Abstract
This article consists of an original translation of Ernst Bloch’s 1923 review of Lukács History and Class Consciousness, preceded by a translator’s introduction contextualising Bloch’s review and interpreting what it tells us about the intellectual and personal relationship between Bloch and Lukács. I argue that Bloch’s review highlights some of the key differences and points of intersection between their thinking. Written when their personal relationship had already soured for both political and intellectual reasons, Bloch’s review makes clear his ongoing commitment to a form of utopianism Lukács had long abandoned. Unlike Lukács, who in History and Class Consciousness argued that the dialectical method could only be applied to the social realm, Bloch followed Engels in developing a dialectics of nature. However, even if Bloch was less willing to become involved in party politics than his erstwhile friend, as the review reveals, both men ultimately emphasised the present moment as the privileged locus of urgent political action.
Translator’s introduction
When Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács first met in the intellectual circle around Georg Simmel in Berlin towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century, a profound friendship was born. Despite their differences in social and cultural background – Bloch was a middle-class Jew from industrial Ludwigshafen am Rhein, while Lukács, who had inherited an acquired aristocratic title, hailed from metropolitan Budapest – the pair were drawn together by a mutual appreciation for the spiritual and iconoclastic, and a distaste for what they saw as the staid and repressive bourgeois conventions of their time. For Lukács, Bloch ‘spoke the mother tongue of classical philosophy’ in an environment of mostly sterile academic discourse (Zudeick, 1987: 28). 1 Meanwhile, in Bloch’s first letter to Lukács, he exclaims that the latter’s manuscript (an excerpt of what was to become Soul and Form) ‘made an extraordinary impression on me’ (Bloch, 1985: 28). Bloch would later recall that in the early years of their friendship, he and Lukács were so close that they had to create a ‘nature reserve’ of differences so as not always to say the same thing in company (Zudeick, 1987: 43).
In the years before and during the First World War, the two men seem to have been in almost daily contact, either in person or by letter. In 1912, Bloch followed Lukács where the pair joined the circle around Max and Marianne Weber. The Webers found these ‘young philosophers’, as Marianne called them in her diary, rather off-putting, but her remarks reveal much about their early common interests. They were, she writes, ‘moved by eschatological hopes of a new emissary of the transcendent God’, and ‘saw the basis of salvation in a socialist social order created by brotherhood’. Evidently these young upstarts cut quite a figure among the pre-war German intelligentsia. Helmuth Plessner would later put the point sarcastically: ‘“Who are the four evangelists?” the question was frequently posed. “Mark, Matthew, Lukács and Bloch” the answer ran’ (in Geoghegan, 1996: 12).
Beyond their common interest in the messianic rebirth of a spiritual culture, Bloch influenced Lukács towards a more positive appreciation of Hegel, while Lukács played a decisive role in developing Bloch’s interest in Marxism. The two men’s mutual influence would be decisive not only for their later intellectual development – not least for the fate of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness – but also for their friendship. Though Bloch’s commitment to Marxism seems to have been strengthened by his friendship with Lukács, the perpetually unaligned Bloch nevertheless seems to have seen Lukács’ decision to join the Communist Party coincide with a narrowing of his friend’s intellectual horizon. We catch a glimpse of this attitude in Bloch’s March 1924 review of Lukács’ book, reproduced here in English translation, when he refers to Lukács having ‘long and exclusively’ been ‘a practitioner of theory’ rather than a ‘theorist of praxis’ (cf. Bloch, 1969: 598–621). And while Bloch recognised History and Class Consciousness as an outstanding work of heterodox Marxist scholarship when it was published in 1923, the view that Lukács’ Marxism – however scandalously Hegelian for orthodox tastes – omitted important perspectives is nevertheless palpable in Bloch’s review of the work.
The context into which Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness intervened in 1923 was one in which the revolutionary project was in crisis. The twin defeats of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the German November Revolution provoked questioning and soul-searching among politicians, activists and intellectuals alike. Bloch references the situation in Germany in his review, which was first published in Der neue Merkur in 1923. 2 He laments that although ‘it is no longer possible to go backwards, even if [the revolution’s] crooked path takes a century’, the German proletarian movement nevertheless ‘languishes in the swampy state of this country, which endures endless crises without the strength to change’. Lukács’ chief concern with the question of praxis in History and Class Consciousness also belies the contemporary need to engage with why a universal proletarian revolution had not (yet) succeeded. In many respects, this was the fundamental question confronted by the theoretical tradition that would become known as Western Marxism, of which History and Class Consciousness is considered a founding text. It is the same question that motivated the investigations of both Bloch and the early Frankfurt School, on whom Lukács’ extensive though often implicit influence has also been documented (e.g. Feenberg, 2014).
Like the early Frankfurt School, Lukács turned to questions of consciousness and culture in search of an explanation of what prevented workers from acting in their social interests. He argued that it was ideology – namely, the idea that the capitalist social system is natural and immutable rather than historically contingent – which prevented workers from recognising their objective interests. This ideology made sense from the perspective of the bourgeois class, Lukács argued, since it would be impossible for the bourgeoisie to recognise capitalism’s historical contingency, and therefore the legitimate demands of workers for economic equality, without simultaneously sacrificing their own dominant position. Thus, even if bourgeois ideology was also a form of ‘false consciousness’ for the bourgeois class, it nevertheless made sense for them to adhere to it on Lukács’ account. On the contrary, the effect on workers of this ‘false consciousness’ was that it prevented them, according to Lukács, from forming a revolutionary ‘class consciousness’ that would align with their objective interests.
The scandal of History and Class Consciousness was that it effectively equated bourgeois with Soviet ideology, both of which, Lukács argued, presented history as a law-governed system in order to legitimise the present social structure – whether capitalist or communist – as natural and inevitable. At the fifth Comintern congress in 1924, the first to be held after History and Class Consciousness was published, Lukács was denounced by Zinoviev as an ultra-Leftist deviant. He was then pursued by the theoretical school around Abram Deborin, which had first systematically developed Marxist philosophy into the theory of dialectical materialism that Lukács was criticising.
