Walking

Review: Walking on Two Legs: On The Very Possibility of a Heideggerian Marxism
Reviewed Work(s): Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History by
Andrew Feenberg
Review by: Ian Angus
Source: Human Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Nov., 2005), pp. 335-352
Published by: Springer
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Human Studies (2005) 28: 335-352 ? Springer 2005
Book Review Essay
Walking on Two Legs: On The Very Possibility of a Heideggerian

Marxism
Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger andMarcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption

of History. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.
The 1960s and 70s provoked a revisiting of the relationship between phe
nomenology and Marxism that had surfaced before in the work of Jean-Paul
Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir around the jour
nal Les Temps Modernes, Lucien Goldmann, French Heideggerian Marxism
(Kostas Axelos and Michel Henry), Enzo Paci and his associates in Italy, and
others. New works such as Karel Kosik's Dialectics of the Concrete which
was associated with the Prague Spring appeared. The US. New Left journal
Telos was important in this rethinking and the 1971 article "Phenomenological
Marxism" by Paul Piccone set the stage for a new, anticipated synthesis. We
may make a preliminary distinction in the history of this relationship between
those who approach phenomenology primarily with Heidegger in mind and
those for whom the main reference is Husserl. A Husserlian Marxism tends to
begin from his late work on The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen
dental Phenomenology and construct a synthesis with a Marxian critique of
capitalist rationality. It seeks a higher rationality not superimposed upon expe
rience but concident with the all-round, free development of human capacities.
Heideggerian Marxism, in contrast, tends to begin from the phenomenology
of human labour and tools in Being and Time in order to extend it through
Marx's account of the capitalist labour process and the late Heidegger's cri
tique of modernity as technology. Of course, from a Marxist standpoint, both
the critique of capitalist rationality and the critique of labour in class society
were understood as necessary and complementary elements of the critique of
alienation. However, the supplementation of Marxism by phenomenology it
self presupposed that the Marxist critique of capitalism had entered into crisis.
Though a new synthesis was anticipated - which would walk on the two legs of
phenomenology and Marxism - its current absence indicated the importance
of whether it was approached from the side of rationalism or that of labour,
reason or practice. The theory of alienation that Marx inherited from Hegel is
thus the largest optic within which phenomenological Marxism succeeds or
336 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
fails. Marx expected that the destitution of workers under capitalism would be
the impetus for its own reversal. The historical disappointment - or perhaps
one should say more cautiously, the terrible delay - of this expectation led
both to the supplementation of Marxism by phenomenology and the attempt
thereby to re-assert the reversal of alienation by phenomenological means.
One of the figures often mentioned in this context, but rarely investiga
any detail, was Herbert Marcuse. His early association with Heidegger,
shift to the Frankfurt School's critical theory of society, and his later notor
as the "guru of the New Left" made him seem a protean, if not ecclect
figure. Many studies of Marcuse have appeared over the intevening years
several of his students have tried to carry his ideas forward, but until
no systematic study of Marcuse has addressed his role in the relationsh
tween Heideggerian phenomenology and Marxism. Andrew Feenberg 's
Heidegger and Marcuse does exactly that and it does it brilliantly. More
it is concerned not only with the history of ideas whereby phenomenology w
supplanted by critical Marxism in Marcuse's development, nor the contin
subterranean influence of phenomenology in his later work, but mainly
the philosophical question of the adequacy of a (Heideggerian) phenome
logical Marxism as such, and the political question of the pertinence of
a philosophy to the conflicts and absences of our own time.
Feenberg's book uses the history of ideas as its spine, with chapters
Heidegger's accounting with Plato and Aristotle in the 1920s (when Mar
was preparing his dissertation under Heidegger's direction), Heidegger's
development (especially the 1954/1977 essay "The Question Concer
Technology"), Marcuse's turn to Hegel in his dissertation and the later bo
Hegel Reason and Revolution, and the influence of Georg Luk?cs on Mar
It concludes with two chapters analyzing "aesthetic redemption" and
question concerning nature" in Marcuse's later, post-World War II, wor
is a thorough, detailed and rich history which allows Feenberg to mak
philosophical and political arguments in the context of an appreciation
critique of Marcuse's work.
The most broad basis for comparison between Heidegger and Marx is t
critique of modernity (also known as capitalism). The Marxism of the 1
had discovered a problem with Marx's dialectic of subject and object th
derwrites the anticipated reversal of alienation. This dialectic was intend
unite the objective critique of capitalist industry and economy with subj
revolutionary will, but history had by then shown that Marx's synthesis
against its intentions, remained "merely theoretical." Continuing crises
capitalist economy not only did not provoke revolutionary consciousness
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY 337
more often produced a turn to the Right against what Marxists called the "ob
jective interests" of the working class. Marxist philosophers had to address the
historical divergence of subject and object within a theoretical resolution of
their relationship. It is for this that Marcuse turned to Heidegger. He thought
that Heidegger's concrete phenomenology of human practice (Dasein) could
fill the absence in Marxist theory.
Not that Marxist theory could take over Heideggerian phenomenology en
tirely unaltered. In order to fill out the abstract nature of Heidegger's account
of Dasein, Marcuse interpreted it more socially in terms of class and more
historically in terms of the master-slave dialectic (80-1). Even much later,
Feenberg argues, a Marcusian concept such as "solidarity" can be seen as
a concretion of Heidegger's concept of "authenticity" (93). Marcuse's dis
sertation, written under Heidegger's direction and later published as Hegel's
Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, aimed at this re-jigging through the
concept of "life." Feenberg claims that this text must be read with an eye to its
strategies and absences - a position to which anyone who has written a dis
sertation will have some sympathy. It doesn't mention Heidegger or Dasein,
though the word "ontology" in the title is a clue to its inspiration and the use of
the term "life" goes back to Dilthey's term that influenced Heidegger (51 ). The
dissertation ended Marcuse's apprenticeship with Heidegger and presciently
introduced Hegel to provide the missing historical and social concreteness and
well as serve as a code word for Marxism (68). The dissertation thus opened
the door to Marcuse's shift to the Frankfurt School and the increasing influ
ence of Hegel, Freud, and art to express the synthesis of subject and object
in a tensional and kinetic concept of "life." For Marcuse, this ended his turn
to phenomenology, although, as Feenberg shows, its influence persisted in
an underground fashion. One-Dimensional Man can be properly understood
only as a Marxist response to Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Tech
nology," an influence that is much more pervasive than the single reference
would suggest since it supports Marcuse's key concept of a "technological a
priori" (Marcuse, 1964: 153-4).
Despite his key revisions intended to bring Heidegger's phenomenology
of human practice closer to a Marxist emphasis on society and class, Marcuse
came to the conclusion that it was necessary to abandon the attempt to syn
thesize phenomenology and Marxism. This much was apparent as early as
Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Feenberg takes considerable
care to unravel the Heideggerian and Hegelian threads in this text, concerned
as he is to maintain that it represents neither a straightforward abandonment of
phenomenology for Hegelian Marxism (against Marcuse's self-interpretation
and as Marxist accounts often claim) nor a simple maintenance of an un
transformed Heideggerian Dasein analysis. The point of connection between
these two threads is, as Lucien Goldmann (1977) has already shown, the 20th
century philosophical project shared by Heidegger and Luk?cs to address the
crisis of European civilization through "a concrete historical ontology based

