ABSTRACT
In the years which followed his return from exile after the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Lukács worked on two major projects — a Marxist aesthetics and a Marxist ontology of social existence. Lukács stresses that it is not immediately clear how these methods are to be applied in the field of aesthetics. The classics of Marxism do not provide even the skeleton of an aesthetics; there can be no question of constructing a Marxist aesthetics by a mere exposition of texts. Lukács does has a rough parallel in the aesthetics of modern linguistic philosophy. Some linguistic philosophers think that aesthetics is properly the study of what critics say; it is the attempt to find the rules that govern critical language. Lukács of course rejects Hegel’s views about the fundamentally spiritual nature of this reality; he rejects Hegel’s view that the three stages of Absolute Mind form a hierarchy, with art as the lowest and philosophy as the highest stage.
