Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity

Book excerpt: This was Herbert Marcuse's first book on Hegel, written in the early 1930s when he was under the strong influence of Martin Heidegger. It provides a still unequaled Heideggerian reading of Hegel's thought that seeks the defining characteristics of "historicity" - what it means to say that a historical event happens. These ideas were foundational for Marcuse; they express a tradition known as "phenomenological Marxism," subsequently represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and by some members of the Praxis group in Yugoslavia. The book is in two parts. The first analyzes Hegel's Logic in order to identify its ontological problematic or theory of being; by focusing on Hegel's Early Theological Writings and the Phenomenology of Spirit, the second part argues that the concept of Life in its historicity was in fact the original foundation of Hegelian ontology. Clearly this is a "purer" form of philosophizing than Marcuse was to pursue after he joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung, discovered Freud, and distanced himself from Heidegger's philosophy. But there is a definite connection between his analysis of historicity in this important early work and his later attempts to understand the underlying dynamic of contemporary history and society in such books as One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicityis included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy,