Soul and Culture

Respected Audience!

In this opening lecture of our series, ¹ a lecture designed to report on our program, I feel that I must discuss something that cannot be contained within the strictly objective approach we demand of subsequent lectures but that comprehends the unifying principle of them all.

The unifying principle of these lectures is, I believe, so profound that the necessarily brief programmatic announcement could not possibly give it full expression. We stated there that we do not intend to popularize, but this simply characterizes our manner. We announced that our world-view [Weltanschauung] is idealistic, but this merely locates our philosophic position among the many philosophical currents. Not even the titles of our lectures reveal the unifying principle we consider essential. This is because the principle is neither substantive nor expressible within the limits of a particular subject matter. With regard to this latter point it is, indeed, possible that the list of the topics to be discussed will seem somewhat arbitrary to an outsider not familiar with the necessary bonds that intimately connect their contents with the philosophical standpoint and the method applied.

Actually, nothing is further from our minds than to have an arbitrarily collected group of speakers lecture in this school on subjects they happen to find interesting. We consider it of primary importance to present the culture that encompasses us to the contemporary public by means of a deliberate selection and a coherently integrated cross-sectional view. In the present state of culture, the raison d’etre for a school could be nothing but making our enthusiasm for that culture capable of bearing fruit in a unified and consistent manner. After all, the greatest danger to our culture today arises from the possibility of the culture itself growing beyond us, making it ever more difficult for us to relate to it. If a school satisfies the interests of its students by offering nothing more than information lacking an inner connection more profound than the mere quality of being interesting, it is bound to do more harm than good.

Since I believe that only a generation bound together by a common development and a shared sense of life can supply such a unified and integrated cross-sectional view of the objectified culture, I should not hide from you that the core of this school consists of men who have developed together and who trust one another. Obviously there are theoretical and individual differences among us; but it is only in relation to a common center that we are conscious of them. Although the various subjects we study do distinguish us from one another, the lectures we gave last year convinced us as well as our audience that their method and form-giving expressed the same unified character. In short, firmly grounded in our similar subjective cultures, we have set ourselves the task of turning this school into a unified manifestation of objective culture, so that it may gather all who feel solidarity with it.

Now, let me speak of this unity that is so important for us. Two paths are open to me in characterizing this unity. I might briefly list the names, in this country or abroad, that stand for cultural aspirations and ideas that we also follow, thus giving names to the developmental tendencies with which we are moving; or I might offer a substantive characterization – disregarding their historical pedigrees – of the ultimate principles on which we agree. I feel that neither path is appropriate.

For even if I told you who our immediate predecessors are – Dostoyevsky in world-view and sense of life, Kierkegaard in ethics, the German Logos and the Hungarian Szellem, Lask and Zalai in philosophy, Paul Ernst and Riegl in aesthetics, Cézanne in artistic culture, the new French poetry, especially the tendency of the Nouvelle Revue Française, or, from among our countrymen, Bartók and Ady with his many good poems that have superseded impressionism and, finally, the Thalia theater movement – I would simply be using all of these names to suggest the diversity of influences on us, without expressing that unity on the basis of which all of these become immediately relevant to our lives and thoughts.

In this connection it must, moreover, be noted that were I to characterize the historical factors with any thoroughness, I should have to discuss movements that affect most of us, but that we now feel we should outgrow. And if we oppose them today, our opposition comes from beyond them. While turning against them, we also presuppose and acknowledge them as factors in our development. Such movements are naturalism and impressionism in art and Marxism in sociology; and we do not want to forget what we owe to them.

As I have said, the listing of names does not present the essence of the school. Even if I were to represent our point of view in theorems formulated around various factors selected from the diverse branches of cultural objectification I should fare no better. I could point out that our ethical and aesthetic convictions are marked by a certain normativism, which is not, however, bound to rules in an academic manner; and that our world-view is characterized by an idealism that strives towards metaphysics but which could not be further from that forced and strained idealism of doctrinal religion. I might also add that, having become aware of the barrenness of monism, the direction of our research tends towards pluralism. The past few decades have, after all, expanded our philosophical horizons; and the most evident conclusion to be drawn from this expansion is that many radically different factors constitute the reality surrounding man. We consider it more important to recognize this multiplicity than to use simplistic thought-schemes and to offer, for the sake of our own peace of mind, an already unified view of the world.

