Heidegger and Marcuse: A history of disenchantment

The 1977 interview and the question of the ex-post

In 1968, Jürgen Habermas wrote of Herbert Marcuse, ‘I believe that it is impossible to correctly understand the Marcuse of today without reference to the early Marcuse. Whoever fails to detect the persistence of categories from Being and Time (1927) in the concepts of Freudian drive theory out of which Marcuse develops a Marxian historical construct runs the risk of serious misunderstandings’ (Habermas, 1968: 10–11). If this is true, Marcuse runs the risk of seriously misunderstanding himself. Two years before his death, in a 1977 interview with Heidegger scholar Frederick Olafson, Marcuse would reject as unsalvageable his early attempt to construct a synthesis between Heidegger and Marx. Seeking to draw out any lingering interest in Heidegger’s thought, Olafson instead provoked Marcuse stridently to reject that any aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy could be redeemed. Heidegger’s Nazi-sponsored rectorship of Freiburg University, Marcuse argues, is ‘one of the errors a philosopher is not allowed to commit . . . a betrayal of philosophy as such’ (Marcuse and Olafson, 2007: 122). Heidegger’s existential analytic no longer provides any applicable concepts, Marcuse continues in ‘Enttäuschung’ (Marcuse, 1977) because it ‘is overshadowed by death, by the entire interpretation of existence as being toward death, and the incorporation of death into every hour and every minute of your life’. ¹

Whether these two critiques are separable is a question worth considering. The late Marcuse’s rejection of Heidegger’s project as ‘overshadowed by death’ might inextricably be tied to the history of his disenchantment – to an ungenerous reading of Being and Time created by Marcuse’s attempts retroactively to discover whether his mentor’s Nazism should have been apparent to him from the beginning. Marcuse’s historical and philosophical trustworthiness on the matter hinges upon a seemingly throwaway comment from the Olafson interview (Marcuse and Olafson, 2007). Responding to a question about the role of individual death in Heideggerian thought, Marcuse turns the question to his ex-post understanding of Heidegger’s Nazism:

It is very good that you bring up the tremendous importance the notion of death has in his philosophy, because I believe that is a very good starting point for at least briefly discussing the famous question of whether Heidegger’s Nazism was already noticeable in his philosophy prior to 1933. Neither in his lectures, nor in his seminars, nor personally, was there any hint of his sympathies for Nazism. So his openly declared Nazism came as a complete surprise to us. From that point on, of course, we asked ourselves the question: did we overlook indications and anticipations in Being and Time and the related writings? And we made one interesting observation, ex-post (I want to stress that, ex-post, it is easy to make this observation): in Being and Time the essential characteristics of existence or Dasein . . . give a picture which plays well on the fears and frustrations of men and women in a repressive society – a joyless existence: overshadowed by death and anxiety; human material for the authoritarian personality. I see now in this philosophy, ex-post, a very powerful devaluation of life, a derogation of joy, of sensuousness, fulfilment. And we may have had the feeling of it at that time, but it became clear only after Heidegger’s association to Nazism became known. (2007: 120–1)

It is unclear precisely what Marcuse means in stressing that ‘ex-post’ it is easy to make this observation. One might think he is simply drawing attention to the historically grounded accuracy of retroactive judgements. My instinct is that he is instead making the opposite case: drawing attention to the insidious ease with which we can retroactively misread texts by unconsciously fitting them into a particular historical lens. Given that Marcuse is making a complicated case regarding the implicit Nazism of Heidegger’s thought, and stressing that no one in 1927 suspected Heidegger’s political sympathies, it would be strange to supply a gloss to ‘ex-post’ emphasizing its ease of observation. It seems, rather, that Marcuse wants to stress that, ex-post, it is easy to make this observation because there is an unspoken treachery to hindsight’s seeming clarity.

