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From "History and Class Consciousness" to" Ontology of Social Being"

Author: WangMengYan
Tutor: ZhouHong
School: Henan University
Course: The philosophy of Marxism
Keywords: Lukacs Practice Change Marx Thinking Concepts mid-late
CLC: B08
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 67
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Abstract

Using the method of literature reference, schematic analysis and historical comparison, we give a detailed explanation of Lukacs’s view of practice and study the transition of his idea between the early period and the later period. Since the systematic elaboration of Lukacs’s earlier view was given in History and Class Consciousness, and he expounded his later theory in the book The Ontology of Social Being, our research is based on the analysis of these two works.To begin with, in Chapter 1, a comprehensive summary is given as the status report of the research of Lukacs’s view of practice. Firstly, we review the life of Lukacs and then introduce and sum up his main achievements. After that, demestic and foreign research status on Lukacs’s view of practice is presented, and the differences and relations between the two with respect to the method and tendency are indicated. Thirdly, we expatiate the sources of his theory and analyze the features of his view. It is pointed out that Lukacs insisted both the subjectivity and priority of practice. Finally, the limitations of his thoughts are investigated in depth. The conclusion is that the ontolgical interpretation of the subjectivity of practice would lead to idealism, and only when the unity of subjectivity and objectivity of practice is adhered to could pratical materialism be insisted and no deviation exist.In Chapter 2, we review the content of Lukacs’s view of practice first, and analyse its basic properties. Then, we do our analysis of the earlier view of practice of Lukacs based on his magnus opus History and Class Consciousness, while deal with his later view of practice based on his old book The Ontology of Social Being. We also point out the defect of his view of practice. All these work provide the hard basis for the later meticulous explanation.In Chapter 3, we investigate the evolution of Lukacs’s view of practice in detail. We give the difference between his view of practice at early time and at later time first, and study the implying of this change. We explain how the view of practice evolves between the two books of Lukacs’s. This is shown in two aspects. First, the view of practice in the later period surpass the one in the former period. The problem of practice was boiled down to the problem of class consciousness in the earlier book. Only when proletarians develop a clear class consciousness could the mission of revolution be made. In contrast, the latter book proposed the ontology of social existence in place of the theory of practice-priority. Besides, Lukacs went back to the theory of alienation instead of purely reification, which reflects that he had rethink the idea and theory of Marx and changed his own viewpoints. In the latter period, the critique of ideology was stressed which developed the theory of class consciousness in the former period and it had more implications for the fact. Second, Lukacs’s later view of practice is more close to the Marxist philosophy. He realized that the basis of subjectivity of practice should be materialism. So his later theory contributed to the Marxist philosophy while the earlier one had deviated from Marxism. In the latter work, the tendency of subjectivity on ontology has been avoided and the importance of productive labor has been emphasized. Following Marx, the theory of totality has been modified to incorporate the practice of total society and the while process of capital production. Late Lukacs reanalysed the relation between reification and alienation and approached Marx’s idea about alienation and commodity fetishism.Chapter 4 deals with the analysis and elucidation of the reasons why the view of practice has been changed in the later period. Three aspects have been researched which are different eras of writing, bases of theory and approachs of philosophy. First, the experience and the courses of thinking varied between the young and old periods and the times differed for the two works. The former was written after the World War I and Russian Revolution while the world communist movement ran into obstacles because of the conditons of reality and theoretical differences. The time that the latter book showed up was after World War II and the Soviet Union as the representive of socialism and the capitalistic western world protested each other while the orthodox Marxism is Stalinism. Second, the young Lukacs was deeply influenced by Hegelian philosophy but the late Lukacs researched the thoughts of Marx even more in-depth and his view of Hegel had also transited. Finally, in the later period, the theory of practice-priority has been altered and the basis of materialism was insisted. The significance of the transition of Lukacs’s view of practice rests in that the earlier idea diverged from the Marxism while the later theory enriched the Marxist philosophy.

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