on human finitude" (48) which would reveal the "ontic-ontological status of
the human practice of making" (49). This project stands on two legs because
"for Hegel as for Heidegger, being appears in producing itself" (50).
Marcuse was the lone thinker of the 1920s who thought, for a short while,
that these two legs could walk together. Later attempts at a Heideggerian
Marxism would need to sustain a similar position, though none of them,
curiously, took their bearings from Marcuse's early work. Despite his obvious
sympathy for this position, Feenberg does not rush to an easy synthesis. He
clearly pinpoints the main difference. Let me quote this key passage in full.
In Heidegger, the contingency of the relation of Dasein to world is never

overcome. At most Dasein^ resoluteness enables it to be itself in the face
of its 'thrownness.' Just as Dasein in Heidegger falls into a world, so in
Hegel Spirit 'falls into otherness,' but unlike in Heidegger it 'overcomes
this through "labor," and thus returns to itself. This whole process, which
constitutes the Being of spirit, does not happen to spirit or take place with
it; rather it is grasped and comprehended by spirit and is carried out and
sustained via this cognition.' The process of revealing in Hegel is concrete,
as labor and self-recognition in the object of labor. It is also social insofar
as spirit is the life of a people and not just of an individual. History then
is alienation and return from alienation to a mediated unity with the other.
(52)
The embedded quote here is from Marcuse's Hegel s Ontology and the Theory
of Historicity (1987: 222). It shows that Marcuse's turn to Hegel - first per
haps as a supplementation but then, at least in his own view, as a substitution
- was because he rejected an existentialist contingency of worldly experi
ence in favour of the Hegelian necessity of the alienation story grounded in
a Marxist ontology of labour. Feenberg shows in detail how the basic con
cepts of Marcuse's thought at this point represent a unique reckoning with the
critical and ontological task of 20th century philosophy based on Heidegger's
and Hegel's different readings of Aristotle. I can only note three related points
of importance in this context: (1) Marcuse was skeptical of Hegel's absolute
and read him as an atheist (58); (2) Essence is dialectically constructed as
the unrealized potentiality of historical existence (59); (3) Marcuse insisted,
against Hegel, that cognition be understood as life and not the reverse (64).
Thus, the absolute is understood as a way of life that is "the unity in differ
ence of subject and object" (67). It is this Hegelian synthesis, understood as a
dialectic of self and otherness, a falling into alienation and return to self, that
Marcuse judged capable of overcoming the historical contingency and neces
sary inauthenticity of Heidegger's Dasein. It is the notion that the productivist
and practical ontology necessary to addressing the 20th century crisis can be
successfully completed only if production is understood as self-production,
labour as self-making, and externality encompassed within an expanded self,

