Gyrgy Mrkus and the Philosophy of Culture:

Critical Theory, Enlightenment and Emancipation

Jonathan Pickle

Dissertation abstract

By analyzing Gyrgy Mrkus emancipatory hermeneutical interventions into the

foundations of critical theory, I endeavour to evince a specific form of post-

metaphysical philosophy that, as a historically-situated and particular cultural practice,

can illuminate both the irresolvable tensions between the high cultural values of Western

modernity and the significance intrinsic to the inevitable choice among the constituent

and yet irreducible world-views animating it. Concerned with the way modern

individuals confront an alienated and reified world typified by the crises of bourgeois

society rendered violently perspicuous at the end of the long XIXth century, I initially

consider how Mrkus suggests Lukcs 1918 conversion to a Hegelian Bolshevism

resolvedin the latters mind onlythe problem (and tragedy) of culture by introducing

a theory of ideology founded on the normative identification of true and imputed

proletarian class consciousness. Eschewing the latter conflation and the class basis

inhering in it, I then turn to survey Mrkus critical appraisal of three different Marxian

approaches to the problem of culture: the base-superstructure metaphor; three distinct

concepts of ideology (including the two forms of critique to which they are subject); and

the notion of cultural production as a paradigm of objectivation concerning humankind as

a self-constituting genus. In the third chapter, the strong metaphysical presuppositions of

Hegels method/system, which informed Lukcs (and Lenins) teleological

conceptualization of history, are considered by evaluating the speculative relationship

obtaining between objective and absolute spirit in terms of the contention that Western

modernity is the culmination of an eschatological progress. The constitutive historical

closure of Hegels system to new needs for unforeseen and essentially differentiated

normative forms of freedom in the future is then opposed to the cultural practice of Kant.

I then show how Mrkus addresses the unassailable practical basis of Kants critical

theory of philosophy, which is oriented towards developing solidarity among autonomous

individuals with respect to the regulative idea of uniting and promoting our social and

personal activities in accordance with the radically historicized and practically achievable

highest possible good. By way of conclusion, I defend the contemporary salience of

Mrkus secular and humanist conception of modern philosophy as a critical

appropriation of this effective tradition, a rational narrative and a project of orientation in

thought that both affirms the eminently anthropological significance elided by the

scientifisation of philosophy and repudiates the conservative/anarchic tendencies of its

deconstruction.

GYRGY MRKUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

Critical Theory, Enlightenment and Emancipation

by

Jonathan Pickle

May 2011

Submitted to The New School for Social Research of The New School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Dissertation Committee: Dr. gnes Heller Dr. Richard J. Bernstein Dr. Dmitri Nikulin Dr. Andrew Arato

All rights reserved

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UMI 3465545Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC.

UMI Number: 3465545

For Stephen Richard Pickle

and all other comrades whom have fallen too soon

before their time of enlightenment and emancipation

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is impossible to exhaustively recognize all those who have meaningfully contributed to

this culminating project of my formal education. Initially then, I wish to acknowledge

those that will not be explicitly named: may their anonymity not belie their importance.

I must recognize the material cause of my being here today in my biological

heritage, but I choose to esteem Jerry and Helen Pickle as my true friends, whose

ceaseless and unwavering support of my endeavours is all the more remarkable for its not

being obligatory. Among my familial friends, I also cherish my sister, Sarah Pickle,

whose youthful indiscretions of idolizing her brother have been rectified by her asserting

a distinctive, genuine and autonomous personality that is both admirable and more

inspiring.

My deep appreciation is also due to my social and intellectual friends with whom

I passionately disagree, for the relentless criticism that has been exchanged. I am

particularly grateful for the agonistic labours of Aaron Jaffe, whose demand for detail and

semantic clarity I hope to one day satisfy.

To my teachers and mentors, I am indebted for their patient engagement with my

impetuous dogmatism. If I have become more liberal in my thinking, it is due to the

formative efforts of Jan Ward and Mary Adams, Shannon Winnubst and Tom Blackburn,

Ingo Farin, Deborah Morse, Christy Burns, and Adam Potkay. During my graduate

education, I am especially thankful for the encouragement of Richard J. Bernstein and

Dmitri Nikulin, whose influence on my own thinking and personal development none of

us will ever fully fathom.

vi

Two persons deserve especial acknowledgement. Serving as surrogate mother, co-

worker, counselor, and true friend, Claire Martin steadied my hand through the most

tumultuous, aggravating and wonderful years of my life so far. I also cannot express

enough appreciation to my dissertation advisor, gnes Heller. My intellectual debt to her

is second only to the inspiration provided by her extraordinary and inimitable ethical

personality.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements..v

I. Introduction1

II. Part I: On the Marxist Foundations of Critical Theory13

A. Chapter I: On Lukcs...14

1. The Pre-Marxist Lukcs.21

2. The Early Marxist Lukcs..59

B. Chapter II: On Marx.87

1. On the Relationship of Base and Superstructure...97

2. The Concept(s) of Ideology.107

3. Cultural Production..140

III. Part II: On the Classical German Idealist Foundations of Critical Theory160

A. Chapter III: On Hegel161

1. Delineation of the Essential Dimensions of Hegels

Concept of Culture...175

2. On the Relation of the Value of Freedom to the Normative

Institutions of Modernity.200

3. On the Metaphysical Closure of Hegels System242

B. Chapter IV: On Kant..261

1. Kants Two Metaphysics.271

2. The Idea of Freedom289

3. Culture as Practices of Emancipation..336

viii

IV. On Concluding with Mrkus..356

V. Works Cited...377

1

Introduction

2

Philosophy is in an unenviable state at present. It no longer knows itself, if it ever did. It

no longer knows what it is to do, if it ever could. It no longer knows what it is capable of

achieving, if ever it is. On the one hand, philosophy is the heteronomous cultural genre

par excellence, historically submitting itself to the cognitive authority of mythico-poetic,

religious, political or scientific traditions. On the other hand, it has arrogantly asserted its

radically autonomous supremacy over all the vicissitudes of mundane existence. At the

same time, there seems to have been no significant development of the cultural genre of

philosophy as a whole; previous philosophies of genuine cultural significance have not

been disproven or falsified, but rendered obsolete or buried under an exponentially

increasing body of tertiary criticism. As a way of life, philosophy runs in place while

running amok.

Such a disparaging image of philosophy is hardly an invitation to consider the

present study a meaningful contribution to its discipline, and, if such a depiction was

exhaustive, it might excuse abandoning philosophical endeavours to discover truths in the

natural sciences or the fine arts. Yet, this image of philosophy is neither historically nor

contemporaneously exhaustive; rather, it is a distinctly modern interpretation of

philosophy by a single participant in the practices apposite to the cultural genre.

The modern predicament of philosophy, which is not without significant

antecedents that may appear to be anticipations, is precipitated by the recognition that its

historically indubitable orientation towards the value of truth is meaningfully challenged.

In this respect, to suggest that it is only in modernity that philosophy becomes

meaningfully challenged is not simply to state that other cultural practices have come to

assert their own value-orientation to truth, for such claims by other disciplines have been

3

present, at least, since the poets and the philosophers became embroiled in their

seemingly interminable dispute. With the decline of the heteronomous authority of

ancestral and ecclesiastical traditions embodying culturally indubitable patterns of

efficacious and meaningful orientation for individuals, modern philosophy became an

autonomous cultural practice with autochthonic sui generis norms apposite to its

objectivation. During the same period, the natural sciences began to function quite

successfully in the service of developing technology requisite to the emerging bourgeois

economy and without recourse to metaphysical legitimation of their cognitive content.

The consequent decline of the system, which from the early XVIIth through the late

XIXth centuries had served as the normative cultural form of philosophy and united it

with the empirical sciences, attends not only to the ascendancy of the latter to their

culturally bestowed cognitive authority with respect to matters of truth; it also reveals

that the specificity of that which meaningfully challenges modern philosophy is not an

external but an internal struggle. In this latter respect, it became questionable whether

philosophy is (or should be) oriented towards that which is and ought to be or that which

is meaningful, and whether these are two mutually exclusive alternatives. From a certain

perspective, the self-initiated inquiry into its own cultural presuppositions, through which

the presumed self-evident and necessary identity of truth and meaning became

problematized, was consonant with the interrogation of philosophical practice with

respect to metaphysics.