This offers a powerful challenge to the rest of the interview, and to the traditional story of Marcuse’s rejection of Heidegger: Marcuse’s damning attack on Being and Time as filled with existential categories that assume a repressive society overshadowed by death is easy to make retroactively – but not at all obvious if one reads Being and Time in its 1927 context. Moreover, the fact that we read Heidegger’s text retroactively could be impeding that act of contextualization, leaving us with ex-post assumptions to unlearn if we are to recapture the text’s significance. If, therefore, we read Marcuse’s seemingly throwaway line as revealing a powerful, semi-conscious ambivalence regarding the ease of reading Nazism into Heidegger’s early thought, then the whole interview should be rethought in light of the dual logic of the ‘ex-post’ and the structure of disenchantment. It seems possible, Habermas declares, and Marcuse seems half-consciously to imply, that the later Marcuse, disillusioned with Heidegger and devoted to Marxism, risks misunderstanding the way in which his early writings on Heidegger might have provided a more accurate account of his mentor than the one offered to Olafson.

This interpretive point bears not just on how we should read the 1977 interview and Marcuse’s later critiques of Heidegger, but on how we understand the contemporary polemic regarding the release of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte. ² With the publication in late 2014 of a number of Heidegger’s little black notebooks, the fact of Heidegger’s Nazism has re-emerged with a newfound intensity. His diaries from autumn 1931 onwards reveal that even after he had lamented his Nazi-supported rectorship of Freiburg University as the ‘greatest stupidity of his life’, he still retained his prior political delusions (Heidegger, 2014). Many of the notebooks have yet to be published, or translated into English, but some of Heidegger’s denouncers believe that their evidence will shatter the reputation of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. These claims seem overstated – Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is no secret, denounced from the 1930s on by Frankfurt School figures such as Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, defended as extrinsic to his phenomenological existentialism by Hannah Arendt (1978), and vigorously attacked more recently in such works as Victor Farías’s Heidegger et le Nazisme (1987). Regardless of how revelatory the black notebooks ultimately prove to be, this is a moment for Heideggerian scholarship in which it is pivotal to be particularly clear about the stakes of Heidegger’s Nazism, and the historiographical problem of the ex-post: not so much about whether he was a Nazi or whether his Nazism contaminates his actual philosophy (Marcuse, Karl Löwith, and Adorno have long since made ingenious, compelling arguments to this effect), but rather about whether, and how, we can productively engage with his thought given these ostensibly damning concerns. ³

In this article I will try to provide a new answer to Olafson’s question regarding the role of individual death in Heideggerian thought by retracing Marcuse’s disenchantment to its less dismissive roots. To do so, I will analyse Marcuse’s writings in a counterintuitive manner, from chronological back to front. I do so on the precept that there is something valuable in doing intellectual history in a way that ends not with the disenchantment of Marcuse’s later writings, but with the promise of the early ones. If one told this story forwards, ending with Marcuse’s vehement rejection of Heidegger for his totalitarian focus on being-towards-death, one could not do justice to Marcuse’s 1977 concerns about the ex-post. I will therefore turn from the Olafson interview and the ‘Enttäuschung’ essay to Marcuse and Heidegger’s exchange of letters in the years immediately following World War II; then to Marcuse’s little-known ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ (Marcuse, 2005b), written in Geneva in 1934; then finally to Being and Time itself, to argue that Heidegger’s theory of death and guilt, combined in the notion of anticipatory resoluteness, provides us with a more precise response to Olafson’s question than that of Marcuse in his late disenchantment. The claim is not at all that we should discredit later attacks on Heidegger that link his Nazism to his writing; it is rather that with a thinker whose political life so damningly threatens his philosophical legacy, in addition to the historical and philosophical project of recreating the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophy might have been tainted by National Socialism from the very beginning, there is a valuable historical move to be made in the reverse temporal direction, bracketing the impulse retroactively to read our ex-post conceptions into every corner of his thought. In this vital moment of Heideggerian scholarship, one can find in Marcuse’s writings on Heidegger and the peculiar Heideggerian notions of death and guilt an answer to the conflicting aspects 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 thinking from his early writings, yet still retrace from end to beginning the way in which Heidegger’s thought was fertile philosophical territory in the first place.

