Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Delivered at 59th Annual Meeting of Heidegger Circle
May 17, 2025
Heidegger’s thought, early and late, aligns with socialist principles and assumptions in several respects that are easily passed over or overlooked. In the following brief remarks, I review some salient instances of Heidegger’s socialism, namely, ways in which his thought, particularly in SZ, converges with that of Marx and Engels.
Marx famously criticizes Feuerbach’s idealism, his abstraction from the historical process and presupposition of an abstract – isolated or, we might say, ‘idealized’ – human individual, as though the human essence were something abstract dwelling in the solitary individual. He also criticizes Feuerbach for thinking that privileges intuition (Anschauung) over “practical human-sensory activity.”
Each of these points of criticism is echoed in Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl – the latter’s idealism, his abstraction (at least initially) from the historical process, and his early emphasis on individual consciousness. Another point of convergence is a rejection of the primacy often attached to epistemology. For Heidegger, the problem of knowledge of the external world is a pseudo-problem, echoing Marx’s observation that “the dispute about the actuality or non-actuality of thinking…is a purely scholastic question.”
Nor should the primacy of the everyday work-world (Werkwelt) for both thinkers be overlooked (SZ71, 117, 352). As it is for Marx, so for Heidegger the understanding-of-existence that comes uniquely from everyday labor is the proper starting point of analysis of human existence. His socialism accordingly affirms the priority of involved praxis over detached theorizing (ultimately underpinning the base/superstructure complex1), of the ready-to-hand over the present-at-hand, and of the fundamental meaningfulness of the system of implements (means of production) that make up the Dasein’s work-world.
Thanks to his historical materialism, Marx together with Heidegger rejects any sort of a-historical (metaphysical) view of human beings, particularly the sort of view that renders them just another kind of substance in nature. So, too, in this same spirit of historical materialism, he rejects views that reduce human beings to their circumstances, ignoring how they alter them. As Marx puts the point famously in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
Human beings make their own history [ihre eigene Geschichte] but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances that are immediately discovered in advance, given, and handed down. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.2
Is there any clearer anticipation of one of the constants of Heidegger’s thinking, namely, his insistence that human beings are to be conceived not metaphysically, but historically, as “thrown projections”?
To exist is equivalent to being an individual and to exist authentically is to come to grips with our responsibility for being who we are individually. Several themes of the existential analysis – not least, uncanniness, angst, death, conscience, and resoluteness – turn on this equivalence. Only individuals exist authentically, owning up to who they are and can be – the very antithesis of mindless conformity to practices and beliefs that spring from identification with the They. Yet while there is no gainsaying the fact that for Heidegger authentic existence entails authentic individualization, it is no less true that the latter entails an authentic socialization. Indeed, it must do so, since being-with (Mitsein) is essential to Dasein: “In each case, the world is always already the one that I share with others” (SZ118). Just as a self is not in any sense given without a world, there is no self without others (SZ116, 125, 146).
To be sure, the analysis of Mitsein in SZ comes on the heels of an analysis of the work-world as, among other things, the site of the everyday, typically inauthentic encounter of others and it is inauthentic because some work-world concern (Besorgen) determines how we are with one another, resulting in a condition marked by a distance and reserve among the parties to the process, relative to one another (more on this below). Yet Heidegger contrasts this everyday phenomenon with being authentically bound to, or bound up with, one another (eigentliche Verbundenheit). In the latter case, there is a common commitment to the same matter (Sache – not directly a Besorgen), as that bond makes possible what the right sort of matter (die rechte Sachlichkeit) is, namely, what “frees up the others for this freedom for themselves” (SZ122).3 With this reference to an authentic way of being-with-one-another, Heidegger explicitly broaches the theme of existential socialization.
He proceeds to elaborate how authentically being-with others differs from being-with them inauthentically. The latter takes the form of indifference on one level and competition on another. Being-with-others inauthentically amounts to being concerned about them only if and to the extent that they can threaten one’s position or job. Thanks to that threat, an existence founded on competition is hell-bent on increasing the distance between oneself and one’s supposed lessers to the point of making the latter dependent upon them, while decreasing the distance between themselves and those deemed “above” them. This sketch of the marks of everyday inauthentic ways of being with others recapitulates the class conflict, the position that capitalists and workers find themselves in relative to others (including members of their own class). What Heidegger describes is nothing less than what Marx in his Paris Manuscript identifies as workers’ – but also in a different sense the capitalists’ – alienation from the product of their work (since the “concern,” determined by the profit motive, takes precedence over what is “the right sort of matter”) as well as their alienation from one another, a situation structurally engineered by the maintenance of the reserve army labor force (the existence of more workers than jobs).
