The realization of philosophy30

What makes the approach taken by Marx and Lukács unique, and distinguishes it not only from Kant but also from Hegel, is their belief that the primary antinomy to be overcome is that of traditional philosophy and social reality. Here the term “metacritique” applies in a double sense. Not only do Marx and Lukács attempt to relate philosophical abstractions to the social lifeworld, they also claim to identify the intrinsic limitation of the traditional philosophical method of abstraction. Because traditional philosophy assumes that the alienated foundations of the social order are rooted in the very nature of reality, it concludes that the antinomies can only be resolved speculatively, in thought, and formulates them in view of such a resolution. The criterion of philosophical adequacy that guides concept formation in the tradition thus reflects an implicit sense of the limits of social change that Marx and Lukács challenge. They argue that the resolution of the antinomies requires a radical social transformation unimagined by their predecessors.

Nevertheless, neither Marx nor Lukács simply dismiss philosophy. Rather, they proceed from the assumption that the tension between the concept of reason and its concrete social substratum reflects contradictions in social reality. Despite its limits traditional philosophy was able to identify social potentialities, even if only in a speculative form. The problem now consists in reconstructing the insights of philosophy in a new context, oriented toward practical social change. Marcuse summarizes this conclusion as follows: “The philosophical construction of reason is replaced by the creation of a rational society. The philosophical ideals of a better world and of true Being are incorporated into the practical aim of struggling mankind, where they take on a human form.”³¹

In sum, the metacritical approach as the term will be used here consists in dialectically relativizing philosophical form and social content, and correspondingly, theory and practice. Marx and Lukács do not philosophize within the historically given tradition, presupposing the continuing validity of philosophy as such, and eo ipso of its forms of evidence and its problematics. Rather, they consider the tradition as essentially completed, and then proceed to study it from “outside,” as a moment in a larger social process in which action can intervene. It is in this light, and not in some merely pragmatic sense of urgency, that we are to understand Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”³²

Within the tradition of Western Marxism, these rather opaque formulations of the theory–practice relation have a quite definite meaning. One of the aims of this book is to clarify that meaning. Since I am writing within that tradition myself, I will follow Marx’s and Lukács’s construction of terms like “philosophy,” “theory,” “practice,” and phrases like “the unity of theory and practice,” “the realization of philosophy.” Before proceeding on this basis, I would like to step briefly outside that framework to anticipate some objections. I will put these objections in the form of questions that implicitly challenge the very idea of a unity of theory and practice or a realization of philosophy.

1. Marx and Lukács claim that they are “realizing” philosophy, putting theory into practice. How does this differ from “applying” theory to the solution of a practical problem?

2. Marx and Lukács claim that the philosophical tradition is finished, which would seem to mean that they themselves are not philosophers contributing to that tradition. Yet surely the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and History and Class Consciousness are philosophical works. Are they then philosophers after all, and if so how can they elaborate a philosophy on the basis of the proposition that philosophy is dead?³³

3. Marx and Lukács seem to say that only the revolution can “solve” philosophical problems, and yet they propose solutions to these problems before the revolution. Does this not imply that the revolution is after all irrelevant to the solution of philosophical problems?

These questions arise from ambiguities in Western Marxism’s special terminology. When this terminology is understood it becomes clear that Marx and Lukács are not making quite such radical claims as at first appears. The chief difficulty stems from ambiguities in the terms “philosophy” and “theory.” I will therefore begin with this issue.

In its usual meaning “philosophy” refers to the activity of reflecting on the basic assumptions and concepts of a discipline, practice, or culture. In this sense Marx and Lukács are obviously still doing philosophy, and they would not deny it. But for them, “philosophy” refers to a specific historical tradition that develops common themes from the Greeks to Hegel. They regard this tradition as “completed,” and they would deny that they are merely continuing it in their own work. The unity of the tradition consists in certain paradigmatic concepts and methods that run through it from beginning to end, in spite of variations and innovations. It is this paradigm that has been exhausted, not the activity of reflection per se.

The early Marx and Lukács, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida have all proposed general theories of the unity of the philosophical tradition, and on that basis have announced its end. Reflection continues, and indeed it has no original concepts to substitute for the old ones. But the philosopher’s relation to these concepts is no longer immediate, naïve; the “death” of philosophy means no more than that thinkers become conscious of the historical limits of the cultural system on the basis of which these concepts arise.

For Marxists, this consciousness is specifically social. They trace the origin of philosophy’s eternal truths, its constants and paradigms, back to a social world that is in the process of disappearing. There is a particularly clear statement of this position in the Communist Manifesto.

