GEORGE LUKACS: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT
Stern, L.
How can life become essential? How can value become reality and meaning be made effective? Around these questions the lifework of George Lukacs is centered. The paradox of his development is...
...1, pp...
...Some of them he praised, some of them he scorned or ignored...
...When in October 1956 Imre Nagy formed his first insurgent government, Lukacs joined it as Minister of Popular Education...
...But because of this the gap separating the peaks from the foothills became ever wider...
...It is far from our intention to defend Lukacs' position...
...The French review Arguments will publish the whole book in instalments in the translation of J. Bois and Kostas Axelos...
...Whether this class consciousness shall create political associations (parties) or shall forego such association and build different or higher ones, cannot be foreseen as yet...
...It is to uncover the content hidden and contained—indirectly and unconsciously— within the form...
...The struggle for the consciousness of the proletariat which was fought on a socio-economic level shall be continued on a philosophical and psychological sphere: instead of a calculative handling of objects, a regard for the faculties of Man as subject...
...Each literary form is but a step in the hierarchy of the posibilities of life...
...164 In the opening essay of his second book Die Seele and die Formen (published in 1911), Lukacs attempted to define the task of the critic...
...differing interpretations of the Renaissance may peacefully live alongside each other just as a new poet's 'Phaedra,' 'Siegfried' and 'Tristan' will always leave untouched those created by his predecessors...
...V Bourgeois consciousness is reified consciousness, but classical philosophy has already shown us how to transcend reification...
...Perhaps Lukacs was thinking of himself when he warned his readers that it is not the political prejudices of a Kleist, a Balzac or a Dos It-toievsky which are important for an understanding of their work...
...The structure of reification is the central problem of modern society...
...First, the name of Lukacs does not appear among the 169 Hungarian writers who signed the "loyalty declaration" to the Kadar government...
...So Lukacs argues...
...Here is the dividing line between Lukacs and his Stalinist foes...
...Aristotle had long emphasized that freedom is based upon freedom from work and Marx, consistently enough, considered freedom as free time...
...What was an atem poral experience in tragedy becomes here an historical event...
...The paradox of his development is that he found the lost "homeland" in Stalinism and yet retained the radical character of his questioning...
...On the contrary in a collection of three essays published by Einaudi in October 1957 in Italy, II significato attuale del realismo critico, which contains his writings on avantgarde literature written about the time of the 20th Congress, he asserts the continuity of his work and draws the attention of his readers to the "Aesopian language" he had to use during the time of Stalin and Zhdanov...
...V1 His work during the Stalinist epoch seems to explain this position...
...The echo of these questions can be heard behind every line of 166 Lukacs...
...At such a point Lukacs' subordination to the authority of the Stalinist party had 171 to end...
...During the war years, however, he drew close to the working class movement...
...In everyday life absolute ethical demands are satisfied by compromises, half-solutions...
...If his judgment of the old romantics can no longer be stamped upon Lukacs himself, it is because in the recent Hungarian revolution he firmly took the side of the workers and youth against the Stalinist regime...
...The forms of life are weighed and they are found wanting...
...that tells us once it happened, once it was there...
...and: Karl Marx, Der 18...
...4 Lucien Goldmann made this connection between the tragic and the dialectic views explicit in "La Communaute humaine et l'Univers chez Kant," 1948 and "Le Dieu Cache," 1955...
...This consciousness is blocked by the irrationality of the Ding-an-sich (the Thing-in-itself) . We cannot show here how this irrationality was transcended by Hegel from an historical point of view and how Marx found the subject-object of history in social classes...
...essence and existence, value and reality lose their apart ness...
...Through this radicalism Lukacs even won the admiration of his critics...
...But up to that moment the proletariat is under the influence of bourgeois consciousness...
...Death, for the romantic, is an answer...
...Tarsadalmi Szemle, Dec...
...For Kant, the problem is one of seeing the world not as given, independent of the subject's act of cognizance (by means of God, for example) , but rather as the product of the subject himself...
...but he gained the admiration of them all...
...The proletariat cannot liberate itself without putting an end to class society, without the complete reorganization of society...
...As we recall, the answer of the young Lukacs to the insoluble situation was that consciousness should become action...
...Also: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris, 1956...
