The perceived intellectual reconciliation of philosophies is founded on a prior lived synthesis

Evidence

THE CUSTOMARY description of the Critique of Dialectical Reason as an attempt to reconcile existentialism and Marxism has always seemed to me to betray a fundamental naïveté about the relationship of thought in general, and political thought in particular, to our being as a whole, to that total human reality of which it is an expression. Intellectual systems are not here opinions which can be tinkered with, adjusted, manipulated until we somehow manage to fit them together properly; and such an operation is all the more ironic when it takes as its object two philosophical approaches which explicitly deny the priority of thought over being (existentialism with the principle that existence precedes essence, Marxism with the teaching of the determination of consciousness by social reality). It seems to me, indeed, that the situation is quite the reverse of what is implied above: the very project of such a “reconciliation” is the sign that it already has been effected in lived reality, that somehow a lived synthesis of the two systems exists already, preceding, motivating, and founding the purely intellectual working out of the synthesis in the domain of thought. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 421

Categorization

• XREF: This is precisely Jameson’s Frankfurt-School method of mediation — the transcoding of opposed systems through a shared base in lived reality, reading back to Adorno’s notion that intellectual antinomies are grounded in social contradictions. — connects to: Intellectual systems fuse first in lived reality, only later in thought; Philosophies are inhabited and lived in rather than merely followed as rules — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 104; Phenomenology describes the feel of thought rather than its content — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 632 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Lays out a core dialectical principle: thought-synthesis is founded on, not parallel to, lived synthesis — a key mediation move the reader wants to trace.

Broader Connections

• Philosophies are inhabited and lived in rather than merely followed as rules #exemplifies (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 104
• Phenomenology describes the feel of thought rather than its content #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 632