Description
Book SynopsisToward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, Immanen argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger''s 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity.
Our knowledge of Adorno''s Frankfurt discussion with Frankfurt Heideggerians remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment''s idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer''s
Trade Review
The variety of responses to Heidegger may be said to be the theme of a new history of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School This impressive account by Mikko Immanen leads us into a vanished world of high culture, learning, and urbane civility—and its ruins, as these great European minds fled to the New World when the Nazis seized power in Germany.
* The Review of Politics *
There are many more biographical, culture-historical, and thematic connections between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School than the quasi-official story of mutual hostility recognizes. In Toward a Concrete Philosophy, Mikko Immanen takes significant steps to set the record straight.
* Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Making Good on Heidegger's Promise
Part I: Who Owns the Copyright to the Problematic of "Being and Time"? Marcuse, Heidegger, and the Legacy of Hegel
1. The Un-Heideggerian Core of Marcuse's Most Heideggerian Text: The Lukács Question
2. The Hegel Debate: The Pinnacle of Marcuse's Freiburg Years
3. Stakes of the Hegel Debate: Davos, Marxism, and the Black Notebooks
Part II: The Frankfurt Discussion: Adorno, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt Heideggerians
4. The Frankfurt Discussion: A Sequel to the Epochal Davos Disputation
5. "What Is the Human Being?" Thrown Dasein or Cura Posterior?
6. Demythologizing Heidegger's Thrownness: Toward Dialectic of Enlightenment
Part III: The Young Horkheimer on Heidegger: From Guarded Enthusiasm to Determined Opposition
7. Being and Time: The Primacy of Practical Reason Misunderstood
8. Critical Theory as a Reply to Heidegger, Scheler, and the Frankfurt Heideggerians
Conclusion
