Hello everyone, this is session 7 of Marx and philosophy, held by Professor Ray Brassier. And I'm going to pass the mic to Ray. Hi. Okay. So, yeah, just hope everyone has today's handouts. Let me know if you don't. So today we're going to focus on Lukács' ratification in the consciousness of the proletariat. But before we do, as a kind of an addendum to last week's session, I just wanted to kind of quickly summarize the significance of Marx's account of surplus
value for his claim that capitalism is internally contradictory, or rather that capitalism is itself what he calls a moving contradiction. Now the interpretation of this claim is controversial, but I just want to try to kind of nail it down because I don't think, although we discussed valorization and the relationship between labor and capital in the valorization process, I think this point was omitted. It's the point that for Marx, capital seeks to reduce socially necessary labor time and
to increase surplus labor time in order to maximize surplus value. In other words, it seeks to extract more and more surplus labor, which is simply unpaid labor from less and less necessary labor or wage labor so in this regard capital is driven to decrease wages and ultimately even the number of wage laborers while striving to maximize its profits okay and the following so here's a quotation from Marx but it's It's from the Grundrisse, not from capital. This is number one on the handout. Marx writes, capital is itself a moving contradiction since it makes an effort to reduce labor time
to the minimum, while at the same time establishing labor time as the sole measurement and source of wealth. Thus, it diminishes labor time in its necessary form in order to increase its surplus form. Therefore, it increasingly establishes surplus labour time as a condition, a question of life and death, for necessary labour time. On the one hand, it calls into life all the forces of science and nature, as well as those of social cooperation and commerce, in order to create a wealth which is relatively independent of the labour time utilised. On the other hand, it attempts to measure in terms of labour time the vast social forces
thus created and imprisons them within the narrow limits that are required in order to retain the value already created as value. Productive forces and social relationships, the two different sides of the development of the social individual, appear to be and are only a means for capital to enable it to to produce from its own cramped base. But in fact, they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation. Now, so this text is often taken to be Marx's statement that because capitalism is intrinsically contradictory because it's basic kind of, it's law of motion entails a fundamental question,
contradiction it will somehow collapse in and of itself it's somehow propelled to a point of collapse but as Heinrich points out Marx seems to have changed his mind about this in capital because there's no equivalent formulation in capital although there is there is a claim that capital in a way is or the claim that capital has a contradictory dynamic is maintained but Marx seems no longer to endorse the claim that this leads to this con that this contradiction is consummated as a systemic collapse so the argument seems to be so the
contradiction in this version the version of Grundris is that the the Valorization process entails maximizing surplus value while minimizing necessary labor time. In other words, getting more and more value from wage labor. But you can only do this if you extract unpaid labour from wage labour. Now, Heinrich suggests that Marx's account of relative surplus value is a way in which
the claim that the contradiction leads to a terminal crisis of capitalism can be avoided. In other words, the distinction between absolute and relative surplus value is the following. surplus value is simply increasing by lengthening the working day. You just make workers work longer hours but you don't pay them for, you don't remunerate the extra hours that they work at the value of their labor itself. That's absolute surplus value. And relative surplus value is increasing productivity is simply increasing the the magnitude of value you know as
embodied in commodities you know generated during the the the hours of wage labor the hours for which the workers are remunerated okay so that's So this is supposed to be an ambiguity, obviously a disagreement between Marxists over whether the contradictory structure of capital and of capital's self-reproduction entails its own destruction or not. And this is obviously important because it goes back to this issue of determinism that's been raised before.
Vulgar Marxism exposes a kind of historical determinism in which capitalism will simply destroy itself. It's simply compelled to destroy itself. and therefore the revolutionary transition to communism is in a way objectively inevitable. But Heinrich insists that this is a misreading and again I think he's right. Marx maintains the claim that capitalism is contradictory but he no longer believes that the contradiction that the moving contradiction is consummated in a final crisis okay a final crisis which you
know entails the transition to communism and this is I guess this is relevant in a way for our discussion of Lukács because Lukács is a Hegelian Marxist I mean, as we'll see, the structure of his argument is completely Hegelian. But it's also interesting because it's the most sophisticated expression of the dialectic of objective and subjective in Marx's account of capital. Basically, if you remember, the basic claim of Hegelianism is the attempt to kind of elaborate
the becoming subject of substance. That's what Hegel, in the phenomenology, this is how Hegel tries to kind of summarize his basic kind of project. Similarly, Lukács sees Marx's account of commodification, of the logic of commodification, as, you know, in a way kind of crystallizing around a contradiction, where commodification can be thought of as kind of objectification, but the process of objectification in a way yields or flips over into a subjectivation. So in other words, for Lukács, the becoming subject of substance is the becoming subject
of the commodity. The commodity he has in mind is wage labor, labor power. The proletariat for Lukács is a self-conscious commodity. So what he's trying to explain in this paper, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, is that the process through which reification crystallizes, yields, reaches a point of extremity which precipitates in a way the subjectivation of labor as a revolutionary self-consciousness. So these are the steps we're going to try to recapitulate.
Now, the problem is that, so, Lukács' essay is very long. It's roughly 150 pages long, and it has three parts. The first part is called The Phenomenon of Reification. The second part is The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought, and the third is The Standpoint of the Proletariat. Now, in order to be able to, I really want to focus on parts two and three, so I'm going to skip over most of part one, although there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. So as to really explain the connection between parts two and three. And the reason, in a way, Hegel, I think, is, Lukács is the most sophisticated exponent of Hegelian Marxism. And this, I think that this essay in particular,
in a way, distills all of 20th century, you know, Marxist critical theory can be, I think, be traced back to this essay. I think the Frankfurt School in particular are, you know, owe an enormous and often unacknowledged debt for this text. So I think understanding it is, you know, incredibly valuable. And I, you know, and I actually think it's the most sophisticated account of the implication of Marx's critique of political economy for classical philosophy, by which Lukács means German idealism, the movement
from Kant to Hegel. So Lukács is explicit in that he thinks that you know, classical philosophy is structured around a set of what he calls antinomies or contradictions, which Hegel tries to overcome, but unsuccessfully, according to Lukács, in a way, so that only Marx's critique of Hegel provides the resources for comprehending the definitive resolution of the what Lukács calls the antinomies of classical philosophy or what he also
calls bourgeois philosophy okay so now okay the handout is long so I'm going to skip over it's got more material than we can possibly go through so I'm just going to kind of yeah try to kind of focus on parts two and three years as quickly as possible but first of all that the relevance you know quote number two on the handout on the first page that this is the kind of the most succinct Lukács' most succinct formulation of what he means by reification reification is in a way the the generalization of commodification and the
subsumption of all social relations under the commodity form so the commodity is becomes a universal social form so he writes in number two on page one the commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of societies of all only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects
and liberate them from servitude to the second nature so created. So, in a way, the logic of commodification and in a way the commodification of every aspect of human existence under capital generates what Lukács calls a second nature. In other words, it conditions, it instills in human beings a set of habits and a set of reflexes, you know, ways of acting, feeling and thinking, which are, you know, which form a second nature.
but a second nature which is entirely kind of suffused by the logic of the commodity for them so we have to you know so the first task is he you know to kind of expose in a way the the structure of the second nature in order to be able to understand how it might be overcome okay so now I'm going to skip to page 3. The quotation number 10 is the penultimate quotation on page 3 and Lukács
writes that what he calls, which is the transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ghostly objectivity or what is also translated as spectral objectivity, cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man. His qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality. They are things which he can own or dispose of like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic qualities into play without their being subjected increasingly
to this ray-fying process." So in other words, it's no longer the products of labor understood as conscious human activity which are commodified and therefore reified. It's even this activity, but also the consciousness engaged in production or labor, which is subject to reification. So consciousness itself becomes reified. Which means that for Lukács, even this reification in a way has some more obvious or more evidence kind of symptoms
and some less evidence symptoms. So the obvious symptoms of reification in a way are the, I guess, the kind of the thought abstractions that come to kind of dominate social consciousness. like you know individuality you know the markets society competition you know the nation etc etc so these are symptoms of the verification of consciousness and and where the level of what you could call at the pre theoretical level there's diffused in kind of everyday ideology but even philosophical thinking is subject to
reification and even the categories of philosophical and scientific thinking are themselves subjected to this process of reification. This is Lukács's more radical claim. So this is why he means it stamps, you know, reification stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man. So here's one, he then begins to kind of to diagnose the, you know, with the symptoms of this reification in terms of the our ability to comprehend the reality of
which we are apart so in other words Lukács at this stage in his argument wants to show that rationality itself and the way in which we make sense of the world conceptually is vitiated by commodification and therefore by reification okay so here's an example in number 11 Lukács writes the capitalist process of rationalization based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality of ruled by chance okay now what he's saying gears up there's a there's an opposition between the
particular and the whole okay and he says that and it was striking about you know the bourgeois understanding of capitalist society in that the laws of bourgeois science seek to identify the laws sought for by bourgeois science or law-like relations between particulars okay so the points about scientific investigation is to you know understand relations between particular objects as manifestations of
laws okay so while the you know particular objects have contingent qualities and characteristics in a way the ways in which those objects interacts are lawful and therefore necessary so there's a distinction between chance and necessity which is correlated to this to the distinction between the whole and the parts okay and what Lucas's argument is that what's striking is that we think we think that the particular features of reality are
governed by law okay we can make sense of the relations of relations between particulars but we can't make sense of the relations between the laws that coordinate these particulars okay so this is to kind of to understand Lukács's argument. So this is a contrast between details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance and Lukács continues on this is still number 11 on at the foot of page 3. It presupposes a society so structured. It produces this kind of distinction, produces and reproduces the structure insofar as it
takes possession of society. This has its foundation already in the nature of speculative calculation, i.e. the economic practice of commodity owners at the stage where the exchange of commodities has become universal. Competition between different owners of commodities would not be feasible if there were an exact rational systematic mode of functioning for the whole of society to correspond to the rationality of isolated phenomena. If a rational calculation is to be possible, the commodity owner must be in possession of the laws regulating every detail of his production. The chances of exploitation, the laws of the market, must likewise be rational in the sense that they must be calculable according to the laws of probability. But they must not be governed by a law in the sense in which laws govern individual phenomena.
