“The Most Profound Confirmation of the Existence of a Dissonance”: Émile Boutroux, Georg Simmel, and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, with an Outlook to History and Class Consciousness

Following the course of the discussion in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel from its beginning to its end, readers find themselves as if implicated in a Schillerian history. Lukács, it seems, is narrating the soul’s progress from idyllic Arcadia through the diremption of modernity to the final reconciliation in Elysium.¹ Such three-stage history is, however, challenged by an argument about form that unexpectedly crosses the readers’ path when they advance halfway through the book. “The creation of forms,” Lukács writes in chapter 4, “is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance.”² In a related passage, he had explained earlier: “Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and events thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form” (TN, 71). If, indeed, the “dissonance” characteristic of modernity is supposed to be an intrinsic quality of life in general, how, then, can its experience function as the mere moment of transition between the naivete of the ancients and the return of the world of epic on a new, ethical level at the end? And what is an even bigger challenge than that: if “every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life,” how can we conceive of The Theory of the Novel as a history with three stages at all?

This article argues that form and formation defy the alleged philosophical history of The Theory of the Novel and suggest an alternative understanding of Lukács’s mode of thinking in the book. At first sight, the enigmatic sentences quoted above could be read as mere remainders from an earlier phase in Lukács’s philosophical development that no longer fit the context of The Theory of the Novel. The earlier phase would in that case be identified with Soul and Form, whereas the context for Lukács’s Theory of the Novel would be an idealist history of philosophy in the vein of Friedrich Schiller or G. W. F. Hegel. Such a reading would, however, only obscure the actual point of interest here: the question of how the argument about form relates, however conflictingly, to the context of philosophical history.

This article explores the tension between the theory of form and the philosophy of history, rather than attempting to explain away that tension. To that end, the first two sections of this article discuss two authors to whom Lukács referred around 1910. Both authors can be seen as spelling out versions of the theme of form and formation that disrupts or, put differently, informs The Theory of the Novel. When Lukács speaks of the “creation of forms,” Georg Simmel’s aesthetic as well as social theory is the most relevant reference. Among the theorists who attended to the concept of form in the years before and after 1900, it was Simmel who developed it in the broadest and most subtle manner. In his writings, form was coextensive with culture itself, from social organization to art and from fashion to the theory of money. As for the “dissonance of life,”³ one might think of Henri Bergson or even more so of Bergson’s teacher and philosophical model Émile Boutroux. During the last third of the nineteenth century, Boutroux had shaped a new way of understanding scientific methodology. For him, the procedures of science, in all their inherent stringency, nonetheless appeared contingent from the standpoint of human life and existence. Two key words thus suggest themselves when asking what it means for Lukács to speak of the dissonance of life and form: form or formation according to Simmel, and the “contingency” of science against the backdrop of life, as brought to the fore by Boutroux.

In the third and final section of the article, an effort is made to indicate how “the creation of forms” can even be seen to anticipate Lukács’s first entanglement with Marxian thought. This entanglement happened in the book following The Theory of the Novel (published in 1916 in a journal issue and in 1920 as a book): a collection of essays published under the title History and Class Consciousness (1922). The two key essays in History and Class Consciousness—“Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation”—share, first, an important structural element with The Theory of the Novel. They exhibit a tripartite history whose middle part, in this case bourgeois capitalism and reification, is the organizing center rather than a transitional phase. Second, the overcoming of capitalism and reification, which is the end of that history, might itself be said to analyze the tension between the theory of form and the philosophy of history. Reality, Lukács tells us here, is not; rather, it becomes. The form imposed on the forms of life in capitalism by means of reification appears, under the aegis of the proletariat, as a fluid and dynamic process of self-formation. As far away as we are at this point from the dissonance of form and life in The Theory of the Novel, it is here—at the culminating point of his early, utopian Marxist work—that Lukács seems to provide a solution to the tension between form and history.⁴

Boutroux and the Contingency of Law in Science

Lukács refers to Boutroux in a programmatic letter dated December 20, 1910, to Leo Popper, the addressee of his famous article on essayism in Soul and Form (1911).⁵ In this letter, Lukács undertakes a sweeping discussion of form and formation in aesthetics, science, and metaphysics. More precisely, Lukács juxtaposes aesthetics and science as practices of formation—of giving form—with metaphysics and the contemplation of form. With this range of topics, the letter can be said to indirectly evoke Simmel’s philosophical agenda, even if Simmel, an otherwise omnipresent figure in the exchange between Lukács and Popper, is not mentioned in this letter.

