Canon-formation and Ethical Self-fashioning in György Lukács

Szolláth, Dávid (2019) Canon-formation and Ethical Self-fashioning in György Lukács. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 73 (288). pp. 145-160. ISSN 00-48-8143

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Abstract

Based on the concept of Friedrich Schiller’s Bildung, this article starts from the premise that aesthetical judgements shape the subject of the judgement. Developing an aesthetical canon means also the construction of the subject. The canonical choices of the Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács, are on the one hand acts of self-fashioning, and on the other, acts of shaping the ideal historical subject of the working class. The article distinguishes three ways of canon-making by Lukács. First, the traditional canon of realism makes the proletariat an inheritor of the bourgeois art of the nineteenth century. Second, the revolutionary way of canon-making states that the working class has to be a strict critic of bourgeois art. In the first model the art of the proletariat has to follow, to reach and to overcome bourgeois art whereas in the other, it has to free itself from it. There is a third way, an “ascetic” way of making a canon. Ascetic critical judgement can be described as a combination of elements from both revolutionary and traditionalist practices. Its core is the rejection of bourgeois art in the awareness that the new, proletarian era has not overcome the old one yet. This last way is closely related to the intellectual path of those communist intellectuals who — like Lukács — came from a wealthy bourgeois family, and by “converting” to bolshevism and leaving behind their class renounced the economic and cultural advantages of it for the sake of a proletarian future.

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