[Both the Roman and Littlefield and the Oxford paperback editions of this book are now out of print. The book is available for reprinting. The selection below is slightly revised.]

Lukács, Marx

and the

Sources of

Critical Theory

ANDREW FEENBERG

ROWMAN AND LITTLEFlELD

Totowa, New Jersey

1981

Contents

Preface

1   The Philosophy of Praxis

2   The Meta-Theory of Philosophy: Marx's Formulation

3   Reification and the Paradigms of Rationality

4   The Meta-Theory of Philosophy: Lukacs' Formulation

5   Culture and Consciousness

6   Cultural Marxism

7   History and Nature

8   Reconciliation with Nature

Notes

Index

Preface

In recent years two books have come to be recognized as the most challenging contributions of Marxism to philosophy. They are Marx's Economic and Philosophica1 Manuscripts, and Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness. These books played a major role in the breakdown of the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism and the consequent revival of interest in Marxist thought among literary scholars, philosophers and sociologists. Yet despite the growing concern with the early works of Marx and Lukács, no one has attempted a comparative evaluation of these two most important texts of "unorthodox" Marxism. The main purpose of this book is to offer such an evaluation.

It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Marx and Lukács themselves 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 in the West. During the first half century after the publication of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács' book became an underground classic, rejected by its author and known only to a few European scholars. The seminal importance of this early work has only been widely recognized in the last decade.

The long eclipse of these books, 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 a romantic revolutionism they eventually rejected in favor of "scientific socialism." Marx's Manuscripts and Lukács' History and Class Consciousness were written at similar turning points in their authors' 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 acts of 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 influence on the later work than the authors were willing to concede.

The romantic influence is undoubtedly present in these early writings. By romanticism is usually meant that trend in modern culture which exalts subjectivity against objectivity, life against rationality, concreteness against abstraction. Certainly the antagonism of Marx and Lukács toward the oppressive formalism of capitalist social life, 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.

It is true that Marx and Lukács were influenced by the romantic critique of capitalism, but 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, playing a propadeutic 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 characteristic modern response to the romantic revolt, the "post-romantic" reconciliation with rational necessity and human finitude that is defining for the ''mature'' personality of modern men and women.

The difficult and ambiguous program of the early Marx and Lukács involved preserving the moment of revolt in romanticism without recapitulating the subjectivistic 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 still an obligatory one for a critical theory which rejects the facile pretensions to science of the so-called Marxist orthodoxy. Marx and Lukács approached this task with a similar method, which I will call "cultural" because of its orientation toward the most general patterns of meaning and purpose of entire societies. Just such a pattern is signified by the concepts of alienation and reification which 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 philosophical problems. This unity of cultural and philosophical concerns is the distinctive trait of their early method.

For Marx and Lukács, philosophy is 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 cultural contradictions of the philosopher's society. Their most challenging conclusion is the idea of a "transcendence" of philosophy as such through the practical resolution of these contradictions in social life. This is perhaps the least well understood aspect of the early "philosophy of praxis" of Marx and Lukács, and the study of it will be the major theme uniting the various investigations which make up this book.

My method of approach in this study is that of a philosopher in the Continental tradition, specifically, the tradition founded on the early writings of Marx and Lukács. Because I believe the paradigms and problems of that tradition are still very much alive, this book is opened onto the future as well as the past, and is in fact less a work of intellectual history than an attempt at showing the continuing value of Marxism for social theory. To accomplish this purpose, I have selected among the themes and texts of my authors with an eye to contemporary concerns. As a result, much that is of primarily historical interest has been left by the wayside, however what remains is the larger and certainly the most interesting part of the whole.

I have devoted more space to the discussion of Lukács than to Marx, as the less well known of the two. Although Lukács was unaware of the existence of Marx's Manuscripts when he wrote History and Class Consciousness, his interpretation of Capital suggests a theory of the continuity of Marx's intellectual development which I elaborate in a specifically Lukácsian interpretation of the early Marx.

Lukács himself I approach from the standpoint of the two major schools of Marxist thought on which his early work had a profound influence. The Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse seized on Lukács' concept of reification which, in combination with other sources, became the basis of its critique of positivism and its dialectical reformulation of Marxist theory. This influence is frequently acknowledged, but it has yet to be traced out in detail. While I do not accomplish that historiographic task here, one aim of this book is to expose some of the important links between Lukács and the Frankfurt School.

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' theory of class consciousness which, along with reification, is the other major theme of the book. They saw in this theory 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' early Marxism. This background may help to explain the difference between my approach to Lukács and that of English and American scholars such as Gareth Stedman Jones and George Lichtheim, who condemn the theory of reification as irrationalist and find Stalinist implications in the theory of class consciousness. I believe it is time to reconsider these very negative evaluations which square neither with the content nor the intellectual impact of Lukács' text.

When Lukács is compared, not with Bergson or Stalin, but with Marx's early philosophical works, a very different picture emerges. Like the early Marx, the early Marxist Lukács is a critic of what Kolakowski has called the "alienation of reason" in modern capitalist society. But that critique is by no means irrationalist; rather, its aim is the establishment of a dialectical paradigm of rationality suited to the task of social self-understanding and human liberation. Such a dialectical paradigm of rationality can be of no service to authoritarian regimes, but only to a socialist culture of self-rule. Not the least important dimension of the early Marx and Lukács is the contribution they make to defining the broad outlines of such a culture.

* * *

The writing 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 long and often fruitful exchanges with Al Gouldner, Stanley Aronowitz, Doug Kellner, Bill Leiss, Stanley Rosen, and Mark Poster. I have also learned a great deal from others writing on Lukács, especially Istvan Meszaros, Paul Breines, Andrew Arato, and Michael Lowy. Authors ask for a great deal of moral support and patience from those with whom they are in daily contact. For exemplary performance in this regard, I want to thank my colleagues in the philosophy department of San Diego State University and, once again, my wife.

The Philosophy of Praxis

MARX AND LUKÁCS

In this chapter and the next, I will discuss the philosophy of the early Marx from a Lukácsian perspective, as a background to the exposition of Lukács' own parallel attempt to resolve the problems first posed by Marx. There are, of course, considerable differences between these authors, and there is always the risk that in comparing them in this manner the identity of the one will be submerged in that of the other. I will naturally 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 might be called "philosophy of praxis," and which is shared by a number of thinkers.1 The identification of such doctrines, which ultimately are defined in ideal-types such as "empiricism" or "idealism," is an important, even if necessarily inconclusive contribution of philosophy to the history of ideas.

The method of Marx and Lukács in their early philosophical works 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 which at the time he seems to have intended as a foundation for empirical studies of economics such as those he presented in his later works. From 1919 to 1923 Lukács, similarly, elaborated a Marxist philosophical theory that is independent of Marxist economics in significant dimensions. 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 the philosophies of Marx and Lukács.

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 that depends on the interpretation given the text concerns whether the Manuscripts are a philosophy of praxis, as I am engaged in defining that term, or, on the contrary, a far less ambitious methodological preliminary or ethical complement to economic research within the framework of the traditional concept of reason.

I have done my best to 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 in a later period. In 1923 Lukács was of course unaware of the existence of Marx's Manuscripts, which had not yet been published when he wrote History and Class Consciousness. The similarities I will identify are all the more significant as indicating the inner connection of the philosophy of praxis with Marxism.

This matter of the similarity between the early Marxist work of Marx and Lukács requires further comment, because of the unwitting tendency of some commentators to treat History and Class Consciousness as though, like the Manuscripts, it had been written before Marx's Capital. Thus Lukács is sometimes blamed for assuming without proof theses which he and contemporary Marxist readers regarded as adequately established by Capital; sometimes Lukács is also blamed for having substituted philosophy for economics, regressing behind the level of scientificity achieved by Marxism, as though no philosophical problems might arise from or be resolved on the basis of the mature thought of Marx.

In fact, Capital is the basis of Lukács' philosophy of praxis and not the early work of Marx, much of which was still unpublished when Lukács began to write as a Marxist. Now, Capital is a quite self-consciously unphilosophical work, 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 properly philosophical problems. Yet we now know on the basis of extensive textual evidence, as the early Lukács could not, 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; but the publication of this text, the so-called Grundrisse, was delayed until the Second World War.3 These textual absences, combined with the image Marx wished to project of his work in Capital, seemed to authorize a scientistic interpretation of Marx's later doctrine which Lukács first challenged from a dialectical perspective.

Lukács made the connection between Marxism and philosophy (that is to say, between Marx and Hegel), primarily through a 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 Capita1. He reevaluated Marx's famous "coquetting" with Hegel, and showed 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 own 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' somewhat speculative extrapolations from Marx's published work can find support in these unpublished ones. Most important, Lukács' 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. A large part of the reason for this convergence of the early Marx and the early Marxist Lukács may be biographical. Like Marx, Lukács was deeply schooled in Hegelian dialectics and so when he sought to develop a Marxist philosophy, he returned precisely to the Hegelian doctrine from which Marx set out. Yet this biographical coincidence does not quite explain the similarity of the transformation undergone by Hegel's dialectic at the hands of Marx and Lukács. It is this link, mediated by the supposedly "scientific" work Capital, which bespeaks an affinity of Marxism for philosophy of praxis.

THE ANTINOMIES

The defining trait of philosophy of praxis, as I will use the term, is the attempt to show that the "antinomies" of philosophy can he resolved only 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 had become more and more sharply sundered in accordance with this distinction. Rich and complex theories of the subjective dimension of being construed the meaning of freedom, value, political ideals, while equally powerful and encompassing theories of the objective dimension of being explained the laws of necessity in nature and history in totally incompatible terms. From his earliest to his last works, Hegel saw his task as cataloguing the resulting contradictions in modern culture and transcending them in a dialectical conception of being which would take into account both its subjective and objective dimensions.

For Hegel the transcendence of the antinomies was a theoretical task, although he did believe that the theory could only be brought to perfection under specific historical conditions which happened to be those under which he lived. Philosophy of praxis begins with a critique of the conservative implications of this approach to resolving the antinomies. Marx argued that because Hegel could not conceive of really radical changes in modern culture, he tended to rationalize temporary historical conditions as though they were eternal necessities. Social revolution and not philosophical speculation was required to transcend the antinomies.

Had Marx confined himself to arguing this position in relation to the antinomies of moral and political life, he would have arrived at a new philosophy of value based on the demand for social change. This new philosophy would have been compatible with some 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, those relating to epistemology and ontology as well as the moral and political ones, in denouncing Hegel's purely theoretical approach. Marx 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 social change 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, Lukács too shares this same approach. When philosophy of praxis contends that human action is philosophically pertinent not just in ethics or politics but in all domains generally, it is asserting a wholly original ontological position. For this philosophy, human action touches the substratum of 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 can affect being, then values do not confront reality as a normless and humanly indifferent sphere, but rather as its highest potentialities.

The philosophy of praxis is thus opposed to both naturalism, for which human being is only a marginal and ontologically insignificant facet of reality, and also to ethical idealism, for which values stand impotently opposed to a reality defined at the outset as indifferent to value. Hence Marx writes that "nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, and rigidly separated from man, is nothing for man."6 And Lukács argues that "the unmediated juxtaposition of natural laws and ethical imperatives is the logical expression of immediate societal existence in bourgeois society."7

This position is a coherent one only where the being of being generally is interpreted through a special sphere of being 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 those spheres within which human being can affect the substratum of reality. The attempt to understand being in general through human being is a kind of inverted philosophical anthropology. Marx and Lukács share this approach with philosophers such as Feuerbach and Heidegger, with this difference: the latter conceive human being metaphysically, and so construct speculative philosophies with moralistic overtones. For Marx and Lukács, on the contrary, history is the "paradigmatic order" for the interpretation of being generally.8

Because of this historical orientation, the philosophy of praxis is not a speculative doctrine, but is based on the (social) scientific study of reality. But, for this philosophy, "reality" is history, and history itself is to be understood as in essence an object of human practice. The ontologically significant relation between human being and being in general is now social action because history is constituted in such action. 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.'"9

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 pertinent to being. Then it can be shown that such philosophical antinomies as that of subject and object, value and fact can be transcended in history. Such transcending action takes on a universal significance, going beyond the merely human world to affect being as such. For philosophy of praxis, history is ontology, the becoming of the human species is the privileged domain within which the problems of the theory of being can finally be resolved. As Marcuse writes in an early essay on Marx's Manuscripts: "The history of man is at the same time the process of 'the whole of nature'; his history is the 'production and reproduction' of the whole of nature, furtherance of what exists objectively through once again transcending its current form.10

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. The discussion of this social dimension of the theory will occupy the major portion of this book. As I have argued above, the philosophical ambition of Marx and Lukács goes beyond social theory, for they claim 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 results of the analysis of society. This most daring dimension of the philosophy of praxis will be treated separately in the concluding chapters of this book. There I will consider serious objections to the philosophy of praxis and attempt to formulate an original response drawing on the resources of philosophy of praxis itself. Before returning now to the social issues that will be the concern of the larger portion of this book, 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

The interpretation of Marx's Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis in my sense is contested by an important tradition of Marx scholarship, the Frankfurt School. 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 a radical historicism such as that described above. Jurgen Habermas also rejects the interpretation of Marx's Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. Habermas 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. This would restrict Marx's conclusions to society, in the larger framework of some traditional ontology in which being is in essence independent of man. Within this same tradition, however, it is customary to interpret Lukács' early Marxism critically as a philosophy of praxis. Thus the common traits I attempt to identify in these two basic sources of Marxist philosophy are here denied.

