Abstract
Marcuse’s first published essay, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’,1 proposes a synthesis between Marxism and Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism. His goal is to produce a ‘concrete philosophy’ capable of dealing with the central problems of the day. This remarkable philosophical debut anticipates later attempts to create a ‘phenomenological’ or ‘existential’ Marxism, and historically situates Marcuse within a current of ‘critical Marxism’ that sought to reconstruct Marxism in order to provide an alternative to the ‘revisionism’ of the dominant trends of the Second International and the dogmatism of Soviet Marxism.2 The essay articulates an activist, practice-oriented interpretation of Marxism that has continued to shape Marcuse’s later writings, and contains one of the first and best interpretations and critiques of Heidegger’s influential Being and Time.
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Notes and References
Marcuse’s article, ‘Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des Historischen Materialismus’, appeared in Philosophische Hefte, I (Berlin: 1928) pp. 43–68 — a journal edited by his friend Maximilian Beck which was oriented toward phenomenology and German Idealism, but which occasionally published articles on Marxism. The article has been reprinted in the first volume of Marcuse’s collected works, Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978) pp. 347–84. Page references will refer first to the Philosophische Hefte original publication and then to the Schriften edition (hereafter S1); translations are my own. A translation appeared in Telos, 4 (Fall 1969), but it is so bad — especially in its bizarre rendering of Heidegger’s terminology — that I cannot recommend its use.
On ‘critical Marxism’ and its differences from ‘scientific Marxism’, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: Seabury, 1980) and my review in Theory and Society, vol. 10, no. 2 (March 1981) pp. 265–78. ‘Existential’ and ‘phenomenological’ Marxisms were developed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France after the Second World War. The project was influenced by French interpretations of Hegel and the early Marx shaped by Heideggerian and Sartrean existentialism.
See Paul Piccone, ‘Phenomenological Marxism’, Telos, 9 (Fall 1971)
Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Whether existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism are or are not compatible is debated in the anthology Existentialism versus Marxism, ed. George Novack (New York: Delta, 1966).
Johann Arnason, Von Marcuse zu Marx (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971) p.7.
Piccone, ‘Phenomenological Marxism’, p. 11.
Pier Rovatti, ‘Critical Theory and Phenomenology’, Telos, 15 (Spring 1973) p. 36.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 45 (S1, p. 347). This definition of Marxism is taken almost verbatim from Lukács’s book on Lenin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).
In 1923 Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971)
Korsch, in Marxism and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1970) published works that stressed the importance of subjective factors in the Marxian theory of revolution against dominant objectivistic-economistic versions of Marxism, which saw the role of Marxian theory as formulating ‘objective’ scientific laws rooted in the economy that would inevitably lead to the triumph of socialism. Against ‘scientific socialism’, Lukács and Korsch rehabilitated Hegelian dialectics, stressing subject-object interaction, contradictions and mediations, and the role of the subject. Marcuse was to share their evaluation of the importance of the Hegelian roots of Marxism and their radical-activistic interpretation, believing at the time that Lukács and Korsch were the foremost interpreters of the radical and progressive elements of the Marxian theory (interview with Marcuse, 28 December 1978). Marcuse notes the importance of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness in a 1930 essay, ‘Zum Problem der Dialetik’, first published in Die Gesellschaft, vol. VII, 1930; reprinted in S1, pp. 407ff and translated in Telos, 27 (Spring 1976) pp. 12ff. He reviews Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy in ‘Das Problem der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit’ (Die Gesellschaft, vol. 8, 1931, reprinted in S1, pp. 469ff. On Lukács, see the books cited in Chapter 1, note 27 and note 16 below. On Korsch, see the articles in Telos, 26 (Winter 1975–6) and my book Karl Korsch.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 45; S1, p. 347.
