## 1. Life and Career



Lukacs was born Bernat Gyorgy Lowinger on
April 13, 1885, in Budapest. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science
from the University of Kolozsvar in 1906 and a doctorate from
the University of Budapest in 1909. In the following years,
Lukacs made a name for himself as a literary and aesthetic
theorist, working in Budapest, Berlin (where he was influenced by
Georg Simmel), Florence, and Heidelberg. In 1910 and 1911,
Lukacs published his essay collection *Soul and Form*
and, together with Lajos Fulep, founded the short-lived
avant-garde journal *A Szellem* (*The Spirit*).
Lukacs's world was sent into turmoil at that time by the
death of his close friend Leo Popper and by the suicide of Irma
Seidler, who had been his lover. He felt responsible for Seidler's
death, and it proved to have an enormous impact on him, as reflected
in his 1911 essay "On Poverty of Spirit."



During the same period, Lukacs developed a close connection
with Max and Marianne Weber in Heidelberg, with Ernst Bloch, and with
the Neo-Kantian philosophers Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask. Between
1912 and 1914 he worked on a first attempt to formulate a systematic
approach to art, which remained unpublished during his lifetime
(*GW* 16). In the First World War, Lukacs was exempted
from frontline military service. In 1914, he married the Russian
political activist (and convicted terrorist) Jelena Grabenko.



In 1913, Lukacs began participating in the influential
"Sunday circle" of Budapest intellectuals, which included
Karl Mannheim. After returning from wartime service in the Hungarian
censor's office, he published *The Theory of the Novel*
(1916). In 1917, despite Weber's support, he failed to receive a
Habilitation (teaching qualification) at the University of Heidelberg.
Between 1916 and 1918, he also resumed his work on aesthetics, which
resulted in the unpublished manuscript of the so-called
"Heidelberg Aesthetics" (*GW* 17). To the surprise
of many of his friends, Lukacs joined the Hungarian Communist
Party in 1918, although, as his essay on "Bolshevism as a Moral
Problem" attests, not without reservations.



Following his rapid ascent as one of the leading thinkers of the
Communist Party, Lukacs became more involved in day-to-day
politics. After the revolution in 1919, he first served as a deputy
commissar and then as commissar of public education in Bela Kun's
government. Later, when war broke out, he served as a political
commissar in the Hungarian Red Army (in which role he ordered the
execution of several soldiers; see Kadarkay 1991: 223). After the
communist government was defeated, Lukacs fled to Vienna at the
end of 1919, where he married his second wife, Gertrud Bortstieber.
Charged with coordinating the clandestine activities of the exiled
Communist Party, he remained under constant threat of expulsion to
Hungary.



In 1923, Lukacs published his most famous work, the essay
collection *History and Class Consciousness*. In these essays,
Lukacs argues forcefully for a philosophically self-reflective
version of Marxism as a solution to the problems that vexed modern
philosophy, develops the idea of capitalist society as a
"totality" that is totally integrated as the value-form,
sketches a distinctive Marxist epistemology, and identifies structural
unfreedom (rather than exploitation or inequality) as the fundamental
problem of capitalism. In these essays, Lukacs draws not only
on Marxist classics but also on sociological insights into the
character of modern societies that he acquired through Weber and
Simmel. His reformulation of the philosophical premises of Marxism
entails a rejection of the then contemporary forms of materialism and
scientism endorsed by many Soviet party intellectuals. Unsurprisingly,
the party orthodoxy condemned the book as an expression of
ultra-leftism (in spite of Lukacs's pro-Leninist revisions to
the articles in the volume that had already appeared previously; see
Lowy 1979: 172-179).



Nevertheless, the book had a decisive influence on the early Frankfurt
School. Lukacs participated in the 1923 "Marxist Work
Week," which laid the foundation for the founding of the
Institute for Social Research, and there is evidence that the major
critical theorists of the time were all deeply impressed by the
reification essay in particular (Stahl 2018). Overall, *History and
Class Consciousness* cemented Lukacs's position as a
leading scholar of Marxism, putting him at the forefront of the
debates of the time (an example being his quickly written study on
Lenin on the occasion of the Soviet leader's death in 1924). In
1928, however, Lukacs had to give up his political activities
after he presented the so-called "Blum Theses" (see 1928).
In this draft of a party platform for Hungary, which was named after
his party alias, he argued for a broad, democratic dictatorship of
workers and peasants. These theses were condemned as a right-wing
deviation by the party (which denounced him as both a left-wing and a
right-wing dissident within a span of five years).



Following another arrest by the Austrian authorities, Lukacs
left Vienna in 1929, first for Berlin and then for Budapest, where he
went underground for three months. He was eventually summoned by the
Soviet party leadership to Moscow, where he stayed from 1930 on,
leaving only for Comintern missions in Berlin and for Tashkent during
the war. In Moscow, Lukacs held a position at the Marx-Engels
Institute. During this time, he first came into contact with early
works by Marx that had previously remained
unpublished. As Lukacs became (at least outwardly) increasingly
subservient to the Stalinist orthodoxy, he publicly retracted the
views espoused in *History and Class Consciousness* (see
1933b). The degree of Lukacs's agreement with Stalinism is
disputed to this day (see Lichtheim 1970; Deutscher 1972; Kolakowski
1978; Pike 1988). However, it is clear from his writings that while he
publicly defended Stalinist dogmas in both aesthetics and politics
during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (1933a, 1938, 1951), he later
repeatedly criticized Stalin and Stalinism (see 1957, 1962).



In 1944, Lukacs returned to Budapest and became a professor at
the local university. In 1948, he published his two-volume study
*The Young Hegel* (written partly during the 1930s in Moscow).
In 1949, he also traveled to Paris to engage in a debate about
existentialism and Marxism with Sartre. The works of this period
reflect both his allegiance to orthodox Soviet Marxism and his
uneasiness with the Stalinist post-war situation. A widely criticized
writing from this time is *The Destruction of Reason*,
published in 1954. It denounced much of the German philosophical and
literary tradition after Marx as an outgrowth of
"irrationalism" and as bearing responsibility for the
ascent of National Socialism. During this time, Lukacs also
continued to defend a conservative ideal of realism in aesthetics (see
1951).



After again being subjected to criticism from the party and virtually
excluded from public life in the mid-1950s, Lukacs was able to
embark on a new chapter following the Hungarian uprising against
Soviet rule in 1956. Following Stalin's death, not only did it
become increasingly possible for him to publicly criticize Stalinism
and to again voice his vision of the future of Marxism (for the first
time since 1928), arguing that the Communist Party should regain
public trust by competing with other leftist forces within a
multi-party democracy, but he also served in the short-lived Nagy
government as minister for public education. After the subsequent
Soviet invasion, he was arrested and imprisoned in Romania. Unlike
other members of the government, he was not executed but merely
expelled from the Communist Party, which he did not rejoin until 1969.
From the 1960s on, Lukacs--having had to retire from all
academic positions--worked on his two-volume *Specificity of
the Aesthetic* and on a Marxist ethics that would later partly
become the *Ontology of Social Being*, which remained
unfinished in his lifetime. He also continued to publish extensively
on literature and art. Lukacs passed away on June 4, 1971, in
Budapest.


