temporal structure all their own. If the given appearances are illusory, then
the concepts which name them effectively must be able to move dialectically
between essence and appearance. In temporal terms, the concept must show that
appearances lack necessity, that the past was essentially different. As
critical, the concept also proclaims the possibility of a better future; it
anticipates a qualitative transformation. Marx’s key concept,
that of the commodity, is not limited to the era which it characterizes. Nor
is it simply universal. Rather, it can retrospectively shed light on its less
developed forms under feudalism and also suggest the form it might take in a
subsequent harmonious industrial society. Briefly, that is, the relation
between the two primary moments of the commodity, use value and exchange
value, mirrors the historically changing tensions within society as a whole,
their relation of opposition within the capitalist form of production had not
yet developed before capitalism and would have to be overcome in the future in
order to transcend fetishism, alienation, exploitation, and impoverishment.
Within Heidegger’s system, much the same can be said about the technological
character of Being. In his terms,
it is the “Janus head” facing both danger and salvation, one foot in the
present epoch and another in a possible subsequent one. Retrospectively, it
also makes sense of the development which led up to it. For a theory to move
between essence and appearance, to interpret the development up to the present
and to uncover potentials for the future in the present, its key concepts must
be neither operationally defined in terms of the given nor ahistorically
general. This accounts for the extensive concern with history evident in the
work of both Marx and Heidegger. That Heidegger’s concepts often seem to
lack the historical content characteristic of Marx’s suggests that a
comparison of the two philosophies may help remove Heidegger’s greatest
weakness. Interpreting Marx and Heidegger TogetherThe problematics of
Marx and Heidegger are comparable in fundamental ways. Central to both are the
twin paradoxes: guided by theory,
the analyses must nevertheless be immanent
to their object; consciously situated
in the world they interpret, their task is to transform it through critique.
The unity of critical theory and situated immanence common to Marx and
Heidegger defines the tangential point of ideology critique and destructive
hermeneutics, social theory and social praxis, interpretation and
transformation of the world. Marx and Heidegger
follow a theoretical approach by
focusing on an essential category. This essence, which is elaborated into a
conceptual framework, is not simply a concept from which one could logically
or dialectically deduce a system, nor does it represent some one being which
grounds all other beings as God did in medieval theologies. The theoretical
approach is a consequence of the claim that the true structure of reality has
been obscured. That this claim does not itself lead to mysticism is due to its
being situated in the character of
capitalist commodity relations or technological Being. Marx and Heidegger see
the root of obfuscation in historical developments and strive for the removal
of the prevalent deception rather than for submission to it or exploitation of
it for purposes of domination. Recognizing the historical objectivity of false
appearances, they view their own theoretical insights as moments in the
historical transformation required to remove the deceptive character of
reality’s contemporary self-interpretation. This sense of historical
objectivity distinguishes Marx and Heidegger from vulgar utopianism which
dreams up ideal societies without concern for making the transition from
today’s problems. Yet the two thinkers are critical
in the sense of orienting their thought toward a qualitatively different
future. As situated, their theoretical and critical approach is immanent.
Their orientation toward the future is based on their position in the present,
which they understand as having developed out of the past. The character of
the systems of Marx and Heidegger, including their methodologies, is
explicitly immanent to their historical situation. The theories are
articulations of their own circumstances, rather than attempts to impose an
abstract, unrelated, ahistorical conceptual framework upon the given. The
given is criticized in accordance with its own claims. However, despite
these at least formal similarities, Marx and Heidegger have generally been
considered to be at logger-heads. Followers of Marx and Heidegger have
maintained primarily polemical relations with each others and previous
attempts to think about Marx and Heidegger together have been problematic at
best. Since the publication of Heidegger’s Being
and Time,
Marxists have dealt with Heidegger in basically two ways. Some, like the early
Marcuse or the late Sartre, sought in Heidegger’s approach a new ontological
foundation or philosophy of man to supplement the analyses of a Marx who
supposedly had little time for epistemological questions. Others, like Lukacs,
lumped Heidegger’s writings in with bistro existentialism and rejected the
whole as bourgeois ideology. Generally, the polemicists have been quick to
attack surface features without understanding their role in a system which
admittedly was until recently only available in the form of obscure hints.