Ibid.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. At this point in his career, Marcuse has not yet begun his critique of science and technology, a concern he will later share with the early Lukács, the late Husserl, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and others — a critique that is a defining characteristic of the current of ‘critical Marxism’ (see Gouldner, The Two Marxisms). On the tendency in the early Lukács to equate science with reification, see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Marxism of the Early Lukács’, New Left Review, 70 (November–December, 1971) and the critique of Jones in Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, pp. 208ff and 274ff.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 47; S1, p. 350.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 47; S1, p. 350. Marcuse is quoting Marx in The German Ideology here.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. During a conversion in La Jolla, California, 28 December 1978, Marcuse stressed the importance of History and Class Consciousness for developing Marxism and noted its impact in his own thought. Marcuse also said that he believed that Lukács and Korsch were the ‘most intelligent’ Marxists to write after the deaths of Luxemburg and Leibknecht, and that in his 1930s work with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, he took a more favourable position toward History and Class Consciousness than Horkheimer and his other colleagues. Morton Schoolman’s claim that Lukács’s theory of reification had no impact on Marcuse’s thought at the time, and his suggestion that Marcuse was consciously combating the Lukácsian theory of reification is without foundation. See The Imaginary Witness, pp. 5ff and 134ff. I shall cite some central Lukácsian passages in Marcuse’s second published essay in section 2.3, and my discussion of One-Dimensional Man in Chapter 9 will indicate how Marcuse returns to Lukács’s problematic in his later works.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, especially the chapter ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. On Lukács’s theory of reification see Arato and Breines, The Young Lukács; Stefan Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977); Feenberg, Lukács, Marx; and Lucien Goldman, Lukács and Heidegger.
See T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1972)
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974)
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), and ‘Science and Technology as “Ideology”’, in Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, pp. 47ff; S1, pp. 350ff.
Marcuse, conversation in La Jolla, 28 December 1978.
Marcuse criticizes Lukács’s theory of class-consciousness as the weak point in his analysis, within the context of a defence of the importance of Lukács’s work, in ‘On the Problem of the Dialectic’, Telos, 27, p. 24. The translation, though, falsely reads that the significance of History and Class Consciousness is ‘not to be overestimated’, whereas instead Marcuse’s German text suggests that its importance ‘cannot be overestimated’.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 47; S1, p. 351. The Marx quote is from his early ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975) p. 182.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 48; S1, p. 351. The Marx quote here is from Theses on Feuerbach, Number 7, which Marx repeats in The German Ideology in his definition of revolutionary practice. This notion is crucial to Marcuse’s position that radical action alters at once social conditions and human nature.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 48; S1, p. 351.
The question can be raised concerning whether this etymological play on Not-wendig is tenable in view of the aura of mechanical determinism around the concept of historical necessity. I note, however, Marcuse’s critique of ‘objectivistic Marxism’ below.
See the critiques of Marxian ‘objectivism’ and ‘determinism’ by Karl Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy, and Karl Korsch, as well as the discussion by Russell Jacoby, ‘Toward a Critique of Automatic Marxism’, Telos, 10.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 48; S1, pp. 352ff.
Marcuse, ‘Transcendental Marxism’, Die Gellschaft, VIII (1931) reprinted in Schriften 1, p. 467.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 51; S1, pp. 356–7.
Although there are tensions in Marcuse’s early writings between Heideggerian individualist perspectives and Marxian class perspectives, I would argue, against Morton Schoolman, that Marcuse does not in his early essays abandon notions of class struggle for emphasis on the ‘discontented, doubting, disaffected and ambivalent individual’ as the subject of revolutionary action (see Schoolman, The Imaginary Witness, pp. 10ff, 79, passim). Instead, I believe that Marcuse tries to merge notions of individual and class struggle in his concept of radical action. The passage just cited indicates that Marcuse accepts at this point Marxian theories of the proletariat as the authentic subject of radical action, but is already beginning to doubt whether the proletariat will carry through its mission in view of the ‘botched-up revolutionary situations’ of the recent past. Later, of course, the distinctive feature of Marcuse’s revision of Marxian will be his radical questioning of the proletariat as the subject of revolution.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 51; S1, pp. 356–7.
