A subject’s autonomy: Undidactic mediation in Georg Lukács and John Dewey

Abstract

This paper looks at autonomy through the dynamic relationship between particularity, experience, and subjectivism in the works of Georg Lukács and John Dewey. While the focus on autonomy appears to be initially focused on the relationship between universality and particularity, the ultimate goal is to then situate the discussion on the horizon of education. Given Dewey’s and Lukács’s common Hegelian lineage, this paper looks at whether they retain elements of commonality, especially in terms of the arts, and whether forms of mediation in art and education could avoid becoming didactic. To explore these questions, this paper revisits subjectivity in two forms: (a) as a form of mediation, and (b) as immediate experience. Some play on the subject as being (qua subjectivity) and a subject (like art) in the curriculum might enter the discussion. However, the former sense of subject tends to be more central than the latter. While immediate subjectivity is critiqued by Lukács as being open to a fragmentation of reality that leads to forms of oppression, the Deweyan perspective proposes a way out of the cycle that traps subjectivism between didactic and fragmentary forms of being. Can the subject mediate without proposing a form of learning that presumes reality as a fixed ground? And could we predicate subjectivist immediacy by what Dewey, in Experience and Nature calls “the recognition of ‘subjects’ as centres of experience” that are, in effect, “equivalent to the emergence of agencies equipped with special powers of observation and experiment”? The binding horizon for both questions will be that of what Lukács calls the speciality of the artwork’s own “world” [eigenen “Welt”] and the dilemmas that this could raise when contextualized in education.

Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full meaning of the smell as the odour of just this beautiful thing is not knowledge because it is more than knowledge. — John Dewey (1906: 297).

Particularity becomes irrevocably fixed: on it the art work’s world of forms is being built. The way by which the categories turn and merge changes: both singularity and universality appear suspended in particularity. — Georg Lukács (1967: 210, Lukács, 1971a: 147). ¹

The role played by the arts on the philosophical horizon which occupied the genial wondrous minds of John Dewey and Georg Lukács, was both remarkable and inspiring. As socially committed intellectuals, their thought was neither politically remote nor ideologically intangible. Thus, while their ultimate social and philosophical concern would never afford to surrender to the short cuts of immediacy, their take on what mediates our being came from the same issues that confront us in our daily living.

This begins to explain how they reached out to a world where being is experienced as more than knowledge, which as argued later in this paper, I would partly attribute to how Hegel’s dialectical logic played an important role in their formative years. Just as for Dewey, the scent of a flower signals more than its knowledge (1906: 297), for Lukács, in its relationship with the particularity of everydayness the artwork gains speciality and becomes its own “world” [eigenen “Welt”; “mondo” speciale] (1967: 263; 1971a: 180). This paper aims to show how this special world brims with autonomy—understood on a wider horizon of being, although never detached from education. It invites readers to explore the role of subjectivity. It revisits concepts like mediation and immediacy. It walks with Lukács’s engagement with particularity as an aesthetic category, while surveying aspects of Dewey’s take on experience and nature, and how this would impact both art and education. More importantly this paper frames the subject’s sense of autonomy, through mediation, which invites readers to understand it beyond those didactic or ideological impositions which continue to split our sense of being and understanding through intractable binaries. Here, the subject never implies an individual and less so an isolated sense of individualism. That would externalize the meaning of autonomy by an unmediated and libertarian heteronomy which fails to partake of the dialectical import by which (being purposefully distanced from a reducible binary of dualistic opposites) both Lukács and Dewey have made in their respective case for what is here being termed as “the autonomy of the subject.”

Posing “our” questions

At a time where democracy remains challenged by the dangers of anti-politics, to seek a theoretical juncture between a Hungarian Marxist and an American Liberal might sound at best irrelevant and at worse suspect. Yet while some would argue that theorists who adhered to political creeds risk moving beyond their sell-by date, Bunzel (1967) was already arguing back in the 1960s that the core danger of anti-politics is the very depreciation of politics; an act which turns political and social theory into strawmen to be burnt by those whose intent is always that of discrediting the political. Anti-politics, argues Bunzel, treats “politics as a poor relation, thereby obscuring its identity, distorting its meaning, and denying its value—in short, [it] depreciate[s] the state of the political.” (1967: 265)

To read Dewey and Lukács’s work in the 21st century has nothing to do with speculating over “what they would have said had they been around today.” Rather, as one revisits such theorists the aim is to understand the questions that they would find hard to recognize. Put another way, we are seeking new questions, not old answers. Here they are brought together not to compare, contrast or even try to make them somehow “complementary.” The aim is to explore whether their work gives us an insight into a much wider spectrum of the possible meanings of autonomy, and by implication how this would add further insight to autonomy in education and educational autonomy—that is, the roles of autonomy in education as a system and institution, and autonomy as an educational (and thereby formative) experience.