## 2. Early Writings



Lukacs's early writings--before his turn to Marxism in
1918--are animated by concerns that are also present, albeit
transformed, in his later political thought. In this period,
Lukacs formulates a sophisticated aesthetic theory and critique
of modern culture, which he diagnoses as being characterized by an
insurmountable abyss between objective cultural forms and the richness
of "genuine life."



He takes up the issue of the relationship between "form"
and "life" in three different but closely interconnected
discussions. First, there is the question of how the element of
"form" distinguishes art as a separate sphere of value.
This is most explicitly discussed in his two attempts at a systematic
philosophy of art. Second, there is the sociological-historical
question about the relation between (individual and collective) life
and aesthetic and ethical forms in modern bourgeois society. This
topic is dominant both in the *History of the Modern Drama*
(1909) and in the *Theory of the Novel* (1916). A third strand
concerns existential and ethical questions, most explicitly discussed
in *Soul and Form* and in the essay "On Poverty of
Spirit."



Alongside "form", two central concepts in
Lukacs's early thought are "totality" and
"life." By "totality" Lukacs means a
whole set of elements that are meaningfully interrelated in such a way
that the essence of each element can only be understood in relation to
the others. "Life" denotes the intrinsic richness and
potentiality of experiences and actions. Both individual and social
life are in principle capable of forming an integrated totality.
However, this is only the case if the essential properties of life's
elements are intelligible in terms of their relations to other
particulars of life. Lukacs claims that this was the case in
Homeric Greece, where a totality of meaning was immanent to life
itself. This immanence of meaning and the totality it constituted were
lost in subsequent historical developments, however, as form became
external to life.



In regard to the relation between form and life, we can distinguish
between forms that are forms *of* life itself, produced by that
life, and abstract forms which are imposed onto life from the outside.
When a form is imposed on life that is not a form of that specific
mode of life (or if the form in question cannot be realized in
empirical life), such an imposition always runs the risk of distorting
the meanings of the particular actions or persons. But at the same
time, form is necessary for life to become intelligible and unified
(see Bernstein 1984: 77-80). Within the sphere of individual
agency, persons face this dilemma in regard to the choice of either
authentically expressing the particular meanings of their own life,
risking the loss of form and, consequently, the loss of intelligible
access to these meanings, or of imposing an external form as a
normative demand on their life, risking distortion, inauthenticity and
even the denial of life itself.


### 2.1 Life and Form



Except for the *History of the Modern Drama* (1909),
Lukacs's earliest work is self-consciously essayistic in
form. As Lukacs explains in "On the Nature and Form of
the Essay" (1911a), this is because the essay addresses life
through the medium of form (1911a: 8) and takes form (in particular,
the form of a work of art) seriously as a subject. Essayistic writing
is not only writing *about* form, however; it must always
examine the conditions under which life can be given form in the first
place. Modernity has made this problem more virulent insofar as the
existing means by which life can give itself form have become
problematic, such that we now experience them as abstractions.



Following Weber, Lukacs characterizes the bourgeois form of
life in terms of the primacy of an ethics of work and inner strength.
Corresponding to this form of life, Lukacs claims, there was
once a form of art that was capable of expressing an unproblematic
relationship between life and form (for example, in Theodor Storm's
case, the insight that the bourgeois citizen must concentrate on work
and entrust the formation of life to fate; see 1910a: 60). However,
when that bourgeois life-form disappeared, the remaining bourgeois
"way of life" was transformed into a kind of asceticism
that grew hostile to life itself. The same holds for the corresponding
movement, within art, of rejecting life in favor of "art for its
own sake," that is, a form of artistic production that
self-consciously (and with justification) refuses to express life
because it has no foundation in a corresponding life form.



Lukacs thus argues that modern art is caught in the dilemma of
having to achieve harmony between life and form, either at the expense
of life's intensity or at a purely symbolic and imaginary
level--by effectively withdrawing from life (an idea he discusses
in reference to Novalis; see 1908: 50; see also Butler 2010: 9). In
both cases, art turns against life. By contrast, a genuine attempt to
give "real" or "absolute life" (that is,
genuinely meaningful life as opposed to the chaos of "empirical
life"; see Kavoulakos 2014: 22-26; Markus 1983: 11;
Lowy 1979: 104) a distinct form necessarily involves the
rejection of the meaningless necessities of ordinary life. In
"The Metaphysics of Tragedy" (1910b), Lukacs
ascribes this task to modern tragedy. When nature and fate have become
"terrifyingly soulless" (1910b: 154) and any hope for a
"friendly order" (ibid.) has disappeared, the tragic
becomes a task--that of rejecting ordinary life in favor of the
opportunity to "live within the periphery of tragedy"
(1910b: 173).



The ethical dimension of the relation between life and form is made
most explicit in Lukacs's essay on Kierkegaard and in
"On Poverty of Spirit." Kierkegaard's rejection of
Regine Olsen's love is lauded for its expression of the need to give
one's own empirical life a definite, unambiguous form, thereby
transforming it into absolute life--in Kierkegaard's case, by
attempting to perform an authentic *gesture* (1910c: 28). Yet
Kierkegaard's ethical position suffered from a defect: he attempted
to reconcile ordinary life with a form that was only appropriate for
genuine, "absolute" life. Due to its inherent ambiguity
and foreignness to form, ordinary life cannot ever be successfully
lived in such a way (1910c: 40). Thus, Kierkegaard's attempt to live
a genuine life was doomed from the start.



The conclusion of this line of thought seems to point towards an
insoluble dilemma. But the 1911 essay "On Poverty of
Spirit"--a fusion of an autobiographical reflection on
Lukacs's role in Irma Seidler's suicide and an examination
of theoretical issues--points to a different conclusion: the
rejection of an "ethics of duty." Lukacs argues
that our adherence to a formal, rule-based ethics is to be blamed for
our alienation from life. Even though the submission to
"form" that is implicit in adopting a formalist ethics is
the basis from which social life becomes possible in the first place,
it prevents people from forming "human relationships." As
Lukacs writes, "[f]orm [...] is like a bridge that
separates" (1911b: 44). Lukacs contrasts such an ethics
with the ideal of "goodness," which represents "real
life." "Goodness" involves a rejection of rules and
duties towards others in favor of pure actions that may be sinful,
chaotic, and futile. The soul of the good person, Lukacs
claims, "is a pure white slate, upon which fate writes its
absurd command" (1911b: 48). This anti-consequentialist and
anti-deontological ethics of pure action ultimately culminates in a
conception of "works." Only by sacrificing themselves for
the sake of works can people (or, as Lukacs's narrator
claims, "men") empty themselves of the psychological
content of everyday life and prepare themselves for the grace of
goodness. This final line of thought points towards a social utopia:
by overcoming the alienated world of "mechanical forces"
(1911b: 45) through works that transform life, we may recover a
genuine community with and a direct knowledge of others wherein
"subject and object collapse into each other" (1911b: 46).
This vision of a final overcoming of alienation seems to offer a way
out of the theoretical impasse of Lukacs's earlier position,
but at the cost of endorsing ethical decisionism.


