Marcuse criticized Heidegger’s existentialism for ignoring concrete historical conditions

Evidence

In all this there was an echo, which was not heard in his inaugural lecture in 1931, of the Schopenhauerian consciousness of the finiteness, physicality and solidarity of creatures, rather than the activist pathos of German Idealism. It was, in a way, as if an awareness of the finiteness and transitoriness of human existence was being given a historical-materialist backbone. The existential transformation of transcendental philosophy was once again being modified in a sociohistorical direction. Heidegger’s position was that we cannot define Dasein's essence by citing a "what" of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter [eines sachhaltigen Was] . . . its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own', and Sartre's position later on was that there was no such thing as human nature, but that human beings are what they make themselves’. Horkheimer’s view was that When the sociologist Mannheim speaks of the "being" Man, whose development takes place and is expressed through or within cultural forms, it is hard to know what he is talking about . . . To the extent that history does not stem from the conscious purpose of the human beings who plan and determine it, it has no purpose.' — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 203</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

Riezler, like Adorno, belonged to the so-called Circle' (Kränzchen), a Frankfurt debating group of which Tillich, Horkheimer, Pollock, Mannheim, Adolph Löwe and Carl Mennicke were also members. … In his lecture, Adorno defended a position which, to avoid misunderstanding, he did not call historical ontology’, but preferred instead to define by using the concepts history' and nature’. While a historical ontology in the spirit of Heidegger, by means of the category of historicity, devalued history as being merely the location of what was new, the concept of natural history would reveal history up to the present as being bound to nature, as a scene of constantly changing historical prisons for the primeval essence of humanity'. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 386</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marcuse initially read Heidegger as transcending bourgeois philosophy from within; Adorno’s natural history concept rejected Heideggerian historicity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 386; Horkheimer grounded existential finitude in historical materialism against Heidegger and Sartre — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 203 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Marcuse initially read Heidegger as transcending bourgeois philosophy from within #qualifies (0.85)
• Horkheimer grounded existential finitude in historical materialism against Heidegger and Sartre #corroborates (0.83) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 203
• Adorno’s natural history concept rejected Heideggerian historicity #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 386
• Marcuse’s unsubmitted habilitation read Hegel as anticipating Heidegger and Dilthey #complicates (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 276