LETTER TO KAREL KOSIK*

Herbert Marcuse
March 22, 1963
Dr. Karel Kosik 26 Magnolia Ave.
Filosoficky ustav CSAV Newton 58, Mass
Hradcansk nam. 11 March 22,1963
Praha 1, Czechoslovakia


My Dear Sir Dr. Karel Kosik:

I am happy to respond to your letter of the 6th of March regarding my interpretation of Heidegger in
1928. I no longer have access to the passage and therefore cannot comment upon it, but I would like to
provide some idea of my current position. Today I would reject any attempt to assert an intrinsic
(or extrinsic!) affinity between Heidegger and Marx. Heideggers affirmative stance with regard to
Nazism, is in my opinion, nothing but an expression of the deeply anti-humane, anti-intellectual,
historically reactionary, and life repudiating tendencies of his philosophy. In recent decades, this
philosophy, stripped of its political dimension, is without substance and cannot be taken seriously:
endlessly repeating meaningless questions that endlessly remain unanswered because they are not
genuine questions. Beyond that, wordplay that gropes in the dark and does violence to the language
while engaged in a Teutonic phantasy (in every other language this wordplay is lost and it simply
becomes untranslatable!). My position today may best be represented by my book, Eros and
Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Even more so by my work which will appear this
December on the structure and ideology of advanced industrial society.35 If you would like, I could
gladly have the former sent to you. It is very good to know that people are somewhat aware of my
Hegel-book where you are. With regard to your question about the relationship between Heidegger
and
Lukcs, I remember having heard from Heidegger himself that he had never read Lukcs. I have no
reason to doubt that. Please dont hesitate to write me again if you have further questions. With my
best regards and best wishes,

[Herbert Marcuse]

Marcuses letter to Karel Kosik (19262003), dated March 22, 1963 and translated by Charles Reitz,
responds to a previous letter from the Czech philosopher asking about his current views on the relation
between Heidegger and Marx. Marcuse makes clear that he would today reject any attempt to assert
an intrinsic (or extrinsic!) Affinity between Heidegger and Marx, arguing that Heideggers
affirmative response to Nazism is nothing but an expression of the deeply anti-humane, anti-
intellectual, historically reactionary, and life-repudiating tendencies of his philosophy. Marcuse
suggests that his position on contemporary theory is best expressed in his 1955 book Eros and
Civilization and tells Kosik that a forthcoming book will appear this December on the structure and
ideology of advanced industrial society, signaling the publication of One-Dimensional Man (1964).
In 1963, Karel Kosik published Dialektika konkrtnho (Dialectics of the Concrete) (Prague 1963,
1965, 1966) translated into English in 1976 (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company). Kosiks book,
like Marcuses early work, combined phenomenology and Marxism, and as the 1960s went on, Kosik
emerged as a major spokesmen for democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia leading to his dismissal
from University teaching in 1970 before he returned in 1990, widely respected as a major intellectual
and activist of his era.