Why We Need a Marxist Analysis of Heidegger

My talk, "Heidegger with Marxism? Dialectics, Ontology and Post-Marxism"

Heidegger entered Marxism on the back of Lukács, as Lucien Goldman argued; Being and Time came out only four years after History and Class Consciousness in 1923. But in what way was the text a response to Lukács’s text? The argument that I will develop in what follows is that Goldmann was correct. But this does not mean in any way that Heidegger possessed an understanding of Marx (or even Lukács)—he never fully read Capital—it is rather that the core problems Lukács opens in History and Class Consciousness, particularly the problem of reification, or the condition that Heidegger would refer to as ‘facticity’, i.e., the “thingliness” or objectification of the world, would align the two philosophers at a basic level. Put another way, the two philosophers have overlapping, but contrasting theories of alienation. Heidegger’s account of alienation in Being and Time construes alienation as inauthentic existence in the world, and what differentiates this account from a Marxist account is found in the absence of any materialist or social account of power or society.

In what follows, I show how Lukács read Heidegger as the peak of bourgeois philosophy and how his critique, along with Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the class experience of Heidegger following the post World War One context in Germany, generated a political radicalism in Heidegger that must be analyzed in any assessment of Heidegger’s pre-Nazi thought, i.e., in the concepts generated in Being and Time. Herbert Marcuse was a student of Heidegger in this time and he is the first Marxist to really attempt a serious synthesis between the writings of Heidegger from the 1920s and Marxism. But Marcuse’s synthesis is soon abandoned once he pieces together Heidegger’s compromised fascist proclivities in the early 1930s and, more interestingly, once Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are published in 1932, one year prior to the Nazi ascension to power.

This is indeed an incredible coincidence of history and almost seems to be a sci-fi happening, as if humanity was sent a coda in the 1844 Manuscripts for deciphering how to steer the socialist revolution at the moment of the fascist ascent to power. On that note, we hosted four sessions on the 1844 Manuscripts with Marxist scholars and I would recommend that you listen to these sessions to get a better idea as to the incredible importance of what Marx opens in these writings.

The truth is that Marxists did not truly break from Heidegger despite his undeniable Nazi affiliations, it is rather the case that Heidegger’s ontological conceptions of Dasein, history and historical happening and event, would become integrated into Marxism and a Heideggerian dimension to post-Marxism remains undeniable. The latter part of my talk touches on the lasting influences of Heidegger in post-Marxist thought, particularly emerging from French post-68 thought.

I’m happy to see such interest in this panel which was co-hosted by The Critical Theory Workshop and the Midwestern Marx Institute. You can listen to my talk Heidegger with Marxism? Dialectics, Ontology and Post-Marxism, here:

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It’s useful to revisit some of the core theses of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness with a focus on the class and dialectical frameworks that Lukács brings to bear. For Lukács, when the individual in bourgeois society confronts objective reality, he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection; it is only the class that can relate to the whole of reality in a practical and revolutionary way. Lukács argues that only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses the ability to transform the modern condition of reification or alienated consciousness.

Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society. This is not posed as a tragic condition and that is why, for Goldmann, Lukács is not a neo-Kantian because a neo-Kantian would submit that suggests that reification can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of social existence; this is done through praxis, or by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development of capitalist society. By becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions and how they relate to the total development of society, the working-class can overcome the limitation of these fetishistic social relations. Reification is, therefore, overcome through class consciousness of the proletariat, and class consciousness entails the development of a tarrying with the negative of a reflection that into alienation and an active consciousness of the in-itself of the class as a collective agent in history. Bourgeois class consciousness is inadequate to achieve such a task because the bourgeois social interest makes its members enter an unmediated relationship with reality as it is given.