Lukács introduces the letter with remarks on Plotinus’s Fifth Ennead (book 8, On Intellegible Beauty), which he refers to as “aesthetics.” Lukács quotes Plotinus, saying that, in the world below, the world of the senses, every partial being is linked to other partial beings and thus has a separate mode of existence. In the world above, by contrast, the supersensible world, each part emanates from the whole without, however, severing itself from the sphere of the whole and the one.⁶ A further phrase quoted by Lukács from the Enneads seems to anticipate the first lines of the later Theory of the Novel (“Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars” [TN, 29]). In the supersensible world, the Plotinus quotation reads, “Nothing walks on foreign soil, but on the contrary every being’s place is his own nature—he [!] and the space in which he dwells are one and the same” (L, 180).⁷ The larger context of what follows in the letter is Lukács’s critique not of the concept of the self-identical world but of its metaphysical implications. The metaphysical claim of the world’s wholeness, Lukács tells the addressee, is what “all rationalistic philosophy (Plato, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, etc.)” aimed at. “The deepest desire is that the world be homogeneous [einheitlich] such as it is (and this is why a Brueghel or a Cézanne thinks of himself as a ‘naturalist’).” Such an assumption, however, is a “horribly big mistake,” according to Lukács (L, 180). It is a mistake not of content but of category. The world that is homogeneous, such as it is, has its legitimate place neither in metaphysics nor in any philosophy of being, according to Lukács, but solely in the theory of art (or, as we will see, in other specific areas such as the sciences). This is the principle guiding his critique of rationalistic philosophy, traditional metaphysics, as well as modern philosophical systems, and it is what motivates his own philosophy of art (Kunstphilosophie) as a critical remedy. The metaphysical rationalism that posits a homogeneous world, Lukács argues, forgets the “main issue” (die Hauptfrage), the basic point in which philosophy ceases to be purely doctrinal and reveals its fundamental stance on truth.⁸ The main issue here is: “How can manifold entities, qualitatively different from each other and incommensurable, be seen, felt, and experienced as unity?” (L, 180).

At this point, the language of dissonance that we saw invading The Theory of the Novel and its philosophical history resurfaces. “For it is not the resolution of the dissonances that is the issue,” Lukács continues. “If you arrive at a point where things are either consonant or dissonant, you already have it easy. The things of reality are however so distant from each other that they remain alien to us and to each other and to our possibilities of understanding” (L, 180). Consonance and dissonance appear here as relative terms so that both imply degrees or modes of being consonant or dissonant respectively. The “deepest dissonance” that Lukács mentions in The Theory of the Novel may then mean an intensification of dissonance to a point where the relation between consonance and dissonance is at issue. At least in his letter to Popper, Lukács identifies actual reality as the realm in which things exist before consonance and dissonance, a realm marked off by the principal lack of relation. Accordingly, his question of how the manifold “can be seen, felt, and experienced” can be read in two ways. The issue can be how that which lacks all relation and is dissonant in a radical sense can be brought into relation and coherence with other phenomena of life as a prerequisite for being seen, felt, and experienced. Or the issue can be how the transformation of the utter lack of relation into some degree of it can be part of experience. In the latter case, we would not merely see, feel, and experience a manifold of things, we would also simultaneously see, feel, and experience that they must be brought into some sort of coherence with each other for us to have any experience of them. In fact, the first reading tends to transform itself into the second if we take into account the nature of Lukács’s explanation for the process of transformation. Transformation into coherence is for Lukács a matter of “projection.” Two variants of such projection are mentioned: the arts and the sciences. In both cases the projection is said to be “imperfect.”⁹ Perfect projection would be possible only in metaphysical or rationalistic systems. But such systems are, for Lukács, illegitimate and premised on category mistakes. As just noted, however, the imperfect projection, as the only legitimate procedure of creating relation, implies that any experience of things is at the same time an experience of their being brought into coherence. The imperfect projection in the arts lies in their technicality, a feature that we coexperience as part and parcel of their own experienceability. As for the sciences, the same function is carried out by the contingency of the laws they establish.¹⁰

It is at this moment in Lukács’s letter that Boutroux and his book De la contingence des lois de la nature come into play. “I just read a very smart book by Boutroux on this [the contingency of all laws in science],” Lukács remarks (L, 180). What exactly could Lukács have found in Boutroux’s “very smart book” with reference to “imperfect projection”?

