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Heidegger, Marcuse and the Philosophy of

Technology



Andrew Feenberg





Heidegger is often considered to be the most important continental philosopher of

the 20th Century. He is certainly one of the most controversial. Despite his politics,

Heidegger had four Jewish students who went on to brilliant careers as social

philosophers, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl L?with, and Herbert Marcuse. I had the

good fortune to study with Marcuse and have been influenced by his thought, although I

am by no means a "Marcusean." Several years ago I decided to investigate the links

between Heidegger and Marcuse more closely and discovered to my surprise that they

share a common interpretation of Aristotle, an interpretation that seems to originate in

Heidegger''s early courses which Marcuse attended. I have followed up this connection in

a book entitled Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History.

This lecture will review some of the main themes of this book.



I arrived in La Jolla, California in the fall of 1965 as a graduate student in

philosophy. One of my reasons for coming was what I had heard of Herbert Marcuse. He

was not yet famous but he was well known and what was known about him intrigued me.

I was interested in phenomenology, but a philosopher wild enough to synthesize Marx

and Freud was wild enough for a young graduate student looking for an alternative to the

positivism then dominating American philosophy.

At the first opportunity I asked Professor Marcuse to help me study Martin

Heidegger’s Being and Time. He accepted my proposal and we spent many Tuesday

afternoons debating the meaning of obscure passages in this book which, unbeknownst to

me, had inspired Marcuse to leave Berlin for Freiburg 38 years before.



























[Text of a lecture based on the Preface to Heidegger

and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of

History (Routledge, 2005)]





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One afternoon as we left Marcuse’s office a magnificent sunset appeared before us.

Standing on the balcony of the Humanities Building dazzled by the spectacle of nature,

Marcuse turned to me and said, in his deep, heavily accented voice, “Make me a

phenomenological reduction of this!” I was unable to reply. I remember feeling the

demand to be unfair, sarcastic.

Zen Buddhists are supposed to achieve sudden enlightenment meditating on an

unsolvable problem called a koan. Phenomenology seemed to collapse in the face of

Marcuse’s stunning koan, but sudden enlightenment did not follow. It could not possibly

have occurred to me then that the rejection of a phenomenological reduction that late

afternoon confirmed yet again Marcuse’s decision to abandon Heidegger’s mentorship in

1933. He had found another way to understand beauty and its promise of happiness.

A few months later, my fellow graduate students and I created a magazine to

publicize our anti-war views. Recall that this was early in the Vietnam War and the

American public was still supportive. Dissent was the act of a small minority to which we

belonged. We asked Marcuse for an article to start us off. He contributed “The Individual

in the Great Society” This article described the suppression of individuality under the

impact of technological advance. It ends with a convoluted passage I want to quote here

as it offers a clue to my koan and the agenda of Marcuse’s later work.

Under both aspects, the traditional concept of the individual, in its classic-

liberal as well as Marxist form seems to be untenable — canceled

(aufgehoben) by the historical development of productivity….Authentic

individuality would remain the distinction of the creative artist, writer, or

musician. The idea of making this creative potential general among the

population at large militates against the very function and truth of the

artistic creation as a form of expression …because it [art] implies

dissociation from, and negation of, common sense and common values:

ingression of a qualitatively different reality in the established one. In the

case of the second alternative (fundamental transformation of the society),

individuality would refer to an entirely new existential dimension: to a

domain of play, experiment, and imagination which is outside the reaches

of any policy and program today.

This article was composed in 1965. It accurately foresaw the shipwreck of Lyndon

Johnson’s Great Society on the rock of Vietnam. What it did not, could not foresee was

the rise of the New Left and the counter-culture. At that time demonstrations against the

war in Vietnam on most campuses, including ours, attracted students by the dozens, not

the thousands who would soon be mobilized by the anti-war movement.

Marcuse believed that the elimination of true individuality in “one-dimensional

society” explained the absence of opposition. Individuality requires mental independence

and a standard, a vision of a better world. The arts have always represented such an

alternative. (Our magazine was called Alternatives.) In modern times a limited form of

individuality became widely available. The Enlightenment opened a public sphere within

which political ideals sustained a critical stance. Now the space of public debate was

closing down. Once again individuality was to be found primarily in the aesthetic realm.

For it to emerge from behind its old artistic borders, Marcuse claimed, it would have to

take a far more radical form than in the past. The new individuals would realize the

negative, critical content of art in the real world, overthrowing its common sense and

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devaluing its values.

