radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations—philosophy concerned with human existence, the human condition, and not with merely abstract ideas and principles. That certainly I shared with a relatively large number of my generation, and needless to say, the disappointment with this philosophy eventually came—I think it began in the early thirties. But we re-examined Heidegger thoroughly only after his association with Nazism had become known.
Olafson: What did you make at that stage of the social aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy—its implications for political and social life and action? Were you yourself interested in those at that stage, did you perceive them in Heidegger’s thought?
Marcuse: I was very much interested in it during that stage, at the same time I wrote articles of Marxist analysis for the theoretical organ of the German Socialists, Die Gesellschaft. So I certainly was interested, and I first, like all the others, believed there could be some combination between existentialism and Marxism, precisely because of their insistence on concrete analysis of actual human existence, human beings, and their world. But I soon realized that Heidegger’s concreteness was to a great extent a phony, a false concreteness, and that in fact his philosophy was just as abstract and just as removed from reality, even avoiding reality, as the philosophies which at that time had dominated German universities, namely a rather dry brand of neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, neo-Idealism, but also positivism.
Olafson: How did he respond to the hopes that you had for some kind of fruitful integration of his philosophy with, let us say, a Marxist social philosophy?
Marcuse: He didn’t respond. You know as far as I can say, it is today still open to question whether Heidegger ever really read Marx, whether Heidegger ever read Lukács, as Lucien Goldmann maintains. I tend not to believe it. He may have had a look at Marx after or during the Second World War, but I don’t think that he in any way studied Marx.
Olafson: There are some positive remarks about Marx in Heidegger’s writing, indicating that he was not at all . . .
Marcuse: That’s interesting. I know of only one: the Letter on Humanism.
Olafson: Yes.