A Commentary on Királyfalvi’s Book The Aesthetics of György Lukács

Leonardo, Vol. 10, pp. 320-321. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain A COMMENTARY ON KIRALYFALVI'S BOOK THE AESTHETICS OF GYORGY LUKAcS Forrest Williams* 'Marxist theory ofart' may mean either oftwo somewhat different things. Sometimes it stands loosely for any theoretical treatment of art that has been significantly affected by Marxist ideas. Treatments of this kind are numerous and include those by such thinkers as Arnold Hauser, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frederick Antal and even John Dewey. Or it may bear the stronger meaning of a treatment that emphatically aspires to extrapolate and develop Marx's philosophical originality in the realm ofart and criticism. To further in this wayan aspect of Marx's frame ofreference, which was indicated only sketchily in the body of his writings, is the more difficult project. In his specifically theoretical discussions, most notable in Die Eigenart des ;t"sthetischen (1963), Gyorgy Lukacs WaS certainly a Marxist contender in the latter, strong sense. An initial difficulty, of course, is that Marx's writings are a living tradition, subject to varying interpretations. And even within a given interpretation, to elaborate or further a specific theme cannot be a simple mechanical extension of Marx's concepts. And there are, moreover, some typical ways to fail by now only too familiar, unfortunately. One is to politicize artistic norms, with a consequent automatic elevation of works that may be proletarian in content or origin. This is to conceive political activity in a pre-Marxist sense, as in Hobbes and other formal versions of social power. It is also, in its critical implications, to invite such counter-intuitive judgments as might rank 'Waiting for Lefty' above 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. Another way to fail is to attempt to reduce artistic activity to the social and economic base, purporting to understand works of art as mere epiphenomena. Yet another way is to simply add sociological or economic "filler" to the tradition of aesthetics that extends at least from Kant to the present. Each ofthese failures is common enough in the literature. Only if ,these failures are avoided is it possible for would-be Marxist theory of art, in the strong sense defined above, to face the really interesting and significant challenge: to recognize the validity of aesthetics, a preMarxist tradition of concepts, without lapsing into its traditionally idealist principles.From Kant to Croce, what we have come to know as 'aesthetics' has been a brilliant offspring of Enlightenment epistemologies. The consuming issue of theory of knowledge was to analyse how an individual conciousness succeeds in conceptualizing the properties or laws of a given object ofexperience. Turning to the analysis ofthe art, these philosophers were preoccupied with an analogous moment: the individual *Aesthetician, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80302, U.S.A. (Received 17 Jan. 1977). 320 consciousness at the peak of its contemplative enjoyment of a sensuously and formally entrancing object. Within this epistemological inquiry, aesthetics dealt with the perspective provided by an ideal critic reflecting on and discoursing about a private, yet-given an ideal sensibility-authoritative appreciation. Its fundemental assumptions were perfectly ahistorical and asocial. The contrasting originality of Marxist thought, of course, derives from a basic change of perspective; the shift it proposes is from isolated and autonomous subjectivities to human activities involving cooperative, socially instituted work. The Lukacs who stands out in Bela Kiralyfalvi's The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukacs [Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, N.J., 1975. 164 pp. $11.25] is, correctly I think, the Lukacs who consciously struggled to recognize the validity of such notions oftraditional aesthetics as the interpenetration of form and content, the self-enclosed 'world' of the artwork, the imaginative departure from resemblance, and so on, without falling into its traditionally idealist theses. Lukacs did so on a number of ways. He saw, ofcourse, as a Marxist, that art springs out of and returns to the needs of social life. Its essential content, therefore, is neither some subjective pleasure nor the merely utilitarian, but the 'ethical-human'; not in the moralistic sense ofthe good rather than the bad, but in the encompassing sense of the human dynamics of purpose and frustration, of good-and-evil, (cp. pp...