Aesthetics as the form of a new consciousness and sensibility! The generalization of

the oppositional force of beauty as social critique! What strange notions! I had no idea

that in 1918 Marcuse participated in the German Revolution as a member of the Berlin

Soldiers’ Council and shortly afterwards wrote a thesis on novels featuring artists in

conflict with society. For him the unity of political and aesthetic opposition was no mere

fantasy. But I also recall this personal detail from my student days: on the wall of his

dining room in California he had a large print of Breughel''s Fall of Icarus which he kept

as a permanent warning against romantic idealism.

The full implications of Marcuse’s ideas on individuality unfolded finally with the

rise of the New Left. In France the May Events of 1968 demanded “All Power to the

Imagination,” a slogan that refuted his gloomy prognostication in the passage quoted

above. He was only too happy to be refuted. We witnessed the beginnings of the

movement together in Paris. Returning to his hotel in the Latin Quarter he was accosted

by a group of students who had just occupied the Ecole des Beaux Arts. They recognized

him from his picture in the newspapers where he was celebrated as the “Guru of the

Students in Revolt.”

We entered the Ecole and Marcuse addressed the hundred or more young artists

gathered in the main assembly hall. It is easy to imagine the excitement of the author of a

thesis on aesthetic resistance at the podium of this monument to “affirmative culture.” He

was warmly received. French students celebrated the grandfathers of the revolution in

preference to their fathers who they blamed for social ills. Marcuse made a short speech

in French, greeting the students in the name of the American student movement and

congratulating them on challenging “consumer society.” They seemed impressed by this

echo from the depths of history although the Maoists in the audience were visibly puzzled

by the reference to consumption.

When An Essay on Liberation appeared a year later it was dedicated to the French

“militants,” the students and young workers in revolt. “The radical utopian character of

their demands,” Marcuse wrote in the preface, “far surpasses the hypotheses of my

essay”. That book explored in some detail the generalization of aesthetic resistance that

the earlier article had dismissed. The boundaries of art had burst and aesthetics had

become a new kind of politics with the transformation of the technical base of society as

its goal. The young resisted not merely because they disagreed with government policy

but because their sensibility rebelled at the waste and violence of the society around

them.

An Essay on Liberation and the several books that followed attempted to explain the

new forms of opposition emerging in one-dimensional society. Although this was a topic

that fascinated me during this same period, I was never fully convinced by Marcuse’s

approach. The emphasis on aesthetics did not quite correspond with my experience of the

movement. I would have said its core impulse was revulsion at the conformist pressures

of the culture of the 1950s in which we had all grown up rather than an aesthetic vision of

the future. In any case, what I took from Marcuse was his critique of technology which I

have developed further in my own books over the last 15 years. My doubts about the

aesthetic interpretation of the New Left were widely shared. Marcuse’s last writings had

diminishing impact and eventually contributed to the decline of his reputation.

Now, looking back on Marcuse’s work, I am still not convinced. But I see his

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thought in a very different light today. When Marcuse left Heidegger he rescinded the

phenomenological reduction for all situations and occasions, sunsets included. But

rereading him, I find the traces of Heidegger’s thought everywhere in his writings and in

the most surprising places. And I miss reference to Heidegger there too, in the most

problematic of Marcuse’s speculations where phenomenology might have been helpful.

Those speculations are a development of ideas already present in his earliest

publications under Heidegger’s tutelage. These early works constitute a unique

philosophical position that has been called “Heidegger-Marxismus.” Marcuse arrived at

this position by a twofold path: on the one hand he concretized the concept of

authenticity in Being and Time, on the other hand he developed a new interpretation of

the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics of “real possibility” or “potentiality.” Marcuse did

not quite follow these paths to the point of intersection but we can project a likely

unification of his thought at which he would no doubt have arrived had he remained

under Heidegger’s influence for a few more years.

Heidegger’s concept of authenticity continues a philosophical tradition that begins

with Rousseau and Kant. In their thought the essence of the human being is freedom.

This marks a break with substantive notions of human nature such as Aristotle’s that

define the human in terms of definite qualities and virtues. Human nature, insofar as there

is such a thing for a philosophy of freedom, consists of formal properties of the subject

rather than a repertoire of attributes. But the logic of freedom in Rousseau and Kant is

bound to a notion of rationality that ends up determining the telos of human development

much as had earlier substantive theories of human nature.