Marcuse’s critics have argued that Marcuse is actually much closer to Heidegger at this point than to Marx, and that the deficiencies in his early work are due to a domination of his thinking by a Heideggerian anthropological-ontological perspective — a perspective that some critics claim is basic to his later work as well. The orthodox Marxist-Leninist Robert Steigerwald, in his highly critical Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, argues that Marcuse’s early writings constitute a dialogue with Marx from the standpoint of Heideggerian existentialism ‘which has nothing to do’ with genuine Marxism (p. 49) and that ‘Marcuse’s system is through and through subjective idealism’ (p. 111). This claim contradicts Steigerwald’s own argument that Marcuse’s philosophical project is an attempt to discover a ‘third way’ between Marxism and bourgeois philosophy and fails to articulate the Marxian elements operative in Marcuse’s early philosophy.
Alfred Schmidt, in an essay on Heidegger and Marcuse, argues that Marcuse’s writings from 1929–3 ‘appropriated the Marxist teaching within the horizon of Heidegger’s Being and Time’; See ‘Existential-Ontologie und historischer Materialismus bei Herbert Marcuse’, in Antworten auf Herbet Marcuse, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Surhrkamp, 1968) p. 19. This picture of Marcuse as a Heideggerian appropriating Marxism into an ‘existentialist’ perspective is quite dubious for, as I shall try to show in the following pages, Marcuse carries out a Marxist appropriation and critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time; thus Habermas’s remark that Marcuse was the first Heideggerian Marxist comes closer to characterizing accurately Marcuse’s blend of Marx and Heidegger in his early writings. See Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Berlin und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963) p. 330. In an article on ‘Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism’, Telos, 6 (Fall 1970), Paul Piccone and Alex Delfini argue that ‘Mar-cuse in 1928 … is fundamentally the same Marcuse of 1970’ (p. 39) and that his ‘late work is fundamentally Heideggerian in character’ (p. 44). I shall try in this chapter to show that even Marcuse’s early work is fundamentally Marxist, and not ‘Heideggerian’, and shall argue later that although Heideggerian elements appear in some of Marcuse’s later works, his fundamental project is the reconstruction of Marxism — a project that takes a variety of forms in a corpus marked by a series of vicissitudes and ruptures.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 52; S1, p. 358.
On the importance of overcoming the subject—object dichotomy and the similarity between Heidegger and Lukács, see Goldman, Heidegger and Lukács, and for Marx’s and Lukács’ attempt to shatter the subject—object conceptial framework, see Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory. This rejection of the dominant philosophical framework in the Western philosophical tradition is a distinguishing feature of ‘critical Marxism’, or the ‘philosophy of praxis’.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 126–30 and pp. 175–90. Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, which is the crucial concept for Marcuse’s appropriation of Heidegger, see my 1973 PhD dissertation, Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity. Heidegger’s analysis of fallenness and inauthenticity can be compared with Lukács’s analysis of alienation and reification in History and Class Consciousness, pp. 83–110. Both deplored tendencies that ‘reified’ human beings into ‘things’. Lucien Goldmann sees Sein und Zeit as ‘a confrontation with Lukács’ work: the answer is polemic with it from a standpoint of anxiety and death’, accomplished by transposing Lukács’s analysis ‘on a metaphysical level by modifying the terminology, without ever mentioning Lukács’. Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanual Kants (Zurich: 1945) p. 244, and his posthumously published Lukács and Heidegger. Marcuse is sceptical on this point, believing that Heidegger had not read either Marx or Lukács at the time (see 1.3) and in fact Heidegger usually puts the term ‘reification’ in quotation marks, as if he was not happy with the term and preferred his own concepts of inauthenticity, fallenness and das Man. Moreover, the crucial difference is that whereas Heidegger sees reification and alienation as ontological constituents of human beings in all societies, Lukács see them as historically specific features of a capitalist society that can be removed by social practice. Although Marcuse would generally take this view, there are overtones in his early essays of Heidegger’s ontologizing of alienation (see my discussion of his essay on labour in the last part of Chapter 3).
