Toward a Concrete Philosophy

Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, Immanen argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity.

Our knowledge of Adorno's "Frankfurt discussion" with "Frankfurt Heideggerians" remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment's idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer's enthusiasm over Heidegger's legendary post–World War I lectures and criticism of Being and Time have escaped attention almost entirely. And Marcuse's intriguing debate with Heidegger over Hegel and the origin of the problematic of "being and time" has remained uncharted until now. Reading these debates as fruitful intellectual encounters rather than hostile confrontations, Toward a Concrete Philosophy offers scholars of critical theory a new, thought-provoking perspective on the emergence of the Frankfurt School as a rejoinder to Heidegger's philosophical revolution.

Mikko Immanen is Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University Jyväskylä.

There are many more biographical, culture-historical, and thematic connections between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School than the quasi-official story of mutual hostility recognizes. In Toward a Concrete Philosophy, Mikko Immanen takes significant steps to set the record straight.

The variety of responses to Heidegger may be said to be the theme of a new history of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School This impressive account by Mikko Immanen leads us into a vanished world of high culture, learning, and urbane civility—and its ruins, as these great European minds fled to the New World when the Nazis seized power in Germany.

Enzo Traverso, Cornell University, author of Left-Wing Melancholia:

This is a rigorous, cogently developed and thoroughly convincing investigation into the critical reception of Heidegger's thought by Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer during the Weimar years. Mikko Immanen's mastery and presentation of this philosophical debate is admirable.

Russell Berman, Stanford University, author of Freedom or Terror:

While much has been written about the history of the Frankfurt School, no one has grappled with the "Heidegger question" and Frankfurt School as neatly as Toward a Concrete Philosophy.