Summary
Marxist philosopher and critic whose Aesthetik (1963) is the subject of “Between Chance and Determinism”, the sixth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: a bulldog Marxist whose Marxism was a necessity regulating his relations with the world, and whose late aesthetics steer between determinism and chance as forces building the artwork (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.81-88).
Details
- His last major work is the two-volume systematic philosophy of art, Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen (1963), still not well known in the West; Béla Királyfalvi’s The Aesthetics of György Lukács covers its main points reliably but misses his concrete examples and his eccentric, pre-Marxist eclecticism (PDF p.81).
- Since his death in 1971 his reputation and influence are lacking in effect upon modern critical discourse, despite his invention of the conceptions of prototype, vanguard and precursor; in literature he stood always for the nineteenth century, for Shakespeare, Goethe, Marx, Hegel, Balzac and Tolstoy (PDF p.82-83).
- Marxism for Lukács was not merely a collection of truths, nor even a method of analysis, but a sort of necessity, first for correcting, then for transforming and conducting, his relations with the world; after 1918 it gave his triad of temporal phases — loss, alienation, and obliteration — a discipline (the dialectic) and a place (the essay) (PDF p.83-84).
- The main problematics and idioms to which he gave currency have less to do centrally with history than with marginality and eccentricity vis-à-vis history: reification, proletariat class consciousness, alienation, totality (PDF p.84).
- “History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.” (quoted PDF p.85)
- In the late aesthetics the main category of art is speciality, particularity, concreteness (Besonderheit), connected with man’s wholeness and with history; totality has become the category through which art overcomes infinite mediation (PDF p.87).
- His wholly controlled dialectic between the artwork and its circumstances allows him to steer confidently between determinism and chance as forces building the artwork (PDF p.88).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Georges Poulet, Edward Said