Lukács: Individuality and the Teleology of Works

Abstract

The young Lukács, whom we are beginning to know better thanks to the work of the Budapest School,¹ is without a doubt one of the great thinkers of modernity — the modernity of a bourgeois society which has stopped believing in itself as a privileged sphere of individual liberation and begun to question its own foundations. In his pre-Marxist writings, the idea that individuality has become problematic recurs like a leitmotiv, above and beyond the variety of subjects treated and the displacements of theoretical perspectives. For Lukács, the individual is called radically into question because he can no longer recognise himself in his objectivations; there has ceased to be any true correspondence between soul and action. There is indeed no continuity of being — continuity, that is, between the subject and what constitutes its domain of externalisation and intervention; the subject is a mere fragment thrown into a broken world, in which objectivity (the character of objects) is chaotic and objects are heterogeneous with respect to each other and other people. Individuals hover at the edge of the abyss because they cannot find meaning in the world surrounding them, constantly hitting up against contingency in the very place where they seek necessity.

‘Obligation kills life’

Lukács