...Max Horkheimer and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklaerung, 1947, p. 269...
...That is why the class consciousness implies a self-awareness...
...In the Hungarian revolution of 1919 he became Commissar of Popular Education in the government of Bela Kun...
...What saved him was only accidental...
...The party is an expression of the highest possible degree of non-reified consciousness...
...Cognizance should become action...
...28 and Dec...
...For the dogma is the word...
...a division between Man and his world...
...The usual lipservice to the authority of Stalin and Malenkov (a little late in the day) can be found in it...
...But who would be deceived by this...
...everyday life will become reified (i.e., false) consciousness and the higher life will become true consciousness...
...Thomas Mann, whom he considers the greatest novelist of our century, called Lukacs the most important literary critic of the time and Sartre, whom he once accused of intellectual dishonesty and demagogery, sees in him one of the leading philosophers of our day...
...But he too became a "praying proselyte" because he crossed the one narrow bridge linking the classic and the tragic on the one side and the romantic on the other...
...i Cf...
...Karl Korsch, Marxismus and Philosophie, second edition, Leipzig, 1930...
...II But let us return to our starting point: through form we arrive at life and through Iife we arrive at form...
...Since the work of the young Lukacs is generally unavailable the reader can have recourse to the last mentioned book of Goldmann, which is an interpretation of Pascal and Racine through the concepts developed by Lukacs in Die Seete and die Formen...
...The finality of tragedy is transcended when the future appears on the scene...
...for the tragic, a question: "how can essence become alive...
...The revolution is therefore a point of junction in history...
...They longed for a community in which they could abandon their isolation...
...Reversing the usual procedure of "psychologism" and "biographism" which consists in explaining an author's work by taking his life as point of departure—a procedure Lukacs always criticized—we will attempt here to understand his psychology and biography, even if only fragmentarily, through his work...
...The bourgeoisie, which in the course of its evolution produces its own negation (the proletariat) , cannot become conscious of itself without negating the terms of its existence...
...For if the creed is strong enough it will cast out the words which have become empty and proven to be lies...
...But in tragedy it is life which is sacri ficed to these demands...
...169 The structure of reification, as discussed by Lukacs, becomes thus all important for the understanding of present day society...
...In non-revolutionary times the party retains its character as vanguard of the proletariat and bearer of its class consciousness...
...III How is it possible to live today...
...It cannot be our task to anticipate any future socialist program but it can be well foreseen, that if the socialist movement is to regain its force again, it will achieve this goal, not so much through the traditional social and economic demands of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century...
...It can be found again in the demand for the unity of theory and practice...
...But all the means he wished to employ for the conquest of life sufficed only to prepare a beautiful death...
...In fact, only the abolition of all punitive systems and the creation of the true community would be Promethean...
...It should be recalled that Marx had a similar vision when he spoke of that historical genesis whose ascent is tragic, whose descent is serene and whose turning point is the fall of the tragic...
...He therefore must find his answer in "beautiful death...
...This struggle against vulgar sociology—Iater to become a struggle against vulgar Marxism—and the insistence upon the analysis of creative forms are a major "leitmotiv" in Lukacs' literary career...
...As a result, among those romantics who grew old, "Some became epigones of their own youth, some saved themselves, tired from a hopeless search for a new religion and the vision of an always greater anarchy...
...Around these questions the lifework of George Lukacs is centered...
...Even if advantage may be obtained from knowing the inner laws governing this process, the process itself cannot be influenced...
...The sensibility, however, relates to that image behind the word which flickers up and disappears only to reappear again...
...IV We have already hinted at the answers which were to be given by Lukacs in his major work, Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein e Tragic consciousness is a consciousness of limit...
...The constitutive elements of Marxist thought appear in the development of the thought of Lukacs: from social conditioning of the forms to a solution of the apparently hopeless situation by means of action...
...a division within Man himself...
...In this way the class consciousness of the poletariat becomes the ethics of the proletariat...
...Only one way was open: a higher aloofness...
...Identification with the party, even if bureaucratized, in non• revolutionary times...
...his victory is the death sentence of the entire school...
...6 The first essay of Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein was translated by Michael Harrington in The New International, Summer 1957...
...their art of living one of dying...
