Chapter six The Controversy Over Subject-Object Identity the antinomy of society and nature

The discussion of Marx’s Manuscripts in Chapter 3 concluded with a critique of his solution to the antinomy of society and nature. His early philosophy of praxis reduced nature to society, both practically and theoretically. In his later work he turned away from this approach. We have now seen that Lukács’s interpretation of classical German philosophy leads to the similarly ambitious claim that the identical subject-object will overcome reification, the form of objectivity of both nature and capitalist society. This would seem to imply the incorporation of nature into society, as in Marx’s Manuscripts.

Lukács was a product of an intellectual environment that favored the idea of independent Geisteswissenschaften based on methods different from those of the natural sciences. He was its representative on the left, defending Geist against theoretical reification by bourgeois social science and vulgar Marxism. He develops the argument with natural science in familiar terms. While the logic of his position seems to demand that he reduce nature to history, he never goes so far. There are several passages in History and Class Consciousness in which he affirms the independence of nature and the validity of the sciences that study it. His argument is thus either more complex or less consistent than Marx’s. His critics have focused on the resulting contradictions ever since. While it is all too easy to caricature Lukács’s position, I will propose a charitable interpretation in this chapter.

The interpretive challenge is twofold. As we have seen, the second part of the reification essay ends with Lukács’s argument that classical German philosophy fails to resolve the antinomies of bourgeois thought. He promises a Marxist resolution, but the third part of the essay does not deliver it. Instead, it presents a rather disorganized exploration of the social implications of the identical subject-object and proletarian revolution. This leaves the impression that Lukács is caught between the poles of an antinomy dividing society and nature. In addition, Lukács’s Defence of History and Class Consciousness purports to explain his position but actually shifts the focus significantly through the introduction of a more conventionally Marxist perspective on the determining role of the economy. He drops references to the concept of reification and instead draws on its sources in Marx’s mature work and Hegel’s dialectic of essence for a different and presumably more “orthodox” vocabulary. Nevertheless, the Defence is helpful for understanding his position. In it he argues rather obscurely for an absolute historicism that is more plausible than Marx’s version. This chapter will consider the implications of these texts for Lukács’s early Marxism, and once again relate his position to Marx’s Manuscripts.

The issue turns on the meaning of Lukács’s concept of subject-object identity. This concept is a particular target of attack for critics ranging from the Althusserians to the Frankfurt School. The former explains Lukács’s identity philosophy as a consequence of his supposed “romantic” rejection of natural science; the latter claims that identity philosophy is rooted in the Promethean project of domination of nature, and asserts the insuperable separation of subject and object. In contrast to all these critics, I will argue that the theory is neither romantic nor Promethean. Puzzling as is his concern with the concept of subject-object identity, Lukács has good reasons for not simply abandoning it as a historical curiosity. In the context of philosophy of praxis it signifies the rationality of reason, the universality of its claims and the freedom of the human species from mystical powers.

The previous chapter summarized the theoretical exigencies that the identical subject-object is supposed to satisfy: the principle of practice, history as reality, and dialectical method. The identical subject-object satisfies the demand of the principle of practice that the action of the subject “penetrate” the object, leaving no thing-in-itself untouched; it posits history as reality in the sense that the subjects and objects of all cognitive domains are explained through their function in the historical totality; and it involves dialectical method insofar as historical subject-object identity is understood not as immediate but as mediated in an interaction of theory and practice, subjectivity and its objectifications.

Bourgeois identity philosophy establishes only a commonality of form of subject and object. Lukács’s metacritique aims to go beyond this toward a deeper unity based on the production of the object by the subject. But what is the meaning of Lukács’s concept of “production?” As we have seen in the last chapter, the text appears to supply not one but two answers. I will review them both here as they relate to the problem of nature.