It is interesting to note that the other highly influential contemporary school of Marxist thought, that founded by Louis Althusser, makes no such distinction. Rejecting equally the early Marxist thought of both Marx and Lukács, the Althusserians see in them 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 as against 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 simply to sketch the Frankfurt School's attempt to "save" the early Marx from historicism.

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas does admit that Marx's text is ambiguous on this score. He claims that the ambiguities have given rise to a "phenomenological strain of Marxism" which overlooks Marx's naturalism and for which, therefore, "the category of labor then acquires unawares the meaning of world-constituting life activity in general.''1l Although Habermas includes Marcuse in this phenomenological tendency, only some of Marcuse's early essays truly belong to it. His later Reason and Revolution in fact belongs to the opposed tendency for which Habermas speaks.

There Marcuse formulates a position close to Schmidt's and Habermas' in denying the ontological status of social categories. Marcuse too notes the ambiguities of Marx's text; he writes of it: "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.''12 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.''13 And so for Marx, "The idea of reason has been superseded by the idea of happiness."14

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, all the antinomies Marx attempted to transcend reappear as alternatives between which he is supposed to have chosen: naturalism or humanism, history or ontology, happiness or reason. 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."l5

Marx himself would not have defined his own advance over Hegel as the demonstration that alienation is a historical category rather than an ontological one. Rather, his advance was to show that all ontology is historical in essence and that the dichotomy between being and history is therefore false. The idea that history, properly understood, has ontological significance is the main philosophical claim of philosophy of praxis. Marx did not choose between an ontological and a historical interpretation of the social categories; he chose both. Only such an understanding of the text can make sense of Marx's 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."16

THE NORMATIVE DIMENSION

The interpretation of the Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis contributes to clarifying the debate concerning the "ethical" moment in Marx's early work. Marx's concept of the "human essence" which is "alienated" under capitalism is frequently interpreted as an ethical ideal opposed to a normless reality. Others see in the Manuscripts an attempt to transcend the opposition of value and fact implied in such an ethical conception. The debate over the Manuscripts is of course related to the larger debate over Marxism and ethics.17 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, ethical and social reality, he would regress behind Hegel to a utopian-moralistic position like that of Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and the other Left Hegelians. In his discussion of Hess, Lukács has shown that this philosophical tendency attempted to recover revolutionary possibilities by positing ethical values as the basis for knowledge of the future, in opposition to Hegel's concrete analysis of and reconciliation with the present moment. But in the process, these thinkers lost Hegel's great advance over Kant and Fichte, his concept of being as continuous becoming. As Marcuse explains it, "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."18 It is through this conception that Hegel relativized the ethical ideal as a moment in the real process of becoming of what is, and so went beyond utopian moralism. This Hegelian conception of development is also the philosophical basis of the Marxian idea of a "transition" to socialism, in contrast with utopian schemes of reform.

Lukács discovers in this Hegelian dialectic of "Ought" and "Is" the basis of the Marxian critique of political economy as revolutionary science. He writes that,

"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 towards the future."19

On these terms, were Marx to posit the "human essence" as an ethical ideal, Hegelian philosophy would already have transcended it in thought 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 and fulfillment, is not arbitrary but expresses the actual limits of the social world. The demand for the abstract ideal is already presupposed by this philosophy as a moment of romantic negation necessarily frustrated by an objectivity which transcends it, that is to say, by reason itself. This philosophy is not overcome by the renewed positing of the ideal, but rather anticipates the latter and refutes it in advance.

Hegel's critique of Kant and of abstract ethical idealism in general, influenced Marx to seek a basis for revolutionary theory in the tendencies of social reality, in a dialectic of ideal and real in history. In his early writings, Marx attempts to transfer the ideal concepts of political philosophy from the domain of pure thought to the domain of reality, where they can be treated 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 reflective ideology-critique. This ideology-critique relativizes what is and what ought to be as contradictory tendencies actually inhabiting the real-in-process.

Thus Marx does not set out from a philosophically elaborated concept of the state, that might be immediately contrasted with the 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."20 Instead, the philosophical deduction of what ought to be must proceed from actual social struggles in which the living contradiction of ideal and real appears. 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.''21

In these earliest " Marxist" writings, Marx can be seen struggling to release new grounds for revolution from the conservative Hegelian formulation of 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."22

In sum, the only way beyond Hegel is through him. This passage Marx makes 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 historically and 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, appears here as the derivation of 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 generally, 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."23

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.

META-THEORY AS IDEOLOGY-CRITIQUE

The terms "meta-theory" and "meta-critique" have entered Marxist discourse through the Frankfurt School. They have achieved wide currency lately through Habermas' use of them to refer to the study of the various forms of theory in the light of their intrinsic dependence on specific "knowledge-constitutive interests."24 These interests Habermas distinguishes from those of everyday practical affairs by their enormous generality, which makes of them transcendental conditions of possible objectivity for the spheres of knowledge they determine. Thus, for Habermas scientific knowledge is not really value-free, but is based on an interest in technical control that first generates for human thought the type of object studied by science.

Habermas' innovation is admittedly based on the Marxist theory of ideology, which also attempts to identify, through reflection on the larger context of beliefs, hidden interests which these beliefs rationalize or serve. Habermas is nevertheless justified in abandoning the traditional concept of "ideology" to introduce a newer terminology, given the historical accretion of often contradictory meanings that have rendered the traditional concept almost useless without a definitional effort quite as large as that required by a neologism. Most importantly, I believe, with the term "meta-theory" Habermas emphasizes the reflective side of the concept of "ideology," while completely avoiding the reductionist implications of that concept in most current usages.

The term "meta-theory" in this sense bears a useful resemblance to the method of Lukács and Marx in certain of their studies of the philosophical tradition. The philosophy of praxis approaches this tradition critically while avoiding sociological reductionism. Marx and Lukács are less concerned with deriving the categories of bourgeois philosophy from the conditions of capitalist society than with uncovering the "rational kernel within the mystical skein" of this philosophy. They attempt, in other words, to discover what retains validity in the tradition in spite of its socially relative limitations, which they also identify. The methodological approach they employ is a reflective one, focused on the hidden connection of theory to a background of involvements from which one cannot successfully abstract, but which one can change.

There is, however, a considerable difference between what I will call the "meta-theoretical" approach of Marx and Lukács and the approach of Habermas. Habermas' 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 high price of a loss in sociological concreteness. Marx and Lukács, I believe, offer no such theory of general anthropological interests. Instead, the meta-theory moves in an opposite direction, toward a domain of concreteness which is claimed to be founding for the theoretical abstractions constructed on its basis. We might better compare this approach with that recommended by Whitehead in a different context:

"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."25

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 positivism, while Marx and Lukács reflect on social theory in a cultural climate deeply imbued by Kantianism. 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. The Kantian system consists in the derivation of these formal properties as they relate to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, as general preconditions for any and all knowledge and action in the corresponding domains of real life. But, as Lukács notes, Kant is sufficiently rigorous and honest to acknowledge the difficulty of linking up this paradigm of reason with the concrete content of the life processes from which it has been abstracted and for which it is supposed to provide the preconditions.

In this Kantian cultural climate, both Marx and Lukács follow in the footsteps of Hegel in attempting to resolve the antinomies of form and content that arise from the 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 concept of totality to the study of the historically given forms of rationality provides the basis for a social theory of theory which is not reductive, for an ideology-critique in the most interesting sense of the term. In their application of dialectics, the juxtaposition of the abstract theoretical concepts of philosophy with a specific social background both explains the impasses and antinomies of theory on a social basis, and shows a path to resolution through social action. Thus philosophy is not seen as a mere rationalization of covert interests, nor as a merely passive reflection of production relations. Rather, it is shown to be the form in which the actual contradictions of social life are raised to consciousness most generally and most rigorously under the horizon of the given society.

Susan Buck-Morss has argued recently that Adorno's cultural criticism was deeply influenced by this method, as he discovered it in Lukács. She summarizes Lukács' approach lucidly 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." 26

Much the same analysis could be made, in a general way, of Marx's early discussions of political philosophy, or his critique of Hegel's Phenomenology in the Manuscripts. It is noteworthy too that Marx's most illuminating later comment on the theory of ideology points in the same direction. Speaking of the "relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent," Marx says:

"What makes them representatives . . . 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 drive the latter practically".27

The uniqueness of the approach taken by Marx and Lukács which distinguishes it not only from Kant but also from Hegel is their common belief that the primary antinomy to be overcome is that of traditional philosophy and social reality. Here the term "meta-theory" applies in a double sense. Not only do Marx and Lukács attempt to relate philosophical abstractions to the social lifeworld, but they claim to identify the intrinsic limitation of the method of formulating abstractions in traditional philosophy. This limitation, they argue, is due to the tradition's systematic refusal to consider the philosophical implications of really fundamental social change. 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 this sort of resolution. The criterion of philosophical adequacy that guides concept formation in the tradition thus reflects an implicit sense of the limits of social change which Marx and Lukács explicitly challenge. For them, the resolution of the antinomies requires a form of radical social transformation unimagined or rejected as impossible by the tradition. Marx and Lukács defend their point of view by arguing that this transformation is really possible, and on this basis they claim to offer an entirely new interpretation of the antinomies, freed from the limitations of the tradition.

Nevertheless, neither Marx nor Lukács simply dismiss philosophy. Rather, they proceed from the assumption that the split between the concept of reason, as elaborated in philosophy, and its concrete social substratum reflects contradictions in social reality and points the way toward the practical resolution of the latter. Traditional philosophy, in spite of its limits, was able to identify social potentialities, even if only in a speculative form antagonistic to practice. The problem now consists in reconstructing the insights of this 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."28

In sum, the meta-theoretical approach in the sense the term will be used here consists in dialectically relativizing philosophical form and social content, and correspondingly, theory and practice. A standpoint immanent to both theory and the philosophical tradition is equally rejected. 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 relative moment in a larger social process in which practice can intervene. It is in this light, and not in some merely pragmatic sense of urgency, that we are to understand Marx's thesis: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it."29

A NOTE ON THEORY AND PRACTICE30

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 as it is understood within that tradition. Since I am writing within that tradition myself, I will continue to use terms like "philosophy," "theory," "practice, "and phrases like "the unity of theory and practice," "the realization of philosophy," in much the sense that Marx and Lukács use them. Before proceeding on this basis, I would like to step briefly outside that framework to anticipate certain objections that are frequently made to the Marxist treatment of the theory-practice relation. These objections might be put in the form of questions that implicitly challenge the very idea of a unity of theory and practice or a realization of philosophy in Marx's and Lukács' sense. Here are some examples:

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 works like Marx's Manuscripts and Lukács' History and Class Consciousness are philosophical works. Are they then philosophers, and if so how can they elaborate a philosophy on the basis of the proposition that philosophy is dead?

3. Marx and Lukács seem to say that only the revolution can "solve" philosophical problems, and yet they propose their solutions to these problems in philosophical works written before the revolution. Does this not imply that the revolution is after all irrelevant to the solution of philosophical problems?

These questions arise largely from problems in understanding Western Marxism's special terminology. When this terminology is understood it becomes clear that Marx and Lukács are not making quite such wild and radical claims as they at first appear to be making. The chief difficulties stem from ambiguities in the terms "philosophy" and "theory." I will therefore treat these first.

Marx and Lukács do not use the term ''philosophy'' to refer primarily to the activity of reflecting on the basic assumptions and ideas of a culture. In this sense they are obviously still doing philosophy, and they would not deny it. For them, "philosophy" refers to a specific historical tradition of reflection that develops common themes from the Greeks to Hegel. They do 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 which run through it from the beginning to the end, in spite of major variations and innovations. It is this paradigm which has been exhausted, not the activity of reflection per se.

However unfamiliar this approach to understanding philosophy may be in the Anglo-American context, it is a well identified tendency in Continental philosophy since Feuerbach. 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. This amounts to treating philosophy a bit like the monuments of a dying civilization. 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, naive; 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 social causes that, they believe, are 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.31

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 this "philosophy" would be an instance. This more general term is "theory." Now we need to distinguish between two types of theory, a type which is identified with traditional philosophy and a new type which is identified with the sort of reflection in which Marxism engages. This is precisely the distinction between "traditional' and "critical" theory that Horkheimer made in a famous essay. Like the Frankfort School, Marx and Lukács argue that traditional theory has been superseded by a new critical theory. In the works with which we will he concerned they do not suggest that philosophy should be abandoned for practical activity or simply "applied" in the usual technical sense of the term. The point, then, is not that reflection should cease, but that a new kind of reflection is needed.