such that a dialectical reversal of capitalist objectification can be expected.
One might note parenthetically that it was actually Karl L?with, Heidegger's
first doctoral student, who was the first to criticize - in his Habilitationsschrift
entitled Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (1928) - the key con
flation of social existence with inauthentic existence in Being and Time such
that the possibility of an authentic sociality was excluded in principle (Wolin,
1995:4,6). This perhaps serves to indicate that this criticism is not dependent
upon a Marxist affirmation that alienation can be overcome as such.
At this point in his text Feenberg inserts a chapter focussed on Luk?cs
to show that Marcuse's search for a concrete dialectic based on an ontol
ogy of production responded to the current crisis in Marxism. Unlike Hegel
and Heidegger, who began with a productivist ontology and yet abandoned
it, Marcuse's interpretation of the absolute as life aimed to solve the split
between subject and object in contemporary Marxism through "a form of
self-consciousness which is both the revelation of a world and the transfor
mation ofthat world" (80, emphases removed). Feenberg 's thesis in the next
two chapters is that Marcuse's later work continues to search for such a revolu
tionary consciousness without a satisfactory solution. In his aesthetic theory,
for which he is probably best known, "the imagination is obviously derived
from the model of art but it paints not just the canvas but all of nature" (97). For
Feenberg, the most promising element of Marcuse's late work is that on tech
nology. He argues that "Marcuse's notion of an aesthetic criterion for the new
technical logos [should] be interpreted as an attempt to articulate a substan
tive, future oriented conception of democracy" (109). At this point he links his
own philosophy of technology to a critical interpretation of Marcuse's relation
to Heidegger and a continuation of the project of a Heideggerian Marxism.
Feenberg criticizes Marcuse for conflating the scientific concept of nature
with the lived experience of nature and claims that, consequently, Marcuse
wrongly tied a change in the direction of technology to the Utopian idea of a
new scientific conception of nature. In a famous essay J?rgen Habermas ( 1970)
criticized Marcuse in exactly the same way Habermas' point was to assert the
unsurpassable character of the objectification of nature in modern science. As
a consequence, the whole of Marcuse's project of the liberation of an aesthetic
sensibility was rejected and the dominant voices of the Frankfurt School turned
against Marcuse for a sober procedural democracy. Dissatisfaction with such
disillusioned sobriety has necessarily turned back to a re-evaluation of earlier
figures such as Marcuse and Adorno. A recent re-evaluation of this crucial
episode in the history of the Frankfurt School by Samir Gandesha (2004:
195, 201, 205) rightly notes the two sources of Marcuse's position, Marxism
and phenomenology, and roots the effectivity of Habermas' critique in "a
marginalization of the world-disclosive conception of language," indicating
that a positive appreciation of Marcuse's work depends upon an appreciation
of the role of phenomenology in disclosing the lived world. Feenberg seeks to

rescue Marcuse's aesthetic sensibility through a phenomenological concept of
lived nature that cannot be collapsed with scientific nature. Thus, he is able to
argue for the relevance of aesthetic sensibility to the philosophy of technology
without incorporating Marcuse's Utopian call for a new science. This also is
worth quoting in full.
Why did Marcuse follow this path? That, I think, is a consequence of the
way in which he mixed a Heideggerian critique of technology with the
early Marx's notion of the alienation of nature. Scientific nature becomes
the object of transformative practice when reinterpreted in these terms.
The result is no more plausible today than were Marx's similar conclusions
in 1844. Marcuse would have avoided this outcome had he pursued the
phenomenological approach at which he hints to its logical conclusion.
Then he would have been able to ground his critique of technology on the
lived experience of nature independent of science. (116)
As carefully as the way was prepared for this conclusion, it hit me like the last
page of an Agatha Christie novel. Unlike all other Marcuse commentators (as
far as I know) Feenberg argues not only for the persistence of phenomeno
logical themes in Marcuse's later work, but that the failure to acknowledge
this influence made it impossible to fulfil his chosen task. Feenberg suggests
that the theme of the liberation of the senses would be better grounded in a
phenomenology of the sensual character of the lived body than in Marx's 1844
Manuscripts (125), that technology could be better understood as "the mate
rial correlate of human action" (126), that the dead-end of the call for a new
science would not be necessary (126), and, most important, that his notion of
an "aesthetic synthesis of experience" could be productively developed (128).
This outlines an unrecognized Marcusian contribution to phenomenology in
which "social critical standards would become ... available as structures of
perception and action" (131). The secret is this: though the story is told for
ward and structured by intellectual history, the philosophical argument pushes
the Marcusian project backward to reveal a missed opportunity. Feenberg 's
conclusion aims to do nothing less than reverse Marcuse's path from phe
nomenology to Marxism while at the same time radicalizing phenomenology
toward a critical aesthetic of everyday life.
But was this missed opportunity a real possibility?
Could Marcuse have developed an explicit phenomenological Marxism to

