Lukacs's Views on Artistic Freedom

Abstract

Since Plato banished the poet from his utopian republic, questions of art's autonomy, artistic freedom and the artist's role in society have been subjects of much philosophical and political debate in the western world. Today, when there is a sharp ideological split between the dominant socio-political systems of our world, the debate is particularly lively and certainly more than theoretical. Daily manifestations of peaceful competition, co-existence, cold war, call it what you will, bring constantly into our consciousness-whichever system we are a part of-the fact that there is a living alternative to our present situation. Some artists in democratic capitalism look with envy upon the lavish subsidization of the arts in the socialist countries, while some evidently outstanding artists of the socialist democracies go to prison or seek political asylum in the western democracies. In our increasingly global human community, questions of personal liberty, artistic freedom and economic necessity become convoluted in our minds. A recent cartoon by Mike Peters in the Dayton Daily News touches simply yet poignantly upon some of the fundamental issues. The drawing is of five or six ragged-looking men, women and children carrying tiny bundles on their backs as they climb to the shore of a river they have just crossed. They are Mexican 'wetbacks'. With smiles on their faces as big as any ever flashed by President Carter, they address a stern-faced and decidedly unfriendly looking U.S. border guard who faces them clutching his gun: 'Buenos dias. We are defectors from the Mexico City Ballet Company'. The cartoon is a splendid summary of the extreme complexity of the issues concerning human freedom today. Some of the questions raised by it are pertinent to our discussion here. How deep is the inter-relatedness of personal freedom and artistic freedom? How basic are economic conditions, economic necessities to the realization of any kind of human freedom? Is the freedom or autonomy of art an issue separable from the concept of the freedom of the artists? Faced with such vexing questions, but possessing a global view of the situation, we are tempted to rise above it all and declare that artists of all times and places are endowed with a set of universal and inalienable rights and freedoms. These rights and freedoms, we are likely to maintain, are not alterable and not determined by social and political circumstances. But, is such a position supportable by historical and empirical evidence? Gy6rgy Lukacs, an important Marxist philosopher of this century, believes that such thinking is the sterile fruit of a subjective idealistic world-view, in contradiction with historical reality. It is my intention here to explore Lukacs's ideas on the subject of artistic freedom, with emphasis upon his analysis of the conditions for artistic freedom in modern capitalistic democracies and in the socialist democracies. True to Marxist methodology in the investigation of any question, Lukacs holds the view that in order for us to know 'where we stand' and 'where we are going', we must have a clear historical perspective; we must know 'where we have come