Natural history

Instead of a one-time and total dereification of the sort promised by the idealist version of the identical subject-object, the theory of rationality proposes a more nuanced interpretation that leaves room for objectivity. A sliding ontological scale includes aspects of the objective world that are more or less resistant to dereification. Some of these, the ones that are specifically social such as wage labor, are susceptible to much more radical transformation than others, such as the nature studied by the natural sciences. Other objects, such as art and technology, and the lived nature of everyday experience stand in between the extremes, more contingent on human action than the nature of natural science but less so than social institutions.⁴⁹ In each case subject and reified object interact as moments in a “totality.”

This version of subject-object identity abolishes the thing-in-itself not by reducing it to the subject but by mediating objectivity in a never-ending process. But this means that the identical subject-object is not a substantial “thing” in the usual sense of the word, identical to itself and enduring through change. Rather, the identical subject-object is a process of self and social transformation that appears and fades with the rhythms of the historical struggle.

This interpretation of subject-object identity can provide a framework for understanding Lukács’s response to the various criticisms described above, especially if the more elaborate arguments of the Defence are taken into account. In the Defence, Lukács goes beyond the few brief comments on science in History and Class Consciousness. However, this text is an unfinished first draft, not a polished publication. Its significance is obscured by Lukács’s avoidance of his own philosophical terminology. He no longer refers to “forms of objectivity” and “reification,” presumably because he does not think such concepts acceptable in the new Soviet context of the debate.⁵⁰ He writes instead about the “metabolic interaction of man and nature.” By this he means the labor process that mediates the natural world. He also refers to the “appearance” of society and to the mode of “perception” determined by the level and type of metabolic interaction. The emergence of new appearances and perceptions under socialism seems a euphemism for the transformation of the reified form of objectivity discussed in History and Class Consciousness.

Although this change in terminology is confusing, other arguments in the Defence clear up ambiguities in History and Class Consciousness. Vogel concludes from Lukács’s distinction of nature and society that he accepts internalism and realism. But this is actually the view Lukács attributes to Rudas in his Defence. He writes, for example, that “Comrade Rudas assumes an immanent development of the natural sciences.”⁵¹ Both Deborin and Rudas claim that science yields knowledge of things-in-themselves, as Engels famously argued in a discussion of the significance of synthetic chemistry and scientific experiment.⁵² This implies that science engages humanity in a direct relation to nature.

Lukács argues that humanity is not the subject of scientific knowledge; humanity is merely an abstraction from the concrete social subjects that interact with nature in history. The cognitive relation to nature depends on the form of the labor process, the “metabolic interchange with nature” imposed by the dominant economic system. He thus proposes a kind of perspectivism according to which economic systems open up ways of knowing. He points out, furthermore, that Marx himself interpreted certain scientific discoveries in terms of their social background. For example, Marx claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution reflects capitalist competition. According to Lukács this view does not lead to relativism since real progress can be observed in the development of the forces of production to which corresponds cognitive progress in the understanding of nature.

The argument from progress is weak and Lukács does not follow it up in a very coherent manner, although he does make a few other suggestive remarks that conform with his theory of dialectical rationality. As we have seen, the capitalist system structures appearances in such a way as to privilege ahistorical facts. The socialist challenge to capitalism creates new cognitive possibilities. Lukács writes,

It is altogether possible that the present crisis of the natural sciences is already a sign of the immanent revolutionizing of its material basis and not merely a reflex of the general ideological crisis of capitalism in decline.

However, as long as we are not in a position to demonstrate concretely the historical genesis of the emergence of our perceptions out of their material basis, i.e., not only that they are, but what they are, and how, etc., as Marx accomplished for our socio-historical perceptions, our mode of looking is lacking an important objective moment of the dialectic: history.⁵³

This passage and the discussion it introduces are peculiarly ambiguous. The ambiguity attaches to the word “history.” Does Lukács mean that scientific research will identify historical aspects of its object that are currently overlooked? Or does he mean that science as a process of inquiry will become reflexive, aware of its own historical conditioning? Both interpretations are implied once again in the following passage.