But neither the analysis of historical antecedents nor the enumeration of substantive theorems is sufficient to delineate the unifying principle. This principle lies even deeper.

I see the unifying principle to which I have repeatedly alluded in this lecture in our common perspective toward cultural expressions – to religion, philosophy, ethics, art, social life, and history. We have similar conceptions of all these; and we seek to approach their structures and significances in a special and distinctive way. We agree in our views of the pluralistic character of cultural manifestations and in our views of the path of cultural development; and we feel that on this path we occupy a common position, which makes us kin. Permit me therefore to make [our common perspective on culture] the central theme of this lecture, because only if I describe this view of culture more closely will I be able to demonstrate the interrelatedness of our lectures this year.

Respected Audience! Subjective culture and objective, the intimate connection of the individual to the culture encompassing him or his distance from it – these are in fact ancient topics, and the only reason for paying particular attention to them today is that the distance between them has become wider than usual, thereby exposing the differences between them. By way of introduction, in order to make our findings more comprehensible, I will explain what we mean by [these concepts].

By ‘objective culture’ we understand all the concrete manifestations of the spirit [szellem, Geist], as transmitted to us in the course of historical development as a human inheritance; we understand by it religion, science, art, the state, and modes of [social] life. As Georg Simmel saw very correctly, we may speak of ‘subjective culture’ when the soul [lélek, Seele] intends to achieve its fulfillment, its perfection – not through itself [alone] by turning exclusively within, but rather by an indirect path leading through the cultural manifestations mentioned above, by making them its own to a certain extent. This definition is felicitous because it indicates – or at least leaves open the possibility – that the soul has or might have a path toward fulfillment other than identification with cultural objects, and especially because it leaves no doubt that the soul does have a reality independent of culture.

The Indian ascetics chose the second path of having the soul absorbed completely in itself, as did those Christian saints who withdrew into solitude. Their choice was based on the conviction that, if they turned their vision exclusively within, the soul would become immediately present and reachable. What may have been given unto them does not secure salvation for us, even if we can attain [such a state] for a moment, at a time of grace; because we break down and are incapable of permanent resistance. The person who has not been redeemed loses himself [altogether] if he cuts himself off from happenings [in the world outside of himself], because such a person is only capable of following the traces of his own soul over the path of manifestations relating to the outside of his life and his actions. For this reason, the un-chosen one must live within life and must involve himself in the reality that surrounds him in space and time; he must connect himself to culture.

When we turn to the question of whether [and how] it is possible for these historical realities, which are strangers to the soul, to have any meaning for life, then we must take still another step back for the answer and must interrogate not only the relationship of the individual to the culture but also the relationship of the individual – of the soul – to its Work [Werk]. It is after all the Work and not the culture that is the primary creation. The individual Work becomes a cultural fact by becoming social and historical. In its original mandate it is a manifestation of the soul seeking to realize itself for its own sake.

We find this concept of the Work – which is difficult to render in Hungarian – in the writings of the medieval German mystics. Initially they understood by it the religious act alone, but later, every external expression of the soul, its documentation for profane life. For us, its meaning thus includes equally the action, the thought, the representation, the ritual – that is, the striving of the soul to arrive at itself through a medium that is alien to it. In the beginning, the mystics wanted to reject the Work because they felt that it could not yield [self-]realization: it would divert attention from the soul, become an end in itself, mislead, and draw attention to itself. But later they admitted that it could not be bypassed, and Meister Eckhart in his sermon on Mary and Martha proclaimed the necessity of the ‘Work’. I feel that the problem as stated by the mystics has timeless significance because it expresses an ‘absolute situation’, an eternal problem linked to our nature as human beings.