They must not, under any circumstances, be rationally organized through and through. This does not mean, of course, that there can be no law governing the whole, but such a law would have to be the unconscious product of the activity of the different commodity owners acting independently of one another, i.e. a law of mutually interacting coincidences rather than one of truly rational organization. And furthermore, such a law must not merely impose itself despite the wishes of individuals. It may not even be fully and adequately knowable. For the complete knowledge of the whole would vouchsafe the Knorr, a monopoly that would amount to the virtual abolition of the capitalist economy."
So Lukács is pointing out to a kind of an intrigue, a very kind of a symptomatic paradox in capitalist consciousness and the consciousness of the capitalist himself. In other words, the capitalist wants to know and to understand, wants to be able to kind of, in order to be able to calculate, you need to know how particular phenomena are subject to knowable laws okay you want to understand the kind of the physical or economic dynamics that's you know that manifest themselves in the interactions of particular phenomena
But at the same time, this understanding of this need to know laws only pertains to the level of particular phenomena, but not to the totality or to the whole of such phenomena. So in other words, the capitalist wants to be able to understand relations or connections between different kind of commodity markets or different markets or different sectors of production and circulation, etc., etc. But the capitalist economy as such is supposed to be mysteriously immune to conceptual comprehension. In other words, that there is no, so that
what Lukács is saying is that there's a ratio or a reason that coordinates, you know, particular phenomena in the capitalist social reality, but there can be no ratio or reason for the operations of the whole, you know, the economy as a whole. And if you think about it, and already this is Lukács's writing in 1920, but if you think about free market ideology as the kind of the ideological kind of alibi for capitalist competition. It's striking that the antipathy to totality of retotalization, the claim that
while individual phenomena may be rationally comprehensible, any attempt to grasp a kind of a phenomenal totality or totality of objects is impossible in principle is you know constantly kind of you know insisted upon or reiterated there's also claimed that rationality only can only pertain to particulars but never to universals as such it only pertains at the level of the individual or a series of individuals but never to a kind of a whole or a totality so already this is what Lukács has diagnosed in this in
you know capitalist consciousness and then he continues this is why you know This is, you know, every crisis, you know, becomes an anomaly. In other words, what's striking is that the consciousness that insists on the lawfulness of every particular phenomenon also insists on the lawlessness or on the anomalousness of the functioning of the totality of phenomena. So this is why every crisis is always a mysterious anomaly. There's no kind of sufficient reason for a crisis. So he writes in number 12, it's the very success with which economy is totally rationalized and transformed into an abstract and mathematically oriented system of formal laws creates the methodological barrier to understanding the phenomenon of crisis.
In moments of crisis, the causative existence of the things that lead their lives beyond the purview of economics, as misunderstood and neglected things in themselves, or as use values, suddenly becomes a decisive factor. Or suddenly, that is for reified rational thought. Or rather, these laws fail to function, and the reified mind is unable to perceive a pattern in this chaos. so from this so a second kind of manifestation of this syndrome is what is the rational form and the rational content of law every law has a rational form but the content is irrational and Lukács takes jurisprudence as an example here I'm not going to read the whole quote because it's
too long but I'll just read the passage in bold on page 5. So the cohesion of these laws is purely formal. What they express, the content of legal institutions, is never of a legal character but always political and economic. Hence law is regarded as a formal calculus with the aid of which legal consequences of particular actions can be determined. However, this view transforms the process by which law comes into being and passes away into something as incomprehensible to the jurist as crisis had been to the political economist. So once again, there's an opposition between form and content.
So for bourgeois consciousness, the rationality, the insistence upon the rationality of form, lawful form goes hand in hand with an insistence on the irrationality or the contingency of the content, of the empirical content. And Lukács traces this dichotomy between rational form and irrational content to Kantian philosophy. We need to take a few more steps before we can understand how he
does this. Okay, so he writes in... moving now to part two. This is the Antinomies of bourgeois philosophy okay so this is on if we just skip to number 15 okay reification is a presupposition of critique so Lukács's claim is that Kant's critique of pure reason and Kant's in a way kind of articulation of the canon of rationality of non metaphysical or self-conscious
rationality is itself conditioned by rayification. Okay. So he writes in 15, Modern critical philosophy springs from the rayified structure of consciousness. And the specific problems of this philosophy are distinguishable from the problematics of previous philosophy by the fact that they are rooted in this structure. Okay. So, he continues, This is, there's a, one symptomatic manifestation of this, the way in which critical philosophy or critical self-consciousness is itself conditioned by reification is the dichotomy between existence and understanding.
In other words, understanding, conceptual comprehension, cannot account for certain brute facts or certain existential data. And Lukács writes, the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return. Sorry, I need to read the whole quote. We wish only to sketch the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy, a.e. Kant's critical philosophy, and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return by the road of the
understanding. However, the character of this existence is revealed at least as clearly by what philosophy does not find problematic as by what it does. So he's going to try to show how the way in which Kant in a way exposes the limitations of what he calls skeptical empiricism and dogmatic rationalism is in a way conditioned by the certain facts of social existence, okay? And this social existence conditions
Kant's formulation of the problematic of the critique of reason. So we can continue. So first of all, there's a correlation. So Kant's critical rationality is contrasted to what he calls dogmatic rationality. Dogmatic rationalism or metaphysical rationalism believes that it can identify the sufficient reason for the being of every entity. and it also believes that it has recourse to intellectual intuition
in being able to apprehend the reason for why things are thus and so. Now, so, dogmatic rationalism, what is dogmatic rationalism? Dogmatic rationalism is a priori knowledge of the structure of substance, or the structure of being qua being. And dogmatic rationalism believes that it can, in a way, deduce the properties and characteristics of substance through reason alone. Now Kant's critique of dogmatic rationalism proceeds by showing how we can't, he distinguishes between concepts and intuitions, between the understanding and sensibility.
so that for for Kant we have to concepts only pertain to objects insofar as they appear to us or insofar as they affect us through our sensibility and not as they are in themselves so this is why for Kant the critique of pure reason or reasons in a way reflection upon its own conditions of possibility yields the result that we can only know things in so far as they appear to us in space and time and not as you know they might be independently of our being spatial
spatial-temperally connected to them. So this means that Kant, what Kant is doing in a way is criticizing the claim that reality has an intelligible form, that reality has a kind of a pre-established harmony between the structure of reality and the structure of mind. Or rather, between the form of substance, the form of being, and the form of thinking.
And it's this kind of, in a way, this is the fundamental postulate of dogmatic rationalism. The idea is that reality has an intelligible structure because the form of thinking and the form of being are somehow kind of necessarily correlated. So, this means, therefore, that for Kant, the forms that reason can discern in reality are legislated by the understanding. okay so if you remember you know in Kant the understanding is you know the
faculty of concepts it's a faculty of judgments okay every judgment kind of you know attributes concept to an object but judgments themselves are coordinated as systems of laws. So Kant's claim is that Newtonian physics, for example, is the systematic kind of coordination of sensible reality under you know, under a conceptual structure which is legislated by the understanding.
So in other words, it's a condition of our representation of the world that the world be intelligible. So therefore, the structure that the world has reflects the structure of the understanding And it assumes a law-like form because lawfulness, or the identification of law, is the kind of the paradigmatic way in which the understanding operates. However, the understanding of the ability to legislate laws in a way to impose laws upon
appearances also presupposes that something is given to it which is itself not already conceptually structured and coordinated and that is obviously sensible intuition or what Kant calls the manifold of sense so for Kant it's the manifold of sense okay which is you know intuited and then which is synthesized first into you know recognizable into recognizable and representable objects and then these objects are then synthesized by the understanding into laws but Lukács says
that what's striking here so there's a form content realism so the Kantianism and Kant's critical rationalism necessities a dualism of form and content where and the paradox is that the understanding can understand why the source of the form is rational because it comes from the understanding itself but the source of the content is irrational because it's purely sensible and it It doesn't have the rational conceptual structure that is generated by the understanding.