Heidegger’s apologists, at the other extreme, try to remove all danger of
criticism by insisting that he must be interpreted – an endless and
thankless task – before he can be judged. Commentators who have
focused on Heidegger’s later works have frequently expressed the feeling
that Heidegger’s thought, for all its depth and breadth, is in the end
somehow empty. However, when not hurtled as a weapon of polemic, this
objection generally appears camouflaged in the guise of a personal aside
tacked onto the end of an objectively argued, uncritical exposition with no
attempt to explain the emptiness in terms of what was analyzed. How does this
emptiness arise from Heidegger’s approach? Where can the problem be
pinpointed in his system? What are the ideological implications? What remains
of value? The answers to these questions must be sought in the innermost
recesses of Heidegger’s system. Such a search differs as much from the last
minute posing of general “critical” doubts at the end of an uncritical
analysis as from an emotional response to surface features. The massive
secondary literature on Heidegger seems to lack such a critical search of his
system, judging its claim to relevance on the basis of its underlying
outlines. The two knowledgeable
attempts to deal with Heidegger as a social thinker fail not only in their
over-zealous defense and acceptance of Heidegger’s pronouncements, but, more
seriously, in seeking something that is not there, Heidegger’s “political
philosophy” in the Aristotelian sense. Otto Pöggeler’s Philosophie und Politik
bei Heidegger [2]
– apparently an attempt to deal with the basic critical problem avoided in
his larger commentary on Der Denkweg
Martin Heideggers –
collects many of the central issues and provides a counter-balance to the
polemics, without, unfortunately, finding time to go beyond making plausible
his defenses of Heidegger. He emphasizes the problem of developing a
“political philosophy” on a Heideggerian foundation, without trying to
understand how Heidegger’s approach already represents an alternative to
Marxism. Alexander Schwan, in
his Politische Philosophie im Denken
Heideggers,[3]
tries to adapt Heidegger’s analysis of the ontological structure of the work
of art simplistically to an analysis of the Hitler state, rather than seeing
the art analysis as itself already a social analysis. The arbitrary nature of
Schwan’s approach becomes striking when he repeats the adaptation with a
very different later Heideggerian model with almost identical results. An
alternative approach to an analysis of the relation of politics to
Heidegger’s thought suggests itself in the material on the 1930’s which
Schwan has himself assembled: to trace the effects of the political climate
upon Heidegger’s writings or to oppose an analysis of the political
phenomena to Heidegger’s conception of history – lines of politically
critical analysis which are, unfortunately, absent from the political
philosophizings of Pöggeler and Schwan. While few have
succeeded in relating Heidegger to Marx, there is an increasing tendency to
focus on his similarities to Hegel. Heidegger himself has become more
concerned with Hegel in his later writings and seminars, although even Being and Time
discussed Hegel’s conception of time at some length. Heidegger, however,
intends to go beyond the tradition which stretched from Plato to Hegel. Hence
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx, the great Hegel critics, are important to
him. The concern with Kierkegaard, who allegedly remained on an ontic level,
diminished after Being and Time,
while Nietzsche assumed a central importance in Heidegger’s work. After his
fascination with Nietzsche waned, Heidegger seems increasingly to have
recognized the importance of Marx’s post-Hegelianism, without, however,
dealing in any depth with Marx. Rather, Heidegger’ s references to Marx
suggest that a discussion between them is one of the great unfinished tasks of
Heidegger’s project. An analysis of these references indicates, further,
that a necessary first step is to correct the misunderstandings which they
express. The work of Theodor
W. Adorno contains a serious and extended critique of Heidegger’s system.
However, Adorno avoids a treatment of Heidegger’s philosophy in isolation.
For him, as a Marxist, it is important to deal with Heidegger the way Marx
dealt with Hegel: as an expression of the latest stage in the history of
philosophy and society. Heidegger’s popularity is to be understood in social
terms and its ideological consequences are to be combated. Consequently,
Adorno’s analysis is difficult to judge on a purely philosophical level.
