Comments on Andrew Feenberg’s Heidegger and Marcuse

Abstract

The aim of Andrew Feenberg's ambitious and intriguing study is to demonstrate the importance of Heidegger's early work for Marcuse's thinking, early and late ("even against Marcuse's explicit self-understanding"), and, more importantly, to project its undeveloped promise as a philosophy of technology. Feenberg argues that "Marcuse remained true at some level to an earlier Heidegger the later Heidegger rejected and concealed" (xiv).2 Marcuse, we are told, shared the early Heidegger's "crucial conviction that the notion of being is modeled on productive activity in Greek thought and the thought of Aristotle in particular" (85; see also 53, 88, 100). Opening chapters on the Greek understanding of techne and Heidegger's early and later reflections on techne and technology give way to four chapters recounting Marcuse's early work on Hegel and later works on Freud and aesthetics, but always with the purpose of demonstrating the persisting valence of that "crucial conviction." The result is a lucid and forceful argument for retrieving the insights of the Greek understanding of techne, as Feenberg sees them interpreted by the early Heidegger, in order to develop the unrealized potential of Marcuse's thinking as the prototype of a needed phenomenological Marxist approach to technology in the present. The argument is not above reproach in my view and, in the interest of stimulating discussion, I would like to offer a few criticisms, suggestions, and pleas for clarification. My remarks are divided into two parts. In the first part, I raise some objections to Feenberg's interpretation of Heidegger's thought. In the second part, I express some reservations with the project that Feenberg derives from the phenomenological promise of Marcuse's philosophy of technology.