The letters – an error a philosopher cannot commit

As Marcuse discloses in the Olafson interview, in 1977 he and Heidegger had not communicated for almost 30 years since their post-war exchange of letters. Having fled Germany in 1933, Marcuse spent eight years in New York at the Institut für Sozialforschung’s branch at Columbia University before moving to Washington, DC in 1942. There he worked for the government, first helping to produce anti-Nazi propaganda at the Office of War Information, then working with the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. At the war’s end, Marcuse returned from exile in America to Germany in his capacity as an OSS operative. Heidegger, barred from teaching because of his association with the Nazi Party, was spending time in Freiburg and at his vacation home at Todtnauberg. He would not be reinstated in his teaching position at the University of Freiburg until the winter of 1950. In April 1947, Marcuse visited Heidegger’s cottage at Todtnauberg during a three-month trip to Germany and Austria, an encounter he would later describe as ‘not exactly very positive’ (Marcuse and Olafson, 2007: 116). Nonetheless, Marcuse and Heidegger began an exchange of letters, Marcuse from Washington, Heidegger from Freiburg, which would sufficiently alienate the two that they never corresponded again. Having become a US citizen in 1940, Marcuse lived there, teaching at various institutions as a political theorist, and speaking in support of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, until his death in 1979. Heidegger, granted Emeritus status at Freiburg, spent his last 20 years writing and teaching on technology, art and the nature of thought, and giving guest lectures at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Art, until his death in 1976.

In ‘Enttäuschung’, Marcuse muses, ‘today it seems inexcusable to me to dismiss Heidegger’s support of the Hitler regime as a brief mistake or error. I believe that a philosopher cannot make such a “mistake” without thereby disavowing his own, authentic philosophy, and philosophy as such’ (1977: 162–3). Even 30 years earlier, with the war fresh in his psyche, this had not determinately been the case. The tonal and logistical dissonance of the letters reveals the extent to which Marcuse was fundamentally uncertain at the time whether Heidegger had committed an irredeemable transgression. In a letter from 28 August 1947, Marcuse resolutely condemns ‘the man who identified with a regime that sent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers’, and writes that ‘common sense . . . refuses to view you as a philosopher, because philosophy and Nazism are irreconcilable’ (Marcuse and Heidegger, 1991: 29). Yet within these same letters his implications undercut this certainty. ‘Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from such identification [with the Nazi regime]. Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?’ Marcuse asks, as if there were still adequate time for Heidegger’s reputation to be changed. ‘I am sending a package to a man from whom I learned philosophy from 1928–1932’, he writes, before acknowledging that the odious philosopher of 1933–4 cannot be detached from the earlier Heidegger (1991: 29). Marcuse seems, on the one hand, convinced that Heidegger’s political misdeeds have irrevocably undermined the import of his philosophy, and, on the other, concerned that Heidegger should retract lines from his 1933 speeches and renounce Nazism. The letters primarily call for Heidegger to apologize for his misdeeds – as if doing so would supply chastened air for Heidegger’s philosophy to breathe once more. Yet if Marcuse truly believes that Heidegger’s political misdeeds have defied philosophy as such, then presumably no apology could exculpate him, nor justify reading his work. ⁴ The Marcuse of the letters, then, is still on the cusp of abandoning Heidegger’s thought completely; the dissonant inflections of his writing suggest that the 1948 Marcuse has not yet altogether conceded that Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism is an irredeemable philosophical error.

Heidegger’s own tonal discrepancies suggest a similar uncertainty about whether his transgression is irremediable. After receiving Marcuse’s package, Heidegger, in a letter of 20 January 1948, conveys his gratitude, noting that he has had the entire contents distributed to former students who were neither in the Party nor had any connections to National Socialism. He ends by thanking Marcuse for openly expressing his misgivings about his teacher, writing, ‘I can only hope that you will someday find again in my works the philosopher with whom you studied and worked’ (1991: 31). Yet if Heidegger’s decision to distribute Marcuse’s gifts appears genuinely penitent, his defensive statements seem an ethically repellent smokescreen. In the same letter he emphasizes that, in all of his lectures from 1933 to 1944, he incorporated a standpoint so unequivocal that, ‘among those who were my students, none fell victim to Nazi ideology’, and suggests that a campaign of false propaganda and nonsensical defamation has been launched against him (1991: 30). Such remarks are less off-putting in their sentiment than in their use. That Heidegger’s students did not themselves become Nazis is relevant – but not as a piece of exculpation. In the most repugnant such smokescreen, Heidegger responds to ‘the grave, justified accusations [Marcuse] express[es] about a regime that murdered millions of Jews’ by adding ‘that if instead of “Jews” you had written “East Germans”, then the same holds true for the Allies’ (1991: 30). This flagrant equation of German and Allied misdeeds likely came from Heidegger’s personal situation in 1948: in light of Stalinist purges, the brutal expulsion of ethnic Germans throughout central and eastern Europe after the war, and the fact that the Soviet Union was still holding German prisoners of war (including both of Heidegger’s sons) under inhumane conditions, Heidegger must have been struck deeply (Maier-Katkin, 2010: 176). Yet the self-justificatory nature of these claims damns his case: Heidegger seems simultaneously to sense that his philosophical position is salvageable and to feel that he has done something irreparable; by alternating between perverse tu quoque arguments and contrition at Marcuse’s ‘grave, justified’ accusations, he undermines the force of either.