Further, while it makes several fundamental points, its form of presentation
suffers from abstractness: distance from the material. Not only is the Marxist
alternative to Heidegger kept on an implicit level; the interpretation of
Heidegger’s system remains itself between the lines. Only when supplemented
by a thorough interpretation of Marx and Heidegger can Adorno’s claims be
evaluated, demonstrated, criticized or expanded upon. Particularly bothersome
in Adorno’s discussions is the way in which he ranges across Heidegger’s
writings without admitting that they have developed under the recognition of
many of the same immanent criticisms which Adorno articulates. Thus, it is
useful to focus on one stage of Heidegger’s path of thought – his final
system – in order to determine just which of Adorno’s accusations hold in
the end. The Hermeneutic ContextHeidegger’s
attitude toward Marx suggests that he has rather uncritically accepted certain
prevailing reductionist interpretations of Marx’s writings and has thereby
reinforced their popularity (cf. Chapter II below). Soviet orthodoxy has not
only reified Marx’s critical, dialectical thought into a metaphysics, but
has used it as a justification for totalitarianism. In rejecting Soviet Diamat,
Heidegger (at least until after the war) thinks he is dispensing with Marx,
thereby accepting orthodoxy’s false claim to authenticity while ignoring
what truth may yet be contained in its system. Here, as elsewhere,
Heidegger’s jargon of origin-al thinking comes into conflict with his
insight into the need for “destructive’ thought, which starts out from
available philosophies to uncover what truth is buried within them. Thus,
Heidegger makes a blanket rejection of the economism of Marx as seen through
the eyes of the old left (Marxist-Leninists and Social Democrats alike)
without considering Marx’s arguments for the primacy of commodity production
in interpreting our world and, thereby, without being able to up-date the
theory to more contemporary needs. Because he does not see the mediation of
Marx’s economic studies with his philosophy (i.e., his explanatory with his
interpretive theory), Heidegger is forced to an extreme humanist
interpretation when he wants to salvage something of Marx’s thought. By
focusing his attention exclusively on Marx’s early work as divorced from Capital,
Heidegger inevitably arrives at the kind of humanist or even existentialist
picture of Marx which is so popular in liberal theological circles and which
allows him to reject Marx as metaphysically humanist. In opposition to
Heidegger’s emphases, the following interpretation of Marx (in Part II)
attempts to make sense of his thought as a whole precisely by steering clear
of possible metaphysical, economist and humanist distortions in order to
arrive at a position which can speak to Heidegger with strength, relevance and
independence. Within the context of a presentation of the core of Marx’s
system, focus will be on Marx’s principle of the primacy of commodity
production, the unity of his social theory and capitalist social practice, and
his analysis of fetishism. It is hoped that the discussion of these focal
points will contribute to thought on these important matters. Although the
view of Marx presented is conceived as a synthesis of contemporary independent
Marxist exegesis, the attempt to structure an interpretation of Marx in terms
of the confrontation with Heidegger is, it seems to me, unique and fruitful. The interpretation of
Heidegger (in Part III) follows similar guidelines. The manifold debates over
existentialism and Marxism are indicative of the tact that Marxists almost
always consider Heidegger an existentialist That is, Heidegger’s doctrine of
man in his Daseinsanalytik is
interpreted moralistically, or at least is taken as an end in itself, as a
subjectivistic, individualistic philosophy, rather than as a first step in the
anti-subjectivistic questioning of Being. This understanding of Heidegger has
not led to significant results because, I suspect, the “existentialism” in
Being and Time is a popular,
superficial level of meaning which merely obscures Heidegger’s own thought
as developed in his later writings. Adorno’s critique is, I think,
convincing in arguing that the appealing elements of Heidegger’s magnum opus
are jargonistic and wholly inconsonant with Marxist concerns. The following
interpretation thus turns to the late Heidegger, where the accent is no longer
on the individual, avoiding, however, the theological interpretation to
which Heidegger’s ambiguity carefully leaves itself open. Seen in relation to
Marxism, Heidegger’s final system seems to call for the comparison with
Marx’s and it is, indeed, surprising that so little has been done along
these lines. The important influences of Heidegger on Marxism tend to be
highly indirect: e.g., through the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and within the context of French structuralism. By contrast, the
interpretation presented here aims at confronting Heidegger’s mature thought
head-on with a viable reading of Marx. The central themes will accordingly be:
Heidegger’s claim for a priority of Being, his doctrine of the forgetfulness
of Being and the structure and methodology of his critical meta-ontology –
especially the relation of its concepts to history. The basic analysis of
Heidegger’s system attempts to capture what seems to be obviously at work in
Heidegger’s writings since the mid-thirties in line with reflections which
Heidegger himself makes in his latest work. The danger is, of course, that any
such over-all sketch is reductive of Heidegger’s thought, whose importance
lies more in its concrete suggestions and specific points then in its general
outlines – witness the above reference to hermeneutics and structuralism.
