Revisiting Marcuse’s “Habilitation Odyssey” in the Light of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”

Abstract At the turn of the 1930s the German Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote his habilitation study for Martin Heidegger, in which he appropriated Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time to provocatively cast G. W. F. Hegel as the originator of the problematic of “being and time.” However, what took off as a fruitful collaboration between Germany’s new philosophical star and the soon-to-be Frankfurt School thinker ended up in Heidegger’s rejecting Marcuse’s study. The article argues that much can be said about the philosophical dimension of the topic if Marcuse’s Hegel study is placed in dialogue with Heidegger’s overlooked Hegel lectures. Furthermore, that extraphilosophical factors played a major role in Heidegger’s decision finds support in his recently published “black notebooks,” filled with toxic anti-Semitism. Taken together with Heidegger’s rare remarks on Marcuse—which are both anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist—there are three plausible lines of interpretation for Heidegger’s decision: philosophical objections, anti-Marxism, and anti-Semitism.