For existentialists – and despite his denial Heidegger is a kind of existentialist –

freedom is illusory unless it escapes every rationalistic conception of its end. This

Heidegger accomplishes by defining human “Dasein” as a self-questioning and self-

making being “thrown” into a world without rhyme or reason and destined to discover its

own meanings there. But inauthentic existence, average everyday existence, consists in

conformism and refusal of self-responsibility. The insight into freedom represented by

Heidegger’s philosophy is too hard a lesson to be commonly lived. To be fully human –

authentic – is to acknowledge the groundlessness of human existence and nevertheless to

act resolutely. By resoluteness Heidegger does not mean arbitrary decisions but rather

“precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the

time,” that is, the response called for by the historical situation. In resoluteness the human

being intervenes activity in shaping its world and defining itself, as opposed to

inauthentic conformism. Unfortunately, Heidegger’s philosophy offers no means for

determining criteria of what is “factically possible” and so leaves the question of action in

the air.

There is, however, a hint whic h Heidegger himself does not follow up. The first

chapters of Being and Time connect making and self-making in the concept of being-in-

the-world. As I will explain later, Dasein’s answer to the question of its being is bound up

with the technical practices through which it gives meaning to and acts in its world. This

connection suggests a way of giving content to the idea of authenticity. Perhaps a specific

type of technical activity could figure in it. But, strangely, production drops out when

Heidegger explains authenticity in the second division of his master work. There he

focuses on the heroic retrieval of the past instead. This ambiguity disappears as

Heidegger develops his later critique of technology. Technical practice ends up unmaking

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worlds and the reference to self-making, and with it the whole problematic of

authenticity, simply disappears from Heidegger’s discourse.

Marcuse took over the theory of authenticity in his early writings, but he rejected

Heidegger’s abstract formulations. What is this “situation” in which the human being is

“thrown,” and what are these “possibilities” so vaguely invoked by Heidegger in Being

and Time? The emptiness of such categories invites revision. Heidegger himself filled in

the blanks with Nazi ideology for a time. While several recent studies argue that this was

an inescapable consequence of his early thought, I do not believe it could have been quite

so evident as it now appears in retrospect to these commentators. The leap from

Heidegger’s abstract formulations to the lower depths of nationalism and racism

represented by Hitler came as a shock to his Jewish students who, after all, were right

there on the scene and certain to spot the obvious. In any case, Marcuse turned in the

opposite direction from his teacher toward Marxism. The self is thrown into a capitalist

society where the alienation of production is the source of the inauthenticity that must be

overcome. Now authenticity becomes the “radical act” of revolutionary refusal of the

existing society.

Marcuse first introduces the Marxist idea of revolution in a two-sided formulation

that encompasses the transformation of both individual and society. As he describes it,

the central concern of “the Marxist fundamental situation…is with the historical

possibility of the radical act — of an act that should liberate a new and necessary reality

as it brings about the actualization of the whole person”. Marcuse soon turns to the

Hegelian idea of labor as an objectification of the human spirit to join Heidegger’s

phenomenological analysis of production with his abstract conception of human self-

making. Labor is an engagement with possibilities actualized through struggle with

nature, possibilities which belong to the human being as well as the object. The

“possibility” required by the “situation” is thus neither the determined outcome of

objective processes as orthodox Marxists supposed, nor an ineffable intuition with

dubious results as in Heidegger himself, but a free appropriation of the human essence in

a socially concrete form through the liberation of labor.

In Marcuse’s view, all this is implicit in Heidegger’s own analysis of Dasein, but

Heidegger fails to achieve the level of concreteness implied by the notion of being-in-the-

world. The world cannot be understood without reference to the divisions within the

community through which each Dasein is situated socially. In one early essay Marcuse

asks, “is the world ‘the same’ even for all forms of Dasein present within a concrete

historical situation? Obviously not. It is not only that the world of significance varies

among particular contemporary cultural regions and groups, but also that, within any one

of these, abysses of meaning may open up between different worlds Precisely in the most

existentially essential behavior, no understanding exists between the world of the high-

capitalist bourgeois and that of the small farmer or proletarian. Here the examination is

forced to confront the question of the material constitution of historicity, a breakthrough

that Heidegger neither achieves nor even gestures toward”.