Were someone to ask me what in essence characterizes our nature as human beings most fully, I should say that it is the fact that we can acquaint others with us and ourselves with ourselves only by setting up between ourselves and others, between ourselves and ourselves, the Work – which is of a substance alien to us. The most important fact attending our fate is that there are many of us and that we live apart. We live torn away from each other; we yearn for each other; but we cannot reach each other. And we ourselves are beyond our reach. This mythic awareness deeply pervades Kant’s teaching of the twofold ‘Ding-an-sich’. (That it has not produced a genuine myth can be explained by the inability of our age to create myths at all – an impoverishment first lamented by the German Romantics.) According to Kant, the world that surrounds us is phenomenon and cannot be reached in its essence; but we are ourselves equally unreachable because we only see the phenomena of our own essences. Amid this twofold unknown we live with the double yearning for self-recognition; and whatever emanation results from this striving is nothing but an act, a thought, a representation, or a ritual. Whatever the substance through which these are realized, it is alien to the soul – like the marble from which a statute is hewn, our thoughts as well as our emotions – because it is only a medium. How is it possible that this substance, which is in the final analysis alien to us, can still mean something, and how is it possible that while obedient to the laws of such substances we can still express something of ourselves? Though perhaps unattainable, [answers to these questions] would be the most valuable culmination of all our researches.

We must begin from this most ultimate ‘absolute situation’, from the fact that the soul and the Work stand over against each other. And what we see here first of all is that in some sense the Work is more, and in some sense less, than the soul that created it.

Because the Work constantly points back to that which imagined, acted, or presented it, it is less than the soul. The thought is always only a sign of something, and it directs us back to the process of experience it is seeking to articulate; and any cultural creation, any ritual will lose its ultimate meaning for us if we break away from the life roots from which it grew.

In another sense, however, the Work is also more than the soul that produced it, as can be concluded from the fact that the Work is governed by its own laws. Matter, which is a medium, can be ordered on the basis of its own laws and it can thus manifest coherent integration, while in the soul there is only chaos and unapproachability. Thinking has its own laws; individual thoughts are linked in a comprehensible order, and every initial assumption is brought to completion in a system. The marble statue has its own laws, prescribed by the material and by its existence in space, as well as by its clear visibility. A poem has its own laws, defined by the type of poem and by its rhythm. Every composition demands voluntary submission to such constraints or laws.

The ability to handle a medium may become ever more perfect with time, and the continuous work of generations may make the laws prescribed by the materials ever more clear. The question is, of course, whether the enhanced capacity to render the material complete within itself necessarily signifies a more perfect expression of the spirit. It is also debatable whether an improved capacity to handle the materials renders the Work more achievable, and whether the soul can finally come to itself in this Work.

The Work, however, clearly has one value: as long as it is alive, it is constantly soul-directed. The Work will not reach the soul, but it will empower it to gain control. The Work represents an artificial limitation of the soul in the face of its infinite possibilities. Being compelled to select, to form, to choose, we implicitly feel the presence of the soul. This explains why the creator feels redeemed by his Work.

While this is the mission of the Work for the creator, its second mission is to form, at least temporarily, a bridge between man and man. As soon as it assumes its task in this social dimension, the Work becomes an object of culture. If the Work has its distinctive laws deducible from its material nature, the cultural object is subject to laws that derive from its social and historical character and are independent of its materiality. As the distance between the Work and its creator widens, the Work becomes an integral part of a historical structure that constitutes an entity separate from the partial entities it encompasses. Literature is not the sum of literary works; art is not the accumulation of art objects; religion is not the aggregate of ritual acts. Culture is more because culture is different from the agglomerate of individual objectifications. In this case, too, we are faced with special laws, for whose formation not only the creative individual but also the individual who responds to [the creation] and sustains its continuity is important. As the Work becomes an object of culture, its distance from the soul – already present at its origin – becomes ever greater. The Work now becomes a new reality.