This new kind of reflection differs from the old at two levels. On the one hand, it treats many assumptions which the philosophical tradition took for granted as problems. On the other hand, it treats these assumptions as problems at the specific level of the social causes from which they arise. For example, instead of accepting the eternal necessity of the antinomy of public and private interest, critical theory would show that this antinomy has a specific social cause that can be removed. 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 arise as antagonistic opposites.

The critique of abstract or "pure" theory is to be understood in this context. It is, once again, not that Marx and Lukács reject conceptual generality for empirical specificity, but rather that for them the process of abstraction in which philosophy detaches its concepts from their social basis gives rise to a bias they reject. This is a bias toward treating philosophical issues as though they rested on eternal facts of nature or ontologically necessary dimensions of the human condition. But once conceived in this way, the social background of these issues is occluded and it becomes impossible to imagine human action contributing to changing this background. 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, which can be changed. This type of reflection resembles what Douglas Hofstadter has called a "strange loop": at the very top of the conceptual hierarchy, at the point at which one reaches the most general and abstract concepts, one finds oneself suddenly plunged down to the lowest rung of the conceptual ladder.

Let me return now to the example of the antinomy of public and private interest cited above to illustrate how practice can contribute to resolving a theoretical problem. Plato sets up the problem as philosophy has treated it ever since. Plato's guardians are qualified to rule by the complete elimination of their private lives; they cannot even know their OWI1 children. (For the Greeks the abolition of the family is the abolition of the private sphere itself.) The lower classes of the Republic pursue private interests but this disqualifies them from rule. The antinomy is evident here. It does not disappear in as different a philosophical doctrine as Rousseau's. Rousseau distinguishes the general will from the will of all as two opposed types of interest. It is true that he does not conceive of a special class as the bearer of the general will, but instead projects the antinomy into the individual. The measure of the split in the individual this produces is the degree of "virtue" required to participate in citizenship. Even a Mandeville, who claims that "private vices are public benefits," readily admits that the intention of the individuals in pursuing private interests is antagonistic to social welfare and only increases it by a paradoxical reversal in contact with other similarly corrupt private interests.

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 the administration of which places the individuals in an antagonistic relation to each other. Public interests then arise alongside the private ones insofar as the community has needs which are not identical with the mere summation of these antagonistic private interests. But what if this basic assumption was false? 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 "private" interest would remain, but these would not stand in an antinomial relation to the public interest of the community. Instead of dedication to public interest requiring renunciation of private interests, the two could support each other harmoniously. The traditional philosophical construction of the issue would no longer apply.

The point I want to make is not that such a Marxist reform of society would work—that is another prohlem—but rather that once one envisages it as a real possibility, social action appears to play a central role in resolving philosophical problems that have traditionally been treated as purely theoretical in character. It is this new role for social action which is intended by the concept of a "unity" of theory and practice. Philosophy is "realized" in this unity in the sense that its old ideal of somehow reconciling public and private interest is finally achieved. The new element is that this realization involves a radical social change, and not a purely conceptual mediation such as Plato's utopia, Rousseau's "virtue," or Mandeville's equivalent of the "invisible hand."

Note that the revolution need not already have succeeded for this new type of theoretical reflection to proceed. 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. Even in his wildest speculations, Plato saw no way to abolish slavery. Aristotle once made the fantastic suggestion that slavery could be abolished if tools would 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 class societies. Thus Marxists do not need to wait for the revolution to propose theoretical analyses of the solutions to problems it is supposed to bring about. However, they do generally insist that only by struggling against capitalism has the working class been able to shake up the dominant assumptions of a millenial class culture so that these assumptions can finally be problematized in theory and new solutions to old problems anticipated. Later chapters will explain this connection between theory and practice in more detail.

THE HERITAGE OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY For Lukács traditional philosophy is in essence theory of culture that does not know itself as such. Philo-sophy is reflection on cultural structures misinterpreted 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 which 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 most important work is de-voted to an extended analysis of the history of philosophy. Lukács had, of course, an important predecessor in the Marxist study of the history of philosophy. In the foreword to History and Class Consciousness, he 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.)

Notes

(Throughout the footnotes, Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. by R. Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT, 1971) 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.)

CHAPTER I

1. The contrast between these two dimensions of the Marxian theory is usefully developed in relation to Lukács by Andrew Arato in "Lukács' Theory of Reification," Telos, no. 11 (1972), pp. 52-53. Cf. also, Stanley Moore, "Utopian Themes in Marx and Mao: A Critique for Modern Revisionists," Monthly Review 21, no. 2 (1969).

2. Important summaries of the debate are contained in: Ernest Mandel, La Formation de la Pensee Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Jurgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967). Also interesting are: Herbert Marcuse, "The Foundations of Historical Materialism," in Studies in Critical Theory, trans. by J. de Bres, (Boston: Beacon, 1973), first published in 1932; Louis Althusser, "Sur le jeune Marx," in Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1966); Bertell Ollman, Alienation (New York: Cambridge University, 1971); Istvan Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

3. Important discussions of the relation of the Grundrisse to Capital are: Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen 'Kapital' (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1968); Irving Fetscher, "The Young and the Old Marx," in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Marx's Socialism (New York: Lieber Atherton, 1973); Ernst Mandel, La Formation de la Pensee Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967). The authors all agree that the early concept of alienation in Marx is further developed in the concept of fetishism in Capital.

4. Mandel, op. cit., p. 172.

5. HCC, p. xliv (emphasis omitted).

6. Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ea., by T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), p. 217.

7. HCC, p. 197.

8. HCC, p. 144.

9. HCC, p. 145. For a further discussion of Lukács' concept of praxis, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács et Heidegger (Paris: Denoel, 1973), pp. 103105.

10. Herbert Marcuse, "The Foundations of Historical Materialism, op. cit., p. 24. The translator has somewhat simplified the original. Cf. Herbert Marcuse ''Neue Qnellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen Materialismus, in Der Deutsche kunstlerroman, Fruhe Aufsatze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 530 531.

11. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. by J. Shapiro, (Boston: Beacon, 1971), p. 28.

12. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1964), p. 275.

13. Ibid., p. 314.

14. Ibid., p. 293. Clearly, Marcuse changed his position from that expressed in his 1932 essay, cited above.

15. Marx, ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," op. cit., p. 155.

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

17. One who sees Marx's Manuscripts as an ethical work is Eugene Kamenka. See his, Marxism and Ethics (New York: St. Martins, 1969). A contrary position is taken by Bertell Ollman, op. cit., p. 47. Cf Allen Wood, "The Marxian Critique of Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972). For an important discussion of the historical debate over Marxism and ethics, see "Y a til une sociologic marxiste?" in Lucien Goldmann, Recherches Dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

18. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Recolution (Boston: Beacon, 1964), p. 136.

19. Georg Lukács, "Moses Hess and the Prohlems of Idealistic Dialectics, in George Lukács, Tactics and Ethics, trans. by M. McColgan, ed. by R. Livingstone (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 191.

20. Marx, "Letter to Ruge,' L. Easton and K. Guddat, trans. and eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 213.

21. Ibid., p. 213.

22. Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), pp. 596 597.

23. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," op. cit., p. 50.

24. For a summary of the theory, see the appendix to Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.

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

26. Susan BuckMorss, The Origins of the Negative Dialectic (New York: The Free Press, 1977), pp. 26 27.

27. Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), p. 121.

28. Herbert Marcuse, "Philosophy and Critical Theory," Negations, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. 142.

29. Marx, ''Theses on Feuerbach," L. Easton and K. Guddat, trans. and eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 402.

30. I owe many of the ideas in this section to Gerald Doppelt, who suggested that I include it.

31. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1979), p. 29.

CHAPTER IV

1. HCC, p. xiv.

2. Frederick Engels, The Peasant Question in France and German, Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1969), p. 648.

3. HCC, pp. 110 and 187-188. It was Nietzsche who first attempted a general critique of rationality as an expression of the will to power, identifying conceptual generality and hierarchy with corresponding social projects of 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.

4. Quoted by Lukács in HCC, p. 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 possibility as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation.

5. HCC, p. 121.

6. HCC, p. 91.

7. HCC, p. 100.

8. HCC, p. 112.

9. HCC, p. 89.

10. HCC, p. 130. The implications of this Lukácsian concept of contemplation for the development of the Frankfurt Schools theory of authority will be discussed in the next chapter.

11. HCC, p. 63.

12. HCC, p. 77. This dilemma Lukács has already treated at great length in The Theory of the Novel before becoming a Marxist. That early work, which contains Lukács critique of romanticism and ethical idealism, concludes with a chapter on the transcendence of social forms of life. The messianic-utopian stage in Lukács thought lies here, in the idea of the creation of a new epic community through the dissolution of all social conventions and constraints in soul-to-soul encounters of the Dosteivskian type. Lukács later idea of unity of theory and practice is an attempt to de-mythologize this early notion by supplying concrete mediations through which it could be realized. For more of Lukács messianism, see Michael Lëwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Révolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976).

13. HCC, p. 134.

14. HCC, p. 87.

15. HCC, p 135.

16. For a sensible review of the position of the Frankfurt School, see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Braziller, 1972), chapter 7 and 8. The appendix also summarizes and contributes to the debate over Marcuses position on the ideological character of modern technology.

17. HCC, p. 129.

18. HCC, p. 112.

19. HCC, p. 128. Once again the parentage of Adorno and Horkheimers The Dialectic of Enlightenment should be clear from its quite similar analysis of the contradictions of formal rationality and technology control.

20. Lucien Goldmann, Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1945) and George Lukács, The Young Hegel (Cambridge: MIT, 1975).

21. HCC, p. 115.

22. HCC, p. 116.

23. HCC, p. 117.

24. HCC, p. 122.

25. HCC, p. 126.

26. HCC, p. 124.

27. HCC, p. 160. Implicit in this critique of Kantian moral idealism is a critique of political voluntarism in the left wing of the socialist movement. It is interesting that Lukács himself is generally perceived as a political voluntarist even though he elaborated the theoretical basis of a profound critique of that position. Lukács own critique of sectarianism as a disguised ethical idealism is to be found on HCC, pp. 320-322 and 326-328. I have discussed this problem in Andrew Feenberg, Lukács and the Critique of Orthodox Marxism, The Philosophical Forum III, noa. 3-4 )1972),pp. 431-432. That same issue also contains a typical discussion of Lukács purported sectarianism. Cf., Adam Schaff, The Consciousness of a Class and Class Consciousness.

28. HCC, p. 134. This interpretation of Kants ethics is of course alien to concerns of recent Anglo-American analysis of Kants thought. It is not, however, without precedent in earlier Kant-criticism. Cf, G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans., by J.B. Ballie (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 615 ff.

29. HCC, p. 126.

30. HCC, p. 126.

31. HCC, p. 137.

32. HCC, p. 138. Kant defines the intuitive understanding as follows: In fact our understanding has the property of proceeding in its cognition, e.g. of the cause of a product, 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 (if the object is a natural product) under the concept. We can, however, think an understanding which being not like our, 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 its representation of the whole. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by H.H. Bernard (New York, Hafner, 1951), p. 255. The centrality Lukács attributes to the idea of an intuitive understanding in the development of assical German philosophy follows closely on Hegels interpretation of the period. 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: Felix Meiner, 1962),p. 33. This identification also underlies Lukács interpretation of Fichte and Hegel. Among recent Kant scholars, those of the historical-ontological school seem to be closest to Lukács en emphasis. Cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism, Moltke Gram, ed., Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967). Heimsoeth writes, for example, that it is a conviction of Kants which endures to his last period, that complete and immediate knowledge is only present where the subject posits the object, op.cit., p. 161.

33. HCC, p. 142.

34. The accuracy of this interpretation of Kants is not the issue here since this was in fact how Hegel understood critical philosophy. Cf. G.F.W. Hegel, Glauben and Wissen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1962), pp. 20-21.

35. See Herbert Marcuse, Hegels Ontologie (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1968), pp. 40-43 and especially, pp. 133-134.

36. HCC, p. 155.

37. HCC, p. 147/

38. HCC, p. 17.

39. HCC, p. 18.

40. HCC, p. 201.

41. HCC, p. 155.

42. HCC, p. xxiii. For an evaluation of Lukács self-criticism, see the concluding chapters of this book. Here it is necessary to point out the error of Lukács assertion in this passage that Hegel rejected the postulate of subject-object identity, for Hegel did admit a mediated identity.

43. For a discussion of this historical background to Lukács concept of subject-object identity, see James Schmidt, The Concrete Totality and Lukács Concept of Proletarian Bildung, Telos, no. 24 (1975), pp. 2-40.

