Contemplative and transforming consciousness

Many critics agree with Rudas and Vogel that the methodological split between society and nature in History and Class Consciousness gives rise to serious problems for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. However, it is not uncommon for the critics, including the later Lukács himself, to fail to notice that this split refutes the idealistic identification of his concept of objectivity with Hegel’s concept of alienation. For, if nature is not posited by society, as Lukács seems to assert, and if it is not transcended in the revolution, then clearly Lukács’s philosophy is not hostile to objectivity per se, and is not idealist. The critics produce an empirically accurate image of the various strands of Lukács’s thought, but at the expense of a theoretically inconsistent critique. Lukács is charged with the contradictory vices of identifying what should be separated (alienation and objectivity) and separating what should be identified (nature and history).³⁶

Lukács’s dilemma arises from the apparently incompatible solutions to the two problems the identical subject-object is supposed to solve. In the first place, Lukács explains social change through the concept of social self-consciousness. This notion is loosely based on the Marxist theory of the proletariat and its place in capitalist society: the class “in itself” becomes the class “for itself.”³⁷ The self-consciousness of the proletariat transforms its immediate form of objectivity and therewith society. In the second place, Lukács proposes an integrally historical ontology that can resolve the antinomies of classical German philosophy. But proletarian self-consciousness cannot transform the immediate form of objectivity of nature. This is what it means to argue that nature is essentially reified as Lukács implies in several of the passages cited above. The dilemma appears inescapable until one grasps the full import of Lukács’s dialectical theory of rationality.

Most readings of Lukács accuse him of inflating the subject at the expense of the object. But the theory of rationality emphasizes the objectivity of the proletariat and the limits of its action. Proletarian practice does not create social reality but rather mediates it. Since all mediation begins with a presupposition, an immediate of some sort, this raises the question of the nature of the presupposition in the case of the proletariat. If the presupposition is wholly extrinsic to its action, then the problem of the thing-in-itself does indeed return. This describes reified technical practice that acts on an alien object. Reification cannot be defeated by such practice. But if the mediated lies wholly within the subject of mediation, then is not its alterity abolished in a perfectly idealist manner? This describes psychoanalysis in which the object of practice is actually an unconscious aspect of the subject. As I showed in the previous chapter, Lukács is aware of the dilemma and attempts to conjure it away in the reification essay.

He argues that reification is gradually overcome in a long-term process and not dissolved in a sudden recovery of absolute agency. This process is not technical but transformative, in the sense that it does not merely use the “law” of its objects to advantage, but alters that very “law.” Nor is it therapeutic; Freud’s version of self-consciousness is impossible in a social context where objective constraints arise from the institutional heritage and the interactions of the individuals.³⁸ But human freedom and initiative can increase relative to the structural impediments of a rationalized society as the proletariat initiates the transition to socialism.

Lukács makes this point repeatedly in different ways throughout the third section of the reification essay, but never applies the argument to the problematic of classical German philosophy analyzed earlier in the essay. He writes, for example, that “Proletarian thought does not require a tabula rasa,” but rather starts out from reification that, for the first time, makes it possible to understand that society is a human product.³⁹ Socialism is a reorganization of the society around a dialectical mediation of the reified capitalist inheritance. He argues further that reification is never completely eliminated but that it is repeatedly overcome in an “unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement.”⁴⁰ And he rejects the humanist tendency to make man himself into an absolute “in place of those transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and systematically replace.”⁴¹ The proletariat does not constitute or posit reality from some transcendental beyond. “It is true that the proletariat is the conscious subject of total social reality. But the conscious subject is not defined here as in Kant, where ‘subject’ is defined as that which can never be an object.”⁴² Lukács invokes Hegel’s famous principle that “the true [be understood] not only as substance but also as subject.” Like the Hegelian absolute, the proletariat too “moves in a self-created world” but that world simultaneously “imposes itself upon [it] in full objectivity.”⁴³ The reference to the ambitious notion of a “self-created world” is thus instantly deflated by the “full objectivity” explained in Marxist social theory.

Since Lukács does not show how these considerations apply to the problem of nature, his critics doubt he can fulfill the promise to transcend the antinomy of subject and object. But there is a hint of a solution in the very terms on which Lukács questions the dialectics of nature. As we saw earlier, he is saved from idealism by the dualism of nature and history implied in the claim that nature lacks the most important determinations of dialectics, namely, the unity of theory and practice and the interaction of subject and object. Later in History and Class Consciousness and in the Defence, Lukács refers to an “objective dialectic” of nature corresponding to Hegel’s objective dialectic of the categories of thinghood such as quantity and quality.⁴⁴ He reiterates that this level of the dialectic lacks the all-important interaction of subject and object of the social dialectic.

