Marcuse described his relationship to Heidegger’s philosophy in an interview:
I read Sein und Zeit when it came out in 1927 and after having read it I decided to go back to Freiburg (where I had received my PhD in 1922) in order to work with Heidegger. I stayed in Freiburg and worked with Heidegger until December 1932, when I left Germany a few days before Hitler’s ascent to power, and that ended the personal relationship. I saw Heidegger again after the war, I think in 1946–47, in the Black Forest where he has his little house. We had a talk, which was not exactly very friendly and very positive, there was an exchange of letters, and since that time there has not been any communication between us. […] We saw in Heidegger what we had first seen in Husserl, a new beginning, the first radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations— philosophy concerned with human existence, the human condition, and not with merely abstract ideas and principles. That certainly I shared with a relatively large number of my generation, and needless to say, the disappointment with this philosophy eventually came—I think it began in the early thirties. But we re-examined Heidegger thoroughly only after his association with Nazism had become known. […] But I soon realized that Heidegger’s concreteness was to a great extent a phony, a false concreteness, and that in fact his philosophy was just as abstract and just as removed from reality, even avoiding reality, as the philosophies which at that time had dominated German universities, namely a rather dry brand of neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, neo-Idealism, but also positivism (Marcuse 2005, 165–166).
Marcuse realised that in order to ground a concrete, praxis-relevant Marxist philosophy, it is not necessary to rely on non-Marxist philosophy. He found the philosophical work he was looking for in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic
Introduction: Critical Theory of Communication
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