The principle of practice

Lukács’s discussion of Hegel completes his venture into “philosophical experience.” It demonstrates that classical German philosophy cannot fulfill the requirements of its own principle of practice. The practical contradictions arising objectively from capitalist reification, between individual and social law, between this law itself and the content that 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 antinomic opposites, mediations that are pure mental constructions. Lukács calls this “conceptual mythology,” i.e., “the failure to understand a fundamental condition of human existence, one whose effects cannot be warded off.”³⁹

Even where this philosophy strives hardest to base itself on a practical principle, it remains in a contemplative attitude because it can offer no real challenge to the fixed and finished character of the capitalist world. Its very concepts of subject and object, of thought and being, express the rigid oppositions of this world. Objectivity can only be united with subjectivity in a speculative 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

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. What Lukács calls “the grandiose conception that thought can only grasp what it has itself created” leads to the demand to “master the world as a whole by seeing it as self-created.”⁴¹ This ambition is frustrated by the contingency of content, as we have seen. The response of classical German philosophy to this problem was the search for a type of practice giving access to that content. This practice would not presuppose reification as its horizon but would transcend this horizon and change reality itself.

But this search fails because the philosophers attempt to go beyond reification theoretically, through resolving its contradictions in thought. The thing-in-itself inevitably confronts the subject of science and technology. Ethics, aesthetics, and the wisdom of the philosopher at the end of history all suffer from an implicit acceptance of reified reality, toward which they adopt an attitude rather than effecting a change. At every stage one dimension of reified thought is surmounted from the point of view of another, theoretical contemplation by ethical practice, ethics by aesthetics, formal rationality by a dialectic cut off, in the last analysis, from history. And precisely because the higher level from which the lower is deduced is itself reified, the original problems of the lower level simply reappear at the higher one in new forms.

The principle of practice not only requires a move beyond theory, it also requires a type of practice that affects “reality” as a whole and not just marginal aspects of it. Artistic practice, to give a counter-illustration, fails because it has so little impact on the social world that is founding for it. What is needed is a practice that is “total” in the sense that it is unbounded by a dimension of reality it cannot alter and that, therefore, persists as a reified residuum, a thing-in-itself.

History remains as the only domain in which to find a practice that can affect not only 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 self-change could be an objective change in reality as the principle of practice requires. Furthermore, history is not a mere sector among others, but is the primary and basic reality. All other subject–object relations can be derived from that of the historical subject and object and interpreted through their historical dimension. Lukács takes Hegel himself as the demonstration in contrario of this claim, for the unhistorical residue remaining in Hegel’s system becomes the point at which the reified subject–object relation is reintroduced.

But the practical production of reality is no Heraclitean flux. The study of history must explain the relation between the “évènementiel” and institutions, practices, and culture. Lukács formulates this requirement as the coincidence of historical action and the structuring of experience through the imposition of a form of objectivity. The process of “synthesis” of the real, its “logical genesis” at the level of the categories, must be identical with the practical production of social reality by its subject. Then form and content, philosophy and reality can be united and the antinomies that 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.⁴²

With this rather puzzling methodological requirement, Lukács wants to avoid two correlated errors: either explaining history in terms of non-historical categories or abandoning historical explanation in the face of the “irrationality” of individual events. Between these extremes lies a type of explanation that draws its categories from the events. As Rockmore explains, Lukács’s approach is “an effort to reconcile a categorical perspective that denies the sufficiency of immediate, intuitive experience with an insistence that the categories emerge directly out of experience.”⁴³

In sum, the world is not merely there in its facticity nor is it literally manufactured by the proletariat. The world—and this includes the proletariat—is bursting out of its reified form of objectivity. The violent actions in which that explosion consists realize the objective tendencies Marx identified. In so doing those acts also construct a new social world that alters the functional relation of the elements of society. The acts in which the revolutionary proletariat shatters its reified form of objectivity open up a new way of being in the world, a new realm of meaning. And thus the structures of meaning inherited from capitalism are transformed and made adequate to the life process they form. The “indifference of form toward content” is overcome.

Lukács argues that the antinomies of value and fact, knowledge and reality would finally be resolved for a self-conscious collective subject of history. It would unite theory and practice: its self-understanding would have immediate repercussions on its behavior, abolishing the gap between “mind” and “matter,” and creating a new type of practice different from reified technical practice. 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 its form of 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. This is what it really means to claim that the proletariat is the legitimate heir of the idealist program.