ABSTRACT

Like many other intellectuals of his generation, the publication of Being and Time in 1927 had a tremendous impact on the 29-year-old Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was so impressed by Being and Time that he decided to return to Freiburg to renew his academic studies, which he had broken off in 1922. Two years later Marcuse would describe Being and Time as a work that seems to mark a turning point in the history of philosophy: the point where the internal tendencies of bourgeois philosophy lead to its own dissolution and clear the way for a new concrete science. At first glance it may seem puzzling why a young critical Marxist like Marcuse was attracted to a philosopher like Heidegger. Marcuse had, after all, actively participated in the workers and soldiers councils that formed in Berlin during the failed revolution of 1918.