This means that revolutionary class consciousness must be capable of mediating itself with itself. But the bourgeoisie cannot mediate itself with itself through negativity because it stands in an antagonistic relation to the proletarian working class and thus it cannot posit itself for itself as the universal class because it is constituted as an inherently exclusive social class. Thus, the bourgeois standpoint is fundamentally anti-revolutionary precisely because the development of its self-interest is reliant on the oppression of the working class and when its self-interest is elevated to the general organizing principle of society, this elevation only reveals its class complicity in a self-contradictory form of social existence. That is why the achievement of the consciousness of the bourgeois standpoint would be equivalent to self-suicide in Lukács’s account. The bourgeoisie cannot be therefore described as a class in and for itself, for if it were to realize itself as a class it would be only as a partial universalism and this realization would self-contradict its founding principles and ideals that emerge from the French Revolution of fraternity, equality, and liberty etc. As a side point, the notion of ‘partial univeralism’ is crucial in my wider analysis of nominalism in my book How to Read Like a Parasite.

Lukács argues that proletarian activity must aim to create organizational forms and institutions capable of forging a new relation of the proletariat working-class to the totality, or to a socially mediate form of organization and practical activity that would be capable of realizing the task of the proletariat in abolishing itself as a class. How is this task to become a historical mission embedded into the motives and objects of its action in history? This involves the realization of the proletariat as a historical agent, but the objective conditions of the crisis of capitalism cannot reach their full maturity without the development of self-consciousness as consciousness of the need for de-alienation among the proletariat. As I mentioned, within this consciousness, what is crucial is that there be an aspiration towards totality, or towards the historical realization of the class as an in-itself wherein what is ‘reflected’ in the consciousness of the proletariat is the new positive reality arising out of the dialectical contradictions of capitalism. A realization into the suffering of the proletariat is not sufficient, there must be an additional reflection into the positive reality of its unique capacity for mediating—and thus overcoming—the social forms of bourgeois social life.[1]

The task that Marx sets for proletarian revolution of ‘self-abolition’ of the proletariat can thus be defined as abolishing the conditions of dehumanization, not merely the abolition of economic exploitation as an end in-itself. This is the crucial insight into revolution that any Marxist humanism imposes on its conception of revolution, namely that revolution cannot be achieved without the conscious action of the class that ‘can and must free itself’, and the ‘abolition’ of the class in-itself is not achieved merely through narrow self-interest alone. But nor can we rely on a purely unconscious force or a mythical conception of agency to realize the historical necessity of revolutionary agency. For these reasons, Lukács avoids a pure messianism in History and Class Consciousness in which class abolition is thought either as a voluntarist or immediate spontaneity of revolutionary activity, he rather thinks this abolition dialectically as a new form of mediation that is other than bourgeois mediation which, to repeat, when bourgeoisie attempts a historical mediation of itself as a class in-itself, it faces a contradiction at the level of its social being that prevents it from progressing to a dialectical realization of the universal or emancipatory movement, precisely because it is complicit in its material interests in the oppression of the proletariat.

But with the weight of history and the events of the 20^th century, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Chinese Communist revolution, any Marxist thinking of proletarian revolution has (and must) set itself the task of overcoming reification, and this has pitted Heidegger’s ontological reflections on history and of the radical authentic act with Marxist thought, however, any attempt at a ‘synthesis’ must contextualize Heidegger’s conceptual apparatus very carefully.

Marcuse and the Limits of the Heidegger-Marx Synthesis

I want to turn to the Marxist who has sought what is likely the most in-depth (and likely the first) synthesis of Heidegger with Marx, namely the Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse. Although Marcuse would later come to reject Heidegger completely, he wrote several essays on Heidegger’s ontology and its implications for historical materialism in the 1920s, prior to the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s. In fact, Marcuse confesses later that he never read Heidegger as a political thinker, as did Sartre, Lefebvre, and so many Marxist philosophers of the time. Pierre Bourdieu says in his incredible book on Heidegger’s political ontology, that these Marxist philosophers engaged in a “philosophical communication” with Heidegger in which their social unconsciousness did not classify his thought as “rightwing thought.”[2]

