The Destruction of Reason
이성의 파괴
A critical history of philosophy by György Lukács, completed in 1952 and published in 1954 by Aufbau-Verlag in East Berlin; from the 1955 edition it carried the subtitle "The Path of Irrationalism from Schelling to Hitler". It defines the mainstream of German bourgeois philosophy after Hegel as "irrationalism", a reactionary response to class struggle, and traces a lineage from the late Schelling, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Nietzsche, the philosophy of life and Heidegger to Nazism. Its chapter treating Nietzsche as the "founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period" became the classic Marxist critique of Nietzsche. The book became a textbook in East Germany but was criticised, in the West and within Marxism too, as too schematic.
In depth
Why did this book become the classic critique of Nietzsche?
The Destruction of Reason sets out to answer, as a history of philosophy, the question "how did Germany arrive at Nazism?". Lukács's answer is that the main current of German philosophy after Hegel was an "irrationalism" that disparaged reason, that it was the bourgeoisie's ideological weapon against the threat of the working class and socialism, and that it finally flowed into Hitler's worldview. The book matters in the history of Nietzsche's reception because, in stark contrast to the left's enthusiasm for Nietzsche as a "true rebel" in the early twentieth century, it is the most systematic Marxist verdict branding Nietzsche an outright anti-socialist thinker.
The book was the fruit of long work. According to the German Wikipedia, Lukács had already finished in Moscow in August 1933 a typescript of over 200 pages, "How did fascist philosophy arise in Germany?", and in Tashkent in 1942 a second, "How did Germany become the centre of reactionary ideology?". Both were published posthumously in Budapest in 1982. The Destruction of Reason was completed on their basis in 1952.
When was it first published?
The first edition is the 692-page book published in 1954 by Aufbau-Verlag in Berlin (East Germany). The German National Library catalogue and the German authority file (GND) record for the work both give 1954 as the year of first publication, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also says 1954. From the 1955 edition it bore the subtitle "The Path of Irrationalism from Schelling to Hitler", and in West Germany it was reissued in 1962 as volume 9 of Lukács's works by Luchterhand. The "1953" in the first sentence of the German Wikipedia article does not even match the 1954 edition that the same article cites. The Hungarian edition is titled Az ész trónfosztása ("The Dethronement of Reason"). The Korean translation is titled 이성의 파괴.
What does it argue?
Lukács regards Hegel's dialectic as the highest stage bourgeois philosophy reached. After Hegel the progressive path passed to Marx's dialectical materialism, and bourgeois philosophy turned to doubting reason itself. In the definition the German Wikipedia quotes, the marks of irrationalism are: "disparagement of understanding and reason, uncritical glorification of intuition, aristocratic epistemology, rejection of social and historical progress, creation of myths".
Herabsetzung von Verstand und Vernunft, kritiklose Verherrlichung der Intuition, aristokratische Erkenntnistheorie, Ablehnung des gesellschaftlich-geschichtlichen Fortschritts, Schaffung von Mythen
With this yardstick Lukács draws a lineage. Before 1848 the late Schelling, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard opposed Hegel's dialectic. In the imperialist period after the Paris Commune, Nietzsche became the new founder of irrationalism. Then come the philosophy of life of Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Oswald Spengler, the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and in sociology Carl Schmitt and Othmar Spann, who displaced Max Weber's liberal rationalism. The book ends with the worldview of Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that this "irrationalism" is a blanket label which, depending on the context, covers everything from theories of intellectual intuition and ontological subjectivism to aristocratic epistemology and the denial of historical progress.
How is Nietzsche treated?
Chapter 3 is titled "Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period". Lukács holds that with the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871 the chief enemy of bourgeois philosophy shifted from the feudal order to socialism. Nietzsche never read a line of Marx or Engels, yet Lukács argues that his whole life's work was a continuous polemic against Marxism and socialism, because the content and method of a philosophy are determined by its position in the class struggle. As evidence he cites the letter Nietzsche wrote to his friend Gersdorff right after the Commune, shocked by the news that the Louvre had burned.
According to Lukács, Nietzsche does not defend capitalism head-on. Instead he offers an "indirect apologetics": he frankly admits capitalism's ugly side but turns the remedy towards myth and the aristocratic hierarchy of "master morality". This made him the most fitting philosophy for intellectuals of the imperialist age who wanted to enjoy the feeling of being rebels without ever breaking with the system. Nietzsche's use of the aphorism instead of a system was, Lukács thinks, a form that allowed a different Nietzsche to be brought out whenever the times required. He reads the Übermensch and the doctrine of slave morality as the morality of the ruling class and concludes that Nietzsche foreshadowed Hitler's fascism in the most concrete way.
The chapter also quotes often from the posthumous compilation The Will to Power. That compilation is not a book Nietzsche wrote but a selection from his notebooks assembled by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast, and from the 1960s Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari exposed the arbitrariness of its editing in their critical edition. Lukács's reading of Nietzsche has therefore been criticised for accepting, from the opposite side, the image of a "fascist Nietzsche" produced by the Nietzsche Archive. Since Montinari himself was a Marxist and a former member of the Italian Communist Party, this is where the dispute over Nietzsche within Marxism shows most sharply.
How was it judged?
Judgements diverged. According to the German Wikipedia the book appeared just after philosophy was institutionalised in East Germany and at once became the textbook for the subject "history and critique of bourgeois ideology". The West German Marxist political scientist Reinhard Kühnl praised it as an accurate analysis of the intellectual origins of fascism and as a book containing a strategy for the struggle against fascism.
For many, however, the book is the "low point" of Lukács's career. The historian George Lichtheim called it "the worst book he ever wrote". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls its simple division between progressive materialism and irrationalism dogmatic and superficial, and notes that in the postscript Lukács defended the Soviet Union under Stalin and cast Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and the pragmatists as subjectivists aiding a new fascism. Theodor W. Adorno remarked sarcastically that the book showed above all the destruction of Lukács's own reason. Lukács himself, after joining Imre Nagy's government in 1956, was denounced in the Eastern bloc as a "revisionist". The book is a product of orthodox Marxism in the Stalin era, yet its author was soon pushed outside that orthodoxy.