Labor and Language: Lukács’s Ideas on Language

Abstract

It may well be argued that the problem of language was for Lukacs a philosophical problem, even if he never approached the philosophy of language from a scholarly perspective. In fact, already in History and Class Consciousness he called attention to Marx’s remarks about the eff ects of reification upon language. Then in his late works, in The Specificity of the Aesthetic, and especially in the Ontology of Social Being, he presented diff erent, more systematic approaches to the problem of language. In the Ontology he provided an ontological theory of language, as “the organ and medium of the continuity of social being,” a theory which here is reconstructed in detail.