The present study will examine the philosophical foundations of critical theory

and the figures most generally affirmed as its effective tradition, by considering the

emancipatory hermeneutic interpretations of Hungarian philosopher Gyrgy Mrkus,

4

whose philosophy of culture questions the very meaningfulness of philosophy in the so-

called post-metaphysical era. Mrkus own practice is a peculiar form of philosophy

because it neither endeavours to logically deduce that which it assumes to be true nor

argumentatively proves the necessity of that towards which it aims. Moreover, Mrkus

works are distinguished by a prevailing and strikingly conspicuous dearth of polemical

refutations which would demonstrate the failures of his predecessors and peers; rather,

in the unresolved tensions inhering in other philosophies, Mrkus recognizes a

resourceful tradition in relation to which he elaborates his own position. Given his

deliberate attempt to resist producing an oeuvre that is reducible to a single, determinate

and unambiguous meaning, it is appropriate to reveal in the series of interpretations

Mrkus proffers a living tradition, the expression of a particular sustained cultural and

personal practice. Thus, in order to discern the fecundity of his project, Mrkus reader is

confronted with the task of similarly developing her or his own coherent account about

those of his works to which she or he attends; by doing so, the reader can meaningfully

participate in the high cultural genre of philosophy by re-producing the normative

cultural relations of Author-Text-Recipient that Mrkus delineates. To this latter end, the

present author has chosen to emphasize the legacies of Marxian critical theory and

classical German idealist philosophy that were prescient for his own reception of Mrkus

works in the philosophy of culture.

In the first chapter, the appraisal of Mrkus philosophy of culture begins with his

seminal essay on the pre-Marxist Lukcs early works on aesthetics and the philosophy of

5

art in order to indicate both how their different and irreducible registers of analysis

address the modern crisis of culture, and how the seemingly metaphysical tragedy of

culture that Lukcs posits is belied by a less prominent tendency in his work that avers

for its possible transcendence by the individual and society as a whole. In order to solve

the crisis of culture at the societal level (which purports to further entail its resolution

with respect to particular individuals), the present study then considers how Lukcs

methodologically abrogates the orientative absolute value of the autonomous individual

posited in his early works by converting to Bolshevism and appropriating both Lenins

theory of the party and Hegels idealist conception of history. To countenance the value

that his philosophy of culture accords to the empirical individuals participation in the

various cultural genres, Mrkus addresses the ideological conceptual framework that

Lukcs early Marxist works express as the surreptitious legitimation of the

substitutionalist consequence of Lenins political practice. The analyses of Lukcs

methodology and his conception of imputed consciousness, however, entail a much

bolder critique than merely unmasking the hidden apology proffered for the political

domination of the Communist Partys particularistic interests. In this respect, Mrkus

own philosophical practice indicates the need to re-assess the speculative and practical

foundations in the effective tradition of critical theory itself, particularly its metaphysical

suppositions that preclude imagining and achieving a genuinely socialist society

independently of the Hegelian historical finalism that had been introduced to

metaphysically legitimate the nascent Soviet society. In this sense, Mrkus rejects

postulating the identity of, on the one hand, the transcendence of capitalism with human

emancipation as such, and, on the other hand, the interests/needs of individuals as

6

members of a socio-economic class with the interests/needs of humankind tout court.

Rather, Mrkus addresses the crisis of culture from the perspective of existential

problems assumed to be universal, and, in this manner, construes the project of culture in

terms of its eminent concern for the free development of each and all by elucidating

emancipatory impulses in cultural practices that are irreducible to socio-economic class

interests.

Assuming his rejection of reductive class-based analyses, the subsequent chapter

on Marx will develop the Marxian provenance of Mrkus appropriation of the paradigm

of material production to wrest its salient meaning for the high cultural objectivations of

Western modernity and consider how emancipatory impulses are both produced and

largely unrealizable given the existing constellation of the cultural spheres and the

institutions of power that manifest within and between them. To these ends, the present

study will address the limited applicability Mrkus discerns in the base-superstructure

metaphor, as well as the problems posed by the Marxian theories of ideology and their

attendant practices of ideology-critique. With respect to the former, Mrkus rejects the

metaphysical characterization of the base-superstructure metaphor either as an

ontological substantive theory or as a monocausal relationship, which, in turn, assists in

illuminating his aversion to considering ideological objectivations merely insofar as they

evince the expression of particularistic class interests. By contrast, an emancipatory

critique of epochal ideologies, which Mrkus philosophical practice exemplifies,

addresses the representative works of modernity not as having a fixed meaning

determined by their authors intention or social station, but as capable of serving as an

effective tradition of values that can elicit emancipatory impulses in their readers of the

7

present. The organization of such a tradition and the articulation of its orientative values

entails indicating both the horizons of thought that are re-produced by adequately

appropriating their meaning-content according to the genre-specific norms of reception

and the ends furthered by means of objectivating the recipients own critical appraisal of

the value of the meaning-content in light of the specific socio-historical conflicts of the

contemporary audience. To this end, Mrkus theory of cultural production avers that the

normative practices apposite to the high cultural genres re-produce the modern sui

generis cultural relations of the author-text-recipient social form, the salient significance

of which Mrkus elaborates with respect to philosophy by proffering a culturological

interpretation of the Hegelian and Kantian philosophical practice.

In its third chapter, the present study will consider the relationship of practical

philosophy to history by addressing the particular metaphysical presuppositions that

Lukcs appropriated from classical German idealism as a means to ideologically

legitimate the Soviet state. These metaphysical principles, which are evinced by the

speculative construction of Hegels system, Mrkus identifies under the headings

historical finitism and his historical finalism. One of Hegels great contributions to

modern philosophy is his attempt to historicize the totality of human activities, including

the practice of philosophy as a particular cultural endeavour. In order to posit the totality

as such and to aver that it can exhaust its philosophical significance (qua true and

meaningful), however, Mrkus maintains that Hegel ultimately posits a superhistorical

consciousness that functions to dialectically sublate the antinomies of modernity in

thought. Although it is the latter form of true consciousness that Lukcs speculatively

identifies with imputed proletarian class consciousness to justify the substitutionalist

8

function of a vanguard party of intellectuals, Mrkus in no way seeks to logically

disprove Hegels (or Lukcs) metaphysical premise that the truth is ascertained only by

means of a superhistorical form of consciousness. To the contrary, Mrkus opposes the

ideological use of this premise by evaluating it as a methodological postulate of Hegels

philosophical practice that contemporaneously serves a conservative rather than

emancipatory function and is, for this reason, of questionable value. The aesthetic

reconciliation expressed in the normative form of true consciousness is not only the

dialectical sublation of human finitude but also the hypostatization of a metaphysical

subject that Mrkus deems theoretically untenable; simultaneously, he rejects the

practical consequence of Hegels historical finitism in its implications for the sphere of

objective spirit. The pre-eminent methodological postulate of absolute spiritviz. the

historical finalism evident in his frequently misunderstood thesis regarding the end of

historydeliberately and constitutively forecloses the possibility that genuinely new

needs for forms of we-consciousness, which have not yet been institutionalized in the

normative form of the modern nation-state, can be philosophically meaningful. To aver

this conclusion, the present study considers Mrkus analyses of Hegels conception of

culture as an epochal ideology that ultimately rests upon a pre-critical metaphysics of the

relationship obtaining between objective and absolute spirit.

