The Rationalism of Georg Lukács

J. Kelemen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137372819
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137370259
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Rationalism of Georg Lukács is a collection of essays and engaging scholarship which uncovers new dimensions of the philosopher's work. The relevance of Lukacs's ideas should be seen in the light of a sharp decline in critical thought as well the continued need to rehabilitate a thinker that was representative of a rational radical perspective.

Part I

To Supervise the Existence of Reason

1

Introduction: Language, Science, and Reason

Abstract: The book is a collection of essays published in different times but treating interconnected topics. Such are Georg Lukács’s conception of language, his philosophy of science, and his theory of literary history and of cinematic art.

This introductive chapter is intended to outline the historical and political background of Lukács’s oeuvre, and to show the connecting threads between the above mentioned themes. Particular emphasis is placed on the unity of the philosopher’s thought (in spite of the spectacular volte-faces during his career), which is due to his commitment to a renewed and original form of rationalism.

The chapter also contains the anticipation of an argument, presented in detail in the later chapters, according to which the choice of rationalism is in itself rational, that is, it has a foundation and it can be based on good reasons.

Keywords: foundation; language; rationalism; reason; science

Kelemen, János. The Rationalism of Georg Lukács. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137370259.

György (Georg) Lukács¹ (1885–1971) was without doubt one of the most important Marxist thinkers and communist intellectuals of the 20th century. His views on philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism exerted an immeasurable influence on several generations of left-wing (and not just left-wing) intellectuals in Europe. The philosopher, who came from an upper-class bourgeois family in Austro-Hungary, was producing controversial and much-debated essays and theoretical works on fiction and drama in the spirit of the Kantian-Hegelian tradition even prior to World War I. In 1918, he became a committed Marxist and joined the Communist Party of Hungary, subsequently playing a role in the Hungarian proletarian dictatorship of 1919. After the collapse of the short-lived regime, he lived in Vienna, in Berlin and—from 1933 until 1945—in Moscow, assuming a variably active role (in the literary and political fields) in the work of the communist parties of Hungary, the Soviet Union and Germany. During his Moscow years, he became politically marginalized but in the shadow of the fascist threat he reluctantly agreed to a compromise with Stalinism. In 1945, he returned to Budapest where his participation in Imre Nagy’s government at the time of the 1956 revolution was to be his final political role.

Appraisals of his philosophical, aesthetic and literary critical work have always tended towards two extremes—not least because of their political context.

On the one hand, it is a fact that his works found a broad and very positive reception. Thanks to the impact on the revolutionary movement of his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness, with its philosophical content and political message, Lukács became known as one of the founders of Western Marxism and its principal representative; and this is still how he is seen today. Yet, despite his political reversals and his compromise with Stalinism, his later works still met with great interest, albeit they were subjected to increasing criticism. In the decades after World War II and especially in the 1960s, he became a guiding figure to those Eastern European intellectuals who were committed to the democratization of socialism and the renewal of Marxism—those who believed in a “renaissance of Marxism.” For posterity he left a work—Demokratisierung heute und morgen—that seems to be a kind of political testament. Containing his political notes on socialism and democracy, it was published some years after his death, by which time many of its ideas had been surpassed. (Lukács 1985)

On the other hand, it is also true that Lukács was sharply criticized by some in Hungary already at the start of his career and before his “conversion” to Marxism. For instance, a leading Hungarian poet and essayist, Mihály Babits, claimed Lukács’s book on modern drama (Lukács 1978a; first published in Hungarian in 1911)² was “nebulous.” Babits’s main accusation was that Lukács was essentially an epigone of German lofty philosophizing. The philosopher’s later works—the Destruction of Reason, The Specificity of the Aesthetic and The Ontology of Social Being—also met with a mixed reception. (To the latter two works I will refer also with the half-titles “Aesthetics” and “Ontology.”) His attempt to found the ontology of social being was considered by most, including his own disciples, to have been a failure. For example, shortly before his death, prominent members of the “Budapest School” (all of them his previous followers: Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda) had addressed to him an extensive critical comment on the unfinished Ontology of Social Being. Their article appeared in the leading Hungarian philosophical journal (Magyar Filozófiai Szemle—Hungarian Philosophical Review), and some years later had been republished in English in a volume dedicated to the reappraisal of Lukács’s philosophy (Fehér et al. 1983). The notes made by the authors express a profound disagreement with most of the theoretical statements of Lukács. (They reject, among many other things, his interpretation of the fundamental category of “genericness” or “species being” and his distinction between “genericness-in-itself” and “genericness-for-itself” Fehér et al. 1983: 151)

The centenary of Lukács’s birth in 1985 saw various commemorative events, conferences and publications, but interest in Lukács was already diminishing. This was at the beginning of the Gorbachev era, the outcome of which would soon demonstrate the impossibility of maintaining, reforming and democratizing the socio-political system whose greatest philosophical representative had been Lukács.