As a new reality, it possesses autonomous significance and an autonomous development, and these cannot be simply deduced from the interactions among the several psyches. That this is the case is evidenced by modern linguistic inquiries, which ever more clearly recognize that the changes, the developmental processes of language cannot be approached from a psychological point of view alone. It cannot be my task at this time to offer an exhaustive treatment of these laws. I must be satisfied to attempt nothing more than to formulate in axiomatic fashion the most general conditions by virtue of which an object of culture is in some measure able to achieve its inter-human task. This brings us to three basic characteristics absolutely necessary to the very existence of culture.

The first circumstance that makes it possible for objects of culture to fulfill this inter-human function can be deduced from the solidarity of the human race: whatever has been achieved by a human being will be accessible to everyone in the future. Stated differently, it is incomparably easier to learn something than to invent it. This applies equally to the technical skill of art, mastering a profession, and reaching out to ultimate visions – although it is, of course, truer of the former than of the last.

This state of affairs has both good and bad consequences for the relation between culture and soul. The unfavorable consequence is the possibility of an independent development in the technique for handling materials that is cut off from the profound relation between a technique and the soul that originally marked the individual or generation driven by an inner necessity toward a particular principle of form-giving. Its favorable consequence is the fact that, for a while, namely as long as the experience is still alive, the vision and exploration of the inner reaches of the soul can be carried on from the point where others had left off having exhausted their finite vital energies.

This brings us to the second, also most general feature that makes culture possible. It can be summed up as a capacity for continuation. However, let me stress once again that this continuation applies in two respects: in relation to technique and in relation to the message. The ultimate tragedy of culture is the lack of parallelism between these two lines of development, since continuity in the handling of the material can last long after the liveliness of the experience has faded. In such cases it will happen that what was meaningful at the time of its first realization becomes incomprehensible in the hands of followers who carry on and develop further that trend in the handling of materials. Take, for example, the history of styles. The Baroque can be said to have fully realized on the level of form what inhered in the artistic principles of the Renaissance, although the topical significance of the latter had not survived the Trecento. In such cases, not only formal development can reach a stage of full ripeness, but also the subject matter, contents, or story may manifest a continuity, although its meaning or message has already disappeared.

In such a historical phase a Werk, a cultural object, is no longer a means since it has acquired independent reality and begun to live a life of its own. Now it is the individual that turns into a medium compliantly realizing the possibilities inherent in the material and what is given within the culture. Here culture comes to life, as an independent reality, and sets out like a golem – forgive me the somewhat trite simile – on a path of its own. It has no more to do with the soul than a parasite has with the host plant that it needs for its life, without, however, the shoots or fruits of the latter.

In such situations, individuals merely follow a road to its end, actualizing the possibilities revealed to them by beginnings that had once been meaningful.

That such a reality, while wholly alienated from the soul, can nevertheless have meaning for us even in such phases finds its explanation in a third particular human capacity. Even if such a cultural objectification has wholly left the soul behind, even if it can no longer tell us anything about that soul, it may still be alive for us as a form that can be regarded in itself and that can mean something to us who view it in such an inadequate manner. It is always this inadequate gaze with which we approach the products of cultures wholly foreign to us, as with ancient images of Hindu gods or African sculpture. They can still speak to us somehow.

And when cultural objects that belong to our own line of historical development become entirely alien to us, and when even our creations are designed for just such an inadequate gaze, we speak of the rise of an aesthetic culture.

The aesthetic perspective as such is just such an inadequate perspective; and Lukács, who discovered this inadequate gaze and developed its theory, has constructed the whole of aesthetics as a system of the inadequate gaze.

The inadequate aesthetic gaze is not to be condemned, for it is one of the most interesting human faculties and calls for a scholarly effort to trace its ultimate structure. It is only aesthetic cultures that are blameworthy because they develop this particular human faculty to the exclusion of other faculties and to the detriment of purposeful life.

