Volume 1. Marx and Heidegger
My philosophy dissertation (1974) "Marx and Heidegger" argues that two of the most significant critical thinkers of Western modernity—one a revolutionary political economist, the other a conservative ontologist—are engaged in fundamentally related enterprises. Both diagnose modernity as a formation in which the true character of human life is systematically concealed behind misleading appearances, and both develop a form of immanent, historically situated critique to penetrate those appearances. For Marx, the concealing mechanism is commodity fetishism: social relations between people appear as properties of things, and this inversion is structurally reproduced by the very form of value that governs capitalist production. For Heidegger, the concealing mechanism is the forgetfulness of Being: the dominant technological form of presence in the modern epoch suppresses awareness of its own historical and contingent character, presenting itself as natural and necessary. The dissertation's wager is that these two diagnoses are commensurable—operating at the same level of philosophical analysis—and that evaluating them against each other illuminates the strengths and limits of each.
The first part of the dissertation establishes the comparative framework and its hermeneutic presuppositions. Heidegger's published references to Marx are shown to be philosophically disqualified: he never read Capital, accepted a Soviet caricature of Marx as a crude materialist or metaphysical humanist, and thus produced criticisms that refute themselves upon contact with the actual text. Adorno's critique of Heidegger, reconstructed from Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics, provides the primary Marxist challenge: Heidegger's categories are formal where they should be material, his system is structurally quietist, and his characteristic language aestheticizes powerlessness rather than analyzing its social conditions.
The second part offers a systematic reconstruction of Marx's mature theory. The early manuscripts show alienated labor arising from commodity production rather than from a violation of a fixed human essence; the Grundrisse provides the historical materialist scaffolding, demonstrating that capitalism's categories are historically specific and that pre-capitalist societies show alienation is neither natural nor necessary; Capital delivers the complete theory: the dual character of the commodity unfolds into the form of value analysis, abstract labor, and commodity fetishism, the "secret" by which social relations take on the illusory form of relations between things.
The third part subjects Heidegger's mature ontology to the same scrutiny. His analyses of the artwork, the thing, and Being-itself each reveal a characteristic pattern: he begins with penetrating descriptions of concrete particular beings— van Gogh's painting, the Heidelberg bridge, the jug, the church bells of his childhood—but then makes a leap into abstraction, declaring the particulars to be instances of a pre-given truth of Being. The negative ontology of "Time and Being" admits, in the end, that its central concepts remain ungrounded assertions and that the application of Being's history to concrete social life is a task not yet accomplished.
The concluding verdict is systematic. Heidegger hypostatizes Being—which is not a being but a moment in the mediation of beings—into an in-itself with its own essential characteristics and temporality. Marx, by contrast, grasps people, products, and the prevailing form of presence as a mediated social totality, in which the mode of production is the primary determinant. The epoch of calculable stock is not an epochal fate but the form of presence generated by commodity exchange—and therefore changeable by the same social forces that produced it. Being must be shown to be conditioned by beings; the ontological self- interpretation of the world cannot be divorced from the ontic self-transformation of the world. This is what Marx accomplished and what Heidegger, despite the power and range of his analyses, ultimately failed to do.
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Chapter I. The Alternative of Marx and Heidegger
This opening chapter establishes the dissertation's central claim: despite their apparent opposition—one a revolutionary socialist political economist, the other a conservative ontologist—Marx and Heidegger share a fundamental philosophical kinship. Both diagnose modernity as a formation in which the true character of human life is systematically concealed behind misleading appearances, and both employ an immanent, historically situated critique to penetrate those appearances. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the concealing mechanism: social relations between people appear as relations between things. For Heidegger, the "forgetfulness of Being" plays the corresponding role: the dominant technological form of presence in the modern epoch suppresses awareness of its own historical and contingent character. In both cases the concealment is not accidental but structurally necessary, reproduced by the very form of social and ontological life it conceals.
The chapter explains why previous attempts at dialogue between the two thinkers— by Lukacs, Marcuse, Sartre, and Adorno—were hampered by political polemic or partial reading. The dissertation's method will be to read Marx through his mature work, Capital, rather than only the early manuscripts, and Heidegger through his later ontological writings rather than the "existentialist" Being and Time. Only by treating each thinker's system as a whole does a genuine comparison become possible.
