Richard Westerman

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman, offers new perspectives on the possibility of a philosophical outlook that combines Marxism and phenomenology in the critique of capitalism. Although Marxism’s focus on impersonal social structures and phenomenology’s concern with lived experience can make these traditions appear conceptually incompatible, the potential critical force of a theoretical reconciliation inspired several attempts in the twentieth century to articulate a phenomenological Marxism. Updating and extending this approach, the contributors to this volume identify and develop new and previously overlooked connections between the traditions, offering new perspectives on Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger; exploring themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology; and examining the intersection of Marxism and phenomenology in figures such as Michel Henry, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. These glimpses of a productive reconciliation of the respective strengths of phenomenology and Marxism offer promising possibilities for illuminating and resolving the increasingly intense social crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Westerman argues that Lukács interprets social being as an interlocking set of intentional practices, governed by an overarching formal logic. People and objects exist in society as complexes of meaning; their meaning is determined independently of their material existence, and is not the projection of a subject. Applying the model gleaned from Lukács’s Heidelberg drafts on art, Westerman identifies three levels of Lukács’s argument. Phenomenologically, individual objects are defined by intentional practices that govern the way subjects relate to them; the commodity, Lukács argues, is the site of a dichotomous intentionality. Second, these individual meanings are governed by a specific principle of validity that generates an ontic social reality, or way the world is understood as operating in the everyday lives of those within it. Third, this is founded on an ontological account of the way any objective reality appears as coherent from a particular subjective standpoint. Ontologically, therefore, social reality is a totality in which the relations between subject and object are determined by an asubjective logical form.

This chapter surveys the key points of the debate around Lukács. Westerman analyses a number of critical interpretations, most of which treat Lukács as a neo-Romantic or Idealist, and so assume that Lukács wrongly designates the proletariat as a subject somehow standing outside of social structures that it created and is capable of acting on. In contrast, more sympathetic readings, particularly those of Lucien Goldmann and Andrew Feenberg, read Lukács as treating subject and object as coequal. Westerman aligns his argument with such approaches: Lukács’s social theory should instead be read in the light of his engagement with Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and the formalist philosophy of art during his time in Heidelberg.

Tracing the development of Lukács’s thought from the heady days of revolution in 1919 to the publication of History and Class Consciousness in 1923, Westerman argues Lukács’s masterwork should not be seen as a single, relatively unified whole. The last-written essays of the book—‘What is Orthodox Marxism?,’ ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’ and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’—are quite different from the earlier ones in their theoretical sophistication. Pointing to the references Lukács makes, to changes in his use of the term ‘consciousness,’ and to Lukács’s increasing tendency to use the term ‘totality’ to designate a self-enclosed whole, Westerman argues that these essays represent a theoretical return to his Heidelberg works. This justifies treating those works as a unified lens to interpret Lukács’s Marxian social theory.

Lukács later rejected the theory he offered in History and Class Consciousness because of its failure to deal adequately with the existence of a material world outside social relations, and the way humans interact with this world. Andrew Feenberg identifies the same flaw in Lukács’s account, albeit with a quite different evaluation: this omission, he suggests, leads Lukács to ignore elements of domination and repression in our relation to the external world and our own natural drives. Westerman responds to these criticisms by drawing on Lukács’s suggestion that ‘nature’ is defined under capitalism in antinomic form: it is because nature is defined in part as ‘irrational’ that it is socially manifest as a formless substance to be appropriated by social relations. Westerman closes by arguing that Lukács’s theory offers new ways to think of our relations to nature that would be shorn of such elements of repression.

Challenging the claim the Lukács depends on a Fichtean expressive-creative subject in order to overcome reification, Westerman argues that Lukács’s subject is defined within the meaning-structures of consciousness. It is the subject-pole of social practice, interpellated as acting in certain ways by the objectively determined meaning of the commodity. Westerman offers a highly original reading of Lukács’s account of subjectivity by relating his account to Alois Riegl’s account of the subject-position revealed by formal analysis of works of art. Drawing on Riegl’s distinction between internal and external coherence, he distinguishes between social forms that exclude or incorporate spontaneous subjectivity within collective practices: reification is the result of the commodity form defining objects purely in relation to other objects, and excluding any subjective input whatsoever. In contrast, Lukács argues that a revolutionary Party must be formed on the basis of free participation by all its members—not led from above by an all-knowing leader. Westerman concludes by identifying Lukács’s Kierkegaardian argument that the structures of history can generate a moral imperative for revolution.

Westerman argues that the basic conceptual framework of Lukács’s later Marxian social theory was first developed in his so-called Heidelberg Aesthetics—his drafts of a philosophy of art, written at Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918, but forgotten and only published after his death. This chapter offers the most detailed account of these manuscripts in English. It contextualizes Lukács’s argument within the reaction against psychologism, which included Hermann Lotze, Gottlob Frege, and Neo-Kantianism. Westerman identifies four significant sources of Lukács’s thought, who serve to represent these broader intellectual trends: art historians Alois Riegl and Konrad Fiedler, and philosophers Edmund Husserl and Emil Lask. Finally, the chapter outlines the aesthetics Lukács developed, focusing on the concepts of the standpoint and the totality, and on the relation between subject and object—all of which were of pivotal importance in his social theory, and which emerge here for the first time.

