The Philosophy of Praxis

The Philosophy of Praxis

MARX, LUKÁCS, AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Andrew Feenberg

This revised edition published by Verso 2014

© Andrew Feenberg 2014

First published as Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory by Rowman and Littlefield 1981

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-172-5 (PBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-173-2 (HBK)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-219-7 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-528-0 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feenberg, Andrew.

[Lukács, Marx, and the sources of critical theory]

The philosophy of praxis : Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School / Andrew Feenberg. — New

edition.

pages cm

“First published as Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, Rowman and Littlefield, copyright 1981, Oxford University Press, 1986.”

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-78168-172-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78168-173-2 (hardback : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-78168-219-7 (ebook) — ISBN 978-1-78168-528-0 (ebook)

1. Lukács, György, 1885–1971. 2. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 3. Frankfurt school of sociology—

History. 4. Dialectical materialism—History. 5. Critical theory—History. I. Title.

B4815.L84F43 2014

190—dc23

2013041199

Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland

Printed in the US by Maple Press

Contents

Preface

Introduction to the New Edition

1. The Philosophy of Praxis

2. The Demands of Reason

3. Metacritique of the Concept of Nature

4. Reification and Rationality

5. The Realization of Philosophy

6. The Controversy Over Subject–Object Identity

7. From Lukács to the Frankfurt School

8. The Last Philosophy of Praxis

9. Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance

Appendix: The Unity of Theory and Practice

Index

Preface

The rational foundations of modernity are in crisis. After World War II, the

liberal and communist blocs each espoused a version of rationalistic

universalism, based on Enlightenment values variously interpreted. These

universalisms overshadowed ethnic, national, and religious differences, and

as universal each claimed to be the true path. The final triumph of

liberalism seemed to many to signal the end of history, the ultimate

resolution of conflicting ideologies in a rational framework of rights and

values served by science, technology, and administrative expertise. But

instead a rising tide of particularisms has placed liberalism on the

defensive. The universalistic claim has itself been reduced to a particular in

this new context. It is under attack from two quarters, from fundamentalist

religious ideology and from post-modern skepticism. The latter attack has

no armies but it is effective in a different way, challenging overconfidence

in science and progress in the advanced countries and among global elites,

just as much of the developing world seems poised to modernize in

imitation of the West.

In this context, what has Marxist philosophy to offer? Clearly, one

cannot simply return to the thoroughly discredited positions of Soviet

ideology, nor adopt a so-called “orthodoxy” based on the works of a

nineteenth-century thinker of genius. Something fundamental has changed

since 1989, not to mention 1847. But the question can be refined. Marxist

thought is far from unified. In the period following World War I, a new

interpretation of Marxism emerged in the West, enriched by the philosophy

and sociology of the time. Throughout much of the last century this so-

called “Western Marxism” played a significant role in philosophical

debates. It has been eclipsed since the fall of the Soviet Union, but

paradoxically so, since it elaborated some of the most trenchant criticisms

of Soviet communism from an original Marxist standpoint. In this book I

return to this tradition for a second look. I believe it has resources for

addressing the crisis of rationality that have been overlooked. I hope to show this in the pages that follow.

This book is a thoroughly revised version of my first book, Lukács,

Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory.1 The original was published over thirty years ago in 1981. The book grew out of a doctoral dissertation on

Lukács prepared for Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San

Diego. In the original version I attempted to treat Lukács not only as a

major Marxist theorist but also as an important continental philosopher. In

this revised version I still pursue the same goals, but I hope with more

success.

Over the years I have looked back on that first book with a mixture of

pride and dismay. I have always believed there were good things in it, and

this belief is occasionally confirmed by people who recall finding it helpful

in navigating the flow of Lukács’s complicated argument in History and

Class Consciousness. On the other hand, there are many problems with this

first attempt. I have often thought about how I would write such a book

“today,” my plans changing from year to year, decade to decade. The

reading of Lukács’s recently published Defence of History and Class

Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic encouraged me to set to work by

confirming many of my own interpretations.2

The early Lukács and the principal members of the Frankfurt School—

Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse—are the major figures in Western

Marxism. Marx’s early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

were immediately adopted as a founding text of this tradition after their

publication in 1932. I describe the underlying doctrine of this whole

tradition as “philosophy of praxis” for reasons I explain in the first chapter.

The essential claim of this philosophy is the significance of revolution, not

just for political and social theory but for the ultimate questions of

epistemology and ontology. The early Marx and Lukács argue that the basic

“demands of reason” that emerge from classical German philosophy are

fulfilled not by speculation but by revolution. This is the famous

“realization of philosophy” for which Marx calls for in his early writings,

and most notably in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Chapter 5 of this new version of the book presents the argument in its most elaborate form in

Lukács. Soon after completing my thesis I was able to show a similar logic

at work in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Like

Lukács, Marx carries out a socially based “metacritique” of philosophy that

I explain in the first two chapters.

The pivotal text of philosophy of praxis is History and Class

Consciousness, published in 1923. The key to understanding this text is the

concept of reification. With this concept Lukács signified the limits of a

modern culture based on the model of scientific-technical rationality. The

usual technocratic understanding of modern society is reified in precisely

Lukács’s sense of the term. Bureaucratic administrations, markets, and

technologies are all products of our scientific age; like science they are

thought to be morally neutral tools beneficial to humanity as a whole when

properly used.

But in reality these institutions are social products, shaped by social

forces and shaping the behavior of their users. They more nearly resemble

legislation than mathematics or science. Thus their claim to universality is

flawed at its basis. Like legislation, they are either good or bad, never

neutral. Lukács argued that when societies become conscious of the social

contingency of the rational institutions under which they live, they can then

judge and change them. This implication of the theory of reification

distinguishes society, including its technology, from the nature of natural

science. Lukács believed that a revolution from below would overthrow

reification and create a socialist alternative to capitalist modernity. That

revolution would not reject reason and its fruits but would reconfigure

rational institutions in response to the needs of the oppressed.

The Frankfurt School applied the concept of reification in a very

different time. Writing under the influence of the post–World War I

revolutions, Lukács optimistically assumed that the working class would

always retain an oppositional consciousness on the basis of the gap between

its daily experience and needs and the rationalized economic and

administrative forms imposed on it. Marcuse’s theory of the “one-

dimensional society” is the culmination of the Frankfurt School’s critique of

this optimistic assessment of revolutionary prospects. He recognized the

extension of reification into the depths of social life. In advanced capitalism

the working class is no longer even partially exempt as media propaganda

and consumerism colonize everyday life and consciousness.

Yet Marcuse did not give up hope in the emergence of a

countertendency, first visible in the New Left. In his view, a “rational”

organization of society through capitalist markets and administrations

produced such irrational consequences—wars, economic and environmental

crises, social pathologies—that new forms of opposition would emerge.

With the decline of traditional forms of working-class revolutionary

struggle, these new forms of opposition are increasingly focused on the

irrationality of capitalism, the absurdity of its pretension to organize all of

social life through the market, and the catastrophic environmental

consequences of its frenetic pursuit of profit with the gigantic resources of

modern technology.

The philosophy of praxis placed questions of rationality and irrationality

at the center of its political vision. In this respect it still has something to

teach us. The concluding chapters of this book will explore the

philosophical basis in the Frankfurt School of the new politics of resistance

to reified rationality.

Revising this early book was important to me for the light it sheds on

my later work on the critical theory of technology. 3 The philosophers discussed in this book stood on the verge of a theory of technical politics

but did not quite manage to develop it, no doubt because technology had

not yet become an object of effective movements for change. This lacuna is

of great significance. They are continually brought up against the problem

of the status of science, technology, and nature in their attempts to develop

an all-encompassing philosophy of praxis. No adequate resolution is

possible without understanding the ways in which technology both mediates

the human relation to nature and is itself mediated by political and social

forces. Progress in insight into technology can be traced in the history of

philosophy of praxis culminating, I argue, in Marcuse’s late work. The

critical theory of technology I developed in later books starts where he left

off and attempts to complete the project these philosophers initiated.

This version of the book differs considerably from the original. I have

retained the principal theoretical concepts, but I have added two entirely

new chapters on the Frankfurt School (Chapters 7 and 8) that provide a far better account of the relation of critical theory to the philosophy of praxis

than the rather sketchy conclusion of the earlier edition. Chapter 4 presents a much-revised evaluation of Lukács’s theory of reification. I have also

been able to update my understanding of Lukács’s concept of nature from

study of his Defence of History and Class Consciousness. This text is the

background to new discussions in Chapter 6 that address Lukács’s critique of science and technology. The later chapters also draw on my research in

philosophy of technology to solve problems left in suspense in the earlier

version of the book.

The earlier version emphasized the Weberian and Hegelian influences

on Lukács. My research on Heidegger for my book Heidegger and Marcuse

made me aware also of the neo-Kantian roots of the critique of reification in

both Heidegger and Lukács.4 This was an influence I had previously underestimated. It is important because it orients the interpretation toward

the ontological significance of meaning in the constitution of worlds. This

phenomenological theme, reinterpreted in social terms, clarifies basic

concepts of philosophy of praxis such as Marx’s early theory of sensation,

Lukács’s concept of “form of objectivity,” and the Frankfurt School’s

critique of experience.

Finally, I have condensed and placed in an appendix two chapters on

historical materialism and class consciousness that interrupted the flow of

the main argument in the earlier version of the book.

Vancouver, August 2012

1 Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981). A paperback edition was published by Oxford University Press in 1986.

2 Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans.

E. Leslie (London: Verso, 2000).

3 My most recent contribution is Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For applications, see Andrew Feenberg and Norm Friesen, ( Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012).

4 Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005).

Introduction to the New Edition

It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Marx and Lukács

failed to appreciate the significance of their own early works. Marx’s

Manuscripts were written in 1844 but had to wait nearly 100 years to see

the light of day. Since its publication this unfinished early work has come to

rival Capital as the text of reference for Marxists and others interested in Marxism. During the first half-century after the publication of History and

Class Consciousness, Lukács’s book became an underground classic,

rejected by its author and known only to a few European scholars, among

them the philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

Marx and Lukács’s critical self-interpretation is only partially

warranted. It is true that their early works reflect a “messianic moment” to

which they responded with an implausible revolutionary eschatology. But

the authority of their self-interpretation has misled commentators into

projecting far too much unity and consistency on the early works. In reality,

the theoretical resources deployed by these philosophers are not entirely

congruent with their political program.

Philosophy resembles art in that the tools and materials have their own

logic. The interpreter must uncover the tensions between the creator’s ends

and means, not simply assume the ends to be realized in the work. This is

especially true of Lukács, whose text is full of contradictions between his

Hegelian framework and his politics. In Marx’s case the consequences

appear later in his suppression of his own most interesting philosophical

writings, the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, published long after his death. Thus arose a whole tradition of interpretation according to which the

later Marx abandoned philosophy as a youthful error.

The seminal importance of the early works was not widely recognized

until the 1960s and 1970s. At that time the influence of thinkers associated

with the Frankfurt School contributed significantly to the receptiveness of a

youthful audience to what might be called “early Marxism.” Marcuse, in

particular, lived through a second messianic moment in old age in response

to the New Left. In his case too there is a tension between his theoretical resources and his politics. Nevertheless, his writings from Eros and

Civilization on excited unprecedented interest in philosophy of praxis.

The long eclipse of both Marx’s Manuscripts and Lukács’s History and

Class Consciousness, left to what Engels once called “the nibbling of the mice,” can be explained by their transitional position in the intellectual

biographies of their authors. Both were trained as philosophers and steeped

in romantic revolutionism. Their early works were written at similar turning

points in their spiritual trajectories, at times when they felt the need to move

beyond these intellectual origins and believed they could do so without

violent rupture through a dialectical transcendence. Later, they judged this

transcendence inadequate, still internal to positions they uncompromisingly

rejected in elaborating their mature outlook. There is little doubt that after

the break their judgment on their early work was too harsh, that it contains

more of value and had more impact on the later work than the authors were

willing to admit.

The romantic influence is undoubtedly present in these early writings.

By romanticism is usually meant that trend in modern culture that exalts

subjectivity against objectivity, life against rationality, concreteness against

abstraction, traditional values against capitalist mercantilism. Certainly

these philosophers’ antagonism toward capitalism, analyzed and

condemned in parallel critiques of “alienation” and “reification,” is to some

degree tributary of that trend. And yet it would grossly distort the theories

of alienation and reification to reduce them to a romantic protest against

reason as is frequently suggested by contemporary critics.

While Marx and Lukács were influenced by the romantic critique of

capitalism, they were still more profoundly influenced by the Hegelian

critique of that critique. For Hegel, as for a number of other major figures in

modern thought, romanticism has the value of a transcended moment. It

plays a propaedeutic role in the development of a rational outlook on the

world that is not merely philistine and complacent but critical and rich in

inwardness. It was Hegel who first systematically elaborated this “post-

romantic” reconciliation with rational necessity and human finitude.

Marx and Lukács aimed to preserve the moment of revolt in

romanticism without recapitulating the subjectivist errors so effectively

criticized by Hegel. I will show that they are only partially successful in this

task, but also that the task itself was well chosen and indeed is still relevant

to critical theory and practice.1 They approached this task with a similar method, which I will call “cultural” because of its orientation toward the

most general patterns of meaning and practice, institutions and artifacts, of

entire societies. Just such a pattern is signified by the concepts of alienation

and reification that they employ to analyze capitalist society. At the same

time, these concepts are derived from reflection on the philosophical

tradition and function in the context of the authors’ discussion of

fundamental philosophical problems. This unity of culture, philosophy, and

politics is the distinctive trait of their early method.

They consider philosophy to be the discipline in which the operative

horizon of everyday life is raised to consciousness and subjected to rational

criticism. On this basis they argue that the conceptual dilemmas or

“antinomies” of philosophy are symptomatic of deep contradictions in

social life. Their most challenging conclusion is the demand for a

“realization” of philosophy through the practical resolution of these

contradictions. This is perhaps the least understood aspect of the early

philosophy of praxis of Marx and Lukács, and the study of it will be a

major theme uniting the various investigations making up this book.

Despite their critical relation to the philosophical tradition, both the

early Marx and Lukács adhere to the fundamental Enlightenment values of

freedom and equality. They depart from the tradition by arguing that under

capitalism these values cannot be achieved by isolated individuals subject

to the laws of the market. This argument is the bridge between philosophy

and social theory. They not only dismiss the agency of the individual, they

argue that subjectivity can no longer be identified with a version of the

Cartesian cogito or transcendental ego. Only a collective, social subject can

realize the values of philosophy. But a social subject is an object in the

world, a phenomenon among others. And yet, this subject is still bound to

the philosophical tradition by basic aspects of its logical structure, which

Marx and Lukács rethink in social terms.

This hybrid approach leads to complications. The abstract individual

subject of pure knowledge transcends nature and need. The freedom of a

social subject is limited by both these determinations. The transcendental

subject is purified of its materiality and enabled thereby to know the truth

and even, in an idealistic framework, to constitute reality. But such a

transcendence is unthinkable for a social group. A social subject cannot be

purified of materiality since it is only through material ties of one sort or

another that it can form from out of the relations of the individuals who make it up. Abstracted from geography, race, language, and technology, and

nothing remains to hold the individuals together in a group. But include

those factors in its definition and it is inescapably earthbound. The

objectivity of the social subject situates it squarely within the real world.

Both common sense and the philosophical tradition would therefore

argue that social subjects, should they exist at all, have no ontological

significance. They are simply contingent assemblages of separate

individuals with political powers and rights, perhaps, but no fundamental

reality. If they had accepted this view, Marx and Lukács would have made a

contribution to political philosophy but beyond that they would have had to

rely on one or another traditional philosophical approach. But neither Marx

nor Lukács accepted this view. Rather, they argue that the social subject

must take over all the same powers that individual subjects enjoyed in the

old philosophy. Somehow reality is to be understood in an essential relation

to a subject situated within it and dependent on it. Is this not a vicious

circle? Why adopt such an improbable position? I will argue that they brave

the paradoxes that result from that move out of fidelity to the ambition of

idealism to explain being starting out from human being, for example, from

the forms and categories of transcendental subjectivity. These traditional

explanatory schemes depend on an individual contemplative subject. But

Marx and Lukács argue that the individual is derivative of one or another

community in which it necessarily has its roots. The transcendental subject

is an abstraction from the social being that grounds it. It cannot therefore

resolve the ultimate problems of philosophy and the attempt to do so

produces speculative myths. Only a social subject can provide the key to a

resolution of the antinomies in practical life and philosophical theory.

The fact that Marx and Lukács share this conclusion is all the more

remarkable since Lukács was unaware of the existence of Marx’s

Manuscripts when he wrote History and Class Consciousness. Lukács

found traces of Marx’s early philosophy of praxis in The German Ideology

and Capital. This suggests a theory of the continuity of Marx’s intellectual

development that I elaborate in a Lukácsian interpretation of the early

Marx. Lukács himself developed the most complex version of the

philosophy of praxis. In his writings the structure of this figure of thought

becomes clear. The identification of such figures, which ultimately are

defined in ideal-types such as “empiricism” or “idealism,” is an important

contribution of philosophy to the history of ideas.

The articulation of the logic of philosophy of praxis is essential to

understanding its later transformation in the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer,

Adorno, and Marcuse were influenced by Marx and Lukács’s philosophy of

praxis that they were familiar with quite early. However, there is a deeper

connection: even where they write without reference to these sources, they

operate within the logic of the philosophy of praxis. That logic requires that

philosophical abstractions be traced back to their roots in concrete social

conditions. And once those conditions have been identified, the

hypothetical construction of their revolutionary transformation rebounds

back on the philosophical concepts and shows how their contradictions can

be resolved.

But the realization of philosophy through social practice is frustrated by

the historical situation of the Frankfurt School, which is very different from

Lukács’s revolutionary context. Although the Frankfurt School works in a

period of reaction, it remains bound by the demands of philosophy of

praxis. Its focus shifts from the specific consequences of capitalism toward

the more general problems of the domination of nature and the structure of

modern experience, presumed to be the source of the failure of the

revolution.

This approach leads to two possible outcomes: either the resolution of

the antinomies through social transformation is treated as a utopian demand,

devaluing social reality by contrast, or a new agent of revolution is

discovered, able to carry through the project of social transformation. These

alternatives correspond roughly to the difference between Adorno and

Marcuse’s late work. In Adorno the historical thesis of the philosophy of

praxis serves primarily to provide an independent point of view for social

critique. Marcuse eventually finds hopeful signs in the New Left. He sees

the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s not as a new agent of

revolution but as prefiguring an emancipatory mode of experience.

Revolution in an advanced society is at least possible in principle on the

basis of a generalization of this new way of experiencing the world. This is

sufficient for Marcuse to construct a final version of the philosophy of

praxis in which the transformation of technology plays a central role. This

version of philosophy of praxis is discussed in the concluding chapters of

this book.

As noted above, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse were deeply influenced

by Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. They seized on his concept of reification

that, in combination with other sources, became the basis of their critique of

positivism and their dialectical reformulation of Marxist theory. Somewhat

later, in the period after World War II, French Marxism came under the

influence of the early Lukács as a whole generation of social theorists

sought radical alternatives to the dominant Stalinist orthodoxy. The most

famous text of this trend is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the

Dialectic, which first introduced the term “Western Marxism” to describe

the tradition stemming from History and Class Consciousness. The French

were primarily interested in Lukács’s concept of praxis and his theory of

class consciousness. They saw in these ideas an alternative to the official

Marxist dogma of the party as surrogate subject of the revolution. With

Lukács they reaffirmed the primacy of working-class praxis, articulated

ideologically by the party but not replaced by it.

I had the good fortune to study with representatives of both these

schools of thought, with Herbert Marcuse and Lucien Goldmann. Starting

out from the disparate traditions and emphases they represent, I propose a

new interpretation designed to reestablish the unity of Lukács’s early

Marxism. This background may help to explain the difference between my

approach to Lukács and that of scholars widely read in the English-speaking

world such as Leszek Kołakowski, Gareth Stedman Jones, and George

Lichtheim, who condemn the theory of reification as irrationalist and the

theory of class consciousness as Stalinist. These very negative evaluations

square neither with the content nor the historical impact of Lukács’s text.

When Lukács is compared, not with Bergson or Stalin, but with Marx’s

early philosophical works and the Frankfurt School, a very different picture

emerges. Like the early Marx, the early Marxist Lukács is a critic of the

“alienation of reason” in modern capitalist society. But that critique is by no

means irrationalist; rather, it aims at the establishment of a dialectical

paradigm of rationality suited to the task of social self-understanding and

human liberation. Such a dialectical rationality can be of no service to

authoritarian regimes, but only to a socialist culture of self-rule. Not the

least important dimension of these philosophers of praxis is the contribution

they make to defining the broad outlines of such a culture.

The writing and rewriting of this book has placed me in the debt of many

people. Lucien Goldmann and Herbert Marcuse introduced me to Marxist

philosophy and to the work of Lukács. My wife, Anne-Marie Feenberg, and

Jerry Doppelt, read chapter after chapter and frequently convinced me to

make changes for the better. Many others read portions of the manuscript

and offered criticism and encouragement. I recall with pleasure fruitful

exchanges with Al Gouldner, Stanley Aronowitz, Doug Kellner, Bill Leiss,

Stanley Rosen, Mark Poster, Steven Vogel, Deborah Cook, Stephen

Crowell, Richard Westerman, Timothy Hall, Robert Pippin, Ian Angus,

Samir Gandesha, Stefano Giachetti Ludovisi, Shane Gunster, Hans Radder,

Allen Wood, Woody Sayre, Michael Löwy, Frank Cunningham, and

William Rasch. We did not always reach agreement but I always learned

something from our discussions.

1 For an analysis of the complex relation of Marxism to romanticism, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2001), Chapter 3. They write, “Marx’s ideas were neither romantic nor modernizing, but constituted an attempt at a dialectical Aufhebung between the two, in a new critical and revolutionary worldview” (99).

CHAPTER ONE

The Philosophy of Praxis

MARX AND LUKÁCS

In this chapter, I discuss the philosophy of the early Marx from a Lukácsian

perspective, as background to the exposition of Lukács’s own parallel

attempt to resolve the problems first posed by Marx. Considerable

differences separate these thinkers, and there is always the risk that in

comparing them in this manner the identity of one will be submerged in that

of the other. I will do my best to avoid an artificial identification of the two

positions where they do actually differ; however, I will argue that in spite of

real differences we are dealing here with a specific philosophical doctrine,

which I will call “philosophy of praxis,” and which is shared by a number

of thinkers.

While writing his notebooks in prison, Gramsci used the phrase

“philosophy of praxis” ambiguously to signify Marxism in general and his

own cultural interpretation of Marxism. In essence Gramsci argues that all

knowledge is situated in a cultural context, itself based on a class-specific

worldview. No domain of knowledge and no corresponding domain of

being is independent of society. That interpretation, which he called

“absolute historicism,” resembles in broad outline the Hegelian Marxism of

Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, Marcuse, and the early work of Marx himself. 1 It seems appropriate therefore to call this whole trend “philosophy of praxis,”

not as a euphemism for Marxism in general but rather to distinguish a

particular radical philosophical version of Marxism from other

interpretations.

The early method of Marx and Lukács is very different from the

“scientific socialism” erected later on the basis of historical observation and

economic theory. In 1843 and 1844 Marx developed a philosophy of

revolution that he seems to have intended as a foundation for economic

studies. From 1918 to 1923 Lukács elaborated a philosophy of revolution

supplementing Marxist economics. For both the early Marx and Lukács, such central Marxist concepts as the proletariat and socialism were not first

developed through empirical research. Instead, as philosophers they set out

from a critical discussion of the philosophical tradition in the course of

which they deduced the characteristic historical concepts of Marxism.

Included in this deduction is the concept of revolution, which plays a

pivotal methodological role in their philosophies.

In interpreting Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as a

philosophy of praxis, I have been obliged to choose positions in some of the

numerous debates over this early work. It will be useful at the outset to

make these positions explicit by situating this interpretation with respect to

some others. I will not review the enormous literature on the Manuscripts;

only two facets of it are relevant here: the debates over the ontological and

the normative character of social categories in the Manuscripts. 2 At issue is more than a matter of textual exegesis. The larger question concerns

whether the Manuscripts are a philosophy of praxis, as I am engaged in

defining it, or on the contrary, a far less ambitious ethical complement to

economic research within the framework of some traditional ontology.

I show the former—that Marx founds a new concept of reason in

revolution through an ontological treatment of social categories. This approach brings to the fore all that links the project of the early Marx to that

of Lukács. But Marx’s Manuscripts had not yet been published when

Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness. In fact, Capital is the primary basis of Lukács’s Marxism rather than Marx’s early work.

Capital is self-consciously unphilosophical in spite of Marx’s prefatory

acknowledgment of Hegel’s influence. In it Marx is careful to minimize the

use of philosophical terminology and to avoid the exploration of

philosophical problems. Yet we now know on the basis of extensive textual

evidence just how complex were the philosophical considerations behind

Capital. The link between the Manuscripts and the published writings of Marx’s maturity is supplied by his own draft of Capital, the Grundrisse; but the publication of this text was delayed until the beginning of World War

II.3 These textual absences, combined with the image Marx wished to project of his work in Capital, seemed to authorize a scientistic

interpretation of his later doctrine that Lukács first challenged from a

dialectical perspective.

Lukács made the connection between Marxism and philosophy (that is,

between Marx and Hegel), primarily through reflection on Marx’s

methodology in his economic writings, and only secondarily on the basis of

those of Marx’s comments on philosophical matters with which he was

acquainted. This is possible because, as Ernest Mandel remarks, “the

concept of alienation … is part of the mature Marx’s instrumentarium.”4

Lukács was in fact the first to show this, to notice and explain not merely

the influence of Hegel on Marx’s early political essays, or on the general

Marxian “worldview,” but on the concepts and method of Capital. He

reevaluated Marx’s famous “coquetting” with Hegel, and concluded that in

that work, “a whole series of categories of central importance and in

constant use stem directly from Hegel’s Logic”. 5

Lukács reconstructed a philosophy of praxis from the methodological

traces of Marx’s philosophical position visible in his economic writings.

The result of this effort is not identical with the position of either the

Manuscripts or the Grundrisse; nevertheless, it is impressive to what extent Lukács’s somewhat speculative extrapolations from Marx’s published work

can find support in these unpublished ones. Most important, Lukács’s

philosophy of praxis has remarkable structural similarities to that of Marx,

notably insofar as Lukács develops an original critique of philosophy

paralleling Marx’s own. This convergence has a biographical background.

Like Marx, Lukács was deeply schooled in Hegelian dialectics and so when

he sought to develop a Marxist philosophy, he returned to the Hegelian

doctrine from which Marx set out. It is this link, mediated by the

supposedly “scientific” work Capital, which bespeaks an affinity of

Marxism for philosophy of praxis. Yet this biographical coincidence does

not quite explain the similarity of the transformation undergone by Hegel’s

dialectic at their hands.

THE ANTINOMIES

The defining trait of philosophy of praxis is the claim that the “antinomies”

of philosophy can only be resolved in history. The concept of “antinomy”

employed here is derived from Hegel, for whom it signifies the ever

widening gap between subject and object in modern culture. Ever since

Descartes distinguished the two substances, philosophy and life have

become more and more sharply sundered. Rich and complex theories of the

subjective dimension of being explain the meaning of freedom, value, political ideals, while equally powerful and encompassing theories of the

objective dimension of being explain the laws of necessity in nature and

history. From his earliest to his last works, Hegel saw his task as cataloging

the resulting contradictions in modern culture and transcending them in a

dialectical conception of being that would take into account both its

subjective and objective dimensions.

For Hegel the resolution of the antinomies is a theoretical task.

However, he believes that this task can only be carried out under specific

historical conditions that happened to be those of his own time and place.

Philosophy of praxis begins with a critique of the conservative implications

of this resolution of the antinomies and a radicalization of its historical

aspect. Both Marx and Lukács argued that because Hegel could not

conceive of really radical changes in modern culture, he treated temporary

historical conditions such as monarchy and wage labor as though they were

eternal necessities. They claimed that the antinomies would be transcended

by social revolution and not by philosophical speculation.

Had Marx confined himself to arguing this position in relation to the

antinomies of moral and political life, he would have created a new political

philosophy. This new philosophy would have been compatible with a

traditional ontology and might have been formulated as a “left” variant of

Hegel’s philosophy. Marx’s startling innovation was to include all the

antinomies in his theory of revolution, those relating to epistemology and

ontology as well as the moral and political ones. He thus arrived at the

astounding proposition that social change could not only accomplish such

goals as reconciling individual and society, moral responsibility and self-

interest, but that it could also unite subject and object, thought and being,

man and nature.

This proposition has a number of paradoxical corollaries from which we

must not shrink in interpreting the early Marx. As we will see in later

chapters, Lukács and Marcuse pose a related challenge. When philosophy

of praxis contends that human action is philosophically relevant not just in

ethics or politics but in all domains, it is asserting a wholly original

ontological position. For this philosophy, human action touches being as

such, and not simply those special domains we usually conceive as affected

by our activities. In somewhat different terms, essentially this same

requirement can be formulated as the transcendence of the antinomy of

value and fact, “ought” and “is.” For, if human action affects being, then values do not confront a normless and humanly indifferent reality, but rather

represent its highest potentialities.

This position is coherent only where being is interpreted through a

special sphere in which human being is actually able to transform the

objects on which it acts. Then the apparently humanly indifferent spheres,

such as nature, can be ontologically subordinated to a sphere within which

action affects the substratum of reality, for example, history. Action can

only constitute reality where reality cannot be conceived independent of

that special sphere.

The attempt to understand being in general through human being is a

kind of inverted philosophical anthropology. Marx, Lukács, and the

Frankfurt School share this approach with philosophers such as Feuerbach

and Heidegger, with this difference: the latter focus on the individual, and

so construct speculative philosophies with moralistic overtones. For

philosophers of praxis, on the contrary, history is the “paradigmatic order”

for the interpretation of being generally.6

For this philosophy, “reality” is historical, and history itself is to be

understood as in essence an object of human practice. Because the

philosophy of praxis conceives being as history and history as the product

of human action, it can mutatis mutandis conceive of human action as

relevant to the constitution of being. Action takes on a universal

significance, going beyond the social world to affect being as such. As

Lukács puts it, “We have … made our own history and if we are able to

regard the whole of reality [ Wirklichkeit] as history (i.e., as our history, for there is no other), we shall have raised ourselves in fact to the position from

which reality can be understood as our ‘action.’” 7

The ontologically significant relation between human being and being

in general is now social action because history is constituted in such action.

History is ontology and the becoming of the human species is the privileged

domain within which the antinomies of philosophy can finally be resolved.

In an early essay on Marx’s Manuscripts, Marcuse concludes that “The

history of man is at the same time the happening of ‘the whole of nature’;

his history is the ‘production and reproduction’ of the whole of nature, the

furtherance of objective being through the renewed sublation of its current

form.”8

Throughout this book, I will be concerned with the implications of this

remarkable proposition. These implications can be considered under two

main headings. First, there is the dimension of philosophy of praxis

concerned with the resolution of social antinomies through the disalienation

or dereification of social life. As I have argued above, the ambition of

philosophy of praxis goes beyond social theory, for it claims that all

objectivity can be disalienated starting out from the disalienation of society.

This wider claim indicates a second dimension of the theory concerned with

the ontological generalization of the social analysis. This most daring

dimension of the philosophy of praxis will be treated through what I call a

“metacritical” approach to the history of philosophy. Later chapters will

then consider the problematic role of nature and attempt to formulate an

original response to the difficulties it poses for an “absolute historicism.”

This argument will draw on the resources of philosophy of praxis in what I

take to be its final formulation in the late work of Herbert Marcuse. Before

turning to a discussion of the concept of metacritique and its relevance to

the idea of a “realization” or “end” of philosophy, I would like to consider

briefly some of the objections to viewing Marx’s philosophy of praxis as a

contribution to ontology.

ONTOLOGY OR HISTORY

With the possible exception of Marcuse, the Frankfurt School contests the

interpretation of Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. Alfred

Schmidt’s careful study of Marx’s concept of nature attempts to situate the

Manuscripts at an equal distance from a materialist ontology and an

absolute historicism. Jürgen Habermas also rejects the interpretation of

Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. He argues that the early

Marx distinguishes between nature as such, and nature as it enters the

historical sphere through labor, and which therefore has a social character.

Marx’s social theory would have implications only for society in the larger

framework of a naturalistic ontology. Within this same tradition, however, it

is customary to attack Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as idealistic. Thus the

similarities I identify between the early Marx and Lukács are denied.

It is interesting to note that another influential school of Marxist

thought, founded by Louis Althusser, makes no such distinction. Rejecting

equally the early Marx and Lukács, the Althusserians see in both a romantic

refusal of scientific objectivity and the independence of nature. There is

thus a certain unwitting convergence of Frankfurt School and Althusserian

interpretations in that both emphasize the autonomy of nature by contrast

with philosophy of praxis and condemn as idealistic any doctrine that

attempts to understand nature through history. I cannot consider these

convergent critiques in detail. Here I would like to simply sketch the

Frankfurt School’s attempt to “save” the early Marx from historicism.

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas admits that Marx’s text

is ambiguous. He claims that the ambiguities have given rise to a

“phenomenological strain of Marxism” that overlooks Marx’s naturalism

and for which “the category of labor then acquires unawares the meaning of

world-constituting life activity in general.”9 Although Habermas includes Marcuse in this phenomenological strain, this would only be true of the

very early and late work. Throughout much of his career, Marcuse’s

position was close to Schmidt’s and Habermas’s in denying the ontological

status of social categories. In Reason and Revolution, for example, Marcuse

too notes the ambiguities of Marx’s text; he writes: “All this has an obvious

resemblance to Hegel’s idea of reason. Marx even goes so far as to describe

the self-realization of man in terms of the unity of thought and being.”10

But, in fact, “Marx … detached dialectic from this ontological base. In his

work, the negativity of reality becomes a historical condition which cannot

be hypostatized as a metaphysical state of affairs.” 11

Such an interpretation may explain Marx’s later Marxism but it does not

account for the Manuscripts. It is particularly significant that in the

formulations of Habermas and Marcuse, the antinomies Marx attempted to

transcend reappear as alternatives between which he is supposed to have

chosen: naturalism or humanism, history or ontology. But Marx himself

writes:

Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism, and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.

It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.12

The early Marx would not have defined his own advance over Hegel as

the demonstration that alienation is a historical category rather than an

ontological one. He argued that all ontology is historical in essence and that

the dichotomy between being and history is therefore false. This is the main

claim of philosophy of praxis, the idea that history, properly understood,

has ontological significance. As a philosopher of praxis Marx did not choose between an ontological and a historical interpretation of the social

categories; he chose both. Hence his most striking utterances, such as the

one just quoted, or the following: “Society is the accomplished union of

man and nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism

of man and the realized humanism of nature.” 13

THE NORMATIVE DIMENSION

The interpretation of the Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis is also

challenged from an ethical point of view. Marx’s claim that the “human

essence” is “alienated” is frequently said to imply an ethical ideal. Marx is

supposed to have rested his case for revolution on the injustice of capitalist

alienation. Humanity’s true essence as “species being” imperatively

requires the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of conditions in which

social institutions are based on cooperation and creativity rather than

competition. This formulation recapitulates the antinomy of value and fact,

i.e., capitalist fact versus socialist value.

Not everyone agrees. Some see in the Manuscripts an attempt to

transcend the opposition of value and fact presupposed by this

interpretation. The debate over the Manuscripts is of course related to the

larger debate over Marxism and ethics.14 Considered as a philosophy of praxis, Marx’s theory is unquestionably normative in some sense, but I

argue that it is not based on an ethical conception.

What is at stake here is the dialectical character of Marx’s theory, hence

also his relation to Hegel. Were Marx to accept the dichotomy of value and

fact, ethics and social reality, he would regress behind Hegel to a utopian-

moralistic position like that of Bruno Bauer and Moses Hess. In his essay

on Hess, Lukács showed that these Left Hegelians attempted to recover

revolutionary possibilities by positing ethical values as the basis for

knowledge of the future. They thus rejected Hegel’s concrete analysis of

and reconciliation with the present.

In his mature works Hegel found the “ought” realized in the “is” of his

society. On Hegel’s terms, if Marx had posited the “human essence” as an

ethical ideal, philosophy would already have transcended it theoretically

through the demonstration of the relative rationality of what is. Alienation

might, like the police courts Hegel deduces from the Idea, remain as an

unpleasant fact of practical life. But then so are fleas and measles. The indifference of philosophical reason to such matters, essentially to human

happiness, is not arbitrary but expresses the essence of social reality. The

demand for the abstract ideal is a moment of negation necessarily frustrated

by an objectivity that transcends it, that is to say, by reason itself.

Hegelianism is not overcome by the renewed positing of the ideal, but

rather anticipates it and refutes it in advance.

Hegel’s critique of Kant and of abstract ethical idealism influenced

Marx to seek a basis for revolutionary theory in the tendencies of social

reality, in a dialectic of ideal and real in history. Lukács argues that Hegel

prepared the Marxian approach:

In contrast to Fichte with his revolutionary Utopia, Hegel developed very early on in his work the tendency to “understand what is,” a tendency which originally pointed energetically in the direction of the future. His concern to comprehend the present as at once become and becoming is … the germ of a true historical dialectics (the dialectics of history translated into thought). For it is precisely in the present that all forms of objectivity can be revealed quite concretely as processes, since it is the present which shows most clearly the unity of result and starting point of the process. Given that, the rejection of all “Oughts” and futuristic utopian thinking, the concentration of philosophy on knowledge of the present (grasped dialectically) emerges precisely as the only possible epistemological method of knowing what is really knowable about the future, the tendencies within

the present which impel it really and concretely toward the future.15

This sounds more like Marx than Hegel, indeed, more like the mature

Marx than the author of the Manuscripts. That work may be seen as

transitional between an ethical and a socioeconomic approach to knowledge

of the future. In the Manuscripts, Marx attempts to reconstruct the ideal concepts of political philosophy as potentialities awaiting realization. The

contradictions between philosophy and reality are reformulated as

immanent contradictions in reality itself. The new method is neither

speculative nor empirical, but synthesizes these contrary approaches in a

metacritique. This metacritique relativizes what is and what ought to be as

contradictory tendencies actually inhabiting the real-in-process. It is

through this conception that Marx relativizes ethical ideals as moments in

the real process of becoming of what is, and so goes beyond utopian

moralism.

For example, Marx does not set out from a philosophically elaborated

concept of the state contrasted with the existing institutions he wishes to

criticize. In fact, he dismisses this method contemptuously in a letter to

Ruge: “Until now the philosophers had the solution to all riddles in their

desks, and the stupid outside world simply had to open its mouth so that the roasted pigeons of absolute science might fly into it.”16 Instead, the philosophical deduction of what ought to be must proceed from actual

struggles testifying to the living contradiction of ideal and real. The

appropriate role for the new philosopher consists in “explaining to the

world its own acts,” showing that actual struggles contain a transcending

content that can be linked to the concept of a rational social life. “The

critic,” Marx writes, “therefore can start with any form of theoretical and

practical consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms

inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.”17

In these earliest “Marxist” writings, Marx can be seen struggling to

release new grounds for revolution from Hegelian political philosophy. A

generation later Engels summarized Marx’s conclusion with admirable

simplicity. Where Hegel had claimed that “All that is real is rational; and all

that is rational is real,” for Marx:

The Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: all that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality; and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality.

In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish. 18

In sum, the only way beyond Hegel is through him. Marx makes this passage in the Manuscripts, where he is finally able to “develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be

and goal.” There Marx identifies reason (true actuality) with the socially

mediated process of satisfying human needs and on that basis developing

human individuality. Then the “existing actuality,” alienated capitalist

society, is shown to be reason’s “unreasonable form,” which must be further

mediated and overcome through revolution. The critique of political

economy, which begins already in the Manuscripts, derives socialist

potentialities from the contradictions of the given capitalist forms. The

“ought-to-be and goal” emerges from the dialectic of existence and essence

as a demand of reason, a methodological precondition of rationality, and not

as an ethical ideal.

As a philosopher of praxis, Marx attempts to reconstruct the concept of

reason so that capitalist alienation appears as reason’s essential problem, a

problem to be resolved through historical action. Marx takes what for Hegel and earlier philosophy is a mere social contingency, human suffering, and

dignifies it with ontological status, not in order to attribute it to the human

condition, but rather the better to comprehend the presuppositions of its

historical transcendence. These presuppositions are preserved ideally in

philosophy in the concept of reason, and therefore Marx insists, against the

reformers of the “practical political party,” that “you cannot abolish

philosophy without realizing it.” 19

The concept of an “Aufhebung” of philosophy also has a

methodological side, with which we will be focally concerned in this book.

Once again, it is by reference to the Frankfurt School that I will attempt to

clarify the project of the early Marx and Lukács.

METACRITIQUE

The term “metacritique” became widely known through Habermas’s use of

it to refer to the study of the various forms of theory in the light of their intrinsic dependence on specific “knowledge-constitutive interests.”20

Habermas distinguishes these interests from those of everyday practical

affairs by their enormous generality, however, despite this they belong to

the social world. They are quasi-transcendental conditions of objectivity for

the spheres of knowledge they determine. The odd description, “quasi-

transcendental,” refers to their character as neither ordinary social facts nor

world-constituting posits of the pure ego. Habermas needs some such

concept since he wants to avoid both positivism and historicism in order to

affirm both the cognitive value of natural science and its rootedness in a

generic interest in technical control that determines the type of object it

studies.

The term “metacritique” in this sense bears a certain resemblance to the

method of Lukács and Marx insofar as it crosses the usual boundaries

between philosophical and social explanation. There is, however, a

considerable difference between the metacritical approach in philosophy of

praxis and Habermas’s metacritique. His knowledge-constitutive interests

are anthropological in their generality. The (relative) truth of knowledge is

conserved in contact with these interests by reason of their very generality.

Reductionism is thus avoided at the cost of a loss in sociological

concreteness. Marx and Lukács offer no such theory of general

anthropological interests. Instead, their metacritique moves in the opposite direction, toward a domain of concreteness that they claim founds

theoretical abstractions. We might better compare this approach with

Whitehead’s: “I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its

function is the double one, first of harmonizing them by assigning to them

their relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by

direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe and thereby

promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought.” 21 In Marx and Lukács, of course, the aim of such criticism of abstractions is not to

found a speculative metaphysics, but rather to achieve what might be called

a sociological desublimation of the concepts of philosophy.

To some extent this difference in orientation, as compared with

Habermas, may be due to the fact that the latter is primarily concerned to

refute a supposedly value-free positivistic empiricism. Concepts drawn

from the Kantian tradition are helpful for this purpose. In Kantian

philosophy the formal properties of rationality are abstracted as completely

as possible from the particular contents on which the faculty of reason

exercises itself. Kant demonstrates that these formal properties, as they

relate to epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, are a priori preconditions for

any and all knowledge and action in the corresponding domains of real life.

Each precondition responds to a distinctive value that is defining for its

orientation toward reality.

By contrast, Marx and Lukács react against a Kantian cultural climate;

they follow in the footsteps of Hegel in attempting to resolve the antinomies

of form and content that arise from Kant’s formalistic paradigm of

rationality. To Hegel they owe dialectics as the method through which the

opposites can be reconciled in a higher unity, a totality. The application of

the category of totality to the study of the historically given forms of

rationality provides the basis for a non-reductive social theory of

knowledge. Philosophy is not regarded as a mere rationalization of covert

interests, nor as a passive reflection of production relations. Rather, it is the

form in which the actual contradictions of social life are raised to

consciousness under the horizon of the given society. The juxtaposition of

the philosophical concepts with a specific social background both explains

the impasses and antinomies of theory, and shows a path to resolution

through social action.

Susan Buck-Morss argues that Adorno’s cultural criticism was deeply influenced by this method, as he discovered it in Lukács. She summarizes

Lukács’s approach as follows:

Instead of reducing bourgeois thought to the economic conditions of its production, Lukács argued that the nature of those conditions could be found within the intellectual phenomena themselves …

Once these thinkers accepted given social reality as the reality, they had to come upon a barrier of irrationality which could not be overcome (and which had led Kant to posit the thing-in-itself, because that barrier could not be removed from theory without being removed from society).

Conversely, if theorists could see through the reified appearances, they would recognize that the antinomies of philosophy were due not to the inadequacies of reason, but to those of the reality in

which reason tried to find itself.22

Much the same analysis could be made of Marx’s early critique of

political philosophy. Buck-Morss contrasts sociological reductionism and

metacritique. But what does it mean to find “the nature of [economic]

conditions … within the intellectual phenomena?” This is a crucial point

that requires clarification in the case of Marx by reference to the influence

of Feuerbach.

Feuerbach’s central idea is that philosophy is secularized theology. He

says, “What lies in the other world for religion, lies in this world for

philosophy.” 23 When philosophy identifies the subject with reason, with thinking, it brings the theological idea of “spirit” down to earth. Similarly,

the concept of the object as an object-of-thought, constituted by thought or

obeying rational laws, is a homely transcendental equivalent of Biblical

Genesis. This appears to be a crass reduction of the essence of philosophy.

What makes Feuerbach interesting is his attempt to go beyond this basic

thesis toward a reconstruction of philosophy.

Feuerbach calls Hegel’s thought, which he sees as the culmination of

the philosophical tradition, a “philosophy of identity.” The identity referred

to is that of thought and being, reason and reality. This identity is

theological and to it Feuerbach opposes what he calls “the true and absolute

viewpoint”: “the viewpoint of the distinction between I and thou, subject

and object.”24 Yet although Feuerbach rejects the philosophy of identity, he reconstructs its formal principles on another plane.

He detaches the formal structure of philosophy from its concept of the

subject and object. The “philosophy of the future,” as he calls it, will

conserve these formal traits but attach them to a new subject–object

concept. This is a metacritique of fundamental philosophical concepts.

These concepts are relativized by reconstructing them in the concrete existential domains from which they were first abstracted.

Feuerbach first redefines the concepts of subject and object, arguing that

they are both sensuous, natural things in the world which cannot be brought

together merely conceptually. The identity achieved in and through thought

is spurious and ideological, but there is another kind of subject–object

identity which can be achieved through sense perception and love.

Feuerbach writes, “The identity of subject and object, which in self-

consciousness [in other words, in Hegel] is only an abstract idea, is truth

and reality only in man’s sensuous perception of man.” 25 Thus the formal principle, subject–object identity, is taken from Hegel and conserved while

its content in Hegel’s thought is rejected.

The upshot is an enlargement of the concept of the subject to include

more than thinking, to include the whole human being, so to speak. This

enlarged subject retains what might be called an “ontological pathos”

through its continued submission to the formal principles of idealism.

Feuerbach expressed his conclusion in ringing phrases that certainly

influenced Marx.

The unity of thought and being has meaning and truth only when man is comprehended as the ground and subject of this unity. Only a real being recognizes real objects; only where thought is not the subject of itself but a predicate of a real being is the idea not separated from being … From this result the following categorical imperatives: Desire not to be a philosopher as distinct from a man; be nothing else than a thinking man. Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real human being and isolated for itself; think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s oceans. Think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, super-worldly God; then you can be sure that your ideas are unities of being and

thought.26

That is precisely Marx’s starting point in the Manuscripts. There he

attempts to obey Feuerbach’s injunction by a heroic effort to overcome the

gap between thought and life. As Marx puts it, “One basis for life and

another for science is a priori a falsehood.” 27 Elsewhere in the text, Marx expresses himself in the first person in a manner that indicates his personal

stake in the matter. “My universal consciousness is only the theoretical

form of that whose living form is the real community, the social entity,

although at the present day this universal consciousness is an abstraction

from real life and is opposed to it as an enemy. That is why the activity of

my universal consciousness as such is my theoretical existence as a social

being.”28

However, Marx is a better dialectician and more rigorous thinker than

Feuerbach. He is not content to retain simply the general form of the

philosophy of identity while giving an anthropological twist to the concepts

of subject and object. He takes more than this from Hegel in order to

accomplish more ambitious goals than Feuerbach’s. Marx follows Hegel in

requiring that subject–object unity be grasped as the actual constitution of

the object by the subject. And like Hegel he tries to avoid a Fichtean

reduction of the object to the subject through a dialectical conception of

their relationship. He also agrees with the Hegel of the Phenomenology of

Spirit that this relationship is established in the historical process. He accepts, in other words, what Lukács describes as “Hegel’s program: to see

the absolute, the goal of his philosophy, as a result remains valid for Marxism with its very different objects of knowledge, and is even of greater

concern to it, as the dialectical process is seen to be identical with the

course of history.” 29 The formal principles Marx retains are thus richer and more complex than those that survive Feuerbach’s critical appropriation of

traditional philosophy.

As Marx works out his program in the Manuscripts, it becomes clear

that he is attempting not just a “reform of philosophy”—Feuerbach’s phrase

—but a rigorous Aufhebung, or transcendence, of Hegelian idealism, and

with it of philosophy generally. To accomplish this Marx develops a

metacritique of Hegel, designed to show that the concept of reason as

absolute knowledge is still a theological attempt to overcome social

alienation in thought. The “ordre des raisons” must be reversed: when

alienation is overcome in real life, then and only then will it be possible to

overcome the alienation of reason. Thus the Manuscripts do not achieve

their end in a mere philosophical reformulation of the concept of reason.

Revolution becomes the basis for a new constellation, overcoming the

opposition of thought and life, thinker and society, by founding reason

practically in life and community. The retention of the formal structure of

Hegel’s thought infused with this new content yields a philosophy of praxis.

THE REALIZATION OF PHILOSOPHY30

What makes the approach taken by Marx and Lukács unique, and

distinguishes it not only from Kant but also from Hegel, is their belief that

the primary antinomy to be overcome is that of traditional philosophy and

social reality. Here the term “metacritique” applies in a double sense. Not

only do Marx and Lukács attempt to relate philosophical abstractions to the

social lifeworld, they also claim to identify the intrinsic limitation of the

traditional philosophical method of abstraction. Because traditional

philosophy assumes that the alienated foundations of the social order are

rooted in the very nature of reality, it concludes that the antinomies can only

be resolved speculatively, in thought, and formulates them in view of such a

resolution. The criterion of philosophical adequacy that guides concept

formation in the tradition thus reflects an implicit sense of the limits of

social change that Marx and Lukács challenge. They argue that the

resolution of the antinomies requires a radical social transformation

unimagined by their predecessors.

Nevertheless, neither Marx nor Lukács simply dismiss philosophy.

Rather, they proceed from the assumption that the tension between the

concept of reason and its concrete social substratum reflects contradictions

in social reality. Despite its limits traditional philosophy was able to

identify social potentialities, even if only in a speculative form. The

problem now consists in reconstructing the insights of philosophy in a new

context, oriented toward practical social change. Marcuse summarizes this

conclusion as follows: “The philosophical construction of reason is replaced

by the creation of a rational society. The philosophical ideals of a better

world and of true Being are incorporated into the practical aim of struggling

mankind, where they take on a human form.”31

In sum, the metacritical approach as the term will be used here consists

in dialectically relativizing philosophical form and social content, and

correspondingly, theory and practice. Marx and Lukács do not philosophize

within the historically given tradition, presupposing the continuing validity

of philosophy as such, and eo ipso of its forms of evidence and its

problematics. Rather, they consider the tradition as essentially completed,

and then proceed to study it from “outside,” as a moment in a larger social

process in which action can intervene. It is in this light, and not in some

merely pragmatic sense of urgency, that we are to understand Marx’s

eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the

world in various ways; the point is to change it.” 32

Within the tradition of Western Marxism, these rather opaque

formulations of the theory–practice relation have a quite definite meaning.

One of the aims of this book is to clarify that meaning. Since I am writing

within that tradition myself, I will follow Marx’s and Lukács’s construction

of terms like “philosophy,” “theory,” “practice,” and phrases like “the unity

of theory and practice,” “the realization of philosophy.” Before proceeding

on this basis, I would like to step briefly outside that framework to

anticipate some objections. I will put these objections in the form of

questions that implicitly challenge the very idea of a unity of theory and

practice or a realization of philosophy.

1. Marx and Lukács claim that they are “realizing” philosophy, putting

theory into practice. How does this differ from “applying” theory to the

solution of a practical problem?

2. Marx and Lukács claim that the philosophical tradition is finished,

which would seem to mean that they themselves are not philosophers

contributing to that tradition. Yet surely the Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts and History and Class Consciousness are philosophical works.

Are they then philosophers after all, and if so how can they elaborate a

philosophy on the basis of the proposition that philosophy is dead? 33

3. Marx and Lukács seem to say that only the revolution can “solve”

philosophical problems, and yet they propose solutions to these problems

before the revolution. Does this not imply that the revolution is after all

irrelevant to the solution of philosophical problems?

These questions arise from ambiguities in Western Marxism’s special

terminology. When this terminology is understood it becomes clear that

Marx and Lukács are not making quite such radical claims as at first

appears. The chief difficulty stems from ambiguities in the terms

“philosophy” and “theory.” I will therefore begin with this issue.

In its usual meaning “philosophy” refers to the activity of reflecting on

the basic assumptions and concepts of a discipline, practice, or culture. In

this sense Marx and Lukács are obviously still doing philosophy, and they

would not deny it. But for them, “philosophy” refers to a specific historical

tradition that develops common themes from the Greeks to Hegel. They

regard this tradition as “completed,” and they would deny that they are

merely continuing it in their own work. The unity of the tradition consists in

certain paradigmatic concepts and methods that run through it from

beginning to end, in spite of variations and innovations. It is this paradigm that has been exhausted, not the activity of reflection per se.

The early Marx and Lukács, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida have all

proposed general theories of the unity of the philosophical tradition, and on

that basis have announced its end. Reflection continues, and indeed it has

no original concepts to substitute for the old ones. But the philosopher’s

relation to these concepts is no longer immediate, naïve; the “death” of

philosophy means no more than that thinkers become conscious of the

historical limits of the cultural system on the basis of which these concepts

arise.

For Marxists, this consciousness is specifically social. They trace the

origin of philosophy’s eternal truths, its constants and paradigms, back to a

social world that is in the process of disappearing. There is a particularly

clear statement of this position in the Communist Manifesto.

The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. 34

If we accept the limitation of “philosophy” to a specific tradition bound

up with the history of class society, then we need a wider term with which

to refer to the general process of reflection on basic assumptions of which

“philosophy” would be an instance. This more general term is “theory.”

Now we need to distinguish between two types of theory, a type that is

identified with traditional philosophy and a new type in which Marxism

engages. This is precisely the distinction between “traditional” and

“critical” theory that Horkheimer introduced in a famous essay. 35 Like the Frankfurt School, Marx and Lukács argue that traditional theory has been

superseded by a new critical theory. They do not suggest that philosophy

should be abandoned for practical activity or simply “applied” in the usual

sense of the term. The point, then, is not that reflection should cease, but

that a new kind of reflection is needed.

This new reflection differs from the old in treating many assumptions

the philosophical tradition took for granted as relative to the social situation

from which they arise. For example, instead of accepting the eternal

necessity of the antinomy of public and private interest, critical theory shows that this antinomy belongs to a specific social world. Critical theory

still works with the concepts of public and private interest elaborated in

philosophy, but it problematizes the social background against which these

two forms of interest appear as antinomial opposites.

The critique of abstract or “pure” theory is to be understood in this

context. Once again it is not that Marx and Lukács reject conceptual

generality for empirical specificity, but rather that the process of abstraction

in which philosophy detaches its concepts from their social basis gives rise

to a bias they reject. Philosophy treats its concepts as though they rested on

eternal facts of nature or the human condition. But once conceived in this

way, the social background of these concepts is occluded and it becomes

impossible to imagine a role for human action in resolving the philosophical

problems they entail. Marx and Lukács thus do not return to the empirical

so much as show the inseparable connection between the most abstract

concepts of philosophy and a concrete social context that can be changed.

Let me return now to the example of the antinomy of public and private

interest to illustrate how practice can contribute to resolving a theoretical

problem. Plato sets up the problem as philosophy has treated it ever since.

The lower classes of the Republic pursue private interests and this

disqualifies them from rule. Plato’s guardians are qualified to rule by the

complete elimination of their private lives; they cannot even know their

own children. For the Greeks the abolition of the family is the abolition of

the private sphere, hence also private interest. The antinomy is evident here.

It does not disappear in as different a philosopher as Rousseau. He

distinguishes the general will from the will of all as public versus private

interest. He does not conceive of a special class as the bearer of the general

will, but instead projects the antinomy onto the individual. The division in

the soul this produces requires “virtue” in the citizen to resist mere greed.

Even Mandeville, who claims that “private vices are public benefits,”

readily admits that the intention of the individuals in pursuing private

interests has nothing to do with the public benefits achieved by a

paradoxical reversal. The antinomy survives down to the present. The

“original position,” famous from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, accomplishes

the same division of public from private interests that Plato demands.

Habermas, with his rigid distinction between communicative and strategic

uses of language, also perpetuates the antinomy.

For a Marxist the limitation of this type of thinking is clear. The unquestioned assumption that lies behind the antinomy is the permanency

of privately owned means of production and the resulting antagonism

between the members of society. Public interests then arise alongside

private ones insofar as the community has needs that are not identical with

the mere summation of these antagonistic private interests. But what if

historical conditions arose in which private ownership of means of

production could be replaced by the rational administration of both the

economy and the state in the interests of the whole community? Of course

some forms of personal “private” interest would remain, but these would

not stand in an antagonistic relation to the public interest of the community.

Instead of dedication to public interest requiring a virtuous dictatorship or

general renunciation of private interests, the two would be in harmony, the

free development of each supporting the free development of all. The

traditional philosophical construction of the issue would no longer apply. Or

at least so claims Marxist theory.

The point I want to make is not that such a Marxist reform of society

would work—that is another problem—but rather that once one envisages it

as a real possibility, social action appears to play a central role in resolving

a philosophical problem that has traditionally been treated as purely

theoretical in character. It is this new role for social action that is intended

by the concept of a “realization” of philosophy. Philosophy is realized in the

sense that its old ideal of somehow reconciling public and private interest is

finally achieved. This realization involves a radical social change, and not a

purely conceptual mediation such as Plato’s utopia, Rousseau’s “virtue,” or

Mandeville’s version of the “invisible hand.”

Note that this new type of theoretical reflection need not await the

revolution. Reflection can always go beyond the given achievements of its

era toward ideal outcomes. This is true of Marx as much as it is of Plato.

But what appears as a real possibility to anticipatory thinking differs

drastically with time and place. Although Plato could imagine women

becoming guardians in his ideal republic, he saw no way to abolish slavery.

Aristotle once made the fantastic suggestion that slavery could be abolished

if tools could activate themselves without human agency. Marx writes in a

time when this idle fantasy of the ancients appears as an imminent

possibility. On the basis of this changed historical situation, he imagines a

wholly different practical context for philosophy than the one prevailing in

all previous class societies. Thus Marxists can propose theoretical solutions to problems the revolution is supposed to solve practically. However, they

do generally insist that only by struggling against capitalism has the

working class been able to problematize the dominant assumptions of a

millennial class culture so that new solutions to old problems can be

anticipated.36 Later chapters will explain this connection between theory and practice in more detail.

1 Gramsci describes Marxism as “absolute historicism” in his Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 417, 465. See also 445–6. For an account of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, see Thomas Nemeth, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980).

2 Important contributions to the debate are contained in: Ernest Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967). Also interesting are: Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R.

Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University Nebraska Press, 2005), first published in 1932; Louis Althusser, “Sur le jeune Marx,” in Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1966); Bertell Ollman, Alienation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Istvàn Mézáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. K. McLaughlin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

3 Important discussions of the relation of the Grundrisse to Capital: Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’ (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968); Iring Fetscher, “The Young and the Old Marx,” in Marx’s Socialism, S. Avineri, ed. (New York: Lieber Atherton, 1973); Ernest Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Most of these authors agree that the early concept of alienation in Marx is further developed in the concept of fetishism in Capital.

4 Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique, 172.

5 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971), xliv (emphasis omitted). Chapter 4 explains this remark in more detail. Throughout the footnotes, History and Class Consciousness will be referred to as “HCC.” All references are to this edition, but Livingstone’s translation has sometimes been modified to approach literalness as nearly as possible.

6 HCC, 144.

7 Ibid., 145. For a further discussion of Lukács’s concept of praxis, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács et Heidegger (Paris: Denoël, 1973), 103–5, and Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

8 Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” 102–3. See the original,

Herbert Marcuse, “Neue Qnellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen Materialismus,” in Der deutsche Kűnstlerroman: Frühe Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 530–1.

9 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 28.

10 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 275.

11 Ibid., 314.

12 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans.

and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 155.

13 Ibid., 157. In this, as in many other passages from the early Marx quoted here, italics have been omitted for the sake of clarity.

14 One who sees Marx’s Manuscripts as an ethical work is Eugene Kamenka. See his, Marxism and Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1969). A contrary position is taken by Ollman, Alienation, 47.

Cf. Allen Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3

(Spring 1972). For an important discussion of the historical debate over Marxism and ethics, see “Y

a-ti-lune sociologie marxiste?” in Lucien Goldmann, Recherches Dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

15 Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealistic Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, trans. M. McColgan, ed. R. Livingstone (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 191.

16 Karl Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans.

and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 213.

17 Ibid. For more on this conception of the theory–practice relation, see the Appendix.

18 Frederick Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 596–7. As Marcuse puts the same point in Hegelian language, “Every state of existence has to be surpassed; it is something negative, which things, driven by their inner potentialities, desert for another state, which again reveals itself as negative, as limit.” (Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 136).

19 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 50.

20 The term was originally used by early critics of Kant but fell into disuse. For a summary of Habermas’s theory, see the Appendix to Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests.

21 Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (New York: Mentor, 1948), 88.

22 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of the Negative Dialectic (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 26–7. For an application of a similar critical approach to the “sublimation” or “euphemization” of social categories in philosophical abstractions, see Pierre Bourdieu, L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988).

23 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 5.

24 Ibid., 70.

25 Ibid., 58.

26 Ibid., 67. For a useful discussion of the relation of Marx to Feuerbach, see Shlomo Avineri,

“The Hegelian Origins of Marx’s Political Thought,” in Marx’s Socialism, 3–4.

27 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 163.

28 Ibid., 158.

29 HCC, 170. Cf. Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” 214–15.

30 I owe many of the ideas in this section to discussion with Gerald Doppelt.

31 Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 142.

32 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, 402.

33 Timothy Hall poses this question in terms of the reflexive problem of “how these theories account for their own self-possibility … The problem faced by metacritical approaches is that the insight into the conditioned character of philosophical critique is itself philosophically question-begging. In taking up a standpoint outside philosophy, the issue of the normative assumptions underpinning this standpoint immediately arises.” Timothy Hall, “The Metacritique of Philosophy: Marx, Lukács & Adorno,” unpublished manuscript, 2.

34 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1979), 29.

35 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

36 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 109.

CHAPTER TWO

The Demands of Reason

DEONTOLOGICAL GROUNDS FOR REVOLUTION

The ambition of philosophy of praxis is to link the fulfillment of what Marx

calls the “demands of reason” to revolutionary political goals. The

establishment of this link implies that revolution can be rationally justified

and that the practice of a rational life includes revolutionary political action.

These are in fact fundamental conclusions of the early Marx and Lukács. In

his early works Marx develops a metacritique of political philosophy and

derives a rationale for revolution from it. In History and Class

Consciousness, Lukács constructs a metacritique of classical German

philosophy from which he too derives a rationale for revolution. And not

coincidentally, Marcuse’s major book on Hegel is entitled Reason and

Revolution. This chapter is primarily concerned with Marx’s early

justification of revolution, while Chapter 5 will take up Lukács’s related argument and Chapter 8 will consider Marcuse’s different approach to the same conclusion.

By way of introduction, it will be helpful to consider the traditional idea

of the right of revolution. Throughout most of its history political

philosophy has been more concerned with rational grounds for obedience to

government than with the right of revolution. In modern times obedience

has been justified by reference to functions performed by the state that

benefit the individuals. However, the expectation of a fair return for

obedience may be disappointed. Then, when the state fails to fulfill its

functions, grounds for obedience become grounds for revolution. Similarly,

most justifications of revolution imply a theory of obligation to a legitimate

state. This dialectic of obedience and revolt is not a sign of inconsistency in

political philosophy, but on the contrary results from its consistent

commitment to rationality in a world of contingencies. These observations

are confirmed by the early theories of Marx and Lukács. In both cases

conservative political doctrines, subjected to a metacritique, are

transformed into their revolutionary opposites precisely in the name of

reason.

We can gauge their originality by comparison with earlier political

theory. The classic ground for revolution, formulated for example by Locke,

is teleological or utilitarian in character. Locke believes that “the end of

government is the good of mankind.”1 Although Marxists only rarely offer utilitarian arguments for revolution, a vaguely utilitarian concern for human

happiness constitutes the moral aura of most Marxist discourse. Marxists

add to Locke’s critique of political relations a parallel critique of property

relations, both of which, in their view, should be instrumental to “the good

of mankind.” Locke’s main point is conserved: society, as a common

creation of human beings, should serve their interests and not the contrary.

Socialism undoubtedly originated in some such sense of revolution as a

legitimate collective means to happiness. But this is not a sufficient

philosophical justification of revolution. Kant shows that a rational being

has higher interests than those discovered through a utilitarian calculus,

including duties of obedience to the state regardless of “material”

consequences. By conceptualizing this “higher” sphere of duty in terms of a

dialectical theory of individuation and mutual recognition, Hegel succeeds

in basing similar conclusions on a far more sophisticated social theory.

Thus in Kant and Hegel philosophy takes a conservative turn, denying the

pertinence of the utilitarian grounds for revolution put forth in theories such

as Locke’s.

Marx revives revolutionary theory not by a “regression” to

utilitarianism, but rather by developing a new deontological ground for

revolution based on the intrinsic nature of rationality. Deontological

grounds for revolution flow from the demand for a rational polity,

independent of the use to be made of the freedom it grants, whether it be

happiness, self-actualization, human dignity, etc. Rousseau is the chief

earlier representative of this position. For him freedom, as the actual

exercise of self-determining rationality, is an end in itself.

The difference between teleological and deontological grounds for

revolution is especially clear in Locke’s and Rousseau’s discussions of

slavery. Both are against it but for very different reasons. Locke argues that

slavery is illegitimate because “this freedom from absolute arbitrary power

is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he

cannot part with it but by which forfeits his preservation and life together.”2

Rousseau, on the contrary, makes no appeal to the right to life, but claims

that moral self-responsibility is incompatible with slavery. He argues that

“when a man renounces his liberty he renounces his essential manhood, his

rights, and even his duty as a human being … It is incompatible with man’s

nature, and to deprive him of his free will is to deprive his actions of all

moral sanction.”3

Deontological grounds for revolution are usually explained as Rousseau

does here, by reference to an absolute value placed on human freedom, the

right of each individual to determine himself and to secure respectful

treatment from others. Where political conditions prevent this they ought to

be overthrown. Here we pass from the mere right of revolution, which

flows from a concern with human happiness, to an obligation to revolution

in the name of freedom. This is very much the sort of problem that

preoccupies the young Marx. He writes in one early essay: “To be radical is

to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself … The

criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being

for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all

those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned,

contemptible being …”4 For the young Marx, a revolution “à la hauteur des principes” is a revolution for freedom and dignity. 5

Basic to this theory of revolution is the idea that the rational subject is

not fulfilled merely in thought, nor even in private morality, but also

requires a sphere of public activity. But where rationality must be deployed,

there freedom too is necessary, for “Freedom is the ‘formal element’ of

rationality, the only form in which reason can be.” 6 Thus for Marx, as for Rousseau, revolution is a condition for the full exercise of reason. It is

comparable with Cartesian doubt or the Enlightenment struggle against

superstition as an attack on contingent obstacles to rationality and as a

methodological preliminary to the flowering of humankind’s highest

faculty.

