Notes on “Georg Lukacs: Record of a Life”

Book details

Georg Lukacs: Record of a Life
Georg Lukács, István Eörsi
1981 (English translation of “Gelebtes Denken. Eine Autobiographie im Dialog” 1983)
Verso

Summary & comments

This book collects together notes made by Lukacs towards an autobiography, “Gelebtes Denken” (Lived Thought), and a series of interviews with Lukacs about his life — notes and interviews all done in the months before Lukacs died of illness in 1971. The material covers Lukacs’ whole life, from childhood, revolutions, exiles and returns.

It is very interesting, and occasionally moving, to see Lukacs bring his characteristic unblinking insight to bear on his own life. He does not separate his intellectual development from his political activity, and separates neither from his love life. One of the central figures throughout is his wife Gertrud Bortstieber.

Lukacs does not waffle and consequently the book is packed with ideas and observations, on cultural, philosophical or political figures (Bartok, Mann, Spinoza, Hegel, Lenin, Stalin), historical events and situations (the Hungarian and Russian revolutions, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).

Consequently, it is extremely annoying that Verso decided not to include an index.

Otherwise a beautiful, indispensible book.

Next steps

Lukacs ranged widely (both under the Attribute of Extension and under the Attribute of Thinking). Reading this autobiography prompts me to think about his life’s work as a coherent developing whole. I am familiar with Lukacs’ “mature” work in politics & philosophy (e.g., H&CC, Young Hegel, Destruction of Reason), and literary criticism (e.g. The Historical Novel, Contemporary Realism, essays on Mann & on Solzhenitsyn), but less familiar with his very early (i.e. pre-Marxist) or very late (e.g. his Ontology) work.

So, my Lukacs “to read” list:

• Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought and Politics (Kadarkay, 1991)
• Lenin’s criticism of Lukacs
• Lukacs’ own later criticism(s) & defense(s) of H&CC
• Lukacs’ book on Lenin
• the Blum Theses (1928)
• look at the social ontology
• doesn’t look like the Aesthetics (1972-9) has been translated into English. Maybe read The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukacs Bela Kiralyfalvi 2015 Princeton UP

On Lukács’ alleged dualism

It is on my books to write a piece on why I think McNally 2015 does not demonstrate (as it claims to) that “the social relations of race, gender and sexuality, among others, [are] internally constitutive of class”. However, that is a story for another day.

One of his footnotes recalled a snippet of Gramsci I came across once, so for now I’d just like to discuss that.

Quotations

Among these shortcomings [of Lukács] are a dualistic confinement of dialectics to society rather than to nature, and a related failure to theorise the mediating role of labour in the dialectic of humans and nature.

McNally, 2015, n.5.

It would appear that Lukács maintains that one can speak of the dialectic only for the history of men and not for nature. He might be right and he might be wrong. If his assertion presupposes a dualism between nature and man he is wrong because he is falling into a conception of nature proper to religion and to Graeco-Christian philosophy and also to idealism which does not in reality succeed in unifying and relating man and nature to each other except verbally. But if human history should be conceived also as the history of nature (also by means of the history of science) how can the dialectic be separated from nature? Perhaps Lukács, in reaction to the baroque theories of the Popular Manual, has fallen into the opposite error, into a form of idealism.

Gramsci, 1971.

[The Popular Manual Gramsci is referring to is Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism.]

Comments

These two texts point to the same shortcoming of Lukács. Lukács conceives of dialectics as applying to social/historical phenomena only, and not to nature. Ilyenkov shares this shortcoming. Ilyenkov is very clear in Dialectical Logic that dialectics/logic is the science of thinking, with thinking understood as a social practical activity. Ilyenkov includes as thinking not just speech, but “the whole objective body of civilisation, … tools and statues, workshops and temples, factories and chancelleries, political organisations and systems of legislation.”

I don’t share Gramsci & McNally’s perspective so I can only guess where the accusation of dualism might come from. It sounds like there is this thing called “dialectics”, and Lukács has decided to apply it to one set of things (society, history), but not another set of things (nature). Splitting reality into two like this — instead of using this given “dialectics” to understand all of reality — is dualist. Lukács has decided that reality is made up of two types of thing.

In his essays on the history of dialectics, Ilyenkov presents things the other way around. Logic and dialectics developed, over the centuries, through a long study (an empirical study if you like) of thought. Ilyenkov’s (and I should think Lukács’) position on what dialectics rightly applies to is based on understanding of how dialectics came to be.

The Gramsci & McNally conception of dialectics seems to be of something handed down to us, something pre-existing.

I am not very familiar with this “Dialectics of Nature” position (I haven’t read much Engels at all apart from his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific pamphlet). Dialectics would certainly have something to say about chemistry or biology as sciences (i.e. as thinking), but I can’t see how dialectics would be applied to chemical or biological matter.

If anyone can recommend recent applications of dialectics to nature, I would like to read and try to understand.

References

Gramsci, Antonio. (19??, tr. 1971). “The Concept of ‘Science'” section of “Problems of Marxism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), page 448.

