Ultimate understanding

Like Marx and Engels, Lukács made no attempt to square unqualified acceptance of the notion of ‘false consciousness’ with admissions of the possible congruence of conceptions (especially theirs) with reality, or even of the impact of their conceptions on the course of events. Nor did Lukács's awareness of Marx's conceptual indeterminateness or of the absence in Marx's work of the systematic treatment of the class structure deflect him from drawing the conclusion that with Marx ‘the right method of the understanding of society and history has been at last discovered’. Lukács conceded that the defence on these lines involves proceeding less by defining concepts than by revealing their methodological function. Since the same concepts continued to be used, he argued, the changed meaning which they assumed in Marx's correction of Hegelian dialectics cannot be determined with terminological exactitude (they are not terminologisch fixierbar). Whatever the possibility of revealing the methodological function of concepts without defining them with precision, Lukács had no doubt about the inherited dogma that, once a social phenomenon is appraised by right dialectics (albeit in terminologically indeterminate concepts), the phenomenon is suspended forthwith, i.e. the problem it poses is ready to be solved.