#georg lukács

[davidhudson]

Georg Lukács, April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971.

Montage by Andy King.

[hyperions-fate]

As a vital human being, as a representative of a new world, it is not only Werther who opposes the dead petrification of the aristocracy and philistinism, but time and again popular figures do also. Werther always represents what is popular and alive as against this torpidity. And the cultural elements which are very liberally inserted (references to painting, to Homer, Ossian, Goldsmith, etc.) always move in this direction: for Werther and for young Goethe, Homer and Ossian are great popular poets, poetic reflections and expressions of the productive life that exists uniquely and alone among the working people.

Georg Lukács, 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' (1936)

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«Los filósofos aparecen siempre, en el fondo —consciente o inconscientemente, queriendo o sin querer—, vinculados a su sociedad, a una determinada clase de ella, a sus aspiraciones progresivas o regresivas. Y lo que en su filosofía nos parece y es lo realmente personal, lo realmente original, se halla nutrido, informado, plasmado y dirigido precisamente por ese suelo (y por el destino histórico suyo). Incluso en aquellos casos en los que, a primera vista, parece prevalecer una posición individual que llega hasta el aislamiento frente a la propia clase, vemos, si calamos hondo, cómo esta posición se halla íntimamente unida a la situación de la clase y a las vicisitudes de la lucha de clases.»

Georg Lukács: El asalto a la razón. Ediciones Grijalbo, pág. 81. Barcelona-México, 1968.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dies-irae-1

[belacqui-pro-quo]

However, the 1963 attack on Lukács by Lichtheim in Encounter took on an added significance due to its absolute condemnation of Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason. In this work, Lukács had charted the relation of philosophical irrationalism—which first emerged on the European Continent, particularly in Germany, with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, and that became a dominant force near the end of the century—to the rise of the imperialist stage of capitalism. For Lukács, irrationalism, including its ultimate coalescence with Nazism, was no fortuitous development, but rather a product of capitalism itself. Lichtheim responded by charging Lukács with having committed an “intellectual crime” in illegitimately drawing a connection between philosophical irrationalism (associated with such thinkers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt) and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Lukács provocatively started his book by saying “the subject matter which presents itself to us is Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy.” But his critique was in fact much broader, seeing irrationalism as related to the imperialist stage of capitalism more generally. Hence, what most outraged Lukács’s critics in the West in the early 1960s was his suggestion that the problem of the destruction of reason had not vanished with the historic defeat of fascism, but that it was continuing to nurture reactionary tendencies, if more covertly, in the new Cold War era dominated by the U.S. imperium. “Franz Kafka’s nightmares,” Lichtheim charged, were treated by Lukács as evidence of “‘the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism,'” now represented by the United States. Yet, Lukács’s argument in this respect was impossible to refute. Thus, he wrote, in terms still meaningful today:

"In contrast to Germany, the U.S.A. had a constitution which was democratic from the start. And its ruling class managed, particularly during the imperialist era, to have the democratic forms so effectively preserved that by democratically legal means, it achieved a dictatorship of monopoly capitalism at least as firm as that which Hitler set up with tyrannic procedures. This smoothly functioning democracy, so-called, was created by the Presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court’s authority in constitutional questions, the finance monopoly over the Press, radio, etc., electioneering costs, which successfully prevented really democratic parties from springing up beside the two parties of monopoly capitalism, and lastly the use of terroristic devices (the lynching system). And this democracy could, in substance, realize everything sought by Hitler without needing to break with democracy formally. In addition, there was the incomparably broader and more solid economic basis of monopoly capitalism."

In these circumstances, irrationalism and the “piling up of cynical contempt for humanity,” Lukács insisted, was “the necessary ideological consequence of the structure and potential influence of American imperialism.” This shocking claim that there was a continuity in the relation of imperialism and irrationalism extending over the course of an entire century, from late nineteenth-century Europe, through fascism, and continuing in the new NATO imperium dominated by the United States, was strongly rejected at the time by many of those associated with the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. It was this, then, more than anything else, that led to the almost complete disavowal of Lukács’s later work (after his 1923 History and Class Consciousness) by left thinkers working in conjunction with the new post-Second World War liberalism.

Nevertheless, The Destruction of Reason was not subject to a systematic critique by those who opposed it, which would have meant confronting the crucial issues it raised. Instead, it was dismissed vituperatively out of hand by the Western left as constituting a “deliberate perversion of the truth,” a “700-page diatribe,” and a “Stalinist tract.” As one commentator has recently noted, “its reception could be summarized by a few death sentences” issued against it by leading Western Marxists.

