Heidegger & Marx: Marcuse’s Dialectic

marx and heidegger

In this piece republished by CSS, Feenberg develops concepts of liberation within the Heideggerian and Marxian framework as developed by Marcuse. While the Center has found much of Marcuse’s theses to be either unfinished or flawed, it is in the process of understanding the questions posed that the contribution to the literature and the corpus, on the whole, can be found.

Feenberg approaches Marcuse as a ‘Left-Heideggerian’, a category which Abromeit disputes, and instead places Marcuse within the Marxian tradition. The relevance or utility of the need to categorize Marcuse as one or the other is, at first passing, irrelevant. But it is through an understanding of the deep problems within Western academia, censorship, its funding sources, and ‘personality contests’ between the men that academia attracts, that we find the real reasons.

It echoes the treatment and categorization of Nietzsche by Walter Kaufman – the well-known scholar who translated and annotated critical English language versions of works like ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ and ‘Ecce Homo’. His aim is to sanitize Nietzsche, to misrepresent Nietzsche’s views on Rome and Judea, to present Nietzsche as either anti-science or anti-nature, and the core purpose of his ostensible philosemitism.  Yet his introduction of Nietzsche to the Anglophone world defined its interpretation for several generations. But Kaufman’s revisioning of Nietzsche was justified within its paradigm.

How so? If Nietzsche and Heidegger are going to be categorized as worthy subjects of study for their insights and revealed truths, and not as examples of mistakes, Western academia finds itself in the position of also having to categorize them as something other than how they were understood by political actors in the last century.

In the case of Nietzsche, it is increasingly impermissible in Western academia to embrace his call for a transvaluation of values without first changing the real content of his other, though related, ideas. Rather than an apologia, we find a rewriting of the real meaning and historical record.

In the case of Marcuse, Abromeit’s ideological and career commitments in light of the above described conditions prevailing in academia, force a position in which he concludes the best contributions of Marcuse have a lineage traced through the acceptable Marxian tradition and not from its Heideggerian foundation. It is, as we can see not surprising, that Marcuse’s work – the nature of its flawed or incomplete conclusions despite the posing of valid and new questions – also a reflection of the purpose of the Columbia University Institute for Social Research (known also  as the Frankfurt School), which may have influenced or predetermined these errors.

The Center reproduces these for the public without alteration, towards a broader and more meaningful public discourse in this exciting and revolutionary post-academy age.

[Originally titled ‘Marcuse’s Dialectic’ – Forthcoming in Transvaluation of Values & Radical Change: Five Lectures]

by Andrew Feenberg

 

old-english-calligraphy-alphabet-this is how Marcuse began his lecture at the famous “Dialectics of Liberation” conference in London in July, 1967:

 

I believe that all dialectic is liberation…and not only liberation in an intellectual sense, but liberation involving the mind and the body, liberation involving entire human existence…. Now in what sense is all dialectic liberation? It is liberation from the repressive, from a bad, a false system — be it an organic system, be it a social system, be it a mental or intellectual system: liberation by forces developing within such a system. That is a decisive point. And liberation by virtue of the contradiction generated by the system, precisely because it is a bad, a false system. I am intentionally using here moral, philosophical terms, values: “bad,” “false.” For without an objectively justifiable goal of a better, a free human existence, all liberation must remain meaningless — at best, progress in servitude. I believe that in Marx too socialism ought to be. This “ought” belongs to the very essence of scientific socialism. It ought to be; it is, we may almost say, a biological, sociological and political necessity. It is a biological necessity in as much as a socialist society, according to Marx, would conform with the very logos of life, with the essential possibilities of a human existence, not only mentally, not only intellectually, but also organically. (Marcuse 1968, 175-76)

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Transcendent Warfare & Shamanism

© 2019 By Ronald Thomas West

for profit & mass paper media redistribution prohibited

3rd Edition

Foreword

his small work is a short explanation of the fundamental mistake or misapprehension of reality by modern thought. If you’re from the culture that came up with virgin birth, Santa Claus & the tooth fairy, it should be easy enough to understand when your own advances in quantum mechanics call bullshit on everything you were taught is reality, in other words, the Western Cartesian-Platonic based science, right?