The chapter also identifies the hermeneutic asymmetry that will dominate Part II: Heidegger never engaged Capital, accepting instead a reductionist Soviet-sponsored caricature of Marx as a crude materialist. The key analytical parallel is drawn between commodity—Marx's "economic cell-form" of capitalist society—and technological Being—Heidegger's corresponding concept of the dominant form of presence in the modern epoch. Both are socially generated illusions that pose as natural necessities. The dissertation therefore argues not that the two thinkers say the same thing, but that their respective critiques operate on the same level of philosophical inquiry and must be evaluated against each other.
Chapter II. Heidegger’s Critique of Marx
This chapter surveys all of Heidegger's published references to Marx chronologically and subjects each to critical analysis. The results consistently expose philosophical disqualification: Heidegger never engaged Capital, operated from a caricature of Marxism, and repeatedly misread Marx as a metaphysical humanist.
In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger silently appropriates Lukacs's concept of reification while claiming that his own ontological analysis is more fundamental. During the war years he identifies Marxism with Soviet dialectical materialism and dismisses it as political ideology rather than philosophy. In the Letter on Humanism (1946)—his first serious engagement—he credits Marx for recognizing that alienation is a historical condition, but misreads him as asserting a fixed essence of man that alienation violates, thereby making him a humanist metaphysician. In later writings he places Marx alongside Nietzsche as the "greatest Hegelians," who invert the metaphysical tradition without escaping it.
A 1969 television interview supplies three explicit criticisms: that Marx posits society as an absolute subject; that Marx "represents" the world by grounding it in subjectivity; and that Marx cannot grasp technology because he remains trapped in a subject/object relation. The chapter refutes all three. Marx consistently treats social structures, not human subjects, as primary; his analysis dissolves rather than fixes the subject/object dichotomy; and his critique of capitalism as a system that reduces persons to abstract labor is precisely a critique of the subject/object form as socially produced. Heidegger's failure to read Capital is not an incidental oversight but a philosophical disqualification: the very text that would have answered his objections is the one he did not read.
Chapter III. A Marxist Critique of Heidegger
This chapter reconstructs Adorno's sustained critique of Heidegger and adopts it as the primary Marxist challenge to the Heideggerian project. Adorno's earliest essays (1931–32) identify Heidegger's "radical new beginning" as, in fact, a retreat inside the very impasses of philosophical idealism he claims to have left behind. His anti-idealist ethos is betrayed by a systematic method that reintroduces the same problems at a deeper level; the notion of "historicity" falsely reconciles nature and history without concretely mediating them.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer share Heidegger's concern with the domination of technological rationality but ground it in concrete social and economic relations rather than in an epochal history of Being. Negative Dialectics provides the most systematic philosophical refutation: Heidegger's three poles—individual beings, human existence, and Being-itself—interpenetrate only formally, without the social-historical mediations that would give the relations content. The system's quietism—its structural inability to connect the critique of modernity to any program of transformation—is not accidental but follows from this formal character.
Jargon of Authenticity delivers the most polemical indictment: the language of "authenticity," "care," "death," and "the call of conscience" functions as jargon that grants an aura of philosophical depth without referential content, thereby serving a conservative ideology that aestheticizes human powerlessness and presents it as a condition of genuine selfhood. Adorno's methodological prescription guides the dissertation throughout: treat philosophy as a "force-field" through which social relations penetrate even the most abstract categories. Wherever Heidegger's concepts appear most autonomous and self-grounding, social history is seeping through, and a Marxist reconstruction must recover it.
Chapter IV. Anticipations: The Early Works
This chapter reads Marx's two major early texts—the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Theses on Feuerbach of 1845—through the lens of his mature analysis of commodity production, demonstrating continuity rather than rupture between the early and late Marx. The central argument is that alienated labor in the Manuscripts is not primarily a psychological or anthropological condition but a structural consequence of commodity production. The four dimensions of alienation—from the product, from the act of laboring, from the human species-being, and from other persons—all follow from the fact that labor produces commodities: objects that belong to another and that return to the producer only through the impersonal mediation of the market. Private property is a consequence, not a cause, of alienated labor; commodity production is the essential determinant.
The Theses on Feuerbach are analysed thesis by thesis. Against Feuerbach, Marx insists that the material world is not a given object of contemplation but a socially produced field of activity; truth is practical, not merely theoretical; and ideology critique cannot rest at intellectual demystification. The chapter reconstructs Marx's five-step program of ideology critique: identify the mystifying appearance; locate its social cause; develop a theoretical account; reveal the social possibilities the appearance conceals; orient theory toward practical transformation.
