German Idealism, Marxism, and Lukács ’ Concept of Dialectical Ontology

: I explore the roots of ontological thinking in the late thought of Georg Lukács via the development of the nature of praxis in German Idealism and the thought of Marx. I contend that the thesis of spontaneous, self-creation as well as social relatedness are both core themes in German Idealism that achieve de ﬁ nitive form in Marx ’ s thought. In e ﬀ ect, I argue that the human capacities for relatedness and the formation of relations with others paired with the teleological structure of human practical agency constitute a crucial ontological ground for critical theory. It is this that Lukács focuses on in his later ontological writings and which can be used to re-orient contemporary critical theory and critical philosophy which has been dominated by post-metaphysical and neo-Idealist currents in recent decades.


The Dilemma of Contemporary Critical Theory
In recent decades, the exploration of themes from German Idealism has been used to articulate models of critical theory that emphasize innate human capacities in order to construct theories of critical reason and theories of democracy.Jürgen Habermas, returning to core ideas from Kant, and reading through the ideas of American pragmatism, served as an alternative basis to that of Marx in order to develop a discourse ethics approach to critique and democracy.Similarly, the work of Axel Honneth itself emerged from philosophical themes about recognition and human ethical life that were initially developed in the early works of Hegel.These constitute, to greater or lesser degrees, the theoretical horizon of much of what has been produced in the critical theory literature for the past half-century or more.Common to both approaches is a rejection of the philosophical anthropology that was laid out by Marx in his early writings that emphasized the importance of labor as a defining feature of human activity -Habermas displacing it with his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, and Honneth with the intersubjective theory of recognitionits radicalism has essentially been eviscerated.
What these theoretical paradigms share is a decisive move away from what Marx, and the first generation of critical theorists, had heralded as an important shift in critical reason: namely that critique was able to connect consciousness with reality; it was able to offer a "materialist" theory of the nature of human action by seeing that the chasm between subject and object was itself an aberration of historical consciousness.Of course, Habermas, Honneth, and their innumerable followers understand themselves to be in line with this tradition of thought.They see their respective theories of reason as "intramundane," by which they mean that it is the actual innate capacities of individuals that can be used for the end of social transformation.It is in the manifold ways that our genetic or generative capacities conflict and intermesh with the normativity of the social system that forms the basis for any critical theory of society.
The tendency, especially in modernity, of the powers of the system to colonize and shape the generative powers of the individual is the very essence of alienation and reification.It forms the basis of the dialectical relation between the individual and society and it holds out for us the very substance of critical reason itself: the capacity to have immanent, anti-reificatory insight into the mechanisms of domination and the potentialities for social transformation.It is my intention in this article to trace the development of the ideas of teleological agency and relatedness as central themes in German Idealism and Marx's thought and how they provide Lukács with the nucleus for a social ontology that can serve as a basis for critical, transformative conception of human social action, what I will call "dialectical ontology."It is my conviction that the development of these themes of teleological agency and inherent relatedness in German thought constitutes an alternative developmental path for critical theory to pursue, against the pragmatist themes of the neo-Idealism of the post-metaphysical and intersubjective turn that critical theory has taken in recent decades.
Indeed, the generative powers of intersubjectivity have been taken as the basic paradigm of all recent critical theories.But this is only tenable if we can prevent communication and intersubjective recognition from the pressures of reification which have the effect of warping these capacities and rendering them inert in the face of modern forms of social power and social domination. 1 The theories of communicative action and recognition are both, as Habermas describes it, "post-metaphysical" by which he means that they no longer originate from a substantive position on political and ethical issues.Rather, discourse is supposed to be the location for determining the validity of values.The danger of these post-metaphysical approaches is that they leave the subject's consciousness vulnerable to the cognitive and value-orientational pressures that critique was supposed to dispel in the first place.The power of reification is such that it can produce the kinds of subjects that will lack the robust capacity for critique.In this way, the processes of communication, discourse, or recognition end up reproducing the very pathological social structures they were intended to overturn. 2een in this way, the post-metaphysical position can also be construed as rejecting any ontological basis for understanding the critical reason, abandoning the one space where critique can be most politically and ethically robust and transformative.As I see it, a turn to the ontological is an essential development in the further evolution of critical theory that can more richly and comprehensively connect with the transformative aims of critical reason by connecting it with an account of human praxis as well as an account of human sociality that is not merely concerned with intersubjectivity, but with the actual existence of human sociality itself.By emphasizing the noumenal (although nevertheless intersubjective) aspect of reason, I contend that both Habermas and Honneth leave their respective theories open to the formative structural-functional dynamics of modern capitalism, to the normativity of the social system.Their conception of social action and social practices is defined by intersubjective-symbolic theories of sociality that, in many ways, stem from philosophies that were reactions to Hegelian philosophy as well as opponents to Marxism.In this sense, they sought to retain the basic structure of modern economic life in its social-democratic, welfare-statist form, and pursued a deeper democratization of consciousness.They stress noumenal properties of the self and thereby underestimate the power of reification to alienate critical consciousness from practical, transformative action.Social relations and practices become absorbed by the dominating logic of capital and, as a result, serve to structure the most basic relational and psychic patterns that form the basis of the modern self.
It is my contention that critical theory has lost contact with the essential philosophical, ethical, and political impulse that drove Idealism as well as its immediate ancestors, Left Hegelianism and Marxism.I submit that the recovery of this impulse rests in many ways on a reconstruction of the core ideas that animated post-Kantian philosophy and on through Marx's thought and then revived once more by Lukács and Western Marxism.These ideas operated according to critical metaphysics of human sociality and praxis and sought to understand the nature of human life as an ontology of human relational and teleological capacities.The true liberation of the individual and society rested on the mastery of this basic insight: human value was seen to be grounded in human capacities for sociality and to externalize oneself via conscious, intentional activity in the world.Kant's synthesis of philosophical rationalism with empiricism to create a  1 Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory. 2 For a more robust critical discussion of this position, see Thompson, The Specter of Babel.
confrontation with Western Marxism, Perry Anderson notes that "the hidden hallmark of Western Marxism as a whole is... that it is a product of defeat." 4 He further notes that: "[t]he most striking single trait of Western Marxism as a common tradition is thus perhaps the constant presence and influence on it of successive types of European idealism." 5Moving away from themes concerning the material nature of class to themes of the philosophy of consciousness constitutes, for thinkers along these lines, a de-radicalization of thought.It essentially constitutes a break between critical theory and radical political praxis."The original relationship between Marxist theory and proletarian practice," Anderson continues, "was subtly but steadily substituted by a new relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois theory." 6ut what this critique misses is that, given the historicity of capitalism, particularly after the expansion of the welfare state and social-democratic institutions after the Second World War, the problem of consciousness has indeed become an ever more central concern in the development and enactment of rational radical politics.As generations of citizens have been absorbed into the value structure and cultural hegemony of the consumer capitalist social order, the problem of the reification of consciousness has expanded exponentially.As Lukács observed from the standpoint of the late 1960s: The class struggle in the era of absolute surplus value was directed toward creating the objective conditions for a meaningful life.Today, with a five-day week a wage corresponding to this, the first conditions for a meaningful life can already emerge, and as a result the problem has arisen that the manipulation which extends from the purchase of cigarettes through to presidential elections divides human beings from meaningful life by a mental barrier.For manipulation is not, as the official doctrine has it, the desire to inform the consumer what the best refrigerator or the best razorblade is, but a question of the control of consciousness. 7 But this control of consciousness, so pervasive in late capitalism, as Lukács points out, also means a control of social praxisthat is, a control over the very ways that the world is constituted.Our ontology, the very being of our world, is therefore shaped by the structures of power and domination exerted by the logic of capital and those that control it.
As such, the assumption of a form of radical subjectivity can no longer be taken for granted as more orthodox Marxists have always assumed.Cultivating a radical, dissensual form of subjectivity that has mature, democratic aspirations at the same time must therefore confront the problem of reification head-on.The key space for contemporary radical politics that seeks to break with the embedded norms, institutions, practices, and purposes of late capitalism is the transformation of consciousness.The reason for this is that, as Lukács would point out, the structure of consciousness is the starting point for the kind of praxis that will ultimately be articulated: since we are essentially practical beings, we seek to externalize in the world those teleological projects that are initially formed and exist within consciousness.Consciousness is not a separate structure from society, it is dialectically enmeshed with it; praxis is saturated with consciousness, and it is the effective and the final cause of human social being.But once consciousness is subsumed by the totality, by the norms, relations, values, purposes, and ends of the prevailing social reality, it is unable to offer a genuine, radical break with that reality.As Lukács notes: "Where consciousness is not an effective moving force of existence, the antithesis between organic being and societal being cannot exist at all." 8 Lukács saw it as an essential project of Marxism to be able to structure and cultivate a radical form of consciousness grounded in our ontology as socio-practical beings in history.Consciousness is therefore a core  4 Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 42.  5 Ibid., 56.6 Ibid., 55.Merleau-Ponty offers a corrective to this line of thinking.Such theorists, he contends, "contest the existence of consciousness in principle and, without saying so, grant themselves the intelligible structure of the whole, and then discover all the more easily the meaning and the logic of each phase in that they have dogmatically presupposed the intelligible structure of the whole."Adventures of the Dialectic, 44.Lukács further notes on this theme that: "Traditional Marxism... has given rise to a false dualism of social being and social consciousness, which is based on epistemology, but for that reason ignores the decisive ontological questions."The Ontology of Social Being, 2: Marx, 147-8.7 Pinkus, Conversations with Lukács, 55. 8 Lukács, "The Ontological Bases of Human Thought and Action," 25. dimension for the formation of radical subjectivity and political agency.As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, Lukács sought to construct "a Marxism which incorporates subjectivity into history without making it an epiphenomenon." 9 In order for critical reason to accomplish this, it must theorize a notion of subjectivity that is not rooted in phenomenological categories, but Marxian categories; it must demonstrate a form of rationality that can put us into critical contact with the generative social dimensions of human life: this means with our dual phylogenetic capacities for relationality as well as for teleological praxis.In the end, it is this understanding of objective human life that, as I see it, was at the heart of the philosophical strivings of German Idealists, early Romantics, Left Hegelians, and Marx.Lukács is therefore not only an heir to this structure of thought, but he remains its intellectual ambassador within contemporary critical theory.
