Ramkrishna Bhattacharya on György Lukács

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

György Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician,literary historian, and critic. He was, according to Wikiipedia, one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxistideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin’s pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution (Leninism).

In this lecture given at Goethe Institute Max Muller Bhavan, Kolkota, Dr Ramkrishna Bhattacharya speaks on Georg Lukacs as philosopher and aesthetician.

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Georg Lukács, Philosopher and Aesthetician

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

Not a doctrine but a method

Georg Lukács (1885-1971), philosopher and aesthetician, was one of the original philosophers of the twentieth century. A lifelong Marxist, he always believed that Marxism was not a doctrine but a method. In his seminal essay, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ he insisted on this point as Engels had done in his celebrated letter to Werner Sombart (March 11, 1895): ‘This is a very interesting point, about which Marx himself does not say much. But his way of viewing things is not a doctrine but a method. It does not provide ready-made dogmas, but criteria for further research and the method for this research.’

Lukács too echoed the same view:

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment…. [O]rthodoxy refers exclusively to method (1971 p.1. Italics in the original).

In this and other respects Lukács was always original both in his approach and in his conclusions. He, however, acknowledged his debt to Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), a fellow German philosopher, who first convinced him ‘through his example that it was possible to philosophize in the traditional manner’ (1983 p.38). Up until 1914 Lukács, in his own words, ‘had been wasting [his] time with the Neo-Kantianism of the period.’ But in Bloch he ‘encountered the phenomenon of a man who could do philosophy as if the whole world of modern philosophy did not exist and who showed that it was possible to do philosophy like Aristotle and Hegel’. Lukács always regarded Bloch ‘as a wholly admirable person and of great integrity,’ even after Bloch left the then German Democratic Republic in 1961 (1983 pp.126-27; see also Lukács 1974 p. 67).

Georg Lukács

It is indeed somewhat overwhelming: ‘doing philosophy’ without referring to contemporary philosophers and not quoting from their works whether in approval or in refutation. It takes tremendous courage and sky-high self-confidence to write a series of articles on Goethe’s Faust with only a copy of the play and a handful of secondary works, all belonging to the eighteenth century, on the table. That is precisely what Lukács did in his Goethe studies that began in the 1930s and were completed in the 1940s. All of them were in the form of essays with not a single footnote or endnote, ruthlessly driving one point, namely, despite occasional backslidings Goethe stood on the side of reason against the irrationalist German romantics.

Lukács’s debt to Bloch

This is the hallmark of Lukács as a philosopher and a literary critic. He knew he was an original thinker and would not let his readers forget it. It is therefore no wonder that George Lichthein finds Lukács’s The Specific Nature of Aesthetics (Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen ) ’[w]holly within the central European tradition’. He complains:

Lukács rarely cites non-German writers, even when they happen to be Marxists or Hegelians. On the evidence of his magnum opus one might be pardoned for supposing that he had never heard of R. G. Collingwood. A few passing references to Christopher Caudwell exhausts the subject of Marxist aesthetics in the English-speaking world. Even within his own culture area he is curiously selective, since he ignored all members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodore Adorno; Lukács does not even refer to Arnold Hauser and Hans Mayer, etc. (1976 pp.116-17).  

In the light of Lukács’s declaration of his debt to Bloch, there is nothing inexplicable or astonishing in this. Lukács was ‘doing’ aesthetic as an extension of his ‘doing philosophy’. He had no need to refer to current works on philosophy or aesthetics. Whatever little he required of anthropology he gathered from V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957), the author of that significantly entitled work, Man Makes Himself. 

 

In an interview with the New Left Review (published in July-August 1971) Lukács candidly said: ‘When all is said and done, there are only three great thinkers in the West, incomparable with all others: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx’ (1983 p. 181). He admitted that to that day (1971) he had not lost his admiration for Hegel, and ‘I think that the work Marx began – the materialization of Hegel’s philosophy – must be pursued even beyond Marx. I have tried to do this in some passages of my forthcoming Ontology’ [the book on ontology came out in 1971]. (1983 pp.181-82).