The problem with dialectical materialism according to Lukács was that it neutered the revolutionary-practical potential of Marxism by doing away both with the notion of the proletariat as a historical agent, and with the present moment as the site of its necessary action. If history is governed by laws, then it follows that there is no need – indeed, no possibility – for historical subjects to act in the present in order to bring about their aims. While Lukács agreed that the proletariat had a unique historical mission to fulfil, he also believed that it was prevented from fulfilling this mission by the dissimulation of its interests – by the bourgeoisie, naturally, but by implication now also by the purveyors of dialectical materialist ideology itself. As Lukács argues in a crucial passage from the essay on ‘Class Consciousness’: The unique function of consciousness in the class struggle of the proletariat has consistently been overlooked by the vulgar Marxists who have substituted a petty ‘Realpolitik’ for the great battle of principle which reaches back to the ultimate problems of the objective economic process. Naturally we do not wish to deny that the proletariat must proceed from the facts of a given situation. But it is to be distinguished from other classes by the fact that it goes beyond the contingencies of history; far from being driven forward by them, it is itself their driving force and impinges centrally upon the process of social change. When the vulgar Marxists detach themselves from this central point of view, i.e. from the point where a proletarian class consciousness arises, they thereby place themselves on the level of consciousness of the bourgeoisie. (Lukács, 1971: 68, emphasis in original)
Lukács’ equation of Soviet and bourgeois ideology was the index of his conviction that the leadership of the Comintern was inadequate to the task of leading further revolutions in the West. Stalinist theory had, he believed, fallen out of step with the demands of revolutionary praxis. History according to Lukács was not a mechanical process whose end goal was pre-given and assured; rather, it still had to be practically realised. Lukács conveys this idea in the essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, when he writes that ‘Hegel’s programme’, namely ‘to see the absolute, the goal of his philosophy, as a result remains valid for Marxism…, and is even of greater concern to it, as the dialectical process is seen to be identical with the course of history’ (Lukács, 1971: 170, emphasis added). At least as controversial as Lukács’ claim here was, however, the fact that he turned not only to Marx, but also to Hegel in order to make it. By returning to the tradition of classical German philosophy, Lukács was violating what had become a doctrine of Soviet ideology, namely that the task of classical philosophy – and above all the kind of idealist thinking Hegel represented – had been definitively overcome by Marx. Official Marxism-Leninism was supposed to be a science whose aims could no longer be served by appeals to a superseded philosophy.
By the time History and Class Consciousness was published in 1923, Bloch and Lukács’ friendship had faded. They were no longer in regular contact, and their political and intellectual developments had led them in different directions. Nevertheless, they were united in their efforts to develop Marxist thinking against the grain of its dogmatisation, and in his 1924 review, Bloch’s admiration for Lukács’ work is unmistakable: he describes his friend as ‘one of our great thinkers’, positioning both himself and Lukács as Marxists working in a truly modernist mode. Yet his admiration is never quite unalloyed, as the qualification of Lukács as the one who has ‘almost reached the level of the valid question yet to be settled’ makes clear (emphasis added). 3
Bloch praised the fact Lukács’ book ‘leads Marx back to Hegel to a significant extent, and leads the latter meaningfully beyond himself’. However, he also presciently saw that in doing just that, Lukács would cause a commotion. ‘Admittedly’, Bloch argues, ‘the book will not have it easy when it comes to finding good readers’, and claimed provocatively that the ‘Russians […], who act philosophically, but think like uneducated dogs, will even smell rubbish in it.’ Though they were ‘[i]nfinitely different from the revisionists’, Bloch continued, the Russians were ‘nevertheless put off by the philosophical heritage in almost the same way, and some of them will say that Marx did not stand Hegel on his feet just for Lukács to put him back on his head’. Indeed, Karl Korsch (2013), whose Marxism and Philosophy appeared in the same year as Lukács’ book and was equally demolished at the fifth Comintern congress, would later note that both the Comintern and ‘revisionist’ social Democrats denounced his and Lukács’ work using practically the self-same arguments. Meanwhile, Bloch also suspected that the ‘usual [i.e. non-Marxist] philosophy scholars’ would ‘not be able to find any access to this singularly legitimate Hegel Renaissance from their deeply uninvolved, purely contemplative attitude’. In contrast to these positions, Bloch values Lukács’ return to Hegel as an eminent thinker of actuality.
The ‘valid question’ whose level Bloch saw Lukács almost having attained was the Leninist one. When he writes, ‘The correct thought is only ever that which stands under the perspective of what is to be done here and now’, Bloch is not merely ventriloquising Lukács, but rather shares his friend’s perspective. Bloch’s dissent with Lukács begins, however, with the question of how we can know what is to be done, or, to put it differently, where would be the Archimedean point from which this could be known and thus put into practice. As Bloch puts it in the opening passage of his review, ‘we do not have ourselves, the Archimedean point that upsets this equally oppressive and unreal world’. Bloch agrees with Hegel here that, as the latter puts in in §85 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself, and hence, too, cannot test its own knowledge by that standard’ (Hegel, 1977: 54, emphasis in original). Lukács seemingly would not disagree: indeed, the strength of his epistemology lies in its attempt to pull back from the reflection theory of knowledge that he saw advocated by some of his ‘vulgar Marxist’ contemporaries. Yet if Hegel, Bloch, and Lukács are united in the view that it is ‘not insofar as thought has produced an object that the latter can be known, but insofar as the object’s being-thought at the same time signifies the recognition of the object itself’, they part company on the relation of utopian thinking to revolutionary praxis, action in the present, and the problem of knowledge. 4
Before his political conversion to communism, Lukács, above all in his literary theoretical work, had been intensely occupied with questions of the utopian imagination, and of the spiritual yearning for transcendence. Yet although he maintained an interest in aesthetics throughout his life, after his turn to Marxism, Lukács’ earlier, more esoteric appreciation of art gave way to a view of culture as subordinate to the interests of class politics. The contours of his differences with Bloch on this issue would be played out in the ‘expressionism debate’ of the 1930s (cf. Bloch et al., 2002). Already in History and Class Consciousness, however, the difference is clear: neither art, nor culture nor religion – all ‘utopian’ in the sense that they are not concerned with the sober analysis of the current conjuncture, but rather speak to the realm of the transcendent, the ultimate, the desired and wished-for – figures in Lukács’ discussion.