To what extent all knowledge of nature can ever be transformed into historical knowledge … cannot be raised here because even where it seems to us that historical developments have occurred their historical character can now be grasped only to a very small extent … [This] is because the capacity to discover the material foundations of knowledge, and to derive knowledge from this material basis dialectically, has not yet up until this point been produced by objective real developments.⁵⁴

In fact Lukács seems to want to affirm both the ambiguous senses of “history” in these passages. Here is a fuller account of these alternatives.

1. Lukács entertains the possibility of a “new science” emerging from the socialist transformation of the labor process. There is a basis for this view in a comment in The German Ideology: “Even this ‘pure’ natural science receives its aim, like its material, only through commerce and industry, through the sensuous activity of men.”⁵⁵ This comment is a pale reflection of some of the most adventurous speculations of the Manuscripts reviewed in Chapter 3 of this book. There Marx writes, for example, that “Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural science, to man.”⁵⁶ The progress of industry is thus also progress in the human relationship to nature, i.e., sense experience. Objective human powers develop through the maturation and humanization of the senses in the course of history. “The supersession of private property is, therefore, the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses.”⁵⁷ As experience is enhanced, science will be transformed. “Natural science will one day incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science.”⁵⁸

Lukács proposes a somewhat similar but more modest theory in History and Class Consciousness. Experienced nature is no poetic schwärmerei, distinguished from the prose of machines and laboratory experiments by the absence of thought and reflection. The perception of nature is not immediate, but is always already mediated, informed by the “metabolism” of man and nature, sensed and comprehended through social forms of objectivity. The reference to changed perceptions and their effects on scientific knowledge, translated into the terminology of History and Class Consciousness, means that everyday experience will be reshaped by a new form of objectivity as capitalism’s rigid opposition of factual form and living content gives way to the fluid interaction between them under socialism.

This notion offers a basis for understanding the possible evolution of science. Lukács argues in the Defence that new “perceptions” will open a historical perspective on nature. Once human beings know that there are no eternal laws of society, and institute that knowledge in a dynamic and self-conscious production system, they will also be predisposed to conceive nature in historical terms. Just as historical elements have already entered some fields of natural science through evolutionary theory and thermodynamics, so every branch of science will someday become historical. A new historically informed science will yield new results reflecting the new structure of interchange with nature under socialism and the “perceptions” or form of objectivity that accompany it.

2. The second possible interpretation of Lukács’s reference to a new science concerns inquiry itself rather than its results. The new perceptions introduced by socialism involve a continual alternation of dereification and stabilization in society at large. This might also describe a new and more dynamic process of research in which a continual deconstruction of the reified heritage of earlier socially biased results would constitute the motor of scientific progress.

Lukács admits that up to now reflexivity has not been required to produce good research. Specialized knowledge of the highest quality has been and still is obtained by researchers with no special insight into their own social and historical situation. Indeed, contemplative epistemology and the correlated reification of nature represent a progress over earlier mythological forms of objectivity and their usefulness is not exhausted. Furthermore, he does not even deny the contribution of reified contemplation to social knowledge prior to the development of the Marxist approach.

But despite these concessions, Lukács suggests the usefulness of social critique of science where its concepts retain traces of an obsolete mode of production. Such critique, he argues, “will probably show that some categories that appear today as ‘eternal,’ as categories directly taken from nature, e.g. work in physics, are actually historical, determined by the specific exchange of matter between capitalist society and nature.”⁵⁹ The mechanical view of nature might be an example.

According to Lukács’s reflexive account, a dereifying process of self-discovery can thus affect natural science. The theorist should become “conscious that the categories in which he conceives objective reality (society and nature) are determined by the social being of his present moment, that they are only mental summations of this objective reality. (Categories are ‘forms of existence, conditions of existence’—Marx.)”⁶⁰ But the outcome of such dereification of nature is quite different from the dereification of society. Since nature as a system or totality does not depend on the unconsciousness of the practices in which it is understood, self-consciousness does not overthrow its reified form of objectivity although some results of scientific research may indeed be overthrown.

Conceivably, the accumulation of new theories arising from an ideology-critique of science could lead to a new science. But little can be said of such a new science in this transitional period. Lukács writes that “Just how deeply the historically changing, therefore historically ephemeral process of capitalist exchange of matter with nature determines our present knowledge of nature, and where those categories that determine the metabolic exchange of any society with nature begin, are questions for individual research.”⁶¹

The dereification of scientific knowledge would not transform nature into a human product in the usual ontic sense of the term. Insofar as the self-critique of science effects scientific change, it issues in a new positing of “objective nature” indeed, the hallmark of scientific advance is that it gives access to a law that resists modification through self-consciousness. The reified dimension of nature on which natural science is based cannot be cancelled by a historical progress that would reveal its truths as human activity.

