Accueil
"In 1918, he became a committed Marxist and joined the Communist Party of Hungary, subsequently playing a role in the Hungarian proletarian dictatorship of 1919. After the collapse of the short-lived regime, he lived in Vienna, in Berlin and—from 1933 until 1945—in Moscow, assuming a variably active role (in the literary and political fi elds) in the work of the communist parties of Hungary, the Soviet Union and Germany. During his Moscow years, he became politically marginalized but in the shadow of the fascist threat he reluctantly agreed to a compromise with Stalinism. In 1945, he returned to Budapest where his participation in Imre Nagy’s government at the time of the 1956 revolution was to be his fi nal political role." (p.3)
"His attempt to found the ontology of social being was considered by most, including his own disciples, to have been a failure. For example, shortly before his death, prominent members of the “Budapest School” (all of them his previous followers: Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda) had addressed to him an extensive critical comment on the unfinished Ontology of Social Being. Their article appeared in the leading Hungarian philosophical journal (Magyar Filozófi ai Szemle—Hungarian Philosophical Review), and some years later had been republished in English in a volume dedicated to the reappraisal of Lukács’s philosophy (Fehér et al. 1983). The notes made by the authors express a profound disagreement with most of the theoretical statements of Lukács. (They reject, among many other things, his interpretation of the fundamental category of “genericness” or “species being” and his distinction between “genericness-in-itself” and “genericness-for-itself”." (p.4)
"A seemingly incidental footnote in History and Class Consciousness, which is nevertheless illustrative of Lukács’s exceptional intuition. In the footnote, the philosopher lays the foundations for a complete research program, based on some interesting observations made by Marx. The goal of the program would be to investigate in a systematic manner the interaction between language and society, departing from the hypothesis that the structures of reifi cation also penetrate language. This is a most radical interpretation of the social nature of language, for it implies the following: language is a social phenomenon not only in the general sense of it being a means for contact among people, but also in the specific sense that the given social relations (e.g., production and commodity relations) are inherently present in the linguistic forms themselves—in, for instance, the semantic structure of expressions. In other words, social relations are not simply “reflected” in language ; rather, they shape and determine its essential structures. In the passages quoted by Lukács, Marx refers to certain linguistic phenomena as “products of the bourgeoisie,” thereby clearly indicating that language has a class nature.
Lukács does no more than mention the possibility of philological research from a historical materialist viewpoint. Even so, we have every reason to suppose that he considered it possible to extend the reifi cation theory expounded in History and Class Consciousness to linguistic phenomena. That is to say, the theory of reification has logical space for a general theory of language that would embody a systematic discussion of linguistic reification and linguistic alienation." (p.6)
"In his later works, he dealt in far greater detail and more exhaustively with the language problem, doing so, however, on completely diff erent foundations. A reason for this may have been that during the rule of the Soviet version of Marxism, thinking about language was excessively infl uenced by the dispute over whether or not language should be considered one of the phenomena of superstructure. On one side of the argument were followers of the Georgian linguist Marr, who were convinced of language being an element of superstructure. On the other side was Stalin, who interfered in the linguistic debate and who adamantly denied the possibility of social relations infl uencing language in any way. (Stalin cut the Gordian knot when he stated that language “is neither ‘base’ nor ‘superstructure’.”) In his late major work on aesthetics, The Specificity of Aesthetic, Lukács himself went as far as to explain, in a naturalist fashion and based on Pavlovian physiological theory, that language is a second signal system (while also cautiously criticizing Pavlov for having ignored the role of work). In doing so, he abandoned the productive interpretation of the social nature of language, which he had proposed in History and Class Consciousness. Of course, this tied in with his renunciation of all concepts presented in his earlier great work.
His final position was that the genesis and fundamental structure of language must be derived from labor. Based on this, as part of the social ontological concept laid out in his last work, he outlined a kind of ontological theory of language." (p.7)
"The philosophy of science in the earlier work, similar to the references made to the class determination of language, is based on the theory of reification. This brings us to the fact that for Lukács the theory of science is first and foremost critique of science. And the manner in which he analyzes the effect of the structure of reification on the consciousness of classes indicates such central elements of his critique of science as, for example, the epistemological and methodological contrast between the natural sciences and the social sciences, the structural link between the natural sciences, capitalism and bourgeois class consciousness, or a definition of historical knowledge as self knowledge. The mere listing of these various factors shows that the Lukácsian critique of science was first and foremost a critique of positivism with roots going back to the pre-Marxian period of his work, to the German historicist, neo-Kantian, and Hegelian tradition.
Here it is worth giving special mention to the scientific-theoretical dualism that is expressed in the juxtaposing of the natural sciences with the social sciences (e.g., with history). This is linked to the author’s subsequent condemnation—under the influence of dialectic materialism—of History and Class Consciousness, which was motivated by the fact that the book limits the validity of dialectics to society. Correct and truly scientific historical knowledge must be dialectic, for it removes itself from the rule (or control) of the scientific cognitive model, the extension of which to society is simply the projection of the structures of reification onto bourgeois consciousness. It is the inspection of the structure of reification that makes possible scientific knowledge of the whole of society, which, however, requires that we take the position of the class consciousness of the proletariat. Th is knowledge is also the self-knowledge of the proletariat. This kind of class determination of the nature and structure of knowledge renders recognition of some kind of proletarian science inevitable.
After the consolidation of Soviet Marxism, a dogmatic belief—from the second half of the 1920s and into the 1930s—was that Marxist philosophy consisted of two parts: dialectic materialism and historical materialism. It was believed that the former described the general laws of objective reality (the “dialectics of nature”), while the latter applied these laws to special areas of society. It is understandable that the concept of History and Class Consciousness cannot be inserted into this formula in any manner. In The Specificity of the Aesthetic Lukács accepted the framework provided by dialectic and historical materialism, seeking to give structure to his work by means of a division into a general dialectic materialist part and a special historical materialist part. Of this, only the first part was completed, which explains the forms of consciousness, including the aesthetic form of consciousness, based on reflection theory.
From a general philosophical perspective, the work bears many features of the dogmatism of Soviet Marxism. The same features are present—sometimes merely as annoying stylistic elements and sometimes at the level of content— in works by Lukács dating from the Moscow period and from the 1950s and 1960s. They are particularly apparent in The Destruction of Reason, which the philosopher published in the 1950s. In terms of their general philosophical foundations, therefore, the two works are closely linked. Typical of both is the subordination of the philosophical message to forceful political assumptions and objectives. The question is, to what extent does this influence today’s readers’ judgment of Lukács’s scientific, aesthetic and philosophical-historical arguments.
At any rate, The Specifi city of the Aesthetic contains many beneficial innovations. These include the successful elaboration of a theory of everyday consciousness and the associated conceptual framework, which aid Lukács as he returns to the task of exploring the characteristics of scientific knowledge. In doing so, he focuses on the notion of de-anthropomorphization.
