2.8 - Cohen, Mitchell - The Concept of Community in The Thought of Lucien Goldmann (En)

TheConceptofCommunityintheThoughtofLucienGoldmann
TheConceptofCommunityintheThoughtofLucienGoldmann
byMitchellCohen

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:2/1986,pages:220234,onwww.ceeol.com.
THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY IN THE THOUGHT OF LUCIEN GOLDMANN*

Mitchell Cohen
The quest for authentic human community was a central theme of Lucien Goldmanns oeuvre, beginning with his earliest writings. Due to the reputation of this Rumanian-French Marxist humanist as a sociologist of culture, the profoundly political nature of his thought is more often than not obscured. However, at the heart of his philosophical and literary studies, political questions are to be found. Indeed they are posed in and underlie the structure of his first book, originally a dissertation for the University of Zrich significantly entitled Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants. Nothing, he insisted, may of right be called philosophy but that whose aim is the liberation of man and the realization of a true community.1 He believed the demand to create a new human community to be a Kantian legacy. Kant, according to Goldmanns reading of him, surpassed earlier thinkers by attempting to go beyond the individual to the ideas of community, the universe, and totality. In a revealing passage, Goldmann writes that the concept of totality is the most important philosophical category as much in epistemology as in ethics and aesthetics, and that its two principle forms are the universe and the human community. He adds that, like Georg Lukcs (who was, along with Jean Piaget, his chief intellectual inspiration), he sees totality not as something pre-existent, but as a goal to be created by collective human action. To philosophies whose premise is the I, Goldmann sought to oppose a philosophy of community, of the we, which surmounts the opposition of contemplation and action, of the individual and the community.2 In Goldmanns unorthodox presentation of him, Kant first and foremost is depicted as a thinker striving for a totality he knows to be unattainable. It is this theme of totality, rather than the relation of subject and object, that Goldmann stresses in interpreting the Copernican Revolution of the first Critique. The pre-critical Kant, he tells us, saw the edifice of the sensible world resting on a system of causation tied ultimately to something outside man, namely, God.3 Humes argument on causation awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, but given empiricist premises the very notion of totality is impossible; no whole that goes beyond its parts can be presupposed if knowledge is based on factual connections resting on habit, constant conjunction, and the association of ideas. Hence, argues Goldmann, Kant
* I wish to thank Larry Adams, Nicole Fermon, and Florindo Volpacchio for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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recognized that totality was not to be posited outside man, but rather as a
possibility within him.4 And hence the notions of transcendental subjectivity and the categories would be transformed by Goldmann into his own concept of transindividuality, on the basis of a synthesis of Lukcs and Piaget. As we shall see below, Goldmanns notion of the transindividual subject served a crucial role in his projection of human community. Our concern here is less with the validity of Goldmanns interpretation of Kant per se than with what his interpretation tells us about his own thought. Goldmann explicitly states that his book on Kant is one of philosophy and not an exercise in Kant philology.5 In this context he wishes to demonstrate the following thesis: That the authentic destiny of man is to strive towards the absolute (tendre vers labsolu) is the fundamental postulate of the critical philosophy and Kant frequently repeats that it neither has to be, nor can be, proved (cela ne doit ni peut se prouver).6 Now at various points in his analysis, Goldmann identifies the absolute with totality, noumena, God, and community. Kant, he argues, strives towards each of these but is unable to reach them save in the realm of aesthetics, and there only subjectively, because his starting point remained the individual.7 Goldmann envisions the modern history of dialectical thought as a movement from Kant through Hegel to Marxism, a movement whose motor, as it were, was the process of humanization and historical placing of the absolute, which eventually becomes the authentic human community.8 This movement commences with the I as the subject of human action and arrives at a Marxist notion of a historical we. Goldmann poses the realization of philosophy and socialism as humanitys self-realization. This is, of course, reminiscent of themes in Marx, especially the young Marx. However, Goldmann conceives philosophy as a generic response to the problems of man qua man but in so doing he tends not to privilege the proletariat as a universal class which realizes philosophy and thus embodies the liberation of humanity: Expressions such as German or French, bourgeois or proletarian philosophy only have meaning to the extent that they aim to show that a philosophy was born among Germans or the French, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, or that its insights were only made possible by the social or economic situation of these groups. In any case they cannot indicate that the philosophy only concerns itself with problems proper to the French or to the Germans, to the bourgeoisie or to proletarians, nor that its results would be valid only for them. In this sense, a German or bourgeois or proletarian philosophy would be as contradictory as squaring a circle. At most it could be spoken of as ideology.9 This perspective remains consistent throughout Goldmanns oeuvre, both when he still accepted a more orthodox Marxist view of the political role of the proletariat, and in the late 1950s and 1960s when he ardently insisted on his fidelity to Marxism while simultaneously rejecting the notion of the revolutionary role of the proletariat. Central to Goldmanns political thinking was the quest for Aufhebung of