[howieabel]

“Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution. ... Only the Russian Revolution really opened a window to the future; the fall of Czarism brought a glimpse of it, and with the collapse of capitalism it appeared in full view. ... at last! at last! a way for mankind to escape from war and capitalism.”  - Georg Lukács, 1967 Preface

[thelastgoodcountry]

“For Lukács, literary history composed an ordered and univocal past whose meaning and value were fixed by the wider history that determined it; the tradition handed down to the present by the 'progressive' epochs of the past was a set of compelling norms, a mortmain that literary legatees must honour on pain of disin­heritance. For Bloch, on the other hand, this history was the Erbe, a reservoir in which nothing was ever simply or definitively 'past', less a system of precepts than a sum of possibilities. Thus, no work was simply replaceable by another, by virtue of its ideological exchange-value, or wholly to be discounted because of its divergence from this or that aesthetic canon.”

— Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation 1, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács (Afterword by Fredric Jameson)

[thirdity]

The mimetic theory of art is simply far too crude. A book is a “portrayal”; it “depicts,” it “paints a picture”; the artist is a “spokesman.” The great realist tradition of the novel does not need to be defended in these terms.

Susan Sontag, "The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács"

[determinate-negation]

[baeddling]

"Neither the people who experience [history] nor the historian have direct access to immediate reality in these, its true structural forms. It is first necessary to search for them and to find them - and the path to their discovery is the path to a knowledge of the historical process in its totality. At first sight, anyone who insists upon immediacy may never go beyond this 'first sight' his whole life long - it may look as if the next stages implied a purely intellectual exercise, a mere process of abstraction. But this is an illusion which is itself the product of the habits of thought and feeling of mere immediacy where the immediately given form of the objects, the fact of their existing here and now and in this particular way appears to be primary, real and objective, whereas their 'relations' seem to be secondary and subjective. For anyone who sees things in such immediacy every true change must seem incomprehensible. The undeniable fact of change must then appear to be a catastrophe, a sudden, unexpected turn of events that comes from outside and eliminates all mediations. If change is to be understood at all it is necessary to abandon the view that objects are rigidly opposed to each other, it is necessary to elevate their interrelatedness and the interaction between these 'relations' and the 'objects' to the same plane of reality. The greater the distance from pure immediacy the larger the net encompassing the 'relations', and the more complete the integration of the 'objects' within the system of relations the sooner change will cease to be impenetrable and catastrophic, the sooner it will become comprehensible."

- Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

[pavor-noctvrnvs]

ʙᴇʟᴀ ʜᴀᴍᴠᴀꜱ: [ᴏɴ ʀᴇʟɪɢɪᴏɴ]

Excerpt from the novel Karneval¹ by Béla Hamvas (Carnival, 1985)

¹ Karnevál (Carnival) is a novel written by the Hungarian philosopher, essayist and historian of religions Béla Hamvas. Written between 1948 and 1951 (Darabos 2002, III: 23), when its author was thrown out of his library job – courtesy of Georg Lukács – and lived literally like a hermit in the scenic town Szentendre in the Danube Bend, it remained in manuscript until 1985, when – still under Communist rule – it was published, with minimal censorial cuts. Though 1184 pages long in two volumes, the novel was sold out within days, becoming a treasure and hailed as the key novel of its time and place. Yet, until today, awareness about it outside Hungary is practically nil, and even inside it is more known about than read, let alone discussed.

From Permanent Liminality and Modernity - Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels by Arpad Szakolczai, 2016, London, Routledge

[davidhudson]

Georg Lukács, April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971.

[onetwofeb]

We publish here the text of one of the last interviews with Georges Lukács, given to Hungarian television. The interview was prepared and conducted by András Kovács. Lukács talks about his youth and the influence Lenin had on his own development as a revolutionary activist. His aim is to convey the sense of Lenin’s grasp on the richness and complexity of historical reality. The interview was recorded in October 1969. We are publishing here the first part, which is mainly about Lukács’s relationship with Lenin’s thought and action.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Robert P. George

Published: Aug 7, 2023

“Critical race theory,” as the phrase is being used in contemporary parlance, has no fixed or agreed upon meaning. That makes it very difficult to analyze or discuss, and it accounts for the chaotic nature of the discussion.

More than 40 years ago, law professor Derek Bell, along with Richard Delgado, Maria Matsuda, Patricia Williams and others, developed an approach to the study of law as it bears on matters of race that came to be known as “critical race theory.”

It drew on an approach to law generally that had emerged a few years earlier known as “critical legal studies.” It also drew, very loosely, on a different and yet older school of thought about the analysis of social life known as “critical theory,” which was associated with the so-called “Frankfurt School” revisionist Marxists of the 1920s-1970s — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse and others.

Additional influencers included continental European “post-modernist” social critics and literary theorists whose work began gaining prominence in the U.S. in the mid-1970s.