The short treatise on the contingency of scientific laws had been its author’s bold debut when it first appeared in 1874. It had been a testament to philosophy’s willingness to recognize the cultural dominance of science in France and Germany at the time, yet it had proclaimed philosophy’s determination to maintain its own, distinct form of reasoning—one that, in this context, was decidedly Kantian.¹¹ Though Boutroux was subsequently eclipsed by Henri Bergson, his first publication had retained its radical status well into the first decade of the twentieth century, when its sixth edition appeared (1908), shortly followed by Isaak Benrubi’s German translation (1911).¹² The former is likely the source for Lukács’s discussion in his letter to Popper. Boutroux, who had spent the academic year 1869–70 in Heidelberg attending the courses of Hermann von Helmholtz, is not so much a philosopher of science or a philosopher informed by science as is Bergson. Rather, Boutroux was a philosopher who tried to understand actual scientific practice and work as a specific mode of existence (to borrow from Bruno Latour),¹³ a thinker paving the way for a Georges Canguilhem or Gaston Bachelard, or the later work of Edmund Husserl.

Boutroux’s premise is as simple as it is surprising and difficult to assimilate. He takes the Kantian construction of experience—the configuration of sensual intuition and conceptual understanding—to describe what scientists do in their daily practice rather than the human condition of experience in general. By science Boutroux in this context explicitly means “la science positive,” that is, science in the age of Henri Poincaré, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Emil du Bois-Reymond. Boutroux strips Kant’s analysis of experience of all intrinsic anthropological meaning and, moreover, of all metaphysical implications; and he does not historicize its features in accordance with Newtonian physics as neo-Kantians would do. For Boutroux, sensual intuition and the construction of conceptual laws are exclusively the activities of positivistic work in the sciences. The question he asks in his work is what a world resulting from the correlated activities specific to scientists looks like, and whether that world, then, is the one we think we know as our world. In other words, the “contingency of the laws of nature” explores the relationship between the scientific construction of the world and of natural laws, on the one hand, and the life in which such construction takes place, on the other. In Lukács’s sense, this is the analysis of science as a “projection” of homogeneity onto life and the world.

For example, after reducing all of science’s conceptual means of formulating laws to be imposed on sense data through science to the one law of cause and effect, Boutroux asks what cause and effect mean for the being of things to which such a role is assigned by the scientist. On the one hand, the conceptual law of cause and effect replaces, in science, the sense data it interprets according to Boutroux. The sense data as such disappear in the synthesis-administered causal ordering. On the other hand, however, cause and effect cannot even be understood as modes in which things exist in the specific existential world of scientists. Even if the world independent of scientific experience does not always correspond to the scientific construction, and even if we come to notice the gap, this is no reason to doubt the objectivity of the scientific synthesis. Such a possibility is, in Boutroux’s understanding, not a failure but the very essence of a priori experience according to Kant and of its constitutive dualism of intuition and understanding. “Thus, above all else,” Boutroux writes,

“If, perchance,” he continues, “the course of things did not exactly conform to the principles laid down a priori by the mind, we should have to conclude, not that the mind is mistaken, but that matter betrays its participation in non-entity by a feeble revolt against order.”¹⁴

Rather than disproving the validity of the synthesis, such discrepancy demonstrates the contingency of scientific law, as long as the synthesis is exercised with caution and precision. Like the English contingency, the French contingence means not only that something happens “perchance” but also, and first of all, that it happens “conditionally,” under certain circumstances. This is the intrinsic connection between contingency and the Kantian a priori. Instead of denying contingency, the philosophical task is to understand it in the right way:

The contingency of scientifically established natural laws is not a consequence of any lack of precision that could be repaired by better instruments or improved theories. Rather, it is inherent in the ontology of a world whose objective reality is formed by various scientific practices. But what can we say about a world whose objective reality—or as Lukács would say objective formation (Gegenstandsform)—is presented in scientific laws? If we look at scientific practices in the terms of Kantian experience and take the resulting world as possessing an ontology or mode of existence of its own, we see a deeper layer of being reveal itself. Boutroux calls this layer of being, anticipating Bergson, “change and life,” “le changement et la vie.”¹⁵ “Le changement et la vie” are, however, in Boutroux’s existential Kantianism, characteristics of being that we approach only indirectly, by way of the contingent laws of nature. By understanding and accepting the contingency of the laws of nature, we recognize contingency also as the only candidate for a predicate of nature that, as such, is not contingent but universally true: “All things presented in experience are based on being, which is contingent both in its existence and in its law. Everything then is radically contingent” (CLN, 33). The contingency of the laws of nature is not a secondary quality of experience. It is not a more or less arbitrary construction, which would be open to chance and attached to an otherwise stable being of things. Instead, being’s own mode of existence and its law is characterized by the contingency of its experience. More precisely, being is characterized by various types or modes of experiential laws or object formations and their layering: “Judging by appearance, being is not only presented to us qua being, i.e. as a series of causes and effects; the modes of being also show forth resemblances and differences, which permit of their being arranged in groups called genera or laws” (CLN, 33).