...is rather the work itself—often contradictory to these prejudices—which provides the key to a critical understanding of the author...
...Maybe Read wasn't even aware of how well his explanation hit the mark...
...But since all consciousness is consciousness of Being (Bewusstsein ist bewusstes Sein) , true consciousness must become the consciousness of a totality in reality...
...after the defeat of the revolution he escaped to Vienna and later to Germany...
...Largely through Lukacs and his school, this term has found such a wide reception that we only need to recall its definition summarily: the relationship between people takes on the character of relationships between things (res) , commodities...
...Zinoviev severely criticized this book at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International held in June 1924...
...The former isolated individual is transcended by the false community of "togetherness" in which not only the isolation but also the individual is surpassed...
...Late in 1948 Lukacs was attacked by his old enemy Rudas, who denounced the "bourgeois influence" in his work and violently accused him of "cosmopolitanism...
...In his Jena Aphorisms Hegel writes, "The highest that ought to be transcended would be death" (Aphorism 30) and "Man, no longer accusing God but acknowledging his dependence, wants to know for what reason he exists...
...It deals with the central category of his aesthetics, "particularity" in an historical and systematical context...
...Whether my starting point is the history of modern thought or the economic and social relations of the capitalist world, I arrive at the structure of "reification...
...active participation in the revolution, even against the party—such is the political viewpoint of Lukacs...
...2 Lukacs, Theorie des Romans, written in 1912-1915, but published in 1920...
...is the question to which the EposNovel responds...
...The contention was that if the meaning of Lukacs' work is understood correctly then he would not undergo the usual ritual of self-criticism and recantation for his 172 role in the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, despite the fact that such action was reported as pending...
...Class consciousness is not the awareness that the total sum of isolated individuals have of their being, but rather the limit set for that class which starts out from what is objectively possible for it in resolving the problems of society...
...Born in 1885 into a family of the Hungarian petty nobility of Jewish origins, he first came under the influence of the southwest German school of Neo-Kan tian thought...
...Those who had once set out to form and create anew the entire world became praying proselytes," wrote Lukacs about the aging romantics...
...Social classes are the only concrete totalities...
...to them everything was dear and valuable inasmuch as it furthered their growth...
...A clearer indictment of the romantic is hardly conceivable...
...Tragic thought is transcended by dialectic thought .4 It is possible to indicate only briefly that the same problem may be encountered in the young Hegel and the young Marx...
...And, if we must accept this refusal for what it actually is—a rejection of Stalinism—why did he wait more than thirty years...
...To revive solitary confinement as against concentration camp, or to resurrect the isolated individual as against the constituent parts of "togetherness" would be no Promethean deed...
...Werner Heider, Die Geschichtslehre von Karl Marx, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1931, P. 76...
...Men," writes Lukacs, "who on the other side of the Rhine would have become tragic heroes could here live out their destiny only in poetry...
...Why this refusal...
...In Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein Lukacs insists upon a partywith a strong inner cohesion...
...There he wrote Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein ("History and Class Consciousness") , published in 1923, which remains one of the few Marxist works of philosophical importance...
...his prosecutors agree that Lukacs has passed over to the "camp of the enemy...
...And because Lukacs could not choose the right measure his compromise became an acceptance...
...Furthermore it was clear that the apologetic character of his work would also have to change...
...The classicists (Hegel, Goethe and, implicitly, Lukacs) tried to live after the revolution (French and Russian) in the name of its traditions by making compromises with the present, whereas the romanticists (Holderlin and Trotsky) could find only a purist and sectarian solution...
...Every period requires other Greeks, other Middle Ages, another Renaissance...
...Coming from life, its task is to change this life...
...But let us not anticipate the viewpoint of Lukacs' first Marxist work, Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein...
...Even in his latest books written after 1949 in which, under attack by both his old enemy Rudas and his former disciple Revai, he several times renounces his concept of a social and aesthetic analysis of form in favor of an analysis of content, Lukacs indicates to all those who have grasped his work that the very fact that he is unable to discover any analysable form in discussing the products of "socialist realism" is the most devastating criticism possible of the entire school...
...Only the ethical breaks in upon this isolation...
...Ars moriendi, or the "art of dying," is also the tragic inasmuch as the tragic character dies his "beautiful death" on the stage for precisely the same ideals that maim the spectator in everyday life...