See the second part of my PhD dissertation, Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity, dealing with ‘Extrication and Individuation’ for a discussion of Heidegger’s doctrine. For a critique of Heidegger’s doctrine of authentic existence see my review of Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, in Telos, 19 (Spring 1974) pp. 184–92.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 54; S1, p. 361. This dialectical negation is twofold in that the disavowal (Widerruf) applies not only to past possibilities for authentic action which are creatively re-covered and repeated, but also applies to past possibilities (ideas, institutions, social-economic-political forms of life) which repressively and irrationally dominate today and so should be negated to make possible historical development and to liberate authentic historical possibilities from the chains of the past. On this basis I believe that Steigerwald makes a grave error when he identifies the Heideggerian-Marcusian notion of Widerruf with the attitude of total rejection of the past, as if Widerruf signified a total negation or annulment, ‘in which the past is to be obliterated, annihilated, cancelled out’ (Steigerwald, Herbet Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’; p. 60). It is essential to see that for Heidegger and Marcuse Widerruf and Erwiderung are part of a project of Wiederholung, which signifies a recovering, retrieving and repeating of past possibilities for authentic existence chosen from the heritage, and thus in no way signifies a total rejection of the heritage, as some Nazi philosophers proclaimed in their notion of Widerruf, which Steigerwald tries erroneously to identify with Marcuse’s concept. Rather, Widerruf is the moment of negation in the project of repetition in which one criticizes and rejects that which in one’s tradition and historical situation is obsolete and constrictive of more liberating possibilities.
Sartre, Critique.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 58; S1, p. 367.
A set of similarities between Heidegger and Marx was worked out by Maxmillian Beck in an article just preceding Marcuse’s ‘Contributions’ in the same philosophical journal. See ‘Referat und Kritik von Martin Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit”’, Philosophische Hefte I (Berlin: 1928) pp. 9–10. Interestingly, Beck was one of the philosphers later supported by the Frankfurt School during their exile period. Both Marcuse and Beck, however, were mistaken in seeing any profound similarities between Marx and Heidegger, a point Marcuse would later clearly see and constantly emphasize. He stressed this to me in conversation in San Francisco on 26 March 1978, and I heard him make the same point in discussion with philosophy students at Columbia University in 1968 and 1972, where he took the position that there was little in Heidegger’s philosophy that was not conformist.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 55; S1, pp. 362–3.
Ibid., pp.55–6; S1, pp. 363–4.
Ibid., p. 56; S1, p. 364.
Ibid.
These remarks of Heidegger are quoted by Karl Löwith, who published excerpts from letters by Heidegger to him, which he received in the 1920s when Heidegger was working on Sein und Zeit, in an article, ‘Les implications politiques de la philosophie de l’existence chez Heidegger’, Les Temps Modernes (November 1946). Löwith’s article is valuable in its discussion of the intellectual milieu around Heidegger, and provides some hitherto unrevealed views of Heidegger on a variety of topics.
Löwith, ‘Political Implications of Heidegger’, p. 346.
Ibid., pp. 345–8.
In Being and Time, p. 298, Heidegger writes, ‘On what is one to resolve? Only the resolution itself can give the answer … To resoluteness, the indefiniteness characteristic of every potentiality-for-being into which Dasein has been factically thrown, is something that necessarily belongs. Only in a resolution is resoluteness sure of itself’.