The introduction of this new concept signifies the formulation from an original viewpoint of the requirement for objectivity in science, including the seemingly paradoxical motif that if this demand can be realized in the social and human sciences, then the latter must be just as de-anthropomorphized as the former ; that is to say, they too must disregard the fact that the subject of their investigation is a human phenomenon. In this way Lukács abandons scientific-theoretical dualism (and thus also the idea of a “proletarian” science) and accepts the program of a single unified science." (pp.8-9)
"The neo-positivist movement that brought philosophy of science into being as a special discipline was still in its infancy, having recently been established by a group of philosophers belonging to the Vienna Circle (born just in 1922).
There is no doubt that Lukács painted a picture of science that was wholly different from the ideas of these philosophers and which anticipated the approach that became typical in the post-neo-positivist period, as expressed in the works of such thinkers as Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos. It suffices to recall Lukács’s firm rejection of the kind of fact-fetishism represented by the positivism of his era with its idolizing of isolated facts unrelated to theory. A similar anti-empirical view was formed subsequently in the supposition concerning the theory-ladenness of facts and in the denial of a “theory-independent” empirical basis and of a neutral language of observation.
Of course, we are not talking about a direct link, but rather of a relationship within a far broader tradition. Still, we may also assume a direct link, because Lakatos had been a student of Lukács in 1945 (indeed, one of his first pupils aft er his return in Hungary). Although we know little of substance about the relationship between the two men, there can be no doubt that the dialecticism imbibed from his master exerted a lasting effect on Lakatos’s thinking, and this is not even to mention the fact that his writings contain terms and concepts borrowed from Lukács.
Perhaps the impact of such factors explains why, in the debate on scientific progress, Lakatos joined the critics of Kuhn. While he accused Kuhn, the theoretician of scientific revolutions, of irrationalism, he considered it important to emphasize that an acceptance of the rational nature of scientific progress aff ects our most fundamental intellectual, political and moral values." (pp.10-11)
"From the outset Lukács employed a nuanced notion of rationality.
On the one hand, he considered capitalism to be the mother of both rationalism and irrationalism. Based on the theory of reifi cation, he concluded that the partially rational nature of the various subsystems of capitalism (e.g., industrial production, bureaucracy, and specialized areas of science) inevitably come into conflict with the irrationality of the system as a whole. This remained throughout as a constant thought in his work, forming a bridge between the essays in History and Class Consciousness and the very different historical analyses contained in The Destruction of Reason. In the latter work, Lukács argues in a similar manner that the lack of transparency and “objective irrationality” of the social whole collide with the rationality of the separate systems of production and social organization and with the rationality of the now indispensable scientific research. The opaqueness of the global system of society and of the historical processes shaping it, gives rise to the objective impression that our life and history are unknowable and subject to blind forces.
On the other hand, however, the partial systems emerging on the basis of their own logic are themselves fragile and limited. This means they can easily turn into their opposites and may also serve as fertile ground for ever renewable irrational philosophies.
One should emphasize that The Destruction of Reason, a controversial late work, brought change both in Lukács’s own oeuvre and in Stalinism. Soviet Marxism, having been influenced by Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, considered the struggle between materialism and idealism to be its main organizing principle. In line with this, Lukács also thought in terms of a sharp dividing line between idealism and materialism. In contrast —as Alasdair Macintyre has demonstrated— it is extremely important that The Destruction of Reason is based on the antagonism between the rational and the irrational." (p.11)
"It is not quite unfounded to say that there are two major trends in the 20th century: the analytics of language (the neo-positivists,Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophers) and the hermeneutics of language (Heidegger and phenomenology on the one hand, and theFrench School represented by Ricoeur, Foucault and Lacan, on the other).
It is natural to ask the question whether the problem of language had any place in the Marxist tradition. This is equivalent to the question whether the problem of language represented a philosophical problem for Marxism, and if so where its place is to be sought within the system of questions raised by Marxism.
Lukács gives us a partial answer to these questions. And if we now focus our attention on Lukács, then it is worth considering another division in 20th-century philosophical thinking. Márkus György, a prominent member of Lukács’s circle of pupils (the “Budapest school”), distinguished two great philosophical paradigms: the “paradigm of production” and the“paradigm of language.” Whereas according to the former the paradigm of social objectivations is material production, the latter regards language and linguistic communication “as the universal paradigm of all forms of human intercourse and human objectivations” [...] Of course, from our perspective, the difference between these two paradigms is not that one of them has a place for language while the other has none, but that one describes language and linguistic communication as part of, and modeled on, other forms of activity, while the other considers language and linguistic communication to be the basis, or norm, of other forms of intercourse and other activities. Clearly, in this division, we must regard Lukács as an exponent of the production paradigm." (p.19)
"The problem of the social nature of language is not exhausted in that it “only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men” (Marx 1998: 49).2 That is, it constitutes not only one aspect of the social nature of man in general, but it also includes the above connections, the intrusion of the historically concrete social structures and ideologies into the formal characteristics of language. And this has a decisive effect on consciousness, because consciousness is intimately linked to language. For this reason “consciousness is from the beginning a social product” (Marx 1998: 49), and there cannot be such a thing as “pure consciousness” (like the Kantian “reine Vernunft”), the reality of which was expressly denied by some great critiques of Kant, like Hamann and Herder, who had already pointed out the intrinsic relationship between language and consciousness. [...]
The bourgeois can “prove from his language” the identity of “mercantile”and “general human aspects,” he can claim that the properties of the bourgeois individual are the human properties in general, because the ideology declaring this came to form, as it were, part of the linguistic code, and the linguistic code itself makes one accept the conceptual schemes anchored in it with a spontaneous naturalness. If it is added to the above that, as Marx emphasized, “ideas do not exist separately from language” (Marx 1973: 163) and that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx 1998: 67),3 then it is not without foundation that we attribute to Marx the view that the intellectual power of the ruling class constitutes linguistic power as well. This is the logical place for a critique of language and a philosophical analysis of language within Marxism. A criticism of ideologies necessarily involves a linguistic demystification based upon the comprehension of the connections between ideologies and language. When Lukács took heed of these ideas of Marx’s, he proceeded to formulate a highly important scientific program—well ahead of his time. The problems quoted have in the meantime been incorporated into the objectives of different disciplines concerned with language (semiotics, socio-linguistics, etc.), but what is called by Lukács “a philological analysis in the manner of a historical materialism,” and what ought to be understood as the historical investigation of the relationship between the dominant ideas of the various ages and their linguistic expression, has never been fully elaborated in the frameworks of Marxism." (pp.21-22)
"It is easily discernible that there is a more or less elaborate conception of language contributing to the theoretical foundations of Lukács’s Aesthetics, and by virtue of its very role it claims to be more general and to grasp comprehensive tendencies of human language. At the same time, this conception reflects a radical change in Lukács’s scientific and philosophical orientation.