It is for this reason that critical theory remains an essential tradition in counter-posing a form of reason that can compete with and contest the instrumental, technical-administrative, and exploitive logics that essentially constitute modern capitalism.A form of reason that can not only critique the alienated form of life from which modern subjectivity suffers but also provide a constructive paradigm for a more humane and democratic culture and polity.A critical theory of society must be able to fulfill, at minimum, two basic functions.First, it must have a coherent theory of society.It must be able to grant some ontological status to the social as an organized, dynamic, and historical form of life.In this sense, it must be able to do more than posit certain features of human socialitysuch as communication, discourse, or recognitionand be able to comprehend society as a historical totality.Second, a critical theory of society must be able to formulate a relationship between consciousness and that totality for it to grant a perspective for judgment that contains within it a transformative position with respect to that totality as an object of consciousness.To fail in either or both of these functions is to articulate a social theory or a social philosophy that is prone to being absorbed by the very structures and functions of that totality itself.In short, it becomes a form of alienated theory that is unable to grant us critical mediation of our world.
My thesis is that Lukács' ideas about the ontology of social being can be understood as an important and novel foundation for Marxist philosophy and for a revitalization of critical theoryone that can provide us with a novel theory of value, ethics, social reality as well as critical judgment and engaged political praxis.It provides a framework for a humanistic, ethical theory rooted in Marxism: what I will call "dialectical ontology" sees the foundations for critical theory in the relation between the active, practical nature of human life, the role of consciousness in the capacity to posit ends and purposes in the world and to seek out and operate within a relational field of activity that is essentially constitutive of the nature of the social world.This leads us to an ability to thematize the totality: the capacity to understand and judge the ways that these dual, phylogenetic capacities for teleological positing and forming and sustaining relations with others are shaped in any given historical context to constitute the world we experience phenomenologically.Lukács gravitated toward such a theoretical position as his work evolved, but it is my contention that this has been the seminal thesis of Marxism and its relation to German Idealism.Indeed, the further he moved away from his neo-Kantian intellectual origins with Weber and Simmel, the more deeply and comprehensively he was able to grasp and develop the premise that Marx's philosophical anthropology was the core guide to a radical form of theory and praxis.
What I would like to investigate in this article is the way that praxis as a concept has been central to the aspirations of critical philosophy viewing human beings as in some sense inherently practical beings capable of the generation of social reality.I trace the development and transformation of the themes of human praxis as teleological positing from Fichte through Lukács as well as the important theme of human relations as constitutive of social reality in order to show how the ontological thesis can be understood as having its own lineage and philosophical grounding as opposed to the post-metaphysical and pragmatic themes espoused by the later generations of critical theory.It was Habermas who initially sought to displace labor as the core of human activity by re-conceptualizing social action as communicative action, one defined by pragmatics rather than by human labor. 10Similarly, Axel Honneth sought to continue this paradigmatic thread by arguing against labor and instead privileging recognition as a form of social action as the realization of a free ethical life.Even his later work that takes labor into account views it merely as "work" and as a part of a recognition paradigm. 11ndeed, in strong contrast to thinkers such as Habermas who have sought a rigorous grounding of critical theory in the pragmatics of language and the structure of communication or Axel Honneth who himself went back to the early Hegel to find in recognition a paradigmatic framework for critical theory, I want to suggest a very different thesis that pulses through both idealism and Marxian "materialism": that is the centrality of praxis as the human capacity to posit oneself in the world of things; as the essential ability to make purposes, objects and meaning in the world.Praxis, understood as a socially constituted activity oriented toward the realization of ends and purposes, is the essence of what Marx and Lukács meant by "labor," and why they saw it as a conceptual nucleus to a philosophical anthropology that could undermine ideological and irrational forms of thought and being. 12I want to move toward seeing this as a dialectical ontology that can re-orient contemporary critical theory.Unlike Habermas' and Honneth's project that both essentially eject or avoid Marx, this structure of thought demonstrates the importance of Marx's ideas as well as dialectically unites the thesis of "Idealism" and "materialism" sublating them into a critical ontology of human social life.It is this general structure of thought that provides the philosophical basis for a dialectical ontologya theory of human reality that is taken from the synthesis of idealism and materialism.

Self-Consciousness and Activity in German Idealism
At the heart of the revolution in philosophy that would become German Idealism was the thesis that the human individual's capacity for mindedness or the capacity for reason that any individual possessed was the product of an innate capacity to organize and synthesize the raw phenomena that composed empirical experience.In the spontaneous capacity for organizing this experience emerges the capacity for thought, for the ability to judge whether the objects we experience conform to the conceptual manifold of thought.The objects of our perception are organized by the universal laws and rules that are constitutive of consciousness itself.In this sense, we as reflective subjects actively organize our perceptions and determine their truth content.
In his attempt to defend Kant's revolutionary philosophical innovation, Fichte makes an important advance in that he wants to understand how it is possible for one to posit oneself and still take oneself as the author of the norms that one follows.Fichte takes Kant's idea of opposing criticism to that of dogmatism to a more radical level of intensity, for it is his intention to formulate a conception of mind that is inherently active, that is constituted by striving to change and reform the world; to awaken the passive habits of reflection that plague culture and have each discover their true selves as active, self-authorizing agents in the world. 13For Fichte, the essential move was to demonstrate that the ego can be a self-authorizing agent or subject only to those norms and maxims that it has authentically authorized.This was a paradox for Fichte in that it had no ground to support the edifice of freedom and knowledge that he felt Kant had ascribed to it.In constructing a solution to the problem, Fichte argued that our innate capacity for intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) paved the way to such a theory of the subject.According to this view, each of us  11 Honneth, Die arbeitende Souverän.12 Indeed, it should be noted that Castoriadis saw this also as the core critical pulse of Marx's work and his affinity with the radicality of the Greek tradition of thought.Castoriadis, L'Institution imaginaire de la société, 354ff.;Castoriadis, Les carrefours du labyrinthe, 221ff.;Castoriadis, Domaines de l'homme, 219ff.13 For a discussion, see Bubner when he comments: "The author [Fichte] thus expressly calls upon the active co-operation on the part of all free spirits, and the manner of lecturing he adopts, abandoning as it does the scholastic procedures traditionally involved, provides a germinating model for an emerging community of readers that will be able to emancipate itself from all alien and external principles and establish a new form of unity on the basis of the creative power of the spirit itself."The Innovations of Idealism, 191.possesses the innate capacity to institute ourselves as knowing, experiencing beings.Our subjectivity is therefore not a static state of being, but an act through which we, as individuals, relate ourselves to self and the world.
Freedom for Fichte is therefore tied to this capacity of the I to know itself by positing itself.The act of positing, the Tathandlung, effectively institutes the knowing self, it lays the ground for what a self is but also for the possibility of securing knowledge of reality itself. 14Knowing is therefore possible because of this act of self-positing since we intuitively know that we possess self-consciousness, that we are the subject and object of our immediate senses.The will operates in a similar way, and this is the ground of freedom.As he puts it: "The free being posits ends for itself with absolute freedom.It wills because it wills, and its willing of an object is itself the ultimate ground of such willing." 15It is the very activity of the Tathandlung, the very capacity to posit oneself as the ground for securing knowledge, that in turn forms the basic ground for Fichte's practical and political conception of freedom.As he puts it in his search for the foundations of political right: "the arrangement we are looking for would have to be directed to the will itself; it would have to enable and require the will to determine itself and will only those things that can co-exist with lawful freedom." 16ut this practical project rests on a prior thesis that Fichte claims about the very property of being a selfdetermining, independent individual.This is the electric core of Fichte's idea: that it is only by grasping oneself as a positing being that we can have proper self-consciousness; and it is only via rational self-consciousness that critical philosophy has meaning because it is this that transforms a self from a dogmatic, unfree being to an authentically self-authorizing being.One can now be seen as possessing critical reflection.The basic idea is that there exists a creative capacity within human beings to be able to posit and to design concepts to be acted upon and realized in the world, but also that this must become the subject's self-conception; for without this, there is no self-authorization and one does not move in a critical space of reasons but is merely repeating heteronomy and dogma.
