Marxian Hermeneutics and Heideggerian Social Theory: Interpreting and Transforming our World

Gerry Stahl

Ph.D. Dissertation

Department of Philosophy

Northwestern University

June 1975

Today neither philosophy of interpretation (hermeneutics) nor philosophy of society can legitimately proceed without the other. Interpretation of the world precedes the possibility of transforming it, according to Martin Heidegger, because the presence of beings is always already meaningfully structured. For Karl Marx, however, interpretations of the world are constituted by human praxis, the reproduction and transformation of social reality. The confrontation of Marx's thought with Heidegger's provides an appropriate historical medium for the indispensable task of bringing the problematics of critical social theory and philosophical hermeneutics to bear upon each other.

The alternative notions, that hermeneutics either founds or is founded upon social analysis, are reconciled by interpreting Marx's social methodology as being in accord with hermeneutic principles and by transforming Heidegger's ontology to take account of social mediations. Thereby, Heidegger's critique of metaphysics clarifies Marx's methodological sophistication, rescuing Marxism from a history of mechanistic corruptions, while Marx's insights into the power of social relations provide a corrective to the politically reactionary self-understanding, abstract form, scholastic structure and non-social content of Heidegger's jargon.

Thinking about Marx and Heidegger together is most fruitfully accomplished by a sympathetic study of their mature approaches and systems, focusing on the relation between beings and Being, the concrete and the abstract, the individual entity and its socio-historical context. Hermeneutic, political and internal justifications for the selection of specific primary texts, for not making explicit use of secondary works, and for interpreting the two philosophers through each others' eyes are indicated in the introductory Part I. Above all, it is argued, a contemporary perspective on Marx is inevitably affected by Heidegger's influence as well as by intervening political developments; and similarly for reading Heidegger.

Marx's theory of commodity fetishism plays a role analogous to Heidegger's theory of the oblivion or Being. In both systems, the distorted appearance of things is related to the prevailing form of the Being of beings: their commodity form for Marx or their technological character for Heidegger. The commodity form of products and of human productive labor prevails in the bourgeois or capitalist era. Marx, whose methodology is specific to an analysis of this period, traces the historical and structural development of these commodity relations in primarily socio-economic terms, The way in which changes in the over-all social character are thereby related to concrete interactions provides the guiding theme of the Marx interpretation, which forms Part II.

Where Marx relates the technological character of the commodity to its actual, concrete, everyday exchange in the marketplace as historically developed, Heidegger insists that the process by which, e.g., the technological character of beings has been given, the "Ereignis," is ungrounded and incomprehensible. But such an insistence ignores the proper position of the Ereignis within Heidegger's system: as the process of self-mediation and of totalization of all that which is present, The analogy between the role of the social character in Marx's system and that of the Ereignis in Heidegger's is drawn in the opening and closing remarks of Part III, the Heidegger interpretation. There it is argued that Heidegger's alternative conceptualization weakens Marx's sense of the historical limits of theory as well as foregoing all ability to comprehend transformations of Being or society concretely.

Considering Heidegger and Marx together suggests that Heidegger's central fault is in failing to relate changes in Being -- the historically prevalent form of presence of beings -- to developments within the concrete social realm of entities. Changes of ontological interpretation can, as Marx demonstrates, be comprehended in terms of transformations within society, whereby, of course, the social theory must itself be hermeneutically appropriate.

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