Relying on these three very general theses, the entire dynamics of culture can be discerned in broad terms, throwing a light on the process we can call the overdevelopment of culture, or its misdirection. Simmel was the first to recognize this tendency to cultural overdevelopment.

In every branch of culture, we can see that developments breed alienation, something that is not fully sensed by individuals until they begin to have new, startling experiences of primordial facts of the soul. These make it evident to them that the old contents are no longer present and that the old forms have become alien. We feel ourselves to be living in such a phase (definable by philosophy of history): the new contents that flash on the horizon, although as yet formless, render obsolete much that is old by their illuminating presence.

I do not want to be precipitate, but it may be right to suggest that this content had become obsolete by the end of the Middle Ages. On this view, what we have experienced since then is an autonomous development of forms coupled with our emerging and growing feeling of alienation from them. The individualism of the Renaissance then means nothing more than that the individual no longer feels immersed in and at one with the contents but apart from them. This sense of apartness gradually rises into consciousness. The developments of the preceding period begin to become visible to the succeeding generation, and in time more and more people will appear and proclaim this alienation from the contents of culture. Perhaps Rousseau was among the first to perceive this alienation, and a straight line leads from him, along the path of influences, to Schiller’s concept of the sentimental and Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony, which signal the very same experience, although from different aspects. The contents one encounters are always felt to be alien. One cannot identify with them and tries to gain distance from them as well as from oneself; one is incapable of taking a decisive stand. All these are but symptoms of this particular condition.

This individualistic process, with its refusal to enter into any contents, culminates in impressionism, for whose psychic disposition I can find no more apt formula than the one offered by a contemporary of ours, a noted journalist, who said of himself, ‘I do not share my own opinion.’

Permit me to complete my characterization of this most general development of culture and the positing of its three laws by the following. Three modes of human intentionality correspond to the stages of culture noted above. Human perception, taken in its broadest sense, can be made sensitive in three different directions, and I think that a different mode of intentionality comes to the fore in each phase of development.

The first mode of intentionality is directed to primordial facts. When a culture is rising or renewed, when the soul and the message are present, the creator is engaged mostly with the soul, intangible but present. This is the time of religious cultures.

The second mode of intentionality is directed to forms. People in these periods sense the inner laws of forms without consciously grasping them in theory, and all their efforts are accordingly directed to the best and most complete working through of materials, to perfection in their handling. These cultures represent the periods of artistic development.

The third mode of intentionality becomes effective when the awareness of separation comes to prevail and the discrepancy between forms and messages becomes more and more evident. At such times, adherence to the laws of the materials and of their formation, which had been followed instinctively by the preceding generations in response to their creative impulses, rises to consciousness; and now theory can grasp that from which creative art has already become more or less estranged. The form and the message having fallen asunder, we see the structure of the former from a distance, and it becomes manifest when viewed at such a distance. This is the time for critical investigation to come alive: logic, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history flourish.

Since it is the third mode of intentionality that prevails today, I believe that the most valuable work for our generation lies in this direction. Accordingly, I will attempt to define our position on the basis of our vision of history. If we recognize that situation, then the task that lies ahead can also be outlined.

If we recall the lectures of last year, their unity can be seen as the result of our will to carry out what we took to be our common task. We sought to make use of our situation as defined in the terms of our philosophy of history, explaining how the fact that most contents have become largely obsolete enabled us to discern the structures of the various realms of culture. That is how it happened that our lectures offered structural analyses of these various cultural realms.

By structural analysis we understood the scholarly effort to bring to light the ultimate specific realities of each of the cultural formations and to examine the specific laws that govern their developments. In the course of these investigations, we came to recognize that the various cultural objectifications were essentially different from one another and could not, therefore, be deduced from one another without distortions.