If, however, this interpretation lacks the profundity which alone can benefit
from Heidegger, at least it consciously avoids the shortcomings of previous
interpretive attempts and clears the way for further work by establishing a
context within which the confrontation between Marx and Heidegger can
meaningfully
be developed. Although placed within a critical argument, the interpretation
of Heidegger, like that of Marx, aims at sympathetic understanding and
constructive development. The problem with previous interpretations of Marx (including Heidegger’s) and of Heidegger (including those by Marxists) can be summed up in one objection: they impose a preconception upon their object. This is precisely what phenomenology, with its slogan: “Zur Sache selbst,” rebelled against. Heidegger has adopted this ethos in demanding that Being-itself be thought about “appropriately.” Appropriate thought appropriates its object in an appropriate way, in a manner derived from the thing itself. Marxism, too, in line with its rejection of ideology, is opposed to criticism from an external standpoint; Marx’s “immanent critiques” of Hegel, political economy and bourgeois ideology in general set out from the presuppositions of the questionable theory itself in order to show its contradictions and inadequacies. To understand Marx
and Heidegger appropriately, to uncover what is unique and original to each,
means to follow their own hermeneutic principles. In comparing the two
systems, neither can be subordinated to the other or to some supposedly
objective third standpoint of commonsensical analysis. The principle guiding
the present work has been to allow the two systems to unfold themselves
autonomously, understanding the tangential points as organic parts of their
respective contexts. This has been sought through keeping the two
presentations distinct rather than comparing them point by point. The systems
are developed through close textual analysis of key works, which, however, are
selected with an eye to the comparison. Further, the confrontation is not
externally imposed; it arises immanently out of the present crisis of Marxist
theory and the contradictions of Heidegger’s thought as well as out of the
internal demands of the two systems. Once the Marx interpretation has been
spelled out, the points of comparison can be developed in terms of the
material as it occurs in the course of the Heidegger presentation, thereby
strengthening the focus of the Heidegger interpretation without distorting
it. Just as, for Marx,
immanent critique need not become apologetic if it retains its critical
thrust, so, for Heidegger, what is decisive is not to avoid the hermeneutic
circle but to come into it in the right way: “Our first, last and constant
task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be
presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the
scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the
things themselves.” [4] As this quotation
from Heidegger notes, it is not merely one’s project and an anticipation of
the results which form preconditions of understanding, but one’s
preconceptions as well. If one is to avoid external critique which is
inappropriate, distorts and misses the point, then account must be taken of
the source of preconceptions, the Wirkungsgeschichte
of the work under consideration.[5]
Only through the history of its effects, its tradition of having been
variously construed, does a work cross the gap between the author and the
reader. The history of ideas is thus the medium which permits understanding,
the reconciliation of the dead spirit in language with that spirit which
forces it to life on the basis of its afterlife. But intellectual
history takes place in the context of socio-political developments.