So let's read number 17. Okay, so there's a necessary correlation between the rational and the irrational. A rational form can only pertain to an irrational content in Kant's critical rationalism. So Lukács writes, Thus here too it will not do to regard rationalism as something abstract and formal, and so to turn it into a superhistorical principle inherent in the nature of human thought. we perceive rather that the question of whether a form is to be treated as a universal category or merely as a way of organizing precisely delimited partial systems is essentially a
qualitative problem. Okay. The categories, Kant's categories, okay, are universal forms of judgment, okay, and they have a universality that is valid only for possible experience. So Kant's relativization of knowledge, the claim that we can only know appearances, not things in themselves, entails that we don't have the reason to have a God's eye view or an absolute perspective on the totality of phenomena.
One consequence of Kant's critical demarcation of phenomena and things in themselves is that it's a condition of our knowing phenomena that we can only know phenomena in space and time but because our intuition of space and time is sensible and not intelligible or rational we don't know why it is that you know space and time has this particular structure for us and can't leave open the possibility that there you know there might be creatures with
other forms of intuition you know he says that there might know creatures you know I mean it's it's ambiguous whether he means kind of supernatural creatures such as angels or extraterrestrial creatures. But he leaves open the claim that creatures with other forms of intuition would know the world in a fundamentally different way so that the forms that they deploy, the forms of appearance of empirical objects, might be different. and therefore the laws coordinating these objects might be different.
So this means that for Kant there's a problem that the universality of the forms is transcendently delimited by the bounds of possible experience so that the forms, the conceptual forms that are necessary in order for us to know appearances are universally valid, but only for creatures endowed with the same forms of intuition. So that means that it's not possible to make, you know, to insist on their absolute universality, their unconditional universality. and that means that there's a problem about knowing about what it means that we can't
claim to know the totality of everything that is okay can't is clear that we can know there's no limits in the domain of appearances to what can be known. Knowledge can progress forever. Knowledge of appearance is potentially interminable and limitless, but there is no knowledge of the different forms of appearances okay this is why there's no knowledge of the metaphysical totality of different forms of appearances so
this is why this is what Lukács is getting at here the contrast between Partial systems and total systems or complete systems of forms is generated by Kant's transcendental distinction between the thing in itself and the appearance. The thing in itself is both the ultimate source of appearance, it's the source of the manifold of sense that is intuited before being, you know, synthesized, conceptually synthesized by the understanding.
But it's also the thing in itself also reappears at the level of the totality of the categories the totality of the concepts that we use to know appearances because as can famously points on his you know the transcendental dialectic God the self in the world these are not we know these are not actually concepts they're regulative ideals which mean that it's a mistake to reify them and to think that they correspond to objects or substantial forms so God the self in the
world or in a way the kind of the horizons the necessary horizons for the integration of all the form of all the conceptual forms deployed by the understanding but they are not themselves objects of knowledge okay and And that means that we can't, in other words, that knowledge, reason is compelled to integrate its knowledge. And it's compelled to integrate, in a way, the laws of nature that it identifies.
but it can never identify an absolute form or an absolute conceptual totality that would provide a rational basis for the connections between the different domains of laws. So what Kant is saying is that the thing in itself both limits our ability, it limits the understanding, because the understanding can only know things in so far as they appear,
but it also limits reason because the difference between sensible or qualitative differences between different kinds of things in themselves can never be conceptually comprehended by reason itself. So what this means concretely is that science progresses by identifying a domain of physical laws, okay? And then there's a domain of biological laws, and then a domain of chemical, psychological, social laws. For every reason it's compelled to identify laws for every empirical object domain that it investigates.
But when it comes to understanding, when it comes to identifying the reason for the difference between, let's say, the physical and the biological, or the biological and the psychological, no such law is apprehensible or identifiable. So in other words, there is no law of laws. There's no law that allows you to synthesize the laws that govern particular empirical object domains. So this is why for Kant, reason is both, so Kant's formalization of rationality means that reason is applicable to everything.
but it's only applicable to everything by circumscribing an empirical object domain, and therefore by knowing things insofar as they appear to us, to creatures with nervous systems like ourselves. But what Kant says is unknowable is the difference between the physical and the biological. The difference between a physical system and a biological system remains unknowable. So this is the paradox in a way that Lukács is diagnosing.
So this allows us to move on to the next couple of sections. I'm going to put a light on. So we have this, so the thing in itself is both, you know, pertains, Kant's concept of the thing itself, the thing in itself is the unknowable material substratum of appearances, it's the ultimate source of, you know, sensible content, but it's also in a way the whole, the unknowable whole that would connect all the different domains of appearance.
So Lukasz writes in 18, there is firstly the problem of matter in the logical technical sense, a problem of the content of those forms with the aid of which we know and are able to know the world because we have created it ourselves. And secondly, there is a problem of the whole and of the ultimate substance of knowledge, which is the problem of those ultimate objects of knowledge, which are needed to round off the partial systems into a totality, a system of the perfectly understood world. The ultimate objects of knowledge are God, the self, and the world. But that's precisely what we can never know for Kant. Kant says, he says, it's a mistake to think of them as objects in the first place. What they really are is regulative ideals for integrating knowledge.
But in a way, Kant's, the point of Kant's is that the integration of empirical knowledge is necessarily interminable because there is no, you know, there is no noble conceptual form that would allow you in a way to kind of to complete or to totalize the process of integration. There's no noble God, there's no noble self, there's no noble world, in terms of which the relationship between all these partial empirical systems could be cohesively subsumed.
So this is the paradox of Kant's, of what Lukács calls formal rationality. So Kant desubstantializes rationality by decoupling, by distinguishing between judgment and intuition. So he says because there's no intellectual intuition, there's no intuition of substance. So in other words, all that we can know are, in a way, the forms and the relations between objects, but we can never understand the relationship between form and content.
Or we can never know the ultimate source of the connection between the matter and the content. So then this generates, in a way, a residue of irrationality. So this form of rationalism continuously regenerates an irrational surplus. So in 19, Lukács writes, So the question then becomes, Are the empirical facts to be taken as given, or can this givenness be dissolved further into rational forms? Can it be conceived as the product of our reason? The point is that for every system of empirical facts, we have critical rationality shows
how nothing is ever absolutely given, everything is synthesized and produced in a way by reason. But in a way, this rationalization of appearances always generates an irrational surplus because the source of the empirical is this unknowable, sensible substratum. In other words, the empirical, every empirical fact has an unknowable substratum, which is the thing in itself. And this is precisely, so in other words, the givenness of, the thing in itself is the ultimate source of givenness, which can never be rationalized.
And it's the irrational condition of all subsequent rationalization. In order for anything to be empirically knowable, we must posit something that is empirically unknowable, which is a thing in itself. And this then manifests itself, if we move on to 20 then, so this is why the thing in itself has two distinct delimiting functions. So this is, Lukasz writes, the two quite distinctly limiting functions of the thing in itself, the impossibility of apprehending the whole with the aid of the conceptual framework of the rational partial systems and the irrationality of the contents of the individual concepts are but two sides of the one problem.
so Lucas is saying that in a way that the the the irrationality of the irrational surplus that is constantly regenerated by formal rationality or Kantian rationality has you know manifested itself at the at the level of you know relationship between individual concepts and individual objects but also at the level of you know the relationships between systems of concepts but both these you know both the you know the problem at the level of individuality and the problem at the level of totality are how to discover
common route. So this is why in a way the kind of the systematicity of Kant's formal rationality and in a way the systematicity which compels you know empirical knowledge or compels kind of post you know which provides the paradigm for empirical investigation after Kant is contradictory. So this is number 21. This is quite an important quotation. The attempt to universalize rationalism necessarily issues in the demand for a system, but at the same time as soon as one reflects upon the condition in which a universal system is
possible, as soon as the question of the system is consciously posed, it is seen that such a demand is incapable of fulfillment. For a system in the sense given to it by rationalism, and any other system would be self-contradictory, can bear no meaning other than that of a coordination, or rather a supra and subordination of the various partial systems of forms, and within these of the individual forms. The connections between them must always be thought of as necessary, visible in or created by the forms themselves, or at least by the principle according to which forms are constructed. Then this is why there is an interdependence of rational form and rational context.
But Lukáš, there is no way of... you can't eliminate... any time to eliminate this irrational surplus. Either the level of content or the level of form represents a dogmetic regression. he writes number 22 says either the rational content is wholly integrated into conceptual system i.e. this is to be so constructed that it can be coherently applied to everything as if there were no irrational content or actuality and in this event thought regresses to the level of a naive dogmatic
rationalism somehow it regards the mere actuality of the rational contents of of the concepts as non-existent. This metaphysics may also conceal its real nature behind the formula that these contents are irrelevant to knowledge. Alternatively, we are forced to concede that actuality or content, matter, reaches right into the form, the structures of the forms and their interrelations, and thus into the structure of the system itself. And in that case, the system must be abandoned as system. So what Lukács is saying is that the price of Kantianism is this kind of necessary direction
of conceptual form and empirical content, or of the intelligible and sensible. So in other words, that empirical knowledge is possible, and in fact, we can apply, we can conceptualize any empirical domain, and then systematize the conceptualization of that empirical domain, but only at the price of never being able to understand why this empirical domain is different from some other empirical domain, okay, and why these, you know, why the sensible qualities of empirical objects are subsumed by these particular concepts
and not others. so the alternative is to kind of find a way of reconnecting is to kind of form and content or matter and form and to show how they are interdependent and this is obviously a completely Hegelian argument so Lukács here is simply kind of reiterating a Hegelian critique of Kant okay so So let's move on. So here, number 24 is Lukács' crispest formulation of what he calls the Antimones of Bourgeois philosophy.