Marcuse was drawn to Heidegger for reasons of a perceived inadequacy of theorizing revolution in Marx’s work, and he claimed that was the publication of Marx’s 1844 Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts that led Marcuse to abandon his attempted synthesis of Marx with Heidegger.[3] Let us now examine Marcuse’s attempted project. For starters, it is important to understand that for Heidegger, Dasein (or human being in the world) is always a concrete Dasein, realized in a particular historical situations, and according to its very essence; it constitutes itself in concretely historical processes. In the modern period, Heidegger claims that Dasein is ‘thrown being in the world’, and as such, it is always determined by its world and not simply in the mode of fallenness in relationship to some “They” or “Das Man”.[4]

This means that there is a contingency of Dasein; it can be realized as a destiny of any collectivity, whether that be nationalist, ethnic group, etc. and thus with his framework of history, or “historicity”, Heidegger offers a theory of historical realization of Dasein, but he does so with a completely neutral analysis of society and history; there is no real context of the class struggle or of power in his analysis of the realization of Dasein. It is to this inadequacy of a missing materialist analysis that Marcuse attempted to inset a Marxist historical materialist analysis onto the realization of Dasein vis a vis a theory of revolutionary socialism.

For Marcuse, the Heideggerian Marxist rapprochement revolves around Heidegger’s conception of history as Geschichte which is a form of history that signifies a happening. Geschichte refers to a no longer contemplative or scholarly form of history; it is what Heidegger calls history as a call to arms; a summons to authentic ontological engagement.[5] It is this call to arms form of history as realization of a collective entity of Dasein—importantly any collective entity—where Heidegger can link up with Marx’s historical materialist analysis. It is crucial to note that for Heidegger, at issue in the historical realization of Dasein is a theory of the act, an act which will deliver an authentic release or withdrawal from the world of Das Man or of the anonymous anyone. But once again, the Heideggerian account of modern anomie or alienation to which the Das Man or the They is analyzed is ultimately a highly esoteric account.

Lukács provides the best analysis of Heidegger’s esoteric and mystical theory of Dasein in The Destruction of Reason, a text published after the Second World War, but which was written in the same immediate German context in which Heidegger was working from the time of Being and Time in 1927 to the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s. Lukács shows that Heidegger’s conception of Dasein is a theory of being construed as completely independent of experience, cognition and comprehension. But Dasein or being still “is.”[6] This account of being and ontology amounts to a quasi-mystical account of being precisely because being is outside of human consciousness and thus by “existence” Heidegger refers to pure human existence as such. Heidegger’s wider account of alienation or the “anonymous anyone” Das Man and inauthentic existence must be understood as a reflection of Heidegger’s class experience and the crisis in bourgeois society of his time. His philosophy must be understood as a projection of this experience, a generalization of this condition to a static condition of modernity as such.

For his part, Lukács (and Marcuse who was Heidegger’s student) both argue that Heidegger avoided any conception of history or society in his analysis of modern Dasein. For Marcuse, this was forgivable because it made Heidegger into a transcendental idealist, to which a materialist supplementation could be offered as a corrective to Heidegger’s otherwise aloof bourgeois philosophy. Marcuse, to his credit, shows that even in the later work of Heidegger on technology and technics, he treats technology as a force in-itself and he once again removes and avoids any discussion of the context of power relations entirely.

Now as I mentioned, Lukács argues that Heidegger’s core idea of “being in the world” is a projection of the class position of alienated bourgeois class experience; and this is why all of the primary categories that make up inauthentic existence in the world: idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, falling and being thrown; must be taken back to the concrete social being of bourgeois society at the moment of its own experience of acute crisis which Heidegger experienced first-hand. In this sense, Heidegger’s thought is not merely a reactionary bourgeois philosophy, it is bourgeois philosophy at its very peak, it is bourgeois philosophy that is eager to find a redemption from a crisis that plagues itself in a total fashion.