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individual and community, a determinate negation of both to create a synthesis of individual-in-community. Individual liberty and la communaut comme le bien suprme are inseparable.10 His position is grounded on an understanding of human beings as social individuals, closely paralleling Marxs Introduction to the Grundrisse. Here Marx rejects the Robinson Crusoe image of man as a natural individual who can be conceived of apart from social and historical realities. Marx complained that thinkers like Smith and Ricardo saw man not arising historical but posited by nature, and not as a historical result but as historys point of departure.11 On the contrary, the individual is always part of a greater historical whole; he is autonomous within this totality, is not undifferentiated from it, yet only becomes himself within it:
The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness is as much of an absurdity as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.12
Marx refers in this passage to a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present. It is these forces within the person that Goldmanns theory of mental structures seeks to explicate. It is also through this theory that Goldmann seeks to understand that critical element in the relation between the individual and other human beings consciousness. Almost no human actions, be they historical, political, cultural or otherwise, are solely those of isolated individuals, of Robinson Crusoes, Goldmann insists. Everyday life demonstrates that it is the we and not the you and I that acts.13 In one of his favorite illustrations he queries how we are to understand three men moving a piano. If we imagine that one of the movers has the status of subject. . . this would mean that we assimilated the two others to the piano as the objects of the thought and actions of the first.14 To understand the action without severing the tie between the consciousness of the three men and their activity is to see the three men as a collective subject of action with the piano as its object. The three have a common structure of consciousness, a common set of intrasubjective relations, in performing the task; they are a transindividual subject. Goldmann employs the term transindividual rather than collective in order to emphasize that he is not describing a group mind but rather an ensemble of individuals with common mental structures developed as they adapt to an environment on the basis of a similar situation. Goldmann is extending Piagets genetic epistemology beyond the individual per se and using it as a foundation for understanding the nature of group behavior.15 Human beings develop sets of mental structures as a result of a common social background and these serve as a foundation for what they can, do, and should project as life possibilities. In reference to class, we might say that what they can project at a given moment is what Lukcs called empirical consciousness, and what
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they should project corresponds to class conciousness. The immediate political question, of course, revolves around what they do project, particularly since these mental structures are always in processes of structuration and destructuration. An individual is part of many, differently composed, transindividual subjects and thus has numerous sets of mental structures of varying consequence. Some transindividual subjects may have but temporary reality (like three men moving a piano), while others may be long lasting, like families, social groups, and classes.16 Thus proletarians will have a set of mental structures (among others) because of their place in the relations production. In another context, as Goldmann brilliantly demonstrated in his classic Le Dieu cach, we can see in Pascals and Racines works the expression of a tragic vision du monde elaborated from the mental structures of a social group, the noblesse de robe in 17th century France. Goldmann classifies mental structures as non-conscious and implicit, although specifying what he means by analogous illustration rather than by definition: when I run I am not conscious of the physical foundation of my action (i.e., I do not decide step by step where my feet are to land or to quicken my heart voluntarily). Similarly, I am not conscious of the structure of formal logic, although I use it regularly.17 In any event, Goldmann wants us to clearly differentiate the Freudian notion of the unconsious from his own use of non-conscious. The structures of Goldmanns concepts of community and transindividual subject parallel one another; he seeks a synthetic relation of each with the individual. Neither the whole nor the part is negated, both are affirmed as necessary, and cannot be imagined as separate. How fundamental this very Hegelian conception is to the entirety of Goldmanns thought can be seen by comparing it to his methodological strictures for the human sciences, strictures whose theoretical elaboration as genetic structuralism preoccupies so much of his writing. Stressing totality as the fundamental methodological concept in the human sciences, Goldmann unceasingly insisted that in the study of society, history, and culture, every partial fact only takes on its true meaning (signification) by being placed in the whole, in the same way that the whole can only be understood through progress in knowledge of partial truths. The advance of knowledge thus appears as a perpetual oscillation between the parts and the whole, which must elucidate each other . . .18 This dialectic in which the part is never apart from the whole nor extinguished by it is the same principle, then, that structures his methodology and his politics; in the latter the whole becomes the human community and the individual its parts. We see this more specifically formulated again in his book on Kant in which he distinguishes three basic visions du monde or philosophical systems: the individualist/atomist vision, the vision tolalitaire and the vision of the person and the community.19 He tells us that in the individualist/atomist system, the principle referents of ethics are the individual and freedom, the
