Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 48 页

2.1 Marx and Heidegger: a Framework for Dialogue

There is no immediate nor obvious relationship between Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein and Marx’s conception of the human. Unlike Sartre’s existential reading of individual praxis, the very possibility of reading Heidegger and Marx in relation to one another must first be established before Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s totalising being-towards-death is brought into relation with Marx’s philosophy of history. There is no reconfiguration of materialism as human practice in Heidegger, nor even an identifiable concept of materialism as such. Nonetheless, the project of Being and Time is to explicate human action as implicitly temporal, to produce an existential analytic (Dasein) whereby time becomes the horizon for understanding human action. It is difficult to overstate the decisiveness, originality and critical function of this analytic. It engenders a philosophy of time which has no counterpart in the modern European tradition because it is unrivalled in its attempt to generate and sustain a framework for grasping, after Kant, the entire field of time [Zeitinbegriff] itself. Heidegger’s concept of ‘originary temporality’ is, as William Blattner puts it, ‘a manifold of nonsuccessive phenomena’ which aspires to ‘explain ordinary time’³⁰, or what Heidegger generally refers to as ‘the vulgar conception of time’. The fact that Being and Time attempts this explanation is unprecedented, and it is as consequential to the philosophy of time as are the particular merits and limits of the work itself. Every philosophy of time after Heidegger, particularly the anti-Heideggerian philosophy of time, remains (and not simply in a chronological sense) a post-Heideggerian philosophy. Heidegger is therefore an unavoidable route, and, this thesis argues, an undeniable asset, to the concept of historical time. Hence before we tackle the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation, we need to consider the ways in which Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein dovetails with Marx’s concept of the human. What dimensions of Being and Time resonate with Marx’s work more generally?

Being and Time disrupts any fixed distinction between theory and practice, between a ‘first philosophy’ (prōtē philosophia [πρώτη φιλοσοφία], which is for Aristotle metaphysics) and a practical philosophy, and therefore between thinking and action. In Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann argues, ‘…action itself, and not only its theory, loses its foundation or archē,’ and by extension, ‘action deprived of archē [is] the condition of the thought which deconstructs the archē.’³¹ The essence of Dasein lies in its ‘to be’ [Zu-sein], but this being (or ‘be-ing’, from the German seiend, the gerund of the infinitive sein) is not a static ‘presence-at-hand’ registered by categories of existentia (ontological ‘whats’), but is rather the movement and motion of an entity inclined and orientated towards a ‘there’.³² In Being and Time, Dasein is reciprocally figured as a form of kinetic thinking and thinking kinesis, and hence it rejects the division between sensibility and conceptuality as authorised by Kant’s transcendental logic, in addition to the function of the cogito in Descartes’s philosophy of self-consciousness. Exceeding Kant’s critiques, Dasein gives us categories and existentiale, ontological ‘hows’ or dynamic states of Dasein’s fluid character which (Heidegger claims) collectively constitute the sense or ‘meaning of being’ [Seinssinn] as such. The where of Dasein’s existence is what Heidegger names ‘the world’, but this world is not an ontical totality of entities we passively find ourselves in, but is rather the ‘wherein’ of Dasein’s act of understanding, an act already in the process of making itself and already in the process of exceeding itself.³³ Significance makes up the structure or ‘worldhood’ of this world and gives this act of understanding its phenomenological intelligibility. In Heidegger, ‘understanding’ is not a cognitive act but an existential ability-to-be [Seinkönnen]. More precisely, understanding is an existentiale constituted by projection upon possibilities, without which there is no world. Dasein cannot be without already always being an understanding ability-to-be in a world.

³⁰ William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 26.

³¹ Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy [1982], trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1, 7. Schürmann is undeniably a deconstructionist, and thus reads Heidegger’s professed ‘dismantling’ and ‘destruction’ of the history of ontology in Derridean terms.

48