The problem with utopianism for Lukács – and he is clearly obliquely referencing Bloch here – is that it assumes the ‘duality of social process and the consciousness of it’, whereas he wants to see the two as indistinguishable. From the utopian perspective, consciousness ‘approaches society from another world and leads it from the false path it has followed back to the right one’ (Lukács, 1971: 78). When Lukács argues it would be ‘foolish to believe that […] the recognition that a post-utopian attitude to history has become objectively possible means that utopianism can be dismissed as a factor in the proletariat’s struggle for freedom’, he does not mean by this that the utopian dreams and desires of the proletariat ought to be taken seriously (p. 78). Quite the contrary: he means that the continued presence of such elements is an obstacle to revolutionary progress. This becomes clear when he criticises the ‘influence enjoyed even today by such completely utopian theories as those of Ballod or of guild-socialism’, which, he claims, ‘shows the extent to which utopian thought is still prevalent, even at a level where the direct life-interests of the proletariat are most nearly concerned and where the present crisis makes it possible to read off from history the correct course of action to be followed’ (p. 79). 5 The implications of Lukács’ view at this point are evident: it is possible to unambiguously discern what course of action must be taken by observing the actual situation of the working class in relation to the totality of economic production. Imaginative projections of what society ought to look like the day after the revolution will not aid the struggle, but will more likely divert it. When Bloch reminds us that, for Lukács, as for Marx, the proletariat ‘has no ideals to achieve, but merely a new society to set free’, it once again draws attention to the – at least rhetorically – hostile tendency towards utopianism inherent in the Marxist tradition.
The problem with all this from Bloch’s perspective was that the proletariat very obviously did have ideals that motivated it and that he believed expressed, in however distorted and partial a way, its manifold desires for a better society. According to Bloch, then, Lukács’ focus on the realm of the actual to the detriment of the possible led him to reject the relevance of art, culture, and religion to the task at hand. History, Bloch insisted, is ‘much more’ than the ‘social extraction of a still hidden social humanity’ with which Lukács was chiefly concerned. It is also, Bloch argued, ‘the artistic, religious, metaphysical production of the secret transcendental human being’. By restricting his analysis to ‘purely social matter’ – which, Bloch notes rather cuttingly, ‘for Lukács governs, despite all the will to totality’ – Lukács could ‘adequately grasp neither life nor nature nor even those nearly always eccentric contents of the dianoetically related processes of comprehension’. For Bloch, actuality, the Now, is not simply transparent to consciousness; the lived moment is always ‘dark’. Crucially, for Bloch the lived moment was the Archimedean point from which it would be possible to discern the necessary course of emancipatory historical action. Unlike for Lukács, who distinguished sharply between the objective class consciousness of the proletariat and the empirical consciousness of real, individual, living members of the class, for Bloch this Archimedean point was no external vantage point, but rather lies within us.
Yet this within was also a without for Bloch to the extent that he understood the darkness of the lived moment as the interface that connects consciousness to the in-itself. Thus he was able to argue that the products of the creative imagination, which spring from the darkness of the lived moment, not only express human desires but also, simultaneously, what Marx called the ‘dream of a thing’ that the material world itself had long possessed. It is in this sense that, for Bloch, actuality and utopia, the real historical moment and the eccentric consciousness of the whole, ‘are not in contradiction’ as they were for Lukács. Rather, Bloch argued that ‘the Now is ultimately the only theme of utopia, whenever one grasps it as the constant demand for the removal of masks, ideologies, mythologies’. For Bloch, the utopian imagination that points beyond the present reality was just as valuable as sober critique when it came to reading off ‘what is to be done’ from the totality of history. Bloch believed that in attempting to eradicate the perspective of a merely abstract, individual-subjective immediacy from the analysis of the social conjuncture, Lukács had failed to see that a form of immediacy is always present in consciousness as the limit of objective knowledge. What is more, as Bloch saw it, the recognition of this fact and its consequences could also have significant revolutionary potential.
Actuality and utopia: On Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Ernst Bloch
We are stirred, indeed very much so. Yet everything stays on the same old spot. What should we do to combat it, which stronger forces, spells would need to provoke us here? And what is it, after all, that remains in the old spot or allows us to remain there? Is it not we ourselves, our own relationships, works, that have become independent from us like ghosts? Because we do not have ourselves, the Archimedean point that upsets this equally oppressive and unreal world?
The days, however, hardly seem up to the task. The West falters, the German proletarian movement languishes in the swampy state of this country, which endures endless crises without the strength to change. Every coup misses the mark in Germany, as does every thought about reality, both equally without influence, almost meaningless. Nevertheless, the situation is constantly revolutionary, even without a side glance at Russia, at the terrific non-simultaneity of that country, and it is not capitalism with its senile dwarfishness, with its exploding emptiness, nor the stuffy, mis-revolutionary misunderstanding of fascism that will sublate this apparent non-simultaneity. As slow and covert as the course of revolution appears, it is no longer possible to go backwards, even if its crooked path takes a century to complete.
No less is the spirit only seemingly asleep. It gathers strength in this silent submergence, takes its time to mature its fruits. How brightly, moreover, did the so-called Expressionist fire recently burn; it wanted to set free a new form of consciousness, its direct archetypal form. This spiritual movement was more strongly related to Anabaptism than Sturm und Drang, than romanticism, and more precisely it is still outstanding. More geniuses than there are muses are said to have found work here: if the movement has petered out in Europe (once again, not in Russia), if the great moment found here only a small, easily fatigued and compromised set of followers, still it has as little vanished as anything great that is unredeemed, and waits for a new army. Here or nowhere did the immediately roaring, piercing Now want to turn and picture itself, did the all-moving, all-concealing darkness of the lived moment want to become the mediated but undeflected object itself. From all sides of experiential reality, deforming, informing it towards the transcendental human, it was and is a matter of reaching the subject-object congruence of the secret human countenance itself.
The old time is therefore over, as paralysing as its decline is, which still reaches into our own days. The wakefulness, the machine, that shedding of the ground will remain with us for a long time. Likewise the state of distance from God is still our part, but it is laden with the consciousness of it (which all embellishing cultures lack) and therefore also with the initial power to turn it around. Likewise too, the great efforts of those who already in bourgeois culture rebel against its ruptures and reifications have long since radiated out of what is sinking. Marx already seems almost entirely on the other side from this type: Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel stand with their counter-mechanical view on the horizon of two ages. But all this, which must now be directed and is temporarily significant, can only be seen when we are no longer standing amidst it in the old world, where a completely other, fresh new time confuses and begins. The actual downfall is already behind us; the epigones, materialists, Alexandrians of the sixties, the eighties, have buried their dead. The rupture between Leibl and Chagall, Wagner and Schönberg, Keller and Döblin is perhaps vaster than was any ever before within the ‘culture’ of modernity, indeed within the entire cultural complex from Athens to classicism, the most aesthetic Middle Ages included. No matter how one already evaluates this newfound situation: Chagall, Schönberg, Döblin and others are palpably not of the old type, they are not decline, sunset, the dissolution of something formed before; rather, their work contains elements that have never yet been there. A great Kairos lived in this time of new spring, of the last beginning, closer to the primitive at the highest stage than the beautiful compromises of ‘culture’.
And from here emerges one of our few thinkers. Georg Lukács is the only one to have almost reached the level of the valid question yet to be settled. The present moment, to all others a conceptual embarrassment, is elevated here to a moment of decision, of insight into totality. Lukacs’ book History and Class Consciousness (Malik-Verlag) leads Marx back to Hegel to a significant extent, and leads the latter meaningfully beyond himself; here, too, a metaphysics of understanding oneself in existence, of raising our head, our reality above the crooked process, traces its dialectical arcs. Admittedly the book will not have it easy when it comes to finding good readers. Those Russians, for instance, who act philosophically, but think like uneducated dogs, will even smell rubbish in it. Infinitely different from the revisionists, they are nevertheless put off by the philosophical heritage in almost the same way, and some of them will say that Marx did not stand Hegel on his feet just for Lukács to put him back on his head. The usual philosophy scholars on the other hand will not be able to find any access to this singularly legitimate Hegel Renaissance from their deeply uninvolved, purely contemplative attitude; Lask’s profound investigations, which relate in various ways to Lukács’ problematic, remain unpursued up to now. The continuous view of the methods and factions of the single sciences, and the epistemological formalism, such as partly hindered the expression of a concrete view of the whole, partly also whitewashed the lack of one – this active idleness issued precisely in the fundamental problem of classical German philosophy, the subject-object problem, a constraint from which only Lukács’ book begins to liberate us. This book is thus important enough to gather these scattered, epochal thoughts once again in a small space. To finally, precisely in the contradiction, once again achieve the profound agreement in which the two philosophies of our time exist from time immemorial.
Only the one who acts, comprehends here. And precisely only insofar as he wants to act. Thought undoubtedly runs ahead, allows a possible process to be skipped over abstractly. Yet still with some certainty not beyond the next step that must practically be realised. The correct thought is only ever that which stands under the perspective of what is to be done here and now.
The crisis
Even the bourgeois man appears to be active. But this only stems from the fact that he is constantly driven. The worker and the entrepreneur are equally reified; both are merely cogs in a machine. The dehumanising state of capitalist mechanisation is more clearly visible in the former, as it is in the civil servant, than in the entrepreneur with his subjective and external appearance of power. In fact, he too is a mere beneficiary of more or less calculable chance, of a self-movement of goods that operates independently of him.
Thus, if these people consider themselves free, they are so only as is the thrown stone, which would believe it was flying of its own volition if it were to become conscious. 6 The production and exchange of goods is however not only entirely withdrawn from human beings, but also increasingly detailed and artificially rationalised as a result of being split into partial operations. This separation from the means of production, this dissolution and decomposition of all organic units of production admittedly caused the limit of nature to recede; however it replaced the latter with the artificial lawfulness of ‘second nature’, with no less servitude than under the old masters or nature’s irrationalities. This lawfulness is artificial; crises alone demonstrate the ultimately anarchic character of the capitalist system of production and exchange, according to the ruptured unity of processes of work and life. A law of mere contingency emerges, every image of the substantive totality is lost through the specialisation of services, disregard for what is concrete about the matter of laws reappears in the crisis as the actual incoherence of the entire system.
The thing-in-itself problem
This division and emptiness are not only expressed economically however. Rather, the same fragmented life that presents and avenges itself economically as a crisis also animates the other phenomena of its time in a related way. Admittedly it corresponds perfectly to the limited bourgeois view to persist with what is merely immediately actual and thereby allow a weakened existence to entirely congeal. The bourgeois economy posits isolated parts as ‘facts’ and a merely reflective correlation between these parts as economic ‘natural laws’, as if it could not be otherwise, whereby bourgeois society admittedly thus also eternalises itself. Furthermore, it corresponds perfectly to the class interests of the bourgeoisie to allow the individual spheres of social being to stand separately alongside one another in order to parcel out subjects according to the division-of-labour commodity form of the whole society: into economic subjects, legal subjects, religious subjects and so on. But historical materialism brings an end to this perpetuation of the bourgeois as the ultimate social and intellectual world. Precisely in its proper meaning, it provides insight equally into the limitation of a period, and the reduction of its modes to the totality of its social being, its stage of reality. As a result, from this perspective the structure of relations between commodities is revealed as the archetype of all objective formations in bourgeois society, as well as all the related forms of subjectivity assigned to them. The purely formal, calculable, specialised and exogenous character of the capitalist means of production and exchange thus returns – completely accordingly, even in its supreme ideology – in the methodological character of modern science. Economy and science in the capitalist age are united in their division of labour, in the anarchic drive to specialisation, in their fracturing of the concrete totality; they are both organised chance, abstract theory over a thoroughly unpenetrated matter. The more developed a science became in the bourgeois age, the more surely it became a formally closed system of specialised partial laws, the more ‘exactly’ it excludes the world lying outside this field, indeed even the concrete substrate of reality of its own sphere, from comprehensibility. It is from this source as such that each individual science creates its ‘precision’: it lets the matter on which it depends rest in order to apply the categories of understanding that result from such a closed world, made methodologically pure, to a fictitious matter that remains irrationally excluded instead of to a real one.
Thus, here economically use value as such is already obscure. Likewise, the content of right as such is formally impenetrable, rationally indeducible. Its production is exported into history or in terms of natural law into the conscience; in both cases, however, the simple violence of positing is equally taken as given. Modern philosophy operates not dissimilarly, in merely abstract methods, finds in the problem of content, in the thing-in-itself problem the limit of its rationalistic-ethereal conception of the world. In a perspective of unparalleled sophistication and constitutive clarity, Lukács applies the Marxist approach to the crisis of method here, the fate of method in modern philosophy. A direct line of development runs from Descartes through Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz to Kant, whose decisive, manifoldly variable motif remains the view that the object of knowledge can be recognised by us because and insofar as we produce it. On this view – according to the valuation of abstractly quantifying calculation – the organs of philosophy become mathematics, and later theoretical physics, the science of pure construction (even natural right took on this form later), of the production of the object out of the formal conditions of objectivity as such. The question never emerged as to why and with what right human understanding grasps precisely such formal systems as its own being in contrast to the given, qualitative, alien, unrecognisable content of these forms. The agreement of quantitative thinking and being was rather the universal category of the modern world, and the qualitative content, the irrational at first hidden behind the majestic architecture of thought of the Spinozist system, increasingly became its bitterest problem. Because scepticism, the ‘crisis’, the consciousness of antinomies in bourgeois thought arose and was increasingly formulated in relation to the unresolved content. This newly conscious intrusion of the other, qualitative world, of undetected reality is most recognisable in the variously striking meaning of the thing-in-itself, as it applies both to the content of the forms through which we know the world, and thus also to the problem of the total reality, which is recognised as a totality by being rounded out into one by the partial systems. The crisis as the economic expression of this merely organised chance thus returns as the thing-in-itself problem within bourgeois thought.