Marx’s concern with the problems of revolutionary rationality is

formulated explicitly in some of his earliest writings. He tries to show that

revolution can satisfy “the demands of reason,” that through it reason, or

philosophy, can be “realized” in social reality. 7 This terminology is of course Hegelian. It was Hegel who first proposed to show that reason was

realized, that the contradiction between the rational concept of the state and its historical reality had finally been overcome. This philosophical tour de

force was intended to lay the revolution to rest, to deprive it of the halo of

rationality with which the Enlightenment had surrounded it. Starting from

such premises, Marx’s task is laid out for him: to demonstrate that reason is

not in fact realized, that it continues to produce “demands” transcendent to

the given state of affairs, that revolution is therefore still a rational act.

But after Kant and Hegel, it is impossible to renew revolutionary theory

by returning to the speculative methods of a Rousseau. Kant’s argument

against revolution is based precisely on the implicit grounds for obedience

to government contained in Rousseau’s revolutionary theory. This theory

itself must therefore be submitted to a radical critique in order to discover

how political philosophy had been reconciled—prematurely—with an

unjust society, and to find in it elements that can be reformulated to again

ground a revolutionary struggle against this society. The core of this effort

consists in overcoming the antinomy of reason and need Marx identifies as

constitutive of the entire tradition of political philosophy. Marx subjects

these concepts to a radical revision in the course of which he develops his

metacritical approach.

Marx’s metacritique of political philosophy is based on a specific

construction of the relation between reason and need that derives largely

from a Kantian interpretation of Rousseau. This limits the bearing of

Marx’s analysis, which simply assumes that the essence of the whole

tradition is revealed in what is presumably its highest stage. Nevertheless,

the analysis is at least an interesting hypothesis about political philosophy

in general; furthermore, Marx’s approach is sociologically justified because

it is the doctrine of Rousseau–Kant that underlies the democratic ideology

of the French Revolution as understood by later German liberalism.

Marx assumes with Rousseau and Kant that freedom is not whim but

“obedience to self-given law.” 8 With them he also assumes that the rules of conduct cannot be derived from happiness as an end, but flow from the

concept of autonomy: the rational individual owes it to himself to maintain

his independence from both his own needs and the power of other men.

Happiness is not, however, a matter of indifference for Rousseau, nor even

for Kant. In Rousseau, for example, freedom is essentially the right and the

power to do what is in one’s own interests as a member of the community.

Freedom is a value in itself, but it is also bound up with the pursuit of collective self-interest in the higher sphere of politics.

It has been argued that in Kant, too, right conduct establishes general

forms of social interaction that maximize the freedom of each individual to

follow his merely “natural” end, which is happiness. Kant does not so much

reject the pursuit of happiness as reduce it to an “anthropological” or

empirical consideration, thereby clearly delineating the boundaries between

deontological and utilitarian grounds for political action.9 The basis of this philosophical distinction is the praxeological one between ethics and

economics. In the ethical form of action, the behavior of all subjects is

intrinsically compatible, while economic behavior is conflictual and

competitive. Ethical action achieves harmony through conformity to a

universal rule. It can thus be called “rational.” The pursuit of material

welfare is mere “content” of experience, determined by nature and therefore

contingent. It is compatible in principle with ethical behavior but

subordinate to it by right.

Marx argues that this construction of the relation of reason and need

splits the ideal of freedom from the actual motives freedom serves. This

split undercuts the protest against poverty in a formally “rational” society,

reducing such protest to a marginal concern of merely empirical interest.

Life becomes a means to rationality in a topsy-turvy vision likely to satisfy

only those for whom the means of life are assured. What is required is a

reformulation of political theory to establish the intrinsic rationality and

universality of the pursuit of happiness and the satisfaction of the needs on

which happiness depends.

Marx worked out this program in three stages, to which correspond

three important early works. In the first part of the essay “On the Jewish

Question” he attacks the problem of need, in order to show that the

conflictual form of action associated with it is not natural and necessary, but

historical and therefore subject to revolutionary change. This essay

culminates in a new formulation of the concept of freedom compatible with

the revision of the concept of need. The second stage of the analysis is

developed in the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of

Right: Introduction.” There Marx “deduces” the political and social

conditions for a realization of his new concept of freedom. This text

identifies the proletariat as the agent of a revolution that will abolish

philosophy in realizing it. The last stage is reached in the Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx follows the thread back to its beginning in the concept of reason, which he now sets out to revise.

THE ANTINOMY OF REASON AND NEED

Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” is an attempt to explain the

contradiction between the ideal democratic state and the facts of capitalist

social life. This contradiction results from the split between moral-political

rationality (the basis of the state) and utilitarian-anthropological goals (the

basis of the economy), as it appears in Rousseau and the French Revolution,

filtered through Kant and Hegel. Marx argues that the split is reflected in

the distinction between “man” and “citizen” in French revolutionary theory,

which corresponds with the distinction between civil society, the sphere of

private activity, and the state, the sphere of cooperative activity.

The state accumulates the determinations of rationality: reflexivity,

necessity, and universality. It is the locus of “species life,” a term derived

from Feuerbach that signifies the consciously social and cooperative nature

of man. The merely empirical functions of natural human existence are then

consigned to the sphere of civil society where the individual lives his “real”

life, as opposed to his ideal life as a rational citizen in the state. In civil society the individuals create a competitive hell. Human action does not

achieve rational universality there, but is rather mere nature. Marx writes:

The perfect political state is, by its nature, the species life of man as opposed to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the political sphere, as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means and becomes the plaything of alien powers. 10

In presenting the problem in this manner, Marx is not simply criticizing

the egoism of bourgeois society. There is that, but more important is the fact

that “species life” is decisively linked to reason in the concept of the state.

Rationality in the political domain is exemplified by the cooperative aspect

of human nature, which takes refuge in the state once it has been driven

from civil society. As Marx put it in a letter to Ruge: “Reason has always

existed, but not always in a rational form … As far as actual life is

concerned, the political state especially contains in all its modern forms the

demands of reason, even where the political state is not yet conscious of

socialistic demands.” 11 The task now is to criticize the “irrational” and contradictory form in which reason exists in the modern state and to explain

why it has been confined to this limited domain while actual life persists as

a natural residue in civil society.

Marx seeks a solution through a critique of the limits of the concept of

political revolution, which is still equivalent for him with the French

Revolution. Political revolution aims to maximize individual freedom in

private life while accepting its basis as received from the ancien régime, namely private property, which it purifies of feudal restrictions. “This

revolution,” Marx says, “regards civil society, the sphere of human needs,

labor, private interests and civil law, as the basis of its own existence, as a

self-subsistent precondition, and thus as its natural basis.”12

Civil society appears essentially as a sphere of “nature” because it lacks

the most important determinations of rationality. On the one hand, the

political revolution does not conceive of civil society as a historical result,

as the outcome of a process of mediation, hence as a self-reflected and self-

developed sphere of reason. Instead, it is seen as the product of the

unmediated natural inclinations of the egoistic individuals. These egoistic

individuals are simply received by the revolution as “the passive, given

result of the dissolution of society [of the ancien régime], an object of direct

apprehension and consequently a natural object.” 13

On the other hand, as a “natural” man, the merely given product of

instinct and need, the egoistic individual of bourgeois society is plunged

into a bellum omnium contra omnes. The activity of this egoistic individual

consists in competitive struggle. Its form is merely particular and falls

under no universal law. Marx claims that the contradiction between reason

and need, the one mediated, necessary, and universal, the other empirically

given, contingent, and particular, cannot be resolved on the ground of

capitalist society.

Marx goes on to show that the bourgeois split in the individual between

need and reason, man and citizen is a dialectical one in which each

antinomial opposite requires the other for its existence. The polarity of man

and citizen reflects a split in human nature, inevitable in capitalist society,

between its empirical content and its rational essence. Marx writes, “Man as

he really is, is seen only in the form of egoistic man, and man in his true

nature only in the form of abstract citizen.”14 The empirical man of civil society is the really existing human being, an egoistic individual standing in

perpetual contradiction with its own rational duty as citizen. But only through the citizen can the man exist, that is, can the individual freely

pursue private interests under the protection of the state. Meanwhile, the

ideal citizen, as a rational actor, manifests the essence of what it is to be human. Yet the citizen is there only to protect and defend the rights of

egoistic man. Existence and essence require each other and also stand in

contradiction.

Political revolution founders on this antinomy. It confines itself to

liberating a pregiven “nature” characterized by irrational private

competition. In contrast to this nature, reason has a bare “artificial”

existence as an “allegorical, moral person” in the citizen. 15 Most abstractly formulated, the dilemma is an example of the fundamental antinomy of

form and content central to Lukács’s version of the philosophy of praxis:

rational form here presides over empirical content not by mediating it and

raising it to rational universality, but by leaving it be in its given irrational

condition.

At this very abstract level, Marx’s critique of formal democracy is

structurally similar to Lukács’s critique of Kantian ethics. In Lukács’s

terms, the antinomy of reason and need is an example of the more general

antinomy of value and fact, of “ought” and “is,” that arises from the

formalistic concept of reason. This concept of reason is based on the

acceptance of “immediacy,” that is to say, on the failure to discover in the

given facts those potentialities and tendencies embodying rationality and

driving toward a rational end. Instead, the given is defined as indifferent to

reason and value, as the merely empirical, factical residue of the process of

formal abstraction in which the concept of reason is constructed. As Lukács

puts it, “Precisely in the pure, classical expression it received in the

philosophy of Kant it remains true that the ‘ought’ presupposes an existing

reality to which the category of ‘ought’ remains inapplicable in

principle.” 16 This is the dilemma of bourgeois democracy as Marx explains it: political rationality presupposes an irrational social existence as its

material substratum.

Marx and Lukács arrive at similar solutions to the problem they have

identified. For Marx, it is necessary to transform civil society into a sphere

of rational interaction. But paradoxically this is not a political goal. Marx

was aware of the Hegelian critique of Jacobin voluntarism and quite self-

consciously worked toward a non-voluntaristic formulation of revolutionary

theory. Marx believed political revolution to be through and through tied to class society because in it moral principles contrary to the material interests

of the individuals must be imposed by the state on a separate civil society of

private owners. A revolution to abolish class society and private property

would only reproduce these evils were it to attempt to impose morality in

opposition to their interests. Rather, a social revolution against the very

principle of class would necessarily have to be rooted in these interests;

only on this condition would it overcome the antinomy of state and civil

society, reason and need. 17

Marx writes, “The political revolution dissolves civil society into its

elements [egoistic individuals] without revolutionizing these elements

themselves or subjecting them to criticism.”18 What is required is precisely the “revolutionizing” of private and individual existence so that it too

conforms with the demands of reason. The content of free activity must no

longer stand in contradiction with freedom itself. In the more abstract terms

of Lukács, this solution “consists in annulling [ aufzuheben] that

indifference of form toward content … which is the basis of reified

rationality.”19

At this point Marx derives what might be called a new “concept” or

Begriff of free society from the Aufhebung of the contradiction between the concept and the object of traditional democratic political theory. He does

not yet know concretely what rational social activity would consist in, but

he knows the condition for such activity, namely, the transcendence of the

opposition between private egoism and rational cooperation. Collective

action in the common interest, action based on the reciprocal recognition of

the humanity and needs of all, must transcend the narrow boundaries of

politics and extend to economic life as well. Economic activity must have a

rational form and human needs partake of rational universality through their

reciprocal recognition.

Marx concludes:

Human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers ( forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power. 20

This condition for the fulfillment of the “demands of reason” is

contained already in abstract form in the modern state. It is the new basis of

deontological grounds for a revolution that will realize philosophy.

In sum, Marx has shown that political philosophy accepts the irrational

form of the pursuit of happiness (civil society) as a natural fact, and so

applies the demands of reason only to the state. These demands concern the

establishment of a true community through the reconciliation of antinomic

opposites such as individual and society, private interest and common good,

and all the similar displacements of the antinomy of content and form in the

political domain. Marx demonstrates that community cannot be realized in

the state, which rules a civil society based on a conflictual form of action.

To fulfill the demands of reason it will be necessary to also realize them in

civil society. To accomplish this, in turn, it is necessary to overcome what

Lukács calls the “immediacy” of the sphere of need, its philosophically

naturalized form. Marx conceptualizes this transformation as a social

revolution that not only changes the state, but also “revolutioniz[es] … the

elements themselves.” Community can be realized at all levels of society,

including the material level of the sphere of need, only when the pursuit of

happiness has been transformed.

THE AGENT OF REVOLUTION

Marx’s next step consists in finding a possible agent for the radical

transformation of man and citizen. This proves to be a more delicate matter

than first appears. On the one hand, Marx must base his new concept of

freedom on some actual social force to escape the merely abstract ethical

relation of philosophy to reality that he has already satirized in his letter to

Ruge. On the other hand, in attempting to base his philosophy on a real

social force, there is the danger that he will reduce historical action to a

mere instrument of philosophy, which latter would then be the real

“subject” of the revolutionary process. From this subject–object relation the

state would be reborn.

Marx first approaches this problem in a speculative form in the

“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.”

There he arrives at an undialectical construction of the relation of theory to

practice, philosophy to the proletariat, that does not so much overcome the

abstract character of ethical demands as attribute this very abstractness to

the demands of an entire social class. Lucien Goldmann suggests that this

failure is not of merely biographical interest, but that the undialectical

conclusions of this text anticipate the later undialectical theory-practice

relation in the socialist movement: “In fact, it suffices to replace the word philosophy in the ‘Introduction’ with the word Party (and at bottom in the

two cases we are concerned with an ideology-elaborating group) in order to

obtain a position very close to that expressed by Lenin in his work What is

To Be Done? ”21

Marx’s failure in this essay is due in part to his method, which differs

radically from that of his later sociological and economic work. He does not

start from an analysis of society but from philosophy. He takes his new

philosophical concept of freedom and tests it against the various classes of

society to find one that can serve as its representative in practice. As he puts

it, “Revolutions need a passive element, a material basis …” 22 Or again,

“Theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.” 23

Marx’s essay looks like a class analysis and indeed some features of it

anticipate his later theory of class. He argues that previous, merely political

revolutions have failed to achieve human emancipation because they have

liberated not man but particular classes from oppression. The French

bourgeoisie, for example, was oppressed by the nobility in terms of its

particular interests. The wrongs it suffered appeared to all other classes to

exemplify the general injustice of the society and so they supported its

revolution. But the liberation of the bourgeoisie from these wrongs was not

human emancipation but only bourgeois emancipation. It did not free

humanity but only the bourgeoisie to pursue its interests, which in turn

came into conflict with the interests of society as a whole.

Thus it is the very principle of class that limits political revolution.

Marx concludes, and this distinguishes his early method from that of the

later works, that his philosophy cannot be realized by a social class in the

usual sense but only by “a class in civil society which is not a class of civil

society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes.”24 What he is seeking, in other words, is a class that is not a class, a “universal” class in something

like Hegel’s sense of the term, with no particular interest at all, hence none

opposed to that of society as a whole. Having arrived at a rather Hegelian

formulation of the problem in his earlier essay, it is not surprising that he

here reaches a variant of the Hegelian solution.

Marx argues that the proletariat alone of all classes can go beyond a

merely political revolution to a general social revolution for it has no place

within the existing system. It is, Marx claims, and here he was right for his

time if not for ours, the product of the “disintegration” of other social strata,

with no sectional interests of its own to defend. For this reason its project can be truly universal in character, and can bring down the system of class

that Marx now identifies as the source of egoistic individualism and the

basis of civil society.

Marx concludes that only the proletariat can “revolutionize the elements

themselves,” that is, transform what it is to be an individual in society, for it

has no interest in conserving a particular status opposed to the whole, hence

no interest in perpetuating the split between civil society and the state. The

proletariat thus appears as the appropriate instrument of Marx’s philosophy

and the demand for revolution is now addressed to this class. Marx writes,

“Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart.

Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the

proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy.” 25

In spite of the elegant symmetry of this solution, it falls far short of

resolving the problems Marx has posed for himself. Here theory and

practice arise independently, and if proletarian revolution satisfies essential

demands of theory, it is by no means clear that the proletariat intends this

result in revolting. Lukács remarks:

The issue turns on the question of theory and practice. And this not merely in the sense given it by Marx when he says in his first critique of Hegel that “theory becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.” Even more to the point is the need to discover those features and determinations both of the theory and the ways of seizing the masses which convert the theory, the dialectical method, into a vehicle of revolution. We must extract the practical essence of the theory from the method and its relation to its object. If this is not done then “seizing the masses” could well turn out to be a will o’ the wisp. It might turn out that the masses were seized by quite different forces, that they were in pursuit of quite different ends. In that event, there would be no necessary connection between the theory and their activity, it would be a form that enables the masses to become conscious of their socially necessary or fortuitous actions, without ensuring a genuine and necessary bond between consciousness and action. 26

Lukács points out that in the same text Marx briefly lays down the basic

condition for achieving real unity of theory and practice. Marx writes, “Will

theoretical needs be directly practical needs? It is not enough that thought

should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive toward thought.” 27 Both

Marx and Lukács thus arrive at the conclusion that it is not only the

“indifference of form toward content” that must be overcome, but also the

indiference of content toward form.

Marx has so far seen the necessity of creating a form of rational

interaction in the fulfillment of human needs and to this end he has

identified an agent capable of implementing the “demands of reason.” But

still the form-content distinction persists because the needs themselves have

not been raised to rational universality, only their form under socialism, i.e.,

cooperation. The proletariat appears as a passive instrument of philosophy

because its revolt unconsciously serves the “cunning of reason” by realizing

this form. An ungenerous observer could still insist that Marx is tossing

“the roasted pigeons of absolute science” into the mouth of the proletariat.

Marx now seems to realize that there is no solution within the framework of

a formalistic concept of reason, and so he proceeds to a radical critique and

revision of the concept of reason itself.

REVISION OF THE CONCEPT OF REASON

In the third phase of his early work, in the Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts of 1844, Marx sets out to unify theory and practice through

revising the concept of reason as it is formulated both in the philosophical

tradition and his own previous writings. To accomplish this, Marx returned

to the study of need from a new angle. In the early essays, Marx found a

form of rational interaction in the pursuit of happiness. But the content of the concept of need with which he worked remained unthematized and

unanalyzed; it remained, in fact, immediate and hence irrational for Marx as

it had for earlier political philosophy. This now becomes the decisive

problem.

If there was a still dogmatic element in the earlier essays, it lay in

Marx’s failure to derive rational social interaction, the “revolutionizing of

the elements themselves,” from the needs it was to help satisfy. Instead,

social revolution still appeared as a philosophical exigency from which the

needy could incidentally benefit. The antinomy of reason and need is not

abolished in the accidental convergence of philosophy and the proletariat,

but rather reproduced in a new guise. The antinomies of philosophy and

reality, theory and practice that appear in Marx’s discussion of historical

agency are simply displacements of the original antinomy of political

philosophy. To resolve these antinomies, Marx reverses the terms of the

problem and attempts to found the demands of reason in the very nature of

need. But this amounts to demonstrating that the content of the sphere of

need is rational, is, in fact, the essential sphere of rationality for a metacritically reconstructed concept of reason.

How does Marx go about it? I will sketch the three dialectical

“moments” of Marx’s metacritique and then elaborate each in some detail.

Marx begins by showing that philosophical categories are displacements of

social ones. For example, Marx is convinced that the problem of alienated

labor is the real foundation of Hegel’s philosophy, but that Hegel does not

pose it correctly.

Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He conceives labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence of man … [But] labour as Hegel understands and recognizes it is abstract mental labour. Thus, that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy, the alienation of man knowing himself, or alienated science thinking itself, Hegel grasps as its essence. 28

The whole artificial, speculative, and ultimately theological structure of

Hegel’s system results from his failure to thematize real labor as the

ontological core of history.

Having relativized the philosophical categories with respect to social

ones, Marx proceeds to the second “moment” of the metacritique: casting

the social categories in the form of the philosophical ones. Reductionism is

avoided by treating the now socially interpreted categories not as empirical

facts but as moments in a philosophical dialectic. Thus Marx’s labor is not

that of the economists but plays a properly philosophical role. Finally, in a

third phase, the metacritique demonstrates the power of social action to

resolve the contradictions of the philosophically recast social categories. In

this phase Marx is able to show that the alienation of labor is a fundamental

problem within philosophy, and not just a contingent social problem. This is

impossible for Hegel who encounters the alienation of labor in history as no

more than a passing concern.

In sum, Marx redefines the terms of Hegel’s philosophy, while retaining

in part the relations Hegel establishes between these terms. Marx can then

set the entire system in motion in history because of the social redefinition

to which he has submitted it. It is clear that Marx’s new definitions do not

correspond with Hegel’s and that he shifts back and forth in the

Manuscripts between his own concepts and Hegel’s. But this is not just an

ambiguous use of terms. Marx’s substantive thesis is that Hegel’s concepts

are a misconstrual of a reality that Marx himself has described more

accurately, that he is solving the very problems Hegel addressed in a

mystified way.

The first phase of Marx’s metacritique is developed in the conclusion of

the Manuscripts in the “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic.” There Marx argues

that Hegel’s term “alienation” stands for the uncomprehended object of thought. To found reason, that is, to demonstrate the unity of subject and

object, “It is necessary, therefore, to surmount the object of consciousness.

Objectivity as such is regarded as an alienated human relationship which

does not correspond with the essence of man, self-consciousness.” 29 The return of the alienated, the demonstration of its unity with the conscious

subject, consists for Hegel only in surpassing the cognitive appearance of

the object. Thus the appropriation of alienated reality is its comprehension.

But, Marx argues, in its social application this method leaves the world

exactly as it was before, tacking a certificate of rationality onto every form

of oppression. Since alienation is, at least for Hegel, really overcome in

philosophy, the need to change the world has vanished. Thought can

congratulate itself on having produced the reality and thereby justifying it.

This is what Lukács means by philosophy remaining in the standpoint

of immediacy. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels describe it as “the

mystery of speculative construction.” They write:

Speculation on the one hand apparently freely creates its object a priori out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the object, falls into the most irrational and unnatural bondage to the object, whose most accidental and most individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general. 30

Hegel’s error results from describing real alienation as the appearance

of the alienation of reason. For Hegel the alienation of the individual in the

ancien régime did not consist in reduction to an “abased, enslaved,

abandoned, contemptible being,” but in the fact that the state did not

correspond with its concept, that, in practice, it could not command the

rational obedience of its subjects. Once the state has been reformed, then it

can command rational obedience even from an “abased, enslaved,

abandoned, contemptible being.” There is thus a merely contingent relation

between philosophy and Marx’s “real” alienation, which consists in human

misery and dependence. The philosopher becomes the “enemy” of the

human community in demonstrating to it that it should accept its fate

without protest. He withdraws the moral credit of the oppressed by

rationalizing the established order.

Marx argues that Hegel falls into “uncritical positivism and uncritical

idealism” because he begins by narrowing the subject to a mere function of

thought.

For Hegel, human life, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All alienation of human life is, therefore, nothing but alienation of self-consciousness. The alienation of self-consciousness is not regarded as the expression, reflected in knowledge and thought, of the real alienation of human life.

Instead, actual alienation, that which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature (which philosophy first discloses) only the phenomenal being of the alienation of real human life, self-

consciousness.31

Hence for Hegel, “It is not the fact that the human being objectifies

himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but that he objectifies himself

by distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes

alienation as it exists and as it has to be transcended.” 32

In opposition to the formula he ascribes to Hegel, “man = self-

consciousness,” Marx argues that man is sensuous natural existence, and

that, therefore, the subject is a natural being. 33 Its essential mode of activity is also natural: labor, not thinking. Similarly, Marx proposes to redefine the

concept of the object as an essential correlate of this subject, existing

proximally for the human senses. Note that Marx does not return to Locke.

He does not found knowledge on the senses in the empiricist manner, but

redefines subject and object in their living connection. Thus Marx’s “sense

object” is not a Lockean “idea” but the actual object itself, as it exists for

the senses and especially as an object of need.

Writing still under the influence of Heidegger in his early review of the

Manuscripts, Marcuse relates the Marxian concept of sensuousness to

Kant’s claim that objects are necessarily given through sense perception.

Sensuousness is thus a transcendental precondition of access to objectivity

in general and not just a material relationship to particular objects.

Feuerbach emphasized the passive nature of the sensuous subject and its

quality of neediness and dependence on its objects. These ideas culminate

in Marx for whom the “distress and neediness that appear in man’s

sensuousness are no more purely matters of cognition than his distress and

neediness, as expressed in estranged labor, are purely economic. Distress

and neediness do not describe the individual modes of man’s behavior at

all; they are features of his whole being.” 34 As such, Marcuse concludes, they are ontological conditions correlated with features of being itself. With

the establishment of these new definitions of the philosophical subject and

object, the first phase of Marx’s metacritique is completed.

The second phase of the metacritique then proceeds to reconstitute the

formal structure of philosophy of identity with the help of these redefined

terms. It is easy to overlook this moment of the metacritique since Marx insists that “real,” natural subjects must have “real,” natural objects. This

seems to imply that objects and subjects are things standing in external

relations. But the concept of “thinghood” is inadequate to grasp the essence

of natural being. 35 Despite the mutual externality of real subjects and objects his remarks seem to imply, Marx goes on to reconstruct their

relations in terms modeled on identity philosophy. Michel Henry notes, “the

structure of the proletariat appears as the structure of consciousness itself

such as this is understood in German metaphysics.”36

In this second phase Marx revises the concepts of need and reason to

overcome their antinomic formulation in political philosophy. This revision

consists in transferring the formal attributes of reason to need. In Hegel,

reason is self-reflective, it mediates itself in the course of its own self-

development in history; again, for Hegel reason is also universal, both in

the narrow sense that its ethical postulates apply equally to all, but also in

the broader sense that its unconditioned categories apply to the whole of

reality. The unity of subject and object is the foundation of this concept of

rationality, the essential demand of reason that establishes reason’s

imperium. Marx transfers these determinations of rationality wholesale onto

“man.” And since “man” in Marx’s sense is a being of need, need no longer

appears as the irrational content of a formalistic rationality, but is itself

charged with the functions of rationality.

For Marx the philosophical subject is now a natural being, man. As

such, this subject encounters its object, nature, in a natural way, through

need. The ontologically primordial sphere is not that of natural science, in

which external relations prevail, but the sphere of need in which subject and

object are essentially related. Bertell Ollman suggests the concept of

“internal relations” to describe this.37 Marx writes, “As a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being [man] is a suffering, conditioned and limited

human being, like animals and plants. The objects of his drives exist outside

himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs,

essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation

of his faculties.”38 Again: “the need of an object is the most evident and irrefutable proof that the object belongs to my nature and that the existence

of the object for me and its property are the property appropriate to my

being.”39

Were this simply a statement about human physiology it would of

course be completely banal. It is no news that hunger requires food.

However, Marx is attempting to make a statement about being in general,

about ontology, and not just about the empirical being of the human animal.

He explicitly affirms that this is an ontological relation, and not merely a

fact of physiology. He writes, “Man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely

anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are true

ontological affirmations of being (nature).”40 What is more, he proposes a theory of the historical evolution of human need that indicates that it is not

only hunger that is objectified in food, but the higher needs of the social

human being that find their essential object in the natural world. In this

sense the interdependence of man and nature takes on a larger metaphysical

significance that I will call their “participatory identity.” Hence Marx says

that “Nature is the inorganic body of man,” to express the idea that man and

nature, subject and object, are indissolubly joined.41

Now too the labor through which need is satisfied will also appear as an

ontological category in the forms of philosophy of identity. Labor is in fact

the actual process of unifying subject and object, man and nature. Here

Marx passes from the abstract and immediate positing of the unity of

subject and object in need, to a reflective, mediated unity through the

production of the object of need by the subject in labor.

Such

philosophically

reconceptualized

labor

Marx

calls

“objectification,” the natural activity of the naturalized subject, man. When

human beings transform their environment through labor, they “objectify”

their needs and faculties. This they must do, for as a natural being man must

“express and authenticate himself in being as well as in thought,”42 The result is a “humanized” nature within which human beings can fulfill

themselves and unfold their potentialities in a continuous process of self-

and world-creation. Human existence is confirmed and universalized in the

transformed objects of labor and, by extension, in all of being. Marx writes,

It is only when objective reality everywhere becomes for man in society the reality of human faculties, human reality, and the reality of his own faculties, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself. The objects then confirm and realize his individuality. They are his own objects, which is to say that man himself becomes the object. 43

Marx uses the word “human” here in an emphatic sense: “Man is not

merely a natural being; he is a human natural being … Consequently,

human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly.”44

To be human in this sense is to be social. Thus the humanization of nature

reveals social dimensions of objects hidden to alienated man. The full

reality of nature is known to an attuned observer, not to “crude” perception.

The “non-musical ear” knows less than the musical ear. 45 It misses the truth of what it hears. Marx thus distinguishes between a merely animal relation

to the world and the revealing of a meaning. It is in the recognition of

meaning that subject and object are united. “Thus society is the

accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature,

the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.”46

Finally, the third phase of the metacritique derives philosophical and

political consequences from these formulations, consequences that appear

once the philosophical terms have been reconstituted in history where they

can be set in motion through social practice. At stake here is the meaning of

the concept of “alienation” which, Marx argues, stands in contradiction to

the “human essence.” Hegel’s concept of alienation is now revised to mean

a specific, degraded type of objectification in which the transformed world

turns around and dominates its creators instead of serving them. The

individuals cannot recognize or develop themselves through alienated

objects, but are crushed and oppressed by them. Because alienation, as “loss

of the object,” is not just a social category but also a determination of being,

it recapitulates the antinomy of subject and object. In alienation, subject and

object stand in conflict, as opposed principles requiring mediation.

Identity philosophy demands that the object appear to speculation as a

product of the subject, but for Marx this production process is now a real

one, occurring in history and not in the head of a philosopher. Alienation is

a problem for philosophy, splitting subject from object, but not a problem

that could be solved in pure thought through a speculative construction.

Marx notes that “the medium through which alienation occurs is itself a

practical one.”47 Its transcendence will also have to be practical, requiring a reversal in the relations between human beings and the products of their

labor. This then is the “real” alienation that must be overcome and that

Hegel confounds with objectivity itself.

Philosophy now appears not as a means through which a subject–object

unity is achieved, but rather as the reflection in thought of their unification

through labor. If this unity is obstructed by alienation, philosophy too will

fail. Thus where Hegel saw actual alienation, alienation in Marx’s sense of

the term, as the phenomenal form of the alienation of self-consciousness, Marx reverses the terms and defines the alienation of self-consciousness as

the phenomenal form of actual alienation.

This alienation of self-consciousness consists in religion and idealistic

philosophy. Human beings create a world through labor that dominates and

dispossesses them; in thought too the products of the mind become

dominating powers. The spiritual and intellectual struggle to understand

alienation gives rise to myths and speculative constructions. The individuals

rationalize their powerlessness and learn to accept its inevitability as a

positive good, “the rose in the cross of the present.”48 In Hegel this form of artificial reconciliation with alienation nevertheless points toward the

solution by mythologizing the actual unity of subject and object in labor.

Such alienated thought, Marx believes, cannot resolve its own

antinomies. The concept of reason cannot be founded so long as alienation

is immediately accepted in reality. It is the fact that philosophy remains in

immediacy, that its transcendence of alienation takes place merely in

thought and not in real life, that is responsible for the turn toward a supra-

sensible reality. But if the overcoming of alienation in practice is essential

to the liberation of reason from theological myths, then revolution itself is a

methodological necessity for philosophy.

A characteristic theory–practice relation now emerges, similar to that

which Lukács establishes in his early Marxist work. If theory attempts to

overcome alienation in pure thought, it will fall into various secularized

forms of religion. Yet alienation is the obstacle that must be overcome in

order to found reason, for to accept it means to fail to unite subject and

object, to demonstrate the production of the latter by the former. Thus

theory can found itself only by passing into practice to destroy alienation in

reality. Marx writes:

It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely

philosophical problem.49

The purpose of theory is to provide the proletariat with the “intellectual

arms” it needs to solve not only its own problems but those of philosophy

as well. No longer does theory appear as the real subject of this process,

representing rational form to the proletariat, which latter, as mere need or factical content, is a “passive,” “material” base. Rather, the proletariat’s

needs are rational in the sense that they reveal the truth of nature. The

contradictions the proletariat experiences in its existence are not

accidentally related to the contradictions of philosophy, but are one and the

same. Theory and practice have been united.

In reaching this conclusion Marx finally derives a wholly new ground

for revolution: the ultimate demand of reason is rationality; revolution alone

can satisfy this demand by resolving the antinomies of philosophy. If this is

true, then reason itself requires revolution, and every rational individual

should lend a hand.

FROM MARX TO LUKÁCS

This chapter has shown that Marx’s early metacritique of philosophy is in

fact a critique of objectivism and formalism, both in politics and more

generally in the theory of rationality. These ideas directly influence later

Marxist theory, notably the Frankfurt School. In Chapter 4, I will show that Lukács’s early Marxist philosophy is also deeply influenced by Marx’s,

even though the Manuscripts were still unpublished at the time of the

composition of History and Class Consciousness. Insofar as the theory

presented in the Manuscripts is concerned, this influence is therefore

indirect, mediated by Marx’s Capital. It is precisely because Lukács studied

Capital to find in it the basis of a metacritique of formal rationality that he

was able to reconstruct and extend its philosophical dimension in a manner

paralleling Marx’s own early work.

Marx arrived at the study of the economy not merely through a change

in interests, but through a philosophical argumentation in the course of

which he demonstrated that economics is the science of alienation. It charts

the original and basic alienation from which its philosophical forms are

derived. Although Marx later abandoned the philosophy of praxis of his

early works, the trace of this original discovery of the economy is preserved

in his later ones. This trace appears most clearly in the continuing

metacritical approach.

Capital criticizes formalistic abstractions by bringing them into relation

to the social substratum from which they were originally derived. It is true

that in Capital these are no longer philosophical abstractions but economic

ones; however, Marx treats these latter in the same way he had treated the

former in the Manuscripts. The social contradictions he discovers are, in effect, philosophical antinomies reconstructed in a domain where they can

be resolved through social action. The “secret” of Capital, its frequent

obscurities, the “coquetting” with Hegel, the significance Marx attached to

it as the basis of a theory of socialist revolution, all this testifies to his fidelity to the original metacritical method. Thus Capital is more than a scientific work on economics; it is also a chapter in the history of

philosophy.

However, given its economic focus, Capital cannot adequately

formulate and resolve the philosophical problems that it implicitly

addresses. This leaves a gap between the critique of capitalism and the

socialist solution that is often filled by making pseudoscientific and

determinist claims for the economic theory. Whatever Marx himself may

have said along these lines on occasion, Marxist economics establishes no

causal connection between capitalism and socialism. As I will explain in

Chapter 4, socialist revolution and the transition to a socialist society involve a type of cultural change that cannot be theorized on the model of

those processes of “natural history” to which the mature Marx once

compared them. On the contrary, Marx’s early metacritique of philosophy

comes much closer to anticipating the cultural approach that can alone

connect the economic theory of capitalism with socialism.

This was Lukács’s great insight: the discovery that the critique of formal

rationality implicit in Marx’s economic works is the key to developing a

theory of revolution. Lukács thus based his argument on a work that

responded only implicitly, methodologically, to his own preoccupations. He

made this implicit dimension of Marxism explicit by reconstructing its

metacritical premises. Then, generalizing Marx’s concepts, Lukács

reformulated the philosophical implications of the economic theory as the

basis of a theory of revolution. To accomplish this, Lukács had to supply

the missing moment in the metacritique at the basis of Marxist economics,

the moment in which philosophy itself operates with the historicized

philosophical concepts to resolve simultaneously both historical and

philosophical problems. In taking this step beyond Marx, Lukács developed

an original philosophy of praxis. But before turning to it, I need to discuss

further the problem of nature in the early Marx. This problem, which first

appears in Marx’s Manuscripts, is central to philosophy of praxis in all its

forms.

1 John Locke, “An Essay Concerning the True Origin, Extent and End of Civil Government,” in Social Contract, ed. E. Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 133.

2 Ibid., 15.

3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in Barker, ed., Social Contract, 175.

4 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 52.

5 Ibid.

6 Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 137.

7 Karl Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans.

and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 213.

8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Paris: Gonthier, 1962), 247, my translation.

Barker’s edition has the tendentiously incorrect “to obey the law laid down by society is to be free.”

Cf. Social Contract, 186. For more on the relation of Rousseau and Kant, see Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

9 Cf. Jeffrie G. Murphy, Kant: The Philosophy of Right (London: Macmillan, 1970), Chapter III.

10 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 13.

11 Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” 213.

12 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 30.

13 Ibid., 30.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 HCC, 160.

17 This critique is basic to understanding the Marxian conception of socialism and socialist politics. It shows that Marx was at least aware of the type of problems raised by conservative critics such as Leo Strauss or J. L. Talmon, who see in Marxism simply another version of Jacobin voluntarism. For more on Marx’s approach, see especially his early essay, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform.’” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society.

18 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 30.

19 HCC, 126.

20 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 31.

21 Lucien Goldmann, “Philosophie et sociologie dans l’oeuvre du jeune Marx: Contribution à l’étude du problème,” in Marxisme et Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 148.

22 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 53.

23 Ibid., 52.

24 Ibid., 58.

25 Ibid., 59.

26 HCC, 2.

27 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” 54.

28 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 203.

29 Ibid. Jean Hyppolite has written a defense of Hegel in response to such criticisms. See

“Aliénation et objectivation,” in Jean Hyppolite, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1965). For a response to Hyppolite, see István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 242–5.

30 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, trans. R.

Dixon and C. Dutte (Moscow: Progress, 1975), 70.

31 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 204.

32 Ibid., 201.

33 Ibid., 203.

34 Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 100.

35 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 206.

36 Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. K. McLaughlin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 72–3.

37 Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 81.

38 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 207.

39 Marx, “Money and Alienated Man,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, 273.

40 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 189.

41 Ibid., 126–7.

42 Ibid., 208.

43 Ibid., 160–1.

44 Ibid., 208.

45 Ibid., 160–1.

46 Ibid., 157.

47 Ibid., 130.

48 The phrase is, of course, Hegel’s. See, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 12.

49 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 162. That the concept of reason is truly at issue in Marx seems to me to be a necessary implication of his discussion of the reform of the sciences. Cf. Ibid., 163–4.

CHAPTER THREE

Metacritique of the Concept of Nature

MARX’S CONCEPT OF NATURE

As I explained in the previous chapter, Marx sought to realize philosophy

and to develop a new concept of reason based on the practical identity of

subject and object metacritically reconstructed in the domain of labor. The

dialectic of the natural subject and object of labor now carries the weight of

idealistic identity theory. 1 This is the first appearance in philosophy of praxis of its most difficult conundrum, which Lukács and the Frankfurt

School must also address. The problem can be formulated simply: how can

the subject, once naturalized, constitute its natural objects? This chapter

will focus primarily on Marx’s solution. In conclusion, and in anticipation

of the detailed discussion in Chapter 6, I will introduce some basic resources developed by later thinkers addressing the same problem.

Marx writes, “[that] the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are

interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for

man is a part of nature.”2 By itself such a statement only classifies man as a natural being without elucidating the essence of nature or establishing

man’s active powers in the natural world. However, Marx aims to prove

more than this; he wants to convince us that the unity of man and nature

results from human labor, which objectifies human faculties in transforming

natural objects. This is the form in which human creative power in nature is

most completely expressed. But since man is a natural being, it is also the

self-relation of nature.

Alfred Schmidt summarizes Marx’s conception as follows:

The hidden nature speculation in Marx [holds that] the different economic formations of society which have succeeded each other historically have been so many modes of nature’s self-mediation.

Sundered into two parts, man and material to be worked on, nature is always present to itself in this division. Nature attains self-consciousness in men, and amalgamates with itself by virtue of their theoretical-practical activity. Human participation in something alien and external to them appears at first to be something equally alien and external to nature; but in fact it proves to be a “natural

condition of human existence,” which is itself a part of nature, and it therefore constitutes nature’s self-movement. Only in this way can we speak meaningfully of a “dialectic of nature.” 3

Marx’s materialism is thus quite different from all previous materialisms

since he believes that human consciousness is a moment in nature’s self-

development and not an external spectator on the latter.

However, his position is not without problems. Throughout the

Manuscripts one senses that there is something wrong with his concept of

subject–object identity. In claiming that “man himself becomes the object,”

to cite but one example among many, he seems to hover between hyperbole

and absurdity. Reading such passages, one wonders if he really means it.

The grandeur but also the paradox of this culminating aspect of the theory

consists in the universality of Marx’s claims for human labor. He is not

content to confine human creative powers to the narrow domain that

mankind actually and potentially transforms in an imaginable labor process,

but wants to extend those powers to “objective reality everywhere.” Under

what conditions can human beings qua social beings, with their fully

developed subjective capacities, recognize consubstantiality with “objective

reality everywhere” as “the reality of human faculties”? Will not the realm

of independent nature always transcend society, hence the human subject?

In short, will not human beings always be strangers in the universe,

whatever their social interactions?

Marx seems to argue the contrary, that under the appropriate social

conditions it will be possible to recognize the essence of nature as human

activity. Formally, this recognition exactly parallels Vico’s notion that

history is knowable as a human product. Just as this notion opens the way to

the dereification of history and the recognition of human creative power in

the historical domain, so Marx wants to dereify nature and to attribute to

human beings a comparable creative power in the natural domain.

The paradox results from casting the dialectics of the labor process in

the form of identity philosophy, metacritically redefining the subject and

object as labor and material. The resulting theory is profoundly

unsatisfactory. It is not only that some things are unimaginable as potential

objects of labor; equally questionable is the reduction of the fundamental

human relation to nature to labor. It is by no means self-evident that the

transformative impulse is the primary one through which being is disclosed.

In everyday coping, play, aesthetic appreciation, recognition, and

contemplation humans relate to being perhaps just as fundamentally as they

do in labor without attempting to remake objects in their own image. And to these less active modes of involvement in the world there correspond

dimensions of the real perhaps just as fundamental as any revealed to the

laboring subject.

Marx is reacting against idealism, which sums up access to reality in the

concept of consciousness. And he may well be right to protest that a more

fundamental practical relation to the real should have priority. Yet the

imaginable extension of the concept of an object of consciousness is in truth

far greater than that of an object of labor. Thus if a Fichte or a Berkeley

were to declare that “consciousness itself becomes the object,” we might

disagree with the philosophical premises that lead to such a conclusion, but

at least the notion of consciousness refers potentially to every possible

object. The idealistic conclusion need not be rejected out of hand because

consciousness self-evidently requires an object irreducible to it. 4

Marx thus encounters a barrier to generalizing his concept of the object

of labor from the human scale to the totality of nature. The universe is not,

in principle, mere raw material: the very idea is either absurd or abhorrent.

Even admitting that labor achieves subject–object identity in a partial

domain such as history, this still falls short of the requirements of

philosophy of praxis. As a result, the whole Kantian problematic of the

thing-in-itself threatens to return, for alongside history, in which subject and

object are one in labor, another sphere of nature and natural science must be

distinguished in which man is not the object.

Instead of accepting the Kantian view, Marx elaborated a theory of

sensation in which the senses “become directly theoreticians in practice,”

acting on their objects as does the worker on his raw materials. 5 The senses, unlike labor, have traditionally been conceived as a potentially universal

mode of reception, relating to all possible (real) objects. The senses can

therefore take over where actual labor leaves off, supporting the assertion of

a universal identity of subject and object in nature.

Marx’s theory of sensation is distinguished by his metacritical

reconstruction of the senses as a historically evolving dimension of human

being. He argues that the object of sensation contains a wealth of meaning

available only to the trained and socially developed sense organ. In

alienated society man experiences nature as a dog or cat might experience a

symphony. And, just as the “musical” ear recognizes itself “affirmed” in the

music it hears, so will liberated humanity recognize itself affirmed in

nature. “The distinctive character of each faculty is precisely its characteristic essence and thus also the characteristic mode of its

objectification, of its objective real, living being. It is therefore not only in

thought, but through all the senses that man is affirmed in the objective

world.”6 On these terms, the emancipated senses are active transformers of their objects and not mere passive receptors; they can be understood on the

model of the labor process as engaging in a theoretical-practical activity,

objectifying human nature and releasing the implicit potentialities of the

material on which they work, in this case as meanings rather than as

artifacts.

For the early Marx, the senses are alienated in the alienation of labor.

Only under communism can the senses achieve their highest pitch of

perfection. When the revolution transforms the senses by abolishing

alienation it attains the core of being itself, as required by the philosophy of

praxis: “The suppression of private property is, therefore, the complete

emancipation of all the human qualities and senses … The eye has become

a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by

man and destined for him.” 7 Revolution unites subject and object in liberated sensation and thereby reveals the truth of nature.

But can one really speak of “truth” in this context? Conceivably, the

historically evolved senses of communist man are different from those of

man in class society, but are the senses in any case significantly related to

the truth about nature? Is it not natural science that discovers this truth,

often by the most arduous effort to transcend the given social-sensory

horizon toward deeper representations? In the Manuscripts, Marx explicitly

rejects the epistemology implied by these questions, and with it, the existing

natural sciences as well.

Marx insists that he is seeking the “unifying truth” of “both idealism

and materialism.”8 Given his quasi-naturalistic assumptions, he cannot claim that the senses “posit” their objects in some sort of prior constitution.

This would be to deny the reality of nature while affirming the natural,

sensory character of man, an obvious contradiction. He therefore argues, on

the one hand, that the sense object is real and not simply a product of

consciousness. On the other hand, he rejects any notion of a thing-in-itself

transcendent to perception in principle. His position is compatible with

neither realism nor Kantianism.

Marx cannot allow, as does British empiricism, that the sense object is

merely a sign, causally (or otherwise) connected with a “real” object. If the

sensed object is only a sign or image, then no real unity of subject and

object is achieved as Kant’s first Critique makes abundantly clear. The

“real” object is not “humanized” by sensation in realistic and critical

epistemology, but flees behind experience to where it can be reached

through thought alone, if at all. Marx therefore rejects the attempt to

conceive nature as a reality transcendent to sensation: “Nature too,” he

writes, “taken abstractly, for itself, and rigidly separated from man, is

nothing for man.”9 To this “abstract” nature, he opposes the concrete, lived nature of direct sensory experience. Marx’s synthesis of idealism and

materialism thus culminates in a unique form of phenomenalism.

Marx rejects the natural sciences for their “abstract materialistic, or

rather idealistic orientation.” 10 His critique might be elaborated more fully as follows. The materialist interpretation of science asserts the reality of the

ideal objects of scientific laws, in contrast with the mere appearances

perceived by the senses; but the ideal objects of science are objects of

thought, and so via materialism we return to the basic premise of idealism,

the notion that in its essence being is an object of thought and not of a

natural, sensuous subject. This is merely a secularized version of the

theological priority of spirit over matter. Marx’s own radical

epistemological atheism insists on locating both appearance and reality in

the sphere of sensation, as levels or degrees in the unveiling of what is. The

truth of the object does not lie beyond sensation or in thought but in truer

and deeper sensation, in the developed and liberated senses of social man.

Only on this assumption can Marx overcome the split between man and

nature threatening his philosophy of praxis.

Now science must be transformed in its methods and its structure.

Following Feuerbach (and definitely not Locke), Marx states: “Sense

experience … must be the basis of all science.” 11 Presumably, the perceptions of the liberated senses can be raised to consciousness by a new

science although it is difficult to imagine in what form. Furthermore, the

division of natural and social science must be overcome: the very object of

natural science has been aufgehoben and in its place stands the

“humanized” nature disclosed to liberated sensation. “There will be,” Marx

prophesizes, “a single science.”12 Marx seems to be saying that a reformed

science will, in studying nature, really be studying the objectifications of man’s socialized senses, hence man himself.

The first object for man—man himself—is nature, sense experience; and the particular sensuous human faculties, which can only find objective realization in natural objects, can only attain self-knowledge in the science of natural being … The social reality of nature and human natural science,

or the natural science of man, are identical expressions.13

In these passages, Marx takes the step that Lukács later refused to take:

the rejection of the existing natural sciences as the precondition for a radical

historicization of the concept of nature. Undergirding the “abstractly

conceived” nature of the existing sciences there is a primordial practical

relation of human subject to natural object. This practical relation cannot be

explained as an external interaction between the sort of entities conceived

by natural science, but constitutes a more fundamental reality.

The next step, which Marx did not take, would be the development of a

philosophy of nature based on a teleological concept of being as in essence

subordinate to human aims. Rather than go this route, Marx rejects his

entire early philosophy. In the works immediately following the

Manuscripts, particularly in the “Theses on Feuerbach” and The German

Ideology, he begins to backtrack. He first rejects not so much the premises

of the Manuscripts as the conclusion they were supposed to establish, the

identity of subject and object. In The German Ideology, for example, Marx

sets out at one point to prove that the entire universe is a product of human

sensuous activity. But, in the very middle of a passage that could have been

lifted from the Manuscripts, he suddenly notes, “Of course the priority of

external nature remains, and all this has no application to the original men

produced by generatio aequivoca.” 14

This is a damaging admission from the point of view of his earlier

philosophy of praxis: it presupposes that nature can be meaningfully

conceived apart from man, and so presumably, comprehended in abstraction

from its sensuous appearance. Perhaps this implication still makes Marx a

bit uncomfortable, for he immediately tries to patch things up. He

continues, “But this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is

considered distinct from nature,” a perspective which, Marx assures us, is

irrelevant in the modern world where industry has transformed nature

except “on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin.” 15

These are schoolboy squirmings compared with the daring and rigor of

the Manuscripts, and show to what extent Marx has abandoned his

philosophy of praxis even though some of his arguments still tend toward

establishing his old conclusions. Such hesitation and wavering occur

several times in the first part of The German Ideology, where occasional passages prepare proofs of the identity of subject and object despite the fact

that Marx now ridicules the very terminology in which such a conclusion

would have to be stated. Soon even this backhanded reference to the

philosophy of praxis of the Manuscripts is dropped, and Marx plunges into

economic and historical research.

Marx’s later concept of nature is not based on philosophical arguments

but on a materialistic faith in science. Yet some important aspects of the

philosophy of praxis survive the abandonment of its most daring theses.

The early metacritique continues to influence his later works. It will be

recalled that the metacritique has three moments, the first two of which

reconstruct the categories of identity philosophy in social reality, while the

third resolves the philosophical antinomies of that philosophy through

projecting the historical transformation of the reconstructed terms. The later

works restrict the metacritique to reified forms of social thought. The

metacritically reconstructed categories still interact dialectically in history,

but the resolution of the antinomies no longer has ontological import.

It was left to Engels to elaborate an ontology corresponding to the social

theory of the mature Marx. He did so in numerous articles and books that

espouse an unabashed naturalism. Marx himself seems to have accepted this

as a satisfactory substitute for the philosophy of praxis. Lukács was, of

course, aware of Engels’, views that he condemned as precritical, still

unawakened from the “dogmatic slumbers” Kant interrupted for all time.

On this point Lukács is undoubtedly right.

EXISTENTIAL MARXISM

Central to philosophy of praxis is the idea that the truth of being is

historical becoming; but it is also from this idea that the antinomy of society

and nature arises. This philosophy attempts to transpose the concept of

subject–object identity from metaphysics to social practice. In support of

this project, philosophy of praxis argues that being is disclosed to the

subject in a practical relation such as needing, laboring, or historical action.

The dialectical interdependence of the practically related subject and object

is then taken as paradigmatic for subject–object relations in general. The antinomy arises from difficulties in understanding the concept of nature on

these terms.

The methodological dimension of this antinomy concerns the relation of

theory to practice. So-called “external” nature is a privileged object of

theoretical contemplation. As Lukács argues, even the corresponding

technical practice in which nature is manipulated is basically

“contemplative” in the sense that it passively obeys the laws disclosed to

theory. The matter stands quite differently with society and history that are

humanly created in their very being. Practice actually produces the objects

that appear in their (created) independence as objects of thought and which

in turn reproduce the practice that produced them. Here the objects of

theory are objectifications of practice, which latter is therefore no merely

derivative function of theory. The contingency of the laws of social life on

practice is without parallel in the domain of natural science.

At issue in the ontological question of whether “external” nature has

priority over social reality or vice versa is the methodological question of

whether theory or practice has epistemological priority. In turn, on this

depends whether or not subject and object can be united. In the customary

representation of theory, subject and object are not identical, but distinctly

separate. The ideal of truth as correspondence of thing and intellect

presupposes the separation of the terms it brings into relation. The subject

of theory occupies a position beyond all but cognitive connection with its

objects, and unites with them not in reality but in knowledge, in a specular

relation, i.e., speculatively.

This tenuous subject–object relation of theory is utterly unlike the

practical relation the early Marx requires. He insists that subject–object

identity be demonstrated by explaining the real process of production of the

thought-objects of theory. This involves no merely reflective

correspondence of thought and things, but an active creating. But can

practice serve this ambitious philosophical purpose?

Marx argues that only “real” objects can exist in practical relations. But

by “real” objects we usually mean objects that are independent of the

subject; it is thus that we distinguish an objective thing from a subjective

one that can only exist “in the mind.” We assume that the reality of objects

is verified in knowledge, by which we distinguish the real from the illusory

or misconstrued. Objectivity is revealed not to practice, but to thought; it

involves not the strong dialectical interrelatedness of a doing, but the weak and contingent relation of a knowing. Since our ordinary conception of

practice presupposes the objectivity of its moments, the very attempt to

make practice primordial appears to be self-contradictory. 16

This contradictory result is reached because Marx rejects idealism and

insists on defining the subject–object relation as a “real” practical relation

between “real” objects, without sufficiently clarifying his concept of reality.

He intends for practice to found objectivity, and yet he implies the contrary,

that objectivity is independent of practice and founding for it. His

philosophy of praxis would thus be bounded by some sort of traditional

ontology and its corresponding form of contemplative rationality. This

boundary is reached in interpretations such as Habermas’s in which nature

“in-itself” lies beyond the horizon of social practice as a permanently

reified external substratum society can never touch in its being but only

know.

Some Marxists have concluded that a speculative nature philosophy can

complete the philosophy of praxis, once and for all subordinating nature to

historical practice.17 They attempt to conceive a “practice” prior to and founding for the objectivity of nature. In such theories, society’s meaning-positing functions are conceived as a generative principle for nature, or

nature itself is conceived as a living organism of which humanity would be

the conscious faculty. Yet even here, in the context of the most ambitious

attempt to found philosophy of praxis, the antinomy of society and nature

reappears. The historical practice which, for Marxism, founds the

objectivity of social objects is the “real” practice of identifiable human

subjects and social groups. The practice in which speculative philosophy

conceives the constitution of nature does not have this “real” character, but

is a conceptual mythology.

To the extent that Marx hints at a solution to the problem, he looks to a

revision of the concept of objectivity as the precondition for conceiving

subject–object identity with real subjects and objects. Unfortunately, he

does not follow through adequately on this requirement of a consistent

philosophy of praxis. He offers daring suggestions for transforming the

concept of nature, but he barely sketches the metacritical revision of the

concept of objectivity on which they depend. We will see that Lukács

employs different conceptual means to address a similar problem with

somewhat more plausible results, if not entirely successfully. It is still

noteworthy that both Marx and Lukács arrive independently at a similar break with the usual concept of objectivity.

The essence of their approach is the rejection of the hypothetical

absolute subject that serves as an epistemological model for traditional

theory of knowledge. The absolute subject has the power to shatter the

hard-won unity of subject and object by positing external nature as reality.

They therefore deny that it is meaningful even to imagine an observer that

could perceive and question the universe from “outside,” from a

disincarnated position of pure thought, the famous “view from nowhere.” In

its regulative employment as an ideal of knowledge this hypothesis is an

ultimate theological postulate they must expunge from philosophy.

The epistemology that derives from their critique is closer to

Nietzsche’s than to Hegel’s, with whom Marx and Lukács are usually

compared. It is true that, like Hegel, they regard knowledge as a historical

outcome, but they deny the possibility of a final synoptic wisdom such as

that in which Hegel’s philosophy culminates. Rather, the tendency to which

they belong would say with Nietzsche:

Let us, from now on, be on our guard against the hallowed philosophers’ myth of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower” let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory notions as “pure reason,” “absolute knowledge,” “absolute intelligence.” All these concepts presuppose an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretive powers—precisely those powers that alone make of seeing, seeing something. All seeing

is essentially perspective and so is all knowing.18

This existentialist reference is not arbitrary, for at least in their critique

of objectivism, Marx and Lukács are “existential” Marxists. Both assert the

inescapable involvement of a finite subject of knowledge in the object of its

knowledge; and both reject the skeptical consequences that usually derive

from this premise by revising the concept of objectivity metacritically in

accordance with the epistemological potentialities of a finite being.

There is a brief argument in Marx’s Manuscripts that makes these points

with startling effect. In a discussion of the cosmological proof of the

existence of God, Marx demands that an imaginary interlocutor who

questions the source of the universe reflect on his own position in relation

to the question:

If you ask a question about the creation of nature and man you abstract from nature and man. You suppose them non-existent and you want me to demonstrate that they exist. I reply: give up your abstraction and at the same time you abandon your question. Or else, if you want to maintain your abstraction, be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, think of yourself too as

non-existent, for you are also man and nature. Do not think, do not ask me any questions, for as soon as you think and ask questions your abstraction from the existence of nature and man becomes meaningless. 19

At issue in this passage is not just the problem of the existence of God,

but also the very nature of objectivity. For, in denying his interlocutor the

right to abstract from his position in existence in order to pose a question

about existence, Marx denies that thinking can occupy what Lukács calls a

“systematic locus,” an absolute position of truth beyond all real connection

with its objects. In Karl Mannheim’s phrase (although not in precisely the

sense he intended), thought is essentially “seinsverbundenes.” 20

There is a formal similarity between Marx’s argument and certain

arguments in Kierkegaard.21 Independent of both Marx and Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel developed this type of argument into a methodology. Like

Marx, Marcel challenges the legitimacy of interrogating being as a whole,

and for the same reason, because it involves abstracting from the

questioner’s position in being. A problem like that posed by the

cosmological proof is insoluble because it is not a legitimate problem at all.

Both Marx and Marcel are concerned to demonstrate the ontological

priority of lived experience over its objectivistic representation. For Marcel,

lived experience is “meta-problematical,” a domain of “mystery” that can

only be explored from within. Marcel’s term “mystery” is ill-chosen,

because he does not intend a numinous reality. As he defines it, “A mystery

is a problem which encroaches on its own data, invading them, as it were,

and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.” 22 Just so, in Marx the

“problem” of the existence of the universe “encroaches” on the subject who

poses it as a problem. Marcel concludes again along lines anticipated by

Marx, that “To postulate the meta-problematical is to postulate the primacy

of being over knowledge … it is to recognize that knowledge is, as it were,

environed by being.” 23

Marcel rejects the act of abstraction in which the subject conceives itself

as a thing in an external relation with another thing, a body or an object of

sensation. What can be so related, he asserts, is only the falsely objectified

concept of the “mind,” whereas the real living subject disappears “behind”

this objective misconstruction in conceiving it. Marcel traces this particular

argument back to Hegel. 24 It is not clear to what text in Hegel Marcel refers, but it may well be to the section on Reason in the Phenomenology of

Spirit. There Hegel attacks every form of objectivistic reduction of subjectivity, as epitomized by phrenology that holds “the reality of self-consciousness to consist in the skull-bone.” Hegel writes:

Brain-fibres and the like, looked at as forms of the being of mind, are already an imagined, a merely hypothetical actuality of mind—not its presented reality, not its felt, seen, in short not its true reality.

If they are present to us, if they are seen, they are lifeless objects, and then no longer pass for the being of mind … The principle involved in this idea is that reason claims to be all thinghood, even thinghood of a purely objective kind. It is this, however, in conceptu: for, only this notion is the truth of reason; and the purer the notion itself is, the more silly an idea does it become. 25

In sum, the skull or brain, as the material reality of thought, exists as

such only as an idea for thought; hence thought exists as material reality

only insofar as that reality is a thought reality. The search for a material

foundation for reason ends up “ingenuously” affirming a thought as

reality.26 Like the hypothesis of the creation of the universe, so in another way the reductionist hypothesis implies the existence of an absolute subject,

beyond all but cognitive connection to existence.

Marx’s argument against the cosmological proof is part of a larger

attempt to establish the ontological priority of the lived nature of which we

are a part over the objective nature of the natural sciences on which we are

a spectator. To accomplish this he interrupts his imaginary interlocutor with

the phrase, “Do not think, do not ask me any questions …” He seems to be

operating here with a criterion of meaning that restricts propositions about

reality to those that can be accounted for in a dialectic of subject and object.

His aim is to deny ontology access to the object “in itself,” as it would

appear to a contemplative subject, apart from its relation to human beings in

labor and sensation.

Otherwise stated, Marx attempts to found his theory on the “real” or

“concrete” relation of human being to nature, subject to object, which, in

labor, has the form of an essential interdependence, rather than founding it

on the model of objective nature we owe to the sciences and which bears no

essential relation to humanity. In effect, Marx wants to show that nature as

it really is can only be conceived in ontological interdependence with

human being, while “abstractly” conceived, merely “external” nature must

be excluded from philosophical consideration as a meaningless

construction.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ATHEISM

Marx’s problematic is also that of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. They

all face the difficulties resulting from the metacritical appropriation of the

idealist subject–object concept. And like Marx they propose a solution

based on a revision of the concept of objectivity. However, the later thinkers

do not question the truth of the natural sciences. As we have seen, Marx

seeks a “unifying truth” that transcends the split between the natural and the

social sciences. Unification on these terms devalues the existing natural

sciences. Perhaps this made sense in 1844, but by the time Lukács and the

Frankfurt School reflect on the issues, it is clear that natural science is one

of several unsurpassable foundations of modernity. Their solution is not to

replace science with another form of thought, but rather to treat it as a social

and historical phenomenon. The result is not a unification of forms of

knowledge and corresponding objects but a theory of their relations. I will

explain this argument in detail as it applies to Lukács in Chapter 6 and Marcuse in Chapter 8.

The contrast between Marx’s approach and that of Lukács is instructive.

Lukács proposes a different metacritical reconstruction of objectivity in

which mediation rather than experience plays the key role. Where in Marx

labor and sensation have the constitutive power formerly attributed by

idealism to transcendental consciousness, in Lukács “forms of objectivity”

established by social practice play the constitutive role. In the next chapter I

will show that these forms are roughly equivalent to cultural perspectives.

They are not merely mental phenomena but shape social reality as well.

Lukács’s argument encloses rationality without remainder in the embrace of

these cultural forms, and culture itself in social practice. Reason, culture,

and practice are stacked like Chinese boxes, the one inside the other, with

no way out. No personal discipline, no science, no wisdom can break

through this limit. This is an integrally cultural epistemology that admits of

no “outside” of culture from which reality could be viewed, no privileged

scientific preserve on the margins of the world.

So far Lukács’s position appears to be merely relativistic, and this is

indeed how it was understood by those who, like Karl Mannheim,

attempted to elaborate a sociology of knowledge on the basis of his concept

of false consciousness.27 However, the intrinsic dependency of knowledge on consciousness and culture is not incompatible with a concept of truth.

Lukács insists that the social involvement of the subject is a necessary

precondition for knowing, and not just a barrier from which a “pure”

science would have to abstract. This is a metacritical reconstruction of the concept of knowledge in the relative, under a finite horizon, rather than a skeptical critique of human limits in the light of an unattainable absolute

truth.

Lukács’s main target in these epistemological considerations is

objectivism, and with it the idea that being in itself transcends the reach of

social practice. Objectivism leads to dogmatic claims to knowledge of being

or, on the contrary, to relativism, which denies such claims on the basis of a

similar conception of truth. Both objectivism and relativism presuppose an

“absolute” in the form of the “systematic locus” of thought as a supposed

spectator on a reality in which it does not, in principle, participate. “This

absolute,” Lukács writes, “is nothing but the fixation in thought, the

projection into myth of the intellectual failure to understand reality

concretely as a historical process.” 28

That failure results in a misapprehension of culture, the repository of

society’s most general categories of thought and action. Cultural

assumptions are conceived as eternal or transcendental, as prior to the real

process and founding for it. The absolute is this appearance of culture at the

horizon of history as an unchanging essence. Lukács reverses this formula:

it is not in transcending history that the truth is to be found, but in the

recognition of the historical character of all transcendence.

For Lukács society cannot be known in the absolute, but it can indeed

be known from within. 29 Lukács traces the “fixation” of thought in a realm beyond history to specific social causes. The absolute and its correlated

concept of the relative appear in response to the untranscended immediacies

of experience in class society. Because conscious cooperation is so difficult

and rare in this type of society, whole domains of social reality confront the

individuals as alien powers over which they have no control. The dominant

culture can serve its historical function of justifying class rule only insofar

as this function remains unconscious, insofar, therefore, as culture itself

appears as eternal truth. The illusion of a transhistorical, systematic locus of

thought corresponds to this untransformed reality and uncomprehended

culture.

Lukács argues that the proletariat throws these immediacies into the

movement of history and subjects them to a practical mediation that

decisively alters the position of truth. Proletarian practice acts on the form

of objectivity of its objects; it consciously transforms culture and therefore

reality as well; and, as the expression of a cooperative and potentially universal historical subject, this practice need not accept any merely given

immediacy as its horizon.

As soon as mankind has clearly understood and hence restructured the foundations of its existence truth acquires a wholly novel aspect. When theory and practice are united it becomes possible to change reality and when this happens the absolute and its “relativistic” counterpart will have played their historical role for the last time. For as the result of these changes we shall see the disappearance of that reality which the absolute and the relative expressed in like manner.30

The idea of theory as observation of reality from a disincarnated “beyond”

is overthrown; theory becomes finite when it is located in a process of

conscious cultural change.

Nietzsche claimed that truth was the last idol of a disenchanted world,

the final form in which the eternal ripped the seamless web of time. Marx

and Lukács too proceed to humanize truth itself, to make it enter into time

as a real moment in the creation of history. They reject any ontological

barrier between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, form and

content. “Reality” is a social product and not a thing-in-itself that precedes

society and which would have to be perceived from a scientific beyond of

culture to be known in its truth. This reality, produced in a social process,

can be known in the forms of its production.

This interpretation of philosophy of praxis suggests yet another

similarity with existentialism. Marx’s and Lukács’s position resembles the

phenomenological concept of “horizon” as a limit “under” which thought

proceeds. Kant would seem to be the primary reference for this approach to

the problem of meaning. It was he who first suggested that there are

specific limits to the range of application of the categories of experience.

The employment of reason beyond the domain of possible experience, that

is to say, in relation to being in itself, gives rise to a “transcendental

illusion.” Marx and Lukács retain the Kantian idea of limiting the

application of the categories to the possible experience of a finite subject,

but they reject the postulated transcendence of the thing-in-itself as a

theological vestige. They thus arrive at what I call a “finite horizon” of

being and knowledge.

In 1935, Max Horkheimer laid out a similar conception in an essay “On

the Problem of Truth.” In this essay Horkheimer presents an extended

argument for “the finitude of thought” which will be determining for the

Frankfurt School. 31 Notwithstanding his explicit rejection of such

Lukácsian categories as “subject–object identity,” the “unity of theory and practice,” and “totality,” the argument is quite close in spirit to that of

Lukács. Horkheimer criticizes both absolutism and dogmatism on the

grounds that they presuppose an incoherent confusion of the eternal and the

temporal. The human subject, situated in history, is called to think eternal

truths, a task at which it may be said to succeed or fail, but which is, in any

case, self-contradictory. This essentially theological concept of truth must

itself be questioned in terms of a historical and dialectical alternative.

“Since that extrahistorical and hence exaggerated concept of truth is

impossible which stems from the idea of a pure infinite mind and thus in the

last analysis from the concept of God, it no longer makes any sense to

orient the knowledge we have to this impossibility and in this sense call it

relative.”32

Once it is admitted that the subject of knowledge is a historical being

and not what Lukács calls a “systematic locus,” then it follows that truth too

must be conceived historically. This has two implications Horkheimer

develops in some detail. On the one hand, the fullest understanding of

particular truths requires that they be considered in the context of the

overall system of knowledge of the historical period in which they appear.