### 2.2 Neo-Kantian Aesthetics



While Lukacs's cultural criticism seeks to capture
distinctively modern phenomena, its claims are backed up by an
aesthetic theory that aims to discover transcendental conditions of
the aesthetic that are immune to historical variability. Even though
Lukacs's early work draws on Georg Simmel's theory of
culture and on the Nietzschean idea of an intrinsic tension between
life and form, its central anchoring point is a Neo-Kantian framework
(for a detailed discussion of the influence of Emil Lask in
particular, see Kavoulakos 2014). This framework is most clearly
evident in his two systematic attempts to produce a philosophy of art
in Heidelberg (*GW* 16 and 17). Here, Lukacs seeks to
provide a philosophical explanation of the conditions of the
possibility of art that takes the *work of art* as the
fundamental locus of aesthetic meaning, rather than deriving this
meaning from either artistic creation or aesthetic experience.



In his early aesthetic thought, Lukacs
distinguishes--taking up Neo-Kantian terminology--between
different spheres of reality. The most immediate sphere is the
"reality of experience," in which everything appears as an
object of qualitative experience, or (in the 1916 version) as having a
given object character (*Gegenstandlichkeit*) that is
fundamentally heterogeneous. Lukacs envisages two arguments
concerning the role that art can play in relation to this sphere: in
the 1912 *Philosophy of Art*, he argues that any adequate
communication of meaning between people must appear impossible from
within the experiential sphere, since the infinite qualitative
particulars of experience cannot ever be successfully communicated.
However, the desire to communicate meaning drives people to adopt
different means of communication that, although inadequate for
expressing the reality of experience, enable them to overcome their
separateness by relating to each other in terms of other spheres of
reality (for example, the sphere of logical validity). While logic and
ethics constitute "pure" spheres of communicable meaning,
however, the categories of the aesthetic cannot be fully separated
from experience.



In the 1916 *Aesthetics*, Lukacs adopts a more radical
version of this Neo-Kantian argument: whereas the reality of everyday
life is characterized by a heterogeneity of forms of objects, the
aesthetic sphere of validity is characterized by a distinct form of
objectivity that is legislated *as a norm* by experience
itself. Thus, the contrast between everyday life and art is not one
between experience and validity but one between the heterogeneity of
everyday life and the homogeneous form that is appropriate to the
autonomy of experience (*GW* 17: 36). Consequently, in
comparison to the logical and ethical spheres of validity, aesthetics
has a distinct status. While in these other spheres of validity
objective norms and subjective attitudes are fully separable, the
autonomy of experience legislates a normative standard that involves a
specific relationship between subjective experience and objective
norm.



The value that defines the aesthetic sphere, Lukacs claims, can
only be derived from the concept of the work of art since this concept
is presupposed by all descriptions of artistic production or aesthetic
experience. Even though neither production nor reception is
constitutive of the value of works of art, they can still serve as a
basis for reconstructing the independent normative status of
aesthetics. The result of this analysis is a conception of the work of
art as an ideal *homogeneous unity of form and material*. In
the 1912 *Philosophy of Art*, this unity is characterized in
terms of the experiential content's becoming completely communicable
and containing all possible aspects of a possible experience, thus
forming a "concrete totality" (*GW* 16: 83, 91, 112
and *GW* 17: 110) of its own world within itself. By contrast,
in the 1916 *Aesthetics*, it is brought about through a process
in which the constitutive function of experience becomes completely
autonomous, determining both form and content. Such an ideal work of
art is, in virtue of this harmony, a Utopian fulfillment of the
attitudes that are already operative in the ordinary world of
experience (*GW* 16: 82).



Works of art therefore present us with an "immanent
utopia" of experience, that is, with the vision of a form of
experience that is ordered and unified by a constitutive
"standpoint" (*GW* 16: 82) such that form and
content are completely appropriate for each other. Because of these
features, such an experience embodies a maximum of objectivity in the
subject's relation to an object that is completely appropriate to
its subjectivity (*GW* 17: 100). This finally answers the
question regarding the *a priori* conditions of art: as an
ideal of a particular kind of possible experience, the work of art is
always historically specific. However, both the *potential* to
become a totality in virtue of their form and the normative
*demand* to do so are timeless, *a priori* conditions of
the possibility of works of art in the Neo-Kantian sense (*GW*
16: 168).


### 2.3 Modernity and the Loss of Totality



Another aspect of Lukacs's early work concerns the historical
changes undergone by our relation to form. In his early analysis of
the history and sociology of drama (*History of the Modern
Drama*, 1909), Lukacs develops an account of the connection
between aesthetic genres and historical changes. He argues that drama
is connected to specific historical circumstances: for drama to exist,
there needs to be a prevailing *Weltanschauung* (*GW*
15: 44) that seeks drama as its preferred mode of expression. This
tragic *Weltanschauung* only exists in periods of societal
disintegration, when individual emotions and objective facts are so
mismatched as to elicit heroic forms of denial of social reality.



In *The Theory of the Novel* (1916), Lukacs turns
towards the philosophy of history in order to clarify the relationship
between the historical changes undergone by transcendental standpoints
and the "pure forms" of aesthetic genres. The primary
object of his discussion is the epic: Lukacs claims that works
of art that belong to this genre--for example Homeric epic poetry
and the modern novel--must always express the objective reality
of social and individual human life *as it is* (1916: 46).
However, because of the distinctive "metaphysical
conditions" of different epochs, they express this objective
reality in radically different ways. Homeric epic poetry takes as its
starting point a world that constitutes a *closed totality*
(1916: 33), that is, a world in which life, culture, meaning, actions,
and social institutions form a harmonious whole. In particular,
Lukacs claims that in Ancient Greece the "essence"
of being was immanent to life rather than having to be sought out in a
transcendent realm. Furthermore, there was no gap between individual
consciousness and objectified meaning in the world that would have
required the individual to project meaning onto the world. Individuals
in Ancient Greece only had to accept the totality of meaning within
their world, even if they were, in some particular situation or
another, unable to understand it. By contrast, modern society is
constitutively alienated: merely conventional social institutions
devoid of meaning are disconnected from individuals and their highly
individualized self-understandings. Therefore, in modern society
meaning can only be found within the inner life of the individual
(1916: 61).



Starting from this description of a closed totality, Lukacs
claims that the intellectual history of the modern world was
prefigured in the cultural history of Ancient Greece, in the movement
from epic poetry to tragedy and then ultimately to philosophy. In the
course of this movement, the sources of meaning became increasingly
more external to immediate life. As a consequence, Lukacs
argues that these three genres inhabit three different
"transcendental *loci*" (1916: 36). Tragedy and
philosophy reflect the loss of a meaningful totality, whereas the
possibility of epic poetry depends on its immanence. As Lukacs
claims, this is why "art forms become subject to a
historico-philosophical dialectic" (1916: 39).