The letters, then, read as two strings of wild tonal variance vying against one other, rather like a piece of Schönberg or a Beckett play. Each is partially intent on rehabilitating Heidegger’s name, partially uncertain whether that is permissible. Hannah Arendt describes the off-putting tonal dissidence of Heidegger’s post-war correspondence in a letter to Heinrich Blücher: ‘Poor Heidegger . . . I find his letters a touching but false mixture of genuineness, mendacity and cowardice’ (Arendt and Blücher, 2000: 112). That Marcuse in 1948 broke off the correspondence is no surprise; that this curious discordant exchange provided any firm answer to the question of whether Heidegger had committed ‘an error a philosopher cannot commit’ seems less clear. There are, undoubtedly, acts a philosopher can make – speech acts, physical acts, political acts – that fundamentally betray his or her own thought, or even philosophy itself. Marcuse seems justified in accusing Heidegger of this. But in these situations of later misconduct, the initial text and philosophy remain unchanged, with an original context that remains the same, though harder to see. And as such, there are very few, if any, errors a philosopher can commit that automatically invalidates the work that came before: for while a philosopher’s reputation is tainted or crushed by shameful, hypocritical actions, it remains possible to work backwards to the rich thought that, in the case of Heidegger, Marcuse described even in 1934 as ‘one of the most fertile avenues of the new philosophy’ (Marcuse, 2005a: 160).

‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ – concrete philosophy, being-towards-death and the racist worldview

In the spring of 1934, Marcuse wrote ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’, two years after he and Heidegger had fallen out in confusing circumstances. Marcuse was Heidegger’s assistant, yet for reasons either personal or philosophical, Heidegger objected so much to Marcuse’s habilitation, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, that he rejected it before it was published in 1932. The degree to which their fallout may have been spurred by Heidegger’s increasingly apparent sympathies with the Nazi Party is uncertain (Marcuse, 1987: 251). ⁵ In December 1932, Marcuse left Freiburg to apply for a position at the Institut für Sozialforschung, of which Max Horkheimer was the director. As Marcuse remembers it, ‘because of the political situation I desperately wanted to join the Institute. At the end of 1932 it was perfectly clear that I would never be able to qualify for a professorship under the Nazi regime’ (Marcuse, 2001: 126). On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. With letters of support from Edmund Husserl and Leo Löwenthal, Marcuse was hired at the Institute, but would never work there. In March 1933, amidst a wave of arrests and public book-burnings, a swastika was run up the flag pole of the town hall, the IFS was shut down and a number of Jewish academics dismissed, among them Horkheimer and Adorno. Marcuse left for the branch office in Geneva, where he stayed until moving to New York in July 1934. That he did not stay in close touch with Heidegger in these final months is unsurprising. This 1932–4 period was for Heidegger the most disastrous and most damning of his life. In April 1933, he was elected rector of the University of Freiburg, and in May he joined the National Socialist Party. In April 1934, Heidegger resigned from his rectorship – before Marcuse had finished writing ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’, but not before signing the ‘Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State’ and giving two controversial speeches: a rectorship address in which he referred to the ‘greatness and glory of this new era’ and an interview in a local Freiburg paper in the winter of 1933, in which he wrote ‘the Führer, himself and he alone, is today and for the future German actuality and its law’ (cited in Heidegger, 2010: 48–9).

‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’, written in French and unpublished in any language until 2005, is the first explicit moment at which Marcuse began to separate himself from Heidegger and turn away from his 1928–32 attempts to combine Marxism and Heideggerianism. Like the letters, the text is caught between two extreme positions on Heidegger. Yet, unlike the letters, these polarities are explicitly intended, and reveal a precise ambivalence regarding the text of Being and Time itself. On the one hand, Marcuse exalts the concrete philosophy Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism provides, with its turn away from the transcendental idealism of Neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen. On the other, he attacks Heidegger’s notions of authentic existence and resoluteness towards death as part of a ‘heroic, racist realism’ that harmonized perfectly with the efforts of the Third Reich, the same argument he would recreate in the 1977 Olafson interview. By tracing these two parts of the argument, one can pinpoint precisely where Marcuse’s sense of the ambivalent political implications of Being and Time lies.

Even after his first estrangement from Heidegger, Marcuse still openly admired the concrete nature of Heidegger’s existential analytic. The turn away from the transcendental idealism of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism was, in Marcuse’s mind, the greatest shift in modern German philosophy, and one that lay not with Husserl, as some claim, but with Heidegger alone: ‘Grasping human being, for Heidegger, is not a matter of pure consciousness of the transcendental “ego” as in Husserl, but one of concrete man in his facticity’ (Marcuse, 2005b: 160). This claim that Heidegger’s value lies in his revolutionary concreteness can seem strange to new readers of Heidegger, particularly those steeped in analytic philosophy, but it was almost universally accepted in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. For Marcuse, the fact that Heidegger understands man as essentially historical, and begins not from abstract notions of right, pure reason or the state, but rather from the immediate everyday experiences that constitute our being-in-the-world – idle talk, curiosity, anxiety, fear, our interactions with tools, etc. – opened up rich new regions of philosophical thought. Thus in 1927 when Marcuse read Being and Time, he decided to move to Freiburg to study with Husserl and Heidegger, and began working to combine Heidegger’s concrete philosophy with that of György Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism (Lukács, 1971). Marcuse’s early writings all work towards this project of Heideggerian Marxism. In ‘Contributions to a phenomenology of historical materialism’ (2005a [1928]), he argues that Dasein’s historical thrownness fundamentally grounds the Marxist situation and paves the way for the revolutionary radical act. In ‘On concrete philosophy’ (2005e [1929]), he calls for philosophy to have ‘concrete human existence as its end’, and reads Being and Time as an ontologically wreathed critique of reification (2005e: 37). In ‘On the problem of the dialectic’ (2005g [1931]), he traces a path from Hegel to Marx, predicated on Heidegger’s theory of historicity. And in ‘On the philosophical foundations of the concept of labor in economics’ (2005f [1932]), he tries to recapture a positive place for labour by re-establishing it in the totality of human Dasein. ⁶ It is astonishing, and almost completely unrecognized, that this project continued as late as 1934. Yet for Marcuse in 1934, the ability of Heidegger’s existential analytic to escape transcendental idealism and provide a concrete theoretical grounding for Marxism was so great that even the discovery of his mentor’s Nazism could not fully dampen it. As Marcuse writes in ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’, ‘what Heidegger proposed as a concrete analysis of human existence and its modes of being constitutes one of the most fertile avenues of the new philosophy’ (Marcuse, 2005b: 160). Lukács and Karl Korsch had attempted critiques of reification, but failed sufficiently to ground them in everyday living. Heidegger, in Marcuse’s mind, provided a concrete, ontologically grounded indictment of the way in which social circumstances objectify and commodify our everyday interactions, preventing us from thinking and acting as full, autonomous, self-realized humans: precisely the successful critique of reification that Marxism in the 1920s was so desperately lacking. ⁷

The text, however, does not shy from attacking what Marcuse sees as a clear link between Heidegger’s theory and the ‘political ideology of racist Germany’, by way of Heidegger’s notions of death and authenticity (2005b: 161). In a prescient critique that anticipates by 30 years Adorno’s 1964 attack on Heideggerianism in The Jargon of Authenticity, Marcuse perceives a latent Nazism within the very notion of authentic existence:

Heidegger’s philosophy is wedded to the idea of an authentic existence that is realized through a firm willingness to die for one’s own possibilities. It is here that Heidegger’s existential analytic is transformed into a politics of heroic, racist realism . . . the characteristics of authentic existence – the resoluteness toward death, the decision, the risking of life, and the acceptance of destiny – become the fundamental categories of the racist worldview. (2005b: 161)