The Manuscripts are thus "anticipations" of Capital: the categories of alienated labor, private property, species-being, and praxis all point forward to the commodity, value, abstract labor, and the critique of political economy. Reading the early works through Capital also illuminates Capital's aims: it is not merely an economic analysis but a philosophical critique of the social form of human activity under the bourgeois mode of production.
Chapter V. Research: The Grundrisse
This chapter examines the Grundrisse (1857–58), the massive preparatory notebooks for Capital, focusing on two interrelated contributions: Marx's account of how to construct historically specific categories, and his reconstruction of pre- capitalist property forms. The methodological section shows that Marx rejects both empiricist description and idealist deduction in favor of a dialectical method that "rises from the abstract to the concrete." Categories such as "abstract labor" and "labor in general" are not universal truths but historically specific: even Adam Smith's apparently timeless insight that labor is the source of value expresses a historically conditioned reality that exists only under bourgeois conditions.
"The Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production" provides the historical foundation for Marx's critique. Through Oriental/tribal, classical Greek and Roman, and Germanic property forms, Marx shows that in all pre-capitalist societies the worker retains some form of unity with the means of production. Capitalism uniquely dissolves this unity. Primitive accumulation is not a process of individual saving but of violent redistribution—the forcible separation of workers from their property—driven by the spread of commodity relations. The chapter identifies four simultaneous historical tendencies that together constitute the transition to capitalism: from owning-worker to free wage-laborer; from communal to private property; from production of use-value to production of exchange-value; and from agriculture to manufacture.
The Grundrisse's central pathos surfaces in its conclusion: capitalism, which creates the universal human producer by developing productive powers on a global scale, simultaneously reduces people to one-sided drudges through alienation and the division of labor. Abstract value, stripped of its limited bourgeois form, would express "the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces." The task of Capital is to trace this stunted dialectic—the self-annihilation of capitalist progress—in order to free human potential from the fetishism of commodities.
Chapter VI. Presentation: Capital
This chapter analyzes Capital, Vol. I (1867), as the culmination of Marx's lifelong project: a philosophical presentation of capitalist society's inner structure beginning with its "economic cell-form," the commodity. The method is dialectical: begin with the most elementary determination of the mode of production and unfold its internal contradictions into the full complexity of capitalist reality. The commodity has a dual character—use value and exchange value—and the tension between them drives the analysis.
The "form of value" analysis, which Marx considered his most important and most difficult contribution, demonstrates how the exchange relation between commodities imposes a common standard on all of them: abstract human labor, measured by socially necessary labor time. This is not merely a technical economic finding but a philosophical revelation: society forces private producers to equate their diverse concrete labors by equating their products; the social character of private labor therefore appears not as a direct relation between persons but as a property of things. This inversion is commodity fetishism. Social relations between people appear as relations between objects, just as in religion, relations between people appear as relations between sacred entities. Going beyond the critique of religion, Marx locates the social basis of religious fetishism in commodity production itself: Christianity's cult of abstract man corresponds to the cult of abstract labor that mediates social relations under capitalism. Religion cannot be abolished without transforming the form of value.
The chapter concludes with an account of how this analysis bears on social reform: any reform that fails to grasp the mediating role of the commodity form will be coopted by the very system it seeks to change. The form of appearance of the essence—exchange value—must be analyzed dialectically and historically if social theory is to contribute effectively to transformation rather than be absorbed by its object.
Transitional Remarks
This short transitional chapter serves as a hinge between the dissertation's two halves. It notes that both thinkers respond to the specific historical contexts of their times: Marx to the consolidation of bourgeois power and the rise of an industrial proletariat; Heidegger to the technological advances surrounding the World Wars and the resulting technification of social existence. The question it raises is whether the century separating them represents such a qualitative change in capitalist society that Marx's categories are no longer adequate, and whether Heidegger is therefore justified in setting aside commodity relations in favor of a more sweeping analysis of technological rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is cited as evidence that it remains possible to comprehend the development of technological rationality from ancient Greece to German fascism within a Marxian framework; Heidegger insists instead on the need for an entirely new set of essential categories and a new language.
