German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Lukács to Strauss

Julian Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367468200
• eBook ISBN: 9781000201772
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The course of German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting and controversial in the history of human thought. In this outstanding and engaging introduction, a companion volume to his German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger, Julian Young examines and assesses the way in which some of the major German thinkers of the period reacted, often in starkly contrasting ways, to the challenges posed by the nature of modernity, the failure of liberalism and the concept of decline.

Divided into two parts exploring major intellectual figures of the left and right respectively, Young introduces and assesses the thought of the following figures:

• Georg Lukács: the critique of capitalism: alienation, reification, and false consciousness
• Ernst Bloch: the Marxist utopia
• Walter Benjamin: the confluence of phenomenology and left-wing thought: the Arcades Project, aura, and the technological reproduction of the artwork
• Oswald Spengler: the pessimistic right and the concept of Western decline
• Max Scheler: Catholic conservatism and the 'objective hierarchy of values'
• Carl Schmitt: the failure of liberalism, dictatorship, 'friends' versus 'enemies'
• Leo Strauss: the rejection of moral relativism and the return to classical philosophy.

Highly relevant when the viability of liberal democracy is again called into question, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Lukacs to Strauss is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology and critical theory, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, religious studies, and political theory.

PART I
The left

1 Georg Lukács

The hard left

György Lukács (György Bernát Löwinger until his father changed the family’s name) was born in 1885, the son of a Hungarian Jewish investment banker who became a baron of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lukács inherited the baronetcy and – German being the lingua franca of the Empire – signed himself ‘Georg von Lukács’ until his conversion to communism in 1918, after which he became simply ‘Georg Lukács’. Lukács is generally regarded as a German philosopher, partly because all his important works were either written in, or quickly translated into, German, but also because his philosophical engagement was confined almost exclusively to the post-Kantian German tradition. He studied in Germany with Georg Simmel and with Max Weber, who became a friend and important early influence.

Lukács despised his haute-bourgeois background and from an early age moved in left-wing circles. In 1918 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and in the following year became Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Concurrently, he became a political commissar in the Hungarian Red Army and during fighting with Rumanian forces ordered the execution of eight soldiers for desertion.¹ Following the collapse of the Republic, he lived as an émigré in Vienna where he published his most influential work, History and Class Consciousness, in 1923. In 1933 he was summoned to Moscow, the second such summons. Unlike most Hungarian émigrés he survived Stalin’s purges, but was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union until the end of the Second World War. Following one of the frequent periods during which he was ostracised as a deviant thinker by the Hungarian Communist Party, in the mid-1950s he became once more active in Party affairs and helped purge the Hungarian Writers’ Union of its crop of deviant thinkers. In 1956 he became a minister in the communist government of Imre Nagy that aimed at both the assertion of Hungarian sovereignty and a more humane form of socialism. The government was quickly removed by invading Soviet troops and Nagy executed. Lukács escaped execution but was exiled to Rumania. The following year he publicly renounced his views of 1956 and remained a loyal member of the Hungarian Communist Party until his death in 1971.

Lukács’ work can be divided into three periods: his early, pre-communist writings; the writings of 1918 to 1923, the centrepiece of which is History and Class Consciousness; and a rather long final period the most salient feature of which is an attack on the tradition of nineteenth-century German philosophy that had nourished him during the first period. Most of this chapter will be devoted to the comparatively short central period, to the work on which Lukács’ reputation as the leading Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century rests. Although he has interesting things to say both before and after, the work that profoundly influenced the First and Second Frankfurt schools (GTC I chaps 2 and 3), as well as both Bloch and Benjamin, belongs to the middle period.