Gramsci on Lukács and the dialectic in human vs natural history

McNally, David. (2015). “The dialectics of unity and difference in the constitution of wage-labour: On internal relations and working-class formation”. Capital & Class, February 2015; vol. 39, 1: pp. 131-146.
http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/39/1/131.full.pdf+html

Notes on “The Young Hegel”

Book details

The Young Hegel: studies in the relations between dialectics and economics
Georg Lukács
1966 (English translation 1975)
MIT Press

Summary

The point of “Young Hegel” is to show the development of Hegel’s thinking up to (and including) his Phenomenology of Mind. The special focus is to show how Hegel’s study of economics (primarily Adam Smith and David Ricardo) affected this development.

This is the most biographical treatment of Hegel I’ve read so far. It’s divided into sections with Hegel at Berne (1793-96), Frankfurt (1797-1800) and Jena (1801-03, 1803-07). The “very” young Hegel in Berne is depicted as idealising Classical civilisation, especially of Greece, which he would contrast absolutely with the “positivity” and dogma of the Christian world. In Frankfurt, Hegel became “reconciled” to the bourgeois/Christian reality, and this reconciliation brought with it (or was partly) a need to link the two worlds — for example to explain the historical changes (Hegel’s main source seems to have been Gibbon!).

I think “reconciliation” is Hegel’s word but, in Lukács’ telling, the process was more than only intellectual. Lukács talks of Hegel’s Frankfurt “crisis”, and how Hegel took much of the source material from his own personal experience of life.

Hegel’s debates with Kant, Fichte and Schelling are covered in detail. So Hegel is placed in historical context in terms of philosophy; also the political situation in Germany and France, and the political/economic situation in England are shown to influence (determine, Lukács would have it) Hegel’s thinking.

The exploration of Hegel’s study and use of economics is very good. Obviously at least part of the point of this exploration is to confirm and consolidate our understanding of the similarities between Hegel and Marx. Pinkard stressed how Hegel’s “idealism” (as in not materialism) is not quite as straightforwardly “idealist” as you might think (e.g., Hegel describes animals as idealists). What you might call Hegel’s “proto-materialism” is drawn out by Lukács.

Marx turns up from time to time in this book, but not really until the final chapter. After a synopsis of the Phenomenology, Lukács reviews Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), which culminate in a critique by Marx of the Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Another frequent visitor in the book is Goethe. Lukács is always stressing the similarity of thinking between Goethe and Hegel.

For all the foibles of his style (see below), Lukács knows how to put a book together, and this book finishes in a kind of triple climax. The first is the one you expect and that the whole book has been building up to: the Phenomenology, dealt with in a huge crescendo of exposition. For the second, Marx steps out of the shadows and we plunge in to EPM. The third and final climax is announced on the very last page — “Historically, only one figure may be placed on a par with Hegel: …” — and it is Goethe who takes the final bow and receives the bouquet.

Lukács’ style

Lukács does have a tendency

• to be a bit unmediated/deterministic with his explanations
• not to shilly-shally about with minor issues
• to make sure Stalin gets a mention every so often.

For the unsympathetic reader there is plenty not to like about Lukács. I like to think Lukács was writing assuming two particular audiences: (a) Marxists, so certain things don’t have to be explained, and certain things can be short-circuited, and (b) the censor and the KGB.

Next steps

Marx’s EPM is an obvious next stop.

For strengthening understanding of the development of the dialectic, with Hegel and Marx as two points on the timeline as it were, I should re-read Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic.

Goethe: the work most mentioned is Wilhelm Meister. Iphigenia on Tauris and Confessions of a beautiful soul also get interesting mentions (as does Faust obvs).

Notes on “The Destruction of Reason”

book details

The Destruction of Reason
Georg Lukács
1962 (tr. 1980)
Merlin

comments

This was a gruelling, depressing read. I am full of respect for Lukács for sifting through so much complete drivel (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, and so on). I’d never read any of these people before and I had naively assumed they were proper philosophers (as they are presented in the mainstream media).

Lukács traces the history and the development of irrationalist philosophy from the French revolution right through to Hitler, with an epilogue on the post-war US, with its increasing shoddiness and cynicism and anti-humanism.

I couldn’t help notice similarities with contemporary developments: the denigration of democracy; the celebration of irrational political action (like the infantile Occupy movement); of apostasy (like the whistleblowers); the almost medieval approach to morality; temper-loss and name-calling in place of debate; …

forward

Because of its nature as a critique and a warning, this book doesn’t open up so many new horizons as the Hegel book did. However there were three clear avenues:

• Two heroes mentioned stand out: Rosa Luxemburg (obviously not new to me) and Georges Politzer (completely new to me).
• “German Classical Humanism” (p530): Herder and Humboldt. These two popped up repeatedly while I was reading for my PhD (on Vygotsky and Ilyenkov) all those years ago (the early 90s).
• I need to do something to correct my patchy knowledge of 19th century history, esp. the years 1848 and 1870.