The cause of this development is a loss of totality through historical
changes that transform the objective institutions of social life into
mere conventions and into a purely external "second
nature" (1916: 62f., 112). This alienation of the individual
from the world leads to a situation of "transcendental
homelessness" (1916: 40, 60) in which individuals must take up a
purely normative "should be" (1916: 47) stance toward the
world. The novel is always related to the development of such
individuals. This development can take the form of a
subjective-idealist illusion (e.g., as in *Don Quixote*) or of
a disillusion, that is, of individuals understanding the impossibility
of finding meaning in the world. Lukacs consequently argues
that the novel is the form of epic writing that is appropriate to a
specific moment in history. In modernity, epic writing no longer has a
distinct form that can express a particular relation between life and
essence within a totality. Rather, the form of the novel is an attempt
to deal with the absence of this relation (1916: 59; see Jameson 1971:
172).



Lukacs's understanding of alienation as a historical loss of
totality and the consequent problem of form allows him to formulate
the kernel of a Utopian vision: the very form of the novel points to
the possibility of a renewed relation between the individual and the
world in which meaning can again be found. 


## 3. History and Class Consciousness



Not only did Lukacs's 1918 conversion to communism and his
subsequent engagement with philosophical Marxism confound his friends,
but even today's readers can find it difficult to track the many
shifts in Lukacs's theoretical commitments between 1918 and
1923.



In the December 1918 article "Bolshevism as an Ethical
Problem," Lukacs draws a connection between his newfound
Marxist convictions and his previous ethical views: whereas the
historical necessity of class struggle is only a *descriptive*
claim in Marxism, the *normative*, ethical requirement to
establish a classless society must be separated from issues of truth
and recognized as a utopian form of ethical idealism, appropriate for
the expression of a pure will. In 1918, Lukacs still thought
that this insight led to a paradox: In order for the proletarian
"messianic class" (1918: 218) to overcome class society,
it must first seize power by creating the most extreme form of class
dominance, i.e., a dictatorship. Bolshevism thus presupposes that evil
actions can produce good outcomes, or, as Lukacs puts it in the
essay "Tactics and Ethics," that tragedy cannot be avoided
in revolutionary politics (1919a: 10). By the time *History and
Class Consciousness* appeared, however, Lukacs seems to
have thought of himself as having found another conception of
revolutionary action that paved the way for a new approach to
political practice.


### 3.1 Reification Theory



At the foundation of this new conception lies the theory of
reification that Lukacs introduces in the essay
"Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."
This essay is credited not only with being one of the foundational
texts of "Western Marxism" (Anderson 1976), but also with
spelling out the paradigmatic "central problem"
(Brunkhorst 1998) of critical theory.



Lukacs frames his argument as an extension of Marx's analysis
of the "fetishism of the commodity form" in *Capital I*(Marx [1867] 1992: 163-176), where Marx refers to the fact
that social relations between producers of commodities appear in
capitalism under the guise of objective, calculable, properties of
things ("value"). 



While in Marx the form that social relations acquire due to this
fetishism (i.e., a form that furnishes commodities with features that
make taking an instrumental, quantifying attitude towards
them--and ultimately towards social relations
themselves--appropriate) is analyzed mainly with regard to how it
distorts the relationship between subjects and their economic
circumstances, Lukacs adopts a far more radical claim. The
commodity form, he argues, has gradually become the "universal
category of society as a whole" (1923a: 86). In capitalist
societies, the commodity form even becomes the dominant *form of
objectivity* itself (*Gegenstandlichkeitsform*). Drawing
on debates in contemporary Neo-Kantian thought (see Lotz 2020:
27-31; Feenberg 2017: 113; Kavoulakos 2018), Lukacs
remains committed to the Kantian idea that the condition of the
possibility of synthesizing our experience into an experience of
objects depends on our having access to "forms," which
thus have a transcendental status. In contrast to Kant, however,
Lukacs understands these forms as both socially shared and
historically variable. In capitalist societies in particular, the
commodity form thus becomes the transcendental determining factor of
both objectivity and subjectivity.



Both the objective and the subjective dimension of the emergence of
the commodity form are analyzed by Lukacs as emerging from
concrete changes to the economic structure. On the objective side,
when industrial work processes become rationalized as a result of
their subsumption under the dominance of commodity exchange, these
processes no longer display the typical "unity" of
intentionally integrated human work. As each individual labor effort
can in principle constitute an input to many products, each operation
is related to a "set of heterogeneous use-values" (1923a:
89) and thus no longer forms part of a unique, unified work process.
On the subjective side, reification entails the fragmentation of human
experience, leading to an attitude of "contemplation" in
which one passively adapts to a law-like system of social
"second nature" and to an objectifying stance towards
one's own mental states and capacities.



As Lukacs writes concerning the commodity form:



> 
> [it] stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his
> qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his
> personality, they are things which he can "own" or
> "dispose of" like the various objects of the external
> world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be
> cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic
> "qualities" into play without their being subjected
> increasingly to this reifying process. (1923a: 100)



Lukacs calls this development "reification." It is
a process that primarily affects the objective way in which human
beings relate to the totality of social relationships that is
constitutive of the meaning of their actions, separating this totality
(and thus the meaning of their actions) from their self-understanding
and establishing it as a form of objective reality. Derivatively, the
socially created features of objects (primarily their features as
commodities), relations between individual people, and their relations
to themselves also acquire the character of a subject-independent,
alien objectivity (Stahl 2011). The objective and subjective
dimensions of the dominance of the commodity form constitute a complex
of reification because the properties of objects, subjects, and social
relations become "thing-like" in this particular way.
These properties become independent, quantifiable, non-relational
features that must remain alien to any subjective meaning that one
could attach to them.



With this description of the way in which the dynamics of capitalist
society affect not only people materially but the very form of
objectivity by which they can relate to the world, Lukacs
combines Weber's theory of rationalization, Simmel's theory of
modern culture, and his own idea of a modern contradiction between
"form" and "life" (see Dannemann 1987) with
Marx's theory of value. The resulting theory of reification as a
socially induced pathology not only had considerable influence on the
Frankfurt School (Stahl 2018; on Lukacs's influence on
Adorno, see Schiller 2011 and Braunstein/Duckheim 2015; on the
engagement of the later generations of Frankfurt School criticism with
Lukacs, see Habermas 1984: 355-365; Honneth 2008; cf.
also Chari 2010, Kavoulakos 2017) but also led Lucien Goldmann to
speculate that Heidegger's *Being and Time* should be read as
an answer to Lukacs (Goldmann 1977).



The theory of social rationalization on which Lukacs's
argument rests goes beyond a mere description of economic relations,
towards a theory of cultural change. The core of this argument is the
claim that the dominance of the commodity form in the economic sphere
must necessarily lead to the dominance of *rational
calculation* and *formal reason* in society as a whole and
will consequently involve a break with the organic unity and totality
of previous forms of human existence. By forcing politics and law to
adapt to the demands of capitalist exchange, the commodity form
transforms these spheres into a mode of rational calculability (a line
of thought that clearly stems from Weber)--which helps to explain
the rise of the bureaucratic state and the dominance of formal,
positive law that continues to alienate individuals from society and
encourages their passivity in the face of objectified, mechanical
rules (1923a: 98).