Fichte emphasizes the active side of the subject and its capacity for positing not only itself but also the capacity to posit ends and purposes in the world. 17As he observes: "But my conception and design of a purpose (Zweckbegriffs) is by its very nature absolutely freeit produces something out of nothing.To such a thought must I connect my action so that it is possible to regard it as free and as being brought forth by myself alone." 18Freedom now hinges upon this very capacity for action (Handeln) insofar as the subject can formulate the concept of design, the very origination of a purpose now becomes an authentic property of oneself.Fichte is now claiming that one's independence (Selbstständigkeit), one of the highest categories for understanding human freedom for Idealism, is not merely a noumenal capacity for reflection, but points outward toward the phenomenal world itself via a capacity to "design," "originate," or "determine" a concept (the verb Fichte employs is entwerfen) and to then produce or realize that concept in the world or, otherwise put, the subject in some basic sense posits something beyond itself as a mere concept.As Fichte formulates this thesis: "I ascribe to myself the capacity to design a concept (Begriff zu entwerfen) simply because I originate it." 19There is a selfconsciousness of the capacity for creating the concept accessed by intellectual intuition.But this is still a noumenal activity which then leads to the proposition that: "I ascribe to myself further the capacity to constitute this concept through a real action beyond that concept itself; ascribe to myself a real, effective  14 Pinkard insightfully comments on this difficult idea that: "Fichte's point was that everything that has been said to existthe Greek gods, natural objects, sensations, monarchiesis to be regarded as a 'posit' and what we ultimately take to exist has to do with which set of inferences are necessary in order to make the most sense of those 'checks' found in our consciousness."German Philosophy, 1760-1860, 117.15 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 126.16 Ibid., 126.17 Lukács notes that: "Philosophically, the term Entäusserung was first used, to the best of my knowledge, by Fichte for whom it meant both that the positing of an object implied an externalization or alienation of the subject and that the object was to be thought of as an 'externalized' act of reason."The Young Hegel, 538.18 Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 107-8.19 Ibid., 108.power capable of constituting something beyond itself, a power (Kraft) that is totally different from the mere capacity of conception." 20ere we reach a kind of limit in Fichte's thought in that he is moving beyond the circular subjective Idealist account of the I as a self-positing activity which then serves as the very ground for its self-knowledge. 21he I now becomes self-conscious of itself as an originating and producing being: as one that is not only able to design and originate a concept but, as he says, possess the power (Kraft) in distinction to the capacity (Vermögen) to constitute it in the world.Here, Fichte is arguing that there is a protrusion of noumenal activity into actual activity in the objective world.Fichte makes the crucial distinction between concepts of cognition (Erkenntnisbegriffe) that seem to remain merely noumenal and those concepts that are purposive (Zweckbegriffe) that, he says, "are not images (bilder) of given objects, but are, rather, images of things that have yet to be brought forth (Vorbilder eines Hervorzubringenden)." 22 Fichte grasps how this capacity for realizing one's own purposes in the world breaks out of the circle of subjectivity into the objective world "when to the conception of a thought it adds a realization of this thought." 23The capacity to generate a purpose (Zweckbegriff) and to realize that purpose, to bring about one's designs into the world, therefore constitutes a new dimension to one's selfdetermination: "The conception of a purpose (Zweckbegriffe), a particular determination of events in me, appears doubled, partly as subjective, a thought, partly as objective, as an action." 24he tension between thought and action (Denken und Handeln) now becomes a new field within which human freedom can take shape.From the Rousseauian origins of Fichte's claim in the Foundations of Natural Right in 1795 when he claimed: "I must subject myself with complete freedom," 25 to his position in the System of Ethics in 1798 where he claims that "freedom is the sensuous representation of self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit)," 26 to the position in his Determination of Man in 1800 with the concept of a purpose (Zweckbegriff) and its realization in the objective world, Fichte moves from a thoroughly subjective Idealist position toward one that incorporates the objective world. 27Of course, this later conception is still biased in favor of the subject, the fully active agent in nature, but it still points to a tension and a movement toward a dialectic between subject and object and toward what would later be at the heart of Marx's and Lukács' ontological conception of human being itself: praxis as the positing of a teleologically constructed concept via the manipulation of nature for its realization. 28he relation between self-consciousness and activity now takes on a more radical and weighty purpose: one can only be taken to be free when one has achieved self-consciousness of oneself as a practical being, that  20 Ibid.21 Nevertheless, even here in Fichte's thesis of the Tathandlung as the basic constitutive act of reality, there is a move toward a concept of objectivity in that the acting self can produce something that is not-I.As Horstmann argues: "If the I is an activity that posits its own existence, it thereby constitutes realitybecause, without that positing activity, which consists in nothing other than making something real, it would be impossible to attach any meaning to the very concept of reality.Thus, the category of reality, as Fichte sees it, is founded in the very manner of acting (Handlungsart) of the human spirit.""The Early Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling," 124.22 Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 108.23 Ibid., 110.24 Ibid.25 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 94. 26 Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre, 9. 27 It therefore dulls the radical edge of Fichte's efforts to read contemporary reconstructions of his thought in the light of twentieth-century philosophical language such as Pinkard's take on Fichte's idea of freedom when he writes: "freedom is the ability of the agent effectively to respond to his (ultimately self-authorized) normative commitments by acting the ways required by those commitments."German Philosophy, 120 and passim.It seems to me that Fichte's radical notion of freedom lies in his claim of the ability to self-authorize not only the norms that I posit, but the ends and purposes that I conceive and which I seek to realize in the world.28 This periodization of Fichte's philosophical development of the concept of the free subject as gradually incorporating the objective world is also made by Henrich, "Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht," as well as Janke, Fichte.Sein und Reflexion.However, both Henrich and Janke fail to stress Fichte's insight that the subject comes to interact with and produce objects in the world or a teleological conception of free agency.Rademacher, "Fichte und das Problem der Dialektik" as well as his Rademacher, Fichtes Begriff des Absoluten, for a discussion of the productive aspects of Fichte's concept of subjectivity, cognition, and practical philosophy.
the intuitive capacity to have this self-knowledge of oneself as an agent capable of realizing a concept in the world and transforming the world forms the basis of genuine self-understanding.Only then can who we are really be known, but, also, that what we do, the purposes we act on in the world can either be critically engaged with or dogmatically followed.Self-consciousness and activity now form a dialectical pair for Fichte and he opens a new plane in the critical function of philosophy, one grounded in the human capacity for the creation of ends on a social-historical scale: "It no longer appears to me to be the final purpose (Endzweck) of the present world to produce a state of universal peace among men and their limitless domination over the mechanisms of nature for its mere sake alone but that this should be brought forth by man himself; and that it is expected from all, that it be produced by all, as one great, free, moral community." 29t now became a central premise of Fichte that practical reason was to be given primacy over theoretical reason.In the I's "striving" (streben) to posit itself in the world, to constantly vacillate between and against the objective world and back again onto itself, it became clear that the purpose of theoretical reason was to establish a justification for moral action in the world, as an imperative for the subject's transformation of the objective domain in which it lives.As Frederick Beiser correctly points out: "He explained that the central assumption of theoretical reasonthat there exists some object outside myselfis demonstratable only as the condition for the possibility of moral action, or of my striving to change and improve the world." 30Although the subject appears, early in Fichte's writing, to be separated into the distinct spheres of rationality on the one hand and sensuality on the other, in time Fichte begins to demonstrate that the very act of intellectual intuition provides the subject with the experience of being able to grasp or at least hover over these two dimensions of reality.The stiving subject constantly seeks to posit itself in the world, subjectivity constantly encounters objectivity and thereby experiences itself as a self-determining subject.But this subject is also a productive one.As Simon Lumsden correctly observes: "Fichte's subject is active and self-generating.It is this peculiarly human act of self-positing that marks the distinctiveness of human subjectivity, a notion that he thinks ought to end the equation of human subjectivity with cognitive capacities." 31 I think it is precisely here, with the end point of Fichte's philosophical system, that the true radical origins of German Idealism begin, that the seed is planted and begins to germinate in the thought of Hegel, the Left Hegelians, Engels, Marx, and Lukács taking shape as a concrete and objective form of freedom that is the form of an ontology of human socio-practical capacities.This radicalism consists of a categorical imperative to transform, to shape the world via an account of the generative capacities of human reason and action.Fichte therefore set up a pole against and in relation to the Spinozist account of the totality and system, something that Hegel would seek to sublate in his own philosophical account of the subject-object dialectic.

