El asalto a la razón: La trayectoria del irracionalismo desde Schelling hasta Hitler

by György Lukács

Lorsqu’on relit La Destruction de la raison, publiée par Georges Lukács en 1954, la position de l’idéologie dominante, confrontée à une critique marxiste et authentiquement philosophique de Nietzsche, devient plus difficile. Que la relation de Nietzsche au nazisme se trouve non seulement élucidée, mais développée en une critique de la philosophie irrationaliste mise en place pour contrer le progressisme issu de la Révolution française, voilà qui fait mieux comprendre le destin de ce livre,
impublié depuis trente ans, mauvaise conscience de l’Université française. Voir la nietzschéolâtrie ambiante dénoncée, mais surtout réfutée et expliquée, constitue déjà pour elle un scandale. Mais ce qui explose ici, c’est aussi le consensus philosophique dominant : à savoir les éternels hommages de la vertu au vice, et du vice à la vertu, entre d’un côté une critique seulement morale de Nietzsche (Ferry, Comte-Sponville…), de l’autre l’immoralisme primesautier des Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida
― et même le sous-nietzschéisme d’un Onfray. Les débordements identitaires actuels, aboutissement de cet irrationalisme, viennent confirmer les vues de l’un des plus grands penseurs du XXe siècle.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Theory, Sociology

706 pages, Unknown Binding

First published April 1, 1952

About the author

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Reviews

[Mirza Sultan-Galiev · Rating 4 out of 5]

The same irrational epistemology denounced in this book now dominates the academic left. Post-modernists are the Spenglers of our day and the discourse of opposition to "Eurocentrism" is most useful to the new fascists from the BJP to the European New Right.

[Raphael Lysander · Rating 1 out of 5]

من أسوأ ما قرأت أبدًا. الكاتب كما أغلب الماركسين للأسف يرى جميع الفلاسفة كما جميع الناس إما برجوازين وإما "برولتارين ثوريين"، ولا ينفك عن استخدام مصطلحات براقة وتصنيفات جاهزة لتغطية جهله والظهور بمظهر الفيلسوف العميق التفكير. إن كل ما يراه هو شعوب تتحرك نتيجة ظروف اقتصادية ومادية بحتة ناسيًا أن هذه الشعوب مكونة من أفراد ولا يتعاطى مع هذا الفرد واحتياجاته ومخاوفه وأفكاره التي تتجاوز الاقتصاد كما فعل بقية الفلاسفة الذين يهاجمهم أمثال شوبنهاور وكيرجارد ونيشته الذي لا يأتي هذا الكاتب نقطة في بحر هؤلاء العظماء

[Volbet · Rating 2 out of 5]

If nothing else, György Lukács did a great job at demonstrating how important it is to think the material-political consequences into the philosophical systems as they develop. From the inherently conservative methodology of post-modern theory to the anti-humanism of modern political philosophy, it’s important to consider the political implications of whatever methodology you decide to use in your work.

But I do wish that Lukács didn’t go about his analysis in such a surface-level, and, honestly, hypocritical manner. As important as it is to trace the development of reactionary ideas, an especially important job in the years following the Second World War, it’s also important to do so in an honest manner.
For example, in Lukács’ critique of Friedrich Nietzsche he rightly mentions Nietzsche’s opposition to the socialist movements of his days, but what Lukács seem to forget is where Nietzsche’s disdain for socialism came from. For some reason, Lukács see, to assume that socialism and similar workers’ movements throughout Europe lived rent-free in Nietzsche’s head, and Nietzsche just had to be against it.
For my money, I would Nietzsche’s dislike of socialism was, at least in part, fueled by the people that came to exemplify socialism in Nietzsche’s admittedly small world. For example, one of the people Nietzsche wrote frequent letters with as Theodor Fritsch, a high-ranking member of the Prussian National Socialist group and a raging antisemite. The same party that Nietzsche’s brother-in-law was also a member of. In Nietzsche’s writing it’s obvious that he, due in part to the two previous examples, linked socialism with antisemitism. And as anyone who has ever read Nietzsche would know, Nietzsche really didn’t care for antisemites, and as such he didn’t really care for socialism.

Why is this important? Well, Lukács actually mentions Fritsch by name in The Destruction of Reason as an example of Nietzsche being exposed to socialist ideas. But of all the thinkers that Lukács links to antisemitism, Fritsch strangely isn’t one of them. And with as well-read and knowledgeable about the European history of ideas, I refuse to believe that Lukács didn’t know that 19th century socialism was highly linked to antisemitism. And I guess I should also mention the less than savory things that Karl Marx said about Jews in his writing.
And this goes to an even larger point in Lukács’ analysis of the decline of reason in the West. Lukács actually does a good job in demonstrating the development in reactionary ideas from the French Revolution onwards, but he does so very selectively, focusing on thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who undoubtedly embodied both the anti-reason movement, as framed by Lukács, and where great inspirations for the German Nazi Party before and during WWII. But Lukács seem to forget that his criteria for being anti-reason was also present in the socialist (and liberal and conservative) politics of the same period.

As such, Lukács doesn’t really demonstrate anything, as the anti-reason in Lukács’ analysis doesn’t go anywhere. So, while reason in Lukács’ world is in decline, there isn’t really anything to say about where that will lead. I could lead to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Republics, the Khmer Rouge or 20th century America.

