Two ways of coming back to reality: Kierkegaard and Lukács

Abstract

Georg Lukfics, in his confrontation with Existenzphilosophie after World War II, poured scorn on what he called this 'permanent carnival of fetishised inwardness' which continued, he said, to 'mesmerise and mislead bourgeois intellectuals'.~ Historically, he held Husserl and Heidegger accountable, but also Kierkegaard, and the latter together with Nietzsche he described as 'antidemocratic', holding both responsible for the destruction of reason. Yet Lukfics's pupil, Lucien Goldmann, regarded Lukfics as Existenzphilosophie's true father; not only did Lukfics's first book Soul and Form (1910) contain a decidedly appreciative though critical piece on Kierkegaard, entitled 'The Foundering of Form on Life') much of Lakfics's earlier work reads as an attempt to bring Kierkegaardian themes to bear on social problems in pre-World War I Europe. What happened in between to cause this change of mind or heart? It is worth noting that the later criticism is tempered. Kierkegaard (and Schopenhauer) still had some of that 'good faith' and 'consistency' which the existentialist philosophers were engaged in 'casting off' as they 'increasingly became apologists of bourgeois decadence'. 3 Perhaps what the later Lukfics saw in these earlier writers was some kind of heroic example that allowed them to escape the charge of decadence that he levelled at their works. Or was there even something in Kierkegaard's thinking itself that positively protects it, that is to say even in Lukfics's eyes, from the charge of decadence? My main argument here is that there is, but that Luk~cs didn't see it. If he had, he might have seen that the charges of decadence he levelled at Kierkegaard, could just as well mutatis mutandis be levelled at himself. In the early essay, itself a fine example of poetic prose, Lukfics accuses Kierkegaard of having made a poem out of his life. It all began with a 'gesture', the act both of renunciation and deception by which Kierkegaard jilted Regine and tried, in furtherance of his love of her, to expunge all traces of his own life in her mind by presenting himself in the role of cynical reprobate. Lukfics correctly sees this attempt on Kierkegaard's part to free Regine for a future untrammelled by vestiges of their common past as totally in vain. Among the possibilities Kierkegaard is forced to leave her with, is that of reflecting that he might well be deceiving her, a possibility which in turn spawns an endless sea of further reflections on possible motives and their implications for their present relationship, which is of course just the situation graphically presented in Either/Or's 'Shadowgraphs', a fact which suggests that the futility of the 'gesture' was early apparent to Kierkegaarcl himself and that his subsequent writings might be better understood as an attempted accommodation to that fact. But