Art and Truth After Plato by Tom Rockmore;

Author:Tom Rockmore; [Rockmore, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Marx, Marxism, and Aesthetic Realism

Marxist aesthetics, which includes important figures such as Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson, has long been one of the liveliest and most interesting of all the many Marxist themes. Major themes in Marxist aesthetics include aesthetic realism, art as ideology, and the relation of aesthetics and politics.1 It is further an important source of the anti-Platonic argument for art as a source of truth. Yet after the breakup of the Soviet Union starting in 1989, leading to a widespread turn away from Marx and Marxism, interest in Marxist aesthetics sharply declined in the West.

It is axiomatic that throughout the Middle Ages no wide-ranging philosophical effort of any kind was ever undertaken or even deemed necessary to justify artistic claims to knowledge. Such claims were simply assumed to be correct as the theological basis of a series of Christian analyses of beauty—a theory of aesthetics in the modern sense as it emerged after Baumgarten did not yet exist—firmly rooted in religious faith. In Marxism a postreligious political faith arguably takes the place earlier occupied by religion. Marxism further deploys a series of arguments of varying levels of cogency to justify knowledge claims in relation to particular artistic styles.

Marxist aesthetics builds on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.2 Marx was particularly interested in the classical literary background, including ancient Greek literature, especially Aeschylus, as well as Shakespeare. His interest in aesthetics, especially literature, was further strengthened by his period at Bonn University, where he studied with A. W. Schlegel, who, with his brother Friedrich Schlegel, was one of the leaders of the early German Romantic movement. Engels, on the contrary, was attracted to the Junges Deutschland movement, a group of politically inclined, progressive writers, which was important in Germany from about 1830 to 1850. This movement, which originated in Italy, and then spread to France and Ireland, included among its core proponents Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienberg, and such more widely known figures as Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Georg Büchner.

I will follow the lead of others in separating the aesthetic views of Marx and Engels. Though the political views of Marx and Engels coincide, their philosophical as well as their aesthetic views differ in basic ways.3 I argue that their aesthetic views follow from their very different epistemological theories.4 Marxist aesthetics is closely linked to the Marxist theory of knowledge invented by Engels, including the notorious reflection theory of knowledge, which is unrelated to Marx’s own approach to knowledge.

Marxism since Engels routinely conflates Marx and Marxism. In describing Marxist aesthetics, I will outline the very different approaches to knowledge in Marx and Marxism before describing Marx’s obiter dicta on aesthetics. I will then turn to the debate on socialist realism before ending with discussion of Lukács’s realist approach to literature.

On the Epistemological Relation of Marx and Marxism

Marx and Marxism feature different approaches to aesthetics, which derive from very different approaches to

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