Knowledge rests not only on corroboration by the facts, but also on the

validity of its concepts within the prevailing categorial system. On the other

hand, that system of categories is historically relative to evolving social and

economic conditions. While Horkheimer does not designate such a

categorial system by the term “form of objectivity,” it is clear that he has

something similar in mind, an underlying cognitive pattern.

Although particular truths depend on the system of categories of their

time, this does not devalue them as relativism believes because there are no

eternal truths setting a higher standard they fail to meet. This has a

surprising consequence. “At the same time as [truth] nevertheless

necessarily remains inconclusive and to that extent ‘relative,’ it is also

absolute, since later correction does not mean that a former truth was

formerly untrue.” 33 Judgments of truth are objectively valid even if historically relative and retain their validity even after history has moved on

and replaced one set of categories with another.

Horkheimer gives the example of a diagnosis of tuberculosis. It may be

correct or incorrect in terms of contemporary medical knowledge and

retains its truth-value in the former case regardless of the future evolution

of medicine. Suppose that someday the very categories of medicine will have changed so much that the concept of “tuberculosis” will appear to its

practitioners as irrelevant as do the “humours” of premodern medicine to

physicians today. This development may represent a progress of knowledge

but it does not alter the truth-value of the diagnosis made at the time when

the categorial structure of contemporary knowledge supported the concept

of tuberculosis. In this sense a truth may be historically bound without

being falsified by history.

Horkheimer applies this argument to science generally. Its truths are

more or less successfully verified on its own terms, but this in no way

exempts science from the historical dialectic. “Indeed, any relation of

concept and object not historically mediated, no longer appears meaningful

as an idea.”34 The historical relativity of science appears clearly “as soon as one more closely investigates the controlling categories and the choice of

objects and methods.” 35 This conclusion is in surprising agreement with contemporary science studies.

Where Horkheimer’s argument differs most from that of Lukács is in

the vagueness of his discussion of the ontological role of human action.

While he asserts that action is implicated in the verification of ideas about

society, it is unclear how and to what extent. Lukács’s similar argument

comes to a clear conclusion: once human beings consciously control the

categorial structure of existence itself, the very idea of a reality wholly

separate from the subject collapses in absurdity. Knowledge is essentially

mediation between an ontologically interdependent subject and object, not

the communication of an isolated subject with an indifferent and alien

thing-in-itself.

But this conclusion rests suspiciously on the hypothetical success of the

revolution in actually transforming social reality. Horkheimer is anxious to

resist any pragmatic reduction of truth to success and this is what creates

the ambiguity in his argument. He accepts the Lukácsian premise that

knowledge of history is not purely contemplative, but he fears that the

Lukácsian conclusion will lead to a mere consecration of the victors in a

time when progressive forces are everywhere in retreat. As a result, he

confines his argument to epistemology and insists on the relative

independence of theory and practice. We will see that this position is central

to the later Frankfurt School. It marks the division between what Lukács

called the era of the “actuality of the revolution,” and a later period which,

following Marcuse, we could describe as the era of “preventive counterrevolution.”

1 Tom Rockmore has argued that the roots of this conception lie at least as much in Fichte as in Hegel. See Rockmore, “Lukács and the Recovery of Marx after Marxism,” in M. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011).

2 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans.

and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C.A. Watts, 1963), 127.

3 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes (London: New Left Books, 1971), 70.

4 This is, of course, Sartre’s thesis, but it is by no means self-evident.

5 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 160.

6 Ibid., 161.

7 Ibid., 160.

8 Ibid., 206.

9 Ibid., 217.

10 Ibid., 163. On the equivalence of idealism and materialism, cf. Robert Havemann, Dialektik ohne Dogma? (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), 27–32.

11 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 164.

12 Ibid., 164. Marx’s discussion of the reform of science has divided commentators. For two different interpretations, cf. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 101–21; and Jean Hyppolite, Études sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1965), 112–13. Mészáros gives a common-sense reading of Marx’s text, which Hyppolite interprets literally as calling for the most radical transformation of natural science.

13 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 164.

14 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1947), 36–7.

15 Ibid., 36–7.

16 It is to avoid this paradox that Heidegger proposes that action has “its own kind of sight.”

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 99.

17 Ernst Bloch is the most famous example. For a discussion of the difficulties arising from Bloch’s position, see Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 156–63.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals,” in The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 255.

19 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 166. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, “La place de l’aliénation dans le retournement marxiste,” in Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à Partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: UGE, 1973), 112–15.

20 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans.

L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 267.

21 Cf., for example, Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 108–9. Like Marx, Kierkegaard

objects to the act of abstraction in which the subject places itself outside of existence to interrogate existence.

22 Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. M.

Harari (New York: Citadel, 1966), 19.

23 Ibid., 18.

24 Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. B. Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 102, 332–9.

25 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baille (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), 370–1.

26 Ibid., 370–1.

27 For a discussion of the relation of Mannheim to Lukács, see Joseph Gabel, “Mannheim et le marxisme hongrois,” in Idéologies (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), 255–78.

28 HCC, 187.

29 This is the thesis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 43–5, 63–4.

30 HCC, 189.

31 Max Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and J. Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), 244.

32 Ibid., 192.

33 Ibid., 192. This astonishing proposition seems to imply either a radical deflation of the concept

of truth, which would reinstitute the thing-in-itself, or a concept of reality as evolving with human

knowledge. For more on this subject, see Chapter 6.

34 Ibid., 193.

35 Ibid., 201.

CHAPTER FOUR

Reification and Rationality

CULTURE AND THE CRISIS OF RATIONALITY

Husserl’s 1935 “Vienna Lecture” ended with an ominous warning: “There

are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of

Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into

hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from

the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes

naturalism once and for all.”1 Husserl was reacting to the rise of romantic and pessimistic currents of thought, a Spenglerian mood of doom hanging

over Europe. The earlier attempts of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians to

distinguish humanistic knowledge from natural science and to salvage

thereby a space for spirit in an increasingly mechanized world had failed.

Triumphant science and technology were met by increasing hostility to

reason itself. Heidegger’s impressive attempt to formulate a philosophical

alternative to disintegrating rationalism came to grief in a lamentable

involvement with fascism.

Lukács too was a product of an intellectual environment that favored the

idea of independent Geisteswissenschaften as against bourgeois social

science and vulgar Marxism. He responded to the crisis with a return to

Marx for a solution in the philosophical domain. His version of “heroic”

rationalism was based on the revolutionary socialist movement.2 Like the young Marx demanding the realization of philosophy, Lukács insisted that

what is at stake in the struggle for socialism is not only a change in society,

but also the fate of rationality: the revolution is an affair of reason. But

Lukács’s path to Marxism was long and began with the very romantic

critique of rationalism that led so many other thinkers to reactionary

conclusions. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce Lukács’s concept of

reification, through which he attempted to reconcile the themes of that early

critique with a renewed faith in reason.

Reification means, literally, treating human relations as relations

between things. In Lukács’s usage, the “thing” implied in the “re” of

reification is not just an entity in general but an object suited to formal

rational comprehension, prediction, and technical control. Lukács writes:

What is important is to recognize clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the form of objectivity of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this “action” likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of the pure observer of these—artificially abstract—processes, the attitude of the experimenter.3

The problem, Lukács argues, is not with scientific reason per se, but

with its application beyond the bounds of its appropriate object, nature. The

bourgeois social sciences do not simply comprehend their objects but reflect

and contribute to the reshaping of society to resemble a thing of nature.

Marxism grounds a different dialectical paradigm of knowledge in a social

movement capable of realizing that paradigm not merely in theory but in

practice as well. The critique of scientism is recruited to the proletarian

cause even as the proletariat becomes the bearer of this alternative form of

rationality. As we will see, this surprising synthesis alters both the critique

and the idea of reason. Understanding it poses challenges not all interpreters

of Lukács successfully meet.

In his youth Lukács belonged to a group of philosophers and social

critics whose principal concern was alienation in modern life.4 Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844 interpreted alienation in terms of labor but this text was still unpublished at the time Lukács and his friends developed their

cultural perspective. Their critique drew on the sociology of Weber and

especially of Simmel, whose analysis of the “tragedy of culture” had a deep

influence on their thinking.5

Culture as they understood it had both a descriptive and a normative

dimension. On the one hand the hermeneutics of culture distinguished

understanding of society from natural science and technology. This

distinction supported a corresponding distinction between culture, as the

realm of creative expression, and civilization, as the domain of practical

activity. On the other hand, scientism, mechanization, and commercialism

were destructive of personal Bildung as a value. Both these senses of

culture come together in Lukács’s early literary criticism where the

objectifications of culture in customs and mores are analyzed as a rigid

“second nature” opposed to the personal self-development of the

individual. 6

World War I threw bourgeois society into a general crisis embracing not

only the ethical and political domains, but the very substance of its cultural

life. As Lukács put it in one early article: “The culture of the capitalist

epoch had collapsed in itself and prior to the occurrence of economic and

political breakdown. Therefore … it is a pressing necessity, precisely in the

interests of culture, in the interest of opening the way to the new culture, to

bring the long death process of capitalist society to its completion.”7 The alienation sapping the spirit of Europe must be overcome along with the

capitalist system that is its material base.

Soon after identifying the new culture with communism, Lukács

rejected his early formulation of the problem. By 1923, when he published

History and Class Consciousness, concepts drawn from Marx’s Capital and

from his own Hegelian interpretation of Marx replace the cultural approach.

No doubt Lukács believed this was necessary to overcome the vaguely

spiritual and politically conservative associations of the concept of culture

at that time. But lacking a concept of culture, Lukács was forced to

formulate his theory of epochal cultural change in a strange mixture of

Marxist economic determinism and idealist philosophical speculation. This

has led to much confusion about his meaning. To a lesser degree Marx’s

own formulations display a similar ambiguity. Neither of these

revolutionary philosophers offer an elaborated theory of the revolution they

advocate. Their explanations waver between philosophical deduction and

causal necessity without achieving a convincing account. However, in the

case of Lukács at least, it is possible to extract a coherent account from his

various formulations. This is what I will attempt to do in this chapter.

In Chapter 2 I have shown that Marx arrives at the concept of socialism

not through an ethical argument but through a theory of rationality and its

“demands.” Marx’s early theory ranks capitalism and socialism as forms of

rationality. Their succession is determined less by economic motives or

political power than by the logic of his metacritique. The later Marx

sometimes takes this logic for a causal link. This is due to his self-

misunderstanding in terms of a scientific paradigm of explanation unsuited

to the tasks he set it. Marx claims that capitalism leads to socialism “with

the inexorability of a law of Nature.” In fact he gets from capitalism to

socialism not by a causal progression but by a dialectical demonstration. He

argues that just as capitalism has stripped craft producers of their tools, so will it lose control of machinery to the industrial labor force it has called

into being. Socialism is thus “the negation of the negation” the

“expropriators are expropriated in the revolution.” 8 It is not surprising that unsympathetic critics speak of a religious or ethical exigency of socialism

in Marx’s work, since the economic theory does not live up to Marx’s

deterministic promise. 9

Lukács takes over Marx’s critique of capitalism and projects a socialist

resolution to its crises. He is more aware than Marx of the risks of

confusing social change with natural processes. He develops a much more

elaborate theory of the passage from capitalism to socialism, not as a causal

sequence but as a dialectical transcendence of the capitalist paradigm of

rational social order by a higher form of socialist rationality. But just

because he downplays economic determinism, his argument has been

interpreted by later commentators as a pure philosophical deduction. As in

the case of Marx, critics claim that Lukács’s faith in socialist revolution is

founded on a philosophical myth, the myth of the proletariat as “identical

subject–object of history.”

The critics misunderstand the concept of social change in Marx and

Lukács. But Marx and Lukács are partially responsible since they fail to

clearly explain their alternative to philosophical deduction and causality. A

theory of cultural change could have provided the missing term between

Marx’s Manuscripts and Capital, on the one hand, and between the critique

of capitalism and the socialist revolution on the other. Unfortunately, when

he turned to economic research and abandoned philosophy, Marx left

behind the conceptual tools needed to develop such a theory. The theory of

alienation in the Manuscripts adumbrates a concept of culture that appears

more fully developed in Lukács’s theory of reification. But as we have seen,

Lukács rejected the concept of culture and so appeared to fall back on a

philosophical projection of the future.10

Today we are remote from the sources of Lukács’s early concept of

culture. The most widely accepted usage of the term no longer has any

connection with reactionary culture-critique but derives from sociology and

anthropology. “Culture” now refers to the unifying pattern of an entire

society, including its typical artifacts, rituals, customs, and beliefs.11 The concept of culture points toward the common structures of social life. It

assigns the researcher the problem of discovering the overarching

paradigms of meaning and value that shape all the various spheres of society. This social scientific sense of culture has influenced everyday

speech as well. The changed meaning and connotations of “culture” free the

term from the associations that troubled Lukács. Today we can safely

identify Lukács’s concept of reification as a cultural construct in the

contemporary usage of the term.

There are of course many versions of a cultural approach to

understanding society. Those closest in spirit to Lukács’s Marxism treat

cultural structures as intertwined with the agency of the members of society

in a circular pattern. The circularity of culture is a familiar social

ontological principle currently referred to by the fashionable term

“performativity.” For example, money is money only insofar as we act as

though it were money and it is the success of this sort of action that

determines our conviction that money is in fact money. Social “things” are

not merely things but are implicated in practices. The categories under

which social life makes sense are the categories under which it is lived.12

Gillian Rose shows that this concept of culture has its source in the neo-

Kantian doctrines debated in Lukács’s own intellectual environment. The

pattern of culture is a kind of naturalized version of the Kantian a priori, a

quasi-transcendental precondition of the facts and values it engenders. “The

status of the precondition becomes ambiguous: it is an a priori, that is, not

empirical, for it is the basis of the possibility of experience. But a

‘sociological a priori’ is, ex hypothesi, external to the mind, and hence

appears to acquire the status of a natural object or cause.”13

This neo-Kantian concept of culture operates under the Marxist surface

of Lukács’s argument, offering a way out of the difficulties of Marx’s

problematic determinism. According to Lukács, social being and social

thought cannot be separately conceptualized and then related by a theory of

reciprocal causal interaction, as in most Marxist theory. This view, he

argues, leads to an insoluble antinomy of thought and things that can be

overcome “only by conceiving of thought as a form of reality, as a moment

in the total process …” 14 The focus must shift from the mechanistic

“influence” of social conditions on consciousness to the generalized

patterning of all dimensions of society by what Rose calls a “quasi-

transcendental” form. Form in this sense is culture as an emergent property

of social behavior, a property that is irreducible to the traditional categories

of subjectivity and objectivity because it constitutes them.

Lukács’s theory is based on the double character of the capitalist economy, as means of life and form of life, utilitarian instrumentality and

foundation of a cultural system. This conforms with Marx’s explanation of

historical materialism in The German Ideology. There Marx writes, “This

mode of production must not be considered simply as being the

reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a

definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing

their life, a definite mode of life on their part.” 15

The unusual feature of Lukács’s cultural approach is his identification

of rationality itself as a cultural pattern. It is this identification that is enshrined in the concept of reification. The disenchantment of the world

Marx described in the Communist Manifesto, where capitalism is attributed

an irresistible power to demystify tradition, is fully realized in the lawful

character of the capitalist system. The mathematical precision of equal

exchange becomes the binding logic of social life, replacing myth and

deference to personal authority. Capitalism’s rational form, the exchange of

equivalents and its laws, replaces earlier non-rational meanings as the

structuring principle of social thought and action. Lukács’s challenge is

explaining opposition to capitalist rationality without resuscitating the

irrationality capitalism overcomes. He transforms romantic protest against a

rigid conventional order into the philosophical conflict of forms of

rationality.

There is a distinct advantage to considering reification as a cultural

category. Reification is often defined as a mental state, an attitude. But this

is not the conception of History and Class Consciousness. In that work

reification is the underlying unity of the social system, the “model” of “all

the forms of objectivity of bourgeois society together with all the

corresponding forms of subjectivity.” 16 Treating human relations as things, the definition of reification, is constitutive of capitalist society, an essential

aspect of its workings. In his unpublished Defence of History and Class

Consciousness he says this explicitly although the reference to reification is

veiled: “The direct forms of appearance of social being are not, however,

subjective fantasies of the brain, but moments of the real forms of

existence.” 17

The point of treating reification as a cultural category is not to deny its

economic basis. From the Lukácsian perspective, Marxist theory explains

the overriding influence of the economy on all sectors of capitalist society

rather than simply assuming it a priori on general “materialist” grounds. A specific feature of the capitalist economy, the commodity form, also

functions as the basis of the capitalist cultural system. Economic exchange

is the paradigmatic order in which rationality emerges from social practice

to become the cultural form of society as a whole. Capitalism is thus the

source of a cultural system prevailing throughout the social order: “What is

known as economics,” Lukács writes, “is nothing but the system of forms

of objectivity of real life.”18

This cultural approach is no more reductionist than capitalism itself, a

society unique in the cultural significance it assigns the principle of

exchange. As Marshall Sahlins writes, “In bourgeois society, material

production is the dominant locus of symbolic production.”19 The theory of reification explains how the cultural pattern of capitalism is derived from its

economic system and, still more fundamentally, from the practices

producing that system. 20

But then the discovery of contradictions in the economic sphere takes

on a larger significance. Exploitation is not just an economic issue but

generates a tension between capitalist rationality as a “mode of life,” and

working-class experience and needs. Class struggle is thus cultural struggle,

and what Marx describes as the economic crisis and breakdown of

capitalism, Lukács reconstructs as the system’s cultural crisis and

breakdown. He thereby avoids economism, which derives revolution from

simple dissatisfaction with the level of welfare that capitalism can (in

theory) deliver to its working class.

The transition to socialism now appears in a different light as well; it is

neither a causal sequence, nor an ethical exigency, but a process of cultural

change. This process arises from the immanent cultural contradictions of

capitalism, contradictions between reified social patterns and living human

beings who resist the imposition of the reified forms even as they

unwittingly reproduce them through their everyday practical activities.

Lukács can finally link the philosophical concerns of Marxism with its

analysis of political economy and projection of a socialist future. The

tension he identifies in social reality between its reified form and its living

human substratum represents metacritically a larger conflict in the

paradigms of rationality. In this conflict, capitalist rationality, with its

quantitative concept of exchange and social law, comes up against a

limitation that is overcome theoretically by Marxist dialectics and

practically by socialism. Lukács reconceptualizes class struggle as the dialectical mediation in which the formal-analytic rationality of capitalism

is transcended as a cultural paradigm by an alternative dialectical paradigm.

Lukács relates Marxism to the problem of rationality through a

revolutionary philosophical interpretation of Capital. The preceding

chapters have shown how Marx moved from an early critique of formalism

in political philosophy to a broader concern with the formalistic concept of

reason, very much as Lukács supposed. Although Marx did not explicitly

follow up this line of thought in his later work, nevertheless, it is clear that

his early metacritique prepared his choice of a dialectical method in

economic and social research. Long before the publication of the

Manuscripts, Lukács discovered that Marx’s critique of fetishistic

formalism in political economy implies a far more general reconstruction of

the concept of reason. Lukács’s theory of reification is an original critique

of formal rationality, based on Marx’s Capital, and pursued to the point where it founds a dialectical concept of reason. There is a sense then in

which his early Marxist work anticipates the publication of the

Manuscripts, and goes beyond them theoretically.

This interpretation of Marxism is controversial. Commentators of the

so-called “scientific” school of Marxism, such as Lucio Colletti and Louis

Althusser, protest that Lukács’s theory of reification leads back to the

romantic culture-criticism from which Marx is supposed to have liberated

radical social thought. For them the Lukácsian approach signifies the

revival of philosophy, that is to say, of ideology, inside the cordon sanitaire

surrounding the “science” of Marxism. The huge intellectual labor through

which Lukács freed himself from his youthful romanticism and arrived at

an original interpretation of Marxism is simply ignored.

Thus Gareth Stedman Jones writes that History and Class

Consciousness “represents the first major irruption of the romantic anti-

scientific tradition of bourgeois thought into Marxist theory.” 21 Colletti has a similar opinion, complaining that Lukács “entered the factory not with

Capital but with the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience

…” 22 In sum, Lukács transformed the Marxian critique of capitalism into a romantic critique of reason per se by conceptualizing formal rationality

through the concept of reification rather than considering such rationality in

the approved “scientific” manner as a universal feature of knowledge as

such.

But Lukács had no need to study Bergson to arrive at his intellectual destination: Marx and Hegel would have sufficed. Nor, pace Colletti, is his

understanding of modern technology so very different from Marx’s that it

would justify the label of “romantic” it has acquired in the course of

numerous polemics. 23 There is ample material in the first volume of Capital to support his critique of the alienating effects of the division and

mechanization of labor. Lukács no more than Marx is hostile to machinery

per se, as is sometimes charged. Nor is Lukács opposed to reason in

general, but like Hegel he rejects the universal pretensions of formal

rationality in order to validate the claims of dialectical rationality.

What really is questionable in his procedure is also what is most

original and fruitful, namely, the discovery that linking all the phenomena

of capitalist society Marx criticizes, from fetishism to mechanization and

crises, there is a common structure, a pattern constituted by the imposition

of formal rationality on the social world. It is this discovery that is the basis

for Lukács’s generalization of Marx’s approach in the theory of reification.

This, rather than any retreat into irrationalism, inspired by mauvaises

lectures, is what lies behind the introduction of the concept of reification and its application in a cultural critique of capitalism. Lukács’s leap from

the critique of political economy to a theory of capitalist culture is a daring

step beyond Marx made possible by the change in the intellectual and social

landscape since Marx’s day.

REIFICATION AS A SOCIOLOGICAL CATEGORY

For Lukács the crisis of reason encompasses the dominant paradigm of

rationality in all its manifestations, from science and technology to the

market and the bureaucracy, and even the socialist opposition itself. The

concept of reification that Lukács applies in all these domains is based on

multiple sources: Marx’s critique of machine industry and his concept of

commodity fetishism; Simmel’s and Weber’s concepts of the exchange

society, bureaucracy, and rationalization; and Hegel’s dialectical concept of

appearance. To these overt influences, I would add the subtler impact of

neo-Kantian philosophy, especially Emil Lask’s concept of meaning.

Lukács’s theory can best be understood as a generalization of Marxian

theory in two dimensions, in sociological breadth through Weber, and in

ontological depth through neo-Kantianism and Hegel. So generalized, the

concept of reification becomes the basis for a critique of capitalist rationality as a worldview and a system logic threatened by its inability to

grasp the material substratum of its own formalistic categories and

institutional structures.

According to Lukács, commodity exchange is the basis of all forms of

reification. He seeks the “Seinsgrund” of reified thought even in its highest

philosophical manifestations in the structure of the market. 24 In Capital Marx explains the market in terms of the fetishism of commodities. By this

peculiar expression he means the substitution of exchange value for use

value, relations between social objects for relations between the human

beings who produce them, both in everyday life and in the scientific

representation of the economy. Fetishism characterizes a society in which

the economic relations between the individuals are governed by the forces

they unleash through their unplanned market interactions. In such a society,

the “law” of the market takes on an independence and power, a “material

character,” the individuals themselves increasingly lose. This is due to the

fact that production and exchange are splintered and fragmented. Marx

writes,

In the form of society now under consideration, the behavior of men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations to each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action. These facts manifest

themselves at first by products as a general rule taking the form of commodities.25

Marx calls the result “fetishism” because the human relations of

producers and consumers appear not as such, but as relations between

economic goods and categories, which latter seem to have an effective

dynamism independent of the individuals. The myriad interactions of

individuals on the market, which none can chart although all contribute

their share, appear as specifically economic “properties” attached to the

goods in circulation. Thus goods “have” a price that seems to belong to

them much as do their physical and chemical properties. Indeed, so real is

their price that it effectively governs the movement of the goods. Similarly,

some goods “are” capital, while others take the form of profit or wages or

savings, and so on. Yet it is clear that while these categories are in no sense

imaginary, neither are they “real” attributes of the things to which they are

applied. They are, says Marx, social relations become things, or “reified.”

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. 26

Although Lukács initially grounds his account of reification in these

considerations on the market, amplified by reference to Simmel’s sociology

of money, in the course of his discussion he adds an additional explanation

in terms of the capitalist transformation of the work process. 27 Capitalism everywhere divorces workers from their means of production and organizes

them in factories. The reification of labor becomes the model of reification

throughout the society. “The destiny of the worker becomes the general

destiny of the entire society.”28 Labor thus has new social and ideological functions in capitalist society, different in principle from those it possessed

in earlier times. It is no longer a special concern of a particular estate as in

slave and feudal society. Labor is not seen as a degraded, subhuman

activity, but as the source of all social utility, as an eminently human

occupation. Not only do ordinary people labor, the capitalist class itself

justifies its right to possess the means of production by claiming that they

are the fruit of its labor. This is not merely ideology; the key traits of

reification workers experience also affect the upper classes. “The problems

of consciousness arising from wage labor are repeated in the ruling class in

a refined and spiritualized, but for that very reason, more intensified

form.”29

Under capitalism, the means of production face the worker as an

independent system that imposes its own rhythm and order. The more

advanced the mechanization, the more the expenditure of labor power

becomes the simple control of the autonomous productive activity of the

machines themselves. Here work becomes “the contemplative stance

adopted toward a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws, enacted

independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human

intervention, i.e., a perfectly closed system.”30

The capitalist too confronts reified reality. His much vaunted

entrepreneurial “creativity,” says Lukács, consists entirely in calculating as

exactly as possible what will happen despite his own intervention. The

capitalist then attempts to so position himself with respect to this

predetermined outcome that he can profit from the objective evolution. Like

the worker confronted with the autonomous machine, the capitalist

confronts the autonomous market.

The machines’ reified appearance of autonomy and rationality obscures

the fact that they are products of human labor, that their essence is not to be

found merely in the structure of their operations, but also in the human

activity that first created them and gave them that structure. What is true of

the machine is also true of the market and, at a higher level of generality, of

society as a whole. In short, obscured behind the rational structure of the

productive system is the collective activity underlying social reality.

The activity of the individual subject in capitalist society cannot

transform that reality in Lukács’s ontological sense of the term, but rather

conforms to it, and especially to its laws, in order to realize its potential

benefits. The intervention of the subject is exhausted in taking up an

orientation with respect to an ultimately unchangeable reality. Where this

orienting activity is multiplied many times over, massive regularities of

behavior appear that may indeed have a significant effect on the real world.

But the subjects do not assume this effect as their common creation, but

rather relate to it as the presupposition of an individual calculus of losses

and gains. Thus, “the attitude of the subject … becomes purely

contemplative in the philosophical sense.”31

Bureaucratization is a further consequence of the capitalist organization

of labor.32 The division of labor disrupts the unity of every social process, not just those associated with industrial production. Specializations emerge

that each address one or another fragment of social life. These

specializations gain a certain autonomy and as a result their objects too

become increasingly independent of each other. This “centrifugal

movement” results in a disjunction between the bureaucracies and the

reality of the society. 33

Lukács follows in Weber’s footsteps in treating these aspects of

reification as results of rationalization. The theory of rationalization has to

do with the extension of formalistic, quantifying reason to social life. Weber

links this process to Protestantism, which presided over the emergence of

capitalism, and the scientific quantification of nature that contributes to the

secularization of modern culture. The capitalist orientation toward

economic gain and the scientific spirit are joined in the idea of society as an

object of technical control. This idea is fully realized in the bureaucratic

system.34 Lukács incorporates Weber’s theory wholesale into his own:

wherever quality appears as quantity, or human interaction appears as the interaction between social things, or the course of social events appears to

be determined by quasi-natural laws, he finds evidence of reification.

Lukács’s originality with respect to Weber lies in his emphasis on the

tension between the formal structure of rationalization and the actual human

“content” of social life on which it is imposed. Lukács thus borrows ideas

from Weber, but treats them in the general framework of Marx’s critique of

fetishism, as a formal-rational “appearance” in dialectical conflict with an

underlying reality. One might almost say that Weber’s theory is recast by

Lukács in the mold of Marx’s, so that its general tendency is reversed: no

longer an account of the inexorable progress of rationalization’s “iron

cage,” Lukács’s refurbished Weberianism sets this trend off against a

dialectical counter-trend that promises eventual release from rationalization.

In Lukács, social reality escapes from the net of reified rationality: the

increasing rationality of the parts is tied, he claims, to the invincible

“irrationality of the total process,” to economic crisis and violent resistance

from below.35 With this approach, he has the basis of a specifically Marxist theory of the culture and crisis of capitalism, developed later in many

dimensions by other Marxists, especially by the Frankfurt School.

REIFICATION AS AN ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPT

Lukács’s essay on reification opens with the statement that “the structure of

commodity-relations [can] be made to yield a model of all the forms of

objectivity of bourgeois society and all the corresponding forms of

subjectivity.” 36 Lukács describes reification with a peculiarly ambiguous term: Gegenstandlichkeitsform, or “form of objectivity.” This term

unfortunately disappears from the English translation and is everywhere

rendered by circumlocutions that obscure its philosophical significance. 37

That significance can only be grasped against the background of the

neo-Kantian debates in which Lukács himself was involved a few years

before he became a Marxist. The trace of these debates is very much

present in History and Class Consciousness. This is the link between

Lukács’s sociological concept of reification and the philosophical

problematic of rationality.

The neo-Kantian reference complicates the interpretation of the passage

quoted at the beginning of this section. What does Lukács mean here by a

“model?” Is he referring to an analogy or a cause? If commodity-relations

are analogically homologous to forms of objectivity and subjectivity, then

we must seek elsewhere for the cause of both. The theory of reification

might then lead to an idealistic explanation of some sort, for example, a

flaw in the spirit of modernity. But if commodity-relations cause objects

and subjects to take a reified form, then Lukács would appear to have

lapsed into crude economic determinism.

The interpretative problem stems from the unspecified concept of form

of objectivity. This neo-Kantian term implies a transcendental account of

meaning that Lukács never explicitly develops. Dilthey and his neo-Kantian

contemporaries all emphasized the distinctiveness of cultural and historical

phenomena. The irreducible individuality of events defies attempts to order

them under laws such as those of the natural sciences. The concept of

“Verstehen,” or interpretive understanding, familiar from Weberian

sociology, is a social alternative to natural scientific explanation. The object

of interpretation is meaning, or “validity” as the neo-Kantians called it.

Meaning is not bare physical existence, but that aspect of things through

which they are intelligible, make sense, are known, belong to a culture. In

this account of the conditions of cultural intelligibility meaning is derived

from the intentions of the subject. Husserl would soon radicalize this

approach in a new form of transcendental idealism.

The neo-Kantian philosopher Emil Lask was also a significant influence

on both Heidegger and Lukács because he began the move from a

transcendental to an ontological theory of meaning.38 Lask’s concept of meaning as form is developed in his transcendental theory of logic. A brief

account of this theory is essential to understanding Lukács. Lask argues that

meanings are ordered under categories in regional ontologies that define

domains of objects. This is easily illustrated by academic fields although

not confined to them. The “object” of physics is matter in motion. The

meanings with which it is concerned are specified by these terms. By

contrast, the “object” of English literature is a canon of poetry and prose

“classics.” Certain works have “meaning” as objects of study in this

context. These general categories are Gegenstandlichkeitsformen. Every

sphere of existence has its own such category. We could, for example,

extend the concept to the tools in a workshop as did Heidegger in a related

analysis of meaning.

Lask’s notion of meaning is difficult to grasp because we normally confound meanings with the things that have meaning. There are a few

experiences in which the distinction can be more easily apprehended.

Consider for example the case of photographic representation. When we are

asked what we see in a picture of a horse we are likely to reply, “A horse.”

But of course we are looking at a piece of photographic paper, not a horse.

The meaning of the picture is distinct from its existence. But this is an

inadequate example since “photographic paper” is also a meaning. If we

showed the picture to a cat, it would not see a “horse” or “photographic

paper” but something to bat around or sit on. It is not clear that even this

constitutes an unmediated relation to existence yet such a relation is an

essential postulate of Lask’s theory.

Lask’s ontology has two divisions: existence and meaning. But nothing

can be said about existence outside the context of one or another meaning

that forms it and Lask does not explain the origin of the forms. They are

neither material things nor metaphysical entities. They are pure

transcendental conditions of realms of objects. But unlike Dilthey, Husserl,

and earlier neo-Kantian philosophers, Lask does not attribute such

conditions to the subject. Lask died in World War I at the age of thirty-nine,

his work still incomplete. No doubt he would have addressed this lacuna

had he lived. In any case, it inspired Heidegger and Lukács, who both

accepted Lask’s breakthrough to a new kind of transcendental account of

meaning that borders on ontology. Meaning is the “being” of the

phenomena through which we gain access to them as what they “are.”

Heidegger and Lukács went on to attempt to ground being in practice rather

than subjectivity.

Lask’s terminology suggests this solution. He argues that the meanings

or validities “hold” of particular entities through the form of those entities,

and “form is nothing other than a particular objective Bewandtnis

[involvement] pertaining to … the material.”39 Involvements are articulated in judgments (“This is a hammer”), but Lask believes they are already

present in the world before any judgments are made. Normally, we live with

the meaningful entities we experience without thematizing meaning as

such. (How often do we say “This is a hammer” when we see one, and yet

we always know perfectly well what we are looking at?) The operative

intelligibility of experience is the basis of the possibility of judgment and

knowledge. Philosophical understanding of meaning requires a departure

from the lived relation to it in the adoption of a transcendental perspective that focuses on the form in which things are given in experience.

In very different ways, Heidegger and Lukács showed how objects and

subjects acquire meaning in a social world, conceived as a totality of

involvements, through the practices of that world. They both seek an

ontologically founding practical relation to meaning in a domain of real

existents. Something (ontic) in the world must found the world as the

totality of involvements (the ontological). The chief difference between

them is that for Heidegger the all important something is the everyday

practical activity of individual Dasein whereas for Lukács it is the

collective practices associated with the economic system.40

In Heidegger’s case this practical ground was explained in a

“fundamental ontology” of phenomenological inspiration. In his workshop

analysis, the notion of Bewandtnis is nicely developed in terms of “the

arrangement, relevance, or involvement of the material itself,” i.e., the

connections between the various tools and the work that grants them

meaning qua tools.41 A hammer out of all connection with nails, boards, and the idea of carpentry could not properly be called a hammer. It would

lack the contextual preconditions of its meaning. It would just be an oddly

shaped, unintelligible thing.

Lukács responded to the lacuna with an account of the role of economic

practices in establishing the conditions of meaning throughout bourgeois

society. He offers a quasi-functional account, arguing that the meaning of

each social entity is determined by “its relation to the whole.” And he adds

that “the intelligibility of objects develops in proportion as we grasp their

function in the totality to which they belong.”

Every substantial change that is of concern to knowledge manifests itself as a change in the form of objectivity of every object of cognition. Marx has formulated this idea in countless places. I shall cite only one of the best-known passages: “A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain circumstances. A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain circumstances does it become capital. Torn from these circumstances it is no more capital than gold is money or sugar the price of sugar.” 42

Lukács concludes that the totality is a higher reality than the isolated facts.

In it the “processual essence” of society “achieves validity,” i.e., takes on its

true meaning. 43

Lukács’s methodology is clearly delineated in these passages. Particular

social objects are to be understood in terms of their economic involvements.

They cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to the whole because that relation is constituting for their meaning. At the highest level

of generality, the whole is characterized by the reification associated with

the commodity form. A hierarchy of categories is implied in this approach,

leading from particular to universal features of the totality.

As a form of objectivity, reification is in the first instance practical

rather than theoretical. In constantly buying and selling commodities,

including intellectual products, or working in mechanized industries, or

engaging with bureaucratic administrations, the members of a capitalist

society live the reified relationships that construct that society. The reified

form of objectivity of the society gives coherence and meaning to social

objects arising from and feeding back into the practical relationship to those

objects, and it shapes the corresponding subjectivity of the atomized actors.

This is what Lukács means when he says that commodity-relations are the

“model” of the forms of objectivity and subjectivity in bourgeois society.

The performativity of practice grants a single overriding form to the whole

society, the form of thinghood.

FORM AND CONTENT

But the story of Lask’s influence on Lukács is not finished with these

observations. Lask’s theory of meaning was intended to solve a

fundamental problem in Kant’s philosophy, the problem of the thing-in-

itself. Lask’s interpretation of the transcendental differed from Kant’s in

that Lask did not propose a principle of mental synthesis by which forms

would join with the content of sense experience. He dismissed the whole

Kantian philosophical psychology and argued that the forms are

independent of the mind. As subjects we are in immediate contact with a

meaningful world. That world has its meaning in itself, not in our minds.

But meaning as we have seen is not identical with existence. The forms

form a content that emerges with them from the original unity of the

existing thing. This content is not a separate “thing,” for every thing is

grasped through its meaning. Rather, the content is simply that which is so

grasped. The easiest way to understand this is in terms of point of view. I

apprehend a cup under the meaning “cup” but the content so apprehended

could also inhabit other forms, for example, Wedgwood, or physical

determinants such as weight and volume. What is more, the meaning “cup”

could itself appear as a content for a higher level meaning such as

“dinnerware,” or an entirely different meaning such as “three letter words.”

In each case the content is formed by the meaning but not exhausted by it.

Lask calls this contingent relation of form and content the “irrationality” of

content. This is his reinterpretation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.44

In Kant the thing-in-itself hovers inconclusively on the border between

the ontic and the ontological. It is unclear if it really is a “thing” or a

hypothetical precondition of sensation. The ambiguity reflects a gap

between form and content Kant formulated as the limitation of finite human

knowledge to objects of experience. Experience is rational, i.e., meaningful,

insofar as it is imprinted by the forms of understanding, but its matter

ultimately escapes the forms. In Lask this tension is reduced to a shadow of

itself. The irrationality of content is simply the trace left by the contingency

of the relation of meaning to existence, the fact that no particular entity is

destined to any one specific meaning.

Lask argued that Hegel attempted to encompass the irrational existence

of things in his system of categories. But this “emanationist” logic fails

because existence cannot be deduced from concepts. The irrational is a

necessary correlate of the rational. The principle of the irrationality of

contents is also central to Lukács’s theory of reification. And he joins Lask

in rejecting emanationism. But he does not accept Lask’s explanation of

irrationality. Instead, he introduces an entirely new approach to the problem

of the contents of the forms that shatters the structure of Lask’s theory.

Lukács historicizes the form/content dialectic and treats the structure of

meaning at the highest level of generality as a cultural form, as the principle

of intelligibility of an epoch. As we have seen, reification characterizes the

capitalist epoch. But in redefining form as a cultural principle in this sense,

Lukács undermines Lask’s characterization of content as a purely logical

correlate. Content no longer stands in an ideal relation to its form but now

acquires a real relationship to it. Objects enter culture through social

processes that can be studied and understood. What is more, tensions

between objects and their forms can be observed and analyzed. The concept

of the irrational contents of the forms now takes on a factical power Lask

would never have allowed.

These modifications of Lask’s schema have two consequences that

Lukács develops in the second and third parts of the “Reification” essay. In

the first place, Lukács recasts the history of modern philosophy in terms of

the tensions between form and content. In the second place, he extends the

argument to the living practical basis of the reified form of objectivity of capitalist society.

As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, Lukács applies his

cultural approach to the analysis of the history of modern philosophy. He

argues that modern philosophy identifies rationality with the reified form of

objectivity of bourgeois society and then attempts to overcome the

irrationality of the contents of the rational forms through deducing them

from concepts. Why was bourgeois philosophy interested in overcoming the

gap between form and content theoretically? According to Lukács, what is

at stake is the vindication of the claim of rationality to embrace domains of

being assigned to irrational forces such as royalty and religion in earlier

societies. The ambition of the bourgeoisie to escape from the worldly power

of the representatives of these forces requires it to extend its conception of

rationality beyond all limits, at least in theory.

Lukács relates this ambition to Vico’s famous “verum-factum” principle

according to which we can only fully understand what we have ourselves

created. But this principle comes to grief because of the formal character of

rationality. The history of classical German philosophy shows the failure of

the project of modern philosophy; the content of its formal rationality

escapes all attempts to encompass it fully within the forms. The

contingency of the world remains and is conceptualized in the thing-in-

itself.

Formal rational disciplines such as mathematics and natural science

cannot grasp their contents, that is to say the purely contingent or “factical”

objects to which they refer. The limitation is self-evident in the relation of

formal laws to the particulars to which they apply. An abstract formula such

as “distance = velocity × time” cannot account for the existence of its

objects, only their relations once they have been conceptualized on the

terms of the law. Similarly, a representation such as a map is useless until

the person holding it has been oriented to the particular environment in

which she is situated.

The gap between form and content is not merely a philosophical

challenge. It also has a practical side. In practical life this gap cannot be

closed by simply squeezing contents into the available forms. This

limitation has never bothered physicists in the application of their formulae

or geographers employing their maps. For them the relation of form and

content is purely theoretical, but it ends up posing problems in daily life

when forms actually form their content. Then it matters practically whether the forms are adequate to fully embrace their content. We are familiar with

the unfortunate consequences of attempts to force the issue: bureaucracies

that make no allowance for individual circumstances, laws the strict

enforcement of which is unjust, work-to-rule strikes, teaching to tests,

technical interfaces and manuals that require users to think like engineers,

and so on.

In practice common sense treats forms as resources in the context of

activities oriented toward a type of content rather than as absolutes. 45 We know very well that the map is not the territory but it is useful nevertheless

once we find our bearings. But Lukács holds that modern capitalist society

is a gigantic instance of economic and social forms imposed blindly on

content.

The commodity form prevails regardless of whether it successfully

mediates the distribution of use values or leaves masses in starvation. The

formal economic laws fail to embrace the concrete content of economic life.

Say’s law can serve as an illustration. It holds that the total supply of goods

and services in a free market economy will equal the total demand at any

given time. This law is contradicted by economic crises in which a glut of

goods outpaces demand, bankrupting producers and impoverishing workers.

Administration and law ride roughshod over the human “cases” they

treat under unbending rules. Technology imposes its rhythms regardless of

the workers’ misery and the waste of their potential. The rationality of the

system is fundamentally irrational from the standpoint of content. And that

content is human! “The quantification of objects, their subordination to

abstract mental categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker

immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim …” 46

The Lukácsian crisis theory is concerned with the generalization and

breakdown of formal rationality as the governing principle of capitalist

social life. The crisis appears “in the conflict between existence in its

immediacy together with its expression in thought in the categories of

reflection, and living social reality.”47 Here we once again encounter the contradiction Marx identified between “true actuality” and “existing

actuality.”

Lukács argues that bourgeois political economy is the immediate

theoretical expression of the social structure (that is, of “existence in its

immediacy”). Its formal-rational character contradicts “living social

reality.” Lukács explains the emergence of political economy in terms of the relative success of the bourgeoisie in imposing its reified categories on

actual social life. “Nor is it an accident that economics became an

independent discipline under capitalism. Thanks to its commodity and trade

arrangements capitalist society has given the whole of economic life an

identity notable for its autonomy, its cohesion and its reliance on immanent

laws. This was something quite unknown in earlier forms of society.”48

But even this relative success of capitalist economic theory and practice

meets its limit in inevitable resistance from below. Thus for Lukács formal

rationality enters into crisis at two levels: epistemologically, in the ultimate

failure of capitalist economic and social categories adequately to grasp the

content of social life; and socio-politically, in the failure of the objects of these categories, the real institutions and relations they reflect, adequately

to shape the lives of human beings in the society.

Nevertheless, Lukács insists that political economy is not simply wrong.

It formulates more or less exact calculations and predictions in every sphere

by abandoning qualitative explanations for quantitative ones. Partial

abstract systems of laws can be constructed, each one embracing a specific

segment of the economy in a form that allows it to be successfully

manipulated for individual advantage. But the strength of this method is

also its limit. Universal and atemporal laws such as those of political

economy cannot grasp the practices that constitute social reality in its

lawful regularity.

While partial social sub-systems such as enterprises and bureaucratic

administrations are highly rationalized, the interactions between them are

“irrational” in the sense that they are not organized and planned as they

would be under socialism. The sum of the rationalized domains does not

add up to the totality. Thus political economy cannot comprehend those

shifts and transformations at the level of the totality in which the

foundations of the social system are laid and changed. “The whole structure

of capitalist production rests on the interaction between a necessity subject

to strict laws in all isolated phenomena and the relative irrationality of the

total process.”49

This “irrationality of the total process” is reflected in the economic

crises of capitalism, in which Lukács sees an unconscious rebellion of use

value against the exchange value that is its phenomenal form. The reified

form here fails to mediate successfully the production and distribution of

the real contents—use values—needed to maintain the system and the individuals who live under it.

This same “irrationality” appears consciously in the class struggle.

Reification constrains human life processes without always fulfilling human

needs or performing the sense-making function that constitutes stable

objects. Life overflows rationalization in every direction and comes back to

haunt the rationalized domains in the course of class struggles. These

struggles reveal the human basis of the society that has been shaped but also

repressed by the reified forms. This provokes reflexive processes unknown

in nature. Human lives considered as content of the reified forms have an

independent power not just to violate expectations but also to understand

themselves as doing so. This resistant self-understanding constitutes the

core of what Lukács, following Marx, calls class consciousness. The

process of abstraction in which wage labor consists

cuts [the worker] off from his labour-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialized process that has been rationalized and mechanized, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanized and rationalized tool … The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the

worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.50

As can be seen from this passage, Lukács is more interested in the

alienation of the working class than in its motivations. The brief reference

here to the workers’ “physical, mental and moral existence,” so damaged by

capitalism, refers us to the self-evident focus of generations of labor

struggle and socialist political work. He takes for granted critical awareness

of poverty, deskilled labor, and the indignities and injustices of life for the

lower classes. These conditions appear as “content” of the reified forms not

for any intrinsic reason but simply because in generating them, capitalism

“forms” them inadequately, producing poverty in terms of wages, deskilling

as technical progress, and indignities and injustices as well-deserved

consequences of personal failings. Obviously, this aspect of Lukács’s

argument appears inadequate today. We would like to know how what

might be called the “facticity” of the working class enters consciousness, by

what process it becomes the basis for resistance and revolt. Lukács’s rather

limited account is explained in his theory of class consciousness, discussed

in the Appendix of this book.

In any case, the situation of the proletariat gives rise to what Lukács calls the “self-consciousness of the commodity,” a bizarre hybrid of the

human and the non-human. Philosophy and revolutionary theory are joined

most intimately in this concept. But Lukács notes that the mere fact of self-

consciousness is not revolutionary. A slave does not modify his status or

society in recognizing the fact of his own slavery. What is different about

the worker? The fact that the worker’s self-knowledge “brings about an

objective structural change in the object of knowledge … Beneath the cloak

of the thing lay a relation between men … beneath the quantifying crust

there was a qualitative, living core. Now that this core is revealed it

becomes possible to recognize the fetish character of every commodity.” 51

Capitalism is uniquely exposed to practical critique by its own

members. No previous economic system was so vulnerable. This is because

the existence of capitalism depends on the members of the society

conceiving themselves as individual agents, interacting through objective

systems such as markets. They must adopt a “contemplative” attitude and

seek personal advantage in these systems. In sum, the reified structuration

of the society depends on reified practice. Capitalism has a reified form of

objectivity that is perceived and acted upon in a reified disposition, closing

the circle of social construction. When it breaks down, the system is

threatened.

The reified form of objectivity of the society is shattered from within.

The workers, as private owners of a commodity called labor power, are

transformed by self-consciousness into a potentially revolutionary force.

The individualistic form of life imposed by capitalism, based on technical

manipulation in conformity with the laws of the system, gives way to

collective and conscious choice. “The act of consciousness overthrows the

form of objectivity of its objects.”52 Lukács thus distinguishes what I call a

“transforming practice” from a “contemplative” or reified practice.

In class struggle economic, political, and social acts react profoundly on

each other, unlike the rigorous separation between them in bourgeois theory

and practice; this constitutes an immediate refutation of the reified point of

view. “Force … appears as the concrete embodiment of the irrationality

limiting capitalist rationality, of the intermittence of its laws.” 53 To the bourgeoisie the result appears as imminent barbarism and social

disintegration. Lukács argues, on the contrary, that it is the

uncomprehended content of that abstract labor power the capitalist pays at

the factory gate shattering its own reified form of objectivity and manifesting itself directly in historical action. Here the totality, as the actual

moving force of history, the reality behind the reified appearances, emerges

independently of the social laws and confronts them with forces they cannot

control.

REIFICATION AND REASON

The full significance of Lukács’s theory of reification can only be

understood by examining its roots in Hegel. In his later Defence of History

and Class Consciousness, Lukács writes that Hegel’s “true philosophy of

society” is his logic of essence because “unbeknownst to Hegel of course—

here the real laws of movement, the real social being of bourgeois society

mirror themselves conceptually.” Thus, “If Marx, in overturning Hegel’s

philosophy, has at the same time rescued its real core, then he precisely

rescued most from the logic of essence—demythologized, of course.” 54

Lukács’s claim is justified by Marx’s frequent use of the Hegelian

category of “appearance,” elaborated in the Doctrine of Essence.

Unfortunately this is one of the most difficult aspects of Hegel’s thought.

Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s concept of essence in his economic theory

also defies simple exposition. 55 For the purpose of this account of Lukács’s theory of reification it is not necessary to summarize these discussions since

he paints the Hegel-Marx relation with a broad brush. I will focus primarily

on an “exoteric” presentation of Hegel’s position in a short essay entitled

“Who Thinks Abstractly?”56 This essay helps to understand the most important aspect of Hegel’s theory relevant to Marx and especially to

Lukács’s interpretation of Marx.

Hegel argues in this essay for reversing the usual understanding of

abstract and concrete. It is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly, but the

ordinary person who summarizes a complex of relationships in a single

trait. Abstraction is thus a synecdoche in which a part stands for the

concrete whole. Hegel gives the example of the servant who is treated as

merely a servant by a vulgar master, in contrast with the “French noble”

who understands that his servant has ideas and purposes just like himself

and who relates to him accordingly as a person.

In this simplified version Hegel’s idea is obviously relevant to Marxist

economics. Take the example of commodity exchange. It is made possible

by abstracting a specific economic relation from the complex human and material relations that surround it. We enter a store and approach the clerk

exclusively as a clerk, ignoring all other aspects of the clerk’s being. We

buy the product without any knowledge of its producers or how it came to

be in the store. The objects and persons we encounter in the economic

exchanges of capitalist society can be considered abstractions from the

wider whole of the social world in which they are embedded. What is

abstracted is the dimension of the social world through which it is

commodified and controlled.

In the Science of Logic, a much more elaborate discussion of the

relation of abstract to concrete is formulated in terms of the concept of

appearance. In Hegel’s sense, appearance is not in the mind, but is the

“immediate” reality of essence, the form in which it reveals itself

proximally. Appearances are abstract in Hegel’s sense, not in terms of

conceptual generality, but as unilateral aspects of a more complex whole.

That whole consists not only in appearances but also in the internal

relations between them that make up a whole. Hegel explores many

different relations between appearances, the most important of which for

Lukács’s argument is the “law of appearance.”

Hegel’s concept of law is drawn from natural science. He does not reject

science but he does reject its claim to arrive at the true essence of the

appearances. Law achieves “only immediate because abstract unity”

between appearances.57 By this he means that the different appearances related by law retain their independence of each other even within their

relation. For example, the formula introduced earlier equating distance with

velocity times time does not “unify” space and time even as it relates them.

The appearances and the law are thus abstract, partial “moments.” Hegel

requires something more, a concrete “totality” that effectively unifies

appearances in a mutually dependent whole.

In the “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx

translates these Hegelian notions into his own language. He distinguishes

the concrete of thought from the reality it represents in order to avoid any

idealistic confusion between the two. Marx offers this “materialist”

qualification simply to clarify his own appropriation of the Hegelian

concepts. He writes, in a famous passage, “The concrete is concrete,

because it is a combination of many objects with different destinations, i.e.,

a unity of diverse elements. In our thought, it therefore appears as a process

of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting point, although it is the real starting point and, therefore, also the starting point of observation and

conception.” 58 In other words, it may seem that the concepts we use to understand the real constitute it, but in fact the real is always already

“synthetic” in itself, a “unity of diverse elements” presupposed by our

thought.

The true intellectual “synthesis” that brings together all the various

categories of the capitalist economy—its appearances—in a concrete

totality in the Hegelian sense overcomes their unilateral character by

explaining their historical origins, social functions, and relations. The law-

governed appearances of the capitalist economy, analyzed in bourgeois

economics, can be unified more fundamentally through explanations that

reveal the mutual constitution of such things as capital, labor, money,

machinery, and ultimately the relations and forces of production. So Marx

writes that “the categories are therefore but forms of expression,

manifestations of existence of this subject, this definite society, i.e., the

concrete reality from which they have been abstracted.” 59

So far Marx seems to add little to Hegel’s concept of the abstract and

the concrete, but another aspect of his position marks a definite departure.

Marx’s theory of fetishism appears to rely on the conventional distinction

between the abstract and the concrete to describe the process in which

money “appears” as the general equivalent for all economic goods. Here is

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s description of this “real abstraction” underlying the

capitalist economy:

The form of the commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit. To begin with, exchange-value is itself abstract value in contrast to the use-value of commodities. The exchange-value is subject only to quantitative differentiation, and this quantification is again abstract compared with the quantity which measures use-values. Marx points out with particular emphasis that even labour, when determining the magnitude and substance of value, becomes “abstract human labour,”

human labour purely as such. The form in which commodity-value takes on its concrete appearance as money—be it as coinage or bank-notes—is an abstract thing which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms. 60

While Sohn-Rethel focuses on exchange, his remarks hint at a second

and more fundamental “real abstraction”: labor. The purely quantitative

“identity” of all commodities is ultimately rooted in the equivalence of the

labor they contain. Under capitalism the comparability of all the forms of

labor, their “abstract” identity (in the conventional sense of the term), is not

merely theoretical but is realized practically in the transformation of the labor process. Labor is systematically deskilled. It loses its “concrete”

character as a complex performance. The qualitative specificity of the

various types of craft labor is eliminated and all are reduced to the mere

quantitative expenditure of energy. The result is the emergence of “work” as

an economic category with a simple quantitative measure in terms of time.

The real abstraction of labor is the basis of the real abstraction of price.

Political economy, Marx argues, is the system of categories describing

such real abstractions. The facts of social life are raised to consciousness in

its categories and comprehended through its formal-rational laws. These

latter are not illusion or ideology, nor are they reality in the full sense of the

term; rather they are the “law of appearance” in Hegel’s sense. But as such

they do not comprehend the “essential relations” that describe the society as

a concrete totality. For that the abstract categories of the economy would

have to be explained in terms of the underlying social relations. Thus

Marx’s use of the conventional distinction is embedded in a Hegelian

dialectic of appearance and reality. Marx’s method condenses the two

concepts of the abstract and the concrete, the conventional and the

dialectical, into one. He shows that abstractness in the sense of conceptual

generality, at least in the case of the commodity and labor, is the necessary

form of appearance of the concrete social reality of capitalism.

But this conjunction is precisely the substance of Lukács’s theory of

reification! Lukács’s starting point is the appearance of autonomy of the economy and, modeled on it, other apparently autonomous social

institutions. Society appears as a collection of independent social “things”

ruled by the laws of the differentiated domains. These “things” are

comprehended by social science as facts. The facts appear as facts insofar

as they are abstracted from the whole, separated from each other, reduced to

quantitative determinants, and stripped of the many mysteries that

characterized similar entities in precapitalist society. This apparent

“factuality” of the social world is the form in which it is revealed in that aspect that has a systematic order, a lawful form.

So much is clear from the earlier discussion of reification, but it is easy

to pass over Lukács’s deeper insight. The real abstraction of the capitalist

economic categories does not merely describe the facts, superficially

understood. This would be to underestimate the significance of reification

by overlooking the problematic status of factuality itself. What does it mean

that social entities have the form of facts? It is unlikely that members of precapitalist societies would find a “factual” description of the foundations

of their social world reasonable or salient. Of course they would be quite

capable of such reifying procedures as counting or measuring particular

objects where appropriate, but that is a far cry from understanding their

origins, the cosmos, the founding myths of their society, the relations

between the ages and sexes in terms of what we call facts. Even we find

factual description inadequate to such things as our close human

relationships. No, factuality is not a self-evident category. It must be

constructed in the social world to which it is effectively relevant. This is the

deepest function of the concept of reification. It is meant to explain how the

world can appear as a collection of facts. The process of reification is the

ontological foundation of the factuality of the social world. It is constitutive

of the facts’ very factuality as their form of objectivity.

This insight explains why Lukács had to give up romantic critique. His

theory of reification will not allow him to simply counterpose social and

economic law to the claims of personality. Nor can he demand a return from

the lawful order of the facts to immediate experience. The problem of

modernity goes deeper, to the ontological foundations. It cannot be

addressed at the level of the soul and its passions, which are merely reflexes

of the Gradgrindian factuality of the world, the Sunday worship of what is

excluded the rest of the week. Rather, transcendence must be sought at the

level of the structuring forces that shape the form of objectivity of the social

world. Lukács identifies those forces with the proletariat, which actually

constructs the social world through its labor. This identification suggests

another similarity between Marxism and Hegel.

Hegel reconstructed Kant’s contrast between understanding and reason,

Verstand and Vernünft, to signify the difference between scientific research and speculative philosophical insight. In Hegel the two are related as stages

in the acquisition of knowledge. The Phenomenology of Spirit contains an

important account of their relation that has a remarkable similarity to

Lukács’s argument. Hegel explores the attempt of science to understand the

appearance of nature as the product of essential “forces” governed by “law.”

This attempt fails to explain the law of these forces and ultimately leads to

the startling discovery that the whole contrast of appearance and essence

depends ultimately on self-consciousness. Hegel writes, “It is manifest that

behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world,

there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which

can be seen.” 61

In contemporary Hegel scholarship, this argument is interpreted to

demonstrate the sociality of knowledge. As Terry Pinkard puts it, with

Hegel, “we move away from a representationalist picture of knowledge to

the idea of socially situated reason-giving activities; we thus move away

from the picture of ourselves as ‘subjects’ representing the world to an

understanding of ourselves as participants in various historically

determinate social practices.” 62 But what if this social “we” of knowledge is

divided by class and enters into conflict not only over particular material

stakes but over those “historically determinate social practices?” In that

case both appearances and the self-consciousness behind them take on

practical functions in a struggle over meaning.

There is another significant difference between this Marxist and the

original Hegelian approach: where in Hegel the contrast of understanding

and reason is an atemporal distinction in ontological levels, Lukács explains

it historically. Marxism shows “that history consists precisely in the

constant transformation of those forms which earlier modes of thinking,

undialectical and stuck fast in the immediacy of their present as they always

were, regarded as suprahistorical.”63 The theory of reification applies this approach to bourgeois culture. This culture takes as suprahistorical the form

of analytic understanding, corresponding to the actual categorial structure

of the economy that is its archetype and source. The identification of

rationality as such with this form explains its general predominance in

philosophy, the sciences, law and administration. Marx’s critique of

political economy thus becomes the basis for a more general critique of

formal rationality.

The sphere of appearance, which consists for Marx in the reified facts of

capitalism, is bounded historically by a possible transcendence in action.

The self-consciousness that overthrows capitalism is not “Geist,” but the

class consciousness of the proletariat. Reification is thus not subjective, but

neither is it an eternally unchanging reality. It is the failure to grasp

reification as social appearance that leads to its philosophical representation

as an eternal foundation of knowledge and experience, rather than as a

historically specific cultural form.

With this discovery the boundaries between history and philosophy

break down. Philosophy now appears as implicated in history rather than

giving access to the eternal. Philosophy arises from the contradictions of the

apparently suprahistorical forms, while the material life of society is viewed

as mere factual content. In relating economy to rationality, Marxism

overcomes the immediacy of form, historicizing it in contact with its

content. This historicization can be extended to all the more abstract

theories that arise on the basis of the formal structure of the economy.

Philosophy is swept into the movement of history, and history itself

becomes the study of the forms of reason, no longer a mere collection of

contingent facts.

The next chapter applies this approach to the history of classical

German philosophy. The passage from Kant to Hegel is the key transition in

this history. Lukács argues that the Kantian analytic understanding

represents in philosophy, at the highest level of generality, the same reified

formalism found in bourgeois political economy. Just as Hegelian reason

transcends the understanding through a synthetic process of mediation, so

Marxism transcends political economy. For Lukács, however, Marx is not

simply applying Hegelian dialectics to a particular domain, nor are the

formalistic categories of political economy merely categories of a specific

social science. Bourgeois economics and the forms of existence of which it

is the expression are the archetypal domain from which formalistic

rationality arises as a cultural pattern. The general predominance of

formalistic rationality in philosophy, science, law, and the other areas of the

superstructures can now be explained on this basis.

In linking political economy, as form of appearance, to its basis in the

totality, Marx indicates the lines along which the concept of rationality

would have to be revised to lose its formalistic limitation. Lukács thus

rediscovers the Kant–Hegel problematic of rationality from these

indications in the economic works. He identifies formal rationality with

capitalism and dialectics with socialism as successive stages in the history

of reason, and not as atemporal paradigms, each potentially valid

throughout all of history. He regards this history of reason as the specific

contribution of Marxism to the resolution of the problems raised by Hegel’s

philosophy.

The great advance over Hegel made by the scientific standpoint of the proletariat as embodied in Marxism lay in its formulation of the categories of reflection [ Reflexionsbestimmungen] not as an

“eternal” stage in the comprehension of reality in general, but rather as the necessary forms of existence and of thought of bourgeois society. Marxism thus grasped these categories as reifications

of being and thought, and therewith discovered the dialectic in history itself.64

It is to Lukács’s metacritique of philosophy that I will now turn.

1 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans.

D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 299.

2 The other major work of this tendency is Karl Korsch, Marxismus and Philosophie (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), originally published in 1923, at the same time as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. Korsch’s book is available in a partial English translation under the title Marxism and Philosophy, trans. F. Halliday (New York: Monthly Review, 1970). See also Franz Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, trans. A. Booth (New York: St.

Martins Press, 1976). For a comparison of Husserl and Lukács, see Mihaily Vajda, “Lukács and Husserl,” in Agnes Heller, Lukács Reappraised (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also, Richard Westerman, “The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl’s Phenomenology in Lukács’s Identical Subject–Object,” New German Critique 111, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 97–130.

3 HCC, 131.

4 See David Kettler, “Marxism and Culture: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918/19,”

Telos, No. 10 (Winter 1971), 35–92; Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

5 Georg Simmel, “On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” in Georg Simmel, The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. K. P. Etzkorn (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1968).

6 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968).

7 Georg Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” trans. P. Breines and S. Weber, Telos, No. 5 (1970), 21.

8 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. E. Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906 reprint), 837. It is significant that this chapter is entitled “Historical Tendency of Accumulation” rather than

“Historical Law of Accumulation.” Marx knew what he was claiming despite his occasional use of misleading language.

9 For a discussion of the gap between Marx’s critique of political economy and the revolutionary theory of socialism, see Stanley Moore, “Utopian Themes in Marx and Mao: A Critique for Modern Revisionists,” Monthly Review 21, No. 2 (1969). Moore’s argument is developed further in “Marx and Lenin as Historical Materialists,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1975).

10 “Missing from Marx’s oeuvre is any concept of culture, of formation and re-formation ( Bildung) … Because Marx did not relate actuality to representation and subjectivity, his account of structural change in capitalism is abstractly related to possible change in consciousness. This resulted in gross oversimplification regarding the likelihood and the inhibition of change.” Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 218.

11 An exhaustive survey of the various meanings of the concept of culture is provided by A. L.

Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1963). They conclude that “most social scientists” would define culture as follows: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols,

constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action” (357).

12 For examples of such an approach, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.

R. Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

13 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, 14.

14 HCC, 203.

15 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1968), 7.

16 HCC, 83 (translation modified).

17 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 79.

18 HCC, 152.

19 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 212.

20 Lukács argues that reductionism gives an unrealistic picture of precapitalist societies. In these societies the economy does not play a central role in the establishment of social meanings. It also complicates the understanding of socialist revolution, a point I take up in the Appendix to this book.

21 Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Marxism of the Early Lukács: An Evaluation,” New Left Review, No. 70 (1971), 44.

22 Lucio Colletti, Il Marxismo e Hegel (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1969), 342.

23 In A Defence of History and Class Consciousness (133), Lukács refutes a similar critique by citing several passages from Capital in which Marx attributes the specific form of the mechanization of industry to the requirements of capitalism.

24 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 289.

25 Marx, Capital, 105.

26 Ibid., 83.

27 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. B. Bottomore and D. Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

28 HCC, 91.

29 Ibid., 100.

30 Ibid., 89.

31 HCC, 130. For a further explanation of the concept of contemplation in Lukács, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York:

Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

32 For this aspect of the theory Lukács refers to Max Weber. See his The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. Henderson and T. Parsons (New York and London: Free Press, 1964).

33 HCC, 103.

34 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).

35 HCC, 102.

36 Ibid., 83 (translation modified).

37 I have modified the English translation throughout to restore the term as “form of objectivity.”

38 Sources for understanding the relation of Lukács and Lask include Hartmut Rosshof, Emil Lask als Lehrer von Georg Lukács: Zur Form ihres Gegenstandsbegriffs (Bonn, Germany: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975); Tom Rockmore, “Fichte, Lask, and Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism,”

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1992), 557–77; Istvan Feher, “Lask, Lukács, Heidegger: The Problem of the Irrationality of the Categories,” in C. Macann, ed., Martin Heidegger:

Critical Assessments (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 373–405. The original connection was made by Lucien Goldmann in the appendix to Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich/New York: Europa Verlag, 1945).

39 Quoted in Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 101. Lask’s comments are found in Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre (Tübingen, Germany: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1911), 68–9.

40 If by “ontic” we mean particular facts and by “ontological” their “being,” i.e. meaning, or more generally their form of objectivity, then Foucault’s description of the “empirico-transcendental double” applies. The being that discovers in its history the forms of its knowledge and thereby makes of its empirical condition a transcendental precondition, ends up founding its being on “le vécu” its lived experience. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 329–33.

41 Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, 102.

42 HCC, 13. The quoted passage is from “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 207.

43 HCC, 184 (translation modified). See the German text of Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 370.

44 See HCC, 116 for the significance of this insight for Lukács.

45 Generalized as a method, this is also one of the foundations of contemporary science and technology studies. It is one of several “dereifying” procedures for understanding scientific-technical thought. See, for example, Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

46 HCC, 165.

47 HCC, 185 (translation modified).

48 Ibid., 231.

49 HCC, 102.

50 Ibid., 165–6.

51 HCC, 169.

52 Ibid., 178.

53 HCC, 179 (translation modified).

54 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 137.

55 See, for example, Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

56 G. W. F. Hegel, Texts and Commentary. Hegel’s Preface to His System in a New Translation with Commentary on Facing Pages, and “Who Thinks Abstractly? ” , trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).

57 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 2, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 135.

58 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 293.

59 Ibid., 302.

60 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), 19. Astonishingly, Sohn-Rethel makes no mention of the relation of this interpretation of Marx to Lukács’s concept of reification.

61 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 103.

62 Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 112–13. Marcuse interprets this passage explicitly in terms of the critique of reification.

63 Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, ed. and trans. R. Livingstone and M. McColgan (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 215.

64 HCC, 177.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Realization of Philosophy

THE HERITAGE OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Étienne Gilson’s book, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, traced the

effects of certain fundamental problems in the philosophical tradition as

they worked themselves out in a succession of thinkers from antiquity to

modern times.1 I too am interested in a “philosophical experience,” but my story is not so ambitious. I focus on the struggle of four modern thinkers to

carry out the specific philosophical program of the philosophy of praxis.