Lastly, in terms of a socialist critique and a material framing of reason, the Destruction of Reason is very Soviet in form. Lukács’ reason is one that is dictated top-down by a technocratic vanguard of reason. In this book this is very much Stalinist Russia and the Soviet Politburo, feeding reason to the proletariat like mana from Heaven.
This, again, comes very much to the forefront in the chapter on Nietzsche, when Lukács in a shortly mention that Nietzsche was, and probably is, popular among workers. The same workers that should be the foundation of any socialist movement. But instead of considering if that means that Hegelian dialectics and historical materialism might not be speaking to the material experiences of workers, Lukács decides that it’s the workers who are wrong. In Lukács’ version of socialism, the intelligentsia needs to dictate to the proletariat what they need.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an important topic, and a hefty 850 page book written on it. But while the author's main point concerns "irrationalism," he doesn't define what he means by that term. He nowhere defines his terms, so far as I could see. His index of topics was no help, for the book doesn't include one. He criticizes Hegel for presenting a "supremely irrationalist... unprincipled eclectic mish-mash, a totally arbitrary selection of famous or not-so-famous names without definite criteria for the choice" (p. 95). I wonder if that sentence isn't an apt description his own book as well. In fact, that pretty much sums up what I think about it.

I could see this book being a good source if one wanted to study and understand Gyorgy Lukacs, but, beyond that, I can't discern what reality it's tethered to.

[Tony Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immensely useful resource for confronting irrationalist ideas today, notably the sly conservatism of the postmodern greats. (Lukács' chapter on Nietzsche shows how much of Foucault is a cut and paste from this earlier "great man".)

There are two ways, Lukács points out, by which conservatives have defended the system:

Whereas direct apologetics was at pains to to depict capitalism as the best of all orders, as the last, outstanding peak in mankind's evolution, indirect apologetics crudely elaborated the bad sides, the atrocities of capitalism, but explained them as attributes not of capitalism but of all human existence and existence in general.

Served up today by mainstream politicians and postmodernists, respectively.

This book is routinely dismissed on the left as a product of the 'late' Lukács. Yes he bends the knee to Stalin here and there. It is also true that the book could have done with quite an edit. But to dismiss it is to deprive ourselves of a very valuable weapon against modern irrationalism.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

György Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1954) stands as one of the most polemical and ambitious intellectual histories produced within the Marxist tradition. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the consolidation of Soviet-aligned regimes in Eastern Europe, the work represents Lukács’s attempt to trace the genealogy of modern irrationalism and its culmination in fascism. Combining sweeping historical scope with a characteristically combative style, the book is both an intellectual weapon against bourgeois philosophy and an artifact of Cold War ideological battles.


At the heart of Lukács’s project is the argument that irrationalist currents in European philosophy—beginning with figures such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—served as a counter-revolutionary response to the emancipatory potential of Hegelian and Marxist thought. Rather than pursuing the progressive trajectory opened by German idealism, Lukács contends that these thinkers abandoned rationality, objectivity, and historical consciousness in favor of subjectivism, voluntarism, and myth. This rejection of dialectical reason, he argues, did not remain an isolated philosophical tendency but developed into an intellectual climate that prepared the ground for fascist ideology in the twentieth century.


Lukács’s analysis unfolds through detailed critiques of major philosophers. Schopenhauer is portrayed as a pessimistic thinker whose voluntarism undermines rational engagement with history. Kierkegaard is dismissed as a reactionary religious existentialist who retreats into inwardness rather than confronting the contradictions of modern society. Nietzsche occupies a central role in the narrative, cast as the paradigmatic irrationalist whose exaltation of the “will to power,” aristocratic elitism, and anti-democratic ethos directly foreshadow fascist ideology. Later figures such as Spengler and Heidegger are treated as heirs to this lineage, embodying the philosophical legitimation of reactionary politics in the interwar period.


Methodologically, Lukács insists on situating philosophy within its socio-historical context. His Marxist framework interprets philosophical doctrines not as isolated intellectual exercises but as ideological responses to material and political conditions. The rise of irrationalism is thus linked to the crisis of bourgeois society, the fear of revolutionary upheaval, and the declining ability of liberalism to offer a coherent worldview. By this logic, the rejection of reason reflects not an abstract philosophical choice but a form of class-based resistance to historical progress.


Despite its historical ambition, The Destruction of Reason has provoked substantial criticism. Many scholars have faulted Lukács for his reductive readings of philosophers, often subordinating textual nuance to political polemic. Nietzsche, in particular, is treated in a manner that later interpreters—whether sympathetic or critical—have found excessively one-dimensional. Similarly, Heidegger’s phenomenology is largely reduced to its affinities with Nazism, with little engagement with the philosophical complexities of Being and Time. Lukács’s commitment to a Stalinist intellectual framework also marks the book, as his categorical rejection of all non-Marxist currents often reads as an attempt to delegitimize intellectual rivals rather than to engage them.


Yet, the work’s limitations are inseparable from its enduring significance. The Destruction of Reason is not merely a history of philosophy but a passionate intervention in the mid-twentieth-century struggle over the meaning of reason, progress, and political responsibility. Its central thesis—that philosophical irrationalism cannot be separated from the social and political forces that sustain it—remains provocative. In an era when fascism was a recent historical memory, Lukács’s insistence on the dangers of intellectual currents that abandon rational critique spoke to urgent political concerns.


