Epistemological atheism

Marx’s problematic is also that of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. They all face the difficulties resulting from the metacritical appropriation of the idealist subject–object concept. And like Marx they propose a solution based on a revision of the concept of objectivity. However, the later thinkers do not question the truth of the natural sciences. As we have seen, Marx seeks a “unifying truth” that transcends the split between the natural and the social sciences. Unification on these terms devalues the existing natural sciences. Perhaps this made sense in 1844, but by the time Lukács and the Frankfurt School reflect on the issues, it is clear that natural science is one of several unsurpassable foundations of modernity. Their solution is not to replace science with another form of thought, but rather to treat it as a social and historical phenomenon. The result is not a unification of forms of knowledge and corresponding objects but a theory of their relations. I will explain this argument in detail as it applies to Lukács in Chapter 6 and Marcuse in Chapter 8.

The contrast between Marx’s approach and that of Lukács is instructive. Lukács proposes a different metacritical reconstruction of objectivity in which mediation rather than experience plays the key role. Where in Marx labor and sensation have the constitutive power formerly attributed by idealism to transcendental consciousness, in Lukács “forms of objectivity” established by social practice play the constitutive role. In the next chapter I will show that these forms are roughly equivalent to cultural perspectives. They are not merely mental phenomena but shape social reality as well. Lukács’s argument encloses rationality without remainder in the embrace of these cultural forms, and culture itself in social practice. Reason, culture, and practice are stacked like Chinese boxes, the one inside the other, with no way out. No personal discipline, no science, no wisdom can break through this limit. This is an integrally cultural epistemology that admits of no “outside” of culture from which reality could be viewed, no privileged scientific preserve on the margins of the world.

So far Lukács’s position appears to be merely relativistic, and this is indeed how it was understood by those who, like Karl Mannheim, attempted to elaborate a sociology of knowledge on the basis of his concept of false consciousness.²⁷ However, the intrinsic dependency of knowledge on consciousness and culture is not incompatible with a concept of truth. Lukács insists that the social involvement of the subject is a necessary precondition for knowing, and not just a barrier from which a “pure” science would have to abstract. This is a metacritical reconstruction of the concept of knowledge in the relative, under a finite horizon, rather than a skeptical critique of human limits in the light of an unattainable absolute truth.

Lukács’s main target in these epistemological considerations is objectivism, and with it the idea that being in itself transcends the reach of social practice. Objectivism leads to dogmatic claims to knowledge of being or, on the contrary, to relativism, which denies such claims on the basis of a similar conception of truth. Both objectivism and relativism presuppose an “absolute” in the form of the “systematic locus” of thought as a supposed spectator on a reality in which it does not, in principle, participate. “This absolute,” Lukács writes, “is nothing but the fixation in thought, the projection into myth of the intellectual failure to understand reality concretely as a historical process.”²⁸

That failure results in a misapprehension of culture, the repository of society’s most general categories of thought and action. Cultural assumptions are conceived as eternal or transcendental, as prior to the real process and founding for it. The absolute is this appearance of culture at the horizon of history as an unchanging essence. Lukács reverses this formula: it is not in transcending history that the truth is to be found, but in the recognition of the historical character of all transcendence.

For Lukács society cannot be known in the absolute, but it can indeed be known from within.²⁹ Lukács traces the “fixation” of thought in a realm beyond history to specific social causes. The absolute and its correlated concept of the relative appear in response to the untranscended immediacies of experience in class society. Because conscious cooperation is so difficult and rare in this type of society, whole domains of social reality confront the individuals as alien powers over which they have no control. The dominant culture can serve its historical function of justifying class rule only insofar as this function remains unconscious, insofar, therefore, as culture itself appears as eternal truth. The illusion of a transhistorical, systematic locus of thought corresponds to this untransformed reality and uncomprehended culture.

Lukács argues that the proletariat throws these immediacies into the movement of history and subjects them to a practical mediation that decisively alters the position of truth. Proletarian practice acts on the form of objectivity of its objects; it consciously transforms culture and therefore reality as well; and, as the expression of a cooperative and potentially universal historical subject, this practice need not accept any merely given immediacy as its horizon.

