The Philosophy of Praxis

Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School

Andrew Feenberg

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781781681725
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781685280
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The early Marx called for the "realization of philosophy" through revolution. Revolution thus becomes a critical philosophical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis philosophies of Luk?cs, and the Frankfurt School. These philosophers argue that fundamental philosophical problems are, in reality, social problems abstractly conceived. This argument has two implications: on the one hand, philosophical problems are significant insofar as they reflect real social contradictions; on the other hand, philosophy cannot resolve the problems it identifies because only social revolution can eliminate their causes.
Realizing Philosophy traces the evolution of this argument in the writings of Marx, Luk?cs, Adorno and Marcuse. This reinterpretation of the philosophy of praxis shows its continuing relevance to contemporary discussions in Marxist political theory, continental philosophy and science and technology studies.

CHAPTER ONE

The Philosophy of Praxis

MARX AND LUKÁCS

In this chapter, I discuss the philosophy of the early Marx from a Lukácsian perspective, as background to the exposition of Lukács’s own parallel attempt to resolve the problems first posed by Marx. Considerable differences separate these thinkers, and there is always the risk that in comparing them in this manner the identity of one will be submerged in that of the other. I will do my best to avoid an artificial identification of the two positions where they do actually differ; however, I will argue that in spite of real differences we are dealing here with a specific philosophical doctrine, which I will call “philosophy of praxis,” and which is shared by a number of thinkers.

While writing his notebooks in prison, Gramsci used the phrase “philosophy of praxis” ambiguously to signify Marxism in general and his own cultural interpretation of Marxism. In essence Gramsci argues that all knowledge is situated in a cultural context, itself based on a class-specific worldview. No domain of knowledge and no corresponding domain of being is independent of society. That interpretation, which he called “absolute historicism,” resembles in broad outline the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, Marcuse, and the early work of Marx himself.¹ It seems appropriate therefore to call this whole trend “philosophy of praxis,” not as a euphemism for Marxism in general but rather to distinguish a particular radical philosophical version of Marxism from other interpretations.

The early method of Marx and Lukács is very different from the “scientific socialism” erected later on the basis of historical observation and economic theory. In 1843 and 1844 Marx developed a philosophy of revolution that he seems to have intended as a foundation for economic studies. From 1918 to 1923 Lukács elaborated a philosophy of revolution supplementing Marxist economics. For both the early Marx and Lukács, such central Marxist concepts as the proletariat and socialism were not first developed through empirical research. Instead, as philosophers they set out from a critical discussion of the philosophical tradition in the course of which they deduced the characteristic historical concepts of Marxism. Included in this deduction is the concept of revolution, which plays a pivotal methodological role in their philosophies.

In interpreting Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis, I have been obliged to choose positions in some of the numerous debates over this early work. It will be useful at the outset to make these positions explicit by situating this interpretation with respect to some others. I will not review the enormous literature on the Manuscripts; only two facets of it are relevant here: the debates over the ontological and the normative character of social categories in the Manuscripts.² At issue is more than a matter of textual exegesis. The larger question concerns whether the Manuscripts are a philosophy of praxis, as I am engaged in defining it, or on the contrary, a far less ambitious ethical complement to economic research within the framework of some traditional ontology.

I show the former—that Marx founds a new concept of reason in revolution through an ontological treatment of social categories. This approach brings to the fore all that links the project of the early Marx to that of Lukács. But Marx’s Manuscripts had not yet been published when Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness. In fact, Capital is the primary basis of Lukács’s Marxism rather than Marx’s early work.

Capital is self-consciously unphilosophical in spite of Marx’s prefatory acknowledgment of Hegel’s influence. In it Marx is careful to minimize the use of philosophical terminology and to avoid the exploration of philosophical problems. Yet we now know on the basis of extensive textual evidence just how complex were the philosophical considerations behind Capital. The link between the Manuscripts and the published writings of Marx’s maturity is supplied by his own draft of Capital, the Grundrisse; but the publication of this text was delayed until the beginning of World War II.³ These textual absences, combined with the image Marx wished to project of his work in Capital, seemed to authorize a scientistic interpretation of his later doctrine that Lukács first challenged from a dialectical perspective.