Now, bourgeois philosophy for him simply means Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, because he thinks that this is the most sophisticated, in a way, conceptual expression of, in a way, the intelligible structure of a capitalist society. So he writes number 24, on the one hand, bourgeois society acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. While on the other hand, it loses, likewise progressively, the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole.
And with that, it loses its own qualification for leadership. Again, this means that the details of social existence, like any other empirical detail, are comprehensible and can be kind of subjected to laws or understood in their law-like correlations. But the price of this is a kind of a debility at the level of the intellectual comprehension of society as a whole. So that the more you understand particular aspects of social existence, the less you're
able to understand the nature of social existence as a whole. So he concludes, and this is the second passage in bold in 24, nevertheless, classical philosophy is able to think the deepest and most fundamental problems of the development of bourgeois society through to the very end. On the plane of philosophy, it's able in thought to complete the evolution of class. and in thought it is able to take all the paradoxes of its position to the point where the necessity of going beyond this historical stage in mankind's development can at least be seen as a problem.
So it's important to see, this is a very sophisticated critique of bourgeois philosophy. But Lukács is not simply saying that Kant and post-Kantan philosophy is simply ideology. It's simply a kind of a series of ideological symptoms. That's not what he's saying. He's saying that its value, in a way it's kind of, you know, paradigmatic value for the, you know, for radicalizing the critique of political economy lies in the way in which it gives the most profound and systematic conceptual, you know, articulation to the fundamental
to the fundamental contradictions in a way that structure class society. So in a way, it's not just then that bourgeois philosophy is a symptom, because in a way it's an attempt at understanding which fails, but whose failure is enormously kind of instructive. In other words, you need to understand how bourgeois philosophy fails to grasp the reality of which it's a part, and this failure manifests itself in these antimonies or contradictions,
because this is, in a way, by understanding this, this allows you to understand the relationship between thought and reality, or between theory and practice more clearly than would any kind of attempt to simply dismiss this philosophy as no more than an ideological symptom. So in a way, what bourgeois philosophy renders intelligible is the limits of intelligibility. and the limits of intelligibility are a symptom of the contradiction, the contradictions that vitiate capitalist society.
This is Lukács' argument. So this is why he said, in 25, he continues, so in a way, the contradictions into which Boudreaux philosophy runs are a consequence of, in a way, the disavowed dogmatic assumption that the rational, formalistic mode of cognition is the only possible way of apprehending reality. Or to put it in its most critical form, the only possible way for us, in contrast to the facts which are simply given an alien to us. Now, again, it's important not to misunderstand Lukács' claim here.
He is not saying, therefore, that bourgeois philosophy dogmatically assumes that rational formalistic cognition is the only way of apprehending reality, and therefore that there is some non-conceptual or some non-rational way of grasping that reality. What Lukács is proposing is an alternative rationality, a reason which is no longer vitiated by the opposition of form and content. He's not saying that the problem with bourgeois philosophy is not that it's too rational, but that it's not rational enough.
It hasn't pushed reason to the point where reason understands its intrinsic conditioning by the extra rational. But this conditioning cannot be intuited. So there's no question of regressing or invoking some kind of intuition here, or some kind of super rational form of cognition. And it's important to emphasize this because Lukács' account is, I mean, I think he's a Hegelian who, because of the time in which he was writing, in a way, he kind of, as Marx puts it, you know, coquettes or flirts with strains of kind of irrationalism that were
very prevalent when he was writing in the wake of the aftermath of the First World War. In a way, the neo-Kantian philosophies that had, you know, dominated and which Lukács himself had been, you know, formed are on the wane and they're being subjected to kind of criticisms by various forms of vitalism or life philosophy or historicism and so that there's a kind of a premium on lived experience and intuition, spontaneity, etc. etc. And some of the things that Lukács says about what's wrong with ratification can easily be aligned with these kind of critiques.
However, I think that the root of Lukács' argument, the root of Lukács' critique of what he calls merely formal rationalism is completely Hegelian. So in other words, he's simply calling for a superior or a more comprehensive kind of conceptual rationality and not simply kind of a relinquishment of rationality. And in a way what he's saying is actually that Marx's own, you know, that the value of Marx's critique of Hegel is to expose the residual dogmatism, you know, the residual dogmatism and empiricism in Hegel's own rationalism.
So that Marxism is the way to complete the post-Kantian rationalism by reuniting it with practice. So this is why then there's a practical interdependence of form and content. So Lukács writes in number 26, when the question is formulated more concretely it turns out that the essence of praxis consists in annulling that indifference of form towards content that we found in the problem of the thing in itself thus praxis can only be really established as a philosophical principle at the same time if at the same time a conception of form can be found whose basis and validity no
longer rest on that pure rationality and that freedom from every definition of content insofar as a principle of practice is a prescription for changing reality it must be tailored to the concrete material substratum of action if it is to impinge upon it to any effect so okay so here's this is a classical kind of you know kind of Marxian formulation that the you know the antimonies of bourgeois or philosophical antimonies can only be practically superseded okay you know conceptual contradictions can only be
practically overcome or dissolved. So this is why it's only, you know, in a way, insofar as the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy are the most acute, you know, conceptual formulations of the contradictions that are intrinsic to, you capitalist class society, then only the transformation of that society can satisfactorily resolve these conceptual antinomies. That's the basic claim. So the value of bourgeois philosophy is to show that the fundamental
antagonisms or antagonists that structure human existence, that seem to structure human existence, and most fundamentally the kind of the, if you're a Kantian, you know, the abyss, you know, the divide between the is and the ought or between, you know, fact and norm, that this fundamental kind of division It's not a kind of an eternal and immutable, you know, factum of the human condition, but rather itself a symptom of class society. So, Lukács' claim is that in a way you need, you know, the virtue of bourgeois philosophy
is that it allows us to understand how, you know, what these contradictions ultimately are and what needs to be done in order to overcome them, how radical the transformation must be in order to overcome them. And okay, so just skipping now to the the The antimony of vulturism, of freedom and necessity, in a way, this is the paradigmatic manifestation of this antimony. This is, as you know, on the one hand, for Kant, you've got a domain, a realm of appearances, which is exhaustively subsumed by law, and in a way, which is kind of as a mechanical structure.
every event has a cause, so everything in the domain of phenomena is causally determined, and yet in order for us to be free, we have to assume that there's a kind of, there's a register of determination which transcends that of physical, mechanical determination. But this is precisely the kind of mode of determination that remains unknowable. It's the self-determination, it's reasons self-determination in accordance with the moral law, the categorical imperative.
imperative, but for Kant, even if this is, you know, we can formulate, you know, the, We can formulate a categorical imperative and give it some kind of intelligible structure. We can never know whether or not it has been effectively realised. We can know what the moral law would be, but we can never know whether or not we have successfully acted in accordance with it.
why we have to believe that we're free without knowing whether we actually are free. And this actually has a profound consequence because it means that this is why overcoming the antimony of fact and norm or the direction of of is and ought, this becomes an interminable task for Kant. This is why, in a way, injustice can never be definitively eradicated because there's a kind of a transcendental mismatch between the requirements, the rational requirements of freedom,
you know, what must be if we are able to kind of, you know, to be self-determining rational agents and the way in which the world is actually organized. And this is, you know, the, in way the the drama of finitude for canteenism is that the world can never be wholly amenable to the satisfaction of the demands of reason and right and this is why you know you know the doing good or
or the realization of the ought, of what ought to be, is an infinite task. It's endless. So this is why... So in order to over... So what Lukács has done now is to say that, obviously Hegel had given a critique of this, But Hegel, in a way, part of Hegel's solution involves reaffirming the kind of the priority of what he calls sytlichite over moralite, what he calls a kind of ethics over law.
So for Hegel, in a way, human beings can realize their freedom by living in some kind of organically coordinated social form. The problem is, and here Marx's critique of Hegel, once again the problem is that if you make freedom dependent upon a kind of a natural organic form or the integration of the individual
into a kind of a cohesive kind of social organism, you, while you don't deprive yourself of the resources you need to be able to explain how these kind of organic totalities also generate, you know, systematic, also have pathological structures. They generate fundamental inequalities and modes of domination, which in a way are incompatible with the most radical understanding of human freedom.
Okay. It's six. Okay. It's, I think we've been going for about an hour and a half. Shall we have a break at this point before continuing? Yes. Does that sound okay? Okay. Okay. Well, let's have a five minute break and then we'll try to get to the end of the handouts. Okay.
Okay. Right. Let's try and... So now, okay, so, Lukács' critique of bourgeois philosophy is that, okay, it merely registers, it's structured around a set of antimonies which are themselves, in a way, they're the conceptual symptoms of material, real socioeconomic contradictions, okay? and he says that we must try to find a way of reconnecting form and content
in order to overcome these antibodies well we know that there's you know they can be overcome in practice but But they can only be overcome in practice if practice understands its own conditions of possibility, which for Lukács means understanding its historical conditions. So here he proposes that in a way history is the source that generates both the relation
and the distinction between form and context. So now if we move on to page 11. So he proposes that both form and content can only be properly understood as historically generated. So he writes in 33, if the genesis of form and content, in a sense given to it in the classical philosophy, is to be attained, it is necessary to create a basis for it in the logic of contents which change. It's only in history, in the historical process, in the uninterrupted outpouring of what is qualitatively knew that the requisite paradigmatic order can be found in the realm of things.