As soon as mankind has clearly understood and hence restructured the foundations of its existence truth acquires a wholly novel aspect. When theory and practice are united it becomes possible to change reality and when this happens the absolute and its “relativistic” counterpart will have played their historical role for the last time. For as the result of these changes we shall see the disappearance of that reality which the absolute and the relative expressed in like manner.³⁰

The idea of theory as observation of reality from a disincarnated “beyond” is overthrown; theory becomes finite when it is located in a process of conscious cultural change.

Nietzsche claimed that truth was the last idol of a disenchanted world, the final form in which the eternal ripped the seamless web of time. Marx and Lukács too proceed to humanize truth itself, to make it enter into time as a real moment in the creation of history. They reject any ontological barrier between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, form and content. “Reality” is a social product and not a thing-in-itself that precedes society and which would have to be perceived from a scientific beyond of culture to be known in its truth. This reality, produced in a social process, can be known in the forms of its production.

This interpretation of philosophy of praxis suggests yet another similarity with existentialism. Marx’s and Lukács’s position resembles the phenomenological concept of “horizon” as a limit “under” which thought proceeds. Kant would seem to be the primary reference for this approach to the problem of meaning. It was he who first suggested that there are specific limits to the range of application of the categories of experience. The employment of reason beyond the domain of possible experience, that is to say, in relation to being in itself, gives rise to a “transcendental illusion.” Marx and Lukács retain the Kantian idea of limiting the application of the categories to the possible experience of a finite subject, but they reject the postulated transcendence of the thing-in-itself as a theological vestige. They thus arrive at what I call a “finite horizon” of being and knowledge.

In 1935, Max Horkheimer laid out a similar conception in an essay “On the Problem of Truth.” In this essay Horkheimer presents an extended argument for “the finitude of thought” which will be determining for the Frankfurt School.³¹ Notwithstanding his explicit rejection of such Lukácsian categories as “subject–object identity,” the “unity of theory and practice,” and “totality,” the argument is quite close in spirit to that of Lukács. Horkheimer criticizes both absolutism and dogmatism on the grounds that they presuppose an incoherent confusion of the eternal and the temporal. The human subject, situated in history, is called to think eternal truths, a task at which it may be said to succeed or fail, but which is, in any case, self-contradictory. This essentially theological concept of truth must itself be questioned in terms of a historical and dialectical alternative. “Since that extrahistorical and hence exaggerated concept of truth is impossible which stems from the idea of a pure infinite mind and thus in the last analysis from the concept of God, it no longer makes any sense to orient the knowledge we have to this impossibility and in this sense call it relative.”³²

Once it is admitted that the subject of knowledge is a historical being and not what Lukács calls a “systematic locus,” then it follows that truth too must be conceived historically. This has two implications Horkheimer develops in some detail. On the one hand, the fullest understanding of particular truths requires that they be considered in the context of the overall system of knowledge of the historical period in which they appear. Knowledge rests not only on corroboration by the facts, but also on the validity of its concepts within the prevailing categorial system. On the other hand, that system of categories is historically relative to evolving social and economic conditions. While Horkheimer does not designate such a categorial system by the term “form of objectivity,” it is clear that he has something similar in mind, an underlying cognitive pattern.

Although particular truths depend on the system of categories of their time, this does not devalue them as relativism believes because there are no eternal truths setting a higher standard they fail to meet. This has a surprising consequence. “At the same time as [truth] nevertheless necessarily remains inconclusive and to that extent ‘relative,’ it is also absolute, since later correction does not mean that a former truth was formerly untrue.”³³ Judgments of truth are objectively valid even if historically relative and retain their validity even after history has moved on and replaced one set of categories with another.

Horkheimer gives the example of a diagnosis of tuberculosis. It may be correct or incorrect in terms of contemporary medical knowledge and retains its truth-value in the former case regardless of the future evolution of medicine. Suppose that someday the very categories of medicine will have changed so much that the concept of “tuberculosis” will appear to its practitioners as irrelevant as do the “humours” of premodern medicine to physicians today. This development may represent a progress of knowledge but it does not alter the truth-value of the diagnosis made at the time when the categorial structure of contemporary knowledge supported the concept of tuberculosis. In this sense a truth may be historically bound without being falsified by history.

