In the autobiographic interviews with Lukács, István Eörsi – one of Lukács students – asks if it is not a defect that the Destruction of Reason does ‘not criticize in it the type of irrationalism characteristic of Stalinism. I am thinking, for example, of the culture of personality, which is undoubtedly a kind of irrationalism’ (Lukács 1983, 103). Lukács answers that Stalinism ‘was in fact a type of hyper-rationalism’, that ‘with Stalin rationalism acquired a form which bordered on the absurd’, that Stalin regarded ‘tactics as primary’ and deduced “ ‘the theoretical generalizations from them’, and that Stalin shows that ‘when the rational is transcended, the possibility of transformation into the irrational does exist’ (104). So Lukács considered Stalinism as a form of irrational rationality, but did not want to criticise it in a book that focuses on the German irrationality that led to Nazism. Lukács formulated the task of the Destruction of Reason as the analysis of ‘Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy (Lukács 1954/1980, 4).
3.3.2. Lukács on Art
For Lukács (1970), an artwork is not a free-floating idea, but aesthetic content that has a specific form and exists in a specific objective context in society. He assumes a specific relationship between the work of art and objective reality. He argues that socialist art is partisan (29) and that therefore the reflection of objective reality in the work of art takes on particular forms, reflecting ‘great social problems’ (33), providing
a picture of reality in which the contradiction between appearance and reality, the particular and the general, the immediate and the conceptual, etc., is so resolved that the two converge into a spontaneous integrity in the direct impression of the work of art and provide a sense of an inseparable integrity (34).
Socialist art would reflect ‘correctly and in proper proportion all important factors objectively determining the area of life it represents’ (38) and show ‘fidelity to reality, the unsparing efort to render reality comprehensively and realistically’ (74). It would have to be a ‘correct reflection of the totality’ (43).
Lukács summarises the basic dogma of socialist realism that he takes for granted: art ‘is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected’ so that it ‘becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface’ (in: Adorno et al. 1980, 33). ‘Great realism’ portrays ‘man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion’ (in: Adorno et al. 1980, 48).
Lukács (1970) labels art that does not fulfil the criterion of socialist realism as ‘bourgeois decadence’, ‘hypocritical, foggy idealism’ (32), ‘capitalist degeneration’ (34), ‘idealistic subjectivism’, ‘subjective idealism’, ‘self-complacency’, ‘parasitic’ (42), ‘philistinism’ (105), ‘deformities’ (106), or ‘sick art’ (109). He was critical of ‘“modernist anti-realism”’ (Lukács 1958/1971, 17) that he characterised as ‘universal distortion’ (33) and the ‘negation of art’ (46). In literature, he was for example critical of Franz Kafka’s and James Joyce’s works. He described Kafka’s writings as ‘decadent modernism’ (Lukács 1958/1971, 92) and accused it of ‘guilt by association with Hitlerism and the preparations for atomic war’ (81).
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Critical Theory of Communication