Chapter seven From Lukács to the Frankfurt School the frankfurt school

Among many other influences, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School were inspired by the philosophy of praxis as they discovered it in the early work of Marx and Lukács. Marx’s concept of nature and Lukács’s theory of reification are fundamental to the thinking of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse.¹ The distinction between traditional and critical theory flows directly from the revival of dialectics in the work of Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, and others writing in the early 1920s.

There is a deeper connection than simple influence between the Frankfurt School and the philosophy of praxis. We have seen that Marx and Lukács engage certain themes that hang together in a specific figure of thought. At its core is the metacritique of philosophy, the notion that the typical binary oppositions of the tradition such as the split between subject and object, fact and value, reason and life, constitute antinomies that depend ultimately on the structure of society and that can be overcome through social change. This turn away from philosophical speculation toward action implies an absolute historicism without which social change would not have ontological significance. “Absolute” in this context means all-embracing. Nature is thus incorporated into history by one or another conceptual means. All these themes reappear in the Frankfurt School, elaborated in original ways.

It is not necessary to assume the direct influence of History and Class Consciousness, although that can by no means be excluded. The Frankfurt School develops its characteristic positions in opposition to both Soviet “dialectical materialism” and Western academic philosophy. In pursuing this project, it simply takes for granted many of the themes explored by Lukács, Bloch, and Korsch, themes that are also found in texts of the early Marx the significance of which becomes clear with the publication in 1932 of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

In the judgment of the Frankfurt School, Lukács’s version of the philosophy of praxis fails in its main project, the Aufhebung of philosophy in an identical subject-object. This judgment is sometimes based on simple misinterpretation. This is especially clear in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which addresses an obvious straw man, as I argued in the previous chapter. Apart from interpretive failure, there are deeper reasons behind the rejection of Lukács’s thought. Lukács shares the ambition of classical German philosophy to construct a universal rationalism, although he intends to reach that goal through social theory rather than through philosophical speculation. This ambition appears excessive and dangerous to the philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

The very idea of a universal rationalism seems obviously to overreach the possibilities of finite human understanding. And yet there are risks in accepting the obvious in this case, for the irrational does not simply stay in its cognitive place as the unknown X. It invariably intrudes on practical life under the guise of religion, tradition, racist or nationalist prejudice, even a Führer. The Enlightenment attempted to conjure away such threats with a rationalism that degenerates, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, into a totalitarian instrumentalism entwined with other irrational forces it cannot control. Lukács’s theory of reification is a first critique of the instrumentalist degeneration Horkheimer and Adorno denounce. His solution is a non-instrumental practice that transforms social meanings from within, a practical version of immanent critique. This practice is supposed to overcome the irrationality of existence, “the indifference of form and content.” But once it fails, the problem of rationalism reappears in all its tragic glory.

The Frankfurt philosophers reject rationalism in the mutilated form in which it has come down to them. They see in Lukács’s theory a continuation of the naïve productivist attitude toward nature characteristic of both capitalist society and traditional Marxism. They put the domination of nature on the Marxist agenda for the first time, radicalizing the Marxist critique of science and technology that begins in Lukács but that he does not carry through to its logical conclusion.

Lukács addresses the problem of social domination. The concrete content that breaks out of the conceptual straitjacket of reification is the laboring human being, not nature. For the Frankfurt School this is no minor omission. They argue that the central issue of the twentieth century is the domination of nature. This realization requires a certain humility. As a natural being, the conqueror of nature is himself among the conquered. Marx promises a completely humanized nature but that project culminates in the atomic bomb, not utopia. Lukács promises a “totality” in which objectivity is transparent to the social subject, but the outcome is totalitarianism. Critical Theory struggles against these utopian promises.²

The rejection of Lukács’s version of the philosophy of practice is also motivated by the breakdown of the unity of theory and practice, that is, the idealized relation of Marxism to the proletariat.³ Theory and practice can only be united where the crisis tendencies identified by Marxism open a breach in the reified forms, and where the proletariat enters that breach. Lukács believes in this prospect in the early 1920s. He notes that the proletariat is “free” to reject its own revolutionary potential, but he shares the optimism of the post–World War I revolutionary upsurge. Furthermore, he is confident that the economic laws of capitalism will continually reproduce revolutionary conditions even if this upsurge fails. The Frankfurt School forms later, at a time when the unity of theory and practice is broken. The revolution is an abstract possibility rather than a real force—so the Frankfurt School philosophers concluded, at first tentatively and then, during and after World War II, more and more unreservedly. With the breakdown of revolutionary expectations, Lukács’s rationalism appears as an illusion entertained in an exceptional historical moment.

If Lukács failed to anticipate the breakdown of the unity of theory and practice, this is due not only to historical circumstances but to the rather small place occupied by technology and social psychology in his argument. For obvious reasons he lacks a media theory. He does note the reifying consequences of mechanization briefly and mentions the reification of the subjectivity of journalists and other middle-class employees. While conceding that immediate experience is reified for all classes in capitalist society, he considers workers partially exempt due to the mechanical nature of their labor. This is more or less the sum total of his dealings with the factors the Frankfurt School holds responsible for the failure of the revolution.

