Chapter nine Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance

Introduction

In this concluding chapter I begin with an analytical summary of the history of philosophy of praxis as a figure of thought. This has been our main concern throughout this book. But the philosophy of praxis raises questions for us today that do not have clear answers in this history. The later sections of this chapter consider two of these questions. Here is a brief preview of these sections.

The failure of proletarian revolution has not ended the struggle against reification but it has fragmented that struggle. How is the metacritique of reification affected by that change? Reified rationality still prevails in society and it is still mediated by tensions between its forms and the content of the life processes it shapes and constrains, but it is no longer plausible to envisage a final end of this condition. Reification in some form is an essential aspect of modernity. Both the successes and the failures of socialist revolution teach us that reified rationality, as embodied in social institutions, will always confront suppressed potentialities motivating transformation from below. This conflictual configuration is now the permanent state of modern society, but it does not at present take the form of general revolutionary struggle.

Can the fragmented struggles of this historical period fulfill the program of philosophy of praxis? The answer to this question depends on the type of practice that is supposed to resolve the antinomies. If that practice is conceived as revolution in the traditional sense, then clearly no resolution is likely in the foreseeable future.¹ On the other hand, a fuller account of practice reveals a hidden dimension overlooked in the exclusive focus on revolutionary activity. That dimension is the horizonal work of establishing the framework of meaning within which activity goes on. Reification is such a horizon and so is the dereifying challenge to it. If changes in that hidden dimension are understood as essentially transformative, then the philosophy of praxis survives the loss of its revolutionary guarantee.

The structure of the theory

Philosophy of praxis is based on a metacritique of idealist philosophy. Idealism attempted to resolve contradictions between subject and object, value and fact, freedom and necessity, life and thought. The idealist resolution of these “antinomies” took the form of a speculative play with concepts. Philosophy of praxis demands a real resolution through the practical transformation of the social basis of the antinomies. The metacritique that establishes the rationale for this approach has three moments: the social reconstitution of idealist categories; the construction of the relations between the reconstituted categories according to the original idealist pattern; and the projection of a resolution of the contradictions between them through social change.

The philosophers of praxis argue that abstract philosophical categories are sublimated versions of concrete social realities. The philosophical subject is a sublimated version of the real subject, social class. The object is not being or the thing-in-itself but the actual object of social practice. The antinomies reflect fundamental problems of capitalist society. For example, if value and fact stand opposed, this is because the capitalist world is structured by economic laws indifferent to human needs, not because these two domains of being are by nature alien to each other. The antinomies cannot be resolved at the level of pure theory, but only by action to change society. Hence Marx’s famous dictum, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.”²

Philosophy of praxis avoids the crude economic reductionism of which Marxism is often accused by reconstructing the relations idealism established between its categories as social relations. For example, in the early Marx labor engages with nature not just technically but ontologically, as the power revealing nature within the social world. Similarly, in Lukács, once the philosophical subject is redefined as the proletariat it is shown to constitute social reality through a process of mediation. In both Marx and Lukács the idealist concepts of synthesis, constitution, and mediation are translated as practical relations to nature and society.

Adorno and Marcuse’s claims for social practice are less ambitious but even they consider the subject–object and value-fact relations as unities fractured by capitalism. The vaunted objectivity of science and its restricted empiricism is won at the expense of a richer experience of things and their potentialities. The excluded “second dimension” is reduced to an inner realm of subjective values. This is what gives rise to the philosophical antinomy of value and fact that idealism attempts to overcome speculatively.

In his early metacritique Marx argues that the antinomies arise from conceptualizing subject and object on the model of cognition. The “real” subject and object are the worker and nature, not the knower and the known. The worker is more than a cogito, a thinker of thoughts; the subject qua worker is a human being with needs, relating to its objects practically rather than theoretically. These practical relations have the form of the idealist “identity” of subject and object. Although common sense considers needs and satisfactions to be accidentally related like any two objects in the world, Marx argues the contrary, that the subject of need and its objects are essentially related. This is an ontological relation in which both subject and object are constituted. The constituting process is played out in the practical humanization of nature through labor and sense experience.

Marx calls this “objectification,” but under capitalism it takes an alienated form. Despite the fundamental interdependence of human subject and object, laboring is associated with poverty and loss. The subject–object relation is lived in suffering and conflict. Private property and wage labor are historically contingent causes of this lived version of the antinomy. Overcoming these institutional obstacles through revolution can bring about a rational harmony of subject and object no amount of philosophical speculation can achieve.