Lukács’s contribution to Marxism lies in his formulation of an aesthetics fully drawn from Marx and Engels’s stray remarks and comments. Unlike Franz Mehring (1846-1919) and Georgii Plekhanov (1856-1918), Lukács and his Russian friend, Mikhail Lifschitz (1905-1983) felt that there is a specific Marxist aesthetics as opposed to this or that aesthetics which had to be harnessed to complete the Marxist system. They also came out against the approach to turn Marxism into just one socio-economic theory among others.¹

Lukács’s debt to Stalin

Interestingly enough, the idea of an independent Marxist aesthetics owing to none excepting Marx and Engels was not a brainwave of Lukács. It was the natural outcome of a debate that was going on in the Soviet Union in 1930. A. Deborin (pseudonym of Joffe Abram Noisweebich, 1881-1962), a Russian Marxist philosopher was trying to establish the orthodoxy of Plekhanov. No less a person than Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the then head of the Soviet Union, came out in protest against this. Stalin, like his mentor V. I. Lenin (1870-1924), believed Marxism to be an integral world outlook, not a hidebound petrified doctrine (Lenin 1967a p. 41). Stalin’s criticism of Plekhanov gave Lukács the idea of making a similar critique of Mehring. 

Lukács acknowledges his debt to Stalin in this respect. He declares: ‘[I]t is a sheer prejudice to imagine that everything Stalin did was wrong and anti-Marxist’ (1983 p. 86). Again he said, ’I have never doubted for a moment that Stalinism involved the destruction of reason. But I would not think it right to criticize Stalin, let us say, because we had discovered some parallel or other to Nietzsche’ (1983 p. 104). 

While not denying that a number of the later features of Stalinism manifested themselves in the Stalin-Deborin debate, Lukács unhesitatingly admits that Stalin’s defence of an extremely important point of view (namely, Marxism as a totalizing worldview) played a very positive role in his own development (1983, p. 86).² The entire subsequent development of both Lukács and Lifschitz was set in train by their works on an independent Marxist aesthetics. The notion, that aesthetics forms an organic part of Marxism, is to be found in the two essays Lukács wrote on Marx’s and Engels’s letters to Ferdinand Lassalle, the author of a play called Franz von Sickingen. The essays appeared in Der Rote Aufbau (1932) and Internationale Literatur (1933).

Lukács also speaks of Elena Feliksovna Usevich (1893-1968), a Polish literary critic, who attacked the orthodox line on naturalism, but never suffered any serious consequence.³ Usevich and some others denied that ideology could be a criterion for the aesthetic achievement of a work of art. On the other hand, they argued that great literary works could emerge on the basis of a very bad ideology as was the case with Balzac’s royalism. This also implied that a good ideology can coincide with very poor works of literature.⁴  

This is a radical departure from the mechanistic concept that great literary works could be produced only on the basis of a good ideology, and conversely, bad ideology would invariably give rise to very poor works of literature. (1983 p.100) 

On the basis of this novel outlook (namely, ideology cannotbe a yardstick for aesthetic achievement) Usevich went on attacking the political poetry of the day with perfect impunity. Neither was she tried or imprisoned nor was she ‘purged’ (1983 p.100). 

Lukács himself was not much involved in all this since he did not know Russian. Nor was he ever taken to task for expressing his views on Hegel in the second half of the 1930s, at a time when Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948) had proclaimed Hegel to be the ideologist of feudal reaction to the French Revolution. At a later stage Zhdanov together with Stalin depicted the entire history of philosophy as a long running conflict between materialism and idealism. This is how Lukács represents the new phase of philosophical studies in the Soviet Union.

This representation, however, cannot be wholly true. Lukács was perhaps forgetting that long before Zhdanov and Stalin, Engels had spoken of the split of all philosophers ‘into two great camps, idealism and materialism’ (Ludwig Feurbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888) in: Selsam and Martel 1963 p.48). 

As against this opposition, materialism vs idealism, Lukács focusses on a different polarity in his The Destruction of Reason (German edition 1954, English edition 1974). He claimed that the struggle was between rational and irrationalist philosophy. Lukács admitted that the irrationalists were all idealists, but materialists were not their only opponents. There were idealists among the rationalist opponents too. This is indeed totally incompatible with the Zhdanovian theory, but Lukács was not blacklisted for his rather unconventional view. On the contrary, his ‘left’ critics accused him for underplaying the polarity of materialism and idealism. But, let it be noted that Lukács did not have to face any inquisition, either in Moscow or in Budapest, for holding such an unfashionable view. In fact Lukács had never been expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party, although he was definitely under a cloud until well into the 1960s. What appeared in the Hungarian encyclopedia in 1962 regarding Lukács’s alleged expulsion from the Party was vehemently denied by Lukács himself (1983 p. 134).