Things used and their relevance to one another as a whole are for-the-sake of Dasein’s being or, equivalently, its worldhood (SZ84, 123, 181). Notably, after observing that being-with others is inherent to what matters to Dasein, Heidegger immediately adds that “Dasein, as being-with, is essentially for the sake of others” (SZ123, 181). Indeed, the pre-thematic disclosedness or understanding of others is part of what makes up the world’s meaningfulness, the condition of the possibility of its projects, concerns, and uses of implements within-the-world. In this regard, i.e., in this identification of what we (as Dasein) are for and the obliviousness to it that is the mark of inauthentic socialization, Heidegger iterates Marx’s insistence on how the current historical and social dynamic (capitalism) alienates human beings from their humanity, their species. As he puts it in the Paris Mss.: “Alienated labor not only (1) alienates nature from the human being and (2) alienates human beings from themselves, from their own function, from their vital activity…it also alienates human beings from the species. It turns their species-life into a means for their lives individually. Firstly, it alienates species-life and individual life, and, secondly, it turns the latter, in its abstract form, into the purpose of the former, also in its abstract and alienated form.”4
Others’ way of “being-here-with” (Mitdasein) us is irreducible to anything merely handy or on hand and, along with our being-with (Mitsein) them, it is “equiprimordial” with being-in-the-world. Thus, Heidegger’s differentiation of Dasein’s way of being from that of tools and trees along with his equation of our ways of being with one another, exposes the inauthenticity of the exploitation at the heart of capitalism that Marx so keenly identified. In other words, both thinkers uphold the ontological difference between being human and being either on hand in nature or a mere resource or tool for social production. That they do so also explains their bracketing of certain disciplines (political economy, anthropology) as “positive science” (SZ50). Exploitation – the status of workers as commodities and instruments of production in capitalism – is itself a violation of the ontological difference with tragic consequences.5
Among many other socialist tendencies in Heidegger’s analysis, three are particularly prominent and thus warrant mention, although they cannot be further pursued in the present context. I have in mind (1) Dasein’s primordial socialization in discourse as a fundamental existential, (2) the social purposiveness of death’s individualizing,6 and (3) historicity as the “happening of a community” (SZ384).
1 Heidegger’s diagnoses of the inauthenticity of “public opinion” and a debt-based conception of morality, for example, arguably align with Marx’s and Engels’ accounts of a superstructure; see Engels, Anti-Dühring. Dialektik der Natur in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 20 (Berlin: Dietz, 1973), 25: “Die neuen Tatsachen zwangen dazu, die ganze bisherige Geschichte einer neuen Untersuchung zu unterwerfen, und da zeigte sich, daß alle bisherige Geschichte die Geschichte von Klassenkämpfen war, daß diese einander bekämpfenden Klassen der Gesellschaft jedesmal Erzeugnisse sind der Produktions- und Verkehrsverhältnisse, mit Einem Wort der ökonomischen Verhältnisse ihrer Epoche; daß also die jedesmalige ökonomische Struktur der Gesellschaft die reale Grundlage bildet, aus der der gesamte Überbau der rechtlichen und politischen Einrichtungen sowie der religiösen, philosophischen und sonstigen Vorstellungsweise eines jeden geschichtlichen Zeitabschnittes in letzter Instanz zu erklären sind. Hiermit war der Idealismus aus seinem letzten Zufluchtsort, aus der Geschichtsauffassung, vertrieben, eine materialistische Geschichtsauffassung gegeben und der Weg gefunden, um das Bewußtsein der Menschen aus ihrem Sein, statt wie bisher ihr Sein aus ihrem Bewußtsein zu erklären.” Also of note here is Engels’ clear rejection of consciousness as the starting point of analysis together with his insistence on tracing it to the being of humans rather than vice versa. Heidegger’s departure from what he regards as Husserl’s idealism echoes both moves
2 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte in Marx Engels Studienausgabe, Band IV, hrsg. Iring Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966), S. 34.
3 Patent here again are echoes of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, e.g., the exploitation of the material world (Sachenwelt) under capitalism proceeds hand-in-hand with the devaluation of the human world, the commodification of workers, and their alienness to their own work and product; see note 5.
4 Heidegger uses ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung) to characterize a way that Dasein is “fallen,” closing itself off from an existential understanding of its authentic, ownmost potential by confusing it with the sort of understanding afforded by factual (external) comparisons. There is an obvious similarity here to the role assigned by Engels and others to ‘false consciousness’; see Engels’ Brief an Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893 in Marx-Engels Studienausgabe, Band I (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966), S. 232.
5 Karl Marx und Friederich Engels, Werke, Band 40 (Berlin: Dietz, 1968), 511: “Mit der Verwertung der Sachenwelt nimmt die Entwertung der Menschenwelt in direktem Verhältnis zu. Die Arbeit produziert nicht nur Waren; sie produziert sich selbst und den Arbeiter als eine Ware, und zwar in dem Verhältnis, in welchem sie überhaupt Waren produziert…Der Gegenstand, den die Arbeit produziert, ihr Produkt, tritt ihn als ein fremdes Wesen, als eine von dem Produzenten unabhängige Macht gegenüber.”
6 Here I am thinking of the following notable passage: SZ264: “Frei für die eigensten, vom Ende her bestimmten, das heißt als endliche verstandenen Möglichkeiten, bannt das Dasein die Gefahr, aus seinem endlichen Existenzverständnis her die es überholenden Existenz-möglichkeiten der Anderen zu verkennen oder aber sie mißdeutend auf die eigene zurückzuzwingen – um sich so der eigensten faktischen Existenz zu begeben. Als unbezügliche Möglichkeit vereinzelt der Tod aber nur, um als unüberholbare das Dasein als Mitsein verstehend zu machen für das Seinkönnen der Anderen.”