Lukács and fichte

These considerations take us to the heart of the problem. Lukács never entirely bridges the enormous gap between the two poles of his argument, classical German philosophy and Marxism. Curious exaggerations expose him to easy criticism. Axel Honneth notes the coexistence of a hopelessly idealistic “official” line and a more “moderate” “unofficial” line that can provide the basis for a recovery of his contribution.²⁰ We differ on the nature of that unofficial line but not on the interest in pursuing the ambiguities of Lukács’s argument.

Lukács’s ambition is to demonstrate that “the core of being stands revealed as a social process.”²¹ He can only achieve this if, as Fichte would have it, he can “exhibit the subject of ‘action’ and, assuming its identity with the object … comprehend every dual subject-object form as derived from it, as its product.”²² According to Tom Rockmore, Fichte is the source of the emphasis on activity not only in Lukács but in Marx as well. This would explain why Lukács has recourse to the decidedly non-materialist notion of an identical subject-object.²³

Lukács’s views on nature are incompatible with this interpretation, but there are occasional passages in History and Class Consciousness, such as the one cited above, which seem to support it. Sometimes the critique of reification seems to extend to the reified form of objectivity of nature as well as society, and there are borrowings from contemporary critiques of natural science. Several critics leap at the bait and argue, with Alfred Schmidt, that nature in Lukács is “totally dissolved into the historical processes of its appropriation in respect of form, content, extent and objectivity.”²⁴

Surprisingly, no one has gone on to complete the critique of Lukács implicit in such assertions. If Lukács really believed that the revolution would overcome all objective being in overcoming reification, his theory would be both rigorously consistent and obviously absurd.²⁵ Then nature would be “posited” by the identical subject-object of history, and in overcoming social reification the proletariat would transform nature itself. This “Fichtean” interpretation of Lukács’s theory rests on the following propositions, which outline an ontology and epistemology in conformity with the critics’ image of Lukács, if not with Lukács’s actual views.

1. Nature is a purely social category, and the natural world therefore has no independence of humanity and human understanding.

2. Nature is essentially reified under capitalism.

3. The identical subject-object of history is also the identical subject-object of nature.

4. Proletarian revolution therefore overcomes the reified objectivity of nature in overcoming capitalism.

5. Since the existing natural sciences are reified, and therefore conditioned by capitalist society both in their genesis and their validity, proletarian revolution also overcomes these sciences in overcoming capitalism.

This summary of Lukács’s theory is immensely overdrawn, but it has the virtue of rendering one commonplace interpretation rigorously consistent. If the critics are correct in attributing some such view to Lukács, then they are also right to tax him with idealism; in this theory the entire existing world is a product of human activity. All that would distinguish Lukács’s “Marxism” from other forms of idealism would be his insistence that this constituting activity is social in character.

But does this construct really concern theses sustained in History and Class Consciousness? Or even its distant implications? The careful reader discovers no significant support for this interpretation, while there are numerous positive statements to the contrary. This is, in fact, the “myth” of Lukács’s famous book that prejudices the very reading of the text.

What is Lukács’s concept of nature? Let us begin with the passage usually cited in support of the interpretation sketched above. Lukács does say that “nature is a social category,” but he proceeds immediately to qualify this statement. The entire passage reads:

Nature is a social category. That is to say [D.h.], what passes for nature [als Natur gilt] at a determinate stage in social evolution, the constitution of the relation between this [dieser] nature and man and the form in which the confrontation of man and nature takes place, in short, what nature signifies [bedeuten] in its form and its content, its range and its objectivity, are all socially conditioned.²⁶

The opening sentence of this passage is often quoted to show that Lukács believed nature in itself, without qualification, to be a social product. But the second sentence is quite careful to discuss not nature as such, but only “what passes for nature.” And surely Lukács intends this qualification, since he introduces the second sentence with “that is to say,” as equivalent to but more precise than the preceding one.²⁷ In the Defence the distinction is explicit: “I talk always (on two occasions!) only of knowledge of nature and not nature itself.”²⁸ Already the first and the third theses of the construct have fallen, for now nature itself, if not the knowledge of it, is independent of man and cannot possibly be “posited” by society. And then, of course, the fourth thesis is also untenable, for under these conditions proletarian revolution cannot transform nature.

