Abstract

During the Sixties and the Seventies, under the communist re´gime, some Yugoslav scholars grouped around the review «Praxis» made an attempt at connecting the «humanistic» philosophy of Marx and the philosophy of Heidegger. In Heidegger’s conceptions of tecnique and die Kehre, and in his definition of the human essence as temporality, they found a prop for invigorating their critique of the historical materialism, through a return to the free and creative essence of Man. But they were too concerned with the recovery of the centrality of Man, in opposition to official Marxism, so they neglected that the reason why Heidegger located Marx’s thought within the history of Being, understood as metaphysics, was the latter’s very definition of Man’s essence in «humanistic» terms. The author argues that an approach aiming at underlining contacts and divergences between the two thinkers should take a different point of departure, starting from the interpretation of Marx’s philosophy within the perspective of Heidegger’s