This is Boutroux’s principle of philosophy in a world of scientific practices of experience: the one law of being is radical contingency as presented in the various contingent laws of the sciences and their configurations. Scientific contingency in this sense constitutes one aspect of what Lukács calls the imperfect (nonmetaphysical) projection of homogeneous unity and experienceability. By presenting the object formation as contingent and in each case a particular instance in layers of objectivity, the unity of experience copresents, in Lukács’s parlance, its own imperfection. The imperfection (nonmetaphysical nature) in this instance is a cognitive one. The contingency of each law of object formation is grounded in the one, general, law of nature’s radical contingency.

Simmel; or, The Aesthetic Process of Form

Lukács takes Boutroux’s argument to be the complicated version of the homogeneous world’s “projection.” Science, that means, offers a less obvious and more complex field of experience than, for example, art, according to Lukács. In the case of science, the experience of consonance and dissonance can be radicalized until the breaking point of “deepest dissonance” is reached where the relational play of dissonance and consonance as such is transcended. The complexity of the argument lies, no doubt, in the fact that contingency—the formula for dissonance in science—is the result of a Kantian type of experience rather than the point of departure for bringing about such experience. Contingency as the law of nature and the law of its laws reveals itself only through an existential reinterpretation of the epistemological practice of science. By contrast, giving form in the work of art, as in Simmel’s take on Kant’s configuration of experience, may be called the more obvious type of experiencing dissonance and consonance. Art, as Lukács had explained in his letter to Popper, does not hide its constructive, “technical” character—on the contrary, it emphasizes that character. The work of art openly professes that the field of experience it offers depends on the devices used in it. But art has its own complexity. With its dependency on technical devices, the work of art also co-discloses the procedure of its being made by means of such devices.

Simmel had the distinction of being Lukács’s usual reference in matters of art theory around the time he wrote to Popper. Lukács’s relationship to the Berlin philosopher was partly that of a disciple and partly that of a collaborator. To render the following remarks on Simmel as comparable as possible to those on Boutroux, we will look at the procedure of bringing about a homogeneous field of experience not in Simmel’s writings on art but in his discussion of Kant’s epistemology. As we will see, however, art has a prominent role in this epistemology for Simmel. In his view, the experience of the work of art stands in for the coexperience of the act of synthesis within our experience of the world.

In the Sixteen Lectures on Kant, delivered to a private audience in Berlin during 1902–3 and published a year later, we find a passage that reads like a remote echo of Boutroux (who gave his own Kant course during those same years in Paris). The passage in question in Simmel’s Lectures is not, however, an argument about the result of practices of experience and the ensuing contingency of natural laws. Rather, in Simmel’s Kant lectures, the relevant passage concerns the activity of experiencing and its process.

Kant’s position on experience, Simmel maintains, is plagued by a tension or, in fact, a dilemma internal to its very construction. On the one hand—according to Simmel’s reading—Kant’s understanding of objectivity in experience requires that the object construction brought about in the synthesis never lose touch with experience proper. But just this virtue of conceptual objectivity, which connects it back to what is presented in experience, also results in the instability of such objectivity. We may feel tempted to say, in Boutroux’s words: objectivity itself points to its being contingent on synthesis in intuition and understanding. Simmel evokes the act of divine creation and its characteristic interplay of sovereignty and unpredictability when he articulates the dilemma of understanding. “What experience has taught,” he writes, “experience can revoke at every given moment.”¹⁶ Structurally comparable with Boutroux, if different in content and direction, Simmel rephrases what was in Kant an epistemological argument as a process in an existential field of its own. In Simmel, however, we do not find an interplay of various laws of nature, all of which express the one, fundamental law of nature’s contingency and the contingency of its experience. Instead, we are confronted with a creative and, as we will see, feverishly nervous, hectic activity of consciousness. Such activity of consciousness in bringing about the unity of experience—orientation toward objectivity and its dependency on what is given in experience—will ultimately be compared to and, indeed, identified with giving form to the work of art.