So in other words, there can be a static or a temporal genesis of form and content that can only be a temporal historical genesis. And then he continues, only the historical process truly eliminates the actual autonomy of the objects and the concepts of objects and the concepts of objects with the resulting rigidity. By compelling the knowledge which ostensibly does these factors justice to construct its conceptual system upon content and upon what is qualitatively unique and new in the phenomena, it forces either historical process, forces it at the same time to refuse
to allow any of these elements to remain at the level of mere concrete uniqueness. Instead of concrete totality of the historical world, the concrete and total historical process is the only point of view from which understanding becomes possible. And here, you know, he continues, this is also the problem, the problem of the historical genesis of form and content is also the question of the genesis of the subject of the agent of this genesis in other words if history is a process okay it's a process that has a subject okay
and here he is hegelian once again you know and the will understanding you know well this is an an ambiguous kind of, you know, what it means to be a Hegelian here is ambiguous, but history is a process with a subject, you know, not a process without a subject, as Althusser will insist, and the subject is usually taken to be geist or spirit or self-consciousness. and Lukács wants to kind of find a materialist alternative to Hegel's kind of characterization of self-consciousness as a subject of history. So in 35 he writes,
For the unity of subject and object, of thought and existence, which the action undertook to prove and to exhibit, finds both its fulfillment and its substratum in the unity of the genesis of the determinants of thought and of the history of the evolution of reality. But to comprehend this unity, it is necessary both to discover the site from which to resolve all these problems and also to exhibit concretely the we, which is the subject of history, that we whose action is in fact history. Okay, so we need to unpack this a little bit. So the unity of subject and object, or thought
and existence, it's also the unity of form and content, or the unity of the intelligible and the sensible. In a way he says that bourgeois philosophy in a way articulates subject and objects or form and content but it cannot identify their common roots okay in fact it criticized you know you know the dogmatic rationalism which simply assumes that you know thought and being or subject and object have a common root but for dogmatic rationalism that common root is God you know, Kant's whole argument in a nutshell is that, you know, God is the
problem for both, you know, dogmatic rationalism and skeptical empiricism. The dogmatic rationalist assumes that, you know, God is, you know, with a the common source for the reality of thought and the reality of substance, but it's also God that guarantees in a way the correlation or the correspondence between knowledge and being. It's because God is the source, or God endows his creatures with rational intuition, which is the very thing that trance is challenging.
Similarly, if you're a skeptical empiricist, it's because you assume that there is, as humans, this, you know, there are, you know, things have secret powers, you know, there, you know, we, you know, we apprehend the appearances of things, but we can only know the kind of the sensible properties and characteristics of things. We can never know the underlying source of these characteristics, and therefore we can never know the secret powers of objects, which is to say that they're substantial reality, nor can we know the laws that govern the relationships amongst these objects. But both, but here he also assumes that such secret powers,
or he seems to assume that if anything, that to be a substance is to be endowed with these secret powers. So there's still a kind of a theological assumption that underwrites in a way the kind of, the skeptical rejection of absolute knowledge. just as it underwrites the kind of dogmatic assumption of absolute knowledge. So Kant wants to kind of demolish, Kant's kind of refutation of the proofs of God's existence, it disqualifies dogmatic rationalism. can't assume we have no access to the common source of thought and existence, or subject
and object. And then his problem is to find an alternative way of explaining the possibility of knowledge in the absence of knowledge of this ultimate source. But the price is this kind of definitive you know this unbridgeable divide between you know conceptual form and sensible content so now Lukács follows you know Hegel in identifying saying that history is the is both the generator of conceptual form and the generator of sensible content. So history is a process, but the problem is
where Hegel thought that self-consciousness or Geist is the ultimate subject of history. You know, Lukács wants to say that it's the proletariat, it's human laborers who are ultimately the agents of history. So he accuses Eden Hegel of reifying history. And this reification is, you know, exemplified in Hegel's kind of appeal to the world spirits. okay the world spirits is for lucas is a reification of history because um the operations
or the you know the activities of the world spirits unfold behind the back of human agents so that every human deed becomes you know transcendent to the doer and the freedom you you know, won by human beings is actually kind of, you know, a manifestation of the cunning of reason. Human, you know, human practical self-determination turns out to be determined by, you know, the unfolding of the world spirits or geist. Okay. So, and here Lukács develops an interesting critique of Hegel.
He writes, okay, this is in the segments in bold from paragraph 37, but they're on page 12. Lukács writes, stages in history for Hegel can only be understood and evaluated as stages from a standpoint already achieved by a reason that has discovered itself. And at this point, Hegel's philosophy is driven inexorably into the arms of mythology. Having failed to discover the identical subject-object in history, it was forced to go out beyond history and there to establish the empire of reason, which has discovered itself. From that vantage point, it became possible to understand history as a mere stage and its evolution in terms of the ruse of reason.
History is not able to form the living body of the total system. It becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the absolute spirit, in our religion and philosophy. So, Lukas rejoined it to Hegel. Here is simply that for Hegel, in Hegel's absolute idealism, History is merely, in a way, a form of manifestation of absolute spirit. So, in a way, spirit externalizes itself in human history. Or rather, actually, to be more precise, the absolute concept externalizes itself in human history.
And this externalization assumes the form of spirit or geist. but spirit itself is only an aspect of what Hegel calls the notion or the concept, which is itself a kind of, according to I think a dubious interpretation of Hegel that Lukács is here taking for granted, you know, the absolute is timeless or eternal. So history only plays a kind of an ancillary role in the system here. And then, you know, so Lukács kind of, you know, develops three objections to this. First is that history's relation to reason appears to be accidental.
So in other words, so this is Lukács in 38. So when, where and in what forms such self-reproductions of reason make their appearance as philosophy is accidental, Hegel observes in the passage cited earlier concerning the needs of philosophy. But in the absence of necessity, history relapses into their irrational dependence on the given which it had just overcome. This is his first objection. the understanding, the relationship between reason and history, the phases, the historical
phases through which reason unfolds are not intrinsic to reason itself. So reason in a way kind of manifests itself in history but is not intrinsically historical according to Lukács. So that's the first so in a way because of the exterior of reason in history then history relapses into the rational dependence on the given. The relationship between reason and history is extrinsic and accidental, not intrinsic and necessary, according to Lukács. The second objection is, Lukács writes, the
unclarified relation between absolute spirit and history forces Hegel to the assumption, scarcely comprehensible in view of his method, that history has an end in his own day and his own system of philosophy, the consummation and the truth of all his predecessors are to be found. So this is the claim that Hegel is committed to the end of history thesis. Again, another dubious, I think another very dubious attribution, but it's the kind of, it was a very kind of, the common kind of objection to Hegel when Lukács is writing. Hegel thinks that the attainment of absolute knowing entails a termination of reasons,
historical, evolution and unfolding. I think this is an implausible reading of Hegel, but okay, this is one that Lukács wants to insist upon. And the third objection is that Genesis detached from history passes through its own development from logic through nature to spirit. But as the historicity of all categories and their movements intrudes decisively into the dialectical method, and as dialectical Genesis and history necessarily belong together objectively and only go their separate ways because classical philosophy was unable to complete its program, process, he means the process reasons developments from logic through nature to
spirits, okay, this process which had been designed to be super historical, you know, in Hegel, inevitably exhibits a historical structure at every point. So, In a way, so, Lukács, you know, criticizes Hegel, in a way, for both, you know, for reifying history, for turning, you know, history into, for attributing to history a kind of a superhuman agency, whose source is ultimately a reason, a rationality, which in a way operates independently of humans.
So in other words, Hegel's appeal to history is merely kind of instrumental, and he hasn't really thought the unity of reason and history, or the way in which human thinking and human activity have their common source in historical becoming. So his proposal, you know, I'm going to kind of go very fast now, just to, his proposal is that in a way the absolute, you know, the idealist absolute is, you know, the subject
object of history. And the subject object of history, you know, for Hegel would be, you know, reason. And what Lukasz is proposing is that it's the proletariat which is the subject object of history. As he writes in number 40, the class which was able to discover within itself on the basis of its life experience the identical subject object, the subject of action, the we of the genesis, namely the proletariat. So what he's saying is this, so the history is the process in which conceptual form and
sensible content, form and matter, are coordinated, are generated and coordinated. But history is, there's an agency in history, history has a subject, and this subject is no longer this kind of, you know, impersonal or super-personal reason, which according to Lukács it is in Hegel, but it's rather humans, but human, labouring humans, or humans insofar as they are producers of use value, so hence the proletariat.