Art and morality
There were two ways, however, to really encounter the actual. The first was art, or as Schiller said, the human being is only there, where he plays. Here the distanced, disjointed bourgeois seemed to finally find life whole again. To this was added an entirely new concept of nature: ‘nature’ now appeared not only (obscuring also bourgeois society) as the epitome of lawfulness, but with Rousseau also as the old kingdom of equality on this side of all lifelessness, commodification, mechanisation and finally, in Schiller and Kant, as the epitome of true humanity, naive totality. The artist above all however is nature, creates like nature; in aesthetics the two criticisms of reason, the realms of necessity and freedom, ultimately come together; in the genius arises for Kant the prospect of an intuitive understanding, which simultaneously produces contents with its forms and in this content finally really actualises his way of life. From here, the breakthrough to Goethean-Schellingian nature philosophy, with its resumption of a qualitative approach, succeeded in turn; even this was admittedly unable, thanks to the unbroken and merely transformed hegemony of its contemplative bearing, to concretely encounter the particularly deep-set reality here. Abstract reality could especially not be overcome in Schelling’s middle and later systems, which proceeded from the at least partially living aesthetic consciousness to the completely bygone totality of mythological consciousness and thus ultimately caused philosophy to terminate in a reactionary mythology, in an exaltation of empty irrationality. Therefore, the second way became more important: acting in order to get to the heart of the matter by means of morality. Kant already turned to practical philosophy, admittedly without transcending philosophy’s formal character in doing so. As a result, theoretical experience remained untouched, insofar as the formal and immediate category of ‘ought’ is inapplicable to it. The immediately given form of empiricism, the guiding thread of natural mechanism, achieves a philosophical justification and consecration in Kant precisely because the practical intention of the subject not to simply accept its empirical existence assumes the formal-abstract form of ‘ought’. On the other hand, as a result of the formalism of production, as it is retained in practical reason, the problem of content, the thing-in-itself character, the theoretical antinomy between form and content returns in practical form. Even still with Fichte, who so ardently sought to achieve the unity of subject and object, conceiving its point of unity so significantly in activity, in the supraindividual deed, the practical norm is only related to the forms of inner action as such. Stressing the practical in any case makes the contrast between form and content more catastrophically conscious than aesthetics did, posits it simultaneously and most urgently as the fundamental problem to be overcome. It was now a matter of finding a form that no longer remains pure of any qualitative determination of content. It was furthermore a matter, transcending the formal even after transcendental logic, of seeing the subject of cognition in terms of content, of advancing to a conception of the subject that can finally be thought as the producer of totality. Moreover, it was a matter, in such an energetic turn against deadness, commodifiedness, diremption of the subject and the objects corresponding to it, to earnestly complete the intellectual salvation of the human being, to produce the subject of the producer itself; and indeed at a level of objectivity, where the dichotomy of subject and object is progressively sublated, where subject and object truly come together in a system in which mediations of content are resolved.
Reason in history
It is with Hegel that this ground is first seriously trodden. His is the realm of history, which finally increasingly engages the concept in the actual. Initially as the phenomenology of spirit, in which the subject has become substance, and this, absolute knowledge, asserts itself in the movement of human consciousness driven dialectically by contradictions, as the simultaneously dynamically relativised subject. Thus, the simply abstract, isolated concept of the philosophy of reflection is left behind; in the dialectical method Kant’s call for intuitive understanding attains its clear, objective and scientific character. Hegel’s method, as it is truly one that follows the way of things, consequently appears equally as the self-movement of the concrete concept and simultaneously as the self-transcendence of reality, historical reality above all, in which change is no circular flow on the surface, as in nature, but the concept itself is rectified. Even here, however, mathematics supplied the example: what is irrational in the respectively found content appeared already to Leibniz as a task, better as a challenge, to restructure, reinterpret that system of forms with which the previous contexts had been produced such that the content appearing as given at first glance should from now on appear as produced, that facticity be dissolved into necessity. Maimon first relativised the thing-in-itself problem in this extremely fruitful way; the romantic ‘irony’ that had grown on entirely different ground gave Hegel further means of himself extending the ancient, purely abstract, immaterial and transforming dialectics into a logic of self-transforming contents. Only abstract thought as in mathematics and rationalistic, including transcendental philosophy is no longer the site of genesis of categories; rather, it is in history that the subject of production is created, that the identical foundation of being, the identity of thought and being, theory and practice, subject and object works; history is the level at which a possible ‘redemption’ of reason and reality, the possible identification of the two is achieved. The form of historical self-mediation is dialectical, and the foundational principle of all dialectical self-recognition of the real is the consideration of all partial appearances as moments of the whole, is the unity maintained in diversity. Totality here means something completely different from a mere abstract sum of isolated parts, and also other than the dry, seemingly all-embracing thought-principle of the empty beginning from which, among the abstract dogmatics, the universe, as it were, fluidly emanates once more. This fundamental category of all concrete reality rather allows the full content of the whole to develop out of each individual moment in contrast with all apparently dividing spheres, as long as only this moment is grasped as truly dialectical, as a moment of process, that is, as the point of passage to totality.