The story of Heidegger’s support for Hitler and the Nazis in 1932–3, his assumption of the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1933, his resignation in 1934, and his muted criticism of National Socialism during the rest of the war is told by Löwith in the article referred to in note 44 and in an unpublished PhD dissertation by Karl Moehling, Martin Heidegger and the Nazi Party (Northern Illinois University, 1972), some of which is summarized in his article ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, Listening, 12 (1977) pp. 92–105. The issue of Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis, and the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and fascism, has elicited spirited discussion. After Löwith’s rather harsh critique of Heidegger in Les Temps Modernes in 1947, and his claims concerning the affinity of Heidegger’s philosophy and personality with fascism, defences of Heidegger appeared in the November 1947 issue of Les Temps Modernes. In Germany, the issue of Heidegger’s politics was subject to much bitter polemic, discussed in the French journal Critique (November 1966), in an article by Beda Alleman in Heidegger, ed. Otto Pöggeler (Köln: 1969) and in Pöggeler’s book Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1972). In the USA Heidegger was severely criticized by, among others, Walter Kaufmann, in From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960) and was defended by, among others, Hannah Arendt, who was a Heidegger student when Marcuse was working with Heidegger. Arendt minimized Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism, stressing his criticism of the regime from 1934 until the collapse of fascism (see ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, in Heidegger and Modern Philosphy). Two recent studies which stress the affinity between Heidegger’s philosophy and his support of fascism are Karsten Harries, ‘Heidegger as a Political Thinker’, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, and Stephen Eric Bronner, ‘Martin Heidegger: The Consequences of Political Mystificatio’, Salmagundi 38/9 (Summer/Fall 1977). For Marcuse’s position on Heidegger and fascism, see the interview with Frederick Olafson, ‘Heidegger’s Politics’.
On Heidegger’s nihilism see the article by Bronner, ‘Martin Heidegger’, and Stanley Rosen, Nihilism (New Haven: Yale, 1973).
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 61; S1, p. 373.
Ibid., p. 65; S1, pp. 378–9. ‘Historicity’ in Heidegger’s theory refers to the basic structures of historical existence; see Being and Time, pp. 424ff. Both Heidegger and Marcuse conceive of ‘historicity’ as a fundamental structure of human existence: all human activities and creations are ‘historical’ and are therefore constituted by ‘historicity’. Historicity is the central category of Marcuse’s early 1928–33 essays, and as the passage just quoted indicates, he takes the Heideggerian ontological category of ‘historicity’ and gives it a Marxian foundation with categories such as mode of production, needs, class struggle, etc. Morton Schoolman is wrong, however, in explicating ‘historicity’ in terms of ‘factors that predispose the individual to action … Historicity pertains to factors that determine radical action’, in The Imaginary Witness, pp. 8–9. Strictly speaking, historicity encompasses all features of human being — radical or not — and Schoolman seems to collapse the concept of historicity into Heidegger’s concept of authenticity which does, in Marcuse’s view, indicate factors that dispose the individual to radical action (anxiety, being towards death, the call of conscience, etc.). Hence historicity is an ontological category that refers to the historical constitutents of existence, encompassing all human behaviour and productions, and is not a privileged signifier for the conditions that produce ‘authentic individuality’ as it is for Schoolman (see his discussion, pp. 27 and 35). I shall discuss Marcuse’s concept of historicity further in section 3.2, and will indicate in section 4.1 why he dropped the term in his work with the Institute for Social Research.
Ibid. A Marxist reinterpretation of Heideggerian notions of care (Sorge) and practical concern (Besorgen) is carried out by Karel Kosik in Dialectics of the Concrete (Boston: Reidel, 1976).
For a later development of this claim, see Gunther Stern, ‘The Pseudoconcreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, VIII, no. 3 (March 1948) pp. 337–71.
On ‘extstential’ and ‘phenomenologtcal’ Marxism, see the sources in note 2 of this chapter. A more strictly theoretical, de-existentialized attempt to combine phenomenology and Marxism is found in Tran Duc Thao’s Phenomenologie et Materialisme Dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1951). Thao was allegedly on the central committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 1970s and is probably free of his infatuation with Husserl. An Italian effort to bind together phenomenology and Marxism is found in Enzo Paci’s The Function of the Human Sciences and the Meaning of Man (Evanston: Northwestern, 1972). Since Marcuse’s early essays were generally unknown, I should stress that he anticipated this trend rather than directly influenced it. Later he would reject attempts to synthesize phenomenology and dialectics, or existentialism and Marxism — a position he would take from his work with the Institute for Social Research to the end of his life. It is possible that conversations with Adorno might have cured him of his fondness for phenomenology; indeed, Adorno has written what to this day remains the most withering attack on phenomenology — see T. W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970).