explain his theory of potentialities? His early Hegel interpretation could
have provided a starting point. Recall that in Hegel's Ontology, the struc
tures of perception would be relative to the practical relations established in
the labor process. ... A phenomenology of the aesthetic Lebenswelt could
have been developed to explain the anticipated transcendence of affirmative
culture (132).
Feenberg 's answer is clear. Marcuse missed an opportunity that was a real
possibility. "In Hegel Marcuse found a way of squaring the circle of moder
nity. ... Dialectics now establishes the ontological priority of what Heidegger
analyzed as everydayness but it does so in the more complex form of the
living and working community, alienating itself and returning to itself in the
course of history" (136). Despite the fact that both Marcuse and Heidegger
saw Marcuse's turn to Hegel as a withdrawal from phenomenology, Feenberg
tends to read such judgments in purely situational or personal terms (xiv).
He must do so to maintain the current possibility of a Heideggerian Marxism
that interprets the analysis of Dasein as accomplished through a historical
dialectic of labour.
II
But can a phenomenology of the body's aesthetic relation to the world gr

a dialectical relation of subject and object? If it cannot, then the revers
alienation that is purportedly prefigured in capitalist objectification is
dermined. One would return again to the unmediated duality of cap
objectification and (absent or merely voluntarist) revolutionary will, an a
ation without reversal that could not consistently be called alienatio
longer - for what is alienation without return? The tripartite story -
out-from-self, expansion of possibilities in externality, return from alien
to self at a higher level - and all the language and conceptual structure
goes with it, has to be abandoned if the return cannot be phenomenologi
grounded. We may ask: is it the task of phenomenology to ground the
component of Marxism that Marxism itself could not ground? Or is the
toward phenomenology from within Marxism to require a profound re
within Marxism itself? Not just of orthodox Marxism and its abandonm
of subjective revolutionary will as Paci and Piccone claimed, but of the
mediation between objectification and subjective will and desire that gro
the conceptual apparatus of alienation itself. Paci deftly showed the simi
between the part-whole relation analyzed by Husserl in Logical Investig
and the particular-universal status of the proletariat under capitalism, bu
doesn't justify the leap to characterizing it as "alienation," thereby assu
precisely what is to be shown (1972: 326-7). Paul Piccone ends his es
which was written under Paci's influence, with the same ungrounded as
tion (1971: 31). If one doesn't take the conceptual structure of the alien
story for granted, what would one be left with?
Heideggerian Marxists have tended to hide this issue behind a Heidegg
inspired exegesis of Marx's texts. Kostas Axelos, in his account of the d
opment of tools and machines into "technicist civilization," asserts that i
"made life and labour unbearable." The key twist is that "capitalist techn
poisons and alienates everything, and only the negativity that is implicated in
its very essence will be able to furnish the antidote that can reconcile men with
a social and human civilization and technique" (Axelos, 1976: 82, 84). But a
poison need not be an alienation if an alienation demands a reversal. A poison
could simply kill. That there is a negativity in the essence of capitalist techni
cism is exactly what needs to be shown. What could manifest this adequately
enough for a theory and convincingly enough for a political practice?
When Michel Henry, also mired in exegesis, claims that "the reversal of
the teleology of life in economic teleology is, in its turn, reversed," he sets
that claim on what seems to me an excellent understanding of Marx's critique
of political economy: "the lack of autarchy of economic reality, the fact that,
unintelligible by itself, it is always founded upon a reality of another order
by which it is determined and to which it refers" (1983: 232, 270). But this
is not an account of alienation and return (though perhaps the difference is
obscured by his language). It is an account of the parasitical nature of economic
representations and, perhaps we may say after Heidegger, of all systems of
representations, on a more fundamental creative stratum of life. Henry's vision
of socialism is of the "acual becoming of social substance, the fact that it
henceforth merges with the life of men instead of being lost somewhere beyond
it in the irreality of abstraction - as if the tie that unites individuals could
be separated from each one of them [i.e. in exchange]" (1983: 298). The
