This article aims to demonstrate how the aesthetical theory of Theodor Adorno represents the very nucleus of Adorno’s “sociological philosophy”. I show why artworks, thanks to the ontological and material elements that constitute them, are the privileged point to comprehend the factors at play in society. In order to achieve this, I investigate particularly the concept of form. With this, I underline how the character of “open form” of modern art claimed by Adorno, though being a manifestation of a contingent (...) historical moment, is able to deeply reflect the character of “openness” of reason, which thus conjugates with the proper function of philosophy. (shrink)

At the end of his life György Lukács described his intellectual career as ‘my way to Marx’ [mein Weg zu Marx]. By this he meant that his professional life can be interpreted as an attempt to get to the real Marx. In this paper I use this expression in a narrower and more direct meaning: I attempt to present the road at the end of which the young Lukács arrived at a Marxist standpoint.

Este trabalho desenvolve a concordância estética e a diferença política entre Hegel e o jovem Lukács da "Teoria do romance". O jovem autor húngaro se apropria da estrutura conceitual da "Estética" de Hegel, pois entende as formas poéticas em sua relação com o desenvolvimento do conteúdo histórico. Lukács e Hegel concebem, desse modo, as duas formas da grande épica (epopeia e romance) em estreita conexão com o momento histórico que as fundamenta: a Grécia arcaica configurada por Homero e a experiência (...) da fragmentação e da consolidação da subjetividade lírica que a modernidade traz consigo. Não obstante a assunção da herança estética de Hegel, o jovem Lukács se afasta das conclusões positivas de Hegel acerca da modernidade, a saber: da suspensão da liberdade fragmentada e lírica da sociedade civil burguesa pela liberdade objetiva na unidade e totalidade da forma Estado, unidade e totalidade verdadeiramente apreendidas pela forma filosófica. Lukács, ao contrário de Hegel, entende a modernidade a partir do ponto de partida negativo, isto é, não a vê como a consumação da liberdade do homem, mas a compreende como a experiência do sujeito fragmentado e separado das estruturas sociais. This work develops the aesthetic agreement and the political difference between Hegel and the young Lukács, who wrote the "Theory of the Novel". The young Hungarian author appropriates the conceptual structure of the Hegel's "Aesthetics", because he understands the poetic forms in their relation with the development of historical content. Lukács and Hegel thereby conceive the two forms of the great epic (Greek epic poem and novel) in close connection with the historical moment in which they arise: the archaic Greece configured by Homer and the experience of fragmentation and consolidation of the lyrical subjectivity brought by modernity itself. Despite the assumption of Hegel's aesthetic heritage, the young Lukács departs from Hegel's positive conclusions about modernity, namely: from the suspension of the fragmented and lyrical liberty of the bourgeois civil society by the objective freedom in the unity and totality of the State form, unity and totality truly seized by the philosophical form. Lukács, in opposition to Hegel, understands modernity from the negative starting point, that is, he does not understand it as the consumation of human freedom, but as the experience of the human subject fragmented and separated from the social structures. (shrink)

In this first of two articles, I look at the project for the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in connection with the idea of a synthesis of the “artistic sciences” as the principal task of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1930) in Moscow. The most important feature of the Academy was the unity of its epistemological conception (the system of artistic sciences) and the institutional structure of the Academy (its “departments,” “sections,” and “laboratories”), which embodied the interdisciplinary intention of (...) uniting the philosophy of art, the artistic sciences, and artistic experimentation. I analyze the connection of the project with the task of “concept formation” in the artistic sciences, which was recognized in European philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century as the main criterion for scientificity in the human sciences. I also investigate how the Encyclopedia project, developed by Gustav Shpet, took into account previous attempts to systematize aesthetic terminology (in nineteenth-century dictionaries). I show that the project of the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” was not the sole attempt to create a new dictionary of aesthetic concepts and of the cultural sciences. Similar projects were being developed in the 1920s and 30s in Germany (Erich Rothacker planned to produce Handwörterbuch der gesamten gemeingeisteswissenschaftlichen und kulturphilosophischen Grundbegriffe) and in France (Étienne Souriau published Vocabulaire d’esthétique; see Souriau 2010). (shrink)

The article ‘Aesthetic culture’ was written in 1908. Although it is in the same period as Soul and Form, in essence, the ideas expressed in this article go beyond the pure philosophy of life and the theory of form, which is different from the idealistic tendency of Lukács in this period. Moreover, ‘Aesthetic culture’ and History and Class Consciousness have ontological and epistemological consistency in subject–object relation and class consciousness. This was the first Marxist reflection of Lukács, and also a (...) reliable sign that he was to join the Hungarian Communist Party 10 years later and turned to Marxism. By criticizing the paradox of aesthetic culture itself, Lukács tried to construct a culture as a whole as a category, and tried to solve the deep contradiction between the freedom of consciousness and the passive form of the subject in modern society. This kind of culture as a whole would be based on the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and take life as the main category, so as to provide the proletariat with practical theoretical conception to expand their space for living in bourgeois culture. (shrink)

In this introductory paper I sketch the tradition, several early aspects of which are discussed in the following essays and reviews. I introduce the main figures whose work initiated and maintained the sociological orientation in Hungarian philosophy thereby tracing its evolution. I suggest that its sociological outlook, if taken to be a characteristic tendency that gives Hungarian philosophy its distinctive flavour, provides us with the framework of a possible narrative about the history of Hungarian philosophy in the broader context of (...) Central European philosophy. This narrative, in turn, suggests a way of integrating the latter into the history of Western philosophy rather than restricting its scope to a handful of canonical works only. (shrink)

The article examines Adorno and Heidegger's contrasting conceptions of art and myth in relation to their reading of western history since the Greeks and to German thinking on the relation between nature and history since Kant. In Part I Adorno's lecture `The Idea of Natural History' (1932), which draws on Lukács's Theory of the Novel and Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heidegger's fundamental ontology in Being and Time, serves as focus for (...) the interrelation between myth, origin and repetition in western history, construed as the forgetting of nature (Adorno) or the forgetting of Being (Heidegger). In Part II, the question of the remythologization or the demythologization of art in Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno is examined in the context of aesthetic modernism. (shrink)

The text reconstructs central theoretical positions in the discourse of modernity in the Weimar Republic in the double semantic context of crisis and contingency. On the one hand, these categories ground the dialectic of destruction and construction, which provides hegemonial evidence for the political and aesthetic concepts of totality in classical modernity. On the other hand, these categories also ground the openness of a thinking in possibilities, which remained marginal in the Weimar Republic but has become dominant in the postmodern (...) critique of modernity. (shrink)