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 57; S1, p. 366.
Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, cited in ‘Contributions’, p. 57; S1, pp. 366–7.
Lenin, The fight for social revolution’, cited in ‘Contributions’, p. 57–8; S1, p. 367.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 58; S1, p. 368.
Ibid. A classical presentation of the phenomenological method is found in Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: Collier Books, 1962).
Ibid., p. 59; S1, p. 369.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marcuse carries out a similar critique of the phenomenological reduction in ‘Über konkrete Philosophie’. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, 62 (1929) pp. 115–16 (reprinted in Scriften 1, pp. 385–406), and criticizes the limitations of the phenomenological method in ‘On the Problem of Dialectics’, pp.19ff; ‘The Concept of Essence’ in Negations; and a later essay ‘On Science and Phenomenology’, in Robert Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds, Boston Studies in the Philosphy of Science, II (1965) pp. 279–91.
The relations and differences between Husserl, Heidegger and other phenomenologists are analysed in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).
This is clear in Husserl’s treatment of values as eternal essences and in Max Scheler’s phenomenological theory of the intuition of values. On Husserl’s phenomenological ethics, see A. Roth, Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960)
Marvin Farber, Phenomenology and Existence (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). There may be other ways for a phenomenologist to handle the problems of ethics, but the most important representatives of the phenomenological tendency have yet to deal satisfactorily with ethical thematics. Heidegger and Sartre, for example, have programmatically excluded the problems of ethics from their major phenomenological works, although ethical concerns are found throughout and call for clarification and development. See my dissertation, Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity, on this topic.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 59; S1, p. 370.
Ibid.
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 60; S1, p. 370.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marcuse was one of the first to use material in the recently published German Ideology in a philosophical problematic that conceptualizes the basic structures of history, society and human nature. His appropriation of historical materialism provided him with a philosophical apparatus that would eventually enable him to reject phenomenology and existentialism and to develop his philosophy and social theory within Marxism. This transition takes place in Marcuse’s work with the Institute for Social Research, which we shall examine in Chapter 4.
Interview with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
See the references in notes 7 and 26.
Some of Max Adler’s texts have been translated in Austro-Marxism, ed. and trans. Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (New York: Oxford, 1978).
Many members of the Vienna Circle considered themselves both socialists and positivists, and discerned a compatibility with Marxism. For a recent attempt to defend positivist-materialist elements of Marxism, see Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
I should mention that Marx’s 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had not been published when Marcuse wrote his first essays. In fact, he wrote one of the first and best reviews of the Manuscripts when they were first published in 1932, and henceforth would utilize the early Marx to secure the basic presuppositions of his theory, and would no longer rely on Heidegger’s anthropology or phenomenology. The importance of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts for Marcuse’s project and his review of them will be discussed in Chapter 3, section 3.3.
Marcuse, ‘Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologischen Methode’, Die Gesellschaft, VI (1929); reprinted in Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, Bd IV, (no date) pp. 338–9.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936).
On the reception of Mannheim’s book, see Volker Meja, ‘The Controversy about the Sociology of Knowledge in Germany’, Cultural Hermeneutics, 3 (1975).
On Mannheim and the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, ‘The Frankfurt Critique of Mannheim’, Telos, 20 (Summer 1974)
exchanges between James Schmidt in Telos, 21 (Fall 1974) and Jay in Telos, 22 (Winter 1974–5).
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, pp. 63–4; S1, p. 376.
That Marx did not advocate this crude materialism, which has dominated Soviet Marxism to the present day and was maintained by Kautsky and other leading Marxists at the time of Marcuse’s early writing, is clear from an examination of Marx’s early writings, which will be discussed in Chapter 3. See also Alfred Schmidt, Marx’s Concept of Nature (London: New Left Books, 1976).
