Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 3, Fall 2001, 327–349
Ethics and Self-Mastery: Revolution and the Fully Developed Person in the Work of Georg Lukács
ROBERT LANNING
ABSTRACT: From his earliest writings as a communist Georg Lukács was concerned with the place of the individual in Marxist theory and practice. Notwithstanding the importance of objective social conditions, a Marxist ontology must advocate the realization of the transformative capacities of individuals — the development of knowledge, the necessity of understanding, thinking and action as resting on a correct choice between alternatives, and the mastery of self. A necessary foundation for the full realization of human potential is to understand the process by which people can emerge from the ordinary experience of existing social conditions and become capable of, and prepared to engagein, the transformation of social reality. For Lukács, these are continuous themes found in his political and philosophical work, and in his literary criticism.
THE WORK OF GEORG LUKÁCS still presents us with opportunities to build on the fundamentals of Marxism, not only in terms of philosophy and literary criticism, but also with regard to the organizational problems that may contribute to the growth of socialist movements. Lukács’ contributions to issues of consciousness, ideology and the development of human potential are important historically, and have significance for progressive movements in the current period. The contemporary theorist and activist, of course, is confronted with certain problems having to do with the varied reception of his work and its relationship to the history of socialism. Interrogation of his political choices has often been the basis for calling into question the value of his theoretical work. There are the difficult statements: “I have always thought that the worst form of socialism was better to live in than the best form of capitalism” (1983, 181); and “every thinker is responsible to history for the objective substance of his philosophy” (1980a, 4). To some these statements appear inflexible and dictatorial; in fact, such statements reflect Lukács’ paramount interest in the full development of human capacities combined with his unyielding commitment to socialism. What has set Lukács apart for both criticism and praise is the commitment behind the statements.
Lee Cogdon, for example, laments the self-sacrifice to socialism of the left bourgeois intellectual. He gives us only the “young” Lukács, a biographical convenience marking the end of what is worth knowing about Lukács, before he succumbed to writing his “blueprint for tyranny,” History and Class Consciousness (Cogdon, 1983, 186). István Mészáros (1995, 281–422) has published extensive criticism of Lukács’ work and political choices, but the critique he puts forward ultimately concerns the crucial relationship between the individual and the objective conditions of capitalism, regarding precisely those interests that made up the core of Lukács’ life and work. More recently, Nicholas Vazsonyi (1997) has viciously argued that the message of Lukács’ early work marked a turning point toward violence. He argues that Lukács’ interpretation of the work of Johann Goethe became his selfjustification for assenting to “indiscriminate murder” in the Stalin era.
On the other hand, George Steiner, who found many of Lukács’ political and philosophical positions disagreeable, nevertheless considered his moral courage and political commitment worthy of lasting recognition.
He felt surrounded by people whose civil courage was minus, minus zero infinite and who, because they might lose a job during the McCarthy period . . . crawled, crawled, who would go around hysterically in fear of political correctness because they were afraid the Dean would call them in if they dared to teach the truth. No, thank you. This was a man, who with a small physique, with frequent grave illnesses, a Jew, a Jew around whom everybody had been gassed or massacred, this man lived his convictions, with which one need not agree, to know that he is what the Greek word “martyros” originally means, which does not mean “martyr” but “witness.” (Steiner, in Corredor, 1997, 70.)
Steiner’s remarks reflect a continuum in Lukács’ life and work: an interest in the emergence of people from their entrapment in the immediacy of everyday life, the formation of an ethical perspective that instructs the political, philosophical and other decisions that contribute to their development as human beings. Considering his commitment to these interests, it is not too much to state at this point in the history of human society that, for Lukács, the problem of human liberation is the problem of the formation of the ethical individual.
The present article examines the complex of ethics and the individual in Lukács’ work, and the concept of the fully developed person. There is a continued need to understand the place of the individual in revolutionary theory, a need that has grown in importance out of the intransigence of capital and expanding forms of dehumanization in this kind of society. Understanding Lukács’ perspective may also provide a treatment of ethics and everyday life that may help to counteract what Norman Geras (1998) has called the “contract of mutual indifference.”
In his last major work, The Ontology of Social Being, Lukács anticipated completing a systematic ethics. Though it was not to be realized, his orientation can be found throughout his work. It followed a basic definition expounded in 1919:
Ethics relate to the individual and the necessary consequence of this relationship is that the individual’s sense of conscience and responsibility are confronted with the postulate that he must act as if on his action or inaction depended the changing of the world’s destiny, the approach of which is inevitably helped or hindered by the tactics he is about to adopt. (Lukács, 1975b.)