Hegel, Left Hegelianism and the Centrality of Praxis
Hegel saw the limitations of Fichte's position.As Frederick Beiser notes: "Fichte does not surmount Kant's dualisms but only restores them in new form.The Fichtean subject is active, noumenal, and purposive, while the Fichtean object is inert, phenomenal, and mechanical.How, then, can there be any correspondence between the subject and object required for all knowledge?" 32Indeed, Hegel had argued that the organic organization of life was one place where reason could become more concrete for the reflective subject, but it was in the recognitive relation that self-consciousness was able to understand the true structure of the self.What we begin to recognize in others is not only their status as subjects and, pari passu, our own, but, as Hegel later elaborates in his ontology of free personhood, as subjects who externalize a purpose or aim (Zweck); that is, the difference between having a will that is rational (Wille) from one that is irrational or impulsive (Willkür) is that the former structures an action (Handlung), a self-conscious translation of subjectivity into objectivity whereas the former does not. 33A subject becomes aware of him or herself as a person, as a free being, only once they have been able to become aware, self-conscious of this structure of interdependent, self-authorized activity.I will concentrate on Hegel's account of human activity and trace how this leads him to a theory of the social basis for human teleological positing.It is only through the self-understanding of one's power to posit ends and to act on them in the world that leads Hegel to a theory of how individuals begin to come to a rational self-consciousness of themselves as teleological as well as relational beings and ushering in the possibility of a free ethical community.
For Hegel, the concept of action (Handlung) becomes distinct from mere act (Tat) in the world.The difference between the two is that the former possesses a teleological structure in that a concept is sought to be realized and the latter does not.The concept of the rational will (Wille) is therefore a crucial concept for Hegel's understanding of rational subjectivity.Hegel constructs this thesis by demonstrating, as does Fichte, the need for the subject to act to externalize the will and to connect subjectivity with objectivity. 34This happens via the process of translating (übersetzen) subjectivity into objectivity via an action that is distinctly mine.That is to say, one is able to see one's will as a property of oneself that becomes also a property of the external world.In this sense, the act of translating the subjective will into objectivity creates an immediate form of being (unmittelbares Dasein). 35Once the subject achieves self-consciousness of the will's capacity to externalize itself, one can be said to have a purpose or aim (Zweck).The rational subject is able, Hegel is saying, to see the content of the inner and the outer world (the thought as well as the thing produced) as having the same structure and therefore to be genuinely one's own: "The content is determined for me as mine in this way: that in its identity of subject and object it enshrines for me my subjectivity, not merely as my inner purpose, but also insofar as it has achieved external existence." 36his means that the concept of an action is one where the subject is aware of its capacity for externalizing a purpose and that this belongs to it: "The externalization (Äußerung) of the subjective or moral will is action (Handlung)." 37But this is only a first step toward a social conception of action, that is, one that can serve to ground the thesis that praxis dialectically mediates subjectivity and objectivity, the particular individual and the social world external to it.Hegel next takes us to a new stage where the subject comes to realize that others also possess this capacity for action and that one's own actions shape and alter the complex environment of others to which one belongs: "I retain my subjectivity in the carrying out of my purposes and aims (see §110), and through the process of objectifying them I supersede my subjectivity at the same time as immediate as well as its individual character as my subjectivity." 38This is because I enter into a recognitive and interdependent social matrix with other telos-positing beings capable of action: "The ground for the existence of the will is now subjectivity and the will of others is that existence that I give to my purpose (Zweck) and which is at the same time an other to me.Accomplishing my purpose therefore has this identity of my will with the will of others." 39he will's capacity for action now possesses a complex structure, but it resonates with Fichte's thesis on the essential productive capacity of the will to realize subjective purposes within the realm of objectivity.
 33 Quante notes that for Hegel the distinction between an act, or deed (Tat), and an action (Handlung) can be understood as follows: "To describe an event as 'deed' means to assume the involvement of the will in the narrow senseto grasp is as voluntarywithout, though, assuming in the description of the perspective of the agent on his own act.To describe an event as an 'action' means, on the contrary, just this: assuming the perspective of the agent himself, comprehending the event not only implicitly as voluntary and intentional, but also understanding it as the realization of the agent's intention …. [I]n order to describe an event as action, one must also include in the description the subjective end of this will."Hegel's Concept of Action, 106 and passim.34 Echoing Fichte, Hegel says in the introduction to the Philosophie des Rechts when discussing the concept of free individuality, that it should be understood "as an individuality returning its determinacy to itself, it is the process of translating the subjective purpose (Zweck) through the mediation of activity and external means into objectivity."Philosophie des Rechts, §8.35 Ibid., § §108-10.36 Ibid., §110.37 Ibid., §113.38 Ibid., §112.39 Ibid., §112.Hegel continues that: "The accomplishing of my purpose therefore implies this identity of my will with the will of others, it has a positive bearing on the will of others."§112.
Hegel's theory of action now comes to take on a complex structure beyond the particularist, atomist, and hedonic model of subjectivity of thinkers such as Adam Smith and the Scottish political economists that were an influence on Hegel's ideas about civil society at the time. 40What Hegel saw as attractive was the way that the sociality of interdependence emerges from the interplay of different individuals.But for Hegel, this market logic can be taken too far and lead to the breakdown of social cohesion and ethical life.Retaining the concept of the individual entails broadening its scope and horizon of reflection once subjectivity is able to see that its true essence is universal: that each attains its full capacity as an active, free agent only among the intentional relations with others.The subject's generative powers are therefore not its own but are made possible by society and our subjective ends must therefore, if they are to qualify as rational, be mediated by universality, by attention to common, shared ends and purposes.
A Rousseauian idea begins to evolve here where the rational will (Wille) is one capable of a self-authorized expression of autonomy that takes into consideration the relational context of othersethical life begins to emerge out of the circle of mere Moralität.The process of relating to others, to see that we were all along social, that the basic structure of what we thought to be merely subjective is in fact relationally objective allows reason to pass from subjectivity into a collective form of life.Even further, such a will becomes rational when it is able to will the welfare (das Wohl) or the good not only of itself but also the welfare of others.The general will in effect becomes embedded in the very structure of the rational will: "But the truth of the individual is the universal and the determination of action is not the externalization of an isolated particularity, but a universal content consisting in itself of an interconnected complex." 41n this way, Hegel's concept of rational individuality is one where the subject produces the good as a product of its will; it is a matter of making concrete what is merely abstract: "the good must of necessity through the particular will and is the same time its substance." 42The will is therefore the bridge between the conceptual and the objective, it forms the basis of the Idea, that is, the unification of the subjective concept with objective reality.Theoretical reason is therefore stripped of its synthetic power and made to be dialectically interdependent with praxis. 43The will is therefore mind embodied in praxis, and it is what produces the ontology of actuality: "As will, the mind steps into actuality; whereas as cognition is it on the soil of conceptual universality.Supplying its own content, the will is self-possessed, and in the widest sense, free." 44egel's construction of the ontology of personhood therefore becomes a building block for the social ontology of relational, teleological positing that constitutes the substantive element in human life.In the Phenomenology, Hegel's exploration of alienation not only was cast as a subjective phenomenon, but also shaped the various ways in which culture was organized and instantiated itself.It is in the particular's mediation by the universal that grants it its freedom as an individual person, and this means self-consciousness of oneself as a subject, as an agent of practice, of action, of the capacity to realize ends in the objective world that are one's own, even when among others. 45The reality of the social world was seen to be fundamentally cooperative: that is made of beings that are both inherently relational and teleological.Ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is therefore the product of the collective ways that a community produces or externalizes its positing of what is good, right, legal, and so on.It is Hegel's critical thesis that this be understood as possessing the criteria of universality and instantiated in objectivity. 46This is rooted in the individual, but the social individual who comes to recognize in others the same capacities for relatedness and externalization of thought in the world as he or she possesses.In this way, the good can become objective and concrete; ethics migrates from a moral standpoint to an ontology where the collective practices and relations of the community (Sittlichkeit) realize social ends and purposes that can be freedom-enhancing and good.Hence, he writes: "The right of the subjective will is that whatever it recognizes as valid (gültig) will be seen by it as good and that an action, as its purpose as externalized objectivity, shall be seen as right or wrong, wrong, good or evil, legal or illegal, based on its knowledge of the value the action has in this objectivity." 47egel is therefore developing further the late Fichtean insight of the bridge between subjectivity and objectivity as the realization of an end in the world, a purpose, a telos.It is this that the Left Hegelians seized upon as central to their own development. 48It was praxis itself that was the central category for them, an engagement with the world in order to de-alienate and return human culture back to itself, to effectively make whole what has been stripped from us.This was Ludwig Feuerbach's intent in his critical philosophical anthropology of religion.In his philosophy of "sensuousness,"a rough translation of Feuerbach's term for his philosophical perspective, Sinnlichkeit, which denotes the idea that actual, situated human experience and existence is the basis for genuine self-consciousnesshuman sentience was the basis for understanding human life and culture and it offered, he felt, humanity the capacity to actively shape the future and become historical beings capable of progress.In this sense, Feuerbach, along with the other Left Hegelians, was working in a new intellectual and political paradigm: what Allan Galloway describes as the end of the "age of faith" and the beginning of an "age of hope" that would go into decline toward the end of the nineteenth century. 49euerbach saw a move from an earlier phase of religious life where human beings were dependent on the objects of nature, Naturreligionen, and a later phase of religious life where human beings were dependent on one another, Geistesreligionen, rather than on nature. 50It was the latter that he examined so well in his Essence of Christianity.Here, human dependence on one another, human sociality and relatedness, was paired with the capacity to create meaning in terms of alienated symbols that expressed the ideals of perfection that structured the deep needs of human beings for freedom, ethical perfection, and community.