We developed and emphasized the doctrine that not only philosophy (and its branches) or poetry (and its genres) but also each objectification of the spirit has a structure specific to it. This structure is the direct emanation of the particular primordial fact that has found expression in it, and even more of the specific material through which it has been expressed. It was precisely these analyses that created our conviction that all entities could be said to belong to a single kind only from a deliberately narrow-minded philosophical standpoint – mostly by analogy to the so-called physical world.

There are certain realities of our lives – such as experience, thinking, and so forth – that do not resemble the physical world at all and yet play as great a role in our lives, if not a greater one, than those that belong there. Instead of denying the existence of these doubtless existing givens, we prefer to expand on that overly restrictive concept of existence and to claim that existence has several realms and appears to us in the form of several distinctive realities.

This methodological pluralism of ours led us to follow after the tradition of idealistic philosophies. It was precisely the thrust of our structural analyses that put a return to Kant on our agenda inasmuch as we regarded him as the principal representative of the critical intentionality that constitutes the fundamental experience of our epoch. We saw the significance of his work in the fact that he had been the first to discern the specific structure and autonomy of each of the three most important cultural formations, namely, theory, ethical action, and aesthetic vision. Zalai, our deceased contemporary, gained importance in our eyes for this reason: after a detour away from Kant, he renewed and consistently carried on precisely this tendency by deepening the experience of a structural view. Our work was directly linked to his by attempting to analyze the specific givens and structures of ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy, and art. It is in this sense that we want to continue the work of the past year, against the background of our attitude as defined by our philosophy of history.

We want to lay bare the specific structure of a Werk in all fields, which results from its being a Werk, on the one hand, and from its being a historical cultural object, on the other.

Let me offer my interpretation of the problems discussed in this year’s program in order to convince you that the diversity of its subjects does not represent an arbitrary assemblage but that it is, rather, the result of an approach from a shared point of departure.

If it is true that development in the various branches of culture can be described as a progressive movement away from a point of departure, then historical retrospection by later generations is a phenomenon of the most complex kind. If we admit that a Werk moves some distance from its own creator and may be easily misunderstood even by his own generation, then the attempt to interpret the true meaning of the cultural work of past generations is fraught with still greater difficulties.

If the history of the human spirit [Geistesgeschichte] strives to understand and reinterpret old objectifications and manifestations of the spirit, it gets entangled in difficulties of a kind that inevitably demand critical and methodological analysis. In his announced lecture, Fogarasi [Béla Fogarasi: ‘The Methods of the History of the Spirit’] intends to describe and characterize the various possible modes of interpretation in terms of the history of the spirit.

I have already noted in the course of this lecture that it is artistic objectification, especially in works of art, that may become wholly disconnected, by way of a highly specific autonomous process, from the original point of departure. This can go so far that the message will fall away, leaving the beholder’s interest oriented exclusively to the form in its distinctive microcosmic closure. In certain historical periods people want to see – and are able to see – a work of art only in this perspective. That attitude is nothing but the result of the achieved independence of one of the three modes of human intentionality, that is, of the orientation to forms. In periods that focus on it to the exclusion of the other two, this mode of intentionality is also represented by an independent scholarly discipline, namely aesthetics.

Although we should fight aesthetic cultures, we must consider this human faculty as well as the discipline that describes it in its entirety as both justified and possible. In his discussion of aesthetics, Lukács [György Lukács: ‘Aesthetics’] will show that aesthetics sets up the work of art precisely in this inadequately viewed form as its object of inquiry, and he will construct the whole system of aesthetics as the fulfillment of this specific mode of intentionality.

While Lukács’ discussion of aesthetics will deal with the formal aspect of art, Balázs [Béla Balázs: ‘The Development of Lyrical Sensibility. Hungarian Poets’ (seminar)] will approach the same subject by focusing on its metaphysical aspect, investigating the mutual relations between the messages and metaphysical experiences and the corresponding forms in a specific artistic field, that of poetry.