Why ethics are relevant to socialist movements, and how ethical individuals can develop rests initially on exploring the capacity for human consciousness, its value, the forward-looking creative and selfcreative capacities to transform reality into conditions that foster free evelopment and expression. For Lukács, the pursuit of ethics always draws us to individuals confronted with alternatives from which they must choose a course of action. But the basic choice is not so much the proverbial fork in the road, the path of a revolutionary cause or one that maintains the bourgeois order. The more basic, constitutional decision (though it is difficult to argue that it is a necessarily distinct antecedent) is whether to embark on the process of becoming a fully developed person, or to remain an object of bourgeois manipulation. That is, individuals must first decide to exercise their capacities to know their capacities, and then to comprehend the substance and consequences of their choices. Commenting on the essential argument of his final work, Lukács wrote, “of course, there have to be individual human premises on which to base a theorization of ontological problems. Hence there must be a convergence: man’s progress towards species being as a solution to the great problems of the age” (1983, 169). Lukács’ concept of the individual, regardless of where it is found in his work, remains legitimately incomplete. He points out “world-historical individuals” in his literary criticism, but these are always presented in the process of discovery, never completion. It is a theme that resonates in the most radical humanist pedagogy such as that of Paulo Freire (1998), where the formation of self can only be discussed as an “unfinished” process of “epistemological curiosity.”
The individuals we seek to learn from in Lukács’ work are to be found in his literary criticism; in his work on literature and his philosophical and political analysis of bourgeois culture we find the theoretical arguments for the formation of individuals. While distinctions can be maintained among philosophy, politics and literature, one aspect of the argument here is that Lukács’ commitment to socialism and to the fully developed person required the integration of these disciplines. Much of his literary criticism is a contribution to a broad revolutionary program that was as much educational as political. All theoretical and programmatic communication, literature as well as polemics, presumes an educational or socializing purpose. In his autobiographical sketch, Lukács regarded “the function of socialist democracy [to be] precisely the education of its members toward socialism” (1983, 172; cf. 137), a position first articulated to Hungarian youth in 1919, that “the struggle for culture, self-education and learning must become the central activity for” them (1975b, 39–40). In a recent reflection on Lukács, Fredric Jameson (Corredor, 1997, 90), suggests that “one of the ways that one has to look at Lukács’ life work is as a contribution to socialist pedagogy, that is, he was not merely making critical judgements or writing literary history, but he was thinking about . . . the use of the heritage . . . and the role that that should play in socialist formation, socialist education.”
Objective Conditions and Individual Action
Admittedly, the term “individual” is problematic. It is not enough to continually affirm that the individual is never seen to be isolated. What is significant about the approach taken by Lukács (and as we will see, by Lenin, Guevara and Freire) is the insistence that underlying the formation of revolutionary cadre is an explicitly cognitive element. It is necessary to emphasize individual choices as acts of consciousness, even where we recognize that individuals act as members of a group. This avoids the problem of seeing individual responses to commonly experienced conditions and dilemmas as reactions to “mass psychology”; that is, where individuals respond because they are pushed by the unreflective reaction of a like-situated crowd. At the same time, Lukács does not argue that single individual actions transform social conditions outright and move history forward independently of other forces or social groups; nor is his understanding of social change grounded in an evolutionary process. Hence, while the individual is the focus, he or she is nevertheless shaped by, and must confront, objective social conditions. The objective conditions of a society — its economy, division of labor, legal and political systems — are central considerations in the formation of oppositional movements. The durability of capitalism may be accounted for, in part, by the power of its objective social structure and institutional arrangements that attempt to regulate multiple aspects of people’s lives.
It is possible, however, to overstate the case for the power of capital on these grounds. Dependence on the correct objective conditions takes the individual for granted as if the right people will emerge in sufficient numbers to propel a movement forward given precise objective prerequisites. The other side of this dependence is the assumption that concrete conditions are unidirectional agents of socialization. Marx’s and Engels’ (1975, 305) response to criticisms of the socialist movement remains an important programmatic principle. They refused to defend inaction rationalized by the claim that a person is only “a child of [one’s] time.” If so, they argued, “all controversy, all struggle on our part ceases; we quietly accept all the kicks our adversaries give us because we, who are so wise, know that these adversaries are [also] ‘only children of their time’ and cannot act otherwise.”
Lukács understood that the social structure and the arrangement of institutional power were meaningless without a recognition of the part played by human intervention in the formation of these same objective conditions. In his early writings as a communist, Lukács sought to give rightful place to objective forces; that is, in dialectical relation to the desire for freedom “as one of the driving forces” in the transition to socialism (Lukács, 1972, 66). The demand for freedom is initially a subjective recognition, a need, and only “through the faithful discovery of ” its relation to “objective reality” could the need be satisfied (Lukács, 1972, 55; 1979, 415). The demand for freedom becomes a meaningful objective necessity when history itself becomes a “mass experience” (Lukács, 1969, 20); history is understood as meaningful human creation when like-minded people develop a programmatic means to spread this recognition.
A fundamental principle of historical materialism is that we make our own history (Marx, 1978, 595; Marx and Engels, 1970, 42), despite the acknowledged inability of the most committed and insightful revolutionaries to fully control the direction of social development. Historical materialist analysis reveals that a necessary objective condition of revolution is the presence, ongoing recruitment and education of individuals prepared to carry out political, technical and cultural activities as a movement develops toward the realization of its purpose. Of the major lessons of the Cuban Revolution for Ernesto Guevara (1998, 7), one was the possibility of an insurrectionary movement creating favorable opportunities rather than waiting in “neo-Kautskyian passivity” (Löwy, 1973, 92) for objective conditions to evolve. Lenin’s regular return in his writings and speeches to the need to draw from the masses more and better professional revolutionaries to compose a vanguard of class struggle is a touchstone of revolutionary history.