It is an accident of history that the statements concerning language in Marxist philosophy were for decades influenced predominantly by a single discipline: Pavlovian physiology and psychology. This inevitably involved theoretical dogmatism (even if the rigid application of certain concepts in Pavlov had not by itself brought along naturalistic traits into the interpretation of linguistic phenomena), since the one-sided orientation to reflex theory excluded not only a generalization of the achievements of the other relevant disciplines, such as linguistics, but also an investigation into the logico-conceptual facet of the problem of language. Even Lukács could not help conforming to the contemporary situation of Marxism. That is why the conception of language in his Aesthetics displays as one of its most substantial constituents of Pavlov’s doctrine (which was developed by him into an original hypothesis of the intermediate “1’ signal system”).
The unwary observer may have the impression that insofar as Lukács relies exclusively upon a single physiological doctrine while discussing the problem of language he comes to be opposed to not only his previous conception of the social nature of language but also to the whole of his philosophical and aesthetic ideas, in whose core lies Marx’s conception of the socio-historical nature of man. This is far from the truth as is best shown by the fact that although Lukács accepts without reservation Pavlov’s theory, he at the very outset subjects to criticism the tendency to examine the problems of the second signal system as abstracted from the wider implications of social practice and to take it as the basis of the interpretation of language.
In doing so, it was obvious for Lukács to refer to Engels, who is known to have attributed a special role to labor in his explanation for the ape becoming man and for the emergence of language. It is worth quoting the following from Engels:
[. . . ] the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.
Let us highlight two facets appearing in the paragraph: (i) labor is a jointly undertaken activity which has a socializing effect that results in people having “something to say” to each other; (ii) necessity created the vocal organ. The first facet implies a reference to the division of labor (although Engels does not use this word), while the second clearly contains a functionalist explanatory principle. (For our purposes, it is of course irrelevant which mechanism Engels thought had given rise to the vocal organ.) Both the argument concerning a link between labor, the division of labor and language and the functionalist explanation referring to a specific necessity have distinguished theoretical historical roots, and these will be worth returning to later on.
But first let us see how Lukács plays the Engels card against Pavlov:
Pavlov’s statements must of course be always understood and interpreted in the sense of dialectical materialism. For however essential Pavlov’s second signal system may be from the point of view of discriminating between man and animal, its true sense, and its highly fruitful significance will be manifest only if, like Engels, we sufficiently stress the simultaneous rise of labor and language, their objective inseparability. Man’s having something to say, a fact which is beyond the sphere of the animal kingdom, originates directly in labor and unfolds—directly or indirectly, and later through a good deal of mediation—in correspondence with the development of labor.
From a critical point of view even more unambiguous is the remark which demurs against the confusion of psychic phenomena in man and animal (in fact, image and concept in animals):
Our objection, or rather, our supplementary proposal can be summarized as follows: Pavlov is in the right when stating that the second signal system and actual thought in terms of concepts are inseparably interrelated, upon which all scientific thought is based. But he does not even hint at the interrelation of the second signal system, speech, and labor. Pavlov is never concerned with historical and genetic questions. He is content to state the interrelation of the development of man and speech. [. . . ] The lack of the genetic link between labor and speech, since it is a very important interrelation, blurs to some extent the fact that the second signal system is a special human manner of apprehension and expression.
The objection is all the more legitimate since by exploring the mechanismof reflex activity Pavlov not only endeavors to explain the physiological components of speech and thought, but he also believes to have grasped their specific essence. Lukács, contrarily, points out that for explaining the nature of language and thought it must be taken into account that they are the interiorizations of the specific human activity that constitutes their basis both in a historico-genetic and in a structural sense.
We cannot ignore the degree of ambiguity in Lukács’s position. At times he speaks of “the simultaneous rise of labor and language,” while at others he claims that language arises directly from labor and emerges in tandem with the development of labor. This latter claim (like Engels’ own hypothesis) could only be verified in the light of a detailed evolutionary mechanism. All of this does not alter the fact that an investigation of language as a form of activity that is part of labor, has illuminative power. Today, it is easy to see this, as several theories put forward in recent decades point in a similar direction. This does not mean that we should conflate the different approaches and the various terms they use: labor, labor process, “teleological positing,” intentionality, and intentional action. (Of course, we are thinking here of those theories that give priority to the communicative function of language, such as the theory of linguistic action or the theory of communicative action. Of less salience are theories giving primary emphasis to the role of language in the expression of thought, such as the Chomskyan philosophy of language.)
Lukács’s critique of Pavlov can be seen as a first tentative formulation of his later theory of language, according to which language and labor are categories of the same ontological level inasmuch as they bridge natural and social being: “Just like labor, language also represents a leap from natural to social being.” In the light of this we need a new kind of linguistics “that would take as its object of research or methodological guide the really existing connections between labor and speech,” and therefore, “could broaden and deepen our knowledge of the historical process of this leap.” (Lukács 1978: 3, 102)
In accordance with this view, when describing the essential features of language (as well as when discussing the aesthetic sphere as a whole), Lukács makes use of the principle that a phenomenon can be understood in its entire depth only if we consider the genesis and the tendencies of development of the totality to which the phenomenon in question specifically belongs. That is why there are numerous references to ethnography on the pages devoted to the discussion of the essential features of language. The remarks on “primitive languages” are intended to illustrate the idea that the property that, according to Lukács, counts as the essential feature of language and which is some kind of “twofold motion,” that is, “overcoming the limits of the actual immediacy by means of generalization and the retransformation of the result thus achieved into a new, more comprehensive immediacy of higher power and better differentiation,” is at the same time the law of real history, of the real development of language. Thus the problem which submerged with Pavlov onto a mere physiological level ascends into historical dimensions, notwithstanding the fact that the data Lukács cites from Lévy-Bruhl and others can hardly be interpreted unambiguously. “If we observe the language of a primitive people chosen at discretion, we shall realise that their derivation of words is incomparably closer to perception and farther from concept than ours,” states Lukács on the assumption that primitive languages are capable of naming sensually concrete objects only and have no means to express the concept of genus. Now the considerations that start out from the assumption that primitive languages have no concepts for genus ascribe an exaggerated significance to a single aspect of language. To put it more exactly, they compare “civilized” and “primitive” languages from a single aspect: on the basis of lexical characteristics. It is doubtful whether this leads to a correct typology.
Incidentally, considerations like the ones mentioned above served for Lévy-Bruhl as arguments for the justification of the existence of some “pre-logical”primitive mentality, which, as it were, should correspond to an infantile level of thought. This conception queries the universality of the basic course of human thought (prevalent even among the various kinds of the concrete socio-historical characteristics) and, in the last analysis, the uniformity of the human species, which contributed greatly to the legitimate criticism of structural and functional ethnology in this connection. As regards our basic problem it is, however, far more important to note that the facts described by Lévy-Bruhl do not constitute conclusive evidence. Boas was already able to demonstrate that the examples used to illustrate that the “concrete” nature of the “primitive languages” radically different from European languages are not generally valid: there exist primitive languages which, in spite of our scientific superstitions, abound in abstract terms which are also used as expressions of concepts for genus (Boas 1911: 657).