Lukács’s metacritique relates the subject–object concept of idealism to the economic processes analyzed in Marx’s mature works. Those works restrict the early metacritique to a limited social arena and abandon larger philosophical goals, but Lukács recovers Marx’s original intent to create a philosophy of praxis. The result differs from Marx’s thought in several respects. Lukács lives in a far more advanced society in which vast bureaucracies deploy a scientific-technical production system. The problem of rationality the early Marx addressed with the idea of a socialist reconciliation of man and nature now appears in a different light. Rationality has split in two, one form corresponding to a strictly instrumental relation to human beings and nature—reification—while another dialectical rationality belongs to the transforming practice in which the social and cultural world are revolutionized by the proletariat. No new concept of reason seems able to reconcile them nor can the rule of the “assembled producers” eliminate the instrumental relation to reality. Reified rationality predominates under capitalism. Its contradictions are reflected philosophically in the antinomies.

Lukács formulates all this through an immanent critique of German idealism. He identifies three “demands of reason” that emerge from idealism’s failed attempt to carry out its program: the principle of practice, history as reality, and dialectical method. They hang together: practice can only transform reality, i.e., being in the strong philosophical sense of the term, where reality is essentially historical. This historical transformation will take place not through a deterministic mechanism or an unbounded creative process, but through realizing the social potentialities revealed in the tension between the rationalized social forms and individual life processes. The philosophical subject of idealism is replaced by the human subject of work, as in Marx, but Lukács emphasizes the role of that subject in constituting and overthrowing reified social institutions rather than its relation to nature. By mediating reification the historical subject reconciles the antinomies of subject and object, value and fact, freedom and necessity, theory and practice.

In both Marx and Lukács, the concept of reason emerges transformed from the metacritique. Its uncritical alienated or reified form is replaced or complemented by a dialectical rationality. That alternative form of rationality is not another scientific or technical discipline but the articulation of social experience, social experience raised to consciousness. Now rationality is associated not only with science and experiment, but also with the practical critique coming from those subordinated to the forms of capitalism. Their situated knowledge reveals aspects of reality to which reified rationality is blind.

That situated knowledge is granted cognitive status by philosophy of praxis. It is not merely a “matter of opinion,” but arises from and refers to a real object Marcuse will later identify with the lifeworld. The metacritically reconstructed subject and object of the lifeworld are ultimately real. Theory builds on the critical method immanently present in lifeworldly experience, not a pure reason in which philosophy of praxis no longer believes.

This view contrasts with the scientistic ideology that becomes increasingly influential from Lukács’s time down to the present. According to this ideology, experience is essentially flawed and subjective in contrast with the objective understanding of a purified cogito, freed from all bonds of corporality, emotion, and situation. Philosophy of praxis dismisses this “view from nowhere” as a reflex of reification and imposes a finite horizon on the cognitive subject. It rejects idealism’s thesis of the absolute autonomy of reason, and relativizes the claims of naturalism by restricting scientific cognition to a limited aspect of the real. Science too is then interpreted as a social institution, situated in a social context. This “absolute historicism” characterizes all four versions of the philosophy of praxis discussed here.

These are some of the main concepts of philosophy of praxis that the Frankfurt School elaborates in very different historical circumstances from Marx and Lukács. Theory and practice are split apart. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse conclude that no proletarian movement promises to realize the demands of reason and reconcile humanity and nature. The Soviet Union resembles Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy far more than Marx’s Paris Commune. Instrumental reason has triumphed and socialist revolution now appears as a lost cause, at least for the foreseeable future. The third moment in the metacritique is beyond reach. Yet the first two moments retain their credibility as a critique of idealism and naturalism, and a reconstructive alternative. But it is impossible to detach the first two moments entirely from the third. If subject and object have become concrete, active social beings in the world, their antinomies demand resolution in the world as well. The Frankfurt School struggles with this conundrum.

In Adorno the outcome is dystopian despair in history. He argues that the thought and experience of the individuals in capitalist society have been radically distorted by the commodification of every aspect of social life. Abstract concepts replace a deeper understanding of the connections and potentialities of things. Experience is reduced to a mere reflection of the given, without the imaginative force required for self-reflection. Instrumental rationality, unrestrained by any concept of potentialities and limits, threatens human survival with the increase in its technological power to exploit and destroy. In this critique one sees the persistence of the ideal of harmony between human being and nature. But now that ideal promises no transformation; it simply devalues the present by contrast.

In his late work Marcuse arrives at a more positive position under the influence of the New Left. The New Left practices a cultural politics that, while it lacks the power of a proletarian movement, at least goes beyond mere technical manipulation within the existing system. The movement testifies to the continuing possibility of practical critique, beyond the “one-dimensionality” of reified experience under capitalism. Radical experience, the “new sensibility,” is informed by an imaginative grasp of the blocked potentialities of a society that artificially maintains competition, poverty, and war long after it has become rich and secure enough to dispense with these vestiges of an obsolete reality principle. The cultural movement has political expressions capable of catalyzing a much broader popular movement, as occurred in France in 1968. The unity of theory and practice is not fully restored by this argument, but its promise is renewed.

Marcuse is the first philosopher of praxis to respond positively to the growth of technology. He argues that radical change must involve not only social transformation but also technological transformation. A technology of liberation must be created to replace capitalism’s technology of domination.

