Instead of this, “philosophy” today is satisfied with running behind science, in misrecognition of the two sole realities of this age: the development of business and the armament that this requires.
Marxism knows of these realities, but it also proposes other tasks: “The philosophers have in different ways only interpreted the world; it is a matter of transforming it."90
On the examination of this thesis, is there a genuine opposition between an interpretation and a transformation of the world? Is not every interpretation already a transformation of the world—assuming that this interpretation is the work of a genuine thinking? And on the other hand, does not every transformation of the world presuppose as its instrument a theoretical prediction?
Which transformation of the world do we have in Marx? That of a transformation in the conditions of production. But where does production have its place? In praxis. And praxis is determined by what? By a certain theory, which casts the concept of production as the production of the human by itself. Marx therefore has a theoretical representation of the human—a very precise representation, which includes as its foundation the Hegelian philosophy.91
Reversing Hegel’s idealism in his own way, Marx requires that being be given precedence over consciousness. Since there is no consciousness in Being and Time, one could believe that there is something Heideggerian to be read here! At least Marcuse had understood Being and Time in this way.
For Marx, being is the production process. This is the representation that he receives from metaphysics, on the basis of Hegel’s interpretation of life as process. The practical concept of production can only exist on the basis of a conception of being stemming from metaphysics.
Here again one finds the tight bond between theory and praxis, in which Auguste Comte saw two sisters. Sisters, perhaps, Heidegger says, but born from unknown parents!
Today, what does one understand by theory? Is it a programming? Program: indication, anticipatory establishment, and communication of a plan. A concert program, however, is no theory of music. In Greek, theory is θεωρία. Θεωρία names residing in the gaze of being.
In the Nicomachean Ethics,92 θεωρία is the highest type of human activity; from this, it is the highest human praxis. Jean Beaufret elaborates that what is characteristic of θεωρία is to be divided into three πραγματείαι (activities).
Where does theory emerge more recently in a fundamental sense? With Kepler’s Cosmotheoros, which is followed by the Physics of Galileo and Newton’s Principia. And what does this concern? Galileo says this plainly: Subjecto vetustissimo novam promovemus scientiam. The questionable matter is movement, which Aristotle had first made into a theme as such: ἡ δὲ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος ἐντελέχεια τοιοῦτον κίνησίς ἐστιν.93