In retrospect, the book is perhaps best read less as a definitive history of modern philosophy than as a powerful document of Marxist intellectual combat. It reveals Lukács at his most polemical, committed to defending the Enlightenment-Hegelian-Marxist tradition as the only coherent basis for reason and human emancipation. While his readings may lack the subtlety that later scholarship demands, they reflect a moment when philosophy was not only an academic pursuit but also a battlefield in the struggle over Europe’s political and cultural future.


The Destruction of Reason exemplifies Lukács’s dual identity as both philosopher and polemicist. It is flawed as intellectual history—too rigid, too reductive, too ideologically driven—yet indispensable as a window into the postwar Marxist critique of bourgeois philosophy and its complicity with fascism. For contemporary readers, its value lies less in its detailed assessments of individual thinkers than in its overarching argument: that ideas have consequences, and that the abandonment of reason can create fertile ground for authoritarianism.

GPT

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The objective of Lukacs’s investigation into the Destruction of Reason is simple: to elaborate the philosophical genealogy of Nazism, “Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy” (4). Lukacs finds this genealogy in the continuing elaboration of philosophical irrationalism, “a reactionary answer to the problem of class struggle…the disparagement of understanding and reason, an uncritical glorification of intuition, an aristocratic epistemology, the rejection of socio-historical progress, the creation of myths, and so on…” (9-10). Lukacs devotes a small amount of space to non-German irrationalists in the pragmatism of William James, the modified Hegelianism of Benedetto Croce, and Henri Bergson’s intuitionism (as well as Sorel’s mystification of socialism through Bergsonian myth) (19-32). The vast majority of Lukacs’s work, however, is dedicated to the analysis of German thought on German soil.

Lukacs’s historical introduction to the circumstances of German historical development are some of his weakest points throughout the work, owing his Marxist version of the Sonderweg thesis. The historical peculiarities of German historical development, namely its national division and inability to concentrate production, princeling absolutism, Lutheranism creating a German “misery” that led to authoritarian and autocratic attitudes (37-57). Yet Lukacs also attacks the conservative Sonderweg, noting that it is the peculiarities of this development that led to the reactionary glorification of “German’s undemocratic development [as] a higher stage compared to the problematic undemocratic democracy of the West” (63).

Lukacs locates in Schelling the first manifestation of German irrationalism in his “rigid contrast between understanding and reason,” his rejection of Hegel’s dialectic (149). Schelling's embrace of myth and religious experience as superior to conceptual experience and reason rejected both Hegel and the Enlightenment, while his understanding of history as unknowable ultimately denied the possibility of social evolution (160, 177). His metaphysics of will and experience set the stage for the intuitionism of later theorists which would culminate in the fascist co-opting of vitalism (185). Schelling’s irrationalism was the irrationalism of restoration, of the attempt to stabilize Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic period. Schopenhauer took up the torch from Schelling, as the representative of the bourgeoisie in political retreat (represented biographically by Schopenhauer’s giving of his look glass to a Prussian officer suppressing the 1848 Revolution). Lukacs locates in Schopenhauer’s pessimism “primarily a philosophical rationale of the absurdity of all political activity,” any activism as “ so lacking in insight with regard to the essence of the world as to verge on a criminal act” (203, 210). We see in Schopenhauer the development of religious atheism which would characterize much of irrationalist philosophy going forth (214). In Kierkegaard, we find a perverted dialectic which ignores the quantitative aspect and “took to a radical conclusion all the philosophical arguments which dehistoricized and de-socialized Hegelian dialectics (250, 255). Rather than pessimism, Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism isolated the individual (256, 280).

Nietzsche is presented as the “founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period,” in a harsh critique which arguably is more hostile than even that of Losurdo in Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Nietzsche’s status as an outsider and theorist writing before high imperialism gave him “a favourable opportunity to conjecture and solve in mythical form the main problems. The mythical form…enabled him to pose imperialism’s cultural, ethical, and other problems in a general way…” (314-315). Lukacs identifies as Nietzsche’s philosophical nodal points “the resistance to socialism [combined with] the effort to create an imperial Germany (324). Even in his liberal period, which Losurdo identifies as optimistically genuine, Lukacs alleges that “Nietzsche gave up none of his aristocratic convictions. For he still saw the salvation of culture solely in a more resolute bestowal of privilege on a minority, one whose leisure was based on the hard physical labour of the majority, the masses” (333). Nietzsche’s opposition to Bismarck was located in the latter’s hesitancy towards imperialism and “Great Wars” (339-340). For his praxis, “what Nietzsche provided with [the overman] was a morality for the socially militant bourgeoisie and middle-class intelligentsia of imperialism” (353). His aim was “to make the idea of human equality intellectually contemptible and wipe out” (366). Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, influenced by Feuerbach, wrongly assumed “that the change in men’s religious ideas constituted the most important and decisive part of history” (361).