This development leads to a contradictory situation on both the
practical and the theoretical level: because the process of
rationalization precludes grasping society as a totality, it cannot
ever succeed in making society subject to rational calculation in its
entirety, for it must exclude all irrational, qualitative dimensions
from such calculation. Here, Lukacs rephrases his earlier
argument regarding the tension between form and life in Marxist terms
(Lopez 2019: 72), as an inability of theories that express a reified
perspective to grasp the concrete, material content of history. One
example, Lukacs alleges, is the inability of economics as a
science to explain the movements of the economy (1923a:
105-107). The same holds for formalist models of law, which
cannot theoretically acknowledge the interdependence of their
principles and their social content and must therefore treat this
content as an extra-legal, irrational foundation (1923a:
107-110).



This analysis of the social and cultural features of reification
allows Lukacs, in a third step, to present an analysis of the
"antinomies of bourgeois thought" (1923a:
110)--defending the radical claim that the unsolved
epistemological problems of the entirety of modern philosophy are
rooted in its failure to break through capitalist reification. In
attempting to achieve a rational system of principles, Lukacs
claims, modern philosophy is always confronted with the issue of there
being a "content" necessary for the application of its
formal principles of knowledge, a content which cannot be integrated
into a formal philosophical system--a prime example of which is
Kant's "thing in itself" (see Bernstein 1984:
15-22). Kantian dualism is nothing other than the most
self-conscious expression of this "hiatus" between subject
(the source of rational unity) and object (the source of non-rational
content). This dualism between subject and object--and, in
ethics, between norms and facts--haunts modern philosophy. As
Fichte and Hegel partly recognize, Lukacs argues, this problem
arises only because modern thought takes the contemplative subject of
reified self-world relations as its paradigm, ignoring the alternative
of an *active* subject that is engaged in the
*production* of the content. Fichte's proposal to postulate
an "identical subject-object" (that is, a subject that
*produces* objectivity by positing objective reality as
distinct from itself) is also the key to Lukacs' answer. But
Fichte's solution still suffers from an inadequacy in that he
conceives of the constitutive activity still as the act of an
individual subject confronted with an external, alien reality (1923a:
124).



An alternative is to be found in the idealist conception of art as an
activity directed at the creation of a meaningful totality and in
Schiller's view of artistic activity, which is not an application of
external, given laws but a form of play (1923a: 138). However, the
conceptualization of practice from the standpoint of aesthetics
obscures its historical dimension. Lukacs acknowledges Hegel as
the thinker who came nearest to finding a solution to this problem by
recognizing that it is the *totality of concrete history*,
understood as the expression of a subject, of a "we",
which is the only standpoint from which the antinomies between form
and content can be overcome (1923a: 146f.). But Hegel adopts a
mythologizing view of this subjectivity in terms of a "World
Spirit" that lies beyond any concrete historical agency. The
subject Hegel desperately tried to find could only be discovered by
Marx--it is the proletariat to which Lukacs assigns the
role of the "subject-object" of history (1923a: 149).


### 3.2 Standpoint Theory and Revolution



In the "Reification" essay, Lukacs is one of the
first authors defending what has later come to be called a
"standpoint theory" and thereby has become an important
forerunner especially of models in feminist epistemology (Jameson
2009).



In particular, Lukacs argues that the position of the
proletariat is one of epistemic advantage concerning the acquisition
of knowledge about society. Both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
are confronted, Lukacs argues, with a reified social reality
(1923a: 164). They will therefore form correct beliefs about this
reality, but only insofar as they understand it in the form in which
it is immediately ("*unvermittelt*") given to them.
This is contrasted by Lukacs to a different understanding which
realizes that the nature of all the individual elements of social
reality is ultimately to be explained in terms of their role and
relationships within the totality of society, which is governed by the
commodity form as its structuring principle. Although the
"empiricist" beliefs that are immediately accessible to
all members of society are thus not strictly speaking false, they are
incomplete, insofar as they are insufficient to comprehend the
ultimate nature of social phenomena, and they are misleading, insofar
as theorists will tend, on the basis of these beliefs, to adopt
further, false beliefs about that nature. Lukacs emphatically
does not state, however, that the proletariat, merely in virtue of its
social position, has access to this superior understanding, but that
the proletariat is capable of achieving it. While the bourgeoisie must
remain "imprisoned within this immediacy" (1923a, 147),
the proletariat is "forced" to go beyond it.



Which feature of the proletariat's existence gives rise to this
advantage is a matter of interpretive disagreement. While many later
forms of feminist standpoint theories assume that social positions
give rise to epistemic opportunities in virtue of the distinctive
experiences they make available that are positively contributing to
acquiring knowledge (see, for example, Jaggar 1983, 371, Smith 1974,
7), other feminist authors, such as Hartsock (1983), draw on the idea
that the distinctive proletarian standpoint might be one that is
closer to use-value than exchange value, since workers have to
interact more directly with material objects, rather than just
exchanging them. While some authors (such as Jameson 2009) also read
Lukacs as endorsing the claim that it is the distinctive
experience that members of the proletariat have which gives rise to a
higher probability of forming correct beliefs, more recent
interpretations (see Teixeira 2020, Feinberg 2020) emphasize that
Lukacs characterizes the experience of workers as identical to
that of members of the bourgeoisie. However, whereas the latter can
integrate that experience into a consistent self-understanding, in the
case of workers, the experience of society as something alien and
objective includes understanding themselves and their own activities.
In Lukacs's words, the worker "appears to himself
immediately as an object and not as the active part of the social
process of labour" (1923a, 167). The epistemic privilege of the
proletariat is not rooted in the fact that this experience would make
some truth accessible to them, but rather in the fact that this
necessitates workers to acquire a "bifurcated
consciousness" of themselves as subject and as pure objects
which is inconsistent and thus drives them beyond accepting reality as
it appears immediately. Therefore, the distinctive epistemic position
of the proletariat is not that it is uniquely situated in a way that
is conducive to forming correct beliefs, but that it is uniquely
situated in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to continue to
hold a set of true beliefs that restrict themselves to immediate
appearances.



The epistemic possibility of gaining insight into the mediated nature
of social phenomena, however, cannot be realized merely by individual
proletarians revising their beliefs. Ultimately, the epistemically
superior perspective is one in which the proletariat not merely
discovers this nature, but also discovers itself, as the collective
author of the structures of social reality. By realizing that it is
the "subject-object of history", the proletariat discovers
itself to be the *subject* of the process of social
reproduction (see 1923a: 181; Jay 1984: 107f). As Lukacs
writes, this "act of consciousness overthrows the objective form
of its object" (1923a: 178). The proletariat can thus overcome
reification only through a practical engagement with totality--by
consciously transforming reality into the *product of the
proletariat's collective action*--which this totality in
its essence has always already been. This process is, in
Lukacs' mind, nothing other than the communist revolution. As
many critics of Lukacs have remarked (Adorno 1973: 190f., Bewes
2002; Jay 1984; Rose 2009), this seems to commit Lukacs to the
view that there can be a complete overcoming of reification resulting
in a totally transparent society. However, this interpretation
downplays Lukacs' insistence that the resistance against
reification must be understood as a never-ending struggle (see 1923a:
199, 206; Feenberg 2011; Feenberg 2014: 116; Lopez 2019).