This may well raise doubt as to the well-foundedness of some of the theoretical statements on language in Aesthetics but it does not exert a fatal effect on the evaluation of the substantial part of Lukács’s position, nor does it hinder, in some degree, the acknowledgment of the concrete linguistic relevance of these very statements. In sum, Lukács regards it as the general trend in the development of language that “linguistic forms reflecting concrete objects gradually disappear from language and are replaced by much more general common nouns.” He continues to say that from this it does not follow that “language loses the ability to concretely designate every concrete object,” since “in our relation to the world sentences acquire an increasing significance” [. . . ] “the complicated syntactic relations of the words determine their senses more and more in the concrete contexts of their application,” and “by virtue of the relations of the words arranged in sentences more and more sophisticated linguistic devices come into being for the purpose of demonstrating concrete objective relations.” Minimally one of the presuppositions of these statements is false, viz., that at the earlier stages of language development, thus in primitive languages, sentences had less significance and they turned into being a more and more essential element of linguistic activity “as it were” simultaneously with the eclipse of the words having concrete meaning." (pp.22-26)
"Another point on which one must disagree with Lukács is that the ability to concretely designate objects was previously based on the semantic properties of words (on the concrete perceptual nature of their meaning). Leibniz—whom, incidentally, Lukács himself cites—demonstrated (in his polemic with Locke) that words can a priori be nothing but general. General terms are not incidental facts of language or facts occurring merely at certain stages of historical development. As Leibniz puts it, they “do not merely improve languages but are required for their essential structure.” It is thus, logically, impossible for words taken in themselves to relate to individuals. In Leibniz’s parlance “particular things” can be spoken of on this level only if “species (logically) infimae” are understood by them [...]
At the same time, it should be made clear that sentence construction is an essential property of linguistic activity. According to the standard conception, accepted by almost all authoritative linguists, the fundamental unity of language is the sentence, that is, men speak in sentences at whatever stage of linguistic development. Still, the main problem is clearly Lukács’s view of the development of language, which Ferenc Fehér, one of the philosopher’s closest pupils, put down to the “overall tendency of evolutionism.” Fehér severely criticizes his master and shows that the application of the general scheme of evolutionism to language is unacceptable to all linguistic and psychological theories that are perceived as relevant (Fehér 1983: 104). Indeed, there is general agreement today that a concept of development extendable to language does not exist, as there is no criterion that could be used to distinguish between existing and known dead languages in terms of their “level of development.”
We should note that Lukács is not completely consistent when committing himself to a kind of “linguistic evolutionism,” for he evidently did not think that concepts of development were valid in every field. We are quite aware that he accepted, for instance, Marx’s “Homer paradox,” namely that the classical works do not constitute a developmental sequence and that, on the contrary, such peaks of world literature as the Homerian epics arose in the earliest stages of social development and could not have arisen in any other period.
Let us return to the issue of the extent to which the presence of complex syntactic structures realized in sentences is a part of each phase of the development of language. It seems we may say that—granting that language has a general trend of development at all—this comes to the fore not in the increase of the significance of sentences but in the increasing complication of sentence structure. Lukács’s statements quoted above can be accepted only if this is meant by them. All that is, however, is a psychological rather than a linguistic problem.
Despite their problematic nature, in a roundabout way, Lukács’s statements are meaningful and that is why they do have scientific relevance. Note that what Lukács tackles is the problem of reference and singular description. In this connection he attains, with the informal means of philosophical analysis, the same results which can be achieved through a logical and grammatical analysis of linguistic structures. In his view, reference (the function of designating concrete objects) is not a separate relationship between the sign and the signified but a function of the relations within the sentence.
Although expressions are a priori in general, individual objects can be grasped by linguistic means, which are provided for by syntax: among the conditions of singular description we find rules which are clearly syntactic. To put it more generally: the relationship of concrete reality and language is not only a semantic but also a syntactic problem. “Only an advanced syntax can designate individuality by means of the linguistic reproduction of ostension,” claims Lukács in the chapter on reproduction of his Ontology of Social Being.
It is trivial, though perhaps not needless, to recall that the theory of language in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is related to the theory of everyday thinking. Lukács himself calls attention to the inherent relationship between the two problems: “The peculiarities of everyday thinking could perhaps be expressed most successfully if speech were subjected to a thorough analysis from this specific angle.” The central core of the problems of Aesthetics is thus occupied by ordinary language and this is an important fact. If a philosophy of language is viable at all it can set its foot at nothing but ordinary language, for—as is shown by Lukács himself—the sign systems carrying higher mental objectivizations emerge from the tendencies extant in ordinary language ; similarly, these higher mental objectivizations are themselves built upon the general foundation of everyday life and everyday thinking in order to constantly enrich this foundation with their results.
If by abstraction we consider solely the topic we touched upon here, placing ordinary language in such a central position may relate Lukács’s theory of language to ordinary language philosophy, even if otherwise Lukács is strongly opposed to the views of the neo-positivist and analytical philosophers on the objectives and the very nature of philosophical research. Notwithstanding their methodological position, according to which important logical distinctions can be discovered by exploring the rules of the use of our linguistic tools, and by doing this we may get closer to understanding the conceptual frames determining thought, would have certainly deserved more attention from the part of a thinker who was investigating the structures of everyday thought." (pp.26-28)
"Lukács not only rejected the views and methods of the analytical philosophers but also was rather perplexed by them. We see this in his chapter on Wittgenstein in The Ontology of Social Being. Here Lukács interprets several enigmatic sentences in Tractatus as “an involuntary excursion into the fi eld of onthology” (Lukács 1976: I. 73), merely acknowledging that, in terms of the present social condition, Wittgenstein does express something important and contradictory, namely the thinking and sentiments of those who, faced with the general manipulated nature of life, are incapable of anything but an inevitably impotent protest—the silence of Wittgenstein [...]
It is worth paying heed to a few points within Lukács’s description of ordinary language, especially to the dialectical contradiction which, according to Aesthetics, is the central organizing principle of the problems arising here. One of the aspects of this contradiction is that language is the substantial property of the mind (“the practical mind itself”), as regards its functioning, the movement of its structures, it is unconscious. Th is point is expressed by Lukács in another way: by means of the category of “mediation,” but owing precisely to this category he goes beyond a simple description of the paradox in question: “people necessarily relate to speech immediately, though as regards its nature it is a system of more and more complicated mediations.”
Through such an application of the category of mediation the problem of language is placed in the light of the comprehensive properties of human life activity. According to this, any new achievement involves a higher complication of determinations and a further articulation of the social conditions of life, and at the same time it becomes a “natural,” spontaneously manifest element of activity and thought extremely simplifying the relations of people to the world and one another. It is here that the source of the further aspects of the dialectical contradiction stressed by Lukács lies: it is the spontaneous naturalness of language that makes available all that is not immediately given to us, and the very same spontaneous availability hampers the “unbiased take-in” of the world. Th is last remark refers to a problem which is not examined by Lukács in detail, but to which he undoubtedly ascribes due significance. It can be summarized as follows: the structures of language influence the course of cognition in a defi nite direction. Another momentum or rather consequence of the same contradiction are the two contrary tendencies infl uencing the whole dynamics of ordinary language, which are called by Lukács, in a metaphorical phrase, though rather accurately, “the tendencies towards rigidity and plasticity.”." (pp.28-29)
-János Kelemen, The Rationalism of Georg Lukács, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 144 pages.
