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October 30, 2006
Is there a relationship? Was there an engagement in a philosophical sense?
Michael Eldred says that
from the standpoint of the respective issues of Marxian and Heideggerian thinking, there is, at least for me, an unsettling point of contact, a locus of striking similarities between Marx's and Heidegger's texts which absolutely challenges us to delve into the issue. It is a kind of overlapping between Marx's late texts and those of Heidegger's with regard to their respective assessments of the modern epoch: the epoch of the bourgeois-capitalist form of society on the one hand, and the technical age on the other, as they reveal themselves respectively in the texts of each thinker, reveal remarkable resemblances, despite all their profound differences. It will be worthwhile comparing the language of the set-up (Gestell) with that of capital, and closely and persistently investigating both these languages (and the thoughts they express) in their relatedness as well as their essential difference
Does Marx continues the philosophical tradition ratehr than questioning it? Is that how Heidegger sees Marx?
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It's easy enough to see that in both Marx and Heidegger one can find a certain apocalyptic tone -- a pervasive sense that one is living on the threshold of a new age -- and perhaps a melancholy reminiscent of Moses, who was privileged to see the Promised Land but doomed never to enter it. In short, there is frustrated apocalypticism to both of them.
On the other hand, Marx unfolds this tone through painstaking analyses of economic conditions, whereas Heidegger unfolds this tone through no less painstaking analyses of etymology. And so I'm far from convinced that the frustration that arises from the constant postponement of the eschaton marks a convergence in matters of substance.
Lucien Goldman, I've heard, has argued that Heidegger's Being and Time could be read as an idealist riposte and appropriation of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness. This interpretation has been endorsed by Habermas, I believe. But even so, this should not obscure the fact that it is an idealist riposte. Nor does Heidegger ever really break out of idealism, even when -- as in his later texts -- he sees it through to its dissolution.