Konstantinos Kavoulakos - Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis

Andrew Feenberg

Georg Lukcss famous book History and Class Consciousness has a strange history. Published in 1923, it was briefly the object of furious condemnation and then largely disappeared from view. True, it had a decisive influence on the Western Marxists, especially the first generation of the Frankfurt School, but references to it were so scarce that it was easy to overlook. Forgotten on the shelves of the few libraries that had a copy, History and Class Consciousness seemed lost in the mists of time along with thousands of other obscure books by minor philosophers. Then there was a brief rebound in the 1970s and 80s, stimulated by the campus radicalism of students of European philosophy and intellectual history. Marcuse awakened interest in Western Marxism, and some young scholars followed the traces back to History and Class Consciousness. Articles and a few books appeared, most of them by Marxists who condemned Lukcs even as they brought his work to the attention of the intellectual community after a long neglect. Surprisingly, both the so-called scientific Marxists and most of the young followers of Western Marxism were in agreement in their attacks on the book. Adornos influential critique of Lukcss supposed idealism resonated with Althussers dubious charge of humanism. Finally, in his 1984 Theory of Communicative Action, Habermass systems-theoretic reinterpretation of Lukcsian reification seemed to drive a stake through the heart of this inconvenient revenant.

But the story was not over yet. Another generation has passed and again interest in History and Class Consciousness has revived. Not all of the attention is welcome. The Hungarian government removed the statue of Lukcs from a Budapest park in 2017 and threatens to close the Lukcs archive. In response, a successful conference, called on short notice, signaled international recognition of Lukcs. Apparently, there are still quite a few people interested in his thought. Some of the research on History and Class Consciousness that has appeared recently is of a much higher quality than the earlier critiques. Of particular interest are those analyses that acknowledge the importance of neo-Kantianism.

This was a subject occasionally mentioned by critics but never deeply analyzed. Lukcs was assumed to be a Hegelian, a position seemingly incompatible with Kantianism. It is certainly correct that Lukcs attempted to renew interest in Hegel among Marxists as an alternative to both mechanistic determinism and ethical interpretations of Marx influenced by Kant. However, this book shows that the turn to Hegel was by no means incompatible with a continuing reliance on many themes and concepts drawn from the neo-Kantian background of contemporary philosophy to which Lukcs himself made significant contributions before he became a Marxist.

Unfortunately, the English translation of History and Class Consciousness has made it more difficult than it might be to notice this important influence. It should be said that we owe a debt of gratitude to Rodney Livingstone for providing us with a readable English version of the book, but which, like all translations, contains errors, including mistranslations of certain neo-Kantian technical terms. For example, consider this version of one of the key sentences in the whole book, found on the first page of the essay on reification. After asserting that the commodity is the central structural issue in understanding every aspect of capitalist society, Lukcs adds: Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them (HCC: 83).

For a cursory reading, the sentence seems to make sense, but what is an objective form? Unless this concept is understood, it cannot be clear what Lukcs is trying to say. In fact the German original does make it clear. In place of the translators objective forms, we find the neo-Kantian term Gegenstndlichkeitsformen, forms of objectivity. This term reappears many times in the book and is almost always translated in a way that obscures its meaning. Furthermore, the use of different expressions to translate the same term makes it difficult to grasp the common theoretical idea. But that idea is critically important to the interpretation of History and Class Consciousness!

The term Gegenstndlichkeitsform refers to a particular way of being an object, a particular type of what we might call object-ness. In the neo-Kantian framework, such ways are multiple. The natural sciences have objects of a certain type, quite different from the objects of artistic production, and so on. Many types of objects exist, each of them a coherent cross-section of the infinite complexity of experience. In the sentence I have highlighted, Lukcs is saying that the commodity exemplifies the particular way of being an object that characterizes all objects in bourgeois society and shapes the subjective response to those objects. That he employs a neo-Kantian term is significant because of his many references to the contemporary debates over the relation between forms of objectivity and their content. This is a puzzling aspect of the book. Why does Lukcs pose the problem of the revolution in terms of this relation rather than in the usual way, for example, in terms of the poverty and oppression of the working class?

The answer to this question is developed at length in this book. Here I can only sketch a few relevant points. The form of objectivity is characterized in the first part of Lukcss essay on reification. The objects of bourgeois society come to resemble the objects of the natural sciences in terms of quantification and lawfulness. Lukcs is thus describing the submission of society to rational forms resembling those successfully imposed on nature through experimentation and research. In sum, capitalism strives to create a second nature, built out of the materialsthe contentof the social world, including the human beings who inhabit that world. Technology and new forms of rational organization play a key role in this process. This explains why the philosophical debates over the nature and limits of scientific-technical rationality, which began in the seventeenth century and continue through Kant down to the present, turn out to be relevant to social theory.

This surprising connection becomes visible toward the end of the nineteenth century as the industrialization process reaches a climax. German philosophers struggle to save a remnant of culture from the aggressive advance of business and technology. The neo-Kantians distinguish meaning from factual existence in order to better understand the place and limits of science, art, and history. They introduce the notion that objectivities of different types reflect specific domains of meaning. In this way they attempt to escape the grip of a scientism that reflects the totalization of capitalist industrialism. But the gap between meaning and existence shows up in a problem that already worried Kant: the thing-in-itself.