While Adorno attacks Heideggerian ‘authentic being’ as totalitarian in its very rhetoric, arguing that the language of authenticity undergirds the Nazi desire for an Aryan race, Marcuse locates Heidegger’s totalitarian yearnings in the central conceptual role death plays within authentic existence. For Marcuse, Heidegger’s claim that we must anticipate death and resolutely hold onto guilt in order to act authentically is akin to the idea that we should be willing to die for our own possibilities. The centrality of death and self-sacrifice therefore forms the fundament of a racist worldview that turns malignant with the rise of the Third Reich: resoluteness toward death, the risking of life and the acceptance of destiny all feed into depraved, genocidal Nazi policies. It is this critique, rather than Heidegger’s refusal satisfactorily to apologize for his political involvements, that Marcuse would later lodge in the Olafson interview and the ‘Enttäuschung’ essay: that Heidegger’s existential analytic is overshadowed by death, that a powerful devaluation of life inheres in the very notion of authentic being. Tracing Marcuse’s denunciations of Heidegger back to their genesis, then, we find that Marcuse sees Heidegger’s work as fundamentally doomed, despite its powerful critique of reification, despite its place as one of the most fertile avenues of twentieth-century philosophy, by a very particular Heideggerian theory: the ‘heroic racist realism’ of death and authenticity.

Death, guilt and the problem of the ex-post

The problem, however, is that this is a clear misreading of Heideggerian death. In Marcuse’s history of German philosophy, we move from neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism to the revolutionary concrete philosophy of Heidegger’s existentialist phenomenology, to its fundamental kinship with the racist worldview of Nazi Germany, all within a few pages, all based on a literal understanding of the concepts of death and authenticity that appear in Being and Time. Despite Heidegger’s potent critique of reification, German philosophy appears mired in disenchantment – while in later decades Marcuse turned to Marxism and Freudianism for the political philosophy he desired, ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ leaves us feeling that the springs of German philosophy have effectively run dry. Yet, I want to argue, if one turns directly to Heidegger’s notion of death and authenticity as it appears in Being and Time, it becomes clear that the critique Marcuse launches in ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ and the Olafson interview is confused, and indeed almost backward. By tracing Marcuse’s critique back to its origin, and evaluating that original argument in detail, one can recapture a way in which Heidegger’s work provided a fertile path for German philosophy in 1934: a way in which Heideggerian death, rather than undermining the ontological critique of reification that Marcuse in his early years found so compelling, actually augments that critique and combats authoritarianism at its theoretical core.

Having examined Dasein in its ‘average everydayness’ in Division One of Being and Time, Heidegger creates an existential analytic of Dasein as a whole in Division Two, examining Dasein’s beginning in guilt and its end in death. This is the theory which Marcuse attacks, but it is in many ways also the political theory of which Heidegger could be most proud. Reading Heidegger’s passages on death and guilt, it becomes less and less clear how he was able to join the Party six years later, except as an act of cowardice and a deep betrayal of his philosophy. Only a Dasein that anticipates its end, death, and resolutely holds onto its beginning, guilt, he argues, can act so as to bring out what it is authentically and wholly, through the process of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. In examining the nature of this complex process, it becomes clear that, far from the grim, literal infatuation with death Marcuse describes, anticipating death and resolutely holding onto guilt are for Heidegger blatantly anti-totalitarian manoeuvres that express an ‘unshakable joy’ in Dasein’s individuality – a joy he himself would betray but which at its philosophical core undergirded the critique of reification Marcuse found so appealing.

