Christian Lotz

Michigan State University

Categories in Phenomenology and Critical Theory. On Heidegger and Lukács

10 May 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

The rejection of a foundational political economy in contemporary “official” critical theory leads to an empiricist and skeptical framework in which, ultimately, the social reality or the society is an arbitrarily established sum of acts and events, which, as such, do not form an actuality [Wirklichkeit]. There can be acts and events in such a social theory, but in the strict sense it would not even be a theory of society because there is no object of such a theory. To grasp society as an object means that it presupposes a unity as objectivity in its categorial form. Kant — and Marx ! — argue that the conditions of the experience of objects are at the same time the conditions of the objects of that experience. An objective theory of society (i.e., one that is not simply the subject’s construction) is a theory in which the categorial organization of social reality is to be found in the social reality, without being metaphysically or logically deducted. Instead, the categorial organization must be phenomenologically revealed. The concept of category is not only important for Lukács, but also, as a short look into the (German) intellectual network in European philosophy at the beginning of the 20th Century shows, for all prominent schools, insofar as the question of how to understand the concept of category is central for their attempts to escape metaphysics. For example, phenomenologists ranging from Husserl to Heidegger were concerned with a reinterpretation of the concept of categories, insofar as these thinkers try to rescue it from what they conceive as its subjective background in Kant. On the one hand, we find attempts to re-interpret categories as something that transcend the positioning of the transcendental subject as something that is somehow given in life (Lask), but on the other hand, we find attempts to turn categories into units of meaning [Sinn] and “regional” frames (Husserl); and, finally, we also find the attempt to re-interpret categories through a hermeneutic lens, such as in Dilthey’s categories of life synthesis  [Lebenszusammenhang] and in Heidegger, who transforms “categories” into what he famously calls “existentialia” in Being and Time. On a side note, we find the problem of categories also addressed as a crucial problem in other philosophers and sociologists, such as Bloch, Durkheim, Maus, Piaget, and Hartmann. In my talk, I will offer reflections on the concept of category in Lukács and Heidegger in order to move at least closer to what I conceive of as the most crucial methodological problem in critical theory; namely, how to generate the basic concepts of a theory of society that must, in order to be established successfully as the true theory of society, claim that it is objective. Accordingly, I submit that the concept of category is a crucial steppingstone towards a theory of social concept-formation.