44. Max Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. by M.J. OConnel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 211. Subject-object Identity in this sense is clearly quite different from the kind of identity rejected by the Frankfurt School, Cf. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974), pp. 169-173. In that discussion, it can be seen that the Frankfurt School interprets subject-object identity entirely in terms of the relation of Spirit to nature, leaving out the interaction of theory and practice in history in which identity consists most importantly for Lukács, For a different view in cf. Martin Jay, The Frankfurt Schools Critique of Marxist Humanism, Social Research XXXIX:2 (1972).

45. HCC, p. 21.

46. HCC. p. 163.

47. HCC, p. 185.

48. HCC, p. 187. To what extent does this treatment of the category of subjectivity answer objections to the use of that category formulated from a structuralist viewipoint? The structuralist critique of subjectivism and humanism began as a reaction to phenomenology and Sartreianism, doctrines interpreted to argue for the unbounded creative capacity of pure consciousness. The early formulations of the critique were scientistic and hence internal to the general antinomy of subjectivism/objectivism they attempted to transcend. (For an especially revealing example, see the November, 1963, issue of Esprit, containing a fascinating debate between Levi-Strauss and several representatives of French phenomenology.) More recently, there has been a recognition in France that the simple abolition of the subject by a scientistic coup de force cannot resolve the specific problems posed by the study of society. The decisive question is not the ontological one of whether human subjectivity exists or whether it is a merely subjective illusion (of a subject?), but rather the methodological one of the position of subjectivity in a framework of structures and rules that it does not posit but which are not somuch determining for it as constitutive of its very being. In different ways, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have been attempting to thinking through the implications of this new position. A brief summary of Bourdeius position and his relation to structuralism is contained in Pierre Bourdieu, Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge, Social Research 35:4 (1968), especially pp. 703-706. Foucault summarizes his perspective somewhat paradoxically as follows: The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated (without, however, constituting its centre). I have not deniedfar from itthe possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 208-209. Without claiming that Lukács (or Marx) anticipates the subtle and original modes of analysis elaborated by Bourdieu and Foucault. I think it can be shown that they are at least situated in neighboring conceptual fields, and that the critique of Marxist subjectivist-humanism elaborated in reaction to Sartres Critique does not apply to their formulation of the Marxist theory of the subject.

Chapter IV

Lukács's Meta-Critique of Philosophy

THE HERITAGE OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

For Lukács traditional philosophy is in essence theory of culture that does not know itself as such. Philosophy is reflection on cultural structures misinterpreted 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 which 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' most important work is devoted to an extended analysis of the history of philosophy.

Lukács had, of course, an important predecessor in the Marxist study of the history of philosophy. In the foreword to History and Class Consciousness, he says " it is of practical importance to return in this respect to the traditions of Marxinterpretation founded by Engels (who regarded 'the German workers' movement' as the 'heir to classical German philosophy.')"¹ However, this statement is misleading to the extent that it would incline the reader to seek in Lukács a treatment of classical Germany philosophy similar to that which it receives from Engels and his orthodox Marxist followers. In fact there are few important similarities, for Lukács returns less to Engels' specific interpretation of the heritage than to the general question posed by Engels of Marxism's relation to its 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 a vast intellectual prolegomena to Marxism. For Engels the German working class movement was the heir of this great intellectual tradition, continuing it within a new framework. However, this new framework, as Engels understood it, bore little resemblance to the heritage which it was supposed to assume. Engels presented Marxism as a science, comparable to the other sciences, while Marxist philosophy became for him a new natural philosophy, synthesizing all the sciences into a materialist worldview. The final traces of classical German philosophy that remain were to be found in a revised dialectic, which presumably continued the Hegelian theory of reality as process. But neither this materialist worldview nor this dialectic can carry the weight of the inheritance Engels claims for them.

In fact for Engels the heritage of the bourgeoisie is not so much philosophy as science. The epistemological and ontological concerns of classical German philosophy go by the boards. Bourgeois philosophy served a function in developing dialectics, in stimulating the growth of the natural sciences and of historical and economic theory, and in combating religion with materialism. But, if Marxism can assume this heritage, it is only by everywhere substituting new scientific modes of thought for the old speculative ones. In the process, reason ceases to be problematical—hence philosophical, it regains the immediate selfcertainty of early modern science, distinguishing itself from philosophy as this science distinguished itself from that of Aristotle.

The uncritical or precritical theory of truth Engels postulated as the basis for the inheritance is particularly evident in those passages where he discusses the legitimacy of the proletariat's claim. For Engels the essence of the heritage is science, the sciences created by the bourgeoisie, because only science is universal, not bound by the class conditions on which it nevertheless depends for its birth. The proletariat along in bourgeois society needs the truth, and it alone, therefore, can rise to the universality and honesty required for the continued pursuit of scientific truth in the period of the decadence of bourgeois society. Even in the natural sciences the declining bourgeoisie cannot accept the truth it discovers, because at every turn new ideas undermine the foundations of bourgeois ideology and subvert the static worldview and the "post festum" religious conversion of a class menaced by the repercussions of its own rationalistic traditions. Hence the task of reason devolves on the proletariat, which is prepared to accept this task in the proper spirit and carry it forward.

Like Engels and the mainstream of the Marxist tradition, 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. However, for Lukács, gone is the enlightenment optimism and faith in science of the Marxist mainstream, gone the supreme selfconfidence of Engels, who still could say of the petty bourgeoisie, "Let [them] cast in their lot with the antiSemites until they have convinced themselves that they get no help in that quarter."² Both the rationalism and the irrationalism of bourgeois society now appears to Lukács to be infinitely more problematical than ever they appeared to earlier Marxists. For the first time there arises within Marxism an interrogation of enlightenment itself, and not just of its limits or abuse in bourgeois society. In this sense, Lukács' 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 the dialectical correlate of the later. In his own terminology irrationalism is described as a reaction against reification under the horizon of reification itself.³ In any case, 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 itself, an attempt which had inevitably to fail on the ground of bourgeois society but which may yet succeed on proletarian soil.

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. These contradictions, Lukács sums up as the "antinomies of bourgeois thought," the split between subject and object, freedom and necessity, value and fact, form and content, which philosophy attempts to overcome in what Lukács calls a "totality." For Lukács as for Hegel, "To transcend such ossified antitheses is the sole concern of reason."⁴ The resolution of the antinomies is the fundamental exigency of this philosophy, through which it attempts to found its concept of reason. But, Lukács argues, in spite of the most strenuous intellectual efforts, the antinomies emerge intact from bourgeois philosophical reflection. Kant's philosophy is for Lukács the highest and purest expression of the antinomies of reified thought, and the greatness of Hegel lies principally in having developed the dialectical methodology by which Kantianism could be subjected to a rigorous critique and transcended. Marxism then appears as the competition of the Hegelian critique of Kant, a completion which requires a radical change in orientation, but which in essence prolongs Hegelian dialectics. Lukács' own contribution consists in the appropriation of Hegel's dialectical critique of Kant and of reified thought generally from within Marxism.

From this standpoint classical German philosophy takes on a wholly new importance for Marxism. It does not belong to Marxism's prehistory, but rather poses for the first time, if in a still relatively unconscious form, the fundamental problems that Marxism is called upon to solve. Lukács therefore reexamines the development of this philosophy, from Kant to Hegel, in order to understand the earliest formulations of the problems to which Marxism is addressed, and the general conditions of their solution. The study of classical German philosophy is a study of the outer reaches of bourgeois thought, as it approaches the point at which its transcendence in Marxism will finally show the way to resolve its antinomies. For Lukács, the theory of the antinomies of bourgeois thought is a summum of the fundamental methodological exigencies of a new concept of reason: the dialectical unification of subject and object, freedom and necessity, value and fact, form and content. These were already the goals which classical German philosophy set for itself and Lukács accepts them as valid, rejecting only the method by which this philosophy hoped to attain them.

The failure of classical German philosophy then demonstrates that reason requires, on purely methodological grounds, a step beyond bourgeois society, beyond philosophical speculation into revolutionary practice. Classical German 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."⁵ 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.

Lukács' Marxism thus refuses either to attempt a speculative resolution of the antinomies of philosophy, or to ignore them in the naïve selfcertainty of science. For Lukács the only possible reconciliation is the practical transcendence of the opposition between the antinomial terms at the level at which they arise. The procedure of Lukács' metatheory of classical German philosophy consists in large part in identifying this level as social and demonstrating the continuing traces of their social origin in the most abstract concepts of this philosophy. This is the theoretical basis for what Lukács calls the unity of theory and practice.

THE REIFIED THEORY PRACTICE RELATION

Lukács' approach to the study of philosophy is deeply 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 in the first instance.

This question makes no sense in terms of the usual Marxist theory of ideology. That theory contrasts an apologetic abstractionism, starting out from the problems of social life and rising to philosophy with, on the contrary, a direct practical assault on these same problems in order to resolve them practically. Clearly, such a philistine position leads to the simple dismissal of philosophy in order to turn to the serious business of practical affairs. Yet the point Lukács wants to make is that the kind of social problems that become the basis of philosophical reflection simply cannot be solved by such an unreflected practicality. They arise, rather, at the points where such practice invariably fails, or still more critically, at those points at which its very success raises further questions it knows not how to address practically. For Lukács, therefore, it is not any and every practice which might resolve philosophical problems, but only a very special kind of practice the nature of which will have to be specified further.

This dialectic of theory and practice might be approached from another angle. Most Marxists consider practice as a more or less conscious implementation of theory (of bourgeois or proletarian ideology, for example), but it would conform more to Lukács' intent to reverse the terms of the equation in order to consider theory as a specific type of practice "raised to consciousness" and there conceptualized. One might ask then what it is a bout 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 which prevent it from resolving practically the types of problems that then appear in philosophy as antinomies? What is there about this practice that makes of it the source of problems it cannot even begin to resolve, which in fact do not appear to be practical problems at all, but rather to be philosophical problems? Already, the very form of these questions begins to indicate unaccustomed reasons why philosophy should arise through a process of abstraction from practical life, leading it ever further from its own material substratum. In a complementary fashion, one also begins to see just why instead of recommending an immediate return to practice, Lukács proceeds to a metatheoretical critique of philosophy in the course of which everyday practice too is subjected to critical analysis.

Most abstractly formulated, the limit on everyday practice with which Lukács is concerned is reification. The previous chapter has discussed the ramifications of this concept in detail. Here I will confine myself to an exposition of those aspects of the concept most relevant to Lukács' metatheoretical critique of philosophy. These are the social origins of the reified theorypractice relation, and its consequences for what Lukács calls "reified thought," that is to say, thought which accepts reification as the horizon, the intrinsic limit of practice generally.

According to Lukács, it is the capitalist transformation of the work process which is the basis of all forms of reification. The reification of labor is therefore the origin and model of all forms of reification throughout the society. "The destiny of the worker becomes the general destiny of the entire society."⁶ In practice, capitalism imposes this particular destiny on ever larger segments of the population as it everywhere divorces workers from their means of production and organizes them in factories does. Ideologically, the capitalist class itself justifies its right to possess these means of production by claiming that they are the fruit of its own labor or that of its ancestors. 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. This is not merely an ideological change; the key traits of reification workers experience also affect the upper classes. "The problems of consciousness arising from wagelabor are repeated in the ruling class in a refined and spiritualized, but for that very reason, more intensified form."⁷

Lukács seeks the "seisgrund" of reified thought, even in its highest philosophical manifestations, in the structure of the capitalist labor process.⁸ Under capitalism, the productive system faces the worker as a completed and independent object world, which imposes its own rhythm and order on his or her laboring activity. The more advanced is the mechanization, the more the expenditure of this labor power becomes the simple control of the autonomous productive activity of the machine themselves. Here work tends to become " the contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws, enacted independently of man's consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system."⁹

It is characteristic of reification that this appearance of autonomy and objective lawfulness obscures the fact that the machine itself is a product of human labor, that its essence is not to be found merely in the structure of its operation, but also in the human activity which first created it and gave it that structure. In short, obscured behind the synchronic rationality of the given productive system is the diachronic development of the human species itself, of its knowledge and powers, and of the class relations of the society which created it.

The capitalist too confronts reified reality in his economic activity in a similar manner at another level. His much vaunted entrepreneurial "creativity," says Lukács, consists entirely in calculating as exactly as possible what will happen despite his 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 activity of the machine, the capitalist is confronted by the autonomous activity of the market.

Thus the activity of the individual subject in capitalist society is not the transformation of reality, in Lukács' ontological sense of the term, but rather conformity to it, and especially to its laws, in order to realize its potential benefits for the individual. The intervention of the subject is exhausted in the taking up of an orientation with respect to reality. Where this orienting activity reflects unconscious social laws, massive regularities of behavior will appear which may indeed have a significant effect on the real world. But the subjects do not assume his effect as their common goal, but rather relate to it yet again as the presupposition of an individual calculus of losses and gains. Thus, "the attitude of the subject becomes purely contemplative in the philosophical sense."¹⁰

Reified thought is thought which arises from just such a confrontation of individual and reality. 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 individualistic in essence. Solidarity between members of the class has a very limited (primarily defensive) function, and the form of their interaction is generally one of competition and conflict, not cooperation and common struggle. 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."¹¹

The individual bourgeois perceives himself as an active agent, a subject of history, while the activity of this class appears to him in its reified form, as an object. From the bourgeois point of view, activity can only be predicated of conscious individuals and only conscious individuals can appear as subjects. However, Lukács argues, individual activity in capitalist society consists primarily in adjusting to the necessary course of events, the better to profit from them. The conscious activity of the individual bourgeois, therefore, makes no essential contribution to the course of events but is exhausted in the more or less successful calculation of what will happen in any case. In this sense, the activity of the individual bourgeois is really passivity, is really an objective aspect of the social process and not a subjective, creative aspect.