"His attempt to found the ontology of social being was considered by most, including his own disciples, to have been a failure. For example, shortly before his death, prominent members of the “Budapest School” (all of them his previous followers: Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda) had addressed to him an extensive critical comment on the unfinished Ontology of Social Being. Their article appeared in the leading Hungarian philosophical journal (Magyar Filozófi ai Szemle—Hungarian Philosophical Review), and some years later had been republished in English in a volume dedicated to the reappraisal of Lukács’s philosophy (Fehér et al. 1983). The notes made by the authors express a profound disagreement with most of the theoretical statements of Lukács. (They reject, among many other things, his interpretation of the fundamental category of “genericness” or “species being” and his distinction between “genericness-in-itself” and “genericness-for-itself”." (p.4)
"A seemingly incidental footnote in History and Class Consciousness, which is nevertheless illustrative of Lukács’s exceptional intuition. In the footnote, the philosopher lays the foundations for a complete research program, based on some interesting observations made by Marx. The goal of the program would be to investigate in a systematic manner the interaction between language and society, departing from the hypothesis that the structures of reifi cation also penetrate language. This is a most radical interpretation of the social nature of language, for it implies the following: language is a social phenomenon not only in the general sense of it being a means for contact among people, but also in the specific sense that the given social relations (e.g., production and commodity relations) are inherently present in the linguistic forms themselves—in, for instance, the semantic structure of expressions. In other words, social relations are not simply “reflected” in language ; rather, they shape and determine its essential structures. In the passages quoted by Lukács, Marx refers to certain linguistic phenomena as “products of the bourgeoisie,” thereby clearly indicating that language has a class nature.
Lukács does no more than mention the possibility of philological research from a historical materialist viewpoint. Even so, we have every reason to suppose that he considered it possible to extend the reifi cation theory expounded in History and Class Consciousness to linguistic phenomena. That is to say, the theory of reification has logical space for a general theory of language that would embody a systematic discussion of linguistic reification and linguistic alienation." (p.6)
"In his later works, he dealt in far greater detail and more exhaustively with the language problem, doing so, however, on completely diff erent foundations. A reason for this may have been that during the rule of the Soviet version of Marxism, thinking about language was excessively infl uenced by the dispute over whether or not language should be considered one of the phenomena of superstructure. On one side of the argument were followers of the Georgian linguist Marr, who were convinced of language being an element of superstructure. On the other side was Stalin, who interfered in the linguistic debate and who adamantly denied the possibility of social relations infl uencing language in any way. (Stalin cut the Gordian knot when he stated that language “is neither ‘base’ nor ‘superstructure’.”) In his late major work on aesthetics, The Specificity of Aesthetic, Lukács himself went as far as to explain, in a naturalist fashion and based on Pavlovian physiological theory, that language is a second signal system (while also cautiously criticizing Pavlov for having ignored the role of work). In doing so, he abandoned the productive interpretation of the social nature of language, which he had proposed in History and Class Consciousness. Of course, this tied in with his renunciation of all concepts presented in his earlier great work.
His final position was that the genesis and fundamental structure of language must be derived from labor. Based on this, as part of the social ontological concept laid out in his last work, he outlined a kind of ontological theory of language." (p.7)
"The philosophy of science in the earlier work, similar to the references made to the class determination of language, is based on the theory of reification. This brings us to the fact that for Lukács the theory of science is first and foremost critique of science. And the manner in which he analyzes the effect of the structure of reification on the consciousness of classes indicates such central elements of his critique of science as, for example, the epistemological and methodological contrast between the natural sciences and the social sciences, the structural link between the natural sciences, capitalism and bourgeois class consciousness, or a definition of historical knowledge as self knowledge. The mere listing of these various factors shows that the Lukácsian critique of science was first and foremost a critique of positivism with roots going back to the pre-Marxian period of his work, to the German historicist, neo-Kantian, and Hegelian tradition.
Here it is worth giving special mention to the scientific-theoretical dualism that is expressed in the juxtaposing of the natural sciences with the social sciences (e.g., with history). This is linked to the author’s subsequent condemnation—under the influence of dialectic materialism—of History and Class Consciousness, which was motivated by the fact that the book limits the validity of dialectics to society. Correct and truly scientific historical knowledge must be dialectic, for it removes itself from the rule (or control) of the scientific cognitive model, the extension of which to society is simply the projection of the structures of reification onto bourgeois consciousness. It is the inspection of the structure of reification that makes possible scientific knowledge of the whole of society, which, however, requires that we take the position of the class consciousness of the proletariat. Th is knowledge is also the self-knowledge of the proletariat. This kind of class determination of the nature and structure of knowledge renders recognition of some kind of proletarian science inevitable.
After the consolidation of Soviet Marxism, a dogmatic belief—from the second half of the 1920s and into the 1930s—was that Marxist philosophy consisted of two parts: dialectic materialism and historical materialism. It was believed that the former described the general laws of objective reality (the “dialectics of nature”), while the latter applied these laws to special areas of society. It is understandable that the concept of History and Class Consciousness cannot be inserted into this formula in any manner. In The Specificity of the Aesthetic Lukács accepted the framework provided by dialectic and historical materialism, seeking to give structure to his work by means of a division into a general dialectic materialist part and a special historical materialist part. Of this, only the first part was completed, which explains the forms of consciousness, including the aesthetic form of consciousness, based on reflection theory.
From a general philosophical perspective, the work bears many features of the dogmatism of Soviet Marxism. The same features are present—sometimes merely as annoying stylistic elements and sometimes at the level of content— in works by Lukács dating from the Moscow period and from the 1950s and 1960s. They are particularly apparent in The Destruction of Reason, which the philosopher published in the 1950s. In terms of their general philosophical foundations, therefore, the two works are closely linked. Typical of both is the subordination of the philosophical message to forceful political assumptions and objectives. The question is, to what extent does this influence today’s readers’ judgment of Lukács’s scientific, aesthetic and philosophical-historical arguments.
At any rate, The Specifi city of the Aesthetic contains many beneficial innovations. These include the successful elaboration of a theory of everyday consciousness and the associated conceptual framework, which aid Lukács as he returns to the task of exploring the characteristics of scientific knowledge. In doing so, he focuses on the notion of de-anthropomorphization.
The introduction of this new concept signifies the formulation from an original viewpoint of the requirement for objectivity in science, including the seemingly paradoxical motif that if this demand can be realized in the social and human sciences, then the latter must be just as de-anthropomorphized as the former ; that is to say, they too must disregard the fact that the subject of their investigation is a human phenomenon. In this way Lukács abandons scientific-theoretical dualism (and thus also the idea of a “proletarian” science) and accepts the program of a single unified science." (pp.8-9)
"The neo-positivist movement that brought philosophy of science into being as a special discipline was still in its infancy, having recently been established by a group of philosophers belonging to the Vienna Circle (born just in 1922).
