H. Marcuse’s Analysis on the Transition from Philosophical Existentialism to Political Existentialism in Heroic Realism

Abstract

Since his entry as a member of the Institut für Sozialforschung’s work team, Herbert Marcuse begins to develop a materialist theory of society far from his youth Heideggerianism. During the period between 1933 and 1936, the Berlin author writes several essays where he criticizes German existential philosophy’s political drift. In these essays, Marcuse confronts Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology’s vulgarized versions -headed by Heidegger- which provided a kind of philosophic foundation to the heroic realism’s “worldview” (Weltanschauung) and to the totalitarian State’s socio-economic policies.