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LUCIEN GOLDMANN
and on the basis of this book, a dialogue developed between two
thinkers who, although unequal in intellectual force, would each
play an important role in the thought of the first half of the
twentieth century - George Lukacs and Ernst Bloch.
As he moves from the existential, tragic and Kantian position
of
Soul and Forms
through the Hegelianism of the
Theory of the
Novel
toward the Marxist philosophy of history in
History and Class
Consciousness,
Lukacs is unshakable in his demand for clarity and
rigor, with the criticism that this implies of all forms of false con–
sciousness and ideology. Against this position, Bloch unflaggingly
defends human and intellectual values, and especially the creative
historical function of a kind of thought which goes beyond the
scientific and positivistic - Utopianism. Essentially Bloch is asking
whether a hope which conceives itself and is philosophically if not
literally founded in a future radically different from the present,
a future which men must create by their actions - whether such
a hope is negative ideology or positive, false or historically creative.
Though a bit schematic, this description gives the essence of the
argument which was carried on in a series of works which are
particularly important in the history of European thought.
In sum, on the one hand we have Lukacs's
Soul and Forms,
Theory of the Novel, History and Class Consciousness,
teeming with
concrete analyses and totally revaluating philosophy and the social
sciences; on the other, Bloch's more poetic and more speculative
Spirit of Utopia,
and the simpler and more popular
Thomas Munser,
Theologian of Utopia.
University sociology will be influenced by the
two through Karl Mannheim's
Ideology and Utopia,
and especially
by Lukacs, through the first part of Heidegger's
Sein und Zeit.
Of
course, most academically trained readers read
Sein und Zeit
in a
completely different way and didn't see the relation. In fact, it was
left to Sartre in
Being and Nothingness
to read in Heidegger things
that are not there (the theory of the trans-individual subject and
of the team), but which are at the roots of the work, that is to say,
in Lukacs. And in the same way, at a much deeper level, Marcuse,
beginning in 1928, finds Heidegger's Hegelian and Marxist origins
(which were in fact mediated through Lukacs).
If
I remember the
Die Gesellschaft
articles correctly (though
I haven't read them for twenty years), there was still an important
