The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukacs;

Author:Georg Lukacs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

3. Vitalism in the Pre-War Period (Simmel)

In his whole mentality and education Dilthey was a man of the pre-imperialistic period, but he sensed the new problems very strongly in advance and subsequently passed into this problem-complex. In Simmel, his junior by twenty-five years, the intellectual tendencies of pre-war imperialism were concentrated in an incomparably more salient and immediate way: he was truly the child and representative of the new period.

As in Dilthey’s case, to be sure, Kant and positivism formed his philosophical starting-point. But with Simmel we are dealing with the positivism of a more advanced age, and no longer with Comte, Taine or Buckle. Influenced very strongly by Nietzsche, Simmel attained eminence in the struggle against the philosophical and social consequences of historical materialism. From the outset, his thought spontaneously ran parallel to Anglo-American pragmatism and developed a close affinity with Bergsonian tendencies. His Kantianism too had a different, more imperialistic nuance: he was resolutely subjectivistic, and the objective reality of the external world was already, for him, no longer a problem at all.

On the contrary, the chief bias of his epistemology was an energetic battle against every kind of imitation, every kind of mental reproduction of reality as it really is. Thus he said of historical knowledge that it was ‘no mere reproduction but an intellectual activity which fashions out of its material … something that, in itself, it does not yet constitute’.26 With Simmel we see perfectly clearly how the Right-wing critique of the narrowly mechanical theory of imitation, given an idealistic basis and a dominance of formal logic, necessarily led to vitalistic subjectivism. Simmel, like many modern idealists, saw that the old materialism’s mechanical theory of imitation was unable to solve complicated problems of concreteness in a satisfactory form. And as with many modern idealists, this observation caused him to reject the knowability, indeed the existence of objective reality. But Simmel was far more decided in this rejection than most of his predecessors or contemporaries. This followed from his vitalistic stance, which allowed him radically to deny any objective reality independent of the subject and yet to confront man with a pseudo-objective external world, because life here offered itself to him as a real intermediary: ‘Life appears to be the most extreme objectivity to which we may penetrate directly as animated subjects, the farthest and most permanent objectifying of the subject. With life we occupy a position half-way between the ego and the idea, subject and object, person and cosmos.’27 Accordingly he dismissed the epistemological question in its only correct and clear formulation, namely the priority of being or consciousness, in the name of a vitalistic ‘third road’. The question was to be modified as follows: ‘Does consciousness depend on life, or does life depend on consciousness? For after all, life is the being which stands between consciousness and being in general … Life is the higher concept and higher actuality beyond consciousness; this is life at all events.’28 Epistemologically speaking, real life belongs to being and experience to consciousness.

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