As Lukacs' essay on the "Problem of Organisation"
(1923b, written shortly before the reification essay) shows, the
distinction between "empirical" and "imputed"
class consciousness had not entirely been resolved by the introduction
of a dialectics of consciousness that is supposed to ground the
spontaneous process that is to lead the proletariat beyond immediacy.
Non-reified consciousness remains only an objective possibility,
always threatened by the seductions of the immediate consciousness.




This has political consequences, as it seems to establish that the
communist party has the function of expressing and disciplining the
already achieved forms of consciousness. This does not lead
Lukacs to endorse the Leninist party conception, however,
mainly because Lenin's vision of politics is incompatible with
his radical criticism of bureaucracy in the reification essay (Arato
and Breines 1979: 154). In his political writings immediately
preceding *History and Class Consciousness*, Lukacs
rather seems to endorse at different points either a qualified
Luxemburgian view of proletarian spontaneity (for example in 1920b)
*or* an elitist conception of party vanguardism (a "party
myth", Arato and Breines 1979: 145), not arriving at an overall
consistent position on this question.


### 3.3 Methodology and Social Ontology in *History and Class Consciousness*



It is easy to see that the resulting conception of society that
Lukacs articulates owes as much to Hegel as to Marx. This
inheritance commits Lukacs to a number of methodological claims
which put him into stark opposition not only to social democrats like
Eduard Bernstein but also, perhaps unintentionally, to the orthodoxy
of the Soviet party.



In his essay "What is Orthodox Marxism?" (1919b),
Lukacs contrasts his method with social democratic economic
determinism. He describes Marxism as a purely *methodological*
commitment to Marx's dialectics rather than as depending on any
belief regarding the truth of Marx's economic theory. In his essay
on Luxemburg, Lukacs even goes so far as to claim that
"it is not the primacy of economic motives in historical
explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism
and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality" (1921:
27).



This primacy of the social totality not only affects the Marxist
method, but also the conception of practice and the underlying social
ontology: by insisting on a foundational role of practice in the
social totality, Lukacs makes political action rather than
labor into the foundation for overcoming reification (Feenberg 1998).
Within his social ontology, Lukacs is finally committed to the
claim that the totality of historical processes, rather than
individual facts, are the foundation of objective reality (1923a: 184;
for the resulting view of history, see Merleau-Ponty 1973), leading
him to a rejection of all "contemplative" epistemologies
(such as Lenin's) which rely on the idea of a simple correspondence
between thoughts and facts (1923a: 199ff; see also Lichtheim 1970:
62-65; in addition, it follows from the premise that only the
perspective of the social totality solves the epistemological problems
of classical philosophy that Lukacs must reject Engels' claim
that the experimental method is a model for the type of defetishizing
*praxis* that can overcome the subject-object divide, see
1923a: 131-133). This ontology of pure processuality finally
entails a normative conception of society that is critical towards all
forms of institutional rationalization which are rejected as forms of
alienation across the board. At the same time, in insisting that the
emancipated society must be capable of presenting itself as a totality
for its subjects, Lukacs is unable to discover any resources
for progress in the differentiation of social spheres (Arato and
Breines 1979: 155).


## 4. The later Lukacs: Praxis, Totality, and Freedom


### 4.1 The Critique of *History and Class Consciousness*



By many of those who were looking for a sophisticated Marxist
philosophy, *History and Class Consciousness* was judged to be
a supremely important book (as for example by Karl Korsch and Ernst
Bloch, see Bloch 1923). The party orthodoxy, was not quite so enamored
with Lukacs, however. In Germany and Hungary, party
intellectuals disapproved of the book because of its idealist
tendencies, culminating in its condemnation by Grigory Zinoviev in his
opening address to the June 1924 World Congress of the Third
International (see Arato and Breines 1979: 180). Lukacs's
hastily composed study on Lenin (1924) ultimately resolved the tension
between a Luxemburgian view of revolutionary politics as an expression
of the spontaneity of the proletariat and a Leninist conception of the
party as a vanguard agent--a tension that characterizes
*History and Class Consciousness* (see Feenberg 1988)--in
favor of the latter. This anticipated a theoretical development
towards a more traditional form of Marxism to which he subscribed for
the remainder of his life (see also the unpublished defense of
*History and Class Consciousness* in 1925a and Lowy
2011).



While the condemnation of Lukacs's work by party
intellectuals and Lukacs's reaction may have been motivated
by political expediency, the conception of society and of political
practice contained in *History and Class Consciousness* had
real shortcomings. Jay (1984: 106-115) argues that the idea of
the proletariat as the "subject-object" of history seems
to entail a Fichtean conception of the self-constitutive capacities of
the revolutionary agent, unlimited by historical circumstances, and,
correspondingly, of a self-constitutive practice that is hostile to
all objectivity, an objection that is echoed by many of his more
recent interpreters (e.g., Rose 2009: 30-1; for a criticism of
this interpretation, see Lopez 2019: 134).



That the reification essay is characterized by a problematic
insistence that it is the very objectivity of social relations that is
to be rejected is bolstered by Lukacs's own evaluation in the
1967 preface to the new edition of *History and
Class-Consciousness*. Here, Lukacs claims (alongside a
number of exercises in self-criticism, which appear both unjustified
and externally motivated) that his earlier arguments involved a
confusion between objectification (*Vergegenstandlichung*),
externalization (*Entausserung*), and alienation
(*Entfremdung*). Lukacs argues that Hegel was
essentially correct to view objectification (that is, the fact that
the objects of our labor and the institutions of society are
independent of our consciousness) not as a deficiency but as a
necessary stage in the development of self-consciousness. Extending
this argument, he claims that the fact that social relationships
appear external is not problematic in itself. Rather, it is
*alienation* (the causes of which Marx uncovered) that should
be the object of the critique of reification: "Only when the
objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence
of man into conflict with his existence [...]. This duality was not
acknowledged in *History and Class Consciousness*" (1967,
xxiv; see also Pitkin 1987; see Lopez 2019 for an argument that this
self-critique was unjustified). 



The distinction between objectification and alienation entails i) the
possibility of a critique of reification that does not require a
complete reappropriation of objective social forms by a collective
subject and ii) a conception of political *praxis* that
acknowledges the mutual dialectical dependence of subject and object
(an insight that, according to Feenberg 2014 and Lopez 2019, is
already present in *History and Class Consciousness*).


### 4.2 Re-reading the Philosophical Tradition: Hegel and the Struggle against "Irrationalism"



These problems motivated Lukacs's turn to another model of
practice--a model of political and social practice that he
attempted to work out up until the end of his life. While the critique
of Fichteanism in his writings between 1923 and 1928--for example
in his review of an edition of Lasalle's letters (1925b) and in a
piece on Moses Hess (1926)--constituted a significant step
towards such a model, it was impossible for him to write anything
controversial on contemporary Marxism after the hostile reception of
his 1928 "Blum Theses." Instead, he tackled the
philosophical foundations of these problems in the context of a new
reading of the philosophical tradition, especially of Hegel.