Heideggerian hermeneutics may be correct when it argues that society can only
be known through linguistic texts: “Language is the house of Being” and
conversely “Being, which can be understood, is language.”[6]
Thus, it is true that Marx focuses on Hegel’s texts, the tomes of bourgeois
political economy and British governmental reports. More generally,
“society” is to be located only in its citizens, that is, in their
(fundamentally linguistic) objectifications in self-reflection, speech,
documents, works and institutions. Marxism none-the-less has the last word
when it points out that the subjects have already been thoroughly mediated, so
that the social superstructure created by their activity is, through them,
already (pre-linguistically) shaped by the character of the social totality.
Karl-Otto Apel is thus right to point to the basis in the “community of
interpreters” for the ontological categories, whose history Heidegger leaves
to a linguistic world-spirit whose theological overtones have merely been
modernized and whose substance has accordingly been diminished.[7]
However, in abstracting from the historically-specific to formulate the ideal
of a speech community, Apel is himself in danger of abstracting from the
social context of the communicating subjects: their relations within a
specific, concrete, historical form of’ production. A merger is necessary
between the hermeneutic insight into the context-dependence of all
understanding and the ideology-critical emphasis on societal mediations. From
his early analysis or Being-in-the-world as the essential structure of human
existence, Heidegger has stressed the importance of the world around a being
to the character of the being itself: a tool has meaning within a technical
context, a jug within the relationships of the physical world, a bridge within
lived space and a word within the communicative situation. The grand question
of Being is ultimately an investigation of the contextuality of beings. But
Heidegger fails to recognize the power of social formations to define the
context of beings; here Marxism furnishes the antidote. With Marx, social
theory supplies the
comprehension of
the context. A Marxist
appropriation of Heidegger’s critique of non-contextual, “metaphysical”
positivism would simultaneously clarify Marxism’s own approach and demystify
Heidegger’s content-poor ontological musings. For Marx and his creative
followers have articulated numerous ways in which the power of the context
to structure the beings it contains is itself created by those beings. Such
analyses are, however, readily subject to misunderstandings unless they are
formulated within a theory which explicitly rejects mechanistic, positivistic,
idealistic and subjectivistic philosophical stances. To bring out those
fundamental theoretical features of Marx’s thought which are especially
important today requires a peculiarly twentieth century formulation which
would make explicit how social facts are comprehended within a social theory
and how the categories and orientation of that theory are related to its
social context. Because the essence of man inheres in the nexus of social relations from the viewpoint of social theory, human activity constitutes social praxis, the process of the production and reproduction of the form and substance of society. The task of socially-conscious theory is accordingly to interpret social phenomena, as human artifacts and, as such, as the expression of social relations among people. The reconstruction of the preconditions of the given social reality should ideally demonstrate the mediations which constitute its history. This demonstration is neither a recounting of empirical history, a logical argument unrelated to the specifics of the case, nor a causal account of events and effects. Rather, it points to ways in which the phenomena have been conditioned, have been characterized by social conditions such that in the end the social origins have become obscured. Political events, for instance, function as both symptoms and screens for social transformations. Outside the political
arena of the past century, divorced from the Russian and Chinese revolutions,
the failure of revolution in the West, the rise of fascism, the development
of advanced industrial economies and culture, Marx cannot today be understood.
For it is in terms of such events and what underlies them that the Leninist,
Stalinist, Maoist, existentialist and humanist interpretations arose. A contemporary
understanding of Marx must take into account these events, the social
relations behind them and the resultant interpretations if it is to comprehend
its own procedure, possibilities and necessity. The situation with respect to
understanding Heidegger is, if slightly less complex, not as different as
might be assumed. What is particularly clear in Capital
holds for Heidegger’s writings and his references to Marx as well: namely,
the philosophical argument is inextricable from timely observations and social
considerations. This relates as much to the perspective of the reader as to
that of the authors. It is precisely our
temporal distance from the concerns of the past decades which makes the
following interpretations possible. Until recently, the hermeneutic goal of
understanding the author better than he understood himself has been hindered
by politics. In their concern to battle socialism and Stalinism, the
Heideggerians ignored or distorted the thought of the man the Soviets claimed
as a founding father. Similarly, Marxists felt compelled to attack and
ridicule the thought of a philosopher who had consorted with fascism, and here
the “existentialist” themes seemed most vulnerable. This is not to imply
that the problems underlying the old politics and polemics have vanished nor
that exegesis must or can completely disavow politics. But philosophy today is
in a period of retrenchment, where hasty formulations prove ineffectual;
serious interpretation of Marx and Heidegger is presently underway throughout
the world. This has opened the possibility of a successful confrontation of
their respective systems, already implicit in the convergence of approaches
and concerns in the respective philosophical camps. The political changes are,
of course, related to social conditions which are more difficult to evaluate.