But the lasting success of such efforts depends on a more substantive, rather than instrumental, approach to the relation of the masses to capital. Capitalism exploits, discriminates, creates illusions, manipulates; these we condemn as its inherent failings, not unintended consequences. As a principle of correct political socialization, Freire (1998, 23) argues that a universal human ethic required for the proper political socialization of individuals must be conscious action taken to negate these normative features of capital. Such an educational principle must be extended to multiple sites of human interaction and development.
It may be useful at this point to introduce an example of the kind of practical problem that has historically characterized the dilemma of individual confrontation with objective class forces. In 1992, 26 coal miners were killed in a methane gas explosion in Pictou, Nova Scotia. Violations of federal and provincial laws regulating health and safety conditions and problematic worker–management relations are matters of public record (Richard, 1997). Under existing laws it is clear that the corporation and the state bear responsibility. But as an issue internal to the working class, it is also a matter of record that, with notable exceptions, the majority of workers ignored or failed to take the opportunity to combat unsafe conditions and other legal violations, that workers cowered against the abusive personalities of shift supervisors, that the majority of the surface workers did not support a union drive because they did not face the same conditions as their estranged brothers below, and that miners who did put themselves at risk refusing unsafe work or who otherwise protested those conditions were not regarded by other workers as an advanced guard of a necessary confrontation with the corporation and the state. Some objective conditions clearly worked against miners’ interests, such as the poor regional economy and lack of employment opportunities. However, other objective conditions such as existing legislation, formal means of complaint, the United Mine Workers’ drive to organize the work force, readily available information on law and workplace regulations, and the courage of a minority could have been more widely used by the workers.
By comparison, such supportive objective conditions have been all but absent among the tin miners of Bolivia. Unsafe working conditions, disease without access to decent medical care, union leaders and other militants subjected to the ruthlessness of dictatorships have been standard conditions of everyday life; and yet, historically, the Bolivian miners have been one of the most militant working classes in Latin America (Nash, 1993).
Within the hundreds of pages of testimony from workers and others in the Nova Scotia mine, an ideological crisis of the character Lukács confronted at various junctures in his work is abundantly evident (cf. Lukács, 1971a, 310–311; 1975a, 53–59). Among the miners at Westray, Lukács would have found those who were conscious of themselves as commodities in capitalist society (1971a, 168) and from that knowledge had begun to erode the power of ideology and the manipulation of capital.1
This kind of experience of everyday life as an object of exploitation and manipulation occupied Lukács immediately upon making his transition from left–bourgeois intellectual to communist. He addressed such practical problems in his first major expression of ethics in a revolutionary context, “Tactics and Ethics,” published in 1919. Lukács’ practical purpose in this effort was to contribute to the formation of political cadre, and to address the moral problem of revolutionary terror,2 dealing with his own and others’ apprehensions. Considered one of his most sectarian articles, “Tactics and Ethics” contains a set of ethical premises that withstands the limits of its immediate historical context, influenced as it was by his own messianic and sectarian politics of the years prior to 1919. Along with the basic premise (noted above) that ethical action must be guided by conscience and responsibility, the principles of Lukács’ ethics included the following: a) that people must decide to take action for the cause of socialism or for reaction; b) that there is no space for neutrality or impartiality; and c) that the individual in conjunction with others must seek to learn what can be known about immediate and historical circumstances in order to evaluate the possible achievements and consequences of their actions (Lukács, 1975b, 8–11). As Löwy (1979, 126–127) points out, Lukács had to jettison his ethical idealism to become a Bolshevik, a decision that relieved him of his “ethically-tinged pessimism” (Lukács, 1971b, 18). His commitment to dialectical and historical materialism meant that his ethics would no longer be guided by a categorical imperative disconnected from political reality, but would be guided instead by humanist and political considerations applied on the grounds of practical problems. Lukács’ views of 1919 were not entirely without residue from the idealism that contributed to his earlier messianic politics or to the formation of his socialist perspective. But the messianic element was a common motivation among many Jewish socialists of the time (Weisberger, 1997) based upon a this-worldly interpretation of a powerful and humane spiritual concept directed at practical social improvement (Scholem, 1971).3 The ideal formulations of his ethical–political outlook also had their practical value. As Nicholas Rescher (1987, 3) points out, ideals should not only be viewed in terms of their possible attainment; they are also valuable when used as “instruments . . . to facilitate the realization of the practical ends to which our values bind us.” Though it may have become politically correct to criticize the idealistic, messianic viewpoint, it should not be so “easy to sneer,” as Löwy (1979, 143) suggests it is for some, at the “objective possibility” that Lukács and his comrades would actually realize their goals. It is also worth noting at this point that Lukács never rejected these ethical principles, although he regretted their bureaucratic, “cynical degeneration” (Lukács, 1983, 156–157).