This analysis of Heidegger is given even more sociological support in Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy as the invention of new “political theology” concepts that are to be understood as responses to the social misery of the culture at the time. This is how we must read the implicit radicalism of Heideggerian thought and why his concepts of history and the authentic act contain a loaded and a latent radicalism. But to truly grasp this radicalism requires that we deploy an understanding not merely of Heidegger as a supplementation to Marxist historical materialism, we must proceed based on a comparison that is purely homologous, not in any way analogous. A homology between historicity in Heidegger’s sense and proletarian revolution can indeed offer important insights for Marxist revolutionary thought so long as it is done carefully.

Marcuse agrees with Lukács in his diagnosis of Heidegger’s philosophy as the highest expression of bourgeois philosophy of the time. Specifically, Heidegger was explaining, in Marcuse’s view, the subjective side of the bourgeois mind – the side that is not determined by economic categories. This is evident in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics where he argued that liberalism and communism are metaphysically both the same.[7] Liberalism and communism for Heidegger are both equalitarian humanist doctrines committed only to material flourishing.

But embedded in Heidegger’s idea of the authentic act we find something very close to what Lukács had articulated in History and Class Consciousness, namely as Marcuse writes in “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism”, , an essay based on his research into his habilitation in 1930 on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity:

“when revolutionary practice is known as authentic historical existence and when concrete change is recognized as the real movement of the world, bourgeois society can finally be seen in its historical becoming and necessary fallenness. (and here is the crucial point Marcuse teases out) There is a Dasein whose thrownness consists precisely in the overcoming of its throwness. The historical act is only possible today as the act of the proletariat, because it is the only Dasein within whose existence this act is necessarily given" (Marcuse, p. 32)

Historical materialism can thus supplement Heidegger’s absent social materialist analysis by providing an adequate context of the class struggle and insert the social being of the proletarian class as that class which can only discover its own thrownness by overcoming its thrownness. At this point we can see that Marx and Heidegger both hold to an ontological account of “thrownness” or alienation of humanity, and Marx’s account of “estrangement” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 elaborates the alienation of human labor that implies that the theory of revolution not merely touch the economic base of society but that revolution in fact be construed along the species being level of humanity and that it be total, that it concern the human as such.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, the subject of revolution is human essence in its totality. Human freedom for Marx implies that man's capacity to relate to his own object of labor connects man into his wider set of social relations and generic life activity. For the Marx 1844, still working under the influence of Feuerbach, the Hegelian idea of objectification contained an ontological foundation in the sensuousness of man, which was the beginning point of the science of man in Feuerbach’s philosophy.  

In capitalist society man must convert his labor into a commodity and this creates an alienation of man’s core life object insofar as he no longer belongs to himself; this makes man into an animal. We see now that the homology emerges between the early Marx and Heidegger around alienation and thrownness or facticity. Historical materialism must concern itself with giving an account of the ruptures and the transformations of the changes to this condition of alienated humanity; and revolution is to be understood as moments in history in which the essence of humanity is restored from its thrownness. If as Marx claims man is not one with his life activity and his life activity is labor, the object of revolution becomes man himself and therefore the object of revolution becomes total. The point where the inhumanity of this alienation or reification is most acute and is most concentrated is found within private property.

The fundamental class analysis for the Marx of 1844, the workers alienation is found in his or her activity whereas for the non-worker or the bourgeois, alienation is found in a state. In this sense one can see that the notion of thrownness, or facticity would naturally align with a conception that Marcuse tried to draw out from Heidegger’s work, which is that only the revolutionary working-class movement of the proletariat can reveal the thrownness of bourgeois society.

What Marcuse’s attempted synthesis of Heidegger with Marx opens for us is a focus on the historical realization of revolution as a total ontological transformation or event. This homology has been taken into the heart of Marxist thought in the context of a perceived inadequacy of Marxist revolutionary thought to deal with the problem of superstructure, or the fact that the 20^th century faced turbulent revolutions in the base or economic level of society, but that revolutions in the base only seemed to perpetuate the problem of fetishism in social relations. In this way, the release of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in the early 1930s do not point to a somehow immature or early theory of revolution, but to an even more advanced theory of revolution that the later Marx of Capital had lost touch with, but this is only evident from the vantage of the way socialist revolutions transpired in the 20^th century.