Vitalism, or the Lebensphilosophie, heralded the next great innovation in irrationalist thought. Taking as its core idea the concept of “life,” life and reality philosophically identified with the human experience thereof and our accompanying intuition, “the essence of vitalism lies in a conversion of agnosticism into mysticism, of subjective idealism into the pseudo-objectivity of myth” (414). Unlike most other philosophers he analyzes, Lukacs concedes Wilhelm Dilthey as a largely apolitical and contentious scholar, and it is in fact this contradiction which created contradictions in his thought (430). Dilthey’s work was elaborated on by the neo-Kantian Georg Simmel, the true representative of pre-war imperialism (442). Simmel intensified religious atheism within the irrationalist current, which “attempted to destroy all hopes of a purposeful life within the human community and of a social answer to the loneliness of the bourgeois individual…” (449). Simmel’s philosophy recognized the anti-capitalist discontent of the pre-war intelligentsia, writing on the alienating nature of money and capitalist culture, but did not present a solution. His view of life as an irrational, metaphysical force turns him into a philosopher of surrender, crisis as an object of an intellectual’s melancholic fascination (455-456). From Simmel we come to the beginning of irrationalism’s farcical representatives, the first being Spengler. Spengler’s historical deficiencies and absurdities are obvious to any historian, but Lukacs elaborates. “Spengler’s epistemology,” Lukacs informs us, “simply applied to history the vitalistic antithesis of life and death, intuition and reason, form and law” (464). Spengler asserted that history was the universal science, but his understanding of culture as the primary phenomenon made history subjective and relative, and created the “methodological prototype for fascist racial theory” (465-475). When Lukacs trains his critique on Heidegger and Jaspers, he terms their existential innovations “parasitical subjectivism.” Heidegger engaged in “an abstractly mythicizing, anthropological description of human existence” which cast “the surrounding world [an] an uncanny, mysterious permanent threat to everything that would constitute the essence of subjectivity” (502). Following Schopenhauer, public activity was “unauthentic” to human existence and the influence of the masses barbaric (503-518). The influence of Ernst Junger, Baumler, Krieck, and Rosenberg on the development of fascism is well-known and obvious.

Lukacs devotes a small chapter to the neo-Hegelians of the early 1900s, who rejected the dialectic, saw Hegel as “completing” Kant rather than surpassing him, and homogenized classical German idealism (550-553). Their philosophy was “an attempt to incorporate irrationalism in a system without giving up rational thought or scientific thinking completely” (558). Despite attempting to ingraiate themselves with Nazism with the neo-Hegelian school of law, the Nazis harshly repudiated Hegel in favour of Nietzsche and Chamberlain (578-580). Analyzing German sociology, Lukacs criticizes the discipline as avoid exploring the economic base of social problems under capitalism (585). Early German sociology sought “a purely theoretical, empirical, historical and at the same time ‘ethical’ political economy which rejected classical economics and would additionally be capable of comprehending problems of society” (589). Ferdinand Toennies, admirably a progressive liberal who attempted to come to academic grips with the reality of historical materialism, nonetheless contributed to the irrationalist current with his antithesis of civilization and culture, influential during the Great War (594-595). The deficiencies of Max Weber lie in his rejection of the economic base and spiritualization of capitalism as an ethical-religious phenomenon (604-607). In the Weimar era, Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim attempted a liberal sociology which nonetheless bent the knee to intuition and stayed within the irrationalist stream (620-641). Pre-Fascist and Fascist sociology culminated in the thought of Carl Schmitt, who “absorbed all the 19th-cent. anti-democratic polemics in his system in order to prove the irreconcilable antithesis of liberalism and democracy and to [approvingly] show the inevitable growth of mass democracy into dictatorship” (655).

Finally, Lukacs turns to the most important aspect of fascism as it appeared in Germany, that being its racialism and Social Darwinism. Lukacs traces the development of racialism in Europe from the feudal nobility, who developed bloodline theory as a way to legitimize nobility as a fact of nature (667-669). I don’t disagree, but his focus on feudalism ignores the reality of racial capitalism, as analyzed by Cedric Robinson. Lukacs turns to Gobineau as a transitional racial theorist, rooted to the feudal tradition but influential in modifying it for the use of reactionary intellectuals later (669-682). Lukacs makes the incisive and all too brief comment that Gobineau was a reflection of the “feudal traditions of European colonizers,” nodding towards Robinson’s later work but not elaborating to any degree (681). Social Darwinism contributed to this trend not only by their obvious racial theory, but with the “absolute identity of and lack of qualitative distinction between natural and social process” (687). Lagarde and H. S. Chamberlain create the final direct link between racialism and fascism, with vitalist intuitionism, religious atheism, and racial theory combining to create a theory of race based on intuition searching for the Aryan religion (696-714). Hitler’s originality, in Lukacs’s view, is his use of “social demagogy” and “techniques of American advertising” to sell fascism to Germany (724-727). Fascism, in the end, is “a philosophy of modernized cannibalism” (737).

Lukacs’s work here should be read in conjunction with Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War and Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, which does a better job on elaborating both the practical political implication of Heideggerian philosophy as well as Nietzsche’s valuable philosophical contributions despite his reactionary nature. Lukacs’s work here is also somewhat restricted, in that his limiting of himself to solely German theorists ignores the wider influence of irrationalism and fascism outside of nations who did not have the degraded material conditions of Germany. Although we hear of Gobineau in France and Chamberlain in the United Kingdom, little is mentioned about the legal apparatus established in the US that actively created and perpetuated a bourgeois form of irrationalism in the South through Jim Crow and federally through immigration policy. His analysis of Hitler is stunted by his reliance on the work of Rauschning, now generally considered by scholars to be fabricated. Finally, the epilogic essay “On Post-War Irrationalism” attempts to maintain the polemical line pursued in the rest of the book to the postwar period (772-843). On certain thinkers, like Walter Lippmann, William Vogt, James Burnham, A. J. Toynbee, Karl Jaspers, Camus, Heidegger, and Junger, this approach works. However, in regards to the philosophy of Wittgenstein as well as John Dewey, the passing comments and attempted analysis do little to actually link them with irrationalism, especially with the latter’s work as a genuinely progressive intellectual and critic of capitalism.

