Abstract
This chapter further develops the themes introduced in the first two chapters and culminates them by touching upon Lukács’ rich ideas on the relationships between philosophical practice, life-form, and the essay-form of writing. Anticipating Montaigne’s conception of the essay, the author further articulates Lukács’ view of “the essay” by examining the main characteristics of “the essay” and the philosophical spirit behind them. Here, the idea is proposed that the essay-form is a form of philosophical practice in which self-edification as “self-attempt” or “self-study” is practiced and expressed in such a way to transform one’s own (or the readers’) sensibility.
An earlier version of this essay was published in Journal of Philosophy of Education 44:1 (2010), pp. 67–77. I am grateful for permission to use this material here.
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Notes
- 1.
One can easily notice that the sense of “philosophy” here already appears different from Dewey’s, but not in the sense that philosophy should be intimately connected with our everyday lives. I am at one with Dewey in regard to the latter point. But I think that the difference between Dewey and me derives from the difference in how to see life, as will be seen later in the chapter.
- 2.
Alcibiades seems at a later date to have been deeply engaged in a political career. In the Apology, it is suggested that he betrayed Athens in the Peloponnesian War.
- 3.
The following citation from a letter Lukács sent to one of his friends not only shows more clearly his main concern at this time of his life but also helps to sensitize us to his conceptual distinction between two types of life: “Your remark that the state is part of the self is correct. What I cannot accept is that the state is part of the soul. It is a mistake to convert the self into the soul. Only the soul has metaphysical reality and the problem is to find the road from one soul to another” (Kadarkay 1991, Lukács, p. 160). Here, Lukács names the empirical self simply as “the self,” (which can belong to the state as a member) and the metaphysical self as “the soul,” (which has nothing to do with the state). In this chapter, “soul” refers to the metaphysical reality of the soul.
- 4.
The term “work” also has a special meaning in Lukács’ writings. For Lukács, any work is the activity of one’s pursuit of the absolute. This is why Lukács considered art as an exemplary activity for soul-searching longing. Thus, any serious work contains one’s soul-content that is expressed in the form of the work. So, according to Lukács, the best way to appreciate the essence of a piece of work might be to detect the soul-content lying behind the form of the work.
- 5.
In the essay on Kierkegaard, Lukács criticizes the possibility of performing a noble and authentic gesture in one’s actual life. He refers to the Danish poet’s break with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, who was thereby sacrificed to an exclusive love of God. Here, Lukács adopts a standpoint more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, expressing astonishment at the latter’s inconsistency with his rigorous position, saying “How could he do it, he of all men, who saw more clearly than any other the thousand aspects, the thousand-fold variability of every motive, he who so clearly saw how everything passes gradually into its opposite?”
- 6.
Here, there is expressed my dissatisfaction with “egoistically self-centered” life-style that is so prevalent in the contemporary culture. In relation to oneself, we tend to be more and more narcissistic and self-celebrating, excessively concerned with fake self-images helplessly shaped by the cheap consumerism of technology and information-driven society. In relation to others, we tend to be highly politicized, oversensitive to politically corrective vocabularies, not knowing how to communicate across culturally and politically different groups. I have been taking pains in showing how the quest of great existential/metaphysical questions can free us from our own self-indulgence and relieve us of political and moral disagreement with others since the former usually tends to be taken as indifferent to, at best, and escapist from, at worst, the latter.
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Kwak, DJ. (2012). Practicing Philosophy, the Practice of Education: Exploring the Essay-Form Through Lukács’ Soul and Form . In: Education for Self-transformation. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2401-3_4
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