Dialectics and Ontology: Why Heidegger is Inescapable in Post-Marxism

I want to now make some observations about Heidegger’s place within post-Marxist thought more generally and I want to track how Marcuse’s homology or synthesis between Marx and Heidegger has become a core feature of contemporary Marxist thought. In Frederic Jameson’s essay, “Ontology and Utopia” of 1994, he claims that the return to ontology in post-Marxist thought that occurred after May 1968, signifies that to build something new into the future, one must include “eventfulness into the structure.” Jameson argues that thinking ontology for post-Marxists, “stops dialectics, embraces paradox, and ruptures thought.”^[8]

The return to ontology inaugurates a different kind of thought as it thinks thought’s relation to being differently, and this difference implies a different role for the foundation of the social and the political. For the post-Marxists, Jameson notes, there is a “relative autonomy” of cultural politics and thus the turn to ontology is a way for post-Marxist thought to consider what Jameson calls the social superstructure, that enables a renewed capacity for thought itself to disrupt the status quo of the social.

The turn to the ontological is a turn to what already is, or what is virtual, latent, at the level of fantasy or half formed, ontology refers to the rockbed of the social structure itself. The turn to the ontological implies an activation of thought as such to be construed with a renewed political radicalism. Where Marx aimed to show the emergence of collective or proto-socialist relations within capital itself, Heidegger’s ontology poses an analysis of capitalist society that forges what I would call a new neo-Kantainism in which social and political life is understood as split between a more primordial level, or ontological level of being, and an ontic level of being. This is the famous theory of ontological difference, which I read as a dualistic theory that pits these two domains in opposition, where the more fundamental ground exposes the truth of being, while the ontic occludes the truth of being. The ontological difference, as Oliver Marchart points out, is concerned with the fundamental level of the ontological, or what Heidegger refers to as Beying, which must be thought in all of its ‘autonomy’ and without recourse to the ontic level of being even though it also relies on thinking of itself through being.^[9] Heidegger’s ontological distinction between the ontological and the ontic implies that the domain of the ontological cannot be accessed for it would require a solid ground (as being), and thus thinking change to the domain of the ontological must be thought without reliance on a ground.

Heidegger’s notion of ontology is therefore “post-foundational” because the grounding function operates on an abyssal foundation. What permits an opening or a disclosure^[10] of ground, or of “grounds” is the ground’s very absence to being. Heidegger’s later concept of event Ereignis is where the truth of being lies in its being revealed, in its un-grounding. Heidegger therefore problematizes the very notion of a solid ground by which a theory of justice, community, or the political could be posited. This absence of ground shifts the question of ground form a transcendental position to a ‘quasi-transcendental’ position as the conditions of possibility and impossibility are now interwoven. The transcendental always emerges out of particular empirical and historical conjectures, and as such, the ground can still be thought, but it remains tethered to the forgetting of being, and it therefore requires a penetration of thought into the history of being in order to be accessed.^[11]

The turn to ontology signifies a profound change within the overall leftist politico-philosophical tradition, and we can locate its effects in the work of the Deleuzian-inspired thought of Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, to neo-Hegelians such as Žižek and Laclau, as well as Derridean and deconstructionists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, and to Alain Badiou, whose primary influences stem from Althusser and Lacan. For some Marxist philosopher such as Adorno, ontology remains an “oppressive superstructure” that “affirms rather than challenges the existing status quo.”^[12] Adorno, like other Frankfurt School thinkers point out that philosophical recourse to ontology reifies existing social processes that affirm the status quo. As Adorno remarks, the incorporation of ontology is

the unconscious expression of a dynamic social process whose dynamics it fails to reflect. This failure is constitutive of ontological discourse, whose preference for stasis over movement, ground over horizon, Being over becoming is but an expression of a human “desire” caused by a world that, in reality, never stands still.[13]

