Methodological universalism

Modern thought claims universality for its science by contrast with culture that is relative to a local situation, a history. Science achieves universality by transcending such contingencies. The crisis of modern knowledge arises when it too is situated historically. This relativistic turn is often traced to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. As we saw in Chapter 3, it forbids a naïve acceptance of the discontinuity between knowledge and culture. This makes it difficult to distinguish the claims to truth of modern science from similar claims of any other “ethnoscience” in any other culture.⁶⁹ This raises important questions about the global impact of the West that can be addressed with Lukács’s concepts of reification and dereification, although he himself did not so address them.

Relativism seems to imply that the global triumph of Western science cannot claim to be based on epistemological superiority but exclusively on military supremacy. But this is not the whole story. The success of Western modernity is not merely military but depends on its critical force as well. It is at that level that something like the universality of modernity can be defended. But as Lukács argues, this universality is fraught with an internal contradiction. It suffers a tension between two forms of knowledge, a reifying and a dereifying form. Dereification too is the basis of a modern way of knowing. It too is a critical method, although it operates in very different ways and circumstances from science. The tension between them reflects the imbrication of nature and history, the full complexity of which is first appreciated by the Frankfurt School.

It is the critical method of science and not an absolute truth content that qualifies it as universal. In one sense, this is obvious since no scientist claims to possess the absolute truth and one and all expect the current scientific representation of nature to be overthrown in some future scientific revolution. Most scientists would say the scientific universal is the method of observation, experiment, and specific types of abstraction such as quantitative measurement and calculation. Understood epistemologically, these features of modern science organize the discovery of “truths,” or at least what scientists use for truths while they last. But understood in ontological terms, something very different is involved, not the construction of a more or less true representation but the constitution of a specific object, the modern concept of nature. The universality of modern science lies in this process of ontological construction, not in any particular truth.

The natural scientific idea of nature systematically negates lived experience; this is the downfall of Bacon’s idols. It strips away the embodied and imaginative relation to the objects of experience central to all non-modern forms of knowing, to all cultures. This negation enters experience as disenchantment and authorizes the exploitation of nature as mere raw material. To the extent that modern societies realize this negation in their mentalities and institutions, they undermine their own basis in the natural world with the consequences we now recognize as impending environmental catastrophe. This has been the tendency of Western culture for several centuries and it is now a global tendency.

Reification and dereification are characterized by their destructive relation to immediate experience and the cultures that arise from it. It is their negativity that ensures their universality. They do not posit absolute truths, but their relative truths flow from the application of methods that know no limits. Although they arise in the capitalist West, they are capable of undermining all cultures all over the world. This conception of modern knowledge suggests an explanation for the success of science in displacing other knowledge traditions as well as an account of the corrective force of dereifying historical knowledge.

Just as the nature of modern science emerges through the negation of the lived experience of nature in the West, so it can negate other experiences of nature, other ontologies, and establish its supremacy on a global scale. The effectiveness of its technology is especially persuasive, but the nature it “conquers” is tailored to culturally relative expectations and denies many aspects of nature more adequately represented in other cultures and in our own past.

Lukács argues for the congruence of the scientific-technical reification of experience and capitalism. As science undermines the lived experience of nature, so the market erodes customs and traditions. Together they project certain basic features of Western culture globally while opening up the entire planet to exploitation. The cultural bias of technology is tied up with capitalist development that mobilizes a similar negative force through the market. I explain this culturally specific aspect of Western universalism in the next chapter in terms of the concept of “formal bias.”

The process of disenchantment provokes counter-tendencies that reveal its bias. The universality of science and technology meets a limit in the harm that goes along with capitalist development, most obvious today from such problems as the intensive exploitation of factory labor, massive pollution, and unprecedented urban squalor. These side effects of progress first appear in the condition of the proletariat in Western capitalism but today are found in exaggerated forms in the developing world.

Lukács shows that Marxism is based on the critical relation of the proletariat to its reduction to wage labor. This reduction negates the lived experience of the working class under capitalism. The reifying logic of scientific-technical rationality here applies beyond nature to human society. What in relation to nature was the construction of the abstract object of scientific rationality becomes in social terms the imposition of an abstract economic form on living human beings.

Resistance to this imposition reveals society as a unique object with a different structure from nature. It is composed of individuals possessed of consciousness and will. The universal destructiveness of reification is now met with another universal, the struggle to reestablish the human dimension of experience cancelled by reification. And like natural science, the dereifying theory of society constructs an object through specific methodological procedures. Lukács summarizes these procedures as knowledge of the totality, that is, as the reduction of every apparently substantial social object to its functional relation to the whole of society and to the practices that support that relation. Marxism exemplifies this methodology.

The dereifying reduction Marxism applies to capitalism has the paradoxical effect of validating aspects of the lived experience of the working class. Capitalist forms are contrasted with the social content on which they are imposed. The effect of reification is thereby cancelled and transcended. The immediacy of capitalist experience is overcome just as capitalism itself overcame the immediacy of the lived experience on which it was imposed. Now lived experience returns not as a narrow local culture, a tradition, but as a futural demand for the material conditions of a decent life. This demand may be inflected culturally, but such basic elements as adequate sustenance, shelter, medical care, education, dignity and respect, opportunities to develop and apply capacities, qualify it as relatively universal, at least in a modern or modernizing context. These are, so to speak, the “primary qualities” of a humane world. Like science, technology, and capitalism, dereification can travel wherever they intrude. This is the methodological basis of Marxist universalism.