By RAFAEL DE ALMEIDA ANDRADE*
Kindness appears as a mediating value between the individual and gender that goes beyond normative relations, the in-itself of bourgeois society.
“I have not desired nor do I desire anything more than to live without idle time” (Simone de Beauvoir)
The essay I am writing has as its sole and exclusive objective “life”. The life I am referring to is authentic life, the one in which men can establish a relationship of essentiality beyond the reification and alienation of the bourgeois way of life. The text is based on some notes left by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on ethics, life and goodness. For the György Lukács of his youth, especially in 1911, in the dialogue On poverty of spirit – the “good man no longer interprets the soul of another, he deciphers it as if it were his own
same, because it became the other.
Therefore, goodness is a miracle, grace and redemption – it is the “kingdom of heaven coming down to earth”.[I] The good man relates to others in an immediate way, kindness (Deck) is the means of overcoming the chaos of an estranged life, not in a conceptual way, that is, purely formal, but in a living and real way, because I recognize the other in myself, it is the “reunion of man with his true homeland”.[ii]
The reunion with one's true homeland is the recomposition of unity between the individual and the community (human race); kindness is a return to life, it is communion with one's fellow man. In this way, the virtue of kindness resides in the relationship with the other. If the bourgeois world and its formal ethics conceive of individuals as isolated and separated from one another, kindness is “capable of imploding forms.”[iii]. Thus, those who possess the ontological quality of goodness “do not allow themselves to be enslaved by individualism, but transcending the limits of the self, make the sufferings and joys of other human beings their own.”[iv]
Bourgeois society is the society of moral obligations and duties, of
protocol life, of social conventions and their institutions, in which life must be controlled. The young György Lukács, especially after overcoming his tragic ethics, summarized in Metaphysics of tragedy (1910), conceives the subject as us, as a social collectivity (humanity), which finds itself in crisis – atomized, split by the bourgeois way of life.
We can say that the construction of authentic life is linked to a universal ethic, which aims at the “humanization of the world” and this ethic necessarily needs to postulate the human being as unitary, generic.[v] The bourgeois ethic of duty is individualistic, goodness is communal, and is intimately linked to setting in motion a praxis positive that goes beyond the merely individual, as it follows a path that suspends all contingency and can transform into human heritage.
The bourgeois way of life imposes several barriers on our relationships that make it increasingly difficult to establish authentically human social bonds. Bourgeois society is established by an abstract split between the individual and gender, the sensitive being and the intelligible being, sensitivity and reason – the old Kantian dualism between the homo phaenomenon e homo noumenon. The abstract objectivity imposed by bourgeois relations presents itself in a form displaced from man's activity, and that “[…] an immediate consequence of this, of man being estranged from the product of his work, from his vital activity and from his generic being, is the estrangement of man from man himself”.[vi]
This estrangement of man from man himself, a product of the relations of production, can be easily seen in everyday relationships, where the bourgeois man is the solitary man in search of meaning, the experiences of these men are always approximate, trapped in themselves, it is the solipsistic world.
György Lukács on his unfinished project – Notes on Dostoevsky 1914-15 – finds in the Russian community a counterpoint to the formalist ethics of the Western bourgeois world, in which the characters in their actions transgress social conventions and norms (first ethics) through the personification of a second ethics. György Lukács is looking for an ethics of action, on which a new world can be established, beyond the bourgeois world, a world in which souls can once again find connection with each other. Thus, kindness appears as an action that goes beyond the pure normative and artificial relationship of the objective spirit and manages to reestablish an essential, real and effective relationship, beyond alienated and reified relationships.
These actions establish a reality in which the relationship between self and other is not abstract, but real and human. The second ethic is established by the action of individuals who seek themselves, but it is not a solitary path, since it is only possible to find oneself when the soul connects with other souls, that is, when it finds its fellow man. In this way, as Soria (1976) points out,[vii] Based on Dostoevsky, Lukács does not establish a simple relationship of “being-with-others”, but of “being-with-them”, that is, man in a deep relationship with his fellow man, allowing a relationship in which, “the timeless essence of the soul manifests itself with a supratemporal bond of the soul”[viii], thus creating a new type of relationship, an essential relationship, in which it is possible to establish a connection between one soul and another, that is, what György Lukács proposes in Of poverty of spirit: the “reunion of man with his true homeland”, a humanly human relationship.
For us, goodness is intimately linked to human emancipation and the specificity of the human race for-itself. A fully emancipated society can only exist and maintain itself through the objective transformation of the world, but the for-itself of the human race, that is, the consciously aimed practice, takes place within capitalist reification itself. the praxis Ethics are linked to class consciousness and political organization and must constantly aim for the “democracy of everyday life”[ix]. The working class has no utopia beforehand that can be introduced by decree, only through struggle and a long historical process of transformations of social contexts and men can the elements be freed germ of the new society.[X]
The alienation and reification of the bourgeois way of life is not a disease that can be cured with doses of medicine every eight hours, but demands a process in which a praxis conscious of objective and subjective transformation, and which has as its core the action of men faced with the alternatives presented.