In turning away from the constitutive closure that Hegels philosophy ascribes to

a normatively considered modernity as the culmination of the teleological process of

human history, the fourth chapter considers Mrkus critical appropriation Immanuel

Kant as a radical attempt to distinguish what Kant says from how the latter practices

philosophy, i.e., to affirm philosophy as a particular cultural practice that has a distinct

9

(and more or less restricted) cultural modality from that which Hegel ascribes to Absolute

spirit. This suggestive reading of Kant is advanced by taking the seemingly paradoxical

position that what Kant articulates is best understood by considering his metaphysical

assertions to be expressions of a cultural practice, while considering the practice itself to

be described in some of his non-speculative writings. By considering Kants dual

metaphysics to be the objectivations of a single and yet distinct cultural practice, the

present study addresses the orientation of the speculative and practical uses of reason

according the values of objective truth and meaning, respectively. Their distinction is

countenanced by Kants contention that human being does not legislate over nature in-

itself but only over its own actions, which, as expressions of the capacity to act freely,

evince irreducibly human significance. In this respect, it distinguishes the meaningful

practice of the sciences from the determinate metaphysics of finite reality that they seek

to establish. The critique of speculative reason does not provide a metaphysics of nature

in-itself but rather seeks to determine the transcendental conditions for the possibility of

legitimately establishing a socially efficacious principle of heautonomy towards which

the sciences can co-ordinate their endeavours according to an ideal of objectivity. The

ideal of objectivity serves as a value for the essentially fallibilistic practice of scientists

in the self-consciously interminable task of determining a dis-anthropomorphized image

of the manipulable world. Moreover, with respect to the practices of cultural modernity,

Mrkus avers that all teleological judgments concerning aesthetic, natural, and historical

matters cannot but be subjectively legitimate perspectives upon a reality that ultimately

transcends the capacity of finite subjectivity to render its meaning conclusively

determined. This does not imply, however, that determinate judgments about how one

10

ought to act is subject to personal caprice; rather, it affirms that the universal validity of

moralitys social form does not entail ascribing universally identical content to that which

can effectively orient human action towards the highest possible good, insofar as it is

abstractly conceivable as the greatest possible need-satisfaction consistent with moral

activity. In this way, Kant affirms the need to respect the intrinsic dignity of each and all

persons to autonomously articulate their own needs in a cosmopolitan society that

guarantees and protects the rights of all subjects through bonds of solidarity that have

been created through their conduct towards the collectives highest possible good. In

Mrkus interpretation of Kant, the orientation towards the latter, however, does not

repudiate the institutional structures of Hegels normatively understood modern state, but

denies presupposing that the social form of the modern state is necessarily the final form

in which it is possible to realize all the possible and essentially differentiated vicissitudes

of human freedom. By doing so, Mrkus accomplishes an absolute historicization of

philosophy that renders the objectively indeterminable future potentially meaningful for

radically transformative cultural practice. However, as Mrkus contends, the elaboration

of a different utopian image is not for the philosopher to do (qua philosopher); rather,

Mrkus suggests that the creative imagination is better suited for elaborating the utopian

visions that may become socially efficacious as a regulative ideal to be negotiated in

perpetuity and indefinitely revised in practice by humanity as a self-constituting genus.

Philosophy has a different task.

In its conclusion, the present study distinguishes Mrkus narrative philosophy

from two other tendencies of its contemporary practice that have responded to the decline

of the system as the normative cultural form of philosophy, to the cultural ascendancy

11

of the sciences to cognitive authority with respect to matters of truth, and to the

problematization of the place of metaphysics in the cultural genre of philosophy. In the

last respect, although he suggests that history of philosophy demonstrates no identifiable

consensus about what metaphysics is, Mrkus adopts, for his own purposes, a

subjectively legitimate perspective upon this history that can be found in Marxs doctoral

dissertation. In this regard, Mrkus addresses the history of metaphysics as the history of

the critique of the postulated unification of what is and what should be the case. By

elaborating his philosophy of culture in light of this orientation, the present author

indirectly attempts to defend his own decision to focus on Hegel and Kant as two pre-

eminent philosophers of modernity as regards this conception of metaphysics. For this

reason, the account is considered by the present author to be a self-consciously affirmed

adoption of Mrkus form of narrative philosophy as a manner of post-metaphysical

thinking. The form of its objectivation, then, is distinguished, in the first respect, from the

scientifisation of philosophy, which, with respect to metaphysics, completely divests

the meaning of truth of all human meaning. Considering metaphysics either solely in

terms of the minimal conditions for the possibility of intelligible discourse or as the

unjustifiable assertion of the empirical sciences intrinsically privileged access to the

truth fails to account for the anthropological significance of metaphysics as a particular

practice of delineating a self-conscious relationship between what is and what ought to

be. In its resolute attempt to be non-metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical), the second type

of philosophies from which Mrkus distinguishes his own practice endeavours to give

articulation to the Other of scientific rationality. In struggling to do so, however, each

effort of the so-called deconstruction of metaphysics has either subsequently been

12

criticized for harbouring its own metaphysical presuppositions or has transformed the

philosopher of today into the prophet of tomorrow.

In contrast to both, Mrkus philosophy of culture attempts to elaborate a

relationship towards a future that addresses the expressed needs of contemporaneity and

is oriented by the principal value of modernity, which is culturally esteemed and is

nevertheless unrealized by the vast majority. Although the particular account of this

relationship can never be definitively justified, it can evaluate the present situation

through a paradigm characterizing a universal human facticity by means of a

meaningful and enlightening narrative. The absolute value of freedom orienting this

approach is not only a legacy of the Enlightenment; it is elicited as socially efficacious

for Mrkus contemporaries by means of a critical theory of the high cultural practice of

philosophy through a paradigm of cultural production as an interminable practice of

human emancipation.

13

Part I: On the Marxist Foundations of Critical Theory

14

Chapter I: On Lukcs

15

Of all the members of the Budapest School, Gyrgy Mrkus demonstrates the greatest

continuity with both a broadly-construed Marxian heritage generally and the specific

theoretical interests of his mentor Georg Lukcs. In his relatively early text, Debates and

Trends in Marxist Philosophy (1968), Mrkus identifies with Lukcs interpretation of

Marxism as a social ontology and rejects the hegemony of the standard Stalinist

orthodoxy.1 By doing so, Mrkus explicitly aligns himself with Lukcs in an

uncharacteristic philosophical gesture, one that evinces the political nature of its

expression as a polemical defense of the pluralization of Marxist tendencies and was

essential to his participation in the so-called Renaissance of Marx. In order to

understand the significance of Mrkus polemic, it is important to recall that, during the

1960s, the global resonance of the abuses of Party ideology had been merely tempered by

Khrushchevs overtures of theoretical and practical contrition at the XXth Congress of the

centralized Communist Party; locally, the Hungarian contingent circumscripted and

permitted only the semblance of the freedom of thought and expression under Kdrs

contemporary relaxation of political persecution. By seeking to undermine the claim

thatin practiceMarxist philosophy was itself a unified and homogenous discipline,

Mrkus radical gesture challenged the essential theoretical premise of the Soviet Party

orthodoxy viz. that an isolated methodology could discern the single, true and final

meaning of historical cultural development in accordance with the objective interests of

1 Cf. Mrkus, Gyrgy. Debates and Trends in Marxist Philosophy reprinted in English translation in

Communism and Eastern Europe, ed. Frantisek Silnitsky, Larisa Silnitsky and Karl Reyman. (Karz Publishers, New York: 1979). Pgs. 104-132.

16

humankind as such.2 The revelation of the systematic brutality of the Russian gulags; the

Soviet conspiratorial campaigns against Tito and an independently self-governing

Yugoslavia; the forcible and bloodied suppression of popular uprisings in Hungary; the

invasion of Czechoslovakia by countries comprising the Warsaw Pact; the restriction or

complete abrogation of common individual liberties enjoyed in the everyday lives of

Western societies; these and further repressive activities, however, decisively and

definitively cast the model of Soviet-type societies not only into a practical crisis of

legitimacy among its participant members. During this period, Marxism as a motivating

ideology was in crisis among workers and intellectuals, in Western bourgeois societies

and the Communist Eastern bloc alike, and thereby precipitated a theoretical crisis of the

basic Marxian presupposition that the transcendence of the capitalist mode of production

was necessarily identical to human emancipation, an unwavering march towards the

(socialist) realm of freedom. Consequentially, its tenets were intensely and increasingly

scrutinized from a philosophical perspective, most notably in the form of a self-critique

of historical materialism, in which Mrkus' critical recognition of the pluralization of

Marxism, i.e., of its variously co-existing tendencies, could concomitantly serve as both a

challenge to the hitherto unthematized postulate of orthodox Marxism that there is a

2 The provocation that one methodology is unable to absolutely determine this totality would ultimately

occasion the policing of Mrkus movements, to expulsion from the Communist Party, and, ultimately, to his politically enforced unemployment from all academic posts. Although Lukcs international celebrity partially shielded the members of the Budapest School from some public retaliation, this protection was hardly unlimited. In 1968 and in a deliberate act of provocation, Gyrgy Mrkus, gnes Heller and other dissident Hungarian intellectuals publically opposed the military intervention of Warsaw Pact countries into the Czechoslovakian reform efforts by signing the Korula declaration condemning the participation of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party; they were subsequently expelled for not complying with Party discipline. On the latter, Cf. HU OSA 300-8-3:34-1-9, Partelet Article on Party Expulsions, Country Series: Hungary, 17 December 1968. Cf. also HU OSA 300-8-3:34-1-1, Three Philosophers Expelled from Hungarian Party [Country Series: Hungary] 17 December 1968.

