Reification and reason

The full significance of Lukács’s theory of reification can only be understood by examining its roots in Hegel. In his later Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács writes that Hegel’s “true philosophy of society” is his logic of essence because “unbeknownst to Hegel of course—here the real laws of movement, the real social being of bourgeois society mirror themselves conceptually.” Thus, “If Marx, in overturning Hegel’s philosophy, has at the same time rescued its real core, then he precisely rescued most from the logic of essence—demythologized, of course.”⁵⁴

Lukács’s claim is justified by Marx’s frequent use of the Hegelian category of “appearance,” elaborated in the Doctrine of Essence. Unfortunately this is one of the most difficult aspects of Hegel’s thought. Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s concept of essence in his economic theory also defies simple exposition.⁵⁵ For the purpose of this account of Lukács’s theory of reification it is not necessary to summarize these discussions since he paints the Hegel-Marx relation with a broad brush. I will focus primarily on an “exoteric” presentation of Hegel’s position in a short essay entitled “Who Thinks Abstractly?”⁵⁶ This essay helps to understand the most important aspect of Hegel’s theory relevant to Marx and especially to Lukács’s interpretation of Marx.

Hegel argues in this essay for reversing the usual understanding of abstract and concrete. It is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly, but the ordinary person who summarizes a complex of relationships in a single trait. Abstraction is thus a synecdoche in which a part stands for the concrete whole. Hegel gives the example of the servant who is treated as merely a servant by a vulgar master, in contrast with the “French noble” who understands that his servant has ideas and purposes just like himself and who relates to him accordingly as a person.

In this simplified version Hegel’s idea is obviously relevant to Marxist economics. Take the example of commodity exchange. It is made possible by abstracting a specific economic relation from the complex human and material relations that surround it. We enter a store and approach the clerk exclusively as a clerk, ignoring all other aspects of the clerk’s being. We buy the product without any knowledge of its producers or how it came to be in the store. The objects and persons we encounter in the economic exchanges of capitalist society can be considered abstractions from the wider whole of the social world in which they are embedded. What is abstracted is the dimension of the social world through which it is commodified and controlled.

In the Science of Logic, a much more elaborate discussion of the relation of abstract to concrete is formulated in terms of the concept of appearance. In Hegel’s sense, appearance is not in the mind, but is the “immediate” reality of essence, the form in which it reveals itself proximally. Appearances are abstract in Hegel’s sense, not in terms of conceptual generality, but as unilateral aspects of a more complex whole. That whole consists not only in appearances but also in the internal relations between them that make up a whole. Hegel explores many different relations between appearances, the most important of which for Lukács’s argument is the “law of appearance.”

Hegel’s concept of law is drawn from natural science. He does not reject science but he does reject its claim to arrive at the true essence of the appearances. Law achieves “only immediate because abstract unity” between appearances.⁵⁷ By this he means that the different appearances related by law retain their independence of each other even within their relation. For example, the formula introduced earlier equating distance with velocity times time does not “unify” space and time even as it relates them. The appearances and the law are thus abstract, partial “moments.” Hegel requires something more, a concrete “totality” that effectively unifies appearances in a mutually dependent whole.

In the “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx translates these Hegelian notions into his own language. He distinguishes the concrete of thought from the reality it represents in order to avoid any idealistic confusion between the two. Marx offers this “materialist” qualification simply to clarify his own appropriation of the Hegelian concepts. He writes, in a famous passage, “The concrete is concrete, because it is a combination of many objects with different destinations, i.e., a unity of diverse elements. In our thought, it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting point, although it is the real starting point and, therefore, also the starting point of observation and conception.”⁵⁸ In other words, it may seem that the concepts we use to understand the real constitute it, but in fact the real is always already “synthetic” in itself, a “unity of diverse elements” presupposed by our thought.

The true intellectual “synthesis” that brings together all the various categories of the capitalist economy—its appearances—in a concrete totality in the Hegelian sense overcomes their unilateral character by explaining their historical origins, social functions, and relations. The law-governed appearances of the capitalist economy, analyzed in bourgeois economics, can be unified more fundamentally through explanations that reveal the mutual constitution of such things as capital, labor, money, machinery, and ultimately the relations and forces of production. So Marx writes that “the categories are therefore but forms of expression, manifestations of existence of this subject, this definite society, i.e., the concrete reality from which they have been abstracted.”⁵⁹

So far Marx seems to add little to Hegel’s concept of the abstract and the concrete, but another aspect of his position marks a definite departure. Marx’s theory of fetishism appears to rely on the conventional distinction between the abstract and the concrete to describe the process in which money “appears” as the general equivalent for all economic goods. Here is Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s description of this “real abstraction” underlying the capitalist economy:

The form of the commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit. To begin with, exchange-value is itself abstract value in contrast to the use-value of commodities. The exchange-value is subject only to quantitative differentiation, and this quantification is again abstract compared with the quantity which measures use-values. Marx points out with particular emphasis that even labour, when determining the magnitude and substance of value, becomes “abstract human labour,” human labour purely as such. The form in which commodity-value takes on its concrete appearance as money—be it as coinage or bank-notes—is an abstract thing which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms.⁶⁰

While Sohn-Rethel focuses on exchange, his remarks hint at a second and more fundamental “real abstraction”: labor. The purely quantitative “identity” of all commodities is ultimately rooted in the equivalence of the labor they contain. Under capitalism the comparability of all the forms of labor, their “abstract” identity (in the conventional sense of the term), is not merely theoretical but is realized practically in the transformation of the labor process. Labor is systematically deskilled. It loses its “concrete” character as a complex performance. The qualitative specificity of the various types of craft labor is eliminated and all are reduced to the mere quantitative expenditure of energy. The result is the emergence of “work” as an economic category with a simple quantitative measure in terms of time. The real abstraction of labor is the basis of the real abstraction of price.

Political economy, Marx argues, is the system of categories describing such real abstractions. The facts of social life are raised to consciousness in its categories and comprehended through its formal-rational laws. These latter are not illusion or ideology, nor are they reality in the full sense of the term; rather they are the “law of appearance” in Hegel’s sense. But as such they do not comprehend the “essential relations” that describe the society as a concrete totality. For that the abstract categories of the economy would have to be explained in terms of the underlying social relations. Thus Marx’s use of the conventional distinction is embedded in a Hegelian dialectic of appearance and reality. Marx’s method condenses the two concepts of the abstract and the concrete, the conventional and the dialectical, into one. He shows that abstractness in the sense of conceptual generality, at least in the case of the commodity and labor, is the necessary form of appearance of the concrete social reality of capitalism.

But this conjunction is precisely the substance of Lukács’s theory of reification! Lukács’s starting point is the appearance of autonomy of the economy and, modeled on it, other apparently autonomous social institutions. Society appears as a collection of independent social “things” ruled by the laws of the differentiated domains. These “things” are comprehended by social science as facts. The facts appear as facts insofar as they are abstracted from the whole, separated from each other, reduced to quantitative determinants, and stripped of the many mysteries that characterized similar entities in precapitalist society. This apparent “factuality” of the social world is the form in which it is revealed in that aspect that has a systematic order, a lawful form.

So much is clear from the earlier discussion of reification, but it is easy to pass over Lukács’s deeper insight. The real abstraction of the capitalist economic categories does not merely describe the facts, superficially understood. This would be to underestimate the significance of reification by overlooking the problematic status of factuality itself. What does it mean that social entities have the form of facts? It is unlikely that members of precapitalist societies would find a “factual” description of the foundations of their social world reasonable or salient. Of course they would be quite capable of such reifying procedures as counting or measuring particular objects where appropriate, but that is a far cry from understanding their origins, the cosmos, the founding myths of their society, the relations between the ages and sexes in terms of what we call facts. Even we find factual description inadequate to such things as our close human relationships. No, factuality is not a self-evident category. It must be constructed in the social world to which it is effectively relevant. This is the deepest function of the concept of reification. It is meant to explain how the world can appear as a collection of facts. The process of reification is the ontological foundation of the factuality of the social world. It is constitutive of the facts’ very factuality as their form of objectivity.

This insight explains why Lukács had to give up romantic critique. His theory of reification will not allow him to simply counterpose social and economic law to the claims of personality. Nor can he demand a return from the lawful order of the facts to immediate experience. The problem of modernity goes deeper, to the ontological foundations. It cannot be addressed at the level of the soul and its passions, which are merely reflexes of the Gradgrindian factuality of the world, the Sunday worship of what is excluded the rest of the week. Rather, transcendence must be sought at the level of the structuring forces that shape the form of objectivity of the social world. Lukács identifies those forces with the proletariat, which actually constructs the social world through its labor. This identification suggests another similarity between Marxism and Hegel.

Hegel reconstructed Kant’s contrast between understanding and reason, Verstand and Vernünft, to signify the difference between scientific research and speculative philosophical insight. In Hegel the two are related as stages in the acquisition of knowledge. The Phenomenology of Spirit contains an important account of their relation that has a remarkable similarity to Lukács’s argument. Hegel explores the attempt of science to understand the appearance of nature as the product of essential “forces” governed by “law.” This attempt fails to explain the law of these forces and ultimately leads to the startling discovery that the whole contrast of appearance and essence depends ultimately on self-consciousness. Hegel writes, “It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.”⁶¹

In contemporary Hegel scholarship, this argument is interpreted to demonstrate the sociality of knowledge. As Terry Pinkard puts it, with Hegel, “we move away from a representationalist picture of knowledge to the idea of socially situated reason-giving activities; we thus move away from the picture of ourselves as ‘subjects’ representing the world to an understanding of ourselves as participants in various historically determinate social practices.”⁶² But what if this social “we” of knowledge is divided by class and enters into conflict not only over particular material stakes but over those “historically determinate social practices?” In that case both appearances and the self-consciousness behind them take on practical functions in a struggle over meaning.