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principle cosmological categories are the atom or monad, the central psychological categories are the image and sensation, and its chief general philosophical expressions are rationalism and empiricism. The whole can be conceived here solely as a composite of independent parts interacting within the framework of reified universality. Similarly, a community, as something extending beyond autonomous individual entities pursuing their own self-interests, (as in the model of the liberal market economy and so much of liberal ethics) is hardly conceivable. In contrast, the essential categories of the vision totalitaire are the whole and the universe. Its basic social referent is the collective and its central ethical term is feeling (expressed in intuition or revelation). Its principle physical category is the Life Principle (e.g., the soul or lan vital). This vision is essentially the antithesis of the atomist/ individualist one, and in it the part or the individual is completely lost in a whole, be the whole defined as God, nation, class or otherwise. Finally, the vision of the person and the community is, for Goldmann, encapsulated in what he called the Kantian formula that states that the universe and the human community form a whole in which the very existence of the parts presupposes their union in the whole, while simultaneously the autonomy of the parts and the reality of the whole constitute reciprocal relations.20 In the vision of the person and the community (my emphasis) Goldmann sees a total solution to the onesidedness of the two other visions, each of which respectively recognizes only the individual or the collectivity.21 The development of a philosophy representing the person and the community is only in its formative stages, writes Goldmann adding that crucial steps in its elaboration were taken by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Lukcs.22 The foundation of Goldmanns politics his quest for authentic community is thus rooted in his hope for a dialectical transcendence of atomistic individualism (which negates community) and collectivism (which negates the individual). The whole in a socialist community is not composed of autonomous unconnected atoms (in which case it would not really be a whole), nor is the whole to be an undifferentiated totality in which the parts lose their reality. The transindividual subject, as a sort of ideal type, is homologously structured: an individual consciousness is conceived of as a relatively autonomous entity which is nonetheless of necessity part of a larger whole in that its (his or her, that is) mental structures are rooted in those of a social group(s). For a socialist community, as for the transindividual subject, there is an unceasing dialectical oscillation between the whole and the parts; as Marx put it, the individual is differentiated within the social reality. We noted earlier that Goldmann, having argued that Kant believed mans authentic destiny entails an unceasing striving for the absolute, claimed that the critical philosophy reaches this goal only subjectively, in aesthetics. In the Critique of Judgment Kant sought to demonstrate that there are universally valid intersubjective judgments of taste based on a harmony of our faculties of understanding and imagination. This judgment is subjective but universal in that a given object ought to induce (but cannot compel) pleasure because it appeals to what is common in all men, whatever their individual
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idiosyncrasies.23 Similarly, Goldmann seeks a socialism which will make the individual part of a whole (the community) on the basis of what ties him as a human being to all other human beings and not because of a compulsion that negates his individual personality. In his study on Kant, Goldmann argues that communication implies that an individual must at least be able to transform what is immediately given in experience in such a way that his comprehension will allow its similar apprehension by another person.24 This is a matter of form, or rather, mental structures. There is, he suggests, a minimum of form necessary to render understanding possible between human beings; parallel to this a maximum can be posed as well that would correspond to an ideal community.25 This seems to imply something of an ideal type analogous to the very process of perfect communication. Socialist community for (at least the young) Goldmann aims to create a whole man, one not beset by the dualisms generated by the very structure of reified capitalist society: form and content, fact and value, subject and object, individual and community etc. In a reified world, man as subject dwells in a universe of objects which appear entirely external to him even though he helped create them. Form, that which orders his experience and enables him to communicate with others, is faced with the content of such social relations atomistic, egoistic individuals selfishly pursuing their own goals. By contrast, common ends in a cooperatively organized society would unite form and content by uniting mans essential sociability with cooperative social relations. Hence form and content would be common to the lives of men as part of an apparently fully (or almost fully) elaborated transindividual subject. The notion of transindividuality, while only anticipated in Kant and explicated fully later in Goldmanns career, thus plays a dual role in his thought as the basis for defining and understanding collective (group or class) behavior, and as a (admittedly somewhat elusive) model for socialist community.26 All this clarifies little about what an authentic community entails, let alone what it would actually look like and how it would come about. It is an irony of Goldmanns intellectual journey that he only began to specify these matters at a time (the late 1950s and 1960s) when he was abandoning the traditional Marxist view of the revolutionary proletariat. However, to determine what he was implying by his incessant use of the term authentic he never defines it we must engage in a brief historical sociology of his thought and turn to his introduction to Marxism in his youth. Goldmann was born in 1913 in Botosani, a town in northeastern Rumania, to a more or less assimilated Jewish family. At about the age of 15 his mother enrolled him in Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair (The Young Guard), a Zionist Socialist youth movement in which he was very active for about three years. Founded in pre-World War I Galicia, this movement was deeply influcenced by German and Polish romantic anti-capitalism, particularly as manifested in the various German youth movements. Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair was marked by extreme hostility to bourgeois life and a search for a a rigorously ethical youth community in which the individual would be fulfilled. In Botosani as elsewhere its members underwent intensive political and cultural education:
