Hi All,

 

Since I last wrote, I have continued reading Lukács’ The Young Hegel (1975) and am finding it informative and highly rewarding, though not always convincing. Lukács’ practical attitude is one of his great strengths as it gives directness and clarity to his prose. However, the ends he has in view seem to me to be indeterminate. It seems to me that the more dubious parts are if anything more interesting than his real achievements, as they suggest ways of reconstituting the content of social philosophy in a practical direction.

 

That said, I think it might be useful to share my understanding of a key chapter in the trilogy of economic chapters in Part Three of the book. The title is “Labour and the Problem of Teleology”. One key point will be interpreting Lukács’s remark that “Hegel fails to notice here [in the Phenomenology] that the consistent application of his own teleological principle leads him back into the old theological conception of teleology.” (363) It seems to me that Lukács is playing variations on the subjectivist tune of Dilthey, though in another key. There may be a fruitful relation to the subject of Stahl’s book on biology mentioned a while ago on this list.

 

I am not content with the literary form I have adopted of exposition combined with comments in square brackets. However, it serves my purposes, so will stick with it for the moment. Hopefully breaking in on the text at this particular moment will not cause too many difficulties, as it is the start of an interlude in the treatment of labour as a factor in society.

 

 

Lukács pauses his economic analysis to consider the nature of teleology (i.e. purposive activity). He notes that Marx wrote in Capital (170); “We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.” (338) That is, we imagine our end-goal before we realize it. The labourer realizes a purpose, which gives a law to his action and to which he subordinates his will. The purpose of economic activity is consumption. Lukács here launches what appears to be a scornful and ill-judged attack on the ideas of God and a divinely ordained purpose, in the course of which he invokes Engels, Hobbes and Spinoza. He writes:

 

“The philosophy of the modern world had failed utterly to clarify the problem of purpose. Philosophical idealism, quite unaware of the human character of purposiveness, had projected purpose onto nature where it had sought – and found – a bearer to vouch for it, namely God.” (338-39)

 

For this reason, Engels poured scorn on the “shallow teleology of Wolff” (339) in Dialectics of Nature, adding that Spinoza and the French materialists sought to explain the world from itself. Engels remarks that this view of Wolff would have it that cats were created to eat mice and mice to be eaten by cats. [The example of predation is obviously problematic, though the problem of evil is nothing new. The point is simply not developed. – SC] In rejecting the idea of objective purpose, Lukács remarks, the arguments of such thinkers “led them logically enough to the complete repudiation of the concept of purpose however defined.” (339) Thus Hobbes and others repudiated teleology in all its forms. Hobbes says that final cause can be replaced by efficient cause in accounting for beings with sense and will (De Corpore). Lukács cites Spinoza’s Ethics (I, Appendix): “all final causes are nothing but human fictions.” However, Spinoza knew that final causes play a role in human affairs, but he thought them subjective. Thus Spinoza wrote: “A final cause, as it is called, is nothing, therefore, but human desire.” (Ethics, IV, 284) A desire is an efficient cause, but men consider it primary because they do not know the cause of their desires. Lukács comments that this “overlooks the specific dialectic of purpose and causality in labour.” (340)

 

[It seems then, that labour is to play a similar role to the pre-rational grasp of a vision of the world in Dilthey in subverting the piety of an objective understanding of the world. – SC]

 

More to follow

Stephen Cowley