...He condemns here the errors of Stalin and the "criminal Moscow trials"—in no stronger terms than Khrushchev employed, to be sure...
...This is why only total commitment of the whole personality to the party and the transposition of every theoretical and political question into organizational and practical terms can render the party efficacious for fulfilling its historic mission as well as determining the rules of individual ethics and behavior...
...These accusations were taken up by his former pupil Revai who, in the meantime, had become a Zhdanovist...
...But under the impact of reification "free time" becomes an extension of the working hours...
...but the limit of such an identification is not the present incapability of the party to place itself at the head of the revolution...
...The ruling authorities, though, have announced several times his intent to recant...
...This campaign might be viewed as prepara...
...also: Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus, Die Fruhschriften, edited by Landshut and Mayer, Vol...
...a mortifying aloneness...
...when every man was a philosopher and philosophy had not yet come to mean homesickness...
...the word which can be turned and turned about, which friend and foe alike can make use of...
...His analysis in the works he wrote during the Stalinist period becomes weaker and weaker, as if his real concern is no more than an apology for his development...
...The critic appears upon the scene at that moment when the subject of the work takes on form...
...From such a viewpoint it was Lukacs who, by attaching himself to a party void of any content, was the romantic...
...How can value become reality and meaning be made effective...
...With the suicide of this "ascetic of purity" as his antagonist calls him—a suicide which will continue to haunt Lukacs—the "pre-Marxist" period in Lukacs' career comes to an end...
...their philosophy of life was one of death...
...it is a point of view of life and the things, i.e., a worldview...
...But the class consciousness of the proletariat is not what the worker Peter or Paul thinks or feels...
...And because the question in this form was constantly posed the tragic could be transcended dialectically by passing from the perspective of the ahistorical and isolated individual to that of history and society...
...If with Lukacs we hold that proletarian class consciousness is not the actual psychological consciousness but the potential consciousness of the worker taking his class interest as a point of departure, then this consciousness has to be determined by the class interest of the proletarian today, which is the transcending of reification...
...To Ruge, who asked him to have the courage to despair, he replied: "Let the dead bury the dead and mourn them...
...L'Express, Feb...
...165 Demands are sacrificed to life...
...If there is a hierarchy of lives, then the life lived to its utmost limit becomes the highest possibility of life and the tragic the highest of forms...
...where once the intention was to be formed it is now the breaking of the forms...
...Perhaps the function of an immanent critique of his position should be to show that this great dialectian has drawn only the logical consequence of his original choice: identification with the party, yes...
...But romanticism, as soon as it became an answer rather than a question, could not develop beyond the fatal point of the "beautiful death...
...the romantics that only the life of Novalis could become poetry...
...The main protagonist in the dialogue of "Of the Poverty of Spirit," after realizing his inability to create a community and thus failing the metaphysical class to which he belongs—every metaphysical class having its own ethical demands to fulfill—commits suicide while pointing to the words of the Bible: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot...
...Socrates emptied the cup," wrote Lukacs in Die Seele and die Formen...
...But the concentration camp is the coercive means of men who live in "togetherness...
...One of the repressive means employed by the ruling class used to be the concealment of truth or the outright lie...
...A strange dialogue would then develop...
...His whole work takes on an apologetic character...
...Proletarian class consciousness can be achieved only through the 168 practice of class struggle by the proletariat and this practice must be directed by the same consciousness...
...In tragedy Man achieved self-realization in his ruin...
...5 Pseudonym of Freiher Friedrich von Handenberg (1772-1801) , poet, mystic and nature philosopher of German romanticism...
...it is what he should think or feel, taking his class interest as point of departure...
...Thus we can trace at this point in the development of Lukacs' thought the same phases we find in the development from Kant to Hegel and to Marx...
...8 For Lukacs, historical materialism is the theory of proletarian consciousness whose practice is revolutionary activity and whose organization (the revolutionary proletarian party) is the mediator between theory and practice...
...Both as determining his own self and determined by his own self, Man becomes master of his destiny in reality...
...then, the degree to which the social conditions of his time can generate material for those experiences necessary for the forms which might have been created independently of him...
...they are, we believe, within the perspective of a Marxist aesthetics...
