John Lukacs
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 98th anniversary of the birth of John Lukacs (31 January 1924–06 May 2019), who was born on this date in 1924.
In profiling historians whose work is philosophically significant or touches on philosophical issues I often note that the writers in question had left little explicit on the philosophical implications of their work. This is not true of John Lukacs, as Lukacs not only penned a large number of works on history (a lot of it focusing on the Second World War, and I have listened to many of these), but he also wrote a significant number of books on historiography, including (but not limited to):
Historical Consciousness; or, The Remembered Past (1968)
At the End of an Age (2002)
The Future of History (2011)
History and the Human Condition: a Historian’s Pursuit of Knowledge (2013)
We at the Center of the Universe (2017)
While Lukacs betrayed sympathies for idealism in his works with which I am familiar, he strangely does not seem to have been much influenced by the substantial idealist tradition in philosophy of history (though he does occasionally cite Collingwood), and I will try to explain this, however unsatisfactorily, in what follows.
There is an apocalyptic thread that runs through Lukacs’ oeuvre, and the numerous titles of his books suggest (though he did not explicitly say) that he felt that western history had reached a violent crescendo in the Second World War, with the following Cold War being a kind of coda and a buffer between the old world that was destroyed in the Second World War and a new world not yet begun. Consider this sequence of titles: The Last European War — 1945: Year Zero — The Legacy of the Second World War — The Passing of the Modern Age — The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age — At the End of an Age… you get the idea. Here is one expression of Lukacs’ apocalyticism:
“When it comes to the movement of ideas in the twentieth century we must recognize that we live in the midst of a monstrous kind of intellectual stagnation, typical of a decaying civilization, no matter what people say when they repeat that we live ‘in a revolutionary age.’ Certain institutionalized ideas, no matter how absurd, live on. Their essence may be dead but they are far from being passé. There are enormous institutions, in enormous buildings, employing enormous numbers of people, incarnating and representing basic ideas in which hardly any of them — employees or beneficiaries — really believe.” (Historical Consciousness; or, The Remembered Past, p. xxi)
And here is how Lukacs finishes off his The Passing of the Modern Age:
“…I have been writing not of the end of the world about which we know little but of the passing of a certain civilization about which we know something. At the worst, then, farewell, not to life but to civilization! Let us not forget that the very word, the very concept of civilization is relatively recent; yet another product of the historical consciousness of the Modem Age. If, by some miracle, we could travel to ancient Greece or Rome, we would be appalled by the dirt, the cruelty, the primitivism of so many things: unlike the idealists of the Renaissance, we would find them barbarian… For the civilization of the Modern Age in the West is the only civilization that we really know.” (The Passing of the Modern Age)
Lukacs strikes me as a man who, after having chronicled much of the twentieth century in excruciating if not spectacular detail, ultimately came to be repulsed by it (sometimes familiarity breeds contempt), and, in being repulsed by his own age, sought in philosophical asides some balm for the wound he had inflicted on himself. Ultimately, his discursive engagement with philosophy was unsatisfying. Lukacs made a distinction between philosophy of history and historical philosophy, claiming the latter for himself, but not the former:
“I, too, am affected by the critical problems of our historical condition and of our thinking; and it is, too, my consciousness of these conditions that led me to certain philosophical recognitions. This is not a unique experience. During the last fifty years a growing number of historical thinkers have addressed themselves to philosophical problems of history; and recently we have acquired a group of specialists on these subjects, something that I consider to be another awkward consequence of specialization. But what I am concerned with is not a philosophy of history but historical philosophy; I am attempting to deal not so much with the knowledgeability of history as with the historicity of knowledge.” (Historical Consciousness; or, The Remembered Past, p. 39)
Lukacs also makes a distinction between historicism and historicity:
“Here, then, is the very difference between historicism and historicity: the first being the (mostly German and idealist) recognition of the presence of history, so categorical as to become, on occasion, abstract; the second, the recognition of the historicity of human reason and of reasoning.”
Lukacs believed that the emergence of a genuine historicity would mark a new stage in the development of human consciousness:
“Our problems — all of our problems — concern primarily human nature. The human factor is the basic factor. These are humanistic platitudes. But they have now gained added meaning, through the unexpected support from physics. It is thus that the recognitions of the human condition of science, and of the historicity of science — let me repeat that Heisenberg’s approach is also historical — may mark the way toward the next phase in the evolution of human consciousness, in the Western world at least.”
Despite the apocalypticism of Lukacs, then, we see a new form of human consciousness rising from the ashes of western civilization. Thus we see that Lukacs not only had an historical philosophy, but also a philosophy of history despite his explicit denial of the latter: in Western history, for Lukacs, “The evolution is from rationalism to historicism to historicity…”
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lukacs
https://archive.org/details/atendofage00luka/page/n9/mode/2up
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22John+Lukacs%22
https://archive.org/details/historicalconsci0000luka
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Lukacs%2C+John%2C+1924-%22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMJqr9M0mmY&t=4s