The true motivation of the Christian belief in God was therefore to be understood as human love of itself, self-love of the ego."By 'love,'" Feuerbach writes, "I mean activity of body and soulliving for others, for humanity, for universal ends.But since these universal ends only find their actuality and truth in concrete human form (for example, it I want freedom, I want really free men; I do not want freedom merely thought about or intended; I want a visible and tangible freedom), I always frankly posit man as the alpha and omega." 51The thesis of the ontological again reemerges here as with Hegel's examination of the nature of human action.It is the objectification of human freedom, reason, and good that concerns him.Religion has only been a distorted expression of this externalization of the good and of reason; it constitutes an alienation of human beings from themselves.The real being of human essence is not to be looked for in cognition, in the structure of consciousness itself, but found in the social essence of human life, in community, in our relations with others: "only in community, it is found only in the unity of man with mana unity that is supported only by the reality of the difference between I and Thou." 52 Feuerbach therefore saw that reason had to be understood as embodied by actual subjects; that the essence of the true reason was one that was in the world, not reason metaphysically posited: "The new philosophy, therefore, has for its epistemological principle, for its subject, not the Ego, not the absolute, that is, not the abstract spirit or mind; in short, not reason in and for itself alone -I hate that Idealism which tears man out of nature." 53Here, again we see that the impulse is to grasp the human not as a material reality, but as a relational and meaning-producing, teleological being.German Idealism's breakthrough for the Left Hegelians was the thesis that actual living human beings, living in relation to others, practically engaging themselves and with nature constitute the plane of genuine human reality.
It was August von Cieszkowski who would place emphasis on the notion that praxis was the externalization of the mind into the world.For Cieszkowski, Hegel's system needed to make the next step toward practical reconciliation of mind with the world or what he described as the "real objective dialectic of life." 54For him, teleology was to be understood as the basic structure of human reason and of life itself and it offered a more concrete way of understanding what he, along with Feuerbach, saw as the possibility of humanity's capacity to articulate the future.This he saw as occurring on three interdependent levels: (i) feeling, which was immediate, natural, and contingent; (ii) thought, which is reflective, theoretical, and governed by necessity; and (iii) the will or, as he calls, it, the "active-practical" (wirklich-praktische), which is to understood as practical, spontaneous, engaged, self-consciously willed, and free. 55He sees the third as the culmination of human reason, to be the result of the full actualization of non-alienated human self-conscious activity.Like Hegel, he sees that it "has both in its inner as well as its external world the objective realization of a subjectively conscious teleology." 56It is the "objective, actual realization of the cognitive truth, of the good i.e., the practicalwhich previously the theoretical mind retained for itself." 57ieszkowski maintains that this new critical phase of the organic evolution of human wisdoma Historiosophie, as he calls itis a movement into the realm of praxis, of the dialectical synthesis of being and thought via the category of action.But this action is what he terms "post-theoretical praxis," that is, it is the result of an activity that takes place not merely in thought, but in the object domain, in the external world.This kind of praxis is "the true synthesis of theoretical and immediate practice, the subjective and objective is revealed to us, when an activity is the true substantial synthesis of being and thought." 58The opposition between actum and factum therefore is sublated as the synthesis of praxis operates to organize passive objects into an intended objectivity via human the synthetic capacity of human thought embodied in praxis.Chaos therefore proceeds to be organized into a speculative synthesis which is also concrete. 59We therefore arrive at the factum zu actum, that is, the reconciliation of the objective world with the practical engagement of human active reason itself. 60hat results from this is, Cieszkowski maintains, a movement from the aesthetic representation of feeling, beauty, to the theoretical contemplation of truth, and finally to the realization and objectification of the good itself, revealing "the inner and outer as concrete individuality, which is the realization of itself." 61The good ceases to be merely a reflective principle and can be realized in the world by active, self-conscious agents who have the good as the ground for their activity, the onto-formative basis of human praxis itself.Once again, we are making a move toward a dialectic between the subjective and the objective and Cieszkowski adds to Hegel's dialectical schema of the "in and for itself" (an und für sich), a third moment: that of "from itself" (aussich-selbst): that is, "self-active Geist, that is, free activity as such, which is also the most concrete evolution of mind and culture (Geist)." 62ieszkowski brings us closer to the thesis that had first emerged with Fichte's articulation of the thesis of the objectivation of subjectivity and Hegel's concern with the establishment of an "ethical life" that would be the concretization of the good that was rooted in free individuality rather than a subsuming form of communitarianism.Cieszkowski seeks to formulate the thesis that the very nature of modern reason is practical, that this is the fundamental, unalienated truth of human beings itself.As Feuerbach had sought to de-alienate religious thought and feeling, Cieszkowski places praxis at the center of our self-understanding as rational, active beings.The teleological thesis that he continues to develop entails seeing mind and culture from a very different vantage point: as one where the possibility of each human being to produce the good, to selfauthorize their ends and purposes in the world can become the font for human culture and the object of the rational polity.Only then will the good cease to be abstract, alienated from the actual living forms of culture and politics.Only then will the good become an actually lived form of life, constitutive of our world rather than a regulative principle: "World history is the developmental process of the mind and culture of humanity in experience, in consciousness and in the enactment of beauty, truth and the good; a developmental process in that we must recognize in its necessity, its contingency and freedom." 63ut ultimately it is here that the Left Hegelians, and Cieszkowski in particular, retained their idealism.By dissolving teleology into the movement of history, as in the quote above, the Left Hegelians are prevented from grasping the concrete, real activities of human groups as the constitutive agents of change.What this thesis sought to do was bring together synthetically the idea of a common good that was rooted in an authentic individuality, but it was unable to go a further step into the realm of objectivity, into a social ontology that was rooted in the actual functions and capacities of human social life.Still, their ideas represented an effort to bring the maturing radical republican political impulses that had been gathered force since the Renaissance in Italy and which made such an impact on the generation that experienced the French Revolution. 64What Galloway referred to as the "age of hope" could therefore alternatively be understood as an age of republican transformation where Rousseau's vision of an individual capable of articulating the general will could be grounded in an active, teleological conception of human praxis.It therefore sets the stage for Marx's philosophical anthropology.

Marx's Ontology: The Relational-Teleological Structure of Human Praxis
The great synthesis of these views is worked out by Marx and Engels in their attempt to push beyond the Left Hegelians and what they maintained was their inability to rid themselves of the baggage of Idealism.In this they were still following the radical wave initiated by Fichte in that they saw the essential human capacity for positing reality as the basis for a new paradigm shift toward "materialism," or the general understanding of human activity as situated within the objective, material environment.This does not entail an abandonment of the basic materialist thesis that human conceptuality is somehow reducible to matter, or some other crude mechanistic materialism, but the formulation of an ontology of human socio-practical life.
In contrast to the ideas of the mechanistic materialists, Marx and Engels argue that categories, such as labor, history, culture, consciousness, and so on, need to be understood as directly involving our activity in the world; human beings are to be understood as acting and living in a system of relations and activities that engage one another and the world.This is the "materialist" thesis that they counterpose to the previous Idealism of the Left Hegelians.It emphasizes the need to see human activity as not simply mental, intentional, or norm-governed but directly involving the objective world in its constitution.In his contribution to The Holy Family, Engelswho was in his student days a prominent follower of the Left Hegeliansmakes this clear when he argues: Once man is recognized as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations, only "Criticism" can invent new categories and transform man himself into a category and into the principle of a whole series of categories, as it is doing now.It is true that in so doing it takes the only road to salvation that has remained for frightened and persecuted theological humanity.History does nothing, it "possesses no immense wealth," it "wages no battles."It is man, real, living man who does all  63 Ibid., 137.64 Check the important discussion by Zöller, "Homo Homini Civis."that, who possesses and fights; "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieving its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. 65e opposition to the "theological" understanding of human beings refers to the persistence of the alienation of human activity from self-conscious control and self-direction.According to Marx and Engels, Left Hegelians never overcame this problem: they were never able to give an ontological account of human life that was not purged of the inflationary problems of Idealism.But here in The Holy Family, the theme of positing oneself in the world that begins with Fichte and is developed through Hegel and the Left Hegelian movement becomes central, but with the crucial difference that it is to be understood as an intrinsically social category. 66hat Marx was able to see was the crucial error in the Fichtean position of the self-positing core of human thought and freedom: namely that it was unable to cash out its very promise of self-authorizing agency.What Marx puts forth in his dialectical view of materialism preserves the thesis that the individual is purposive and active, but that this operates within an inherently social matrix of relations and processes that are historically determined by the ways in which human practical activities have been organized.Praxis is itself the core category here, since Marx sees that this must be conceived ontologically, not as a mere mechanistic-materialist phenomenon (e.g., as neural pathways determining thought and action), nor as pure Ideality, but rather the synthesis of the two: "The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach's) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of an object or of intuition (Anschauung), but not as sensuous human activity (sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit), practice (Praxis), not subjectively." 67he idea here is that "sensuous human activity" be understood as distinct from praxis in that the former seems to convey the idea that we act as isolated beings according to our senses.Praxis, on the other hand, is the capacity to project the concept into the world, to make objective what is subjective.Hence: "In praxis man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, this-sidedness of his thinking." 68The dialectic between the inner, mental structure of the idea, the concept, and the natural, material world constitutes praxis as opposed to mere conscious of cognitive activity.The subjective, "this-sidedness" of thinking only becomes real, or ceases to be abstract, once it is realized in the world via this process of externalization.History is not the subject of change, but human praxisit circumscribes the very capacity for transformation: "The materialistic doctrine concerning the change of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men ….The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be comprehended and rationally understood only as revolutionary praxis." 69Activity (Tätigkeit), long the category of Fichte and Hegel, now becomes praxisthe metabolizing process of thought via the engagement with the natural world.This retains a place even more at the center of Marx's thought where human teleological positing is seen as the essential, phylogenetic nucleus of human life, constitutive of the ontology of the social world and of history itself.
