1.5.6. Adorno, Habermas and Marcuse about Heidegger
Herbert Marcuse was in the 1920s influenced by Heidegger, but turned away from him when his Nazi sympathies became evident. Frankfurt School authors such as Marcuse, Adorno and Habermas were extremely critical of Heidegger and certainly share the assessment that a critical theory of society is not possible with, but only against Heidegger.
Theodor W. Adorno argues that Nazi ideology is immanent in Sein und Zeit, which was published in 1927 (Heidegger 1927). Adorno writes in his analysis that Heidegger’s ‘metaphysics of death’ cultivates ‘the heroic possibilities of death’ and is ‘a propaganda for death’ (Adorno 1965/2001, 131; see also Löwith 1946). Heidegger’s combination of philosophy and poetry is for Adorno (1960/1961) ‘provincial kitsch’ (229) that uses ‘archaic language’ (230). For Adorno, Heidegger’s fetishism of the origin is a form of mysticism (Adorno 1960/1961, 32–34). The ‘cult of origin and renewal’ would ‘not by accident and not externally have sympathy with the barbarism that took shape in his [Heidegger’s] political history’ so that foundations of ‘National-Socialist ideology’ would be contained in Sein und Zeit (241) [translation from German]. ‘Heidegger’s agreement with fascism and the ideology of the conservative revolution, the more elegant version of fascist ideology, was not a lack of character of the philosopher, but lay in the content of his doctrine’ (287).
In a lecture from 1935 that after its re-publication in 1953 resulted in public debates, Heidegger (2000, 213) spoke in the context of National Socialism of the ‘inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)’. Jürgen Habermas (1953, 197) drew the German public’s attention to his discovery that Heidegger in 1953 ‘publishes his words, in the meantime eighteen years old, about the greatness and inner truth of National Socialism’ and that it was therefore ‘time to think with Heidegger against Heidegger’.
1.5.7. Heidegger and Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse in 1928 moved from Berlin to the University of Freiburg in order to start a habilitation project under Heidegger’s supervision. Marcuse’s thought was in the mid- to late-1920s deeply influenced by Heidegger’s (1927) Sein und Zeit. This also becomes evident in Marcuse’s first published essays, such as Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism (Marcuse 2005, 1–33). Marcuse tried to combine Marx and Heidegger. This influence also becomes evident in Macuse’s habilitation thesis Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, which he prefaces with the words: ‘What this work contributes to the unfurling and clarification of problems, it owes to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger’ (Marcuse 1932a, 8). Because of his Jewish background, Marcuse could never defend his habilitation thesis. With the rise of Nazism, he had to flee Germany and spent the rest of his life in the USA. In 1941, he published his first English book, which was a second monograph about Hegel: Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. In this book (1941a), Marcuse does not mention Heidegger at all. By the 1930s he had completely turned against Heidegger’s philosophy.
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Critical Theory of Communication