[Paul O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one cost me quite a bit, if I recall correctly. It's been out of print for some time. Fortunately, I managed to get a pretty decent second hand copy. Why? A few years back this book was quoted in a lot of the political literature that was swirling about in the anti-Bush years. What little I knew of it at the time gave me the impression it'd be an intriguing read. It was. Lukacs started out as a conservative and ended a Stalinist so.....not much difference? The book was written after World War Two explaining how fascism/hitlerism came to be. Much like most books along this line the fault is said to reside in the way people were thinking-or not thinking, but were manipulated by the ideologies available in the marketplace. Marketplaces are a problem for the communist Lukacs, naturally. Lukacs' tour takes the reader from Schelling through to Rosenberg. There's a heavy emphasis on the naughtiness of German thinkers, though the author is not so chauvinist as not to include those worthy of distain from other countries, like Kierkegaard & Gobbineau. Marxist/Stalinist rhetoric and tricks aside, the survey of German philosophy both before and during the war provides the reader with an index of how much irrationalism was rationally discussed amongst the intellectual class and sold in lesser doses to the masses through middlebrow bagmen like Alfred Baeumler. After this survey the reader is treated to a brief introduction to a philosophy even move heinous than nazi ideology: American democratic, capitalist philosophy. An american reader of The Destruction of Reason might sit smugly through 750+ pages of Teutonic awfulness and cheer the author on, but the appendix will make him distinctly uncomfortable-or it should. Democracy and capitalism have not been factually worse for any polity than national socialism or the Holocaust were for Germany. Of course, Lukacs was compelled to fiddle for his dinner, or his own Ideology, or just for plain old Uncle Joe. The interesting question is who did the compelling. For Lukacs irrationalism was at root "a blurring of the frontiers between epistemology and psychology". To attack perceived 'enemies' with unremitting verve while remaining silent as to any critique concerning one's beliefs, values and philosophy displays a hearty blurring within the author himself. I think, however, Lukacs was too smart not to know this and that is why this second hand book is so valuable to me. Lukacs was the first thinker I encountered who spelt out the fact that in taking a philosophical stance a thinker explicitly renounces his right to claim innocence as a defense. Philosophical commitment was an act in itself; an act that one can be judged by. Perhaps, must be judged by. This doesn't downplay the fact that philosophy itself contains awesome stakes for its creators and espoucers. You renounce your intellectual innocence for?..... Well, whatever. Your meaning of life may make a world for you and yours, but you loose your right to say you are not of, and at least partially-if not wholly-responsible for, it. Only a die-hard Marxist-Stalinistic could embrace this fact than ignore its consequences for himself as Stalinism was the intellectual act by proxy par excellence. But this lesson is of immeasurable value to us nonMarxist-Stalinists. Especially if philosophy has been important to us, and thusly we cannot claim with any justice to be innocent.......

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was certainly interesting in its way - tracing German philosophy and sociology from the bougeois revolution in France as a basis of the irrational roots of imperial, monopoly capitalism and the type of politics that goes along with that. The book can be read as an eerie specter for the present state of things.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rousing call for a Red Renaissance! You can probably skip the lengthy editor's intro, and it's definitely a work to approach with an already reasonable grasp of philosophy (German idealists and their reactionary detractors, in particular). But the last two chapters in particular, dealing respectively with "German sociology" (i.e. via critique of Max Weber), and an unpacking of the cynical functionality of retrogressive racist mythology for the Nazis, are (tragically still) highly relevant.

[Maik Civeira · Rating 5 out of 5]

En este libro, el filósofo húngaro trata de cómo el declive de la racionalidad en la cultura europea permitió el surgimiento de la ideología nazifascista. La tesis central de Lukács es que el rechazo a la racionalidad y la exaltación del instinto, impulsados por ciertas corrientes filosóficas, crearon las condiciones intelectuales propicias para que se desarrollara la ideología nazi.

Entre los pensadores señalados con el dedo acusador de Lukács se incluyen Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, los teóricos del racismo y los darwinistas sociales. Los cinco primeros tienen en común que predicaron una filosofía que encumbraba el instinto, la intuición, la vitalidad, los mitos o la experiencia personal incomunicable por encima del conocimiento racional, científico y objetivo. También negaban la posibilidad del progreso.

De Nietzsche hemos sabido durante mucho tiempo que su filosofía fue una de las más influyentes en el desarrollo de la ideología nazi. De fondo, su pensamiento defiende la división estricta de la humanidad en clases dominantes y sometidas, mientras rechaza todas las ideologías (democracia, socialismo, feminismo), que pudieran alborotar a las masas fuera de su lugar correspondiente.

Hitler cosechó más de un siglo de filosofía irracionalista, que consideraba el conocimiento objetivo, a través de la razón y la ciencia, como imposible, incomunicable o desestimable, para privilegiar en cambio conocimientos que se podían obtener a través del instinto, la voluntad o misticismo. Estas formas de “conocimiento superior”, al no poderse someter a pruebas y escrutinio, que lo habrían hecho objetivo y accesible para los demás seres humanos, podía ser cualquier cosa, cualquier posverdad, cualquier hecho alternativo, que ultimadamente se correspondía con la voluntad del líder supremo.

