From kant to hegel

At the center of History and Class Consciousness is an extraordinary discussion of the development from Kant to Hegel seen as steps in the intellectual progression leading to Marxism. That progression is explained as the gradual working out of Kant’s original intuition in ever more concrete, ever more adequate forms, culminating in the final recognition of the social practice behind the reified appearance. In the course of this discussion, Lukács shows that Marxism is the veritable Aufhebung of classical German philosophy, arising from its inner dynamic on the basis of its results.

Lukács’s argument in the second part of the essay on reification is presented as a quasi-history, behind which it is possible to identify a static model that in fact organizes his presentation. This model is the Kantian “system” with its threefold division into critiques of pure reason, practical reason, and judgment. The history of classical German philosophy, as Lukács presents it, is in fact the successive thematization of each of these three aspects of Kantian doctrine qua solution to the antinomies. This analysis yields three “demands of reason” that must be fulfilled to overcome reified thought. They are: 1) the principle of practice, 2) dialectical method, 3) history as reality. In this section and the next I will attempt to explain the response of classical German philosophy to these demands. As one attempt after another to fulfill them fails, the emphasis shifts, culminating finally in Marxism. All along the way, Lukács draws out the implicit conclusions established by this “philosophical experience,” conclusions that later form the basis of a new concept of reason.

Lukács’s conception of reified society as a “second nature,” the laws of which are created by human beings but which appear as natural laws, suggests an important philosophical parallel. This is, after all, approximately the form of the Kantian theory of knowledge, the notion that experience is governed by laws imposed on it by the subject which, in turn, necessarily determine the knowledge of the subject. What is the significance of this parallel?

Lukács seeks the answer to this question in a metacritique of Kant’s famous “Copernican Revolution.” Note that metacritique is not ideology critique. Rather, Kant’s theory is a rational way of understanding reified social reality, under its horizon, that is to say, as it appears to reified thought. More precisely, this means that when Kant founds the identity of “our” knowledge and objectivity in the concept of transcendental synthesis, he is not merely masking, but rather explaining the very same social reality Lukács also explains. It was thus Kant, in a sense, who first discovered the process of reification but only insofar as it can be understood speculatively as the result of an imaginary individual practice.

Kant’s philosophy is an enormous theoretical advance over earlier rationalism that simply assumed the rationality of the universe without suspecting the constitutive function of the subject.¹⁶ Where earlier philosophy had, for the most part, taken for granted the objectivity of objects and the immediacy of experience, Kant shows that objectivity is the product of a synthesis performed by the subject on the raw materials of experience through the imposition of forms of objectivity such as space, time, and causality. The synthesis of experience consists in its submission to these forms without which it would not take shape as a coherent world of objects at all. This was Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” which placed the subject at the center of the epistemological universe where formerly the object held sway. But this revolution had a surprising consequence. Recognizing the role of mental activity in perception gave rise to the notion of the thing-in-itself; Kant’s successors focused on overcoming this paradoxically unknowable reality.

Lukács’s interpretation of this problematic is quite unusual. Instead of regarding the thing-in-itself as beyond experience, he explains it in terms of the form–content distinction he found in the work of Emil Lask. Recall that the neo-Kantians distinguished between the realm of nature to which general laws applied and history, which was said to be made up of unique events. These phenomena were considered “irrational” insofar as they resisted explanation through law. They constituted a kind of intra-experiential thing-in-itself. Lask’s contribution was situated in this context. He argued that the thing-in-itself should not be conceived as unknowable, nor as an exclusively historical phenomenon, but rather in terms of the relation of meaning or form to content in experience. Meanings apply to a meaningless ‘‘material,’’ for example, the stuff of sensation which now stands in for the thing-in-itself in Lukács’s appropriation of Lask. This shifts the emphasis away from the epistemological problem of how the mind produces representations in various fields. Instead, Lask focuses on the ontological question of meaning as a necessary feature of experience.

Lukács applies these concepts in his interpretation of Kant and his successors. He describes their challenge as explaining meaning in such a way as to demonstrate that it actually “penetrates” its content and shapes it to the core. Only thus would it be possible to prove that reality is not fundamentally meaningless. Subject–object identity thus does not erase the factual independence of reality, but rather comprehends reality through and through. “Identity” signifies that reason can “produce” its objects in this special sense in theory and practice.¹⁷

But, Lukács argues, classical German philosophy is torn by the conflict of two principles. On the one hand, it demands that rationality overcome the contingency, the merely factical givenness of objects. This is the condition for founding a universal rationalism, unbounded by supernatural mysteries or unknowable realities. On the other hand, it assumes a reified, formalistic concept of reason that secretes contingency and facticity as the residue of the process of abstraction from concrete content in which rationality consists. Such a formalistic concept of reason can never unite fully with its objects.