The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.³⁴

If we accept the limitation of “philosophy” to a specific tradition bound up with the history of class society, then we need a wider term with which to refer to the general process of reflection on basic assumptions of which “philosophy” would be an instance. This more general term is “theory.” Now we need to distinguish between two types of theory, a type that is identified with traditional philosophy and a new type in which Marxism engages. This is precisely the distinction between “traditional” and “critical” theory that Horkheimer introduced in a famous essay.³⁵ Like the Frankfurt School, Marx and Lukács argue that traditional theory has been superseded by a new critical theory. They do not suggest that philosophy should be abandoned for practical activity or simply “applied” in the usual sense of the term. The point, then, is not that reflection should cease, but that a new kind of reflection is needed.

This new reflection differs from the old in treating many assumptions the philosophical tradition took for granted as relative to the social situation from which they arise. For example, instead of accepting the eternal necessity of the antinomy of public and private interest, critical theory shows that this antinomy belongs to a specific social world. Critical theory still works with the concepts of public and private interest elaborated in philosophy, but it problematizes the social background against which these two forms of interest appear as antinomial opposites.

The critique of abstract or “pure” theory is to be understood in this context. Once again it is not that Marx and Lukács reject conceptual generality for empirical specificity, but rather that the process of abstraction in which philosophy detaches its concepts from their social basis gives rise to a bias they reject. Philosophy treats its concepts as though they rested on eternal facts of nature or the human condition. But once conceived in this way, the social background of these concepts is occluded and it becomes impossible to imagine a role for human action in resolving the philosophical problems they entail. Marx and Lukács thus do not return to the empirical so much as show the inseparable connection between the most abstract concepts of philosophy and a concrete social context that can be changed.

Let me return now to the example of the antinomy of public and private interest to illustrate how practice can contribute to resolving a theoretical problem. Plato sets up the problem as philosophy has treated it ever since. The lower classes of the Republic pursue private interests and this disqualifies them from rule. Plato’s guardians are qualified to rule by the complete elimination of their private lives; they cannot even know their own children. For the Greeks the abolition of the family is the abolition of the private sphere, hence also private interest. The antinomy is evident here.

It does not disappear in as different a philosopher as Rousseau. He distinguishes the general will from the will of all as public versus private interest. He does not conceive of a special class as the bearer of the general will, but instead projects the antinomy onto the individual. The division in the soul this produces requires “virtue” in the citizen to resist mere greed. Even Mandeville, who claims that “private vices are public benefits,” readily admits that the intention of the individuals in pursuing private interests has nothing to do with the public benefits achieved by a paradoxical reversal. The antinomy survives down to the present. The “original position,” famous from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, accomplishes the same division of public from private interests that Plato demands. Habermas, with his rigid distinction between communicative and strategic uses of language, also perpetuates the antinomy.

For a Marxist the limitation of this type of thinking is clear. The unquestioned assumption that lies behind the antinomy is the permanency of privately owned means of production and the resulting antagonism between the members of society. Public interests then arise alongside private ones insofar as the community has needs that are not identical with the mere summation of these antagonistic private interests. But what if historical conditions arose in which private ownership of means of production could be replaced by the rational administration of both the economy and the state in the interests of the whole community? Of course some forms of personal “private” interest would remain, but these would not stand in an antagonistic relation to the public interest of the community. Instead of dedication to public interest requiring a virtuous dictatorship or general renunciation of private interests, the two would be in harmony, the free development of each supporting the free development of all. The traditional philosophical construction of the issue would no longer apply. Or at least so claims Marxist theory.

The point I want to make is not that such a Marxist reform of society would work—that is another problem—but rather that once one envisages it as a real possibility, social action appears to play a central role in resolving a philosophical problem that has traditionally been treated as purely theoretical in character. It is this new role for social action that is intended by the concept of a “realization” of philosophy. Philosophy is realized in the sense that its old ideal of somehow reconciling public and private interest is finally achieved. This realization involves a radical social change, and not a purely conceptual mediation such as Plato’s utopia, Rousseau’s “virtue,” or Mandeville’s version of the “invisible hand.”

