Concrete Philosophy And Ontology Of History —A Study Of Herbert Marcuse’s Early Philosophical Thoughts

The thesis aims to study systematically on Herbert Marcuse’s early philosophical thoughts and reveal its origins, philosophical orientation and internal context. Based on relevant research, the thesis elaborates mainly on it from the following four aspects.The first chapter sorts out Herbert Marcuse’s early life experiences and the origins of his philosophical thoughts. It highlights Georg Lukacs as an intermediary for studying Herbert Marcuse’s early philosophical thoughts. Lukacs, with his History and Class Consciousness, not only opens a new road for Marcuse interpreting Marxism, but also makes Marcuse understand the importance of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and the "affinity" between existentialism and Marxism. Briefly, the "affinity" is mainly embodied in three aspects. Firstly, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology implies an ontologically veiled critique of reification. Secondly, Heidegger exposes and criticizes radically German Idealism. Thirdly, Heidegger discovers a way for demonstrating historicity as the fundamental determination of Dasein, which supplies a frame of reference for examining critically the truth and validity of Marxism.The second chapter, associated with Herbert Marcuse’s critical examination of the contemporary German philosophy (1871-1933), observes concrete philosophy’s orientation, and its necessity in the present situation and basic characteristics. According to Marcuse’s opinion, philosophy must experience some change to conceptualize the historical world and reestablish its contact with the real world. Specifically, the concrete philosophy must be established to deal with some of the important problems in the present situation. When arguing for this philosophical orientation, Herbert Marcuse not only emphasizes the importance of the existential turn but also takes Georg Lukacs’ concept of totality as a positive factor of the concrete philosophy. According to the decisive methodology, Dasein’s existential truth may refer to the "unified "existence decided by the specific historical situation with its unified structure. Thus, only the concrete philosophy may undertake the task of analyzing the "crisis of existence" of the contemporary capitalism and consequently supply normative guidelines for the historical act.The third chapter comments mainly on Herbert Marcuse’s phenomenology of historical materialism and his preliminary analysis of ontology of history. Different from other members of Institute for Social Research, Marcuse doesn’t counterpose historicity and the concrete history. He believes that they are connected with each other. The former is the precondition of the latter, and the latter is the concretization of the former. So it can be concluded that Herbert Marcuse regards basically Marxism as a historical theory in a double sense. On one hand, Marxism is a theory of the radical act, that is, the theory of the proletarian revolution and a revolutionary critique of bourgeois society, on the other hand, it is a science(Wissenschaft) insofar as the revolutionary action that it wishes to set free and to stabilize requires insight into its own historical necessity. For the second sense, historical materialism is an ontology of history, which refers to the entire domain of knowledge related to historicity. Based on the unique understanding, Marcuse constructs the phenomenology of historical materialism and illustrates the first principle of historical materialism, the concept of ideology and historical necessity from the perspective of existential-ontology.The fourth chapter highlights three important viewpoints of Herbert Marcuse with Marcuse’s study on dialectic in the early 1930s and his reinterpretation of the foundation of historical materialism. Firstly, Hegel’s dialectic is essentially a theory of historicity and its primordial foundation is the being of life and its specific motility. Secondly, by setting the Hegelian dialectic rightside up, Marx, as the heir of German idealism, not only returns the dialectic to its proper domain but also becomes the first person to grasp the authentic historicity of human Dasein using the only approach appropriate for this purpose. As a concrete and historical dialectic, Marx’s historical theory meets the demands of concretization. Only with the concretization, Marxism may truly achieve the unification of theory and practice. Thirdly, the relationship between Marx’s philosophy and critique of political economy is not opposite but unified. The unity is represented by the point that Marx’s "ontology of man", which is established in the severe confrontation with Hegel, and especially his explanation of the labor, a concept of ontology, constitutes the foundation of the critique of political economy and the historical materialism.Based on the systematical study on Herbert Marcuse’s early philosophical thoughts, the thesis comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, It is not an arbitrary option but an inevitable result for Herbert Marcuse to step on the path of synthesizing Hegelian Marxism and Existential Ontology after his reading and studying critically on Georg Lukacs’ and Martin Heidegger’s theories. Secondly, Herbert Marcuse’s early works are not incoherent, complex and contradictory as Alfred Schmidt believes. On the contrary, they help to discover an ontology of history with its coherent inner system. Finally, Herbert Marcuse’s early works are not dispensable "pre-Critical" juvenalia. His achievements in his early times, especially his radical interpretation of the historicity, the existential-ontological analysis of the concept of labor and the concept of ideology in double senses, lay a philosophical basis for his two-dimensional social critical theory which he establishes and develops in the phase of critical theory.