The antinomies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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