Marcuse believes he can achieve this breakthrough with a Hegelian-Marxist

interpretation of the dialectic of life. Life resembles Heidegger’s Dasein in seeking its

unity and wholeness through a future oriented construction of its own potentialities. It

does not have a prior essence but must create itself under the given conditions. In this

sense it is “historical,” a being that relates its past and future. Yet Marcuse’s concept of

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life differs from Heidegger’s Dasein. The expression of its “care” in work and world

leads to objectification and mutual recognition, themes entirely absent from Heidegger’s

existential analytic. Marcuse conceives the notion of the human “essence” in Hegelian-

Marxist terms, as self-conscious unity of self, community and world, and on this basis he

argues that it can only be realized through overcoming the alienation of the worker under

capitalism.

Marcuse never articulated the relation between his theories of authenticity and

possibility quite as clearly as this. The radical act and the dialectical interpretation of

history are the two sides of an arch awaiting the keystone to join them. I argue in my

book that that keystone is the later critique of technology through which Marcuse

returned to these themes in disguised forms. In the process, he again encountered

Heidegger’s thought which in the interim had become a critical philosophy of

technology.

Like Heidegger the later Marcuse saw technology as more than technical, as more

even than political; it is the form of modern experience itself, the principal way in which

the world is revealed. For both philosophers "technology" thus extends its reach far

beyond actual devices. It signifies a way of thinking and a style of practice, indeed, a

quasi-transcendental structuring of reality as an object of technical control. Release from

this form of experience can only come through another form of experience, an aesthetic

form. In Heideggerian terms, as Hubert Dreyfus explains them, Marcuse calls for a new

disclosure of being through a transformation of basic practices. Marcuse''s critique of

technology does not just introduce humanistic criteria of technological reform into radical

political judgments, but describes the a priori form of a new type of experience belonging

to a new social order.

While the later Heidegger no longer calls for resoluteness in the face of the

inauthentic world of technology, Marcuse remains committed to something like

“authentic ind ividuality”. In his last works an authentic human existence is to be achieved

at the level of society as a whole through the transformation of technology into an

instrument for realizing the highest possibilities of human beings and things. Marcuse

argues now that this cannot be achieved on the basis of the existing capitalist technology

regardless of the prevailing property and political relations. The very general notions of

labor and possibility with which he worked in his early writings covered over the awful

gap between making and self-making in a world organized around modern technology. A

further concretization is necessary to distinguish the type of technology that can join

them. But Heidegger-Marxismus long since abandoned, Marcuse lacked the theoretical

means to articulate his new position coherently and persuasively. His last works are

inspiring gestures at a theory at which he no more than hints. How then are we to

understand the concept of a new technology in which these works culminate?

A possible solution to the enigma of Marcuse’s later thought came to me three years

ago when reading Heidegger’s 1931 lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. These lectures,

which Marcuse attended as Heidegger’s assistant, present a strange reading of Aristotle

which is decisive for the later technology critiques of both Heidegger and Marcuse. The

1931 lectures were anticipated by an earlier lecture in 1923 in which its themes were

more crudely expressed. 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

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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

techne. Thus in Heidegger’s account, Aristotle’s conception of being in general is derived

from the Greek practice of technical making.

Techne is the model of “revealing” for the Greeks, that is, the form of Greek

experience of the world. The fundamental kinesis is the realization of the true essence of

things in earthly existence. While we tend to interpret these categories through their

scholastic degeneration products as objective facts, Heidegger shows them to be rooted in

Aristotle’s analysis of the technical practice of the craftsman, who enables the potential

of the artifact to enter the world through appropriate actions. Heidegger here approves the

Greeks’ focus on production but he claims they, and especially their successors, grasped

it inauthentically as an object in the world and not as the original disclosure of a world. In

its role as an ontological model, techne must not be treated objectively, but

phenomenologically described from within on its own terms.

The study of kinesis in this sense leads directly to an ontology of practice. 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.

Exaggerating only slightly, one could say that Aristotle is presented here as a

phenomenological philosopher of technology who anticipated Heidegger’s own thought.

Theodor 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”.

However, as he develops his later critique of technology, Heidegger begins to argue

that the Greek production model is the remote source of modern technological thinking

and therefore fundamentally misguided. 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. 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. “The Question Concerning

Technology” contains an analysis of the making of a Greek chalice based on Heidegger’s

early Aristotle interpretation. Greek techne appears here implicitly as a model of an

emancipatory technology, contrasted favorably with modern technology insofar as it is

respectful of human beings and nature. Techne realizes the inherent potentialities of

things rather than violating them as does modern technology.

