Destruction of Reason

* Book: Georg Lukács. The Destruction of Reason. Merlin Press, 1980.

URL =

Discussion

John Bellamy Foster:

"Irrationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a well-known current of European philosophy, drawing inspiration from an emphasis on the will-to-life/will-to-power, instincts, intuition, myths, and vitalistic life principles, as well as a deep social pessimism—in opposition to the earlier Enlightenment emphasis on materialism, reason, science, and progress. It took the form of a deeply reactionary movement that was virulently anti-humanistic, antidemocratic, antiscientific, antisocialist, and anti-dialectical, as well as frequently racist and misogynist. Some of the leading figures of the irrationalist turn in the period 1848–1932, included Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, Sorel, Spengler, Bergson, Heidegger, and Schmitt.

Such philosophical irrationalism was the intellectual generalization of larger historical influences occurring within the dominant society. Hence, direct causal links with reactionary movements are often lacking. However, the broad connection between these ideational tendencies and the eventual emergence of fascism, and particularly Nazism, in Europe, is undeniable. Sorel professed his admiration for Benito Mussolini.17 Heidegger and Schmitt were Nazi ideologues and functionaries. None other than Hitler captured the spirit of unreason present at the time when he declared: “We stand at the end of the Age of Reason.… A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising, an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or scientific sense.”

Approaching the problem of irrationalism from a Marxist perspective, Lukács in The Destruction of Reason traced its historical roots to the defeat of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848, followed by the emergence of the imperialist stage of capitalism beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, leading to the First and Second World Wars. “Reason itself,” he argued, “can never be something politically neutral, suspended above social developments. It always mirrors the concrete rationality—or irrationality—of a social situation and evolving trend, sums it up conceptually and thereby promotes or inhibits it.”19 It is immanent critique, based on the scrutiny of changing historical conditions, that constitutes the essence of the Marxian dialectical method in the analysis of the development of thought.

For Lukács, Schopenhauer was the originator of “the purely bourgeois version of irrationalism.”20 His magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea, published in 1819, was directed against Hegelian philosophy. Schopenhauer attempted to oppose his subjective idealism of the will to G. W. F. Hegel’s objectivist idealism of reason. In doing so, he went so far as to schedule his lectures in Berlin in the 1820s opposite to those of Hegel’s own, but to no avail, since he was unable to attract an audience. It was only with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Germany that the overall climate shifted in his direction. At that point, the German bourgeoisie shifted their allegiance from Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, who in the last decade of his life achieved widespread acclaim.

Schopenhauer’s genius, according to Lukács, was to pioneer the method of “indirect apologetics,” later perfected by Nietzsche. Earlier apologetics for the bourgeois order had sought to defend it directly, despite its manifold contradictions. In Schopenhauer’s new method of indirect apologetics, the bad side of capitalism (and even its contradictions) could be brought into the open. This was never attributed to the capitalist system but to egoism, instincts, and will, perceiving human existence in deeply pessimistic terms as a vice-ridden process of self-dissolution.22 Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, or the will-to-life, which he attributed to all of existence, thus took the form of a cosmic egoism. By reducing everything in the end to pure will, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Lukács wrote, “anthropomorphizes the whole of nature.” The will, for Schopenhauer, embraced Immanuel Kant’s things-in-themselves (noumena), beyond human perception. “I must recognize,” Schopenhauer declared, “the inscrutable forces which manifest themselves in all natural bodies as identical with that which in me is the will, and as differing from it only in degree.”

Schopenhauer’s notion of the will was perhaps best revealed by his response to Baruch Spinoza’s famous statement that a falling stone, if it were conscious, would think it had free will and that its momentum was a product of its own volition—an argument designed to refute the notion of free will. Schopenhauer inverted Spinoza’s meaning and declared: “The stone would be right. The path is the same for the stone as the motive for me, and what is manifested in the stone’s case as cohesion, gravity, persistence in the assumed state is, in esoteric essence, the same as that which I recognize in myself as will.”24 For Schopenhauer, “crude materialism” simply denied the immanence of those “vital forces” which were identical with the will to life, beyond which there was “nothing.”

