Heidegger and Marcuse

The Catastrophe and Redemption of History

Andrew Feenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135947880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2005. Herbert Marcuse was Martin Heidegger's most famous student. He claimed to have left existentialism behind in 1933 when Heidegger was declared first Nazi rector of Freiburg University and Marcuse fled into exile.The contentious relations between these two thinkers reflected the split in twentieth-century continental philosophy between exist- entialism and Marxism. But Andrew Feenberg's careful study of Heidegger's early lectures, as well as of previously unpublished work by Marcuse, suggests that the famous student remained closer than he cared to admit to the even more famous teacher. Heidegger and Marcuse examines for the first time Marcuse's remarkable attemptsin his early and late work to bridge the gap between existentialism and Marxism in a radical critical theory.

CHAPTER 1

Techné

Prologue with Plato and Aristotle

Heidegger and Marcuse

We are several hundred years into the project of Enlightenment, initiated in the 18th century by thinkers who believed in progress. We are the heirs of that project, which freed science and technology for the adventure of modernity. This has made all the difference. No doubt human nature remains much the same—at least the level of aggression remains disturbingly high—but the means at our disposal are now more powerful than in the past. Quantity has changed into quality as technology alters the basic parameters of human action. New dilemmas emerge in a society reconstructed around these new technical means.

Two philosophers have reflected most deeply on this situation. Martin Heidegger invites us to study technology as the decisive philosophical issue of our time. Most philosophers either celebrate technical progress or worry about its unintended consequences; they conceive society as separate from technology, which holds either a promise or a threat. Heidegger, on the contrary, defines modernity itself as the prevalence of technology. Particular technical achievements and failures are unimportant since our very dependence on technology gives rise to general catastrophe. Heidegger’s student, Herbert Marcuse, reformulated the philosophy of technology in the framework of a radical social theory and projected an alternative to the desperate situation Heidegger described. For Marcuse technology is not a fixed destiny as it is for Heidegger. The promise of Enlightenment remains to be fulfilled in the future through a deep transformation of technology. Together, these two philosophers offer the deepest insight into the danger of technology and the possibilities of redemption.

Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is a puzzling combination of romantic nostalgia for an idealized image of antiquity and deep insight into modernity. His originality lies in treating technique not merely as a functional means but as a mode of “revealing” through which a “world” is shaped. “World” in Heidegger refers not to the sum of existent things but to an ordered and meaningful structure of experience. Such structures depend on basic practices characterizing societies and whole historical eras. These constitute an “opening” in which “being” is revealed, that is to say, in which experience takes place. Human being, called “Dasein” by Heidegger, can only be understood as always already involved in a world in this sense. As such, it is “being-in-the-world.” The things of the world are “revealed” to Dasein as they are encountered in use and so Heidegger calls them “equipment” (Zeug).

Heidegger’s language sounds mysterious. We will return to the reason for his peculiar locutions in a later chapter. Here it is enough to consider what he is saying at the simplest level. He is not claiming that things exist because we use them but rather that their meaning is tied up with our existence as experiencing, active beings. As such we encounter them as this or that particular object available for this or that role in our lives. A thing that was in principle out of any possible contact with a being such as ourselves, would not “make sense” but would be a bare existence, its infinite potentials a meaningless blur. It is we who order experience into recognizable objects. Without us, chairs and tables would not be the sort of things one calls chairs and tables (e.g., things to sit on, to eat at, to set and stack and clean, and so on). Mountains and stars too would be empty of meaning out of the context of a world in which such things have a place even if it be purely aesthetic, imaginary, or scientific. The difficult point is that without a finite being-in-the-world to encounter them, things are literally meaningless, non-sense, without distinction, boundaries, or definiteness. It is absurd to talk about “things” on this hypothesis. What we normally call “objective reality” is perfectly real, but it falls under this finite horizon we cannot coherently think our way around, behind, or beyond.

This picture of Dasein’s active and engaged being-in-the-world is obscured in modern times by technological thinking which treats everything as essentially an object of cognition, a simple matter of fact, including human beings themselves. Heidegger argues that this objectivistic outlook is not innocent. It goes along with the fundamental restructuring of the world by technoscience. Eventually human beings as well as things become mere components in the technical system. The modern world is a place of total mobilization for ends that remain obscure. It is this apparent “value freedom” or “neutrality” of technology that Heidegger and later, Marcuse, identify as the source of the uniqueness and the tragedy of modernity. This is what allows technology to destroy both man and nature. A world “enframed” by technology is radically alien and hostile. The danger is not merely nuclear weapons or some similar threat to survival, but the obliteration of humanity’s special status and dignity as the being through which the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings have become mere raw materials like the nature they pretend to dominate (Heidegger 1977).