Horkheimer applies this argument to science generally. Its truths are more or less successfully verified on its own terms, but this in no way exempts science from the historical dialectic. “Indeed, any relation of concept and object not historically mediated, no longer appears meaningful as an idea.”³⁴ The historical relativity of science appears clearly “as soon as one more closely investigates the controlling categories and the choice of objects and methods.”³⁵ This conclusion is in surprising agreement with contemporary science studies.

Where Horkheimer’s argument differs most from that of Lukács is in the vagueness of his discussion of the ontological role of human action. While he asserts that action is implicated in the verification of ideas about society, it is unclear how and to what extent. Lukács’s similar argument comes to a clear conclusion: once human beings consciously control the categorial structure of existence itself, the very idea of a reality wholly separate from the subject collapses in absurdity. Knowledge is essentially mediation between an ontologically interdependent subject and object, not the communication of an isolated subject with an indifferent and alien thing-in-itself.

But this conclusion rests suspiciously on the hypothetical success of the revolution in actually transforming social reality. Horkheimer is anxious to resist any pragmatic reduction of truth to success and this is what creates the ambiguity in his argument. He accepts the Lukácsian premise that knowledge of history is not purely contemplative, but he fears that the Lukácsian conclusion will lead to a mere consecration of the victors in a time when progressive forces are everywhere in retreat. As a result, he confines his argument to epistemology and insists on the relative independence of theory and practice. We will see that this position is central to the later Frankfurt School. It marks the division between what Lukács called the era of the “actuality of the revolution,” and a later period which, following Marcuse, we could describe as the era of “preventive counter-revolution.”

 

1 Tom Rockmore has argued that the roots of this conception lie at least as much in Fichte as in Hegel. See Rockmore, “Lukács and the Recovery of Marx after Marxism,” in M. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011).

2 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C.A. Watts, 1963), 127.

3 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes (London: New Left Books, 1971), 70.

4 This is, of course, Sartre’s thesis, but it is by no means self-evident.

5 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 160.

6 Ibid., 161.

7 Ibid., 160.

8 Ibid., 206.

9 Ibid., 217.

10 Ibid., 163. On the equivalence of idealism and materialism, cf. Robert Havemann, Dialektik ohne Dogma? (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), 27–32.

11 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 164.

12 Ibid., 164. Marx’s discussion of the reform of science has divided commentators. For two different interpretations, cf. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 101–21; and Jean Hyppolite, Études sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1965), 112–13. Mészáros gives a common-sense reading of Marx’s text, which Hyppolite interprets literally as calling for the most radical transformation of natural science.

13 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 164.

14 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1947), 36–7.

15 Ibid., 36–7.

16 It is to avoid this paradox that Heidegger proposes that action has “its own kind of sight.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 99.

17 Ernst Bloch is the most famous example. For a discussion of the difficulties arising from Bloch’s position, see Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 156–63.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals,” in The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 255.

19 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 166. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, “La place de l’aliénation dans le retournement marxiste,” in Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à Partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: UGE, 1973), 112–15.

20 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 267.

21 Cf., for example, Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 108–9. Like Marx, Kierkegaard objects to the act of abstraction in which the subject places itself outside of existence to interrogate existence.

22 Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. M. Harari (New York: Citadel, 1966), 19.

23 Ibid., 18.

24 Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. B. Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 102, 332–9.

25 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baille (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), 370–1.

26 Ibid., 370–1.

27 For a discussion of the relation of Mannheim to Lukács, see Joseph Gabel, “Mannheim et le marxisme hongrois,” in Idéologies (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), 255–78.

28 HCC, 187.

29 This is the thesis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 43–5, 63–4.

30 HCC, 189.

31 Max Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and J. Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), 244.

32 Ibid., 192.

33 Ibid., 192. This astonishing proposition seems to imply either a radical deflation of the concept of truth, which would reinstitute the thing-in-itself, or a concept of reality as evolving with human knowledge. For more on this subject, see Chapter 6.

34 Ibid., 193.

35 Ibid., 201.