In concluding, Westerman reconsiders the relative importance of the likes of Husserl, Lask, Riegl, and Fiedler with more conventionally understood sources of his thought, such as Hegel. He also offers suggestions as to how Lukács’s theory might be applied to understanding contemporary society, relating his argument to that of Fredric Jameson. Finally, he suggests that Lukács’s aestheticized interpretation of social forms offers a different way to think about rationality from the abstract, a priori version of Jürgen Habermasm offering new possibilities for Critical Social Theory.

Westerman examines Lukács’s identification of the proletariat as the site of the overcoming of reification. While agreeing that his argument is not entirely convincing, Westerman argues that its failure is more interesting than normally assumed. First, Lukács suggests that reification produces a contradictory structure within individual consciousness that fragments the subject, leaving their lives increasingly empty. While his argument may not succeed entirely, it offers useful ways to think about how reification may be ruptured, and the seeming permanence of capitalism may be brought into question. Such fragmentation, however, is only negative—and may equally well generate reactionary responses as revolutionary ones, as shown by the recent rise of populism. Lukács suggests that an open, inclusive Party is the way to avoid this: it provides a fluid forum in which subjects may work together in generating a common identity.

Considering recent failed attempts to derive an ethical theory from Georg Lukács’s original formulation of reification, this paper offers an alternative more rooted in Lukács’s theory as a whole. By analyzing his critique of the empty Ought in Kant and Fichte, followed by his advocacy of substantial, materially-grounded Oughts in his late Ontology, I suggest that we can nevertheless find latent possibilities for grounding such values even in his theory of reification. Drawing on recent interpretations of Lukács that emphasize his debt to Neo-Kantianism, Husserl et al, I argue that one of Lukács’s central critiques of reification is precisely its expulsion of substantial values from formal social relationships. This implies, I suggest, a structural demand to reincorporate such values within relations, so that they might reach valid form; I conclude with some suggestions on the ethical demands this might entail.

This article examines different intellectual-historical approaches to the work of Georg Lukács, arguing that a methodology similar to that of the Cambridge School is, curiously, that most in line with Lukács’s own approach. I begin with some general methodological comments on intellectual history, before showing that a proper appreciation of the discourses within which Lukács was situated is essential to understanding both the specifics and the overall project of History and Class Consciousness. Finally, I argue that situating thinkers like Lukács properly within their time does not reduce them to museum pieces; rather, by seeking to capture the alterity of the past without reducing it to familiarity, we may de-reify our own world-views.

This book offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of a philosophy of art that he planned but never completed before he converted to Marxism. Reading Lukács’s work through the so-called “Heidelberg Aesthetics” reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois Riegl; it also offers a theory of subjectivity within social relations that avoids many of the problems of earlier readings of his text. At a time when Lukács’s reputation is once more on the rise, this bold new reading helps revitalize his thought in ways that help it speak to contemporary concerns.

Aesthetic attitude theories suggest we must attend disinterestedly to the properties of objects to experience aesthetic delight in them: we view them without regard to their use for us. Bence Nanay’s recent revival of the concept explains it through the distribution of our attention over the many properties of individual objects. While agreeing with Nanay’s approach, I argue such perception presupposes certain intentionality towards the object in the Fregean-Husserlian sense. Whether we see the same object as informative or aesthetically gratifying depends on whether we understand it as, say, a map or as a work of design or art. Furthermore, intending an object as aesthetic means we treat it as internally coherent: its properties are defined in relation to one another, rather than the purposes of a subject. This, I conclude, even affects the presentation of historical or moral values that obviously originate outside the object of aesthetic appreciation.

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács is known for his reintroduction of Hegelian thought to Marxist philosophy—but I argue that his account of the subjectivity of the proletariat owes just as much to the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. Despite strong differences in their outlook, their accounts of subjectivity have strong structural similarities. For both, a division of the self against itself produces suffering that leads in turn to a growing consciousness of the roots of the problem; in the end, the self is restored through a relation to itself grounded in the absolute, and thereby becomes capable of freedom. Lukács’s theory of subjectivity is, thus, predicated on changing the orientation of the proletariat towards itself—in ways that are deeply indebted to the peculiar theology of Kierkegaard

The concept of the subject is at the core of many social movements that attempt to empower disadvantaged groups by identifying a basic subjectivity underlying and uniting such groups. Though otherwise supportive of such movements, recent continental philosophers and social theorists such as Althusser, Derrida, and Butler have criticized such notions of subjectivity, arguing that they presuppose false and harmful ideas of unity and substantiality as the ‘true’ essence of these groups. In this paper, I propose that one possibility for resolving this debate can be found in the work of Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. I argue that they ground an authentically subjective selfhood on the distinct meaningfulness of individual consciousness. Identifying phenomenological motifs in the way they describe consciousness, I suggest that they define meaning by the way different particular experiences recall or relate to one another. By interpreting the many possible meanings of experience, subjects are able to build up an image of themselves, while collective subjectivity can be grounded on the exegesis of shared experiences. Because such meaningfulness is genuinely sui generis, emerging within consciousness, action in accordance with such images counts as autonomous; at the same time, meaning is sufficiently fluid that there can never be one single correct interpretation of it. Ultimately, the Western Marxists suggest, it is in the constant formulation and reformulation of images of oneself through reinterpretation of one’s experience that constitutes subjective selfhood.