Like Boutroux and many others who resumed the Kantian project in the first decades of the twentieth century, Simmel does not distinguish the status of the Transcendental Aesthetic (with the associated forms of intuition) from that of the Transcendental Analytic (with the associated forms of judgment proper to understanding). Put differently, the framing of intuition through time and space and the imposition of the categories of understanding on the sense data are not treated as separate in kind. Instead, Simmel carves out a shared space for the drama of a primordial and unpredictable activity. A coherent realm of the “judgment of experience” (Erfahrungsurteil) is sketched out (K, 54) in which experience may revoke what it teaches, that is, in which experiential judgment in toto is structured as creation. The actions of judgment performed by the subject of experience are as powerful as they are free. They unfold into a continuum of endlessly nuanced forms of realization.

This “judgment of experience” is singled out by Simmel as an issue that, as much as it poses a problem for the study of Kant, also goes beyond “a special question of Kant philology”:

The two extreme poles proper to the judgment of experience are, according to Simmel, the judgment of perception (which, by presenting only singularities, lacks objectivity) at the lower end and, at the higher end, the a priori judgment (which is generally valid but concerns only empty forms of understanding reality). The ordinary experiential judgment holds an unstable middle position between these two poles. Simmel calls it “an intermediary step, a developmental stage,” characterized by “countless degrees of judgment” (K, 55). In the concept of the countless degrees of judgment lies the true heart and dynamic center of Kant’s philosophy for Simmel, that is, the insight that characterizes the Kantian worldview beyond Kant’s own work. It is indeed a dynamic concept, although Simmel explicitly does not go beyond the framework of Newtonian physics. Confronting Kantian experience with non-Euclidean geometry or tertium datur categories seems to be of no real relevance to Simmel. What he emphasizes, instead, is the seamless internal variability and flexibility of the objective forms imposed on data in experiential judgments. This essential and internal variability and flexibility are already to be found in Kant’s judgment of experience, according to Simmel, particularly within his adherence to the Newtonian world. And this openness and endless applicability embodies Kant’s essential modernity or, indeed, his modernism: “the relation of reason to reality, expressed in a definite manner, as a development heading towards infinity” (K, 54).

Simmel develops this dynamic center—the center not of Kant’s works alone but of the “relation of reason to reality” as it manifests itself in his works—in two steps. Both are complicated and would need more thorough and detailed discussion than this essay can accommodate. In the present context, they are summarized only to the extent that they shed light on the theory of form in the moment it enters Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, defying and restructuring its historical design.

The first step is Simmel’s famous reference to Kant’s theory of schematism in the first Critique. In Kant, the problem of connecting the two stems of experience, intuition and concept, finds its solution in the schema, the geometric figure or contour of a diagrammatic shape. In his reading of Kantian schematism, Simmel emphasizes that activity of consciousness which is neither intuition nor understanding but that provides the connection of the one to the other. Rather than the lines of the schema and its shape, it is for Simmel the drawing of lines that is the focus of philosophical interest. For once, Simmel cites Kant’s own words from the Transcendental Deduction of Pure Concepts of Understanding: according to Kant, the mind “cannot think of a line” in connecting intuition and concept “without drawing it in thought.”¹⁷ From these “utterly simple phrases” of Kant’s (K, 59), Simmel develops what might be called a narrative of the primordial activity of experiential judgment and, with it, of thinking. Simmel even speaks of the “deed” of the mind.¹⁸ By concentrating on the act of drawing a line (describing a circle, placing three lines perpendicular at one point), Simmel develops a theoretical model explaining his notion of seamless variability and of the endlessly flexible applicability of the understanding’s categories to the data of intuition. It is with the activity of drawing a line that experience paradigmatically teaches and revokes, grants and denies.

The following excerpt gives a certain idea of how Simmel develops this narrative, carefully and in vivid detail, in what is a much longer passage in his Lectures:

The process exemplified here for space and extended to time holds true for all sorts of synthesizing activity in consciousness, including those performed by the categories. It is this inclusive and comprehensive process that Simmel calls indiscriminately form and formation: “Every formation is separation; the line through which we give shape to a form and thereby introduce it into a plane separates one part of that plane from another; and it is unification; the one part is now juxtaposed as a unity with the other part” (K, 63).

In his second step, Simmel provides a psychological description of the primordial activity of giving form, the “deed” of consciousness. This description is concerned with the Ego. The Ego is experienced as the agent drawing lines in consciousness, a process that had appeared at first as taking place without an agent, as an anonymous event. The Ego is experienced, as one looks back at the action that has taken place, as the doer of the deed. This is the moment of art in Simmel’s reconstruction of the theory of schematism and its crucial role for the “judgment of experience.” It is in the field of art, in making and experiencing art, that we reconstruct the doer of the deed as a creator. Only when the Ego is interpreted as the creator or, in particular, as the recipient of the work of art, does the full meaning of form and formation resurface in and for the judgment of experience, according to Simmel’s Kant.