Admittedly even Hegel remains essentially still purely intellectually contemplative in this endeavour. The subject comes, as is well known, everywhere too late here, only adds its thoughts if a form of life has already turned grey. The genuine ‘We’ of history, the place of the identical subject-object is, despite its correct projection in the historical process, not yet discovered. Consequently, the dialectical method already essentially operates in nature, where however the binary opposition of subject and object is fundamentally unsurpassable, indeed a subject in the historical sense has no place at all. Moreover, the various dialectical phenomenal complexes, despite the dominant fundamental category of totality, cannot possibly be treated using Hegel’s mechanically unchanging scheme of a dialectical triad; not only the ‘objective dialectic of movement’ of nature, but also the social dialectic as such requires, depending on the degree of historical concreteness, and depending on the differentiated phenomena of the relevant form of social being, a system of qualitative graduation of a dialectical character. Ultimately, the failed subject-object relation in history also had its revenge in that even Hegel leaves history behind at the end of his system, the sphere of life most proper to the dialectical method, the locus of its concrete fulfilment. Even the contemporary state left it behind; the sphere of absolute spirit however pushes this inconsistency to its conclusion, even if historical determinations continuously play into it. Above all however, since Hegel did not recognise the concrete subject-object of history, its always human producers, he had to mythologise their unidentified drive and content fetishistically; as a result, the individual spirits of peoples and ultimately the demiurgic role of the world spirit, the idea itself, arose. As the subject thus sank back down to the merely individual immediacy of consideration, to merely unengaged abstract contemplation once again, an insurmountable distance arose between mover and moved, which was not resolved in its immediacy, unmediatedness through the simply abstract mythology of the concept, but was on the contrary fixed and eternalised. This leads at the same time to the question of ‘ought’ and the place that this occupies. According to Lukács, even this question emerges from a simply immediate behaviour, which allows the facts to exist and simply transcends them in an arbitrary subjective manner, or relates facts to seemingly generally valid, simply formally legitimate cultural values whose contents are unknown. The same is the case with religious utopia, and Lukács responds polemically here to my characterisation of Münzer as a theologian of the revolution, insofar as he brought the interiority of the human being into historical reality only in an unmediated way, independently of its concrete historical being, undialectically. The real actions of Münzer, and only really the later, ideologically not groundless transition of Anabaptism to capitalism then appear as good as completely independent of religious utopia, which it can neither really lead nor offer concrete goals or means of realisation. The intelligible ‘I’ finally becomes the transcendental idea (regardless of whether this is interpreted as ‘ought’ or as metaphysical being, world spirit, absolute spirit), whose nature excludes a dialectical reciprocity with the empirical components of the ‘I’, with empiricism as such, and therefore excludes a self-recognition of the intelligible ‘I’ in the empirical realm. It is precisely therefore that according to Lukács such a view also necessarily leads to mysticism, to the mythology of the concept: mythology inevitably accepts the objective structure of the problem, whose non-deducibility was the impetus of its emergence; the critique of Feuerbach as ‘anthropological’ is maintained here. And thus, at first sight the paradoxical situation is created in which this mythological, projected world appears closer to consciousness than immediate reality. According to Lukács, however, this paradox is resolved as soon as we consider that the solution to the problem – abandoning the perspective of immediacy – is necessary in order to truly overcome immediate reality, while mythology represents nothing more than the fantastic reproduction of the insolubility of the problem itself; immediacy is thus recreated at a higher level. In such a way all these dualistic pairs of concepts are equivalent: fact and ought – necessity and freedom – determinism and intuitive irrationalism – economically isolated vulgar Marxism and ethical supplement – fatalism and voluntarism – mechanism and religious utopia; they all stem from an immediate, undialectical attitude and above all from leaving behind the totality of these basic dialectical categories. Escaping from the immediacy of empiricism and its equally merely immediate rationalistic reflections may thus not, according to Lukács, advance to the attempt to go beyond the immanence of social being, if this false transcendence is not to once again fix and eternalise the immediacy of empiricism with all its insoluble questions in a philosophically sublimated way. On the contrary, going beyond empiricism can here only mean so much that the objects of empiricism are themselves grasped and understood as moments of the totality, that is as moments of the historically self-transforming society as a whole. Even relativism and dogmatism (the epitome of an absolute) are from the dialectically mediated point of view still pairs of opposites on the same undialectical ground; because the move of the relativists occurs in an ultimately stationary world, indeed is in itself a lifeless circle, so that here, the absolute of the dogmatists is only thought as worse and more decadent. Only historical dialectic creates a radically new situation in opposition to the apparently world superior absolute of the dogmatists: the historical process itself becomes significant, is grasped in its uniqueness, in its dialectical striving forwards, in its dialectical setbacks, in its uninterrupted a character as a struggle for a higher ground of truth and reality. The absolute is not denied here directly, nor is it held to itself as an eternal measure, but here the measure is dialectically and permanently applied concretely to itself, rendered dialectical; the ‘absolute’ appears in concrete historical form, as the constantly correcting fundamental tendency of the process in general. This is on the whole Lukács’ treatment of the question of being, the derivation of its location from the perspective of immediacy; however, a middle position arises against it at the same time, a perspective of continuous historical concreteness which processually elevates the facts and in turn entelechially limits and demotes ideas. In the same way, Hegel and the critique of Hegel pave the way for Lukács to a logic of actual being, to a dialectic of the totality which is both present and transitory.
Theory and practice
We already heard that right thinking is only one that lets us know what is to be done here and now. Simple action, the tangle of individual actions of individual people and groups, does not provide an appropriate measure of the correctness of conflicting perspectives. Neither does simple thought, as abstract, where not even observing opinion about still pre-actual possibilities is in a position to provide this measure. The different opinions remain here rather peaceful disagreements, their contradictions take the form of discussions, as always when the concept already wants to learn to swim before it goes in the water, before it persists in its specific element.
But organisation is the first form of mediation between theory and practice. In assessing the situation, in preparing for and carrying out an action, the organisational question attempts to identify those moments that have necessarily led from theory to the most appropriate form of action for it; it seeks to identify, therefore, the essential determinations that combine theory and practice. The spirit concerned with organising proletarian class consciousness has elevated what the revolutionary instinct unequivocally possesses to the clarity of the concept; it makes the unconscious conscious and thus becomes the leader of the unconscious, the expression of the proletariat fighting for its class consciousness. One cannot think this coincidence of thinking and being, this becoming being of communist thought, becoming thought of communist being, this unity of Marxist concept and class consciousness of the proletariat seamlessly enough in Lukács: the real insight into facts here is one which not only relates respectively to the whole of due events, but on which at the same time means the decisively moving moment, self-understanding and therefore real self-comprehension of one’s own reality. Admittedly, however, it is done neither with the rapid act of heroism nor with the contemplative character that looks on as everything in the world seemingly matures of its own accord, unrelated to the subject of its development. But the free, volatile act of consciousness of the proletariat is necessary in order to divert the course of capital, in order to prevent the sheer collapse into barbarism, above all however to exploit the present developmental tendencies so that instead of a merely mechanical collapse truly a dialectical, subject-oriented transition to socialism takes place. This activity of class consciousness is thus a violent force: just as capitalist society itself came into being violently, indeed as its law by means of which capitalist society maintains itself even after its ‘transition’ from feudalism, is only a latent violence, so too can only acute violence release the new society from the old. It is not a question of taking over reification from the capitalist way of thinking or contemplatively waxing lyrical about ‘eternal natural laws of the economy’ in opposition to which neither activity nor anything new in terms of content could arise. Rather, as soon as the proletariat – today in fact still a mere object of the social process and only potentially, only latently also its participatory subject – emerges as its subject in a revolutionary act, the apparently natural lawfulness of the economy will simultaneously be overcome. The law of repetition no longer has any justification for the purely dialectical process substrate of social actuality. The theory of praxis as it transitions rapidly to the praxis of theory transforming the world in the process is thus neither voluntaristic putsch nor fatalistic laissez-faire of ‘natural laws’, nor some sort of evasive ‘ethicising about the economy’, nor a merely subjective utopia. All this rather intervenes above or below, stems, according to Lukács, from the same abstract, immediate, undialectical stance, the same still contemplative alienness of concept and reality. The dialectical method alone allows the class-conscious proletariat as subject-object of history to identify the Archimedean point from which history can then be mastered, just as its content, its matter can be rescued from the gloom of reified abstractions and failed transcendences.