Lukács no deja de fustigar a los intelectuales liberales de su tiempo, muchos de los cuales prefirieron coquetear con la reacción antes que cederle un centímetro a la izquierda. Con mucha relevancia actual, el filósofo alerta del carácter que revestirá el pensamiento reaccionario en los Estados Unidos: la nueva filosofía reaccionaria se disfrazaría de racionalismo y reclamaría para sí la herencia de la Ilustración. O sea, si antes teníamos que estar alertas al irracionalismo, ahora debemos estarlo ante el pseudorracionalismo.

¿A quién recomiendo este libro? A los liberales y centristas, para que vean cómo muchas de las formas de pensar que están en boga tienden a conducir a un crecimiento de doctrinas de odio y opresión. A los izquierdistas, para que recuerden que el pensamiento racional, el conocimiento científico y el ideal del progreso eran valores cardinales de la izquierda, que se sentía legítima heredera de la Ilustración.

[Attasit Sittidumrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

สาระสำคัญที่ลูคัสนำเสนอผ่านงานเขียนคลาสสิกของเขาเล่มนี้คือการวิเคราะห์และทำความเข้าใจว่าเหตุใดประเทศซึ่งเป็นผู้นำทางภูมิปัญาแห่งต้นศตวรรษที่ยี่สิบอย่างเยอรมัน ถึงได้ให้กำเนิดระบอบการเมืองอันสามานย์อย่างเผด็จการนาซีและฮิตเลอร์ขึ้นมาได้ โดยลูคัสเสนอว่าการเกิดขึ้นของนาซีและลัทธิฟาสซิสต์ในเยอรมันนั้น เป็นผลจากพัฒนาการทางประวัติศาสตร์ของเยอรมันเองที่ฟูมฟักและบ่มเพาะขนบความคิดที่่ตัวเขาเรียกว่า irrationalism หรือลัทธิไร้เหตุผล ทั้งนี้ โดยเทียบเคียงกับวิธีวิทยาที่ลูคัสมองว่าเป็นฐานของความรู้อันแท้จริงอย่างวิภาษวิธี (dialectic) ภาวะไร้เหตุผล (irrationality) ก็คือภาวะที่ความคิดซึ่งอยู่ในระดับอัตวิสัยเผชิญหน้ากับขีดจำกัดอันเกิดจากการปะทะกับความเป็นจริงอันมีลักษณะวัตถุวิสัยที่แตกต่างไปจากที่ตัวความคิดนั้นเข้าใจ ซึ่งตามหลักการแบบวิภาษวิธีแล้ว การปะทะดังกล่าวคือขั้นตอนสำคัญที่จะผลักให้ความคิดเกิดการยกระดับด้วยการปรับเปลี่ยนให้ตัวมันเองสามารถเข้าใจความเป็นจริงซึ่งอยู่นอกเหนือความเข้าใจในตอนแรกได้ ทว่า ภาวะไร้เหตุผลนี้กลับคือภาวะที่ความคิดในระดับอัตวิสัยไม่สามารถก้าวข้ามขีดจำกัดและยกระดับตัวเองเพื่อทำความเข้าใจความเป็นจริงทางวัตถุวิสัยได้ จนนำมาสู่ภาวะถดถอยที่ความคิดจะละทิ้งเหตุผลและหันไปหาทางเลือกอื่นๆที่ช่วยในการทำความเข้าใจความเป็นจริงดังกล่าวไม่ว่าจะเป็นความเชื่อ หรืออารมณ์ความรู้สึก ฯลฯ ในแง่นี้ ภาวะไร้เหตุผลจึงเปรียบได้กับวิภาษวิธีที่ถูกตัดตอน หรือก็คือวิภาษวิธีที่ไม่สามารถก้าวข้ามขีดจำกัดจนส่งผลกลับมาทำลายเหตุผลซึ่งเป็นฐานของตัววิภาษวิธีเอง

