Immanent critique as praxis: presentation and research in Lukác\'s reification essay

Author(s)

Jonas Marcondes Sarubi de Medeiros

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2013-03-07

Examining board members

Ricardo Ribeiro Terra; Silvio Cesar Camargo; Gabriel Cohn

• Advisor: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra

Abstract

This research deals with the originality of the presentation of the Essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, the core of Georg Lukács History and Class Consciousness. Through structural analysis of text and reading of classical German sociologists and philosophers, commentators and translators, it was concluded that each of the three sections of the Reification Essay carries a specific pace/progress. The 1st section, The Phenomenon of Reification, locates the historical genesis of reified, contemplative behavior in formal processes of rationalization. The 2nd section, The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought, aims to establish a practical, non-contemplative behavior by a literary study of German idealism which is structured as a properly dialectical presentation, in which figures succeed each other by means of interversions and turns toward new principles. Finally, in the 3rd section, The Standpoint of the Proletariat, the history of philosophy becomes philosophy of history; Lukacs conducts a historical study centered in the category of objective possibility, inspired by a weberian procedure; it is the presentation of a judgment of causal attribution of praxis the practical, non-reified behavior to the proletariats class situation, through a comparative typology that points to structural similarities and crucial differences in the ways each of the social situations that comprise the capitalist mode of production experience reification. In Final Considerations, one seeks to sketch, in very general terms, a future research program that aims to update Lukács dialectical method, understood here not as dialectical mode of presentation, but exclusively as dialectical mode of research. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 09/03710-3 - The mode of exposition on Lukács' reification essay
• Grantee: Jonas Marcondes Sarubi de Medeiros
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master