Passion for objectivity

Lukács’s approach to literary judgment is marked by objectivity. He did not care for the author and his/her intentions, but concentrated on what had been written. Performance rather than anything else was his sole concern. George Steiner, not an altogether unsympathetic critic of Lukács, has spoken of Lukács’s pact with the Devil, that is, ‘historical necessity’:

The daemon promised him the secret of objective truth. He gave him the power to confer blessing or pronounce anathema in the name of revolution and the ‘laws of history’. But since Lukács’s return from exile [August 1, 1945], the Devil has been lurking about asking for his fee. In October 1956 he knocked loudly at the door (1987 p. 65).⁵

It is true that Lukács had agreed to make all sorts of compromise with the powers that be; he did many things that made his friends and admirers uncomfortable. For example, he did not speak out against the Moscow Trial (1936-38). The only reason of his silence, he said, was to remain inside the Party and be a soldier in the fight against fascism. It is similar to Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles: a modern allegory of selling one’s soul in exchange of attaining objectivity.Objectivity was the key word in Lukács’s life and thought. Istvan Eörsi (1931-2005) has conjectured how Lukács might have reacted if he (Eörsi) would decide to discuss with him the contents of his (Eörsi’s) essay entitled ‘Georgy Lukács, Fanatic of Reality’:

If I were able to discuss with him this proposed essay of mine, he would most certainly direct my attention to its objective nature. “For,” he would say, “it is not altered in the least by the fact that I have died.” I would venture to object that his death would be certain to have an emotional effect on the author and, not unlikely, on the readers of this article in their attitude to the subject. Because the latter would appear, by the fact of death, unexpectedly final and closed and we would not have been prepared for it. “All this is very likely,” he would reply, “but what we are prepared for is one thing and what the subject is quite another. The subject is not altered by the state and character of our preparedness” (The New Hungarian Quarterly 1971 p. 26; Psyche and Society, May 2013, pp. 7-8).

Here is an example of Lukács’s objectivity in relation to himself. It was widely known that Thomas Mann (1875-1955) had modelled the character of Naphta in his novel, The Magic Mountain, on young Lukács. Naphta is a Jesuit, highly respected by the members of his own order but alienated from his priestly community. Generally speaking, he is not a pleasing character. Yet Lukács did not mind it a bit that he had been portrayed in an unfavourable light. Eörsi observes:

[I]t was none other than Lukács who drew attention to the proto-fascist features of Naphta’s character. He was of course aware who Thomas Mann’s model was but he considered it the writer’s private business where he took his models from. He was persuaded that as a literary critic he had only to do with the objective nature of the work as it had been realized readily and with their relationship it bore to reality, and he thought that he could well leave autobiographical matters, not bearing directly on the essential issues, to the painstaking care of philologists (The New Hungarian Quarterly (NHQ ) 1971 p. 32; Psyche and Society (PAS), May 2013, p. 12).

One of Lukács’s favourite quotes was from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship where Philine says, ‘And if I do love you, what concern is that of yours?’

Lukács claimed that this was his life long attitude to ‘important men’ (1983 p.40). He also considered this to be the critic’s ideal standpoint with regard to artists and to people in general (NHQ 1971 p. 32; PAS p.11). He remained unaffected by slanders that dogged him throughout his life. After hearing a particularly unsavoury slander he reflected a little and told Eörsi, ‘Look, I have always said that as long as I’m not there I don’t mind if they hang me’ (NHQ 1971 p. 31; PAS 2013 p.11).

Intention versus Performance

Looking at the performance rather than the intention of the author is the hallmark of Lukács both as philosopher and literary critic. Lukács’s insistence on performance rather than intention has a history of its own. While reviewing Margaret Harkness’s novel, City Girl, in a letter addressed to the author (April 1888), Engels applied the term ‘realism’ in a very special sense: ‘The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author’s opinion’ (Marx-Engels 1976 p. 91). He cited Balzac as a case in point. Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his works were all in defence of the aristocratic classes. Yet his novels represent the republican heroes in the most favourable light:

That Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the real men of the future where for the time being, they alone were to be found – that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the greatest features in old Balzac (Marx-Engels 1976 p. 92).

Now we know that this evaluation of Balzac was not originally Engels’s. As early as 1870 Emile Zola (1840-1902) had formulated it in this very way. Similarly, unbeknown to both Zola and Engels, Nikolay Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836-1861), a Russian critic, had also illustrated this position (namely, opposition between intention and performance) by referring to the story of Balak and Ballam in the Old Testament. Balak wished Ballam to curse Israel, ‘but in the solemn moment of elation a blessing instead of a curse involuntarily rose to his lips.’ (Lukács 1972 p. 114).⁶

Lukács mentions Dobrolyubov but not Zola.⁷ Going beyond Engels Lukács formulated that discrepancy between intention and performance, between Balzac the political thinker and Balzac the author of Human Comedy constitutes Balzac’s historical greatness (Lukács 1972 p. 21). Lukács never tires of reiterating this, always in relation to Balzac, and never ceases to praise Engels for his ‘methodological clarity’ which, in his opinion the great Russian critics lacked, although they ‘were no less distinctly aware of this dialectic’ (1972 pp. 91, 114). One may suspect that Lukács was trying to separate the political views held by the author and her/his creativity by upholding Engels’s praise of Balzac as a realist author. Zola, on the other hand, wished to appropriate Balzac in the progressive camp. So he declared: ‘Balzac is ours: Balzac, the royalist and Catholic, worked for the Republic for the free societies and religions of the future’ (Qtd. Wellek, 4:17-18).⁸

What is ‘Party literature’?

N. Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, once provided a helping hand to Lukács. In a letter published posthumously (1960), it was found that in Krupskaya’s opinion, by ‘Party literature’ Lenin did not mean literature as fine art or imaginative literature. Apparently then Lenin meant only those pieces (non-fiction) that appeared in Party press . Certainly this interpretation gives an entirely new complexion to the formulation made in Lenin’s famous 1905 essay, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’. Two years after the publication of this letter Lukacs declared he had long held that very view. ‘The importance of this statement is considerable, for this essay was the bible of sectarianism in the arts during the ideological dictatorship of Stalin and Zhdanov It is curious and interesting, that the publication of Krupskaya’s letter should have received so little attention’ (1969 pp.7-8).

Although it is possible to make the most of this highly interesting and charitable explanation, not everybody has been taken by it. István Mészáros, otherwise a staunch defender of Lukács, is more than sceptical in accepting such a view of ‘Party literature’ in Lenin’s 1905 essay (1972 pp.107-09). Mészáros does not refer to Lukács’s preface to the English edition of Probleme des Realismus (Berlin 1955 English translation 1962) but to his essay on Solzhenitsyn (1969) in which Lukács cryptically refers to ‘Krupskaya’s letter’ without any further reference (1970 p.77). Yet the escape route provided by Krupskaya, intentionally or unintentionally, has been largely ignored by literary critics who claim to be Marxists. It is rather strange that Krupskaya’s remark on Lenin’s essay has not been reproduced in Lenin’s On Literature and Art, a collection of extracts of Lenin’s views as found in his writings or in the memoirs of others. In any case, Krupskaya’s clarification is rarely, if at all, mentioned in articles and book-length studies on Lenin and his aesthetic views.

Lukács’s shortcomings

Since Lukács would like to be judged in the same way as he used to judge others, we would like to point out some of Lukács’s shortcomings at the end. First, he was thoroughly Euro-centric, having an extremely narrow perspective of ‘the great tradition’ reminiscent of the canon of F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), the eminent English critic of the last century. Second, Lukács’s generalizations are often rather sweeping; he disregards all evidence that go against his thesis. Third, he could never properly appreciate the contribution of modernists or even of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) as the founder of a new kind of theatre.⁹ Fourth, Lukács was constitutionally incapable of responding to poetry, whether of the past or of the present. And, last but not least, his political stand often blinded his vision. in his ultra-left phase he dismissed Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (Home and the World) as a ‘Gandhi novel’ which betrays his utter ignorance of the date of composition of the original novel (serialized in Sabujpatra in 1914, published in book form in 1916, when Gandhi was nowhere in the picture), and the time when the translations into English (1919) and from English to German (1920) appeared. There is not the least trace of objectivity in Lukács’s assessment of Tagore as found in this deplorable review article which does little credit to his stature as a literary critic.

One might multiply instances of many such limitations in Lukács’s works. Nevertheless, his contributions to both Marxist philosophy and aesthetics are admittedly outstanding.

POSTSCRIPT

 

I have consciously avoided repeating Mészáros’s analysis of Lukács’s philosophical outlook as given in his Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic. He pinpoints three categories, namely, (a) “Ought” and Objectivity, (b) Continuity and Discontinuity, and (c) Totality and Mediation. His explication merits re-reading, not once, but several times. I have only tried to supplement Mészáros by highlighting the aesthetic aspects in Lukács’s literary-critical works.

For an overview of Lukács’s outlook of literature and art, Bela Kiralfalvi’s The Aesthetics of György Lukács is a reliable guide.

Notes:

 

1 Here and elsewhere I have adapted Lukács’s own words instead of quoting him verbatim every time. References to the sources are given in parentheses.

2 For further details regarding the debate see Kolakowski 3: 63-76.

3 Lukács mentions E. Ussiyevitch as ’[t]hat intelligent and courageous critic of the Thirties’ in his Preface to the English edition of Probleme des Realismus (printed as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism), p. 8. Lukács is said to have been ‘the intellectual leader’ of the Russian journal, Literaturny Critique whose inner circle comprised M. Lifshitz, I. Satz, and E. Usiyevitch (Mészáros p.139).