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We instilled in them a vision of the world, according to the former head of Goldmanns chapter.27 Without being religious, comments one historian, its members were imbued with a religious spirit in the sense of a moral revivalism and inner faith.28 In the mid to late 1920s the years of Goldmanns membership Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair incorporated Marxism into its world-view. Here Goldmann first studied Marxism, and also came into contact with the work of Max Adler, with whom he would later study in Vienna. When Goldmann quit Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair in 1930 (the chapter split and he went into the Communist underground) certain themes of his own thought, rooted in romantic anti-capitalism and predominant in Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair ideology, had undoubtedly begun to take shape: humanism, secular religiosity (in Le Dieu cach he argued that Marxism was a non-transcendent religion based on a wager on humanitys future similar to Pascals wager on Gods existence), and a vision of socialism as the realization of the individual in a community. Writing on Chagall three decades later Goldmann compared the artist to Racine who, having quit the Jansenist world for the world tout court, saw the latter in the very categories of the former.29 Goldmann could just as easily have been describing himself. Romantic anti-capitalism, which in an earlier decade had profoundly influenced Lukcs as well,30 largely rested on the contraposition, made most famous by Tnnies, of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). The former was identified with Kultur and ethical, aesthetic, organic spiritual ideals while the latter was envisioned as Zivilisation, an Anglo-French mechanical, external, material world of technical-economic advance.31 Romantic anti-capitalism cast its eyes back to a supposed world not yet contaminated by Zivilisation with its rationalization and quantification of all aspects of life. Goldmanns quest for authentic community, as well as his methodological opposition to scientism, positivism, rationalism, and empiricism may in part be viewed as a Marxist reworking and attempted transcendence of the issues raised by the Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft dichotomy. Goldmanns use of authenticity must furthermore be viewed in light of the theory of reification and Lukcs contribution to it. In one of his many discussions of reification, Goldmann stated that,
The natural, healthy relation among men and goods is in effect that of production that is consciously regulated for future consumption, by the concrete qualities of objects, by their use-value.32
Following Marx and Lukcs he insists that in production for the market, exchange-value becomes the dominant reality and key mediating force in social relations. He writes:
In economic life, which is the most important part of modern social life, all authentic relations with the qualitative aspects of objects and human beings (des objets et des tres) tend to disappear both in the relations between men and things as well as in inter-human relations in order to be replaced by a mediated, degraded relation of purely quantitive exchange-values. Naturally, use-values continue to exist and even govern the whole of
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economic life in the last instance; but their impact (leur action) takes on an implicit character.33 Goldmann explicitly views this implicitness as inauthenticity here. With the rise of capitalism and the primacy of exchange-value in all aspects of life, we have the first social system in which economics per se dominates all modes of existence. Furthermore, To the extent that the influence of the economy on other domains of life grows progressively while, inversely, the influence of these domains on economics tends to disappear, the result is a paradoxical situation in which in the best of cases spiritual life attains a subjective authenticity which is the counterpart of its objective inauthenticity.34 In a 1958 essay (originally a lecture) devoted entirely to reification, Goldmann asserted that while, in principle, religion, art, morality etc. are neither autonomous realities nor simple reflexes of economics, they increasingly become such reflexes as capitalism develops. Their authenticity, as it were, is drained as they become more and more enmeshed in the market and as the apparition of an autonomous economic whole penetrates all human manifestations and remakes them in its own image.35 In the above passages, authenticity clearly denotes something based on qualitative human needs i.e. those not derived from or dependent on quantitative factors. Authenticity rests on the distinction between use and exchange value with the former viewed as natural and healthy, qualitative and immediate, and the latter seen as reifying, quantitative and unhealthy. Classical Marxism, insists Goldmann, saw in the disappearance of reification a return to the human and to the meaningful.36 We may therefore conclude that if, in capitalism, relations take on the appearance of interaction among things, authentic (i.e. socialist) relations would, in some way, eliminate the mediation of the market in human interchange. Goldmanns contrast between authentic and inauthentic also echoes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic life in Lukcs early essay on The Metaphysics of Tragedy in Soul and Forms. Here the young Lukcs, deeply influenced by romantic anti-capitalism and Kantian themes, consumed by the questions of death and mans limits, radically opposed authentic life to everyday, empirical existence.37 Goldmann saw in Soul and Forms a foundation text of existentialism and contrasted it to History and Class Consciousness; the latter, a Marxist text, recognized that what Soul and Forms saw as immutable categories and conditions of human existence were in fact historically placed and historically conditioned realities. Thus at the heart of History and Class Consciousness is the question of the consciousness of a class and its potential historical consciousness; in Lukcs distinction between class and empirical consciousness we find the earlier distinction between authentic and inauthentic life in a new and historically concretized form. Furthermore, if we follow him in linking the thought of Lukcs to that of Heidegger, Goldmanns use of the term authentic is also clarified.38 While recognizing how antithetical these thinkers were, he nonetheless insisted on a fundamental homology in their categories of thought that could be traced to