The late nineteenth century was a period associated in part with the growth of neo-Kantianism in philosophy, beginning with Friedrich Lange’s The History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance (1866), which sought to overthrow all materialist tendencies—notably, Karl Marx’s historical materialism.26 But even more influential and geared to the new imperialist age was irrationalism as a general philosophical tendency. Schopenhauer’s leading follower (outside of Nietzsche, on whom he exercised a considerable influence), and a dominant figure in philosophical irrationalism in the late nineteenth century, was Hartmann, with his massive tome, The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). A more eclectic thinker than Schopenhauer, Hartmann professed to be bringing together Hegel’s optimism with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. But it was the deep pessimism and irrationalism of Hartmann’s work that most impressed readers at the time, marked especially by his notion of cosmic suicide.

In Hartmann’s view, this was the best of all possible worlds, but nonexistence was superior to existence. Hence, he believed that at some point the will, or “Unconscious Spirit,” would become so wrapped in the human species “at the height of its development” that it would lead to a cosmic suicide, bringing to a “temporal end” the entire world process, resulting in the “last day.” At that point, “the human negation of will” would “annihilate the whole actual volition of the world without residuum and cause the whole kosmos to disappear at a stroke by withdrawal of the volition, which alone gives it existence.” Humanity’s end would not take the form of a traditional “apocalypse,” coming from without, but would emanate from the suicide of the will, extending to the universe as a whole.27

Nietzsche died in 1900. The date was significant, since in Lukács’s view, Nietzsche was the “founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period,” which was then only commencing. The imperialist or monopoly stage of capitalism in Marxist theory began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but, in terms of Nietzsche’s life and work, only “the first shoots and buds of what was to come” in that respect were visible. Nietzsche’s genius was instinctively to capture a sense of what was to come and to develop the method of irrationalism for the new age of empire as a “mythicizing form” of analysis, made more obscure by the frequent use of aphorisms. It is this that accounts for the mesmerizing nature of Nietzsche’s literary style, which was at the same time a means of perfecting indirect apologetics.28 Everything in Nietzsche is presented in a haze so that, while the whole political-social thrust of his philosophy is not in doubt, it also gives rise to endless discussions arising from its mythic character, inviting imitators, and establishing the dominant form in which philosophical irrationalism is pursued to this day.

Summarizing the main character of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Lukács wrote:

- The more fictive a concept is and the more purely subjectivist its origins, the higher it stands and the “truer” it is in the mythical scale of values. Being, so long as its concept contains even the slightest vestiges of a relationship to a reality independent of our consciousness, must be displaced by Becoming (equals idea). Being, however, when freed from these shackles and viewed purely as fiction, as a product of the will-to-power, may then, for Nietzsche, be a still higher category than Becoming: an expression of the intuitive pseudo-objectivity of myth. With Nietzsche, the special function of such a definition of Becoming and Being lies in supporting the pseudo-historicity vital to his indirect apologetics and in simultaneously dismissing it, confirming philosophically that historical Becoming can produce nothing that is new and outruns capitalism.

Yet, for the all the brilliance—and even attraction—of Nietzsche’s philosophy, its systematic reactionary and irrationalist character cannot be denied. At the end of his The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer had declared that the will-to-life was everything, beyond which there was nothing. Nietzsche, in a play on Schopenhauer, famously pronounced: “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourself are this will to power—and nothing besides!”30

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche, in opposition to Marxism, wrote:

- Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.… If it is a living and not a dying body…it will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power. But there is no point on which the ordinary consciousness of Europeans resists instruction as on this: everywhere people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed—which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.