The basic idea was to show that racism — and inequalities produced by racism or associated with it — were obscured by conventional, formalistic legal analysis and “liberal” ideology that purported, at least, to prescind from racial or other identitarian forms of categorization.

In its stronger versions, critical race theory was explicitly hostile not only to “legal formalism” and “liberalism,” but also to capitalism, rationalism and the idea of intellectual or analytical objectivity (and, correspondingly, to the belief in objective truth).

Critical race theory had a certain impact in the worlds of legal education and scholarship, but by no means became dominant. It competed with other intellectual movements, such as the “economic analysis of law” pioneered by libertarian or libertarian-leaning legal scholars such as Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook and Richard Epstein.

Critical race theory was clearly a left-wing movement; economic analysis was generally regarded as a right-wing movement. Of course, most legal scholars belonged to neither of these schools, but were traditional “formalists” and “liberals” who, whatever their politics, did legal scholarship more or less as it had traditionally been done, and taught their courses in that same manner.

What is being taught in many schools today is not critical race theory, if by “critical race theory” one means the writings of Bell, Delgado, Matsuda, Williams and others who developed this approach to law.

In fact, students are not given a formal “theory” of anything at all. But they are encouraged to view the world in a certain way — they are being taught to be identitarians — that is, to treat racial or gender identities as central to who they, themselves, and other people are. And this teaching is often justified in the name of “anti-racism.”

The world is divided up into two categories or classes: persecutors and persecuted, oppressors and victims. You are one or the other depending on your “identity.” If you are a “white, heterosexual, cisgender” person, and especially if you are one of those who is also male, then you enjoy “privilege” that makes you, wittingly or unwittingly, at least something of an oppressor — or, at a minimum, a beneficiary of oppression. If you are BIPOC (Black, indigenous, person of color) or LGBTQA+, then you are in the victim class. Everything is racialized or (more broadly) “identitized.”

In this way, students are taught to think of themselves as privileged or victimized. The privileged are infected by “whiteness,” which it is their duty to recognize in themselves and in society and to ameliorate. They must adopt — and express (for “silence is violence”) —certain moral and political views. They must confess that they have wrongly benefited from “white privilege” and they must adjust their behavior accordingly. They must be an “ally” and, while not leading (for that would be taking advantage of their privilege), they must support “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Supporting “equity” means rejecting merely formal equality, that is, treating people the same — equally — irrespective of race or ethnicity — which allegedly masks privilege and the racism and other forms of bigotry (e.g., “heteronormativity”) that created and sustains it. Demographic performance disparities arising in contexts of formal equality must be seen as the fruit of prejudice and injustice and, in the name of “equity,” not be allowed to stand. Concepts like “merit” must be abandoned — again, they allegedly mask privilege.

So let’s say that, based on test scores and grades, a class is admitted to a prestigious university that is 40% Asian, despite the fact that Asians are, let’s say, only 8% of the general population. What you have, despite formal equality, is a violation of equity. Asians are “overrepresented” while other racial categories may be “underrepresented.” 

Now you might ask: “How can it be a problem, since Asians are ‘non-white’ and therefore cannot benefit from ‘white privilege’?” The answer, in some circles, is strangely that Asians are “white-adjacent.”

Critics of critical race theory, and especially critics of what is being taught in the schools as “anti-racism,” regard it as being racist.

Supporters regard it as the only authentic form of anti-racism, condemning “liberal” theories and approaches that propose formal equality (and “color-blindness” in public policy) as mere masks for institutional or structural (“systemic”) racism.

Conservatives and old school liberals contrast the core ideas of critical race theory with the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King who dreamed of, and worked for, the day when his children, and all children, would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Advocates of critical race theory endorse the vision of Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of the bestselling “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” who says, “The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination toward equity.”

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

==

I don't much care what name you give it. I don't care if it's not technically "Critical Race Theory" (it's Critical Pedagogy). What I care about is teaching kids to be helpless and fragile as victims of "oppression" that doesn't exist, and guilty and apologetic for "oppression" they're not guilty of.

In Xianity, you're both helpless/fragile ("nothing without god") and guilty/apologetic ("Original Sin"). That's bad enough, but separating and distributing it out across society isn't just mentally unhealthy, it's socially unhealthy and adversarial.

[beguines]

Although our political problem differs in a fundamental way from that of communists at the beginning of the twentieth century—we have to organize individuals; they had to organize masses—Georg Lukács's insight into individualism as a barrier to collective will-formation is crucial to theorizing communist desire as collective desire. Lukács notes that the "freedom" of those of us brought up under capitalism is "the freedom of the individual isolated by the fact of property," a freedom over and against other, isolated individuals, "a freedom of the egoist, of the man who cuts himself off from others, a freedom for which solidarity and community exist at best only as ineffectual 'regulative ideas.'" He writes, ''The conscious desire for the realm of freedom can only mean consciously taking the steps that will really lead to it. And in the awareness that in contemporary bourgeois society individual freedom can only be conupt and corrupting because it is a case of unilateral privilege based on the unfreedom of others, this desire must entail the renunciation of individual freedom." Communist desire is a desire for collectivity.