The conscience and responsibility that grounded Lukács’ ethical statements centered on the struggle against the reduction of the human personality to quantifiable relations between things, and against the subordination of the person to the bureaucratic manipulations that structure the immediate conditions of reified consciousness (1971a, 89–90, 99). Making a “socially correct decision in a meaningful alternative” (Lukács, 1980b, 93) would not result in the working class in general, or the Westray miners in particular, for example, being catapulted from their everyday existence to the position of unchallenged masters of their social world. Rather, the first instance of such decisions would be that people come to know the conditions of their social existence as a first instrument against those conditions.
The Potentiality of the Individual in Theory and Practice
A character in Jorge Semprun’s The Long Voyage represents the kind of person who has taken a decisive stand against the seemingly insurmountable power of objective social forces. Before his death, Hans, a German Jew fighting as a member of a French resistance unit, tells a friend, “I don’t want to die a Jew’s death”; that he wants to give the fascists an additional reason for killing him (Semprun, 1964, 178). Hans will die a Jew, but by his own choice he will die also as a consequence of resisting the fascist construction of an ineluctable destiny for his people. Semprun gives to Hans the task of demonstrating a singular assault against fate. Lukács (though he understates the level of Jewish resistance) sees in Hans an exemplar of individual potential, its simultaneous realization and negation in collective social life: “this Jewish communist partisan who falls in France is the first figure in literature who stands at the level of the Warsaw uprising” (Lukács, 1975a, 70).
Semprun’s character stands in opposition to the individual in the literature of bourgeois decadence, that emerged as a reaction to the growing autonomy of the working class and as an apologetic defense of capitalism. That literary perspective created subjectivist, exceptional supermen as leading characters who were, nevertheless, in “flight from the major problems of social life” (Lukács, 1969, 276–300; 1971c, 103–109, 168; 1981, 139). Modernist literature produced the isolated, passive, dehumanized individual as a normative response to oppressive conditions, a logical outcome of an apologetic acceptance of the conditions of life under capitalism (Lukács, 1963, 20–21). Such treatments of the individual are developed from, or correspond to, the individual in irrationalist philosophy that worked against a critical understanding of social organization and cultural progress, and against the full realization of human potential. This was evident in Schopenhauer’s absolute individual detached from its social context and the consequent devaluation of political activity against the unalterable futility of human existence; it was evident also in Schelling’s division of humanity into higher and lower races, in Nietschze’s capitalist apologetics and his reduction of human beings to instinctual, animalistic qualities, and in Gobineau’s “fatalistic pessimism” that rationalized race hatred (Lukács, 1969, 142–143; 1980a, 177–178, 201–205, 345–355, 669–682; 1981, 130–131). Capitulation to these concepts of the individual lead directly to an attitude of despair as a “mass emotion,” “the standard moral attitude” to the unreflected immediacy of fascist society, and which has been carried forward to forms of dehumanization under colonial regimes, and its more subtle forms in liberal democracy (Lukács, 1980a, 82–3; cf. 765–853).
For Lukács the potential for individual development is grounded in the historical materialist concept of labor, the capacities of human consciousness, the possibility of projecting a planned result, and, therefore, the capacity to transform existing reality. Lukács summarized his ontological orientation to these transformative capacities in a restatement of Marx’s comparison of the architect and the bee (Marx, 1971, 174): “That is to say, things do not change of their own accord, by virtue of spontaneous processes, but as a consequence of conscious choices. Conscious choice means that the end precedes the result. This is the foundation of human society in its entirety” (Lukács, 1983, 141). Thus, Lukács emphasized the transformative content of labor as a rational activity, a conscious, relatively autonomous choice of action within or in opposition to the structure of capitalist production. Whether choosing among scattered stones for a primitive tool or literary depictions of capitalist reality (Lukács, 1975a, 30; 1971c, 98–99), it is the individual — the “indissoluble minimal unity” (1975a, 135) — that is the most elemental producer of transformative action.
The concept of potentiality may be an empty one without a practical understanding of how it can be realized in everyday life. This can only be understood as points and passages in a “causal chain” of activity, whether economic or any other process of transformation (Lukács, 1975a, 76; 1980b, 24, 34). The function of realist literature as an instructive force, for example, offers readers an awareness of the outcomes of individual confrontations with prevailing conditions as interconnected events and choices (Lukács, 1964, 218). The development of personality itself, as Lucien Seve (1978) has argued, is constructed around the interconnection of acts mediated by social forces and relations. In this way, actions are not reduced to fragmented “behaviors,” but are understood in terms of a totality of relations between a single individual and a multiplicity of social actors and forces. The relative autonomy of choice, then, is relevant only to the degree that people and circumstances are viewed as elements of social totality. John Somerville (1974, 274) explains this aptly: that “choice is determined by self . . . does not mean that the self is determined by the self. The self cannot be free from antecedent causes any more than the choice can.”