recovery of subjective praxis from its loss in objectified representations is thus
a grasping of the fundament of human creative activity itself such that "the
demand for transparency [of social relations under socialism] is nothing other
than the phenomenological milieu immanent to individual life... the rejection
of all transcendence, the refusal to allow the social relation to be constituted
beyond this life ... the assertion of the positive character of life" (Henry, 1983:
300).l In my view this is a brilliant Heideggerian interpretation of Marxism
outside the figure of alienation through the conceptual homology of Marx's
critique of political economy and Heidegger's critique of representation.
This interpretation was made possible only by the thorough investigation
of the phenomenology of manifestation undertaken earlier. That investigation
concludes in this way: "There exist two specific and fundamental modes in
conformity with which the manifestation of what is takes place and is man
ifested. In the first of these modes, Being manifests itself to the outside, it
makes itself unreal in the world_In the second of these modes, in feeling,
Being arises and reveals itself in itself, integrates itself with self and experi
ences self..." (1973: 684). One may thus read Henry's subsequent book on
Marx as an overcoming of the separation of the two modes, which Marxists
would call subject and object, by the primacy of the creative fundament. I
do not know if Henry's terminology of modes is meant to carry the allusion
to Spinoza, but it clearly has the merit of pointing to the phenomenologi
cal attempt to overcome the subject-object dualism of modern philosophy.
Hegel and Marx attempted to do this also, of course, but through dialecti
cal synthesis rather than phenomenological reduction. Such a Heideggerian
Marxism is no longer an account of alienation and return in which that which
is made into object is re-appropriated by the subject at a higher level. It is a
story of the parasitism of representations, of ideology as the attempt to con
ceal the creative fundament of representation as a factor (e.g. labour-power
as labour) within systems of representations, of the "return" toward the cre
ative fundament itself. This phenomenological return is not a Hegelian one
that can capture its point of departure. It is ever-present "under" represen
tations and can be recovered by a phenomenological dismantling (Abbau).
This understanding of the critique of representation can also be utilized to
show the parallel between ecology and the critique of political economy -
between the two relations labour/labour power and wilderness/nature (Angus,
1997: 186-97). Can there, then, be a r?gime of the fundament, an organi
zation (like socialism, perhaps) that can be separated from representation?
To maintain so is to confuse the phenomenological turn with the Hegelian
Marxist one. Henry does not confuse them, but then his communism takes
the form of a machine society producing a superabundance of goods without
human intervention (1983: 306),2 a liberation from labour not o/labour. One
must conclude that, because any r?gime requires a system of representation,
and because systems of representation are parasitic on the creative fundament
that produces them, there can be no r?gime of the creative fundament itself.
This understanding grounds a conception of a limited "ideological" r?gime in
which the ever-presence of the creative fundament is systematically obscured.
While this can indeed be made to correspond to one ideal of socialism as an
automated leisure society, the point in this context is that it precisely does not,
and cannot, return, through a reversal, the objectification of labour to its living
praxis.
The point of my excursus into Axelos and Henry is to show that
Heideggerian Marxism is least successful when it understands itself as a re
instatement of the Hegelian dialectical unity of subject and object that could
ground a revolutionary will within capitalist objectification. The separation
between these is a historical fact that needs to be understood rather than re
instated by a theory, as if such re-instatement could be anything more than
self-delusion. Rather, it is most successful when the critique revises Marxism
phenomenologically and generalizes it into a critique of systems of represen
tation. But the price of this revision is the recognition that there can be no
system of the creative fundament - which Marx adumbrated as 'labour' -
itself, that parasitic systems will and must persist. It would require a long,
but important, disgression to suggest that the political form of 'socialism' to
which such a critique corresponds has already shown signs of emergence in
the new social movements of our time (Angus, 1997: 176-85, 191-2; Angus,
2000: Part III; Angus, 2001).
Since Feenberg's argument works chronolog