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon

[hintergrundrauschen]

Das Sein bestimmt das Bewußtsein – nicht, zumindest nicht materialistisch. Denn der Materialismus schreibt sich nicht von der Materie her als vom Ersten, dem das Bewußtsein den Spiegel vorhielte, sondern von der in die negative Totalität des Kapitalverhältnisses gebannten Gattung. Der Materialismus ist keine Milieutheorie, kein Determinismus; überhaupt leitet er nicht ab. Er stellt kritisch dar. Er treibt, sagt Marx, »Kritik durch Darstellung« (MEW 29: 550), d. h. die objektivierte Selbstreflexion der in sich verkehrten Gesellschaft im Horizont ihrer ultimativen Krise als ihrer definitiven Wahrheit. Der Materialismus ist so keine Ursprungsphilosophie, sondern das Selbstbewußtsein negativer Dialektik, nicht die Große Methode von Intellektuellen, die sich aufs Objekt anwendet, sondern Kritik, die die verdinglichte Immanenz des Objekts aufsprengt. Der Materialismus ist nicht, schon gar nicht in seiner kategorischen Position als Kommunismus, Organ eines Interesses, Agent einer Klasse, Kommissar eines Programms: deshalb taugt er weder zur »Wissenschaft als Beruf« noch zu deren Konsequenz: »Politik als Beruf«, weil er das Widervernünftige der kapitalisierten Gesellschaft nicht ins System schachteln und zur Theorie vergolden mag. Materialismus ist der Antagonist von derlei Praktiken der Rationalisierung, dieses, wie Theodor W. Adorno sagt, »Defaitismus der Vernunft« (AGS 6: 15). Schließlich ist der Materialismus keinesfalls Marxismus. Denn Marxismus ist vorkritisch, eine Option bürgerlicher Aufklärung. Marxismus ist zudem antikritisch, eine Strategie radikalbürgerlicher, jakobinischer Intellektualität. Wo der Materialismus der marxschen Kritik der politischen Ökonomie von Ideologie spricht, da hört der Intellektuelle penetrant Interpretation, Meinung, Manipulation: Dies, um sich zur professionellen Vermittlung von sog. »Tatsachenurteilen« und sog. »Werturteilen« zu ermächtigen. Das ist wesentlich autoritär. Nicht nur, weil der Intellektuelle das gesellschaftliche Unwesen verdoppelt, indem er sich verhält wie das Geld zur Ware, d. h. als Philosoph, der den »gerechten Preis« ausmittelt. Sondern auch, weil der philosophische Akt schon in der bloßen Form seines Urteils jenen Unterschied von Wesen und Schein setzt, wonach, ökonomisch betrachtet, der Gebrauchswert bloß Erscheinung des Werts und, politisch betrachtet, das empirische Individuum nur die Fußnote des juristischen Subjekts ist: »faule Existenz«. Schließlich ist Marxismus konterrevolutionär, denn das zu emanzipierende »Wesen« der Menschen ist keinesfalls Arbeit; wäre es so, ginge es tatsächlich um die »Befreiung der Arbeit«, würde die Repression des Besonderen durchs Allgemeine, des Individuums durch die Arbeitskraft fortgeschrieben, während doch freie Assoziation und endlich, wie Adorno in den »Minima Moralia« den Kommunismus glücklich definiert, die Einheit der Vielen ohne Zwang herrschen soll, d. h. »die Verwirklichung des Allgemeinen in der Versöhnung der Differenzen« (AGS 4:114). Der Materialismus ist kein Marxismus, weil jedweder Marxismus seit Karl Kautsky und Lenin auf den barbarischen Satz Stalins führt: »Wer nicht arbeitet, der soll auch nicht essen (Stalin 1938: 159). Summa summarum ist der Materialismus kein Marxismus, weil er die marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie beim Wort nimmt und damit als die Einheit von Kapitalkritik, Staatskritik und Ideologiekritik, als die sie von Anfang an gedacht war: Das ist die Quintessenz.

Bruhn, Joachim (2012): Die Konstellation des Materialismus, in: Lukács, Georg u. a.: Verdinglichung, Marxismus, Geschichte. Von der Niederlage der Novemberrevolution zur kritischen Theorie. Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Markus Bitterolf und Denis Maier, ça ira-Verlag, Freiburg, S. 367f.

[foraredfuture]

A rare photo of Georg Lukács being happy. Usually he looks rather stern in photos.