There is no doubt that Lukács painted a picture of science that was wholly different from the ideas of these philosophers and which anticipated the approach that became typical in the post-neo-positivist period, as expressed in the works of such thinkers as Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos. It suffices to recall Lukács’s firm rejection of the kind of fact-fetishism represented by the positivism of his era with its idolizing of isolated facts unrelated to theory. A similar anti-empirical view was formed subsequently in the supposition concerning the theory-ladenness of facts and in the denial of a “theory-independent” empirical basis and of a neutral language of observation.
Of course, we are not talking about a direct link, but rather of a relationship within a far broader tradition. Still, we may also assume a direct link, because Lakatos had been a student of Lukács in 1945 (indeed, one of his first pupils aft er his return in Hungary). Although we know little of substance about the relationship between the two men, there can be no doubt that the dialecticism imbibed from his master exerted a lasting effect on Lakatos’s thinking, and this is not even to mention the fact that his writings contain terms and concepts borrowed from Lukács.
Perhaps the impact of such factors explains why, in the debate on scientific progress, Lakatos joined the critics of Kuhn. While he accused Kuhn, the theoretician of scientific revolutions, of irrationalism, he considered it important to emphasize that an acceptance of the rational nature of scientific progress aff ects our most fundamental intellectual, political and moral values." (pp.10-11)
"From the outset Lukács employed a nuanced notion of rationality.
On the one hand, he considered capitalism to be the mother of both rationalism and irrationalism. Based on the theory of reifi cation, he concluded that the partially rational nature of the various subsystems of capitalism (e.g., industrial production, bureaucracy, and specialized areas of science) inevitably come into conflict with the irrationality of the system as a whole. This remained throughout as a constant thought in his work, forming a bridge between the essays in History and Class Consciousness and the very different historical analyses contained in The Destruction of Reason. In the latter work, Lukács argues in a similar manner that the lack of transparency and “objective irrationality” of the social whole collide with the rationality of the separate systems of production and social organization and with the rationality of the now indispensable scientific research. The opaqueness of the global system of society and of the historical processes shaping it, gives rise to the objective impression that our life and history are unknowable and subject to blind forces.
On the other hand, however, the partial systems emerging on the basis of their own logic are themselves fragile and limited. This means they can easily turn into their opposites and may also serve as fertile ground for ever renewable irrational philosophies.
One should emphasize that The Destruction of Reason, a controversial late work, brought change both in Lukács’s own oeuvre and in Stalinism. Soviet Marxism, having been influenced by Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, considered the struggle between materialism and idealism to be its main organizing principle. In line with this, Lukács also thought in terms of a sharp dividing line between idealism and materialism. In contrast —as Alasdair Macintyre has demonstrated— it is extremely important that The Destruction of Reason is based on the antagonism between the rational and the irrational." (p.11)
"It is not quite unfounded to say that there are two major trends in the 20th century: the analytics of language (the neo-positivists,Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophers) and the hermeneutics of language (Heidegger and phenomenology on the one hand, and theFrench School represented by Ricoeur, Foucault and Lacan, on the other).
It is natural to ask the question whether the problem of language had any place in the Marxist tradition. This is equivalent to the question whether the problem of language represented a philosophical problem for Marxism, and if so where its place is to be sought within the system of questions raised by Marxism.
Lukács gives us a partial answer to these questions. And if we now focus our attention on Lukács, then it is worth considering another division in 20th-century philosophical thinking. Márkus György, a prominent member of Lukács’s circle of pupils (the “Budapest school”), distinguished two great philosophical paradigms: the “paradigm of production” and the“paradigm of language.” Whereas according to the former the paradigm of social objectivations is material production, the latter regards language and linguistic communication “as the universal paradigm of all forms of human intercourse and human objectivations” [...] Of course, from our perspective, the difference between these two paradigms is not that one of them has a place for language while the other has none, but that one describes language and linguistic communication as part of, and modeled on, other forms of activity, while the other considers language and linguistic communication to be the basis, or norm, of other forms of intercourse and other activities. Clearly, in this division, we must regard Lukács as an exponent of the production paradigm." (p.19)
"The problem of the social nature of language is not exhausted in that it “only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men” (Marx 1998: 49).2 That is, it constitutes not only one aspect of the social nature of man in general, but it also includes the above connections, the intrusion of the historically concrete social structures and ideologies into the formal characteristics of language. And this has a decisive effect on consciousness, because consciousness is intimately linked to language. For this reason “consciousness is from the beginning a social product” (Marx 1998: 49), and there cannot be such a thing as “pure consciousness” (like the Kantian “reine Vernunft”), the reality of which was expressly denied by some great critiques of Kant, like Hamann and Herder, who had already pointed out the intrinsic relationship between language and consciousness. [...]
The bourgeois can “prove from his language” the identity of “mercantile”and “general human aspects,” he can claim that the properties of the bourgeois individual are the human properties in general, because the ideology declaring this came to form, as it were, part of the linguistic code, and the linguistic code itself makes one accept the conceptual schemes anchored in it with a spontaneous naturalness. If it is added to the above that, as Marx emphasized, “ideas do not exist separately from language” (Marx 1973: 163) and that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx 1998: 67),3 then it is not without foundation that we attribute to Marx the view that the intellectual power of the ruling class constitutes linguistic power as well. This is the logical place for a critique of language and a philosophical analysis of language within Marxism. A criticism of ideologies necessarily involves a linguistic demystification based upon the comprehension of the connections between ideologies and language. When Lukács took heed of these ideas of Marx’s, he proceeded to formulate a highly important scientific program—well ahead of his time. The problems quoted have in the meantime been incorporated into the objectives of different disciplines concerned with language (semiotics, socio-linguistics, etc.), but what is called by Lukács “a philological analysis in the manner of a historical materialism,” and what ought to be understood as the historical investigation of the relationship between the dominant ideas of the various ages and their linguistic expression, has never been fully elaborated in the frameworks of Marxism." (pp.21-22)
"It is easily discernible that there is a more or less elaborate conception of language contributing to the theoretical foundations of Lukács’s Aesthetics, and by virtue of its very role it claims to be more general and to grasp comprehensive tendencies of human language. At the same time, this conception reflects a radical change in Lukács’s scientific and philosophical orientation.
It is an accident of history that the statements concerning language in Marxist philosophy were for decades influenced predominantly by a single discipline: Pavlovian physiology and psychology. This inevitably involved theoretical dogmatism (even if the rigid application of certain concepts in Pavlov had not by itself brought along naturalistic traits into the interpretation of linguistic phenomena), since the one-sided orientation to reflex theory excluded not only a generalization of the achievements of the other relevant disciplines, such as linguistics, but also an investigation into the logico-conceptual facet of the problem of language. Even Lukács could not help conforming to the contemporary situation of Marxism. That is why the conception of language in his Aesthetics displays as one of its most substantial constituents of Pavlov’s doctrine (which was developed by him into an original hypothesis of the intermediate “1’ signal system”).