This program involves a social critique of idealism while preserving the

structural features of the idealist subject–object relation. Like Gilson’s

philosophers, mine run into problems working out the implications of their

program. There are two central problems, the status of science and

technology in a radical social version of philosophical idealism, and the

historical contingency of a social resolution of philosophical antinomies.

The philosophers of praxis offer various solutions to these problems and are

forced by changing historical circumstances to reformulate the program.

Within this larger framework, History and Class Consciousness itself

contains a remarkable study of the particular philosophical experience of

German idealism. This is the best description of the second part of the

“Reification” essay, which surveys the history of classical German

philosophy. Lukács develops a metacritique of the various positions taken

in the course of the progress from Kant to Hegel and relates them to the

cultural contradiction of capitalism.

For Lukács traditional philosophy is in essence theory of culture that

does not know itself as such. Philosophy reflects on cultural structures—

forms of objectivity—that it misinterprets as eternal principles disconnected

from the accidents of history and social life. Yet in spite of this systematic

misconstruction of culture, philosophy is important insofar as it thematizes

cultural presuppositions and exposes them to discussion and criticism.

Philosophy has a unique contribution to make to a social theory that wants to understand its own place in a process of cultural transformation of which

it is a part. This explains why the heart of Lukács’s most important work is

devoted to an extended analysis of the history of modern philosophy.

In the foreword to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács says “it is

of practical importance to return in this respect to the traditions of Marx-

interpretation founded by Engels (who regarded ‘the German workers’

movement’ as the ‘heir to classical German philosophy’).”2 However, this statement is misleading; it would incline the reader to expect a treatment of

classical German philosophy similar to what it receives from Engels and his

orthodox Marxist followers. In fact there are few important similarities, for

Lukács returns not to Engels’s interpretation of the heritage but to deeper

questions concerning Marx’s relation to his philosophical forebears.

Engels was the first to describe the broad sweep of the history of ideas

from the French Enlightenment through Hegel and Feuerbach as an

intellectual prolegomena to Marxism. However, his version of Marxism

bore little resemblance to the heritage it assumed. He presented it as a

natural philosophy, synthesizing the sciences into a materialist worldview.

The final traces of classical German philosophy that remain were to be

found in a revised dialectic that presumably continued the Hegelian theory

of reality as process. But neither this materialist worldview nor this version

of the dialectic can carry the weight of the inheritance Engels claims for

them.

For Engels the essence of the heritage is science, because only science

is universal, not bound by the class conditions on which it nevertheless depends for its birth. Although the bourgeoisie created modern natural

science, it can no longer accept the truths its own sciences discover. Now

new ideas undermine the foundations of its ideology, the static worldview

and the “post festum” religious conversion of a class menaced by the

repercussions of its own rationalistic traditions. The proletariat alone needs

the truth, and it alone, therefore, can rise to the universal point of view

required for the pursuit of truth in the period of the decadence of bourgeois

society.

Like Engels, Lukács too sees more at stake in the socialist movement

than a change in property relations; the struggle will also decide the fate of

reason itself. But both the rationalism and the irrationalism of bourgeois

society now appear to Lukács to be infinitely more problematical than they

appeared to earlier Marxists. Gone is the enlightenment optimism and faith in science of traditional Marxism, gone its untroubled confidence in

progress.3 For the first time there arises within Marxism an interrogation of enlightenment itself, and not just of its limits or abuse in bourgeois society.

Lukács’s critique of reified rationality foreshadows the later work of

Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Like them,

Lukács sees in modern irrationalism not a mere regression behind the

achieved level of rationality, but its dialectical correlate. He describes

irrationalism as a reaction against reification under the horizon of

reification itself.4 The heritage of classical German philosophy now appears in a very different light than it did to Engels, not as the salvation of the scientific debris of the Enlightenment from an increasingly obscurantist

bourgeoisie, but as a great attempt to validate and found rationality, an

attempt that had inevitably to fail in its bourgeois form but which the

proletariat may yet bring off.

For Lukács, bourgeois thought reaches its peak in classical German

philosophy, but at the same time its contradictions manifest themselves

there with more clarity and rigor than elsewhere. Lukács sums up these

contradictions as the “antinomies of bourgeois thought,” the split between

subject and object, freedom and necessity, value and fact, form and content.

Philosophy attempts to unite the poles of these antinomies in what Lukács

calls a “totality.” For Lukács as for Hegel, “To transcend such ossified

antitheses is the sole concern of reason.” 5 The resolution of the antinomies is the fundamental exigency of this philosophy, through which it founds the

concept of reason.

Lukács considers Kant’s philosophy to be the purest expression of these

antinomies. The greatness of Hegel lies principally in having developed the

dialectical methodology by which Kantianism could be subjected to a

rigorous critique. But the antinomies emerge intact from bourgeois

philosophy in spite of its most strenuous intellectual efforts. Marxism then

appears as the completion of the Hegelian critique of Kant, a completion

that requires a radical change in orientation, but which in essence prolongs

Hegelian dialectics. Lukács’s own contribution consists in the appropriation

of Hegel’s dialectical critique of Kant from within Marxism.

From this standpoint classical German philosophy takes on a wholly

new importance for Marxism. It poses for the first time, if in a still

relatively unconscious form, the fundamental problems that Marxism is

called upon to solve. Lukács refuses either to attempt a speculative resolution of the antinomies of philosophy, or to close his eyes to them in

the naïve self-certainty of science. The only possible reconciliation is the

practical transcendence of the opposition between the antinomic terms at

the level at which they arise. The procedure of Lukács’s metacritique of

classical German philosophy consists in identifying this level as social and

discovering the traces of their social origin in the most abstract concepts of

this philosophy.

Bourgeois philosophy, Lukács says, “is able to think the deepest and

most fundamental problems of the development of bourgeois society

through to the end—on the plane of philosophy … And—in thought—it is

able to take all the paradoxes of its position to the point where the

methodological necessity of going beyond this historical stage in mankind’s

development can at least be seen as a problem.”6 Henceforth the founding of a universal concept of reason is impossible without this historical

progress. This historical progress has therefore become, as such, a demand

of reason. The failure of classical German philosophy demonstrates that

reason requires, on purely methodological grounds, a step beyond bourgeois

society, beyond philosophical speculation into revolutionary practice.

PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE

Lukács’s approach to the study of philosophy is disconcerting for it asks us

not only to believe that philosophical abstractions are rooted in social life,

but, stranger still, to believe that the problems arising from these

abstractions can be resolved in social life. This approach implies a question

not ordinarily posed about philosophy, namely why it is philosophy.

This question is easily answered by the usual Marxist theory of ideology

according to which philosophy serves to justify capitalism. This version of

Marxism dismisses speculation and demands a direct practical assault on

the problems philosophy merely mystifies. Philistines, whether Marxist or

bourgeois, have always imagined they can simply replace philosophy with

the serious business of action in the world. Lukács’s point is that the kind of

problems that become the basis of philosophical reflection cannot be solved

by unreflective practice because they arise at the points where such practice

fails, or still more critically, at those points at which its very success raises

further questions it knows not how to address. For Lukács, therefore, it is

not any and every practice that might resolve philosophical problems, but

only a very special kind of practice the nature of which he explains in

History and Class Consciousness.

One might ask then what it is about the type of practice prevalent in

bourgeois society that generates the problems with which philosophy is

concerned. This question could also be reformulated more precisely as

follows: what is the inner limit on practice in bourgeois society preventing

it from resolving practically the types of problems that then appear in

philosophy as antinomies? What is there about this practice that is the

source of problems it cannot even begin to resolve, which do not appear as

practical problems at all, but rather as philosophical problems? Already,

these questions begin to indicate why instead of recommending an

immediate turn to practice, Lukács offers a metacritique of philosophy in

the course of which everyday practice too is subjected to critical analysis.

Reified thought arises from the practical confrontation of the individual

and society. It is not confined to the bourgeoisie, but affects all classes in

bourgeois society, including the proletariat. Not surprisingly, however, it is

particularly suited to the life conditions of the bourgeoisie, which are

essentially individualistic. Solidarity between members of the class has a

very limited (primarily defensive) function. Their usual social and

economic interactions are competitive and conflictual. Therefore, what the

class creates in common, as a class, it generally accomplishes

unconsciously, through mechanisms which work behind the backs of the

individuals. Each capitalist is aware of the activity of the class as a whole,

“as something external which is subject to objective laws which it can only

experience passively.”7

These sociological considerations form the essential background to

Lukács’s metacritique of philosophy. The antinomy of value and fact can

serve here as an exemplary philosophical problem. Social reality is

governed by a pitiless determinism, indifferent to the needs and values of

the individual. Value stands opposed to fact, freedom to necessity. This

correlation of inner freedom and outward necessity, of subjective value and

objective reality is the immediate theoretical consequence of a practice that

refuses all solidarity, all conscious collective Aufhebung of the unintended

consequences of individual actions. The isolated individual is condemned to

accept the existing social reality, free only to take up one or another attitude

toward it.

The struggle of the individual with reified reality can play itself out in two complementary forms.

The reified consciousness must also remain hopelessly trapped in the two extremes of crude empiricism and abstract utopianism. In the one case, consciousness becomes a completely passive observer moving in obedience to laws which it can never control. In the other it regards itself as a power which is able of its own—subjective—volition to master the essentially meaningless motion of objects. 8

These two antinomic opposites reappear everywhere in reified theory, in

an ethics of duty versus a psychology of adaptation, in the lawful course of

history versus the role of great men and ideas, in environmental causes of

behavior versus personal responsibility, and so on and so forth.

For the individuals, the dilemma is painful and inescapable. They may

accept the given reality as is, and attempt to achieve a personally

advantageous position within it. Freedom is now restricted to movement

within the framework of the necessary laws of existing reality. No attempt

can be made to transform or alter this world and what must necessarily

come to pass within it. Resistance only leads to defeat. However, the

psychic costs of “realism” have also been calculated from Stendhal to the

modern critiques of conformism: society as a market, indeed, a racket in

selfhood.

The other horn of the dilemma is a utopian struggle to realize higher

values in the world. The individuals may refuse the existing reality and

stand on principle regardless of consequences. The subject is split in half,

its substance divided between empirical needs and desires that can best be

satisfied by conformity, and the authentic selfhood that derives from moral

law or some other transcendent source. This position, which Kant

developed into a coherent ethical philosophy, is no more successful than

realism in resolving the antinomy of value and fact. An unyielding reality,

mechanistic in the unfolding of its autonomous course, proves unresponsive

to utopian aspirations that it threatens in the inner citadel of the self.

“Freedom,” Lukács writes, “is neither able to overcome the material

necessity of the system of knowledge and the soullessness of the fatalistic

laws of nature, nor is it able to give them any meaning.” 9

With this argument Lukács arrives at a theory of alienation similar to

that of the early Marx. He shows how, from the structure of everyday

practice in capitalist society, “The activity of man, his own labor becomes

something objective and independent of him which is submitted to the

alienated autonomy of the natural social laws.” 10 This is the core of the Marxian critique of capitalism, the demonstration that even at his most

active, man remains “object and not subject of events.” 11

THE REIFIED THEORY-PRACTICE RELATION

So far the discussion of Lukács’s metacritique of philosophy has shown that

the antinomies of practical reason can be derived from the structure of

practical activity in capitalist society. This is not surprising since practical

reason is inevitably close to actual practice in its concepts and problems.

However, the parallel demonstration that the antinomies of pure reason,

specifically the antinomy of subject and object, can also be derived from

this same structure is more challenging.

According to Lukács, the reified paradigm of knowledge is rooted in the

practice of technical control that is the central project of the bourgeoisie

from its origins as a class. More precisely, it is the universality of this

project that distinguishes bourgeois thought. Precapitalist societies carved a

narrow sphere of activity out of nature, frequently ascribing their power

over this small, humanized enclave to divine intervention. Technical

rationality was thus always bounded by another type of thinking reflecting

the feebleness of the human species and its limited understanding of the

world. Never before the emergence of capitalism did human beings see their

destiny as the total and integral domination of nature.

In capitalist society the ancient impotence and restraint gives way to an

ambition to overcome every residue of uncontrolled nature, and this new

project completely transforms the concept of reason. Corresponding to the

gradual fulfillment of this ambition, there is an increasing extension of

reification that, projected to the limit, would make it possible to control

every aspect of existence through a quantitative representation of its

essence. The subject that is dialectically correlated with this concept of

reality is an agent of individual technical practice. From this standpoint, the

recognition of the inviolability of the impersonal, autonomous laws of

reality is the very condition of the comprehension and domination of reality

by the individual. Indeed, for reified thought, “only a reality caught in such

concepts can really be mastered by us.” 12 For this thought the reified is the rational and therefore also the controllable.

The theoretical validation of bourgeois society requires the

demonstration that the entire universe is rational and controllable in

principle. The demonstration at first consists in the construction of formally

rational models of the universe that reveal it to be available for domination.

Capitalism was thus accompanied by attempts to validate its project on the

basis of rationalistic metaphysics and mathematical science.

For reified thought the domination of nature, and that of the human

species in general, is only possible insofar as nature conforms to reason.

What exists as reality in the outer world must also exist as reason in the

subject. “The salient characteristic of the whole epoch is the equation,

which appears naïve and dogmatic, of formal, mathematical, rational

knowledge both with knowledge in general and also with ‘our’

knowledge.” 13 What is produced by “us” in thought as rational knowledge must prove itself as universal and objective. The principles of an

autonomous and free reason must be shown to correspond with the nature

of things. This is the original significance of the concept of the identity of

subject and object.

Lukács points out that this rationalistic philosophy involves a curious

reversal of perspectives. Practically, the subject stands in a contemplative

relation to the world. It is on this condition that subjectivity can control its

world under the horizon of reification. But theoretically, the subject claims

to reproduce the world actively in thought. It is on this condition that

reification appears as the essence of reality. Practical contemplation and

theoretical activity compass this basic antinomy of reified thought.

Lukács summarizes the problem as follows:

The contradiction that appears here between subjectivity and objectivity in modern rationalist formal systems … the conflict between their nature as systems “produced” by “us” and their fatalistic necessity as distant from and alien to man, is nothing but the logical and methodological formulation of the state of modern society. For, on the one hand, men are constantly smashing, replacing and leaving behind them “natural” irrational and factical bonds, while, on the other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality they have created and “produced by themselves,” a kind of second nature the operation of which opposes itself to them with exactly the same lawful necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form). “To them, their own social action,” says Marx, “takes the form of the action of objects,

which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”14

In capitalist society, then, the unmastered, alienated form of social life

takes shape as the dictate, no longer of irrational religious powers nor even

of human masters, but of “scientific” laws. Reified reason becomes an

expression of this alienation. No sooner achieved in pure theory, the identity of subject and object limits practice, confronting the individuals with a

second nature, the laws of which they are impotent to change.

Reification’s technical paradigm of subjectivity and objectivity

presupposes an individual subject. The more or less unconscious collective

practices in which capitalism really consists appear to reified thought to lie

on the side of the object. What the individuals cannot consciously and

individually accomplish is thus not “accomplished” at all, but rather

suffered by them as a fate. Of course, the individuals do relate to the

products of these unconscious activities, but not as to human products.

Rather, all they perceive of the collective practice in which they are

engaged is its results, and behind these its form, imprinted on their objects.

This form appears as an impersonal and autonomous law that preexists and

predetermines social behavior.

Lukács argues that it is only insofar as the object has been actively

submitted to this form that it enters the circuit of capitalist technical

domination. Thus priority would go to history in explaining social laws and

not vice versa. Reified thought fails to see that social practice is the ground

of reification. Instead, it believes that the result of reification, the

construction of objects as technically manipulable, reveals their preexisting

essence. For reified thought this essence is precisely that dimension of the

object through which power over it can be achieved. The reified object

surrenders its own vital mechanism to human control, revealing its truth as

a potentiality for manipulation that has always slumbered within it.

Lukács’s point, once again, is that this way of representing the subject–

object relation reverses the picture by occluding the unconscious social

practice that “prepares” the object for instrumental manipulation, both

materially and through the work of social signification in which it takes on

a lawful form.

Reified practice is the basis of the antinomy of subject and object and

the other antinomies of philosophy. These antinomies arise because the

reified subject of practice treats the product of its combined action with

other similar subjects as a law-governed, objective reality. It is the

unconsciousness of their collective social practice that condemns these

subjects to actively reproduce a world foreign to themselves and to their

aims. Philosophy conceptualizes the reified form of objectivity of the

objects of this practice. It cannot recognize its own limits because it treats

the most general consequences of a historical situation in which decision-

making processes are separate as a metaphysical reality. In grasping these

consequences as a law, it hypostatizes ontologically what is in reality due to

a specific type of practice.

If philosophy arises from reification and reification itself arises from the

unconsciousness of social practice, then could one not imagine a unique

kind of “action” that would consist in bringing this social practice to

consciousness and thereby changing the conditions of philosophical

reflection? Might it not be possible to dereify the world, dissolving the

social basis of the philosophical antinomies, simply by becoming aware of

the unintended consequences of one’s actions, bringing these consequences

within the domain of social choice?

This would be another basis for control of objects: not individual

manipulation in conformity with laws but conscious collective decision

about the laws themselves. Lukács suggests, following Marx, that the

individuals might come together, under certain objective conditions, to

make such decisions, thereby interrupting the feedback mechanism that

chains them to the perpetual reproduction of their alienated condition. This

is Lukács’s explanation of the Marxian idea of socialism as “human control

of history.”

Here theory, as consciousness of reality, would become a practical act

with real effects and would no longer be comprehensible on reified terms as

value-free contemplation of reality from a mythic epistemological

“beyond.” As Horkheimer puts a similar point, “in genuinely critical

thought explanation signifies not only a logical process but a concrete

historical one as well. In the course of it both the social structure as a whole

and the relation of the theoretician to society are altered, that is both the

subject and the role of thought are changed.”15 This conclusion describes Lukács’s agenda in the historical analysis of classical German philosophy.

FROM KANT TO HEGEL

At the center of History and Class Consciousness is an extraordinary

discussion of the development from Kant to Hegel seen as steps in the

intellectual progression leading to Marxism. That progression is explained

as the gradual working out of Kant’s original intuition in ever more

concrete, ever more adequate forms, culminating in the final recognition of

the social practice behind the reified appearance. In the course of this discussion, Lukács shows that Marxism is the veritable Aufhebung of

classical German philosophy, arising from its inner dynamic on the basis of

its results.

Lukács’s argument in the second part of the essay on reification is

presented as a quasi-history, behind which it is possible to identify a static

model that in fact organizes his presentation. This model is the Kantian

“system” with its threefold division into critiques of pure reason, practical

reason, and judgment. The history of classical German philosophy, as

Lukács presents it, is in fact the successive thematization of each of these

three aspects of Kantian doctrine qua solution to the antinomies. This

analysis yields three “demands of reason” that must be fulfilled to

overcome reified thought. They are: 1) the principle of practice, 2)

dialectical method, 3) history as reality. In this section and the next I will

attempt to explain the response of classical German philosophy to these

demands. As one attempt after another to fulfill them fails, the emphasis

shifts, culminating finally in Marxism. All along the way, Lukács draws out

the implicit conclusions established by this “philosophical experience,”

conclusions that later form the basis of a new concept of reason.

Lukács’s conception of reified society as a “second nature,” the laws of

which are created by human beings but which appear as natural laws,

suggests an important philosophical parallel. This is, after all,

approximately the form of the Kantian theory of knowledge, the notion that

experience is governed by laws imposed on it by the subject which, in turn,

necessarily determine the knowledge of the subject. What is the

significance of this parallel?

Lukács seeks the answer to this question in a metacritique of Kant’s

famous “Copernican Revolution.” Note that metacritique is not ideology

critique. Rather, Kant’s theory is a rational way of understanding reified

social reality, under its horizon, that is to say, as it appears to reified thought. More precisely, this means that when Kant founds the identity of

“our” knowledge and objectivity in the concept of transcendental synthesis,

he is not merely masking, but rather explaining the very same social reality

Lukács also explains. It was thus Kant, in a sense, who first discovered the

process of reification but only insofar as it can be understood speculatively

as the result of an imaginary individual practice.

Kant’s philosophy is an enormous theoretical advance over earlier

rationalism that simply assumed the rationality of the universe without

suspecting the constitutive function of the subject.16 Where earlier philosophy had, for the most part, taken for granted the objectivity of

objects and the immediacy of experience, Kant shows that objectivity is the

product of a synthesis performed by the subject on the raw materials of

experience through the imposition of forms of objectivity such as space,

time, and causality. The synthesis of experience consists in its submission to

these forms without which it would not take shape as a coherent world of

objects at all. This was Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” which placed the

subject at the center of the epistemological universe where formerly the

object held sway. But this revolution had a surprising consequence.

Recognizing the role of mental activity in perception gave rise to the notion

of the thing-in-itself; Kant’s successors focused on overcoming this

paradoxically unknowable reality.

Lukács’s interpretation of this problematic is quite unusual. Instead of

regarding the thing-in-itself as beyond experience, he explains it in terms of

the form–content distinction he found in the work of Emil Lask. Recall that

the neo-Kantians distinguished between the realm of nature to which

general laws applied and history, which was said to be made up of unique

events. These phenomena were considered “irrational” insofar as they

resisted explanation through law. They constituted a kind of intra-

experiential thing-in-itself. Lask’s contribution was situated in this context.

He argued that the thing-in-itself should not be conceived as unknowable,

nor as an exclusively historical phenomenon, but rather in terms of the

relation of meaning or form to content in experience. Meanings apply to a

meaningless ‘‘material,’’ for example, the stuff of sensation which now

stands in for the thing-in-itself in Lukács’s appropriation of Lask. This

shifts the emphasis away from the epistemological problem of how the

mind produces representations in various fields. Instead, Lask focuses on

the ontological question of meaning as a necessary feature of experience.

Lukács applies these concepts in his interpretation of Kant and his

successors. He describes their challenge as explaining meaning in such a

way as to demonstrate that it actually “penetrates” its content and shapes it

to the core. Only thus would it be possible to prove that reality is not

fundamentally meaningless. Subject–object identity thus does not erase the

factual independence of reality, but rather comprehends reality through and

through. “Identity” signifies that reason can “produce” its objects in this

special sense in theory and practice.17

But, Lukács argues, classical German philosophy is torn by the conflict

of two principles. On the one hand, it demands that rationality overcome the

contingency, the merely factical givenness of objects. This is the condition

for founding a universal rationalism, unbounded by supernatural mysteries

or unknowable realities. On the other hand, it assumes a reified, formalistic

concept of reason that secretes contingency and facticity as the residue of

the process of abstraction from concrete content in which rationality

consists. Such a formalistic concept of reason can never unite fully with its

objects.

Thus in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, reified thought encounters the

insurmountable contradiction between its ambition to produce its objects in

thought by deducing them from their forms, and the impossibility of

embracing the content of these forms with a formalistic concept of reason.

Earlier dogmatic metaphysics had not even recognized the problem. Lukács

argues, “it is evident that this principle of systematization [of rationalism] is

not reconcilable with the recognition of any ‘reality,’ and ‘content’ which in

principle cannot be deduced from the principle of form and which therefore

has simply to be accepted as a facticity.”18

Kant’s thought is truly “critical” with respect to dogmatic rationalism to

the extent that it recognizes the insuperable antinomy of form and content

for a formalistic concept of reason. Finite understanding requires a material

substratum of irreducibly contingent facts. With this the very notion of

building a philosophical system on the model of mathematics collapses.

Kant argues “that pure reason is unable to make the last leap toward the

synthesis and the constitution of an object, and so its principles cannot be

deduced ‘directly from concepts, but only indirectly by relating these

concepts to something wholly contingent, namely possible experience.’”19

Because this “possible experience” cannot be produced by the subject,

irrationality, in the form of the thing-in-itself, invades the terrain on which

the traditional rationalist systems were constructed. 20

But, Kant is as uncritical and dogmatic as his predecessors in assuming

that rationality is essentially formalistic. As we will see, Lukács regards the

principle of identity as necessary for any consistent rationalism, including

Marxism, but he argues that the reified paradigm of formal knowledge is

tied specifically to capitalist society.

It is precisely because Kant both accepts reification and criticizes artificial solutions to the problems it raises that he is driven beyond the

limits of earlier philosophy. Once the unity of reified thought and reality has

been undermined, maintaining a concept of reason capable of “producing”

its objects is only possible beyond the horizon of pure theory. The

methodological validation of the power of reason must take place in another

region of human existence.

Thus Kant was led to pose the fundamental demand of reason that

preoccupied classical German philosophy thereater, and led eventually to

Hegel’s dialectic: the exigency of a “subject of thought which could be

thought of as producing existence without any hiatus irrationalis or

transcendental thing-in-itself.”21 Kant attempts to discover a level of reality at which the duality of subject and object is transcended, and starting out

from which their empirical duality can be deduced. This exigency, in turn,

can only be satisfied by abandoning the contemplative point of view, and

discovering a practical subject that, in generating its own world of objects,

transcends the rigid dichotomy of form and content. This new orientation

toward practice is motivated by the desire to find a subject, the object of

which is integrally and fully its own product. Lukács explains:

The very moment when this situation, i.e. when the indissoluble links that bind the contemplative attitude of the subject to the purely formal character of the object of knowledge becomes conscious, it is inevitable either that the attempt to find a solution to the problem of irrationality (the question of content, of the given, etc.) should be abandoned or that it should be sought in practice. 22

Responding to this dilemma, Kant turned from epistemology to ethics,

from the thinking to the acting subject, to find the identical subject-object.

Ethical action seems to transcend the empirical duality of subject and

object. No merely given facticity, resistant to subjectivity and independent

of it appears to trouble the production of ethical substance.

However, the ethical subject still confronts the reified reality described

in the Critique of Pure Reason. Its practice encounters a world in which

“laws still operate with inexorable necessity.”23 As we have seen in an earlier discussion of the value–fact antinomy, the subject divides into an

empirical self, given over to the laws of this world, and a transcendental

self, free to obey the ethical law. The ethical act assumes a phenomenal

form determined by the laws of the world just like any other thing. It is

perfectly integrated into the course of outer determinism, and thus there is a

sense in which no value enters experience through it. Rather, in passing from an intention of the will into the positive form of objective behavior,

the higher values seem to be irretrievably lost. Only the inner form of the

act in the mind of the actor distinguishes it from a non-ethical act; only the

disposition of the will of the actor and not the act itself is ethical in essence.

Lukács sums up this dilemma: “For precisely in the pure, classical

expression it received in the philosophy of Kant it remains true that the

‘ought’ presupposes a being to which the category of ‘ought’ remains

inapplicable in principle.” 24

Ethical practice does not successfully fulfill its function in the system.

All ethics can show “is the point where the real interpenetration of form and

content should begin, where it would begin if its formal rationality could allow it to do more than predict formal possibilities in terms of formal

calculations.” 25 The actual identity of subject and object in the ethical act remains an unknowable thing-in-itself transcending experience. The ethical

solution to the cognitive form–content problem has merely reproduced its

terms.

Kant fails to discover what Lukács calls “the principle of practice,” the

essence of which “consists in annulling that indifference of form toward

content that we found in the problem of the thing-in-itself.”26 The principle of practice requires the transcendence of the theoretical orientation toward

reality in a practice that is “tailored to the concrete material substratum of

action, in order to impinge upon it to some effect.” 27 Nevertheless, Kant’s move beyond knowledge toward practice opens the way to solutions his

successors elaborated.

Kant’s aesthetics provides the starting point for these attempts. It

includes the concept of the “creation of a concrete totality that springs from

a conception of form oriented toward the concrete content of its material

substratum.” 28 Kant develops this idea in terms of a hypothetical “intuitive understanding” that would transcend the gap between concept and sense

intuition by actually creating the objects of its knowledge. He contrasts this

intuitive understanding with human reason as follows:

In fact our understanding has the property of proceeding in its cognition … from the analytical-universal (concepts) to the particular (given empirical intuition). Thus, as regards the manifold of the latter, it determines nothing, but must await this determination by the judgment of the subsumption of the empirical intuition … under the concept. We can, however, think an understanding which being not like ours, discursive, but intuitive proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of whole

as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts. The contingency of the combination of the parts, in order that a definite form of the whole shall be possible, is not implied by such an

understanding in its representation of the whole.29

The intuitive understanding is not a theoretical subject, incapable of

penetrating the content of its objects. On the contrary, it synthesizes theory

and practice. Its “content is not given but ‘created.’ The intuitive

understanding is, in Kant’s words, spontaneous (i.e., active) and not

receptive (i.e., contemplative) both as regards knowledge and intuitive

perception.”30 Adumbrated in this concept is the speculative notion of the practical production of reality that so influences later thinkers. While Kant

himself did not so employ it, his successors, notably Schiller and Fichte,

believed it could resolve the antinomies of philosophy. 31

According to Lukács, German philosophy after Kant used the concept

of an intuitive understanding to radicalize Kant’s epistemological

revolution. The subject was to play the chief role not only in epistemology,

but in ontology as well by constituting not only the forms of knowledge but

also the content, the thing-in-itself, which for Kant lay irrevocably beyond

knowledge. The Kantian concept of synthesis is thus transformed into a

metaphysical principle of world constitution.

In Schiller the problem of the production of objective reality in thought

is approached through a new problem of a similar type that arises in relation

to the subject. Both the philosophical and the real social development

increasingly fragment the subject into opposed faculties that no longer form

a unity. The rigid specializations of bourgeois social life penetrate the

subject and interrupt communication between the different aspects of the

self. The comprehension of the totality can no longer proceed through the

deduction of reality from the subject, a task the limits of which have been

revealed by Kant. Instead, Schiller proposes the deduction of the unity of

the subject as a whole from the aesthetic subject, operating as an intuitive

understanding in the perception-creation of itself.

The aesthetic subject cannot reconcile the faculties of the mind without

being generalized beyond the sphere of artistic production. This Schiller

does in his theories of the “instinct of play” and aesthetic education. The

aesthetic principle then reconciles all the contraries of human nature, both

in theory and practice, and shows the way back to a unified and total

humanity. But this attempt to employ a non-formalistic intuitive

understanding modeled on aesthetic practice is unsuccessful. Outside the

sphere of actual artistic production, it ceases to be a true subject of practice.

Schiller generalizes it by taking up an aesthetic attitude toward the existing

world, an attitude that reproduces the world in thought as a finished work of

art, in this way apparently overcoming its reified facticity. But here the

“action” of the subject is reduced to yet another form of contemplation, not

calculating reason, but aesthetic appreciation.

Fichte, who also attempts to construct a new concept of reason on the

basis of the intuitive understanding, transforms it into a transcendental

faculty of the mind from which proceeds the empirical subject and the

entire existing world. Now philosophy turns not toward an attitude, as with

Schiller, but toward a renewal of speculative metaphysics. But this position

too falls short of practice. The activity that was to unite the faculties,

subject and object, form and content, turns out to be no more than another

form of contemplation, a “speculative mythology.”

In one important respect, however, Schiller and Fichte do represent an

advance over Kant. Although they no more than he discover the true

principle of practice, they finally challenge the dogmatic assumption that

formalistic knowledge is the only kind of knowledge. With Hegel this

challenge is brought to fruition in dialectics. His unique contribution is the

historical approach to overcoming the irrationality of the contents of

knowledge. He attempts to embrace the material substratum of thought

through dialectics, to create a logic of the concrete concept, a logic of the

totality.

HEGEL’S HISTORICAL DIALECTIC

Hegel realizes that the principle of practice cannot be fulfilled starting out

from the individual subject and a formalistic paradigm of knowledge. The

dialectical unification of subject and object requires a subject that is also an

object, a subject commensurate with the reality it knows. This is the

demand that the “subject be substance.” Lukács explains:

Only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, only if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved. 32

In sum, the antinomies must be resolved not by a mythologized

transcendental subject modeled on the individual, but by a principle

immanent to the world.

To establish that principle, Hegel takes the Kantian construction of the

subject–object relation and shatters its ontological basis in the traditional

concepts of subject and object, which Kant and his followers

presupposed. 33 If thought and things are no longer defined as ontologically independent domains of being, in what form can they be grasped? Hegel

proceeds to “release” the correlated attributes of subjectivity and objectivity

from their reification in the hypostasized individual subject and object.

Once released from the grip of their traditional ontological base, the

attributes of thought and things are thematized in new combinations in a

dialectical ontology.

In this ontology, functions of the subject, such as reflection, appearance,

synthesis, and abstract form are transferred to the real where they organize

its dialectical movement. As Marcuse puts it, “Formulated paradoxically,

human consciousness does not grasp objectivity, not even in its

transcendental form; rather, conceiving is the doing and essence of

objectivity itself. Conceptual activity and human concepts can be true and

reach the essence of objectivity only because conceptual activity constitutes

the essence of objectivity.” 34 The traditional subject and object no longer appear in antinomic opposition, but are now derived from a more basic

unity.35 Hegel was thus finally able to discover a way of uniting form and content, the rational categories of philosophy and their material substratum.

This is the significance of the dialectic.

In contrast with the formalistic notion of explanation through

classification under universal concepts, dialectical mediation unfolds the

implicit meaning of its immediate starting point. In a sense, then, the

immediate is always already mediated if only inarticulately. There are no

things-in-themselves, “sense data” or other preconceptual entities that are

given form for the first time by thought since the essential element in which

thought moves, meaning, is already implicit in its “material”

presupposition.

In Hegel the object of knowledge is neither an inert unreflected

substance nor is it created by a transcendental subject. As Robert Pippin

shows, Hegel’s project radicalizes

critical philosophy’s attempt at reason’s reliance on itself alone in accounting for experience or evaluating action, but it attempts to do so … by avoiding or denying any assumption that such self-determination should be understood as “imposing itself” on a foreign manifold or object … Whatever comes to count as a constraint or limit on thought’s self-determination is itself viewed as a kind of product or result, a higher or more comprehensive level, of thought’s self-determination.36

Given this approach, the system cannot be exposited more geometrico

because it depends on a process. That process is a mediation rather than a

demonstration. It is narrated rather than deduced. History is the ontological

region uniquely suited to such a process of mediation. In history the alterity

of the object is time-bound rather than metaphysical. Time belongs to the

unfolding process of meaning-making. It separates the implicit from the

explicit meaning and the gap between them is overcome in time. Thus

Hegel treats history as reality, as ontologically fundamental.

Hegel’s turn toward history marks a sharp break with rationalism.

Rationalism finds in history its least suitable object because history

involves newness and qualitative change. Formal reason can only grasp

history in terms of a system of foreseeable possibilities derived from

abstract, atemporal laws. But history as a process of concrete becoming

escapes it. By contrast, history is the ideal object of dialectics. It embodies a

type of objectivity that lends itself to explanation in terms of a non-

formalistic concept of reason.

But, Lukács argues, for history to provide a solution to the problems of

classical German philosophy, it would be necessary to discover the subject

of history not only speculatively but in fact, to find the real “we” whose

action is history. Hegel’s version of the historical subject is the Spirit of

Peoples. But peoples do not understand the significance of their own action.

They are not conscious of the truth of their deeds, which can only be

comprehended once completed, once history has passed on to a new stage

and the past is delivered over to philosophical reflection.

A mediation that transcends history stands between the activity of the

historical subject and the meaning of its acts. Hegel conceptualizes this

mediation as a second collective subject, the World Spirit, which uses the

Spirit of the Peoples to attain ends the latter does not understand. (Hence

the phrase “cunning of reason.”) Lukács concludes that Hegel’s subject of

history can never claim its acts as its own. It is not the master of its own

process, the “subject as substance” that, in achieving self-consciousness,

transcends the antinomies of reified thought in the theoretical and practical

transformation of reality.

History itself never achieves self-consciousness. Only the World Spirit

can accomplish this as it comes to self-awareness in the head of the

philosopher at the “end” of history. Reason thus fulfills itself in history only

by transcending history. As a result, “History is not able to form the living

body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that

culminates in the ‘absolute spirit,’ in art, religion and philosophy. But

history is much too much the natural, and indeed the uniquely possible life-

element of the dialectical method for such an enterprise to succeed.” 37

This, according to Lukács, explains why Hegel is obliged to confront

the antinomies of classical German philosophy outside of history in the

realm of absolute spirit. As soon as dialectics deploys itself in that timeless

realm the problems of form and content arise once again. The dialectical

categories continue to “develop” in the theory of absolute spirit and in pure

logic, but as eternal forms detached from the real becoming of the world.

This dialectical process is purely ideal, no longer corresponding to the real

time of historical action.

Hegel’s work is the culmination of classical German philosophy,

drawing the logical conclusions from its various experiments and

discoveries. In spite of his limitations, Hegel did discover two essential

conditions of the principle of practice, the dialectic, and the special affinity

of dialectics for history. However, until the actual subject of this practice is

also discovered reason cannot be founded rationally. This, Lukács believes,

awaited the Marxist theory of history. Marxism arises directly on the soil of

the Hegelian system, but informed by a far deeper insight into the empirical

stuff of history. In Marxism the speculative character of the Hegelian

approach is finally overcome in a correct understanding of history. “In this

sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation and extension of

the criticism that Hegel himself leveled at Kant and Fichte.” 38

THE PRINCIPLE OF PRACTICE

Lukács’s discussion of Hegel completes his venture into “philosophical

experience.” It demonstrates that classical German philosophy cannot fulfill

the requirements of its own principle of practice. The practical

contradictions arising objectively from capitalist reification, between

individual and social law, between this law itself and the content that it

determines, between, in short, the historical subject and object, cannot be

transcended from within reification. Instead, reified thought produces more and more complex speculative mediations uniting the antinomic opposites,

mediations that are pure mental constructions. Lukács calls this “conceptual

mythology,” i.e., “the failure to understand a fundamental condition of

human existence, one whose effects cannot be warded off.”39

Even where this philosophy strives hardest to base itself on a practical

principle, it remains in a contemplative attitude because it can offer no real

challenge to the fixed and finished character of the capitalist world. Its very

concepts of subject and object, of thought and being, express the rigid

oppositions of this world. Objectivity can only be united with subjectivity

in a speculative manner because no real practical unity can be conceived in

the untranscended framework of capitalist society. As Lukács writes, “But

how to prove this identity in thought and being of the ultimate substance?—

above all when it has been shown that they are completely heterogeneous in

the way in which they present themselves to the intuitive, contemplative

attitude?” 40

Nevertheless, Lukács concludes, within these limits classical German

philosophy does succeed in indicating the direction in which a solution to

its problems can be found. What Lukács calls “the grandiose conception

that thought can only grasp what it has itself created” leads to the demand

to “master the world as a whole by seeing it as self-created.”41 This ambition is frustrated by the contingency of content, as we have seen. The

response of classical German philosophy to this problem was the search for

a type of practice giving access to that content. This practice would not

presuppose reification as its horizon but would transcend this horizon and

change reality itself.

But this search fails because the philosophers attempt to go beyond

reification theoretically, through resolving its contradictions in thought. The

thing-in-itself inevitably confronts the subject of science and technology.

Ethics, aesthetics, and the wisdom of the philosopher at the end of history

all suffer from an implicit acceptance of reified reality, toward which they

adopt an attitude rather than effecting a change. At every stage one

dimension of reified thought is surmounted from the point of view of

another, theoretical contemplation by ethical practice, ethics by aesthetics,

formal rationality by a dialectic cut off, in the last analysis, from history.

And precisely because the higher level from which the lower is deduced is

itself reified, the original problems of the lower level simply reappear at the higher one in new forms.

The principle of practice not only requires a move beyond theory, it also

requires a type of practice that affects “reality” as a whole and not just

marginal aspects of it. Artistic practice, to give a counter-illustration, fails

because it has so little impact on the social world that is founding for it.

What is needed is a practice that is “total” in the sense that it is unbounded

by a dimension of reality it cannot alter and that, therefore, persists as a

reified residuum, a thing-in-itself.

History remains as the only domain in which to find a practice that can

affect not only superficial traits of reality, but the very essence of the

phenomena. Since, unlike nature, history is the product of human action, it

is conceivable that here self-change could be an objective change in reality

as the principle of practice requires. Furthermore, history is not a mere

sector among others, but is the primary and basic reality. All other subject–

object relations can be derived from that of the historical subject and object

and interpreted through their historical dimension. Lukács takes Hegel

himself as the demonstration in contrario of this claim, for the unhistorical

residue remaining in Hegel’s system becomes the point at which the reified

subject–object relation is reintroduced.

But the practical production of reality is no Heraclitean flux. The study

of history must explain the relation between the “évènementiel” and

institutions, practices, and culture. Lukács formulates this requirement as

the coincidence of historical action and the structuring of experience

through the imposition of a form of objectivity. The process of “synthesis”

of the real, its “logical genesis” at the level of the categories, must be

identical with the practical production of social reality by its subject. Then

form and content, philosophy and reality can be united and the antinomies

that emerge in the Kantian system finally overcome. As Lukács explains it:

To go beyond … immediacy can only mean the genesis, the “production” of the object. But this assumes that the forms of mediation in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects as they are given, can be shown to be the structural principles of construction and the real tendencies of the movement of the objects themselves, that therefore intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis. 42

With this rather puzzling methodological requirement, Lukács wants to

avoid two correlated errors: either explaining history in terms of non-

historical categories or abandoning historical explanation in the face of the

“irrationality” of individual events. Between these extremes lies a type of explanation that draws its categories from the events. As Rockmore

explains, Lukács’s approach is “an effort to reconcile a categorical

perspective that denies the sufficiency of immediate, intuitive experience

with an insistence that the categories emerge directly out of experience.” 43

In sum, the world is not merely there in its facticity nor is it literally

manufactured by the proletariat. The world—and this includes the

proletariat—is bursting out of its reified form of objectivity. The violent

actions in which that explosion consists realize the objective tendencies

Marx identified. In so doing those acts also construct a new social world

that alters the functional relation of the elements of society. The acts in

which the revolutionary proletariat shatters its reified form of objectivity

open up a new way of being in the world, a new realm of meaning. And

thus the structures of meaning inherited from capitalism are transformed

and made adequate to the life process they form. The “indifference of form

toward content” is overcome.

Lukács argues that the antinomies of value and fact, knowledge and

reality would finally be resolved for a self-conscious collective subject of

history. It would unite theory and practice: its self-understanding would

have immediate repercussions on its behavior, abolishing the gap between

“mind” and “matter,” and creating a new type of practice different from

reified technical practice. The “contemplative” limits of the traditional

philosophical subject would be transcended, as would the rigid opposition

of subject and object, value and fact. In knowing, this subject would be producing the object of its knowledge or, more precisely, changing its form

of objectivity by overcoming its own immediacy. This would be a Kantian

“intuitive understanding” based not on a mythic principle, a transcendental

ego or a hypothetical god, but on actual finite subjects in the world. This is

what it really means to claim that the proletariat is the legitimate heir of the

idealist program.

MEDIATION

Marx describes the historical tendencies leading to socialism emerging

within the capitalist economy as tensions, breakdowns, crises. These crises

reveal the limits of reification not only as a social form but as a form of

rationality. The transcendence of capitalism in socialist revolution is also

the transcendence of its philosophical limits, the resolution of the antinomies. For Lukács as for the early Marx revolution is method, the

solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought.

Lukács works out the implications of this position in the third part of the

Reification essay, but the argument is developed in scattered passages that

omit important themes and problems. He explains the historical mediation

of social forms by their contents, but he fails to apply the concept of

mediation to the antinomy of society and nature. Instead he offers bold

statements claiming that the proletariat is the identical subject-object. This

makes for several confusing ambiguities I will examine in more detail in the

remainder of this chapter and the next.

In brief it is unclear if the identical subject-object is a particular entity,

the proletariat as a class, or a process of mediation engaging the whole

society in which the proletariat plays an essential role. In the former case,

there is little to be said in defense of the theory today. In fact this is a commonplace interpretation; Lukács is supposed to have described the

proletariat as a kind of romantic subjectivity writ large. This interpretation,

which I will call “metaphysical,” makes of him a voluntarist in relation to

society and a subjective idealist in relation to nature. Here is an example of

the sort of lyrical passage that seems to confirm this image of Lukács:

Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth. As Hegel says: “Truth is not to treat objects as alien.” 44

The alternative interpretation of subject-object identity as a process of

mediation belongs to a theory of dialectical rationality. This theory has

suggestive implications for us even though our context is very different

from that of Lukács in the early 1920s. Mediation has not disappeared along

with the revolutionary proletarian movement but has simply changed

purpose and form. The important point is that mediation is a process, not a

thing. The continuation of the passage quoted above confirms this

interpretation. Lukács goes on:

Thus thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they “correspond” to each other or

“coincide” with each other (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process. What is “reflected” in the consciousness of the proletariat is the new positive reality arising out of the dialectical contradictions of capitalism. And this is by no means the invention of the proletariat, nor was it “created” out of the

void. It is rather the inevitable consequence of the process in its totality; one which changed from being an abstract possibility to a concrete reality only after it had become part of the consciousness of the proletariat and had been made practical by it. And this is no mere formal transformation. For a possibility to be realized, for a tendency to become actual, what is required is the objective overthrow of society, the transformation of the function of its moments and with them the structure and content of every individual object. 45

What is happening in these passages? Here Lukács condenses two

radically different discourses, the idealist discourse of classical German

philosophy and the Marxist critique of political economy. The performative

power of thought drawn from the one discourse is joined to the concept of

economic evolution of the other. Simply put, history moves forward

through the realization of its objective tendencies but the tendencies can

only be realized when they are seized and appropriated by consciousness.

Has Marxism ever said anything else? But in Lukács’s version of this thesis

something new is implied, for the concept of mediation implicates the fate

of reason in social theory.

Here I will review some of the passages in which Lukács explains the

concept of mediation underlying his theory of dialectical rationality. They

are of more than historical interest. If we abstract from certain Marxist

references more relevant in 1923 than today, they suggest a dialectic of

reification and resistance, structure and agency. Anticipating my

conclusion, I will argue that the notion of mediation supports a non-

essentialist interpretation of the role of the proletariat in the resolution of

the antinomies. In the remainder of this section I will focus on five passages

that reveal the implications of Lukács’s theory.

1. The proletariat cannot create a new society ex nihilo, but must start

out from the capitalist heritage. The transcendence of reification in

proletarian class consciousness implies no epistemological withdrawal to a

free cogito, to a pure undetermined ground. Its precondition is capitalist society itself, its culture, its forms of thought that can only be transcended

through a reflection in which they are criticized and comprehended

historically. Reification is the foundation of true knowledge of society

precisely insofar as it is relativized dialectically.

Proletarian thought does not require a tabula rasa, a new start to the task of comprehending reality and one without any preconceptions … [but] conceives of bourgeois society together with its intellectual and artistic productions as the point of departure for its own method … It implies that the

“falseness” and the “one-sidedness” of the bourgeois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society. 46

Why? Because “it is just in this [bourgeois] objectification,

rationalization and reification of all social forms that we see clearly for the

first time how society is constructed from the relations of men with each

other.” 47 Where precapitalist societies saw the work of God, capitalist societies recognize the human hand, if in an alienated form. This explains

why Marxist economic theory is a critique rather than a positive statement

free of reference to “error.”

2. The proletariat is the subject of history but it is not an idealist subject.

It is determined as much as determining, and cannot freely create a world

after its own designs.

It is true that the proletariat is the conscious subject of total social reality. But the conscious subject is not defined here as in Kant, where “subject” is defined as that which can never be an object. The

“subject” here is not a detached spectator of the process. The proletariat is more than just the active and passive part of this process: the rise and evolution of its knowledge and its actual rise and evolution in the course of history are just the two different sides of the same real process. 48

Lukács further clarifies this proposition, writing that the “identity” of

thought and existence means not that the subject creates the object but “that

they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical

process.” 49

3. History must be explained through human action, but human action

itself is as much product as producer of history. “Man has become the

measure of all (societal) things,” and the understanding of history consists

in the “derivation of the indissoluble fetishistic forms from the primary

forms of human relations.”50 “Man is the measure” specifically in opposition to all attempts to “measure” history from “above” or “outside”

of history, i.e., from a god, nature, or transhistorical laws conceived as

founding for history. Yet this is no humanism in the sense of a doctrine that

would derive history from a prior concept of man, or from a quasi-

theological creative power attributed to the human species.

For if man is made the measure of all things, and if with the aid of that assumption all transcendence is to be eliminated without applying the same “standard” to himself or—more exactly—without making man himself dialectical, then man himself is made into an absolute and he simply puts himself in the place of those transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and

systematically replace.51

4. Lukács develops this argument further in a passage that shows that

the transcendence of the antinomies is not a one-sided predominance of the

subject.

The dialectical process, the ending of a rigid confrontation of rigid forms, is enacted essentially between the subject and the object … [Only if] the relativizing or the interpenetration of the subject and the object themselves … only if “the true [were understood] not only as substance but also as subject,” only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, and if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.52

Lukács’s rejection of the voluntaristic notion of the proletariat as a free

agent overcoming all structure comes through clearly in these passages.

Instead, he affirms that the proletariat is objectively structured and that only

as such is it an agent of structural transformation. Its objectivity is the

condition of its subjectivity while also limiting its agency.

5. This position seems incompatible with the notion that reification

characterizes only the bourgeois era and can be wholly eliminated under

socialism. Given the dialectic of reification and mediation, the elimination

of the former would eliminate the latter. Insofar as the truth is discovered

dialectically, reification is a necessary moment in the process of discovery.

Reification is, in sum, not the “opposite” of dialectics, but a moment in it.

Nevertheless, the position of the reified moment in the totality may change

in the course of history. Lukács himself says something like this in a

passage that shows he was aware of the danger of a utopian interpretation of

his theory:

At the same time it is clear that from the standpoint of the proletariat the empirically given reality of the objects does dissolve into processes and tendencies; this process is no single, unrepeatable tearing of the veil that masks the process but the unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement; and thus the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history

awakening into consciousness.53

Again, Lukács concedes that “even the proletariat can only overcome

reification as long as it is oriented toward practice. And this means that

there can be no single act that will eliminate reification in all its forms at

one blow; it means that there will be a whole host of objects that at least in

appearance remain more or less unaffected by the process. This is true in

the first instance of nature.” 54 I will come back to this reservation concerning nature in the next chapter.

Konstantinos Kavoulakos reasonably asks, “How ‘identical’ is then this

subject-object of history, which is pervaded by internal ruptures, by internal

divisions that impel it to a constantly renewed search for its identity? We

should rather think of it, ultimately, as an open process rather than as … the

completion of the Hegelian ‘absolute spirit.’” 55 These remarks are anticipated by Marcuse in an early text in which he credits Siegfried Marck

with having “put to an end the primitive ‘critique’ according to which

Lukács’s analysis can be refuted by calling it a ‘metaphysics.’” 56

THE DIALECTIC OF REIFICATION

Out of these scattered passages a theory emerges that Lukács himself did

not articulate in a coherent fashion. This theory helps us to understand how

he could have believed his position was truly dialectical rather than a replay

of the old transcendental tune or a regressive return to Gemeinschaft. It gains in plausibility to the extent that it deflates his rhetorical appeal to the

creative power of the subject. But the dialectic seems to concern only

society. The theory does not directly address the ontological issues raised

by the critique of classical German philosophy. Furthermore, it has

implications that do not square easily with Marxism.

Because he relates reification to commodity fetishism, Lukács cannot

admit that it persists under socialism in principle rather than as vestige. He

makes a similar assumption concerning bureaucracy, law, and technology,

all of which are reified under capitalism and presumed to be dereified under

socialism. But this seems to leave socialism without an institutional

structure, a conclusion Lukács nowhere reaches. So what is his alternative?

One sees him attempting to find the alternative in a passage in which he

remarks that

the world which confronts man in theory and in practice exhibits a kind of objectivity which—if properly thought out and understood—need never stick fast in an immediacy similar to that of forms found earlier on. This objectivity must accordingly be comprehensible as a constant factor mediating between past and future and it must be possible to demonstrate that it is everywhere the product of man and of the development of society.57

It is hard to see the difference between this good “objectivity” and the

persistence of something like reification in a context where it has become

more malleable instead of rigidly determining for the human lives it shapes.

If this theory remains implicit this is because the Marxist tradition holds no place for it. The elimination of the commodity form would seem to

eliminate its effect, reification. For Marx the alternative is planning of some

unspecified sort under the control of the “assembled producers.” But

Lukács has read Weber and knows that planning requires administration,

which is just another instance of reification. He cannot consider the state as

a simple institutional solution to the problem of reification. His later book

on Lenin suggests a combination of the Soviets and a more or less

conventional state apparatus under party control, but his analysis is brief

and inconclusive, and history has refuted it at least in the form it took in the

Soviet Union. 58 Nevertheless, this speculation on the socialist state shows how Lukács intended his theory of rationality to be realized in the practice

of the “identical subject-object.”

All this suggests a very different image of socialist revolution from the

classic one derived from the French and Russian experiences. Those

revolutions are generally understood as one-time breaks in the continuity of

history. Although this idea still influences Lukács’s notion of historical

development as a sudden reversal—how could it not in 1923?—his theory

implies an evolutionary pattern in which reification and its overcoming

stand in a permanent relationship of ever renewed conflict and resolution,

beginning before the overthrow of capitalism and continuing long

afterwards. The “revolution” would alter the conditions of that conflict,

favoring agency over structure. But it would do no more than institute new

terms of struggle.

Human action in modern societies, whether capitalist or socialist,

continually constructs reified social objects out of the underlying human

relations on which it is based. The reified form of objectivity of these

objects gives a measure of stability and control while at the same time

sacrificing significant dimensions of the human lives they structure. The

chief difference between capitalism and socialism is not that the one is

reified and the other dereified, but rather that the one stands or falls with

reification while the other can support a continual mediating and

transforming of reified social objects in order to realize the potential of

those sacrificed dimensions. This approach implies a theory of modernity as

a differentiated social formation with two variants, a capitalist one in which

reification is predominant and resistances suppressed, and a socialist one in

which resistances modify malleable reified systems subject to continuous revision.

The theoretical possibility of a socialist variant undoes the most

important consequence of reification, namely, the misrecognition of its own

social contingency. Once that possibility is established, reification appears

not as a “second nature” alien to subjectivity, but as a mediated product of

subjectivity, “properly understood.” Society is no longer seen as

subordinate to laws it cannot change, because those laws are revealed as

social products. This perception subverts the functional role of reification

under capitalism that consists precisely in blocking consciousness of the

productive power of collective action.

What are the philosophical implications of Lukács’s dialectic? The basic

“demand of reason” is that knowledge and action stand in essential relation

to reality itself. Reified rationality and its technical practice cannot fulfill

this demand because it cannot “penetrate” the contents of its forms,

specifically, the life process underlying capitalism. By contrast, dialectical

rationality and the proletarian revolution that corresponds to it reach down

into those contents by modifying their form of objectivity, hence also their

function in the social totality. This is not a superficial change in quantity or

quality but a fundamental change in meaning, in nature. Nor is it the full-

blown constitution of reality by a social version of the transcendental

subject. Rather, subject-object identity is achieved in society through a

process of mediation. But the question remains: can that process of

mediation be extended beyond society, specifically, to nature? Unless

subject and object can be united in every domain, the demands of reason are

not fulfilled. Lukács’s attempt to address this problem is the subject of the

next chapter.

1 Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1937).

2 HCC, xlv.

3 Engels still could say of the petty bourgeoisie, “Let [them] cast in their lot with the anti-Semites until they have convinced themselves that they get no help in that quarter.” Frederick Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1969), 648.

4 HCC, 110 and 187–8. It was Nietzsche who first attempted a general critique of rationality as an expression of the will to power, identifying conceptual generality with hierarchy, control, and domination. The Frankfurt School continues some aspects of this critique, which it enriches and concretizes in terms of the Lukácsian critique of reification. See Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi, “The Over-Bourgeois and the Dissolution of Subjectivity: Adorno as Nietzsche’s Scholar,” in Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi, ed., Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future (Rome: John Cabot Press, 2009).

5 Quoted by Lukács in HCC, 141. The passage is from Die Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems. In its entirety it reads: “The antitheses … which used to be expressed in terms of mind and matter, body and soul, faith and reason, freedom and necessity, etc., and were also prominent in a number of more restricted spheres and concentrated all human interests in themselves, became transformed as culture advanced into contrasts between reason and the senses, intelligence and nature and, in its most general form, between absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity. To transcend such ossified antitheses is the sole concern of reason. This concern does not imply hostility to opposites and restrictions in general; for opposites and the totality of life, at its most intense is only possible as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation.”

6 HCC, 121.

7 Ibid., 63.

8 Ibid., 77. Lukács had already treated this dilemma in The Theory of the Novel before becoming a Marxist. That early work, which contains Lukács’s critique of romanticism and ethical idealism, concludes with a chapter on the “transcendence of social forms of life.” The messianicutopian stage in Lukács’s thought lies here, in the idea of the creation of a new epic community through the dissolution of all social conventions and constraints in Dostoevskian soul-to-soul encounters. The theory presented in History and Class Consciousness is quite different despite the formal similarity to messianism, as I will show in the conclusion of this chapter. For more on Lukács’s messianism, see Michael Löwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Révolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976).

9 HCC, 134.

10 Ibid., 87.

11 Ibid., 135. It is important not to confuse reification with objectification as such. Reification is a particular type of alienated objectification in which the alienated human powers appear as formal rational laws. Hence dereification is a disalienation and not the abolition of objectification as the later Lukács charged in his critique of his own early work. See HCC, xxiv.

12 Ibid., 129 (translation modified). The similarity of this argument to Heidegger’s later discussion of technology is striking. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).

13 HCC, 112.

14 Ibid., 128.

15 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. J. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 211. Subject–object identity in this sense is clearly quite different from the kind of identity rejected by the Frankfurt School. Cf. Martin Jay, “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism,” Social Research, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2

(1972). See also John Grumley, “Adventures of the Concept of Totality: Thoughts on Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality” Thesis Eleven, No. 15 (1986), 111–21.

16 Lukács’s interpretation of Kant is developed further in Lucien Goldmann, Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1945) and Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. R.

Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1975).

17 HCC, 116. Lukács was influenced by Emil Lask’s Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr, 1902.) For the neo-Kantian background, see Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988).

18 HCC, 117 (translation modified).

19 HCC, 116.

20 Ibid., 115.

21 Ibid., 122.

22 Ibid., 126.

23 Ibid., 124.

24 Ibid., 160.

25 Ibid., 134.

26 Ibid., 126.

27 Ibid., 126.

28 Ibid. 137.

29 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. H. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 255.

The centrality Lukács attributes to the idea of an “intuitive understanding” in the development of classical German philosophy follows closely on Hegel’s interpretation. In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel even asserts that “die Idee dieses urbildlichen, intuitiven Verstandes ist im Grunde durchaus nichts anders als dieselbe Idee der transzendentalen Einbildungskraft” G. W. F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1962), 33. This identification also underlies Lukács interpretation of Fichte and Hegel.

30 HCC, 138. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 255.

31 HCC, 138.

32 Ibid., 142.

33 The accuracy of this interpretation of Kant is not the issue here since this was in fact how Hegel understood critical philosophy. cf. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, 20–1.

34 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans. S. Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 118.

35 See ibid., 36–8 and especially 118–19.

36 Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 67.

37 HCC, 147.

38 Ibid., 17.

39 Ibid., 18.

40 Ibid., 201.

41 Ibid., 121–2.

42 Ibid., 155.

43 Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 137.

44 HCC, 204.

45 Ibid., 204–5.

46 Ibid., 163.

47 Ibid., 176.

48 Ibid., 21.

49 Ibid., 204.

50 Ibid., 185.

51 Ibid., 187.

52 Ibid., 142.

53 Ibid., 199.

54 Ibid., 206.

55 Konstantinos Kavoulakos, “Back to History?” in M. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011), 164.

56 Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 67. Marck writes, “Das Existenzproblem soll an Stelle des

Seinsproblems in den Mittelpunkt treten, die Fragen des gesellschaftlichen Daseins die metaphysischen Probleme durch ihre Vermenschlichung und Entfetischiseirung lösen.” Siegfried Marck, Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (Tübingen, Germany: Verlag von J. C. B.

Mohr, 1929), 130.

57 HCC, 159.

58 Andrew Feenberg, “Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukács and the Dilemmas of Organization,” in John McCormick, ed., Confronting Mass Technology and Mass Democracy: Essays in Twentieth-Century German Political and Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 45–69.

CHAPTER SIX

The Controversy Over Subject-Object Identity

THE ANTINOMY OF SOCIETY AND NATURE

The discussion of Marx’s Manuscripts in Chapter 3 concluded with a critique of his solution to the antinomy of society and nature. His early

philosophy of praxis reduced nature to society, both practically and

theoretically. In his later work he turned away from this approach. We have

now seen that Lukács’s interpretation of classical German philosophy leads

to the similarly ambitious claim that the identical subject-object will

overcome reification, the form of objectivity of both nature and capitalist

society. This would seem to imply the incorporation of nature into society,

as in Marx’s Manuscripts.

Lukács was a product of an intellectual environment that favored the

idea of independent Geisteswissenschaften based on methods different from

those of the natural sciences. He was its representative on the left,

defending Geist against theoretical reification by bourgeois social science

and vulgar Marxism. He develops the argument with natural science in

familiar terms. While the logic of his position seems to demand that he

reduce nature to history, he never goes so far. There are several passages in

History and Class Consciousness in which he affirms the independence of

nature and the validity of the sciences that study it. His argument is thus

either more complex or less consistent than Marx’s. His critics have focused

on the resulting contradictions ever since. While it is all too easy to

caricature Lukács’s position, I will propose a charitable interpretation in this

chapter.

The interpretive challenge is twofold. As we have seen, the second part

of the reification essay ends with Lukács’s argument that classical German

philosophy fails to resolve the antinomies of bourgeois thought. He

promises a Marxist resolution, but the third part of the essay does not

deliver it. Instead, it presents a rather disorganized exploration of the social

implications of the identical subject-object and proletarian revolution. This leaves the impression that Lukács is caught between the poles of an

antinomy dividing society and nature. In addition, Lukács’s Defence of

History and Class Consciousness purports to explain his position but

actually shifts the focus significantly through the introduction of a more

conventionally Marxist perspective on the determining role of the economy.

He drops references to the concept of reification and instead draws on its

sources in Marx’s mature work and Hegel’s dialectic of essence for a

different and presumably more “orthodox” vocabulary. Nevertheless, the

Defence is helpful for understanding his position. In it he argues rather obscurely for an absolute historicism that is more plausible than Marx’s

version. This chapter will consider the implications of these texts for

Lukács’s early Marxism, and once again relate his position to Marx’s

Manuscripts.

The issue turns on the meaning of Lukács’s concept of subject-object

identity. This concept is a particular target of attack for critics ranging from

the Althusserians to the Frankfurt School. The former explains Lukács’s

identity philosophy as a consequence of his supposed “romantic” rejection

of natural science; the latter claims that identity philosophy is rooted in the

Promethean project of domination of nature, and asserts the insuperable

separation of subject and object. In contrast to all these critics, I will argue

that the theory is neither romantic nor Promethean. Puzzling as is his

concern with the concept of subject-object identity, Lukács has good

reasons for not simply abandoning it as a historical curiosity. In the context

of philosophy of praxis it signifies the rationality of reason, the universality

of its claims and the freedom of the human species from mystical powers.

The previous chapter summarized the theoretical exigencies that the

identical subject-object is supposed to satisfy: the principle of practice,

history as reality, and dialectical method. The identical subject-object satisfies the demand of the principle of practice that the action of the subject

“penetrate” the object, leaving no thing-in-itself untouched; it posits history

as reality in the sense that the subjects and objects of all cognitive domains

are explained through their function in the historical totality; and it involves

dialectical method insofar as historical subject-object identity is understood

not as immediate but as mediated in an interaction of theory and practice,

subjectivity and its objectifications.

Bourgeois identity philosophy establishes only a commonality of form

of subject and object. Lukács’s metacritique aims to go beyond this toward

a deeper unity based on the production of the object by the subject. But

what is the meaning of Lukács’s concept of “production?” As we have seen

in the last chapter, the text appears to supply not one but two answers. I will

review them both here as they relate to the problem of nature.

Lukács’s principle of practice is sometimes explained as the creation of

the object by the subject or its absolute reduction to human relations. This is

Lukács’s later interpretation of History and Class Consciousness, which he

considered more Fichtean than Hegelian. 1 In this quasi-Fichtean interpretation, the identity of subject and object implies the preeminence of

the subject in a radically different form of society transparent to human

knowledge and will. This resembles Marx’s speculative notion of labor in

the Manuscripts. In that early text, the ontic power of labor to create is granted ontological significance as the fundamental access to being. In the

last chapter, I argued that Lukács holds a properly Hegelian view based on

the concept of mediation so far as society is concerned, but he insists that

nature has a quasi-independent status. He thus avoids a transcendental

humanism in which the creative power of the divinity would be exercised

by human agents. His saving inconsistency is his explicit recognition that

finite human subjects cannot constitute nature as they have history.

Furthermore, even in the passages that appear most productivist, where

Lukács exaggerates the role of the proletariat, he is careful to qualify the

argument, to note that the subject of practice operates under given historical

conditions that determine the limits of its agency. In these passages practice

does not create but rather mediates the object. Here the subject in no way

resembles a collective cogito, a transcendental ego outside a world it

constitutes. The subject does not posit society but is a moment of society,

determined as well as determining. Such a subject “penetrates” its objects

by altering their form of objectivity in accordance with their real

potentialities. This ontological interpretation of subject-object identity

establishes the unbounded reach of rationality at the level of function and

meaning.

This second approach is elaborated in a dialectical theory of rationality

according to which the proletariat constitutes itself as a subject through a

continuing process of mediation of its own reified form of objectivity.

Subjective and objective dimensions are united through an active process

and not simply identified conceptually. The argument is Hegelian: reason arises from understanding, and dialectics from analytic rationality.

Perhaps the ambiguity in Lukács’s notion of production can be traced

back to Hegel. There are two patterns of dialectical development in Hegel.

In one pattern a synthesis leaves behind its contradictory origin by creating

a third entity. This is the pattern exemplified by Hegel’s view of historical

development. Generalized, this pattern leads to a metaphysical

interpretation of Hegel’s thought in which, for example, the system

culminates in a panlogical God of some sort.

But there is another pattern in which a continuing mediation between

contradictory entities transforms or defines them without dissolving them

into a third. This pattern is exemplified in Hegel’s notion of “being at home

in the other as such.” It is the pattern of life, which objectifies itself in its

environment, transforming object and subject without abolishing their

difference. 2 This is the implicit pattern of the Logic in which successive concepts represent possible ways of knowing and being. The sequence of

these concepts reflects increasing complexity and completeness, not the

results of a production process in the usual sense.

Marx followed the tendency of Hegel’s historical writings in imagining

a third; communism would leave capitalism and its proletariat behind in the

creation of a new form of society. The abolition of the commodity form

would once and for all transcend the contradictions of capitalism. But once

capitalism is conceived as a rationalized society and the Marxist critique

generalized to the forms of rationality, the revolution cannot culminate in a

third. Socialism can no longer pretend to restart the clock of history because

the past is ever renewed in the rationalized social institutions at the basis of

modernity.

Lukács’s identical subject-object looks like the impossible third in his

more florid descriptions of its revolutionary power. But his version of

dialectics describes a relation between rational form and its objects or

contents. He repeatedly states that the theory is about the tension between

those contents, the life process of the proletariat, and economic,

bureaucratic, and technological rationality. It is unclear how that tension

could be definitively resolved.

A quasi-Fichtean interpretation makes the utopian claim that reification

can be wholly overcome in a future socialist society. Even allowing for the

persistent reification of nature, as Lukács does, this is a puzzling view.

Lukács is supposed to have imagined an identical subject-object the actions of which would have no objective limits and no unintended consequences.

With the complete abolition of reification, the subject would be free to

create the world according to its arbitrary will. Whether or not Lukács

intended his theory to be taken to such an extreme as his critics usually

assume, it is fair to say that he left himself open to misinterpretation.