Modern technology does not realize objective essences inscribed in the nature of the

universe as does techne. It appears as purely instrumental, as value free. It does not

respond to inherent purposes, but is merely a means serving subjective goals. For modern

common sense, means and ends are independent of each other. Technology is “neutral” in

the sense that it has no preference as between the various possible uses to which it can be

put. This is the instrumentalist philosophy of technology that is a spontaneous product of

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our civilization, assumed unreflectively by most people.

Technology in this scheme of things encounters nature as raw materials, not as a

world that emerges out of itself, a physis, but rather as stuff awaiting transformation into

whatever we desire. This world is understood mechanistically not teleologically. It is

there to be used without any inner purpose. The West has made enormous technical

advances on the basis of this understanding of reality. Nothing restrains us in our

exploitation of the world. Everything is exposed to an analytic intelligence that

decomposes it into usable parts. In the 19th century it became commonplace to view

modernity as an unending progress.

But for what ends? The goals of our society can no longer be specified in a

knowledge of some sort, a techne, as they were for the Greeks. They remain purely

subjective, arbitrary choices, and no essences guide us. Reason now concerns only

means, not ends. This has led to a crisis of civilization from which there seems no escape:

we know how to get there but we do not know why we are going or even where. The

Greeks appear to have lived in harmony with the world whereas we are alienated from it

by our very freedom to define our purposes as we wish. So long as no great harm could

be attributed to technology, this situation did not lead to serious doubts beyond the usual

literary protests against modernization. But the 20th century, with its effective propaganda

machines, world wars, atom bombs, concentration camps and environmental

catastrophes, has made it more and more difficult to ignore the strange aimlessness of

modernity. Because we are at such a loss to know where we are going and why,

philosophy of technology has emerged in our time as a critique of modernity. The focus

on technology gives rise to several different kinds of critique. Situating Heidegger and

Marcuse in this field correctly proves important for interpreting their thought.

The most important forerunner of modernity critique is Max Weber. Weber

distinguishes between "substantive" and "formal" rationality in a way that corresponds

roughly to the distinction between techne and technology. Substantive rationality, like

techne, begins by positing a good and then selects means to achieve it. Many public

institutions are substantively rational in Weber''s sense: universal education is a good

which determines appropriate means such as classrooms and teachers. Formal rationality

is concerned uniquely with the efficiency of means and contains no intrinsic reference to

a good. Modernization consists in the triumph of formal rationality over a more or less

substantively rational order inherited from the past. The market is the primary instrument

of this transformation, substituting the cash nexus for the planned pursuit of values.

Bureaucracy and management are other domains in which formal rationality eventually

prevails.

Heidegger’s diagnosis of our time resembles Weber’s superficially but it is basically

different. Weber assumed the ultimate subjectivity of goals, as we all tend to in a modern

society where there is no universal rational consensus on meaning and value. For Weber

as for us, modern society is right to rely only on facts. The Greek faith in an objective

logos has long since been refuted by modern science. Heidegger too believed that the

triumph of value neutral technical means over objectivistically goal-oriented thinking is

the necessary consequence of our modern condition. But he saw this condition as itself

historically relative. Our inability to take meaning and value seriously, our prejudice in

favor of factual knowledge, is precisely the mark of that relativity. It is this which makes

us overlook the ontologically fundamental character of being-in-the-world. As a result,

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we see Greek techne as prescientific. But can we find a way of understanding it that is not

internal to modernity? This is the task Heidegger sets himself and he believes it can be

accomplished with a phenomenology of everyday human existence.

Heidegger’s account of techne is thus quite different from the Weberian approach

sketched above. He starts out from the assumption that the world is initially revealed

through techne and does not pre-exist it in the form of a collection of present-at-hand

things taken up by human technical activity in a contingent manner, for example, on this

or that occasion to fulfill this or that passing need. Every aspect of being he uncovers in

the study of techne is thus originally posited by techne. This even includes the raw

materials of technical work. These materials are understood from out of their place in

production rather than as pre-existing objects.

Heidegger attributes to the material a quality he calls “bearance.” Bearance is not

merely the absence of resistance, but signifies the essential availability of the material for

form. The clay is not simply there to be formed into a jug; insofar as it is part of the

process of production, it demands the achievement of form. “With the transformation of

the clay into the bowl, the lump also loses its form, but fundamentally it loses its

formlessness; it gives up a lack, and hence the tolerating here is at once a positive

contribution to the development of something higher”.

