As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” from Telos 4 (Fall 1969).
Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” (1928) continues his efforts at fusing a contemporary form of Marxism with the work of his doctoral supervisor Martin Heidegger and his phenomenological project in Sein und Zeit (1927). The central tenet that Marcuse uses to construct a thread between Marxism and phenomenology is the analysis of the concrete and the correctness of knowledge as a truth related to this concreteness. The significance of Marxism as a theory of analysis is its self-reflexivity, the means by which it reflects on the process of historicity itself and, in addition to this, the processes of becoming that it undergoes as a result of its historical analysis. The difference here is that phenomenology claims to investigate the essences of things but does not concern itself with its own method or with a dialectical approach between the abstract and concrete, which inevitably occur as one attempts to capture a representation of an object. For Marcuse, Marxism
is a science to the extent that the revolutionary activity which it seeks to bring about and direct requires the comprehension of its historical necessity and of the validity of its own nature. Marxism comes to life in the inseparable unity of theory and practice, science and action; and every Marxist analysis must retain this unity as its most important guiding principle. If it attempts to validate its logical consistency, universal congruence, or its timeless cogency from any standpoint over and beyond Marxism, it misses the point from the very beginning. Its truths are not cognitive but actual. (3)
The unity of its science grounds itself in the concrete through the unity of its mediation between abstract and concrete phenomena. However, the process of understanding the concrete inevitably brings into the fore the question of historicity because the objects that one encounters are discovered to possess historicity themselves and one then has to abstract from the concrete historicality to situate those same objects. Therefore, in essence Marcuse will then draw a parallel between phenomenology and Marxism concerning this question of historicity itself.
Following Heidegger’s fundamental analysis set forth in Being and Time, we will then attempt a phenomenological interpretation of historicity. Before inquiring into the question whether the doctrines of Historical Materialism adequately emphasize the phenomenon of historicity, we will raise the problem of the method of interpretation. This historicity of existence requires a correction of phenomenology in accordance with the dialectical method, which reveals itself as the proper approach to all historical subject-matter. In so doing, Marxism also tentatively clarifies the dialectic. Only at this point can we deal with the phenomenology of Historical Materialism. Also, the Marxist doctrines pertaining to the structure of historicity can be interpreted in the light of the phenomenon of historicity itself. (4)
The ultimate foundation of historicity in both Heidegger’s phenomenology and Marxism is a primary reason for comparison for Marcuse. To answer the question of the most immediate and thus the historical is the most profound for Marxism and phenomenology; as a consequence, any derivation from this radical basis would be absurd.
“To be radical is to grasp things at their roots. But the root for man is man himself.” Action is grasped as “existential,” i.e., as an essential attitude of, and deriving from, human existence: “All societal life is essentially practical. All mysteries, which lead theory to mysticism, find their rational solution in human praxis and in the comprehension of this praxis.” Every action humanly “alters the circumstances,” but not every action alters human existence. Human existence does not necessarily change with a change of circumstances. Only radical action changes both the circumstances and human existence. (6)
Therefore to ignore the essence of existence is to result in mysticism, a lesson that is the central teaching of both phenomenology and Marxism. In this way, human existence is determined by its concreteness, the production of itself determines the means by which it has to produce objects and materials for its continuing existence, and this constitutes the “determinations of historicity” (7) itself. Now, what seems may not exist in Marxism, especially in the text of Capital, having non-phenomenological imports and seemingly only preoccupied with the economic and philosophical implications of commodity-exchange, Marcuse turns to the earlier texts of Marx, which were discovered in his time giving birth to a phenomenological version of Marx, namely, The German Ideology (1846)[1] and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The distinctive feature about Marxism itself, as with Hegel’s system, is that it in itself comprises many different philosophical aspects and tenets that all interrelate, but which may be read as separate insofar as they are phases or aspects of Marxist analysis as a whole.