Thus in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, reified thought encounters the insurmountable contradiction between its ambition to produce its objects in thought by deducing them from their forms, and the impossibility of embracing the content of these forms with a formalistic concept of reason. Earlier dogmatic metaphysics had not even recognized the problem. Lukács argues, “it is evident that this principle of systematization [of rationalism] is not reconcilable with the recognition of any ‘reality,’ and ‘content’ which in principle cannot be deduced from the principle of form and which therefore has simply to be accepted as a facticity.”¹⁸

Kant’s thought is truly “critical” with respect to dogmatic rationalism to the extent that it recognizes the insuperable antinomy of form and content for a formalistic concept of reason. Finite understanding requires a material substratum of irreducibly contingent facts. With this the very notion of building a philosophical system on the model of mathematics collapses. Kant argues “that pure reason is unable to make the last leap toward the synthesis and the constitution of an object, and so its principles cannot be deduced ‘directly from concepts, but only indirectly by relating these concepts to something wholly contingent, namely possible experience.’”¹⁹ Because this “possible experience” cannot be produced by the subject, irrationality, in the form of the thing-in-itself, invades the terrain on which the traditional rationalist systems were constructed.²⁰

But, Kant is as uncritical and dogmatic as his predecessors in assuming that rationality is essentially formalistic. As we will see, Lukács regards the principle of identity as necessary for any consistent rationalism, including Marxism, but he argues that the reified paradigm of formal knowledge is tied specifically to capitalist society.

It is precisely because Kant both accepts reification and criticizes artificial solutions to the problems it raises that he is driven beyond the limits of earlier philosophy. Once the unity of reified thought and reality has been undermined, maintaining a concept of reason capable of “producing” its objects is only possible beyond the horizon of pure theory. The methodological validation of the power of reason must take place in another region of human existence.

Thus Kant was led to pose the fundamental demand of reason that preoccupied classical German philosophy thereater, and led eventually to Hegel’s dialectic: the exigency of a “subject of thought which could be thought of as producing existence without any hiatus irrationalis or transcendental thing-in-itself.”²¹ Kant attempts to discover a level of reality at which the duality of subject and object is transcended, and starting out from which their empirical duality can be deduced. This exigency, in turn, can only be satisfied by abandoning the contemplative point of view, and discovering a practical subject that, in generating its own world of objects, transcends the rigid dichotomy of form and content. This new orientation toward practice is motivated by the desire to find a subject, the object of which is integrally and fully its own product. Lukács explains:

The very moment when this situation, i.e. when the indissoluble links that bind the contemplative attitude of the subject to the purely formal character of the object of knowledge becomes conscious, it is inevitable either that the attempt to find a solution to the problem of irrationality (the question of content, of the given, etc.) should be abandoned or that it should be sought in practice.²²

Responding to this dilemma, Kant turned from epistemology to ethics, from the thinking to the acting subject, to find the identical subject-object. Ethical action seems to transcend the empirical duality of subject and object. No merely given facticity, resistant to subjectivity and independent of it appears to trouble the production of ethical substance.

However, the ethical subject still confronts the reified reality described in the Critique of Pure Reason. Its practice encounters a world in which “laws still operate with inexorable necessity.”²³ As we have seen in an earlier discussion of the value–fact antinomy, the subject divides into an empirical self, given over to the laws of this world, and a transcendental self, free to obey the ethical law. The ethical act assumes a phenomenal form determined by the laws of the world just like any other thing. It is perfectly integrated into the course of outer determinism, and thus there is a sense in which no value enters experience through it. Rather, in passing from an intention of the will into the positive form of objective behavior, the higher values seem to be irretrievably lost. Only the inner form of the act in the mind of the actor distinguishes it from a non-ethical act; only the disposition of the will of the actor and not the act itself is ethical in essence. Lukács sums up this dilemma: “For precisely in the pure, classical expression it received in the philosophy of Kant it remains true that the ‘ought’ presupposes a being to which the category of ‘ought’ remains inapplicable in principle.”²⁴

Ethical practice does not successfully fulfill its function in the system. All ethics can show “is the point where the real interpenetration of form and content should begin, where it would begin if its formal rationality could allow it to do more than predict formal possibilities in terms of formal calculations.”²⁵ The actual identity of subject and object in the ethical act remains an unknowable thing-in-itself transcending experience. The ethical solution to the cognitive form–content problem has merely reproduced its terms.