There is another significant difference between this Marxist and the original Hegelian approach: where in Hegel the contrast of understanding and reason is an atemporal distinction in ontological levels, Lukács explains it historically. Marxism shows “that history consists precisely in the constant transformation of those forms which earlier modes of thinking, undialectical and stuck fast in the immediacy of their present as they always were, regarded as suprahistorical.”⁶³ The theory of reification applies this approach to bourgeois culture. This culture takes as suprahistorical the form of analytic understanding, corresponding to the actual categorial structure of the economy that is its archetype and source. The identification of rationality as such with this form explains its general predominance in philosophy, the sciences, law and administration. Marx’s critique of political economy thus becomes the basis for a more general critique of formal rationality.

The sphere of appearance, which consists for Marx in the reified facts of capitalism, is bounded historically by a possible transcendence in action. The self-consciousness that overthrows capitalism is not “Geist,” but the class consciousness of the proletariat. Reification is thus not subjective, but neither is it an eternally unchanging reality. It is the failure to grasp reification as social appearance that leads to its philosophical representation as an eternal foundation of knowledge and experience, rather than as a historically specific cultural form.

With this discovery the boundaries between history and philosophy break down. Philosophy now appears as implicated in history rather than giving access to the eternal. Philosophy arises from the contradictions of the apparently suprahistorical forms, while the material life of society is viewed as mere factual content. In relating economy to rationality, Marxism overcomes the immediacy of form, historicizing it in contact with its content. This historicization can be extended to all the more abstract theories that arise on the basis of the formal structure of the economy. Philosophy is swept into the movement of history, and history itself becomes the study of the forms of reason, no longer a mere collection of contingent facts.

The next chapter applies this approach to the history of classical German philosophy. The passage from Kant to Hegel is the key transition in this history. Lukács argues that the Kantian analytic understanding represents in philosophy, at the highest level of generality, the same reified formalism found in bourgeois political economy. Just as Hegelian reason transcends the understanding through a synthetic process of mediation, so Marxism transcends political economy. For Lukács, however, Marx is not simply applying Hegelian dialectics to a particular domain, nor are the formalistic categories of political economy merely categories of a specific social science. Bourgeois economics and the forms of existence of which it is the expression are the archetypal domain from which formalistic rationality arises as a cultural pattern. The general predominance of formalistic rationality in philosophy, science, law, and the other areas of the superstructures can now be explained on this basis.

In linking political economy, as form of appearance, to its basis in the totality, Marx indicates the lines along which the concept of rationality would have to be revised to lose its formalistic limitation. Lukács thus rediscovers the Kant–Hegel problematic of rationality from these indications in the economic works. He identifies formal rationality with capitalism and dialectics with socialism as successive stages in the history of reason, and not as atemporal paradigms, each potentially valid throughout all of history. He regards this history of reason as the specific contribution of Marxism to the resolution of the problems raised by Hegel’s philosophy.

The great advance over Hegel made by the scientific standpoint of the proletariat as embodied in Marxism lay in its formulation of the categories of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen] not as an “eternal” stage in the comprehension of reality in general, but rather as the necessary forms of existence and of thought of bourgeois society. Marxism thus grasped these categories as reifications of being and thought, and therewith discovered the dialectic in history itself.⁶⁴

It is to Lukács’s metacritique of philosophy that I will now turn.

 

1 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 299.

2 The other major work of this tendency is Karl Korsch, Marxismus and Philosophie (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), originally published in 1923, at the same time as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. Korsch’s book is available in a partial English translation under the title Marxism and Philosophy, trans. F. Halliday (New York: Monthly Review, 1970). See also Franz Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, trans. A. Booth (New York: St. Martins Press, 1976). For a comparison of Husserl and Lukács, see Mihaily Vajda, “Lukács and Husserl,” in Agnes Heller, Lukács Reappraised (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also, Richard Westerman, “The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl’s Phenomenology in Lukács’s Identical Subject–Object,” New German Critique 111, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 97–130.

3 HCC, 131.

4 See David Kettler, “Marxism and Culture: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918/19,” Telos, No. 10 (Winter 1971), 35–92; Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

5 Georg Simmel, “On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” in Georg Simmel, The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. K. P. Etzkorn (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1968).

6 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968).