Thereby we will also finally be capable of grasping the Now in which we stand. The merely individual opinion, but also the bourgeois concept can never reach the moment in which the actual and the whole creatively take place. They remain trapped in an immediacy that merely flashes past, they will never proceed from their ‘history’, which is in fact no history at all, from the limited bourgeois, or indeed suprahistorical transcendent horizon of their historical goal-setting, to the fluently real present. Lukács thus discovers from this side the problem of nearness, the mediated direct self-encounter of understanding of self, incorporates my doctrine of the darkness of the lived moment, confronts it with Hegel’s sensuous certainty, with the phenomenology of the here and now – where, however, the fundamental problem itself only appears as an initial difficulty, not as the alpha and omega of the concrete identification of the We. For Lukács the Now is at least the difficulty of the middle; because however dialectical logic is no longer absolved from occurring being – an absolution that made it into petrified thought – but rather thought here appears as the form of actuality, as a moment of the overall process itself, so it can relate to the moment of moments, to the Now of active mediation. Only so long as humans direct their interest – in an observing contemplative way – towards the past or future, both become petrified into a foreign being, and between subject and object the unsurpassable ‘dead space’ of the present is stored. 7 As soon, however, as the itself responsive, itself dialectical concept is capable of grasping the present as becoming, and recognises it in its tendencies out of whose dialectical contradiction it is capable of creating the future, the present becomes its present, at the moment of the deepest, widest-branched mediation, at the moment of the decision, the birth of the new. Only whoever is called and intends to bring about the future can see the concrete truth of the present: the truth means no longer behaving in the objective realm as if towards a stranger. And the new in the tendencies that realise themselves (with our conscious help), the self-relation of the social subject dialectically invested in them, the inventory of tasks in this moment is the truth of this moment. In Kant, the tendency prevailed of excluding all content from the subject side, too, to leave only consciousness as such and perhaps not even that, out of simple formalistic purity, relationlessness. With Hegel, despite the strong tendency to transform the subject into substance, to set both rising in unity, the genesis of the We was also not achieved, but it remained hidden in the still abstract mythologies of the concepts of national character or the world spirit. Here, however, the mediated grasp of the height of one’s time occurred, the detonation of abstract formalism and otherwise abstract mythology, the concrete self-relation of the social subject takes place in the class consciousness of the proletariat. The worker, above all, has completely become a commodity, initially completely an object; however his self-consciousness is at the same time that of a commodity and thus the self-disclosure of capitalist society founded on commodity production with all its contradictions and dialectical transitional tendencies. Only the working class is able to relate to the whole, the ultimate substrate of social actualisation. The sublation of the proletariat is the realisation of philosophy, the sublation of philosophy is the realisation of the proletariat; in other words: the (sublated) proletariat is the true We of history, at the same time its matter; it is the identical subject-object of history finally encountering itself.
Agnosticism out of responsibility
It is thus not insofar as thought has produced an object that the latter can be known, but insofar as the object’s being-thought at the same time signifies the recognition of the object itself. Thinking and being are identical at this stage insofar as thinking here no longer encounters the simple facts of empiricism, the false, reified, non-total, but the higher reality of developmental tendencies itself, and grasps itself as becoming-conscious, becoming-actual, as the most important constitutive element in the process of the manifestation of reality. The impingement on these developmental tendencies, the guiding entry of theory, therefore, into the process of transformation of reality is the only criterion of its truth or falsity; everything formal, everything still methodological, the residue of all subjectively abstract ‘ought’, of all utopian overhaul is only an expression of the temporary impossibility, from a philosophy of history perspective, of capturing and representing all categorial problems of the self-transforming reality. Whereby admittedly for the ‘ought’, the mythology of the concept and also abstract utopia are added, which maintain these problems in the status of immediacy, thus eternalising the dualism between the kingdom of freedom and that of necessity, or at least pushing them to the abstract-revolutionary mythologisms of an apocalypse. The proletariat has no ideals to achieve, but merely a new society to set free. The phenomenal complexities of art and in particular of the completely dark, non-identical nature have certainly not yet found their subject-object relation; but every attempt to form the utopian here as existent only has a form-destructive rather than a reality-creating effect. Only in the environs of materialist, material-related dialectics can the ground of reality be won and must continually be won again; according to a peculiar agnosticism, therefore, which is only concerned with the transcendent insofar as the concrete dialectical mediation is ripe to manifest this concretely. Calvin brought the underworld to consciousness by means of the doctrine of predestination; Lukács, as a theoretician of constitutive praxis, achieves the same thing by means of a quite unique combination of inner-worldly asceticism and Hegel’s pure concretional dialectic. The deepest meaning of this heroic, temporary and dialectical agnosticism, however, is undoubtedly timidity before what is hidden, a responsible attitude before what is secretive, a strict need for its limitation, for its undistracted imposition against all apparent concretion or premature abstract constriction.
Critique and agreement
Now it is time to look around us. Initially rather affected, because the indoctrinated at first sees no image. Nothing can be more certain than this handwriting, this line, nothing sharper than to acknowledge and posit a colour. But the images we achieve in this way are not colourful; thought that has a precise target often circles around and back on itself and its kind. Some things sound occasionally as if one would say that the life of one who loves happily can only be compared with itself. That is undoubtedly true, but nobody could claim that in saying so anything vital had taken place.