Heidegger offers up a new form of neo-Kantianism in which the ontological difference leads to an embrace of ontological event as the privileged site of truth production; this means that remains the space where thought can affect and alter the ontic.^[14] The Heideggerian theory of ontology posits that a change that is able to disrupt the ordinary order of being qua being in the domain of the social (ontic) is facilitated by a theory of the event. But the event only occurs if thought identifies substance rather than form, i.e. if thought identifies with and alters the ontological and not only the ontic. We are taken back to Marcuse’s attempted synthesis in which the authentic act now is thought in a context in which many Marxist philosophers have abandoned or retreated from a dialectical account of class society, in which the activation of the working class is no longer the agent of historical realization.

In this context, thought and ‘philosophy’ is granted a potent role for thinking political change. The ontic domain of society is thought as fundamentally ‘depoliticized’ and unable to affect the formation of community, class consciousness or the political. This is bound up with the post-Marxist notion of the “retreat of the political” as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe declared in the early 1990s at the dawn of the collapse of the USSR.^[15]

In this post-political context, as Laclau notes, contemporary society is in a state of permanent ontological disequilibrium (Laclau) in which crisis is continuous and inescapable. For post-Marxists, politics becomes an idealist emergence governed by spontaneity, as Oliver Marchart notes:

What is given in the moment of the political is not only a crisis within a particular discourse (which leads to conceptual change only), but the encounter with the crisis of breakdown of discursive signification as such – in political terms, the encounter with society’s abyss or absent ground.[16]

The ontological is ultimately thought as a domain that is prior to politics, a primordial domain of being-together that political events kick up. In this mode of analysis, politics becomes a rare occurrence, it is not an organized class politics in which the proletariat revolutionizes society. Heideggerian naturally fits into the post-Marxist conception of political change and indeed of the political as a post-political domain; but my problem here is that we return to the same problems that Marcuse and Lukács discovered in Heidegger, namely that his thought represents the highest achievement of bourgeois philosophy, but now for post-Marxists, Heidegger’s thought points to the end of bourgeois philosophy, to the end of man, to the end of metaphysics, and indeed to the end of revolutionary socialism itself. I take it as an imperative task of Marxist thought in facing this so-called post-political situation, that we insist on returning to the early Marx and to the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness to restore a sense of thinking politics that is properly dialectical, that is focused on the achievement of a realized working-class interest.  

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[1] Lukács, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness translated by Rodney Livingstone MIT Press. p. 129.

[2] Bourdieu, Pierre (1988) The Political Theology of Martin Heidegger trans. Peter Collier Stanford University Press.

[3] Marcuse, Herbert (2005) Heideggerian Marxism edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit University of Nebraska Press.

[4] Ibid, p. 24.

[5] Ibid, pp. 38 – 40.

[6] Lukács, Georg (2021) The Destruction of Reason trans. Brian Palmer Verso Books. pp. 502 – 503.

[7] Heidegger, Martin (1959) Introduction to Metaphysics trans. Ralph Manheim Yale University Press. p. 49

[8] Jameson, Frederic (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions Verso, 240.

[9] Marchart, Oliver (2007) Post-Foundational Political Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 25.

[10] Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, Harper and Collins, 22.

[11] Ibid, 25

[12] Adorno, Theodore (2003) Jargon of Authenticity, Routledge Classics, 49.

[13] Ibid, 54.

[14] The project of Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe in the Philosophical Center for Research on the Political, and the various responses elicited by this center will provide a frame of reference for thinking political difference.

[15] The phrase “post-political” refers to the idea influenced by Francis Fukuyama in the End of History and the Last Man that has held great sway in liberal thought that the end of the cold war has ushered in the death of ideological threats to liberalism and western democracy. 

[16] Marchart, Oliver (2007) Post-Foundational Political Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 32 – 33.