...when perfection was habitual and genius was not required to approach the ideal, for the ideal and the real were one and the same, and no break existed within man or between man and his world...
...stars and the movement of men was the same...
...His recent work is a lengthy polemic against romanticism and an apology on behalf of his interpretation of the classical viewpoint...
...In life, we only live in our highest moments and this desire for self-realization gives birth to tragedy...
...Marx-Engels Gesamt Ausgabe, I/1, pp...
...he lived long enough to witness a new revolutionary period...
...it is rather the fact that it no longer pursues true revolutionary practice...
...To attempt to revive the old would be both political romanticism and a priori doomed to failure...
...HIs EARLY LITERARY WORK prophesies the later political destiny of its author—so much so that we shall be able to develop his biog 162 raphy from words he had written long before they were realized by the actual choices of his life...
...Such aclass, from whose viewpoint the organization of society is possible, is the proletariat...
...How can essence become alive...
...Objects not subjects appear, the kernel of whose relationships is covered by a thick crust...
...This turns against man, thus alienating him from himself...
...Yet this bureaucracy is the highest possible expression of proletarian class consciousness...
...There Lukacs wrote his literary essays, published in Eastern Germany and Hungary between 1945 and 1948...
...tion for a forthcoming trial against Lukacs...
...In Germany "they were fanatics and slaves of their own development...
...I.ukacs' new book published in Hungary in December 1957 contains one chapter of his aesthetics...
...It permitted him, after emptying the cup, to return to his original choice for the revolution...
...Except for certain terms, Lukacs never changed any part of this judgment...
...What was an end becomes now a beginning...
...not only in his veiled essays on Hegel and Goethe but in clear and firm taking of sides for the Hungarian Revolution...
...I In his very first book (The Evolution of Modern Drama, 1908) , written in Hungarian at the age of 23, Lukacs engages in a critical discussion with those vulgar sociologists who try to explain the content of literary work directly through an analysis of the economic and social substructure...
...Tragedy is transcended (aufgehoben, i.e., abolished, lifted to a higher plane and preserved) in dialectics...
...our task is to clarify the intent of his work and to affirm its continuity...
...The word is the shell of the creed and here lies the divide between friend and foe...
...here it is to be achieved in his resurrection...
...In commiting myself totally I must renounce my individual freedom and accept party discipline because every individual liberty which is not total liberty only prolongs the constraint of class society...
...Together with Nagy, Losonczi, Kadar, Donath and others, he laid the groundwork for the organization of a new, anti-Stalinist communist party...
...In 1911 he published a collection of essays in German under the title Die Seele and die Formen ("The Soul and the Forms") . This work drew the attention of Thomas Mann and many other writers to Lukacs...
...This answers Marx's question: how can a work possess eternal value in spite of its historicity...
...The romantic, on the other hand, wants to live out his unattainable yearnings which are, in turn, hostile to Iife...
...This affinity between opposites has its origin at the point where 167 the tragic and romantic attitudes become identical...
...The product of man becomes a thing independent of himself and a world is created in which the relatednesses of objects takes command...
...Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Cf...
...7 Cf...
...Frequent criticism and self-criticism guarantee the party its mediating role...
...The all-decisive word about a man and his destiny has been pronounced when it is decided through what form his life can be expressed and what form is required by his high moments...
...The first essay appeared in Arguments, Avril-Mai 1957...
...We want simply to indicate here the organic quality of Lukacs development...
...From East Berlin through Prague to Budapest (Cf., France-Observateur, Nov...
...Likewise in the work of the young Marx we find a concern with the same problem...
...in capitalist society, the proletariat...
...a solitary dialogue between a man and his destiny"—as Lukacs would say —a destiny rich in spectacular changes, whose thread remains unbroken not because of the accidental fact that it emanates from one and the same person but because of the strength of an inner logical development...
...The rhythm of production and the rhythm of work are the same as the rhythm of false literature and entertainment...
...Should, however, this bureaucracy become so ossified that henceforth it cannot place itself as the head of a, revolutionary movement of the proletariat, then it has turned against the proletariat...
...No doubt...
...it is an a priori point of view through which the artist sees his experiences sub specie formae...
