Lukács’ and Husserl’s Critiques of Science

Mihály Vajda

[Excerpt, pp. 105-106: A linchpin of the theses of the two thinkers:]

Science can do no more than predict events to which we must adapt. In this sense, they are not a means to self-realization; they make us part of the "objective" world governed by the natural laws they have discovered: they make us objects of transcendence.

This failure of science to carry out the task of human knowledge, i.e., to give meaning to our existence, stems, according to both Husserl and Lukács, from the fact that science is unable to assume the standpoint of the totality. Science has been reduced to technique (techné), an art of manipulation that rules out meaningful and really human action in favor of limited calculation, since it does not approach human reality as a totality, but only as the sum of "particular facts" governed by "objective" laws. The loss of the totality means at the same time the abolition of historicity. "The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method consists," says Lukács, "in its failure to see and take account of the historical character of the facts on which it is based."

Husserl formulates the same idea in positive terms. "This we seek to discern not from the outside, from facts, as if the temporal becoming in which we ourselves have evolved were merely an external causal series. Rather we seek to discern it from the inside. Only in this way can we, who not only have a spiritual heritage but have become what we are thoroughly and exclusively in a historical-spiritual manner, have a task which is truly our own. We obtain it . . . only through a critical understanding of the total unity of history — our history." What science lacks is precisely this critical understanding of the total unity of our history.

SOURCE: Vajda, Mihály. "Lukács' and Husserl's Critiques of Science," Telos, no. 38, Winter 1978-79, pp. 104-118. (Click on link for full text PDF file.)

“Nature, Society, and Praxis” by Mihály Vajda

Lukács’ Lost Manuscript Tailism and the Dialectic Reviewed by R. Dumain

Simple and Higher Categories of the Dialectic by Georg Lukács

The Question of Educational Work by Georg Lukács

"Existentialism" by Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács on Irrationalism and Nazism: The Unity of Cynicism and Credulity

Lukács on Wittgenstein

Edmund Husserl and the Aims of Phenomenology by Marvin Farber

“Theory and Practice from the Point of View of Human Needs” by Agnes Heller

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Marx and Marxism Web Guide

American Philosophy Study Guide

The Philosophy of Theory and Practice: Selected Bibliography

Philosophy and the Division of Labor: Selected Bibliography

Theodor W. Adorno & Critical Theory Study Guide

Salvaging Soviet Philosophy (1)

CONTACT Ralph Dumain