Although the distinction between nature and society is apparently ontological it is presented twice in these passages in methodological terms. This suggests a very different reading of Lukács. He is not telling us what kind of being nature is but on what terms it can be changed, on what terms the proletariat as subject can interact with this object. The argument is thus not about the difference between the essence of society and nature but about their different relation to practice. Forms of consciousness follow from this distinction. Lukács distinguishes between contemplative and transforming consciousness, the one suited to knowledge of nature, the other to knowledge of society. There is a realm in which consciousness is practice, in which we can transform our objects by becoming socially self-conscious, and alongside it, there is another realm in which our action will always be contemplative, i.e., technical. The first realm is society, the second is nature. Lukács claims that we need not organize our whole social life through technical control of some human beings by others, as capitalism requires, but that we will always stand in a technical relation to nature.

The concept of “contemplative” consciousness is essentially constructivist despite the usual meaning of the word. Lukács’s constructivism operates at the abstract level of the form of objectivity rather than focusing on particular social influences on the content of knowledge as do Marx’s occasional remarks on science. For example, Lukács writes in History and Class Consciousness that “it is in the nature of capitalism to process phenomena” in such a way as to generate “facts.” And he concludes, “The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method [of bourgeois social science] consists, then, in its failure to see and take account of the historical character of the facts on which it is based.”⁴⁵ As we saw in Chapter 4, factuality is a social product, not an immediate given. What Lukács calls “contemplation” hides the social practices that institute the facts.

Reified social reality is a “second nature” with laws that appear as rigid as those of the first nature described by natural science.

Man in capitalist society confronts a reality “made” by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its “laws”, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. But even while “acting” he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events.⁴⁶

The three principal bases of a modern society, the economy, the technology, and the administrations, are reified objects of contemplation in the sense that the individual cannot alter the laws of the system “made by himself (as a class),” but only understand and manipulate those laws to personal advantage.⁴⁷ But in these social instances a collective practice based on the self-consciousness of the social subjects can transform the laws themselves.

It is obvious that nature, at least in the form in which it is encountered in natural science, does not form a fourth system contingent on capitalism for its existence and immediately transformed by the collective consciousness qua practice in which capitalism is overthrown. This is so even if we accept Lukács’s constructivist interpretation of contemplation according to which it masks an underlying practice. To be sure, contemplation of nature is not truly passive but, unlike in the social case, dereifying consciousness of the scientific construction of nature does not necessarily alter the ‘‘facts’’ of nature itself.

This distinction is clarified by Paul Dumouchel’s revision of systems theory.⁴⁸ He distinguishes two types of spontaneous orders or systems constituted by agents who each follow a rule of action individually. Some spontaneous orders are “rational” in the sense that they are stable in the face of the agents’ discovery of the rule of the system. Competitive games are examples of rational orders: the players’ willingness to play by the rules is not normally affected by their knowledge of the rules. But there are also spontaneous orders that are “irrational” in the sense that when the agents come to understand the rule of their action, they will necessarily modify it.

Dumouchel offers the example of sacrifice or scapegoating, considered by René Girard to provide a basic mechanism of social solidarity. The sacrificial logic cannot withstand the revelation that the rule of scapegoating is the random or arbitrary choice of the victim—the object of the sacrifice is an ordinary person, as guiltless as those who kill him. Sacrifice is cancelled by the self-consciousness of the sacrificial community.

In Dumouchel’s scheme the passage beyond irrationality through consciousness can lead to the creation of a rational order governed by new rules, or a “reasonable” order based not merely on individual action but planned collectively in terms of such explicit norms as justice.

On these terms, reified social forms constitute irrational orders that can be transformed once the agents understand their logic. The capitalist system is not based on rationality in Dumouchel’s sense, but on blindness. It cannot withstand the discovery of its own inner logic by those who enact it. The alternative suggested by the mediation theory is the institution of a permanent system of transitions from the irrational to the rational and the reasonable. But the relation to nature is not irrational in Dumouchel’s sense. It is not generally modified by consciousness of its reified form. It is thus essentially reified and knowledge of it is destined to remain permanently “contemplative.”