Can anything be found on YouTube? Seemingly the answer is yes.

When procrastinating one of my favourite activities is YouTubing. It is unbelievable what one can find on there; there is Jimmy Page doing the violin thing on his guitar, there are Street Fighter II Turbo championships (I remember watching one the other day and commenting on the unbelievable moves with a friend on MSN messenger), the other day I was checking out compilations of Michael Jordan's best moves (I stopped watching basketball after he retired) but YouTube still has the potential to amaze me. One example is this vintage interview with Heidegger, in which he criticizes Marx' 11. thesis on Feuerbach:



Heidegger has an obstinate philosophical style that can be a source of many headaches. In his writing there is no distinction between signifier and signified, ideas are rather already present in language. To present new ideas he transforms language itself (that is where the headaches come from, he does not write in German, he writes in Heideggerian, constantly belabouring words with new meanings). It is not surprising that this style shifts into manipulation when talking about other authors, as is the case with Marx. For all those not fluent in German, the 11. thesis that Heidegger is criticizing, reads:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Source: Marxists internet archive

Heidegger objects that to change the world one must first interpret it. We can surely not argue with that. The problem is the attribution of an anti-intellectualist sentiment to Marx. Even a cursory inspection of the syntax of thesis 11 will reveal the word "only", which means that interpretation and changing of the world are not to be seen as antagonistic. Marx sees the role of materialism in not stopping at the point of interpretation, but taking it further to the point of changing it.