4 We shall come back to Balzac later. Let is be noted that Lukács often drew logical conclusions of this kind from the works of Marx and Engels and extended the scope of the original declarations/statements.

5 By ‘October 1956’ Steiner most probably means Lukács’s tenure as a Minister of Culture in Imre Negy’s Government and the course of subsequent events that culminated in his deportation to Romania (4 November 1956). Lukács had previously become a member of the enlarged Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party (Mészáros p. 149).

6 The reference is to Numbers 23:8-10. Balak there said to Ballam, ‘What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemy, and you heap blessing for them!’ To this Ballam replied, ‘Am I not obliged to say what Yahweh puts into my mouth?’ (23:11-12. Qtd. from The Jersalem Bible version). This happened not once, not twice, but thrice.

7 Leo Popper (1886-1911) was the first to develop a theory of ‘double misunderstanding’ at the level of artistic intention and that of reception. He wrote of this to Lukács on October 7, 1910 (Lukács 1986 p. 126, 128 n1). Leo Popper is known to have influenced young Lukács (Lukács 1986 p. 295).

8 Cf. ‘The artist usually sets out – or used to – to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tail, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two bluntly opposing minds, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it’ (D. H. Lawrence 1923/2003 p.14). To this Angela Carter added: ‘[Lawrence] was right, even if he did not want this to happen to his tales’ (Carter p.3). For further examples (for instance, the case of Dickens) see Hawthorn p. 71.

9 In his long essay, ‘Realism in the Balance’ (Das Wort 1938) directed against Bloch, Lukács praised a one-act playlet by Brecht. Brecht viewed it as a sinister compliment: ‘Lukács has welcomed The Informer as if I were a sinner returning to the bosom of Salvation Army’ (Bloch and others p. 58 n18).

Works Cited

Bloch, Ernst and others. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1980.

Engels, Frederick. 1895. Engels to W. Sombart in Breslaun. London, March 11, 1895. First published: in the Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutscher Arbeiterbewegung No. 3, 1961; Source: Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 3, pp. 504-506. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_11.htm

Engels, Frederick. 1987. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Selsam and Martel (q.v.).

Eörsi, István. 1971. György Lukács, Fanatic of Reality. The New Hungarian Quarterly. Vol.12 No. 4 pp.20-34. Reprinted in Psyche and Society (Kolkata). Vol. 11 No. 1, May 2013 pp. 7-14.

Hawthorn, Jeremy. Unlocking the Text. London: Edward Arnold, 1988 (first pub. 1987).

Jerusalem Bible, The. London: Darton, Longan & Todd, 1968.

Kiralfalvi, Bela. 1975. The Aesthetics of György Lukács. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth and Dissolution. Vol. 3. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 (first pub. 1978).

Lawrence, D.H. 1923/ 2003. Studies in Classical American Literature (1923), in:The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence. Eds. Ezra Greenspen and others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lenin, V. I. 1967a. Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Selected Works. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lenin, V. I. 1967b. On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lichtheim, Georg. 1976. Lukács. London: Fontana/Collins.

Lukács, Georg. 1974. Conversations with Lukács. Ed. Theo Pinkus. London: The Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. London: The Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg. [1968]. Goethe and His Age. London: The Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg. 1983. Record of a Life. London: New Left Books.

Lukács, Georg. 1986. Selected Correspondence 1902-20. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lukács, Georg. [1970]. Solzhenitsyn. London: The Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg. Tagore’s Gandhi Novel. Review of Rabindranath Tagore: The Home and the World. Source: George Lukács, Essays and Reviews, London: The Merlin Press, 1983; First Published: in the Berlin periodical, Die Rote Fahne, in 1922. Available in

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1922/tagore.htm>

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume 3, pp. 504-506.

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_11.htm>

Mészáros, István. 1983/1991. Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic. London: The Merlin Press.

Selsam, Howard and Harry Martel (eds.). 1987. Reader in Marxist Philosophy. New York: International Publishers.

Steiner, George. 1960/1987. Lukács and the Devil’s Pact, The Kenyon Review. XXII, No. 1, Winter 1960, pp. 1-18. Reprinted in George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Wellek, René. 1983. A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950. Vol.4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This piece was presented in the Max Mueller Bhavan Library, Kolkata as a part of the lecture programme, The German Intellectual Tradition: From Kant to Habermas Phase II, on April 4, 2015.