Lukács argues that the imposition of a narrow reified rationality is met by resistance from below. This dialectic institutes another, higher form of rationality. The Frankfurt School by contrast focuses on the consequences of the failure of resistance and the regressive forms of irrationality associated with it. The unifying theme of its analysis is the growing power of technology to control the social and natural worlds in an increasingly exploitative pattern signified by the concept of “domination.” Freudian ideas about repression and character structure, new approaches to authoritarianism and a radical critique of the psychic impact of regimentation at work, abundance of consumer goods, media propaganda, and so on, explain the effectiveness of the new system.

By the time he finally realizes that the revolution is not about to overtake the advanced countries of Europe but will remain confined to Russia for a long time to come, Lukács reasons about politics in Leninist terms. He can no longer draw on the resources of his earlier work to deal with the new problems emerging in advanced societies. As a result, he does not elaborate an independent theory of the failure of the revolution in the West.

Of course, the theory of reification can be deployed for this purpose, and that is precisely what the Frankfurt School does. It is in recognition of this that Adorno calls Lukács’s early book “important” despite his harsh critique, and elsewhere praises him as “the first dialectical materialist to apply the category of reification systematically to philosophy.”⁴ In addressing the role of reification in the failure of the revolution the Frankfurt School makes a definite advance.

The loss of revolutionary prospects has philosophical as well as political implications. According to Lukács’s metacritique, the tension between the reified form of the society and its living human content is not only social but also appears in classical German philosophy as a fundamental and unsurpassable irrationality, signified by the concept of the thing-in-itself. Lukács’s resolution of this tension depends on the unity of theory and practice. To the extent that the Frankfurt School accepts Lukács’s metacritique, its rejection of his solution reverberates through every level of its approach, from political theory to ontology.

The decisive turning point for the Frankfurt School comes with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book they concede the collapse of socialist hopes. The total reification of consciousness, which Lukács had attributed to the bourgeoisie and the middle strata, now extends to the working class as well. Instrumental reason erodes everyday experience and replaces a rich and complex relation to reality with simple manipulation. No meaningful world is possible anymore. The principle of life that in Lukács undermined the reified forms has been cancelled in a mechanistic universe.

The redemptive promise of rationality no longer lies in the socialist future but is reconstructed around the role of reflection in recognizing the limits of human technical powers over both inner and outer nature. “Nature” now stands in for the life process Lukács identified with the proletariat. However, this nature is not a positive force but names what is repressed by technological domination. It is the object of a reflective retrieval aimed at bounding technology and the competitive forces that deploy it in order to allow other dimensions of existence to flourish. Respect for these other dimensions is tied up with compassion, solidarity, and happiness.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later writings, this critique of instrumentalism does not quite culminate in a positive concept of rationality capable of replacing the reified one. Negative dialectics is not such a concept. It does not resolve the antinomies but rather identifies them as such and suspends all premature resolutions. It is the logic of immanent critique and not a constructive alternative.⁵ For the alternative implied by the critique to emerge, a social change would be required that Adorno neither describes nor predicts. But Adorno hints tantalizingly at more than this. A society reconciled with nature would be a utopia, albeit an unusual one. This utopia is not an alternative rational plan of existence but can only be indicated negatively, as not this or that contemporary horror. As Adorno writes, “the true thing determines itself via the false thing.”⁶

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man continues this argument while attempting to construct a positive notion of dialectical rationality. The modern differentiation of imagination from instrumental rationality denies the potentialities of people and things. Those potentialities can be grasped imaginatively and incorporated into a new concept of reason. Marcuse draws on Marx’s Manuscripts for the idea of lived nature, a Marxist version of the phenomenological Lebenswelt, which he contrasts with the stripped-down quantified nature of science and technology. Following the early Marx, Marcuse ontologizes the human relation to this lived nature. Reality is not the indifferent object of an abstract cognitive subject, but confronts the human subject as a subject in its own right.

The distance between this version of the Frankfurt School approach and the early Marx and Lukács is not so great. In place of Adorno’s negative utopia, Marcuse attempts to specify the broad outlines of a future alternative. The idea of potentiality is developed in Hegelian terms as the determinate negation of the capitalist system. It remains fairly abstract at first but acquires content through the struggles of the New Left. Nature now appears not just negatively as the repressed, but concretely as the natural environment and in expressions of the human needs for peace, beauty, meaning, and love. At this point Marcuse’s theory shows itself to be an original version of the philosophy of praxis. Through a long detour, the Frankfurt School returns to its sources.

In this chapter and the next I will trace these developments, weaving back and forth between the negative dialectics of Adorno and Marcuse’s “two-dimensional” ontology. This chapter will begin by considering some implications of the concepts of nature and rationality in Horkheimer and Adorno and conclude with considerations on the political impasse they reach. Chapter 8 then shows how phenomenological themes in Marcuse’s theory of experience led him to a far more positive evaluation of utopian prospects. In conclusion I will show how the idea of the liberation of nature figures in the philosophy of praxis of the Frankfurt School. Along the way I will develop several themes from my own critical theory of technology that address deficiencies in the original Frankfurt School approach.