The weak points in Marcuse’s formulation are all too obvious today. I identify two principal ones in Chapter 8: the reliance on a normative grounding in the affirmation of life, which, while intuitively appealing, is vague; and the undifferentiated critique of science and technology that leads to the implausible demand for a new science. Nevertheless, despite these problems Marcuse revives the philosophy of praxis. He succeeds, I believe, in opening up new ways of thinking about technology and experience, and the theory–practice relationship that would result from their transformation.

The accompanying table shows the main points of similarity between these philosophers. Several things become clear from the table. Adorno is the odd man out. Because he believes the unity of theory and practice has broken down completely his position is quite different from the others. But he shares enough with them that many of his ideas could serve as inspiration or confirmation of Marcuse’s closely related version of philosophy of praxis. Marcuse believed the results of the breakdown of the unity of theory and praxis were partially compensated by a radical vision shared by critical theory and the movements of the New Left. This vision falls far short of the unity envisaged by Marx and Lukács, but it suffices to overcome Adorno’s excessively pessimistic conclusion.

  Principle of practice (ontologically effective practice) History as reality (versus nature as reality) Dialectical method (versus natural scientific method) Finite horizon (validates experiential knowledge) Unity of theory and practice Marx Labor and sensation objectify human faculties Lived nature is social, man as nature's spirit Metacritique of abstract reason Refutation of cosmological argument Reality strives toward thought Lukács Transforming practice mediates form of objectivity Scientific nature is social since factuality is socially constructed Dialectic of subject and object versus contemplative epistemology No absolute spectator (view from nowhere) Marxist method corresponds to practical dereification Adorno Aesthetics as model but unrealized in practice Nature is historical and history natural Negative dialectics versus identity thinking Secondary qualities real versus scientific abstractions Theory only unites with informed practice Marcuse Cultural revolution transforms the structure of experience Lived nature as a subject within history Two-dimensional thought versus one-dimensional operationalism Existential truth versus mathematical truth Critique and movement share vision of free society Table 1: The Philosophers of Praxis Compared

A second point of significance emerges from the table: the variety of solutions to the conundrum of nature and history confronting the philosophy of praxis. Marx’s most radical solution devalues the natural sciences as an illusion. He invokes some sort of new science that would transcend current science just as socialism would transcend the capitalist economy, but this is quite implausible. The ambition to overthrow capitalism cannot be extended to the scientific basis of modern society.

The problem is even more obvious in Lukács. He attempts to extend the revolutionary paradigm to the whole field of rational institutions, including the economy and administration, as well as science and technology, and ultimately to rationality as such. But when it comes to proposing a new concept of reason to replace the reified one, he runs into problems. He balks at the consequences of his own concept of mediation. His dialectic presupposes the very reification the revolution is supposed to overcome. The dialectic serves as a placeholder for a new, reconciled concept of reason, but it cannot be substituted for the reified rationality embodied in the essential institutions of modernity. That Lukács was aware of the difficulty shows up in his philosophy of science. He treats the formal structure of scientific factuality as intrinsically social while sparing the contents of natural science from ideology critique. The distinction between genesis and validity defuses the original Marxian critique of science.

Adorno rejects the absolutization of either nature or history and so does not quite affirm history as reality. Instead of a theory he proposes a chiasmus: nature is historical and history is natural. If nature is identified with the struggle for survival, then indeed it has penetrated history in the form of the violent assault of human beings on nature and each other. History is natural insofar as it is based on that struggle. On the other hand, nature is not an eternal given, but evolves as human understanding and technical practice alter its form.

Marcuse argues that nature is a “subject” and as such deserves respect. Of course the nature in question is not that of natural science but the nature of the lifeworld. He does not anthropomorphize this nature as Habermas charged, but rather attempts to reconstruct the concept of essential potentiality in historical terms.³ Lived nature belongs to history insofar as it contains potentialities that can be realized by social revolution. In this respect it contrasts with the merely manipulable nature of technological rationality.

How lived nature is supposed to relate to the nature of natural science is unclear in Marcuse’s thought. He is misled by a lingering fidelity to a concept of revolution that dictates an epistemological transformation when extended to reason as such. He formulates a highly speculative alternative to the dominant understanding of science and argues for the enlargement of scientific reason’s scope to encompass the fruits of an aesthetic engagement with reality. It is not easy to concretize this suggestion.

Marcuse’s position makes more sense in its application to technology. The application of aesthetic criteria and the imaginative construction of the potentialities implicated in technological design are hardly controversial. Marcuse’s critique is aimed at an exclusive emphasis on profitability and power. But although plausible in its general lines, the absence of a clear distinction between science and technology leaves his argument vulnerable to all sorts of critical abuse. Chapter 8 attempts to save Marcuse’s contribution by clarifying this issue.