Knowledge, reality and manipulation

Abstract

The investigation of the social and epistemological context of the rejection of ontology makes Gyorgy Lukacs’s critique of neopositivism an important moment of his late work, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (The Ontology of Social Being). This article argues, on the one hand, that Lukacs’s critique of neopositivism can be regarded as an indispensable contribution to understand the social roots of realist attitudes towards ontology, and, on the other hand, that the target of Lukacs’s marxist critique of neopositivism is indeed a special, neutral epistemological position between realism and instrumentalism, which became explicit only in a later period of history of neopositivism. To prove this assumption, I investigate some components of Lukacs’s critique of neopositivism-critique by showing inter alia that Lukacs fails to distinguish clearly between the two different forms of realism—scientific and moderate—which lead to the rejection of ontology.