So now he wants to having... so this is still kind of merely a theoretical identification of the proletariat as a subject-object of history. So in other words, it's a philosophical designation of the proletariat as subject of history, But the point is that this subject is still unconscious, is still unaware of its own status, and in a way needs to become self-conscious, needs to recognize itself, recognize itself as the agent of human historical becoming, and as the agent that is responsible for actually
existing social reality, you know, the agent that is responsible that makes history but also that makes social structures. So it's necessary therefore to identify the standpoint of the proletariat. It's necessary to kind of identify a proletarian standpoint and this is number 41. So Lukács writes, the objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy the same for both proletariat and bourgeoisie. But this does not prevent the specific categories of mediation by means of which both classes raise this immediacy to the level of consciousness, by means of which the merely immediate reality becomes for both the authentically objective reality from being fundamentally different,
thanks to the different position occupied by these two classes within the same economic process. So now the role of mediation is important. In a way what Lukács is saying, I think, is that in a way, way you know both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat you know experience social reality you know immediately but in a way this immediacy can be conceptually mediated you know and in a way can be you know self-consciously articulated and And what he's saying is that philosophy, classical philosophy, is the result of the mediation of the bourgeoisie's immediate experience of social reality.
So the categories of mediation by which the bourgeoisie, you know, raises social immediacy to the level of consciousness are the categories of bourgeois philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy is just self-conscious, it's just a self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie. It's a critical self-consciousness, it's not just ideology, but it's the structural contradictions that it keeps running into are it can never satisfactorily resolve them because it can't identify their real source
in actually existing social reality. So therefore, the task, the proletarian mediation of its immediate social experience requires generating new conceptual categories. So the proletariat must learn to mediate its experience of social reality, but to do so, which means raising it into kind of, you know, to the level of self-consciousness, but doing so requires forging new conceptual categories. So, now I'm going to move forward here.
Yes, I'm going to move forward to page 14. and the genesis of the direction of fact and norm. So in other words, the claim will be that the proletarian self-consciousness requires, is a self-consciousness in which form and content are united and which, in a way, theory and practice are brought together. and only this approach you know the self-consciousness in which theory and practice are fused is self-consciousness which overcomes the direction of fact
and norm or of the is and the ought so in number 44 Lukács writes every Every theory of the ought is left without any level. Either it must allow the meaningless existence of the empirical reality to survive unchanged, with its meaninglessness forming the basis of the ought. By meaninglessness, he means its kind of irrationality. In other words, it's the irrational source of sensible content and conceptual form, which provides the basis of the direction between what is and what ought to be.
okay but this gives as Lukács writes this gives the order a purely subjective character this means that this you know the art is a is a principle of duty or of obligation but which is can never be definitively satisfied or alternatively Lukács continues or else he writes theory must presuppose a principle that transcends the concept of both what is and what ought to be, so as to be able to explain the real impact of the ought upon what is. And the task is to discover the principles by means of which it becomes possible in the first place for an ought to modify existence. And by clear, so the task is to develop a revolutionary
self-consciousness. There's only the, you know, the self-consciousness which understands, the historical process through which this direction of fact and norm or what is and what ought to be was generated, only, you know, will understand that it was generated through the antagonism of class, the contradictions of the capitalist totality, and therefore only the abolishing the forms, the social forms that generate these contradictions,
which means the commodity form, wage labor, private property, class, and the state. So this is, you know, insofar as all these antagonisms, insofar as all these antimonies reflect these, you know, the structural characteristics of capitalist social reality, only the transformation of that reality can abolish these antinomies. So, and this requires the revolutionary union of theory and practice. So this is why the mediation here, the mediation of the proletariat's mediation of its social existence
will no longer be purely philosophical, purely conceptual. It won't simply unfold in thought. It is necessarily a lie to practice. So he writes in 45, to leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world should be understood as aspects of a totality, as aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world, and as such, it's not something subjective foisted onto objects from outside. It's no value judgment or ought opposed to there is. It's rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.
So here Lukács distinguishes between what he calls a subject-object and an object-subject. he says the capitalist, the bourgeois subject, or the bourgeois takes himself to be a subject but is in fact merely the object of capital, the capital valorization process. The proletarian takes himself to be an object but is in fact the veritable subject of the valorization process, according to Marx, according to Lukács. So he writes in 46, for the worker, the reified character of the immediate manifestations
of capitalist society receives the most extreme definition possible. It's true. For the capitalist also there is the same doubling of personality, the same splitting up of man into an element of the movement of commodities and an objective and impotent observer of that movement. For his consciousness, it necessarily appears as an activity, albeit this activity is objectively an illusion, in which effects emanate from himself. So he's talking about the bourgeois consciousness. The bourgeois takes himself to be an agent, takes himself to be the ultimate doer, the ultimate kind of the moving power in social reality. but the activity of the bourgeois is subordinated to, as we see, to self-valorizing value.
Everything that the bourgeois is doing is in fact surreptitiously determined or is enthralled to the valorization process. So he's not really an agent at all. So this illusion blinds him to the true state of affairs, Whereas Lukács writes, the worker who is denied the scope for such illusory activity perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its whole tendency slavery without limits. So he's therefore forced into becoming the object of the process by which he is turned into a commodity and reduced to a mere quantity. So, the proletarian can acquire self-consciousness first by, in a way, by being forced by recognizing
that he is, you know, the object of a process, that he's been turned into an object, a commodity, But in a way, the commodification of proletarian existence is, you know, which is unfold in a purely quantitative register, because commodification is a logic of quantity, has a qualitative effect. What does this mean? I think what Lukács is saying here is simply that in a way the intensification of exploitation,
which is to say that the process by intensifying the exploitation of labor, the extraction of surplus labor from necessary labor and therefore the extraction, you know, the augmentation of surplus value. This is a purely quantitative process from the vantage point of the capitalist, but it has qualitative characteristics from the vantage point of the proletarian because this quantitative transformation entails a qualitative transformation at the level of working conditions or the uh or rather even in the the capitalists um um consumption of
uh the labor power of the worker um that this consumption um has qualitative effects for the worker herself. So this is why he will... Okay, so I'm just going to skip to number 49. So the special nature of labor as a commodity which in the absence of this consciousness acts as an unacknowledged driving wheel in the economic process, now objectivates itself by means of this consciousness. So in other words what Lukács is arguing is that the maximizing the extraction of surplus value is an increase in
quantity which reaches a point at which it yields a difference in quality. It yields a difference in quality at the level of the consumption of labor power and this consumption is experienced by the labor because it's the labor power of the laborer. So the capitalist consumption of labor power in the factory or the workplace entails a qualitative shift in the consciousness of the labor so and Lukács continues on number 16 now page 16 now that this core is revealed it becomes possible to recognize the fetish
character of every commodity based on the commodity character of labor power in every case we find its correlation between men entering into the evolution society. And then in 50, while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him and cripples and atrophies his soul, it remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities. He is able therefore to objectify himself completely against his existence, while the man reified in the bureaucracy, for instance, is turned into a commodity, mechanized and reified in the only faculties that might enable him to
rebel against reification. And finally, this is number 51, thus the purely abstract negativity in the life of the worker is objectively the most typical manifestation of reification. It is a constitutive type of capitalist socialization but for this very reason it's also subjectively the point which this structure is raised to consciousness and where it can be breached in practice okay so here so this is the point of the the substance becoming subjects okay so lucas argument now it's sketched very fast in the in the final the third third and final section of the essay. And I think we should talk about how convincing it is, but it's an interesting argument. So it relies on the kind of the Hegelian claim
about the transition from quantity into quality. There's also a point at which a process of quantitative intensification yields a qualitative transformation. So that's one aspect and that's in the capitalist consumption of the workers' labour power in the devourisation process. And secondly, the other aspect for Lukács, it's precisely because, in a way, the proletarian,
in a way, because the proletarian is engaged in a very kind of manual labor, which is kind of, in a way, kind of stupid, you know, is decomposed into kind of very elementary gestures. It means that his consciousness, you know, his cognitive awareness is not completely reified. So in other words, that the actions and the, you know, the the physical activity of the proletariat is reified, is maximally reified, but not his
consciousness. Whereas it's the opposite if you're, for instance, you know, if you're a blue, if you're a kind of a bureaucrat or let's say a white collar worker, there your physical activity is dereified, you can come, you know, you're basically kind of, you're not, your body is not kind of forced to carry out, you know, very kind of stereotype actions, but your thinking becomes reified, and even your emotions become reified. This is, I think, Lukács' argument, okay? So in other words, there's a kind of physical reification which engenders a psychological de-raification and vice versa. There's a
physical de-raification which entails a psychological reification. And I think that this is one of the claims, one of the presuppositions of Lukács's argument. Okay, so I know I'm stopping now because I know I've talked, I've gone on for a long time today, but just because there was a lot of material to cover so I think we should talk we should have some questions now okay so the first question there's a I see there's a question in the sidebar oh it's not a question really I just had taken some notes and put it in for the
class record just before the break. I just thought it was an interesting point and I typed it up real fast. Okay, no that's very helpful, that's very helpful. So yes, we need to obviously there are lots of things to lots of questions to be asked so who would like to start? I can ask something if no one else wants to. Okay. Well, could you talk a little more about, there's a couple passages, possibly you either
skipped over them or I was away for a minute, but I'm interested in these passages about artistic creation as the result of the antinomy between odd and is. I can't really tell if he's sort of critiquing the idea of this or endorsing it, or how artistic creation would relate to revolutionary practice of the proletariat. Okay, this is very interesting. So this is on page 10 of the handouts. So this is just after he's, you know, it's 31 and 32. So, immediately before that, there's a discussion of the, you know, a paragraph about the antimony of nature as lawful form of lawless content, which I discussed, but I skipped over this.