I have said earlier that culture is made possible by the solidarity of humankind, which allows it to carry on all initiatives in one of two directions: either by moving toward the original experience or by improving the materials that communicate that experience. I have also indicated that the former entails a slower process and, perhaps, a development by leaps. It produces some progress in the sense that a survey of its history permits the conclusion that among the periods characterized by a lively intentionality directed to the soul, to primordial facts, there are differences in sensibility, in their sensitivity to these facts.

The soul-based realities present at the successive stages of internal development are not only different but also growing in number. Poets, nevertheless, strive to make the medium, that is, the language, available at a given cultural stage signal or express all that their sensibility reveals to them. The language that has drifted away in the course of its independent development has to be recaptured and re-spiritualized or, to put it differently, from the side of the soul, there begins a new materialization of new soul-based experiences. This struggle can be observed particularly well in the formation and transformation of metaphors in poetic language. While tracing the path of that internal development, Balázs will also set up a typology of poetic similes that represent that change. In this instance, as in every other field, we consider it imperative to present concrete analyses of the works of art.

When forms have reached the peak of their autonomous, divergent development, to which I have referred already several times, and which entails that the message and the form have drifted far away from each other, two options present themselves. It may be the case that people with no message to convey find it so easy now to master the handling of forms that they are able to produce works of art with no connection to the soul at all, even if these works affect completion, flaunting a misleading air of self-importance. It is no longer the soul but merely language that speaks here: it is an almost automatically producing artistic culture that writes or carves in place of human creators.

Such periods are the time of the epigone and dilettante. It becomes crucial to distinguish between what is genuine (echt) and what is not (unecht) – we do not have the appropriate Hungarian equivalents of these German words. Hauser [Arnold Hauser: ‘Dilettantism in Art’] undertakes to characterize these phenomena.

In these very same periods of the divergent overdevelopment of forms, it may also be the case that some people, important and valuable by virtue of their souls, already feel the new content but are not artists enough to find an adequate new form that breaks radically with the old. Since only a genius could break through this boundary line, they become dilettantes of a distinctive type: they prefer deliberately to impede the available completion of the old forms by systematically breaking them up in order to suggest at least the new message that they are as yet unable to represent. This is a dilettantism radically unlike the usual type, humanly very important, but nevertheless deficient because the way of art always leads through a Werk. Paul Ernst said once that a great artist must unite something of a great man and something of an acrobat in one person. Whoever possesses only one of these remains a dilettante.

The problem of dilettantism becomes important at stages of culture like our own, when the lines of autonomous development themselves diverge from one another, so that it is not only the mutual relations between the message and the form but also those between the contents and the composition that can be more clearly discerned.

Antal’s lecture [Frigyes Antal: ‘The Development of the Composition and Content of Modern Painting’] will discuss this general problem in its application to the materials of painting.

He will trace this development, however, by including an additional point of view, that of the sociological background. For it is possible to raise the question whether a cultural objectification like an art form may not be related to the social formations – to the classes – which constitute the framework within which the form is realized.

Marx was the first to see clearly that there was some connection between cultural objectifications and social forms, that is, the corresponding social structure. For this reason the Marxist starting point is not to be neglected. Of course, our view of this relationship differs from that of Marx, and we reject the theory of the base and superstructure [Überbau]. But even if we put his solution aside, the problem itself remains important to us.

It is this connection between Marxism and our standpoint that makes Szabó’s lecture [Ervin Szabó: ‘On the Ultimate Issues of Marxism’] on Marxism relevant for us.

That it can be a highly fruitful starting point to problematize the impact of social forms on the arts has been convincingly demonstrated by Lukács in his history of the drama. Antal will attempt to apply this point of view to the fine arts.

It may be precisely its sociological background that makes folk art different from ours, and which makes us think of it as a culture alien to us.

It is well known that folk culture first became a problem in Romanticism, in a cultural period when the alienation from forms first became a conscious experience for certain people. This experience turned their interest toward alien cultures – and folk art meant such a relatively alien culture to them. Since those times, a sentimental longing for folk art has remained alive; and now, when we are trying to ascertain the structures of all cultural objectifications, folk art is of importance because our natural distance from it makes it easier for us to trace the structure of its forms. This is why we shall listen to the lectures by Kodály [Zoltán Kodály: ‘The Hungarian Folk Song’] and Bartók [Béla Bartók: ‘Folk Music and Modern Music’] and learn about their approaches.