Lukács made the connection between Marxism and philosophy (that is, between Marx and Hegel), primarily through reflection on Marx’s methodology in his economic writings, and only secondarily on the basis of those of Marx’s comments on philosophical matters with which he was acquainted. This is possible because, as Ernest Mandel remarks, “the concept of alienation … is part of the mature Marx’s instrumentarium.”⁴ Lukács was in fact the first to show this, to notice and explain not merely the influence of Hegel on Marx’s early political essays, or on the general Marxian “worldview,” but on the concepts and method of Capital. He reevaluated Marx’s famous “coquetting” with Hegel, and concluded that in that work, “a whole series of categories of central importance and in constant use stem directly from Hegel’s Logic”.⁵

Lukács reconstructed a philosophy of praxis from the methodological traces of Marx’s philosophical position visible in his economic writings. The result of this effort is not identical with the position of either the Manuscripts or the Grundrisse; nevertheless, it is impressive to what extent Lukács’s somewhat speculative extrapolations from Marx’s published work can find support in these unpublished ones. Most important, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis has remarkable structural similarities to that of Marx, notably insofar as Lukács develops an original critique of philosophy paralleling Marx’s own. This convergence has a biographical background. Like Marx, Lukács was deeply schooled in Hegelian dialectics and so when he sought to develop a Marxist philosophy, he returned to the Hegelian doctrine from which Marx set out. It is this link, mediated by the supposedly “scientific” work Capital, which bespeaks an affinity of Marxism for philosophy of praxis. Yet this biographical coincidence does not quite explain the similarity of the transformation undergone by Hegel’s dialectic at their hands.

THE ANTINOMIES

The defining trait of philosophy of praxis is the claim that the “antinomies” of philosophy can only be resolved in history. The concept of “antinomy” employed here is derived from Hegel, for whom it signifies the ever widening gap between subject and object in modern culture. Ever since Descartes distinguished the two substances, philosophy and life have become more and more sharply sundered. Rich and complex theories of the subjective dimension of being explain the meaning of freedom, value, political ideals, while equally powerful and encompassing theories of the objective dimension of being explain the laws of necessity in nature and history. From his earliest to his last works, Hegel saw his task as cataloging the resulting contradictions in modern culture and transcending them in a dialectical conception of being that would take into account both its subjective and objective dimensions.

For Hegel the resolution of the antinomies is a theoretical task. However, he believes that this task can only be carried out under specific historical conditions that happened to be those of his own time and place. Philosophy of praxis begins with a critique of the conservative implications of this resolution of the antinomies and a radicalization of its historical aspect. Both Marx and Lukács argued that because Hegel could not conceive of really radical changes in modern culture, he treated temporary historical conditions such as monarchy and wage labor as though they were eternal necessities. They claimed that the antinomies would be transcended by social revolution and not by philosophical speculation.

Had Marx confined himself to arguing this position in relation to the antinomies of moral and political life, he would have created a new political philosophy. This new philosophy would have been compatible with a traditional ontology and might have been formulated as a “left” variant of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx’s startling innovation was to include all the antinomies in his theory of revolution, those relating to epistemology and ontology as well as the moral and political ones. He thus arrived at the astounding proposition that social change could not only accomplish such goals as reconciling individual and society, moral responsibility and self-interest, but that it could also unite subject and object, thought and being, man and nature.

This proposition has a number of paradoxical corollaries from which we must not shrink in interpreting the early Marx. As we will see in later chapters, Lukács and Marcuse pose a related challenge. When philosophy of praxis contends that human action is philosophically relevant not just in ethics or politics but in all domains, it is asserting a wholly original ontological position. For this philosophy, human action touches being as such, and not simply those special domains we usually conceive as affected by our activities. In somewhat different terms, essentially this same requirement can be formulated as the transcendence of the antinomy of value and fact, “ought” and “is.” For, if human action affects being, then values do not confront a normless and humanly indifferent reality, but rather represent its highest potentialities.

This position is coherent only where being is interpreted through a special sphere in which human being is actually able to transform the objects on which it acts. Then the apparently humanly indifferent spheres, such as nature, can be ontologically subordinated to a sphere within which action affects the substratum of reality, for example, history. Action can only constitute reality where reality cannot be conceived independent of that special sphere.

The attempt to understand being in general through human being is a kind of inverted philosophical anthropology. Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School share this approach with philosophers such as Feuerbach and Heidegger, with this difference: the latter focus on the individual, and so construct speculative philosophies with moralistic overtones. For philosophers of praxis, on the contrary, history is the “paradigmatic order” for the interpretation of being generally.⁶

For this philosophy, “reality” is historical, and history itself is to be understood as in essence an object of human practice. Because the philosophy of praxis conceives being as history and history as the product of human action, it can mutatis mutandis conceive of human action as relevant to the constitution of being. Action takes on a universal significance, going beyond the social world to affect being as such. As Lukács puts it, “We have … made our own history and if we are able to regard the whole of reality [Wirklichkeit] as history (i.e., as our history, for there is no other), we shall have raised ourselves in fact to the position from which reality can be understood as our ‘action.’”⁷

The ontologically significant relation between human being and being in general is now social action because history is constituted in such action. History is ontology and the becoming of the human species is the privileged domain within which the antinomies of philosophy can finally be resolved. In an early essay on Marx’s Manuscripts, Marcuse concludes that “The history of man is at the same time the happening of ‘the whole of nature’; his history is the ‘production and reproduction’ of the whole of nature, the furtherance of objective being through the renewed sublation of its current form.”⁸

Throughout this book, I will be concerned with the implications of this remarkable proposition. These implications can be considered under two main headings. First, there is the dimension of philosophy of praxis concerned with the resolution of social antinomies through the disalienation or dereification of social life. As I have argued above, the ambition of philosophy of praxis goes beyond social theory, for it claims that all objectivity can be disalienated starting out from the disalienation of society. This wider claim indicates a second dimension of the theory concerned with the ontological generalization of the social analysis. This most daring dimension of the philosophy of praxis will be treated through what I call a “metacritical” approach to the history of philosophy. Later chapters will then consider the problematic role of nature and attempt to formulate an original response to the difficulties it poses for an “absolute historicism.” This argument will draw on the resources of philosophy of praxis in what I take to be its final formulation in the late work of Herbert Marcuse. Before turning to a discussion of the concept of metacritique and its relevance to the idea of a “realization” or “end” of philosophy, I would like to consider briefly some of the objections to viewing Marx’s philosophy of praxis as a contribution to ontology.

ONTOLOGY OR HISTORY

With the possible exception of Marcuse, the Frankfurt School contests the interpretation of Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. Alfred Schmidt’s careful study of Marx’s concept of nature attempts to situate the Manuscripts at an equal distance from a materialist ontology and an absolute historicism. Jürgen Habermas also rejects the interpretation of Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. He argues that the early Marx distinguishes between nature as such, and nature as it enters the historical sphere through labor, and which therefore has a social character. Marx’s social theory would have implications only for society in the larger framework of a naturalistic ontology. Within this same tradition, however, it is customary to attack Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as idealistic. Thus the similarities I identify between the early Marx and Lukács are denied.

It is interesting to note that another influential school of Marxist thought, founded by Louis Althusser, makes no such distinction. Rejecting equally the early Marx and Lukács, the Althusserians see in both a romantic refusal of scientific objectivity and the independence of nature. There is thus a certain unwitting convergence of Frankfurt School and Althusserian interpretations in that both emphasize the autonomy of nature by contrast with philosophy of praxis and condemn as idealistic any doctrine that attempts to understand nature through history. I cannot consider these convergent critiques in detail. Here I would like to simply sketch the Frankfurt School’s attempt to “save” the early Marx from historicism.

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas admits that Marx’s text is ambiguous. He claims that the ambiguities have given rise to a “phenomenological strain of Marxism” that overlooks Marx’s naturalism and for which “the category of labor then acquires unawares the meaning of world-constituting life activity in general.”⁹ Although Habermas includes Marcuse in this phenomenological strain, this would only be true of the very early a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the New Edition
• Chapter One: The Philosophy of Praxis
• Chapter Two: The Demands of Reason
• Chapter Three: Metacritique of the Concept of Nature
• Chapter Four: Reification and Rationality
• Chapter Five: The Realization of Philosophy
• Chapter Six: The Controversy Over Subject-Object Identity
• Chapter Seven: From Lukács to the Frankfurt School
• Chapter Eight: The Last Philosophy of Praxis
• Chapter Nine: Philosophy of Praxis: Summary and Significance
• Appendix: The Unity of Theory and Practice
• Index