ABSTRACT
Marcuses original project addresses the question on a deeper level. In his early writings, he describes his search for an alternative reason as concrete philosophy. Alfred Schmidt, in an essay entitled Existential-Ontology and Historical Materialism in Herbert Marcuse, has called attention to the critical impulses Marcuse drew in this regard from his reading of Being and Time, in particular from the Heideggerian critique of the historical decline of occidental metaphysics. Characteristic in this context is the fact that Marcuse, like Heidegger himself, was less interested in aesthetic imagination than he was in transcendental imagination, in which he discerned an a priori spatio-temporality that he felt was constitutive for the particularly human form of existence. The formulation even when it has no intention of so doing points to the riddle of the transcendental imagination and to the originary synthesis of apperception, described by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason as an art concealed in the depths of the human soul.