I have decided to introduce our lectures on logic and epistemology only at the end because their field is quite different from that of the arts, although the above-described approaches can be fruitfully applied here, too. We certainly do not want to obscure the radical difference that divides cognition from expression, yet beyond this difference there are certain observable similarities and mutual correspondences between theory and art, which should be attended to.

Logical constraints represent for thought the same kind of material resistance as the various media that the other processes of objectification use as mediators. In speaking here of the material, we mean matter in the broadest sense of the word when it includes all that is alien to the soul, that resists it on account of its own autonomous laws. From this perspective, systematization in thinking, when it points out the specific laws that govern the mediating material of thought, corresponds to composition or form in art.

In my lectures of last year, I attempted to show these primary constraints in one branch of thought, in epistemology. Here they are produced by certain fundamental correlations that, already inherent in certain systematizations, always delimit the set of possible solutions open to thinking. Quite apart from a purely logical vision, thinking has its own structure that predetermines the paths open to it – not one single direction, of course, but nevertheless a limited set of directions. A specific form of pure, sensual or intellectual, perception underlies all thought. As soon as one tries to grasp this perception, it will turn into a concept of some kind and locate itself in some system that will sweep thinking in a direction diverging from the one taken at its point of departure.

Last year, I discussed a special type of such systematization, to wit, epistemological systematization. In the lecture of this year [Károly Mannheim: ‘The Structural Analysis of Epistemological Systems’], I want to specify the claims made then by connecting them to a description of certain systems.

The lectures by Varjas [Sándor Varjas: ‘Phenomenological Investigations’] will move in a similar direction. He will deal with phenomenology, which is the most interesting branch of modern logic. In essence, phenomenology aspires to discern the primordial ‘facts’ of logic non-systematically, without intentionality towards systematization, in a universe accessible to pure ‘looking’ [Schauen]. Varjas wants to show that although such Schauen is possible, the enterprise takes a tragic turn as soon as one attempts to integrate its isolated results into theory, because theory construction inevitably implies a position in some systematization.

I hope that I have been able to show you how our investigations, applied in several fields, are in fact connected, and it is this connection that nurtures them. This common theory of cultural objectification is based on the vision that distinguishes our generation; here I have merely sought to present within the framework of a systematic theory that which constitutes our shared experience, and that you will find intermittently expressed, if only in an unsystematic way, in the course of our lectures.

That we feel able to see clearly the structure of cultural objectifications is, as I have said earlier, a circumstance linked to our historical situation. And I think it is the emergence of new contents that alienates us from the old structures and renders them apparent. It is as yet early to speak of the forms such new contents will assume, for that can only be the product of the life of a whole epoch. Similarly, we cannot expect to find more than some isolated metaphysical tenets that we can embrace at the beginning of a process that can be completed only by an entire, substantive metaphysics.

Even if it may never be granted to us to see the new contents in the clarity permitted by a new form, we are confident that we shall have accomplished something if we prepare the way, by as complete an understanding of the old culture as possible, for the new culture that we feel to be of the greatest importance.

The ultimate interdependence of subjective culture and objective culture implies that neither can exist if the other totally fails.

Objective culture surrounds us like an enormous Leviathan, unconnected to us, yet it cannot sustain its strange life and growth without the individuals who work on it and dedicate themselves to it. And no individual can be redeemed without their having appropriated objective culture, without having transformed it, again and again, into subjective culture.

We feel a premonition of cultural renewal in the fact that this relationship between objective and subjective culture has again come into view. Our task is to call attention to that fact. We find it important to develop our sensitivity to these problems. It is of crucial importance today, more than ever before.

Translated by Anna Wessely; translation edited by David Kettler and Volker Meja