There is something like a phenomenological reduction at work here. The “natural

attitude,” in which things are given objectively is suspended to allow them to appear as

they are originally revealed to human activity. Techne itself is considered ontologically,

as a relation of Dasein to world, rather than as a causal interaction with things. Although

this reverses our usual perspective, it is not arbitrary. After all, every human society

known to us, with the exception of our own, has notions equivalent to the Greek idea of

techne, notions that describe the meaning or essence of things in objective terms on the

basis of the practices underlying the society’s relation to its world. Of course each society

assigns these meanings without a scientific basis in our modern sense. But they all do

assign meanings; that is the important fact that we overlook in our enthusiasm for the

objective scientific view. Something is going on in the traditional relationship of society

and world we conceive as arbitrary and subjective but which Heidegger takes for the

founding act in which worlds are revealed. There must then be some equivalent founding

of our modern world too, and indeed Heidegger identifies this equivalent with modern

technology. But we moderns are uniquely ignorant of the very idea of “world” as it

appears to all other peoples and is theorized by the Greeks. We can learn from them to

grasp the process of revealing that is at the basis of our existence too.

Considered as a phenomenology in this sense, Aristotle’s techne analysis displays an

original unity underlying the dichotomies of objectivistic thinking. Heidegger’s theory of

revealing appears to justify a return to a concept of essence, but it specifies no content to

that concept. Much as we might like to revive the ancient concept of essence, it rests on

an outdated ontology with socially conformist implications. For example, Heidegger’s

famous example of the chalice has a predetermined form laid down in the culture and

accepted uncritically as essential by the craftsman and the community. Greek philosophy

betrayed an unconscious fidelity to historically surpassable limitations of its society in

treating conventions as essences. Modern philosophy cannot proceed in this naive

fashion.

Marcuse continues the early Heidegger’s production centered concept of being.

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Although Heidegger himself never proposed a revival of techne, his description of its

structure anticipates Marcuse’s own theory in which an emancipatory technique that

respects the essence of its objects is projected into the future rather than found in the past.

Heidegger’s early Aristotle interpretation thus influences him profoundly although its

presence in his thought is soon masked by references to Hegel and Marx. Marcuse''s early

book on Hegel is a study of this very same problematic of techne as movement central to

Heidegger''s own early philosophy and is based on an interpretation of Hegel’s debt to

Aristotle. And Marcuse’s Marxism remains linked to the idea of techne through the

emphasis on the disalienation of labor he discovered in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844

while still a student of Heidegger.

Marcuse accepts the usual modern view that essences can neither be based on

tradition and community standards nor speculatively derived in an a priori metaphysics of

some sort. But what he calls "one-dimensional thinking" plays out that modern

skepticism by rejecting the idea of essence altogether and remaining at the empirical

level. It thereby avoids tradition-bound conformism and outdated metaphysics but only

by treating the logic of technology as an ontological principle. Today we can design our

technological “chalices” any way we wish and this seems a liberation. But liberation has

a price: one-dimensional thinking cannot recognize inherent potentialities and so can

offer no guidance to social reform. To what can we appeal for criteria? What, for

example, are the grounds for preferring respect for nature to its ruthless exploitation,

freedom to domination?

The core of the problem is once again the concept of essence. Like Heidegger,

Marcuse dismisses any return to Greek metaphysics. But unlike Heidegger, he refuses to

reduce all essential thinking to the contemplation of the process of revealing. Instead, he

seeks to reconstruct the concept of essence historically. Ancient philosophy joined logos

to eros, theoretical abstraction to striving toward the good. But it lacked historical self-

consciousness. The temporal dynamic it found in things was specific to an individual or

species. Each type of thing had its own essence, and, although these essences were

objects of striving, they themselves did not exist in time. Hence ancient philosophy

arrived at a static conception of eternal ideas. The fixed nature of its essences

corresponds to its own lack of historical self-consciousness, its inability to conceive of

becoming as the fundamental ontological determination.

Today such an unhistorical conception of essence is unacceptable. We have learned

that human beings make themselves and their world in the course of history. Not just

individual things are caught up in time, but essences as well. If we are to revive the

language of essence today, its conceptualization must therefore be historical. Marcusean

historicism is rooted in the materialism of the Marxist tradition. Dialectics, as a logic of

the interconnections and contexts revealed in historical strife, offers an alternative to

ancient dogmatism and modern positivism. Hegel’s dialectic is in fact an attempt to

achieve the very reconstruction of essence Marcuse requires. Hegel’s Logic dissolves the

traditional distinction between essence and appearance. Things do not have fixed

essences separate from their manifestations because things are not themselves stable and

fixed. Rather, they belong to a field of interactions which establishes their inner

coherence and their boundaries. These interactions are a source of tensions that drive

things forward toward their developmental potentialities. For Hegel, potentialities are

inscribed in things but do not constitute them as independent Aristotelian substances.

