SOURCE: "The Bourgeois Irrationalism of Schopenhauer's Metaphysics," in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, edited by Michael Fox, The Harvester Press, Sussex, 1980, pp. 183-93.

A Hungarian literary critic and philosopher, Lukács is a leading proponent of Marxist thought. In the following excerpt, which originally appeared in his The Destruction of Reason (1954), Lukács contends that Schopenhauer's "purification" of Kant and his resulting idealism effect complacency toward social improvement and pacifies objectors to the established capitalist order.

It is a well-established fact that on all crucial philosophical questions, Kant occupies a shifting, equivocal position. With matchless lucidity Lenin characterized Kant's position between materialism and idealism [in Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus, 1952]:

The basic feature of Kantian philosophy is the reconciling of materialsim and idealism, a compromise between the two, a systematic binding together of heterogeneous, mutually contradictory philosophical orientations. When Kant assumes that something outside of us, some thing-in-itself corresponds to our...