The unwary observer may have the impression that insofar as Lukács relies exclusively upon a single physiological doctrine while discussing the problem of language he comes to be opposed to not only his previous conception of the social nature of language but also to the whole of his philosophical and aesthetic ideas, in whose core lies Marx’s conception of the socio-historical nature of man. This is far from the truth as is best shown by the fact that although Lukács accepts without reservation Pavlov’s theory, he at the very outset subjects to criticism the tendency to examine the problems of the second signal system as abstracted from the wider implications of social practice and to take it as the basis of the interpretation of language.
In doing so, it was obvious for Lukács to refer to Engels, who is known to have attributed a special role to labor in his explanation for the ape becoming man and for the emergence of language. It is worth quoting the following from Engels:
[. . . ] the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.
Let us highlight two facets appearing in the paragraph: (i) labor is a jointly undertaken activity which has a socializing effect that results in people having “something to say” to each other; (ii) necessity created the vocal organ. The first facet implies a reference to the division of labor (although Engels does not use this word), while the second clearly contains a functionalist explanatory principle. (For our purposes, it is of course irrelevant which mechanism Engels thought had given rise to the vocal organ.) Both the argument concerning a link between labor, the division of labor and language and the functionalist explanation referring to a specific necessity have distinguished theoretical historical roots, and these will be worth returning to later on.
But first let us see how Lukács plays the Engels card against Pavlov:
Pavlov’s statements must of course be always understood and interpreted in the sense of dialectical materialism. For however essential Pavlov’s second signal system may be from the point of view of discriminating between man and animal, its true sense, and its highly fruitful significance will be manifest only if, like Engels, we sufficiently stress the simultaneous rise of labor and language, their objective inseparability. Man’s having something to say, a fact which is beyond the sphere of the animal kingdom, originates directly in labor and unfolds—directly or indirectly, and later through a good deal of mediation—in correspondence with the development of labor.
From a critical point of view even more unambiguous is the remark which demurs against the confusion of psychic phenomena in man and animal (in fact, image and concept in animals):
Our objection, or rather, our supplementary proposal can be summarized as follows: Pavlov is in the right when stating that the second signal system and actual thought in terms of concepts are inseparably interrelated, upon which all scientific thought is based. But he does not even hint at the interrelation of the second signal system, speech, and labor. Pavlov is never concerned with historical and genetic questions. He is content to state the interrelation of the development of man and speech. [. . . ] The lack of the genetic link between labor and speech, since it is a very important interrelation, blurs to some extent the fact that the second signal system is a special human manner of apprehension and expression.
The objection is all the more legitimate since by exploring the mechanismof reflex activity Pavlov not only endeavors to explain the physiological components of speech and thought, but he also believes to have grasped their specific essence. Lukács, contrarily, points out that for explaining the nature of language and thought it must be taken into account that they are the interiorizations of the specific human activity that constitutes their basis both in a historico-genetic and in a structural sense.
We cannot ignore the degree of ambiguity in Lukács’s position. At times he speaks of “the simultaneous rise of labor and language,” while at others he claims that language arises directly from labor and emerges in tandem with the development of labor. This latter claim (like Engels’ own hypothesis) could only be verified in the light of a detailed evolutionary mechanism. All of this does not alter the fact that an investigation of language as a form of activity that is part of labor, has illuminative power. Today, it is easy to see this, as several theories put forward in recent decades point in a similar direction. This does not mean that we should conflate the different approaches and the various terms they use: labor, labor process, “teleological positing,” intentionality, and intentional action. (Of course, we are thinking here of those theories that give priority to the communicative function of language, such as the theory of linguistic action or the theory of communicative action. Of less salience are theories giving primary emphasis to the role of language in the expression of thought, such as the Chomskyan philosophy of language.)
Lukács’s critique of Pavlov can be seen as a first tentative formulation of his later theory of language, according to which language and labor are categories of the same ontological level inasmuch as they bridge natural and social being: “Just like labor, language also represents a leap from natural to social being.” In the light of this we need a new kind of linguistics “that would take as its object of research or methodological guide the really existing connections between labor and speech,” and therefore, “could broaden and deepen our knowledge of the historical process of this leap.” (Lukács 1978: 3, 102)
In accordance with this view, when describing the essential features of language (as well as when discussing the aesthetic sphere as a whole), Lukács makes use of the principle that a phenomenon can be understood in its entire depth only if we consider the genesis and the tendencies of development of the totality to which the phenomenon in question specifically belongs. That is why there are numerous references to ethnography on the pages devoted to the discussion of the essential features of language. The remarks on “primitive languages” are intended to illustrate the idea that the property that, according to Lukács, counts as the essential feature of language and which is some kind of “twofold motion,” that is, “overcoming the limits of the actual immediacy by means of generalization and the retransformation of the result thus achieved into a new, more comprehensive immediacy of higher power and better differentiation,” is at the same time the law of real history, of the real development of language. Thus the problem which submerged with Pavlov onto a mere physiological level ascends into historical dimensions, notwithstanding the fact that the data Lukács cites from Lévy-Bruhl and others can hardly be interpreted unambiguously. “If we observe the language of a primitive people chosen at discretion, we shall realise that their derivation of words is incomparably closer to perception and farther from concept than ours,” states Lukács on the assumption that primitive languages are capable of naming sensually concrete objects only and have no means to express the concept of genus. Now the considerations that start out from the assumption that primitive languages have no concepts for genus ascribe an exaggerated significance to a single aspect of language. To put it more exactly, they compare “civilized” and “primitive” languages from a single aspect: on the basis of lexical characteristics. It is doubtful whether this leads to a correct typology.
Incidentally, considerations like the ones mentioned above served for Lévy-Bruhl as arguments for the justification of the existence of some “pre-logical”primitive mentality, which, as it were, should correspond to an infantile level of thought. This conception queries the universality of the basic course of human thought (prevalent even among the various kinds of the concrete socio-historical characteristics) and, in the last analysis, the uniformity of the human species, which contributed greatly to the legitimate criticism of structural and functional ethnology in this connection. As regards our basic problem it is, however, far more important to note that the facts described by Lévy-Bruhl do not constitute conclusive evidence. Boas was already able to demonstrate that the examples used to illustrate that the “concrete” nature of the “primitive languages” radically different from European languages are not generally valid: there exist primitive languages which, in spite of our scientific superstitions, abound in abstract terms which are also used as expressions of concepts for genus (Boas 1911: 657).