The level at which the true activity of the bourgeoisie is to be found is precisely that of the class as a whole, of which the individual is only conscious as pure objective force. This level of true activity is unconscious because it results from the mutual interaction of the thousands of decisions of the members of the class, and from the unforeseen consequences of these decisions. It is this which the individual bourgeois experiences as the objective laws of the economy which, like Bacon's nature, must be obeyed to be controlled.

These sociological considerations form the essential background to a discussion of Lukács' metatheoretical procedure in the critique of philosophy. The antinomy of value and fact can serve here as an exemplary philosophical problem that arises from the reified theorypractice relation, and which can usefully illustrate Lukács' general approach.

From the standpoint of the reified theorypractice relation, the individual is condemned to accept the existing social reality in fact, free only to take up one or another inner attitude toward it. The reified objectivity of social reality takes the form of a pitiless determinism, indifferent to the needs and values of the individual, while these latter now appear to be purely subjective, inward, with no basis in a "reality" of any kind. 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 which refuses all solidarity, all conscious Aufhebung of the unintended consequences of individual action.

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."¹² These two antinomial opposites reappear everywhere in reified theory, in the opposition of a psychology of adaptation to an ethics of duty, in the opposition of a philosophy of history which emphasizes the lawful course of events to one which emphasizes the role of great men and ideas, in the opposition of a legal theory emphasizing environmental causes to one emphasizing personal responsibility, and so on and so forth.

For the individual, the dilemma is a painful and inescapable one. He or so 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 or what must necessarily come to pass within it. That way lies utopia, and the hopeless struggle against the inevitable. However, the psychic costs of the realistic capitulation before reification have also been calculated from Stendhal to the modern critiques of conformism, and found to be considerable. Society as a market, indeed a racket in selfhood, is ultimately what Lukács' discussion suggests.

The other horn of the dilemma is a utopian struggle to realize higher values in the world, against all the force of resistance of the latter. The individual may refuse the existing reality and oppose to it moral exigencies that would give it a meaning. However, Lukács argues, this attitude splits the subject in half, dividing its substance between empirical needs and desires that can best be satisfied in conformity with existing reality, and the authentic selfhood that derives from conformity with a moral law. This position, which Kant developed into a coherent ethical philosophy, is no more successful than "realism" in resolving the antinomy of value and fact. Indeed, by incorporating the split between these dimensions into the inner life of the subject, it intensifies it to a tragic degree. An unyielding reality, mechanistic in the unfolding of its autonomous course, proves unresponsive to the moral promptings of utopian aspiration which 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."¹³

Lukács arrives by this route at a theory of alienation quite close 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 o the natural social laws . . ."¹⁴ This is the core of the Marxian critique of capitalist alienation, the demonstration that in this society, even in his most strenuous selfassertion man remains "object and not subject of events."¹⁵

REASON AND DOMINATION

So far the discussion of Lukács' metatheory of philosophy has shown that the antinomies of practical reason can be derived from the immediate lifeworld of practical activity in capitalist society. This is, perhaps, not so surprising since practical reason is inevitably closest to actual practice in its concepts and problems. However, more difficult will be the parallel demonstration that the antinomies of pure reason, specifically the antinomy of subject and object, can also be envied from this same practical lifeworld. Lukács' metatheory of pure reason is based on the demonstration of the intrinsic dependence of the philosophical subjectobject concept on the capitalist technical "conquest" of nature. This particular way of dealing with the antinomy of subject and object links Lukács' work once again to the Frankfurt School, which has on various occasions called into question, if not denied, the achievements of technical progress and the universal validity of the natural sciences.¹⁶ At the same time, implied in Lukács' approach is also a remarkable critique avant la lettre of another tendency of contemporary social thought, structuralism, with its privileged emphasis on the moment of synchronic system in social life, and its attempt to derive development from pattern. I will return to some of these themes in more detail in later chapters; here I will focus primarily on the epistemological aspects what I take to be one of Lukács' most suggestive innovations in Marxist philosophy.

How, on Lukács' terms, can one understand the subjectobject relation of bourgeois philosophy, which claims to be founding for practice rather than founded by it? In an argument full of hesitations and obscurities, Lukács suggests an answer to this question which I will reformulate as a metatheoretical critique of this philosophy's subjectobject concept. A study of this argument will also show how Lukács derives the antinomies of pure reason from the structure of reified practice. This example will thus continue to clarify the sense in which Lukács' approach to "ideology" is based on a theory of practice rather than on a theory of the reflection of the base in the superstructures.

According to Lukács, the reified paradigm of knowledge is rooted in the practice of technical control which 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 from earlier forms of thought. In precapitalist society, human beings carved out of nature only a narrow sphere of activity for themselves, frequently ascribing their power over this small humanized enclave of reality to divine intervention. Technical rationality was thus always bound at its limits by another type of thinking, a condition which reflected 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 for the first time to a Faustian ambition to overcome every residue of uncontrolled nature, to humanize it and submit it to desire, 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 which, projected to the limit, would make it possible to represent every aspect of existence by its quantitative essence and to control it.

Of course this tendency toward total reification exists practically only as a tendency. Theory comes to the aid of the still incompletely realized project of total domination by demonstrating its possibility in principle. This demonstration at first takes the form of the construction of formally rational models of the universe which reveal it to be available for domination. Capitalism was thus accompanied by the development of rationalistic philosophy and mathematical science, as attempts to validate its project. (The similarity of this argument to Heidegger's later discussion of technique is striking.) Bourgeois class consciousness required such a demonstration to found itself as a universal and coherent worldview, capable of organizing the infinite and unending extension of the exploitation of nature.

In the theoretical sphere, the validation of bourgeois society requires the demonstration that the entire universe is rational, reified and controllable in principle. Bourgeois thought believes it has comprehended reality only when the human and qualitative dimensions of the real have been reduced to formal, quantitative relations between things. The subject that is dialectically correlated with this concept of reality is an agent of individual technical practice, hence a contemplative subject in the sense of this term explained the previous section. From this standpoint, the recognition of the inviolability of the impersonal, autonomous laws of reality is the very condition of the comprehensive and domination of reality by the individual. Indeed, for reified thought, "only a reality caught in the net of such concepts can really be mastered by us."¹⁷

Might there not be another basis for control of objects: not individual manipulation on the basis of laws but conscious collective decision about the laws themselves? This would seem to be a possibility at least with respect to the laws of society. This possibility is foreclosed by reified thought which understands law in every sphere as the precondition, not the outcome of instrumental action. For this thought, in sum, the reified is the rational and therefore also the controllable. The concept of knowledge is accordingly narrowed to include only such rationality.

To show that the world is rational in this sense is to derive its form from the very structure of reified reason; what exists as reality in the outer world also exists as truth in the subject. The point can be made in another way. For reified thought "our" domination of nature, that of the human species in general, is only possible insofar as nature conforms to "our" reason. "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."¹⁸ What is produced by "us " in thought as rational knowledge must find its validation in reality as universal and objective. Then the deduction of the world from the principles of an autonomous and free reason can be shown to correspond with the nature of things. Thus the ambition of capitalism to dominate and transform the earth leads to the theoretical exigency of the demonstration 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 alone that subjectivity can dominate reality within the horizon of reification. But theoretically, the subject attempts to produce the wold actively in thought. It is on this condition alone that reification can appear 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, while rule the producers instead of being ruled by them."¹⁹

In capitalist society, then, the unmastered alienated form of social life takes shape as the dictate, no longer of irrational religious powers, but of "scientific" laws. In its reified form reason itself becomes an expression of this alienation.

Reified thought believes it has found the essence of reality in the formal rationality of the system of determinants which expose it to reified practice. Like the individual confronted with the machine, the individual confronted with reified social reality discovers the nature of the object in its structure and not in the process of its production. Thence arises what Lukács describes as the antinomy of logical genesis of the "categories" in terms of which reality is understood, and the actual (collective) production of the social world in the course of history. This is the major methodological contradiction that results from the antinomy of subject and object in reified thought. According to Lukács, the bourgeois social sciences exemplify this methodological contradiction. They all seek to understand their objects through their logical structure, in abstraction from the process of their historical becoming. The illusory priority of "structure" over "process" (and its romantic inversions) arise from a confusion in ontological levels characteristic of reified thought: the individual subject confronts the products of the collective activity in which it unconsciously engages as though they were an objective reality, independent of man. Thus the "categorical" level of cultural forms and the corresponding analytic concepts seems to represent a more basic level of being than historical development, a level of eternal laws and principles that is fundamental for history.

What is really happening belies this approach. In fact, if history appears to be a subordinate domain, this is because the reified individuals do not act on social reality through a conscious collective practice, nor, therefore do they signify "reality" as the object of such a practice. As we have seen in the previous section, reification's technical paradigm of subjectivity and objectivity presupposes an in individual subject in principle. 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 as a fate by them. Of course, the individual does relate to the products of these unconscious activities, but not as to human products. Rather, all he perceives of the collective practice in which he is willy nilly engaged is its results, and behind these its form, imprinted on the objects of his control. This form appears as an impersonal and autonomous law which preexists and predetermines social behavior.

Lukács argues that this form is not a law but a principle of practical synthesis of reality by an unconscious social practice. It is only insofar as the object has been submitted to this form that it enters the circuit of capitalist technical domination. Thus priority would go to history in explaining apparent social laws and not vice versa. Reified thought refuses to see this social practice as a practice, as a creative historical intervention. Instead, it sees the historical process in which its objects are reified and dominated as unveiling the preexisting essence of these objects. For reified thought this essence is precisely that dimension of the object through which control of it can be achieved. Thus in submitting to the formal rationality of reification, the object surrenders its own vital mechanism to human control, revealing its true essence as a potentiality of manipulation which has always slumbered within it. Lukács' point, once again, is that this way of representing the subjectobject relation reverses the picture by occluding the unconscious social practice which "prepares" the object for instrumental manipulation, both materially and through the work of social signification in which it takes on its lawful form.

FROM KANT TO HEGEL

Lukács' conception of reified society as a "second nature," the laws of which are created by man but which appear as objective as natural laws, suggests an important philosophical parallel. This is, after all, approximately the form of the Kantian doctrine, which proclaims that experience is governed by laws imposed on it by the subject and which, in turn, necessarily determine the knowledge of the subject. What is the significance of this parallel?

Once again, it is necessary to insist that Lukács understands theory as practice "raised to consciousness," and not as the mere reflection of an objective condition. Thus Lukács does not claim that Kant's theory is an unintended or unconscious metaphor for realities of which Kant was only dimly aware. Rather, Kant's theory is a perfectly rational and conscious way of understanding these realities, under their horizon, that is to say, within the framework of reification. 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 reflecting, but rather explaining the social realities Lukács also explains, but as those realities emerge from reified practice and appear to reified theory. It was thus Kant, in a sense, who first discovered the reification of reality by social practice discussed in the last section, but only insofar as that process can be constructed speculatively as an imaginary individual practice.

This inability of classical German philosophy to go beyond a speculative theory of reification has complex consequences which Lukács elucidates in the course of his metatheoretical critique. In short, where practices does not "penetrate" reality, affecting it in its essence, the limits of practice will leave their mark on theory; Kant's idea of the thing in itself is the clearest example of a theoretical trace of that domain of objectivity of which reified practice has renounced the transformation. However, in arriving at a concept such as the thing in itself, philosophy does succeed in indicating, at least negatively, the preconditions of unreified practice and the corresponding theory for which the antinomies of reified thought would not arise. This is the kernel of truth to be found in philosophy once the mystical shell of speculative construction has been stripped away by the metatheoretical revision of its concepts.

From this standpoint, Kant's philosophy is an enormous theoretical advance over earlier rationalism, which simply assumed the rationality of the universe without "noticing" the constitutive functions of the subject. The progression from Kant to Marx can then be understood 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. At the center of History and Class Consciousness is an extraordinary discussion of the development of classical German philosophy, seen in this light as a step in the intellectual progression leading to Marxism. In the course of this discussion, Lukács shows that Marxism is the veritable Aufhebung of this philosophical tradition, arising from its inner dynamic and on the basis of its results. In this section, I will recount the main lines of Lukács' discussion.