Lukács seems to be arguing two apparently contradictory points: social critique shows that the form of objectivity of nature is historically bound, while scientific research establishes the transcendence of particular facts and theories, at least while they prevail. The conceptual framework in terms of which we identify nature is socially contingent, but knowledge of nature refers to objects independent of us, that is, to presuppositions and not results of our practices. The success of a scientific fact in escaping critique need not be eternal to serve the purpose of the argument. Nature is a moving target; as Marcuse says, “nature is not a manifestation of ‘spirit,’ but rather its essential limit.”⁶² And the position of that limit changes in history. Scientific knowledge is always already subject in principle if not in present practice to a critique that would refute particular results while establishing new ones as the new “nature itself.”

These two points seem incompatible because we assume that if our conception of nature in general is socially conditioned, then all the results of research carry the stigma of a social origin and cannot yield knowledge of an independent reality. But Lukács argues that it is senseless to conclude from a social critique of the general concept of nature that particular results are merely relative. This would be to confuse social theory with research and to make of the former a “systematic locus” of absolute knowledge. Finite knowledge is bound to a context. In the context of research, critique does not stand alone but is a moment in a process leading to a new posit of reality. Removed from that context, it cannot serve in a general argument for relativism or the existence of the thing-in-itself. Modern science knows the truth of nature in the only meaningful sense of the word. This is so even though the conceptual framework within which nature is known is reified, hence conceived in a socially relative perspective on the world.⁶³

I think this is what Lukács means in the passage cited above by the need for “individual research” into the extent of social determination, in opposition, presumably, to general speculation. This is a Lukácsian version of the finite horizon Marx deployed in 1844 to block the cosmological argument, as we saw in Chapter 3. In support of his position Lukács refers to Hegel’s argument according to which the Kantian thing-in-itself is a pure thought object, an abstraction from all concrete existence. As such it cannot be the ultimate reality because it depends on the subject of the process of abstraction.

Under the finite horizon, history, not nature or the thing-in-itself, is ultimate reality. The reification of nature is a moment of the historical process in which the experience, knowledge and technical control of nature develop. The social totality contains a reified moment—nature—that is not cancelled by self-consciousness, but which rather opens a realm of irreducible facts and theories. Nature may not be dereified by human practice on the same terms as society, but its participation in the dialectic reveals it to be fundamentally historical.

It is time to draw the conclusions of this argument. The concepts of dereification and subject-object identity do not belong to a Fichtean metaphysics. These concepts are essentially methodological and not substantive. This is shown by Lukács’s constant emphasis on the importance of methodology. Indeed, on the first page of History and Class Consciousness, he claims that Marxist “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”⁶⁴ As Gillian Rose puts a similar point, “Lukács turned … the logic of constitutive principles, away from a logic of identity in the direction of a theory of historical mediation.”⁶⁵ He means for us to take him literally when he describes “proletarian thought,” i.e., Marxism, his own theory, as “a theory of practice that only gradually transforms itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world.”⁶⁶

As we saw in the case of the social application of the theory of dialectical rationality, this position is incompatible with the notion that reification characterizes only the bourgeois era. Given the internal link between reification and dialectics in the concept of mediation, it is impossible to eliminate the former without also eliminating the latter. Insofar as the truth is discovered dialectically, reification is a necessary moment in the process of discovery. Reification is, in sum, not the “opposite” of dialectics, but a moment in it. “For, if concepts are only the intellectual forms of historical realities then these forms, one-sided, abstract and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine aspects of it … Insofar as the ‘false’ is an aspect of the ‘true’ it is both ‘false’ and ‘non-false.’”⁶⁷

What may nevertheless change radically in the course of history is the position of the reified moment in the totality to which it belongs. István Mészáros writes, “Granting that it is unthinkable to supersede … all possible dangers and potentials of reification is fully compatible with conceiving ‘Aufhebung’ as a succession of social enterprises of which the later is less … alienation-ridden than the preceding one.”⁶⁸ Lukács’s argument for a historically self-conscious science is an example of such an advance.