first chapter seeks to establish that Heid
lows him not only to surpass Greek metaphy
metaphysics was defined and held back by i
this argument that is the basis for the clai
phy of technology is not only a regional in
and ecological effects of technology (a comm
taking-over of the task of philosophy per s
As important a philosopher of technology a
the regional justification (1984: chapter 1),
the basis for the contemporary relationship
philosophical question that Feenberg addres
Marcuse to Heidegger is the possibility that
Michel Henry (1985) has called a conceptio
assume the mantel not only of a critique of
definition of the task of philosophy itself.
Heidegger claims that the model of techn?
Greek metaphysical distinctions: physis-p
first distinction separates that which comes int
comes into being through human activity. T
knowledge in human making. Thus, one may
of knowledge in human activity that groun
forms and those which operate without a pri
actor. Marx utilized this Greek conception,
when he pointed out that "what distinguishes
of bees is this, that the architect raises his s
erects it in reality" (1970: 178). This prior id
of useful things is the essence that activity b
too difficult to see that techn? underlies the ex
case of objects ofpoi?sis. The more importan
claim is that techn? also underlies the existe
of objects of physis, or nature (as one would
Plato applied the existence-essence distinct
by claiming that the static world of ideas is
sure to the kinetic world of experience. Th
Heidegger later called metaphysics, should be
of the model of techn? for subsequent Greek
phy outright insofar as it depends on these t
is techn? that holds together the distinction
kinesis, movement, then it reigns through a
time. Feenberg summarizes:
What conclusion do we draw from these historical considerations on anceint
Greek philosophy? I will be provocative and say that the philosophy of
technology begins with the Greeks and is in fact the foundation of all
Western philosophy. After all, the Greeks interpret being as such through
the concept of technical making. This is ironic. Technology has a low status
in high culture but it was actually there at the origin ofthat culture and, if
we believe the Greeks, contains the key to the understanding of being as a
whole. (8)
This is not the only irony. Feenberg's wording obscures a key point here. It
was not the Greek understanding itself that techn? was the model for phi
losophy. This is the Heideggerian interpretation of the Greek understanding.
Greek philosophy itself, as Feenberg himself documents, denied a distinction
between that which is true of that which produces itself and that which is
true ofthat which is produced by humans (8). It is this denial which allows
Socrates to argue against Callicles (and, in general, the instrumentalism of the
rhetoricians) that human action has an essence just like non-human things.
Techn?became the model for Greek philosophy precisely insofar as it was not
understood to be drawn from human action but, instead, as applicable to be
ing as such. Greek philosophy battled the conventionalism of the rhetoricians
(nomos) with distinctions that were themselves universalized from the model
of human action (logos). In taking over this Heideggerian understanding of the
nature of Greek philosophy since the theory of ideas, Feenberg must commit
himself to the coincident Heideggerian notion that such philosophy involves
a forgetting of the prior origins of philosophy - his version of the Marxian
and Nietzschean claim that philosophy does not know itself. Feenberg does
not appear to be aware of this, however, as indicated by his puzzlement as to
why Heidegger would refer to physis as a form o?poi?sis even though it isn't
in his Greek grammar (141, footnote 5). To this extent, the notion of being as
production cannot be regarded as an original formation of philosophy.
One should also underline that the Heideggerian reading of Greek philoso
phy is by no means self-evident. The work of Hannah Arendt, for example, took
off from precisely the same point but argued that the collapse of techn? and
phron?sis, art and politics, in Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle "channels
what according to Aristotle pertains to the ethical realm and is connected with
the plurality of human affairs into a debate strictly dealing with ontology" The
root of this misinterpretation was that "the pollution of sophia by poi?sis and
techn? explains that the Greek ontologist grants more attention to the being
of nature than to his own being. The reason is that Being in the sense of the
subsisting presence of nature is that which the activity of production never
ceases presupposing and taking for granted" (Taminiaux, 1997: 6, 8). This
Arendtian critique of Heidegger underlies all attempts (Gadamer, Habermas,
etc.) to separate a realm of praxis from techn? and assert the political steering
of contemporary technology It is not only consistent but reinforcing to say
both that Heidegger collapsed Aristotle's praxis into techn?, and that techn?
was the model for revealing. But if one wishes, as did Arendt, to rescue an
Aristotelian concept of politics as praxis to counterpose to techn?, then it
must be shown, against Heidegger's challenge, how the concept of praxis is
not indebted to techn? in its fundamental conception. Feenberg's account of
Marcuse's path seems the stronger option here. It is, at any rate, the more
Heideggerian.3
The understanding of post-Platonic Greek philosophy as governed by the
model of techn? allows a clarification of the specific character of modern phi
losophy. Whereas the Greeks did not question the origin of essences, modern
historicism has revealed the ungrounded character of the eidos. Thus, mod
erns tend to read Callicles with more sympathy than Socrates (11, 41) and,
one might say more generally, modernity is a universalization of the instru
mentalism of Greek rhetoric in a new partnership with techn?. "The modern
technological revealing sweeps away all concepts of essence and leaves only a
collection of fungible stuff available for human ordering in arbitrary patterns"
(39) because "we have discovered the active involvement of human beings in
the meaning of beings even if we express this insight in a distorted form as sub
jectivism and nihilism" (39). Here is the claim to 'distortion' again- a concept
to which any appropriation of the Marxist legacy must give some meaning.
Perhaps it is the very fact that, while modern historicism has discovered the
activity of humans in the question of essence, the fact of this involvement has
been there since Greek philosophy. Most modern thinkers have confused these
two elements, whereas Heidegger's analysis of Greek philosophy as techn?
allows them to be distinguished. It is likely this confusion which leads to the
subjectivism and nihilism which Feenberg rightly diagnoses.
There is another characteristic of modern technology that Feenberg passes
over in silence, but which is essential for connecting Marx's critique of political
economy to the Heideggerian critique of representation: its systematicity. It
is precisely the overcoming of essence by fungible stuff, techn? by Gestell,
that knits the various productive activities into a whole. This whole is not the
aggregate of a number of similar activities considered together, but an integral
whole of activities that mutually refer to each other and function in relation
to each other: a system. The idea of a system is an essentially modern idea
(Heidegger, 1985:29ff). In Henry's words, "if we consider the unconcealment
proper to modern technology as it is described by Heidegger, we notice that
it is one and accomplishes itself globally: within this unconcealment, the fate
of the activity of the one who works is identical to that of the raw materials, of
form and of its end. The essence of technology is like a structure: the elements
co-constituting it receive their intelligibility and their definition from that
structure" (1985: 9).
As Heidegger said, modern technology also contains the other possibil
ity "that [man] might experience as his essence his needed belonging to
revealing" (quoted, 40). This would be the Heideggerian version of the re