Marcuse, ‘Contributions’, p. 65; S1, p. 379.
Lukács was later to repudiate his rejection of materialism; see the 1967 preface to the re-edition of History and Class Consciousness. Sartre’s critique of philosophical materialism is found in the essay, ‘Materialism and Revolution’, and his later quasi-Marxian work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Engels maintained in his ‘Lugwig Feuerbach’ essay, quoted by Marcuse, that the ‘basic question of all philosophy’ concerned the relation between thought and being — hence the choice between idealism and materialism — claiming that Marxism resolutely opted for philosophical materialism, and holding that being and nature were primary and that spirit and thought were secondary and derivative; thus consciousness, on this analysis, is a ‘product, function and derivation of matter’. Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, Kautsky and other prominent Marxists followed this line, which became a pillar of orthodox Marxism. See Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy.
See Gustav Wetter, Sowjet Ideologie Heute (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1962) pp. 24–67; the collective work Marxist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968) pp. 9–13, 53–83
R. O. Gropp, Grundlagen des dialektischen Materialismus (Berlin: VEB Verlag, 1970) pp. 17–21, 35–78. The orthodox Marxist Steigerwald follows this line in attacking Marcuse for his ‘deviation’ from philosophical materialism, Herbert Marcuses ‘drifter Weg’, pp. 62–75.
Marx stressed, especially in his early writings, the development of the many-sided individual as the goal of socialism; see the discussion in Chapter 3. Once Marcuse broke with Heidegger, he was increasingly to stress the importance of the Marxian theme of the emancipation and development of the individual.
Marcuse, ‘ÜJber konkrete Philosophie’. Page references will refer first to the original Archiv pagination and then to the Schriften 1 reprint.
This is the young Marx’s sense of ‘radical’; see Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975) p. 182. I might note that a major theme of twentieth-century philosphy is a dissatisfaction with the abstractions of the traditional philosophers, which had degenerated into ‘school philosophies’, rigid and academic systems of categories. Against these scholasticisms, Dilthey and Lebensphilosophie sought the concrete in a ‘philosophy of life’ based on Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and Bergson’s theory of élan vital and durée. Husserl sought a new concrete philosophy in his phenomenological turn to the things themselves; Heidegger sought concreteness in his turn to ‘being-in-the-world’ as the starting point of philosophy and in his concern for everyday life, the individual, death, anxiety and the like; Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would seek the concrete in the realm of consciousness and experience, in art, in the body, sexuality, revolt, struggle and history. American philosophers, like James and Dewey, would seek the concrete in experience, nature, art and religion. English philosophers, dissatisfied with the abstractions of the old Idealism, as well as logical atomism and positivism, would turn to a study of ordinary language and common experience. Hence, every major school of philosophy had its own concept of the ‘concrete’, which has come to signal a claim to primordiality, authenticity, the really real, etc. in its different usages. Marcuse’s lust for the concrete was thus rooted in a fundamental drive of twentieth-century philosphy for a new philosophy that would finally satisfy the drive for concrete reality prevalent in those who were dissatisfied with the moribund systems of the classical philosophers, in which once living philosophies had degenerated into abstractions to be memorized, rehearsed and reproduced in class-rooms and journals.
On the search for the concrete, compare Stefan Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977) pp. 20ff,
the amusing anticipation of this problematic by Hegel, ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ in Walter Kaufmann, Hegel (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968).
Marcuse, Über konkrete Philosphie, p. 119; S1, p. 395.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 118–19; S1, p. 344.
Ibid., p. 123; S1, p. 400.
See Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (London: Oxford University Press, 1938)
Josiah Thompson, The Lonely Labyrinth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967).
Marcuse, Über konkrete Philosophie, p. 124; S1, pp. 401–2.
Ibid., p. 125; S1, p. 403.
Ibid., p. 126; S1, p. 403.
Ibid., p. 127; S1, p. 405.
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Kellner, D. (1984). Phenomenological Marxism?. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_3
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