So, what he's saying, Lukács is, he's criticizing aestheticism, okay, or romantic aestheticism as a way of resolving the antimony. So he's criticizing romanticism, okay? And in a way, and a kind of, or the philosophical aestheticism, you know, which is a kind of, you know, unfolds from a kind of romanticism. So in a way, one way, and this is the claim that artistic creation resolves the antimony between, that the the antimony between lawful form and lawless content is resolved in artistic creation because as he writes in 31 the principle of artistic
creation is the creation of a concrete totality that springs from a conception of form orientated towards the concrete content of its material substratum in this view form is therefore able to demolish the contingent relation of the parts to the whole and to resolve the merely apparent opposition between chance and necessity so it's the claim that this the antimony between formant contents which vitiates formal rationality is overcome in artistic creation so the artistic creation is a superior kind of rationality which overcomes this kind of dualism between you know conceptual form and sensible content because here the form, here the conceptual form and the material content are indissociable.
The act of creation, you know, in a way it's the kind of the creation of form from contents but of contents as necessarily formed. But Lukács thinks that this is, he's criticizing this. So he thinks that this is a way, and I mean, it's a very, I think, it's very, it's very acute. And he's writing in the first, at the end of the second decade of the 20th century, Staticism and Romanticism are two ways of rejecting the, you know, both, you know, capitalist, you know,
reification in capitalist social reality, but also the symptoms of reification in formal rationality or philosophical rationality. So in 32 he writes, Lukács writes, you know, if man is fully human only when he plays, we are indeed unable to comprehend all the contents of life from this vantage point. And in this aesthetic mode, conceived as broadly as possible, they may be salvaged from the deadening effects of the mechanism of reification. But only in so far as these contents become aesthetic. That is to say, either the world must be aestheticized, which is an invasion of the real problem, the real problem of the social forms which
underlying the process of reification, which an invasion of the real problem is just another way in which to make the subject purely contemplative and to annihilate action, or else the aesthetic principle must be elevated into the principle by which objective reality is shaped but that would be to mythologize the discovery of intuitive understanding so he's saying that so he's criticizing a kind of aestheticism which see retreats into the aesthetic sphere and finds you know kind of satisfaction in arts so that art is the recompense for
you know the frustrations and contradictions which vitiates capitalist social existence but Lukács points that you're evading the real problem okay because in a way the the conceptual form and sensible content here are only fused together in an in an aesthetic register but remember the domain of the sensible exceeds the domain of the aesthetic as understood in a kind of in this cultural sense okay aesthetics you know you know aesthetics as a kind of you know the understood as kind of artistic you know artistic experience artistic you know
kind of the domain of artistic experience is a restriction of the Kantian aesthetic which is simply the domain of the sensible of spatial temporal affection as such and the point here is that artistic, you know, is that art becomes a way of overcoming the dichotomy of conceptual form and sensible content in a restricted sensible form. You localize the problem and you evade responsibility for eradicating its ultimate root in social practice.
The alternative is to turn it into a metaphysical principle. Here he means a kind of romanticism, either Schillingian romanticism, but also I think things like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would fall, or even Bergson would fall under the aegis of this. The ascetic principle becomes a cosmic principle. You say that reality is a kind of, you know, the diffusion of form and content this ubiquitous kind of you know metaphysical principle and that when then arts is to be valorized because only arch you know kind of you know properly
recapitulates this kind of metaphysical principle and this is why like a philosopher like Schelling can hold arts up as the highest kind of you know above philosophy or religion and know what's striking you know I mean I think what's really remarkable about this essay is how pertinent it still is because this aesthetic evasion is still very much in effect today I mean I wonder what do you think you would have thought of more contemporary artistic forms like punk or fluxus or situationism that seek to intervene directly into the social field
in the name of emancipation would that be subject to the same critique I suspect I mean Lukács is notorious if you if you know anything about his you know the controversy he's notorious okay for defending you know realism and the bourgeois novel and for being against kind of at least in his around this time for being kind of anti-modernist okay now I think there's a whole complicated story to tell about why you know he made those decisions I think okay the key thing to remember with Lukács is that he was involved he was practically
involved. He wasn't just an academic, he was practically involved in the Hungarian Revolution. He was a party member. He played a part in government. He was close to Lenin and he had exchanges with Lenin. He was never just an academic. And a lot of Lukács' philosophical and even aesthetic decisions are politically determined, and sometimes for the worse, sometimes in a very problematic way. So he changed his mind. Later, he changed his mind about modernism, but in the 20s he was notorious and he was castigated and ridiculed as a reaction,
because he refused to embrace European modernism, or at least in literature. He changed his mind years later. But there were political reasons for this. So he would probably be very disparaging. It's difficult to say because, look, every aesthetic phenomenon is historically circumscribed. So, Lukács, you know, he might have been, if you're asking about what his response to, you know, he died in 1970 or 70, very early 70s. So if you're asking what his response would have been to things going on, like the examples
you've just given, with which he was kind of contemporaneous, he might have been more positive, he might have thought that there was something kind of worthwhile there, but He would have insisted, you know, and I think he remained a Leninist, that it's impossible, you know, the belief that art can kind of directly intervene into the fabric of social reality at the level of social form, that art can actively reconfigure social form is, you know, unconvincing, is an illusion.
He's saying art might have political valences, but you need to understand, you know, the difference between, you need to have this kind of dialectical understanding of the relationship between theory and praxis, and what kinds of praxis can reconfigure social forms. So, you know, the claim that art in and of itself is the locus of revolutionary activity, I think you would have thought was just, again, another bourgeois invasion. Ray, can I ask a question along these lines? Yes. Do you think this has anything to do, this question of art and maybe which types of art he would critique
and which ones could have a place in revolutionary practice. Okay, aside from that preamble. Does this have anything to do with, in section 44, the direction of fact and norm? When we are describing art here, could a certain form of art be this ought, which he's describing? Because the lemma sounds the same to me, I mean, without not just trying to interpolate replace one word for another, etc. But yes, this dilemma does sound somewhat similar as described in 44. Yes, I think that's absolutely correct. I mean, look, if you think life should be more like art, art and life should be fused together.
very popular in the 60s there was a whole the the point was that's you know once the distinction between life and art had been dissolved or rather the condition under which this would unfold would kind of automatically dissolve or supersede um reification you know and kind of bourgeois alienation etc etc but in a way the real the reason why there's a distinction between arts and life the reason why we can't simply make our lives into works of art or social there are objective social reasons for why it is currently impossible for us to you know to make our lives into works of art and anyone who
tries to turn their life into a work of art in social conditions where it's not where that isn't available to everyone is an a state is evading is in a way perpetuating that is ought in a way you're saying you know you're saying life ought to be a work of art you know life is not art but it should be art you You know, art is what life ought to be. And if you think you can kind of resolve that at the individual level or even at the level of some kind of, you know, community, then you are perpetuating the diremption. You're still enforcing the diremption. Because Lukács thinks the diremption is enforced at the level of the social,
of the capitalist totality. And it's because of the commodity form, because of wage labor, class in the state and nothing short of revolution can dissolve those so revolution by which he means proletarian revolution is the condition for the reunification of art and life yeah I think that's that's clearly what he would say that's really interesting thank you
What about the closing phase of the argument, the claim that the proletarian is a self-conscious commodity? does anyone want to ask about that or does anyone has he not with that has he i mean he earlier he was critiquing hegel for um a kind of end of history um and teleology um has he has he has he not what's what's different in in what he's saying
here like it's like it's almost like this this contradiction between form and content is somehow resolved in this figure of the proletariat well he thinks okay so how does the arguments the argument is very interesting because it has both it has a an objective presupposition which is to say exploitation. Exploitation is a structural condition. So the exploitation of wage labor by capital is an objective social phenomenon. However, this, for Lukács, he thinks that
um you know contrary to the kind of the i guess the the value theory account that we've been examining up until now in a way lukash thinks that um uh in a way value itself is merely alienated labor so in other words he thinks um that's value in the valorization process is driven by labor and so in a way it's it's the claim would be there's an externalization and an alienation so labor externalizes itself
externalizes itself and then is alienated well it's first externalizes wage labor and then alienated in the commodity form and in in in the capital you know in the you know the capital as which is represented by the capitalist, the capitalist that then controls, owns the means of production and forces the laborer to sell her labor to it. So already he thinks that labor is the subject of the social process and he
thinks that the bourgeois capitalist is merely a pseudo-subject, okay, is a in a way a fake subject who has usurped the kind of the veritable place which belongs to labor as the genuine social subject. So in a way all that labor so labor is self-failinated because labor doesn't recognize you know commodities and everything generated in accordance with the commodity form and even capital as merely externalized and alienated labor.
It doesn't realize that that it's just it has created all these things. and once it realizes, or rather, so the claim is that there's a point at which exploitation becomes so intense that it, in a way, it sparks the self-consciousness of the wage laborer, the wage laborer who is merely, who was in a way kind of, who could be mechanically exploited, his exploitation becomes intolerable, okay? Because it forces a degree of suffering, of psychological and physical suffering,
which, you know, in a way kind of sparks the self-consciousness of the labor and makes the laborer recognize that he is the veritable creator of the value, of the wealth, and the value that he's being deprived of and to which he is subjected.