The formation that comes about through drawing a line in schematism is not a unity that implies separation but a separation that brings about unity. In terms of the psychology of art, this means that the primary experience of the work of art is not the realization of its unity and hence of its distinct being. Instead, it is the experience of the fundamental distance in which the work of art manifests its form as separation. The separatedness of the artwork is its distance from the world as well as from us, its recipients. The work of art confronts us as “one power (confronts) another” (K, 68).¹⁹ This “seeming incompatibility” (or irreconcilability: dies scheinbar Unverträgliche) is precisely the “success of that unity in which the work of art coalesces: since this unity obtains for the work of art the form of the soul itself” (K, 68–69). This loaded and enigmatic statement may be seen as the source or point of reference for Lukács’s first book, the essay collection Soul and Form. It is in the contemplation and enjoyment of the artwork’s inner cohesion and closed form that the soul gains its own unity and cohesive form, namely, the form of the recipient and of the artwork’s reconstructed creator. In other words: the priority of separation over unity in schematism’s functional understanding of form paradigmatically manifests itself in and for experience in the work of art. And it does so precisely through the predominance of distance and incompatibility in the artwork as compared to qualitative unity.

With this last development in Simmel’s interpretation of Kantian epistemology—the artwork’s introduction as the indispensable paradigm of the synthesis of experience—we have reached what Lukács, in his letter to Popper, means by the “projection” of cohesion in art. Through the technicality of its devices, the work of art demonstrates that only what exists thanks to such devices can claim existence in the artwork and for it. The further complication of the “projection” of coherent experience in art, however, is that it consists in a process rather than a result. This is Simmel’s lesson: what experience teaches can be revoked by experience.

Conclusion: An Outlook on History and Class Consciousness

Taking together Boutroux’s thesis regarding the contingency of nature’s laws, on the one hand, and the experience of aesthetic form as separation and distance in Simmel, on the other, we are finally in a position to assign a rich and precise meaning to Lukács’s enigmatic phrase from The Theory of the Novel. The “imperfect projection” of a coherent experience under the condition of “the deepest dissonance” can be explained in at least two ways. These explanations are different yet functionally equivalent. In neither case is the projection Lukács has in mind a mere construction. What is at issue is the copresence of the projection’s result with its own ongoing process. In science the projection coindicates itself in the unity of experience as the law’s contingency. In the aesthetic model of experience, the projection coindicates the creative activity—the “deed”—of consciousness together with the unity of the work of art and its distance from the world.

It might be argued that the reference to Simmel is sufficient for interpreting Lukács’s concern with the dissonance between life and form. This is true as far as the mere content of that dissonance is concerned. Simmel’s example suffices for us to understand the meaning of dissonance and the role of form within a “philosophy of life.” But such understanding has not been the goal of this article. The issue has been to understand how Lukács’s formulation of that dissonance functions within the larger, historical context of his Theory of the Novel. Understanding the tension between the history recounted in The Theory of the Novel and its argument about form requires an understanding that goes beyond art in the narrower sense. In the letter to Popper, Lukács had made a more complex argument. He had named both art and science as two variants or regional modes of “projection.” He had implied that “projection” as such constitutes a more general structure than either of the two examples offers. At the same time, he had also declared the general, metaphysical notion of a life unified in itself to be a category mistake. A life unified in itself does not exist in a general—metaphysical—mode of existence. It exists in the specific domain of “imperfect projections” alone. Suspending the metaphysical notion of a unified life, it makes sense to say that the problem of imperfect projection determines the actual structure of things, whereas the completed, perfect projection appears in the status of quasi-metaphysical images. This is the case with The Theory of the Novel itself: complete projection of a unified experience appears in a historical past that had not yet disclosed the problematic nature of the projection (the ancient epic); and such a perfect projection appears also in a future that is meant to transform the contingency and the process of projection into a new—namely, epic and integral—framework for the world (the Dostoyevskian return of epics).