Death, Heidegger argues, can be defined as ‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’ (Heidegger, 1962: 289/245). The opacity of this definition has important interpretive significance. To refer to ‘death’ as the end of Dasein is not, as Marcuse reads it, to make a simple claim about the cessation of a human life. For Heidegger, the concept of death is explicitly not a literal concept, but rather a metaphorical one. Neither the biological ending of an animal life (‘perishing’) nor the end of Dasein’s life (‘demising’) constitutes Dasein’s death: ‘Dasein can end [i.e. demise] without authentically dying.’ ⁸ Instead, Heidegger defines death as a ‘way to be’, setting up a contrast between the inauthentic way of life established by das Man and an authentic state of being created when we ‘anticipate our death’, recognizing the possibility of a world without us in it. ⁹ Death, Heidegger argues, ‘individualizes Dasein down to itself’, and therefore ‘makes manifest that all Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our own potentiality-for-Being is the issue’ (1962: 308/263). Death, the possibility of our own impossibility, makes overwhelmingly clear to us that the petty everyday things that concern us, and in particular our concern with acting as das Man acts, are ultimately not required; in death, Dasein is revealed as not ultimately dependent on others, despite having lived in its everydayness according to the social norms of das Man. ¹⁰ The thrust of this non-literal, non-relational role of death is that the place of authentic being in Heideggerian thought, at least in substance, is anti-authoritarian and profoundly aligned with his attack on reification. In recognizing the possibility of my having no more possibilities (which we could imagine as the possibility of the collapse of our world), my relations to those around me are severed, and the essential inadequacy of such beliefs as that I must wear a tie to work (as one wears a tie to work), or that I must support the Führer (as one supports the Führer) is made manifest to me. It is only by constantly anticipating one’s figurative death that Dasein is able to escape the constraints of das Man and instead be authentically itself in a radical freedom:

Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the One-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself . . . in an impassioned freedom towards death – a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘One’, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. (1962: 311/266; bold in the original)

Anticipating death is just one half of authentic being. To achieve authentic being Dasein must not only anticipate its death but resolutely hold onto its beginning in guilt – again not in any literal sense, but by recognizing that it is ‘the null Being-the-basis of a nullity’ (1962: 352/305). This definition, like that of Being-toward-death, is less opaque than it seems, and crucially anti-authoritarian in its metaphorical nature. Dasein in its average everydayness merely acts as das Man acts, which, Heidegger claims, means that properly speaking, no one is acting. When one is mindlessly following the model of one’s neighbour, or one’s general, one is not acting; as such, Dasein is a nullity. Yet Dasein is a ‘thrown’, and therefore null, basis for this nullity; Dasein cannot properly take complete responsibility for its own Being at any given moment because Dasein always finds itself having been thrown into a world that it did nothing to ground. ¹¹ Thus, as Heidegger points out, Dasein is not guilty in the normal sense of ‘having debts to someone’ or ‘having responsibility for something’, but in the existential sense of Dasein’s being the null basis of a nullity (1962: 326/281). One might worry, as Marcuse does, that resolutely holding onto one’s guilt, rather than inspiring an impassioned freedom towards death and life, might instead inspire a nihilistic indifference to living that could harmonize with Nazism: in recognizing itself as the null basis of a nullity, Dasein could be led abjectly to deny that there is any meaningful way to act, and thereby blindly follow any powerful political rhetoric. ¹² Yet while it is of course possible in practise that Dasein might inauthentically adhere to das Man and thereby adopt such a nihilistic indifference towards living, this is explicitly the position Heidegger seeks to counter with his notion of anticipatory resoluteness:

Anticipatory resoluteness brings one without Illusions into the resoluteness of ‘taking action’ . . . and springs from a sober understanding of what are factically the basic possibilities for Dasein. Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility. In it Dasein becomes free from the entertaining ‘incidentals’ with which busy curiosity keeps providing itself – primarily from the events of the world. (1962: 358/310)

By anticipating its death and resolutely holding onto its guilt, Dasein is instilled with a sober understanding of its potentiality-for-Being-a-whole, an understanding that leaves it radically liberated from the inauthentic everyday possibilities of unthinkingly going along with das Man. With a sober anxiety at the possibility of its own impossibility and its own existential status as the null basis of a nullity, Dasein is led not to the nihilistic indifference towards life and death which das Man (or the Führer) might instil, but to the unshakable joy of the possibility of authentic being.

