Aesthetic Culture

Editor’s Introduction

“Aesthetic Culture” is one of the most important statements of György Lukács’s philosophy of culture in the period prior to his departure from Hungary in 1912 to study in Heidelberg. First published in the journal Renaissance in 1910 and reprinted in 1913 in the essay collection to which it lent its title, “Aesthetic Culture” appeared in immediate proximity to the essays in his first major book, The Soul and Forms, and shares a number of concepts and concerns with that work. In Lukács’s early essays, concepts from the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) fashionable at that time in the German-speaking world mingled with such heterogeneous literary sources as Christian mystical writings, German romantic criticism, the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann’s and Ibsen’s naturalist drama, and the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and D’Annunzio to lend his meditations a vague but thickly elaborated terminology of “life,” “soul,” “form,” “mood,” “solitude,” “depth,” “culture,” “heroism,” and “tragedy.” At the same time, despite this idealist conceptual framework, these texts reveal surprising continuities between Lukács’s pre-Marxist, ethical criticism of modernist literature and his mature, Marxist opposition of an historically grounded “critical realism” to a subjectivistic and decadent modernism. Directly attacking the aestheticist stance that Lukács thought characteristic of modern art and literature generally, “Aesthetic Culture” is an especially revealing work to compare to his later communist polemics against expressionism and the modernist novel.

Lukács’s title embodies a paradox, which he unfolds in the course of the essay. At present, he argues, there is no culture, and especially no “aesthetic culture.” Indeed, it is precisely the emphasis on the “aesthetic” in present-day art and life that is symptomatic of culture’s definitive disappearance and, at the same time, that is inimical to any culture’s forming in modern society. Wherever aesthetic culture has appeared, Lukács asserts, “there is no architecture, no tragedy, no philosophy, no monumental painting, no real epic.”

The key to this paradox lies with the problem of form, which the aesthete ironically has no ability to bring into being. Instead of authentic artistic or cultural form, the aesthete emphasizes the “mood,” the fleeting inner sensation that an artwork or even the outer world more generally may occasion. The task of the artist shifts from giving form to life towards a new, peculiarly “modern” imperative, that of provoking aesthetic sensations in the inner selves of spectators and readers. Artistic forms evaporate in this hothouse atmosphere in which beautiful feelings are forced to effloresce. Genuine, unified form appears only when the artist actively struggles to overcome the powerful resistances of life to being contained within the forms of art. Aesthetic culture, however, allows the artist to piece together surfaces effortlessly, creating pleasant appearances with nothing of the endurance that forms have against the passing of time. “The admirers of ‘form,’” Lukács concludes, “killed form; the priests of l’art pour l’art paralyzed art.” The novelty of the aesthetic sensation and the ephemerality of artwork’s value are two sides of a single process in which objective substantiality of artistic form progressively gives way to the aesthetic effect’s fleeting presence in the isolated soul.

Lukács suggests that aesthetic culture—this paradoxical absence of any genuinely formed, objectively substantive art or culture—has appeared only recently, at the end of the 19th century. At this threshold of the new century, he believed, inner experience had rapidly come to supplant form not just in art but in all spheres. Aesthetic culture emerged when the whole of life might be judged not according to any intrinsic value it might have, but rather according to a shifting “aesthetic” standard: its ability to occasion moods, to bring about pleasant or intense sensations in solitary men and women who live passively disengaged from their own lives, like a spectator might enjoy a theatrical performance from a darkened box.

The German idealist tradition had looked to tragedy as the dialectical means by which the seeming antinomies of a character’s...