The chapter also provides a preliminary orientation to Heidegger's concept of Being for readers arriving from the Marx analysis. Being is the universal determination of beings as beings; in different historical periods this takes different forms—beings have been present as God's creations, as objects for subjects, as materials for labor. It is not a subjective worldview but an ontological a priori: prior to individual perception and choice, beings are always already given as interpreted. In Being and Time, Being is still anchored in the human structure of meanings; in the later writings, it acquires a degree of independence from the subject. The forgetfulness of Being—the concealment of Being behind the beings it determines—corresponds, in Marx's vocabulary, to the concealment of social relations behind the commodity's fetish-form. Part III will test whether Heidegger's system stands up to the standard set by Marx's dialectical-materialist analysis.
Chapter VII: The Work
This chapter examines Heidegger's lecture "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) as the pivot of his mature philosophy and as a case study in his characteristic "reversal" of perspective. The traditional conception of art treats the work as a representation created by a human artist for a human audience: truth is transmitted from creator to viewer via the work, and the origin of truth lies in human subjectivity. Heidegger's first move is to cite an experience—van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes—in which the work itself seems to reveal truth independently of any human cognitive act. The painting discloses the essence of the shoes as reliable tools in a farmer's world; this revelation is performed by the work itself, not by the painter's or viewer's understanding.
Art is therefore redefined as the "setting-into-work of truth": the work does not transmit but creates truth's presence for the first time. This reversal extends throughout the essay. The artist is revealed to be less the creator of the work than the occasion by which truth sets itself into a work; creating turns out to be more a receiving of unconcealment than an act of origination. Truth— unconcealment—is primordially given and already determines the character of the clearing into which beings come to presence; it has been "cast" before the dialectic of work and truth begins. The force of the dialectic is retained in form but annihilated in content: the outcome is pre-determined by the prior character of unconcealment.
Art is therefore not the creation of truth but the concrete execution of a pre- given destiny—one of several historical media through which truth comes to configure an epoch, alongside political founding, religious sacrifice, and philosophical questioning. The chapter raises but reserves for Part III the question of how this art ontology stands up to a critique grounded in the concrete productive activity of the artist within social and material history.
Chapter VIII: The Thing
This chapter analyzes Heidegger's account of the "thing" as a place that gathers the Fourfold (Geviert)—the interplay of heaven and earth, the holy and the mortal—and thereby opens a world. Beginning with Heidegger's late essay on sculpture and art-space, the chapter traces a persistent tension in his treatment of things: between his rich descriptive engagement with particular beings—bridges, jugs, church bells, forest paths—and his tendency to abstract from their particularity into purely formal ontological pronouncements about "the embodiment of the truth of Being."
The old bridge at Heidelberg provides the clearest illustration: Heidegger shows how a building-thing creates place by structuring space in which a world of human activity—commerce, worship, contemplation, seasonal celebration—can come to be. Each particular bridge organizes its world differently through its specific architectural form, and this specificity matters. But Heidegger systematically leaps from the rich particularity of each case to a universal formal claim that drains the concrete content away. The jug illustrates the same pattern: its capacity to gather the Four in the gift of its contents is explicated poetically, but the unique material and cultural history of any actual jug dissolves into the "mirroring-play" of the Fourfold. The creation of space, developed at length in its concrete specificity, is then simply declared to be the embodiment of the truth of Being—a declaration that adds no explanatory power but gains an aura of depth through the vocabulary of Being.
The chapter closes with Heidegger's meditation on the church bells of his childhood as an instance of "refusal of sight" and forgetfulness of Being: the obfuscations of the good life, the just society, the presence of God all point to their determinate negations by concealing them. The key interpretive question— whether beings dialectically produce Being, or whether Being pre-determines beings—remains unresolved and calls for a direct examination of Being-itself.
Chapter IX: Being-Itself
This chapter confronts the central structure of Heidegger's mature ontology by reading "Time and Being" (1962) and its associated seminar as his most explicit statement of the relation between Being and beings. Heidegger's is a "negative ontology": Being cannot be directly grasped because it is always self-concealing, present only as absent, given only in its refusal. The central paired concepts—the meaning of Being and the forgetfulness of Being, unconcealment and concealing, Being and nothingness, appropriation and expropriation—all exhibit the same structure: Being gives itself while withdrawing, reveals while concealing. No revealing takes place without a corresponding concealing; finitude is constitutive of ontological disclosure.
