ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a less ambitious approach which shed some fresh light on the confrontation of Werner Marx and Martin Heidegger. It describes the general truth-criterion which Marxism brings to bear in evaluating philosophical positions. Liberatory praxis is, for Marxism, at once a value and a truth-criterion. In Marxism the fact-value distinction dissolves, for liberatory praxis grounds not only its axiology but also its epistemology. Heidegger himself is not thinking in terms of liberatory praxis when he makes his indictment of humanism. Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” questions Marx’s materialism: Even if materialism is not taken to mean that everything is simply matter, it remains “a metaphysical determination according to which every being appears as the material of labor". The specific form of domination under consideration — the domination of nature — is traced to the primitive cleavage between mental and manual labor structurally established with the emergence of chiefs and priests.