Considered as a grand hypothesis concerning the philosophical development from Kant to Hegel and Marx, Lukács' philosophy of praxis is rich in suggestive ideas but also in problems and difficulties. Lucien Goldmann's study of Kant and the later Lukács' study of the young Hegel have given evidence of the fruitlessness of the general approach sketched below.²⁰ It is impossible here to evaluate this research into the history of philosophy, interesting as that would be. All that we can do now is to consider how Lukács' hypothetical history functions inside his own conception.

In brief, Lukács argues that classical German philosophy is torn by the conflict of two principles. On the one hand, it understands rationality as the basis for overcoming the contingency, the merely "factical" giveness of objects. This principle can be formulated in terms of the exigency of an identity of subject and object as the condition for founding a universal rationalism, unbounded by supernatural mysteries or unknowable realities. In Kant this unification of subject and object takes the form of the "production" of the object in thought through its derivation from rational form. On the other hand, classical German philosophy assumes a reified, formalistic concept of reason which necessarily secretes contingency and facticity as the residue of the process of abstraction from concrete content in which it is constituted. Such a formalistic concept of reason can never be fully united with its corresponding objects. Thus this philosophy's paradigm of knowledge comes into conflict with its method of validating the claims of knowledge. Lukács regards the principle of identity of subject and object as necessary for any consistent rationalism, including Marxism, but he regards the reified paradigm of knowledge as tied specifically to capitalist society. Marxism succeeds where classical German philosophy failed precisely through meeting the demands of an identical subjectobject in terms of a different, dialectical paradigm of rationality.

Lukács' extremely complex argument for this conclusion is presented as a quasihistory, behind which it is possible to identify a static model that in fact organizes his presentation. This model is the Kantian "system" itself, with its threefold division into critiques of pure and practical reason, and of 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 contradiction described above. As one after another attempt fails, the emphasis shifts from one to another of the elements of this structure, culminating finally in the Hegelian dialectic. All along the way, Lukács draws out the implicit conclusions established by this "philosophical experiment," conclusions which will later form the basis of the Marxian solution to the problem of founding a new concept of reason.

Lukács begins his discussion not only with a critique of Kant, but with a critical appreciation of that aspect of Kantian philosophy which already anticipate dialectics. It is most of all the extreme rigor with which Kant confronted he contradictory demands of founding a universal concept of reason and the limits of his own reified conception of theory that leads him to the threshold of dialectics. As noted above, reified thought encounters an 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. Instead of arbitrarily dismissing this contradiction, as had earlier rationalistic metaphysics, Kant conceptualizes it in the notion of the "thing in itself."

This concept serves many functions in Kant's thought, which Lukács groups into two main types. On the one hand the thing in itself is the material substratum of the rational forms in which the object is comprehended. On the other hand it is the ultimate end of knowledge, as God, the soul, and so on, which "are nothing but mythological expressions to denote the unified subject or, alternately the unified object of the totality of the objects of knowledge, considered as complete (and completely known.)"²¹ These different functions of the thing in itself have in common the fact that in each case it represents an absolute limit to (reified) human knowledge, a barrier beyond which thought cannot penetrate. The thing in itself thus blocks the attainment of systematic knowledge of the universe as a whole in both the direction of the deduction of the content of knowledge from its forms, and the unification of the totality of forms in a single universal system.

The problem of the content of the concepts of the understanding arises from the seemingly "impenetrable" character of the empirical facts presented through these formalistic concepts, the impossibility of deriving the material substratum of the concepts from the concepts themselves. Earlier dogmatic metaphysics had not even recognized this problem, although its trace can be discovered there too in unconscious forms. Spinoza, for example, had postulated an infinity of mediations linking substance (form) with its particular modes (content), thereby affirming the possibility in principle, if not in practice, of deducing the entire universe from its logical structure.

Kant rejects this assumption of earlier systematic philosophy and shows that the concepts of the understanding cannot be related abstractly in a metaphysic, but require a material substratum of irreducibly contingent facts to be deployed correctly. With this the very notion of building a philosophical system on the model of mathematics is refuted. Kant argues "that pure reason is unable to make the last leap towards 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'."²² Because the concepts of the understanding must always be employed in relation to an entirely contingent "possible experience," which cannot be produced by the subject, irrationality invades the terrain on which the traditional rationalist systems were constructed. And, Lukács argues, "it is clear 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."²³

Kant's critique of metaphysical system building shows the connection between the two aspects of the concept of the thing in itself; for now the deductive presentation of the concepts of the understanding no longer appears, as it did for rationalism, as a legitimate grasp of the totality of knowledge and of the world. The concepts of the understanding have been tied to their content, and this content cannot be deduced from these concepts. The greatness of Kant's philosophy is that is rejects any return to irrationalism or dogmatic metaphysics in the face of this difficulty. Kant's thought is truly "critical" with respect to dogmatic rationalism to the extent that it recognizes the insuperable opposition of form and content for a formalistic concept of reasons. But in another way Kant is as uncritical and dogmatic as his predecessors, in assuming that rationality is essentially formalistic. To this extent, Kant too accepts the basic framework of reified thought without question.

It is precisely because Kant both accepts this framework and criticizes the artificial solutions to its problems that he is driven beyond the limits of earlier philosophy. The struggle to maintain a systematic of reason in the fact of this apparently insurmountable difficulty brings him to the limits of reified thought. Now that the unity of reified thought and reality has been fundamentally undermined, the maintenance of 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 be fulfilled in another region of human existence.

Thus Kant was led to pose the fundamental demand of reason which was to preoccupy classical German philosophy thereafter, and eventually to lead 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."²⁴ In contrast to the dogmatic metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which begins by accepting the reified form of objectivity of its objects and then attempts to unify subject and object by deducing his form of objectivity from reason, the new philosophy will attempt to discover a level of reality at which the duality of subject and object is transcended, and starting out from which the empirical duality of both can be deduced.

But this exigency, in turn, can only be satisfied by transcending the contemplative point of view, by discovering a practical subject which, in generating its own world of objects, transcends the rigid dichotomy of form and content of contemplative thought. 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:

Theory and praxis in fact relate to the same objects, for every object is given as an indissoluble complex of form and content. However, the diversity of the attitudes of the subject orients practice toward what is qualitatively unique, toward the content and the material substratum of the object concerned. As we have tried to show, theoretical contemplation leads to the neglect of this very factor. . . . 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.²⁵

Responding to this dilemma, Kant turned from epistemology to ethics, from the thinking subject to the ethical individual to find the level of subjectobject unity. The empirical duality of subject and object seems to be transcended in a deeper unit at the level of being at which this subject operates. No merely given facticity, resistant to subjectivity and independent of it appears to trouble the genesis of reality.

However, in Kant's work this identical subjectobject of ethics 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."²⁶ As we have seen in an earlier discussion of the valuefact antinomy, the subject divides into an empirical self, given over to the laws of this wold, and a transcendental self, which is free to obey the ethical law. The determinism of outward reality now penetrates into the inner life of the individual. A similar split between the empirical and the transcendental haunts the ethical act, through which the individual strives to realize absolute principles in reality. This act is always an act in the world, where it must take on a phenomenal form determined by the laws of the world just like any other thing. The ethical act is perfectly integrated into the course of this outer determinism, and thus there is a sense in which no value enters reality through it. Rather, in passing from an intention of the will into the positive form of ethical behavior, the higher values seem to be irretrievably lost. It is only the inner form of the act in the mind of the actor which distinguishes it from an unethical act, only the disposition of the will of the actor and not the act itself which is ethical in essence. Lukács sums up this dilemma in a passage already cited in a previous chapter, the significance of which should now be clearer: "For precisely in the pure, classical expression it received in the philosophy of Kant it remains true that the 'ought' presuppose a being to which the category of 'ought' remains inapplicable in principle."²⁷

Ethical practice does not successfully fulfill its function in the system, but rather reproduces the same contradiction that arises in the sphere of pure reason. All that this ethic can show "is the point where the real interpretation 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."²⁸ But the actual unity of form and content, the actual unity of subject and object in the ethical act remains an unknowable thing in itself, transcending all experience. The ethical solution to the formcontent problem which arises in the sphere of knowledge 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 towards content that we found in the problem of the thing in itself."²⁹ The principle of practice is not discovered through the mere transcendence of the theoretical orientation toward reality, unless this transcendence is toward a kind of practice which is "tailored to the concrete material substratum of action, in order to impinge upon it to some effect."³⁰ Nevertheless, Kant's move beyond pure speculative metaphysics and reified contemplation toward practice represents important progress in the direction of a solution he could not work out. It was left to his successors to attempt to find it.

Kant's aesthetics provided the starting point for this attempt, because 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."³¹ The aesthetic subject is not a formalistic, nationalistic subject, incapable on principle of penetrating the content of the objects toward which it is oriented, but a sort of synthesis of theory and practice. It is an "intuitive understanding," "whose content is not given by 'produced', and which . . . is spontaneous (i.e. active) and not receptive (i.e. contemplative) both as regards knowledge and perception."³² Adumbrated in this concept is the principle of a practical synthesis of reality on which Lukács bases his theory. Kant himself did not employ this aesthetic principle for such a general purpose; however, his successors, notably Schiller and Fichte, saw and exploited the possibility of using it to resolve the antinomies of philosophy.

In Schiller the problem of the production of objective reality in thought begins to recede into the background as a new problem of a similar type arises in relation to the subject itself. Both the philosophical and the real social development increasingly fragment the subject into opposed faculties which no longer form a unity. The comprehension of the totality now no longer proceeds through the deduction of reality from the subject, a task the limits of which have been revealed by Kant, but through the deduction of the unity of this subject itself from the subject of aesthetic experience.

The aesthetic subject cannot reconcile the faculties of the mind without being generalized beyond the sphere of artistic production. This Schiller does in his theory of the "instinct of play" and aesthetic education as the means of overcoming the rigid speculation of bourgeois social life. 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 generalize the nonformalistic intuitive understanding of aesthetic practice and to make of it a new concept of reason is not successful. Outside the sphere of actual artistic production, it ceases to get a true subject of practice. Schiller generalizes it by taking up an aesthetic attitude toward the existing world, an attitude which 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, if not that of calculating reason, still that of aesthetic appreciation.

Fichte, who also attempted 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 rest of the 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 which was to unite the faculties of the subject, subject and object, form and content, turns out to be no more than another form of contemplation.

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 do finally challenge the dogmatic assumption that formalistic knowledge is the only kind of knowledge. With Hegel this challenge is brought to fruition in the dialectical method. The unique feature of this dialectic is its selfconscious approach to overcoming the irrationality of the contents of knowledge. Hegel was the first to attempt to embrace the material substratum of thought through dialectics, to create a logic of the concrete concept, of the totality.

HEGEL'S DIALECTIC

In Kant's thought, the subject "synthesizes" the real, thereby producing an objective world of experience. This means that the objects of our knowledge are not immediately given but are always worked up by thought before we become aware of them. The synthesis of experience consists in its submission to forms of objectivity, such as space, time and causality, without which it would not take shape as a coherent world of objects at all. Where earlier philosophy had, or the most part, taken for granted the objectivity of objects and the immediacy of experience, Kant showed that objectivity is the product of a synthesis performed by the subject on the raw materials of experience through the imposition of these abstract forms. This was Kant's most famous "Copernican Revolution," which placed the subject at the center of the epistemological universe where formerly the object held sway.

As Lukács explains it, Germany philosophy after Kant attempted to use the concept of an intuitive understanding, drawn from Kantian aesthetics, to radicalize still further this revolution in epistemology. The subject was not only to play the chief role 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. This is the starting point for the elaboration of the Hegelian dialectic. However, Hegel is able to arrive at his dialectical conception only by taking an important step beyond earlier philosophy. He realizes that the demand of the principle of practice cannot be fulfilled starting out from the individual subject, however much this subject may be sublimated in the transcendental. The dialectical unification of subject and object cannot take place at this individual level, but requires a subject who is also an object, a subject commensurate with the reality, which 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 selfcreated 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.³³

In sum, not a mythologized transcendental subject modeled on the individual, but some larger, collective principle alone can be adequately imagined as the basis of the resolution of the antinomies.

From this starting point, Hegel was led to make a new type of radical generalization of Kant's Copernican Revolution. Hegel's innovation was to take the Kantian construction of the subjectobject relation and to shatter its ontological basis in the traditional concepts of subject and object, which Kant and his followers still presupposed.³⁴ If thought and things are no longer defined as ontologically independent and primary domains of being, in what form then can they be grasped? Hegel employed what I have called a metatheoretical procedure to answer this question. He "released" the correlated attributes of subjectivity and objectivity from their reification in the hypostasized subject and object in order to reconstruct their relations in a different context and at a different level. Once released from the grip of their traditional ontological base, these attributes could then be thematized in new combinations in a dialectical ontology.

