Review: Objective Reason and the Late Lukács

Reviewed Work(s): The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukács and Peter Palmer
Review by: Franklin Hugh Adler
Source: Contemporary Sociology , Nov., 1982, Vol. 11, No. 6 (Nov., 1982), pp. 634-635
Published by: American Sociological Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2068486

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 634 REVIEW ESSAYS

Objective Reason and the Late Lukacs

The Destruction of Reason, by GEORG LUKACS. Translated by Peter Palmer. London: Merlin
Press, 1980. 865 pp. $32.50 cloth.

FRANKLIN HUGH ADLER

Antioch College

According to its jacket, the newly translated
Die Zerstorung der Vernunft is an attempt to
study the philosophic and historical origins of
fascism, using "the investigative tools of his-
torical materialism." With the possible excep-
tion of Existentialisme ou Marxisme? (written
in 1948), it is arguably Lukdcs's worst major
work; indeed, the former anticipates The De-
struction of Reason (written in 1952) in con-
tent, general argument, and tone. Both these
prototypes of Stalinist scholarship, published
during the imposition of Soviet rule over
Eastern Europe, betray what George
Lichtheim. once called the sacrifizio dell'intel-
letto; they are bitter pills for those who con-
tinue to draw inspiration from the vital, non-
reductionist, emancipatory Marxism that the
young Lukdcs-and others like Korsch and
Gramsci-championed during the 1920s. Such
Marxism, whose most articulate expression is
to be found in Lukdcs's History and Class
Consciousness, stressed the world-con-
stituting power of consciousness, and thus
its primacy both with reference to the very
concept of dialectics and to concrete historical
action itself. Its point of departure was a cri-
tique of so-called scientific socialism-the
economism, objectivism, and idolatry of the
natural sciences that flowed from Engels's
dialectics of nature.
The Destruction of Reason is a retreat from
such an "idealist" position, if not a full-scale
capitulation to the lobotomized Marxism of
the Third International. Even Lukdcs's recur-
rent professions of orthodoxy did not spare
him from harassment and imprisonment-
Stalinist intellectuals were always suspect to
the degree they were intellectuals. Such an
observation raises a major dilemma in inter-
preting and evaluating Lukacs's intellectual
production: On the one hand, he was drawn to
Marxism in search of a clear, ethical and to-
talizing world view; on the other, he had to
continually accommodate himself to the "cor-
rect" line, engaging in what he would later call
"strategic retreats" so that he might wage
"guerrilla warfare" against the Stalinist restric-
tion of culture. Thus, despite Lukdcs's own
quest for theoretical clarity, readers are con-
fronted with a hermeneutic task of major pro-
portions: Are we dealing, at any given point,
with the "real" Lukdcs or with feigned con-
formity?
To answer such a question would require
nothing less than a lengthy hermeneutic study
of the "late" Lukdcs, one yet to be written,
despite several recent fine interpretations that
understandably focus on the "young" Lukdcs
(in particular, those by Arato and Breines,
Ldwy, and Boella). For present purposes, we
must simply take Lukdcs at his printed word
and begin with the epistemological principle
that informs the entire work: the reflection
theory of knowledge-"true" knowledge is the
reflection of an unfolding objective reality that
exists outside, and independent from, human
consciousness and will. In contrast to the con-
stitutive theory of consciousness and the cri-
tique of a pseudo-scientific "dialectics of na-
ture' that Lukdcs advanced in History and
Class Consciousness, here he is in perfect
conformity to official standards of Marxist-
Leninism. Instead of serious elaboration and
discussion, short and sterile references to En-
gels and Lenin are randomly tossed off by a
philosopher who well knew the theoretical
price to be paid: stripping knowledge of any
independence, any internal criteria of truth,
and thus obliterating any meaningful distinc-
tion between truth and ideology. "What En-
gels said of lawyers is valid in an even acuter
sense for philosophy: 'The reflecting of eco-
nomic conditions in legal principles operates
without impinging on the awareness of the
agents, and the lawyer imagines that he is
operating with a priori theses, whereas they
are simply economic reflexes' " (p. 313).
There is no "innocent philosophy"; all phi-
losophers, despite their intentions and self-
understandings, reflect their class positions.
Thus, in the 1967 preface to a new edition of
History and Class Consciousness, Lukdcs ac-
counts for his youthful "idealism" as a reflec-
tion of the confusions of an intellectual
changing from one class to another, from the
bourgeoisie to the proletariat. Arriving on the
proletarian shore, the complex mediations
between inner and outer nature could be over-
come by "objective truth," now understood as
"the correct reflection of objective reality."