So, the mechanism of historical change, of social transformation, is human praxis, but it is only a first step.Marx adds to this a relational dimension to praxis, that we are social, members of a collective organization of activity: "the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual.In its actuality, it is the  65 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, 116.66 As Meikle convincingly argues: "the content and importance of given by Marx and Engels to the specific description of their theory of history as 'materialist' derived directly from theory object of giving content in terms of real human social existence to the Hegelian dialectic of essence, form, 'principle,' etc., and of defining a materialist basis with which to replace Hegel's inverted starting point of the Idea.A 'materialist' theory of history meant to them precisely a realist version of, and therefore an inversion of Hegel's theory."Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, 45. 67 Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," 400.(Translation modified.)68 Ibid., 401.69 Ibid., 401.Fetscher notes on Marx's turn on Hegel: "Hegel believed that he had discovered the subject of this action-fact (Tathandlung) in the spirit (for example in the world spirit which produces history).However, Marx objects against Hegel that his world spirit only appeared to have produced real history, and that basically this is only a myth with the help of which we can subsequently interpret the rational process of history.Admittedly, history was already recognized by Hegel as the source of a solution to the problems of classical German philosophy, but history itself does not yet appear in real and profane terms because it is not viewed from the standpoint of its real subject."Marx and Marxism, 85.  ensemble of social relations." 70As a result, praxis is the synthesis of the materialist and the Idealist substrates that preceded him in Greek and German philosophy.The structure of this unity is captured nicely by Merleau-Ponty: "in Marxism 'matter'and, indeed, 'consciousness'is never considered separately.It is inserted in the system of human coexistence where it forms the basis of a common situation of contemporary and successive individuals, assuring the generality of their projects and making possible a line of development and a sense of history." 71therwise stated, Marx takes up the teleological structure of human agency as a basis for the understanding of a concrete ontology of human social life and history.Although each individual possesses the capacity for teleological positing, it must be understood as a collective, a social force.That is to say, it is the move from an individualized stance to one that is collective and social, that we relationally, cooperatively generate ends and purposes and actively shape the world as members of a community that is so essential for Marx.Marx offers a social ontology in the sense that even the individual's powers of praxis are themselves properties that are only realizable and intelligible in a relational, social context.Indeed, the individual brain possesses an innate capacity for language, but language as such can only exist, that innate capacity can only become concrete, exercised, real (wirklich), in the world, among and cooperatively with other languageusers. 72A solitary, non-socialized human being would physically be human, but ontologically less than. 73arx therefore fuses the relational with the teleological aspects of human praxis as socially constituted forms of activity that seek to realize ends and purposes in the world.
Human teleological agency now becomes a socially structured and organized capacity, one that has its roots in innate individual capacities, but only is made real and concrete via cooperation or relational dynamics.It is this that forms a critical seed for Lukács' philosophical emphasis on consciousness, on the "subjective factor," and the turn toward developing Marxist ethics.The arc of German Idealism and Marx's thought therefore becomes the field for the development of his ideas and, I will contend, a more radical form of politically engaged and critical theory and practical reason.

Lukács and Critical Social Ontology
Lukács' project was to deepen the philosophical infrastructure of Marxian philosophy to expand its ethical content.He saw the irrational tendencies in mechanistic forms of materialism that were typical of orthodox Marxism, but he also saw Fichte and the Left Hegelian attempts to theorize a form of self-positing agency as too rooted in Idealism and as creating an antithesis between the realm of objective, factual world and the subjective world of values. 74The possibility of an ethics that was distinctively Marxian meant an over coming of the antinomies that plagued bourgeois ethics and philosophy more broadly.Indeed, what makes Lukács'  70 Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," 402.71 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 129. 72 Sayers points out that: "In short, for Marx there is no subject that is present from the start, even as something which exists only in-itself or implicitly, or as a seed, germ, or idea, principle, goal, etc.None of these teleological notions are applicable.""Marx and Teleology," 51. 73 It is worth considering Merleau-Ponty's view of this when he writes: "If it is neither a 'social nature' given outside ourselves, nor the 'World Spirit,' nor the movement appropriate to ideas, nor collective consciousness, then what is, for Marx, the vehicle of history and the motivating force of the dialectic?It is man involved in a certain way of appropriating nature in which the mode of his relationship with others takes shape; it is concrete human intersubjectivity, the successive and simultaneous community of existences in the process of self-realization in a type of ownership which they both submit to and transform, each created by and creating the other."Sense and Non-Sense, 129. 74 Lukács points out that this is because of the individualized (i.e., non-socialized) way that these thinkers saw the nature of praxis: "because the practice of individual action (the only one that Kant knows) cannot be anything more than pseudo-practice.It is a form of practice which is unable to shake the foundations of reality and for which, therefore, the object-forms of (contemplatively grasped) reality remain unaltered.Its new attitude to reality leaves reality untouched and cannot be more than something formal and subjective: the Ought.""Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics," 190. ideas powerful is that he brings to culmination the ideas of German Idealism, particularly its emphasis on selfauthorized praxis, with the socio-relational essence of human life in order to construct a Marxian ontology, a project he never realized.But he does show us the path toward a theory of ethics that can be seen as objective that is, as a To ground an evaluative form of reason that can embrace the insights of Marx's philosophical anthropology but also the more general implications of a "materialist" theory of history and human praxis is key to the effort to build a critical, dialectical ontology.This entails sublating dialectically the Kantian distinction (one only further embedded in neo-Kantianism) between epistemology on the one hand and practical reason on the other.The chasm between theory and practice reflected the dirempted experience of modernity under capitalism: the alienated, reified forms of consciousness that plague modern life.The possibility of reconciling reason with the good meant realizing the promise of a concretization of freedom, the true actualization of the good as a form of ethical life in the world rather than the construction of a priori principles for action.
Here, again we can see the unique salience of the ontological turn.For, if we are to grasp the project of realizing reason and freedom in the world, then the question becomes how in fact the world itself is generated: how are we to understand the nature of the ontology of the world we experience and co-create?This was the central question that Lukács saw Marx's thought capable of answering: an ontological account of the world meant seeing it as rooted in human social praxis, and this means seeing it as an expression of "teleological positing," or the externalization into the world of the conceptual, ideational, mental, intentional, goal-directed structure of consciousness and of agency.The concrete freedom of human life therefore needs to be seen as a sublation of the classical distinction in ethics between what is and what ought to be, between Sein and Sollen.In this way, as István Mészáros, reflecting on the origins of Lukács' mature project, maintains: [O]n the basis of his Ontology the positive outcome can only be envisaged as the impact of a "Sollen": the autonomous choice of their potential humanity by the individuals (the "unauflösbare Minimaleinheiten") who become aware, after an arduous work of theoretical demonstration and persuasion, that they can and ought to change their way of life. 75e "ought" no longer lingers as an abstraction, as a mere principle, but becomes constitutive of our practical being.
