Chapter five The Realization of Philosophy the heritage of classical german philosophy

Étienne Gilson’s book, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, traced the effects of certain fundamental problems in the philosophical tradition as they worked themselves out in a succession of thinkers from antiquity to modern times.¹ I too am interested in a “philosophical experience,” but my story is not so ambitious. I focus on the struggle of four modern thinkers to carry out the specific philosophical program of the philosophy of praxis.

This program involves a social critique of idealism while preserving the structural features of the idealist subject–object relation. Like Gilson’s philosophers, mine run into problems working out the implications of their program. There are two central problems, the status of science and technology in a radical social version of philosophical idealism, and the historical contingency of a social resolution of philosophical antinomies. The philosophers of praxis offer various solutions to these problems and are forced by changing historical circumstances to reformulate the program.

Within this larger framework, History and Class Consciousness itself contains a remarkable study of the particular philosophical experience of German idealism. This is the best description of the second part of the “Reification” essay, which surveys the history of classical German philosophy. Lukács develops a metacritique of the various positions taken in the course of the progress from Kant to Hegel and relates them to the cultural contradiction of capitalism.

For Lukács traditional philosophy is in essence theory of culture that does not know itself as such. Philosophy reflects on cultural structures—forms of objectivity—that it misinterprets as eternal principles disconnected from the accidents of history and social life. Yet in spite of this systematic misconstruction of culture, philosophy is important insofar as it thematizes cultural presuppositions and exposes them to discussion and criticism. Philosophy has a unique contribution to make to a social theory that wants to understand its own place in a process of cultural transformation of which it is a part. This explains why the heart of Lukács’s most important work is devoted to an extended analysis of the history of modern philosophy.

In the foreword to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács says “it is of practical importance to return in this respect to the traditions of Marx-interpretation founded by Engels (who regarded ‘the German workers’ movement’ as the ‘heir to classical German philosophy’).”² However, this statement is misleading; it would incline the reader to expect a treatment of classical German philosophy similar to what it receives from Engels and his orthodox Marxist followers. In fact there are few important similarities, for Lukács returns not to Engels’s interpretation of the heritage but to deeper questions concerning Marx’s relation to his philosophical forebears.

Engels was the first to describe the broad sweep of the history of ideas from the French Enlightenment through Hegel and Feuerbach as an intellectual prolegomena to Marxism. However, his version of Marxism bore little resemblance to the heritage it assumed. He presented it as a natural philosophy, synthesizing the sciences into a materialist worldview. The final traces of classical German philosophy that remain were to be found in a revised dialectic that presumably continued the Hegelian theory of reality as process. But neither this materialist worldview nor this version of the dialectic can carry the weight of the inheritance Engels claims for them.

For Engels the essence of the heritage is science, because only science is universal, not bound by the class conditions on which it nevertheless depends for its birth. Although the bourgeoisie created modern natural science, it can no longer accept the truths its own sciences discover. Now new ideas undermine the foundations of its ideology, the static worldview and the “post festum” religious conversion of a class menaced by the repercussions of its own rationalistic traditions. The proletariat alone needs the truth, and it alone, therefore, can rise to the universal point of view required for the pursuit of truth in the period of the decadence of bourgeois society.

Like Engels, Lukács too sees more at stake in the socialist movement than a change in property relations; the struggle will also decide the fate of reason itself. But both the rationalism and the irrationalism of bourgeois society now appear to Lukács to be infinitely more problematical than they appeared to earlier Marxists. Gone is the enlightenment optimism and faith in science of traditional Marxism, gone its untroubled confidence in progress.³ For the first time there arises within Marxism an interrogation of enlightenment itself, and not just of its limits or abuse in bourgeois society.

Lukács’s critique of reified rationality foreshadows the later work of Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Like them, Lukács sees in modern irrationalism not a mere regression behind the achieved level of rationality, but its dialectical correlate. He describes irrationalism as a reaction against reification under the horizon of reification itself.⁴ The heritage of classical German philosophy now appears in a very different light than it did to Engels, not as the salvation of the scientific debris of the Enlightenment from an increasingly obscurantist bourgeoisie, but as a great attempt to validate and found rationality, an attempt that had inevitably to fail in its bourgeois form but which the proletariat may yet bring off.

For Lukács, bourgeois thought reaches its peak in classical German philosophy, but at the same time its contradictions manifest themselves there with more clarity and rigor than elsewhere. Lukács sums up these contradictions as the “antinomies of bourgeois thought,” the split between subject and object, freedom and necessity, value and fact, form and content. Philosophy attempts to unite the poles of these antinomies in what Lukács calls a “totality.” For Lukács as for Hegel, “To transcend such ossified antitheses is the sole concern of reason.”⁵ The resolution of the antinomies is the fundamental exigency of this philosophy, through which it founds the concept of reason.

Lukács considers Kant’s philosophy to be the purest expression of these antinomies. The greatness of Hegel lies principally in having developed the dialectical methodology by which Kantianism could be subjected to a rigorous critique. But the antinomies emerge intact from bourgeois philosophy in spite of its most strenuous intellectual efforts. Marxism then appears as the completion of the Hegelian critique of Kant, a completion that requires a radical change in orientation, but which in essence prolongs Hegelian dialectics. Lukács’s own contribution consists in the appropriation of Hegel’s dialectical critique of Kant from within Marxism.

From this standpoint classical German philosophy takes on a wholly new importance for Marxism. It poses for the first time, if in a still relatively unconscious form, the fundamental problems that Marxism is called upon to solve. Lukács refuses either to attempt a speculative resolution of the antinomies of philosophy, or to close his eyes to them in the naïve self-certainty of science. The only possible reconciliation is the practical transcendence of the opposition between the antinomic terms at the level at which they arise. The procedure of Lukács’s metacritique of classical German philosophy consists in identifying this level as social and discovering the traces of their social origin in the most abstract concepts of this philosophy.

Bourgeois philosophy, Lukács says, “is able to think the deepest and most fundamental problems of the development of bourgeois society through to the end—on the plane of philosophy … And—in thought—it is able to take all the paradoxes of its position to the point where the methodological necessity of going beyond this historical stage in mankind’s development can at least be seen as a problem.”⁶ Henceforth the founding of a universal concept of reason is impossible without this historical progress. This historical progress has therefore become, as such, a demand of reason. The failure of classical German philosophy demonstrates that reason requires, on purely methodological grounds, a step beyond bourgeois society, beyond philosophical speculation into revolutionary practice.