versal that Hegelians call negativity and which grounds their application of
the form of the alienation story to history. But note that while a "belonging to
revealing" is, in a certain sense, the corresponding negativity of the "forgetting
of Being" in technological civilization, it does not promise a reversal whereby
the structures of technological civilization become de-alienated or "authentic"
(Eigentlich). What possibility does it open? This is a crucial, but less-explored
issue. One reason that it is less-explored is that Heideggerian Marxists have
been too quick to confuse this Heideggerian "negativity" of open-ness with a
Hegelian one and to opt for the supposed dialectical solution. As I have docu
mented above, Feenberg is by contrast clear about the difference between the
Heideggerian and Hegelian forms of appearing in production.
A contemporary philosophy of technology thus contains the related possi
bilities of a critique of technological civilization and a renewal of philosophy,
but one which is more of an open field than the expectation of determinate
negation. There may be a Heideggerian Marxism, but only if it rids itself of the
inherited Hegelianism of dialectical Marxism and confronts the phenomenon
of appearing anew.
IV
How stands it, then, with Feenberg 's central claim that a re-evaluation
Heideggerian-phenomenological element of Marcuse's thinking can gro
contemporary philosophy of technology? Feenberg 's argument that M
turned to Hegel to ground a notion of revolutionary reversal that cou
grounded from a Heideggerian position is compelling. His tracing of li
phenomenological themes and conceptualizations in Marcuse is concep
deft and interpretively convincing. But the argument, precisely in b
back the phenomenological component, tends to leave unresolved, not
even addressed, the underlying issue of the relation between the H
theory of alienation and the phenomenological kinaesthetic of the live
(Landgrebe, 1981). We have the two legs, but can't be sure if the creat
walk.
From this point of view, the intellectual history that Feenberg carefully
traces might fall victim to the philosophical problem that drives it forward. Al
though Marcuse might well have underestimated the phenomenological traces
in his later work, he might have been right on the basic point that his adher
ence to a Hegelian version of negation requires departure from Heidegger and
phenomenology. To stand the question on the other leg: Does the philosophy
of technology that can be grounded by bringing back phenomenological ki
naesthesis allow one to spot an incipient revolutionary will and ground an
expectation of reversal? "Catastrophe and redemption" reads the sub-title to
the text. Should it be catastrophe or redemption? Poison without antidote?
There are two possible philosophical options here and a divide in the politi
cal road: either one wants to heal Marxism by rediscovering Hegelian negation
within the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics (redemption) or one recog
nizes that phenomenological kinaesthesis grounds neither Hegelian negation
nor revolutionary will (catastrophe). Despite the brilliance of Feenberg's in
tellectual history and philosophical analysis, I think that he muddies this
alternative. The basis for the two legs, he rightly points out, is that "for Hegel
as for Heidegger, being appears in producing itself" (50). But, for Hegel, the
negativity in appearing is manifested as an opposition that grounds a synthe
sis, whereas, for Heidegger, negativity is a withdrawal, a concealment within
unconcealment, that haunts all manifestation as such. Heideggerian negativity
never becomes a second positive and can't be enfolded within a continuous
dialectical movement.
The political divide is between those who seek to find a revolutionary unity
to the plurality of critical social movements of our time and those for whom
this plurality in an unsurpassable historical event.4 The most honest form
of the first alternative is Marcuse's post-Heideggerian path. Feenberg shows
that until the late 1960s it takes the form of a Hegelian-Marxist concept of
potentiality where "potentialities emerge from history and are not bound by
the given form of things" (20). Its philosophical ground is in a historical and
dialectical concept of essence "culminating in the concept of the essence of
man, which sustains all critical and polemical distinctions between essence
and appearance as their guiding principle and model" (Marcuse, 1968: 86).
Later, under the influence of the New Left, he argued for a "new sensibility"
in which the values of life would prevail (20). In all its shifts it attempted
to link emergent social movements to a revolutionary subjectivity. I would
judge this a genuine tragedy, an honest and questing revolutionary sensibility
ultimately held back from confronting the novum of its time by a presupposed
Hegelian negativity, an episode in the historical tragedy of Marxism itself.
Acceptance of the plurality of critical social movements might ground a new
politics: not Heidegger's but perhaps Heideggerian. Feenberg doesn't address
this question in this book, but in another seems to accept the Marxist critique
of new social movements that demands a "class politics" even while he admits
that the labour movement doesn't totalize all social struggles (2002: 62). One
of the crucial issues for a politics of anti-hegemonic coalition is what sense of
universality it might contain instead of "class politics" and, in more practical
terms, whether an anti-hegemonic alliance might emerge from it. I cannot go
into this question here, but I am sure that, if such an alliance should emerge,
Marcuse's ghost will march with it, whereas Hegel's will wait at home with
the negativity.
The philosophical options: To what extent does Feenberg's philosophy of
technology expect a Hegelian return from alienation? To what extent does
it seek the creative fundament uncovered by the critique of representations?
There are two Marcusian threads that Feenberg wants to pull on here: life
and democracy. He argues that the value of "life" in the Marcusian sense is
designed into the technical codes by which a society structures itself around
a technology. "Each such code affirms life within the limits of the technical
knowledge and the repressive structure of the dominant regime. Ethical and
aesthetic mediations play an essential role in this process, integrating techni
cal principles to a design that coheres with social and natural values" (105). In
short, he uncovers the Marcusian historical essence of life (Dasein) within the
social organization of each technology, not (only) within the capitalist social
order as a whole. This philosophical analysis grounds both academic studies
of, and political interventions in, specific technologies with values inherent in
their design and application. If this possibility were sufficiently developed to
disturb the "background consensus that everywhere trumps tradition" (108)
based on technology it would unleash a "substantive, future oriented concep