Lukács’s principle of practice is sometimes explained as the creation of the object by the subject or its absolute reduction to human relations. This is Lukács’s later interpretation of History and Class Consciousness, which he considered more Fichtean than Hegelian.¹ In this quasi-Fichtean interpretation, the identity of subject and object implies the preeminence of the subject in a radically different form of society transparent to human knowledge and will. This resembles Marx’s speculative notion of labor in the Manuscripts. In that early text, the ontic power of labor to create is granted ontological significance as the fundamental access to being. In the last chapter, I argued that Lukács holds a properly Hegelian view based on the concept of mediation so far as society is concerned, but he insists that nature has a quasi-independent status. He thus avoids a transcendental humanism in which the creative power of the divinity would be exercised by human agents. His saving inconsistency is his explicit recognition that finite human subjects cannot constitute nature as they have history.

Furthermore, even in the passages that appear most productivist, where Lukács exaggerates the role of the proletariat, he is careful to qualify the argument, to note that the subject of practice operates under given historical conditions that determine the limits of its agency. In these passages practice does not create but rather mediates the object. Here the subject in no way resembles a collective cogito, a transcendental ego outside a world it constitutes. The subject does not posit society but is a moment of society, determined as well as determining. Such a subject “penetrates” its objects by altering their form of objectivity in accordance with their real potentialities. This ontological interpretation of subject-object identity establishes the unbounded reach of rationality at the level of function and meaning.

This second approach is elaborated in a dialectical theory of rationality according to which the proletariat constitutes itself as a subject through a continuing process of mediation of its own reified form of objectivity. Subjective and objective dimensions are united through an active process and not simply identified conceptually. The argument is Hegelian: reason arises from understanding, and dialectics from analytic rationality.

Perhaps the ambiguity in Lukács’s notion of production can be traced back to Hegel. There are two patterns of dialectical development in Hegel. In one pattern a synthesis leaves behind its contradictory origin by creating a third entity. This is the pattern exemplified by Hegel’s view of historical development. Generalized, this pattern leads to a metaphysical interpretation of Hegel’s thought in which, for example, the system culminates in a panlogical God of some sort.

But there is another pattern in which a continuing mediation between contradictory entities transforms or defines them without dissolving them into a third. This pattern is exemplified in Hegel’s notion of “being at home in the other as such.” It is the pattern of life, which objectifies itself in its environment, transforming object and subject without abolishing their difference.² This is the implicit pattern of the Logic in which successive concepts represent possible ways of knowing and being. The sequence of these concepts reflects increasing complexity and completeness, not the results of a production process in the usual sense.

Marx followed the tendency of Hegel’s historical writings in imagining a third; communism would leave capitalism and its proletariat behind in the creation of a new form of society. The abolition of the commodity form would once and for all transcend the contradictions of capitalism. But once capitalism is conceived as a rationalized society and the Marxist critique generalized to the forms of rationality, the revolution cannot culminate in a third. Socialism can no longer pretend to restart the clock of history because the past is ever renewed in the rationalized social institutions at the basis of modernity.

Lukács’s identical subject-object looks like the impossible third in his more florid descriptions of its revolutionary power. But his version of dialectics describes a relation between rational form and its objects or contents. He repeatedly states that the theory is about the tension between those contents, the life process of the proletariat, and economic, bureaucratic, and technological rationality. It is unclear how that tension could be definitively resolved.

A quasi-Fichtean interpretation makes the utopian claim that reification can be wholly overcome in a future socialist society. Even allowing for the persistent reification of nature, as Lukács does, this is a puzzling view. Lukács is supposed to have imagined an identical subject-object the actions of which would have no objective limits and no unintended consequences. With the complete abolition of reification, the subject would be free to create the world according to its arbitrary will. Whether or not Lukács intended his theory to be taken to such an extreme as his critics usually assume, it is fair to say that he left himself open to misinterpretation.

In fact, his early philosophy of praxis was immediately criticized both on these grounds and for its inability to give a consistent account of the concept of nature. I will review several of these original critical arguments here, as well as more recent ones. They concern Lukács’s supposed idealism and romanticism, the false identification of objectification and alienation in his concept of reification, and his unacceptable dualism of society and nature. I will argue that these criticisms overlook the dialectical theory of rationality. In the conclusion of this chapter I will consider whether that theory offers resources for resolving the antinomy of society and nature haunting his claim that revolutionary action can realize philosophy.