When we trace Marcuse’s argument back to its roots, then, we find that his claim that Heidegger’s philosophy is ‘wedded to the idea of an authentic existence that is realized through a firm willingness to die for one’s own possibilities’, and that therefore the ‘resoluteness toward death, the risking of life, and the acceptance of destiny become the fundamental categories of the racist worldview’ is based on a severely misleading understanding of Heidegger (Marcuse, 2005b: 161). Heidegger is explicitly not concerned in his description of anticipatory resoluteness with a nihilistic or sacrificial notion of anticipating one’s literal death – say by a willingness to die or risk one’s life, or sacrifice the lives of others through a genocidal policy that idolizes some unforeseen authentic future. That literal phenomenon he explicitly designates as ‘perishing’, and it plays no role in Heidegger’s theory of authentic being and the need to free oneself from das Man. Nor is Heidegger concerned with resolutely holding on to one’s literal guilt, for example by accepting one’s destiny because one had no control over the world one was thrown into, and therefore acquiescing to whatever robust political forces govern one’s nation. That literal phenomenon he characterizes as ‘having debts to someone’, and it does not reveal the need to question and ethically ground the political situation into which one is thrown. Marcuse could have launched a compelling argument along the lines of what Adorno would argue in 1964: that the language of authenticity in Heidegger’s work left him open to precisely the sort of rhetoric that Hitler would employ in the 1930s. But the misreading of death Marcuse in fact provided, first in ‘German philosophy, 1871–1933’ and later in the Olafson interview, shows why Heidegger’s theory, despite its problematic rhetoric, seemed compelling in the first place. The positions Marcuse critiques are precisely the unthinking, ‘inauthentic’ adoption of the ways of das Man that Heidegger seeks to counteract with his conception of anticipatory resoluteness; and it is precisely the impulse to reify what are in Heidegger explicitly non-literal phenomena that prevents Marcuse from seeing the way in which, for all the similarity of Heidegger’s language to a Wagnerian rhetoric of authentic Aryan existence, Heidegger’s conception of death and authentic being in its substance augments his critique of reification and cogently opposes the totalitarianism and unthinking acquiescence of National Socialism.

Marcuse’s misleading conception of Heideggerian authenticity and death remained unchanged throughout his later life, hardening over time, so that in the Olafson interview he would declare:

[In Heidegger’s work] authenticity is overshadowed by death, by the entire interpretation of existence as being toward death, and the incorporation of death into every hour and every minute of your life. This again I see as a highly oppressive notion, which somehow serves well to justify the emphasis of fascism and Nazism on sacrifice, sacrifice per se, as an end-in-itself . . . I think the roots of this authoritarianism you can find (again ex-post) in Being and Time, and the heteronomy may not only be that of outside authorities and powers, but also, for example, the heteronomy exercised by death over life. (Marcuse and Olafson, 2007: 120–1)

But while ex-post it is very easy to make such an observation, it is as much a crude literalizing of Heidegger’s theory as it was in 1934, and as antithetical to Heidegger’s affirmation that death and authenticity bring us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being and instil in us an unshakable joy. At this critical moment of Heideggerian scholarship, then, it is perhaps worthwhile to invoke Heidegger’s own notion of anticipatory resoluteness, rather than Marcuse’s disenchanted one. Heidegger too seems to identify the temporal problem of the ex-post, though not in its explicit form: in anticipatory resoluteness, Heidegger calls for a project of conflicting temporal dimensions that addresses the inevitability of our disenchantment. Heidegger’s answer is that we must both constructively anticipate our death and resolutely hold onto our guilt: and it is this theory, latent in the very account of death that Olafson asks for and Marcuse critiques in the 1977 interview, that, I would argue, we should take up in addressing the impossibility of the ex-post. In this precarious moment of Heideggerian scholarship there are two clear projects that might aid each other in their reverse temporalities. One project, motivated by guilt, seeks the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophy fed into his Nazism, working forward from Heidegger’s concepts in Being and Time, the language of authenticity, etc., to Heidegger’s Nazism and the writings of the Schwarze Hefte to show the ways in which it might be problematic for contemporary scholars to employ Heideggerian concepts. The second project, anticipating the collapse of Heideggerian scholarship, imagining a world in which Heidegger is no longer a productive source of analysis, seeks to rediscover the way in which Heidegger appeared to be a fertile avenue for contemporary philosophy in the first place, working backwards from a place of disenchantment to the work’s initial cogency so as actively to retrace and escape the prejudices that belie our current ex-post position. It seems to me that, as regards Heidegger’s political philosophy, we are failing to match the one project with the other: that we should give credence to Habermas and accept the way in which, if we do not actively retrace our contemporary philosophical disenchantments, like Marcuse we run the risk of seriously misunderstanding the nature of our own critical scholarship.