Nevertheless, Lukács continues to affirm if not exactly the second and fifth theses, something quite similar. He says, “it cannot be our task to investigate the question of the priority or the historical and causal order of successions between the ‘laws of nature’ and capitalism. (The author of these lines has, however, no wish to conceal his view that the development of capitalist economics takes precedence.)”²⁹ In addition, at the end of the reification essay, when Lukács concedes that there is an objective dialectic of nature, he distinguishes it from the dialectic of subject and object in history. He notes that “the growth of knowledge about nature is a social phenomenon and therefore to be included in the second dialectical type.”³⁰ Thus the fate of the natural sciences and that of capitalism would still seem to be intimately intertwined. (Just how intimately only becomes clear in the Defence, to be discussed below.)

These statements, combined with the critique of reification, have been used by Colletti and others to build an image of an irrationalist, “Bergsonian” Lukács.³¹ Yet Lukács himself rejects irrationalism as an immediate reflex of reification. “The value of formal knowledge in the face of ‘living life’ may be questioned (see irrationalist philosophies from Hamann to Bergson),” but, Lukács writes, reification is not thereby transcended: “Whether this gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair, whether we search for a path leading to ‘life’ via irrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact.”³² Another significant passage makes clear Lukács’s disagreement with the irrationalist attack on the natural sciences. After a lengthy and apparently “Bergsonian” critique of the application of natural scientific method to society, a critique that seems at points to cast doubt on the validity of science in general, Lukács states: “When the epistemological ideal of the natural sciences is applied to nature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be an ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie.”³³

Lukács’s precise attitude toward the fifth thesis should now be clear. He does believe the rise of capitalism to have stimulated the growth of modern natural science, but he nowhere proposes that it is therefore false or that proletarian revolution will abolish it. The validity of natural science and of the reified concept of nature seems to be independent of the conditions of its creation. Here Lukács is in agreement with the views of the later Marx and Engels.

After examining all these passages in detail, one is astonished to discover that nothing remains of the image of Lukács as a subjective idealist at the level of the collective “I” of the proletariat, Lukács the irrationalist, the Bergsonian, an image that begins with Deborin in 1924 and continues to contemporaries such as Colletti. While Rockmore may be right to suggest that Fichte’s activist conception of subjectivity influenced Lukács, Lukács was no Fichtean. In fact the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness has a quite banal respect for the natural sciences. He nowhere denies the independence of nature or the validity of the sciences that study it. But this raises other questions.

Lukács’s goal is to overcome the antinomy of subject and object and restore their unity through action in history. But how can reason be founded on the identity of subject and object in history while nature “in itself” remains beyond the scope of human action? To the extent that nature is conceived as irreducible and non-social in a dualistic worldview, the whole theoretical superstructure collapses. Steven Vogel has made this dualism of nature and society the centerpiece of his critique. Vogel focuses on Lukács’s failure to incorporate nature into his social theory. The distinction between knowledge of nature and “nature itself” seems a regression to Kantianism. What is this nature that by definition lies beyond knowledge if not the old thing-in-itself?

Unless the identity of subject and object in nature can be established, its identity in history appears as a purely contingent feature of the universe. Another type of rationality with its own objectivity arises alongside history, and there subject and object can never be united. Reason remains permanently caught in the antinomies of reified thought in its relation to nature. The Kantian construction of rationality now returns in full force, bringing in its train all the untranscended antinomies Lukács set out to resolve. It would seem that Lukács is saved from his critics only to fall into self-contradiction.

Vogel claims that Lukács confuses an epistemological distinction with an ontological one. Lukács distinguishes between a reified, contemplative conception of knowledge that resembles positivism, and a self-conscious, dialectical conception. This epistemological distinction is independent of the distinction between nature and society. However, since Lukács accepts a contemplative conception of knowledge of nature that he rejects in the case of society, he concludes that nature and society are ontologically distinct domains. Vogel objects to the very notion of a contemplative epistemology, arguing that post-empiricist philosophy and sociology of science demonstrate that the subject of knowledge is practically implicated in the construction of scientific facts and theories. The dereifying critique of social science Lukács pursues can thus be extended to natural science as well. Knowledge of nature, like social knowledge, is dialectical. There are no epistemological grounds for distinguishing their objects.

Vogel argues that if there is something in nature that is not socially produced, then history is not “reality,” not the fundamental ontological domain from which all others are derived. Unless some solution can be found, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis will collapse into a limited methodological preliminary to historical research. It could no longer pretend to solve ontological problems, but only epistemological problems of historical knowledge. Reason would not be implicated in revolution, only in social theory. This is in fact the position adopted by Lucien Goldmann, Lukács’s most important follower.³⁴ Vogel is more critical; he writes that this “solution” to the contradiction has a comic character since Lukács will have “labored long and hard and brought forth a mouse.”³⁵