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difference between Marcuse and Lukacs. Heidegger, developing a
dualist philosophy of history, radically separated ontology from the
ontic, philosophy from the positivist sciences (and also the authentic
from the inauthentic, the elite from the mass, and so on). A monist,
faithful in this respect to Hegel and to Marx, Lukacs refused any
such separations. And, while radically criticizing not only any posi–
tivism, any concept of science in the indicative mood, but all meta–
physics, all philosophical theory which was conceptually closed and
separated from action and from totality, Lukacs called for a philo–
sophical science and a scientific philosophy (not even conceiving
that one could develop on a purely conceptual level a Marxist on–
tology of history). And each of these positions was internally coherent
and defensible.
Marcuse's articles, however, had a rather curious, and ulti–
mately significant, characteristic: they were written on a conceptual
and philosophical level, beyond concrete historical analysis - on
the plane where basically any philosophy of the concept, from Plato
to Descartes to Kant, is situated.
It
was a Heideggerian leftover
within a system that was no longer Heideggerian, but a leftover
which, given the Marxist position he had adopted, led Marcuse's
thought back at least in this respect to a more conceptual and more
theoretical philosophy, with which Marx and Lukacs and Heidegger
actually had broken.
The second important phase (1933-41) in Marcuse's evolu–
tion is his membership in the "Frankfurt School" to which, basically,
he still belongs. At that time, it was made up of the three principal
figures who continue to represent it today - Horkheimer, Adorno
and Marcuse; along with Walter Benjamin, who died during the
war, and Erich Fromm and Leo Lowenthal, who both later left the
group. In France, its principal activity was the publication of a
magazine called
Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung,
and a book on
authority and the family. In the U.S., they put out a theoretical
work signed by both Horkheimer and Adorno,
Dialektik der Auf–
klarung
(Dialectic and Rationalism), centered on the dialectic
be–
tween progressive concreteness and the abstractions of classical ra–
tionalistic philosophy that lent themselves to oppression.
Marcuse's articles in this period (some of which have just been