In fact, his early philosophy of praxis was immediately criticized both

on these grounds and for its inability to give a consistent account of the

concept of nature. I will review several of these original critical arguments

here, as well as more recent ones. They concern Lukács’s supposed

idealism and romanticism, the false identification of objectification and

alienation in his concept of reification, and his unacceptable dualism of

society and nature. I will argue that these criticisms overlook the dialectical

theory of rationality. In the conclusion of this chapter I will consider

whether that theory offers resources for resolving the antinomy of society

and nature haunting his claim that revolutionary action can realize

philosophy.

THE CRITIQUES

Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas wrote two of the major early critiques of

History and Class Consciousness; they accuse Lukács of idealism from a

Leninist perspective and introduce the main themes of later critique,

particularly “orthodox” Marxist critique.3 Deborin and Rudas claim that Lukács sets Engels against Marx in order to substitute his own idealistic

dialectic for their materialistic dialectic. In a footnote to the first essay of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács does actually reject the

application of dialectics to nature, and offers an interpretation of historical

dialectics he distinguishes rather sharply from that of Engels.

It is of the first importance to realize that the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels—following Hegel’s mistaken lead—extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics—the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.—are absent from our knowledge of nature. 4

This seems to imply that nature and society are separate domains to

which correspond separate methods of study. Rudas writes, “If the dialectic

is restricted to society, then two worlds exist, with two quite different sets

of laws: nature and society. In nature phenomena are undialectical, in society they are dialectical … According to L. the world is dualist.”5

Deborin calls this “a new conception of dialectical method … a conception

which contradicts that of Marxism.”6

Deborin goes on to argue that Lukács is an idealist who “sees in the

category of knowledge, in a certain sense, the substance or truth of reality.” 7

In his dialectic, practice and historical reality are supposedly aufgehoben in

knowledge. Hence, “according to Lukács praxis is overcome only though

theory, only through knowledge, and not through the self-development of

reality, of which knowledge is simply a part.”8 Deborin sees Lukács as a traditional idealist, completely overlooking his revision of the subject-object concept. “The object,” Deborin declares, “is swallowed by the

subject.” 9

Deborin concludes by contrasting this theory with orthodox Marxism.

Knowledge, he objects, is never identical with its objects but tends

asymptotically toward accurate representation. The true unity of subject and

object is to be found in the domain of labor practice, not in revolutionary

class consciousness. The object with which Marxism is specifically

concerned is nature, the substratum of human life, the subject is labor, and

their unity (not identity) is the process of production.

Like many later critics of Lukács, Deborin misses the point because he

does not grasp the originality of Lukács’s concept of consciousness which is

not identifiable with “knowledge” in the usual sense. Merleau-Ponty

clarifies Lukács’s distinction between consciousness and knowledge. “In

the proletariat, class consciousness is not a state of mind or a knowledge,

nor yet is it a theoretical construction, because it is a praxis, that is to say

less than a subject and more than an object.” 10 More precisely, class consciousness denotes the inner tendency of the “historically significant

actions of the class as a whole” in which it enacts new meanings in conflict

with capitalist society.11 These new meanings are not thoughts in the heads of the proletarians but functional shifts in the totality. It is thus incorrect to

argue that for Lukács consciousness “transcends” practice, or that the

subject “swallows” the object. Lukács’s goal is to overcome the opposition

of theory and practice, subject and object, in a region of historical reality

where they stand in essential and necessary relation. But by defining the

Lukácsian subject as a knower, Deborin forces the theory back into a traditional idealistic framework it is designed to escape.

In his new foreword of 1967, Lukács himself discusses these problems,

and suggests another critique that is surely unique as an example of

philosophical self-misunderstanding. He describes how the reading of

Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts finally convinced him of the ontological priority

of objectivity and the universality of objectification; therewith, says the

older Lukács, his early Marxist work became completely “alien” to him.12

He dismisses his own identity theory as an “attempt to out-Hegel Hegel.”13

Many other critics have similarly charged the early Lukács with

confounding, as did Hegel, objectification with alienation in the concept of

reification. 14

This is the line taken in Adorno’s influential critique. This critique

carries the imprimatur of a great thinker. It is elaborated against a

sophisticated theoretical background and represents the tradition of the

Frankfurt School, which shared Lukács’s ambition to construct a Marxist

philosophy on the ruins of German idealism. Adorno claims that Lukács

lapsed into idealism, believed the proletarian subject could constitute social

reality independent of any institutional framework or objective constraint

on its action, and idealized immediacy and precapitalist society. Quite a

program! And Adorno does not hesitate to associate his critique with that of

the Stalinists who first denounced Lukács, including presumably Deborin

and Rudas. 15

There is a good deal of irony in the fact that the brutal and primitive functionaries who more than forty years back damned Lukács as a heretic, because of the reification chapter in his important History and Class Consciousness, did sense the idealistic nature of his conception … If a man looks upon thingness as radical evil, if he would like to dynamize all entity into pure actuality, he tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien thing that has lent its name to alienation, and not in vain. 16

Unfortunately, Adorno’s critique is no better than the Stalinist ones.

Like them, he addresses a straw man. He claims that reification, which he

too interprets as a cognitive phenomenon, is overcome by the dereification

of consciousness rather than concrete social change in the real world of

“non-identical” objects. “The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be

glossed over rather than denounced in the lament about reification.” 17

To make matters worse, Adorno considers the critique of reification to

be a version of romantic anxiety over the distancing effect of rationality.

Blaming all problems on reification implies that immediacy is the solution.

Reduced to the thesis that in criticizing reification, he is criticizing the very

independence of the object, Lukács seems to call for assimilating things to

the stream of consciousness or action. So Adorno writes, “The liquefaction

of everything thinglike regressed to the subjectivism of the pure act.”18 The

reference here is at once to a kind of existentialist decisionism and to the

Fichtean actus purus in which the world is “posited” by transcendental

consciousness. Versions of this critique abound in the literature and after

becoming acquainted with them few readers bother to go back to the

original, much less read it with fresh eyes.

But in the first pages of his book Lukács warns the reader that the

concept of “totality” under which he conceives social reality “does not

reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity.”19

This reservation is confirmed elsewhere in the text despite the often

overblown language in which Lukács describes the identical subject-object.

Under the rhetorical surface his views depend on a rather conventional

Marxism, not the rehash of subjective idealism and naïve romanticism

Adorno attributes to him.

In sum, Marx, not Heraclitus or Bergson. It is certainly worth

questioning whether this is coherent, but it is hardly idealist. What requires

understanding is Lukács’s purpose in producing this strange hybrid of

classical German philosophy and the Marxist critique of political economy.

We need to know whether he accomplished anything of interest in doing so.

Ignoring the complexity of his thought is not helpful for this purpose.

LUKÁCS AND FICHTE

These considerations take us to the heart of the problem. Lukács never

entirely bridges the enormous gap between the two poles of his argument,

classical German philosophy and Marxism. Curious exaggerations expose

him to easy criticism. Axel Honneth notes the coexistence of a hopelessly

idealistic “official” line and a more “moderate” “unofficial” line that can

provide the basis for a recovery of his contribution.20 We differ on the nature of that unofficial line but not on the interest in pursuing the

ambiguities of Lukács’s argument.

Lukács’s ambition is to demonstrate that “the core of being stands

revealed as a social process.”21 He can only achieve this if, as Fichte would

have it, he can “exhibit the subject of ‘action’ and, assuming its identity with the object … comprehend every dual subject-object form as derived

from it, as its product.”22 According to Tom Rockmore, Fichte is the source of the emphasis on activity not only in Lukács but in Marx as well. This

would explain why Lukács has recourse to the decidedly non-materialist

notion of an identical subject-object.23

Lukács’s views on nature are incompatible with this interpretation, but

there are occasional passages in History and Class Consciousness, such as

the one cited above, which seem to support it. Sometimes the critique of

reification seems to extend to the reified form of objectivity of nature as

well as society, and there are borrowings from contemporary critiques of

natural science. Several critics leap at the bait and argue, with Alfred

Schmidt, that nature in Lukács is “totally dissolved into the historical

processes of its appropriation in respect of form, content, extent and

objectivity.” 24

Surprisingly, no one has gone on to complete the critique of Lukács

implicit in such assertions. If Lukács really believed that the revolution

would overcome all objective being in overcoming reification, his theory

would be both rigorously consistent and obviously absurd.25 Then nature would be “posited” by the identical subject-object of history, and in

overcoming social reification the proletariat would transform nature itself.

This “Fichtean” interpretation of Lukács’s theory rests on the following

propositions, which outline an ontology and epistemology in conformity

with the critics’ image of Lukács, if not with Lukács’s actual views.

1. Nature is a purely social category, and the natural world therefore has

no independence of humanity and human understanding.

2. Nature is essentially reified under capitalism.

3. The identical subject-object of history is also the identical subject-

object of nature.

4. Proletarian revolution therefore overcomes the reified objectivity of

nature in overcoming capitalism.

5. Since the existing natural sciences are reified, and therefore

conditioned by capitalist society both in their genesis and their validity,

proletarian revolution also overcomes these sciences in overcoming

capitalism.

This summary of Lukács’s theory is immensely overdrawn, but it has

the virtue of rendering one commonplace interpretation rigorously

consistent. If the critics are correct in attributing some such view to Lukács, then they are also right to tax him with idealism; in this theory the entire

existing world is a product of human activity. All that would distinguish

Lukács’s “Marxism” from other forms of idealism would be his insistence

that this constituting activity is social in character.

But does this construct really concern theses sustained in History and

Class Consciousness? Or even its distant implications? The careful reader

discovers no significant support for this interpretation, while there are

numerous positive statements to the contrary. This is, in fact, the “myth” of

Lukács’s famous book that prejudices the very reading of the text.

What is Lukács’s concept of nature? Let us begin with the passage

usually cited in support of the interpretation sketched above. Lukács does

say that “nature is a social category,” but he proceeds immediately to

qualify this statement. The entire passage reads:

Nature is a social category. That is to say [ D.h.], what passes for nature [ als Natur gilt] at a determinate stage in social evolution, the constitution of the relation between this [ dieser] nature and man and the form in which the confrontation of man and nature takes place, in short, what nature signifies [ bedeuten] in its form and its content, its range and its objectivity, are all socially

conditioned.26

The opening sentence of this passage is often quoted to show that

Lukács believed nature in itself, without qualification, to be a social

product. But the second sentence is quite careful to discuss not nature as

such, but only “what passes for nature.” And surely Lukács intends this

qualification, since he introduces the second sentence with “that is to say,”

as equivalent to but more precise than the preceding one. 27 In the Defence the distinction is explicit: “I talk always (on two occasions!) only of

knowledge of nature and not nature itself.”28 Already the first and the third theses of the construct have fallen, for now nature itself, if not the

knowledge of it, is independent of man and cannot possibly be “posited” by

society. And then, of course, the fourth thesis is also untenable, for under

these conditions proletarian revolution cannot transform nature.

Nevertheless, Lukács continues to affirm if not exactly the second and

fifth theses, something quite similar. He says, “it cannot be our task to

investigate the question of the priority or the historical and causal order of

successions between the ‘laws of nature’ and capitalism. (The author of

these lines has, however, no wish to conceal his view that the development

of capitalist economics takes precedence.)” 29 In addition, at the end of the

reification essay, when Lukács concedes that there is an objective dialectic of nature, he distinguishes it from the dialectic of subject and object in

history. He notes that “the growth of knowledge about nature is a social phenomenon and therefore to be included in the second dialectical type.”30

Thus the fate of the natural sciences and that of capitalism would still seem

to be intimately intertwined. (Just how intimately only becomes clear in the

Defence, to be discussed below.)

These statements, combined with the critique of reification, have been

used by Colletti and others to build an image of an irrationalist,

“Bergsonian” Lukács. 31 Yet Lukács himself rejects irrationalism as an immediate reflex of reification. “The value of formal knowledge in the face

of ‘living life’ may be questioned (see irrationalist philosophies from

Hamann to Bergson),” but, Lukács writes, reification is not thereby

transcended: “Whether this gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair,

whether we search for a path leading to ‘life’ via irrational mystical

experience, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in

fact.” 32 Another significant passage makes clear Lukács’s disagreement with the irrationalist attack on the natural sciences. After a lengthy and

apparently “Bergsonian” critique of the application of natural scientific

method to society, a critique that seems at points to cast doubt on the

validity of science in general, Lukács states: “When the epistemological

ideal of the natural sciences is applied to nature it simply furthers the

progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be an

ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie.” 33

Lukács’s precise attitude toward the fifth thesis should now be clear. He

does believe the rise of capitalism to have stimulated the growth of modern

natural science, but he nowhere proposes that it is therefore false or that

proletarian revolution will abolish it. The validity of natural science and of

the reified concept of nature seems to be independent of the conditions of

its creation. Here Lukács is in agreement with the views of the later Marx

and Engels.

After examining all these passages in detail, one is astonished to

discover that nothing remains of the image of Lukács as a subjective

idealist at the level of the collective “I” of the proletariat, Lukács the

irrationalist, the Bergsonian, an image that begins with Deborin in 1924 and

continues to contemporaries such as Colletti. While Rockmore may be right

to suggest that Fichte’s activist conception of subjectivity influenced

Lukács, Lukács was no Fichtean. In fact the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness has a quite banal respect for the natural sciences. He

nowhere denies the independence of nature or the validity of the sciences

that study it. But this raises other questions.

Lukács’s goal is to overcome the antinomy of subject and object and

restore their unity through action in history. But how can reason be founded

on the identity of subject and object in history while nature “in itself”

remains beyond the scope of human action? To the extent that nature is

conceived as irreducible and non-social in a dualistic worldview, the whole

theoretical superstructure collapses. Steven Vogel has made this dualism of

nature and society the centerpiece of his critique. Vogel focuses on Lukács’s

failure to incorporate nature into his social theory. The distinction between

knowledge of nature and “nature itself” seems a regression to Kantianism.

What is this nature that by definition lies beyond knowledge if not the old

thing-in-itself?

Unless the identity of subject and object in nature can be established, its

identity in history appears as a purely contingent feature of the universe.

Another type of rationality with its own objectivity arises alongside history,

and there subject and object can never be united. Reason remains

permanently caught in the antinomies of reified thought in its relation to

nature. The Kantian construction of rationality now returns in full force,

bringing in its train all the untranscended antinomies Lukács set out to

resolve. It would seem that Lukács is saved from his critics only to fall into

self-contradiction.

Vogel claims that Lukács confuses an epistemological distinction with

an ontological one. Lukács distinguishes between a reified, contemplative

conception of knowledge that resembles positivism, and a self-conscious,

dialectical conception. This epistemological distinction is independent of

the distinction between nature and society. However, since Lukács accepts a

contemplative conception of knowledge of nature that he rejects in the case

of society, he concludes that nature and society are ontologically distinct

domains. Vogel objects to the very notion of a contemplative epistemology,

arguing that post-empiricist philosophy and sociology of science

demonstrate that the subject of knowledge is practically implicated in the

construction of scientific facts and theories. The dereifying critique of

social science Lukács pursues can thus be extended to natural science as

well. Knowledge of nature, like social knowledge, is dialectical. There are no epistemological grounds for distinguishing their objects.

Vogel argues that if there is something in nature that is not socially

produced, then history is not “reality,” not the fundamental ontological

domain from which all others are derived. Unless some solution can be

found, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis will collapse into a limited

methodological preliminary to historical research. It could no longer

pretend to solve ontological problems, but only epistemological problems

of historical knowledge. Reason would not be implicated in revolution, only

in social theory. This is in fact the position adopted by Lucien Goldmann,

Lukács’s most important follower.34 Vogel is more critical; he writes that this “solution” to the contradiction has a comic character since Lukács will

have “labored long and hard and brought forth a mouse.”35

CONTEMPLATIVE AND TRANSFORMING CONSCIOUSNESS

Many critics agree with Rudas and Vogel that the methodological split

between society and nature in History and Class Consciousness gives rise

to serious problems for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. However, it is not

uncommon for the critics, including the later Lukács himself, to fail to

notice that this split refutes the idealistic identification of his concept of

objectivity with Hegel’s concept of alienation. For, if nature is not posited

by society, as Lukács seems to assert, and if it is not transcended in the

revolution, then clearly Lukács’s philosophy is not hostile to objectivity per

se, and is not idealist. The critics produce an empirically accurate image of

the various strands of Lukács’s thought, but at the expense of a theoretically

inconsistent critique. Lukács is charged with the contradictory vices of

identifying what should be separated (alienation and objectivity) and

separating what should be identified (nature and history).36

Lukács’s dilemma arises from the apparently incompatible solutions to

the two problems the identical subject-object is supposed to solve. In the

first place, Lukács explains social change through the concept of social self-

consciousness. This notion is loosely based on the Marxist theory of the

proletariat and its place in capitalist society: the class “in itself” becomes

the class “for itself.” 37 The self-consciousness of the proletariat transforms its immediate form of objectivity and therewith society. In the second place,

Lukács proposes an integrally historical ontology that can resolve the

antinomies of classical German philosophy. But proletarian self-

consciousness cannot transform the immediate form of objectivity of

nature. This is what it means to argue that nature is essentially reified as

Lukács implies in several of the passages cited above. The dilemma appears

inescapable until one grasps the full import of Lukács’s dialectical theory of

rationality.

Most readings of Lukács accuse him of inflating the subject at the

expense of the object. But the theory of rationality emphasizes the

objectivity of the proletariat and the limits of its action. Proletarian practice

does not create social reality but rather mediates it. Since all mediation

begins with a presupposition, an immediate of some sort, this raises the

question of the nature of the presupposition in the case of the proletariat. If

the presupposition is wholly extrinsic to its action, then the problem of the

thing-in-itself does indeed return. This describes reified technical practice

that acts on an alien object. Reification cannot be defeated by such practice.

But if the mediated lies wholly within the subject of mediation, then is not

its alterity abolished in a perfectly idealist manner? This describes

psychoanalysis in which the object of practice is actually an unconscious

aspect of the subject. As I showed in the previous chapter, Lukács is aware

of the dilemma and attempts to conjure it away in the reification essay.

He argues that reification is gradually overcome in a long-term process

and not dissolved in a sudden recovery of absolute agency. This process is

not technical but transformative, in the sense that it does not merely use the

“law” of its objects to advantage, but alters that very “law.” Nor is it

therapeutic; Freud’s version of self-consciousness is impossible in a social

context where objective constraints arise from the institutional heritage and

the interactions of the individuals.38 But human freedom and initiative can increase relative to the structural impediments of a rationalized society as

the proletariat initiates the transition to socialism.

Lukács makes this point repeatedly in different ways throughout the

third section of the reification essay, but never applies the argument to the

problematic of classical German philosophy analyzed earlier in the essay.

He writes, for example, that “Proletarian thought does not require a tabula

rasa,” but rather starts out from reification that, for the first time, makes it

possible to understand that society is a human product.39 Socialism is a reorganization of the society around a dialectical mediation of the reified

capitalist inheritance. He argues further that reification is never completely

eliminated but that it is repeatedly overcome in an “unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement.” 40 And he rejects the humanist tendency to make man himself into an absolute “in place of those

transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and

systematically replace.” 41 The proletariat does not constitute or posit reality from some transcendental beyond. “It is true that the proletariat is the

conscious subject of total social reality. But the conscious subject is not

defined here as in Kant, where ‘subject’ is defined as that which can never

be an object.” 42 Lukács invokes Hegel’s famous principle that “the true [be understood] not only as substance but also as subject.” Like the Hegelian

absolute, the proletariat too “moves in a self-created world” but that world

simultaneously “imposes itself upon [it] in full objectivity.” 43 The reference to the ambitious notion of a “self-created world” is thus instantly deflated

by the “full objectivity” explained in Marxist social theory.

Since Lukács does not show how these considerations apply to the

problem of nature, his critics doubt he can fulfill the promise to transcend

the antinomy of subject and object. But there is a hint of a solution in the

very terms on which Lukács questions the dialectics of nature. As we saw

earlier, he is saved from idealism by the dualism of nature and history

implied in the claim that nature lacks the most important determinations of

dialectics, namely, the unity of theory and practice and the interaction of

subject and object. Later in History and Class Consciousness and in the

Defence, Lukács refers to an “objective dialectic” of nature corresponding

to Hegel’s objective dialectic of the categories of thinghood such as

quantity and quality. 44 He reiterates that this level of the dialectic lacks the all-important interaction of subject and object of the social dialectic.

Although the distinction between nature and society is apparently

ontological it is presented twice in these passages in methodological terms.

This suggests a very different reading of Lukács. He is not telling us what

kind of being nature is but on what terms it can be changed, on what terms

the proletariat as subject can interact with this object. The argument is thus

not about the difference between the essence of society and nature but about

their different relation to practice. Forms of consciousness follow from this

distinction. Lukács distinguishes between contemplative and transforming

consciousness, the one suited to knowledge of nature, the other to

knowledge of society. There is a realm in which consciousness is practice,

in which we can transform our objects by becoming socially self-conscious, and alongside it, there is another realm in which our action will always be

contemplative, i.e., technical. The first realm is society, the second is nature.

Lukács claims that we need not organize our whole social life through

technical control of some human beings by others, as capitalism requires,

but that we will always stand in a technical relation to nature.

The concept of “contemplative” consciousness is essentially

constructivist despite the usual meaning of the word. Lukács’s

constructivism operates at the abstract level of the form of objectivity rather

than focusing on particular social influences on the content of knowledge as

do Marx’s occasional remarks on science. For example, Lukács writes in

History and Class Consciousness that “it is in the nature of capitalism to process phenomena” in such a way as to generate “facts.” And he

concludes, “The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method

[of bourgeois social science] consists, then, in its failure to see and take

account of the historical character of the facts on which it is based.” 45 As we saw in Chapter 4, factuality is a social product, not an immediate given.

What Lukács calls “contemplation” hides the social practices that institute

the facts.

Reified social reality is a “second nature” with laws that appear as rigid

as those of the first nature described by natural science.

Man in capitalist society confronts a reality “made” by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its “laws”, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. But even while “acting” he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. 46

The three principal bases of a modern society, the economy, the

technology, and the administrations, are reified objects of contemplation in

the sense that the individual cannot alter the laws of the system “made by

himself (as a class),” but only understand and manipulate those laws to

personal advantage.47 But in these social instances a collective practice based on the self-consciousness of the social subjects can transform the

laws themselves.

It is obvious that nature, at least in the form in which it is encountered

in natural science, does not form a fourth system contingent on capitalism

for its existence and immediately transformed by the collective

consciousness qua practice in which capitalism is overthrown. This is so

even if we accept Lukács’s constructivist interpretation of contemplation according to which it masks an underlying practice. To be sure,

contemplation of nature is not truly passive but, unlike in the social case,

dereifying consciousness of the scientific construction of nature does not

necessarily alter the ‘‘facts’’ of nature itself.

This distinction is clarified by Paul Dumouchel’s revision of systems

theory.48 He distinguishes two types of spontaneous orders or systems constituted by agents who each follow a rule of action individually. Some

spontaneous orders are “rational” in the sense that they are stable in the face

of the agents’ discovery of the rule of the system. Competitive games are

examples of rational orders: the players’ willingness to play by the rules is

not normally affected by their knowledge of the rules. But there are also

spontaneous orders that are “irrational” in the sense that when the agents

come to understand the rule of their action, they will necessarily modify it.

Dumouchel offers the example of sacrifice or scapegoating, considered

by René Girard to provide a basic mechanism of social solidarity. The

sacrificial logic cannot withstand the revelation that the rule of

scapegoating is the random or arbitrary choice of the victim—the object of

the sacrifice is an ordinary person, as guiltless as those who kill him.

Sacrifice is cancelled by the self-consciousness of the sacrificial

community.

In Dumouchel’s scheme the passage beyond irrationality through

consciousness can lead to the creation of a rational order governed by new

rules, or a “reasonable” order based not merely on individual action but

planned collectively in terms of such explicit norms as justice.

On these terms, reified social forms constitute irrational orders that can

be transformed once the agents understand their logic. The capitalist system

is not based on rationality in Dumouchel’s sense, but on blindness. It cannot

withstand the discovery of its own inner logic by those who enact it. The

alternative suggested by the mediation theory is the institution of a

permanent system of transitions from the irrational to the rational and the

reasonable. But the relation to nature is not irrational in Dumouchel’s sense.

It is not generally modified by consciousness of its reified form. It is thus

essentially reified and knowledge of it is destined to remain permanently

“contemplative.”

NATURAL HISTORY

Instead of a one-time and total dereification of the sort promised by the idealist version of the identical subject-object, the theory of rationality

proposes a more nuanced interpretation that leaves room for objectivity. A

sliding ontological scale includes aspects of the objective world that are

more or less resistant to dereification. Some of these, the ones that are

specifically social such as wage labor, are susceptible to much more radical

transformation than others, such as the nature studied by the natural

sciences. Other objects, such as art and technology, and the lived nature of

everyday experience stand in between the extremes, more contingent on

human action than the nature of natural science but less so than social

institutions. 49 In each case subject and reified object interact as moments in a “totality.”

This version of subject-object identity abolishes the thing-in-itself not

by reducing it to the subject but by mediating objectivity in a never-ending

process. But this means that the identical subject-object is not a substantial

“thing” in the usual sense of the word, identical to itself and enduring

through change. Rather, the identical subject-object is a process of self and

social transformation that appears and fades with the rhythms of the

historical struggle.

This interpretation of subject-object identity can provide a framework

for understanding Lukács’s response to the various criticisms described

above, especially if the more elaborate arguments of the Defence are taken

into account. In the Defence, Lukács goes beyond the few brief comments

on science in History and Class Consciousness. However, this text is an

unfinished first draft, not a polished publication. Its significance is obscured

by Lukács’s avoidance of his own philosophical terminology. He no longer

refers to “forms of objectivity” and “reification,” presumably because he

does not think such concepts acceptable in the new Soviet context of the

debate. 50 He writes instead about the “metabolic interaction of man and nature.” By this he means the labor process that mediates the natural world.

He also refers to the “appearance” of society and to the mode of

“perception” determined by the level and type of metabolic interaction. The

emergence of new appearances and perceptions under socialism seems a

euphemism for the transformation of the reified form of objectivity

discussed in History and Class Consciousness.

Although this change in terminology is confusing, other arguments in

the Defence clear up ambiguities in History and Class Consciousness.

Vogel concludes from Lukács’s distinction of nature and society that he accepts internalism and realism. But this is actually the view Lukács

attributes to Rudas in his Defence. He writes, for example, that “Comrade

Rudas assumes an immanent development of the natural sciences.” 51 Both Deborin and Rudas claim that science yields knowledge of things-in-themselves, as Engels famously argued in a discussion of the significance of

synthetic chemistry and scientific experiment.52 This implies that science engages humanity in a direct relation to nature.

Lukács argues that humanity is not the subject of scientific knowledge;

humanity is merely an abstraction from the concrete social subjects that

interact with nature in history. The cognitive relation to nature depends on

the form of the labor process, the “metabolic interchange with nature”

imposed by the dominant economic system. He thus proposes a kind of

perspectivism according to which economic systems open up ways of

knowing. He points out, furthermore, that Marx himself interpreted certain

scientific discoveries in terms of their social background. For example,

Marx claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution reflects capitalist

competition. According to Lukács this view does not lead to relativism

since real progress can be observed in the development of the forces of

production to which corresponds cognitive progress in the understanding of

nature.

The argument from progress is weak and Lukács does not follow it up

in a very coherent manner, although he does make a few other suggestive

remarks that conform with his theory of dialectical rationality. As we have

seen, the capitalist system structures appearances in such a way as to

privilege ahistorical facts. The socialist challenge to capitalism creates new

cognitive possibilities. Lukács writes,

It is altogether possible that the present crisis of the natural sciences is already a sign of the immanent revolutionizing of its material basis and not merely a reflex of the general ideological crisis of capitalism in decline.

However, as long as we are not in a position to demonstrate concretely the historical genesis of the emergence of our perceptions out of their material basis, i.e., not only that they are, but what they are, and how, etc., as Marx accomplished for our socio-historical perceptions, our mode of looking is lacking an important objective moment of the dialectic: history.53

This passage and the discussion it introduces are peculiarly ambiguous.

The ambiguity attaches to the word “history.” Does Lukács mean that

scientific research will identify historical aspects of its object that are

currently overlooked? Or does he mean that science as a process of inquiry will become reflexive, aware of its own historical conditioning? Both

interpretations are implied once again in the following passage.

To what extent all knowledge of nature can ever be transformed into historical knowledge … cannot be raised here because even where it seems to us that historical developments have occurred their historical character can now be grasped only to a very small extent … [This] is because the capacity to discover the material foundations of knowledge, and to derive knowledge from this material basis dialectically, has not yet up until this point been produced by objective real developments. 54

In fact Lukács seems to want to affirm both the ambiguous senses of

“history” in these passages. Here is a fuller account of these alternatives.

1. Lukács entertains the possibility of a “new science” emerging from

the socialist transformation of the labor process. There is a basis for this

view in a comment in The German Ideology: “Even this ‘pure’ natural

science receives its aim, like its material, only through commerce and

industry, through the sensuous activity of men.” 55 This comment is a pale reflection of some of the most adventurous speculations of the Manuscripts

reviewed in Chapter 3 of this book. There Marx writes, for example, that

“Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural

science, to man.”56 The progress of industry is thus also progress in the human relationship to nature, i.e., sense experience. Objective human

powers develop through the maturation and humanization of the senses in

the course of history. “The supersession of private property is, therefore, the

complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses.” 57 As experience is enhanced, science will be transformed. “Natural science will

one day incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will

incorporate natural science; there will be a single science.” 58

Lukács proposes a somewhat similar but more modest theory in History

and Class Consciousness. Experienced nature is no poetic schwärmerei, distinguished from the prose of machines and laboratory experiments by the

absence of thought and reflection. The perception of nature is not

immediate, but is always already mediated, informed by the “metabolism”

of man and nature, sensed and comprehended through social forms of

objectivity. The reference to changed perceptions and their effects on

scientific knowledge, translated into the terminology of History and Class

Consciousness, means that everyday experience will be reshaped by a new

form of objectivity as capitalism’s rigid opposition of factual form and

living content gives way to the fluid interaction between them under socialism.

This notion offers a basis for understanding the possible evolution of

science. Lukács argues in the Defence that new “perceptions” will open a

historical perspective on nature. Once human beings know that there are no

eternal laws of society, and institute that knowledge in a dynamic and self-

conscious production system, they will also be predisposed to conceive

nature in historical terms. Just as historical elements have already entered

some fields of natural science through evolutionary theory and

thermodynamics, so every branch of science will someday become

historical. A new historically informed science will yield new results

reflecting the new structure of interchange with nature under socialism and

the “perceptions” or form of objectivity that accompany it.

2. The second possible interpretation of Lukács’s reference to a new

science concerns inquiry itself rather than its results. The new perceptions

introduced by socialism involve a continual alternation of dereification and

stabilization in society at large. This might also describe a new and more

dynamic process of research in which a continual deconstruction of the

reified heritage of earlier socially biased results would constitute the motor

of scientific progress.

Lukács admits that up to now reflexivity has not been required to

produce good research. Specialized knowledge of the highest quality has

been and still is obtained by researchers with no special insight into their

own social and historical situation. Indeed, contemplative epistemology and

the correlated reification of nature represent a progress over earlier

mythological forms of objectivity and their usefulness is not exhausted.

Furthermore, he does not even deny the contribution of reified

contemplation to social knowledge prior to the development of the Marxist

approach.

But despite these concessions, Lukács suggests the usefulness of social

critique of science where its concepts retain traces of an obsolete mode of

production. Such critique, he argues, “will probably show that some

categories that appear today as ‘eternal,’ as categories directly taken from

nature, e.g. work in physics, are actually historical, determined by the

specific exchange of matter between capitalist society and nature.”59 The mechanical view of nature might be an example.

According to Lukács’s reflexive account, a dereifying process of self-discovery can thus affect natural science. The theorist should become

“conscious that the categories in which he conceives objective reality

(society and nature) are determined by the social being of his present

moment, that they are only mental summations of this objective reality.

(Categories are ‘forms of existence, conditions of existence’—Marx.)” 60

But the outcome of such dereification of nature is quite different from the

dereification of society. Since nature as a system or totality does not depend

on the unconsciousness of the practices in which it is understood, self-

consciousness does not overthrow its reified form of objectivity although

some results of scientific research may indeed be overthrown.

Conceivably, the accumulation of new theories arising from an

ideology-critique of science could lead to a new science. But little can be

said of such a new science in this transitional period. Lukács writes that

“Just how deeply the historically changing, therefore historically ephemeral

process of capitalist exchange of matter with nature determines our present

knowledge of nature, and where those categories that determine the

metabolic exchange of any society with nature begin, are questions for

individual research.” 61

The dereification of scientific knowledge would not transform nature

into a human product in the usual ontic sense of the term. Insofar as the

self-critique of science effects scientific change, it issues in a new positing

of “objective nature” indeed, the hallmark of scientific advance is that it

gives access to a law that resists modification through self-consciousness.

The reified dimension of nature on which natural science is based cannot be

cancelled by a historical progress that would reveal its truths as human

activity.

Lukács seems to be arguing two apparently contradictory points: social

critique shows that the form of objectivity of nature is historically bound,

while scientific research establishes the transcendence of particular facts

and theories, at least while they prevail. The conceptual framework in terms

of which we identify nature is socially contingent, but knowledge of nature

refers to objects independent of us, that is, to presuppositions and not

results of our practices. The success of a scientific fact in escaping critique

need not be eternal to serve the purpose of the argument. Nature is a

moving target; as Marcuse says, “nature is not a manifestation of ‘spirit,’

but rather its essential limit.”62 And the position of that limit changes in

history. Scientific knowledge is always already subject in principle if not in present practice to a critique that would refute particular results while

establishing new ones as the new “nature itself.”

These two points seem incompatible because we assume that if our

conception of nature in general is socially conditioned, then all the results

of research carry the stigma of a social origin and cannot yield knowledge

of an independent reality. But Lukács argues that it is senseless to conclude

from a social critique of the general concept of nature that particular results

are merely relative. This would be to confuse social theory with research

and to make of the former a “systematic locus” of absolute knowledge.

Finite knowledge is bound to a context. In the context of research, critique

does not stand alone but is a moment in a process leading to a new posit of

reality. Removed from that context, it cannot serve in a general argument

for relativism or the existence of the thing-in-itself. Modern science knows

the truth of nature in the only meaningful sense of the word. This is so even

though the conceptual framework within which nature is known is reified,

hence conceived in a socially relative perspective on the world.63

I think this is what Lukács means in the passage cited above by the need

for “individual research” into the extent of social determination, in

opposition, presumably, to general speculation. This is a Lukácsian version

of the finite horizon Marx deployed in 1844 to block the cosmological

argument, as we saw in Chapter 3. In support of his position Lukács refers to Hegel’s argument according to which the Kantian thing-in-itself is a pure

thought object, an abstraction from all concrete existence. As such it cannot

be the ultimate reality because it depends on the subject of the process of

abstraction.

Under the finite horizon, history, not nature or the thing-in-itself, is

ultimate reality. The reification of nature is a moment of the historical

process in which the experience, knowledge and technical control of nature

develop. The social totality contains a reified moment—nature—that is not

cancelled by self-consciousness, but which rather opens a realm of

irreducible facts and theories. Nature may not be dereified by human

practice on the same terms as society, but its participation in the dialectic

reveals it to be fundamentally historical.

It is time to draw the conclusions of this argument. The concepts of

dereification and subject-object identity do not belong to a Fichtean

metaphysics. These concepts are essentially methodological and not

substantive. This is shown by Lukács’s constant emphasis on the

importance of methodology. Indeed, on the first page of History and Class

Consciousness, he claims that Marxist “orthodoxy refers exclusively to

method.”64 As Gillian Rose puts a similar point, “Lukács turned … the logic of constitutive principles, away from a logic of identity in the

direction of a theory of historical mediation.”65 He means for us to take him literally when he describes “proletarian thought,” i.e., Marxism, his own

theory, as “a theory of practice that only gradually transforms itself into a

practical theory that overturns the real world.”66

As we saw in the case of the social application of the theory of

dialectical rationality, this position is incompatible with the notion that

reification characterizes only the bourgeois era. Given the internal link

between reification and dialectics in the concept of mediation, it is

impossible to eliminate the former without also eliminating the latter.

Insofar as the truth is discovered dialectically, reification is a necessary

moment in the process of discovery. Reification is, in sum, not the

“opposite” of dialectics, but a moment in it. “For, if concepts are only the

intellectual forms of historical realities then these forms, one-sided, abstract

and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine aspects of it …

Insofar as the ‘false’ is an aspect of the ‘true’ it is both ‘false’ and ‘non-

false.’”67

What may nevertheless change radically in the course of history is the

position of the reified moment in the totality to which it belongs. István

Mészáros writes, “Granting that it is unthinkable to supersede … all

possible dangers and potentials of reification is fully compatible with

conceiving ‘Aufhebung’ as a succession of social enterprises of which the

later is less … alienation-ridden than the preceding one.” 68 Lukács’s argument for a historically self-conscious science is an example of such an

advance.

METHODOLOGICAL UNIVERSALISM

Modern thought claims universality for its science by contrast with

culture that is relative to a local situation, a history. Science achieves

universality by transcending such contingencies. The crisis of modern

knowledge arises when it too is situated historically. This relativistic turn is

often traced to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. As we saw in Chapter 3, it

forbids a naïve acceptance of the discontinuity between knowledge and culture. This makes it difficult to distinguish the claims to truth of modern

science from similar claims of any other “ethnoscience” in any other

culture.69 This raises important questions about the global impact of the West that can be addressed with Lukács’s concepts of reification and

dereification, although he himself did not so address them.

Relativism seems to imply that the global triumph of Western science

cannot claim to be based on epistemological superiority but exclusively on

military supremacy. But this is not the whole story. The success of Western

modernity is not merely military but depends on its critical force as well. It

is at that level that something like the universality of modernity can be

defended. But as Lukács argues, this universality is fraught with an internal

contradiction. It suffers a tension between two forms of knowledge, a

reifying and a dereifying form. Dereification too is the basis of a modern

way of knowing. It too is a critical method, although it operates in very

different ways and circumstances from science. The tension between them

reflects the imbrication of nature and history, the full complexity of which

is first appreciated by the Frankfurt School.

It is the critical method of science and not an absolute truth content that

qualifies it as universal. In one sense, this is obvious since no scientist

claims to possess the absolute truth and one and all expect the current

scientific representation of nature to be overthrown in some future scientific

revolution. Most scientists would say the scientific universal is the method

of observation, experiment, and specific types of abstraction such as

quantitative measurement and calculation. Understood epistemologically,

these features of modern science organize the discovery of “truths,” or at

least what scientists use for truths while they last. But understood in

ontological terms, something very different is involved, not the construction

of a more or less true representation but the constitution of a specific object,

the modern concept of nature. The universality of modern science lies in

this process of ontological construction, not in any particular truth.

The natural scientific idea of nature systematically negates lived

experience; this is the downfall of Bacon’s idols. It strips away the

embodied and imaginative relation to the objects of experience central to all

non-modern forms of knowing, to all cultures. This negation enters

experience as disenchantment and authorizes the exploitation of nature as

mere raw material. To the extent that modern societies realize this negation

in their mentalities and institutions, they undermine their own basis in the natural world with the consequences we now recognize as impending

environmental catastrophe. This has been the tendency of Western culture

for several centuries and it is now a global tendency.

Reification and dereification are characterized by their destructive

relation to immediate experience and the cultures that arise from it. It is

their negativity that ensures their universality. They do not posit absolute

truths, but their relative truths flow from the application of methods that

know no limits. Although they arise in the capitalist West, they are capable

of undermining all cultures all over the world. This conception of modern

knowledge suggests an explanation for the success of science in displacing

other knowledge traditions as well as an account of the corrective force of

dereifying historical knowledge.

Just as the nature of modern science emerges through the negation of

the lived experience of nature in the West, so it can negate other

experiences of nature, other ontologies, and establish its supremacy on a

global scale. The effectiveness of its technology is especially persuasive,

but the nature it “conquers” is tailored to culturally relative expectations

and denies many aspects of nature more adequately represented in other

cultures and in our own past.

Lukács argues for the congruence of the scientific-technical reification

of experience and capitalism. As science undermines the lived experience

of nature, so the market erodes customs and traditions. Together they

project certain basic features of Western culture globally while opening up

the entire planet to exploitation. The cultural bias of technology is tied up

with capitalist development that mobilizes a similar negative force through

the market. I explain this culturally specific aspect of Western universalism

in the next chapter in terms of the concept of “formal bias.”

The process of disenchantment provokes counter-tendencies that reveal

its bias. The universality of science and technology meets a limit in the

harm that goes along with capitalist development, most obvious today from

such problems as the intensive exploitation of factory labor, massive

pollution, and unprecedented urban squalor. These side effects of progress

first appear in the condition of the proletariat in Western capitalism but

today are found in exaggerated forms in the developing world.

Lukács shows that Marxism is based on the critical relation of the

proletariat to its reduction to wage labor. This reduction negates the lived

experience of the working class under capitalism. The reifying logic of scientific-technical rationality here applies beyond nature to human society.

What in relation to nature was the construction of the abstract object of

scientific rationality becomes in social terms the imposition of an abstract

economic form on living human beings.

Resistance to this imposition reveals society as a unique object with a

different structure from nature. It is composed of individuals possessed of

consciousness and will. The universal destructiveness of reification is now

met with another universal, the struggle to reestablish the human dimension

of experience cancelled by reification. And like natural science, the

dereifying theory of society constructs an object through specific

methodological procedures. Lukács summarizes these procedures as

knowledge of the totality, that is, as the reduction of every apparently

substantial social object to its functional relation to the whole of society and

to the practices that support that relation. Marxism exemplifies this

methodology.

The dereifying reduction Marxism applies to capitalism has the

paradoxical effect of validating aspects of the lived experience of the

working class. Capitalist forms are contrasted with the social content on

which they are imposed. The effect of reification is thereby cancelled and

transcended. The immediacy of capitalist experience is overcome just as

capitalism itself overcame the immediacy of the lived experience on which

it was imposed. Now lived experience returns not as a narrow local culture,

a tradition, but as a futural demand for the material conditions of a decent

life. This demand may be inflected culturally, but such basic elements as

adequate sustenance, shelter, medical care, education, dignity and respect,

opportunities to develop and apply capacities, qualify it as relatively

universal, at least in a modern or modernizing context. These are, so to

speak, the “primary qualities” of a humane world. Like science, technology,

and capitalism, dereification can travel wherever they intrude. This is the

methodological basis of Marxist universalism.

LUKÁCS’S “CONSTRUCTIVISM”: OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

Many of the issues discussed in this chapter receive a very different

treatment in a very different language in recent science and technology

studies. In this concluding section I will formulate and respond to some of

the objections a constructivist scholar might address to my presentation of

Lukács’s views on science. 70 While I do not claim that Lukács anticipates constructivism, I do believe he is closer to it than might seem possible on a

superficial reading.

Objection 1. It is confusing to qualify the objects of natural science as

“really” or “essentially” reified since reification is an illusion that hides the social processes underlying all objects, whether natural or social. Like

social objects, natural objects are grounded in the practical activities in

which they are constructed. They have a processual character as

intrinsically bound up with these activities. Distinguishing them from social

processes as essentially reified confuses reification with objectivity.

It is true that “real” in the usual sense contrasts with illusion and

certainly reification is illusory in at least one aspect. However, the sense in

which the nature of natural science is really reified is not this usual one. We

saw in Chapter 5 that reification is neither a mental state nor a thing but is the thing-like appearance of the system of practice. Reification is “real” to

the extent that this appearance has real consequences. The difference

between the reification of nature and society has to do with these

consequences.

Lukács accepts that there are several ways of being an object and many

kinds of objectivity that are not reified. Reification is only one way with a

very specific meaning. It is not identical with objectivity in general. A

reified object is one that has the form of an independent fact governed by

laws. All four terms are important. A reified object has a form in the sense

that it is measurable and isolable. As we saw in Chapter 4, factuality is not the only such form, but is a specific way in which objects present

themselves. A reified object is governed by laws in the sense that a rule can

be found explaining its motion, whether it be a natural law or the logic of a

system of social interactions. Its apparent independence means that

whatever social processes were involved in its institution are occluded. To

argue that certain types of objects are “really” or “essentially” reified does

not mean that no such processes underlie their existence, but that their

reified form is unalterable in practice. In such cases it is possible to reveal

the process of reification of the object theoretically but with no effect on the

object itself. This distinguishes natural scientific objects, which are not

undermined by learning how they were “discovered,” from certain social

objects that cannot withstand self-consciousness.

Objection 2. The main feature of reification is the unconsciousness of the practices in which objects are constituted. Dereification consists in the

discovery of the constituting practices. Were scientists to become conscious

of the constructive role of their practices science would be dereified even

without refuting any specific theory. Such a dereification would have a

general transformative impact on research.

This is not quite Lukács’s understanding of reification. While it is true

that unconsciousness of reifying practices is a necessary condition for the

constitution of reified social objects, these objects are dereified not simply

in the knowledge of the practices but in the effects of that knowledge on the

practices. Knowledge of nature simply does not respond to self-

consciousness. In fact scientists are fully aware of the practices in which

they construct their objects without that changing the nature of the objects

one iota. This is the meaning of the constructivist methodological rule:

“follow the actors.” Such knowledge is not a dereification in the full sense

since scientists continue to represent nature as a factual, law-governed

realm independent of the observer. To cease to do so and to tie research to

its specific practical basis would undermine the knowledge claim

characteristic of science. It would be inconsistent with the constructivist

analysis itself because it would systematically re-modalize and localize

factual propositions laboriously constructed as independent of the observer

and universally valid regardless of local context.71

Objection 3. These arguments set up all sorts of dualisms, a dualism of

knowledge of objects and objects “in themselves,” a dualism of scientific

nature and nature in everyday experience, and a dualism of nature and

society. Are these defensible claims?

Are objects identical with our knowledge of them since we have no

other access to them? Claiming the contrary seems to imply a god’s-eye

view from nowhere. But this radical constructivist notion is politically

dangerous as it leaves no grounds for contesting the current state of

knowledge in the name of the way things “really” are. Knowledge of

objects and objects themselves can be distinguished without assuming an

absolute observer in terms of the incompleteness of all human knowledge.

We do not need to know what things are independent of our knowledge of

them to know that we do not know them completely and to suspect that we

do not even know them correctly.

How can the reified nature of natural science be both independent of the

observer and only one perspective from which to perceive nature, alongside

another perspective that would be that of everyday experience? Is a nature

that is relative to a perspective truly independent? Operational definitions

are necessary here to block metaphysical assumptions. On Lukács’s terms,

to say that the nature of natural science is independent of the observer is to

say no more than that it is not transformed by self-consciousness, i.e., by

knowledge of the practices in which it is constituted. This is compatible

with the relativity of scientific nature to a specific perspective.

How can we distinguish essentially reified nature from the contingent

reification of society given the imbrication of society and nature in

technology? It is important to bear in mind that the reified “nature” in

question is that of natural science, not the nature we directly experience in

the lifeworld. The natural scientific concept of nature is an abstract object

of theoretical representation, not a concrete reality. Observation and

experiment and the technology employed in research all serve in the

construction of such a representation. Its reification is essential because

natural science casts everything into the form of factuality in order to know

it. The knowledge associated with technology, such as engineering

knowledge, is also reified. But actual technologies are more complex than

these theoretical representations. They belong to the lifeworld and therefore

to society. Although they have a reified aspect, they are not essentially

reified.

Objection 4. Lukács claims that scientific and technical practice are

“contemplative” rather than transformative. This is paradoxical since

nothing has changed the world more than science and technology. Marx’s

notion of transformative practice is unalienated labor in which nature and

society mediate each other mutually, not a purely social self-consciousness

distinct from nature.

Lukács’s critique of what he calls “contemplative” practice concerns

modern technical control in accordance with reified law. Science and

technology are contemplative in the sense that they alter only superficial

features and not the “law” of the object. They presuppose that law as the

basis from which to modify those features. In the case of action on nature,

this is inevitable. One cannot act on the laws of nature, only discover and

use them to act on the objects they govern. In the case of society, the matter

stands differently. The “laws” of social interaction that govern systems of

practice such as the market can be changed by the coordinated efforts of the individuals who enact them. This is “transforming practice.”

Marx’s concept of unalienated labor is also transformative, but this is

not the only kind of transformation he recognized. Revolution is also

transformative and this is what Lukács attempts to explain with his theory

of reification and dereification. But, admittedly, the relation between the

two types of transformative practice is complicated. What Lukács

understands by dereification extends in principle to the labor process and

technological artifacts, but he does not explain how. To do so he would

have to distinguish between two related dimensions of work and technical

artifacts, their social meaning and the control of nature they make possible.

These two dimensions are confounded under capitalism but they must be

distinguishable if socialism is to overcome reification.72

1 HCC, xxiii.

2 I discuss Marcuse’s interpretation of this aspect of Hegel’s Logic in Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 62–5.

3 See John Hoffman, Marxism and the Theory of Praxis (New York: International, 1975). There are also several Althusserian critiques of Lukács in English which belong to the same general tendency. See Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Marxism of the Early Lukács: An Evaluation,” New Left Review, No. 70 (1971), 27–64; and John Horton and Fari Filsoufi, “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in Theory and Method,” The Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. VII, No. 1 (1977). Both these articles mistakenly identify Lukács’s turn to “orthodoxy” with the writing of his little book on Lenin in 1924, even though several major essays developing the viewpoint expressed in History and Class Consciousness are written in the years that follow. The question of political Leninism was simply not the touchstone of philosophical “orthodoxy” for Lukács that these critics make it out to be. (See the Appendix to this book.)

4 HCC, 24 n6.

5 Quoted in Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 146.

6 Abram Deborin, “Lukács und seine Kritik des Marxismus,” in Abram Deborin and Nikolai Bucharin, Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp: 1968), 192.

7 Ibid., 192.

8 Ibid., 214.

9 Ibid., 218.

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 66. See the

Appendix for further discussion of this concept.

11 HCC, 51.

12 Ibid., xxxvi.

13 Ibid., xxiii.

14 For a balanced discussion of this commonplace charge, see Andrew Arato, “Lukács’s Theory of Reification,” Telos, No. 11 (1972), 42–3.

15 Adorno was a disappointed admirer. This may explain some uncharitable readings. See Detlev Clausen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 84.

16 See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 190–1. For my critique of Adorno’s critique of Lukács, see Andrew Feenberg, “Reification and Its Critics,” in M. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011), 172–94.

17 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

18 Ibid., 374.

19 HCC, 12.

20 Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 27; Cf. Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1981), 124–32. For my critique of Honneth’s critique of Lukács, see Andrew Feenberg, “Rethinking Reification: On Axel Honneth’s Reading of Lukács,” in T. Bewes and T. Hall, ed., The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: New Essays on the Social, Political and Aesthetic Theory of Georg Lukács (New York: Continuum, 2011), 101–20.

21 HCC, 19 (translation modified).

22 Ibid., 123.

23 Tom Rockmore, “Lukács and Marx after Marxism,” in Thompson, Georg Lukács Reconsidered, 46–8.

24 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes (London: New Left Books, 1971), 70. Jindřich Zelený carries the misunderstanding still further, writing that Lukács interprets Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach to call for “a reduction of all reality to practical human activity.” See Jindřich Zelený, Die Wissenschaftslogik bei Marx und Das Kapital (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968), 302.

25 Steven Vogel finds this Fichtean interpretation superior to Lukács’s own hesitations on the question of nature. See his Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1996), 31 and 180n.

26 HCC, 234 (translation modified). Cf. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 410.

27 Andrew Arato argues for a similar conclusion in “Lukács’s Theory of Reification,” 41–2.

Lukács insists on this point in A Defence of History and Class Consiousness, 97.

28 Ibid., 97.

29 HCC, 131.

30 Ibid., 207.

31 See Lucio Colletti, Il Marxismo e Hegel (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1969), 317–56. This chapter is titled, significantly, “Da Bergson a Lukács.”

32 HCC, 110.

33 Ibid., 10. Stedman Jones quotes part of the second sentence of this passage to prove Lukács’s hostility to natural scientific method in general (“The Marxism of the Early Lukács: An Evaluation,”

20). Such crudely selective use of quotations is evidently compatible with the “scientific” objectivity Jones boosts in his article!

34 Lucien Goldmann, Sciences Humaines et Philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1952), 17.

35 Vogel, Against Nature, 29.

36 For an example of this approach, see Giuseppe Bedeschi, Alienazione e Feticismo nel Pensiero di Marx (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1968), 177–207.

37 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 173.

38 This is so notwithstanding Habermas’s important discussion of the efficacy of therapeutic self-reflection in Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), Chapter 10, especially 231ff.

39 HCC, 163.

40 Ibid., 199.

41 Ibid., 187.

42 Ibid., 21.

43 Ibid., 142.

44 Ibid., 207.

45 Ibid., 6.

46 Ibid., 135.

47 Ibid., 89, 97–8.

48 Paul Dumouchel, “Systèmes sociaux et cognition,” in Introduction aux sciences cognitives, ed.

D. Andler (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

49 HCC, 193.

50 Michael Löwy discusses possible reasons for Lukács’s failure to finish and publish this interesting text in “Revolutionary Dialectics against ‘Tailism’: Lukács’s Answer to the Criticisms of History and Class Consciousness,” in Thompson, Georg Lukács Reconsidered, 66.

51 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 95. “Rudas would appear to understand objective as meaning the opposite of socially determined” (Ibid., 102).

52 Frederick Engels, “Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 605.

53 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consiousness, 117. The original passage is found in Georg Lukács, Chvostismus und Dialektik (Budapest: Aron Verlag, 1996), 63.

54 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consiousness, 118. The original passage is found in Lukács, Chvostismus und Dialektik, 64.

55 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 418.

56 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans.

and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 163.

57 Ibid., 160.

58 Ibid., 164.

59 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 131.

60 Ibid., 105.

61 Ibid., 131.

62 Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 69.

63 Similarly, the fact that one sees an object from a contingent perspective does not generally refute propositions about what is so seen. Husserl explained this strikingly, commenting on the perspectival character of vision. “Thus we see that not only for us human beings, but also for God—

as the ideal representative of absolute knowledge—whatever has the character of a spatial thing, is intuitable only through appearances, wherein it is given, and indeed must be given, as changing

‘perspectively’ in varied and yet determined ways, and thereby presented in changing ‘orientations.’”

Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. B. Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 386.

64 HCC, 1.

65 Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 28–9.

66 HCC, 205.

67 Ibid., xlvi–xlvii.

68 István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 249.

69 Philippe Descola calls this a “relative universalism.” For Descola’s conception, see his Lécologie des autres: L’anthropologie et la question de la nature (Versailles: Editions Quae, 2011).

For a discussion of Descola’s theory, see Andrew Feenberg, “Reflections on Lécologie des autres: L

‘anthropologie et la question de la nature, by Philippe Descola,” available at

www.journaldumauss.net. For texts challenging a Eurocentric concept of science, see Sandra Harding, ed., The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).

70 With thanks to Steven Vogel whose comments on this chapter helped me to write this section.

71 This is not to deny that scientific facts can be re-modalized under specific circumstances. It is the specificity of the circumstances that is important. A general re-modalization on philosophical or sociological grounds would devalue scientific knowledge. Bruno Latour’s discussions of modality have led to such a relativistic conclusion, but he himself rejects it in ways too complicated to discuss here. See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 296. For a critical discussion of Latour’s approach, see Hans Radder, The World Observed / The World Conceived (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), Chapter 14.

72 I refer readers to my formulation of the critical theory of technology that attempts to fill in this lacuna in the theory. See Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2002), Chapter 7.

CHAPTER SEVEN

From Lukács to the Frankfurt School

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Among many other influences, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School

were inspired by the philosophy of praxis as they discovered it in the early

work of Marx and Lukács. Marx’s concept of nature and Lukács’s theory of

reification are fundamental to the thinking of Horkheimer, Adorno, and

Marcuse. 1 The distinction between traditional and critical theory flows directly from the revival of dialectics in the work of Lukács, Korsch, Bloch,

and others writing in the early 1920s.

There is a deeper connection than simple influence between the

Frankfurt School and the philosophy of praxis. We have seen that Marx and

Lukács engage certain themes that hang together in a specific figure of

thought. At its core is the metacritique of philosophy, the notion that the

typical binary oppositions of the tradition such as the split between subject

and object, fact and value, reason and life, constitute antinomies that

depend ultimately on the structure of society and that can be overcome

through social change. This turn away from philosophical speculation

toward action implies an absolute historicism without which social change

would not have ontological significance. “Absolute” in this context means

all-embracing. Nature is thus incorporated into history by one or another

conceptual means. All these themes reappear in the Frankfurt School,

elaborated in original ways.

It is not necessary to assume the direct influence of History and Class

Consciousness, although that can by no means be excluded. The Frankfurt

School develops its characteristic positions in opposition to both Soviet

“dialectical materialism” and Western academic philosophy. In pursuing

this project, it simply takes for granted many of the themes explored by

Lukács, Bloch, and Korsch, themes that are also found in texts of the early

Marx the significance of which becomes clear with the publication in 1932

of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

In the judgment of the Frankfurt School, Lukács’s version of the

philosophy of praxis fails in its main project, the Aufhebung of philosophy

in an identical subject-object. This judgment is sometimes based on simple

misinterpretation. This is especially clear in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics,

which addresses an obvious straw man, as I argued in the previous chapter.

Apart from interpretive failure, there are deeper reasons behind the rejection

of Lukács’s thought. Lukács shares the ambition of classical German

philosophy to construct a universal rationalism, although he intends to reach

that goal through social theory rather than through philosophical

speculation. This ambition appears excessive and dangerous to the

philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

The very idea of a universal rationalism seems obviously to overreach

the possibilities of finite human understanding. And yet there are risks in

accepting the obvious in this case, for the irrational does not simply stay in

its cognitive place as the unknown X. It invariably intrudes on practical life

under the guise of religion, tradition, racist or nationalist prejudice, even a

Führer. The Enlightenment attempted to conjure away such threats with a

rationalism that degenerates, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, into a

totalitarian instrumentalism entwined with other irrational forces it cannot

control. Lukács’s theory of reification is a first critique of the

instrumentalist degeneration Horkheimer and Adorno denounce. His

solution is a non-instrumental practice that transforms social meanings from

within, a practical version of immanent critique. This practice is supposed

to overcome the irrationality of existence, “the indifference of form and

content.” But once it fails, the problem of rationalism reappears in all its

tragic glory.

The Frankfurt philosophers reject rationalism in the mutilated form in

which it has come down to them. They see in Lukács’s theory a

continuation of the naïve productivist attitude toward nature characteristic

of both capitalist society and traditional Marxism. They put the domination

of nature on the Marxist agenda for the first time, radicalizing the Marxist

critique of science and technology that begins in Lukács but that he does

not carry through to its logical conclusion.

Lukács addresses the problem of social domination. The concrete

content that breaks out of the conceptual straitjacket of reification is the

laboring human being, not nature. For the Frankfurt School this is no minor omission. They argue that the central issue of the twentieth century is the

domination of nature. This realization requires a certain humility. As a

natural being, the conqueror of nature is himself among the conquered.

Marx promises a completely humanized nature but that project culminates

in the atomic bomb, not utopia. Lukács promises a “totality” in which

objectivity is transparent to the social subject, but the outcome is

totalitarianism. Critical Theory struggles against these utopian promises.2

The rejection of Lukács’s version of the philosophy of practice is also

motivated by the breakdown of the unity of theory and practice, that is, the

idealized relation of Marxism to the proletariat.3 Theory and practice can only be united where the crisis tendencies identified by Marxism open a

breach in the reified forms, and where the proletariat enters that breach.

Lukács believes in this prospect in the early 1920s. He notes that the

proletariat is “free” to reject its own revolutionary potential, but he shares

the optimism of the post–World War I revolutionary upsurge. Furthermore,

he is confident that the economic laws of capitalism will continually

reproduce revolutionary conditions even if this upsurge fails. The Frankfurt

School forms later, at a time when the unity of theory and practice is

broken. The revolution is an abstract possibility rather than a real force—so

the Frankfurt School philosophers concluded, at first tentatively and then,

during and after World War II, more and more unreservedly. With the

breakdown of revolutionary expectations, Lukács’s rationalism appears as

an illusion entertained in an exceptional historical moment.

If Lukács failed to anticipate the breakdown of the unity of theory and

practice, this is due not only to historical circumstances but to the rather

small place occupied by technology and social psychology in his argument.

For obvious reasons he lacks a media theory. He does note the reifying

consequences of mechanization briefly and mentions the reification of the

subjectivity of journalists and other middle-class employees. While

conceding that immediate experience is reified for all classes in capitalist

society, he considers workers partially exempt due to the mechanical nature

of their labor. This is more or less the sum total of his dealings with the

factors the Frankfurt School holds responsible for the failure of the

revolution.

Lukács argues that the imposition of a narrow reified rationality is met

by resistance from below. This dialectic institutes another, higher form of

rationality. The Frankfurt School by contrast focuses on the consequences

of the failure of resistance and the regressive forms of irrationality

associated with it. The unifying theme of its analysis is the growing power

of technology to control the social and natural worlds in an increasingly

exploitative pattern signified by the concept of “domination.” Freudian

ideas about repression and character structure, new approaches to

authoritarianism and a radical critique of the psychic impact of

regimentation at work, abundance of consumer goods, media propaganda,

and so on, explain the effectiveness of the new system.

By the time he finally realizes that the revolution is not about to

overtake the advanced countries of Europe but will remain confined to

Russia for a long time to come, Lukács reasons about politics in Leninist

terms. He can no longer draw on the resources of his earlier work to deal

with the new problems emerging in advanced societies. As a result, he does

not elaborate an independent theory of the failure of the revolution in the

West.

Of course, the theory of reification can be deployed for this purpose,

and that is precisely what the Frankfurt School does. It is in recognition of

this that Adorno calls Lukács’s early book “important” despite his harsh

critique, and elsewhere praises him as “the first dialectical materialist to

apply the category of reification systematically to philosophy.” 4 In addressing the role of reification in the failure of the revolution the

Frankfurt School makes a definite advance.

The loss of revolutionary prospects has philosophical as well as political

implications. According to Lukács’s metacritique, the tension between the

reified form of the society and its living human content is not only social

but also appears in classical German philosophy as a fundamental and

unsurpassable irrationality, signified by the concept of the thing-in-itself.

Lukács’s resolution of this tension depends on the unity of theory and

practice. To the extent that the Frankfurt School accepts Lukács’s

metacritique, its rejection of his solution reverberates through every level of

its approach, from political theory to ontology.

The decisive turning point for the Frankfurt School comes with

Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book they

concede the collapse of socialist hopes. The total reification of

consciousness, which Lukács had attributed to the bourgeoisie and the

middle strata, now extends to the working class as well. Instrumental reason

erodes everyday experience and replaces a rich and complex relation to reality with simple manipulation. No meaningful world is possible

anymore. The principle of life that in Lukács undermined the reified forms

has been cancelled in a mechanistic universe.

The redemptive promise of rationality no longer lies in the socialist

future but is reconstructed around the role of reflection in recognizing the

limits of human technical powers over both inner and outer nature.

“Nature” now stands in for the life process Lukács identified with the

proletariat. However, this nature is not a positive force but names what is

repressed by technological domination. It is the object of a reflective

retrieval aimed at bounding technology and the competitive forces that

deploy it in order to allow other dimensions of existence to flourish.

Respect for these other dimensions is tied up with compassion, solidarity,

and happiness.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later writings, this critique

of instrumentalism does not quite culminate in a positive concept of

rationality capable of replacing the reified one. Negative dialectics is not

such a concept. It does not resolve the antinomies but rather identifies them

as such and suspends all premature resolutions. It is the logic of immanent

critique and not a constructive alternative.5 For the alternative implied by the critique to emerge, a social change would be required that Adorno

neither describes nor predicts. But Adorno hints tantalizingly at more than

this. A society reconciled with nature would be a utopia, albeit an unusual

one. This utopia is not an alternative rational plan of existence but can only

be indicated negatively, as not this or that contemporary horror. As Adorno

writes, “the true thing determines itself via the false thing.”6

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man continues this argument while

attempting to construct a positive notion of dialectical rationality. The

modern differentiation of imagination from instrumental rationality denies

the potentialities of people and things. Those potentialities can be grasped

imaginatively and incorporated into a new concept of reason. Marcuse

draws on Marx’s Manuscripts for the idea of lived nature, a Marxist version

of the phenomenological Lebenswelt, which he contrasts with the stripped-

down quantified nature of science and technology. Following the early

Marx, Marcuse ontologizes the human relation to this lived nature. Reality

is not the indifferent object of an abstract cognitive subject, but confronts

the human subject as a subject in its own right.

The distance between this version of the Frankfurt School approach and

the early Marx and Lukács is not so great. In place of Adorno’s negative

utopia, Marcuse attempts to specify the broad outlines of a future

alternative. The idea of potentiality is developed in Hegelian terms as the

determinate negation of the capitalist system. It remains fairly abstract at

first but acquires content through the struggles of the New Left. Nature now

appears not just negatively as the repressed, but concretely as the natural

environment and in expressions of the human needs for peace, beauty,

meaning, and love. At this point Marcuse’s theory shows itself to be an

original version of the philosophy of praxis. Through a long detour, the

Frankfurt School returns to its sources.

In this chapter and the next I will trace these developments, weaving

back and forth between the negative dialectics of Adorno and Marcuse’s

“two-dimensional” ontology. This chapter will begin by considering some

implications of the concepts of nature and rationality in Horkheimer and

Adorno and conclude with considerations on the political impasse they

reach. Chapter 8 then shows how phenomenological themes in Marcuse’s theory of experience led him to a far more positive evaluation of utopian

prospects. In conclusion I will show how the idea of the liberation of nature

figures in the philosophy of praxis of the Frankfurt School. Along the way I

will develop several themes from my own critical theory of technology that

address deficiencies in the original Frankfurt School approach.

FORMS OF RATIONALITY

The path from Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism and alienation

through Lukács’s theory of reification to the Frankfurt School’s critique of

domination is a winding one but it must be followed to understand the fate

of the philosophy of praxis. Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism and

alienation depend on each other in important ways. They intersect in the

concept of wage labor, the transformation of work into a market good. This

transformation awaits the generalization of commodity exchange that is

sharply restricted in precapitalist societies to exclude most land and labor.

The wage system sets in motion the process leading to the deskilling and

mechanization of labor. Through that process capitalism develops a

technology uniquely suited to its requirements. That technology reduces the

worker to an appendage of the machine.

I have shown earlier that Lukács’s metacritique of reified rationality invokes both components of Marx’s theory. He argues that the commodity

form is the model of all forms of subjectivity and objectivity in capitalist

society, and also claims that the relation of the worker to the machine

realizes that form in the technical subject–object relation. Accordingly,

reified rationality has two aspects: the quantitative or formal laws under

which things are grasped, and the reduction of the subject of action to a

manipulator of things in accordance with those laws. Each aspect derives

from one or the other component of Marx’s theory, abstraction from

commodity fetishism and technical subjectivity from alienation. Lukács’s

metacritique of reified rationality grounds a dialectical alternative.

Under the influence of Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, the philosophers of

the Frankfurt School develop a similar conception of dialectics. However,

their emphasis is different. Marx and Lukács were primarily interested in

the domination of human beings by the capitalist system. But neither

realized that insofar as the dominated human being is reduced to a natural

object, all of nature is implicated in the social critique. This is the chiasmus

through which the Frankfurt School transforms Marxism into a critique of

the domination of nature. Its reformulation of Marxism thus goes beyond

the critique of capitalism to take in the very concept of progress, understood

as the “conquest of nature.”