Lukács was able to tease out the importance of teleology and the "final cause" from his study of the thoughts of the young Hegel.As Lukács frames the matter, "[t]he philosophy of the modern world had failed utterly to clarify the problem of purpose." 76More to the point, Lukács sees this as "the problem of teleology, the right definition of the concept of purpose, above all as a concept of praxis, of human activity." 77In thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, among others, the problem of final cause was essentially dismissed in favor of a mechanistic paradigm that saw all reality as a result of a network of causes.Intentionality was seen to be either theological or the result of an inflated metaphysics.He sees in Hegel an important step forward in bringing teleological thinking back into contact with the problem of causality: "Hegel's concrete analysis of the dialectics of human labor annuls the unyielding antithesis of causality and teleology, i.e., it locates conscious human purposes concretely within the overall causal network, without destroying it, going beyond it or appealing to any transcendental principle." 78he idea of a purpose, of a final cause to human action or activity, i.e., of labor, is central to Lukács because he sees in it a pathway toward a way of thinking that can perhaps shatter the process of the reification of consciousness.The limits of early attempts, by thinkers such as Fichte, remain for Lukács their inability to grasp praxis as a social category, that is, as a category that is developed in the individual via its associational life with others.Lukács sees the important steps that the Left Hegelianssuch as Cieszkowski and Hessmade toward a concrete understanding of the dialectic, but that it must be grounded in a socialized conception of  75 Mészáros, "Lukács' Concept of Dialectic," 54. 76 Lukács, The Young Hegel, 338.For an important discussion, see Skomvoulis, "Lukács' Late Appropriation of Hegel's Philosophy." 77 Ibid., 338.78 Ibid., 345.human beings. 79Teleological activity is possible only in socialized form, something Kant and Fichte did not see: "This development began with Kant and Fichte, but their concept of praxis was so moralistic and exaggerated that it led to the rigid confrontation of theory and praxis, and to the abstract isolation of practical philosophy which Hegel criticized so trenchantly." 80y reclaiming the generative, end-positing, purpose-creating dynamic of human social life, we can perhaps have critical insight into alienated forms of ethical life and seek their radical transformation.The essence of the ontological, as Lukács sees it, is captured in the process of becoming, the generative powers of human praxis in the realm of nature.From an ontological point of view, "[t]rue reality appears here as a concrete becoming, and genesis is the ontological derivation of any objectivity, without which living precondition this would inevitably remain incomprehensible as a deformed rigidity." 81The objectivity of the ends and purposes we create in the world is to be contrasted with mere subjectivity or the regulative, abstract nature of "principle." So too with human value.Ethics now becomes not a separate sphere of thinking, one dedicated to principle alone, but rather is concerned with the system of norms and relational forms that are the basis of our concrete life.The point here is that the mind and world are not mechanically separable, as Kant and Fichte had laid out.Rather, we are dealing with a dialectic where the contents of both interpenetrate, where the normative order shapes the teleological agency of the individual which then reaffirms the social totality.The concept of the totality, in this sense, refers to the complete system of norms, values and concepts and the practices, relations, and institutions and the ends and purposes they are organized to realize and sustain.The totality is a metaphysical concept, but in an objective sense: any given society can be characterized by the ways that practices and relations are organized to realize ends and purposes; and these require that certain organized mental complexes, such as values and concepts, be internalized by subjects which are then responsible for the enactment and re-constitution of the social world.Total reification would mean the absolute dissolution of the subject into such a normative totality; it would mean that the ontology of the social world would exert its pressure on the subject in such a way that it sees the existent reality as valid and the only possible world.But in Hegel and Marx, we are introduced to a way of understanding human praxis that makes such a total dissolution impossible since it maintains that the very modes of activity and relating in modernity possess the seed for an ontological expression of freedom. 82hat Hegel and Marx were able to reveal, in different ways, was a capacity to comprehend the importance of the totality, but even more, the nature of praxis as the determinate structure of human life, which is inherently transformative, non-determinative, and ontological.Praxis is ontological in the double sense of the term: it at once an actually existent thing that marks off the human species in the sense of its capacity for teleological positing, but also that this constitutes a form of freedom in the sense that "work (i.e., praxis) changes a purely reacting, passive adaptation of the reproductive processes to the environment by a conscious and active transformation of it... [it] is the ontological model of a completely new mode of existence." 83This point is essential to stress, for it is Lukács' position that this distinctive human capacity for realizing ends in the world also entails positing the "causal chains" that bring it about.The means as well as the ends are determined by human choice; even though these are constrained by nature, they nevertheless provide for an  79 Lukács notes that, for Cieszkowski and Hess: "The future as the object of dialectical thinking, the attempt to grasp the future concretely by means of dialectics and to make it into a criterion by which to judge past and presentall this is a marked advance on Fichtean philosophy of history.""Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics," 186.80 Lukács, The Young Hegel, 350.81 Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, 1: Hegel, 22. 82 As Menozzi points out: "The radical novelty of Hegel and Marx concerns their ability to place the teleological principle into the immanence of the real world and the reinsertion of purpose into causality.Teleology, from this point of view, does not mean an ultimate end predetermined by a transcendental intelligence, but rather the achievement of an imagined purpose fully within the bound of the real and concrete world of labor and history.""Reading Hegel after Marx," 102.83 Lukács, "The Ontological Bases of Human Thought and Action," 26.infinite variation of creativity and possibility translated into reality, this constituting what Lukács refers to as "the ontological kernel of freedom." 84he ideality of value, for instance, is made real in the world via the capacity for teleological agency.The neo-Kantian split between the realm of "facts" and the realm of "values" is dialectically and synthetically brought together in the realm of praxis: In general, cognition clearly differentiates between the objective nature-in-itself of things and its value-for-men, which is ideational only, during the cognitive process.During work, however, this value-for-men becomes a real and objective property of the product, and it is precisely this which fulfil societal functions if properly conceived and executed.Through this process it becomes valuable (or in the case of failure, of negative value).The process of concrete objectification of this value-for-men is the only means whereby real value can come about.The fact that on higher societal levels these values take on more abstract forms, does not do away with the fundamental importance of this ontological genesis. 85e idea is that value is what it is not from a merely subjective standpoint, but from its reference to its objective existence and, ex hypothesi, its purpose or the importance of that purpose for human beings.Freedom is immanent to human praxis in two related senses: first, in that it contains the element of choosing different means for the realization of a purpose; and second, in a self-authorizing sense of being able to posit one's own ends in the world or at least to be able to consider the collective ends and purposes that organize our world and their value for the development of human persons.Here, we can see the inherent link between a descriptive account of praxis as teleological positing on the one hand and its ethical, value-laden implications on the other.It constitutes an objective theory of human value. 86hereas subjective Idealistssuch as Kant and Fichtewere able to thematize the possibilities of cognition and, even in Fichte's case, to develop an idea of an objectively positing subject, they could not see that the forces arrayed against such a philosophy of free agency and autonomy could not be dissolved by the solitary ego's self-consciousness alone.Rather, what had to be grasped were the various ways that the totality of social reality set limits both as an objective world but also as a constitutive, constituting force on the subject.In other words, the totality was dialectically and constitutively related to the subject; it was not in any meaningful or coherent sense separate or separable from it.Marx's ability to see beyond Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others lay in his insight that the totality, viewed as the complete systemic dynamics of relations, norms, practices, and purposes that define the features of any given social reality, generates its own categories for understanding it, and that these categories allow us to alter and to change the very totality that generates them. 87Lukács puts this in his own way when he argues: Individuality has already become a natural category of being and so as the human genus (Gattung).These two poles of organizing being can reach the elevation to human personality and humankind only simultaneously and through a process whereby society becomes more and more "societal."...The task of materialistic ontology that has become historical is... to discover the genesis, the growth, and the contradictions within unified development.It has to show that man, as the producer and at the same time, the product of society, actualizes in his humanity something ontologically higher than to be an individual specimen of an abstract genus ….It has to show that these individuals will rather find an increasingly articulate collective voice, and will raise themselves to the level of an ontological-societal synthesis of individuals-become-personalities and conscious humankind. 88 84 Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, 3: Labor, 39.As Lukács puts the matter: "Man indeed must gain his freedom through his own activity.But he can only do this, because each of his activities already contains a moment of freedom as a necessary component.""The Ontological Bases of Human Thought and Action," 35.85 Lukács, "The Ontological Bases of Human Thought and Action," 27. 86 Insightfully, Lukács sees the possibility for a relation between ethics and human praxis emerging for the first time in Hegel: "For Hegel, however, the whole of morality is simply a part of human practice which leads on to more genuine ethics, and the only real significance of the 'ought' is in so far as it expresses a discrepancy between the human will and 'anything that is'; in the ethical sphere the will becomes identical with its concept, and the central position of the 'ought' is thus overcome, even in the world of practice."The Ontology of Social Being, 1: Hegel, 10-1.87 Rockmore insightfully notes on this point that: "Marx insists, correctly I believe, that categories which apply to experience emerge from it and must be altered as the experiential object to which they refer changes.It follows that there can be no final ground to knowledge in a foundational sense.""Hegel, German Idealism, and Antifoundationalism," 108.88 Lukács, "The Ontological Bases of Human Thought and Action," 33.
Progress in human terms is seen as the capacity for the individual to return to itself; it is the possibility of the individual to achieve self-consciousness of itself as a relational and a practical being, with the power to posit shared ends and purposes in the world, to see the world as collectively created and as mutable, possible of redirection, change, and to view oneself as part of a collective form of agency, a subject in the true sense of the term.This is the concretization of freedom.
This is what sets the stage for the salience of the theory of reification.For, if we follow the thesis to its conclusions, then it becomes clear that there is no way to stand outside of the totality.Rather, what is needed is an immanent means by which we can grasp the ways that the totality distorts and deforms consciousness in order to render the world that we experience as inalterable, stable, and distinct from us.Reification is a process whereby the categories that are constitutive of the totality work themselves into the subjective structures of consciousness, polluting self-consciousness by setting up a dualism where in fact there is really a dialectical, dynamic monism. 89Lukács, like Marx, sees that our categories are forms of being and that they constitute structures of existence by organizing our practical capacities and activities.