In the reification essay, Lukacs describes Hegel's philosophy
as the only "bourgeois" theory of history and freedom that
comes close to solving the problem of reification due to its insight
that the abyss between subject and object can only be overcome by
seeing both as elements within a process that actively produces the
very distinction between them. Thus, Lukacs remains committed
to the claim that Marxist social theory must be read as a critical
completion--rather than a rejection--of Hegel. This means,
however, that he must show that the Hegelian idealist metaphysics that
Marx rejects does not exhaust Hegel's philosophy. His writings on
Hegel, most prominently *The Young Hegel* (1948) and the
relevant sections of the *Ontology of Social Being*, can be
read as a defense of this commitment. In the former work,
Lukacs argues that Hegel's development of dialectics was
informed by his reading of the British economists Steuart and Smith.
According to Lukacs, this empirical grounding enabled Hegel's
dialectics to draw on the idea of objective, social-historical
progress and to understand modern society and economy as a processual
totality that is structured by contradictions. Hegel's view of an
ontological dialectics must therefore be read as reflecting the
structure of objective social reality. The resulting
"objectivism" allowed Hegel to avoid the subjectivist
conception of dialectics to which (as Lukacs alleges) Kant and
Fichte still subscribed. Hegel, however, subordinated this objectivist
ontology to logic in the course of the development of his system. It
is this "logicism," i.e., the primacy of categories over
being, that led Hegel to postulate the idealist conception of the
"subject-object" that is needed to explain the identity of
logical categories and ontological determinations. This split between
a "genuine" dialectics that reflects the objective
contradictions of society (even if in an idealist manner) and a
"logicist" system is the main argument in
Lukacs's discussion of Hegel in the *Ontology* (see
*GW* 13: 489f., 506, 520-523).



A second, much more problematic set of commitments was made explicit
in Lukacs's writings between the 1930s and the 1950s. This
concerns his conviction that, after Hegel, modern thought had become
sharply divided into two opposing tendencies: "Marxist
dialectics" and "bourgeois irrationalism."
Lukacs's view that virtually all non-Marxist theorists after
Hegel--including Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger--can be subsumed under the label of irrationalism (a
blanket term which, depending on the context, refers to everything
from theories of "intellectual intuition," ontological
subjectivism, and "aristocratic" epistemological positions
to the denial of progress in history) was perhaps motivated by an
earnest desire to apply the method of immanent critique (see Aronowitz
2005) to developments within philosophy that had facilitated the rise
of National Socialism. Some of his arguments against Heidegger also
resemble Adorno's critique (see also Adorno 1997). Overall, however,
his philosophical arguments for the simplistic distinction between
progressive materialism and irrationalism--in particular those
that he presents in *The Destruction of Reason* (according to
George Lichtheim, "the worst book he ever wrote";
Lichtheim 1970: 68)--are dogmatic and superficial. A number of
particularly problematic claims are made in the postscript to the
*Destruction*, where Lukacs not only defends the Soviet
Union under Stalin but also accuses Bertrand Russell of being secretly
religious (1954: 808) and Wittgenstein and the pragmatists of being
proponents of a form of subjectivism that had facilitated the rise of
a new form of fascism (1954: 782ff.; for other examples, see the
unpublished 1933a).


### 4.3 The Ontology of Social Being



The most fundamental level on which Lukacs develops his revised
model of Hegelian Marxism is that of ontology, or, more specifically,
an "ontology of social being." Lukacs claims that,
as far as ontology is concerned, we can distinguish three levels of
being in the world: material or inorganic being, organic life, and
social reality (*GW* 13: 22). All three levels are
distinguished by a division between the genuine essence of entities
and their appearance. While on all three levels entities appear as
fixed objects, their real essence is always that of interrelated,
irreversible processes (*GW* 13: 240). This entails that the
*basic form of all being* is temporality and historicity
(*GW* 13: 228). 



While this general ontology remains underdeveloped and is not informed
by much knowledge of concurrent philosophical developments,
Lukacs's theory of social reality has contemporary relevance.
Social reality, Lukacs claims, differs from the other levels of
reality not only insofar as it is governed by causal, non-teleological
laws but also insofar as it contains an element of *teleology*
as a result of "teleological positing" (*GW* 13:
20; 1971c: 12ff.). Due to their ability to perform labor, humans can
"posit" functions or goals that are to govern the natural,
causal processes they manipulate. By choosing one of the potential
results of the employment of their natural and technological
capacities as the correct one, individuals can draw a distinction
between successful and unsuccessful executions of their intended
actions in labor. This, Lukacs argues, introduces normative
distinctions or values into the world (see 1971b: 75f and
153-156; 1968: 140). In particular, Lukacs claims that
the objectification of human intentions in institutions enables us to
understand the existence of objective values as products of
social-historical developments without sliding into historical
relativism. However, as some of his own students noted, this
explanation remains too unclear to solve the problem of normativity
for Marxism (see Feher et al., 1976). The same doubts remain with
regard to Lukacs's further claim that there is one
fundamental, immanent value of social history, namely the unfettered
development of human capacities (*GW* 14: 153).



Because Lukacs sees the process of labor as the foundation of
all social and normative phenomena (see also 1971c: 65; Thompson
2011), the totality of society can be described as the totality of all
relations between the teleological acts of "positing"
conditions of success in labor. However, even though Lukacs
thus acknowledges intentional consciousness as an irreducible factor
in these acts (see Lukacs 1968: 138), their meaning is
ultimately determined by the objective, historical development of
social relations. 



From these ontological commitments it follows that intentionality,
which guides individual acts of labor, is a condition for the
existence of the totality of social facts, and *vice versa*
(see Tertullian 1988). In particular, he describes language and
institutions as media of "indirect" teleological positing
because they enable forms of action that do not directly modify nature
but that indirectly aspire to bring others to do so (*GW* 14:
172; 1968: 142). Although he remains committed to the primacy of
labor, Lukacs allows that these linguistic and institutional
mediations acquire a dynamic of their own over time, becoming
independent of the goal of dominating nature, in particular because
they allow for a generalization of the cognitive grasping of
particular phenomena (see *GW* 13: 47; *GW* 14: 165ff,
342-357) and for greater distance between subject and object
(1971c: 100).



Lukacs's conception of individuality as a product of the
choice between alternatives within a socially determined totality
ultimately led to a theory of *alienation* that partially
replaced the theory of reification of his younger years. Whereas the
latter theory was closely connected to the ideal of the collective
reappropriation of society, Lukacs describes alienation in the
*Ontology* as primarily the result of social conditions that
turn *individuals* into merely "particular"
personalities (*GW* 14: 530) instead of allowing them to
develop their capacities to the degree that the present development of
productive forces could make possible. This means that alienation (for
instance the alienation brought about by excessive professional
specialization) must be understood as the socially induced incapacity
of individuals to participate in "species being" or the
social totality. The overcoming of alienation thus always
demands--along with social changes--subjective
transformation, i.e., individual change (*GW* 14: 551). This
points towards the *ethical dimension* of the
*Ontology*. Lukacs claims that there is a normative
ideal immanent in society as such, namely, the ideal of social
relations that allow all to fully participate in the social totality
with their whole personality, thereby realizing their universal
nature. This suggests a conception of political *praxis* that
amounts to a form of democratic politics.