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the milieu of late 19th and early 20th century German philosophy in which they both developed. This was especially evident if one compared Lukcs concept of totality (as elaborated in History and Class Consciousness) and Heideggers notion of Being (in Being and Time):
The fundamental problem common to Lukcs and Heidegger is that of the inseparability of man from meaning (du sens) and the world, that of the identity of subject and object: when man understands the world, he understands the meaning of Dasein, the meaning of his being and inversely, it is in understanding his own being that he is able to understand the world . . . What Heidegger tells us of Being is already there in Lukcs in relation to totality. Being is . . . a fundamental reality beginning from which Dasein questions. Its character is temporal, meaningful (significatif) and historical.39
Dasein (Being-there), briefly, is Heideggers term for Man as an entity capable of inquiry into his own Being. Heidegger envisions authenticity as explicit self-awareness, a self-determined existence created by ones own choices and actions. This entails assuming full responsibility for oneself and ones choices, as well as the pursuit of such a self-determined life in constant awareness of death, ones ultimate, omnipresent limit. Authenticity is fullness of Being of the self-conscious and self-determining I. Inauthenticity, then, is a form of alienation; it is ones definition through others and is directed towards the present, rather than towards the future, the possible. Death, Daseins finitude, is not faced. Inauthentic Being means that one is determined by the they (i.e. by others) rather than by the I.40 If Being and Totality function similarly for the authors of Being and Time and History and Class Consciousness, authenticity for Goldmann must denote the self-conscious self-determination of the We, ultimately a self-conscious transindividual subject, a fully realized human community. In his earliest essay on Lukcs and Heidegger which appeared as an appendix to his Kant book Goldmann wrote that true and false consciousness in Lukcs was transformed into authentic and inauthentic being in Heidegger. He goes on to argue that Being and Time was, in part, a response to History and Class Consciousness, although in Heidegger, From the community of the we, only the one remains (De la communaut du Nous, il nest rest que le On).41 But in what form shall this we make its historical appearance? We have seen that Goldmann envisions an authentic community as the embodiment of a self-determined, transindividual social existence, the condition for the realization of the individual. However, Goldmann was frequently at pains to emphasize that it was the emergence of the liberal capitalist market economy in the first place that allowed for the emergence of our modern notion of the individual. The individual, he argued, is threatened both by the elimination of the market and by the creation of central state planning under communism, as well as by the emergence of post-World War II organized capitalism in the West with its monopolies and large scale state intervention into the economy for its regulation. The consequence of organized capitalism was the stabilization of Western societies and their ability to integrate oppositional forces including the proletariat more and more through rising living
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standards and creating a culture of mass consumerism in which people live in a Club Mediterrane of the mind.42 Influenced by the work of Serge Mallet, Andr Gorz, and the New Working Class theories prominent in the French New Left, Goldmann asserted that the old Marxist schema of impoverishment of the proletariat was no longer valid in the West because the middle strata of society, rather than becoming proletarianized, had been transformed and had taken on an entirely new character. As a function of the technologically advanced and organized nature of contemporary capitalism, a new dependent wage-earning middle strata of specialists and technicians had replaced les notables, the traditional independent middle classes. Throughout the 1960s Goldmann repeatedly projected the possibility that a law of diminishing returns would radicalize these technicians; while their expertise made them recipients of good wages for narrow jobs, the higher their standards of living, the less value they would find in only struggling to increase them.43 Hence, theirs would be an integration contestatrice increasingly frustrating for them and impelling them more and more to struggle for meaningful working conditions and labor. Turned against hierarchy and the notion of a life-time in a well-renumerated niche, they would struggle to expand their roles in decision-making and ultimately would demand autogestion, self-management, bringing the traditional proletariat with them. All these arguments led Goldmann politically to the same place indicated by his conception of authenticity; to autogestion as the embodiment of socialist community. Goldmann never wrote a detailed program for a socit autogestionaire but did delineate its broad principles on several occasions, most explicitly in a roundtable Dbat sur autogestion with Serge Mallet and others under the auspices of Le Nouvel Observateur in July 1968. Here he suggested that autogestion ultimately entails the complete suppression of the state, and a market socialism in which industries are owned, managed and operated by the workers. Governed by a comit de directeurs held accountable to a conseil de gestion representing the personnel as a whole, an enterprise in such a system would allow for the various competencies required of advanced industry while refusing privilege to those occupying specialized positions and maintaining linstance supreme de decision on important matters in the hands of the workers as a whole or their representatives.44 In Goldmanns view, a completely self-managed society was a far distant prospect and in the meantime a balance between democratic planning and decentralization of the economy would have to be sought. Traditional Marxism, he argued, conceptualized socialism in terms of the suppression of the market, the socialization of the means of production, and the establishment of economic planning in order to synthesize: 1. rationally organized production and distribution of goods, 2. a concrete realization of the values of liberty, equality, and community, 3. the qualitative aspects of psychic life and inter-human relations which characterized precapitalist societies . . ., and 4. the absence of exploitation and social class divisions which characterized primitive communism.45 This formulation is no longer sustainable given the experiences of this century, particularly in the Soviet Union. Furthermore,