In this ontology functions of the subject, such as reflection and appearance, are treated as functions of the real itself. Thus the concepts of synthesis and abstract form, which in Kant belonged to the subject as its essential content, are transferred to the real where they organize its dialectical movement. The traditional "things" identified with the subject and object no longer appear in antinomial opposition, but are now derived as secondary spheres from a more basic unity established in this dialectic.³⁵ On this basis, Lukács argues, Hegel was finally able to discover a way of uniting form and content, the rational categories of philosophy and their material substratum, in real experience.

The ontological region Hegel found to be uniquely suited to the elaboration of this approach was history, a region which embodies a type of objectivity that lends itself to explanation in terms of a nonformalistic concept of reason, and which requires as its subject a collective principle that can truly be found in reality. This historical subject must e shown to produce the actual content of the object, not simply speculatively in thought but in reality itself. As Lukács interprets his thought, Hegel was concerned to show that in history the process of "synthesis" of the real, its "local genesis" at the level of the categories of philosophy, is identical with the practical production of social reality by its subject. Then form and content, philosophy and reality can be united, and the antinomies which 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.³⁶

Thus Hegel chooses to treat history as reality, as the ontological region in which the antinomies are resolved, because here the rational genesis of the object by the subject and the selfmoving, selfproducing activity of practice are one.

Hegel's turning 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 this approach. On the other hand, history appears as an ideal object to which to apply dialectics. Here a logic of contents finds an object which is in constant qualitative transformation through the interaction of subject and object, form and content in a totality.

But, Lukács argues, history only points in the direction of a solution to the problems of classical German philosophy; the mere point is not yet the solution. For that 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. The historical subject Hegel proposes is the "Spirit of Peoples." But the Spirit of Peoples does not understand the significance of its own action in the course of history. It is not in principle conscious of the truth of its deeds, but only comprehends them once they are completed, once history has passed on to a new stage and the past is delivered over to philosophical reflection.

This limit Hegel conceptualizes by creating a second collective subject, the World Spirit, which uses the Spirit of the Peoples to attain ends which this latter does not understand. (Hence the phrase "cunning of reason.) Between the activity of the historical subject and its own selfconsciousness stands a mediation which itself transcends history. Lukács concludes that Hegel's subject of history can never claim its acts as its own. It is not the selfconsciousness of its own process, the "subject as substance" which, in achieving selfconsciousness, transcends the antinomies of reified thought in the theoretical and practical transformation of reality.

History itself never really achieves selfconsciousness. Only the World Spirit can accomplish this as it comes to selfawareness in the history of the individual 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 lifeelement of the dialectical method for such an enterprise to succeed.³⁷ This, according to Lukács, explains why Hegel is obliged to confront the original problems of classical German philosophy outside of history in the real of absolute spirit. The dialectical method can only establish the identity of subject and object where historical and dialectical genesis coincide. As soon as dialectics deploys itself outside of history the problems of form and content arise once again. In the theory of absolute spirit, in pure logic, the dialectical categories continue to "develop", but now as pure and eternal forms attracted from any specific content and from the real becoming the world. The time of this dialectical process is a purely ideal time, no longer corresponding to a real practice of objectification.

Hegel's philosophy ends up in the suprahistorical realm of pure thought not because his construction of the problems is essentially reified or false, but rather because he has not discovered the true subject of historical practice. Hegel's work is the culmination of classical German philosophy, drawing the logical conclusions from its various experiments and discoveries. These conclusions can be summed up in three "demands of reason" which must be fulfilled to overcome the horizon of reified thought. They are: 1) the principle of practice; 2) dialectical method; 3) history as reality. In spite of his limitations, Hegel did discover the dialectic and the special affinity of dialectics for history, and these discoveries suffice to develop the basic outlines of the principle of practice.

However, not until the actual subject of this practice is also discovered can reason be founded rationally. This, Lukács believes, required the historical developments which finally culminate in 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 to history is finally overcome in a correct appreciation of the role of social practice in the real production 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 FAILURE OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Lukács' metatheory of classical German philosophy identifies a common failure to overcome the limits of reified thought. This philosophy attempts to go beyond reification, Lukács argues, only theoretically, through resolving its contradictions in thought. But at every stage in the progress of this philosophy one dimension of reified thought is surmounted from the point of view of another, theoretical contemplation by ethical practice, ethics by aesthetics, formalistic knowledge by a dialectic cut off, in the last analysis, from history. And precisely because the higher level from which the lower is deduced as a special case is itself reified, the original problems of the lower level simply reappear at the higher one in a new form.

The ontological foundation of classical German philosophy is reified capitalist society. Lukács tries to show that the antinomies of this philosophy are vast generalizations of the practical "antinomies" of life in this society. Where the individual confronts the opposition of value and fact in day to day practical activity as the undecidable alternative of principled and realistic behavior, the opposition of subject and object as the impossibility of fully controlling and understanding the alienated rationality of the capitalist world, philosophy confronts these same contradictions theoretically and raises them in their concept. But philosophy cannot overcome them where it accepts reification as the only possible framework for thought and action.

The contradictions arising objectively from capitalist reification, between individual and social law, between this law itself and the content which 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 antinomial opposites, mediations which are pure mental constructions. This, Lukács calls "conceptual mythology," which is "nothing more than the expression in thought of some fundamental fact of life that men can neither grasp nor reject."³⁹

Even where this philosophy strives hardest to base itself on a practical principle, it remains in the reified attitude of contemplation because it can offer no real challenge to the fixed and finished character of the capitalist wold from which its problems arise. The very concepts of subject and object, of thought and being, which it employs immediately express the rigid oppositions of this world. Objectivity can only be united with subjectivity in a speculative, mythological 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 Even Hegel cannot escape this dilemma once the dialectic develops itself outside history, in the medium of pure thought.

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. "To go beyond this immediacy can only mean the 'production' of the object."⁴¹ In this exigency is contained the condition for a transcendence of conceptual mythology toward a solution to the riddle of philosophy. Lukács believes he has discovered this solution in the metatheoretical revision of the concept of subjectobject identity.

It will be recalled that Marx too developed a metatheoretical critique and revision of the identity of subject and object in his early work. This critique consisted in redefining the subject and object of philosophy in terms of their concrete social substratum, relating the redefined subject and object according to the forms of philosophy of identity, and then "setting in motion" historically the redefined concepts in order to resolve the contradictions of this philosophy. Now Lukács reaches much the same sort of conclusion, starting out from a similar evaluation of the demand for identity as the decisive philosophical result of traditional speculation.

REVISION OF THE CONCEPT OF SUBJECTOBJECT IDENTITY

Lukács' concept of subjectobject identity is a particular target of attack for critics ranging from the Althusserian to the Frankfurt School. The former explains Lukács' identity philosophy as a consequence of his supposed "romantic" rejection of natural science; the latter reject identity philosophy as rooted in the project of domination of nature of the bourgeoisie, and assert the insuperable separation of subject and object in opposition to any and all theories of identity. In his 1967 "Preface" to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács himself dismissed his own earlier theory of identity as an "attempt to outHegel Hegel," as a philosophical flourish designed to cap off an overly abstract argument without regard for the realities of social life.⁴² In contrast to all these critics, I will argue that the Lukács of 1923 revised the concept of subjectobject identity to explain the basis of the possibility of a socialist social practice and to elucidate its philosophical implications.

Puzzling as his concern with this abstract conception may seem, Lukács has good reasons for not simply abandoning it as a historical curiosity. There is more to this demand for identity than the capitalist project of the domination of nature. (The error of the Frankfurt Schools' critique of identity philosophy is to accept this narrow restriction of the concept at the outset.) More generally, the identity aimed at includes the larger project of establishing the rationality of reason, the universality of its claims and the freedom of the human species from mystical powers, including those of outer and inner nature and of society as well. More concretely formulated, the identity of subject and object means that humankind is or can be at home in the universe, that it can hope to understand the world and itself, and to subsume both nature and society under the exigencies of its own expanding life process. Once again, the form of this subsumption is not necessarily to be identified with capitalist technical domination.

I would like now to turn to Lukács' metatheory of identity philosophy. My discussion will be limited to those aspects of the theory most relevant to the concerns of this book.⁴³ The discussion will have to be divided into two complementary parts. Lukács' arguments works from two sides at once, closing the gap between philosophical speculation and history. On the side of philosophy, abstract conditions are posited, while on the side of history a reality is identified satisfying these conditions. The argument as a whole proceeds, as does Marx's similar one, to bring philosophy down to earth by discovering realities which possess the dignity of the Concept. In the remainder of this chapter and the following ones I will reconstruct the argument in its two phases, philosophical and sociological, beginning here with the former.

The philosophical argument contains an ambiguity to which I will return in the concluding chapters of this book. As we have seen, bourgeois identity philosophy establishes only a commonality of form of subject and object. Lukács' metatheoretical revision of the concept of subjectobject identity 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 the concept of "production" with which Lukács works? Two answers are possible, and I will review them both here. ON the one hand, Lukács' discussion of the principal of practices leans toward an idealistic concept of production as creation of the object. On these terms, the identity of subject and object implies the radical preeminence of the subject in the theoretical system. Yet even in the passages that argue most consistently for this conclusion, Lukács is careful occasionally to qualify the argument, to note that as an object in the world the subject of practice operates under given historical conditions that determine the limits of its creativity. These qualifications are elaborated into an alternative interpretation of the concept of production in other parts of Lukács' book. In these passages the concept of production is taken to mean not the creation but the mediation of the object. Here the subject in no way resembles a collective cogito, a transcendental consciousness outside a world its constitutes. As an agent of social practice, the subject is also and necessarily an object. It 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. The significance of this distinction for social theory is discussed in the remainder of this chapter; its relevance to the philosophy of nature is taken up in the conclusion of this book.

The core of Lukács' argument is common to both these conceptions of the identity of subject and object. In briefest compass, Lukács' arguments might be paraphrased as follows. 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 lawgoverned, objective reality. It is the unconsciousness of the collective social practice of these subjects which condemns them to actively reproduce a world foreign to them and to their aims. Lukács' point might be reformulated to say that reification arises from the unintended consequences of individual activities feeding back into the latter and giving them the form of a lawgoverned process. Reified theory also arises on this basis as the conceptualization of the reified form of objectivity that the objects of t his practice acquire as such. This form of theory is adequate to understanding the world only in the framework of this practice. But 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 though they were metaphysical realities. In grasping the unintended consequences of these processes as a law, it hypostasizes ontologically what is in reality on a dimension of a specific type of practice.

What Lukács suggests, following Marx, is that the individuals might come together, under certain objective conditions, to make conscious collective decisions about their social activities, thereby interrupting the feedback mechanism which chins them to the perpetual reproduction of their alienated condition. This is Lukács' explanation of the Marxian idea of socialism as "human control of history."

This conception of socialism suggests an intriguing possibility: 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" which would consist in bringing this social practice to consciousness and thereby changing it? 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 and, in common with other social actors, bringing these consequences within the domain of conscious social choice and control? Here theory, as consciousness of social reality, would become a practical act with real social consequences and would no longer be comprehensible on reified terms as valuefree contemplation of reality from a mythic epistemological "outside." 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."⁴⁴

Practice as Production. The central question left unanswered by this brief description of the theory concerns the nature of the "action" in which thought would consist. As noted above, Lukács offers two different answers to this question. The first of these proceeds from the analysis of the failure of classical German philosophy to elaborate an adequate principle of practice. The problem, as Lukács poses it, consists in finding a type of practice which does not presuppose reification as its horizon but which transcends this horizon and changes reality itself. The problem first emerged as such (although in a different formulation) with classical German philosophy. Hegel, for example, argued that the subject of such a practice would also have to be substance, that is to say, that its subjective activity would also have to be its own selfproduction as a real object in the world. Classical German philosophy reached this conclusion by the negative demonstration that any practice operating on a world of alien objects must accept the law of those objects as its horizon, as an autonomous order of reality which it cannot alter. The only practice capable of "penetrating" its objects thus proves to be one in which the subject is the object of its own practice, in which therefore its subjectivity is already an objective reality. Then changes in its subjective orientation would be immediately reflected in real changes, fulfilling the exigency of the principle of practice.

Classical German philosophy has already explored the limitations of many types of practice in its search for this identical subjectobject. Technical practice and, Lukács would add, natural scientific knowledge proceed from a reified subjectivity for which the problem of the thing in itself inevitably arises. Ethics, aesthetics and the wisdom of the philosopher at the end of history all suffer from an inner resignation, even reconciliation with reified reality, toward which they take an attitude rather than effecting a change. Historical action remains as the only domain in which to find a practice that can affect by its action not only its own orientation toward reality or partial segments and 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 selfchange would be an objective change in (historical) reality, as the principle of practice requires.