Recalling Einstein’s No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it, I’d suggest if this were a cultural phenomenon, and if you could gather all of best brains from the history of Western civilization, the real solution would be to identify and weed out the mistakes of the ‘best and brightest.’ Going to that thought, try solving this problem or even grasping the magnitude of the proposed thesis:

A: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato
-Alfred North Whitehead

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B: The [Plato’s] doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment-theoretical physicist Bernard d’Espagnat

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C: nouns or millennia destructive process objectifyinglanguage, projecting individual identity onto pieces of ones surroundings, or dis- integrating environment; a result of the isolated projection of self or (ego) individuation by Western humanity exclusive of integration to a sentient, aware surrounding, where all environment had been/should be, social-Ronald Thomas West

For those readers more or less stuck in a rut of the Cartesian-Platonic paradigm of reality, I invite a perusal of the following essays as a creative endeavor in social science fiction (and to wonder at what many, many millions of your tax dollars have been spent exploring in the so-called ‘special access programs’ of the American intelligence community.)

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The Humanitarian Aid Industry: Corruption, Neoliberalism and Fraud

sealTranslated by Paul Antonopoulos – CSS Project Director;  MENA and Latin America Research Fellow

Furthering the Critical Deconstruction of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

 

This piece should be read in tandem with CSS’s “What is the Non-Profit Industrial Complex?

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By MisionVerdad – The humanitarian industry circulates $150 billion a year – its main driver is poverty and its key machinery is non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These can accurately be compared to large corporations: they have to beat the competition by securing the greatest amount of donations to snatch markets from other organizations.

80% of NGO funds come from governments. The three largest donors on the planet are the United States, the European Union and Great Britain. This allows them to decide how and where it is invested, consequently they do not choose the poorest countries but where they have a political and/or economic agenda.

These public funds transferred to private sectors not only serve to industrialize neoliberal corruption, but to enhance mechanisms of international intervention that evade the nation-states in favor of the power games developed by transnational economic sectors.

With this, we look at three emblematic cases.

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CSS defends Syria, builds multipolarity at international security conference

SealBy: Jafe Arnold and Paul Antonopoulos – CSS Project Director;  MENA and Latin America Research Fellow.

CSS Research Fellow Paul Antonopoulos speaks at “Threats to Security in the 21st Century: Finding a Global Way Forward” in Lahore, Pakistan

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old-english-calligraphy-alphabet-the international conference, “Threats to Security in the 21st Century: Finding A Global Way Forward”, was held on May 5-6 and hosted by the School of Integrated Social Sciences at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. The Center of Syncretic Studies was represented at the conference, the first of its kind in Pakistan, by Research Fellow Paul Antonopoulos.

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Kaminski on Pavel Gubarev’s “The Torch of Novorossiya”

A Review of Gubarev’s book on the Donbass Revolution and Orthodox-Communist Syncretism

Screen Shot 2016-04-01 at 14.28.35By: Jacek C. Kaminski – translated by Jafe Arnold

Jacek C. Kaminski is a Polish journalist and leftist activist. He is an editor of “Socjalizm Teraz” (Socialism Now), the co-founder of the Movement for Social Justice, and the Polish representative of the International Human Rights Movement “World without Nazism.”

pavel-gubarev-1

Font BOE Pavel Gubarev’s book The Torch of Novorossiya is an extremely important source for understanding the essence of the dramatic political and military struggles now taking place in Ukraine. We are dealing not only with the testimony of an important participant in the events, but also the bold forecasts of a political visionary which have a fair chance of being realized.

In Poland, the 32-year old figure of Pavel Gubarev might be forgotten, but in Ukraine, and especially in Donetsk, he still has a considerable number of followers. We recall that the author was one of the initiators of the uprising in Donbass which led to the proclamation of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the civil war in Ukraine. After the victory of the Euromaidan in Kiev, he initiated the creation of the People’s Militia of Donbass which became the core of the DPR army. On March 1, 2014, Gubarev became the People’s Governor of the Donetsk region, a development which gave the signal for an uprising against the Euromaidan putschists of Kiev.

After being detained by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) within a week, he was released months following his arrest in the course of war prisoner exchanges thanks to the efforts of the rebel garrison in Slavyansk and the legendary Colonel Igor Strelkov. During the war, Gubarev organized logistics and supplies for Slavyansk after being stormed by soldiers of the Kiev junta and he stood at the head of the “Novorossiya” political movement. He now holds some criticisms of the current authorities of the people’s republics of Donbass, but he nevertheless believes in the realization of his idea of a Great Novorossiya. His proposed vision makes up one of the parts of the publication.

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