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while the evils of Stalinism were undoubtedly the product of concrete historical circumstances, they were integrally linked to the abolition of the market and its replacement by an economy entirely controlled by a central authority.46 Formal though they may be under capitalism, Goldmann insisted on the intrinsic importance as well as the necessity of the values of liberty and the individual for a socialist society, one of whose goals would be to make them concrete. Since the market of liberal capitalism was the condition of their emergence, and since the abolition of that condition fundamentally threatened them, Goldmann concluded that the market had to be retained in some form if a socialist community was to be realized that did not negate them. Thus while the more autogestion and decentralization the more free and socialist a society would be, the more autogestion is extended, the more it constitutes in certain respects although having a socialist character a return to a liberal economy, in contrast to both organized capitalism or a Soviet command economy.47 The key question, as he posed it, was, To what extent the suppression of private property in the means of production, tied to far-reaching decentralization, to a reduction (but not suppression) of central planning, and finally to the maintenance of the market, and consequently of an economic sector of social life, can permit the creation of a socialist society which will suppress the negative elements of reification and extreme quantification, while simultaneously safeguarding and reinforcing traditional values linked to the market, notably individual liberty, equality, and tolerance.48 In the end, Goldmanns argument undermines his quest at least in part. In his view of community Goldmann, the student of Lukcs, emphasized the human debilitation caused by reification and identified it as an essential aspect of the inauthenticity that socialism and qualitative human relations were to overcome. In his essay on reification, Goldmann was unequivocal in asserting that reification was an inevitable consequence of the market economy of liberal capitalism. However, he simultaneously insisted on the fundamental link between sustaining a market and maintaining those values born of it. This, on a political philosophical level, leads him to advocate market socialism. What is never reconciled, however, is the fact that on one hand the market creates reification (by necessitating exchange-values) and a vision du monde radically at odds with Goldmanns idea of authentic community, while on the other the market is the prerequisite of that community. In short, Goldmanns goal is detotalized, and this parallels not only a shift he made in his methodological writings, but demonstrates just how elusive the notion of totality tends to become. For both Lukcs and Goldmann totality was at once a central principle of Marxist method and a vision of political aspiration.50 Lukcs argued that the perspective of totality was to be attained by a class, the proletariat, whose class situation becomes comprehensible only if the whole of society can be understood, and from whose viewpoint self-knowledge coincides with knowledge of the whole.51 The proletariat is, as such, potentially an identical subject-object. For Lukcs, following Marxs analysis
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of the fetishism of commodities, the entire structure of capitalism could be found embodied in the commodity form; self-knowledge (i.e. class consciousness) of the worker therefore entailed grasping the structure of society as a whole. It is because of this identity of subject and object that Lukcs can speak of totality as the perspective of the proletariat. Goldmann came to argue in his methodological writings that the notion of subject-object identity was too radical, too idealistic, and too Hegelian a formulation for the simple reason that thought is an important aspects but only an aspect of reality.52 This, however, does not mean that subject and object are opposed to one another. On the contrary, Goldmanns entire analysis of transindividuality and mental structures seeks to demonstrate that in the social, historical, cultural, and political worlds the subject is always part of the object of knowledge and the object is always partially within the subject. The key word is partial; one can speak only of a partial identity of subject and object. Now, for the author of History and Class Consciousness totality was predicated on full identity. Hence the following question inevitably arises: if we speak of partial identity, are we not compelled to speak of a partial totality and what sense can be made of something as self-evidently contradictory as a partial totality? Politically, we would seem to be left with community as a Kantian idea of reason, to be sought in history by the actions of men and women but, in the end, never fully achieved. At the heart of Goldmanns endeavour was a belief system which he likened quite unabashedly to religion. Risk he wrote in Le Dieu cach, possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements in the human condition . . .53 The realization of socialist community was a question of objective possibility, not inevitability. Marxism was based on a wager of humanitys future and its historical possibilities analogous to Blaise Pascals wager on the existence of God. Throughout his life Goldmann was intrigued and haunted by the image of Deus absconditus, in his last years he seemed to be a man searching for a transindividual subject capable of winning his wager. He greeted the Paris Events of 1968 with enormous enthusiasm and felt that they had both affirmed and challenged his own thinking. In the following two years until his death in 1970 years in which the left retreated he began a never completed process of reevaluation and even started to question basic terms of Marxist discourse.54 Nineteen-sixty-eight did, however, convince him that the traditional proletariat yet had a powerful role to play.55 While his writings remained optimistic, in private he became much less so. In Kant he had praised great thinkers for their capacity to sense, at least in a confused manner, the limits of their own vision while for the epigoni everything is clear and nothing poses a problem.56 Perhaps Goldmann too sensed the limits of his own vision and aspirations.