Acknowledgements. Amitava Bhattacharyya, Amlan Dasgupta, Sunish Kumar Deb, Siddhartha Dutta, Arindam Saha, and Arun Sen. The usual disclaimers apply

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya taught English at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata and was an Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He is now a Fellow of PAVLOV Institute, Kolkata.


Email ID: ramkrishna.bhattacharya@gmail.com)

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Critiquing Timpanaro’s Concept of Hedonism vis-à-vis Materialism - PART II

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx emphasized the fact that humans become truly human only when they can rise above consumption and set themselves to other kinds of activity excepting those meant to supply their daily needs, the means of subsistence. One of their objections against the capitalist society, nay of class society in any form, is that humans are reduced to mere animals by the social conditions created by the exploiting class. Marx writes:

‘Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. (EPM p.73)’

What is the consequence of this self-alienation? Marx writes:

‘As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. (EPM p. 73)’

Does Marx speak like Axel, the aristocrat in Comte de Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1836-89)’s play, Axel, who tells her beloved Sara non-chalantly: ‘Living? The servants will do that for us’ (Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous. Act 4 Scene 1, p.283).⁷ No. Marx was quite conscious of the biological needs of humans:

‘Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.’ (EPM p. 73)

We hear an echo of this in Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

‘The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?’ (CWCE pp 126-27)’

In the same work, young Engels laments:

‘It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his (sc. worker’s) attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep, none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of Nature, much less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human being to the level of a brute?’ (CWCE pp. 152)’

What makes humans distinct from all other species belonging to the same genus is that the humans are productive while others are not. Marx distinguished the concept of production in animals and humans in this way:

‘Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one­sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. ‘(EPM pp. 75-76)

Marx developed this idea more lucidly in Capital, Vol. I:

‘We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination [the German text reads Kopf, ‘head’] before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.’ ⁹ (Moscow ed. 3:7, p. 174)

And then comes the most startling sentence, or rather an apophthegm or maxim: ‘Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.’ (EPM p.76)

In this work Marx also speaks of man-woman relations:

‘Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.¹⁰ (EPM pp.99-100 n31)

Prostitution to Marx is not just a special case of domination. It demeans both the exploiter and the exploited. It is viewed against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation as a whole. He goes on explaining:

‘In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural procreative relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural function.’ (EPM pp.100-01. Italics in the original).

Marx also distinguished between food as such and what he significantly calls the ‘human form of food’. He says:

‘For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals.’(EPM p.109)

#

There is no room for doubt that in their first attempts at self-clarification Marx and Engels emphasized the need for food and drinks, clothing and habitation, which are essential for the survival of all humans at all times. In their joint work, German Ideology they observed:

‘The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, orohydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.’ (GI p. 31)

At the same time Marx and Engels again distinguished between humans and all other animals in the following way:

‘Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.’ (GI p. 31. Italics in the original.)

Here is a purely objective way of viewing things, not from the angle of consumption, but from that of production. Consumption does not occupy any significant place in the Marxian model of studying human societies, whether pre-capitalist or capitalist.

All this amply proves how Marx viewed the function of food not merely as a means of subsistence but also as a human product, something to be enjoyed only when one is eating not just because one is hungry but because one is prepared to appreciate the art of cuisine as well as the appearance of the dishes to please the eye. In other words, only by transcending the basic natural need for food that human kind can really achieve the aesthetic and truly human enjoyment. It is neither the gourmet nor the gourmand that Marx approves of. Food should have a properly human relationship to all humans, who do not suffer from hunger and can enjoy their food as a human product. 

#

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels do not openly discuss the views of Babeuf (1760-97), the French egalitarianist, but Charles Andler is of the opinion that ‘Babeuf is by implication classed [by Marx and Engels] among the reactionaries as one of those who “preached universal asceticism and a crude egalitarianism”.’(Qtd. in Ryazanoff, CM, p.230). Whether or not such a view is tenable, the fact is that Marx and Engels were very much opposed to any form of asceticism. In their satire against Feudal Socialism they write:

‘Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.’ (CM, Moscow ed. p.89)

Of course Babeuf cannot and should not be tarred in the same brush as the preachers of Christian Socialism. He had no intention of pleasing either the aristocrats or the priests. Yet it cannot be denied that in the writings of at least some of the Babeuvists the idea of ‘universal asceticism and a crude equalitarianism’ are encountered. (Ryazanoff p.232). Engels in his The Peasant War in Germany ( ) accounts for the feature ‘why asceticism not only characterized the risings of medieval days but likewise, at the outset, tinged with religious hues every proletarian movement of recent times’(Ryazanoff p.232). The passage, in spite of its great length, is worth quoting in full:

Already among these precursors of the movement we notice an asceticism which is to be found in all mediaeval uprisings that were tinged with religion, and also in modern times at the beginning of every proletarian movement. This austerity of behaviour, this insistence on relinquishing all enjoyment of life, contrasts the ruling classes with the principle of Spartan equality. Nevertheless, it is a necessary transitional stage, without which the lowest strata of society could never start a movement. In order to develop revolutionary energy, in order to become conscious of their own hostile position towards all other elements of society, in order to concentrate as a class, the lower strata of society must begin with stripping themselves of everything that could reconcile them to the existing system of society. They must renounce all pleasures which would make their subdued position in the least tolerable and of which even the severest pressure could not deprive them.

