Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx

摘要

With so many Marxists affirming the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, it's odd that so few reference hermeneutics. Indeed, while Marx emphasizes change in the eleventh thesis, he never denigrates interpretation. Nevertheless, if hermeneutics is the "art of interpretation," one of the high arts of bourgeois philosophy qua conservative metaphysics, one that focuses almost solely on interpreting the world but frets about actually changing it - where praxis is reduced to interpretation alone - then perhaps we can understand why many Marxists have shied away from it. All the same, while attempts to construct a Marxist hermeneutics remains an unfinished project, neglecting works like Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) or Paul Ricoeur's From Text to Action (1986) only shortchanges readings of the Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire, and so on.