17

single, true and final meaning to the interests of humankind, and a plea for its

replacement with a form of value pluralism as a constitutive feature of an emancipatory

project. Hence, in a negative sense, Mrkus critique meant a global challenge to

appropriation of the Marxian tradition by an apologetic ideology, which disguised its

positivistic content through the form of an old-fashioned, dogmatic metaphysics; it was

an attempt to recover the critical/emancipatory meaning of this tradition within the

realities of the twentieth century.3 To this end, Mrkus followed Lukcs in opining that

the Soviet hegemony had distorted the original intentions of Marx to such an extent that it

was necessary to challenge its claim to be an orthodox interpretation of Marx (and to do

so by addressing Marx's corpus directly), as it were to re-found the possibilities for a

critical theory of contemporary society by inquiring into areas of social consequence that

Marx himself had given relatively little attention. While each drew significantly divergent

conclusions, this return to Marx and to revivifying the critical tradition of classical

German idealism is best understood as an attempt to elaborate a philosophy of culture.

The abiding and seminal significance of Lukcs notwithstanding, concentrating

myopically on this influence obscures the originality of Mrkus oeuvre and, through his

emancipatory hermeneutics, the fulfillment of the Kantian formulation of the

3 Mrkus, Gyrgy. Alienation and Reification in Marx and Lukcs, Thesis Eleven, Nos. 5/6 (1982). Pg.

139. Mrkus use of the term ideology is not accidental, for, at the level of the theoretical description, the implicit and yet essential plurality of co-existing Marxist orientations not only reveals that the Party insisted on positing its own particular interests as if they were the universal interests of humankind; a fortiori it critically elicits the suggestion that differently possible alternative conceptual frameworks are systematically blocked by means of this false claim to universality. As the present study will come to show, it is precisely the attempt to discern how the Party sought to legitimate itself as the privileged interpreter of the universal and true interests of humankind that orients Mrkus critical assessment of History and Class Consciousness in Ideology and Its Ideologies: Lukcs and Goldmann on Kant (Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 8 no. 2 (1981), pp. 126-147.

18

Enlightenment dictum to think with ones own mind.4 Although the frequency of explicit

references to Lukcs significantly diminishes after his emigration from Hungary, it would

be incorrect to suggest that this phenomenon implies a repudiation of either Lukcs

influence or the studies Mrkus had produced during the years of the Budapest School;

rather, it indicates a change in the manner how Mrkus attends to Lukcs oeuvre. In

order to elucidate this change in the function that Lukcs assumes in Mrkus own

critical writings, the present study will address two papers that evince this difference.

Whereas the 1973 study on his mentor (Life and the Soul: the Young Lukcs and the

Problem of Culture) is primarily concerned to describe the partially complimentary and

yet significantly contradictory registers of Lukcs theoretical work prior to the latters

conversion to Bolshevism, the 1981 article (Ideology and Its Ideologies: Lukcs and

Goldmann on Kant) is increasingly critical of the ideological character of the conceptual

framework and the methodological assumptions inhering in Lukcs early Marxist

writings.5 As it will be shown, Mrkus 1981 essay demonstrates not only a critical stance

towards Lukcs, butwhile not negating his earlier claims that culture continued to be

the singular thought of Lukcs lifeit also clearly elaborates the grounds of Lukcs

4 Indeed, the legacy Immanuel Kant influence is increasingly and explicitly central to Mrkus' critical

project following his immigration to Australia in 1978, as he attempts to elaborate a critical theory of cultural production in Western modernity. 5 To suggest, however, that Mrkus is critical of Lukcs is not to indicate that he is dismissive. In this

respect, the critical theoretical labour engages in a form of ideology critique that, as in Marx, Mrkus insists ought not to conflate the meanings of critique and dismissal. Indeed, it is the latter identification that is theoretically presupposed by certain Marxist tendencies aiming to align the Marxs later writings with a positivist science. While this is clearly evident in his polemical stance against the standard interpretation of Marxism, the more philosophically substantive account of the relationship of the sciences (especially of the natural sciences) to the practice of ideology-critique is explored in Mrkus acute rejoinder to Jorge Larrain. (Cf. Gyrgy Mrkus, Ideology, Critique and Contradiction in Marx: An Answer to J. Larrain, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Vol. XI, No. 3 (1987), pp. 74-88.) The present study will address the Marxian conceptions of ideology in chapter two, although the relationship of Marxist philosophy to the natural sciences can only be considered tangentially.

19

conversion to Marxism that Mrkus finds most unappealing. Mrkus objects to these

grounds in four ways:

1) by maintaining that the history of the 20th century can no longer support

the contention that (actually existing) Soviet socialism is a liberating form

of social (re-)production;

2) by suggesting that, in the process of providing a conceptual re-orientation

of the traditional class-based analyses of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals,

Lukcs own conceptual frameworkthat which opposes false and

true consciousness on the one hand, and empirical (mass-

psychological) and imputed consciousness on the otherelides the

central significance and value assumed by the empirical individual in his

pre-Marxist works;

3) by challenging the postulate of an ubiquitous method of ideology critique

that Lukcs had announced was essential to Marxist orthodoxy;

4) by critically confronting the practice of philosophy that as a cultural

genre, through constituting the meaning of its common objects differently

in accordance with differing forms of ideology critique, can no longer

practically rely on the value of value-monism.

Despite the numerous similarities (and interesting differences) evinced by the 1981 paper,

a detailed account of Goldmanns position in relation to that of Lukcs and Mrkus lies

beyond the scope of the present study.6 Rather than address the resonance with Goldmann

6 Nevertheless, it is important to note that both Goldmann and Mrkus were deeply influenced by Lukcs

and each suggests similar concerns about the historical finalism evident in the Hegelian methodology of

20

(or the many other contemporary critical theorists from whom he implicitly distinguishes

himself), however, the present study will attend to Mrkus philosophy of culture as it

reconsiders the philosophical presuppositions of Marxist critical theory themselves. To

this end, the interrogation of the foundationalist claims of classical German Idealism will

be considered as an essential moment of his absolute historicization of speculative

philosophy, which is oriented by the absolute value of human freedom as a form of post-

metaphysical thinking. This aspect of his intellectual trajectory not only gives specific

content to the unique appropriation of Marx, which most clearly distinguishes Mrkus

from Lukcs, but extends the philosophical import of the political gesture made by the

1968 paper, regarding the essential multiplicity of Marxist philosophies, to the pluralism

of Kantianism.

According to Mrkus, modern and contemporary philosophies both manifest an

essential plurality of interpretations of their effective historical traditions and base

themselves upon constitutively opposing hermeneutic practices, evinced by and

elaborating to a greater or lesser extent contradictory ideological world-viewsor

horizonseach of which conditions the intelligibility and meaning the participating

social actors discern in their cultural practices and products. The first part of the present

study, therefore, considers Mrkus hermeneutic interventions as indicating the seminal

philosophical reflections on culture that inform his own theoretical practice, and proceeds

with the understanding that not only does each thinker addressed have a different and

History and Class Consciousness that occasion their respective returns to Kant; however, Goldmanns account remains idealistic in its privileging of the conceptual framework of a philosophy of consciousness (pace his appropriation of Piaget) whereas Mrkus bases his interpretation of cultural objectivations on the social practices of their (re-)production (which presupposes, but is not reducible to the implicit legitimation of their meaning-content of their conscious representation).

21

irreconcilable methodology for attending to their common object of investigation, but a

fortiori that Mrkus self-consciously recognizes and deliberately chooses one among

several possible interpretive stances (with respect to both the authors works he considers

and to the problem of cultural objectivation itself). For this reason, the following re-

construction of his hermeneutic practice of interpreting the major precursors to his own

philosophy of culture initially emphasizes the content of Mrkus critical interventions.