Section I: Art and culture

The first period of Lukács’ thought runs from roughly 1903 until he joined the Hungarian Communist Party at the end of 1918. His topics are art and culture and the relation between them. The works of this period are interesting in themselves. But given that his reputation rests on his Marxist writings, what has concerned scholars of his early period is the question of their continuity or otherwise with the Marxist works. When Lukács, the bourgeois aesthete, suddenly announced that he had joined the Party his friends were astonished, and in Weber’s case, appalled. (‘The Soviet experiment’, Weber wrote – presciently – in a final letter to Lukács in 1920, ‘will discredit socialism for the coming hundred years.’)² At the time, therefore, the view was that there had been a complete reversal in his worldview: his friend Anna Lesznai spoke of a conversion ‘from Saul to Paul’. But this view is, I believe, mistaken. With the benefit of hindsight, the continuity between the first and second periods is, I think, unmistakable. Specifically, what becomes clear is that the two periods stand to each other as problem and solution. The early work articulates a pathology of modern, ‘bourgeois’ culture, the early Marxist works seek to articulate our best hope of a cure.

* * *

In the 1962 Preface to the major work of the early period, The Theory of the Novel (1914–25) (TN), Lukács describes its author as having become a Hegelian and as, indeed, the first person to apply Hegelian philosophy to ‘concrete aesthetic problems’ (TN 15). (Hegel himself, of course, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, applied his conception of dialectics to, inter alia, the question of the structure and social function of Greek tragedy.) What Hegel means to the early Lukács is basically the famous ‘death of art’ thesis. In the Introduction to his Aesthetics lectures, Hegel writes:

Art no longer provides the satisfaction of our spiritual-intellectual (geistige) needs which earlier peoples had sought and found in it – a satisfaction which, on the part of religion, was deeply connected to art. The beautiful days of Greek art, as well as the golden time of the later Middle Ages, are no more.³

Like so many of those whose minds were moulded by German humanism, Lukács believes that art reached a pinnacle of greatness in ancient Greece – although, idiosyncratically, he seems to favour Homer’s eighth century over the fifth century of Aeschylus and Sophocles (TN 30, 35 et passim). Great art, Lukács agrees with Hegel, had a second flowering in the Middle Ages – he speaks of the medieval Church as the ‘new polis’ (LR 185; Lukács’ emphasis) – but since then it has been in steady decline, terminating in the modern age in which art (i.e. ‘great art’) is no longer possible. The reason it is no longer possible is that ‘art is always a consequence of [authentic] culture’ (LR 153–4) and today there is no authentic culture. Art is dead because culture is dead. What, then, is ‘culture’? What, in particular, was culture in Greece, the place of its finest flourishing where there were ‘only answers but no questions, only solutions (even if enigmatic ones) but no riddles’ (TN 31)?

‘Happy are those ages’, writes Lukács,

when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars … The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars. (TN 29)⁴

What Lukács is talking about is what Hegel calls ‘customariness’ or ‘ethical substance’ (TN 33–4 et passim), the set of generally unspoken norms constitutive of a given culture which, as a matter of ‘transcendental psychology’ (TN 32), determine the individual’s entire life. Culture, writes Lukács, ‘signifies a powerful unity of all aspects of life (this is never a conceptual unity of course), so no matter what perspective we choose on life, we see essentially the same thing’ (LR 148). So, for example, ‘Doric’, ‘Ionian’ and ‘Corinthian’ signify not just architectural styles but rather complete forms of life. Whatever aspect of life one looks at one sees the ‘same thing’: ‘the same instinct’ determines not just one’s sense of virtue but also ‘the shape and form of one’s home, one’s style of furniture, the fashion of one’s clothes and one’s artistic taste’ (LR 161). The norms constitutive of the ‘substance’ of a culture – norms both personified and protected by the gods – provide answers (albeit sometimes ‘enigmatic’ ones) to all normative questions. One’s path through life is always ‘guided by the gods’ (the ‘stars’) so that (like a Liverpool football player) one will ‘never walk alone’ (TN 86). One is born into a normative social structure, a ‘world of [normative] meaning’, so that the only question facing the individual is that of one’s own proper ‘locus’ within it, the role in the social totality to which one is ‘predestined’ (TN 32). Even the Homeric hero is only a ‘locus’ within the social totality, and so only a ‘head taller’ than everyone else (TN 66). (Nietzsche says something similar about the gods: the Greek gods were of the same race as men, no more than the aristocrats of the social totality.)