The causal chain that develops human potential is typically grounded in existing social relations of production and cultural values. As a result of this typicality there ordinarily arises a social movement of individual acts that leads to the problematic appearance of a “law-like” development of “general economic tendencies” (Lukács, 1978, 89); that is, objective economic conditions that may serve as a barrier to potentiality. From the point of view of bourgeois ideology which is satisfied with skimming the surface of everyday life, such development and tendencies do not require that individuals be fully conscious of the relation of their particular acts to a general development. But it is of central importance to any set of propositions designed for the radical socialization of individuals that economic and cultural development should come to be known as a “synthesis of individual acts,” which at once “determines the manner, direction, tempo, etc. of the social development” and directs individuals to the revolutionary opportunities such syntheses create (1978, 81, 89, 149; 1975a, 76–77). However, the quality of the actions taken within such opportunities is important individually and organizationally. It is not enough to possess a superficial awareness of the contradictions of capitalism; such limited knowledge leads to isolated, sectarian acts, the consequences of which are dire. Still, Lukács shows how the general problem of individual actions at the level of superficial awareness contain also the possibilities for genuine transformative action. Individual rebellion stands outside “revolutionary transformations, which are in their turn syntheses of innumerable individual acts [that] proceed from the whole and react on the whole” (Lukács, 1978, 81). That actual social revolutions are “border cases” only indicates their historical rarity, and by no means diminishes the importance of the more widespread, periodically volatile class and other types of social struggle.
If the fundamental concern is revolutionary social change, as it was for Lukács, a range of social agents, strategies, and economic conditions make up the complex of social forces as the basis upon which such change will take place. The focus on individuals and the causal chains producing and resulting from their actions induces the revolutionary to attend to the development of transformative capacities in the individual. Without such a focus, the choice between ethical or dehumanizing possibilities is obscured behind the immediacy of everyday life, and the means to build political action is severely constrained.
Lenin’s concentrated efforts to promote a core of professional revolutionaries as a case in point, centered on two elements. One was the necessity of training cadre and developing their experience, based on the unassailable principle that revolutionary practice and the skills of leadership can be learned by anyone. “Theoretical knowledge, political experience and organizing ability are things that can be acquired. If only the desire exists to study and acquire these qualities” (Lenin, CW, Vol. 5, 317; cf. 377–78, 422). This pedagogical principle is augmented by an organizational principle, that capable revolutionary leaders teach new cadre who, in turn, are expected to teach others in study circles of workers and students, for example (Lenin, CW, Vol. 5, 422–23, 441–43, 450–51). It was precisely the lack of sufficiently trained leaders and, implicitly, the absence of a program of revolutionary socialization that was much of the focus of What Is to Be Done?, his critique of past failures and shortcomings among the Social Democrats. The second element that formed Lenin’s professional revolutionaries was the promotion of self-mastery in the trained leader, the embodiment of revolutionary knowledge and practice (Lenin, CW, Vol. 5, 377–78). Such organizational qualities of teaching and learning were integral with personal qualities of comrades Lenin admired (Lenin, cf. CW, Vol. 9, 436–37; Vol. 16, 361–64; Vol. 17, 92–95; Vol. 29, 89–94).
Individuals as building blocks of revolutionary movements were a central element in Guevara’s assessment of the Cuban revolution. He argued (1968, 393, 399) that the security of the revolution, its reproduction over generations, could be mediated by “the masses [who] now make history as a conscious aggregate of individuals who struggle for the same cause,” “a solid bulk of individualities moving toward a common aim.” Such formulations intended to advocate vigorously the importance of building revolutionary consciousness depend on multiple successes at the level of single individuals. Any other formulation suggests, falsely, that a mass movement to carry social change forward is an objective condition that arrives on its own time, ready-made and filled with an indistinguishable collective of men and women fully conscious of the same goals (cf. Löwy, 1973, 20, 92). The active formation of the individual as part of a revolutionary strategy must, in the first instance, be directed toward the realization that individual development and social change are possible.
The Individual as a Literary Passage in Reality
It is the interaction of development and ethical choice that provides the substance for a focus on the individual. As an intervention in the process of bourgeois socialization, Lukács developed his concept of the individual through his literary critique, for it was here that individual lives could be depicted in easily recognizable ways in their development as critical personalities or as representatives of bourgeois or reactionary ideology. The individual is understood in terms of how he or she responds in confrontation with reality, within a complex of processes given full development in the best of realist literature. These can become effective pedagogical tools of socialization and revolutionary organization because realism can be understood, principally, as the accurate portrayal of the inner life of human beings in the “collisions” that take place between their own interests and experience, and those of others. Literature, then, provides a ground for exploring the ethical personality-in-formation (Lukács, 1981, 143; 1969, 103).
Realist literature is a forum through which people “appraise the changes they have brought about in [the world], and through this, discover their own growing qualities and potentialities as human beings” (Finkelstein, 1979, 277). Literature demonstrates the reasoning through of distinctions between truth and falsehood, subjective and objective differences (Lukács, 1981, 156; Parkinson, 1977, 129). In its representation of reality, literary portrayal of the individual must offer to the reader an examination of choices among alternatives that demonstrate the contradictions of real life, and how the formation of the self proceeds through the choices made (Lukács, 1972, 53–55). It is from these decisions that the meaningfulness of human action can be derived without a didacticism that limits alternatives.