Subsequently, it will consider both how the concretization of the negative moment of

theoretical description further reveals an immanent positive potentiality for the practical

transcendence of the social presuppositions that condition the very emergence of the form

of their cultural objectivation and the cultural relations that can sustain the critically

effective (re-)production of a normative social form of the cultural genre of philosophy

obtaining between the philosopher of culture, the object of his investigation, and the

reception of his work. Notwithstanding his seminal and powerful influence, addressing

the young Lukcs in this manner will serve as a propaedeutic to reconsidering the

foundations of critical theory, and the significance of how Marx, Hegel and Kant

manifests in Mrkus philosophy of culture.

I. The Pre-Marxist Lukcs

Mrkus first explicit and sustained philosophical consideration of culture manifests by

means of his 1973 essay Life and the Soul: The Young Lukcs and the Problem of

Culture, which he composed while otherwise collecting, ordering and editing a

collection of posthumously-discovered manuscripts on aesthetics and the philosophy of

art that had remained hidden in a Heidelberg bank vault since the recently-deceased

22

(1971) Lukcs had written them nearly sixty years earlier. The discovery was a boon for

Mrkus not least because the discovery enabled one to cast significant doubt on the

prevailing assumption that Lukcs philosophical itinerary had suffered an abrupt

discontinuity when he joined the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918 and

adopted its ideological commitments as his theoretical ballast. To depict the sense of this

understanding of continuity, Mrkus argues that, in spite of different formulations of the

question, methods and modes of addressing or presenting it: Culture was the single

thought of Lukcs life. Is culture possible today? For Lukcs, the question of culture

was synonymous with the question of life, with the immanence of meaning in life.

Through culture, men and events become part of a meaningful totality.7 By choosing

culture as his theme and providing a different possible (and plausible) re-constitution of

the itinerary of the early Lukcs oeuvre, however, Mrkus does not seek to summarily

dismiss either the significant contributions of his predecessors interpretations generally

or the particular widespread assumption that a theoretical rupture was precipitated by

Lukcs political alliance.8 Mrkus critical purpose, then, is not to simply rehabilitate a

7 Mrkus, Gyrgy. Life and the Soul: the Young Lukcs and the Problem of Culture in Lukcs

Reappraised, ed. gnes Heller. (New York, Columbia University Press: 1983). Pg. 3-4. 8 To the contrary, he explicitly contends that both provide vital perspectives for a more robust account of

Lukcs philosophical commitments. Thus, [i]n pointing out these parallels [between the early works and those following the so-called conversion, particularly the 1963 The Specificity of the Aesthetic], the intention is not to replace the generally accepted picture of a discontinuity in the development of Lukcs thought with an equally one-sidedindeed, even more misleadingstress on its continuity. There is simply no doubt that the conversion of 1918 had a profound effect on Lukcs view of the world and influenced the way in which he solved individual problems. (Cf. Ibid. Pg. 3.) Therefore, the present studys account of Mrkus relationship to the young Lukcs writings addresses the latters work up to and including History and Class Consciousness (1923), and avers that what and how Mrkus appropriates Lukcs only trivially relies upon the distinction introduced by the so-called conversion. Given its previously delineated horizons, Lukcs Bolshevik conversion will be considered as introducing problematic methodological premises that Mrkus intends to avoid. In a more complete account of Mrkus philosophy of culture, the relevance of the pre-Marxist Lukcs will be explicated with reference to the arts

23

so-called pre-Marxist Lukcs, whose early writings could thereby be canonized by

virtue of this theoretical elaboration as Marxist philosophy. (Such a gesture would

presuppose that the latter is a homogeneous and monolithic entity, which Mrkus would

completely renounce as non-existent.) Rather, it is to demonstrate that multiple

irreducibly differentiated interpretations of Lukcs development are both plausible and

valid (each interpreting the thinkers corpus from a different perspective and basing their

analyses on different considerations of what constitutes the object of Lukcs studies).9 In

his 1973 paper, Mrkus refuses to dissolve the competing trajectories of Lukcs thinking

into a simple unity, and thereby preserves and emphasizes their essential plurality,

conspicuously leaving the door open to further considerations about what ideological

ends are served by commentators appropriating Lukcs oeuvre in a determinately one-

sided manner that does attempt to resolve its tensions.10 As Mrkus Debates and

Trends essay argues, the standard interpretation of Marxism, particularly in its Stalinist

guise, is representative of the cultural assumption that there isand can beonly one

theoretically cogent interpretation of (natural and/or social) phenomena.11 Thus at the

as an autonomous high cultural genre of Western modernity, although it can only be tangentially addressed by the present study. 9 The same contention is evident in Mrkus analyses of Marxist theories of culture and of Kants practical

philosophy, but self-consciously resisted by the insular metaphysical premises of Hegels methodology. This does not mean, however, that Mrkus does not accept significant elements of Hegelian philosophy; the notion of ideal (geistige) objectivations, for example, is pre-eminent throughout Mrkus writings. It only affirms that Mrkus is resolutely reluctant to concede the textual support in Hegels oeuvre for articulating a plurality of equally valid and radically differentiated interpretations regarding Hegels philosophy are acceptable on Hegelian grounds. 10

The same can be said of the 1981 article with respect to Lukcs and Goldmanns critical reception of Kants philosophy, although the historically latter paper contains more critical suggestions for the practice of philosophy. 11

As we shall see, this philosophical assumption is shared by the Hegelian metaphysics and is typical of, what Mrkus calls, an aestheticizing attitudea speculative disposition that was similarly maintained in the critiques of early Romanticism. Mrkus own attitude maintains the irreducible plurality of perspectives and cultural spheres, which he maintains is typical of the Enlightenment.

24

same timeand, perhaps, more importantlyMrkus analysis implicitly contends that

at least some methodological assumptions and cultural considerations logically precede

and cannot be resolved by the mere adoption a Marxist perspective. Precisely because the

principles and relative importance ascribed to the values animating the critique of cultural

objectivations are not necessarily universally homogeneous, Mrkus suggests that a more

radical and theoretically encompassing manner of doing philosophy exists for which the

standard tendency of orthodox Marxism is but a particular manifestation.

Whereas to maintain that different methodological premises condition diverging

normative criteria inhering in distinct cultural practices primarily concerns the critical

reception of Lukcs works, Mrkus more ostensible purpose in the 1973 paper is to

demonstrate that Lukcs pre-Marxist works do not evince a coherent set of norms as to

their cultural production, which thereby multiplies the possible ways in which the

conceptual framework of his oeuvre can be interpreted. Standard Marxist

interpretations and those which likewise metaphysically postulate a univocal meaning to

historical phenomena attempt to rationalize the essential multiplicity of registers inhering

in Lukcs early works by transposing to the level of speculative reconciliation a coherent

depiction of an abiding, single meaning manifesting throughout his oeuvre; in this

manner, the works antedating Lukcs conversion to Marxism are either simply dismissed

in importance or they are understood to be strictly opposed and thereby sublated in his

conversion to Marxism. The methodological assumption of maturation, however, actually

belies the plurality of equally justifiable world-views and value-orientations that animate

the cultural genre of philosophy generally and Lukcs critical inquiries in particular. It

is, then, not merely a question of Marxisms methodological superiority at rendering

25

historical phenomena intelligible and meaningful, a question to which a final and definite

answer cannot be forthcoming in principle; Mrkus implicitly maintains further that this

question itselfi.e., of Marxisms primacy (as one of, if not the primary question of

critical philosophy)can only arise from a particular concatenation of historical

processes of various social practices that constitute the essential meaning(s) of the

normative methodological assumptions of philosophy as a cultural genre. In Mrkus

analyses, the different and particular forms of philosophy (as a cultural genre) are

produced according to different principles of construction and, to this end, Mrkus essay

accounts for the irreducible and constitutive tension between the historical and

metaphysical dimensions of Lukcs thought. The theoretical elaboration of this tension

is not intended to abate but to speculatively transpose and reveal the problematic situation

faced by modern persons viz. as that which is itself transposed to the level of theory in

Lukcs sometimes complimentary sometimes contradictory formulations of the

possibility of culture.12 Thus:

In Lukcs diagnosis during this [pre-Marxist] period one can detect two

parallel forms of analysis, one metaphysical and existential, the other

historical. With almost periodic regularity Lukcs himself tried to

clarify their relationship, both in principle and methodologically.

However, between these two types of analysis there remain, at least

implicitly, unresolved yet fruitful contradictions, relating not only to

12 The attempt to address these theoretical problems from the perspective of social praxis is one of the tasks

that a critical theory of cultural production aims to elucidate. The distinctively modern character of this undertaking is precipitated by the cultural value of individual freedom, whichin practiceprecludes the possibility of definitive philosophical closure in the ineliminable moment of contingency and its essential openness unto the future.

26

questions of methodology. (This failure to achieve a resolution may

perhaps have been the reason for the frequency of Lukcs attempts at

unification.) For underlying this problem of methodological parallelism

is a deeper problem, a philosophical dilemma (although the two are not

identical, nor can one be reduced to the other). The issue is whether the

condition of the age in which he lived was an expression of the existential

and ontological tragedy of culture or of an historical crisis from which

recovery was possible.13

Mrkus does not seek to resolve, for himself, the latter problem, because to do so would

commit him in practice not only to promoting one or another of the dominant world-

views of cultural modernity but a fortiori to maintaining that reconciliation between the

divergent world-views is itself theoretically possible and thereby that a definitive

coherent meaning to social practices is in principle determinable. Nevertheless, Mrkus

investigations of the antinomic vicissitudes of modernity may be understood as so many

attempts to critically analyzein one or the other directionhow this crisis itself is

produced as if it were an insuperable horizon. Despite his methodologically-induced

skepticism, there is sufficient indication that Mrkus does adopt a single attitude towards

the possible resolution of the so-called crisis of culture yet it is based on contingent and

provisional grounds of practical solidarity forged among diverging manners of cultural

orientation. Doing so, however, in no way commits Mrkus a priori to a particular

emancipatory programme, to the position that the crisis of culture will be resolved or that

its resolution is unambiguously desirable; rather, it asseverates attentiveness to the

13 Ibid. Pg. 4-5.

27

historically changing constellation of socio-cultural forces that exhibit relations of power

between the different spheres of Western modernity. Ultimately, the tentatively advanced

and practical conclusions of Mrkus philosophy are not theoretical deductions of the

necessary course of history, butin a manner that resonates with the dialectical thinking

of Goldmanna wager on the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment. This wager,

which is consistently oriented towards a value-idea of freedom that is essentially

Kantian in character, is mitigated by recognizing the antinomies of the Enlightenments

different and incoherent tendencies as well as by the irreducible counter-tendencies of

Romanticism that continue to challenge the legacy of the Enlightenment. In order to

understand how Mrkus has come to this position, it is necessary to begin by

countenancing the way that Mrkus circumscribes his analysis of Lukcs early writings

to methodological considerations. (The central focus of these

investigations is the relationship between the a prioriaesthetic and

socio-historical concepts of form.) Important as these analyses are, the

contradictions between the two methods of investigation are evidence

of various (in part, contradictory) attempts to find a solution to the crisis of

culture; they imply different historical perspectives.14

The crisis of culture that the young Lukcs confronted chiefly indicates,

subjectively, the decline of the self-evident supremacy of Western culture to its

respective participants, which had been constitutive to the conceptualizations of culture

proffered by Enlightenment thinkers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,

objectively, to the alienation and/or reification of modern socio-cultural practices. During

14 Ibid. Pg. 20.

28

the early decades of the 20th century, Lukcs shared the theoretical question of culture

i.e., whether culture could universally and legitimately motivate persons to the proper

ends of humankindwith other neo-Kantian philosophers of culture viz. Heinrich

Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel andmost importantlyMax Weber. Each of

these thinkers addressed culture from a revised Kantian perspective, but historical

experiencesparticularly the horrors of World War Iundermined the nave faith in the

necessarily progressive and emancipatory orientation of the high cultural practices of

Western modernity. Throughout this period, diverse quasi-speculative yet provisionally

foundational philosophies articulated various theories of the concept of culture,

primarily in response to the alienation endured by social actorsboth as to their

estrangement from one another and each from the objective complexes of meaning

yielded by their collective productionfrom the waning ability of tradition and religion

to organize and orient social actors towards meaningful forms of social integration. The

conception of culture, which was problematized and yet employed by Lukcs and his

contemporaries, was therefore distinctively and essentially modern not merely in the

sense that it was self-consciously recognized to be the product of human industry and

innovation, serving to realize ends posited by social actors, but also to the extent that, in

determining these ends, their selection and principles of production were understood to

be contingent and mutable.15 In Mrkus description, this philosophical conceptualization

15 That is, Mrkus maintains, it is only under conditions of modernity that the ways people live and act in

the world, and also the manner they understand this world, are conceived by them as constituting a form of culture, that is, as not being simply natural, or God-ordained, but as something man-made and re-makable which conforms with equally humanly created and changeable standards and ends. Cultural modernity is a culture which knows itself as culture and as one among many. (Cf. Mrkus, Gyrgy. A Society of Culture: The Constitution of Modernity in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell. (London, Routledge: 1994). Pgs. 15-16.) Such an introductory characterization

29

of culture, however, initially emerges in the wake of the declining pre-critical

metaphysical systems during the late XVIII and early XIX centuries, arising as a highly

ambivalent, contested, and, yet, critical concept that could be used to rectify a residual

normative deficit in the practical orientation of everyday life. In one of his more succinct

formulations, Markus explains:

Culture served to replace the idea of a binding traditionit designated and

designates all those human achievements and accomplishments which as

historically accumulated and inheritable material and ideal objectivations

constitute the storehouse of human possibilities that can be put selectively

and creatively to use for meeting the ever new exigencies of a dynamically

changing life. But to this broad (anthropological) notion of culture stands

opposed its narrow (value-marked) sense: culture as high culture

designating a very specific set of practices and their products, those which

under the conditions of modernity are regarded as autonomous, having a

value in themselves, i.e., primarily the sciences and the arts.16

In the following, the analysis proffered by the present study will be confined to

explicating how and why Mrkus considers culture problematic and constitutes the

of the period of cultural modernity is abstract enough to describe Western modernity from the time of the Enlightenment to the present day. Mrkus, however, occasionally hesitates to refer to the period following World War II as cultural modernity. (He is most emphatic on this demarcation in his paper The Paradoxical Unity of Culture: The Arts and Sciences (in Thesis Eleven, no. 75. November 2003. Pgs. 7-24. Esp. pg. 8.).) His suggestions imply that contemporaneity may be either a new dynamic emerging pari passu the decline of cultural modernity, or the most recent phase of the restless dynamic of cultural modernitys dialectic. In the following, the latter, more modest interpretation is assumed on the basis of its prevalence in Mrkus writings. Thus the term cultural modernity will be used to cover the historical period from the late XVIIIth century Enlightenment to the present day. When Mrkus seems to intimate a significant change in its essential modality, the appellation contemporary culture will be employed. 16

Mrkus, Gyrgy. A Philosophy Lost: German Philosophies of Culture at the Turn of the Century in Divinatio. Studia Culturologica series. Vol. 2. 1998. Pg. 54.

30

main object of philosophical investigation in the works of Lukcs maturation. In this

way, it will be shown how Mrkus not only appropriates the practico-historical problem

set forth by Lukcs (by emphasizing the period of The Soul and Form to his

conversion), but it will also indicate how Mrkus rejects and transforms Lukcs

manner of resolving the crisis of culture following the latters adoption of a particular

form of Hegelian Marxism.