There are some subtle and some not-so-subtle differences in the

formulations of this theme in the Frankfurt School. This is not an obstacle

to broad-brush treatments, but it makes for difficulties in characterizing its

position with precision. To begin, here is a sketch of some of the

commonalities based primarily on Horkheimer’s early book, Eclipse of

Reason. 7

Horkheimer’s metacritique of rationality resembles Weber’s distinction

between formal and substantive rationality. Reason is not “pure” but is

always socially embedded in one of two ways. Substantive rationality,

which Horkheimer calls “objective reason,” incorporates a goal in its

structure. It is not merely a means but also includes an “objectively” valid

end. At the origin, that end is simple self-preservation. Later, religion and

culture supply premodern societies with a variety of such ends, but their

claims are no longer convincing. In modern society rational means are

value-free. All that remains to guide their application is the struggle for

existence, which eliminates all restraint on competition and on the

exploitation of nature. And since human beings are natural beings, they, too, fall victim to their own technology. Horkheimer introduces the concept of

“subjective reason” to describe the instrumental rationality of a system of

pure means, without a substantive end beyond the increase in its own power

and range.

Modernity is characterized by the complete triumph of subjective

rationality and the consequent “catastrophe of Enlightenment,” the

disappointed hope in reason. The conflicts of human beings and societies

pursuing their individual and national self-preservation with the tools of

modern technology now threaten their survival as much as raw nature ever

did. Furthermore, technical progress goes along with increasing

psychological repression. Control of inner nature is the condition of

effective control of outer nature. Under the conditions of class society both

forms of control overshoot their mark, producing individual and social

pathologies.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno protest the

untrammeled pursuit of technical power, which they regard as the irrational

core of rationalism.

In class history, the enmity of the self to sacrifice implied a sacrifice of the self, inasmuch as it was paid for by a denial of nature in man for the sake of domination over non-human nature and over other men. This very denial, the nucleus of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality: with the denial of nature in man not merely the telos of outward control of nature but the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged. As soon as man discards his awareness that he himself is nature, all the aims for which he keeps himself alive—social progress, the intensification of all his material and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself—are nullified, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which under late capitalism is tantamount to open insanity, is already perceptible in the prehistory of subjectivity. 8

Horkheimer argues that only a generalization of the will to self-

preservation can save humanity from self-destruction. This requires a

reflective recovery of the original meaning and purpose of rationality.

Reason is not truly value-free but has always included a reference to self-

preservation that it can now achieve only as a human goal. Control of the

natural world must be guided by respect for human nature and greater

reliance on the intrinsically life-affirming aspects of natural growth.

Dialectic of Enlightenment develops this argument. The solution the

authors propose is obscurely hinted at in scattered passages throughout the

book. In one such passage, they remark: “By virtue of this mindfulness

[ Eingedenken] of nature in the subject, in whose fulfillment the

acknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden, enlightenment is universally opposed to domination.” 9 And they go on to suggest that domination can only be dissolved when it is recognized as “unreconciled nature.” 10 This unreconciled nature cannot be conquered and absorbed but must be

accepted through a process of reflection. It is such reflective acceptance that

really challenges power. “Dominant practice and its inescapable alternatives

are not threatened by nature, which tends rather to coincide with them, but

by the fact that nature is remembered [ erinnert]” 11

PARTICIPATION IN NATURE

These ideas lie in the background of Adorno’s later work. There his critique

of society unfolds with a slightly different emphasis than Horkheimer’s and

Marcuse’s. The difference corresponds to the emphasis placed on each of

the two sources of the notion of reification in Marx. Adorno draws

primarily on the theory of commodity fetishism. What most impresses him

is the notion that abstract quantity replaces quality as immediate appearance

throughout society. He generalizes this notion as Lukács had proposed as

the universal “model” of all forms of objectivity and subjectivity. But

unlike Lukács, Adorno presents this thesis programmatically as a critique of

rational conceptualization. His term for his approach is “non-identity” of

concept and object. This suggests an irrationalist hostility to concepts, but

Adorno is not an irrationalist.12

A Marxist account of knowledge must begin with the fact that

experience is a socially mediated relation to real objects. Adorno’s

emphasis on mediation responds to the suspicion that experience has been

reified by capitalism. This is one way of interpreting commodity fetishism:

we no longer relate immediately to the reality—the use value—of the object

but to an abstraction projected in the market. What Adorno calls

“identifying thought” imagines that it has understood what it names in

classifying it. In this respect it resembles commodity fetishism that reduces

objects to a narrow and abstract “meaning,” i.e., price. Classification is

unable to penetrate the veil of reification since it ignores the history and

connections of the things classified. Overcoming immediacy is a necessary

theoretical task beyond the scope of mere classification.

Lukács explains reification in terms of the form of objectivity through

which he distinguishes between the rational form and lived content of

experience. Although he does not employ Lukács’s terminology, Adorno’s

concept of identifying thought and its material consequences in the

domination of human beings and nature also describes the formal structure

of reification in tension with its content. Recovering reality therefore

requires recognition of that content, the “priority of the object,” relative to

identifying thought.

The “non-identity” of concept and object is the difference between that

aspect of the particular that can be completely subsumed under a universal

and other aspects that escape simple subsumption. True understanding is

not based on classifying what immediately appears but respects the intrinsic

complexity of its objects. That requires many different conceptual probes

that mediate the multiple aspects of the phenomena. Adorno writes, “By

gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine

the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised

from thinking.”13

Adorno calls this procedure the construction of a “constellation.” This

aspect of Adorno’s theory is roughly similar to the Hegelian concept of the

concrete, as discussed in Chapter 4. Objects are not isolated and self-contained; they are functional components in the social totality. Their truth

is revealed in assemblages of concepts that articulate their various

connections with other objects. These assemblages reveal the object’s

contingency, lack of unity, contradictory nature. They expose its

potentialities as well as its history and thereby achieve a “rational identity”

that adequately represents the object as a mediated whole. The conceptual

mediations articulate real mediations constitutive of the object and driving

its development. In this sense the constellation transcends the givenness of

the thing. However, Adorno also asserts the transcendence of the thing, as

material, with respect to its concept.

What does this puzzling insistence on the material reality of the object

really mean? Adorno surely does not intend to remind us of the simple fact

that things are not thoughts. This is a trivial point Dr. Johnson settled long

ago. 14 But he does insist that thoughts are not things in the sense that there is always more to reality than is reflected in our comprehension of it; every

universal concept, indeed even every constellation of such concepts, is

incomplete.

This ultimate non-identity is not trivial since it signals the

methodological requirements of openness and revisability of knowledge.

However, Adorno goes further than this. It is not just that things are infinitely complex, but that the relatively indeterminate character of reality

is opened to us through our bodily contact with it. This is the properly

materialist dimension of non-identity.

Subjects are not abstract cogitos but embodied persons to whom things

are present physically and not just conceptually. Adorno thus finds himself

in agreement with those passages in Marx’s Manuscripts that emphasize the

sensuous, material reality of both subject and object in opposition to

Hegelian idealism. As Marx says, we are real, natural entities and only as

such can we have real entities as our objects. Experience is most

fundamentally an encounter, not a consciousness.

Adorno conceives materiality as a preconceptual fact. While this sounds

a bit like phenomenology, Adorno rejects both Husserl’s concept of

consciousness and Heidegger’s ontologized version of it as “being-in-the-

world.” He argues that phenomenology is a positivism of the immediate

facts of consciousness. His concept of experience includes aspects slighted

in one way or another by phenomenology, such as the distortion of

immediacy by commodity fetishism, and the potentialities of things

revealed in their constellations. Adorno’s critique is justified to the extent

that phenomenology has no account of these aspects of experience.

Having rejected phenomenology, Adorno does not propose some sort of

causal account of perception à la Locke. The somatic basis of perception is

not reducible to naturalistic physiology. In all such accounts a meaningless

object, which Adorno charges is actually an abstract posit of thought,

somehow produces an effect of meaning in the subject. Rather, one must

start from the actual experience that is a complex of so-called secondary

qualities, meanings, and values along with direct physical interaction with

the world. The experiential encounter with the concrete is not reducible to

knowledge of objective facts, but is qualitative and value-laden. Adorno

claims that all this is “real,” not a subjective illusion or mental projection.

The contribution of the subject to experience is not a source of error but an

essential constituent. Through it alone the objects of experience take on

meaning. In interpreting the meaning of the object in these terms, the

constellation tells us about reality and not about ourselves.

But this interpretation of non-identity pushes the problem back a step;

for now, to make sense of his claim that we are material things interacting

with other material things, we must understand what Adorno means by a

“material thing.” Unfortunately, this aspect of his theory is underdeveloped.

Scholars have suggested a variety of interpretations of his implicit ontology.

For example, Brian O’Connor argues that despite significant differences,

Adorno’s theory has much in common with phenomenology, while J. M.

Bernstein relates it to the concept of material inference.15 But whatever their interpretation, the commentators reaffirm the basic structure of

philosophy of praxis: a deeper unity of subject and object underlies the

historically evolved split due to the reifying dynamics of capitalism and

exemplified by the philosophical tradition. A thinking that restores those

suppressed dimensions can also claim to be rational in a different sense

from instrumentalism. Instrumental rationality arises through abstraction

and reduction of this richer original experience. Its objects come to it with a

history and with connections to other objects that it strips away to arrive at

a quantitative, manipulable remainder. Adorno’s “anthropomorphic”

concept of experience prescinds from the effective disenchantment of the

world by modern scientific-technical thinking.16

However, here the story gets complicated. Although the truth of

sensation is the mutual mediation and interdependence of subject and object

as revealed in the unreduced experience, this truth is ever less accessible in

modern society. The prevailing instrumentalism is not merely theoretical

but affects experience itself. The diminished experience available in this

society constitutes a particularly pernicious real abstraction, one that

endangers rationality itself by reducing it to its purely instrumental aspect.

From this reduction spring the various antinomies of philosophy, the split

between subject and object, value and fact, and so on. The unity (if not

identity) of subject and object in experience is blocked by a social

phenomenon, the disenchantment process, and can thus only be recovered

through social change. The pattern established in this analysis of experience

is the familiar one of philosophy of praxis: desublimation of the

philosophical categories, transposition of their relations in idealist

philosophy to their desublimated surrogates, and resolution of the

antinomies in history.

Adorno’s critique of the overextension of instrumental rationality

appears similar to Habermas’s colonization thesis. Like the colonization

thesis, this argument depends on a notion of appropriate balance between

different world relations, lost in the course of capitalist development. But

Adorno anticipates Habermas’s formulation and rejects it in advance. In

“On Subject and Object” he criticizes as “shameful” the concept of communication as “imparting information between subjects … because it

betrays what is best—the potential for agreement between human beings

and things.” This is a peculiar phrase: in what sense can human beings and

things “agree”? Adorno goes on to explain that “Peace is the state of

differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in

each other.” 17

These passages occur in a speculative ellipsis Adorno “allows” himself

exceptionally. He quickly moves on to other subjects without explaining

properly what he means. When scattered passages throughout his work are

compared, certain ideas come through that help to interpret his intent.

Nature and history are not independent of each other, but must be

understood in their inseparable connection. In modern societies a

historically sedimented “second nature” of dead conventions and

institutions occupies the place of mythic fate that unmastered nature once

signified for primitive peoples. Natural beauty, especially where human

artifacts have been harmoniously integrated into it, prefigures a redemptive

future in which the “wounds” of nature will heal and life will flourish in

peace, i.e., mutual participation of “differentiated” human and natural

being. Nature, in one of Adorno’s interpretations, thus holds a utopian

promise. 18

That promise is the deepest connection between the Frankfurt School

and the philosophy of praxis. What is this harmonious relation to nature if

not the transcendence of the antinomy of subject and object in which that

philosophy culminates? The connection to the early Marx is obvious. It is

true that at points the Manuscripts affirm the unlimited transformative

power of labor, yet there are other passages in Marx’s text that emphasize

less the humanization of nature by man than the participation of man in nature. 19

The notion of participatory identity makes room for the sheer

naturalness of nature in a way the theory of the humanization of nature

through labor does not. In claiming that human needs are correlated with

their objects ontologically, Marx asserts an ultimate harmony joining the

human being as a natural being with the nature in which its human nature is

fulfilled. Nature is not merely the object of the subject because the subject

is itself a natural object. The consubstantiality of subject and object

supersedes the contingent relation between them assumed by modern

philosophy since Descartes. The existing scientific-technical rationality, based on the most extreme separation of subject and object, is condemned

as an alienated expression of rationality. Human beings participate in the

world in other ways that are less reductive and more firmly based in

concrete experience.

But for Adorno, the participation of the differentiated is not identity. He

explains that “it would be impossible to conceive that state as either

undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis; rather,

it would be communication of what is differentiated.”20 But Adorno holds back at the decisive moment. He famously argued that the world is properly

understood in the light of redemption but that ultimate prospect serves only

to devalue the given. Redemption does not actually enter history as he

conceives it.

THE RATIONAL CRITIQUE OF RATIONALITY

The Frankfurt School argues that rationality is entangled in a paradox: its

progress leads not to freedom but to domination. Science, democracy, and

prosperity were all made possible by rational critique of the myths and

ideologies that supported the ancien régime. This is what Habermas calls

the “Enlightenment project.” It promises that domination will recede as

rationality advances. The failure of this happy prospect has led to two

different critiques of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, romantic critique

calls for a retreat from rationality and all its works. On the other hand the

Frankfurt School proposes a “rational critique of reason.” These two styles

of critique imply different politics and it is therefore important to

distinguish them clearly.

The romantic critique of reason begins in the late eighteenth century,

accompanied by an idealization of the past. In literature the critique opposes

passion to bourgeois calculation and social conformism. The familiar image

of life versus mechanism captures the essence of the romantic critique.

Modernity is often rejected in the name of traditional values.

This critique appears to be verified by the twentieth-century

catastrophes of reason. Wars, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, and

now environmental crisis threaten the Enlightenment project not from

without but from within. But it is difficult to believe that the full content

and significance of rationality is exhausted by its role in these disasters. The

romantic critique is right to challenge a rationalism that blindly submits everything to markets and technology, but it goes too far when it rejects

reason as such. Surely reason has self-critical and self-corrective potentials.

This is the argument of the Frankfurt School’s critique of rationality. The

Frankfurt School hopes to construct a coherent basis for a critical theory of

modernity out of the flawed inheritance of the Enlightenment.

The Frankfurt School’s method was anticipated by Marx’s economic

critique of capitalism. Capitalism claims to be a rational economic system.

The market appears rational but, strangely, trading goods for money leads to

inequality. This inequality escapes Enlightenment critique because it is not

justified by narrative myths, as was feudalism, but by the exchange of

equivalents—wages for labor.

The French anarchist Proudhon famously claimed that “property is

theft.” He treated the market as a fraud rather than as a coherent system.

This is the economic equivalent of romantic critique in literature. 21 Marx was a more rigorous thinker. He realized that a system as complex and

successful as capitalism could not be based on mere fraud. The origin of

inequality would have to be found in the very rationality of the market. The

equal exchange of wages for labor disguises the role of the length of the

working day in determining the rate of exploitation. The deeper problem is

not the unfairness of this system, but the larger consequences of capitalist

management of the economy, such as the deskilling of work and economic

crises. With this argument Marx showed that rational systems can be

oppressive and he extended this type of critique to technology as well,

although that aspect of his thought lay dormant until Lukács and the

Frankfurt School revived it.

The methodological significance of Marx’s analysis lies in combining

the apparently contrary notions of rationality and bias. This is precisely

what the Frankfurt School does much later in its critique of the

technological consequences of Enlightenment. The point of that critique is

not to blame technology for social ills, as does romantic critique, nor to

appeal to technological rationality as an antidote to the inefficiency of

capitalism, as does traditional Marxism, but to show how technology has

been adapted in its very structure to an oppressive system.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment this approach is expressed in a passage in

which the authors describe the ambivalence of the machine as both

representative of humanity as a whole and an instrument of domination.

The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the means universally available, its “objective validity” for everyone, itself implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its means. On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them. In the form of machines, however, alienated reason is moving toward a society which reconciles thought, in its solidification as an apparatus both material and intellectual, with a liberating living element, and relates it to society itself as its true subject … Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the perspective of the universal, the social realization of thought, is so fully open to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology.22

The alienated reason embodied in machines is an objective reality and

as such refers to a universal subject and not simply to its owners. The very

objectivity of the machine implies that it should be controlled by all in the

interests of all. This would be the “universal, the social realization of

thought,” which is obstructed by the existing capitalist society. The

availability of the apparatus for this purpose is now so obvious to the

simplest reflection that the “rulers” must reject thought itself to maintain

their power. The critical standard in terms of which rational achievements

are measured is not extrinsic, as in romantic critique, but is contained in the

implicit telos of rationality itself. Rationality supplies its own standard of self-critique.

In sum, the universal character of rational achievements promises

universal benefits, but the promise is betrayed as the technical realization of

rationality is biased toward domination. Adorno makes a similar argument

with respect to the market: equal exchange promises a fairness belied by the

actual realization of the market under capitalism. 23

This is the paradox of rationality: economic and technological progress

have gone hand in hand with the progress of domination. To understand the

paradox without romantic subtexts we need a concept of social bias

appropriate for the analysis of rational systems. The Frankfurt School

intended just such an analysis but developed only the rudiments of a

method for performing it. This is why its style of critique is often

confounded with romantic anti-modernism.

The difficulty lies in the departure from the usual concept of bias that is

closely associated with prejudice. But bias in a less familiar sense appears

in other spheres as well. For example, because right-handedness is

prevalent, many everyday objects are adapted to right-handed use. This,

too, could be called a bias but it does not involve prejudice. Rather it is built

into the design of the objects themselves. In this it resembles the kind of

bias exhibited by technology and other rational systems under capitalism.

The issue can be clarified by distinguishing what I call “substantive”

bias from “formal” bias. Enlightenment critique addresses the more familiar

substantive bias. Eighteenth-century philosophers were confronted with

institutions that claimed legitimacy on the basis of stories about the past and

religion. The Enlightenment judged according to facts and arguments and

this was fatal to the ancien régime. Later, a similar critique attacked race and gender bias again in the name of rational ethical principles and

scientific knowledge of human nature. I call the bias criticized in such cases

“substantive” because it is based on pseudo-facts and emotions, specific

contents that motivate discrimination.

But, as the Frankfurt School argues, technology and markets also

discriminate in modern rational institutions. Prejudice is not involved. A

biased technology is still rational in the sense that it links cause and effect

efficiently. It appears “value-neutral,” since it is not an expression of belief

and emotion. Indeed, it is often innocent, as in the case of right-handed

tools. Nevertheless, some cases are far from innocent. These are cases

involving the asymmetrical distribution of power through technical or

economic arrangements. For example, when the division of labor is

technologically structured in such a manner as to doom subordinates to

mechanical and repetitive tasks with no role in managing the larger

framework of their work, their subordination is technologically embedded.

Inequality is enforced by the very rationality of the machine. This sort of

bias is properly called “formal” because it does not violate formal norms

such as control and efficiency under which technology is developed and

employed.

Formal bias can arise from the relation of technologies to their context

and it can also enter into the design of devices. Thus Adorno writes:

It is not technology which is calamitous, but its entanglement with societal conditions in which it is fettered … Considerations of the interests of profit and dominance have channeled technical development: by now it coincides fatally with the needs of control. Not by accident has the invention of means of destruction become the prototype of the new quality of technology. By contrast, those of its potentials which diverge from dominance, centralism and violence against nature, and which might well allow much of the damage done literally and figuratively by technology to be healed, have withered. 24

As technologies develop, their social background is forgotten, covered

over by a kind of unconsciousness that makes it seem as though the chosen

path of progress was inevitable and necessary all along. This is what gives

rise to the illusion of pure rationality. That illusion obscures the imagination of future alternatives by granting existing technology and rationalized social

arrangements an appearance of necessity they cannot legitimately claim.

Critical theory demystifies this appearance to open up the future. It is

neither utopian nor dystopian but situates rationality within the political

where its consequences are a challenge to human responsibility.

But what if the masses fail to accept the responsibility the theory thrusts

upon them? Critical theory establishes the possibility in principle, indeed

the urgent necessity, of a social transformation it regards as extremely

unlikely.

THEORY AND PRACTICE25

The Frankfurt School recapitulates many of the themes of philosophy of

praxis. Marx’s metacritique reconstructed the concept of need in the forms

of rationality, overcoming their antinomial opposition in traditional

philosophy. The Frankfurt School’s metacritique of value-free technological

rationality achieves a similar result: reason is once again tied essentially to

need, the need for self-preservation. Lukács’s theory of reification is a

direct and acknowledged influence. The Lukácsian dialectic of form and

content, and its consequences in the antinomies of philosophy, has its

parallel in the Frankfurt School’s critique of the cultural effects of

commodity fetishism. And like Marx and Lukács, the Frankfurt School

argues that capitalism contains the potentiality for a socialist society that

would transcend alienation and reification.

But there is a characteristic difference in emphasis that distinguishes

Adorno’s philosophy especially from philosophy of praxis. In Marx and

Lukács, potentialities are manifest in social struggle and realized through

the immanent transformative effects of proletarian consciousness and

action. In the absence of such historical manifestations of real potentiality,

Adorno explains it as an objective striving in things themselves toward their

own perfected forms. The “damaged life” of modern capitalist society, not

only in persons but also in nature, aspires more or less unconsciously to a

full and flourishing life possible only under socialism. 26

Once it no longer appears in the struggles of the dominated, this

aspiration risks tipping over into outright re-enchantment of the

disenchanted world of modernity. To avoid this facile outcome, Adorno

argues that potentialities are revealed negatively in the structure of damaged life through immanent critique and art. Potentialities are no longer

manifested in the experience of a revolutionary class, but depend now on

the critical consciousness of the intellectual or artist. Adorno of course

wishes that critical consciousness were more widely shared but he does not

expect this to happen any time soon and certainly does not attribute it to an

active historical subject.

The conditions of Lukács’s “principle of practice” are no longer

fulfilled. The realization of philosophy is no longer a historical task. In a

late lecture, Adorno says, “What is at stake is that, given that philosophy is

faced with the challenge of transcending itself, if I can put it in this

somewhat portentous way, this task should not simply be reflected on, but

should really be carried out rigorously through the medium of thought.” 27

Note: thought, not practice as in Marx and Lukács.

Does this represent a regression to the sort of moralizing critique Hegel

and Marx overcame with the historical concept of potentiality? Brecht

ridiculed the last critics in his Tui Roman and Lukács admonished Adorno

for abandoning history for the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” 28 The Frankfurt School philosophers would deny that charge. Their critical standpoint is

historically justified by the quasi-dystopia of rational domination that

emerges from the failure of the revolution. But this conclusion threatens the

structure of an argument developed from the premises of the philosophy of

praxis.

Before their final renunciation of the revolution, Horkheimer and

Adorno searched hopelessly for a solution. In 1956 they engaged in a

dialogue on the theme of “a new manifesto.”29 This dialogue is easily dismissed as an aberration among their works, but it is symptomatic of a

fundamental problem. The dialogue presupposes the logic of Lukács’s

interpretation of the theory–practice relation. Here one can see how

Horkheimer and Adorno hang in suspense on the results of the philosophy

of praxis in which they no longer quite believe. Their dialogue reveals the

consequences of the breakdown of the third moment of the philosophy of

praxis, the historical resolution of the antinomies. That breakdown blocks

the production of the manifesto and determines the peculiar tone of the

dialogue.

The pretension to update the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx

and Engels in 1847, is astonishing, particularly given the silliness of much

of the talk. For example, what are we to make of the first exchanges on the misplaced love of work, which then devolve into a conversation about the

anal sounds emitted by a worker’s motorcycle? The dialogue returns

constantly to the question of what to say in a time when nothing can be

done. The communist movement is dead, killed off by its own grotesque

success in Russia and China. Western societies are better than the

communist alternatives that nevertheless symbolically represent an

emancipated future. Horkheimer is convinced that the world is mad and that

even Adorno’s modest hope that things might work out someday stinks of

theology. Horkheimer mocks his friend: “Teddie wants to rescue a pair of

concepts: theory and practice. These concepts are themselves obsolete.”30

Instead, he remarks, “We probably have to start from the position of saying

to ourselves that even if the party no longer exists, the fact that we are here

still has a certain value.” 31 In sum, the only evidence that something better is possible is the fact that they are sitting there talking about the possibility

of something better.

In this situation Horkheimer asks, “In whose interest do we write?”32

“People might say that our views are just all talk, our own perceptions. To

whom shall we say these things?” He continues, “We have to actualize the

loss of the party by saying, in effect, that we are just as bad [off] as before

but that we are playing on the instrument the way it has to be played today.”

And Adorno replies, cogently and rather comically, “There is something

seductive about that idea—but what is the instrument?”33 Although Adorno remarks tentatively at one point that he has “the feeling that what we are

doing is not without its effect,” Horkheimer is more skeptical. He says, “My

instinct is to say nothing if there is nothing I can do.” And he goes on to

discuss the tone and content of the manifesto in such a way as to reduce it

to absurdity: “We want the preservation for the future of everything that has

been achieved in America today, such as the reliability of the legal systems,

the drugstores, etc. This must be made quite clear whenever we speak about

such matters.” Adorno replies, “That includes getting rid of TV programs

when they are rubbish.” 34 Contradicting himself, Horkheimer concludes the recorded discussion with the grim words, “Because we are still permitted to

live, we are under an obligation to do something.” 35

My description of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialogue may seem unfair.

Do they deserve mockery? “Yes and no,” to quote Horkheimer. In one sense

their dialogue is already self-mocking. Horkheimer claims that the tone in which the manifesto is written must somehow overcome its futility in the

present period when it can have no practical effect. Something similar takes

place in the dialogue. The lighthearted tone reveals the contradiction

between the existential situation of the speakers and their project.

What is most peculiar about this exchange is the refusal of these two

philosophers to derive a critical standard from philosophical reflection once

history can no longer supply it. This is what Habermas would do later:

admit the breakdown of Hegelian-Marxist historicism and substitute a

transcendental critique. If no “next step” lights the way, perhaps ethics can

do the job in its place. But Horkheimer and Adorno insist on the importance

of situating their thought historically both in terms of their own position and

the absence of a party and a movement. As Horkheimer notes, “We have to

think of our own form of existence as the measure of what we think.” 36 But how can critique negate the given society when that society is the critic’s

sole existential support? The critic is the highest cultural product of the

society. In the absence of any realistic alternative, his capacity to negate the

society justifies it. He can neither escape from history into the

transcendental, as Habermas would have it, nor can he rest his historical

case on the progressive movement of history. No wonder the dialogue

wavers between the comic and the portentous.

How did the Frankfurt School end up in such a bind? The answer to this

question leads back to Marx and Lukács. History and Class Consciousness

contains the most influential reflection on the relation of theory and practice

in the Marxist tradition. Lukács renewed the Hegelian-Marxist historicist

critique of abstract ideals that underlies the dilemma at the heart of the

dialogue. This argument was known to Horkheimer and Adorno and its

impact on their reflections in the Manifesto discussion is obvious.

As we saw in Chapter 2, Lukács introduces the problem of theory and

practice through a critique of an early text in which Marx demands that

theory “seize the masses.” Instead, philosophy must proceed from the living

contradiction of ideal and real. The philosopher must “explain to the world

its own acts,” showing that actual struggles contain a transcending content

that can be linked to the concept of a rational social life. “The critic,” Marx

concludes, “therefore can start with any form of theoretical and practical

consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in

existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.” 37 Lukács elaborates these

Marxian ideas in a critique of Kantian ethical idealism echoed in Horkheimer’s statement that “reality should be measured against criteria

whose capacity for fulfillment can be demonstrated in a number of already

existing, concrete developments in historical reality.”38 As Marx writes, “It is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also

strive toward thought.” 39 Theory must be tied to practice, to real historical forces.

But, Adorno argues, Marx did not live in a world in which utopia is

blocked by the very working class he had charged with realizing it. Now

that the revolution has failed, there appears to be no way out of the trap set

by the tension between norm and history. Under these conditions, the

speculative temptation beckons, but the pressure to satisfy the Hegelian-

Marxist historicist criterion blocks the further progress of thought. It is

impossible to return to what Marx once called the “roasted pigeons of

absolute science,” that is, to some sort of utopian or transcendental

thinking.

Horkheimer poses the dilemma in two contradictory propositions,

saying, on the one hand, “Our thoughts are no longer a function of the

proletariat,” and on the other, that “Theory is theory in the authentic sense

only where it serves practice. Theory that wishes to be sufficient unto itself

is bad theory.” 40 He concludes that “the idea of practice must shine through in everything we write” without any compromise or concession to the actual

historical situation, a seemingly impossible demand.41 This yields what he calls “a curious waiting process,” which Adorno defines as, “in the best

case … theory as a message in a bottle.”42

Marx and Lukács establish the methodological horizon of Marxist

politics for the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss their new

manifesto under that horizon. They accept the critique of pure theory and

ethical idealism; but now that the proletariat no longer supports a

transcending critique of society, any concession to practice drags theory

back into the realm of everyday political wheeling and dealing or, worse

yet, into complicity with the murder of millions by totalitarian communist

regimes. As Horkheimer remarks, “What is the meaning of practice if there

is no longer a party? In that case doesn’t practice mean either reformism or

quietism?” 43

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ALTERNATIVE

Is there no alternative within the Marxist framework? In fact there is an

excluded alternative occasionally evoked in the course of the dialogue. This

alternative is Marcuse, who hovers like Banquo’s ghost over the

conversation. Adorno comes closest to articulating this position and is

pulled back by Horkheimer each time. At one point he remarks, “I cannot

imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective

oppositional forces being unleashed.”44 This will turn out to be the thesis Marcuse hints at in One-Dimensional Man and develops in An Essay on

Liberation. But Horkheimer rejects this view as overly optimistic. A bit

later Adorno refuses to accept that human nature is inherently evil. “People

only become Khrushchevs because they keep getting hit over the head.” 45

But again Horkheimer rejects the hope of a less repressive future and even

ridicules Marcuse, claiming that he expects a Russian Bonaparte to save the

day. Finally, there is a passage in which Adorno seems to be seeking an

appropriate style for the manifesto. He says, “You have to find the point that

wounds. Offending against sexual taboos.” And Horkheimer immediately

calls him to order: “Marcuse, take care.”46

What are we to make of this ghostly presence of a Marcusean

alternative? It seems to me that these remarks already anticipate and

condemn Marcuse’s openness to the return of history with the New Left.

Where Horkheimer and Adorno ultimately rejected the New Left, Marcuse

took the Hegelian–Marxian-Lukácsian plunge back into history. He was

well aware that the New Left was no equivalent of Marx’s proletariat, but

he tried to find in it a hint of those “objective oppositional forces” of which

Adorno spoke in 1956. Marcuse’s important innovation was to recognize

the prefigurative force of the New Left without identifying it as a new agent

of revolution. In this way theory might be related once again to practice

without concession to the existing society, although also with no certainty

of success.

This formulation still reflects the duality of theory and practice that

Lukács resolved in the revolution. But no such resolution is possible for the

Frankfurt School. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse all agree that

philosophy and art conserve the transcending content of experience. This

content also comes to the surface periodically in social struggles that

attempt to realize it in reality. The two sources of transcending content

remain separate, independent of each other. And yet they can and do communicate on occasion. The later argument between Adorno and

Marcuse was over whether such communication had taken place in the New

Left. 47

Adorno’s position is explained at length in a 1969 essay entitled

“Marginalia to Theory and Practice.”48 Amid much interesting discussion of the nature of theory and practice, Adorno indulges in a polemical attack

on the New Left, which he dismisses repeatedly as a pathetic caricature of

real political resistance. He insists on the importance of rational,

theoretically informed practice and measures the New Left by that standard.

This text rejects his earlier assumption in the Manifesto dialogue that the unity of theory and practice is desirable and necessary. Now, faced with an

actual practical movement, Adorno discovers the virtues of their separation.

Marcuse was predisposed to a more positive evaluation of this historical

experience than Adorno. In earlier writings he had praised the twentieth-

century avant-gardes for attempting to overcome the separation of art and

life. He interpreted this as a salutary challenge to the affirmative culture of

the nineteenth century. The much overrated religion of art called forth the

mockery of Dada and the cadavres exquis of surrealism.49

When the New Left emerged, Marcuse interpreted it on the model of the

early avant-gardes as an attempt to realize the imagination in reality.

Although Adorno was at first sympathetic, he soon came to the conclusion

that the movement was simply a scene on which the “pseudo-activity” of a

psychologically damaged youth played itself out. And certainly the

narcissism and reification Adorno complained of were manifest in many

aspects of the New Left. He was not entirely wrong to argue that the society

had corrupted its adversaries.50

Marcuse was far from uncritical and constantly insisted that the New

Left base its actions on theory and solidarity rather than wishful thinking

and impulse. 51 But he did so in dialogue with the New Left and not as a hostile critic. On the whole he considered the New Left as a popular

breakthrough to a critical relation to advanced capitalism. Critique was

historical once again, no longer only philosophical and artistic. What

impressed him most were manifestations of solidarity and the rejection of

consumerism, the principal glue holding the one-dimensional society

together. Marcuse recognized what we now accept as a commonplace,

namely, that despite its flaws the New Left redefined the possibilities and goals of the opposition to advanced capitalism. It introduced a new form of

radicalism freed from vanguardism and workerism. In Marcuse’s thought

this conclusion was associated with a quasi-Hegelian teleology

reinterpreted non-dogmatically: freedom is not the necessary outcome of

history, but when struggles for freedom do occur they can be recognized as

contributing to a possible destiny humanity may yet fulfill.

Marcuse’s interpretation of the New Left depends on a theory of

experience that has a certain similarity to Lukács’s theory of consciousness.

Recall that in History and Class Consciousness the proletariat is able to transcend its reduction to a commodity because of the gap it recognizes

between its reified form as wage labor and the concrete life conditions that

depend on the rate of wages. The mismatch between these two

determinations, the one stemming from the commodity form and the other

from concrete experience, gives rise to an original practical mediation that

is the basis of the revolutionary movement and of Marxist dialectical

method as well.

Marcuse argued that the New Left was rooted in a radical form of

experience that mediates the reified, one-dimensional reality of capitalism.

That mediation results from the recognition of the unrealized technical

potential of the production system, chained by capitalism to waste and war

when it could easily supply all the needs of the population. Poverty and the

competitive struggle for existence are now technologically obsolete.

Recognition of this gap between the potential and the existing reality, like

that which Lukács identified in the case of the proletariat, is not merely a

matter of opinion but, Marcuse claims, has the force of a somatic necessity

for the youthful revolutionaries.

Marcuse offers revealing examples of such recognition, and argues that

it corresponds to a generalized aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in the

affirmation and flourishing of life. He explains that this “new sensibility”

achieves a partial desublimation of libido and a redeployment of erotic

energy beyond the bounds of sexuality as a generalized aesthetic relation to

reality. The new sensibility promises to rejoin reason with life in a new

science and technology. It overcomes the restrictions Horkheimer and

Adorno believe block access to an experience of potentiality. This would be

the realization of the Frankfurt School’s dream of a truly enlightened reason

able to reflect on itself and to motivate solidarity with humanity and nature.

I will have more to say about these radical ideas in the next chapter.

1 Horkheimer was less influenced by Lukács than Adorno and Marcuse. See John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Accordingly I will focus primarily on the latter two.

2 One is reminded of Nicholas Berdiaeff’s epigraph to Huxley’s Brave New World: “Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive ? … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins ‘parfaite’ et plus libre.” (“Utopias appear much more realizable than used to be believed. And we now find ourselves faced with a still more agonizing question: how to avoid their definitive realization? … Utopias are realizable. Life is marching toward utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which the intellectuals and the educated class will dream of means to avoid utopias and to return to a less ‘perfect’ and freer non-utopian society.”)

3 For Lukács’s theory of the unity of theory and practice, see the Appendix.

4 Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” in E. Bloch, G. Lukács, B. Brecht, W.

Benjamin, T. Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. R. Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), 151.

5 Stefano Petrucciani, Introduzione a Adorno (Rome: Editori Laterza, 2007), 127. “In quanto sta dentro la totalità falsa, pero, la dialettica negative non può essere già questo ‘altro pensiero’; ciò che può fare è soltanto evocarne la figura.” (“Insofar as it lies within the false totality, however, the negative dialectic cannot already be that ‘other thought’; what it can do is only to evoke its outlines.”)

6 Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. J.

Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12.

7 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1947).

8 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 54.

9 Ibid., 40 (translation modified). The German text is to be found in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1944, reprint n.d.), 55.

10 Ibid., 41 (55).

11 Ibid., 255 (305). It is in this context that they claim that “All reification is a forgetting” (230, translation modified).

12 Habermas and his followers have been particularly active in pursuing the irrationalism issue.

See also Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Ehrfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 245–67, and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 266–8.

13 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 162.

14 The non-identical in this crude sense is an immediate particular that transcends all mediation.

Without confounding this notion with Adorno’s deeper intent, Robert Pippin has mocked it as

“asterisk” philosophy: every time a universal appears, it should be accompanied by an asterisk sending readers to the bottom of the page where they will be informed that particulars are always more and other in some respects than the concepts under which they are classified. See “Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life,” in Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105.

15 See Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of a Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004); Bernstein, Adorno.

16 This is the theme of Bernstein’s, Adorno.

17 Theodor Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H. W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 247.

18 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 46–7, 68. For a comprehensive account of Adorno’s ideas on nature, see Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (Durham, NC: Acumen Publishing, 2011).

19 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B.

Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 206–8.

20 Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” 247.

21 See Andrew Feenberg, “Marxism and the Critique of Social Rationality: From Surplus Value to the Politics of Technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2009), 37–49.

22 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29–30.

23 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 147.

24 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. E. Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 161–2, n15.

25 A longer version of this section is published as “Waiting for History: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Theatre of the Absurd,” available at platypus1917.org.

26 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 66, 68.

27 Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. R. Tiedemann, ed. R. Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 170.

28 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 22.

29 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, trans. R. Livingstone, New Left Review, No. 65 (September–October 2010). I am well aware that this text does not represent Horkheimer and Adorno at their best. Perhaps that is one of the reasons it is so interesting.

Their unguarded comments reveal much that is masked in more polished presentations.

30 Ibid., 36.

31 Ibid., 53.

32 Ibid., 44.

33 Ibid., 46–7.

34 Ibid., 48–9.

35 Ibid., 61.

36 Ibid., 56.

37 Karl Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans.

and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 213.

38 Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, 55.

39 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Early Writings, 28.

40 Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?”, 58, 52.

41 Ibid., 56.

42 Ibid., 58.

43 Ibid., 52.

44 Ibid., 42.

45 Ibid., 44.

46 Ibid., 46.

47 For their differences, see “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” trans. E.

Leslie, New Left Review, No. 233 (January–February 1999), 123–36. Compare also Theodor Adorno,

“Marginalia to Theory and Practice,” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, with Herbert Marcuse, “The Failure of the New Left?”, in Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. D. Kellner (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

48 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Practice.”

49 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149–50. Adorno objected to Marcuse’s early essay on “Affirmative Culture” that Marcuse underrated the critical import of art in his denunciation of its socially conservative, compensatory function. For the disagreement with Adorno, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994), 220–2. Marcuse’s later views are further developed in Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 31–2. For a discussion of Marcuse’s theory of the avantgarde see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50–1.

50 Adorno condemned the whole New Left on terms appropriate only for a small fraction of the movement. Unfortunately that fraction did gain disproportionate influence, but this must not blind us (as it did Adorno) to the largely humane and democratic objectives of the mass of participants. I attempt to explain the problem in a more balanced way in Andrew Feenberg, “Paths to Failure: The Dialectics of Organization and Ideology in the New Left,” in A. Reed, ed., Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Politics of the 1960s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 119–44.

51 For example, Marcuse criticized those New Leftists who advocated pure spontaneity: “Within the repressive society, and against its ubiquitous apparatus, spontaneity by itself cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice—in this sense indeed, as a result of organization.” Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 89.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Last Philosophy of Praxis

MARCUSE’S PHENOMENOLOGY

In this chapter I will bring the story of the Frankfurt School and philosophy

of praxis to a conclusion. I first discuss phenomenological themes in

Marcuse linked to his startling conception of a liberation of nature. The

chapter continues with a discussion of the ontological significance of

Marcuse’s concept of nature, and concludes with remarks on the relation of

science and technology in critical theory.

Despite differences in terminology, sources, and politics, Marcuse’s

argument is similar in many respects to Adorno’s, but he emphasizes

alienation rather than commodity fetishism as the underlying problem of

advanced industrial society. This ties his argument more closely to Hegel,

whose dialectic of master and slave is the original formulation of the

concept of alienation. Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic of

essence resembles Adorno’s concept of non-identity but it is also shaped by

this theme from the Phenomenology. Adorno would surely have rejected the

teleological concept of history it implies. The significance of this difference

becomes clear in the 1960s.

Chapters 5 and 6 of One-Dimensional Man present a remarkable synthesis of phenomenology and Marxism. 1 Marcuse’s argument can be clarified by reference to four main sources: Lukács’s concept of reification,

Heidegger’s critique of technology, Husserl’s late discussion of science and

the lifeworld, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of the impoverishment

of experience under capitalism. The problem Marcuse poses is how to

explain the connection between capitalism as a system of domination and

scientific-technical rationality. Chapter 5 contrasts premodern ontology with modern science. Chapter 6 then explores the connection between science and technology and concludes with a discussion of their political

role under capitalism.

This problematic is first articulated from within Marxism by Lukács in

History and Class Consciousness. He signals the congruence of modern

scientific modes of thought and the structure of everyday experience under

capitalism. He describes the reified form of objectivity of experience

through which it loses its human qualities and comes to resemble the

“facts” of natural science. As we have seen in Chapter 4 of this book, the

“form of objectivity” is a neo-Kantian version of Kant’s a priori

preconditions of experience. But in contrast with the neo-Kantians, Lukács

argues that reification derives from the commodity form rather than from

the structure of consciousness.

Marcuse sketches a history of rationality as a succession of such a priori

preconditions. In ancient Greece, reason encountered a world of

independent things, each with a meaning and purpose. For the Greeks,

exemplified by Aristotle, these things are “substances.” As such they are

more than the sum of their mechanically related parts. They have an inner

core that holds them together in the face of change. This core combines

logos and eros. Things exhibit both rational structure and orientation toward a “desired” end, their telos. Aristotle introduced the word “essence” to talk

about this core. It is the dynamic center of the thing’s being that drives it

toward perfection. Here “is” and “ought” are harmonized in the notion of

potentiality. As potentiality, value belongs to the objective world; it is not

reduced to a subjective preference as in the modern projection of being.

The Greek conception is realized practically in technē, the knowledge

associated with craft production and artistic creation. Like natural objects,

artifacts have an objective essence, but unlike natural objects they cannot

realize that essence through an inner dynamic. They require the help of a

craftsman. Technē thus incorporates the ends as well as the means, the final

cause as well as the matter, form, and skills of the maker. This is “objective

rationality” in Horkheimer’s sense.2

Today we no longer believe in teleological substances; instead,

scientific reason offers mechanical explanations of a purposeless nature.

The things of experience are broken up into measurable components,

functional units awaiting transformation and recombination. The relations

between these components are explained causally, as a kind of machinery.

This new concept of reason is the a priori of science, the precondition of its

mode of experiencing and understanding the world. Marcuse follows Hegel

in claiming that the domain of history responds to a different logic in which

potentiality still has a place. He does not envisage a return to the Greek world. That is neither possible nor desirable. But he does attempt to

reconstruct the idea of potentiality in modern terms as the relation between

value and fact in social life. “Logical truth becomes historical truth. The

ontological tension between essence and appearance, between ‘is’ and

‘ought’ becomes historical tension and the ‘inner negativity’ of the object-

world is understood as the work of the historical subject.” 3 This historical reconstruction of the concept of essence provides a standard for the critique

of modern society and especially its science and technology.

In his 1930 book Hegel’s Ontology, Marcuse argues that reality has two

“dimensions,” empirical existence and the essence of the phenomena, their

potentialities striving toward realization. As a historical thesis this implies a

progressive vision in which the potentialities are expressed in social

struggle. But, in One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, Marcuse argues

that advanced capitalist society restricts thought and action more and more

to the first dimension. This “one-dimensional society” tends to reduce

everything to its empirically given form, suppressing the second dimension

of essential potentiality. Thus what Adorno calls “identifying thought”

prevails. It blocks recognition of the inadequacy of the available

satisfactions and the dangers of unreflective technological advance.

Like Adorno’s distinction between ordinary and “emphatic” universals,

Marcuse’s distinction between formal and substantive universals

corresponds to the two dimensions.4 Formal universals classify objects in accordance with quantity and quality. They refer to the empirical, the

factual. Substantive universals such as freedom and equality point beyond

the facts toward their potentialities. These potentialities are not unreal but

are implied in the manifold connections and the history of the phenomena,

their constellations. The objects of everyday experience reveal themselves

as incomplete, as still fraught with possibilities. Knowledge of this second

dimension depends on the imaginative power of the human mind which

transcends the given toward its essential meaning. The validation of the

transcending content of the substantive universals today is based on the

actual technical potential of the production system, which could provide a

better and freer life under a different political and economic dispensation.

By contrast, science works exclusively with formal universals. It

projects a world of quantitative determinations, dissolving the object as a

substantial reality. In eliminating the dimension of essence, science exposes

the object to mechanical explanation and technical manipulation. It does not recognize potentialities but only the empirically given facts. In practice it

serves those with the power to establish the facts and reinforces their power.

Science

has

two

essential

features,

quantification

and

instrumentalization. It does not address experience in its immediacy but

transforms everything it encounters into quantities. Since quantities are

alien to values, this stance eliminates purpose from the world. This is the

basis of the value-neutrality of science, its indifference to the good and the

beautiful in the interests of the true. But values do exist and require some

sort of locus. Hence, correlated with the quantified reality of science there

is an inner world of subjective feelings in which everything associated with

value takes refuge. This inner world is excluded from the objective world

science explains, hence also from the domain of rationality.

The scientific world, now stripped of any valuative features and

disaggregated, is exposed to unrestrained instrumental control. Within the

context of research this instrumentalism appears innocent enough. Science

learns by manipulating its objects in experiments. The prior quantification

of the objects makes it possible to draw precise conclusions from these

manipulations. But the innocence of science is lost when the possibilities of

instrumental control are exploited on a much larger scale by technology.

Like Heidegger, Marcuse concludes that the technical applicability of

science is no accident. A technological project lies at its basis. “The science

of nature develops under the technological a priori which projects nature as

potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organization.”5 The unity of science and technology lies in the fact that the quantifiable reality of

science is an instrumentalizable reality for society. What for science is a

measurable object of experiment and explanation is raw material for

production in society. In both cases the a priori concept of the object

precedes and makes possible its appropriation by rational theory and

practice.

Marcuse’s critique of science and technology reverses the Marxist thesis

according to which socialism will free the technical forces of production

blocked by outmoded capitalist relations of production. Marcuse insists

instead that the existing technology dominates both human beings and

nature. The forces of production themselves must be reconstructed on the

basis of life-affirming values. Their mere growth is not progressive. A

social revolution must interrupt the “continuity of domination” now installed in the very structure of the machines. This requires

a break with the continuity of the technical apparatus of productivity which, for Marx, would extend (freed from capitalist abuse) to the socialist society. Such “technological” continuity would constitute a fateful link between capitalism and socialism, because this apparatus has, in its very structure and scope, become an apparatus of control and domination. Cutting this link would mean, not to regress in the technical progress, but to reconstruct the technical apparatus in accordance with the needs of free men. 6

Marcuse’s critical strategy is complex. On the one hand, while he never

calls into question the cognitive value of natural science and technology, he

argues that they have been incorporated into the capitalist system and are

part of its apparatus of exploitation and alienation. But he also believes that

science and technology are historically contingent and that they may be

transformed in the future. Thus the critique is not entirely negative. On the

other hand, Marcuse’s critique extends beyond actual science and

technology to the a priori cultural form that determines them. This

technological a priori operates throughout social life, determining the

experience of objects generally, even those remote from scientific and

technological intervention. This aspect of the critique is to some extent

independent of the first.

Marcuse cites several passages from Heidegger’s writings in support of

his concept of the technological a priori. Heidegger explains that the

“essence of technics”—Marcuse’s a priori—is a project of mechanization.

“Modern man takes the entirety of Being as raw material for production and

subjects the entirety of the object-world to the sweep and order of

production … the use of machinery and the production of machines is not

technics itself but merely an adequate instrument for the realization of the

essence of technics in its objective raw materials.”7

In Heidegger the essence of technics is a dispensation of being, but

Marcuse argues that it has a social basis in capitalism. He quotes

Horkheimer and Adorno, who trace its source to the capitalist

transformation of labor: “By virtue of the rationalization of the modes of

labor, the elimination of qualities is transferred from the universe of science

to that of daily experience.”8 Marcuse draws on phenomenology to analyze this “transfer.”

Modern science is adjusted to the requirements of a “universe of self-

propelling, productive control.”9 It is not the goals of science or its

particular theories that are so determined but the structure of scientific rationality. “The projection of nature as quantifiable matter … would be the

horizon of a concrete societal practice which would be preserved in the

development of the scientific project.” 10 How has this come about?

Marcuse rejects a causal explanation and turns instead to Husserl’s analysis

of the relation of science to the lifeworld.

The concept of “lifeworld” refers to everyday experience. Husserl

understands experience not in terms of the famous sense data of empiricism

but as a system of meanings immediately available to consciousness and

enacted in ordinary practice. In Heidegger a similar concept is called simply

“world.” For both these phenomenological thinkers, science derives

ultimately from a life-worldly basis. The a priori form of the scientific

enterprise, its concepts and methods, are not the autonomous creations of

pure reason they appear to be but are based on aspects of everyday

experience in this phenomenological sense. But unlike Husserl and

Heidegger, Marcuse argues that experience is traversed by social

contradictions.

He writes that the lifeworld is a “specific mode of ‘seeing’ … within a

purposive practical context.” 11 Under capitalism the context is the project of

the domination of nature. “Individual, non-quantifiable qualities stand in the

way of an organization of men and things in accordance with the

measurable power to be extracted from them. But this is a specific, socio-

historic project, and the consciousness that undertakes this project is the

hidden subject of Galilean science.” 12 That subject is the capitalist class, or, in another reading of Marx, capital itself.

The concept of “project” Marcuse introduces in this passage derives

from Sartre who employed it to emphasize the freedom of the subject to

choose its path in life. 13 A project is not a particular plan of action; it is what Heidegger calls the “projection” of a world, that is, an ordering of

experience around a certain way of being in the world. Particular plans

become possible only within a project-projection of this sort. In Sartre and

Heidegger these terms are ontological categories of individual existence but

Marcuse historicizes them as civilizational categories referring to the

freedom of whole societies.

On this account capitalism is more than an economic system; it projects

a world in the phenomenological sense of the term. The congruence of

science, technology, and the form of experience is ultimately rooted in the

logic of capitalism. Existing science and technology cannot transcend the capitalist world. Rather, they are destined to reproduce it by their very

structure. They are inherently conservative, not because they are ideological

in the usual sense of the term, nor because their understanding of nature is

false, but because they are intrinsically adjusted to serving a social order

that ignores potentialities and views being as the stuff of domination. Thus

“technology has become the great vehicle of reification.” 14

The development of this argument is anticipated in a précis of One-

Dimensional Man that Marcuse wrote while teaching in France in the late

1950s. This text contains once again a significant reference to Heidegger,

but not just to the late Heidegger, famous as a critic of technology. Marcuse

also goes back to Being and Time for a conception of technology as

intrinsically oriented toward human needs. He writes,

A machine, a technical instrument, can be considered as neutral, as pure matter. But the machine, the instrument, does not exist outside an ensemble, a technological totality; it exists only as an element of technicity. This form of technicity is a “state of the world,” a way of existing between man and nature. Heidegger stressed that the “project” of an instrumental world precedes (and should precede) the creation of those technologies which serve as the instrument of this ensemble (technicity) before attempting to act upon it as a technician. In fact, such “transcendental” knowledge possesses a material base in the needs of society and in the incapacity of society to either satisfy or develop them.

I would like to insist on the fact that the abolition of anxiety, the pacification of life, and enjoyment are the essential needs. From the beginning, the technical project contains the requirements of these needs … If one considers the existential character of technicity, one can speak of a final technological cause and the repression of this cause through the social development of technology. 15

This is a peculiar passage, a kind of metacritique posing as an

interpretation. It translates Heidegger’s existential analysis of worldhood as

a system of instrumentalities based on a generalized concept of “care” into

the historically specific concept of technicity. Heidegger’s “care” has

become the orientation toward human needs intrinsic to instrumental action

as such, including modern technology. But service to human needs has been

blocked by capitalism. Thus Heidegger’s ontology of instrumental action

unifying human being and world in terms of unspecified possible ends has

become a normative account of the failure of capitalist technology to realize

quite definite ends! Marcuse sets up the contrast between a truncated

technological a priori aimed exclusively at domination and an alternative a

priori that would fulfill the telos of technology in the creation of a

harmonious society reconciled with nature. Technology is not neutral but

ambivalent, available for these two different developmental paths.

Compressed in these few lines is the move Marcuse made in the early

1930s from Heidegger to Marxism via Hegel and Marx’s Manuscripts of

1844. In the Manuscripts, Marx describes the ontological unity of man and

nature in terms of labor. Translated into Heideggerian terms, this would be

equivalent to being-in-the-world as the ontological condition realized in

everyday instrumental action. But Marx’s notion has a normative character

Heidegger’s does not. The fulfillment of rich and complex human needs

through the application of human capacities and powers in labor contrasts

with the impoverishment and alienation of capitalism.

In Heidegger’s case there is, to be sure, what Marcuse calls a “final

technological cause” but it is left completely vague, relative to the

contingent project of Dasein. That vagueness would seem to be the

condition for its ontological significance, whereas, from a Heideggerian

standpoint, Marcuse’s turn toward need appears merely ontic. Why, given

these differences, did Marcuse retain this curious reference to Heidegger?

As we will see later in this chapter, Marcuse follows Marx in attributing

ontological significance to need. Furthermore, Heidegger’s concept of a

transcendental project is useful for grounding the opposition of capitalism

and socialism in a historicized theory of the a priori preconditions of

experience. Marcuse claims that the capitalist project of technological

domination of nature is historically contingent. Another world is possible.

But for this other world to enter history it must be reflected in the

actions of an agent. Now that the proletariat no longer plays that role, whole

swaths of Marxist theory are obsolete, especially the idea of class

consciousness central to Lukács’s version of the philosophy of praxis.

Marcuse substitutes the idea of a radical transformation of experience for

that outmoded idea. The form of objectivity of a capitalist society is

reflected in a truncated experience, but a richer experience is adumbrated in

art and the oppositional movements. “The leap from the rationality of

domination to the realm of freedom demands the concrete transcendence

beyond this rationality, it demands new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling,

touching things, a new mode of experience corresponding to the needs of

men and women who can and must fight for a free society.”16 The new mode of experience would mediate between the existing society and a new

society based on a harmonious relation to nature.

THE LIBERATION OF NATURE?

Walter Benjamin introduced the notion of a “liberation of nature” in his eleventh thesis on the philosophy of history. The contrast he formulates

between exploitative and liberating labor is familiar except that Benjamin

refers not to the exploitation and liberation of human beings but of nature.

He does not hesitate to give this unexpected application of Marxist

categories its full utopian force. He writes that the Social Democratic

conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naïve complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. 17

Nature is a kind of reverse or negative image of society in the early

Frankfurt School. It appears as a necessarily lost utopia. This pessimistic

view is not contradicted by the implicit irony of Benjamin’s purified sea

water and extra moons. But environmentalism has given a more substantial

content to the notions of exploitation and liberation of nature. Adorno and

Horkheimer do not relate the utopian promise of nature to concrete

environmental issues, which only enter public discussion in the 1970s.

However, Marcuse does address ecology explicitly on terms that appear to

follow directly from Adorno’s elliptical remarks on nature discussed in the

previous chapter. As usual, Marcuse enthusiastically breaches Adorno’s

self-imposed limits, and this makes for a more explicit and decisive

presentation.

In a 1972 speech, he wrote that nature “has a dimension beyond labor, a

symbol of beauty, of tranquility, of a non-repressive order.”18 Yet this nature is being destroyed by capitalism. Marcuse’s essay on “Nature and

Revolution” represents the furthest advance of the Frankfurt School toward

environmentalism. He argues that

Value-free matter, material [there only] for the sake of domination is a historical a priori, pertaining to a specific form of society. A free society may well have a very different a priori and a very different object; the development of the scientific concepts may be grounded in an experience of nature as a totality of life to be protected and “cultivated,” and technology would apply this science to the reconstruction of the environment of life. 19

He goes on to suggest the possibility of a “liberation of nature” that

would be “the recovery of the life-enhancing forces in nature, the sensuous

aesthetic qualities which are foreign to a life wasted in unending competitive performance.” 20

These potentialities of nature hark back to Aristotelian essentialism but

refracted through Hegel’s historicism. Potentiality is a dynamic future-

oriented principle rather than an “essence” in the Aristotelian sense, i.e.,

that which the thing always already was. It is not constructed speculatively

as a fact independent of humanity but comes into view in the course of

actual struggles and reflects the essential involvement of human beings with

lived nature. Those struggles are based on the imaginative capacity to

project a better future. A technology transformed by those struggles would

be respectful of its objects, both human and natural. In this context,

“science and technology would be the great vehicles of liberation.”21

Marcuse foresees a reconciliation with nature through a new technical

practice based on an aesthetic form of objectivity. But he adds an important

proviso to his theory of the liberation of nature. “Marx’s notion of a human

appropriation of nature retains something of the hubris of domination.

‘Appropriation,’ no matter how human, remains appropriation of a (living)

object by a subject. It offends that which is essentially other than the

appropriating subject, and which exists precisely as object in its own right

—that is as subject!” 22 Marcuse here reaffirms the Frankfurt School’s fundamental thesis of the non-identity of man and nature, subject and

object. But there is also a sense in which his theory is an affirmation of

harmony through participation in a “non-exploitative relation: surrender,

‘letting-be,’ acceptance.”23 The Frankfurt School’s insistence on non-identity is superseded by a different kind of identity, the identity of nature in subject and object, which is recognized in reflection and aesthetic

appreciation.

Marcuse knows that the utopian conception of nature he shares with

Adorno appears unscientific, even regressive. But these are resolutely

modern thinkers who resist theoretical backsliding. They are not looking to

re-enchant nature or to merge with it in a romantic unity. Yet Marcuse links

his argument directly to several surprising comments in Adorno’s Aesthetic

Theory that appear decidedly premodern. There Adorno claims that human

beings are called “to help nature ‘to open its eyes,’ to help it ‘on the poor

earth to become what perhaps it would like to be.’” 24 Marcuse seeks a non-

metaphysical interpretation of such notions, a third term beyond premodern essentialism and the idealistic kitsch of a “new age.”

He finds his answer in Kant’s aesthetics, which defines natural beauty

as “purposiveness without purpose.” Nature exhibits characteristics of an

object constructed for a purpose without actually having been so

constructed. Marcuse interpreted purposiveness in this sense as a purely

formal property of self-organizing objects. It arises from freedom, the self-

production of the object according to its own intrinsic nature, its growth

potential. We can distinguish the freely developed living thing from the

mutilated product of a constricted growth process. The distinction manifests

itself in formal properties we associate with health and beauty. This

conception supports a normative understanding of nature and its tendencies.

Exactly how is this supposed to work? Adorno considers this idea and

draws utopian conclusions from it but stops short of accepting its literal

truth. He writes that natural beauty “recollects a world without domination,

one that probably never existed.” 25 Natural beauty hints at the idea of freedom that corresponds to such a world. But, Adorno concludes, nature is

in reality a realm of unfreedom and so the aesthetic appreciation of nature is

deceptive, a suggestive misapprehension.

Marcuse takes a different tack. Natural beauty and its purposeless

purposiveness express the flourishing of life. A concrete “libidinal”

attachment to the world underlies the aesthetic dimension. This attachment

is historically variable, restricted by scarcity in the past, and suffering a

peculiar reduction to sexuality in the present.

But Marcuse also argues that advanced technology tends to generalize

aesthetic perception albeit in the specific context of the market. Here

Marcuse’s comments are prescient. He notes the emergence of a new

relation of worker to machine, a more distanced and informed relation due

to advancing automation. This is “the emergence of a free subject within the

realm of necessity” that Marx had predicted for socialist society. It leads to

an aesthetic relation to the products of the new technology.

Already today, the achievements of science and technology permit the play of the productive imagination: experimentation with the possibilities of form and matter hitherto enclosed in the density of unmastered nature; the technical transformation of nature tends to make things lighter, easier, prettier … loosening up of reification. The material becomes increasingly susceptible and subject to aesthetic forms, which enhance its exchange value (the artistic, modernistic banks, office buildings, kitchens, salesrooms, and salespeople, etc.). 26

This aestheticization of the built world primarily serves capitalism, but

it is ambivalent, contributing to the emergence of a new form of

oppositional consciousness that appears in the New Left as an erotic mode

of presence. Its full development awaits a liberated society. 27 Pleasure in beauty would then express a life-affirming sensibility. Beauty would relate

the given to its potentialities in sensation, rather than selling a product or

serving as a temporary escape from competitive strife.

Concepts such as beauty, health, potentialities have an intuitive appeal.

It is obvious that strip mining “wounds” nature in Adorno’s sense; by

contrast the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright is far more compatible with

the unfolding of the potentialities of its living setting. In one of his last

speeches, in 1979, Marcuse developed this contrast in its implications for

environmental struggle. He argued that ecological devastation is an effect of

capitalist productivity against which the “life instincts” rebel. That rebellion

inspires the New Left.

What we have is a politicization of erotic energy. This, I suggest, is the distinguishing mark of the most radical movements today. These movements do not … constitute a struggle to replace one power structure by another. Rather, these radical movements are existential revolts against an obsolete reality principle. They are a revolt carried by the mind and body of individuals themselves

… A revolt in which the whole organism, the very soul of the human being, becomes political. A revolt of the life instincts against organized and socialized destruction. 28

Disgust and rage at the abuse of human beings is an “aesthetic”

expression of our sensitivity to suppressed potentialities. It articulates their

value at the existential level. At that level the subject does more than

observe the given state of affairs; she participates in it vicariously. This is

the other side of the coin of mutual participation in which Adorno found the

meaning of peace with nature. On Marcuse’s account participation is

experienced as solidarity. Disgust and rage at harm to the environment

would inspire its less destructive appropriation within the human world.

But, after all, is Marcuse’s parti pris for “life” more than a sentimental

preference? Apart from killing, what is not life-affirming in some sense?

And indeed, even killing in self-defense might qualify. Nature goes on in

one form or another regardless of what human beings feel and do. Why

single out its flourishing around a renaissance palace neatly tucked into the

landscape, or Wright’s Falling Water? Nature “flourishes” in a garbage can

too, especially one uncollected for a week, but this is not the affirmation of

life we recognize as normatively valid. Does this mean our intuitive

understanding of life affirmation is an arbitrary and subjective opinion without normative force? Not necessarily.

There is a difference between our intuitions and the counter-example

insofar as the former seem to be rooted in our nature and are generally

shared while the latter is a mere intellectual construction set up for the sake

of argument. To call the multiplication of bacteria in a garbage can an

example of flourishing is to ignore the emphatic meaning we normally give

the term. What “flourishes” is not simply a mass of cells but the realization

of such values as vitality and grace through the free development of living

things in which we recognize a certain family resemblance or affinity. The

concept is necessarily anthropocentric if it is to have any force at all. A

garden or a child “flourish” bugs merely multiply. Furthermore, the

introduction of life as a value in public discourse is not arbitrary. It makes

sense in a context of permanent aggressive warfare, racial conflict, mass

imprisonment, and extensive poverty. This was the context in which

Marcuse wrote and it is still our context.

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO ONTOLOGY

Marcuse’s late conception of nature is ambiguous. He seems to hover

uncomfortably between psychology and ontology. In Eros and Civilization

he regards the nature of lived experience as the object of the erotic “drive”

in the Freudian sense. But too strict an adherence to Freudian psychology

would undermine Marcuse’s philosophical argument with empiricism and

naturalism. Experience does not have ontological significance from a

psychological standpoint. Drives in Freud are subjective objects of study,

not “ontological affirmations of being (nature),” as Marx claims.29 As a natural science, psychology implies a transcendent nature, indifferent to the

projection of our feelings and fantasies. But Marcuse remarks that “it seems

permissible to give [Freud’s] conception a general ontological meaning.”30

This unusual interpretation of Freud implies phenomenological themes

Marcuse only alludes to, but which are essential to his argument.

Marcuse’s philosophy of nature is of course rooted in Hegel and Marx

as well as phenomenology. As he wrote in one early text, Hegel “is

concerned … with the process of reification and its transcendence as the

basic happening of human life, which Marx then represented as the basic

law of historical happening.” 31 Marcuse’s philosophy of praxis continues

the tradition by dereifying nature, uncovering its essential implication in human existence obscured by technological rationality. These themes are

developed in Marcuse’s early writings, especially in his first book on Hegel,

although without the reference to Freud; they provide the bridge between

psychology and ontology in his most daring late works.

For eros to acquire ontological value, “life” must be considered as a

form of being “revealing” nature in something like Heidegger’s sense of the

term, rather than as just another natural object. In his Hegel thesis Marcuse

interprets Hegel’s concept of life in terms that echo Heidegger’s concept of

being-in-the-world. His argument can be read without reference to

Heidegger, but in a thesis dedicated to Heidegger, written by his assistant at

the time, it is difficult not to see an attempt to reconstruct Hegel’s concept

of life in quasi-phenomenological terms. Marcuse implicitly returns here to

Heidegger’s own early term for what will later be called “Dasein,” namely,

“factical life.” Life in this phenomenological sense is not independent of the

environment with which it engages but establishes its identity through that

engagement. “Being-in-the-world” refers to a structure of meaning that

grounds the reified opposition of subject and object in a prior unity.32

Interpreting Hegel, Marcuse writes, “The world in which Life unfolds

exists only as its world.”33 “At one and the same time therefore, the world is

the ontological ‘presupposition’ of Life as well as the externality and

negativity in which Life has ‘lost’ itself! .” 34 In Hegel the activity of the living being is a transformation and appropriation of nature. Nature is not

an indifferent obstacle in this conception but forms the subject’s essential

milieu. Through its free activity in this milieu the subject realizes itself. In

Hegel’s remarkable phrase, it comes to be “at home with itself in its

other.” 35 The opposition of subject and object is thus grounded in “an ontological relation, one that holds among beings themselves … This bond

precedes all knowledge and in fact makes factual knowledge possible.”36 In sum, a world is revealed in the unity of subject and object that transcends

their division in inauthentic objectivistic accounts of experience. That world

is not factically present but underlies cognition. Epistemology is thus

subordinated to ontology. Truth is not first produced by a method but

inhabits experience itself prior to any cognitive labor.