Equally important, the type of practice is question must affect "reality" as a whole and not just marginal aspects of it. Artistic practice, to give a counterillustration, cannot satisfy the exigency of an identity of subject and object because there always exists a social world on its margins which is founding for it and which it cannot touch. What is needed is a practice that is "total" in the sense that it is unbounded by dimensions of reality it cannot alter and which, therefore, persist as a reified residuum, a thing in itself. In Lukács' view, the dialectical identity of subject and object can only be established through history because history is not a mere sector among others, but can be grasped as the primary and basic reality. Only where history is the reality can the demonstration of the identity of subject and object in history have the general significance required to resolve the antinomies of reason. This means, however, that all other subjectobject relations must be derived from that of the historical subject and object, that they must all be interpreted through their historical dimension. Lukács takes Hegel himself as the demonstration in contrario of this position, for the residue of unhistorical reality remaining in Hegel's system becomes the point at which the reified subjectobject relation is reintroduced.

Lukács argues that the antinomies of value and fact, knowledge and reality would finally be overcome for the identical subjectobject of history. The knowledge of a selfconscious collective subject of history would also be a practice affecting the substratum of reality. For it theory and practice would be united: the immediate repercussions on its behavior of its own selfunderstanding would transcend the gap between mind and matter, creating a new type of practice unlike the technical one of reification. 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 the form of its 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.

Practice as Mediation. Interpreted along these lines, the Lukácsian concept of subjectobject identity leaves more questions open than it answers. The argument is so formal and abstract that it is difficult to relate it to any really imaginable historical practice. It would even be possible, if one stopped short at this point in interpreting Lukács' text, to conclude that for him the proletariat freely creates a world after its own designs. Yet Lukács did not intend us to stop short here, and he explicitly denies this interpretation of his thought. He writes,

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.⁴⁵

Can one specify more precisely the exact sense in which the proletariat functions in the medium of objectivity even in its role as subject? This is the decisive question of whether Lukács' theory leads to an essentially romantic assertion of the proletariat as free creative power, breaking the chains of capitalist convention in a unique act of untrammeled selfexpression. In fact it is essential to Lukács' conception that the proletariat not be conceived as such a generalized romantic subjectivity, which would still move within the framework of a reified worldview as the incarnated freedom antinomially opposed to the "pitiless necessity of the laws" of the system. Rather, if the proletariat as subject is also an object, this is because its freedom is a specific mediation, a "determinate negation" of the given, hence actualization of real potentialities in the Hegelian sense of the terms, rather than a utopian will.

On the basis, Lukács redefines the proletariat as a knowing subject to explain its "true" consciousness as a function of its social insertion rather than in terms of the usual concept of scientificity. For this class knowing cannot be understood as liberation from existence but rather as a concrete mediation within existence. Thus the transcendence of the premises of capitalist culture in proletarian class consciousness implies no epistemological withdrawal to a free cogito, to a pregiven, undetermined ground of truth. The precondition of this transcendence is capitalist society itself, its culture, its forms of thought, which can only be transcended through a reflection in which they are criticized, mediated and comprehended historically. Capitalist culture 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 "onesidedness" of the bourgeois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society.⁴⁶

Thus for Lukács truth is a mediation, and the transcendence of the capitalist standpoint rests on a specific socially determined and rulegoverned operation performed on it to which it is intrinsically and uniquely susceptible.

Lukács' metatheoretical revision of the subjectobject concept makes possible a true dialectical unity of category and history, and avoids the dissolution of the former into the latter. This unity is achieved by emphasizing the objective side of the subjectivity which constitutes the social world, and through which it is bound by a determinate order in which it exercises its socially specific freedom. Lukács argues that 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) tings," he writes, and the understanding of history consists in the "derivation of the indissoluble fetishistic forms from the primary forms of human relations."⁴⁷ In this sense, "man is the measure" specifically in opposition to all attempts to "measure" history from an "above" or an "outside" of history itself, such as a god, nature or transhistorical laws conceived as founding for historical objectivity. Yet this is no humanism in the sense of a doctrine which would derive history from a prior concept of man, or from a quasitheological 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.⁴⁸

To argue for the possibility of a mediated subjectobject identity is to argue that history would become increasingly "rational" once grasped by a selfconscious humanity. It would cease to appear as a lawgoverned domain of alienated objectivity and become instead the objective preconditions of a process of subsumption and transcendence of a wholly different order. Like a tree adapting to its environment in the very assertion of its unique identity, so humanity would rework the stuff of circumstance by bringing it under the law of its own selfdevelopment. This is the very opposite of a reified technical practice, not in the sense of being absolutely free from all objective conditions and limits—that is the utopia of technique—but in the sense of representing a higher, unreified relation to these objective conditions and limits. The dialectic is the paradigm of rationality corresponding to such a practice because it posits no eternal laws, but explains the transcendence of objective conditions through their incorporation into the project of a life process.

With this, the philosophical "deduction" of the identical subjectobject of history is completed, and the sociological work of fleshing out that concept must begin. This second phase of the argument is discussed in detail in the next two chapters. For it Lukács relies primarily on traditional Marxist contributions to understanding how the experience and life conditions of the working class prepare it to engage in a new type of conscious collective social practice that might ultimately replace the market as the organizing principle of an industrial society. Lukács tries to show that such practice is dereifying by its very nature, overcoming the gap between private decisionmaking processes and therefore capable of transcending the horizon or reification.

What is lacking in Marx's own discussion is a theory of the possibility of the proletariat becoming conscious of these objective potentialities of its class situation, the "revolutionizing of the elements themselves" Marx identifies as the precondition of social revolution. Lukács focuses precisely on this dimension of the problem. Thus the sociological counterpart of his concept of subjectobject identity is presented as an analysis of proletarian class consciousness. This argument reaches the same conclusion as the preceding one, but from the "below" of history instead of from the "above" of abstract conceptualization.

² Frederick Engels, "The Peasant Question in France and German," Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1969), p. 648.

³ HCC, pp. 110 and 187188. It was Nietzsche who first attempted a general critique of rationality as an expression of the will to power, identifying conceptual generality and hierarchy with corresponding social projects of 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.

⁴ Quoted by Lukács in HCC, p. 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 possibility as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation."

⁵ HCC, p. 121.

⁶ HCC, p. 91.

⁷ HCC, p. 100.

⁸ HCC, p. 112.

⁹ HCC, p. 89.

¹⁰ HCC, p. 130. The implications of this Lukácsian concept of contemplation for the development of the Frankfurt School's theory of authority will be discussed in the next chapter.

¹¹ HCC, p. 63.

¹² HCC, p. 77. This dilemma Lukács has already treated at great length in The Theory of the Novel before becoming a Marxist. That early work, which contains Lukács critique of romanticism and ethical idealism, concludes with a chapter on the "transcendence of social forms of life." The messianicutopian stage in Lukács thought lies here, in the idea of the creation of a new epic community through the dissolution of all social conventions and constraints in soultosoul encounters of the Dosteivskian type. Lukács later idea of unity of theory and practice is an attempt to demythologize this early notion by supplying concrete mediations through which it could be realized. For more of "Lukács messianism, see Michael Lëwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Révolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976).

¹³ HCC, p. 134.

¹⁴ HCC, p. 87.

¹⁵ HCC, p 135.

¹⁶ For a sensible review of the position of the Frankfurt School, see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Braziller, 1972), chapter 7 and 8. The appendix also summarizes and contributes to the debate over Marcuse's position on the ideological character of modern technology.

¹⁷ HCC, p. 129.

¹⁸ HCC, p. 112.

¹⁹ HCC, p. 128. Once again the parentage of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment should be clear from its quite similar analysis of the contradictions of formal rationality and technology control.

²⁰ Lucien Goldmann, Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1945) and George Lukács, The Young Hegel (Cambridge: MIT, 1975).

²¹ HCC, p. 115.

²² HCC, p. 116.

²³ HCC, p. 117.

²⁴ HCC, p. 122.

²⁵ HCC, p. 126.

²⁶ HCC, p. 124.

²⁷ HCC, p. 160. Implicit in this critique of Kantian moral idealism is a critique of political voluntarism in the left wing of the socialist movement. It is interesting that Lukács himself is generally perceived as a political voluntarist even though he elaborated the theoretical basis of a profound critique of that position. Lukács' own critique of sectarianism as a disguised ethical idealism is to be found on HCC, pp. 320322 and 326328. I have discussed this problem in Andrew Feenberg," "Lukács and the Critique of 'Orthodox' Marxism," The Philosophical Forum III, noa. 34 )1972),pp. 431432. That same issue also contains a typical discussion of Lukács' purported sectarianism. Cf., Adam Schaff, "The Consciousness of a Class and Class Consciousness."

²⁸ HCC, p. 134. This interpretation of Kant's ethics is of course alien to concerns of recent AngloAmerican analysis of Kant's thought. It is not, however, without precedent in earlier Kantcriticism. Cf, G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans., by J.B. Ballie (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 615 ff.

²⁹ HCC, p. 126.

^{30 HCC, p. 126.}

³¹ HCC, p. 137.

³² HCC, p. 138. Kant defines the "intuitive understanding" as follows: "In fact our understanding has the property of proceeding in its cognition, e.g. of the cause of a product, from the analyticaluniversal (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 (if the object is a natural product) under the concept. We can, however, think an understanding which being not like our, discursive, but intuitive proceeds from the syntheticaluniversal (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 its representation of the whole." Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by H.H. Bernard (New York, Hafner, 1951), p. 255. The centrality Lukács attributes to the idea of an "intuitive understanding" in the development of assical German philosophy follows closely on Hegel's interpretation of the period. 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: Felix Meiner, 1962),p. 33. This identification also underlies Lukács interpretation of Fichte and Hegel. Among recent Kant scholars, those of the historicalontological school seem to be closest to Lukács en emphasis. Cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, "Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism," Moltke Gram, ed., Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967). Heimsoeth writes, for example, that "it is a conviction of Kant's which endures to his last period, that complete and immediate knowledge is only present where the subject posits the object," op.cit., p. 161.

³³ HCC, p. 142.

³⁴ The accuracy of this interpretation of Kant's is not the issue here since this was in fact how Hegel understood critical philosophy. Cf. G.F.W. Hegel, Glauben and Wissen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1962), pp. 2021.

³⁵ See Herbert Marcuse, Hegels Ontologie (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1968), pp. 4043 and especially, pp. 133134.

³⁶ HCC, p. 155.

³⁷ HCC, p. 147.

³⁸ HCC, p. 17.

³⁹ HCC, p. 18.

⁴⁰ HCC, p. 201.

⁴¹ HCC, p. 155.

⁴² HCC, p. xxiii. For an evaluation of Lukács selfcriticism, see the concluding chapters of this book. Here it is necessary to point out the error of Lukács assertion in this passage that Hegel rejected the postulate of subjectobject identity, for Hegel did admit a mediated identity.

⁴³ For a discussion of this historical background to Lukács concept of subjectobject identity, see James Schmidt, "The Concrete Totality and Lukács Concept of Proletarian Bildung," Telos, no. 24 (1975), pp. 240.

⁴⁴ Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. by M.J. O'Connel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 211. Subjectobject Identity in this sense is clearly quite different from the kind of identity rejected by the Frankfurt School, Cf. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974), pp. 169173. In that discussion, it can be seen that the Frankfurt School interprets subjectobject identity entirely in terms of the relation of "Spirit" to "nature," leaving out the interaction of theory and practice in history in which identity consists most importantly for Lukács, For a different view in cf. Martin Jay, "The Frankfurt School's Critique of Marxist Humanism," Social Research XXXIX:2 (1972).

⁴⁵ HCC, p. 21.

⁴⁶ HCC. p. 163.

⁴⁷ HCC, p. 185.

⁴⁸ HCC, p. 187. To what extent does this treatment of the category of subjectivity answer objections to the use of that category formulated from a structuralist viewipoint? The structuralist critique of subjectivism and humanism began as a reaction to phenomenology and Sartreianism, doctrines interpreted to argue for the unbounded creative capacity of pure consciousness. The early formulations of the critique were scientistic and hence internal to the general antinomy of subjectivism/objectivism they attempted to transcend. (For an especially revealing example, see the November, 1963, issue of Esprit, containing a fascinating debate between LeviStrauss and several representatives of French phenomenology.) More recently, there has been a recognition in France that the simple "abolition" of the subject by a scientistic coup de force cannot resolve the specific problems posed by the study of society. The decisive question is not the ontological one of whether human subjectivity "exists" or whether it is a merely subjective illusion (of a "subject"?), but rather the methodological one of the position of subjectivity in a framework of structures and rules that it does not posit but which are – not somuch determining for it as – constitutive of its very being. In different ways, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have been attempting to thinking through the implications of this new position. A brief summary of Bourdeiu's position and his relation to structuralism is contained in Pierre Bourdieu, "Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge," Social Research 35:4 (1968), especially pp. 703706. Foucault summarizes his perspective somewhat paradoxically as follows: "The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated (without, however, constituting its centre). … I have not denied—far from it—the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it." Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 208209. Without claiming that Lukács (or Marx) anticipates the subtle and original modes of analysis elaborated by Bourdieu and Foucault. I think it can be shown that they are at least situated in neighboring conceptual fields, and that the critique of Marxist subjectivisthumanism elaborated in reaction to Sartre's Critique does not apply to their formulation of the Marxist theory of the subject.