Praxis: The dialectical source of knowledge

Abstract

In his Phenomenology, Hegel makes an at? tempt to restore ontology to the center of philosophical investigation. In the course of this endeavor he attacks the "subjective" idealism of Kant and Fichte for substituting a philos? ophy of abstract universal forms for a philoso? phy of reality, and for juxtaposing a universal ethical imperative with the actual world of human experience. Thus, Hegel insists, philoso? phy becomes deprived of real content. It is essentially from a similar perspective that Luk?cs, in History and Class Consciousness, criticizes Kantian formalism. He argues that commodity production and the capitalist divi? sion of labor engender a corresponding frag? mentation in philosophy and in the sciences. This fragmentation results in narrow specializa? tion and in an effort to interpret all the special? ized sciences in terms of an abstract and mathematically oriented system of formal "laws." The more highly developed a specific scientific endeavor is, the more it tends to be? come a formal, closed system of its own partial laws. Thus, the specialized sciences lose sight of the "whole," and more and more consider their own concrete ontological or material base as lying outside of their sphere of investigation. For example, bourgeois economics, as well as the neo-Kantian interpreters of the psycholog? ical and philosophical-anthropological implica? tions of economic life ? such as Simmel in his Philosophie des Geldes ? divorce the particular manifestations of the capitalist economy (money, exchange value, capital, etc.) from their real social and historical foundation and consider them as if they were the eternal model of human relations in general. However, by disregarding the real, social foundation of economic life, and by excluding all data that do not lend themselves to strict formalization, formal systems create a limit to their own rationality. In the field of economics, this "limit" becomes especially explicit at times of crisis. As Luk?cs writes: