Publication Details

Abstract

The scare immanently creative atmosphere of ideas urges the contemporary bourgeois philosophy to take advantage of the ideas of their own predecessors (neo-hegelianism, neo-positivism), to borrow also from older thinkers (noe-Thomism), and sometimes even to receive the impulses from their ideological opponents. Hybrid deformations accompanied by hidden polemics characterize especially Heidegger’s philosophy that in a mystified form uses but also misuses many Marxist terms and categories (practice, instrument, fetishization and others). The aim of this paper is to point out this double appearance of Heidegger’s philosophy on the concrete example of the problems of man and his substance. Heidegger’s criticism of the traditional conception of man as animal rationale yields, for this purpose, material enough for argumentation. Heidegger partly and out of focus expresses the deformation of the relation of the historical subject and object as it is bound up with the start and development of bourgeois production of goods, that split of the inner and the outer, of the private and the public, the personal and the collective. While Hegel still tries to save the unity of these poles by their mystical „identification“, for Heidegger they exist only in two sharply distinguished levels. Only exteriority, officiality, anonymity, mass and objectivization have their real efficacy, while genuineness, moral responsibility, personality, authenticity have a statute of a tragically heroic commitment and decision of a lonely individual. Heidegger anticipates the truth of bourgeois individualism in conformity and brutality of the petty-bourgeois, he anticipates the powerlessness of private humanity facing the inhumanity of bourgeois conditions, he anticipates the irreality of a good intention of a „private existence“ facing the reality of evil and exploitation. At the same time this reflection does not leave the element of thinking, even though the thinking is more original, pre-theoretical, and tha: is why he does not find the real cause of this deformation. Heidegger’s conception of being and of man is a reflection and selfreflection of a wealthy class of exploitation.