We can therefore finally understand why the “deepest dissonance” does not merely defy or interrupt the history of the novel. The structure of “imperfect projection,” as exemplified in different ways by Boutroux and Simmel, can also be seen as restructuring the history of the novel in its entirety. Instead of an account that gives a historically limited place to the homelessness of the novelistic protagonist, the “confirmation of dissonance” transforms history itself. It makes history an outgrowth, as it were, of the essential flatness proper to the contingency of scientific laws and to the procedural formation of the artwork. The novel is the structural truth of what becomes a history only by allowing “metaphysics” to determine our understanding of such a history’s beginning and end. The Greeks, in this reading, were repeating their own mythological conception of reality in their epics. It is not that they formed their understanding of reality according to their epics; rather, they transferred what was already a genuinely epic conception of reality to their literature in the form of the epic. Concerning epics after the novel, the Dostoevsky epics still to come, we no longer expect them to overcome dissonance with some new order of metaphysical consonance. Rather, we look to them for a concept of the world that accepts contingency and the procedural understanding of form as its ethical task. Such a world is to create the conditions for narrating and living alike within a state of essential contingency, as described by Boutroux, and an endlessly flexible play of separation and unity, which is Kantian formation itself according to Simmel. Ethics and narration are intimately correlated activities in these epics to come. They are inseparable elements of one and the same task—that of giving form to life.

This schematic reconstruction of The Theory of the Novel is not meant to debunk any false pretenses on the part of Lukács or to read his book against the grain. Its claim is only to take seriously that Lukács was writing a theory of the novel rather than a theory of the epic. It is the novel and its theory that is the point of departure for the book, and only from its perspective, and on its basis, can we hope to understand what Homeric epics were and what Dostoyevskian epics are meant to become.

The proposed reading conceives of The Theory of the Novel less as an attempt at overcoming the problem of Soul and Form than as its radicalization and generalization. The final suggestion of this article takes this argument one step further. Even in History and Class Consciousness—and this is the same claim expressed in a more general fashion—the problem of the “deepest dissonance” is still the organizing principle of thought. It is reification and alienation that are, according to this claim, the core and center of History and Class Consciousness—the modernity, this time, not of the novel but of bourgeois capitalism. Before attempting to defend this claim, it should, however, be emphasized that the assumption is not meant to take anything away from the urgency and seriousness of Lukács’s critical and political program. As a theory—and Lukács repeatedly emphasizes the status of the book as theoretical in nature—History and Class Consciousness, however, cannot even begin to function as a political critique without accepting reification and alienation as its basis and first points of reference.

The following remarks do not claim to provide any adequate understanding or reconstruction of History and Class Consciousness on its own terms. There is no need to emphasize that the volume of essays addresses a completely different field of topics than those taken into consideration so far in this article. It harks back to completely different traditions of thought and theoretical fields. The remarks to follow only attempt to identify those moments in the book that are comparable to what has been stated regarding The Theory of the Novel. A final warning concerning the limited nature of what follows is in order: while all essays of the collection are implicitly taken into account, the remarks refer largely to the most famous essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” with a few further remarks concerning “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation.” These two essays are the only ones Lukács composed exclusively for History and Class Consciousness.

The first remarks concern the central position of reification and alienation in the reification essay.²⁰ For Lukács, reification and alienation are the basis for all theoretical understanding, and he emphasizes that this assumption follows Marx closely. In fact, this is what Lukács calls his “orthodox Marxism.” A typical passage expressing this principle reads as follows: “The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it.”²¹ Summarizing Marx, Lukács claims that in “primitive societies” we see an “essentially episodic appearance of the commodity-form” (HCC, 84).²² Only in universalized, bourgeois capitalism do reification and alienation permeate and structure the entire social fabric. Vice versa, without them there is no unity and wholeness in society to begin with. From the point of view of individuals—bourgeois as well as proletarian—their existence “is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (HCC, 90). Yet the absorption of individuals into the alien system of society is the prerequisite for human actors to become what they are according to Aristotle: representatives of the animal sociale or, in Lukács’s words, of “socialized man.” The socialized human being “can stand revealed in an objectivity remote from or even opposed to humanity.” But with him we see “for the first time how society is constructed from the relations of men with each other” (HCC, 176). The systematization of society—rationalization in Weber’s terms—is then the precondition for overcoming reification and alienation by means of political action.

The centrality of the middle phase in Lukács’s philosophy of social development is even more pointed than in his reflections on the novel. In this case, the alienation that comes with systematic reification—the existence of an objectified world—directly connects totality to the split between humanity and its world. Only the world of alienation (i.e., of a qualitative split) is a world (structurally) united in itself.²³ This accomplishment of the commodity-form, Lukács says, “has repercussions upon the nature and validity of the category itself. Where the commodity is universal it manifests itself differently from the commodity as a particular, isolated, non-dominant phenomenon” (HCC, 85). The past and the future of history are extrapolations from reality as objectified by the commodity-form in its new, transformed meaning. The past consists only of worlds that are unified in episodic and transient ways. Seen without reference to the totality of the societal fabric in capitalism, these episodes are not readable and understandable on their own. They exist only to be processed within the whole of society, which is unified in the all-permeating capitalist commodity-form. As much as it is opposed to the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the agent of the future, is introduced as another form and aspect of the “socialized man,” whose first incarnation is the bourgeois. The same reification and alienation underlie both classes. But while the bourgeois experience themselves as the agents of their life when in fact they are mere products of the social process, the proletarians experience their own reification as a commodity and for exactly that reason retain their humanity. This remainder of humanity enables them to become agents of the social process. For the bourgeoisie, the social is a static realm: reality as being. For the proletariat, the social is a dynamic process: reality as becoming.²⁴

