Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

The Idea of “the Luciferian” in Lukács’s 

Heidelberg Aesthetics (1916–1918)

Goethe’s importance for the young Lukács is not widely recognized, despite 

the fact that the Lukács scholarship often finds it difficult to get away from 

questions of influence. Goethe should at least be added to the long list, which 

includes Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey (all of whom Lukács him-

self names in the 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel).

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 In contrast to 

the short 1916 preface, in which Dostoyevsky is the “prophet of a new man 

[Künder eines neuen Menschen], the shaper of a new world [Gestalter einer 

neuen Welt], discoverer and rediscoverer of a new-old form [Finder und Wie-

derfinder einer neu-alten Form],”

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 in the 1962 preface, Lukács enumerates 

influences in a way that diminishes his early work.

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The unfinished Heidelberger Ästhetik, a habilitation draft, written between 

1916 and 1918, focuses extensively on Goethe,

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 but unlike the more essay-

istic Theory of the Novel, the aesthetics follows the conventions of a formal 

academic treatise. The difference of approach between the two roughly 

contemporaneous works is illuminating. The aesthetics, despite being more 

formal, contains Schlegelian stylistic breaks

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 that show Lukács to be more 

interested in speculative consequences than in systematic theorizing. In The 

Theory of the Novel, on the other hand, an overtly essayistic approach is 

complicated by the latency of its systematics. When writing essayistically, 

Lukács uses implicitly systematized premises as the springboard for meta-

reflections, while in the Heidelberg Aesthetics the essayistic lapses seem to 

reflect discomfort with the systematic construction. The Heidelberg Aesthet-

ics often gives the impression of a seamless theorization, but the moments 

when Lukács “brackets” and “transcends” his systematic positions therefore 

feel all the more exposed. Such essayistic course-corrections produce pro-

found shifts in the apparent argument, giving the impression that Lukács is 

either unable to commit to his own theorization or that he was not primarily 

interested in producing a descriptive aesthetic theory.

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Before giving an example of this, I will quickly sketch the central claims of 

Lukács’s aesthetics: he develops an idea of “aesthetic positing” (ästhetische 

Setzung) which advocates for works of art on the basis of their immanence, 

singularity, self-sufficiency, and internal coherence. The autonomy of each 

aesthetic positing, its intrinsic claim to be its own “reality,” causes it to 

exclude and negate the everyday reality from which it emerges.

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 Lukács 

understands this negativity of the work of art as a radicalization of Husserl’s 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

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idea of bracketing.

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 The work of art, for Lukács, is constituted out of the 

same material as “everyday reality” (Erlebniswirklichkeit), and for this rea-

son the two can only be in competition. The real world does not stand a 

chance, however, because in every cultural formation yet known, with the 

exception of the ancient Greeks, “real” reality is essentially contingent and 

thus inferior to the work of art: “Everyday lived experience is therefore far 

from being something original [etwas Ursprüngliches] in a systematic sense; 

it is impossible to think of a more artificial and contrived arrangement of 

objects [das gekünstelteste Objektsgefüge].”

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 A successful aesthetic positing, 

which is always possessed of its own intensive reality, provides a coherence 

of experience that is lacking in the real world.

In short, virtual realities are more real than reality—but this power of the 

work of art is highly unstable, prone to being “transcended” from one of 

two directions: (1) the “soul,” as Lukács would say, cannot be truly at home 

in the work of art, because the latter has the status of a Kantian Ding an 

sich, isolated both from its creator and its recipient. The soul always remains 

homeless: it may temporarily and partially enter the world of the work, but it 

can never permanently reside there. It must always return to the incoherence 

of the “empirical” world. (2) The work may be transcended by philosophical-

conceptual abstraction. In thinking about and justifying art, the “everyday 

reality” of works is constantly counter-bracketed by their “idea.” The expe-

riential immanence of the work as “aesthetic positing” leads Lukács to 

reject the canonical conceptions of beauty from Plato through Kant, Hegel, 

Schelling, and Goethe.

Such are the apparent claims of Lukács’s aesthetics. I now turn to a pas-

sage (at the very end of the chapter entitled “Subject-Object-Relation”) 

which represents the most extreme case of Lukács’s tendency toward essay-

istic reframing:

It however also cannot be left unsaid [kann nicht verschwiegen