Lukács’ belief that realist literature “loosens the tongue of the dumb and opens the eyes of the blind” (1964, 217) is a conviction that it is capable of moving people from their socially determined state of being to a consciousness of their total environment, affirming human capacities and transforming possibilities into reality. In The Seventh Cross (1987), his comrade Anna Seghers shows how the mundane reality of the everyday among ordinary working people is revealed to have a deeper, more profound level in the simple but significant decisions that transcend the immediacy of everyday life and disprove its apparent static character. None of Segher’s characters, as they encounter and assist an escaped prisoner from a Nazi camp, directly confronts explicit ethical dilemmas or experience sudden transformations of self. Even the main character, George Heisler, a member of the communist resistance, is not portrayed as an extraordinary leader. Rather, the subjects of realist literature such as Seghers’ are depicted as “typical characters under typical circumstances” (Engels, in Marx and Engels, 1975, 379) who act on alternatives in an ever moving, developing reality. Realism involves its characters and its readers in the social and personal forces that direct or pressure subjects into choosing one course of action over others, thereby shaping individuality while the person in some measure is shown to be reshaping reality. In this regard, socialist realist literature4 is required to take concrete conditions and experiences of persons as its “ultimate criteria,” just as Marx required for the full realization of his method (Lukács, 1978, 4; Marx and Engels, 1970, 47–48; Marx, 1970, 20–21).
From a socialist realist perspective the corresponding formation of the individual and of social change are inseparable, even when the contingent relation between the two emerges critically from a writer of bourgeois humanism; that is, when the ideology of the writer does not match the picture of reality produced in his or her work of art. Lenin spoke to the importance of this recognition in the work of writers such as Tolstoy (Lukács, 1972, 52; Lenin, CW, Vol. 15, 202–209; Vol. 16, 323–27; Vol. 17, 49–53). Lukács’ critique of bourgeois literature centered on the historical formation of the personality in emerging capitalism as a prelude to the fully developed human being in socialism. He saw in Goethe, for example, a bourgeois artist leading the criticism of early capitalist society. In characters such as Werther and Wilhelm Meister, Goethe was able to detect individuation as concrete advancement both in the appearance of everyday life and as a key source of the discovery of the essence of individual relations in the growing capitalist order. Goethe concerned himself with the development of individuals whose personalities exhibited the effects of their opposition to society, precisely because of his recognition of the obstacles to development thrown up by the bourgeois social order (Lukács, 1968, 39–40, 60–62).
Lukács considers the tension between the individual and social environment to be a principle of personality development (1963, 28), exemplified by Gorky (1964, 208–09). Lukács also considers a principle of the “dissolution of personality” to be any attempt to trace or theorize its development via the separation of the individual from society — the “attenuation of reality” (Lukács, 1963, 26–27). The portrayal of the tension between individual and society is the expression of real life in its conflicts and development, and a picture in miniature of the personality in formation.
The depth of the literary vision, of the realist approach to reality, is always passion . . . the passion not to accept anything as naked, cut and dried, dead experience, but to resolve the human world into a living inter-relationship between human beings. Whenever the prejudices of class society are too strong in a writer for him to do this, and he abandons this literary resolution of society into human relationships, then the writer ceases to be a realist. (Lukács, 1981, 144.)
The accurate, meaningful portrayal of human relations is the representation of them as struggles that have endured and will endure precisely because they are future-oriented; hence, a counterforce to despair. They embody development, transformation, dynamis as inner and outer forces consciously chosen by the writer to illustrate the full realization of the human personality (Lukács, 1975a, 33–37; 1963, 100; 1980b, 28–29, 43).
Hegel’s distinctions between abstract and concrete potentiality presented Lukács with a necessary framework through which a writer could insert the ethical development of characters. It is incumbent upon the writer to construct characters whose relation to reality fully reveals the potential of their interaction with it; it is incumbent upon philosophers and revolutionaries to promote the full development of the individual with such potentiality in mind (Lukács, 1971c, 154; 1963, 21–24). In socialist realist literature, potentiality in the formation of individual characters provides the future orientation necessary for the disclosure of revolutionary possibilities (Lukács, 1963, 100–101).
The Fully Developed Person
The individual, like human society itself, cannot be fully developed except under conditions of freedom. Parkinson (1977, 158) summarizes two components of Lukács’ concept of freedom: “power over things other than oneself, and power over oneself, i.e., selfmastery.” While these must be dialectically, not sequentially developed forms of freedom, self-mastery is clearly necessary in some measure before external relations can be fully addressed. Only on the basis of self-control, the mastery of consciousness and emotions, can the individual hope to make meaningful steps toward an ethical confrontation with reality. Therefore, the fully developed person is a person in pursuit of the knowledge necessary to deal with or create the alternatives required to address individual needs or social problems. In the first instance, to move toward mastery of the self places the person in direct contradiction to the major thrust of capitalist society; it is a rejection of that fragmentation, subordination, and passivity that revolutionary theorists from Marx forward have seen as the normative, destructive impact of capitalism on the individual. At the level of consciousness of the necessity of making this confrontation, individuals need to begin the necessary distancing from constraints embodied in the belief that social conditioning represents the triumph of oppressive social forces (Lukács, 1980b, 34). Being a child of one’s time, to reference an earlier point, is not a condition without alternatives.