Nevertheless, this certainly largely depends on the thing itself remaining incomplete here. Only implied, often only brushed, often represented even in a no longer sufficient, inherited conceptual form. Additionally, often veering between a neo-Kantian and a Hegelian language, obviously thoroughly mixed up with Marxist concepts. Individual parts, also longer parts are thus often difficult, and one longs to emerge from the shade of the gates into the flourishing panorama. If the book is however also thus unfinished, it nevertheless remains all too constantly in that intermediate methodological state that Lukács (incorrectly) calls the stigma of our moment in the history of philosophy; Lukács could, however, counter many objections of this sort with Marées: my painting may be unfinished, but those of the others are not even begun. 8 Another attitude admittedly leads deeper into the ground of the fragmentary, one which long and exclusively felt itself obliged to be a communist leader, a practitioner of theory, less a theorist of praxis or even of the old diagnostic theoria itself. This happened in the storm of immediate being as the apparently only possibility to fulfil the duty of the day, the height of the times; whereby the newly pressing consciousness of the totality here brought back only later the related duty: to make one’s fortune, in short, the office of the concept.
Now this thinker has learned an enormous amount from his constant relatedness to the practically possible and actual. But with a certain simplistic tendency to homogenisation, and indeed with an almost exclusively sociological homogenisation of the process, too great a price may have been paid for this concreteness. History is much more, quite apart from all the demands of the omnia ubique, a polyrhythmic structure, and not only the social extraction of a still hidden social humanity, but also the artistic, religious, metaphysical production of the secret transcendental human being is a thinking of being, of a new deep relationship of being. Certainly, these various deep relationships and their objects are not sharply delineated from one another, but rather stand in a dialectical exchange, almost ceaselessly intersecting, mixing, merging, establishing the precision of the lower stage of being again and again in the higher one. But with the restriction of homogenisation to purely social matter (which for Lukács governs, despite all the will to totality), one will adequately grasp neither life nor nature nor even those nearly always eccentric contents of the dianoetically related processes of comprehension.
Indeed, already social thought runs ahead here somewhat, sees the possible earlier and further ahead. This should admittedly not be practically pursued for long, but at least for a while beyond the next step. Even within society, economic security can be achieved more successfully than legal or moral security, and the spiritual as such can assume another, more enshrouded force or indeed take a more long-winded path. Lukács himself notices against an all too homogeneously handled historical materialism, that the analyses of Mehring are for instance fine and deep, if applied to the state and military organisation of Friedrich the Great, but they half fail as soon as they are applied to the cultural formations of the period. Social thought is certainly fulfilled in the same moment that it follows the achievable tendency of its subject in a consciousness-raising way. The longer and more surely, however, that ‘thought’ of such phenomenal complexes lasts, whose contents, without being devoid of history, are sociologically expressed only very approximately and not historically concretely enough, and therefore time and again stand, as for example the natural law of the Enlightenment or Greek art, as a task, as a problem, or indeed as a template before the various ages. Likewise, the entire complex of physical nature is historically-processually still to be overcome, its subject, which was able here to transcend nature as its reality, has not yet come, not yet been discovered behind its concretised twilight or will o’ the wisp. Likewise, too, religion – even if one defines it with Lukács as a still fantastic realisation of human nature – nevertheless cannot be fulfilled through social reality, but all these eccentric process contents still require their own space, in other words, the obstruction of the totality through the concept of the sphere. For even this concept does not itself stem from the capitalist social division of labour and the diremption of objects (which simply stem from the helpless fractions of the ‘individual sciences’) that correspond to it. Rather, the sphere is an expression posited in the process itself of various subject-object levels, a consequence of the arduousness of the foundation of empire, which expresses and distributes itself temporally through process, spatially through the establishment of different spheres. The practice of Lukácsian concretisation thus never fully satisfies the sensitive, endlessly experimental being of history, the richly intertwined deep relationships of the reality process. Above all however, this praxis does not satisfy the partial and still constitutively anticipating subject-object relation in the dianoetic sphere, which, also in times of social abstractness in an individual deep subject can succeed in a utopian concrete way. Caution does not apply here, which would admittedly give thought the right to accelerate, to power the leap into the social sphere, but which in the dianoetic sphere shrinks back from the tendencies that reside in it, as if here a sort of natural law, a kind of iron law of thought reigned and not a realm of the new, not-yet-conscious katexochen.
It is nevertheless clear that much is extremely close to us here. Seen from a different eye, an almost undistinguishably similar view looks back at itself from the deep. Insofar as it did not already result from Lukács’ thought, what is properly binding here can hardly be indicated even cursorily. It is magnificent how in Lukács thought finally participates in the process of becoming itself, no longer contemplatively, but as the highest informative expression of the matter at hand. Now becoming is no abstract rushing past of a general flow, no contentless durée réelle, not even any longer Hegel’s independently occurring, panlogical process without constant and intensifying recourse to the subject. Rather, innermost tendency is grasped as uninterrupted human production and reproduction of those relations which, ripped from this context of bourgeois thought, of the isolating and quantifying concepts of reflection, appear as things, as reified, lawful, closed systems. Finally, the structure of the human world approaches as the counterpoint of dynamically self-transforming forms of relation in which the process of exchange between man and man, man and nature, the great self-encounter, gradual subject-object identification, the becoming reality of the We plays out. The overall metaphysical theme of history is thus discovered in Lukács via another route, but in terms of content it conforms completely with the ‘spirit of utopia’. Only a stage in the Now: and beside and above the proletariat appears the darkness of the lived moment, the therein hidden being of reality as such, triumphing against all abstractions distant from the subject. A small shift only in the accent of the unfinished now: and instead of Lukács’ apparent ‘agnosticism’, this arch-responsible obstruction of transcendence, the aversion appears to every hastily naming, rightly self-constructing metaphysics, the form of the inconstruable question appears, an entirely related respect takes effect for the not only for-us, but therefore also for-itself really disclosed secret of the We, which is the secret of the world. Actuality and utopia are not in contradiction, but the Now is ultimately the only theme of utopia, whenever one grasps it as the constant demand for the removal of masks, ideologies, mythologies of being-in-transit, as the intimation of both the tendencies driving in the now as well as the authenticity hidden within it, of the adequation of the process. ‘It will then become plain’, writes Marx in a sentence that recalls Malebranche on the problem of knowing the object, ‘that the world has long dreamed of something of which it only needs to become conscious to possess it in reality.’ This sentence, which lends to human thought the highest constitutive power, at the same time the highest responsibility for the world, the task of the seventh day of creation, connects Lukács in the last instance and the metaphysics of the cosmic interpretation of dreams, evocation of God. Here as there, the lived moment, the We-subject emerges as real from among the flowers of false consciousness and into the ever less deviating self-objectifications of its own proximity. Under this, and under no other sign will the proletariat triumph, if the pre-history of humanity is completed and existence finally becomes real.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.