Heidegger and Marcuse: A history of disenchantment

Abstract

In a 1977 interview with Frederick Olafson, Marcuse denied that any aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy was redeemable, suggesting that its latent Nazism was clear to him ‘ex-post’. This tiny phrase raises a significant problem for Heideggerian scholarship: the equivocal nature of hindsight’s seeming clarity. Playing with the notion of disenchantment, I retrace Marcuse’s disenchantment with Heidegger, from the Olafson interview to their 1947–8 exchange of letters, to Marcuse’s little-known ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ and finally to Being and Time itself, to argue that Heidegger’s theory of death and guilt provides an answer to the problem of the ex-post: a way in which we can recreate from beginning to end the disenchanting story of how Heidegger’s Nazism informed his thought, yet still retrace from end to beginning the way in which Heidegger’s thought was fertile philosophical territory in the first place.