In "Time and Being," Heidegger argues that Being and time are co-given in the Event of Appropriation (Ereignis), which is neither a being nor a meta-being but the very giving of presence and the giving of time together. This formulation is meant to escape the metaphysical tradition in which Being is conceived as a supreme being or a property of beings, and to articulate instead the "it gives" that sends both Being and time to human historical existence. The technological epoch—in which all beings are disclosed as calculable, interchangeable stock—is one historical "sending" of Being, one form in which the giving of presence has been destined.
The chapter then poses the critical question directly: what does this path of thought actually offer? The seminar to "Time and Being" reveals the limits. The central concepts—unconcealment, presence, Ereignis—remain admitted assertions; Heidegger concedes that their content is questionable and their application to different realms is a task not yet accomplished. The question of how the technological form of Being is limited to this planet—rather than being a universal ontological condition—is dismissed as naive by Heidegger but is in fact a decisive objection. He knows that salvation from technological danger is possible but can say nothing specific about where, what, or how. The poverty of his social commentary is the inevitable result of his refusal to root the history of Being in the concrete history of beings.
Concluding Remarks
The concluding chapter brings the two halves of the dissertation into direct comparative assessment. Both Marx and Heidegger formulate theories of technological Being—the prevailing form of presence in the modern epoch—using the related concepts of abstract value and calculable stock. Both locate this form of Being within a historical meta-ontology that comprehends how Western civilization has developed toward a mode of presence that is limited, contradictory, and self- concealing. But the structure of their arguments is fundamentally different, and this difference is decisive.
Heidegger treats man, beings, and Being-itself as monads with only formal relations to one another; Marx grasps them through concrete social mediations. Heidegger's central error is to hypostatize Being—which is not a being but a moment in the mediation of beings—into an in-itself with essential characteristics, possibilities, and its own temporality. Marx, by contrast, understands people and their products as a mediated totality in which the mode of production serves as the primary determinant. "Being," in Marx's theory, is implicitly dealt with rather than fetishized as an autonomous category; the prevailing form of presence is explained by social relations rather than grounded in an epochal destiny.
For Heidegger—as for Hegel—the history of Being unfolds within the realm of Being-itself. For Marx, the history of Being is a consequence of concrete human history, and its apparent autonomy from human control is an illusion generated by the complexity of mediations within an antagonistically structured society. That beings are now present as calculable stock, abstracted from their particular context and physical character, is primarily a result of their being caught up in relations of exchange. These concrete social and economic relations—equating all labor to abstract labor, equating all products to commodities, equating all persons to abstract market participants—produce the technological form of presence. Heidegger's one-sided determination of beings by Being must be reversed: Being must be shown to be conditioned by beings, and the ontological self-interpretation of the world cannot be divorced from the ontic self-transformation of the world.
Epilogue: The Working of Sonic Being in E-Music
The Epilogue applies the dissertation's comparative framework to a concrete case study: electronic music as an illustration of technological Being. It opens with Heidegger's analysis of the artwork—specifically his reading of van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes—and immediately subjects it to critique. Heidegger focuses on the representational content of the painting (what the shoes disclose about the farmer's world) while ignoring what is most specific to the painting as a painting: the brushwork, the pigment texture, the post-impressionist gesture through which the material of paint is made to bear the weight of presence. This omission is symptomatic of the broader limitation the Epilogue diagnoses.
Two additional critical frameworks are brought into conversation with Heidegger. Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction shows how the transformation from unique aura to technical reproducibility changes the ontological character of artworks, democratizing access while simultaneously regressing the depth of experience. Adorno's account of the culture industry shows how the apparent spontaneity of popular music masks a standardization imposed by the logic of commodity production.
E-music—electronic music whose material is technically constituted sound—is analyzed as the point where these tensions become audible. Composers of electronic music treat sound itself as technically specifiable frequencies, amplitudes, and timbres; they are in a sense ontologists, disclosing the being of sound in a way that makes visible the technological form of presence Heidegger identifies as the character of the modern epoch. Yet the historical development of e-music also illustrates the dialectic of enlightenment: its innovations were partly absorbed by the commodity logic of popular music, and its compositional practices were shaped throughout by social and economic forces. Bourdieu's concept of habitus— skill as an embodied system of dispositions—and Giddens's concept of structuration—social institutions reproduced through repeated practices—are invoked to show that the changing ontological character of musical works is produced by the concrete, collective labor of composers and performers, not by an autonomous epochal sending of Being. The Epilogue thus confirms the dissertation's thesis in miniature: what Heidegger presents as ontological destiny is better explained as the outcome of social history.