This may well raise doubt as to the well-foundedness of some of the theoretical statements on language in Aesthetics but it does not exert a fatal effect on the evaluation of the substantial part of Lukács’s position, nor does it hinder, in some degree, the acknowledgment of the concrete linguistic relevance of these very statements. In sum, Lukács regards it as the general trend in the development of language that “linguistic forms reflecting concrete objects gradually disappear from language and are replaced by much more general common nouns.” He continues to say that from this it does not follow that “language loses the ability to concretely designate every concrete object,” since “in our relation to the world sentences acquire an increasing significance” [. . . ] “the complicated syntactic relations of the words determine their senses more and more in the concrete contexts of their application,” and “by virtue of the relations of the words arranged in sentences more and more sophisticated linguistic devices come into being for the purpose of demonstrating concrete objective relations.” Minimally one of the presuppositions of these statements is false, viz., that at the earlier stages of language development, thus in primitive languages, sentences had less significance and they turned into being a more and more essential element of linguistic activity “as it were” simultaneously with the eclipse of the words having concrete meaning." (pp.22-26)
"Another point on which one must disagree with Lukács is that the ability to concretely designate objects was previously based on the semantic properties of words (on the concrete perceptual nature of their meaning). Leibniz—whom, incidentally, Lukács himself cites—demonstrated (in his polemic with Locke) that words can a priori be nothing but general. General terms are not incidental facts of language or facts occurring merely at certain stages of historical development. As Leibniz puts it, they “do not merely improve languages but are required for their essential structure.” It is thus, logically, impossible for words taken in themselves to relate to individuals. In Leibniz’s parlance “particular things” can be spoken of on this level only if “species (logically) infimae” are understood by them [...]
At the same time, it should be made clear that sentence construction is an essential property of linguistic activity. According to the standard conception, accepted by almost all authoritative linguists, the fundamental unity of language is the sentence, that is, men speak in sentences at whatever stage of linguistic development. Still, the main problem is clearly Lukács’s view of the development of language, which Ferenc Fehér, one of the philosopher’s closest pupils, put down to the “overall tendency of evolutionism.” Fehér severely criticizes his master and shows that the application of the general scheme of evolutionism to language is unacceptable to all linguistic and psychological theories that are perceived as relevant (Fehér 1983: 104). Indeed, there is general agreement today that a concept of development extendable to language does not exist, as there is no criterion that could be used to distinguish between existing and known dead languages in terms of their “level of development.”
We should note that Lukács is not completely consistent when committing himself to a kind of “linguistic evolutionism,” for he evidently did not think that concepts of development were valid in every field. We are quite aware that he accepted, for instance, Marx’s “Homer paradox,” namely that the classical works do not constitute a developmental sequence and that, on the contrary, such peaks of world literature as the Homerian epics arose in the earliest stages of social development and could not have arisen in any other period.
Let us return to the issue of the extent to which the presence of complex syntactic structures realized in sentences is a part of each phase of the development of language. It seems we may say that—granting that language has a general trend of development at all—this comes to the fore not in the increase of the significance of sentences but in the increasing complication of sentence structure. Lukács’s statements quoted above can be accepted only if this is meant by them. All that is, however, is a psychological rather than a linguistic problem.
Despite their problematic nature, in a roundabout way, Lukács’s statements are meaningful and that is why they do have scientific relevance. Note that what Lukács tackles is the problem of reference and singular description. In this connection he attains, with the informal means of philosophical analysis, the same results which can be achieved through a logical and grammatical analysis of linguistic structures. In his view, reference (the function of designating concrete objects) is not a separate relationship between the sign and the signified but a function of the relations within the sentence.
Although expressions are a priori in general, individual objects can be grasped by linguistic means, which are provided for by syntax: among the conditions of singular description we find rules which are clearly syntactic. To put it more generally: the relationship of concrete reality and language is not only a semantic but also a syntactic problem. “Only an advanced syntax can designate individuality by means of the linguistic reproduction of ostension,” claims Lukács in the chapter on reproduction of his Ontology of Social Being.
It is trivial, though perhaps not needless, to recall that the theory of language in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is related to the theory of everyday thinking. Lukács himself calls attention to the inherent relationship between the two problems: “The peculiarities of everyday thinking could perhaps be expressed most successfully if speech were subjected to a thorough analysis from this specific angle.” The central core of the problems of Aesthetics is thus occupied by ordinary language and this is an important fact. If a philosophy of language is viable at all it can set its foot at nothing but ordinary language, for—as is shown by Lukács himself—the sign systems carrying higher mental objectivizations emerge from the tendencies extant in ordinary language ; similarly, these higher mental objectivizations are themselves built upon the general foundation of everyday life and everyday thinking in order to constantly enrich this foundation with their results.
If by abstraction we consider solely the topic we touched upon here, placing ordinary language in such a central position may relate Lukács’s theory of language to ordinary language philosophy, even if otherwise Lukács is strongly opposed to the views of the neo-positivist and analytical philosophers on the objectives and the very nature of philosophical research. Notwithstanding their methodological position, according to which important logical distinctions can be discovered by exploring the rules of the use of our linguistic tools, and by doing this we may get closer to understanding the conceptual frames determining thought, would have certainly deserved more attention from the part of a thinker who was investigating the structures of everyday thought." (pp.26-28)
"Lukács not only rejected the views and methods of the analytical philosophers but also was rather perplexed by them. We see this in his chapter on Wittgenstein in The Ontology of Social Being. Here Lukács interprets several enigmatic sentences in Tractatus as “an involuntary excursion into the fi eld of onthology” (Lukács 1976: I. 73), merely acknowledging that, in terms of the present social condition, Wittgenstein does express something important and contradictory, namely the thinking and sentiments of those who, faced with the general manipulated nature of life, are incapable of anything but an inevitably impotent protest—the silence of Wittgenstein [...]
It is worth paying heed to a few points within Lukács’s description of ordinary language, especially to the dialectical contradiction which, according to Aesthetics, is the central organizing principle of the problems arising here. One of the aspects of this contradiction is that language is the substantial property of the mind (“the practical mind itself”), as regards its functioning, the movement of its structures, it is unconscious. Th is point is expressed by Lukács in another way: by means of the category of “mediation,” but owing precisely to this category he goes beyond a simple description of the paradox in question: “people necessarily relate to speech immediately, though as regards its nature it is a system of more and more complicated mediations.”
Through such an application of the category of mediation the problem of language is placed in the light of the comprehensive properties of human life activity. According to this, any new achievement involves a higher complication of determinations and a further articulation of the social conditions of life, and at the same time it becomes a “natural,” spontaneously manifest element of activity and thought extremely simplifying the relations of people to the world and one another. It is here that the source of the further aspects of the dialectical contradiction stressed by Lukács lies: it is the spontaneous naturalness of language that makes available all that is not immediately given to us, and the very same spontaneous availability hampers the “unbiased take-in” of the world. Th is last remark refers to a problem which is not examined by Lukács in detail, but to which he undoubtedly ascribes due significance. It can be summarized as follows: the structures of language influence the course of cognition in a defi nite direction. Another momentum or rather consequence of the same contradiction are the two contrary tendencies infl uencing the whole dynamics of ordinary language, which are called by Lukács, in a metaphorical phrase, though rather accurately, “the tendencies towards rigidity and plasticity.”." (pp.28-29)
-János Kelemen, The Rationalism of Georg Lukács, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 144 pages.
