Heidegger's "Productive Dialogue with Marxism"

Abstract

This paper takes the theme of Heidegger’s phrase ‘a productive dialogue with Marxism’ from the Letter on Humanism and examines what Heidegger could have meant by it by referring to a number of his works and commentary in other places, and the backdrop of European, Western, and global history in the twentieth century. The paper touches on Heidegger’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, Kostas Axelos and Jean Beaufret. It looks at a key section of the 1969 television interview Heidegger conducted with Richard Wisser, when he discussed the eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. The paper examines Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter and of Being and Time in view of what he meant by ‘the language of metaphysics’, as well as his central interpretation of Marx at Zahringen in 1973, and his understanding of ‘production’ in relation to his critique of technology. The paper concludes by showing how Heidegger understands Marx and Marxism to have made possible a historical dialogue at the ‘end of metaphysics’ which opens the way to what Heidegger sees as the Abendland, that is, what befalls us through the new beginning history offers to thinking.