This raises the question of what a philosopher of the bygone communist era can say to today’s reader. Has not the radical change in the historical situation invalidated the legacy of this thinker who placed his entire theoretical work in the service of a political movement, the communist party, and its anti-capitalist struggle?

There is a plausible answer to this question. In terms of the reception of Lukács’s oeuvre, the impact of the changed historical situation has not been solely negative. On the contrary, recent political shifts have allowed us to read Lukács’s works in a new light, thereby discovering things that were previously hidden. Something similar has happened to many great philosophers of the past.

Yet, leaving all this aside, is it true that the collapse of communism necessarily rendered Lukács’s teachings obsolete? And is there really no place for the kind of alternative critical thought that the Lukacsian variant of Marxism represents? The disappointments and failures of the transition in Eastern Europe and capitalism’s current crisis suggest the very opposite. In a world seemingly lacking a practical alternative to capitalism, it is more important than ever for us to be able to imagine at least the possibility of an alternative. Indeed, as one of Lukács’s own students, István Mészáros, recently emphasized with great force, the future of humanity depends on our ability to imagine and realize an alternative world (Mészáros 1995).

One should add that our present crisis is also a crisis of reason. In all fields of culture, politics and international relations—and, indeed, in everyday life—we are witnessing the advance of irrational beliefs and the aggressive attacks of forces hostile to reason and democracy. We face a situation in which the values of rationality need to be strengthened, just as Lukács in his day considered the defence of such values to be one of his major tasks.

Lukács did not define himself as a “rationalist” thinker. Here I am not referring to the tendency of the young Lukács to sympathize, on occasion, with the irrational and even the mystical. Rather I wish to draw attention to the evident fact that in his Marxist period Lukács preferred the label “dialectic materialism” and applied this to himself. Even so, in view of the manner in which he opposed irrationalist (or what he considered to be irrationalist) philosophical tradition or how he discussed the problem of science, we necessarily see in him a modern representative of a certain kind of rationalism.

The studies in this volume address in various forms what we may call Lukács’s “rationalism.” This definition in part indicates the direction of the Lukács interpretation ascribed to here and in part it characterizes the volume from a thematic viewpoint.

In thematic terms, I should like to note the following.

The single chapters discuss issues that are rarely addressed in connection with Lukács. Indeed, to my knowledge, several of the questions have never been raised before, despite the otherwise broad reception and impact of the philosopher’s works. Such questions are: Does Lukács have a rationally reconstructable and “original” philosophy of language? Does he have a philosophy of science that is comparable with 20th-century conceptions of scientific knowledge? We find in the Lukácsian oeuvre an abundance of texts that can be used to answer all such questions. Even so, we know little about what the author of these texts really thought about language and science. Similarly, we have scant knowledge of Lukács’s early work on literary theory and literary history; this area, too, is treated in the volume. Perhaps the situation is as it is because of the political conditionality of his work. For his audience, the militant communist was of interest first and foremost as a philosopher of politics and culture (and, of course, as a theoretician of Marxist aesthetics).

The chapters of the first part of this volume give affirmative answers to the aforementioned questions. Lukács did not cultivate the philosophy of language and science as a discipline or as some academically institutionalized branch of philosophy; nor did he even use these terms. More importantly, for him language—and science too—represented a philosophical problem. In order to investigate the nature of language and scientific knowledge he set out criteria that lay outside the purview of scientists operating under the auspices of the academic division of labor.