tion of democracy" (109). Thus, while "there are problems with Marcuse's
approach,... at least it offers a properly modern solution to the conundrum of
rights and goods while promising a path to the realization of more liberating
projects than those of either tradition or business" (110). These proposals con
stitute a valid extension of Marcuse's work in the direction of a philosophy of
technology, but they are largely silent on the philosophical divide that I have
argued must be addressed by any attempt to revive a Heideggerian Marxism.
In this context, one might try to make something of Feenberg 's insistent and
consistent rejection of any return to tradition or pre-modern technologies,
which he interprets as "nostalgia for a pure immediacy of the phenomenolog
ical sort" (1995: 223), or his acceptance of what Stephen Gait Crowell (2001 :
131, 182) has called the "received view" of the relation between Husserl and
Heidegger as a shift from consciousness to experience which prevents him
from bringing the Husserlian critique of modern rationality into relation with
Marxism. But the hints are too fleeting to be conclusive.
For a contemporary philosophy of technology to fulfil the expectation of a
critique of technological civilization and a reformation of the task of philoso
phy itself, it must address two issues that inevitably come with an appropriation
of the Heideggerian critique of technology. The first is the notion that the later
Greek metaphysics of presence involves a forgetting of the prior origins of
philosophy. The second is whether there are limits to a productivist philosophy
itself- a question posed equally by the strand in contemporary environmental
philosophy which asserts that all beings have an intrinsic worth apart from
their instrumental value to humans and by Heidegger's later conception of
thinking as releasement (Gelassenheit). One wonders whether a Husserlian
Marxism might shed some light on these issues through its critique of one
sided rationalism.
Feenberg's book doesn't address these questions, in large part because of
the failure to ask directly whether the two legs of Marcusian Heideggerian
Marxism can effectively walk together. I have suggested that they can't, that
either Hegel or Heidegger has to go. To this extent, the philosophical task of
the book is obscured by the organizing spine of intellectual history. I think
that Feenberg is exactly right about Marcuse's latent Heideggerianism, but
that Marcuse is right that his move to Hegel had to jettison not only Hei
degger but phenomenology outright. Feenberg's philosophy of technology
should be watched with great interest as it takes on the huge task of a cri
tique of technological civilization and a reformation of the task of philoso
phy itself in the manner of Marcuse and Heidegger. This truly stellar book,
which has the great merit of bringing the project of phenomenoloigcal Marx
ism to life again in our own philosophical context, remains as yet unclear on
whether its hopes are Heideggerian or Hegelian, on which way the "revealing"
will go.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida has pointed out that philosophies of life must "weigh carefully" whether
they understand that "the specter weighs, it thinks, it intensifies and condenses itself within
the very inside of life, within the most living life, the most singular (or, if one prefers,
individual) life" with specific reference to Michel Henry (Derrida, 1994: 109). When Karl
Marx claimed that "labour is the living, form-giving fire ... the transitoriness of things,
as their formation by living time" he seems to have assumed, rather than shown, that the
present as "living time" could throw off the weight of the "dead past" (Marx, 1973: 361).
But can life manifest itself, if manifesting is to humans, without death? And if not, human
society must make a place for death, as it always has, and the free society can be free from
neither death nor the past. And, again, how could such a burden be understood through the
figure of alienation?
2. While this is Henry's logic, I do not agree that any ideal of socialism must require an end to
creative praxis. Rather, it implies the possibility of appealing outside the system of repre
sentation to the creative fundament - which would be a political act of Abbau, dismantling,
deconstruction - without expecting that this appeal could itself become systemic. This would
require new forms of democracy and political discourse.
3. It is interesting to point out that while both Marcuse's and Arendt 's interpretations of Greek
philosophy focus on techn?, due to Heidegger's influence, Adorno 's interpretation focusses
critically on the identity of thought and being in Greek philosophy. This interpretation
obviously parallels that of Marx's critique of Hegel. In contrast to the Heideggerian critique,
Adorno sees the account of kinesis in Aristotle as promising because "where matter and
form touch movement must always and necessarily arise" (2001: 99-100, 84). Even if this
touch is not sufficient to bring matter into philosophy and unsettle the identity of thought and
being, it does represent the most advanced point of Greek metaphysics for Adorno because
it is the source for the concept of mediation.
4. One might argue that I've set the bar too high, that the emergence of a revolutionary reversal
can't be shown theoretically. For myself, I have once expected enough from Marxism to
demand an account of the point from which its own specificity derives. If it doesn't work,
if theory and praxis do not become a world-revolutionizing unity, surely it's better to go
elsewhere. But beyond myself, it's not a question of predicting the future, but of showing the
revolutionizing moment itself at work in the present. If such a moment is not manifested as
such, then Marxism deflates into carping that the age of freedom and equality hasn't arrived.
One does not need much theory to see this.
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Ian Angus
Department of Humanities
Simon Fraser University
Website: www.ianangus.ca

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Review: Walking on Two Legs: On The Very Possibility of a Heideggerian Marxism

Book Review Essay

Walking on Two Legs: On The Very Possibility of a Heideggerian

Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger andMarcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption

crisis of European civilization through "a concrete historical ontology based

In Heidegger, the contingency of the relation of Dasein to world is never

labour as self-making, and externality encompassed within an expanded self,

of the role of phenomenology in disclosing the lived world. Feenberg seeks to

Could Marcuse have developed an explicit phenomenological Marxism to

But can a phenomenology of the body's aesthetic relation to the world gr

Since Feenberg's argument works chronolog

revealing" (quoted, 40). This would be the Heideggerian version of the re

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