NOTES
1. Lucien Goldmann, Introduction a la philosophie de Kant. (Hereafter, IPK) (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) pp. 203-5. Goldmann (1913-1970) grew up in Botosani, Rumania where he was first active in the socialist Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair movement and then in the communist underground. He continued his
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radical activities while studying law at the University of Bucharest before going to Vienna in 1933 to study briefly with Max Adler. Goldmann moved to Paris where he continued his studies and then spent World War II in Switzerland where he worked with Jean Piaget. In Paris after the war he completed a doctorat dtat at the Sorbonne, secured a position at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes and also founded the center for the sociology of literature at the Free University of Brussels. He played a major role in bringing Lukcs work to France. In addition to his book on Kant, Goldmanns writings include: Sciences humaines et philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1952), Le Dieu cach: tude sur la vision tragique dans les Penses de Pascal et dans le thtre de Racine (Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 1955), Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), Structures mentales et creation culturelle (Paris:Anthropos, 1970), Marxisme et sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), La Creation culturelle dans la societ moderne (Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1971), Epistmologie et philosophie politique (Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1978). 2. Ibid. p. 309. 3. Goldmann writes that ... Hume had directed his attacks against the concept of cause and even in Kants first works ... the entire edifice of the intelligible world rested on this concept. It is because the form of the sensible world (time and space) must have a cause that there necessarily exists an intelligible world, a God, taught Kant. Cause is only a way of designating the association of empirical representations. Hence Hume affirmed that one does not have the right on the basis of the notion of cause to conclude that something exists which is not empirically given. IPK p. 132. 4. Ibid. pp. 130-36. 5. Ibid. p. 242. For a critique of Goldmann on Kant, see especially Patrick Riley, Kants Political Philosophy (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Little Field, 1983) pp. 143-46. 6. Ibid. p. 135. 7. Ibid. pp. 253-54. See (pp. 224-5) of this essay. 8. Shortly after his book on Kant was first published (1945), Goldmann revised this geneology and placed Pascal before Kant as the first of modern dialectical thinkers. 9. IPK p. 199. 10. Lucien Goldmann, Le Matrialisme dialectique est-il une philosophie? inRecherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) p. 18. 11. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1973) p. 84. 12. Ibid. 13. LucienGoldmann,LeDieucach:tudesurlavisiontragiquedanslesPensesdePascaletdanslethtre de Racine (Hereafter, DC) (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) p.25. 14. Lucien Goldmann, Reflections on History and Class Consciousness in Istvn Mszros, editor, Aspects of History and Class Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) p. 72. 15. Goldmann, who named his own method genetic structuralism, was less interested in Piagets schema of the stages of a childs development than with the theory of the processes of knowledge and learning that the Swiss psychologist articulated. These processes were based on the genesis and evolution of mental operations within the individual that Piaget characterized as structured wholes. These mental structures underlie our experiences and our possibilities of learning. Never static, they are always structurating and destructurating. Every individual, like every organism, strives to adapt to and thus seeks an equilibrium with its environment. The individual develops mental structures through this interaction, accommodating to external realities by modifying already present structures and going through a process of assimilation in which he/she acts on the environment on the basis of those structures. The subject of knowledge is thus always active. Goldmann insisted that Piagets work confirmed Marxs epistemology and that both represented a dialectical understanding of the relation between human beings and the world around them. Goldman persuaded Piaget to reconsider Marx as well. For Goldmann on Marx and Piaget see Goldmanns La Psychologic de Jean Piaget and Lpistemologie de Jean Piaget in Recherche dialectiques politique (Paris: Denol/Gonthier, 1978). For Piaget on his relation with Goldmann see Jean Piaget, Bref tmoignage, in Hommage Lucien Goldmann: Lucien Goldmann et la sociologie de la litterature (Bruxelles: Editions de 1Universit de Bruxelles, 1974). For Piaget on Marx, Lukcs and Goldmann, see Jean Piaget, Introduction a lpistmologie genetique, Vol. III (Paris: PUF, 1950; pp. 198-202, 249, 250-1. 16. Goldmann, Reflections on History and Class Consciousness p. 82. 17. Lucien Goldmann, Structure: Human Reality and Methodological Concept, in Richard Macksey
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andEugenioDonate,editors.TheStructuralistControversy:TheLanguagesofCriticismandtheSciences of Man (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1972) p. 101. 18. DC pp. 14-15. 19. I summarize and paraphrase from IPK pp. 61-4. 20. IPK p. 64. 21. Ibid, 22. Goldmanns use of the world person undoubtedly reflects the influence of French Personalism on him. This group of radical Catholics was centered around the journal Esprit and in particular its editor Emmanuel Mounier who rose to prominence in the mid-1930s when Goldmann arrived for his first stay in Paris. Mounier saw the socialist person as part of a community, part of a we in contrast to the individual who represented egotistical bourgeois man. The person, he argued, could ... be defined as a movement towards a transpersonal condition which reveals itself in the experiences of community and of the attainment of values at the same time. Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism,) (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952) p. 70. Mounier characterized his own vision as tragic optimism and saw the animating principles of Marxism as those of a secularized Christianity (Ibid., p. 70). All these notions parallel Goldmannian themes and Goldmann not only placed Personalism directly on the path begun by Kant and leading to Marx and Lukcs (IPK p. 41) but at one point he also asserted that after Lukcs, Personalism was the most important philosophical event in the years before World War II, IPK p. 308. 23. The judgment of taste exacts agreement from everyone; and a person who describes something as beautiful insists that everyone ought to give the object in question his approval and follow suit in describing it as beautiful. The ought in aesthetic judgments, therefore, despite an accordance with the requisite data for passing judgment, is still only pronounced conditionally. We are suitors for agreement from every one else, because we are fortified with a ground common to all. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, J. W. Meredith, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 82. 24. IPK pp. 160-1. 25. IPK p. 160. 26. The use of transindividual subject becomes an intrinsic part of Goldmanns vocabulary in the 1960s but the concept itself informs not only IPK but all of his writings in the 1950s. Cf Sciences humaines et philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1952) and DC. 27. Authors interview with David Zoller, former head of Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair in Botosani, July 10, 1980, in Rehovot, Israel. 28. Elkana Margalit, Social and Intellectual Origins of the Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement 1913-1920,Journal of Contemporary History.IV:2,April 1969, p. 34. See also MargalitsHa-Shomer ha-TsairMeadatnearimle-Marksismmahpkhani 1913-1936)(HaShomerhaTsairFromYouth Community to Revolutionary Marxist 1913-1936) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University and Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1971). For an analysis of the movements development in the 1920s, especially see pp. 149-54 and pp. 292-96. 29. Lucien Goldmann, Discussion following his presentation of Sur la peinture de Chagall, in Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure, Maurice de Gandillac, Lucien Goldmann and Jean Piaget, editors. (Paris and the Hague: Mouton and Co., 1965) pp. 169-70. Although it is speculation, one wonders if Goldmanns experiences in Ha-Shomer ha-Tsairs youth community had an impact on his sympathy for the 1968 student revolt and if his advocacy of autogestion, a decentralized self-managed socialism, might similarly have been effected by Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair since this movement saw its ideals realized in the Palestinian (later Israeli) kibbutzim, self-managed collective farm communities. 30. See in particular the fine study by one of Goldmanns students, Michael Lwy, Georg LukcsFrom Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1979). Lwys book has especially informed my treatment of romantic anti-capitalism. 31. See Ferdinand Tonnies Community and Society (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963). 32. Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) p. 37. 33. Ibid. p. 38. 34. LucienGoldmann,Civilisationetconomie,inLhistoireetsesinterprtations:Entretiensautourde Arnold Toynbee sous la direction de Raymond Aron (Paris and the Hague: Mouton and Co., 1961) p. 83. 35. Lucien Goldmann, La relocation in Recherches dialectiques p. 68. 36. Ibid. p. 102.
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37. Lukcs expressed his agony in these terms: Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends; new confusing voices always mingle with the chorus of those who have been heard before ... To live is to live something through to the end: but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through to the end. Life is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable existences; one can only describe it negatively by saying that something always happens to disturb and interrupt the flow. Georg Lukcs, The Metaphysics of Tragedy, in Soul and Forms (London: Merlin Press) pp. 153-4. 38. The relation between Lukcs and Heidegger preoccupied Goldmann from his earliest writings. An essay on the two thinkers appeared as an appendix to the original German edition of IPK but was dropped from the French translations. 39. LucienGoldmann,LukcsandHeidegger:FragmentsposthumestablisetpresentsparYoussefIshaghpour (Paris: Denol/Gonthier, 1973) pp. 106-7. This volume is composed of materials Goldmann worked on shortly before his death. 40. Heidegger writes, The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way ... As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the they and must first find itself. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962) p. 167. 41. Lucien Goldmann, Lukcs et Heidegger, in Le structuralisme gntique: Loeuvre et linfluence de Lucien Goldmann (Paris: Denol/Gonthier, 1977) pp. 217-8.This essay is the French translation of the original appendix to IPK. 42. LucienGoldmann,Pouvoirethumanisme,inMarxismeetscienceshumaines(Paris:Gallimard,1970) p. 349. 43. Goldmann, Reflections on History and Class Consciousness, pp. 79-81. 44. Lucien Goldmann, discussion in Goldmann, Serge Mallet et al., Debat sur Fautogestion, in Autogestion: Etudes, debats, documents. Cahiers 7 (December 1968) pp. 67-8. 45. Lucien Goldmann, conomie et sociologie: propos du Trait dconomie politique dOscar Lange, in Marxisme et sciences humaines, pp. 215-216. 46. Lucien Goldmann, La philosophic des lumires, in Structures mentales et creation culturelle (Paris: Anthropos, 1970) p. 124. 47. Goldmann, Dbat sur lautogestion, p. 66. 48. Goldmann, Economie et sociologie . . .p. 218. 49. Goldmann, La reification, p. 68. 50. See George Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) p. 198. 51. Ibid., p. 20. 52. Lucien Goldmann, La sociologie de la litterature: statut et problmes de methode, Marxisme et sciences humaines, p. 55. 53. DC p. 337. 54. Lucien Goldmann, Revolution et bureaucratic, in Lhomme et la socit 21 (July-September 1969), p. 79. 55. Goldmann, Preface to Marxisme et sciences humaines, p. 8. 56. IPK p. 205.

2.8 - Cohen, Mitchell - The Concept of Community in The Thought of Lucien Goldmann (En)

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THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY IN THE THOUGHT OF LUCIEN GOLDMANN*

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