Suffice it to say that developments in the consciousness of youth throughout
the world in the past decade suggest progress in the conditions of the
possibility of a new epoch in both Marx’s and Heidegger’s terms. If this
is so, then the Marxian and Heideggerian systems have gained in relevance, and
that means in accessibility and comparability. The point of new
interpretations of Marx and Heidegger is not to rewrite Capital and Being and
Time as though sub
specie eternitatis;
rather, each age – every decade, class and country – requires its own
understanding, incorporating both changes in the social fabric and consequent
modifications in revolutionary perspectives. That the American New Left
considered Capital irrelevant is
understandable; whatever unfortunate consequences it may have had, this
attitude allowed for a freshness, creativity and experimentation which may
not only have been its greatest virtue, but its only objective potential. The
1970’s, however, call for a synthesis of the best in the old and new
leftovers. The following is not the required reformulation of Marx and
Heidegger, but understands itself as a faltering step in the task of
clarification, analysis and interpretation which recognizes itself to be
politically, historically and philosophically situated. This means that
perspectives which may well be appropriate in Eastern Europe, Italy or China
are here rejected. Not unrelated to the concern with the situation of advanced
industrial society, the insights of Theodor W. Adorno have guided the whole of
the dissertation. Acknowledgment is made therefore by quoting Walter Benjamin,
Adorno’s guru, whose ephemeral and contradictory character may provide an
appropriate symbol for the iconoclastic attitude of the so-called Frankfurt
School. In line with their
tentative character, the following presentations can be taken as theses on
reading Marx and Heidegger today, working hypotheses for future inquiry.
Accordingly, the thought of Marx and Heidegger, which is conceived of as
systematic, as well as the debates between them are presented in terms of
their development. Rather than starting with texts which represent mature
statements of the systems, the analyses unfold in chronological order, even if
the continuity and teleology of thought is often stressed over the deviations.
Not the least motivation for this procedure is the suspicion that the System
has become an anachronism. Where systematic presentations tend to petrify into
monuments, an approach which follows the research which spirals in on a system
makes more sense pedagogically and critically, for it stresses the arguments
and aporia. Nevertheless, the mature
works of Marx and Heidegger assume a priority in the interpretation of their
early works, which are grasped as the seeds of the later thought and thus as
inadequate articulations of that which they intend. [1] Jürgen Habermas, “Knowledge and human interests: A general perspective,” Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971). Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Erkenntnis und Interesse,” Technik und Wissenshaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968). [2] Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1972). [3] Alexander Schwan, Politische Philosophie im Denken Heideggers (Köln: Westdeutscher, 1965). [4] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 195. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), S. 153. [5] This notion of the importance of the historical effects of a text on the subsequent comprehension of that text is developed in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960; 2nd ed. Tubingen: Mohr, 1965). [6] These central motifs of Heidegger’s thought are elaborated in Gadamer’s discussion, especially in the Preface to the second edition of Wahrheit und Methode. [7] Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), especially the extensive Introduction to the first volume. This introduction represents the latest stage in the debate between hermeneutics and ideology critique, demonstrating Apel’s role as innovative interpreter of both Heidegger and Marxism. The dispute, the most extended and explicit confrontation of the thought of Marx and Heidegger to date, began with Habermas’ critique of Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode in the former’s “Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften” (Philosophische Rundschau, Beiheft 5, February 1967). Subsequent contributions to the debate have been collected in Continuum (vol. 8, nos. 1&2, 1970) and Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).
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