ภายใต้วิธีคิดเรื่องภาวะไร้เหตุผลดังกล่าว ลูคัสก็ได้ชี้ให้เห็นถึงปัญหาในพัฒนาการทางประวัติศาสตร์ของสังคมเยอรมันที่ได้กลายเป็นขีดจำกัดและทำให้เยอรมันกลายเป็นสังคมที่ให้กำเนิดลัทธิไร้เหตุผล โดยลูคัสได้ชี้ให้เห็นว่าในขณะที่ประเทศอย่างอังกฤษและฝรั่งเศสคือตัวอย่างของประเทศที่วัฒนธรรมกระฎมพีตั้งมั่น อันเป็นผลจากชัยชนะของสงครามกับพวกเจ้าที่ดินในช่วงรอยต่อระหว่างยุคสมัยกลางกับยุคสมัยใหม่ (ผ่านการนำของกษัตริย์แบบสมบูรณาญาสิทธิ์ที่ยกระดับให้ชนชั้นชาวนาเกิดการรวมกลุ่มและยกสถานะเป็นพ่อค้าและกระฎุมพี) เยอรมันกลับเป็นประเทศที่ชนชั้นชาวนาล้มเหลวในการทำสงครามปลดปล่อยตนเองจากเจ้าที่ดินจนส่งผลต่อความเป็นเอกภาพที่ชนชั้นชาวนาไม่สามารถรวมตัวกันได้ ขณะเดียวกับที่ผลักให้ชนชั้นเจ้าที่ดินยกรัะดับเทคโนโลยีและความสามารถจนกลายเป็นกษัตริย์ปกครองแคว้นต่างๆอย่างเข้มแข็ง ผลก็คือพัฒนาการต่อการเกิดชนชั้นกระฎุมพีในเยอรมัน ที่ชนชั้นดังกล่าวกลายเป็นชนชั้นที่ต้องสยบยอมต่ออำนาจของชนชั้นปกครอง และไม่สามารถสถาปนาวัฒนธรรมหรือชุดความคิดทางอุดมการณ์ที่เป็นอิสระจากการบงการของชนชั้นปกครองได้ สังคมเยอรมันนับตั้งแต่ศตวรรษที่สิบเจ็ดจวบจนศตวรรษที่สิบเก้าจึงเป็นสังคมที่กระฎุมพีขาดพลังไม่อาจกลายเป็นฐานในการปฏิวัติประชาธิปไตย(เหมือนที่เกิดในประเทศฝรั่งเศส) และส่งผลต่อความลักลั่นในพัฒนาการทางประวัติศาสตร์ต่อมาที่แม้จะพัฒนาความสามารถทางการแข่งขันและการเติบโตทางเศรษฐกิจจนนำหน้าประเทศอื่นๆในยุโรป แต่โครงสร้างทางการเมืองของเยอรมันก็กลับถูกแช่แข็งผ่านพันธมิตรระหว่างกระฎมพีกับชนชั้นปกครอง ซึ่งส่งผลทำให้โครงสร้างส่วนบนหรือ superstructure เกิดความขัดแย้งกับโครงสร้างส่วนล่าง ที่พร้อมจะเปลี่ยนแปลงภายใต้สถานการณ์ทางเศรษฐกิจที่ส่งผลต่อการขยายตัวของมวลชนและกรรมาชีพ

ภายใต้เงื่อนไขของความลักลั่นขัดแย้งระหว่างโครงสร้างส่วนบน (ที่ถูกแช่แข็ง) กับโครงสร้างส่วนล่าง (ที่เรียกร้องการเปลี่ยนแปลง) ลัทธิไร้เหตุผลจึงไม่ใช่อะไรเลยนอกจากผลผลิตจากโครงสร้างส่วนบนที่มุ่งปกปิดความลักลั่นดังกล่าวด้วยการหันเหพลังที่พร้อมจะปฏิวัติเปลี่ยนแปลงของโครงสร้างส่วนล่างให้กลายเป็นพลังปฏิกิริยาชาตินิยมภายใต้การนำของชนชั้นปกครอง โดยหนึ่งในหน้าที่สำคัญของลัทธิไร้เหตุผล ก็คือการเชิดชูเสรีภาพภายในที่ตั้งอยู่บนการตระหนักถึงการดำรงอยู่ของชีวิตและอัตถิภาวะส่วนบุคคล พร้อมๆไปกับการลดทอนค่านิยมประชาธิปไตยและความเชื่อในความก้าวหน้าตามกฏวิภาษวิธีว่าเป็นเพียงความคิดชั้นรองที่--อย่างย้อนแย้งที่สุด--ล้าหลังและไม่ก้าวหน้าเท่ากับวิธีคิดแบบไร้เหตุผล(ซึ่งปฏิเสธความก้าวหน้าเสียเอง) นั่นจึงไม่แปลกที่ลูคัสจะมองว่าลัทธิไร้เหตุผลคือลัทธิทางปรัชญาที่ตั้งอยู่บนภาพลวงตาอันเป็นผลมาจากความล้าหลังในพัฒนาการทางประวัติศาสตร์ของเยอรมัน ไม่สำคัญว่าเนื้อหาทางความคิดของลัทธินี้จะทรงพลังยิ่งใหญ่ขนาดไหน (ไมว่าจะเป็นปรัชญาของเชลลิ่ง คีย์เกอร์การ์ด นิตเช่ท์ ไฮเด็กเกอร์ แยสเปอร์ หรือสังคมวิทยาของเวเบอร์ ฯลฯ) แต่สุดท้ายแล้วความคิดภายใต้ลัทธินี้ก็เป็นได้เพียงแค่อุดมการณ์ทางการเม���องที่่ตั้งอยู่บนความบิดเบี้ยวและปฏิเสธความเป็นจริงเท่านั้น เทียบไม่ได้กับประเทศและระบอบการเมืองซึ่งขับเคลื่อนผ่านลัทธิมาร์กและกฏวิภาษวิธี (อย่างโซเวียตและประเทศคอมมิวนิสต์ทั้งหลาย) ที่คือตัวแทนอันแท้จริงของการนำมนุษยชาติไปสู้ปลายทางประวัติศาสตร์

