Soul and Form
 Cover of the 1911 edition | |
| Author | György Lukács |
|---|---|
| Original title | Die Seele und die Formen |
| Language | German |
| Published | 1908 |
| Media type | |
Soul and Form (German: Die Seele und die Formen) is a 1908 book of literary criticism by Georg Lukacs. It was his most famous pre-Marxist critical work, and won him wide fame as a theorist. Judith Butler considers it to be a form of pre-Marxist Romantic anti-capitalism.[1]
The most famous essay regards Kierkegaard's breaking off his engagement to Regine Olsen. Lukacs reads it as metaphoric for the sacrifice of life that the author makes. And the angst of existential commitment would play a role in the development of existentialist Marxism.
Regine Olsen, the concrete, living, fleshly person, thus becomes a character in the aesthetic romance of Kierkegaard.[2]
Ágnes Heller reads Lukacs as seeing Kierkegaard as sacrificing the actuality of love for the shape of form.[3] Kierkegaard has presented the Seducer who uses and exploits women as the villain. But Lukacs interprets the rejection of Regine Olsen, as a living character with her own subjectivity, as the similar exploitation by the existential aesthetic. From both himself and Regine, Kierkegaard take away the possibility of living a conventional normal life. While Regine, would later enter into a conventional bourgeois marriage, she would always exist as a existential form in the writings of Soren. As a founder of Christian existentialism, Kierkegaard needs to sacrifice the love which is most dear to him the altar of the Cross. It is from this rejection of the conventional bourgeois life, and the comfortable happiness and fulfillment it offer, that Lukacs sees as the origin of Kierkegaard's existential angst. Lukacs recognized in this dilemma, the tragedy of his own rejection of 'life' with Irma Seidler, in preference for work over life.[4]
References
- ↑ Soul and Form. pp. 3–7.
- ↑ Lukács Reappraised. p. 27.
- ↑ Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays. p. 21.
- ↑ Georg Lukacs Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy. p. 214.