In the second section of the essay on reification (“The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”) (HCC, 110–49), Lukács gives a detailed history of “modern critical philosophy” (HCC, 110), meaning German idealism primarily from Kant to Hegel. He sees this development as the expression of reification and alienation in the categories of reflection. Certainly, the theory of reification and alienation is itself an element of philosophy. In that context, the theory occurs under the name of objectification or object formation (Kant). As a mere expression of reification and alienation, distinct from critique and its transformation into political action, the philosophy of object formation reflects on the process of reification and alienation only in the form of the (nondialectical) “dilemma” of system versus facticity. Since Kant, according to Lukács, philosophy engages in building systematic wholes of objectivity. By absorbing the singularity of the factual within themselves, such systems eradicate all immediate facticity. Philosophy develops through a series of attempts to solve this dilemma, from Kant’s concept of freedom in his ethics, to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Tathandlung with its presupposed subject-object, to Hegel’s dialectical mediation. All these attempts fail, however, to transform the dilemma into dialectical movement. Even Hegel, the inventor of dialectics, fails to let the dialectical method transcend reflective philosophy proper. Most interesting in the present context is the ending of the Phenomenology when, for Lukács, Hegel misses his last and most dramatic opportunity to exit the dilemma of system versus facticity. It is the moment in which Spirit in its appearance as the State (Staat) incorporates the subject-object as its being. As a being, the subject-object ends history but is no longer part of history, since the subject-object as a being betrays history’s important relation to becoming. Never does philosophy come closer to transcending its merely reflective nature for Lukács, and nowhere does it fail more blatantly (HCC, 146–49).

It is against the background of this last act and final failure of idealist philosophy that Lukács constructs his own version of a possible end of history and a picture of a future to come. This is the subject of the third section of his essay on reification (“The Standpoint of the Proletariat”) (HCC, 149–209) as well as the decidedly political essay “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation.”²⁵ Again, the two textual complexes in question offer an entirely distinct field of argumentation and reference, which cannot be covered here in any sufficient manner. Just one single point can and should be emphasized. How, according to Lukács, is history to make the transition to a future and final form that, however, is still historical (a becoming rather than a being)?

Lukács’s famous theory of the proletariat as the final agent of humanity and the liberator to come in history is a most complicated and subtle construction. The stakes are clear. The proletariat must stand in for the subject-object and, at the same time, avoid the disastrous error Hegel committed in his philosophical system with the State, Religion, and Spirit tout court in this role. The proletariat has to become subject-object not beyond but within history. This means for Lukács that history reaches its final phase only if it is finally guaranteed that history will never come to an end. “Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to the consciousness of the process” (HCC, 197). The densest formulation of what it means for the final agent in history to awaken to the consciousness of the process may be this one: “The deed of the proletariat can never be more than to take the next step in the process. Whether it is ‘decisive’ or ‘episodic’ depends on the concrete circumstances” (HCC, 198). With the “next step” the future is, logically speaking, the future of a possibility. Pragmatically speaking—as Lukács’s footnote to the two italicized words shows²⁶—the “next step” is the concept of political action that takes place, categorically, with an open horizon but under specific circumstances. Such an end of history is, politically speaking, the definite beginning of history each time a consciousness recognizes some possibility as its own next step. For the agent of the next step to recognize a possibility as his or her next step, however, the form of the world must be transformed. It must be the projection of a coherent world in which a given consciousness can act and experience itself as agent at the same time.²⁷ This—once again essentially imperfect—projection is called “organization” by Lukács. In and through such organization, a form is given to the world in which action is guided not by an envisioned result but by the sense of the (historical) process from within the process.

As we know all too well, “organization” was the jargon of the Communist Party and of political and economic theory of the time.²⁸ Even after the end of communism as Lukács knew it, however, we are still living in the world of political and economic organization, even if few or none have so far been able to take the next step.

Notes

References