Shortly after finishing his Hegel thesis, Marcuse had the opportunity to

read Marx’s newly published Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of

1844. Here Marcuse found his interpretation of Hegel confirmed and radicalized.

Man does not have objects merely as the environment of his immediate life activity and does not treat them merely as objects of his immediate needs. He can “confront” any object and exhaust and realize its inner possibilities in his labour. He can produce “in accordance with the laws of beauty” and not merely in accordance with the standards of his own needs. In this freedom man reproduces “the whole of nature,” and through transformation and appropriation furthers it, along with his own life, even when this production does not satisfy an immediate need. Thus the history of human life is at the same time essentially the history of man’s objective world and of “the whole of nature” …37

In the later work, these themes are taken up through the reinterpretation

of Freud. Freud’s theory of the erotic provides the basis for a radical

reinterpretation of aesthetics. The erotic drive is not merely psychological

but has an ontological correlate in the beauty of lived nature. This

correlation is necessary for experience to play a role in Marcuse’s critique

of technological rationality and its “one-dimensional” ontology. Erotic

experience in this sense is not merely subjective; it has the scope of a

Heideggerian “attunement,” a mode in which reality as a whole is given.38

Marcuse’s concept of lived nature and its beauty must overcome the

transcendence of the nature of natural science if it is to have this ontological

significance. He must validate experienced nature by incorporating it into

the historical process, in opposition to the ahistorical construction of

external nature in the scientific worldview. At the same time, he must not

invalidate scientific and technological knowledge that he concedes are

essential for any modern society, including a socialist society. Although

Marcuse’s remarks are all too brief, he has such a theory. In One-

Dimensional Man he distinguishes the physical structure of matter from the

historical form it acquires as object for a subject, but he concludes that “the

two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are interrelated

in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the historical

aspect can never be eliminated so radically that only the ‘absolute’ physical

layer remains.” 39

This passage maintains the distinction between natural science and

history within a fundamentally historical ontology. Agreeing with Hegel

and the early Marx, Marcuse argues that all forms of knowledge and

experience are essentially social, rooted in the “we” of society rather than

the “I” of a pure epistemological subject. There is thus no pure thing-in-

itself or nature totally unconnected to humanity. This view, widely shared in

one form or another in Marcuse’s early milieu, guarantees experiential knowledge against naturalistic reduction to psychology. 40 The historical standpoint is ontologically fundamental. No “view from nowhere” threatens

to reduce it to an accident of biology.

The early Marx anticipates Marcuse’s historicist ontology with his

concept of the irreducibly meaningful character of experience. But in

contrast with phenomenology (and on this point he follows Marx, not

Heidegger), Marcuse also recognizes that access to meaning is contingent

on the evolution of needs. Technical advance does not merely serve

preexisting needs, but produces new needs corresponding to the

development of human faculties and capacities. These new needs introduce

a higher dimension of fulfillment by relating human beings to the meaning

of their experience, to music rather than sound, to a home rather than

shelter, to a meal rather than sustenance.

The restriction of human development by capitalism motivates the

revolution. At the everyday level of human life, this is about poverty and

the damage it causes. But once subject and object are redefined as life and

world, the revolution is an affair of reason: the world does not yet but must

someday correlate adequately with its living subject. The unity of subject

and object is thus not merely a speculative concept but becomes a historical

demand. All this is explained in Marx’s Manuscripts, discussed here in

Chapter 2. Marcuse comments, “It is only the Marxian conception which, while preserving the critical, transcendent element of idealism, uncovers the

material, historical ground for the reconciliation of human freedom and

natural necessity; subjective and objective freedom.” 41

That “material, historical ground” is the dereification of reified

capitalist society. Reification as Marcuse uses the term—and here he

follows Lukács—is not just a mental attitude but is also a cultural pattern

affecting institutions and technologies. Marcuse calls it “one-

dimensionality” in his later work, but he already distinguishes a second

“dimension” in his Hegel thesis to refer to the level of essential potentiality

in contrast with the empirical facts.42 Dereification is the establishment of that second dimension in consciousness and as an active force in social life.

This is not merely a local event. Reification is the form of a rational

culture, a culture that proves its superiority to earlier cultures based on myth

by discovering the truth of nature and revealing the human basis of history.

This is the progressive conception of Marxism, which sees in capitalism a

universal if limited achievement. As I argue in Chapter 6, dereification follows reification in transcending any particular culture to achieve a

certain universality. Just as reification reaches out to encompass the entire

globe in rational structures, so dereification follows it and reveals the

human potentialities it suppresses. Revolt thus gives insights of general

validity no less than science, technology, and economics. This dialectic is

implicit in Marcuse’s concept of aesthetic “form as one of the necessities of

being, universal beyond all subjective varieties of taste, affinity, etc.” 43

In recognition of its universality, Marcuse proposes that the aesthetic

imagination should be included among Kant’s transcendental forms of

experience. As such it would be coextensive with the objectified world of

space, time, and causality on which science and technology are based and

not a mere psychological or sociological phenomenon.

The great conception which animates Kant’s critical philosophy shatters the philosophical framework in which he kept it. The imagination, unifying sensibility and reason, becomes “productive” as it becomes practical: a guiding force in the reconstruction of reality—reconstruction with the help of a gaya scienza, a science and technology released from their service to destruction and exploitation, and thus free for the liberating exigencies of the imagination. The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man. Such a world could (in a literal sense!) embody, incorporate, the human faculties and desires to such an extent that they appear

as part of the objective determinism of nature.44

This is what allows Marcuse to claim in his essay on “Nature and

Revolution” that there is an “existential … truth in things, in nature.”45 This

“truth” is existential in the sense that it is experiential rather than scientific.

The fact that experience is always our experience and not that of an

imaginary pure rationality means its anthropocentric character is

unsurpassable. But it is not a mere psychological construct. Rather it is the

condition of another kind of knowledge different from scientific knowledge.

That knowledge arises as a “synthesis, reassembling the bits and

fragments which can be found in distorted humanity and nature. This

recollected material has become the domain of the imagination, it has been

sanctioned by the repressive societies in art.”46 The existential truth so understood is not only propositional but also constitutes the “horizon of

experience under which the immediately given forms of things appear as

‘negative,’ as denial of their inherent possibilities, their truth.”47

Experience thus has a normative character. We do not perceive the

world as scientific reason apprehends it, as a meaningless order of primary

qualities in abstract space and time. The “secondary qualities” belong essentially to the sensed world, and these include the objects of lived

“judgments” of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, experienced directly in

the act of sensation. These qualities reveal the potentialities of nature, “what

perhaps it would like to be.”48

With these remarks Marcuse echoes Adorno’s concepts of constellation

and non-identity. But, unlike Adorno, Marcuse envisages struggle to realize

those “inherent possibilities,” the “truth” of things. Experience offers a non-

scientific knowledge that is also a force, driving history toward higher

levels of freedom. The negative becomes positive in this struggle.

Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the actual human condition in the given society, and the ‘‘given’’ possibilities to transcend this condition, to enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts

‘‘positive’’: oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is “contained” in the present.49

In Lukács, dereification is confined to suppressed humanity, but

Marcuse’s implicit ontology does not allow for a separation of the human

and the natural: the “aesthetic Lebenswelt” is a “being-in-the-world.” His existential truths are attributed to an aesthetic faculty that transforms not

only human life but nature itself. Human beings can, in Marx’s astonishing

phrase, “form things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”50

These reflections help us to understand Marcuse’s hyperbolic claims for

technological change. Perhaps the most astonishing of these claims is his

revival of the surrealist notion of “hasard objectif” in An Essay on Liberation. This is the notion of a transformed world in which “human

faculties and desires … appear as part of the objective determinism of

nature—coincidence of causality through nature and causality through

freedom.”51 This dualistic conception of liberation maintains the unity in difference of nature and society. It once again poses the problem of the

relation between reified rationality, in the form of science and technology,

and the concrete content of lived experience.

Socialist technology lies at the intersection of two disparate sources, the

scientific understanding of nature in terms of causality, and respect for

human and natural potentialities, formulated as meanings. This intersection

takes the form of what I have called a “technical code.”52 Such codes translate between the two worlds of reason and experience. They represent

social demands in the form of technical specifications. Meanings

encountered in experience gain technical salience through such translations.

Technology is not autonomous but essentially imbricated with society

through this process.

The sidewalk ramp is a good example. Until it was introduced,

disability was a private problem. The interests of the disabled were not

represented in the design of sidewalks that obstructed their movements at

every crossing. The “universal” rationality of sidewalks was “particular” in

its exclusion of the disabled. But once society accepted responsibility for

the free movement of the disabled, the design of sidewalks translated the

new right. This recognition takes the form of a design specification

representing the disabled. The sidewalk becomes more “universal” in

responding to an enlarged range of interests, a range more nearly

corresponding to humanity as a whole. 53

Something like this concept of technical code is implicit in Marcuse’s

discussion of capitalist technology, which he argues is designed for

domination. One-Dimensional Man makes a similar point explicitly in

relation to socialism.

The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks—the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its

utilization.54

An Essay on Liberation draws out the ontological implications of this

conception: “Technique, assuming the features of art, would translate

subjective sensibility into objective form, into reality.”55 Thus not only are meanings embodied in technology, but lived nature is itself reshaped in

response to its technical mediation. As Augustin Berque has shown, there is

no better illustration of this than the production of landscape in the course

of history. 56 The technical work of traditional agriculture not only yields food but also a meaningful organization of space. Socialism must do the

same for industry with respect to the whole material base of modern

civilization.

Marcuse’s concept of nature lies at the core of his philosophy of praxis.

The revolution takes place not only in society but in things as well. The

historically charged categories of critical theory operate to resolve the

philosophical antinomy of humanity and nature, frozen in place by both

naturalism and idealism. The contraries are reconciled through the transformation of the technology that binds them together in a unity.

SCIENCE OR TECHNOLOGY

Philosophy of praxis has a critical relation to science and technology from

the beginning. But at the same time it resists the unqualified rejection of

reason characteristic of much romantic thought. Nevertheless, its critique of

scientific abstraction and the dehumanizing effects of industrial technology

seems anti-modern and technophobic. This leaves philosophy of praxis

vulnerable to the charge of “romantic irrationalism.” There are real

difficulties involved in constructing a “dialectic of Enlightenment” that

does not recapitulate the errors of conservative cultural critique. The

vagueness of the Frankfurt School critique of science and technology leaves

room for doubt. This issue is part of a larger one that concerns the politics

of rationality in modern society.

This conundrum already makes its appearance in Marx whose critique

of science and technology under capitalism leads not to a return to

traditional sources of authority or to romantic passion but to the demand for

a new science and technology. Lukács and the Frankfurt School offer more

moderate but still highly speculative discussions of the prospects of

rationality under socialism. Can we find a better grounded solution today on

the basis of our much more sophisticated sociological understanding of

science and technology?

Lukács exemplifies the treatment of science and technology within

philosophy of praxis. He criticizes the quantification of being under

capitalism. All the phenomena of scientific and technical progress,

economic markets, the transformation of the labor process,

bureaucratization of the economy and the state, are tied together by a

reifying logic stemming ultimately from the fetishism of commodities. He

claims that the quantitative methods of natural science applied to society

yield reactionary ideology, but he admits that applied to nature they

contribute to scientific progress.57 Properly understood, society is subject to a qualitative historical account based on a functional hermeneutic in which

the economy plays a central role. He never explains how the two

contradictory sides of this equation might come together in a socialist

technology, both scientific and social, both quantitative and qualitative. The

lacuna is critical for the Frankfurt School. If technological domination is conceived as the simple realization of the quantifying procedures of

science, then the transcendental argument would seem to exclude socialism

insofar as it too relies on technology.

Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to solve this problem in Dialectic of

Enlightenment through distinguishing the instrumental uses of rationality

from the faculty of reflection. They argue that universal quantification

betrays the real power of thought. “The reduction of thought to a

mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure.”58 The expulsion of essences through the reduction of things to their measurable

aspects leaves thought helpless to criticize (“measure”) the world. Science

is thus complicit with capitalism. This complicity involves more than

supplying capital with machines; it also corrupts experience itself. Abstract

labor and the fetishism of commodities become touchstones of experience,

stripping it bare of normative qualities. The elimination of a proper

“measure” deprives the individuals of a basis on which to resist conformity

to society’s demands. The true purpose of technology, the preservation and

enhancement of life, is lost.

As we saw in the last chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that

modern scientific-technical rationality is both committed to domination by

its quantifying reduction of the real, and destined to serve humanity as a

whole through its objective form as machinery. The mutilated capacity for

reflection must be recovered to realize this destiny. Only in reflection can

human beings recognize their natural limitations and thereby moderate their

struggle to dominate nature and each other. To save Enlightenment from

itself they must overcome the damage capitalism has inflicted on

experience and reason. A reflective humanity can orient the struggle toward

its proper goal.

This argument is merely hinted at in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Horkheimer and Adorno seem to have no idea what a successor technology

would be like. What is more, they do not explain what positive motive

could move masses of people to reflect, nor what reflection would reveal to

them beyond their own limits. Perhaps the implausibility of such a

development explains the growing gap between Horkheimer and Adorno’s

philosophy and their politics, culminating in their violent rejection of the

New Left.

The New Left was received very differently by Marcuse. His

transcendental framework led to a far more radical conclusion than the bare

emphasis on reflection in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The movement

instituted a new a priori of experience that would not only release the

critical power of reflection but also lead to the transformation of

technology. This would be a “two-dimensional” experience responsive to

the potentialities of people and things. In effect, he developed a substitute

for the original Marxist theory of class consciousness and on that basis

conceived a unity of theory and practice once again.

Marcuse’s appropriation of phenomenology for Marxism is thus central

to his argument and enables him to develop a positive concept of revolution

incorporating technology for the first time. Here is how he describes that

concept in an unpublished late essay:

Only if the vast capabilities of science and technology, of the scientific and artistic imagination direct the construction of a sensuous environment, only if the work world loses its alienating features and becomes a world of human relationships, only if productivity becomes creativity, are the roots of domination dried up in the individuals. No return to precapitalist, pre-industrial artisanship, but on the contrary, perfection of the new mutilated and distorted science and technology in the formation of the object world in accordance with “the laws of beauty.” And “beauty” here defines an ontological condition—not of an oeuvre d’art isolated from real existence … but that harmony between man and his world which would shape the form of society. 59

The vision is exciting, but is it coherent? Marcuse has no more

explanation than do Horkheimer and Adorno for how a quantifying science

and technology would be appropriated in the context of the socialist

transformation he projects. This is a damaging inconsistency in the

Frankfurt School’s critique. It is already visible in Lukács’s theory of

reification that is the source of all such critiques.

Marcuse wavers between two strategies for overcoming this difficulty,

the re-enchantment of nature through the transformation of science, and the

institution of respect for nature through transformed technology. The latter

strategy resolves the antinomies practically, independent of the evolution of

science. Either or both of these strategies can succeed in fulfilling the

requirements of the philosophy of praxis but they are not equally plausible

and Marcuse does not distinguish them clearly.

Marcuse mentions the transformation of science briefly in One-

Dimensional Man. The emergence of an “aesthetic Lebenswelt” holds the promise of a new science that will assimilate the aesthetic qualities that

emerge in the full experience of nature. The new science will discover value

in the very structure of its objects. The antinomies will be resolved through a representation of nature in which their opposed poles are reconciled,

subject with object, value with fact.

In a confusing passage, Marcuse attributes qualities such as beauty, that

today’s science does not recognize, to the nature of a future natural science.

But he immediately rejects the idea of a return to a “qualitative physics”

and so undermines this notion even as he evokes it. In any case he imagines

the transformation of science as the long-term consequence of a new mode

of experience rather than as a political task of the revolution. Science might

gradually evolve in new directions through genuine discoveries stimulated

by life in a liberated society. But no one can anticipate, much less dictate,

the science of the future. 60

The alternative to the theory of the new science is the reconstruction of

technology on the basis of experiential knowledge. Technology would be

reshaped by respect for the potentialities of human beings and things. This

evolution would release the aesthetic imagination from its marginal role

under capitalism to a central place in the design of technology. 61 Here the antinomies are not resolved by a changed representation of the world but by

a new practical relation to the world. The philosophical significance of the

revolution would depend not on a new science but on a technology shaped

by the new a priori of experience.

Unfortunately, Marcuse does not distinguish between the emergence of

new scientific concepts and methods and new technical codes and designs.

He leaves the impression that socialism awaits an unimaginable cognitive

advance—a new science of nature—rather than much simpler technical

changes well within our reach today. Not surprisingly, this theory has met

with a generally skeptical response. 62

THE INNOCENCE OF SCIENCE?

Even if the technological option correctly interprets Marcuse’s intent and

overcomes the usual objections, there are still problems with the critique of

quantification. These problems concern what science and technology share,

namely, precise rational methods of calculation and control. Like

Heidegger, Lukács, and his Frankfurt School colleagues, Marcuse wants to

extract grounds for critique from these features. But he admits that they

cannot be eliminated from technology even in a socialist society. If that is

so, then the objectionable aspect of capitalist technology must lie elsewhere, but where?

In a Habermasian framework one might argue that the term

“domination” is inappropriate as a description of the scientific-technical

quantification of being; the neutral term “control” would be a better

description with “domination” reserved for specific uses of scientific-

technical powers. 63 But as I explained in Chapter 7 the solution to the conundrum is not to revert to this outdated notion of the neutrality of

science and technology, but to understand their social implications in a

more complex framework.

All these theories confuse the shared a priori precondition of science

and technology with a unity of purpose and consequence they need not

share. The “command of nature” Bacon prophesized is common to both but

this is not sufficient grounds for identifying them without distinction.

Without going as far as Habermas in restricting the use of the concept of

domination, it is still important to note that the link between capitalism and

natural science is fundamentally methodological, not substantive. The

economic system and science share a reliance on quantification, as

exemplified by commodity fetishism and measurement, but they do not

share the same relation to society or serve the same goals.

The concept of domination does seem inappropriate when applied to

natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and geology rather than to their

contingent social uses. Of course social needs often inspire research; some

scientific objects and research programs clearly reflect specific power

relations or ideologies. But the most profound link between capitalism and

natural science is its construction of nature as an object. At this level

science is relatively neutral with respect to the ideologies and values

circulating in modern society. A technological attitude toward nature will be

shared to some extent by any modern society, including a socialist society.

Yet, even here, where its connection to social forces is remote, the very

neutrality of science cancels the consideration due to the potentialities of

human beings and things.64 But it is only conservative in its social implications to the extent that its prevailing technological applications

ignore those potentialities as well. The important link between technology

and capitalism is not pure method but a particular application of the

method. In this context neutrality is an ideological choice.

Crudely put, science treats potassium cyanide and magnesium

hydroxide indifferently as natural substances, but administering one or the

other to a living human being transforms them into poison or medicine. The

choice has nothing to do with scientific-technical rationality, but the

technological a priori contains an inherent potential for domination, insofar

as it allows one to conceive the conditions of life and death indifferently as

“natural.” That potential need not be actualized. Indeed, society has

structured the institution of medicine specifically to exclude neutrality as

between life and death. Unfortunately, no similar exclusion protects

workers and nature from the harms of industrialism.

Thus even though scientific-technical rationality is not exactly

“innocent,” there is a difference between the theoretical representation of

nature and the practical response to social forces in the construction of

useful artifacts. To get from research to social facts an essential mediation is

required; that mediation is the design process, itself based on technical

codes that embody social demands in technical specifications.

The scientific-technical conception of nature enters the social world

through formally biased technical realizations. These realizations depend

not just on rational principles but also reflect the understanding and

intentions of social actors. Technology relies on scientific knowledge at the

level of causal effectiveness, while also participating in the meaningful

contexture of ordinary experience. Technology thus lies “between reason

and experience” and cannot be identified completely with the abstract

understanding of nature of natural science. 65 Because it functions in and responds to far more substantive aspects of the lifeworld than science,

technology has distinctive characteristics. The theory of formal bias

explained in Chapter 7 shows how the apparently contradictory world relations of the scientific-technical disciplines and everyday experience are

combined in design.

Counteracting the potential for domination implicit in science and

technology requires incorporating values protective of life in design.

Designs answering to such values are routinely found in precapitalist

societies. This is the work of craft. But craft belongs to societies of scarcity

in which class rule is based not on technology but on myth and force.

Under capitalism craft traditions are abandoned and the underlying

population excluded from the design process. Capitalism revolutionizes

production and subordinates the whole society to technical power that

becomes the new source of legitimacy. Thus capitalist technology fully unfolds its potential for domination not only at the level of its particular

objects but generally, socially. This situation can be reversed where design

takes into account the potentialities projected by a democratic process

informed by a humane imagination.

Marcuse thus argues that technology must again incorporate an

objective “final cause.” Teleology returns as an attribute of artifacts

responding to human and natural potentialities. He writes, “the technical

mastery of final causes is the construction, development, and utilization of

resources (material and intellectual) freed from all particular interests which impede the satisfaction of human needs and the evolution of human

faculties. In other words, it is the rational enterprise of man as man, of

mankind.” 66 And again:

The critique of technology aims neither at a romantic regression nor at a spiritual restoration of

“values.” The oppressive features of technological society are not due to excessive materialism and technicism. On the contrary, it seems that the causes of the trouble are rather in the arrest of materialism and technological rationality, that is to say, in the restraints imposed on the materialization of values. 67

Here the original telos of rationality is restored.

RECONCILIATION WITH NATURE

Technological domination is neither extrinsic to technology, nor inevitable

wherever technology is employed. Design is the mediation through which

the potential for domination contained in scientific-technical rationality

enters the social world as a civilizational project. Capitalism realizes that

potential by extending it without limit to every aspect of nature and human

beings: “When technics becomes the universal form of material production,

it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality—a

world.”68 The break with that world does not immediately transform science, although in the long run it may have consequences for the scientific

conception of reality. However, the break does require an immediate

engagement with technology.

Although Marcuse treats it as a revolutionary task, that engagement

does not await the revolution. It began long ago as excluded actors

protested the side effects of the dominant designs. Such protests were

commonplace in the labor movement as it grappled with the threats to

health and safety caused by the industrial revolution. The theory of reification illuminates this experience and links it to contemporary protests

around such issues as environmental pollution. Resistance from below

provides the impetus to revise technical assumptions and designs. These

considerations belong to a dialectical critique of technology that is neither

irrationalist nor technophobic.69

Struggles over technology and other rational systems intrinsic to

modernity promise the resolution of the antinomies not through a

conceptual innovation but rather through the practical transformation of the

relation of human beings to each other and to nature. Note that it is not a

question of “attitude” Marcuse would have dismissed a merely subjective

reconciliation. The focus on design differentiates his solution from such

unconvincing notions as Heidegger’s “free relation” to technology, or the

many appeals to voluntary simplicity emanating from a certain wing of the

environmental movement. The point is not just to change attitudes toward

technology or material goods in general, but to reconstruct the industrial

system in accordance with different values. This is the concrete “liberation

of nature” in which philosophy of praxis culminates.

Here in summary are the main points of Marcuse’s position.

Horkheimer and Adorno would have agreed with most of them.

1. Exper ience of nature is historically shaped. The nature revealed

under the technological a priori is not the last word on the truth of being,

but may be transcended in another a priori.

2. The technological a priori of modern societies reveals only an aspect

of experienced or lived nature. That aspect has become the basis of science

and technology and also of a cultural system that suppresses or derealizes

other aspects.

3. A nature understood on restricted instrumental terms stands opposed

to human beings who fear and dominate it. This is the origin of the

philosophical antinomies of matter and spirit, fact and value, necessity and

freedom.

4. Other aspects of lived nature include aesthetic beauty and

potentialities. These aspects of nature are “objective” in the sense that they

belong to the object of human perception. They are not subjective illusions.

5. These aspects are revealed to sensation informed by the erotic and

imaginative faculties. These faculties belong to a fully developed reason, as

opposed to the restricted instrumental rationality of modern societies.

6. The differentiation of these faculties from rationality is an effect of scarcity in class society. Technological advance has made this

differentiation obsolete, even dangerous, since reason uninformed by eros

and the imagination is an increasingly destructive and self-destructive force.

7. A free society in which erotic and imaginative faculties flourish

would encounter a different nature from the restricted one of today. Human

beings would be at home in that nature to a far greater degree than they are

today.

8. Such a society would interact with nature through a different

technology that was more respectful of nature’s potentialities and limits.

This technology would still serve human needs, but it would do so less

destructively.

9. Human liberation and the liberation of nature go together. These two

forms of freedom are not identical. They still presuppose a relationship of

differentiated subjects and objects, but in a liberated society they will be

able to achieve a harmonious relationship.

10. The failure of restricted instrumental rationality is increasingly

obvious and may (but need not) lead to a revolt in favor of new social forms

based on cooperation, solidarity, and respect for nature.

1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

2 For more on the relation of Marcuse’s thought to Aristotle, and to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005).

3 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 141.

4 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 150–1.

Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 211–15.

5 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 153.

6 Herbert Marcuse, “Re-Examination of the Concept of Revolution,” in A. Lothstein, ed., All We Are Saying (New York: Capricorn Books, 1970), 280.

7 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, quoted, 153–4.

8 Ibid., quoted, 157.

9 Ibid., 158.

10 Ibid., 160.

11 Ibid., 164.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., xvi.

14 Ibid., 168.

15 Herbert Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society,” in D. Kellner and C. Pierce, ed., Herbert Marcuse: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 136–7.

16 Herbert Marcuse, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man” in D. Kellner, ed., Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 117–18.

17 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 259.

18 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” in D. Kellner, ed., Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960 s (London and New York: Routledge 2005), 174.

19 Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 61.

20 Ibid., 60.

21 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 12.

22 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 68–9.

23 Ibid., 69.

24 Ibid., 66; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 100, 107.

25 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 66.

26 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 50. Note that the success of Steve Jobs in aestheticizing electronic gadgets does not refute Marcuse’s thesis but rather confirms it, as can be seen from this passage.

27 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 73. See also Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), Chapter 8.

28 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 3. No. 9 (1992).

29 Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C.A. Watts, 1963), 189.

30 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 125.

31 Herbert Marcuse, “Zum Problem der Dialektic I and II,” in Herbert Marcuse Schriften, vol. I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 440.

32 The ontological concept of life in Hegel, Heidegger, and Marcuse is developed more fully in Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse, Chapter 3.

33 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans. S. Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 156.

34 Ibid., 158.

35 G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 175. Hegel’s conception of the lifeworld relation is confirmed at the objective level by modern biology. Biological organisms do not relate externally to a generalized nature but internally to the specific niche within which they function and thrive and which is shaped in turn by their activity.

Organisms are thus not independent things; the correlation of species powers and needs with features of the natural environment refutes individualistic ontology. The human technical relation to nature completes the integration of organism and environment by modifying both.

36 Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 162.

37 Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 97.

38 “Wer in den Kategorien der Freudschen Trieblehre, aus denen Marcuse eine marxistische Geschichtskonstruktion entwickelt hat, wer in seiner neuerdings wieder hevorgekehrten Anthropologie die überlagerten Kategorien von Sein und Zeit nicht einmal mehr ahnt, ist vor handfesten Mißverständnissen nicht sicher.” “Whoever cannot again notice the underlying categories of Being and Time in Freud’s categories of the drive theory, out of which Marcuse developed a

Marxist historical construct, or in his recently reconstructed anthropology, will run the danger of serious misunderstandings.” Jürgen Habermas, Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 10–11.

39 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 218.

40 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 72–4.

41 Ibid., 73–4.

42 Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 75.

43 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 32.

44 Ibid., 31. The “gaya scienza” mentioned here refers to Nietzsche’s book of that title ( Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft) but perhaps also to Emerson’s lecture on “The Scholar” from which Nietzsche took his title: “I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries & unpublished beauties, heralds of civility, nobility, learning & wisdom; affirmers of the One Law, yet as ones who should affirm it in music or dancing.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, Vol. 10, 262.

45 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution, 69.

46 Ibid., 70.

47 Ibid.

48 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 107. Quoted in Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 66.

49 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 87.

50 Quoted in Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 67.

51 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 31.

52 Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010), Chapter 4. I have developed this argument in an “instrumentalization theory” that explains the correlation of causal dimensions of technology with dimensions of meaning and identity.

53 For more on this subject, see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 8.

54 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 231–2.

55 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 24. It is interesting to find the concept of translation in something very close to the sense it has in science and technology studies today in these old texts of Marcuse. For the most similar type of translation Latour calls “delegation,” see Bruno Latour,

“Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in W. Bijker and J.

Law, ed., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992).

56 Augustin Berque, Médiance: de milieux en paysages (Paris: Reclus, 1990).

57 HCC, 10.

58 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E.

Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 20.

59 Marcuse, “Beyond One-Dimensional Man’,’ 117–18. See also “Cultural Revolution,” in Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 138–9.

60 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 164–6, 229–31. For a rather different discussion than mine of Marcuse’s views on science, see C. Fred Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature (Tampa, FL: University of Florida Press, 1985), 59–64.

61 It may be objected that the distinction between science and technology this implies has been outdated by the new “technoscience.” Like Heidegger, Marcuse seems to have adopted something like that notion even before it was formulated by constructivist science and technology studies. There are certainly domains in which the distinction is difficult to make but these domains are still fairly marginal to the central productive activities of modern societies. It would be a mistake to confound science and technology while we can still make a meaningful distinction between research in fields

such as computer science and engineering and the production that goes on in computer and construction companies. For a variety of contemporary views, see Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder, and Gregor Schiemann, ed., Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

62 See for example Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature.

63 Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 88.

64 This neutrality is implicit in the very nature of quantification. Hegel writes, “Magnitude is that characteristic wherein, while no harm appears to be intended, a Determinate Being can be seized, and whereby it can be destroyed.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1., trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 391.

65 See Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 9.

66 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 234.

67 Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society,” in Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 57.

68 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 154.

69 For an introduction to such a philosophy, see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience,

Chapters 1 and 4.

CHAPTER NINE

Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance

INTRODUCTION

In this concluding chapter I begin with an analytical summary of the history

of philosophy of praxis as a figure of thought. This has been our main

concern throughout this book. But the philosophy of praxis raises questions

for us today that do not have clear answers in this history. The later sections

of this chapter consider two of these questions. Here is a brief preview of

these sections.

The failure of proletarian revolution has not ended the struggle against

reification but it has fragmented that struggle. How is the metacritique of

reification affected by that change? Reified rationality still prevails in

society and it is still mediated by tensions between its forms and the content

of the life processes it shapes and constrains, but it is no longer plausible to

envisage a final end of this condition. Reification in some form is an

essential aspect of modernity. Both the successes and the failures of

socialist revolution teach us that reified rationality, as embodied in social

institutions, will always confront suppressed potentialities motivating

transformation from below. This conflictual configuration is now the

permanent state of modern society, but it does not at present take the form

of general revolutionary struggle.

Can the fragmented struggles of this historical period fulfill the program

of philosophy of praxis? The answer to this question depends on the type of

practice that is supposed to resolve the antinomies. If that practice is

conceived as revolution in the traditional sense, then clearly no resolution is

likely in the foreseeable future. 1 On the other hand, a fuller account of practice reveals a hidden dimension overlooked in the exclusive focus on

revolutionary activity. That dimension is the horizonal work of establishing

the framework of meaning within which activity goes on. Reification is

such a horizon and so is the dereifying challenge to it. If changes in that

hidden dimension are understood as essentially transformative, then the philosophy of praxis survives the loss of its revolutionary guarantee.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE THEORY

Philosophy of praxis is based on a metacritique of idealist philosophy.

Idealism attempted to resolve contradictions between subject and object,

value and fact, freedom and necessity, life and thought. The idealist

resolution of these “antinomies” took the form of a speculative play with

concepts. Philosophy of praxis demands a real resolution through the

practical transformation of the social basis of the antinomies. The

metacritique that establishes the rationale for this approach has three

moments: the social reconstitution of idealist categories; the construction of

the relations between the reconstituted categories according to the original

idealist pattern; and the projection of a resolution of the contradictions

between them through social change.

The philosophers of praxis argue that abstract philosophical categories

are sublimated versions of concrete social realities. The philosophical

subject is a sublimated version of the real subject, social class. The object is

not being or the thing-in-itself but the actual object of social practice. The

antinomies reflect fundamental problems of capitalist society. For example,

if value and fact stand opposed, this is because the capitalist world is

structured by economic laws indifferent to human needs, not because these

two domains of being are by nature alien to each other. The antinomies

cannot be resolved at the level of pure theory, but only by action to change

society. Hence Marx’s famous dictum, “The philosophers have only

interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.” 2

Philosophy of praxis avoids the crude economic reductionism of which

Marxism is often accused by reconstructing the relations idealism

established between its categories as social relations. For example, in the

early Marx labor engages with nature not just technically but ontologically,

as the power revealing nature within the social world. Similarly, in Lukács,

once the philosophical subject is redefined as the proletariat it is shown to

constitute social reality through a process of mediation. In both Marx and

Lukács the idealist concepts of synthesis, constitution, and mediation are

translated as practical relations to nature and society.

Adorno and Marcuse’s claims for social practice are less ambitious but

even they consider the subject–object and value-fact relations as unities

fractured by capitalism. The vaunted objectivity of science and its restricted

empiricism is won at the expense of a richer experience of things and their

potentialities. The excluded “second dimension” is reduced to an inner

realm of subjective values. This is what gives rise to the philosophical

antinomy of value and fact that idealism attempts to overcome

speculatively.

In his early metacritique Marx argues that the antinomies arise from

conceptualizing subject and object on the model of cognition. The “real”

subject and object are the worker and nature, not the knower and the

known. The worker is more than a cogito, a thinker of thoughts; the subject

qua worker is a human being with needs, relating to its objects practically

rather than theoretically. These practical relations have the form of the

idealist “identity” of subject and object. Although common sense considers

needs and satisfactions to be accidentally related like any two objects in the

world, Marx argues the contrary, that the subject of need and its objects are

essentially related. This is an ontological relation in which both subject and

object are constituted. The constituting process is played out in the practical

humanization of nature through labor and sense experience.

Marx calls this “objectification,” but under capitalism it takes an

alienated form. Despite the fundamental interdependence of human subject

and object, laboring is associated with poverty and loss. The subject–object

relation is lived in suffering and conflict. Private property and wage labor

are historically contingent causes of this lived version of the antinomy.

Overcoming these institutional obstacles through revolution can bring about

a rational harmony of subject and object no amount of philosophical

speculation can achieve.

Lukács’s metacritique relates the subject–object concept of idealism to

the economic processes analyzed in Marx’s mature works. Those works

restrict the early metacritique to a limited social arena and abandon larger

philosophical goals, but Lukács recovers Marx’s original intent to create a

philosophy of praxis. The result differs from Marx’s thought in several

respects. Lukács lives in a far more advanced society in which vast

bureaucracies deploy a scientific-technical production system. The problem

of rationality the early Marx addressed with the idea of a socialist

reconciliation of man and nature now appears in a different light.

Rationality has split in two, one form corresponding to a strictly instrumental relation to human beings and nature—reification—while

another dialectical rationality belongs to the transforming practice in which

the social and cultural world are revolutionized by the proletariat. No new

concept of reason seems able to reconcile them nor can the rule of the

“assembled producers” eliminate the instrumental relation to reality. Reified

rationality predominates under capitalism. Its contradictions are reflected

philosophically in the antinomies.

Lukács formulates all this through an immanent critique of German

idealism. He identifies three “demands of reason” that emerge from

idealism’s failed attempt to carry out its program: the principle of practice,

history as reality, and dialectical method. They hang together: practice can

only transform reality, i.e., being in the strong philosophical sense of the

term, where reality is essentially historical. This historical transformation

will take place not through a deterministic mechanism or an unbounded

creative process, but through realizing the social potentialities revealed in

the tension between the rationalized social forms and individual life

processes. The philosophical subject of idealism is replaced by the human

subject of work, as in Marx, but Lukács emphasizes the role of that subject

in constituting and overthrowing reified social institutions rather than its

relation to nature. By mediating reification the historical subject reconciles

the antinomies of subject and object, value and fact, freedom and necessity,

theory and practice.

In both Marx and Lukács, the concept of reason emerges transformed

from the metacritique. Its uncritical alienated or reified form is replaced or

complemented by a dialectical rationality. That alternative form of

rationality is not another scientific or technical discipline but the

articulation of social experience, social experience raised to consciousness.

Now rationality is associated not only with science and experiment, but also

with the practical critique coming from those subordinated to the forms of

capitalism. Their situated knowledge reveals aspects of reality to which

reified rationality is blind.

That situated knowledge is granted cognitive status by philosophy of

praxis. It is not merely a “matter of opinion,” but arises from and refers to a

real object Marcuse will later identify with the lifeworld. The metacritically

reconstructed subject and object of the lifeworld are ultimately real. Theory

builds on the critical method immanently present in lifeworldly experience, not a pure reason in which philosophy of praxis no longer believes.

This view contrasts with the scientistic ideology that becomes

increasingly influential from Lukács’s time down to the present. According

to this ideology, experience is essentially flawed and subjective in contrast

with the objective understanding of a purified cogito, freed from all bonds

of corporality, emotion, and situation. Philosophy of praxis dismisses this

“view from nowhere” as a reflex of reification and imposes a finite horizon

on the cognitive subject. It rejects idealism’s thesis of the absolute

autonomy of reason, and relativizes the claims of naturalism by restricting

scientific cognition to a limited aspect of the real. Science too is then

interpreted as a social institution, situated in a social context. This “absolute

historicism” characterizes all four versions of the philosophy of praxis

discussed here.

These are some of the main concepts of philosophy of praxis that the

Frankfurt School elaborates in very different historical circumstances from

Marx and Lukács. Theory and practice are split apart. Horkheimer, Adorno,

and Marcuse conclude that no proletarian movement promises to realize the

demands of reason and reconcile humanity and nature. The Soviet Union

resembles Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy far more than Marx’s Paris

Commune. Instrumental reason has triumphed and socialist revolution now

appears as a lost cause, at least for the foreseeable future. The third moment

in the metacritique is beyond reach. Yet the first two moments retain their

credibility as a critique of idealism and naturalism, and a reconstructive

alternative. But it is impossible to detach the first two moments entirely

from the third. If subject and object have become concrete, active social

beings in the world, their antinomies demand resolution in the world as

well. The Frankfurt School struggles with this conundrum.

In Adorno the outcome is dystopian despair in history. He argues that

the thought and experience of the individuals in capitalist society have been

radically distorted by the commodification of every aspect of social life.

Abstract concepts replace a deeper understanding of the connections and

potentialities of things. Experience is reduced to a mere reflection of the

given, without the imaginative force required for self-reflection.

Instrumental rationality, unrestrained by any concept of potentialities and

limits, threatens human survival with the increase in its technological power

to exploit and destroy. In this critique one sees the persistence of the ideal

of harmony between human being and nature. But now that ideal promises

no transformation; it simply devalues the present by contrast.

In his late work Marcuse arrives at a more positive position under the

influence of the New Left. The New Left practices a cultural politics that,

while it lacks the power of a proletarian movement, at least goes beyond

mere technical manipulation within the existing system. The movement

testifies to the continuing possibility of practical critique, beyond the “one-

dimensionality” of reified experience under capitalism. Radical experience,

the “new sensibility,” is informed by an imaginative grasp of the blocked

potentialities of a society that artificially maintains competition, poverty,

and war long after it has become rich and secure enough to dispense with

these vestiges of an obsolete reality principle. The cultural movement has

political expressions capable of catalyzing a much broader popular

movement, as occurred in France in 1968. The unity of theory and practice

is not fully restored by this argument, but its promise is renewed.

Marcuse is the first philosopher of praxis to respond positively to the

growth of technology. He argues that radical change must involve not only

social transformation but also technological transformation. A technology

of liberation must be created to replace capitalism’s technology of

domination.

The weak points in Marcuse’s formulation are all too obvious today. I

identify two principal ones in Chapter 8: the reliance on a normative grounding in the affirmation of life, which, while intuitively appealing, is

vague; and the undifferentiated critique of science and technology that leads

to the implausible demand for a new science. Nevertheless, despite these

problems Marcuse revives the philosophy of praxis. He succeeds, I believe,

in opening up new ways of thinking about technology and experience, and

the theory–practice relationship that would result from their transformation.

The accompanying table shows the main points of similarity between

these philosophers. Several things become clear from the table. Adorno is

the odd man out. Because he believes the unity of theory and practice has

broken down completely his position is quite different from the others. But

he shares enough with them that many of his ideas could serve as

inspiration or confirmation of Marcuse’s closely related version of

philosophy of praxis. Marcuse believed the results of the breakdown of the

unity of theory and praxis were partially compensated by a radical vision

shared by critical theory and the movements of the New Left. This vision

falls far short of the unity envisaged by Marx and Lukács, but it suffices to overcome Adorno’s excessively pessimistic conclusion.

Principle of

History as

Dialectical

Finite horizon Unity of

practice

reality (versus method (versus (validates

theory and

(ontologically nature as

natural

experiential

practice

effective

reality)

scientific

knowledge)

practice)

method)

Marx

Labor and

Lived nature is Metacritique of Refutation of

Reality strives

sensation

social, man as abstract reason cosmological

toward thought

objectify

nature's spirit

argument

human

faculties

Lukács

Transforming

Scientific

Dialectic of

No absolute

Marxist

practice

nature is social subject and

spectator (view method

mediates form since factuality object versus

from nowhere) corresponds to

of objectivity

is socially

contemplative

practical

constructed

epistemology

dereification

Adorno

Aesthetics as

Nature is

Negative

Secondary

Theory only

model but

historical and

dialectics versus qualities real

unites with

unrealized in

history natural identity

versus

informed

practice

thinking

scientific

practice

abstractions

Marcuse

Cultural

Lived nature as Two-

Existential

Critique and

revolution

a subject

dimensional

truth versus

movement

transforms the within history thought versus mathematical

share vision of

structure of

one-

truth

free society

experience

dimensional

operationalism

Table 1: The Philosophers of Praxis Compared

A second point of significance emerges from the table: the variety of

solutions to the conundrum of nature and history confronting the

philosophy of praxis. Marx’s most radical solution devalues the natural

sciences as an illusion. He invokes some sort of new science that would

transcend current science just as socialism would transcend the capitalist

economy, but this is quite implausible. The ambition to overthrow

capitalism cannot be extended to the scientific basis of modern society.

The problem is even more obvious in Lukács. He attempts to extend the

revolutionary paradigm to the whole field of rational institutions, including

the economy and administration, as well as science and technology, and

ultimately to rationality as such. But when it comes to proposing a new

concept of reason to replace the reified one, he runs into problems. He balks at the consequences of his own concept of mediation. His dialectic

presupposes the very reification the revolution is supposed to overcome.

The dialectic serves as a placeholder for a new, reconciled concept of

reason, but it cannot be substituted for the reified rationality embodied in

the essential institutions of modernity. That Lukács was aware of the

difficulty shows up in his philosophy of science. He treats the formal

structure of scientific factuality as intrinsically social while sparing the

contents of natural science from ideology critique. The distinction between

genesis and validity defuses the original Marxian critique of science.

Adorno rejects the absolutization of either nature or history and so does

not quite affirm history as reality. Instead of a theory he proposes a

chiasmus: nature is historical and history is natural. If nature is identified

with the struggle for survival, then indeed it has penetrated history in the

form of the violent assault of human beings on nature and each other.

History is natural insofar as it is based on that struggle. On the other hand,

nature is not an eternal given, but evolves as human understanding and

technical practice alter its form.

Marcuse argues that nature is a “subject” and as such deserves respect.

Of course the nature in question is not that of natural science but the nature

of the lifeworld. He does not anthropomorphize this nature as Habermas

charged, but rather attempts to reconstruct the concept of essential

potentiality in historical terms. 3 Lived nature belongs to history insofar as it contains potentialities that can be realized by social revolution. In this

respect it contrasts with the merely manipulable nature of technological

rationality.

How lived nature is supposed to relate to the nature of natural science is

unclear in Marcuse’s thought. He is misled by a lingering fidelity to a

concept of revolution that dictates an epistemological transformation when

extended to reason as such. He formulates a highly speculative alternative

to the dominant understanding of science and argues for the enlargement of

scientific reason’s scope to encompass the fruits of an aesthetic engagement

with reality. It is not easy to concretize this suggestion.

Marcuse’s position makes more sense in its application to technology.

The application of aesthetic criteria and the imaginative construction of the

potentialities implicated in technological design are hardly controversial.

Marcuse’s critique is aimed at an exclusive emphasis on profitability and

power. But although plausible in its general lines, the absence of a clear distinction between science and technology leaves his argument vulnerable

to all sorts of critical abuse. Chapter 8 attempts to save Marcuse’s contribution by clarifying this issue.

THE DIALECTIC OF REASON AND EXPERIENCE

According to Marxism, the proletariat is the subject of socialist revolution.

Marx and Lukács share this notion, and even Adorno and Horkheimer, in

their 1956 dialogue, can imagine no other revolutionary agent. Why this

emphasis on the proletariat? There are several converging reasons. The

spread of technology into the factory transforms work, workers, and the

control of production, creating a compact social subject motivated to

overthrow the system. Meanwhile, the unfolding dynamic of capitalist crisis

makes it ever more difficult to sustain the population, and the emergence of

a growing and better informed class of workers promises a democratic

alternative to capitalist management of the system. The combination of

motivation, crisis, and capacity underpins the classical doctrine of socialist

revolution.

Unexpectedly, twentieth-century capitalism in the advanced countries

adjusted sufficiently to the threat from below to defuse revolutionary

motivations. At the same time, the spread of technology and management

continues to produce resistant, if non-revolutionary, subjects in many areas

of social life. These dispersed subjects have a tension-filled relation to the

reified structures that form them. Out of these tensions come struggles that,

whether the participants know it or not, are the direct descendants of the

proletarian movements that inspired Marxism. The fact that these struggles

have not been totalized in a singular confrontation with capital, the fact that

no inevitable economic laws promise victory, all this is obvious today. But

history has not ended for that matter. A new paradigm of social change is

needed based not on the French and Russian revolutions but on a dialectical

concept of mediation. I have suggested reasons for this in the discussion of

resistance that concludes Chapter 5.

What is left of Marxism under these new conditions? We need to take

seriously Lukács’s startling assertion at the beginning of History and Class

Consciousness that the essence of Marxism consists not in factual claims

but in dialectical method. By this he means not only the theoretical method

of Capital but the method of practical critique arising in resistance to reified

markets, bureaucracies, and technologies. That resistance is ongoing in new forms, if still far weaker than its object, but the fact that it exists at all holds

open the utopian possibilities that encouraged Marcuse in his last work to

keep the philosophy of praxis alive.

If we follow Marcuse in taking these resistances seriously, then we must

return to the dialectic for a new approach. It teaches that modern institutions

are not substantial “things,” but must be grasped in their contingency on the

practices that constitute them. We must also cease thinking about the

subject of resistance as a substantial, unified agent with stable

characteristics and objective interests. Instead, it too must be seen as a

relational aspect of the fractured and contradictory unity of the reified

institutions that assemble it.

Those institutions have multiplied enormously since the days of Marx

and now cover the whole surface of modern society with various systems of

rational control, including state and corporate administrations, educational

and medical institutions, and the media. Even leisure activities are

structured by the same hierarchical division.4 Each such system assembles a latent subject capable of entering into conflict with the institutional base.

Modern society is neither a unity nor an aggregate. Rather, it is

inherently divided into reified subjects and objects by the systems that

found it. These systems are held together in dialectically divided “totalities”

by their rational form. They impose those forms as the basis of social order

in every sphere. Their heterogeneous content is never absorbed completely

by the forms, nor is it indifferent to the incomplete process of formation

imposed on it.

The social rationality of those systems is based on specific cognitive

achievements, natural and social scientific insights that determine coherent

configurations of human and natural resources. These are real achievements

for the most part, not arbitrary or merely ideological. But they are

underdetermined by rational considerations and biased formally by social

interests, primarily by the interests that flow from the capitalist organization

of production and distribution.

The nearly total rationalization of modern society entangles social

theory with philosophy in unexpected ways. Concepts of will, interest,

ideology, and power no longer suffice to understand the rationalized world.

Insofar as it has a rational form it appears to realize universal and necessary

laws. And yet its bias is all too clear and gives rise to conflict. 5 What kind

of society has the form of an argument? One that is split between rational domination and a lived experience that overflows instrumental boundaries

and motivates resistances. Those resistances are the mediations that

restructure rational domination, modifying its forms and reducing its power

in order to accommodate the interests of the dominated. The essence of the

Marxist dialectic is the process of mediation, as exemplified originally by

Marx’s critique of political economy and the struggles of the labor

movement.

The socialist movement conceived that process through class struggle

because it believed the route to power led through the factory. This

obscured the cognitive aspect of mediation and gave rise to unrealistic

revolutionary expectations. Marxists believed they could create a socialist

society by decommodifying the economy and substituting state planning for

private ownership of capital. But the overthrow of capitalism does no more

than inaugurate a new phase in the struggle with reification. Lukács is more

aware of this fact than most of his contemporaries. 6 He envisages a long-term struggle rather than a brief and decisive coup. But he equivocates on

the role of reification after the revolution.

Lukács knows that no modern society can function without structures.

The revolution cannot therefore institute a society in which all institutions

are dissolved into temporary political arrangements. At one point he

suggests the possibility of a new kind of non-reified stabilization, but this

suggestion is not developed beyond a brief note. I wonder if he had any idea

what post-revolutionary structures would be like if not some version of the

market, bureaucracy, and technology evolved under capitalism. Workers’

councils might choose managers instead of boards of directors, and

economic planning might replace the banking system, but these

modifications of the capitalist inheritance do not abolish reification root and

branch. Under socialism at best reified institutions would no longer be as

well armored against change from below as under capitalism.

This conception of socialism has political implications. The conflictual

interactions in which most mediation consists can only flourish in a

democracy. The contestation in which the process of mediation goes on

presupposes respect for basic democratic principles, human rights, and the

will of the majority. It thus follows that socialism must be democratic, a

conclusion that finds support in Marx’s enthusiastic description of the Paris

Commune. Furthermore, socialism must be a “deep democracy” in which

all forms of rational order, and not just law, are subject to dereification and transformation.

We already have significant examples of democratic interventions that

prefigure a different regime of rationality. Struggles over technology most

clearly illustrate the challenge to reification. In addition to continuing class

conflict over technological innovation in production, many types of protest

have emerged in recent years around environmental and medical issues, and

the Internet. Demonstrations, lawsuits, hearings, and forums have turned

environmentalism into a political issue and transformed public awareness of

medical research. Online protests over control of the Internet and hacking

have created a new information politics. Most remarkable is occasional lay

participation in the work of scientific experimentation and technical

design. 7

Although their scope and effectiveness are still severely limited,

interventions such as these enlarge the public sphere and anticipate a more

democratic form of modern society. Yet they have been systematically

underestimated and ignored by political theorists. Where they are noticed at

all, resistances are generally viewed not dialectically but from the one-sided

perspective of the dominant. From that perspective rationality stands

opposed to ignorance and disorder. But the reality is quite different.

Rational domination is biased not only by the usual errors, prejudices, and

traditions that threaten everything human beings think and do, but by two

problems of principle that stem from the very nature of reification and

require democratic correction. These problems have to do with

specialization and control.

Everything is connected in the real world, but reification differentiates

the totality into fragmented parts. Disciplinary specializations follow the

reified pattern in isolating particular cross-sections of the totality for

analytical treatment. The cognitive advantages of specialization are

undeniable, but it can lead to unanticipated problems in the application. For

example, not infrequently engineers design a production process or a device

that is hazardous for the workers who use it. Once it is deployed, medical

complications ensue and another specialization must be called in to deal

with non-engineering aspects of the concrete system formed by the device

and the workers’ physiology. In the best of cases, the combination of

specializations initiates an iterative design process that resolves the

problems.

Who is likely to first notice the limitations of the engineers’ useful but narrow conception of reality? There is no meta-discipline able to predict the

need to integrate multiple forms of disciplinary knowledge. Another source

of knowledge must come into play, knowledge “from below” based on real-

world experience. Such knowledge is frequently occasioned by overlooked

harms of technology, or unexploited technical potentials that have not been

identified by the technologists themselves but which users can imagine and

even in some cases implement on their own. The chief contemporary

examples of these two categories are the medical harms of industrial

pollution, and the communicative potentials of the Internet. 8

There is a second systemic problem with reification: the challenge of

control. This is reason’s original sin. Technical control of human beings

leads to decisions that inspire resistance not just for contingent motives but

structurally, necessarily. Consider, for example, the dilemma of capitalist

management that must keep up with technological advances while

reproducing its control of a more or less antagonistic labor force. These

twin requirements have determined the technical code of capitalism, based

on authoritarian management, deskilling, and automation. Alternative and

more humane paths of progress have been foreclosed and this pattern has

been generalized to other social domains. For example, the politics of

energy is biased by the imperative requirement of energy companies to

enlarge their centrally controlled grids. Alternative sources of energy and

conservation have been marginalized. The Internet originated in a

decentralized logic but today is in the grip of struggles over control that

threaten to bring it into conformity with the general pattern. The point is not

to argue for the dissolution of all these rationalized systems, but the extent

of centralization and its consequences are very much worth questioning.9

Resistance to heavy-handed controls and inhumane policies lead to

conflicts and eventually to restructuring domination in less oppressive

forms. This is not a conventional political process. Democratic

interventions must be translated by technical professionals into new

regulations and designs. Struggle gives rise to new technical codes both for

particular types of artifacts and even for whole technological domains.

This is an essential form of activism in a rationalized society. It limits

the autonomy of experts and capitalist management and forces them to

redesign the worlds they create to represent a wider range of interests. The

translated demands are assimilated by the institutions and may lead in turn

to future iterations of the struggle, further contestation. This is the logic of reification and mediation and it is unsurpassable. I call it “democratic

rationalization” because it reproduces rational institutions in response to

pressure from below. 10

TRANSFORMING PRAXIS

The contemporary relevance of the concept of practice developed in these

pages should be the subject of another book, but I do want to offer some

tentative thoughts here in conclusion. What I have called “transforming

practice” is characterized by the following attributes:

1. Transforming practice is aimed at meaning.

2. Meaning is not subjective but is enacted in practice and “raised” to consciousness.

3. Meanings are entangled with each other in a cultural system that forms the horizon of thought and action.

4. Insofar as it is enacted, culture has system effects that are more or (often) less intended consciously by social actors.

5. Culture does not exhaust social reality but stands in tension with the forces it evokes.

In what follows I will summarize the formulations of this concept in

Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, and consider how it might be

applied to contemporary social movements.

We have seen how Marx and Lukács attempt to break through the

barrier of alienated and reified cultural forms to a reflexive concept of

transforming practice. Their attempts establish the foundations of

philosophy of praxis but also lead to an exaggerated notion of activity. In

Marx’s Manuscripts practice takes on the creative power of the divinity:

untransformed nature is treated as mere matter awaiting the human touch.

In Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness an ambiguity hangs over the

concept of subject–object identity. In a metaphysical reading, it signifies the

supremacy of the subject over all being. But in what I call a methodological

or dialectical reading, his concept of mediation has much in common with

the Frankfurt School’s concept of non-identity. This ambiguity is discussed

in Chapter 6.

Paradoxically, the Frankfurt School’s emphasis on the liberating

implications of reflection and restraint make possible a deeper

understanding of transforming practice. The notion of a “non-exploitative

relation to nature” is too easily caricatured as hippie nonsense, the flower

child’s anthem. But the philosophers of the Frankfurt School do not

advocate abandoning the idea of activity central to the Marxist conception of human being. Rather they attempt to conceptualize a different kind of

activity that respects the object as bearer of potentialities, as possessed of a

certain “wholeness” or self-relation. The previous chapter discussed this

concept of the object in relation to nature, but it obviously applies also to

human beings. To achieve such respect requires a break with the dominant

instrumentalist conception of practice. Marcuse conceives the alternative as

an “aesthetic” or “erotic” world relation. It too is a kind of practice, a self-

and world-transforming practice of the sort imagined in earlier philosophy

of praxis but left implicit in the emphasis on revolutionary activity.

This implicit practice appears passive since it is not characterized by

manipulation and control, but it nevertheless has an effect on the world

through a politics of meaning that, as Lukács argues, alters the functional

place of objects in the totality. Even reified practice contains such a non-

instrumental moment, a moment in which a horizon of meaning is posited

under which the active work of change goes on. In his prescient reflections

on technology, Francis Bacon famously defined the relation between this

special type of passivity and activity, writing, “Nature to be commanded

must be obeyed.” 11 The technical actor must obey the “commands” of nature, its laws; he can use the laws for his own ends, but to do so he must

accept them. This could very well serve as an uncritical definition of

reification. In their implicit self-understanding under capitalism the

individuals define themselves as individuals rather than as members of a

collective. This is the horizon they posit and under which they generally

act. As a result they cannot act together; their “command” of society is

strictly limited by “obedience” to the individualist capitalist framework that

serves as the “law” of their practice.

Pace Bacon, this framework is not natural. Following Ian Angus, we

can say it is “instituted.” He suggests “an expanded meaning of ‘institution’

in which it refers to the opening of a space from which a new temporal

order comes forth and applies both to a formation of knowledge and an

epoch of Being.” 12 This describes reification as an a priori basis of thought and action.

The worst harms of reification arise not from the instituting moment per

se, but from its systematic misconstruction in class society as an ontological

principle beyond all mediation by the subject. Thus practice is narrowed to

its overtly active dimension, while the establishment of its horizon is

conceptualized “contemplatively” as an unchangeable objectivity to which

human beings must adapt. Since reified practice cannot act on its horizon,

the more vigorous its exertions the more effectively it reproduces the very

framework of assumptions within which it is condemned to operate. But

this is not a fateful necessity. A non-instrumental action transforming the

horizon is possible.

Philosophy of praxis recognizes horizonal transformation in this sense,

but that creates a certain tension with the Marxist concept of revolution. In

what does transforming practice most essentially consist, action on the

horizon of action or the action made possible by that action? Which practice

fulfills the requirements of the principle of practice and resolves the

antinomies, “material-semiotic” change or power-political change? The

Frankfurt School resolves the ambiguity in emphasizing the aesthetic, a

domain of activity in which the horizon is the essential object of action.

With this emphasis it invokes a power more radical and thoroughgoing than

anything dreamed up by industry or politics, what Adorno calls a “pacified

technique.”13

The Frankfurt School’s emphasis on aesthetics is overly narrow but

suggestive. The instituting moment of practice is most clearly a conscious

and purposeful mediation in the case of aesthetics. This is so for several

reasons. Aesthetic practice begins by freely positing a “form” as a horizon

of the ordinary instrumental actions through which the work is created. The

imaginative freedom characteristic of aesthetic practice enables idealizing

strategies that signify unfulfilled potentialities of the social world. This is

accomplished through the way in which the form incorporates aspects of the

materials, and is thus not simply imposed but is in some sense emergent. As

Lukács argues, the aesthetic form–content relation is dialectical; concept

and object interact productively. One way of understanding this interaction

is in terms of a limit, the independent logic of the object to which the form

must adapt in forming its materials.

Marcuse generalizes these aspects of aesthetics beyond the realm of art.

He conceives a technical practice that resembles art making in revealing

potentialities and respecting its materials. In reaction against an overactive

instrumentalism, he even proposes “letting be” as an ideal. Here the notion

of limit is carried to the limit. This makes sense in an aesthetic context. I

have found it most clearly exemplified by aspects of Japanese culture. It is

beautifully anticipated in a Japanese Buddhist tale that has a particular

relevance to this discussion because it concerns a reconciled technology, the swords of the legendary maker Okazaki Masamune. This account is from D.

T. Suzuki:

Masamune flourished in the latter part of the Kamakura era, and his works are uniformly prized by all the sword connoisseurs for their excellent qualities. As far as the edge of the blade is concerned, Masamune may not exceed Muramasa, one of his ablest disciplines, but Masamune is said to have something morally inspiring that comes from his personality. The legend goes thus: When someone was trying to test the sharpness of a Muramasa, he placed it in a current of water and watched how it acted against the dead leaves flowing downstream. He saw that every leaf that met the blade was cut in twain. He then placed a Masamune, and he was surprised to find that the leaves avoided the blade.

The Masamune was not bent on killing, it was more than a cutting implement, whereas the Muramasa could not go beyond cutting, there was nothing divinely inspiring in it. The Muramasa is terrible, the Masamune is humane. One is despotic and imperialistic, the other is superhuman, if we may use this form of expression. 14

This tale is the mythological expression of transforming practice. The

feeling that such a concept is self-contradictory only testifies to the

persistent influence of reification. In the parable, the sword that cuts

annihilates its object only to find another in the perpetual flow of the

stream. Masamune’s sword is the more powerful because it acts not on

things—on leaves or men—but on the horizon of its own practice, the

assumption that killing is an inevitable fate.

The idea of letting be, or reconciliation as a positive mediation and a

true positing, appears in Japanese culture in the more familiar form of

“borrowed scenery.” The architectural style that leaves trees standing as

natural ornaments of the house is as much a mediation of nature as a

different style that begins by leveling them. From an aesthetic standpoint,

the living trees are as surely chosen and incorporated into the lives of

human beings as if they had been clear cut to make way for a real-estate

development.15 Yet their independence as “subjects” facing the human subject is not overthrown by a violent identification. What is more, the

letting be of the trees shows respect not only for outer nature, but also for

that which in human nature requires trees. It is as much nature in the subject

as without that is mediated in this reconciled practice; for, whatever human

beings do to an Other, they simultaneously do to themselves in another

mode. That is, in effect, the defining trait of a finite being.

This approach to practice may seem remote from Marxism, and

certainly the concept of aesthetic practice, even generalized as it is in

Marcuse, cannot fully explain radical political movements. But the

emphasis on horizonal change is an implicit aspect of traditional Marxist politics. Marxism addresses not particular wrongs but the generalized

wrong of capitalist civilization as a whole. A totalizing critique emerges

through the positing of a horizon. That horizon is the life process of the

proletariat, damaged by alienation and commodification. Marxism begins

with “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is

a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.” 16 This imperative establishes a limit: action begins in respect for the humanity of the worker.

The “law” of that humanity commands the overthrow of all that violates

it. 17

A similar correlation of passivity and activity defines class

consciousness in Lukács. The prior condition of struggle is the “self-

consciousness of the commodity.” In it the worker posits her own needs as a

limit violated by the commodification of labor. Unfulfilled needs motivate

resistance not just to poverty but to its cause, the reification of the worker’s

own self. This self too is a kind of “nature” to be defended against capitalist

clear cutting. That defense is the source of the revolutionary act that

overthrows the system. It begins with a self-transformation that is itself a

social transformation.

Clearly, these Marxist conceptions of practice go beyond Marcuse’s

“letting be,” and even Marcuse only mentions this notion to emphasize the

contrast between emancipatory technique and the dominant exploitative

instrumentalism. The link between meaning and enactment implies active

engagement with reality, even if in the extreme case of “letting be” that

engagement takes the form of adjustment to the independent potentialities

of the materials. More commonly activism involves overt interventions into

social and political processes. What characterizes such interventions as

transformative is not the degree of violence they exhibit but their relation to

the totality, i.e., to the cultural system as a whole.

The Marxist conception of practice depends on a specific historical

configuration of the proletariat but its structure survives changes in that

configuration. The underlying problem Lukács attempts to solve with his

notion of class consciousness is the possibility of totalizing critique. Since

critical agency is itself empowered by the system it criticizes, is there not a

contradiction in its stance? This was the insuperable obstacle in Horkheimer

and Adorno’s futile dialogue. The answer Lukács proposes is the dialectic

of form and content. A modified version of that dialectic applies even after the decline of the revolutionary proletariat.

Societies impose forms on contents they activate and shape, evoke and

channel. There is no guarantee that the forms will effectively contain the

contents. The culture of rule in every society addresses the gaps with

prescriptions and solutions of various sorts, such as religious ideology and

administrative initiatives. The conditions of critique are fulfilled where

tensions between form and content become conscious as such at the level of

content, i.e., the subordinate social actors. Then a resistant subjectivity

forms and counter-ideologies and initiatives challenge the system. Lukács

identifies this unique situation with capitalism and its proletariat. We now

know that it has a wider reach.

Although we do not have many equivalents today of the militant class

struggles that inspired Marx and Lukács, a deep transformation of the

horizon of contemporary practice is gradually emerging. This

transformation takes place in scattered regions of society in response to a

critical awareness of the harms of a destructive way of life. Awareness

liberates the individuals for political activity most visibly in movements

around gender issues, struggles against exclusion, the environmental

movement, and the defense of the Internet against commercial domination,

surveillance, and censorship. Economic and environmental crises weaken

the grip of reification. The horizon of practice shifts with the realization of

the contingency of the world created by technocratic neoliberalism.

The movements to which this gives rise are still quite weak and lack an

overall strategy of change. They do not fulfill the conditions of revolution

as Lukács explains them. But the unfavorable comparison with earlier

proletarian movements should not blind us to subtle changes taking place in

the conduct of politics and the nature of the public sphere that may yet

shape a new era. Of the figures discussed here, Marcuse understood this

best.

He proposed two different strategies in the struggle against the one-

dimensional society. The “Great Refusal” was an aesthetic principle

generalized as a total rejection of the system. 18 This strategy recapitulated old debates that opposed reform to revolution. Uncompromising and

absolute critique was an attractive stance in the context of a dystopian

society rich enough to co-opt every demand in any case. But ironically the

search for the unco-optable demand led to Marcuse himself becoming an

icon in the mass culture of 1968, a fact from which his reputation suffers to this day.

A new configuration emerged in the 1970s that Marcuse called the

“preventive counter-revolution.” Co-optation continued but became

supplemented by recession and repression. The New Left disintegrated, but

left behind a large critical public and a sense of suppressed possibilities.

Marcuse now echoed the German slogan, “A Long March through the

Institutions.” 19 In a time of political eclipse one must find a place in the institutions of society. But it is still possible to bring contestation to bear on

those institutions, accepting the likely ambiguity of the outcome.

Demanding the overthrow of the system is not the touchstone of resistance

it might be in a time of revolutionary ferment.

These two strategies exemplify two different versions of the dialectic.

The Great Refusal is a disappointed response to the failure of the

metaphysical version in which a substantialized revolutionary agent such as

the proletariat resolves the contradictions and establishes a socialist state.

The Long March reflects the dialectic of permanent mediation of rational

institutions by their members. I argue for the disruptive thesis—disruptive

for traditional Marxism, that is—that only the second version makes sense

today as a theory of progressive social change.

The system as a whole is not an object of resistance at this time, and

may only become so in the future through the horizonal changes underlying

contemporary resistances, challenging fundamental assumptions and

institutions. Thus these resistances are neither revolutionary nor reformist in

the usual sense of the term; they differ from minor reforms internal to the

normal functioning of the institutions since they restructure the context

within which the system operates. This too is a kind of transforming

practice that affects the totality. For want of a better term, I will call them

“radical reforms.” They are not to be conceived as merely deficient by

comparison with true revolutionary practice. Even if the system could be

abolished, many reified institutions would continue to exist and inspire

resistances and radical reforms similar to those we see today.

Traditional Marxism recognized this reality to some extent. It supported

the growth of a labor movement demanding economic reforms, and it

proposed a gradual transition to socialism. But labor struggle and the

transition were conceived as temporary phenomena, the one preparing the

revolution and the other following it and ending with the advent of

communism. 20 In reality, reform and transition are always already engaged in modern society and will never end. They are inherent in the structure of

modernity, not just in a particular economic system. The failure to

recognize this has doomed revolutions in the name of socialism. Having

overthrown capitalism, they reproduced its reifying consequences in other

institutional forms while blocking mediation in the name of the revolution.

The contemporary significance of the philosophy of praxis appears clearly

in the light of this history.

1 The operative word here is “foreseeable,” but obviously philosophical conclusions cannot be based on events that might occur despite being unforeseeable.

2 Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Anchor, 1967), 402.

3 For my position on Habermas’s famous critique of Marcuse’s concept of nature, see Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge, 1999), Chapter 7.

4 For the example of video games, see Sara M. Grimes and Andrew Feenberg, “Rationalizing Play: A Critical Theory of Digital Gaming,” in A. Feenberg and N. Friesen, ed., (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012). The concept of social rationality underlying this discussion is explained in Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), Chapter 8.

5 Is it still necessary to point out the failure of Habermas’s system theory to deal with the bias of rational systems? See Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Chapter 7.

6 HCC, 208, 313–14.

7 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Chapter 6, especially 142–7.

8 For a discussion of the Internet on these terms, see Feenberg and Friesen, eds., ( Re) Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012). See also Brian Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: Participation and Exclusion in Nuclear Decision-Making (London: Earthscan, 2011).

9 Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapter

3.