Kant fails to discover what Lukács calls “the principle of practice,” the essence of which “consists in annulling that indifference of form toward content that we found in the problem of the thing-in-itself.”²⁶ The principle of practice requires the transcendence of the theoretical orientation toward reality in a practice that is “tailored to the concrete material substratum of action, in order to impinge upon it to some effect.”²⁷ Nevertheless, Kant’s move beyond knowledge toward practice opens the way to solutions his successors elaborated.

Kant’s aesthetics provides the starting point for these attempts. It includes the concept of the “creation of a concrete totality that springs from a conception of form oriented toward the concrete content of its material substratum.”²⁸ Kant develops this idea in terms of a hypothetical “intuitive understanding” that would transcend the gap between concept and sense intuition by actually creating the objects of its knowledge. He contrasts this intuitive understanding with human reason as follows:

In fact our understanding has the property of proceeding in its cognition … from the analytical-universal (concepts) to the particular (given empirical intuition). Thus, as regards the manifold of the latter, it determines nothing, but must await this determination by the judgment of the subsumption of the empirical intuition … under the concept. We can, however, think an understanding which being not like ours, discursive, but intuitive proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts. The contingency of the combination of the parts, in order that a definite form of the whole shall be possible, is not implied by such an understanding in its representation of the whole.²⁹

The intuitive understanding is not a theoretical subject, incapable of penetrating the content of its objects. On the contrary, it synthesizes theory and practice. Its “content is not given but ‘created.’ The intuitive understanding is, in Kant’s words, spontaneous (i.e., active) and not receptive (i.e., contemplative) both as regards knowledge and intuitive perception.”³⁰ Adumbrated in this concept is the speculative notion of the practical production of reality that so influences later thinkers. While Kant himself did not so employ it, his successors, notably Schiller and Fichte, believed it could resolve the antinomies of philosophy.³¹

According to Lukács, German philosophy after Kant used the concept of an intuitive understanding to radicalize Kant’s epistemological revolution. The subject was to play the chief role not only in epistemology, but in ontology as well by constituting not only the forms of knowledge but also the content, the thing-in-itself, which for Kant lay irrevocably beyond knowledge. The Kantian concept of synthesis is thus transformed into a metaphysical principle of world constitution.

In Schiller the problem of the production of objective reality in thought is approached through a new problem of a similar type that arises in relation to the subject. Both the philosophical and the real social development increasingly fragment the subject into opposed faculties that no longer form a unity. The rigid specializations of bourgeois social life penetrate the subject and interrupt communication between the different aspects of the self. The comprehension of the totality can no longer proceed through the deduction of reality from the subject, a task the limits of which have been revealed by Kant. Instead, Schiller proposes the deduction of the unity of the subject as a whole from the aesthetic subject, operating as an intuitive understanding in the perception-creation of itself.

The aesthetic subject cannot reconcile the faculties of the mind without being generalized beyond the sphere of artistic production. This Schiller does in his theories of the “instinct of play” and aesthetic education. The aesthetic principle then reconciles all the contraries of human nature, both in theory and practice, and shows the way back to a unified and total humanity. But this attempt to employ a non-formalistic intuitive understanding modeled on aesthetic practice is unsuccessful. Outside the sphere of actual artistic production, it ceases to be a true subject of practice. Schiller generalizes it by taking up an aesthetic attitude toward the existing world, an attitude that reproduces the world in thought as a finished work of art, in this way apparently overcoming its reified facticity. But here the “action” of the subject is reduced to yet another form of contemplation, not calculating reason, but aesthetic appreciation.

Fichte, who also attempts to construct a new concept of reason on the basis of the intuitive understanding, transforms it into a transcendental faculty of the mind from which proceeds the empirical subject and the entire existing world. Now philosophy turns not toward an attitude, as with Schiller, but toward a renewal of speculative metaphysics. But this position too falls short of practice. The activity that was to unite the faculties, subject and object, form and content, turns out to be no more than another form of contemplation, a “speculative mythology.”

In one important respect, however, Schiller and Fichte do represent an advance over Kant. Although they no more than he discover the true principle of practice, they finally challenge the dogmatic assumption that formalistic knowledge is the only kind of knowledge. With Hegel this challenge is brought to fruition in dialectics. His unique contribution is the historical approach to overcoming the irrationality of the contents of knowledge. He attempts to embrace the material substratum of thought through dialectics, to create a logic of the concrete concept, a logic of the totality.