Kosik, Lukács and the Thing in Itself

e-mail: rockmore@duq.edu

Engels, who appears to take Marx and Marxism as synonymous terms, asserts but does show that Marx and/or Marxism solve the main problems of German Idealism. This point is later argued in detail by Lukács and by Korsch. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács famously claims that Marxism solves the unsolved problem of the thing in itself running throughout German idealism. This same claim is later repeated and developed by Kosik in Dialectic of the Concrete. With Ilyenkov, he was one of the two most significant Marxist thinkers during the dark years of Stalinism. This paper reconstructs the problem of the thing in itself as it arises in Kant’s critical philosophy, and as it is supposedly solved from the Marxist perspectives of Lukács and Kosik.