10 Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 1. The temptation to dismiss this logic as reformist or co-opted must be resisted. A similar attitude would have led to the dismissal of the struggles of the early labor movement. The problem of reform versus revolution only arises in what Lukács called the period of the “actuality of the revolution.” We are not there. Here is how J. M.

Bernstein makes a similar point: “I argue that the best we can hope for … is that rationalizing processes are repeatedly challenged and transformed by social practices that create havens of symbolic renewal … that nonetheless cannot themselves be fully incorporated into those rationalized systems. Hence, the suggestion is, rather than looking for rational, stable, and systematically reproducible social forms … we should be operating with a suitably adjusted anti-utopian (albeit thereby utopian) conflict model of ethics and society.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and

Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19 n33. It is noteworthy that Lukács called his own approach a “post-utopian attitude to history” ( HCC, 78).

11 Francis Bacon, “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man,” in E. A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 28.

12 Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 5.

13 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 47.

14 D. T. Suzuki, “Zen and Swordsmanship I,” in D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1959), 91–2.

15 Frank Lloyd Wright translated this idea of borrowed scenery into modern architecture. For the influence of this idea on Wright, see Anna Whitsun, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect of Landscape (Part II),” Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, (Fall 2000), 4–25.

16 Marx, ‘‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,’’ 257–8.

17 On the concept of limit ( peras), see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, 191, 213–15.

18 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149–50.

19 Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 55.

20 Feenberg, Transforming Technology, Chapter 2.

APPENDIX

The Unity of Theory and Practice

INTRODUCTION

The first essay in History and Class Consciousness is a lengthy elucidation

of the enigmatic phrase “the unity of theory and practice,” i.e., the relation

of Marxism to the proletariat and its movement. Lukács argues that “theory

is essentially the intellectual expression of the revolutionary process

itself.” 1 The argument is complex and interesting despite Lukács’s erroneous assumptions about the future of the movement. Yet his

contribution has been systematically caricatured by critics who insist that it

anticipates already in 1923 his later accommodation with Stalinism,

rationalizing in advance the confiscation of the historical mission of the

proletariat by a party and a police state. This caricature has become the

standard interpretation in the English-speaking world. 2

In this Appendix, I will attempt to reconstruct Lukács’s position in its real context, that of contemporary Marxist thought and the many dilemmas

and unsolved problems implicated in the relation of theory to practice in his

time. I will first show how Lukács deals with the contradictions in the

program of historical materialism, and then turn to his theory of class

consciousness. My approach in this chapter is influenced by French

interpreters such as Lucien Goldmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Lucien

Sebag, who describe a very different image of Lukács from the prevalent

one. But it is, I believe, a more accurate image.

These interpreters do not project back onto Lukács’s early Leninism, or

Marxism’s later fate under Stalin, as though the meaning of the origin were

revealed teleologically in history. This is Whig history in reverse and best

avoided by interpreting events in their contemporary context. This is not to

say that contemporaries fully understand the ways in which their ideas may

be used and abused in the future. Leninism in the early 1920s already had

some of the authoritarian features that later characterized the Soviet state,

but those features still responded to real political challenges of an

emancipatory movement.3

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY

Lukács situates Marxism at the intersection of the two fundamental

discoveries of modern social theory. The first of these, which he attributes

to Vico, holds that society is a human product; from this idea derive all

those social theories that emphasize human agency. As Marx writes, human

beings are “both the authors and the actors of their own drama.” 4 The second discovery, attributed to Smith and Ricardo, holds that in one of its

dimensions—the economy—this product has a rational form described in

universal laws resembling the laws of nature. Thus Marx also claims that

social life can be “viewed as a process of natural history,” in which men are

“governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and

intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness

and intelligence.” 5 Every later social determinism stems from this insight.

These two discoveries compass the antinomy of structure and agency.

This antinomy still divides social theory, which emphasizes now one, now

the other of its poles, the logic of the social order or the action of subjects in

history.6

The antinomy bedevils Marxism from the beginning. By Marx’s day,

capitalism had subordinated all other areas of social life to its exigencies.

This state of affairs argued for an emphasis on structure, the determining

power of the economic laws over against the will and intentions of human

beings. And yet the evidence of Vico—that history is a human product—

was increasingly confirmed by revolutionary movements and romantic

cultural protest against the deathless mechanism of the market. Hence the

contradiction between two of Marx’s most important theories: historical

materialism, which was supposed to show the dependency of social and

political agency on economic structure; and the projection of a disalienating

socialist revolution through which humanity as subject would reassert its

claims.

The contradiction finally culminates in the early twentieth century with

a series of debates in the social democratic movement. In these debates, a

voluntaristic theory of action is dialectically correlated with a mechanistic

conception of society. Emphasizing structure leads to passivity, the long

wait for the inevitable revolution that never comes. The action theory cannot in principle go beyond suggesting the desirability of moralizing the

social world or of manipulating it technically according to its laws.

“Economic fatalism and the reformation of socialism through ethics are

intimately connected.” 7 Thus the great foes in German Social Democracy, the determinists of the orthodox “Center,” and the neo-Kantian liberals of

the revisionist right, appear to Lukács to occupy opposite poles of the

bourgeois antinomy of fact and value, reified law and individual action in

history. Lukács argues,

With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analyzed in such detail. The important role increasingly played in this ideology by “man” as a value, an ideal, an imperative, accompanied, of course, by a growing “insight” into the necessity and logic of the actual economic process, is only one symptom of this relapse into the reified immediacy of the bourgeoisie. 8

This dilemma emerges from the ambiguities of Marxist theory. Its

program for explaining the role of the subject in history is based on a

general ontology that affirms the primacy of matter over thought. This leads

by analogy to the notion that the “material” life process of society is the

“base,” determining for its “ideal” expressions in the superstructures. That

this is an analogy is clear: there is no evident boundary between social

“matter” and “spirit” since ideology is, admittedly, “a material force when it

seizes the masses,” and since production incorporates the knowledge of the

producers. However, the analogy draws its force less from the concrete

content of social research than from its polemic opposition to idealistic

social theory that first distinguished social “matter” and “spirit” and ordered

them as effect and cause. Engels says as much in a famous letter to Bloch in

which he admits that Marxism’s historiographic practice differs from its

materialist program.

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error is permissible. 9

As it is generally formulated, the materialistic program leads to

insoluble dilemmas. Once social matter and spirit are conceived as

independent entities, how can they be brought into relation? The mind–

body problem returns to haunt Marxism, which must seek in the theory of

ideology a social pineal gland to join what it has conceptually sundered.

Like all other solutions of the mind–body problem, that of Marxism is a

failure. If social thought is explained as a “reflection” of the economic base,

as the image of its original, it is impossible to understand the “reciprocal

action” of the former on the latter. Yet without this reciprocal action,

Marxism collapses into an economic determinism of which Engels does not

hesitate to say that it is “a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.” 10

These dilemmas show that a given problematic is not transcended by

reversing the value signs attached to its terms. Rather, the same antinomies

appear within the inverted problematic in inverted form. Thus where

idealism ends up in the hazy indetermination of a theory of “values” and

“free will,” the materialistic correlate results in a determinism so rigid as to

be incompatible with any concept of historical agency at all. The trace of

the original idealistic problematic bends Marxist theory toward such

conclusions in spite of contrary tendencies in concrete applications.

Adequately relating base to superstructure requires not only more

mediations between the terms than materialism provides, but also a

definition of the terms that will admit of a mediation in principle. This is

precisely what is lacking in the materialist program because it is a prisoner

of the traditional ontological distinction of matter and spirit. As such it

conceives objectivity as self-subsistent and unreflected, as existence in the

mode of thinghood, subject to formal laws. The subjective ‘‘factor’’ appears

now as the correlated opposite of existence, as insubstantial, pure reflection,

which enters the world only accidentally through a problematic incarnation.

The mark of this rigid opposition of thought and things appears clearly in

the familiar methodological dilemmas of the materialist program.

The revolution can only be explained in this framework by descending

from the clear air in which the laws float to the earthly level of particular

historical data. These data often appear to be ideologically determined

rather than determined by the mode of production. Revolution in particular

implies the possibility of superstructural dominance, which violates the

deterministic thesis of historical materialism. The case is not helped much

by the structuralist revision of the thesis à la Althusser according to which

revolution is the structurally possible result of the contingent flow of

events. That move goes some way to overcoming determinism but it leaves

the occurrence of the revolution to chance. What is required is an

explanation of the sequence leading from capitalism to socialism as a structural rather than a purely contingent process of change, without falling

into a determinism that excludes human agency. Lukács’s alternative

account interprets the revolutionary process not as the simple consequence

of the economic laws but as the determinate negation of those laws. As he

argues, “A dialectical necessity is far from being the same thing as a

mechanical causal necessity.” 11

The difference stems from the fact that the dialectic involves conscious

Aufhebung. Hence Lukács’s emphasis on the central role of consciousness

in the revolution. But consciousness in this context is not an insubstantial

spiritual entity as it is for the official Marxist program. In the background of

that program, Lukács detects Marx’s early metacritical reconstruction of the

functions of consciousness in the material life process. On this basis Lukács

rejects the causal paradigm of subject–object relations, with its external

interactions between separate spheres of reality—being and thinking—and

instead shows the dialectical interdependency of the antinomial opposites.

The relativization of thought and social being with respect to each other

still shapes Marx’s earliest formulations of the distinction between base and

superstructure. In The German Ideology, for example, passages such as the

following abound: “Consciousness can never be anything else than

conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.” 12

Or again:

This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are … What they are therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.13

While open to a mechanistic interpretation, such passages take on their

full significance only in the context of the metacritical revision of

consciousness and life that Marx first undertook in the Manuscripts. There

Marx’s critique of the idealistic concept of consciousness is far more radical

than his later programmatic position on the superstructure. The

reconstruction of philosophical concepts proceeds through an immanent

critique of both the abstract ideal and its antinomic correlate, the equally

abstract “real.” Thus Marx not only revises the concept of reason but also

the opposed concept of need. As explained in Chapter 2, the revision of the one is the revision of the other, the demonstration that the sphere of need

has the form and function of rationality. This double movement of the metacritique is purged from the later theory of ideology and the

superstructures, which treats the opposed correlates as independent real

objects and then relates them as cause and effect. The implicit starting point

of Lukács’s own social theory is a recognition of the failure of this later

conception and a recovery of Marx’s original metacritical insight.

The contradictions of the traditional Marxist conception have

methodological consequences. Lukács argues that reified theory, including

its Marxist forms, cannot transcend the antinomy of structure and agency.

For it the structural dimension of society appears to be independent of and

prior to the level of mere historical events, the “content” of social life

produced by conscious action. He rejects the attempt to find mediations

between such a separately conceived structure and history. The two aspects

must arise simultaneously, as mutually necessary aspects of a third element,

a basic substratum. This substratum is social practice. History is a process

in which that practice generates not just events, but the structural order

through which they take on meaning and coherence. On this basis, Lukács

repeatedly argues that history is no mere causal sequence but the production

of the social world in a specific form that has the socially relative

universality of (what we could call) a cultural system.

For a model of this process Lukács draws on classical German

philosophy, which confronted a somewhat similar problem at a much higher

level of generality. Lukács interprets the philosophical concepts of

“synthesis” and “mediation” as the conceptual mythology corresponding to

the real practical production of structure as history and in history.

Demythologized, these concepts explain the structural dimension of society

through the process of its real production. Agency is then conceived not

merely as a sequence of actions but as a process of systematization, the

construction and deconstruction of a culturally secured social order. The

remarkable coordination implied in this process results from the logic of the

economic system.

Following Marx’s suggestion, Lukács claims that the capitalist economy

has a double character. The bourgeoisie constitutes the world of its daily

activity through an individualistic economic practice, the reified form of

which it then perceives as the essence of society. In the course of its

activity, reification is generalized beyond its specifically economic content

to become the basis of thought and perception generally. The economic

categories thereby become models of a specific type of objectivity, shaping

consciousness and social reality in all domains.14

The social reproduction of the economy depends on the cultural

generalization of its categorial structure. Lukács argues that consciousness

is both shaped by its relation to immediate appearances and contributes in

its turn to orienting practice toward the activities required to reproduce the

system. As Marx put it in another context, “Production thus produces not

only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”15 The form of objectivity and the mode of consciousness based on it are essential

mediations in the process of social reproduction.

Society no longer divides into separate spheres of material objectivity

and spiritual subjectivity, body and mind metaphorically reconstituted as

dimensions of the social world. Social subjectivity and objectivity are no

longer seen as causally related independent entities, but rather as functional

elements in a system of practice. With this the circle is closed, practice

producing a world of objects that, by their form, shape a consciousness that

orients practice toward the reproduction of these same objects.

This dialectical circularity of the system of practice is the basis of its

systematic misperception as a solid reality constituting for practice. Lukács

writes that “history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the forms of

objectivity that shape the life of man.” 16 And yet each form of objectivity presents itself immediately to consciousness as an atemporal system,

without roots or history. In fact the very efficacy of forms of objectivity

rests on the misperception of them as unhistorical, natural, and necessary.

Reification has precisely this character.

Can this circularity be broken? This is the question of the possibility of

a “true” or revolutionary consciousness. The purpose of Lukács’s theory of

class consciousness is to identify the conditions for a transcendence of

immediacy, a demystification of the form of objectivity of society. That

demystification takes place in proletarian class consciousness through a

metacritical revision of the form of objectivity. Social appearance—

reification—and social reality are mediated at the level of lived experience,

and not merely in a scientific or philosophical theory. It is the discovery of

this practical metacritique that promises not just the truth of social reality,

but its transformation. The life experience of the proletariat makes possible

a unique revelation of the cultural limits of capitalism while at the same

time promising a real transcendence of those limits.

Capitalism is distinguished from all earlier social formations by the fact that the reified form of objectivity of its economy plays the chief role in its

reproduction. In precapitalist societies, reproduction is secured through

cultural mechanisms that are less directly rooted in the economy, such as

tradition and religion. As a result class struggle is not functionally located

where it can threaten the overall survival of the mode of production, even if

it can still threaten particular institutions, laws, and rulers. Under

capitalism, on the contrary, class struggle has devastating implications

because it directly affects the most basic foundations of the society. The

dereifying class consciousness of the proletariat, arising in the context of

economic struggles, has the same sort of general cultural impact as

reification itself. This is why Lukács says that “the process of the revolution

is—on a historical scale—synonymous with the process of development of

proletarian class consciousness.”17

This interpretation of the Marxist theory of class consciousness unites

historical materialism and socialist revolution as two sides of the same coin.

It is no longer necessary to make ad hoc claims to defend the theory, for

example, explaining that the normal dominance of base over superstructure

may be exceptionally reversed in the revolution. The revolution is no longer

conceived here as a superstructural reaction on the base, nor is the base

conceived in narrow economic terms. The base is a system of practices that

establishes reification as the form of objectivity of the whole society. Its

transformation depends not on the exceptional efficacy of consciousness,

but on the dynamics of the total cultural system. Hence Lukács writes,

The coercive measures taken by society in individual cases are often hard and brutally materialistic, but the strength of every society is in the last resort a spiritual strength. And from this we can only be liberated by knowledge. This knowledge cannot be of the abstract kind that remains in one’s head—

many “socialists” have possessed that sort of knowledge. It must be knowledge that has become flesh and blood; to use Marx’s phrase, it must be “practical critical activity.” 18

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AS IDEAL-TYPE

It is no accident that History and Class Consciousness begins with a

discussion of the unsolved problem of the relation of Marxism to the

proletariat. Philosophy of praxis depends on historical action, but what sort

of action qualifies? In his first attempts to find an agent of revolution, Marx

surreptitiously makes philosophy the subject of a historical change the

proletariat itself would undergo rather than initiate and control. Lukács

seeks an alternative to this unsatisfactory view with his theory of proletarian class consciousness. He argues that Marxism is not related in a merely

accidental manner to the thought and action of proletarians, that it is not a

scientific “consciousness from without” that the proletariat would serve as a

“passive, material basis,” but that Marxist method is itself a reflection of

proletarian class consciousness. Lukács writes, “every method is

necessarily implicated in the existence of the relevant class.” 19

I call such a theory–practice relation “reflexive.” Although Lukács’s

version of this approach is his own, its roots lie in Marx’s early writings.

Marx first develops the concept of reflexivity in considerations on the

revolutionary state, discussed in Chapter 2. He is influenced by Hegel’s critique of the Jacobin experience in the French Revolution. In the

Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel claimed that the Terror was the result of an

attempt to legislate a universal moral law in ignorance of the imbrication of

universal and particular in actual social life. In response to Hegel’s analysis,

Marx attempts to avoid political moralism, based not on real social tensions

but on abstract principles in the Jacobin manner.

In the early 1840s, Marx is writing under the influence not only of

Hegel, but also of Feuerbach, whose theory of religious alienation he

generalized to include morality and the state. Just as Feuerbach reduced

religion to its human basis in the alienated community, so Marx projects the

“social” as the implicit unity of the contraries into which life is divided in

alienated class society.

Thus in “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’” he

argues that communism cannot be a utopia imposed against private

interests, for the very act of imposing it would reproduce the basic ill, the

split between moral values and interests. The proletariat should avoid

politics, except for purely negative purposes, and instead concentrate on

social action toward the end of creating a wholly new type of society in

which politics will be unnecessary. 20 A revolution that aims to bring morality down to earth, rooted in the needs of the people, could never

succeed on the basis of state action. The goal is not merely to change the

state by infusing it with correct moral principles, but far more radically to

abolish the state.

This early critique of political moralism implies a general revision of

the relation of theory to practice. If Marxism is not merely a disguised

moral exigency from which the state would necessarily be reborn after the

revolution, it must stand in a new relation to the class it represents. Starting from the critique of morality, Marx arrives at a concept of revolutionary

theory as the “reflection” of life in thought. Reflexive subjectivity

corresponds to social revolution just as abstract moral subjectivity

corresponds to political revolution. The one emerges from the “social

instinct” of the proletariat and articulates the inner meaning of its actions,

while the other reflects the opposition of “ought” and “is” as they are

experienced by the isolated individual in bourgeois society. Hence Marx

writes in an early letter that his theory simply explains to the “world” “its

own actions,” articulating the historically evolved content of the social

movement. “We simply show it (the world) why it struggles in reality, and

the consciousness of this is something which it is compelled to acquire,

even if it does not want to.” 21

Marx’s later works are ambiguous, conserving only traces of this

original concept of subjectivity, as for example in the preface to Capital

where he writes, “So far as such criticism represents a class, it can only

represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the

capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the

proletariat.” 22 This passage continues to suggest that Marxism is somehow rooted in the life experiences of the working class, although unfortunately

Marx never explains exactly how.

What he might have meant is suggested by a brief passage in The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drives the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent. 23

Applied to the proletariat, this would mean that the “problems” the

proletariat confronts are “solved” theoretically by Marxism in a way that

reflects the similar practical solution to which the class is driven by its life

circumstances. This could have been the basis for a theory of the essential

relation of Marxist theory to proletarian practice had Marx ever developed

such a theory. Instead, in his mature writings, he offers programmatic

references to the “determination of thought by being” and “historical

necessity.” Although this deterministic language is often seen as a concession to scientism, it serves the same purpose as the earlier reflexive

theory of consciousness in blocking the regression to moralistic socialism.

Marx’s metacritique lies in the background of Lukács’s theory of class

consciousness. It suggests a radical revision of the usual understanding of

the relation of thought to action. Thought is usually conceived as the locus

of rationality and meaning, while action is mere physical execution. But

according to the metacritique, rationality and meaning can no longer be

exclusively identified with individual thought, as they have been by modern

philosophy since Descartes. For a reflexive theory of consciousness, they

inhere not so much in thought as in acts. And these acts belong to a system

of behavior that includes the beliefs of the individuals as a merely

subordinate element. The consciousness of the subject relates to practice as

a functional element within it, necessary for its performance but not for that

matter the producer or truth of that performance. “Marx breaks with every

limitation of signifying activity to the understanding alone, the true subject

no longer being the subject of knowledge alone … but the real human being

inserted into the concrete life of the society of which he is a member.” 24

This is precisely Lukács’s position. He refuses an identification of

meaning and mind. Meaning and its formal structures are now detached

from their usual locus and reconstructed through the concept of the form of

objectivity as real social determinants. Practice is in itself teleological,

meaning-bearing, and not simply the execution of a teleology and a

meaning-content first disclosed to the subject in thought. Rather, that

disclosure takes place later when theory raises practice to consciousness by

thematizing its operative significance.

The Marxist tradition addresses these issues in terms of the theory of

class consciousness. But this theory was not elaborated by 1923 much

beyond the initial hints to be found in Marx and Engels. References to

“subjective factors” covered over the yawning gap Lukács attempts to fill

by drawing on several sources, including Weberian sociology and Hegel.

His theory is best understood as an investigation into what I will call the

“specific rationality” of social standpoints. It measures the epistemological

credentials of different classes and on that basis their revolutionary

potential.

For all classes but the proletariat, class consciousness is “false,” remains

“a class-conditioned unconsciousness of one’s own socio-historical and

economic condition.”25 In these cases, class consciousness not only defines what the members of the class at their most lucid can know, but also sets the

boundary of their understanding beyond which they cannot penetrate

without shedding their class identity.

This boundary is, ultimately, the culture of capitalism. Lukács asks

whether any standpoint exists inside the given culture from which that

culture appears not as a transhistorical limit on consciousness but as a

merely historical stage. Is there any class position within capitalist society

from which its most basic presuppositions can be transcended? He answers

that the proletariat can in principle achieve such a transcendence,

overleaping its own age from within, in defiance of Hegel’s pessimistic

restriction of wisdom to knowledge of the past.26

According to Lukács the specific rationality of class behavior can be

represented theoretically in a model corresponding with the rational content

of class action independent of the actual thoughts of the individuals. He

employs Weber’s concept of the “ideal-type” to define this model. Although

not identical with the reality it describes, the ideal-type can be useful in

isolating the probable causes and motives of behavior that more or less

conform to it. Weber explains: “For purposes of causal imputation of

empirical events, we need the rational, empirical-technical and logical

constructions, which help us to answer the questions as to what a behavior

pattern or thought pattern … would be like if it possessed completely

rational, empirical and logical ‘correctness’ and ‘consistency.’” 27 Lukács constructs the concept of class consciousness as an ideal-type in this sense.

By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular life situation if they were able perfectly to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation … Now class consciousness consists in fact in the appropriate and rational reactions “imputed” [ zugerechnet] to a particular typical position available in the process of

production.28

Lukács explains that class consciousness is not “the sum nor the average

of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the

class.”29 With respect to this real consciousness, class consciousness would only be the horizon of rationality, the “objectively possible” beliefs that the

individuals could hold at their most lucid and rational.30 To the extent that the concept of class consciousness is properly constructed in each case,

“plausibly motivated” in Weber’s words, it would describe the teleology of class behavior on which depends the “historically significant acts” of the

class. 31 The concept of class consciousness is tailored to the basic tendencies of class action from the outset, while the real consciousness of

the individuals frequently trails behind, rationalizing the activity of the class

post festum.

In his discussion of Lukács, Merleau-Ponty attempts to resolve the

ambiguity of this account in which class consciousness seems neither

wholly real nor merely ideal. He defines class consciousness as “the inner

principle of activity, the global project which supports and animates the

productions and actions of a class, which designates for it an image of the

world and of its tasks in this world and which, external conditions taken

into account, assigns it a history.” 32 This seems a good explanation of Lukács’s intent.

Lukács constructs the model of class consciousness on the basis of three

determinants: the reified form of objectivity of society, the social situation

of the various classes of society, and their class interests.

1. Form of Objectivity. The reality of every society is to some extent

concealed by the form of objectivity in which it appears. An adequate

understanding thus cannot be based on uncritical acceptance of immediacy.

For a class to attain a true consciousness of its own social world, it must be

able to apprehend social appearances as dialectical moments in a

comprehension that goes beyond them to their basis in social reality itself.

But not all forms of objectivity allow the transcendence of immediacy.

Precapitalist forms confound nature and culture in a single seamless web,

attributed to a God or gods and impenetrable to the members of society.

Only reification, the form of objectivity of capitalism, can be successfully

mediated by members of the society it structures. This is because reification

reveals human agency in the construction of the social world, if in a

distorted form.

According to Lukács, workers relativize the reified form of objectivity

of capitalist society in their daily experience. They are thus potentially

capable of seeing reification as a historically limited moment in a larger

process that surpasses capitalism. It is this ability to transcend immediacy

that exposes the entire structure of reified thought to criticism. A correct

theoretical understanding of society is finally possible from this class

standpoint, as a critique of the economic and epistemological premises of

capitalism. Lukács argues that workers’ practical-critical response to the reification of experience is the foundation of Marxist dialectics. Marxism is

thus, as theory, “adjusted” to the implicit methodological approach of

proletarian class consciousness.

2. Class Situation. Lukács writes that “in capitalist society reality is—

immediately—the same for both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”33 And again: “The proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of every

aspect of its life.” 34 However, reification is differently experienced from different class standpoints. It is interesting that Lukács cites as evidence for

this one of the few Marxian passages on alienation to which he had access:

The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation.

But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognizes alienation as its own instrument and in it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman

existence.35

Class situation determines a perspective on the form of objectivity of

the society. It motivates the bourgeoisie to remain in immediacy and the

proletariat to transcend it.

Class situation also determines what Lukács calls the “immediate

objects” of the class, that is to say, the objects of its daily activity that are

paradigmatic for it in interpreting more “distant” social spheres. To avoid

confusion, I prefer to call these initial objects of class consciousness

“proximate objects” to distinguish them clearly from the immediate form of

objectivity of the society as a whole.

Lukács argues that these proximate objects form an inner circle of

awareness, starting out from which the class strives to achieve a universal

comprehension of all sectors of society. Whether it succeeds or not in

transcending the limits of its own proximate objects will depend on its place

in the production process. Classes engaged in secondary economic activities

are unable to construct a coherent worldview. Only a class such as the

bourgeoisie or proletariat, involved in the industrial economy, can

encompass the entire society in thought by generalizing from its particular

situation.

3. Class Interest. Every class consciousness is adjusted to the interests

of the class. Where these interests are better served by a consciousness that

remains in immediacy, class consciousness will be “false consciousness.”

This is the case, Lukács claims, for the bourgeoisie. In a true consciousness

of society it would discover the limited and partial character of its domination as a ruling class. It therefore remains in the “necessary illusion”

of reification, the better to believe in its universal mission. And where the

uprisings of the oppressed challenge its pretensions, the class nevertheless

remains in ignorance through the “falsity of consciousness,” i.e., through

the development of ideology in the pejorative sense.36 The class interest of the bourgeoisie thus maintains the class in immediacy and represses

comprehension of the class struggle.

Only the proletariat, the bourgeoisie’s antagonist in this struggle, has no

interest in the maintenance of capitalism and therefore no need for illusions.

As an industrial class it can understand the society as a whole. And it

experiences reification not as a universal transhistorical horizon, but rather

as a barrier to its own self-actualization, a barrier it can attempt to

overcome both in practice and in theory.

Lukács claims that workers themselves are the proximate object of this

initial dereification because they cannot accept immediately their own form

of objectivity under capitalism as commodified labor power. They are

constantly aware of the difference between their social form as

commodified labor and real content as persons. Unfortunately, he has little

to say about the concrete contexts in which workers more or less

spontaneously dereify aspects of social reality. 37 The capitalist, on the contrary, receives the worker at the factory gate as a commodity and is not

obliged to think beyond this immediacy for any reason of principle.

For Lukács the proletariat is always already situated beyond immediacy

in the simple act of becoming (socially) self-conscious. This self-

consciousness begins to shatter the reified form of its objects and penetrates

to their “reality.” It can do so, Lukács argues, because the consciousness of

the proletariat is “the self-consciousness of the commodity; or in other

words it is the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society

founded upon the production and exchange of commodities.” 38

In the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relation to capital. Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity; or in other words it is the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and exchange of commodities … [W]hen the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practice. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge.39

This is the unity of theory and practice. Workers’ recognition of their own social role transforms that role. They are freed from the reified self-understanding that keeps them divided as owners of a commodity, labor

power. This in itself constitutes a fundamental social change. From isolated

individuals they are transformed into a rebellious collective subject: “the act

of consciousness overthrows the form of objectivity of its object.”40 The patterns of behavior that flow from and reproduce reification are altered by

social self-consciousness. Instead of facing apparently solid social facts

individually, workers recognize their own collective implication in these so-

called facts and in so doing dereify them: the social world no longer appears

as a collection of things but as a complex of processes in which the workers

are always already engaged.

For example, a “thing” such as a corporation has a form supplied by law

and established practice that is stabilized as a reified appearance. In normal

times, the isolated individual agents confront the corporation as an

overwhelming power, a “reality” to which they must adjust. But during a

strike, social form and content are juxtaposed and clash. The corporation is

revealed to be a complex of human relations that can be challenged,

exposing it to transformation at every level: economic, social, political. The

revolution is such a dereifying practice writ large, encompassing the entire

society.

Dereification is not of course a pure thought process, still less a

quasiphilosophical transcendence of opinion in knowledge. It is a situated

knowledge, a transformation according to quite specific determinations,

very different from the activity of a scientific cogito. Nor does the

possibility of such a dereification imply that workers are spontaneously

revolutionary. The point is rather to explain how workers can demystify

reification sufficiently to act autonomously on their own behalf and in their

own interests as a collective social subject. Class consciousness consists in

a more or less spontaneous critique of reification to which correspond

everyday practices that challenge the most fundamental premises of

capitalism and its culture when deepened and systematized in the context of

union and party activities. These practices usually stop far short of

revolution, but they underlie the very possibility of revolution. In sum, this

theory is an attempt to show in principle that the class can make a

revolution that does not merely replace one set of rulers with another, but

that transcends the cultural horizon and alters the foundations of society.

For that possibility to be actualized specific historical conditions must be met. Those conditions include the mass strike and a revolutionary party. 41

THE MEDIATIONS

In contrast with the French scholars whose interpretation of Lukács

influences this account, scholars influential in Germany and America argue

that his distinction between class consciousness and real consciousness is

not only arbitrary but politically dangerous. They rely heavily on Lukács’s

borrowings from Weber, while ignoring his concept of practice. The effect

of this emphasis is to misrepresent his concept of class consciousness to the

point where he appears to announce later repressive Soviet practice. This

interpretation is neither textually nor historically plausible.

How do the critics justify this extraordinary charge? Since they

overlook the link Lukács makes between class consciousness and “the

historically decisive acts” of the class, the ideal-typical construct of the

former seems to have no basis in reality. 42 Lukács is supposed to have no way of “getting” from class consciousness to real consciousness, but can

only juxtapose the one to the other as “ought” to “is.” He is thus confronted

with the very question he himself had posed in relation to Marx on the

second page of History and Class Consciousness, i.e., whether he is foisting

his own revolutionary goals on a proletariat with quite other aims. Leszek

Kołakowski concludes that since, according to Lukács, proletarian class

consciousness is embodied in the party, the party can safely ignore the

empirical consciousness of the proletariat and act on its own. For Lukács,

“the party is always right.” 43 But in the era of the Russian Revolution, this question has tragic implications; the party has become imperious and

demands of classes that they conform to an essence it imputes to them,

rather than reflecting the thoughts and actions of their members. Such an

approach, as Lukács elaborates it, constitutes an anticipatory justification of

Stalinist voluntarism.

James Miller argues similarly that Lukács’s approach “doubles” the

proletariat into a real class, not necessarily revolutionary at any given

moment, and an ideal one possessed by definition of revolutionary class

consciousness. Theoretically, the consciousness of the ideal proletariat is

represented by Marxism, while practically it is represented by the vanguard

party. Thus the revolutionary subjectivity of the class is surreptitiously

attributed to the party, while the real proletariat is dismissed as stuck in

“reified facticity.” The tension between proletariat and party, real and ideal

class is left unresolved in fact, while conceptual equivocations prevent its

recognition in theory. “The subject’s objective subjectivity is ‘held safe’ in

the party, but the subject himself becomes a mere abstract object for the

party. The equivocation of Lukács was the equivocation of Lenin—and this

equivocation was ‘transcended’ not in utopia, but in concentration

camps.” 44

Does Lukács really leave such a yawning abyss between class

consciousness and real consciousness? This interpretation ignores Rosa

Luxemburg’s influence on Lukács’s political thought. In her essay “The

Mass Strike,” Luxemburg argues that theory prolongs action and articulates

its inner meaning. Marxism sums up the class experience in ideas that it

disseminates through educational work and propaganda in times of social

peace. Ideas are the highest product of theory but they represent the lowest

level of class consciousness. Mere opinions are what Luxemburg calls a

“theoretical and latent” class consciousness. Class consciousness achieves

full development not in this contemplative form, but in the “practical and

active” expression of class aspirations and solidarity in revolutionary

struggle. Theory must cease to be a mere representation of the meaning of

class struggle to become consciousness as a historical force in that

struggle. 45 As Lukács later explains, “Proletarian thought is in the first place merely a theory of praxis which only gradually … transforms itself

into a practical theory that overturns the real world.”46

For Luxemburg, as for Lukács, the party plays a decisive role in the

passage from theory to practice, the latent to the active. “Organization,”

Lukács writes, “is the form of the mediation between theory and

practice.” 47 What is theoretical at any given moment must be made present organizationally if it is later to become practical in struggle. In relation to

the masses, “the party is the objectification of their own will (obscure

though this may be to themselves).”48 Like theory, the party represents the still latent meaning of struggles that need only achieve sufficient breadth

and intensity to express themselves in revolutionary consciousness. Theory

and party organization are thus joined to historical necessity by their

expressive function. They grant conscious and explicit form to the implicit

content of the spontaneous struggle.

From this Luxemburgian standpoint, political leadership no longer has

the voluntaristic traits Marx rejected. It does not change the fundamental

orientation of the movement, but rather expresses the significance of

ongoing actions, thereby aiding the actors to clarify their own goals.

It [the party] must immerse its own truth in the spontaneous mass movement and raise it from the depths of economic necessity, where it was conceived, on to the heights of free, conscious action. In so doing it will transform itself in the moment of the outbreak of revolution from a party that makes demands to one that imposes an effective reality. This change from demand to reality becomes the lever of the truly class-oriented and truly revolutionary organization of the proletariat.49

In the concluding essays of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács

expresses reservations about Luxemburg’s theory. While he still maintains

that Luxemburg “saw the significance of mass actions more clearly than

anyone,”50 he praises Lenin for having grasped the role of the party in resolving major technical problems of the revolution such as class alliances

and the seizure of the state. Far from authorizing the party to ignore the

class, these essays also contain a critique of sectarianism. Lukács

emphasizes the hermeneutic function of independent party action rather

than just its technical aspect. The coincidence of hermeneutic and technical

functions is achieved where, by their exemplary form, the party’s

technically necessary acts also serve to advance consciousness. Thus

Lukács writes that the party’s

organizational separation from the class does not mean in this case that it wishes to do battle for its interests on its behalf and in its place … Should it do this, as occasionally happens in the course of revolution, then it is not in the first instance an attempt to fight for the objective goals of the struggle in question (for in the long run these can only be won or retained by the class itself), but only an

attempt to advance or accelerate the development of class consciousness.”51

This conception of the relation of party to class is shared by Gramsci,

whose Prison Notebooks offer a striking complement to Lukács’s theory of

class consciousness. Gramsci elaborates precisely the least developed sides

of that theory within a generally similar framework. He starts out from the

same view of practice as Lukács. As he puts it, worldviews are “implicit” in

the action of classes and become “explicit” in the corresponding ideologies.

Gramsci explains the process in which the difference between the beliefs of

the individuals and the theoretical construction of the specific rationality of

their action is reduced so far as possible, and the individuals provided with

ideas that raise to consciousness or make explicit what is already

adumbrated in their practice.

A new class acts in function of its real social situation and interests even if at first its self-understanding is still determined by the established

ideologies, the “common sense” of the old society. In this situation, the

meanings implicit in the acts of the class contradict its beliefs. But in the

long run, the implicit meanings will prevail and real consciousness will be

brought into harmony with them. The determinism of class consciousness is

therefore felt not through the literally unthinkable relation between real

consciousness and a theoretical construct, as Lukács’s critics charge, but

through the gradual effects of class practice on thought, through, in short,

the need of the class for beliefs that articulate its historically necessary

behavior.

To bring belief into harmony with behavior requires, in Gramsci’s

words, the “cultural deployment” of the worldview implicit in action

(Lukács’s “class consciousness”), and this process consists in “adjusting

culture to the practical function.” 52 Class consciousness is not immediately realized in class thought, but must be spread through real, historically

effective mediations. First, a theory must be elaborated that corresponds

with the class consciousness of the class by falling under the horizon of the

specific rationality of its class behavior. Second, a specialized stratum of

intellectuals and organizers must communicate the ideas corresponding with

its implicit worldview. In the modern world, Gramsci argues, political

parties are primarily responsible for these functions. The party’s role is to

socialize the class consciousness of the class, a process that is “objectively

possible,” in Lukács’s terms, because the class is predisposed to believe

ideas that rationalize its behavior. Class consciousness, the worldview

implicit in action, is the goal toward which real consciousness tends.

But parties are relatively autonomous groups of individuals, with their

own real consciousness. Who is to say that the views they “impute” to the

class in their theory and propaganda actually correspond to the needs of the

class? Gramsci argues that the class itself will always be the judge of the

adequacy of the ideology offered it by the party. The excessive deviation of

the party from the class consciousness of the class will result in the class

abandoning the party. Lukács too argues that “the constant misapplication

of false theories must lead inevitably to the collapse of the party.”53 The determinate contingency of the relation between party and class insures

against arbitrariness.

Class consciousness is achieved to the extent that the class unifies itself behind representatives whose real consciousness makes sense of their

action. The adjustment of real consciousness to class consciousness is thus

a social process that takes place in a relation between different real

consciousnesses, some of which have the leading, others the following role.

The supposed gap between “objective possibility” and actuality is closed by

showing how the real consciousness of the members of the class

approximates to their class consciousness through the development of

specific social relations. Where the party is given assent, its propaganda

serves the function of progressively bringing real consciousness into line

with class consciousness.

In Gramsci as in Lukács the party does not have the proletariat at its

disposal, but rather vice versa. When Lukács writes that the party is “the

visible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness,” he does not mean

that the party is the true subject of the revolution, but on the contrary, that it

is the privileged object of the working class as subject, the object through

which the class “sees” its own situation and potentialities most clearly.54

Even in its acts, the party “appears” to the class that can accept or reject it,

follow or abandon it, as the explicit formulation of a class project

inarticulately present in the life of the class itself. The party is thus not a mechanism of social control in the service of the revolution—an impossible

contradiction: it is there to be “seen,” and the sight of it is a moment in the

constitution of a subject of history.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Once the party comes to

power, it is no longer simply an object but becomes a subject in its own

right. Given the immense means of repression and propaganda at the

disposal of the modern state, this is no small matter. The Soviet state

explored all the terrifying possibilities of one-party rule and in the process

destroyed the prospects of socialism it was the first to open up. The critics

of Lukács’s theory of class consciousness are mistaken, however, in

identifying his theory with this outcome. His hope in a fruitful combination

of workers’ councils and party was disappointed. 55 Far cruder and more elemental processes were engaged than anything he imagined. Even as late

as 1923 neither Marxism nor liberalism had yet taken the full measure of

the new tyranny equipped with the productive and organizational powers

unleashed by modern invention. The final accounting was to come later, at

great cost. But the theory of class consciousness hardly weighs in the balance.

1 HCC, 3.

2 See for example the presumed authoritative work of Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: 3—The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Chapter VII.

3 The German constitutional scholar Henry Ehrmann contacted me shortly after the first version of this book was published, excited to find someone interested in Lukács’s organizational theories.

He explained that he had been a member in exile of a group called Neues Beginnen that attempted to implement these theories as a response to Nazi persecution. He recalled that the group was able to evade arrest for a time due to its tight structure and discipline. Clearly, the issue for these revolutionaries, as for Lenin in his early party work, was survival in the face of tyranny, not the imposition of tyranny.

4 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International, 1963), 115.

5 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 15, 23.

6 For a brilliant treatment of the antinomy, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.) Anthony Giddens offers another treatment in The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). For an early approach to the antinomy, see Hans Freyer’s 1923 Theory of Objective Mind, trans. S. Grosby (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998).

7 HCC, 38.

8 Ibid., 197. Cf., for an example, Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J.

Stenning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1964). For a detailed discussion of the problem of mechanical determinism in this period, see Lucio Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, trans. J. Merrington and J. White (New York: Monthly Review, 1972). On Marx and determinism, see Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 3 (July 1984).

9 Frederick Engels, “Engels to J. Bloch,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 693.

10 Ibid., 692.

11 HCC, 178.

12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1968), 14.

13 Ibid., 7.

14 HCC, 83.

15 Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904), 280 (translation modified).

16 HCC, 186.

17 HCC, 326.

18 Ibid., 262.

19 Ibid., 164.

20 Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 350.

21 Letter from Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), quoted in HCC, 77.

22 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., 20.

23 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 121. Fredric Jameson identifies this passage as the source of Lukács’s theory of class consciousness. See, Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 46.

24 Lucien Sebag, Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris: Payot, 1964), 88: “A critical theory of knowledge is possible; revealing a gap between what is said and what is done, it brings to light the non-fulfillment of that which is implied by a given ideology. This presupposes that the domain of Doing [le Faire] can be autonomized, become its own point of reference. Ideologies then simply are added to it to veil it, deform it, or on the contrary unveil it; but this deformation, when it exists, can always be objectively demonstrated.” Pierre Bourdieu calls the view according to which practice is merely the execution of a project formulated in conscious thought or unconscious mental structures

“subjectivist voluntarism.” See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 216, n28. See also Adolpho Sanchez Vasquez, The Philosophy of Praxis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), Chapter VIII. Sanchez Vasquez writes that Marx “acknowledged the existence of unintentional praxis, while insisting that it is still rational” (276).

25 HCC, 52.

26 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 11.

27 Max Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. E. Shills and H. Finch (Glencoe, Il: The Free Press, 1949), 42.

28 HCC, 51 (translation modified).

29 Ibid., 51.

30 Ibid., 92. Bourdieu formulates a similar point in his own terms: “The awakening of ‘class consciousness’ is not a primal act constituting the class in a blaze of freedom; its sole efficacy, as with all actions of symbolic reduplication, lies in the extent to which it brings to consciousness all that is implicitly assumed in the unconscious mode in the class habitus.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 216, n28.

31 HCC, 51. Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, 92.

32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 67.

33 Ibid., 164.

34 Ibid., 149.

35 Cited in Ibid., 149.

36 HCC, 65.

37 For a more detailed discussion of the dialectics of working-class consciousness in a loosely Lukácsian framework, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), Chapter 2.

38 HCC, 168.

39 Ibid., 168–9.

40 HCC, 178.

41 For further discussion of the significance of class consciousness in Lukács’s early Marxist writings, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

42 Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 27. Morris Watnick, “Relativism and Class Consciousness,” in L. Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 160.

43 Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, 282.

44 James Miller, “Marxism and Subjectivity,” Telos, No. 6 (1970), 180. Cf. Michael Löwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Revolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976), 227–54.

45 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 199.

46 HCC, 205.

47 Ibid., 299. For Lukács’s critique of Luxemburg, see Andrew Feenberg “Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukács and the Dilemmas of Organization,” in J. McCormick, ed., Confronting Mass Technology and Mass Democracy: Essays in Twentieth-Century German Political and Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 45–69.

48 HCC, 42.

49 HCC, 41–2.

50 Ibid., 298.

51 Ibid., 326.

52 Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince (New York: International Publishers, 1959), 113– 14.

53 HCC, 327.

54 Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans. N. Jacobs (London: New Left Books, 1974), 27 (translation modified). See also HCC, 42.

55 Feenberg, “Post-Utopian Marxism,” 66–9.

Index

absolute subject, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 93fn5, 115

abstraction, xii, xiv, 11–12, 14–15, 18, 27, 40, 48, 52–3, 52fn21, 79, 81, 83–6, 94, 102, 138, 142,

144, 156, 159, 161, 194

action. See practice

adaptation. See conformism

Adorno, Theodor W., viii, xiv, xv, 12, 92, 126–8, 151–2, 154–163, 165–175, 173fn50, 177, 179,

183–6, 192, 195–6, 201, 204, 206–10, 216, 219

advanced capitalism, ix, 173

aesthetics, 12, 104, 110–11, 184, 189, 217

Alford, C. Fred, 197n60, 197n62

alienation

defined, 38

in Hegel, 15, 33–5, 39

in Marx, 2fn3, 39–40, 46, 62, 64, 156, 236

transcendence of, 167

Althusser, Louis, 6, 68, 122, 226

Angus, Ian, 216

antinomy

of bourgeois or reified thought, 98

of content and form, 27, 29, 102

defined, 3

of freedom and necessity, 192

of philosophy and reality, 15

of public and private, 18–19

of reason and need, 24, 25–9, 32

of society and nature, 49, 51, 113, 121

of structure and agency, 224, 228

of subject and object, 38, 97, 99, 121, 131, 135, 162, 205

of thought and things, 65

of value and fact, 4, 8, 95–6, 104, 204, 225

appearance, 12, 34, 47–8, 55, 66, 69–72, 79, 83–9, 100, 108, 138, 147, 158, 167, 176, 229, 235, 238

See also form of objectivity; reification

Aristotle, 20, 176

Aronowitz, Stanley, xvi

atheism, 47, 54–9

Aufklärung. See German philosophy

authoritarianism, xv, 153, 223

autonomization. See reification

Bacon, Francis, 144, 198, 216

base and superstructure, 225–8, 230

Bauer, Bruno, 8

Benjamin, Walter, 182–3

Bergson, Henri, xv, 68, 128, 131

Bernstein, J.M., 161, 214fn10

Berque, Augustin, 194

Bloch, Ernst, 1, 151, 154–5

Bourdieu, Pierre, 13fn22, 234fn24, 235fn30

breakdown. See crises

Brecht, Bertolt 168

Buck-Morss, Susan, 12–13

Capitalism. See civil society; crisis; fetishism; reification

categories, xiv, 2–3, 7, 33, 36, 49, 55, 57–8, 65–6, 69–70, 74, 76, 78–81, 85–6, 88–9, 107, 109, 111–

12, 125, 135, 141, 162, 180, 182, 194, 204, 213, 228

See also antinomy

civil society, 25–31

class, ix, xv, 1, 17–20, 28, 30–1, 46, 56, 67, 71, 81–2, 87, 92, 95–7, 113–14, 121, 126, 133, 136, 145–

6, 153–4, 157, 168, 171, 180, 199, 201, 204, 211–12, 216, 219, 229–30, 231–43

class consciousness, xv, 17, 31, 81–2, 218–19, 227, 230, 232

defined, 234

determinants of, 235–7

false, 55, 233

and real consciousness, 234, 239

class struggle, ix, 67–8, 81–2, 210–11, 218, 229–30, 240

cogito, xiii, 114, 123, 160, 205, 238

Colletti, Lucio, 68–9, 131

common action. See practice

communication, 58, 106, 162–3, 172

communism, vii, 7, 46, 63, 124, 221, 231

conformism, 96, 163

conquest of nature. See nature

consciousness, ix, xii, 10, 12, 14, 17, 26, 32, 34–6, 34, 45–7, 53–4, 66, 71, 86, 95, 99–100, 107, 113–

14, 116, 126, 134–7, 154, 160, 168, 174, 185, 206, 229

See also class consciousness; practice

conservatism, 21–2

contemplation, xiv, 44, 49, 98, 100, 106, 111, 135–6, 141, 149, 216, 240

Continental philosophy, vii

crisis, vii, 61–9, 73–80, 139, 144, 153, 163, 210

criterion of meaning, 54

critical theory, ix–x, xii, 18, 151, 156, 164, 167, 175, 194, 208

See also Frankfurt School

cultural change, 41, 56, 63–4, 67

culture

affirmative, 172–3

defined, 65–6, 65fn11

Lukács and, 63–4, 69, 73

and meaning, 74, 78, 215

modern, xii, 3–4, 72, 93fn5

and nature, 235

and philosophy, 91

and rationality, 55, 66, 88, 190, 234

and science, viii, 62, 143, 145

and truth, 55–6, 144–5

culture industry. See mass culture

Dada, 173

daily life, 79

Deborin, Abram, 124–7, 131, 138

decisionism, 127

dereification, 238

Descartes, René, 3, 163, 233

determinism, 63–5, 73, 95, 104, 191–2, 224, 226–7, 242

See also Marxism

dialectics, 9–10, 12, 68, 89, 93, 106–9, 116, 123–4, 143, 155, 235

See also antinomy; Hegel; rationality

dialectics of nature, 125, 135

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 61, 73, 75

Disalienation. See dereification

domination, xiv, 93fn4, 97, 99, 122, 152–4, 156–9, 162–5, 168, 175, 178, 180–5, 193, 195–6, 198–

200, 207, 211, 213–4, 219, 236

See also nature

Dumouchel, Paul, 136–7

economics, 1, 24, 40–1, 67, 80, 84–5, 89, 130, 139

Engels, Friedrick, 10

enlightenment, vii, xii, 23, 92–3, 152, 157–8, 163–6, 194–5

epistemology, vii, 4, 12, 46, 51, 55, 58, 104–5, 129, 132, 140, 188

essential relations. See internal relations

existentialism, 56

experience, 53, 145–6, 161, 191–2

fascism, 61

Feuerbach, Ludwig, viii, 5, 13–16, 25, 35, 47, 48, 92, 231

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9, 45, 105–6, 109, 128

finite horizon, 55–7, 142, 206

See also finitude; horizon

finitude, xii, 57

form of objectivity, 57, 62, 76, 87, 92, 99, 117–18, 135, 137–8, 140–2, 159, 175, 184

change or mediation of, 9, 56, 82–3, 112, 119

and consciousness, 229–30, 233, 235–6

defined, 73–4

and economics, 66–7, 76, 82

and neo-Kantianism, x, 73

Fourier, François Charles, 182

France, 180, 207

Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, x, 6, 18, 54, 57, 73, 93fn4, 162–7, 183–4, 195, 215–16

Lukács and, ix, xiv, 151–6, 170–2, 198

French Revolution, 24–6, 231

Freud, Sigmund, 134, 153, 187, 189

German philosophy, xii, 21, 36, 78, 88, 91–4, 100, 102–3, 105, 108–10, 114, 117, 121, 128, 133–4,

152, 154, 228

Gilson, Étienne, 91

God, 14, 52, 57, 112, 115, 123, 235

Goldmann, Lucien, xv, 132, 223

Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 1fn1, 241–3

Habermas, Jürgen, 6–7, 11–12, 19, 163, 170, 198

Hamann, Johann Georg, 131

happiness, 8, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 32, 154

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 10, 23, 53, 187–9, 199fn64

and antinomies, 3–5, 12

and dialectics, 12, 107, 113, 123–5, 175

and Feuerbach, 13

on history, 107–9, 176

and Kant, 8–9, 22, 93, 103

and Lukács, 69, 83–8, 134, 170, 231

and Marx, 2–3, 7, 10, 14–15, 28, 30, 33–6, 38–9, 89

and romanticism, xii

Heidegger, Martin, x, 5, 74–5, 179–81, 187, 190

Henry, Michel, 36

hermeneutics, 62, 195, 241

Hess, Moses, 8

historicism, 1fn1, 6, 11, 122, 151, 170–1, 183, 206

history, 3, 17, 99, 114, 130, 132, 139–140, 159, 162, 171–2, 194, 208–9, 224–5

and form or category, 55, 57–8, 76fn40, 88–9, 228–9

human control of, 56, 83, 99–100, 111

as human product, 5, 9, 44, 49

and ontology, 5, 7, 33, 38, 49, 100–2, 108, 122, 143, 176, 189–90

subject of, 108–9, 112, 115, 243

Honneth, Axel, 128

horizon, xii, 12, 46, 50, 55–7, 93, 98, 101, 103, 110, 142, 171, 179, 192, 203, 206, 215–9, 234, 237–

8, 242

Horkheimer, Max, viii, xiv–xv, 18, 57–8, 92, 100, 151–2, 154, 156–8, 167–72, 174–6, 179, 183,

195–6, 201, 206, 210, 219

human essence. See human nature

human nature, 26–7, 46, 106, 158, 163, 166, 172, 218

humanism, 7, 38, 115, 123

Husserl, Edmund, 61, 74–5, 160, 175, 179

ideal and real. See antinomy

ideal-type, xiv, 230–8

idealism, xii–xiv, 8, 14–15, 35, 45–7, 50, 54, 74, 91, 124, 127–9, 135, 160, 170–1, 190, 194, 204–6,

226

identity philosophy, 36, 38, 44, 49, 122

See also meta-theory; subject–object identity

ideology, vii, 24, 68, 71, 86, 92, 94, 101, 141, 165, 194, 206, 209, 211, 219, 225–6, 228, 237, 242

immediacy, 27, 29, 34, 39, 56, 80, 88, 101, 111–12, 118, 127, 146, 159–60, 177, 225, 235–7

individual. See freedom

internal relations, 36, 84

intuitive understanding, 105–6, 112, 186

irrationalism, 69, 92–3, 131, 194

Jameson, Fredric, 232fn23

Jones, Gareth Stedman, xv, 68

Kadarkay, Arpad, 62

Kant, 100–1, 105, 184, 191

ethics in, 27, 96, 104

political philosophy in, 22, 24

and meaning, 56–7, 77

and rationality, 12, 102–3, 132

and reification, 101–2

See also German philosophy; synthesis

Kavoulakos, Konstantinos, 117

Kierkegaard, Soren, 52

knowledge. See culture; truth

Kołakowski, Leszek, xv, 239

Korsch, Karl, 1, 151

labor, 4, 6, 35, 37–9, 43–6, 49, 54, 62–3, 68–9, 71–2, 81–3, 85–7, 96, 122, 126, 137–9, 145, 149,

152, 156, 162–4, 166, 174, 179, 181–3, 188, 194–5, 200, 204–5, 211, 213, 218, 221, 237–8

Lask, Emil, 69, 74–5, 77–8, 101–2

Lebenswelt. See lifeworld

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 30, 118, 240–1

Leninism, 125fn3, 223

Lichtheim, George, xv

life, ix, xii, 3, 14–15, 22, 25–6, 35, 39, 43, 66–7, 81–2, 131, 146, 163, 167, 183, 186–8, 190, 195,

197, 227, 229

lifeworld, 15, 148, 149, 175, 179–80, 188fn35, 199, 206, 209

lived experience, 53, 144–6, 187, 193, 211, 229

Locke, John, 21–2, 35, 47, 160

Löwy, Michael, xiifn1

Lukács, Georg, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xv 1, 27, 49, 55–6, 61–2, 66–8, 75, 78, 80–1, 91, 94–5, 110, 112–

13, 117–18, 121, 152–4, 168, 205–6, 208–9, 212, 223–4, 232fn23, 243

critical ambiguities in, 133–6, 139–43

critiques of, 68–9, 113, 124–30, 132, 151–2, 239–40

and Hegel, 9, 83–4, 87, 108–9

and Kant, 87–8, 100–1

and Marx, xii–xiv, 1–3, 11–12, 15–17, 21, 39, 41, 51–2, 54–5, 69, 86, 96, 99–100, 171, 227–8,

231–2

and Weber, 69, 72–3

Luxemburg, Rosa, 240–1

machinery, 63, 69, 71, 76, 85, 140, 156, 164–6, 176, 178–80, 185, 193, 195

See also technology

man, 4–5, 7, 13–4, 21–3, 25–7, 29–30, 33–9, 43–8, 52, 56, 71, 96, 98, 113, 115, 117–18, 130, 134,

136, 138–40, 157, 162, 182, 184, 188–9, 191, 196, 200, 205, 218, 225, 229

man and citizen, 25, 27, 29

Mandel, Ernest, 3

Mandeville, Bernard, 19

Mannheim, Karl, 55

Marcel, Gabriel, 52–3

Marck, Siegfried, 117

Marcuse, Herbert, vii, viii, ix, xi, xiv–xv, 5–7, 87fn62, 173fn51

market, viii–ix, xiii, 69–70, 79, 81–2, 96, 145, 149, 156, 159, 164–6, 185, 194, 210, 212, 214

Marx, Karl, viii, xii–xiv, 4, 30, 52, 64, 89, 156, 164, 192, 212, 218, 227–8

and antinomies, 4, 7, 204–5

development of, xi, 1–2, 40–1, 48–9, 68

and Hegel, 15, 33–5, 83–4, 124

and Lukács. See Lukács

on nature, 43–4, 54, 155, 163

on political philosophy, 9–10, 21–5, 29

and subjectivity, 14, 231–3

Marxism, traditional, 152, 220–1

Marxism, Western, vii–viii, xv, 16–17

Masamune, Okazaki, 217–18

mass culture, 220

materialism, x, 39, 44, 46–7, 66, 151, 200, 223–4, 226, 230

meaning, x, xii, 6, 38, 45–6, 50, 54, 56, 65–6, 69, 73–8, 87, 95–6, 102, 108–9, 112, 119, 122–3, 126,

135, 147, 149, 152, 154–5, 158–61, 171, 176–7, 179, 186–8, 190, 192–4, 199, 203, 215–6, 219,

223, 228, 231–3, 240, 242

mediation, 19, 26, 38, 43, 54, 56, 58, 68, 88, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 116, 119, 123, 133–4, 137, 143,

159, 160fn14, 161, 174, 194, 199–200, 204, 208, 210–12, 214–8, 220–1, 226, 228–9, 239–43

See also dialectics; immediacy

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 126, 223, 235

Mészáros, István, 143

Metacritique, 11–15, 33–8, 40–1, 49, 68, 95–6, 101, 154, 156, 167, 204–7, 227–9, 232–3

methodological necessity. See revolution

Miller, James, 239

mind-body problem, 226

mode of production, 58, 141, 226–7, 229, 232

Moore, Stanley, 64fn9

mystery, 34, 53

naturalism, 6–7, 38, 49, 61, 187, 194, 206

nature

domination of, xiv, 122, 152, 154–7, 178–9, 198

history and, ix–x, 6, 49, 51–2, 61–2, 102, 111, 121, 125–32, 139–42, 162, 208–9, 235

man and, 5, 7, 36–8, 43–8, 188

human, 25–7

liberation of, 182–3

living or lived, 54, 144–6, 148–9, 159, 179–80, 187, 189, 191–2, 194

reconciliation with, 162–3, 181, 183, 196–7, 200–2, 205, 215, 218

reification of, 96–8, 116–17, 133, 135, 143

See also Lukács

nature philosophy, 50

need, ix, xiii, 10, 19, 24–9, 32–7, 40, 49, 67, 81, 92, 96, 153, 163, 166–7, 174, 178, 180–2, 190, 198–

200, 202, 204–5, 210, 213, 218, 227–8, 231, 234, 237, 242

neo-Kantianism, x, 69, 73–4, 101–2, 175–6, 225

New Left, 173–4, 173fn50, 173fn51, 185, 195–6, 208, 220

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51, 56, 93fn4, 144

O’Connor, Brian, 161

object. See antinomy; subject-object identity

Ollman, Bertell, 36

one-dimensionality, 190, 207

ontology, vii, 2, 4–8, 39, 49–50, 54, 74–6, 105, 106, 129, 133, 154–5, 161, 175, 181, 187–94, 225

party, xv, 11, 30, 118, 169–73, 223, 238–43

perception. See sensation

petty bourgeoisie, 232

phenomenalism, 47

phenomenology, 160–2, 175–82, 187, 190, 196

philosophical anthropology, 5

philosophy, xi, xii–xiii, 17–20, 33–4, 88, 91, 93–4, 97–8

philosophy of praxis, viii, x, xiv, 1, 3–5

phrenology, 53

Pinkard, Terry, 87

Pippin, Robert, 108

Plato, 18–20

positivism, xv, 11, 35, 132, 160

potentiality, 99, 155, 167–8, 174, 176–7, 183, 190, 209

practice, 5, 16, 38, 45, 55, 65, 67, 75–7, 87, 119, 143, 152, 169, 170–2, 179, 184, 203, 215–20, 228–

33, 238

contemplative and transforming, 82, 135–6, 149, 205, 215

contrasted with theory, 18–19, 49–50

principle of, 104, 107, 109–12, 122, 168, 205

as production or creation, 102–3, 105, 123

reified, 82, 95, 97–9, 101

socialist or proletarian, 30–2, 56, 116–17, 133, 242

unity of theory and, 39–40, 135, 153, 196, 207

precapitalist society, 26, 71, 164

process. See antinomy

proletariat, 1, 25, 30–2, 36, 40, 56, 62, 64, 82, 87–9, 92–3, 95, 112–6, 123–4, 126, 129, 131, 133–5,

145, 153–4, 171–2, 174, 182, 204–5, 210, 218–20, 223, 225, 229–34, 236–7, 239, 241, 243

See also practice

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 164

psychology, 77, 95, 153, 187–94

quantity and quality, 72, 85, 120, 135, 135, 158, 177

Radder, Hans, xvi

rationality, 23, 25–6, 36, 55, 61, 64, 66, 73, 78, 93fn4, 122, 124, 163–7, 176, 193, 195–6, 201–2,

205–6, 212–13, 227–8, 232–4, 242

dialectical, xv, 10, 62, 67–9, 114, 119, 155, 209

formal, 12, 27–8, 40–1, 68, 80, 88–9, 102–3, 156–7

as mediation, 113, 123, 137, 143

technical or instrumental, viii–ix, 145, 161, 179

See also rationalization; reason

rationalization, 12, 69, 72–3, 81, 115, 179, 211, 214

realization of philosophy, viii, xiii–xiv, 15–20, 31, 61, 91–120, 168

reason, 157–8

concept of, 39fn49

demands of, viii, 21, 23, 26, 29, 36, 40, 94, 100, 119, 205

See also rationality

reductionism, 11, 13, 33, 204

reflection, 196

reification, viii–ix, xii, 72, 73, 83, 86, 95, 97–8, 119, 137–8, 146–8, 154, 159, 212–13, 216, 235–8

as a cultural pattern, 66–7, 69, 180, 190

defined, 62, 96fn11

dialectic of, 82, 89, 116–19, 123, 143

and fetishism, 71, 156

and rationalization, 72, 80–1

reified thought, 132

See also reification

relativism, 55, 57, 138, 142, 144

religion, 12, 23, 39, 78, 109, 152, 157, 166, 173, 229, 231

revolution, 46, 63–4, 118, 149, 190, 194, 196, 203, 208–9, 216, 220, 231

and philosophy, viii, ix, xiv, 1–2, 4, 15, 17, 39, 82, 94

proletarian, 112, 119, 153, 174, 226–7, 230, 238, 243

right or grounds of social and political, 8–9, 21–9, 40

subject or agent of, xv, 29–32, 172, 210

Rockmore, Tom, 112, 128, 131

romanticism, xii, 68, 124, 128

Rose, Gillian, 65–6, 143

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19, 22–5

Rudas, Laszlo, 124–5, 127, 133, 138

Ruge, Arnold, 9, 26, 29

Russian Revolution, 210, 239

Sahlins, Marshall, 67

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 180

Say, Jean-Baptiste, 79

Sayre, Robert, xiifn1

Schiller, Friedrich, 105–6

Schmidt, Alfred, 6–7, 43, 129

science, vii–ix, 62, 92, 152, 174, 176, 183–4, 189, 196–9, 206, 208–9

natural, 36, 45–8, 47fn12, 54, 58, 78–9, 84, 129, 130–1, 135–6, 139–45, 147–9, 177–9

social, 73–4, 86, 146, 194–5

Sebag, Lucien, 223

second nature, 63, 98, 101, 120, 135, 162

sectarianism, 241

self-consciousness, 13, 34–5, 39, 43, 53, 82, 87–8, 109, 133, 136, 141, 143, 147–9, 218, 237–8

sensation, x, 45–7, 53–4, 77, 161, 185, 192, 201

Simmel, Georg, 62

slavery, 20, 22, 82

Smith and Ricardo, 224

social democracy, 225

social reproduction, 228–9

socialism, 1, 22, 28fn17, 32, 41, 61, 63–4, 67–8, 80, 89, 100, 112, 116–18, 124, 134, 138, 140, 149,

167, 178, 182, 193–5, 197, 208, 212, 221, 225, 227, 232, 243

See also practice

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 85

speculation, vii, 4, 34, 38, 43, 63, 94, 139, 142, 151–2, 205

Stalinism, xv, 223, 239

Stedman Jones, Gareth, xv

Stendhal, 96

Structuralism, 226

subject. See antinomy; subject-object identity

subject-object identity and domination, 100fn15

in Feuerbach, 13–14

idealistic, 101, 110

in Lukács, 122–4, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 137, 143, 215

in Marx, 36, 43–9, 51

participatory, 37, 162–3, 184

as production, 38, 98, 101–2

and proletariat, 113–15

suprahistorical reality, 88

Suzuki, Daisetz T., 217

synthesis, 47, 62, 77, 84–5, 101, 103, 105, 107, 111, 123, 175, 191, 228

systematic locus, 52, 55–7, 142

technology, vii, ix–x, xiii, xv, 61–2, 69, 79, 91, 110, 117, 136–7, 145–6, 148–9, 152–7, 164, 166–7,

174–6, 178–81, 183–5, 191, 193–202, 197fn61, 207–10, 213, 216–7

teleology, 174, 200, 233, 235

theology. See religion

thing-in-itself, 12, 45–6, 56–8, 77–8, 101–2, 104–5, 110–11, 122, 132–3, 137, 142, 154, 184, 204

totality, 12, 14, 57, 76, 80, 83–6, 89, 93, 104, 106, 109, 113, 116, 119, 122, 126, 128, 137, 141–3,

146, 152, 159, 180, 183, 200, 213, 215, 219–20

See also dialectics; mediation; reification

transition to socialism, 67, 134, 221

truth, 17, 46–7, 50, 52, 55–8, 113, 116, 143–5, 159, 188, 190–2, 201

See also rationality; reason

utopia, 9, 19, 152, 155, 171, 183, 231, 240

Vico, Giambattista, 44, 78, 224

Vogel, Steven, xvi, 132–3, 138

Weber, Max, x, 62, 69, 72–4, 118, 239

Whitehead, Alfred North, 11

work. See labor

working class. See proletariat

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 186

On the Typeface

This book is set in Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach for

Adobe Systems in 1990, which has become one of the few contemporary

book faces to rival the classic types of Caslon, Bembo, and Garamond.

Though it has no obvious precursor, it retains a calligraphic sentiment that

Robert Bringhurst dubs “neohumanist” in his Elements of Typographic

Style.

Telltale features of Minion include the subtle cant in the bar of the “e,”

the angular bowl of the “a,” and the tapered bulbs that terminate the head of

the “a” and the tails of the “y” and “j.”

Minion’s restrained personality and even color have made it a popular

workhorse type, the narrow set width of which provides economy yet does

not detract from its suitability for book settings.

Document Outline

- Halftitle Page

- Title Page

- Copyright Page

- Contents

- Preface

- Introduction to the New Edition

- Chapter One: The Philosophy of Praxis

- Chapter Two: The Demands of Reason

- Chapter Three: Metacritique of the Concept of Nature

- Chapter Four: Reification and Rationality

- Chapter Five: The Realization of Philosophy

- Chapter Six: The Controversy Over Subject-Object Identity

- Chapter Seven: From Lukács to the Frankfurt School

- Chapter Eight: The Last Philosophy of Praxis

- Chapter Nine: Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance

- Appendix: The Unity of Theory and Practice

- Index

Table of Contents

Halftitle Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

Introduction to the New Edition

Chapter One: The Philosophy of Praxis

Chapter Two: The Demands of Reason

Chapter Three: Metacritique of the Concept of Nature

Chapter Four: Reification and Rationality

Chapter Five: The Realization of Philosophy

Chapter Six: The Controversy Over Subject-Object Identity

Chapter Seven: From Lukács to the Frankfurt School

Chapter Eight: The Last Philosophy of Praxis

Chapter Nine: Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance

Appendix: The Unity of Theory and Practice

Index