Goodness appears as a mediating value between the individual and gender that goes beyond normative relations, the in-itself of bourgeois society, and sets in motion a duty-to-be of a society guided by community, equity, solidarity and fraternity that opposes barbarism, indifference and individualism. Ethical action has as its central core the self-awareness of the inseparable unity between the human individual and the human gender, that is, it is the self-awareness that one is not separated from the social totality, but is both the product and the producer of the social totality. Thus Lukács emphasizes: “The task of a materialist ontology made historical is […] to show that man, as simultaneously the producer and the product of society, achieves in his being-man something higher than being simply an exemplar of an abstract gender, that gender – at this ontological level, at the level of the developed social being – is no longer a mere generalization to which the various exemplars are 'mutely' linked; is to show that these, on the contrary, rise to the point of acquiring an increasingly clearly articulated voice, until they reach the ontological-social synthesis of their singularity, converted into individuality, with the human race, converted in them, in turn, into something conscious of itself”.[xi]
According to György Lukács, the correctness of socialist consciousness is above all the awareness of the path it must follow, “the purpose in its general principles, its respective means in their particularity, specific and often changeable, and of the next steps in their peculiarity”[xii]. In this way, goodness is inserted in the field of concrete action, that is, a position taken before the world, in which “within whose concrete sphere concrete decisions are taken by the human being, and a concrete antinomy that induces him to make responsible choices”[xiii].
Thus, kindness presupposes a responsibility on the part of the individual, as it implies praxis and is not limited to mere denial, but sets in motion a decision that is based on the human race, which “inseparably contains a social antidote, the duty to promote a social counter-power in opposition”[xiv]. For György Lukács, “since the purpose is to provoke concrete social actions on the part of the greatest possible number of people, the means used and the fate of the people involved are equally objects of responsibility”.[xv]
For the Hungarian philosopher,[xvi] the fight against abstract relations can only be waged through the historical-social positions of the alternatives that arise in human life, and this fight effectively enters an intense phase, when men are placed between conflicting moral alternatives, in which “they have to make a decision and are obliged and willing to draw all the consequences of this. In this way, the moral sphere surpasses itself in the conflict”[xvii], that is, the moral sphere surpasses itself when an encounter erupts, a connection between me and the other in their alterity, between individual and society, becoming an ethical action.
Thus, ethical action is based on: “[…] expressing the entirety of one’s aspirations and truly externalizing one’s personality (great ethical actions or greatest works of art are privileged examples of these superior objectifications in which the aspiration for self-determination of the human race is realized)”.[xviii]
We understand that kindness is an ethical category, as it goes beyond, at the same time, the abstract and normative relations of bourgeois society and individualistic aspirations, as kindness implies a relationship with the other, a praxis which aims at the realization of the other. The externalization and objectification of goodness affects society as a whole “and, ultimately, the very destiny of the human race”[xx], as György Lukács states when portraying Minna, a character in Lessing's play (Minna von Barnhelm – 1767) – “it is a simple, intact impulse of an authentic human being who desires a life with meaning, only achievable in community and love”. […] It is, therefore, the impulse to see concrete men in their concrete humanity”.[xx]
*Rafael de Almeida Andrade He has a master's degree in social sciences from the São Paulo State University UNESP-Marília..
Notes
[I] G. Lukacs. The Soul and the Forms. Belo Horizonte: Authentic Publisher, 2015, p. 252.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibidem, P. 250
[iv] Miguel Vedda. Preliminary study: Between metaphysics and history. About the intellectual trajectory of young Lukács In: LUKÁCS, György. About the poverty of spirit and other writings of youth. Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2015, p. 56.
[v] Agnes Heller. Al di lá del dovere: L'etica paradigmatica del classicismo tedesco nell'operadi György Lukács. In: FEHÉR, Ferenc; HELLER, Ágnes; MÁRKUS, György; RADNOTI, Alexander. La scuola di budapest: Sul giovane Lukács. Florence: La nuovaItalia, 1978. p. 59-75.
[vi] Karl Marx. Economic-philosophical manuscripts. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2010.
[vii] Jose Ignacio Lopes Soria. The search for human possibility. La anthropologia de Gy. Lukács In: LUCAS, Juan de Sahagun. Anthropologies of the 20th century. Salamanca Follows, 1976.
[viii] Ibidem, p. 208.
[ix] G. Lukacs. Socialism and Democratization: Political Writings 1956-1971. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2011.
[X] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
[xi] G. Lukács. The ontological bases of human thought and activity. Magazine Topics of Human Sciences n. 4. São Paulo: Human Sciences Publishing House, 1978. p.14.
[xii] G. Lukács. The Social Responsibility of the Philosopher In: LUKÁCS, G. The Social Responsibility of the Philosopher and Other Political Writings. São Paulo: Lavrapalavra, 2021. p.237.
[xiii] Ibidem, P. 236
[xiv] Ibidem, P. 240
[xv] Ibidem, P. 240
[xvi] G. Lukács. Minna von Barnhelm In: LUKÁCS, G. Goethe and his time. Barcelona-Mexico: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1968. p. 25-50.
[xvii] Ibidem, P. 33.
[xviii] Nicolas Tertulian. The great project of ethics. Verinotio Magazine, n.12, p. 21-29, 2018.
[xx] Ibid.
[xx] G. Lukács. Minna von Barnhelm In: LUKÁCS, G. Goethe and his time. Barcelona-Mexico: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1968. p. 43
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