Last Rites: A Conversation with John Lukacs

John Lukacs is the author of over thirty books, including most recently Last Rites (Yale University Press, 2009). In this book he offers further autobiographical reflections on his convictions and on historical inquiry that he displayed earlier in Confessions of an Original Sinner (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Lukacs in May 2009.

Donald A.Yerxa: About twenty years ago in Confessions of an Original Sinner you described yourself not only as an original sinner but also a reactionary. How would you describe John Lukacs today?

John Lukacs:Confessions was an autobiography of sorts of the first sixty years of my life. Actually it was an auto-history: that is a history of my thoughts and beliefs. I used the word "reactionary" because I had grown very impatient with many so-called conservative thinkers and conservative thinking, especially in this country. It was a way to suggest that I am something else than a conservative. I am, as I say in Last Rites, "a remnant reactionary, a remnant bourgeois, a remnant admirer of the civilization and culture of the past five hundred years, European and Western." I say this even though I consider many of the dominant ideas and achievements of the past 500 years—for example, objectivity, progress, and materialism—to be insufficient, and I strongly resist these categorical formulations as absolutes.

Yerxa: And still an original sinner?

Lukacs: Yes (laughing). As Dorothy Sayers, I believe, had a character say in one of her novels: "I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me."

Yerxa: What are some of the key elements of your historical philosphy?

Lukacs: There are several overlapping notions that I believe we ought to understand. They include such things as historical consciousness, the remembered past, and the participant nature of all historical knowledge.

Yerxa: You stress that the purpose of human knowledge is more than accuracy or certainty; it's understanding. What are the implications of this for historical inquiry?

Lukacs: Pascal had a very profound insight when he noted that we understand more than we know. History is the knowledge, or the attempt of knowledge, of human beings of other human beings. The conditions of this knowledge are different from other kinds of knowledge because humans are, as far as we know, the most complex organisms in the universe. The understanding of a most complex creature of another most complex creature has its limitations. For example, we think in words, which have their own histories. Words are not finite categories but meanings—what they mean for us, to us. And—this is important—there can be no essential separation of the knower from the known. Our historical knowledge is inevitably participant. There cannot be any antiseptic separation of the knower from the known. Consequently, a historical "fact" cannot be nailed down definitively, for we cannot define things, we can only describe them. Lord Acton, one of the greatest historians of the 19th century, thought that history had become a science. We could have an account of, say, the Battle of Waterloo that will be fixed and valid for British and French and Prussian and Dutch historians alike. This was a noble illusion; this is not how our historical understanding is. We cannot nail down a so-called historical "fact" for good—and not even necessarily because of the eventual appearance of new documents.

Yerxa: Would you comment on another of your key points, that the human mind intrudes into and complicates the structure of events?

Lukacs: To put it simply, what happens is inseparable from what we think happens. The two are not identical, but they are inseparable. This is not only true of our personal lives; it's true about history and the physical world, even about matter, about physics. It is my conviction, again, that there is an inseparable connection between the knower and the known. And this makes the entire scheme of mechanical causality, no matter how efficient, really insufficient.

Yerxa: One of the most provocative assertions you make is that humans are at the center...