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 REVIEW
Given these epistemological premises, The
Destruction of Reason possesses a logic that
is clear and unassailable. Reason equals the
forward march of the proletariat and so-
cialism. "Hence-and whether or not an in-
dividual wants it or is even aware of it-every
stand for or against reason is inseparably
linked to his opinion of socialism" (p. 753).
Reason, after the October Revolution, culmi-
nates in Soviet reason. Antireason or "ir-
rationalism" equals all attempts to occlude
objective truth, understood as the forward
march of the proletariat and socialism; it sub-
sumes a smorgasbord of disparate
philosophies whose only common element is
the intrinsic opposition to objective truth so
understood: idealism, romanticism,
phenomenology, existentialism, vitalism,
racialism and interpretive sociology. Antirea-
son, in the age of imperialism and in the wake
of the October Revolution, culminates in fas-
cism.
The Destruction of Reason is thus a study in
the linear degeneration of bourgeois thought,
thought that reflects the declining and ulti-
mately counterrevolutionary ontological status
of a class that must necessarily make a last-
ditch and thoroughly irrational attempt (fas-
cism) to defend itself against socialism. As an
ascendent and revolutionary class, the
bourgeoisie and its philosophers represented
reason, but after 1789-and especially after
1848 and 1871-they represent antireason.
Within this logic, Luka'cs argues, one can
situate philosophers and philosophies by ex-
amining their "subterranean class basis." Let
us cite, for example, his treatment of
Nietzsche. Lukdcs poses what would other-
wise be a most paradoxical question: "How
can we maintain of Nietzsche that his whole
life's work was a continuous polemic against
Marxism and socialism, when it is perfectly
clear that he never read a single line of Marx
and Engels? We believe that the claim is
still feasible, for the reason that every
philosophy's content and method are deter-
mined by the class struggles of its age" (p.
313). Hence, what Nietzsche was really about,
despite his own subjective awareness, was
"idealizing those egoistic tendencies in the
declining bourgeoisie that were burgeoning in
his own lifetime and became truly, universally
prevalent in the imperialist period. That is to
say, it was the egoism of a class which, having
been condemned by history to its doom, was
mobilizing all mankind's barbaric instincts in
its desperate struggles with its grave-diggers,
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ESSAYS 635
the proletariat, and was founding its 'ethic' on
these instincts" (p. 346). That Nietzsche's
writings might have represented a crisis in
Enlightenment thought, the end of Christian
ethics, or an attempt to treat existence in an
age when fixed universals had collapsed under
the feet of modem man is academic mystifica-
tion or worse. Sympathetic interpretations,
like that of Kaufmann, are designed "to suit
the purposes of American imperialism," the
new Cold War bearer of antireason.
Lukdcs's argument unfolds with transparent
clarity; armed with class analysis he has cut
through all the mystification of modem philo-
sophic and social thought-no need for
nuance, no hesitation before seeming
paradoxes, for "objectively speaking" nothing
is accidental. The same knowing "ce n'est pas
par hazard" that incessantly repeats itself in
Existentialisme ou Marxisme? reappears in
The Destruction of Reason: "It is no accident
that ..." and occasionally, for greater em-
phasis, "It is certainly no accident that....
Yes, Lukdcs's study of modem bourgeois
thought has attained full clarity, but at the
expense of reason. It is a hopelessly reduc-
tionist understanding of modem philosophy
and a patently inadequate interpretation of
history, especially the history of fascism. If
there were an ontological pattern to bourgeois
development, and its reflected thought, which
necessarily tended toward fascism, why is it
that fascism was an exceptional outcome that
occurred in precisely those nations that had
experienced incomplete bourgeois develop-
ment? The Destruction of Reason is little
more than an exercise in a dogmatism that
embraces not only Stalinism but also the vir-
tues of Stalinist "science" (in passing Lukdcs
defends Lysenko' s utterly scatterbrained
though ideologically "correct" theory of ge-
netics against "reactionary bourgeois science
and philosophy"). It is significant that later, in
Kadar's liberalized Hungary, Lukdcs's crit-
icism of Stalin was, on the whole, muted and
limited. Never did he conduct a study on
Stalinism similar to his study on fascism,
though in keeping with his epistemology it,
too, must have had an "objective basis," that
is, the Soviet mystification, the "cult of per-
sonality," must have "necessarily" reflected
an objective and perverse reality. Here we
confront again the sacrifizio deli'intelletto.
Lukdcs could not remain true to his own
method, as misconceived as it might have
been.