แนะนำครับ จริงๆแล้วลูคัสเป็นคนเขียนหนังสืออ่านไม่ยาก ถ้าตั้งใจจริงๆอ่า่นไม่นานก็จบได้ แถมส่วนที่แกตีความนักปรัชญาต่างๆก็นาสนใจ เพราะเป็นการตีความโดยใช้วิธีวิทยาแบบมาร์กซิสต์ดังเดิม ดังนั้น ใครที่สนใจแนวทางการเอาแนวคิดเรื่องวัตถุนิยมวิภาษวิธีแบบดั้งเดิมมาวิเคราะห์ตัวบททางปรัชญา และความสัมพันธ์ระหวา่งตัวบทดังกล่าวกับเงื่อนไขทางประวัติศาสตร์ทั้งเศรษฐกิจ สังคม การเมือง เล่มนี้คืองานชั้นครูที่ต้องอ่าน

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me almost exactly one month to the day, but I finally finished the nearly 900-page behemoth that is The Destruction of Reason. This book was published in 1954 by Marxist philosopher Georg (or György) Lukács, and it was his attempt to trace the historical development of irrational thinking in Germany from the Enlightenment period, through the failed 1848 Spring Revolution(s), to its culmination in fascism, Hitlerism, and Nazi ideology.

I wanted to read this book because I think that it has relevance to contemporary life under neoliberal capitalism following the failed response by governments to address the [ongoing] Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in the resurgence of far-right (or proto-fascist) groups, as well as anti-vaxxers, climate-deniers, and attacks on the rights and safety of the LGBTQ2S+ community as well as women’s bodily autonomy. Reading this book, I have noticed many parallels with the descent towards irrationality in contemporary society, which could potentially lay the groundwork for another fascist period, and it makes me extremely concerned for our future.

Lukacs examined the development of irrationality from a Marxist perspective, which led him to claim that irrationality is not solely based on intellectual ability or philosophical considerations, but rather, it is socially constructed and historically specific. This means that the development of irrationality and what constitutes irrationality manifest themselves differently at different historical moments. Conceptions of what constitutes rational or irrational thinking depend on sociohistorical context, lived material conditions, and the dynamics of class struggle at a given time.

The receptiveness to irrationalism (and subsequently fascism) in Germany was a product of many factors, including the lived material conditions of everyday Germans, and was rooted in the economic hardships of capitalist life following the failed Spring Revolution of 1848, the loss of World War I, national humiliation by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the Economic Crisis of 1929. The combined effect of these events meant that the average German citizen experienced almost a complete loss of security in their individual and social life, including those of the “middle classes.” This economic hardship paved the way for irrational beliefs and pessimism to spread among the general public, with validation coming from prominent public figures and intellectuals of the period, but the tendency towards irrationality started from a perceived threat to the personal existence of the masses.

Overall, I think that the biggest takeaway from me has been that nihilism, cynicism, pessimism, and agnosticism represent different forms of irrational beliefs that build on one another. These beliefs can all be considered decadent bourgeois ideologies (or philosophies) because they permit the detachment of individuals from collective social life. The proliferation of these irrational ideas allows for detachment from class struggle, by fostering apathy and exploiting mass feelings of despair. Nihilism, cynicism, pessimism, and agnosticism struggle to put forward a coherent interpretation of progress in human history (or seek to distort any notion of progress), and in doing so, they work to negate any revolutionary potential which may exist in the mass public during times of crisis. These beliefs can lead to feelings that real social change is essentially impossible.

With irrationality, claims about the unknowability of objective knowledge are elevated or expressed to be a higher form of knowledge. The inability to ever truly know something is upheld as somehow ethically, morally, epistemologically superior to the knowledge that we acquire through the scientific process.

A byproduct of these ideologies is that they either (intentionally or not) serve to deny and/or prevent the possibility of:

- Objective reality and/or objective knowledge independent of human consciousness;
- Trust in the scientific process to help us approximate the laws governing objective reality;
- The existence of a [collective] society (through the primacy of the individual);
- Social classes and shared class interests;
- Historical progress/evolution, and the role of human agency in that process;
- Recognizing our interdependence with each other and the ecosystems that sustain us; and
- The emergence of new qualities (i.e., the creation of something qualitatively new).

If we are unable to agree on the existence of a A) shared objective material world, and that B) class antagonisms exist at every stage in historical development, and we C) reject the possibility of our own agency in acting collectively to resolve class antagonisms, then that only serves to maintain the status quo of the capitalist system, further benefiting the bourgeois ruling class.

Irrational beliefs help to create and reinforce a largely negative picture of the world, while also limiting any self belief in our ability to change the world. From this we can recognize how these beliefs are a reaction against Marxism (dialectical and historical materialism) serve to limit any/all progress towards a socialist future. These irrational philosophies are inherently reactionary or counter emancipatory.

[Daniel]

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[Imanol Faya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro es un laburo intelectual monumental y de una importancia actual singular. Su tesis fundamental puede resumirse en lo siguiente: "No existen posiciones filosóficas inocentes."

[TheAugphilosophylog · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can no longer enjoy Deleuze now. But perhaps that is for the better.

[Tom Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book with a great reputation among Western philosophers, but interesting as a kind of Eastern Bloc counterpoint to Hannah Arendt or Karl Popper on the intellectual origins of fascism. Some of the orthodoxies associated with that have not held up, notably on the natural sciences, but Lukacs analysis of the political significance of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and even of the more conservative aspects of Weber's political thought, is salutary.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

only occasionally gets to the point: irrationalism's concern is marking out and preserving the estate of bourgeois ideology from ruthless criticism. unfortunately, lukacs' strategy is too broad and too totalising to be as useful as adorno and horkheimer's work on the same.

[Leonardo]

Sobre la suerte del irracionalismo europeo.

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