This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs widely, both by its wild fanatic form and by its contents, from the middle-class asceticism as preached by the middle-class Lutheran morality and by the English Puritans (to be distinguished from the independent and farther-reaching sects) whose whole secret is middle-class thrift. It is quite obvious that this plebeian and proletarian asceticism loses its revolutionary character when the development of modern productive forces increases the number of commodities, thus rendering Spartan equality superfluous, and on the other hand, the very position of the proletariat in society, and thereby the proletariat itself becomes more and more revolutionary. Gradually, this asceticism disappears from among the masses. Among the sects with which it survives, it degenerates either into bourgeois parsimony or into high-sounding virtuousness which, in the end, is nothing more than Philistine or guild-artisan niggardliness. Besides, renunciation of pleasures need not be preached to the proletariat for the simple reason that it has almost nothing more to renounce’. (PWG pp. 63-64. Italics in the original.)

Notwithstanding this striking feature, asceticism cannot be a part of the communist programme as Marx and Engels envisaged it. But a negation of asceticism and abstinence does not necessarily lead to an assertion of the other extreme: eating and drinking and making merriment are the sole aims of life. In fact, given Marx’s views of the future communist society, it is conceivable that he wanted to steer a middle course between unlimited consumption and total abstinence, the golden mean that would make human life happy without overindulgence either in too much of sensual enjoyment or scrupulously avoiding all pleasures.

Marx and Engels preferred to see humans not as isolated individuals but as units in a well-organized society. They would all get whatever they need (and needs would obviously vary from person to person, depending on each one’s circumstances) and they would contribute to social welfare to the best of their ability. Marx formulated the goal of communism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ (Moscow ed. p.22; Peking ed. p.17) Such a society would demand rational men and women, not trying to keep up with the Joneses; on the other hand, they should be conscious of others’ needs, not only of their own. Consumption would be based o rational choice, not on what ‘the hidden persuaders’ (in Packard’s words) would make them do. Since there would be neither any status (as in the pre-capitalist societies) nor any class division (as it prevailed in all human societies after the dissolution of the pre-class society, otherwise known as ‘primitive communism’), both consumption and production would be organized on rational lines. Self-enjoyment at the cost of others would have no room in such a society.

In view of all this, Timpanaro’s advocacy for hedonism as inhering in materialism (including Marx’s) seems to be not only ill-conceived, but also harmful to the understanding of the socio-philosophical basis of communism. Materialism to many has one and only one meaning: ‘a tendency to consider material possession and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values’ (as given in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary). The other meaning, ‘Philosophy the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications,’ is seldom noted and understood. By equating materialist ethics with hedonism Timpanaro has strengthened the hands of the anti-materialists and fideists. Instead of throwing light on the matter, he has made the confusion worse confounded.

We can do no better than conclude this critique with what Engels famously observed in Ludwig Feurbach:

‘By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting, and stock-exchange swindling — in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in a general way a “better world”, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary “materialist” excesses.’ (On Religion, p.237)’

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Notes

To the readers: Quotations from some sources, more particularly from the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, unless otherwise mentioned, are taken from the texts available in the Marxist Internet Archive. For facilitating references and locating the exact place, the page numbers in the print versions are also given, although the translations will vary to some extent.