Both Marcuse and Heidegger are controversial figures. Marcuse is remembered as the guru of the New Left, the darling of 1968, a drastic foreshortening of a career that extended over more than fifty years of intense philosophical activity. Heidegger, of course, is the philosopher who betrayed his calling by becoming a Nazi and recognizing Hitler as his “Führer,” never renouncing his error publicly even after World War II. And Heidegger is also, in the view of many, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Here there will not be much discussion of these contentious issues. Others have explored every aspect of the Heidegger case. The conclusion I have reached from studying their views is that while Heidegger’s thought could be accommodated to certain aspects of Nazism, especially to its eschatological mood and elitist spirit, only an astonishing insensitivity could have blinded him to even more important incompatibilities. Apparently, he found excuses for Hitler’s biological racism and the persecution of his Jewish neighbors, students, colleagues, and teacher. But then he was hardly alone in combining academic brilliance and moral blindness (Sluga 1993). In any case, I do not dismiss Heidegger’s philosophy as Nazi ideology, and thus continue to study it for its contributions to our understanding of technology.

Marcuse shared that view in the period of his apprenticeship to Heidegger. Like Heidegger’s other Jewish students, who included Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith, Marcuse never noticed Heidegger’s political leanings until the surprise announcement that he was to become the first Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg.¹ To the end of his life Marcuse praised Heidegger as a great reader of classic philosophical texts, and that is exactly what will interest us here. Not only did Marcuse admire Heidegger’s teaching, he drew quite openly on Heidegger’s critique of modern technology in One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964, 153–54). A history of philosophical influence remains to be unraveled.

Despite my intention to focus on philosophical issues, my position is bound to annoy some scholars. In the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical theory, Heidegger is the very devil. Theodor Adorno could think of nothing worse to say of Marcuse than that he was a secret Heideggerian, and Jürgen Habermas articulated his deep uneasiness at the extreme negativity of Adorno’s negative dialectics by hinting that its conclusions resembled Heidegger’s. On the other side of the fence there are few Heideggerians who have shown an interest in Critical Theory. In that tradition the problems of political and economic domination that concern these Marxist philosophers are generally dismissed as merely “ontic.”

I intend to forge ahead despite these controversies. In any case, I am interested in other aspects of the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse. My approach is based on Heidegger’s distinction between the Greek notion of techné and the modern idea of technology. Where the ancient craftsman built his world in making the product of his craft, modern technology destroys the world to the extent of its technological success. Greek philosophy analyzed being on the model of techné, and, Heidegger argues, technology is the model for understanding being in modern times (Lovitt, 1980). Heidegger sees no way back to the world of the Greeks, no way to recover ancient techné in a modern context. His late speculations on what he called the “new beginning” are much celebrated by postmodern commentators. But these speculations on what might follow the passage through modernity are so vague and abstract the commentators cannot agree on what they mean, much less make a convincing case for sharing Heidegger’s hopes.

Marcuse left Heidegger behind in 1933 and joined the Frankfurt School in exile. Yet in the background of his thought there is an analysis of Greek philosophy that can have no other source than his teacher. But Marcuse was never interested in the secularized eschatology that today seems to fascinate postmodern students of Heidegger. Instead of plunging forward into these mysteries, Marcuse looks back to the Heidegger of his own early studies, the Heidegger whose interpretation of the technical model of being can be read to imply a very different redemption. In this peculiar reading, the task of a post–Heideggerian philosophy is to conceive a technology based on respect for nature and incorporating life-affirming values in its very structure, the machines themselves. I understand this utopian demand as an implicit recovery of the idea of techné in a modern context, freed from the limitations of ancient Greek thought and available as a basis for a reconstructed modernity.

This is the hypothesis which I will work out in this and the following chapters. I begin with a reconsideration of the place of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel in the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse. I do not agree with the commonplace view according to which Marcuse dropped Heidegger to take up with Hegel and Marx. This view is contradicted by the fact that in 1930 Marcuse presented Heidegger with a doctoral thesis on Hegel’s Ontology, which is couched in Heideggerian terms. How can this be explained? Aristotle is the missing link between Hegel and Heidegger on the one hand and Marcuse on the other.

Those of us who remember Aristotle from college days as dull reading, too close to common sense to generate much excitement, will be surprised to learn that his thought was absolutely crucial for all three thinkers. Heidegger’s admiration for Aristotle is frequently noted but rarely analyzed in the detail it requires.² This is an admiration Heidegger shared with Hegel, whose interpretation of Aristotle he regarded as a landmark in the development of modern thought. But Heidegger’s Aristotle is practically unrecognizable: the Greek philosopher is transformed into an existential ontologist avant la lettre.