Here Nietzsche conflates appropriation—which, in classical political theory and in the work of thinkers as diverse as John Locke, Hegel, and Marx meant the process of acquiring property (and which, for Marx, ultimately involved production)—with actual exploitation. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s usage, exploitation was no different than expropriation (that is, appropriation without equivalent or reciprocity). Thus, in a sleight of hand, appropriation, which is the basis of life, becomes equated with exploitation/expropriation, which is not essential to existence, thereby shutting off any notion of an egalitarian or humane future. Moreover, Nietzsche ultimately grounds his view here in a biological determinism, which, he tells us, constitutes the “essence” of the “will to power.” In this way, his essentialism with respect to human nature differs from that of Thomas Hobbes only insofar as the latter, in the historical context of the seventeenth century, was a progressive rather than regressive thinker.

Nietzsche’s writings exhibit endless attacks on socialism and even democracy. “Socialism,” he wrote, was “the logical conclusion of the tyranny of the least and dumbest.” In a twist on Darwinism, which he appropriated in the form of a mere cliché along the lines of social Darwinism, he argued that rather than the survival of the fittest, European society was characterized by the survival of the unfittest. In this view, the mediocre masses or “herd animals” were taking over society by force of numbers from the more “noble” elements, so that it was the noble spirits that needed to be protected by means of force. “We shall perish,” he wrote, “because of the absence of slavery.” Detesting bourgeois society, but detesting democracy and socialism even more, Nietzsche declared: “Such phantoms of the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the shabby products of a slave mentality hiding from its own nature.”

Modern society, for Nietzsche, interfered with the natural hierarchy of races, constituting “an age” that “mixes races indiscriminately.” This called for the reassertion of the “master-race,” which he depicted in “Aryan” terms, as connected to the “blond Germanic beast” to be found “at the center of every noble race.” In contrast, “the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population—represent the decline of mankind.”37

Glorying in the defeat of the Paris Commune, Nietzsche referred to it as the “most primitive form of social structure,” since it represented the interests of the herd. He worried about the tragic fate awaiting “the conquering master race, that of the Aryans” in the democratic and socialist age. Such conquering “Aryan humanity” was characterized as originally blond and “completely pure and primordial,” as opposed to the previous “dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants” of Europe and elsewhere.38 In The Will to Power, he openly declared: “The great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect of our race. I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples”—lacking the right to exist.

In Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” “noble” spirits and the master race would again experience the triumph of the will in the cyclical swings of history. Yet, eternal recurrence, meant a lack of overall progress, so that the cumulative result was “Nothingness (the ‘meaninglessness’) for ever more!” Although Nietzsche wished to supersede nihilism through the Overman as the personification of the will-to-power, it was to nihilism that everything always eternally returned, as genuine forward progress was foreclosed.

Vitalism, or Lebensphilosophie, was, in Lukács’s conception, the dominant philosophy of the whole imperialist period in Germany. However, vitalism had its foremost representative in this period in the work of Bergson in France. Bergson’s philosophy rested on two forms of consciousness: intellect and intuition. The intellect related to the mechanical world of natural science, intuition to metaphysics and thus the realm of philosophy. He believed that, by looking inward into the intuitive realm, it was possible to solve problems like the character of time and evolution in ways that complemented—but went beyond—science and reason. Thus, he challenged, as Lukács put it, “the scientific character of normal scientific knowledge,” creating a “stark confrontation of rationality and irrationalist intuition.”

Bergson’s two most important concepts were those of time as subjective duration, and the élan vital, or vital impulse. On the basis of these concepts, he proposed a kind of third way in philosophy existing outside of mechanistic materialism and idealism/teleology. “Time,” he stated, “is invention or it is nothing at all.” The moment we confront “duration, we see that it means creation.” Our own lives gave us the clues to unlocking the secret of time, or the ability to endure, since duration was not an attribute “of matter itself, but that of life which reascends the course of matter.” The élan vital was the creative impulse of life, lighting up matter, which explained evolution. On these essentially mystical bases, Bergson went on to challenge Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as natural selection and Albert Einstein’s conception of spacetime for failing to capture the subjective, intuitive, and creative bases of existence.