In order to make sense of the metaphysical and existential dimensions of his

mentors early essays, Mrkus emphasizes Lukcs deployment of the concepts of life

and soul, whichin their dualityare mediated by form as the particular manner in

which one person relates to other persons, to the world of social institutions and cultural

objectivations. The form of life is that of mere everyday existence, of a second nature

typified by the sedimented structure of impersonal and, yet, interpersonal objectivity: a

world of rigid forms (conventions and institutions) alien to man. These were once created

by the soul, guided by reason and by clear goals, but they have inevitably turned into

external forces that merely exist but are no longer alive.17 At this level of social

objectivity, dualistic oppositions obtain between particular individuals and between the

individual(s) and the needs appropriate to their societal integration, an alienation that is

expressed existentially by ones inauthentic subjectivity. The latter opposition founds

Lukcs contention that man is not what he is but what he could be and yields to a

metaphysical contradiction between the life of a person as a particular subject of

potentiality and the normative form of the authentic personality expressing her or his

17 Mrkus, Gyrgy. Life and the Soul: the Young Lukcs and the Problem of Culture in Lukcs

Reappraised, ed. gnes Heller. (New York, Columbia University Press: 1983). Pg. 6.

31

integration into the institutional structures that the soul creates to order her or his life.18

Although the institutional structures of meaning are expressed through autonomous

cultural practices (in genre-specific forms posited as inter-subjectively valid), this does

not exclude heterogeneous factors from influencing (restricting or enabling) the manner

in which the individual is capable of participating in meaningful cultural activity.

For the moment, Mrkus does not address whether Lukcs contends that the

alienation of particular persons from their authentic personality is a socially or

historically conditioned phenomena; rather, he considers the way in which the soul

appears as the contrasting form of existence appropriate to an integrated individuality. By

addressing the socio-ontological potentiality of singular human beings according to the

two forms of existence with which they appear, Lukcs emphasizes that the freedom of

the individual person is constituted (qua individual) on the basis of her or his practical

relationships to the cultural productivity of the soul. In Lukcs early essays, this

conception of the experience of the soul is considered both metaphysically and from an

existential perspective: On the one hand the soul is the substance of mans world, the

creative and founding principle of every social institution and work of culture. On the

other hand the soul means authentic individuality, the nucleus that makes every

personality fundamentally unique and irreplaceable and gives it its intrinsic value.19 As

the following will suggest, Lukcs contends that the freedom of the individual is

metaphysically understood to refer to the capacity (opportunity) to give form to life itself;

existentially, this is expressed in terms of the practical ability to pursue a vocation that

18 Ibid. Pg. 9.

19 Ibid. Pg. 7.

32

produces works in accordance with particular value-commitments that are chosen by the

individual. Hence:

The soul is experience or, more accurately, it can become experience,

but it is not in any way identical with the sum total or stream of ones

experiences. Soul means, in fact, the maximum development, the highest

possible intensification, of the powers of an individuals will, his

capabilities and his psychical energies, those unique potentialities that

every human being is capable of developing, and ought to develop, in

order to become a real personality. The soul is, as it were, the vocation

of an individual. And this vocation is directed outwards, towards the

outside world and other human beings. For authenticity is nothing other

than actively using ones abilities to the full, shaping everything that

happens to one into a personal destiny that expresses ones innermost

nature.20

20 Ibid. Pg. 8. Mrkus elicits the existential ground of Lukcs use of the Weberian conception of

vocation by referring to a complementary and eminently Kantian conception of experience as that which a particular person expresses through an activity that is in principle universalizable (either in terms of theoretical cognition or as a practical subject). The specific Kantian character of this use of the concept of experience is conditioned by Mrkus citation from Lukcs The History of the Development of Modern Drama: mans whole being can only manifest itself with immediate energy in his will and in his actions initiated by his will. For emotions and thoughts are transient and variable in form, much more elastic in their nature and more exposed to outside influences than the will. The individual does not know how far his emotions and thoughts are really his own (or how far they have become so). He only knows this with complete certainty when they are tested for some reason, that is, when he has to act in accordance with them, when they become part of his will and result in actions. Cf. Ibid. Pg. 22. Fn. 29. This reading is anticipated by Mrkus previous comparison of Lukcs Heidelberg manuscripts on aesthetics and The Specificity of the Aesthetic with regard to the single thought of Lukcs life. There, Mrkus maintains: Both [works] are attempts to establish the place and function of art within the system of human activities and to explain its relationship with everyday life (in the terminology employed by the young Lukcs, its relationship with experienced reality) and with the generic forms of human activity and objectivation (in early terminology, the fundamental forms of the transcendental constitution) that shape and appropriate reality. Cf. Ibid. Pg. 3.

33

In these writings, the use of the term metaphysical does not refer to the principles and

properties of the brute physical world that natural science investigates but to the

ambiguous relationship between modes of transcendental constitution, on the one hand,

and the practically-constituted ontology of the social world, on the other. These modes of

transcendental constitution refer to the production of the high cultural forms and the

works that comprise them (most notably, the natural sciences, the arts, and philosophy),

which achieve their degree of social efficacy and importance by means of concrete and

contingent acts of evaluative reception.21 Thus, it is essential to stress that, for both

Lukcs and Mrkus, the cultural production of works of art is only one of several

manners according to which individuals can impose form on the disparate material they

find in everyday life.22 This entails the premise that there are multiple ways in which a

person can both live and give meaning to her or his life; the work is, for this reason,

simultaneously a working, a forming of an individual life into a singular soul.

Mrkus discusses the duality that Lukcs posits between life and soul by first

considering the objectivity of cultural objectivations before turning to the meaning their

21 It is the form of soul, objectivated in the work, which temporarily resolves the antinomy of individual and

society, and permits genuine communication between its members, a respite from the misunderstandings that typify quotidian existence. The work is a peculiar and polysemic notion in the early philosophy of Lukcs; it refers not only to the objective product of a particular kind of human activityof production in a very general senseit is a fortiori dialectically (and, therefore, inextricably) related to the producer, the life of whom is itself given form by the act of giving form to that objective product. Here, one is able to glimpse the later trajectory of Lukcs thinking and the emphasis he gives to the category of labour in his works on social ontology. These late writings from the 1960s exert an unmistakable and essential influence on the development of Mrkus early attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. 22

Mrkus continues: Through these forms, on the one hand, the soul becomes pure and homogeneous, since it is centered upon a single value; on the other hand, using this single value, the soul can bring order to the chaos of life, of mere existence, and can invest it with meaning. As the principle of objectivation, the principle of the validity of objectivation, form is also the principle of mediation between life and the soul, although it can never finally resolve the antagonism, the dualism, between them. Cf. Ibid. Pg. 11.

34

objectivity yields to subjectivity. He begins his interpretation of this central notion by

asserting that, for Lukcs:

The concept of form is more all-embracing than that of the work. For

Lukcs, form designates all the functions connected with the creation of

meaning. It enables the multiplicity of facts, events and all other elements

of life to be arranged into meaningful structures, organized patterns of

meaning. (Accordingly, form is related not only to the sphere of absolute

spirit but also to that of objective spirit.) Each separate form is a

particular way in which the soul responds to life.23

In this respect, Lukcs notion of aesthetic form refers to schema in accordance with

which the material of life is selected, ordered and structured, a schema that will vary

depending on the genre, style, etc.24 Although Mrkus does not explore Lukcs

suggestion that scientific objectivations may similarly endow life with the form of soul,

his chosen emphasis does not necessarily imply that the arts are paradigmatic for other

spheres of cultural modernity; as they are representative of cultural objectivations in

general, they provide a particular instance for how the soul may express itself.25 Thus, in

order to pre-emptively counter the Hegelian interpretation that would countenance their

hierarchical relationship to one another, Mrkus qualifies Lukcs contention regarding

the multiplicity of possible forms of cultural objectivation by insisting further on their

23 Ibid. Pg. 10-11.

24 Ibid. Pg. 11.

25 Given his preference for literature, Lukcs often further seems to belie this insight by concentrating on

that particular genre.

