3 - Reification and metaphysics: Lukács and Heidegger

Summary

Having outlined the basic elements of Hegel's philosophy, and the key moves in the debates between Left and Right Hegelian schools, we can now turn our attention to twentieth-century Hegelianism. The second part of this book focuses on what I am calling “German Hegelianism”, by which I mean primarily the tradition of Hegelian Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. In the following chapter, I introduce some of the key Hegelian-Marxist ideas of Hungarian political philosopher Georg Lukács (1885–1971), in particular his critique of Hegel's concept of alienation, and Lukács's own conception of the process of reification in modernity. Lukács's classic work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), re-energized the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, and would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century social and political thought. As we shall see, Lukács's concept of reification was decisive for the Frankfurt school of critical theory, above all in Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (written during World War II but not published until 1947).

In the second part of this chapter, I present a brief introduction to the thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, whose existential phenomenology posed a radical challenge to Hegelianism. Heidegger's various critiques of Hegel – for his metaphysical theory of time, and for his Cartesian metaphysical subjectivism – will be explored in some detail because they have proven very important for postwar French philosophy, particularly for the French poststructuralist critique of Hegel.