So in a way, so labor already has, labor is objectified in capital, okay, but objectifying, you know, objectifying labor, once it recognizes itself as, you know, in its alienated form as capital, okay it becomes self-conscious it returns into itself and it wants it then wants to in a way take control of the conditions under which it is externalized okay if you remember
the distinction between externalization and estrangement okay so labor is always externalizing so labor the labor is a creation of use value okay but then use value in under capital use value is subordinated to exchange value but exchange value is nothing but in a way self alienated labor as creator of use value so So Lukács' argument is that labor is both subject and object, but doesn't recognize itself as either. So it becomes, once it recognizes itself in the commodities that it has produced and the
wealth that it has produced, it recognizes itself as an object, but then the next stage is to recognize itself as the creator of those commodities and of that wealth, and therefore also as a subject. This isn't strictly teleological because there is no law, okay, there's no historical law that governs the conversion of quantity into quality. There's no historical law that tells you at what point, what degree of exploitation in a way guarantees the emergence of proletarian self-consciousness. It's a dialectical law not a historical law. So in this sense there's, if there's a teleology,
it's not a straightforward, it's not historical teleology of the kind that Lukács is you know is is criticizing in in Hegel but there is a teleology but it's a dialectical teleology so then the question is but that dialectical teleology is the condition for remember this history begins with you know communism, it's only when the subject object of history recognizes itself, you know, that it becomes, you know, a self-conscious historical agent. So there's
a, there is a teleology, it's a dialectical teleology, and it's a dialectical teleology which is the precondition for a historical teleology. Because up until now, in a way, everything that's happened has not been, I mean, Lukács is not, nothing in his account requires a kind of, an appeal to historical necessity. You know, he's, I mean, he's, you know, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I mean, he hasn't said whether or not it's necessary.
I mean, it's still driven by, you know, the subject of the process is still labor, but labor is expropriated and subordinated to a dominating power, which is that of capital. But capital is just labor and alienate in a strange form.
So, I mean, even with Lukács' critique of Hegel, it's not that he criticizes Hegel for assuming that history has come to an end with absolute knowing, with the absolute knowledge which is coextensive supposedly with Hegel's own philosophy. But given that there's no guarantee that the proletarian revolution will succeed, I don't think that Lukács' account is deterministic.
And he's writing this just after the October Revolution, or like in 2021. So he's writing in the midst of a civil war, you know, the civil war in which the forces of capitalism are intent on destroying the Russian revolution and strangling it, you know, and it's kind of caught. so nothing has been settled here so I don't think it's whatever other criticisms can be made I don't think the claim that this presupposes a kind of historical teleology is fair or is kind of warranted by
what he himself has written so far Thanks I can also see along these lines how it would be a precursor to, say, Frankfurt School, as you're discussing, like an imminent critique. I mean, if we're talking about labor, how labor is objectified in capital, as well as the proletarian class consciousness is thought of through that objectification. That sounds like along the lines of what imminent critique could amount to for some.
Yes, I mean I think once again, so the claim, an imminent critique means that there's no transcendent vantage point from which to criticise a phenomenon. So, I guess the, I mean, look, what's interesting is, I guess the question that could be asked is that, in a way, in the first part, you know, we know what the bourgeois standpoint is, and that there's a kind of, I guess that there's a kind of, there's a spontaneous or immediate bourgeois vantage point, which is, you know, straightforwardly ideological.
It's the kind of that standpoint is propagated in newspapers, media, and by, you know, in the kind of the everyday consciousness of the time in which Lukács was writing or our time. The more refined form of that, the more refined expression is the philosophical expression. And the philosophical expression is an attempt to kind of obviously to grasp reality at a much deeper level, but it's still conditioned by these kind of, you know, by these social
forms. So the proletarian vantage point, I mean what's interesting is that can the proletarian vantage point be identified from a non-proletarian vantage point because Lukács himself is not a proletarian clearly, he's a philosopher. He's a philosopher who has taken the side of the proletariat. in fact he's a look look as was came from a you know the upper bourgeoisie as many of these people did so and in a way he's saying that it's only his is acute critical self-consciousness his philosophical self-consciousness that
allows him to see how the fundamental philosophical problems that he's inherited are all kind of conditioned by capitalist social forms, are all symptoms of capitalist reification. And then he's identified the proletarian standpoint which can overcome these problems, but he's not himself occupying that vantage point. So there's a, I guess, an interesting question about you know how far you can go in you know his critique is imminent in so far as it's it's it's the auto critique of a
bourgeois philosopher but it still seems to kind of the characterization it gives of the standpoint of the proletariat still seems to be, well, one objection would be to say that it's still transcendent because he's saying, you know, this is, he hasn't said what kinds, what categories proletarian revolutionary theorizing will generate, but he's simply, he's identified, he's pointing to the place where this revolutionary consciousness will emerge from a social position which is
external to it. So I think that complicates the picture. I mean there's a bourgeois standpoint, you know, there's the immediate bourgeois standpoint, there's the mediated philosophical bourgeois standpoint, there is the immediate proletarian standpoint, and then there's the mediate proletarian standpoint, which Lukács is pointing to from outside. It's not clear what where what lukash's own standpoint is if you're going to kind of enumerate standpoints it seems that there's one too many here which is that of lukash himself that's interesting but could would he say that it's the capital the the ideology of capitalism that
that is common to both his perspective and the proletariat standpoint that he is pointing to, that ideology, consciousness under capitalism is the same for all? Well, remember, he thinks that consciousness is reified, so he thinks that bourgeois consciousness is reified, and the symptoms of this reification extend even to philosophical consciousness. Now he thinks that proletarian consciousness isn't fully reified. He thinks that proletarian physical existence is reified, but not its consciousness.
So, no, I don't think, and you see, he himself is, I get, you know, reified consciousness is ideological consciousness. There are degrees of reification. And he clearly is seeing through, you know, he's exposing reification. and so then the question is you know what is it that allows him to kind of well I think it's it's only because he's been trained as a bourgeois philosopher you know who has read Marx that he's able to kind of you know diagnose these symptoms of reification and identify the underlying causes
in capitalist reality, but so far he has nothing in common with the proletarian. Or rather, I mean, there's no idea, ideology can't be the common thread, ideology can't be the common thread because Lukács claims, you know, is denouncing it and exposing it and insofar as proletarian consciousness is impregnated with ideology, then it continues to... I mean, you know, the worker who is subject to ideology is the worker who unthinkingly
kind of spouts capitalist ideology, the worker who reads the newspapers that just spout capitalist ideology. Then the workers who reject that ideology and who are trying to kind of, you know, understand, trying to forge new ways of understanding capitalist reality, have a perspective that's different from Lukács's. It's non-ideological, but it's not non-ideological in a way which is different from Lukács's perspective. So this is why it's kind of… this is tricky,
Okay, this is tricky. Of course, I mean, look, in one sense, you can say that if capitalism is a class relation, it's simply at the simplest, most elementary level, you either own the means of production or you don't. And if you don't, you just own wage labor. I mean, obviously, it's never quite so simple in empirical reality. But for Marx's structural analysis, what he means, the basic antagonism is between those who own the means of production and those who don't. Those who have to kind of sell their labor to be able to buy what they need to exist.
So in that sense, even someone like Lukács can claim to be siding with the proletariat in so far as he's not a capitalist in that he doesn't own means of productions, although he came from a family which probably did or could have. So I think that the really complicated question here is the difference between Marx's purely abstract structural determinations of class difference and class vantage points and their
concrete empirical characterisation. Because, you know, obviously someone like Lukács came from the minor nobility in Hungary, so he was a product of a very kind of privileged and elevated stratum of society. and yet he chooses to side with those who want to abolish the privileges of his class. And I think what, as is often the case here, there's a moral factor that for anyone who's
not a proletarian, the motivation for siding with proletarians is going to be moral, not practical and then and then the danger then is that you reintroduce the is-ought distinction okay with direction of fact and norm okay because you say exploitation and inequality exist but they shouldn't the proletariat the proletarian who is the victim of this exploitation inequality I mean in a way they're engaged in a practical struggle okay so the for the way in which they
think about what needs to be done in order to change things doesn't involve this direction of is and ought but it does for anyone who isn't a proletarian if you see what I mean. Yes, that makes sense. And then the danger is that, and this is why I think it's not accidental, that Marxist intellectuals, you know, and this is a syndrome in the Frankfurt School, it often, the critique of capitalism devolves into a moral critique. It's a striking, and in the history of the Frankfurt School,
it's striking how they end up in a position which is simply, which is that capitalism is but ought not to be. But that is not Marx's critique of capitalism. And it's not Lukács' critique of capitalism. If your critique of capitalism is that, capitalism is a very bad thing and it should not, that's just, that's a completely, that's a bourgeois critique of capitalism. And it's not, you know, it's not, you know, it's, which in a way precludes the possibility of revolutionary transformation. I think we should end after the end of this answer,
because it's 30 minutes after the end of the schedule. OK, yes. OK, again, I'm sorry it's gone on so long. Next week will be, it's a shorter text, so it shouldn't be the handout won't be so long so I'm sorry about that No, that's fine Okay, so yeah next week we're Althusser we'll do Althusser's Contradiction and Overdetermination Great, thanks Okay, great, thanks Thank you See you next week Thank you Bye