1. In order to have a general understanding of hedonism as a technical, philosophical term, see ‘Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-350 BC),’ ‘Cyrenaics,’ and ‘hedonism’ in Blackburn (or any other dictionary/encyclopedia of western philosophy). See also Shields, and Tännsjö.
2. See, for instance, Bottomore and others (eds.). There is no article on hedonism and no reference to it in the article on ethics. See also Eagleton.
3. See the works by Ash, Kamenka, and Sayers, devoted exclusively to the place of ethics in Marxism.
4. It is interesting to note that, while almost all the Presocratic and post-Socratic philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero are placed in the first circle of Dante’s Inferno (Canto 4), Epicurus and his followers are separated and assigned to the sixth circle (Canto 10), their sin being that they ‘make the soul die with the body.’ But Dante did not continue to hold the same view of Epicurus throughout his life. See Mazzeo pp.106-20
5. For a bird’s-eye view of Epicurus and his philosophical views, particularly ethics, see Bogomolov, pp. 259-78 and Shields (ed.), pp. 237-50.
6. It is interesting to observe that in medieval England, of all persons, Plato and Seneca were taken to be the advocates of communism! In Piers the Plowman by William Langland (c.1332-c.1400 CE) a passage runs as follows:

Envy heard this and bade Friars go to college And learn logic and law and also the contemplative life, And preach to men of Plato and prove it by Seneca, That all things under heaven ought to be in common (Passus XX, p.198)

7. Marx and Engels did not succeed in publishing German Ideology in book form in their life time. The ms lay ‘abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice’. But they were not overly concerned, for the main purpose behind writing the book was to achieve self-clarification, and they felt they had achieved it. See GI, pp. 13 and 681-82 n1.
8. In another edition of Axel published by J. M. Dent et Fils, the sentence occurs on p. 260. The play, otherwise insignificant, is widely known for this speech alone.
9. For a somewhat different translation of this highly significant passage see Capital (Penguin Books), vol.1, 7:1, p. 284.
10. This note is given by Marx on page V of the manuscript where it is separated by a horizontal line from the main text, but according to its meaning it refers to this sentence. (Note by Progress Publishers)

Works Cited

Aristophanes. The Knights, Peace, The Birds, The Assemblywomen, Wealth. Trans. David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978.

Ash, William. Marxism and Moral Concepts. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964.

Ash, William. Marxist Morality. London: Howard Baker, 1988.

Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna. Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Firenze (Florence): Societa Editrice Fiorentina, 2009; London: Anthem Press, 2011.

Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna. Lokāyata Darśana and a Comparative Study with Greek materialism, in: Partha Ghose (ed.), Materialism and Immaterialism in India and the West: Varying Vistas. New Delhi: Centre for the Studies on Civilizations, 12:5, 2010, pp.21-34. (2010c)

Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna Development of Materialism in India: the Pre­Carvakas and the Carvakas, Esercizi Filosofici 8, 2013, pp. 1­12. (2013a) http://www2.units.it/eserfilo/art813/bhattacharya813.pdf

Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Bogomolov, A. S. History of Ancient Philosophy: Greece and Rome. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985.

Bottomore, Tom and others (eds). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. New Delhi. Maya Blackwell/ Worldview, 2000 (second edition).

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de l’isle-Adam, Comte de Auguste Villiers. Axel. Paris: Maison Quantin. 1890. (A copy of this edition is to be found in the University of Toronto Library, Call no. LF V758.2, accn. no. 153342, also available on the web). Another copy of the play published by J. M. Dent et Fils from Paris, London, and New York, n.d., can be read on the web: http://www.archive.org/details/axelvill00vill

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Krishnamishra. Prabodhacandrodaya. Ed. and Trans. by Sita Krishna Nambiar. Delhi: MLBD, 1971.

Langland, William. The Book concerning Piers the Plowman. Rendered into modern English by Donald and Rachel Attwater. Ed. Rachel Attwater. London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1967.

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Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german.../ch01a.htm

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https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/.../communist-manifesto/

Marxist update: Anon. Philosophy of hedonism. http://marxistupdate.blogspot.in/2011/10/philosophy-of-hedonism.html downloaded on 27.2.2014.

Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony. Dante and Epicurus, Comparative Literature, 10:2 Spring 1958, pp.106­-20.

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Co., 1960.

Ryazanoff, D (ed.). Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Calcutta: Radical Book Club, 1972.

Sayana-Madhava. Sarvadarsanasamgraha, Chap. 1. See C/L.

Sayers, Sean. Marxism and Morality -revised.doc -marxismandmorality.pdf

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Shields, Christopher (ed.). The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Tännsjö, Rorbjörn. Hedonistic Utilitarianism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. [Extracts available on the net.]

Thomson, George. The First Philosophers (Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. 2). London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955.

Timpanaro, Sebastiano. On Materialism. London: Verso, 1980.

Acknowledgements: Amitava Bhattacharyya, Amlan Dasgupta, Chinmay Guha, Debapriya Pal, and Sunish Kumar Deb. The usual disclaimers apply.

Prof Ramkrishna Bhattacharya taught English at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata and was an Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He is now a Fellow of Pavlov Institute, Kolkata.

This paper was first published in Psyche and Society 12:1 May 2014, 4-1


Part I of this essay is available here

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