...With progression in the external world excluded, every energy turned inward upon itself and soon 'the land of poets and thinkers' surpassed all others in depth, fineness and fervor...
...But the questions, "how can essence become alive...
...Sir Herbert Read who, by his own admission has hardly read Lukacs, sees his appeal in a combination of great sensibility and dogma...
...The tragic, when it occurs, presupposes a division in the classical world...
...It also serves as the revolution's memory and as a school for the proletariat- The party is bureaucratized...
...Not even the third-rate party politicians and theoreticians for whom they are intended...
...Even after permission was granted him to return to Hungary, where he now is, not a word of self-criticism has come from him...
...Qualitative differences disappear and the realm of quantity prevails...
...He introduces us into an atmosphere of infinite longing: a longing that remembers...
...Meager biographical details are known about Lukacs...
...The party is also mediator between Man and history because it develops the consciousness of its members at the same time that it intervenes in history...
...is the question to which tragedy replies...
...Did Lukacs not already make two self-criticisms on previous occasions...
...173...
...ONLY IN OUR DAY has the reification of consciousness become all embracing...
...In fact, if I see the world from the viewpoint of history instead of from that of the isolated individual, then the scandal which is my death (i.e., the natural limit of the isolated individual's life) disappears...
...For even if we accept his notion that the classicists tried to live in the world by making compromises the question becomes one of the measure and extent of these compromises...
...Mass culture and the entertainment industry are but one of its products...
...the cell was Lebniz' monad, having neither door nor window...
...and, finally, the form itself as a means to success, because the more profound the success, the more profoundly social is the reason for it...
...When the order of the movement of the...
...What is socially determined is, first of all, the worldview of the artist...
...The higher life, once created by tragedy in an illusory world, now appears in reality...
...The task is not to anticipate this future dogmatically but to find the new world through the critique of the old...
...3 Lukacs, "Von der Armut am Geiste," in Neue Blaetter, 1912...
...East Europe, February, etc...
...There has been no pro-regime announcement from Lukacs...
...We believe that the answer may be found in his own work...
...Since becoming aware that Lukacs is no longer one of theirs, they have begun a vilification campaign against him...
...how does one have to live today...
...it was not primarily determined by an external eruption such as the First World War even though that event played such a great role in the development of many European intellectuals...
...3 This is Lukacs' answer to this dilemma without a way out...
...1 Attacking it for "idealist" tendencies, he gave the signal for a whole series of trials against heretics initiated by the first "thought bureaucrats" within the Comintern (Rudas, Thalheimer, Bela Kun, Deborin, Luppol and others) . Lukacs and those who were attacked as his disciples (Korsch, Revai and Fogarasi) were victims...
...Communities already exist within the ethical world and only the action of the community in the full measure of its consciousness is needed to arrive at the final term of Marxism...
...and "how can life become essential...
...remain to be answered in life and not in a literary form or expression...
...The discrepancy between ethics and reality 170 is abolished...
...This, together with the concept of the revolution as the free act of the proletariat, explains Lukacs' political position...
...We shall see how his pro-Stalinist political choice was influenced by this indictment of romanticism and how, by a strange turn, what he most opposed was to determine what he was to become...
...Kadar tried time after time to obtain Lukacs' collaboration, but this he definitely refused...
...But because they looked upon this self-created and phantom Cosmos as a real one they had to believe in the possibility of acting without renouncing...
...He became a romantic in reaction to the romantic school...
...However as this would harm Stalin...
...Society's punitive system clearly indicates this: 7 solitary confinement was the punitive expression of the isolated individual...
...Those who once had set out to form and create anew the entire world became praying proselytes...
...i.e., in practice...
...The form is a principle of selection, a principle which chooses from among manifold experiences those which have to be described...
...In his Memoirs Victor Serge recalls thatLukacs proposed the commitment of historians in the service of the party central committee long before the Stalinist era...
...Destiny was generous toward Lukacs...
...Lukacs was always aware of the problem of the romantics— he has waged a lifelong fight against this school—yet kinship is either the cause or effect of this opposition...
...We can now refer to two books published by Lukacs since then...
...Aphorism 50) . Man, no longer accusing God, has already transcended his tragedy...
...this is why its authority must be yielded to...
...13, 56, 115, 133...