Self-mastery is an ethical achievement. Lukács notes how significant and enduring the problem of overcoming emotional, instinctual limitations has been in human history (Lukács, 1980b, 134–135; 1971c, 150; 1981, 222–223). The value of self-mastery is significant when its personal expression is a response to communal needs, as resistance, for example, to emotional manipulation. Semprun provides an example of how realist literature treats this problem. Amid the other horrors of Buchenwald was the command assembly of prisoners to witness the execution of one of their own in the “perfect chorus-like” response to the Nazi demand for “symmetry and order.” Instead of taking a fellow prisoner’s death as “a threat or warning . . . we are busy dying this pal’s death, and by doing so we negate it, we cancel it, from his death we are deriving meaning and purpose for our own lives” (Semprun, 1964, 52; cf. Lukács, 1969, 362). The mastery of internal purpose for these men is vital because of their proximity to death; the self-mastery of coal miners in less drastic circumstances would be no less internal while its outer manifestations would be more immediately contentious.
Central to the fully developed personality is the desire and search for knowledge and an interest in making new knowledge a source of personal and social change. This takes us full circle to a principle of Lukács’ early ethics. It is an appeal to search out, to discover what lies beyond the appearance of immediate circumstances. The knowability of the world is as fundamental to historical materialism, as it is antithetical to reactionary bourgeois ideology. A rejection of the idea that the world can be known, a “mistrust of all theory, and contempt for understanding and reason” not only characterizes bourgeois ideology as Lukács saw it (Lukács, 1981, 201–202; Kiralyfalvi, 1975, 31–32; Parkinson, 1977, 41–45), but also anticipates with those very phrases the further decline of bourgeois ideology into postmodernism.
The search for knowledge, then, is thoroughly bound up with the practice of ethics. Lukács would not disagree with Freire, as noted earlier, that a universal human ethic must consist of conscious acts against exploitation, discrimination, the creation of illusions, and so on. Such an ethic is not a reified system of morality; it operates, rather, as a dialogical process that derives its substance from the historical and political continuum. Lukács argued in “Tactics and Ethics” for “ethical self-awareness,” a basis of knowledge with which to weigh moral decisions against the “historico-philosophical situation”; that is, in relation to what is or can be known about what has led to a particular historical juncture (cf. Lukács, 1971a, 153–154). Speaking to the same issue late in his career, he cited value conflicts as potentially determining confrontations in class struggle. The alternatives that emerge from class struggles (and other struggles for social justice should not be excluded) are most resolutely faced by those in control of their emotions, their consciousness and their capacity to act. The precise alternative chosen cannot be prescribed except to insist that it fulfills that universal ethic we have described. The substance of the correct action will be found somewhere between an alternative that succumbs to the immediacy of a crisis and the other extreme, an option that is ultimately emptied of substance by “an overrationalized, logicized and hierarchical system of values” (Lukács, 1980b, 93). Thus, one’s knowledge of existing circumstances is not expected to be complete, nor can it be expected to anticipate all possible consequences; that is, knowledge must be understood as incomplete, the only correct approach possible if bourgeois knowledge itself is to be recognized as incomplete. Once this unfinishedness is accepted for both knowledge perspectives, we are in a position to make a political and moral demand for further exploration of possibilities. Nor can knowledge be restricted to “the result of purely subjective deliberations, where . . . the individual concerned acts ‘to the best of his ability and in good faith’.” If that were the case, the way would then “be clear for extreme levity and frivolity and every moral standard would become illusory” (1975b, 9–10). The pursuit of knowledge should be understood as one aspect of “the struggle of the proletariat against itself ” (Lukács, 1971a, 80), but it is also a struggle not confined to class questions alone.
The partial knowledge with which a person initially confronts a problem serves as a springboard to acquire more complete knowledge (Lukács, 1975a, 147; 1975b, 9). This is as true of finding one’s way out of the forest without a map (Lukács’ example) as it is of determining a course of action for the development of self. As a process, the search for knowledge corresponds to the teleological positing in labor — deliberative and purposeful — the means by which knowledge is both created and discovered based on the awareness of need, and which demonstrates that the will to control the direction of the self has a materialist basis (Lukács, 1980b, 17–27, 42–46). To once again make the connection between what Lukács writes and its educative impact, we note that this is a point made repeatedly by Freire. Genuinely meaningful knowledge, the knowledge of human development and transformation, cannot be confined either to the moment of its production or to the individual or group of persons who initially produce it (cf. Gadotti, 1994, 12–13). Its value as a contribution to relatively autonomous, ethical action lies in the ability and willingness of persons to become knowledgeable by discovery, participation and action, rather than having knowledge simply transferred from authority to subject.