Bergson was born in 1859, the year of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but he could never accept Darwin’s theory of natural selection, arguing that natural science was inadequate in this area, and that there must be some vital, creative impulse, a cosmic élan vital underlying all evolution. Utilizing arguments that are now employed by advocates of Intelligent Design—for example, that the evolution of the eye could not be explained by natural selection—he attributed “creative evolution” to a vital power independent of matter and organization.

Bergson’s attacks on the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and on reason in general, caused E. Ray Lankester, the protégé of Darwin and Thomas Huxley, a close friend of Marx, and the leading British biologist of his day, to rebel at Bergson’s presentation of “intuition as a true guide and the intellect as an erroneous guide.” In assessing Bergson’s contribution, Lankester, a strict materialist, wrote: “To the student of the aberrations and monstrosities of the mind of man, M[onsieur] Bergson’s works will always be documents of value,” akin to the interest that “a collector may take in a curious species of beetle.”44 (Socialist biologists subsequently transcended the debate between mechanists and vitalists via materialist dialectics, in what constituted a major contribution to science.)45

Bergson was incensed by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which interpreted time (or spacetime) in terms of physics and was gradually receiving general recognition. In a famous face-off in April 1922, Bergson argued in opposition to Einstein that a physical notion of time professed by the intellect was inadequate and that time could only fully be understood when also approached subjectively and intuitively in terms of duration. Einstein responded that, “The time of the philosophers [conflating both psychical time and physical time] does not exist, there remains only a psychological time that differs from that of the physicists.” For Einstein, neither Bergson’s élan vital nor his duration had any meaning in terms of physical science.

In Lukács’s view, there was no such thing as an “‘innocent’ philosophy.” This was clearly the case where Heidegger was concerned, despite its rarefied aspect. In Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece Being and Time, the consideration of individual beings is downplayed in the search for the “fundamental ontology” of metaphysical Being. He proposed that Being can be approached on the basis of an existential analytic focused on Dasein, or human existence, which, as he later explained, can be conceived as dwelling in and performing the role of “the shepherd of Being.” Hence, although Being, for Heidegger, cannot be apprehended directly, it can be disclosed in part phenomenologically and existentially by the scrutiny of Dasein in the context of its “becoming-with” the world. All previous philosophies, from Plato to the modern era, were deemed by Heidegger to be superficial and narrowly metaphysical insofar as they did not focus on the fundamental ontological problem of Being. One consequence of Heidegger’s philosophy was to decenter the conscious (transcendental) ego, and to shift philosophy from questions of subject-object relations to authenticity and inauthenticity.

Given that the pursuit of Being as such is the main thrust of Heidegger’s existential analytic, one might think that it would not have much relation to politics and ethics. Yet, the reactionary, irrational, and vitalistic elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, while not present on the surface, seeped out in various ways, exhibiting the true nature of his irrationalist logic. This occurred not simply in his official Nazi period, but also in his later work after the war, and was arguably implicit in his whole philosophical position from the beginning.

Thus, in his published lectures on Being and Truth, presented at the University of Freiburg in the winter of 1933–1934, shortly after he joined the Nazi Party and only a few years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger declared:

- An enemy is each and every person who poses an essential threat to the Dasein [existence] of the people and its individual members. The enemy does not have to be external, and the external enemy is not even always the most dangerous one. And it can seem as if there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to find the enemy, to expose the enemy to the light, or even first to make the enemy, so that this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may not lose its edge.… [The challenge is] to bring the enemy into the open, to harbor no illusions about the enemy, to keep oneself ready for attack, to cultivate and intensify a constant readiness and to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation.