The recognition of the fundamental significance of this framework begins with The German Ideology. Initially this method is purely phenomenological. The predicament of “historical man” should be concretely outlined; only what can be shown in this context will be valid. “The presuppositions with which we begin are neither arbitrary nor dogmatic. They are real presuppositions which permit abstractions only in the imagination. They are real individuals, their activities and their material conditions of life. . . . These presuppositions can therefore be established by purely empirical means.” (8)
Thus while Marx in Capital may possess the phenomenological imports of concreteness, man himself, and the nature of his environment (Umwelt) the economic analysis builds upon these components not in a dialectical progression as such, but adding to the more Hegelian elements of alienation. Man and his relations in the early Marx are not entirely reducible to their economic conditions or situated around them; there is a certain concreteness of the nature of man that embeds them as individuals in their activities and their material conditions of life. Thus the material production of life for man is what concerns Marxism and its phenomenological descriptions of the essence of what it means to be a human as well within a society.
Originally, production as reproduction always appears as maintenance and continuation of existing society according to the natural conditions of changing modes of production. Along with “material life,” society also reproduces its “ideations” (idealte). “The mental production of ideas and images is initially interwoven into man’s material activities and intercourse.” The fundamental historical phenomenon indicates that in society ‘spiritual’ realities are ‘dependent’ and based on ‘material’ realities. From an historical perspective, law, morality, art, science, etc., do not appear as abstract, a-historical regions. They arise from, and are rooted in, the concrete character (Sein) of a concrete society: “Men produce thoughts, ideas, etc. But these are real, active men, conditioned by a specific development of their means of production and of the corresponding forms of social intercourse.” (9)
Marcuse is attempting to link’s immediate sociality to the concreteness of phenomenology, which it attempts to capture in its method. Marcuse will use this parallel construction to then introduce the work of Heidegger by clarifying the fundamental conditions of human existence as the meaning of being is very close in the Marxist understanding of the species essence of man in his being.
Heidegger starts out by seeking to clarify the question of the meaning of being. But the entire work deals only with a privileged form of being, of “existence” (Dasein), i.e., human existence. “This being, which we ourselves always are and that among others, raises the question of the possibilities of being, we describe as existence.” The forms of being involving existence are described through the many stages of the phenomenological investigation, Initially, the constitution of being involving existence appears as “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein). As such, being and world exist together. The problems of transcendence, reality, and the demonstrability of the world in their traditional contexts turn out to be pseudo-problems Existence is always “being-in-the-world.” This is because the world and its existence is already given, and it is given in its accessibility. Existence initially reveals itself not as cogito, which subsequently becomes ego, but rather as both, in the sense “I-am-in-a-world.” Knowledge as the shifting of a (worldless) subject into an externally existing world ceases to be a puzzle when this knowledge is shown to be typical of original mundane existence. (12–13)
The question of what kind of being Heidegger is outlining here, or more precisely who and what are considered beings under human existence, is problematized here in Marcuse’s discussion. While Heidegger’s analysis concerns the fundamental conditions of human existence, it is devoid of historical objects and any form of explicit onto-political program, at least it denies any kind of Marxist metaphysics of class, society, or capitalism itself. However, Marcuse is correct to maintain the critique that although the absence of any explicit political coloring, Heidegger’s apparently neutral or objective phenomenological description is nonetheless clouded by a vision of who and why certain humans are privileged more than other human beings especially in relation to Heidegger’s problematic ethical component of being-with or Mitsein. After outlining Heidegger’s project in his Being and Time, Marcuse then begins his critique of phenomenology by the means of claiming that although investigating historical existence of man and society leads to the materiality of historicity itself and nothing else, phenomenology neglects this fact insomuch as they treat the objects of their analyses as outside of historicity. In conclusion then, for Marcuse a phenomenology can only truly relate to the things themselves by recognizing the material historicity:
“Phenomenology” means to let things reveal themselves. But the objects themselves are already in historicity. This sphere of historicity begins as a concrete historical situation, and is already present in the formulation of the question. It encompasses the unique personality of the questioner, the direction of his question, and how the object first appears. To be sure, there is a scientific method which can originally grasp its object abstracted from historicity as if they were a-historical (mathematics and mathematical physics). It can and must do this, precisely because its intent is not historicity. But this omission of historicity by all sciences concerned with the character and the meaning of human existence which approach their subject-matter as “relevant”, leads to failure. (21)
Notes
1. Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundations of the Dialectical Theory of Society,” in Reason and Revolution, Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1955), p. 272. Marcuse’s footnote reads as follows: “Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ v; see The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, International Publishers, New York 1939, p. 198, and Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx, New York 1936, p. 293.” The German Ideology was first published in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