For Lukács, the rise of individuals from peasant and working-class origins, or intellectuals able to transcend their class boundaries, was proof that the acquisition of knowledge was a transformative project. In his Aesthetics, he referred to this process in the context of scientific thinking, but it is equally applicable to other circumstances. What is important in the acquisition and creation of knowledge is a demonstration of the cognitive capacity of persons acting on their objective surroundings so that their “subjective history of the discovery of objectivities, relationships, categorical connections” becomes evident to them and to others as an instructional force capable of forming the personality and shaping human action (Lukács, 1979, 414). But with Lukács, as with Freire (1998, 34–35, 41–42), the development of knowledge is not an impartial pursuit; it has as its goal a concept of “right thinking” that references a kind of ethical reasoning that drives human liberation from the oppression of capital.
In literature the person in pursuit of full development is found among those characters who are integrated with, and therefore derive their initial, partial knowledge of the world from, the typical life of the masses. Like Anna Seghers’ ordinary anti-fascists, such characters derive from the conventional relations of everyday life enough sense of its contradictions and limits to search for means of superseding it. This is their transformative labor, their teleological positing as literary characters; it is the work of the writer and the reader to draw from such depictions an understanding of the dynamics of the circumstances and actions of these characters. It is the necessity of understanding and creating a “causal chain” of potentially transformative acts from existing conditions and relations that causes Lukács to focus on the typical personality. This was one of his emphases in the analysis of the main characters of Walter Scott’s work.
They are of middling position who “generally possess a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping human passion, is never enraptured devotion to a great cause” (Lukács, 1969, 32). This is true of other 19th-century realists, but takes a leap toward closer proximity to “a great cause” in democratic and socialist humanist writers.
The social position of middling characters, as individuals in pursuit of self-mastery, is important for three reasons. One, the development of character depends on the critical awareness and willingness of the writer to accurately depict the popular life of the people, “the dialectic of social necessity and individual destiny” through their explorations of everyday life and its collisions of political, cultural and other interests (Lukács, 1964, 229; 1969, 355). Second, the mundane and pivotal choices people make are reflections of their “passionate receptivity” of reality (Lukács, 1964, 224) that is clearly defined as the embodiment “of some historical situation that best represent[s] the specific age, nation and class to which they belong [as a] mediation of the individual and the universal” (Kiralyfalvi, 1975, 80). Third, the typicality of realism and its characters guards against the assertion that only the unique person achieves social significance. Thus, what attracts us to such characters, and the reason they are so crucially instructive in disseminating knowledge of the world and an ethical, political confrontation with it, is that we witness their conflicts and the resolution of them in what we can know about their reality. The dialectical interaction between objective social forces acting on the individual (Lukács, 1963, 122–23) and the inner life of the persons concerned presents, in indirect form, our own conflicts with reality and echoes the map of choices with which conscious individuals are confronted.
Conclusion
In Lukács’ philosophy, literary criticism and political writings, the dialectical relation between the individual and society appears as a continuum. In the formation of individuals, he considers the choices they made among the alternatives they faced, and those they could produce from objective economic, institutional, and artistic conditions. With a view to the formation of a body of committed, knowledgeable individuals as a material necessity for any social movement,
Lukács made the person who was capable of self-mastery a central element in his development of Marxism. Such individuals must possess, at base, a willingness to critically develop knowledge of reality that can present further opportunities for ethical and revolutionary action. With this crucial but basic knowledge, people, whether coal miners or intellectuals, are able to critically address the “barrier of immediacy [that] has become an inward barrier” (Lukács, 1971a, 164). The fully developed person cannot be realized on the basis of slogans or tactics unattached to the historical reality of which he or she is a product. Near the end of his life Lukács (1975a, 149) made the point again, that commitment to the development of social movements must come from a broad and truthful perspective of historical progress within and beyond the individual. “It is only with such a perspective,” he wrote, “that the person in question sees how his own personal life will be changed.”
Notes
1 Reich’s critique of ideology and mass psychology is important to consider, especially why some people act in crisis situations and others do not (Reich, 1970, 19–24).
2 With regard to terror, Lukács’ use of the term is in no way related to contemporary occurrences such as airline sabotage or suicide bombers. It is important to note Marx’s criticism of “alchemists of the revolution” who placed violence ahead of theoretical and organizational activities (cf. Avineri, 1968, 201). Brenkert’s (1983, 170–71) discussion of violence in Marx’s writings puts the problem in class terms: working-class conditions of life and work, and the denial of moral responsibility by capitalists were causes for violent responses from working people. Freire (1970, 40–42) uses precisely this frame of reference to name the initiators of violence as those whose power forms the indignities of daily life. Lukács’ correction (in 1940) to his early reference to terror came in his use of a passage from Lenin. Terror is a spontaneous manifestation of “the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole” (Lukács, 1981, 207).
3 Although Lukács described his relation to Judaism in rather neutral terms (1983, 29–30, 144–145), his literary and philosophical thinking matured in the period Weisberger describes, the same period of widespread Jewish assimilation into the Hungarian bourgeoisie (Löwy, 1979, 70–71; Gluck, 1985, 74, 175–176).
4 Socialist realism is used here as Lukács explained it in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963, 93–135).
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, Nova Scotia B3M 2J6
Canada
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