In 1923, Heidegger gave a lecture entitled “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle” (Heidegger 2002, 111ff).³ Aristotle’s greatest achievement according to this lecture is his analysis of kinesis, movement, but movement in a sense no earlier interpreter of Aristotle had ever conceived. It is the movement of “factical life,” later called “Dasein,” that Aristotle is supposed to have grasped for the first time. This movement consists in practical engagements with the world and these are interpreted in Aristotle’s theory of techné. Techné is the model of “revealing” for the Greeks, that is, the form of Greek experience of the world. The study of kinesis leads directly to the problems of ontology, the very problems with which Heidegger is most concerned. In this interpretation Aristotle appears to anticipate Heidegger’s own theory in Being and Time according to which everyday instrumental activity offers the basic access to reality. Theodore Kisiel sums up Heidegger’s view at this early stage in the development of his thought: “The field of objects which yields the original sense of being is that of the produced object accessible in the course of usage. Accordingly, it is not the field of things in their theoretical reification but rather the world encountered in going about our producing, making, and using which is the basis, the according-to-which and toward-which of the original experience of being…. Being means being produced, and as produced, begin accessible for use and disposable, meaningful in regard to one particular way of getting around” (Kisiel 1993, 264).⁴

However, as he develops his critique of technology, Heidegger begins to argue that the production model is the remote source of modern technological thinking and therefore fundamentally misguided. Already in the period when he is actually writing Being and Time, he begins to retreat from the position sketched in the early Aristotle lecture. He still approves the Greeks’ focus on production but he claims they grasped it inauthentically as an object in the world and not as the original disclosure of a world (Heidegger 1982, 110–11). In some of his later works the Greek concept of production is redefined by Heidegger as a purely ideal process of manifesting entities. Production is cut loose from its common sense roots in the making of artifacts and becomes a synonym for revealing (Heidegger 1998, 222). By 1939, Heidegger is denying that techné is at all helpful in understanding physis, precisely the opposite position from that of his earlier works (Heidegger 1998, 223). In the 1950 lecture on “The Thing,” Plato and Aristotle are dismissed for having confused the essence of the thing with the eidos mobilized in the techné of its making (Heidegger 1971, 168). Salvation will come from a domain beyond production. Interpreters often project this later negative attitude toward production back on the early work, with confusing results since Heidegger never entirely breaks with his own phenomenological account of it. In fact, his technology critique still implies the earlier approach in complicated ways we will explore in later chapters.

Marcuse had left by the time Heidegger made this “turn.” His thought continues the early Heidegger’s production-centered analysis of being. The model of techné influences him profoundly although its presence in his thought is soon masked by the influence of the early Marx. Marcuse’s innovative reinterpretation of Hegel is a study of this very same problematic of movement central to Heidegger’s own early philosophy. I will argue that Marcuse’s turn to Hegel is not a turning away from Heidegger but an attempt to work out the implications of Heidegger’s early Aristotle interpretation for Hegel’s dialectic which, Marcuse asserts, is itself based on Aristotle. The dialectic describes the internally contradictory character of existence Marcuse interprets as a theory of revealing in something like Heidegger’s sense.

The central chapters of this book develop this background in detail. Once this task is accomplished I will turn to Marcuse’s later work which appears now in a rather different light. Many things that have puzzled and sometimes outraged commentators since the 1960s come into focus as reflections of continuing Heideggerian influences. It would be too much to say that Marcuse is a crypto-Heideggerian, but he is indeed addressing questions posed by Heidegger and offering an alternative response. This is especially apparent in the existential demands of Marcuse’s politics, his “two-dimensional” ontology, and his approach to art and technology. These issues will be discussed in the concluding chapters of this book.

Techné and the Good

We are well aware that we are a technological society, and not just because we use so many devices but also in our spirit and our way of life. But only recently has this awareness reached the humanistic disciplines. It is strange that the 20th century, the century of astonishingly rapid technical advance, should have produced relatively little philosophical reflection on technology. John Dewey is the only figure of the stature of Heidegger to concern himself extensively with this theme (Hickman 1990). When Heidegger and Marcuse wrote about technology, it was still possible and indeed more than possible—intellectually respectable—to ignore it. Their path breaking reflections went beyond the boundaries of conformist thought in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Now all that is slowly changing; indeed, it must change for these fields to retain any significance.

Surprisingly, these modern resistances to the question concerning technology, particularly strong in philosophy, were not shared by the Greeks. Of course the Greeks, at least Plato and Aristotle among them, shared their society’s aristocratic prejudice against work and admired pure contemplation above all else. But this did not prevent them from reflecting on the ontological significance of technical activity which Heidegger later reinterprets as the “question of being.” How did they pose the question?

Philosophy begins by interpreting the world in terms of the fundamental fact that humanity is a laboring animal constantly at work transforming nature. This fundamental fact shapes the basic distinctions that prevail throughout the tradition of Western philosophy. The first of these is the distinction between what the Greeks called physis and poiésis.⁵ Physis is usually translated as nature. The Greeks understood nature to be that which creates itself, that which emerges f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Techné: Prologue with Plato and Aristotle
• Chapter 2 The Question Concerning Techné: Heidegger’s Aristotle
• Chapter 3 The Dialectic of Life: Marcuse’s Hegel
• Chapter 4 Interlude with Lukács: Totality and Revolution
• Chapter 5 Aesthetic Redemption
• Chapter 6 The Question Concerning Nature
• Chapter 7 Conclusion: The Path to Authenticity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index