This is well illustrated by a seemingly incidental footnote in History and Class Consciousness, which is nevertheless illustrative of Lukács’s exceptional intuition. In the footnote, the philosopher lays the foundations for a complete research program, based on some interesting observations made by Marx. The goal of the program would be to investigate in a systematic manner the interaction between language and society, departing from the hypothesis that the structures of reification also penetrate language. This is a most radical interpretation of the social nature of language, for it implies the following: language is a social phenomenon not only in the general sense of it being a means for contact among people, but also in the specific sense that the given social relations (e.g., production and commodity relations) are inherently present in the linguistic forms themselves—in, for instance, the semantic structure of expressions. In other words, social relations are not simply “reflected” in language; rather, they shape and determine its essential structures. In the passages quoted by Lukács, Marx refers to certain linguistic phenomena as “products of the bourgeoisie,” thereby clearly indicating that language has a class nature.

Lukács does no more than mention the possibility of philological research from a historical materialist viewpoint. Even so, we have every reason to suppose that he considered it possible to extend the reification theory expounded in History and Class Consciousness to linguistic phenomena. That is to say, the theory of reification has logical space for a general theory of language that would embody a systematic discussion of linguistic reification and linguistic alienation. Evidently, a central element of this theory would be the idea that language is determined by class, or, to be more precise, the teaching that the class structure of society is assimilated into linguistic forms.

After History and Class Consciousness, Lukács went no further along this route. In his later works, he dealt in far greater detail and more exhaustively with the language problem, doing so, however, on completely different foundations. A reason for this may have been that during the rule of the Soviet version of Marxism, thinking about language was excessively influenced by the dispute over whether or not language should be considered one of the phenomena of superstructure. On one side of the argument were followers of the Georgian linguist Marr, who were convinced of language being an element of superstructure. On the other side was Stalin, who interfered in the linguistic debate and who adamantly denied the possibility of social relations influencing language in any way. (Stalin cut the Gordian knot when he stated that language “is neither ‘base’ nor ‘superstructure’.”) In his late major work on aesthetics, The Specificity of Aesthetic, Lukács himself went as far as to explain, in a naturalist fashion and based on Pavlovian physiological theory, that language is a second signal system (while also cautiously criticizing Pavlov for having ignored the role of work). In doing so, he abandoned the productive interpretation of the social nature of language, which he had proposed in History and Class Consciousness. Of course, this tied in with his renunciation of all concepts presented in his earlier great work.

His final position was that the genesis and fundamental structure of language must be derived from labor. Based on this, as part of the social ontological concept laid out in his last work, he outlined a kind of ontological theory of language. He was working on this theory during the 1960s, that is to say, at a time when analytical linguistic philosophy—including ordinary language philosophy—was at its heyday. In Chapter 2, I seek to show that the Lukácsian concept represents—at least in its fundamentals—a serious alternative to the analytical approach to the language issue.

The aforementioned chapter is transversal in the sense that it presents the changes in Lukács’s ideas on the given problem, doing so in a manner that spans the various periods of his oeuvre. The same also applies to the chapter that analyzes Lukács’s ideas on philosophy of science as presented in History and Class Consciousness and the late work The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Significant differences can be observed between the two sets of ideas; unsurprisingly it seems that these differences are systematically linked with the manner in which—largely for historical reasons and shaped by political developments in the Soviet Union—Lukács’s views on Marxism and materialistic dialectics changed.

Strictly in terms of the philosophy of science, this change should not be regarded either as a positive development or as a negative reversal. The analyses on scientific knowledge in History and Class Consciousness or in The Specificity of the Aesthetic are, in themselves, both interesting and original. Meanwhile, in historical terms, they are both characteristic and symptomatic.

The philosophy of science in the earlier work, similar to the references made to the class determination of language, is based on the theory of reification. This brings us to the fact that for Lukács the theory of science is first and foremost critique of science. And the manner in which he analyzes the effect of the structure of reification on the consciousness of classes indicates such central elements of his critique of science as, for example, the epistemological and methodological contrast between the natural sciences and the social sciences, the structural link between the natural sciences, capitalism and bourgeois class consciousness, or a definition of historical knowledge as self-knowledge. The mere listing of these various factors shows that the Lukácsian critique of science was first and foremost a critique of positivism with roots going back to the pre-Marxian period of his work, to the German historicist, neo-Kantian, and Hegelian tradition.

Here it is worth giving special mention to the scientific-theoretical dualism that is expressed in the juxtaposing of the natural sciences with the social scienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  To Supervise the Existence of Reason
• Part II  Problems of Literary History and Aesthetics
• Bibliography
• Index