35

irreducibility.26 Lukcs, therefore, resolutely rejects not only the derivative character of

art vis--vis speculative philosophy distinctive of the Hegelian metaphysics of absolute

spirit but also the secular analogy of the artist to a divine creator suggesting aesthetic

creatio ex nihilo. However, these cultural formsscientific, aesthetic, etc.which evoke

the possibility of transcending ordinary life do not merely refer to the structure of the

objective product. Each form embodies a vision, an immediate interpretation of life as

experienced, Mrkus explains, not an interpretation in the sense of a subjective

response on the part of a self divorced from life but an interpretation within the schema of

a creative arrangement of the raw material of life. This schema is inseparable from the

concrete material of the work of art and is itself a source of experience. It is expressed

through the objective structure of the work of art.27

In Lukcs early writings on aesthetics, although the material of life from which

the artist draws in order to give to it new form is unambiguously understood to refer to an

everyday life typified by alienation and inauthenticity, the description Mrkus provides of

Lukcs conception of everyday life suggests that it is ostensibly paradoxical.28 On the

26 To this end, Mrkus maintains that [t]he plurality and the autonomy of the various forms are basic

themes in the philosophy of the young Lukcs. His Aesthetics refers to this question as one of the most important theoretical considerations that turned him against Hegelian philosophy (the manuscript contains an elaborated critical confrontation with Hegel). Hegels monism and panlogism are based on the assumption that all forms of transcendental constitution can be reduced to one single type, namely theoretical logical constitutionmore accurately, that they can be deduced logically from its principles. By contrast, Lukcs formulates the Kantian basic thesis of his own system as the complete independence of all autonomous forms of constitution from each other and the complete impossibility of deriving any one of them from any of the others. (Aesthetics, ch. 1). Cf. Ibid. Pg. 23. Fn. 36. Mrkus fundamental agreement with this characterization will be demonstrated in the second part of the present study by addressing his consideration of the conceptions of metaphysics in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. 27

Ibid. Pg. 11-12. 28

Given that it is the metaphysical/existential dimension of Lukcs early thinking that is presently under consideration, the immediately following remarks refer only to the most abstract dialectics of social organization. Subsequently, by means of the consideration of Lukcs socio-historical analyses, these metaphysical suggestions acquire greater historical specificity in the repudiation of bourgeois society. The

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one hand, it is that life of mechanical and rigid structures from which the soul has

withdrawn, while, on the other hand, quotidian existence is characterized as an

amorphous chaos of life that becomes, in the work of art, an ordered cosmos, a new

life, but one which, howeverby contrast with ordinary lifeis now unambiguous and

perspicuous.29 This seemingly paradoxical characterizationof a world of rigid forms

(conventions and institutions) that is also an amorphous chaosdoes not merely

contradistinguish a world of meaning to one of non-meaning, for an absolute dichotomy

cannot be coherent as their dialectical opposition can only introduce this distinction on

the basis of relative values, evaluations, and value-commitments in statu nascendi. That

which permits everyday life to appear to be rigidly ordered from one perspective, then, is

precisely the relative de-valuation of the principal value(s) in accordance with which it

had been created and had animated the soul of those for whom it originally bore

meaningful and orienting significance. In other words, without addressing the particular

value-commitments attending to the artists practice and objectivation of a particular

interpretation of the world, or world-view, the individuals act of cultural production can

be understood as intending nothing other than a meaningless re-ordering of indifferent

material. Eminent works of art, those which genuinely transcend the world of

conventional meanings and artifacts, however, cannot objectively annihilate the

ordinary life from which they obtain their material; each is a re-forming of said material

latter, however, is not merely a concretization of the metaphysical register but founded upon an essentially different (somewhat complementary, somewhat contradictory) consideration of the tragedy of culture. In the former, the possibility of culture is asserted to be definitively unrealizable on a general and social level (although this does not necessarily preclude momentary and exemplary instances of an individuals transcendence of this tragedy); the socio-historical register, on the other hand, suggests that the social transcendence of the cultural tragedy apposite to bourgeois society is concretely possible while leaving the actual realization of this possibility undetermined and contingent. 29

Ibid. Pg. 11.

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by the artist as a subject in order to objectivate that which is meaningfully inarticulable

within the rigid structures of significance ordering everyday life. Correlatively, the

reception of the artworkthat is, the very possibility of its intersubjective validityis

itself meaningful only to the extent to which the recipient her- or himself similarly rejects

the conventions and orienting values of ordinary life and implicitly, albeit temporarily,

adopts a value posited by the artwork as having determined its form.30 In this respect,

artworks evince the alienation of the producer in two respects: on the one hand, by means

of the objectification of the product the artist relinquishes authorial control over its

meaning and, on the other hand, the spatio-temporal distanciation of the transmission of

meaning occasioned by this artistic objectification viz. the cultural expression of the

practical and mutual estrangement of human beings from one another. For precisely this

reason, Mrkus continues, the link can never be adequate as far as content is

concerned, partly because the world view objectively embodied and expressed in the

form of the work does not necessarily stand in any relationship to the views and

intentions of its creator (according to the aesthetics of the young Lukcs, intention and

completed work are separated by an irrational leap) and partly because the experiences

evoked by the work are eo ipso the receivers own experiences.31 The cultural

production of great works of art, however, does not merely offer the promise of a

meaningful order of reality contradicting the world of everyday life and solicit the hope

30 Here, Mrkus again emphasizes, the universally valid link that a work of art forges between creator

and audience is created exclusively by the form objectified in the work. Cf. Ibid. This does not entail, however, that the creator and the recipients reject the same values. 31

The value that organizes the reception of the particular work, therefore, need not be the same as that which oriented its production, but, in order to be efficacious as a work of art, it must be posited by the recipient in accordance with the norms of the cultural genre and with respect to a value that is distinct from that which prevails in everyday life. Cf. Ibid.

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for a society of culture constituted by authentically integrated personalities. As an

essential condition for the possibility of meaningfully eliciting this hope, the artwork

must establish a contingent yet normative asymmetrical relation to the paradoxical

perpetuation of the world of impersonal, mechanical forces, a world of rigid forms

(conventions and institutions) alien to man as a fortiori that which is subjectively

negated in the practices of cultural production/reception.

Insofar as the objectification of the work of art can be understood to be the

transposition of the struggle to give form and immanent meaning to life itself, the

consideration of the indeterminacy inhering in the essentially unstable relationship

between the artist, the work, and the recipient belies the active struggle against the

alienated and rigidified structures of ordinary life. The working of the artist to produce a

self-enclosed totality of meaning in the product that she or he alienates to an independent

existence in the world is, more presciently, evocative of the ethical problematic that is

intrinsic to the endeavor to formi.e., to cultivatean authentic and integrated

personality viz. the effort to achieve an immanence of meaning in life. To this end,

Mrkus asserts:

The guarantee provided by the great cultural objectivations, that the

struggle against the alienation of ordinary life is not in vain, either in

human or in historical terms, offers only hope. It does not supply proof

that the goal of this struggle can actually be reached. For the great

question of whether culture is possible, to use the language of the young

Lukcs philosophy, cannot simply be reduced to the issue of whether it is

possible to create out of the raw material of life eternally valid, objective

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forms, forms that must necessarily be divorced from life; it turns primarily

on whether it is possible to shape life itself, if only in ways that, from a

historical perspective, may be no more than transitory.32

The more radical difficulty, regarding the ability to shape life itself, then, refers not

merely to the re-ordering of the material of life but to a real transcendence of the reified

forms of life that have typified everyday life, to the possibility of objectively negating

their ossifying tendencies, and of producing alternative sustainable conditions that admit

differing and yet meaningful practices by individuals. In this respect, one may locate the

central question regarding the possibility of a revolution in everyday life at the

theoretical nexus of the sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory

trajectories Mrkus discerns in Lukcs early philosophy. In spite of his attempts to

vitiate the conclusion by elaborating the conception of the soul, the

metaphysical/existential register of Lukcs pre-Marxist writings most explicitly insists

on the necessity of failure. According to Mrkus, in the Heidelberg Philosophy of Art,

Lukcs contends:

[T]he shaping of life according to ethical principles is impossible, for the

self, as the product of the ethical will, is incapable not only of

transforming the facts of the outside world but also of penetrating the soul

in its entirety. There is no way in which an individuals inner life can be

transformed into fate, that is, into a meaningful totality determined by

the ethical nature of the personality.33

32 Ibid. Pg. 13.

33 Ibid. Pg. 14.

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Mrkus interpretation of this metaphysically necessitated failure, however, implies that

Lukcs is not entirely consistent by posing the ethical problematic from the perspective

of the culture of a socialized aggregate of persons. Thus, the character of this necessary

failure is offered as a meaningful response to the question of the possibility of culture in a

non-absolute manner, i.e., its objective necessity appears only in relation to the relative

scarcity of those exceptional instances in which, Lukcs maintains, such failure has been

overcome. By maintaining this necessary failure relative to the exemplary status of