### 4.4 Aesthetics: Realism and the Work of Art as a Closed Totality



While Lukacs made his ontological commitments explicit only
towards the end of his life, they informed the development of his
aesthetics from the 1930s on. From the general materialist premises of
his ontology and from his rejection of the epistemology of *History
and Class Consciousness* in favor of the Leninist alternative (see
1938), it follows that cultural and mental phenomena must always be
seen as *reflections* (or "mirroring,"
*Widerspiegelungen*) of an objective reality (*GW* 11:
22, 55).



Like science and ethics, art breaks with the immediacy of our everyday
practical engagements that dominates more common forms of reflection
(*GW* 11: 207, 214). Yet aesthetic reflections on reality
differ from science (or more generally from conceptual and theoretical
reflections) in three respects: First, while scientific knowledge
presupposes the "deanthropomorphization" of the subject
matter (meaning that reality is presented as independent of human
desires or subjectivity), the aesthetic subject matter remains
anthropomorphized insofar as art presents reality in the form of inner
experience. Thus, aesthetic representation always remains connected to
a possible "evocation" of a human subject's reactions
(*GW* 11: 438). Second, while science is always conceptually
mediated, art breaks with the immediacy of everyday life in favor of a
new immediacy of experience (*GW* 11: 237, 509, 513). And
third, while science reflects reality in the form of general laws,
aesthetic representation is always bound to represent universal
aspects of the essence of reality in the form of the individuality (or
specificity) of the work of art (Lukacs's term for
individuality is *Besonderheit*, a concept which he takes from
Hegel's *Science of Logic*, where it describes the
dialectical sublation of both generality and particularity within the
"notion").



According to this conception of art as a mode of reflection, the
function of a work of art is to present humans with the totality of
the objective, historical reality within an "homogeneous
medium" (such as pure visibility in painting or poetic language
in poetry; see *GW* 11: 642). The employment of such a medium
makes it possible for art to single out and represent the universal
aspects of a given form of human reality as a "closed
world-in-itself" or as an "intensive totality"
(*GW* 11: 238, 461, 774; *GW* 12: 232). As Lukacs
argues (*GW* 11: 660), the medium of each specific form of art
establishes strict laws that allow the work of art to adequately
present the world of humanity from a specific standpoint. For this
reason, such works of art allow us to comprehend the universal aspects
of our existence and to consciously participate in the collective life
of humanity (*GW* 11: 519-530). Lukacs describes
this effect as "defetishization" (*GW* 11: ch. 9),
anticipating the ethical call to overcome alienation formulated in the
*Ontology*. A successful work of art can thus have the effect
of "catharsis" (*GW* 11: 811), transforming the
"whole person" of everyday life (the person who is
entangled in their diverse relationships) into a "person as a
whole" (the person who realizes their humanity by acquiring a
sense of self-consciousness regarding the richness of the human
relations that constitute the historical development of
humankind).



Even though they represent objective reality, works of art are, in
virtue of this mode of reflection, subject-dependent because their
character is constituted by their capacity to evoke a subjective
reaction: i.e., an understanding of how and why the world revealed in
art is appropriate to the comprehending subject in its universal
nature (*GW* 11: 305). This reaction is not only one of passive
acknowledgment; it also actively transforms the subject by
facilitating consciousness of that very universal nature. Thus, in the
work of art, subjectivity and objectivity are mutually constitutive of
each other. In a transformed sense--as Lukacs explicitly
acknowledges (*GW* 11: 582; *GW* 12: 217)--the
subject-object of idealism is an appropriate concept for works of art
(which, one might add, fulfills Lukacs's aspirations for the
socialist revolution he had to renounce, both politically and
philosophically). Of course, in this new sense the term
"subject-object" no longer signifies a privileged agent
becoming self-conscious, but only the interdependence of subjectivity
and objectivity in a specific sphere of experience.



Lukacs makes a similar conceptual move by endorsing the claim
that all consciousness is a reflection of reality. On the one hand,
this signals a revision of the epistemological position he defended in
*History and Class Consciousness* (where he criticized the
distinction between a seemingly objective reality and purely
subjective forms of perception) in favor of Lenin's theory of
consciousness. On the other hand, Lukacs is keen to make
room--at least within the boundaries of the aesthetic--for
the idea that some insights can be had only in relation to a totality
that encompasses subjectivity and objectivity.



At this point, Lukacs no longer derives his aesthetic
commitments from purely philosophical premises--as he did in his
early Heidelberg writings--instead building on anthropological
premises (especially concerning the concept of everyday life, in
regard to which he notes the similarity between his analysis and
Heidegger's notion of practical engagement; see *GW* 11:
68-71; for related points on the *Ontology* see Joos
1982), psychological theorizing (proposing an extension of Pavlov's
behaviorist classification of signal systems; see *GW* 12:
11-191), and a speculative notion of world history. The most
important concept binding these premises together is the idea of
*mimesis*. Mimetic behavior, Lukacs argues, is a
fundamental way of coping with the world and a source of both magic
and art. Through the mimetic imitation of natural processes, humans
acquire the ability to represent the salient aspects of the world in a
closed and totalizing manner, gradually learning to separate such
imitations from the necessity of immediate reaction. In contrast to
magic, which does not separate reflection and objective causation,
mimesis in art is consciously taken as reflection and has an aesthetic
effect on its audience specifically in virtue of this feature
(*GW* 11: 382). In other words, while both art and science
overcome the superstition of magic, only art can retain the mimetic
dimension of representation.



Lukacs's commitment to a conception of the work of art as a
closed totality structured by the strict laws of its medium and
objectively reflecting the development of humanity in the mode of
mimetic evocation had considerable implications for his own judgments
as an aesthetic theorist. His writings on literary realism published
from the 1930s to the 1950s--especially "Realism in the
Balance" (1938), *The Historical Novel* (1955), and
*The Meaning of Contemporary Realism* (1955)--display to
various degrees a mixture of philosophical insight and Stalinist
orthodoxy. In any case, they are animated by a strong commitment to
the superiority of realism, as exemplified by Balzac, Tolstoy, Gorky
(see *GW* 5), and Thomas Mann (see 1949), which he contrasts
with the "decadent" avant-garde literature of his time.
This position drew sharp criticism, for example from Seghers, Brecht,
and Adorno (see Lukacs 1981; Brecht 1977; Adorno [1958] 1977;
on the Lukacs-Brecht debate, see Pike 1985).



However, to the extent that Lukacs's commitment to realism
reflects a commitment to the notion that works of art should present a
totality of meaning that is not alien to the life of individuals but
rather overcomes the alienation they suffer in everyday life, it
expresses (even in its most distorted versions) an intuition that
sustained his work from the beginning: a desire to overcome the
tension between human life and the objective social forms that
constitute modern society.