In this sense, the categorical shaping of consciousness in turn organizes the practical structure of our interaction with nature and society.Reification is the loss of dialectical contact between our categories and the real world, the loss of self-consciousness of our own self-positing capacities and the estrangement of the ends and purposes of the community from their optimal good in developing one's personality and individuality.Once we see ourselves as socialized individuals, as practical beings that interact with other practical beings, we begin to become aware that the organizational, institutional, and normative texture of our world and that which we have internalized via socialization, are constituted by potentialities for change and alteration: "It should never be forgotten here that even these partial complexes themselves consist of complexes, human groups and individuals, whose reaction to their environment, which forms the foundation of all complexes of mediation and differentiation, insuperably involved decisions between alternatives." 90his is why the ontological approach is so potentially generative for social criticism: it provides a means of understanding how the categories that form the totality also necessarily shape our intuition about the object domain.The reason is simple: the categories are ontological in that they are not only regulative ideas, but constitutive principles that not only organize our cognition and perception, but also serve to organize our teleological agency as well, the very realization of the social reality of which we are a part.In other words, they shape the purposes, the practices, relations, norms and ends and purposes that create and sustain and constitute the world, our social reality.Our social world is not posited from the outside, but constantly constituted by its participants.Lukács points us toward a materialist ontology for the purpose of forming a basis for an objective expression of Hegelian universality, a common interest, a common good that can be realized, can be actualized as a concrete form of ethical life. 91

Dialectical Ontology and Critical Theory
The implications of this philosophical structure of thought are central to the enterprise of critical theory and its own roots in this tradition.It is my firm conviction that any genuine critical theory of society that has practical, transformative aims must be rooted in the dialectical ontology for which these thinkers laid the foundation.It is only by grasping in thought and in theoretically mediated social praxis the thesis that freedom is not a regulative ideal or principle but an achieved status of being; that this being is not a static, ahistorical dimension of reality, but a dynamic, phylogenetic capacity of human beings for praxis and for relatedness; that  89 For important discussions of reification along these lines, see Dannemann, Das Prinzip Verdinglichung, 131ff.as well as Thompson, Twilight of the Self, 99ff.90 Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, 2: Marx, 146.91 Of course, for Lukács, this also requires that human beings engage their interiority, their subjectivity of experience and connect it with the totality as well.Philosophy moves from the universal to the particular and seeks to expand them both, aesthetics moves from the opposite direction with the same intent.See the important discussion by Pascal, "Georg Lukács: The Concept of Totality."both praxis and relatedness must form the ground for an ontological, as opposed to a post-metaphysical, approach to social reality, democracy, and critical reflection.As I see it, Lukács was one of the thinkers of the twentieth century who was able to grasp this powerful insight and that its displacement by the pragmatist, intersubjectivist, and post-metaphysical turn in critical theory has suppressed the development of this crucial strain of thought.
The key idea for a critical theory of society rests in part on the ways that an antithesis can develop under cultural forms of alienation.The dualism that emerges between the generative, teleological structure of agency on the one hand and the normativity of the social system that shapes it is of key importance here.Reification entails the absorption of the subject's self-consciousness of one's teleological agency as this is coded by the colonization of system imperatives.Norms organize and give expression to our subjective intentionality and goal-directedness.These are embedded in a totality: in a system of norms, relations, and practices that articulate institutions with ends, purposes, and power over the social behavior of individuals. 92It is this fundamental social ontology that requires us to see that the nature of human existence at any given time in history is itself defined by the structure and shape of this totality.To speak of an ontology of social being is to put us into contact with a non-reified, and potentially radical form of agency.Since all agency has the structure that its actions are for a purpose or end, we can say that reified consciousness allows for our agency to be essentially heteronomous and alienated. 93he key political project is therefore to understand how the ends and purposes of the social system retrogressively shape the relations and processes of our social world; how it can make its ends and purposesgenerally according to the processes of capital accumulation and its dynamicsthe ends and purposes of the entire social system and the subjective, internal world of the self.A dialectical ontology is able to comprehend the totality; it is able to call into question the ways that the collective purposes and ends that define and articulate our institutional order also shape subjectivity.It can grant us ontological coherence in that it reveals the machinations of social and cultural processes of alienation and social domination.At the same time, it offers up a new grammar for critique and the possibility of building alternative, freedom-enhancing institutions.To democratically be able to posit collective ends that enhance cultural and ethical progress is therefore not to be approached in some utopian or a priori way, but in terms of objective values.We seek to make freedom real in a concrete sense by instantiating the kinds of relations, practices, norms, and purposes that make it real in the world.Relationally structured forms of praxis are at the core of this transformative project. 94o elaborate this important point about objective values further, we can note that, when viewed from the Lukacsian perspective I have developed here, such a position means understanding human value not as formal or procedural principles upon which we act but, rather, as realizations of norms and ends that instantiate our social forms.Our social institutions are not merely formal complexes of norms but enacted practices that require their internalization by members of that institution.In this sense, the ontological refers to the very status of the social reality of the world I inhabit: a world that is what it is as a result of an established array of norms and practices that realize the relations, social processes, and ends or purposes.The reified character of these arrays of social practices can be called into question and be transformed by critical engagement.The objectivity of human value therefore comes into view as a field of enacted practices and social entities, but also a field of power.To establish new values means transforming the norms, practices, relations, ends, and purposes of our social worldit entails putting us into critical contact with the idea that we are the generative, onto-formative origin of social reality.
It is for this reason that I traced the radical thesis of teleological positing from Fichte through Lukács in order to demonstrate that the resolution of the problem of synthesizing the opposition between ideal and real,  92 See Thompson, "Toward a Critical Social Ontology" for a more developed discussion.93 As Okrent observes about the nature of agency: "In the relevant sense, an agent is an entity that acts, and one can have reason to believe that an entity is acting only its behavior can be interpreted to have some point ….Agency and goal-directedness are related notions, and the... teleologist must identify them together or not at all." Rational Animals, 30.94 As Marković insightfully points out: "Praxis is ideal human activity, one in which man realizes the optimal potentialities of his being, and which is therefore and end in itself... it also satisfies a need of other human beings."From Affluence to Praxis, 64-5.subject and object, individual and society is gradually achieved.This ontological position grants us a critical ground for a return of Marx to the center of a critical theory of society.For now, the metaphysical takes on a more critical and concrete valence in that we must direct our critical-evaluative powers toward the actually lived lives of people and seek to crack open the façade of reification, to resist narrow technical reason, instrumental rationality, exploitive relational dynamics, and the collective ends and purposes set by the powerful.We cannot hope for communication, discourse, recognition, or any other post-metaphysical project to perform this task on its own: they must operate within the structure of a dialectical ontological insight into the substantive nature of social reality.
Critical theory only becomes truly engaged and radical when it is able to call into question the ends and purposes of the social system and the ways these ends and purposes organize our relations and practices.But it must also seek to realize the promises of the radical Idealists: that only self-authorizing agency can achieve and affirm common ends and purposes.Since reification can too easily seep into our discursive and recognitive relations, we must have the means to access an objective vantage point on self and world.Shattering reification requires that we achieve self-consciousness of ourselves as relational and teleological beings and that we understand a critical form of political judgment as rooted in the self-authorizing, free subject.Such a subject is itself only possible within an ethical life that realizes such a concept, that makes it real, ontological.Only when we are able to see how these ends and purposes are expressions of social power and domination, when we are able to make them the focus of political struggleonly then will we be able to grasp the possibility of truly social-transformative critique.
The idea of a dialectical social ontology is one that puts us into contact with the concrete ways that the phylogenetic capacities for praxis and relatedness are shaped by social systems into forms of life, states of social being, and shapes of consciousness that are determinative of that culture.The critical edge of this insight is that it can offer us the possibility of change in a radical way: that is, it offers up the possibility of concrete, real transformation.This was key in Marx's turn away from Idealist dialectics and toward what he termed "materialism": the engagement with the concrete, objective, ontological forms of life with an insight into the structure of necessity that led to the potential of real freedom.As Lukács was able to see, this took the form of focusing on the ontology of human social being as essentially teleological in character, that the basis of human life was the capacity to produce meaning, artefacts, symbols, purposes and realize them objectively in the world.What we must add to this is Marx's own emphasis on the relational dynamic of human social being: that we are essentially relational beings and that even the capacity for teleological positing takes shape only within relational contexts.

Conclusion and Future Prospects
My aim in this article has been to demonstrate that an important axis runs through the development of German Idealism, Left Hegelianism, Marx's thought, and the evolution of Western Marxism and Critical Theory.The centrality of the thesis on the teleological structure of human agency leads us to a different understanding of basic human capacities and to the idea that human social relations are just as praxisoriented as they are recognitive or communicative.In fact, it is perhaps more basic, and more essential, that we see the teleological structure of human agency and praxis since it is the constitutive basis for social reality.As such, the question of reification can be confronted and prevented from infecting discourse or recognitive relational processes.This in turn leads us to a more politically relevant form of critique since the very categories of social ontologyof practices, norms, relations, processes, and ends or purposescan become the very substance of our critical reason and the sphere within which transformative praxis operates.A direct engagement with the ontological structure of existence, of social reality itself, as a field of social transformation therefore presents itself as opposed to post-metaphysical and noumenal layers of discourse ethics, justification, and recognition.
The radical impulse of this premise is the philosophical anthropology that sees human life as teleological as well as relational; that human social forms are the result of praxisa praxis that cannot be reduced to the  29 Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 176.30 Beiser, German Idealism, 232. 31 Lumsden, Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject, 46.32 Beiser, "The Enlightenment and Idealism," 32.