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Instead, the constellation of their present connections gives a direction to their

development.

Once Marcuse joins the Frankfurt School, this original Heideggerian Hegelianism is

overlaid with a messianic concept of the future derived from Walter Benjamin. Now the

future is not simply a human creation but a redemptive possibility interrupting the

continuity of history. The essential potentialities, while remaining rationally grounded in

social analysis and critique, delineate this redemption, revealing the world in its truth. As

Adorno writes, “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of

despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the

standpoint of redemption.….Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange

the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will

appear one day in the messianic light….Consummate negativity, once squarely face,

delineates the mirror image of its opposite”.

All this determines the shape of Marcuse’s later critique of technology. He is neither

hostile nor indifferent to technology but calls for its radical reconstruction. Marcuse

remarks that in a liberated society “certain lost qualities of artisan work may well

reappear on the new technological base”. And he refers to “The Greek notion of the

affinity between art and technics” to illustrate his thesis that technology can be redeemed

by the imagination. Although Marcuse does not use the term, the idea of techne, now

reappears as the basis for a new type of world relation, grounded in a life affirming

“sensibility,” or existential project. This project would instill technology with the mission

of realizing the potentialities of human beings and things. Reason itself would be

transformed, recovering the progressive promise of the Enlightenment against the present

catastrophe. Thus redeemed, reason would transcend the opposition of technique and

values, just as does techne.

Like Adorno, Marcuse turns to aesthetics for some trace of negativity in the face of

the success of capitalism at integrating its opposition. This turn belongs to a long

tradition, particularly strong in Germany, of aesthetic opposition to the status quo. In

Eros and Civilization he identifies beauty with that which is "life-enhancing." "For the

aesthetic needs have their own social content: they are the claims of the human organism,

mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment" denied by the established society. The

"ugliness" of modern societies is not merely unsatisfying to the senses of sight and

hearing but offends against the "life instincts," i.e. against a wide range of needs that

cannot be channeled into profit-making and war.

An Essay on Liberation develops this position in a surprising way. Marcuse''s

argument there is rooted not in the study of anti-capitalist struggle but in the history of

the artistic avant gardes. His aesthetic theory attempts to recapitulate the turning point in

the development of modernism when radical experiments in overcoming the split

between art and life proliferated in the first years of the century. On Marcuse''s view,

technological civilization can only be released from the bind it is caught in by a return to

the promise of those early avant gardes. This aesthetic transformation is now possible,

Marcuse argues, because the very wealth of modern societies has rendered their

repressive organization obsolete.

Marcuse’s argues that once increasing wealth releases society from the struggle for

existence, perception can transcend the given toward unrealized potentialities

foreshadowed in art. Art has anticipated the realization of these potentialities in

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imagination for thousands of years. They “cannot possibly be given in the immediate

experience which prevails in repressive societies. They are given rather as the horizon

under which the immediately given forms of things appear as ‘negative,’ as denial of

their inherent potentialities, their truth”. In such societies, the aesthetic imagination

produces images that serve as the normative context of what is revealed in sensation.

Now, in an advanced society, the sheer technical possibility of the realization of these

norms destabilizes the structures of class rule and the underlying forms of experience and

individuality on which it is based. At this higher stage of economic and technical

development, the aesthetic ceases to be a “horizon” of appearance and begins to structure

perception itself. In the emerging “aesthetic Lebenswelt ” the senses take on the utopian

function of art. With this “new mode of experience” “the imagination [turns] into a meta-

political power”.

The earlier Hegelian-Marxist argument that establishes the “second dimension” of

essence theoretically now becomes practical, existential. Sensation itself has a normative

aspect inseparable from its truth value. Marcuse writes that the violation of nature

“offends against certain objective qualities of nature — qualities which are essential to

the enhancement and fulfillment of life. And it is on such objective grounds that the

liberation for man to his own humane faculties is linked to the liberation of nature — that

‘truth’ is attributable to nature not only in a mathematical but also in an existential sense.

The emancipation of man involves the recognition of such truth in things, in nature”.