Note that this new type of theoretical reflection need not await the revolution. Reflection can always go beyond the given achievements of its era toward ideal outcomes. This is true of Marx as much as it is of Plato. But what appears as a real possibility to anticipatory thinking differs drastically with time and place. Although Plato could imagine women becoming guardians in his ideal republic, he saw no way to abolish slavery. Aristotle once made the fantastic suggestion that slavery could be abolished if tools could activate themselves without human agency. Marx writes in a time when this idle fantasy of the ancients appears as an imminent possibility. On the basis of this changed historical situation, he imagines a wholly different practical context for philosophy than the one prevailing in all previous class societies. Thus Marxists can propose theoretical solutions to problems the revolution is supposed to solve practically. However, they do generally insist that only by struggling against capitalism has the working class been able to problematize the dominant assumptions of a millennial class culture so that new solutions to old problems can be anticipated.³⁶ Later chapters will explain this connection between theory and practice in more detail.

 

1 Gramsci describes Marxism as “absolute historicism” in his Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 417, 465. See also 445–6. For an account of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, see Thomas Nemeth, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980).

2 Important contributions to the debate are contained in: Ernest Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967). Also interesting are: Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University Nebraska Press, 2005), first published in 1932; Louis Althusser, “Sur le jeune Marx,” in Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1966); Bertell Ollman, Alienation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Istvàn Mézáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. K. McLaughlin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

3 Important discussions of the relation of the Grundrisse to Capital: Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’ (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968); Iring Fetscher, “The Young and the Old Marx,” in Marx’s Socialism, S. Avineri, ed. (New York: Lieber Atherton, 1973); Ernest Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique de Karl Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Most of these authors agree that the early concept of alienation in Marx is further developed in the concept of fetishism in Capital.

4 Mandel, La Formation de la Pensée Economique, 172.

5 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971), xliv (emphasis omitted). Chapter 4 explains this remark in more detail. Throughout the footnotes, History and Class Consciousness will be referred to as “HCC.” All references are to this edition, but Livingstone’s translation has sometimes been modified to approach literalness as nearly as possible.

6 HCC, 144.

7 Ibid., 145. For a further discussion of Lukács’s concept of praxis, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács et Heidegger (Paris: Denoël, 1973), 103–5, and Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

8 Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism,” 102–3. See the original, Herbert Marcuse, “Neue Qnellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen Materialismus,” in Der deutsche Kűnstlerroman: Frühe Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 530–1.

9 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 28.

10 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 275.

11 Ibid., 314.

12 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 155.

13 Ibid., 157. In this, as in many other passages from the early Marx quoted here, italics have been omitted for the sake of clarity.

14 One who sees Marx’s Manuscripts as an ethical work is Eugene Kamenka. See his, Marxism and Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1969). A contrary position is taken by Ollman, Alienation, 47. Cf. Allen Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1972). For an important discussion of the historical debate over Marxism and ethics, see “Y a-ti-lune sociologie marxiste?” in Lucien Goldmann, Recherches Dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

15 Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealistic Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, trans. M. McColgan, ed. R. Livingstone (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 191.

16 Karl Marx, “Letter to Ruge,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 213.

17 Ibid. For more on this conception of the theory–practice relation, see the Appendix.

18 Frederick Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 596–7. As Marcuse puts the same point in Hegelian language, “Every state of existence has to be surpassed; it is something negative, which things, driven by their inner potentialities, desert for another state, which again reveals itself as negative, as limit.” (Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 136).

19 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 50.

20 The term was originally used by early critics of Kant but fell into disuse. For a summary of Habermas’s theory, see the Appendix to Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests.

21 Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (New York: Mentor, 1948), 88.

22 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of the Negative Dialectic (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 26–7. For an application of a similar critical approach to the “sublimation” or “euphemization” of social categories in philosophical abstractions, see Pierre Bourdieu, L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988).

23 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 5.

24 Ibid., 70.

25 Ibid., 58.

26 Ibid., 67. For a useful discussion of the relation of Marx to Feuerbach, see Shlomo Avineri, “The Hegelian Origins of Marx’s Political Thought,” in Marx’s Socialism, 3–4.

27 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 163.

28 Ibid., 158.

29 HCC, 170. Cf. Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” 214–15.

30 I owe many of the ideas in this section to discussion with Gerald Doppelt.

31 Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 142.

32 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, 402.

33 Timothy Hall poses this question in terms of the reflexive problem of “how these theories account for their own self-possibility … The problem faced by metacritical approaches is that the insight into the conditioned character of philosophical critique is itself philosophically question-begging. In taking up a standpoint outside philosophy, the issue of the normative assumptions underpinning this standpoint immediately arises.” Timothy Hall, “The Metacritique of Philosophy: Marx, Lukács & Adorno,” unpublished manuscript, 2.

34 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1979), 29.

35 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

36 Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 109.