...That Marx arrives at this goal through a critique of society and political economy whereas Lukacs arrives there through literary criticism and a critique of society is of no importance...
...How is it possible to live suspended between everyday life with its virtues and duties devoid of meaning, and absolute life which, by its very nature, is inhuman since it seeks to realize in the individual the ethical work of all mankind...
...not through the demands for a betterment of working conditions, for the nationalization of industry or the collectivization of agriculture, etc., not even primarily through direct political action—since the success of such action might very well be turned into its opposite by the reified consciousness—but through a critique of reification and a fight against its consequence, the impairment of life's value...
...Behind the works of the past the critic projects our own desires...
...Yet it sees clearly that the tragic solution is beyond realization...
...The tragic world in its completedness gives way to the dramatic world of reality...
...During the years between 1910 and 1912, Lukacs was frequently seen in the home of Max Weber where he was one of the animators of the circle that formed around the famous sociologist...
...While Korsch passed over to the ultra-left opposition, Lukacs and his friends disowned their previous writings, submitted to the Comintern authorities and went to the Soviet Union where they remained until 1945...
...Lukacs was forced to resign his chair of aesthetics at the University of Budapest, but in 1949, he announced his reconversion to Leninist orthodoxy, in the form of a severe self-criticism...
...ist casuistry more than its intended victim, the most serious apprehension is for the suppression of Lukacs' forthcoming Aesthetics, the fruit of his career...
...These lines were written long before Lukacs' conversion to Marxism, yet not only do they answer the question raised by Marx...
...It is always romantic youth who projects this behind our individual or common past...
...functionally, this is the same place as the "great moment" described in Lukacs' previous writings on tragedy...
...But "the form of life is no more abstract than the form of a poem" and "the essay aspires after truth but, like Saul who went to search for his father's donkeys and instead found a kingdom, so will the critic who is truly able to seek truth find, in the end, the goal he did not seek: life...
...For, during the revolution, the mass of the population takes its destiny into its own hands...
...But if faith is only a remote ideal and the word merely a mask for cynicism and hypocrisy then there is nothing to halt the cruel unfolding of tyranny...
...In this sense the conversions and reconversion of Lukacs to "Marxism" and his praise of "Stalin's genius" in his most recently published books, lie outside of his significance, and it is not through his frequent self-accusations and recantations that his evolution can be understood...
...And the class which will be able to solve the social problem, from whose viewpoint society can be reorganized, is the class of producers...
...Form thus becomes an ethical valuejudgment and life means either everyday life in which everything is possible because nothing is realized or the higher life with its absolute demands in which everything is lived to the utmost limit...
...Our fate shall be to enter the new life alive...
...268 ff...
...The revolution, on the other hand, can be nought but the free and conscious act of the proletariat...
...Since Marx, in fact, the question no longer is one of interpreting the world but of "changing it...
...Creativity is replaced by efficiency and meaning by order...
...One of the traits of Lukacs' life and work has been to accept the ultimate consequences of his choices...
...2 In Lukacs' later work the same terms will reappear in another form...
...POSTCRIFT: The preceding pages were written almost a year ago...
...The subject of Die Seele and die Formen is the isolated individual face to face with the universe...
...The same men in France would have been concerned with the outer world in terms of tragedy or revolution...
...Of Novalis, 5 Lukacs writes, "He asked Life, but Death brought him the answer It was the greatest tragedy of...
...So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth...
...how can life become essential...
...Through its struggle the proletariat develops its consciousness in such a way that when this evolution reaches its end the proletariat ceases to exist...
...Lukacs argues that it is not the content of a literary work which is determined by this substructure but the form...
...But we recall the special place the proletariat occupies in Marx because this class, being the last class in society, cannot liberate itself without liberating all of class society, and cannot undertake this liberation without the free and conscious act which is the revolution...
...Now, the most subtle form of repression lies in the stultifying effect of a great mass of correct information which is misappropriated by reified consciousness...
...8 Cf...
...Unaware that two days later he would betray them, this group charged Kadar to present the new party to the people...
...On November 4, 1956, 163 when Kadar was installed in power by Russian troops, Lukacs—along with Nagy—escaped to the Yugoslav Embassy and from there was ab ducted to Rumania with the other members of this group...
...MAY, 1957...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