Heidegger’s roles as a Nazi Party functionary, ideologue, and, during his years as rector at the University of Freiburg, the most prominent academic supporter of Hitler are now well known. He helped institute Gleichschaltung, or the bringing-into-line within the German academy, playing a leading role in purging the university of colleagues and students who failed to conform to the dictates of the Nazi regime. He also worked closely with the legal theorist Schmitt, the main author of the notorious Führer principle, promoting Nazi ideology and presiding over symbolic book burnings.52 His 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics not only provided a tribute to Nazism but also advanced an argument for the triumph of the “historical Volk [people]…and thereby the history of the West,” activating “new spiritual energies.” In a conversation with Karl Löwith in Heidelberg in 1936, Heidegger agreed “without reservation” to the suggestion that his “partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy.”

Heidegger frequently lauded Mussolini and Hitler, presenting Nietzsche as a forerunner of both fascist leaders. In Heidegger’s book on Friedrich Schelling, a long sentence from the original lecture was omitted in the 1971 edition but was later reinserted at Heidegger’s own request. It said: “As is well known, both of the two men in Europe who have, in the political-national fashioning of their respective Volks, inaugurated counter-movements [Gegenbewegungen] to nihilism, namely Mussolini and Hitler, were in turn, each in their own way, essentially determined by Nietzsche; still this was so without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical domain having come into its own.” Nietzsche, Heidegger explained in his lectures, had shown that “democracy” led to a “degenerate form of nihilism” and thus demanded a more authentic Volk movement. In a course on logic in 1934, Heidegger declared that “Negroes are men but they have no history.… Nature has no history.… When an airplane’s propeller turns, then nothing actually ‘occurs.’ Conversely, when the same airplane takes Hitler to Mussolini, then history occurs.”54 “The sham culture” of Western civilization, he explained, will be superseded only by the “spiritual world” of the Volk based on “the deepest preservation of the forces of the soil and blood.”

In his infamous Black Notebooks (a philosophical diary that Heidegger asked to be included at the end of his Collected Works), he gave repeated evidence of his deep antisemitism. Thus, he attributed the faults of modernity and Western rationalism to “World Judaism,” a term used in Hitler’s Mein Kampf referring to a Jewish conspiracy of world domination. “World Judaism,” Heidegger wrote in the Black Notebooks, “is ungraspable everywhere [because of its dominance of rationalist thought] and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we [Nazi Germany in the Second World War] are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.” Following the publication of the Black Notebooks, as Heidegger scholar Tom Rockmore has noted, “it seems increasingly clear that Heidegger’s philosophy, his turning to National Socialism, and his anti-Semitism are neither separate nor separable but rather inseparably linked.”

It is clear that Heidegger never moved away, or even intended to distance himself, from his extreme reactionary views, which underpinned his whole philosophical effort. In his famous Letter on Humanism, published in 1947, he provided a systematic attack on humanism, disparaging German Enlightenment thinkers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Unlike today’s posthumanism, however, Heidegger was chiefly concerned with negating the notion of human beings as primarily material or corporeal beings, having an “animal rationale.” For Heidegger, the truth lay in the existential analytic of Dasein, conceiving real human existence as approaching Being. In his usual veiled language, Heidegger heralded a “destiny” still to come, based on a historicity “more primordial”—closer to Dasein — ”than humanism.” Humanism, which he identified with rationalism, was at all times to be opposed, “because it does not set humanitas high enough” in promoting the empiricist ontic of mere individual, material beings, as opposed to the fundamental ontology of Being, in which the conscious ego is decentered. Heidegger intimated that, due to language, which he saw as at the center of Dasein, there was a close relationship between ancient Greek and German cultures (along what was generally conceived to be the Aryan line) that made Germany unique in furthering the authentic historicity of the West.

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger acknowledged the power of Marx’s critique of alienation before proceeding to criticize naïve materialism and reducing Marx’s theory of alienation to the issue of technology. As Lukács stated, there was no doubt what Heidegger was saying here, namely that he saw “Marxism as the chief antagonist.”

(https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/)

More information

• Continuing and updating this discussion on the new 'irrationalism': John Bellamy Foster on Late Imperial Bourgeois Irrationalism