The world of Greek culture was a world of flourishing humanity because it was a world that satisfied our most fundamental needs. It was a world of trust in which one trusted even one’s enemies (TN 44) – trusted them to ‘play by the rules’. It was a world in which ‘meaning’ was ‘immanent’ in life (TN 41), a world of moral ‘security’ since ‘a god always plots [one’s] … path’ (TN 86). It was a world, therefore, of ‘community’ (TN 133), a world in which one was profoundly ‘at home’ (TN 29). And since the ‘circle’ of the world was ‘closed’ (TN 33), there was no external vantage point from which one could question the meaning of the whole. (As described by Lukács, the Greeks would have been incapable of experiencing ‘the absurd’.)

* * *

What is the role of the artist within this charmed circle? Art, writes Lukács, ‘applies form to life’. As in the case of Michelangelo releasing the figure slumbering in the marble, it articulates the ‘soul dormant in the chaos we usually associate with the spiritual life of man’ (LR 157). Great art, then, articulates intuitively understood ethical substance. And (unlike modern art which has retreated to the privacy of the bourgeois drawing room and corporate office) it does so in public (LR 161). Unlike the modern painter who must decide what attitude to take to the Madonna, the medieval painter’s attitude was predetermined (LR 161): in thriving cultures artists are subject to ‘healthy persecution’ (LR 152). (Arguably, Stalin’s Soviet Union produced the two greatest composers of the twentieth century.) The artist may feel compelled to become a critic, but criticism occurs within a loyalty to the fundamentals of ethical substance. Having despaired of Europe, claims Lukács, Gauguin found happiness in the thousand-year-old culture of Tahiti. His happiness consisted in being ‘useful’, in being able to contribute to the community something no one else could do as well: in his later years, Gauguin turned away from the European art form of painting to the creation of decorative artefacts in the style of his adopted homeland (LR 160–4).

Much of this account of art and culture – in an earlier book I called it the ‘Greek paradigm’ of great art⁵ – appears almost word for word in, inter alia, Richard Wagner’s socialist essays of the mid-nineteenth century and in Heidegger, above all in his 1936 The Origin of the Work of Art (PLT 15–86). And it is implicit, we shall see, in Bloch’s celebration of the public festival as a central feature of utopia (p. 57 below). These, and many other German thinkers, all share in Hegel’s nostalgia for Greece and its community-creating style of art. The shadow – or possibly light – cast by the Graecophilia of the German gymnasium was wide and long.

* * *

What about us? What is our cultural – or, Lukács will argue, a-cultural – condition? Essentially it is the negation of all those features that collectively constituted the excellence that was Greece. If the Greeks had ‘answers but no questions’ we have questions but no answers. Our world is full of oppressive (bureaucratic) necessities, but none are meaning-giving. We no longer have a shared ethical substance, a shared culture; both God and the gods are silent. And so we are ‘estranged’ (TN 66) from our natural and human world because it refuses to satisfy our need for ‘goals’, for meaning (TN 60). If we have goals at all they are matters of subjective psychology and hence often appear in modern literature (Crime and Punishment, for instance) as crime or madness (TN 61) (a healthy corrective, surely, to the clichéd advice to ‘find your passion’). Lacking shared, authoritative goals we are, like Strindberg, ‘fragmented’ both externally and internally (LR 91–4). Internally, we live centreless lives, externally we are deeply ‘lonely’, devoid of community with others (TN 45). This gives rise to the problem of trust: since we have no shared, communal ‘essence’, authentic trust is problematic in modern society (TN 44–5).

This is the cultural condition that is reflected in modern art. In Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ and in tragic drama (LR 187) (Hamlet is an obvious example) we see the rise of the ‘interior monologue’, the expression of the ‘absolute loneliness’ of the modern individual (TN 45) that comes into being when ‘the gods are silent’ (TN 66). The formal consequence of our cultural malaise is the rise of the novel, modernity’s substitute for the Greek epic. That the modern novel is essentially a quest for an authentic self and home (Lukács seems to regard the Bildungsroman as the paradigmatic form of the novel) is a symptom of our ‘transcendental homelessness’ (TN 61). What we write about is what is absent.

