Lukács’s critique of irrationalism

From the antinomies of bourgeois thought to the destruction of reason

Abstract

Challenging claims of a complete intellectual and political reorientation, this paper argues that Gyorgy Lukács’s post-war critique of the forms of irrationalism characterising reactionary and proto-fascist thinking in Destruction of Reason carries forward a critique of bourgeois philosophy looking back to Lukács’s critique of “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” in History and Class Consciousness. Part 1 examines Lukács’s claims in History and Class Consciousness that Kantian philosophy and the oppositions it sets up – between theoretical and practical reason, science and morality, triumphant understanding and the unavailability of the totality and opacity of the “thing-in-itself” – reflect in the contemplative sphere the concrete contradictions of bourgeois-capitalist society. Part 2 shows how Lukács’s account of the genesis of modern philosophical “irrationalism” in Schelling directly situates this as arising out of the “problem of the irrational” reflected in the antinomies of Kantian critical philosophy, by positing an intellectual intuition putatively capable of transcending the limits of finite understanding and granting access (for an elite few) to an “abyssal” suprarational Ground of experience. In the concluding Part 3, we contend that, as Destruction of Reason tracks the devolution of philosophical irrationalism into far-Right ideology in the 20^th century, the 1933 essay “Grand Hotel Abyss” critiques the recurrent gesture of radical intellectuals to funnel their dissatisfaction at capitalist reification into exotic invocations of “spiritual crisis” which leave the political-economic dimensions of capitalist societies unexamined, because they lean on the same irrationalist premises established in Schelling’s irrationalist response to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. In the contemporary situation, as the far Right reemerges, and academic social critique continues to draw on premises drawn from irrationalism, Lukács’s position assumes new pertinence.