The use of the term existential here, like Marcuse’s references to an “aesthetic

Lebenswelt,” invites a phenomenological interpretation he does not elaborate. Instead, he

leaves us in suspense, wondering precisely what he means. Clearly, the existential truth is

not rationally validated in scientific research (“mathematically”). What makes it an

existential truth must be its experiential character. Marcuse seems to intend a truth that is

revealed in experience rather than one that is proven by experience. But in what modern

philosophical framework other than phenomenology does this make sense? By failing to

draw on that framework Marcuse appears to advocate a na?ve reenchantment of nature

rather than the existential ontology he actually intended but did not develop.

How would all these changes rung on Heideggerian themes have appeared to

Heidegger himself? He never commented on Marcuse’s later work but we do have one

hint of his view of Heidegger-Marxismus. In 1969, Heidegger met with a group of friends

in Le Thor, Provence. The record of their discussions has been published in a volume

entitled Four Seminars. Here we find the only reference to Marcuse in Heidegger’s

published writings. He notes that production is defining for the “world” in Marx, and

further, that production is a type of praxis. “Reversing Hegel’s idealism in his own way,

Marx requires that being be given precedence over consciousness. Since there is no

consciousness in Being and Time, one could believe that there is something Heideggerian

to be read here [in Marx]! At least Marcuse had understood Being and Time in this way”.

What is implied in this derisive remark about Marcuse? Marx claimed that the

fundamental relation to being is not consciousness but praxis. Being and Time similarly

describes the human relation to the world as fundamentally practical. In his student days,

Marcuse noted the parallel and read Being and Time as the key to Marx. But Heidegger

himself goes on to dismiss productionist metaphysics. Being, he argues in his later work,

cannot be understood through the model of technical making. This is the stance

consistently maintained by the later Heidegger which he projected back onto his early

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work.

The Aristotle course gives the lie to this self-representation. Heidegger was not a

consistent critic of productionism. In fact much of Being and Time was inspired by

Aristotle’s account of techne. He told his class in 1931: “We have to clarify for ourselves

what it signifies that man has a relation to the works that he produces. It is for this reason

that a certain book called Sein und Zeit discusses dealings with equipment; and not in

order to correct Marx, nor to organize a new political economy, nor out of a primitive

understanding of the world”. Thus Marcuse was not mistaken in interpreting Being and

Time as a productionist text, and hence also in finding Heidegger relevant to Marx.

Marcuse remained true at some level to an earlier Heidegger the later Heidegger rejected

and concealed.

Marcuse’s aesthetic radicalism in his own later work is intricately intertwined with

these repressed themes in Heidegger. In my view, there remains much in Marcuse that is

theoretically incomplete precisely because he refused either to drop these

phenomenological themes or to develop them phenomenologically. Marcuse’s aesthetics

of technology introduces a fatal ambiguity in his thought. At first it seems that he follows

the usual Marxist formulations in which potentialities are objective properties of society.

But in the late Marcuse potentialities are revealed aesthetically, that is, to an attuned

subject. Such a subject, technically engaged with the potentialities of its objects, is

analyzed for the first time not in Marx but in Heidegger’s phenomenological

interpretation of Aristotle. Only a phenomenological account of values in action can

make sense of the notion that aesthetics provides the normative basis for the

reconstruction of technological rationality. And when Marcuse imagines aesthetics

incorporated into everyday sensation as a critical force, he implies a phenomenological

conception of experience. It is not unreasonable to suppose that such a conception of

experience could be reconciled with the sort of objective considerations brought forward

in Marcuse’s social theory. But he does not pursue this line and falls between the two

alternative interpretations of potentiality, an existential-aesthetic interpretation and a

Marxist notion based on an evaluation of social forces.

Why did Marcuse fail to explain the links between his early work under Heidegger’s

influence and his later work? He could not go back to his existential roots after the “Fall

of the Titans of German philosophy”. Heidegger’s betrayal stood as an absolute barrier

between Marcuse as a Marxist and the other great trend of 20th century European thought,

phenomenology and existentialism. The split between these trends now appears less

significant than it did before they were both overshadowed by postmodernism and

poststructuralism. Perhaps they were not opposites but frères ennemis with too much in

common not to be in rivalry. Sartre’s later work represents the one great failed attempt to

synthesize the contending trends in the framework of a philosophy of consciousness. I

believe that philosophy of technology could have offered another possible synthesis that

was never developed to its logical conclusion. To demonstrate this, I attempt in my new

book to break through the barrier between these trends and make explicit a remarkable

theory of techne initiated by Heidegger, continued by Marcuse, and suppressed in the end

by both.