7 Georg Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” trans. P. Breines and S. Weber, Telos, No. 5 (1970), 21.

8 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. E. Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906 reprint), 837. It is significant that this chapter is entitled “Historical Tendency of Accumulation” rather than “Historical Law of Accumulation.” Marx knew what he was claiming despite his occasional use of misleading language.

9 For a discussion of the gap between Marx’s critique of political economy and the revolutionary theory of socialism, see Stanley Moore, “Utopian Themes in Marx and Mao: A Critique for Modern Revisionists,” Monthly Review 21, No. 2 (1969). Moore’s argument is developed further in “Marx and Lenin as Historical Materialists,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1975).

10 “Missing from Marx’s oeuvre is any concept of culture, of formation and re-formation (Bildung) … Because Marx did not relate actuality to representation and subjectivity, his account of structural change in capitalism is abstractly related to possible change in consciousness. This resulted in gross oversimplification regarding the likelihood and the inhibition of change.” Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 218.

11 An exhaustive survey of the various meanings of the concept of culture is provided by A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1963). They conclude that “most social scientists” would define culture as follows: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action” (357).

12 For examples of such an approach, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

13 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, 14.

14 HCC, 203.

15 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1968), 7.

16 HCC, 83 (translation modified).

17 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 79.

18 HCC, 152.

19 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 212.

20 Lukács argues that reductionism gives an unrealistic picture of precapitalist societies. In these societies the economy does not play a central role in the establishment of social meanings. It also complicates the understanding of socialist revolution, a point I take up in the Appendix to this book.

21 Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Marxism of the Early Lukács: An Evaluation,” New Left Review, No. 70 (1971), 44.

22 Lucio Colletti, Il Marxismo e Hegel (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1969), 342.

23 In A Defence of History and Class Consciousness (133), Lukács refutes a similar critique by citing several passages from Capital in which Marx attributes the specific form of the mechanization of industry to the requirements of capitalism.

24 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 289.

25 Marx, Capital, 105.

26 Ibid., 83.

27 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. B. Bottomore and D. Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

28 HCC, 91.

29 Ibid., 100.

30 Ibid., 89.

31 HCC, 130. For a further explanation of the concept of contemplation in Lukács, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

32 For this aspect of the theory Lukács refers to Max Weber. See his The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. Henderson and T. Parsons (New York and London: Free Press, 1964).

33 HCC, 103.

34 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).

35 HCC, 102.

36 Ibid., 83 (translation modified).

37 I have modified the English translation throughout to restore the term as “form of objectivity.”

38 Sources for understanding the relation of Lukács and Lask include Hartmut Rosshof, Emil Lask als Lehrer von Georg Lukács: Zur Form ihres Gegenstandsbegriffs (Bonn, Germany: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975); Tom Rockmore, “Fichte, Lask, and Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1992), 557–77; Istvan Feher, “Lask, Lukács, Heidegger: The Problem of the Irrationality of the Categories,” in C. Macann, ed., Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 373–405. The original connection was made by Lucien Goldmann in the appendix to Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich/New York: Europa Verlag, 1945).

39 Quoted in Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 101. Lask’s comments are found in Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre (Tübingen, Germany: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1911), 68–9.

40 If by “ontic” we mean particular facts and by “ontological” their “being,” i.e. meaning, or more generally their form of objectivity, then Foucault’s description of the “empirico-transcendental double” applies. The being that discovers in its history the forms of its knowledge and thereby makes of its empirical condition a transcendental precondition, ends up founding its being on “le vécu” its lived experience. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 329–33.

41 Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, 102.

42 HCC, 13. The quoted passage is from “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 207.

43 HCC, 184 (translation modified). See the German text of Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 370.

44 See HCC, 116 for the significance of this insight for Lukács.

45 Generalized as a method, this is also one of the foundations of contemporary science and technology studies. It is one of several “dereifying” procedures for understanding scientific-technical thought. See, for example, Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

46 HCC, 165.

47 HCC, 185 (translation modified).

48 Ibid., 231.

49 HCC, 102.

50 Ibid., 165–6.

51 HCC, 169.

52 Ibid., 178.

53 HCC, 179 (translation modified).

54 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 137.

55 See, for example, Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

56 G. W. F. Hegel, Texts and Commentary. Hegel’s Preface to His System in a New Translation with Commentary on Facing Pages, and “Who Thinks Abstractly?” , trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).

57 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 2, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 135.

58 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 293.

59 Ibid., 302.

60 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), 19. Astonishingly, Sohn-Rethel makes no mention of the relation of this interpretation of Marx to Lukács’s concept of reification.

61 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 103.

62 Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 112–13. Marcuse interprets this passage explicitly in terms of the critique of reification.

63 Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, ed. and trans. R. Livingstone and M. McColgan (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 215.

64 HCC, 177.