What, then, are we to do? Romanticism is a protest against the senseless necessities of the modern world, the ‘fetters’ of (Enlightenment) ‘rationalism’. But protest is all there is to Romanticism; it has no genuine alternative to offer. Ibsen and Flaubert tried to overcome their own earlier romanticism through social realism, and effortlessly succeed in displaying the ‘odiousness’ of bourgeois life. But they also display the futility of escape, of escape through the grand passion (Hedda Gabler comes to mind), with the result that, together with Schopenhauer and Baudelaire, their dominant tone is bitterness (LR 97–106). Serious modern art reveals the tragic cast of the modern mind: the quest for homeland, community, meaning, ‘wholeness’ (TN 30) is one that is never satisfied.

In contrast to Romanticism, claims Lukács, rationalism is anti-tragic. Bernard Shaw ‘did not believe in tragedy … [which is] no more than a literary, psychological way of saying that Shaw was a socialist’ (LR 125). Socialism and the proletariat, Lukács writes in 1910, are our only hope of escaping our tragic condition. The choice, then, is between the misery of tragic longing, on the one hand, and socialism, on the other.

What kind of socialism? The problem with democratic socialism is that it is tainted with bourgeois modes of thought. It is moreover weak, lacking the ‘repressive’ power once possessed by Christianity (LR 151). The Bolsheviks, by contrast, represent a clean break with bourgeois life and possess, too, the requisite repressive power. Unfortunately, however, they have such power only by resorting to terror and dictatorship. Bolshevism is based on ‘the metaphysical assumption that good can issue from evil’, an assumption which, qua metaphysics, is a matter of ‘faith’. He himself, Lukács writes in ‘Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem’, lacks this faith, with the result that Bolshevism presents itself as an ‘insuperable ethical dilemma’. And so, for all its failings, he writes in early 1918, he must remain a reluctant democratic socialist (LR 220). A few months later, of course, he discovered the necessary faith – or more likely, since he was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard at the time, made the ‘leap’ to faith – and joined the Party. When ‘Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem’ finally appeared in December of that year, he was, in fact, already a Party member.

The continuity between Lukács’ Marxist and pre-Marxist thought is, now, I think, clear. What is clear is that he joined the Party because he took communism to be the only available ‘answer’ to the ‘questions’ posed by modern life, the best hope of a cure for the ills of bourgeois society diagnosed in his pre-Marxist period. But just how could communism be thought of as a cure for those ills, as something capable of overcoming the ‘tragic’ condition of modern life?

‘Philosophy is really homesickness’, says the early Lukács, quoting Novalis (TN 29). Philosophy is nostalgia. Nostalgia, I observed in the Introduction, has a poor reputation because the place for which it yearns is one that never existed. We sentimentalise the past. As Schopenhauer and Freud point out, childhood was never the golden age of memory, and as Mary Beard reminds us, life in ancient Greece was, much of the time, nasty, brutish and short, nothing at all like the lost paradise portrayed in the German gymnasium. But that a golden age never existed in the past does not preclude it from coming into being in the future, or at least from serving as an inspirational ideal for the creation of the future. And, as we might call it, this ‘productive’ use of nostalgia is what, in 1914, Lukács takes philosophy to be: ‘the task of true philosophy’, he says, is to draw the ‘archetypal map’ of ‘utopia’ (TN 29), the ‘immanent utopia’ that is the ‘core and essence’ of the Greek epic (TN 48). This, I think, tells us the essence of at least Lukács’ version of Marxism. As he sees it in 1918, Marxism represents our best hope of creating a future society that will be bound together by ethical substance, community, meaning and homeland. More specifically, it gives him a new narrative to replace the depressing ‘death of art’ narration of Western history, a narrative of rise as well as of fall. To the extent that one can generalise from Lukács’ case, the thought presents itself that (utopian) Marxism as such is the product of the Graecophilia of the German ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Titlepage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The left
• Part II The right
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index