As we shift our attention to how the autonomous relationship with an increasingly heteronomous world shapes the arts and education, we turn to theorists like Lukács and Dewey to seek other ways of problematising the prevalence of the sense of unquestioned and undigested immediacy with which we are faced when going about living and making sense of our existence. By invoking the names Dewey and Lukács, this paper will not seek to nostalgically reaffirm some ideological positioning vis-à-vis socialism or liberalism. Rather, one attempts to understand why a social experience—or a social ontology, as Lukács would call it—could be one of many approaches by which we pose our own questions as the subjects of (and to) autonomy in all its diverse implications and contradictions that this would imply.

As committed public intellectuals, these philosophers lived long enough to witness a world that barely survived two world wars, fascism, the Shoah, Stalinism, and the heights of the Cold War. For Lukács, it was a matter of life or death. Being Jewish he would take refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union to escape the Nazis, while he sought relative safety from Stalinism by remaining a committed communist. Given his dissenting voice, the paradox of survival stayed with him in 1956 when he was arrested, and in 1968 by reclaiming his right to be a member of the Hungarian communist party (see Eörsi, 1983: 18–20; Kadarkay, 1991: 320ff; Baldacchino, 1996/2018: 20–24).

In contrast, but not without a degree of similarity, Dewey remained a committed liberal even when he witnessed liberalism’s rapid decline in the 1930s (Dewey, 1984, 1989, 2000). He was known for endless acts of social responsibility, but perhaps his emblematic role in the “Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials” of 1937, known as the “Dewey commission,” captures how he regarded his work as having a central role in history (see Ryan, 1995: 247–248).

Dewey died in 1951, but 5 years later in 1956, Lukács (who passed away in 1971) escaped execution by a whisker, having been Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s doomed government in Hungary. What Lukács (1983: 168) describes as a spontaneous and highly heterogeneous movement was crushed by the Soviets when they invaded Hungary to stop Nagy’s attempt to reject Stalinism. As Lukács would recall later in his life, and not without a degree of equivocation, “[m]y interrogators said to me that they knew I was no follower of Imre Nagy and so there was no reason why I should not testify against him. I told them that as soon as the two of us, Imre Nagy and myself, were free to walk around Budapest, I would be happy to make public my opinion of all of Nagy’s activities. But I was not free to express an opinion about my fellow-prisoners.” (Lukács, 1983: 132–133)

Some say that Lukács was spared because he had friends in Moscow, though it is more likely that he was far too revered as a Marxist philosopher in the West for the Soviets to eliminate him and risk even more outcry within their own alliance of political parties which, in what was then Western Europe, began to decline. Not unlike his comrades in Western Europe’s communist parties, Lukács was aware of the intractability of the situation in the post-Stalin era, which in his interview with Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, and Wolfgang Abendroth he characterizes as a process that one could “clumsily call the revocation of Stalinism in the form of Stalinism.” As he explains, “we are for the time being demolishing Stalinism in a Stalinist way, and a genuine demolition will only succeed when we break radically with Stalinist methods.” (Lukács, 1974: 103)

Just over 10 years after Hungary’s invasion, he would witness a repeat performance of Stalinist oppression in Czechoslovakia in 1968 as he took refuge in obscurity back in post-revolutionary Hungary, while still threading between recognition in the world and suppression back home as he kept smuggling his work to be published in West Germany. Like Dewey’s faith in liberal democracy, Lukács continued to nurture a degree of self-assurance that the socialist system initiated by the Bolsheviks in 1917 would somehow find its own redemption beyond the Stalinist ways by which Stalinism was expected to be deposed.

Splits and hierarchies

Within this historical scenario it is not hard to imagine how for both Dewey and Lukács to raise questions and entertain discussions over the possibility of a subjective realm and whether this implies a form of experiential mediation or an aesthetic experience, was neither ethereal nor unworldly. Even when their thoughts and questions are discussed by scholars and students, they were never limited to the pages of specialized academic journals. Today such questions are often dismissed by an insistence on immediate “practical” solutions. What is seen as “mere theory” is frowned about, just as policy makers are not that keen on funding universities which take a stand in preserving a free discursive space for inquiry. Back in the 1960s, Lukács foresaw a major flaw in the same “practicalist” reasoning that is a commonplace sport for politicians of all persuasions whose claim to fame often comes from the immediacy of social media and the world of entertainment.

Dewey qualified liberal democracy as being inherently associative, which you could argue was also a condition of the realization of liberalism (particularly in its pragmatic potentials). On the other hand, Lukács did not see liberal democracy as succeeding in its associative mission, especially when it remained suppressed by an individualist fragmentation which, far from being pragmatic, reduced democracy into a practicalist mechanism.

I believe it is no contradiction to say that a movement against manipulation, a movement for genuine democracy, can condemn itself to inactivity by excessive practicalism. The potential effect of theoretical discoveries cannot be valued highly enough in this connection. (…) Theoretical clarification, genuinely philosophical theoretical clarification, is absolutely necessary here; the phenomena of the present crisis cannot simply be taken theoretically at face value (Lukács, 1974: 116).

One could argue that what Dewey hoped to find in democracy’s pragmatic potentials, Lukács saw as a system hollowed out by practicalist assumptions. This was not because Lukács dismissed democracy (which is easy to assume, especially in his communist convictions), but because for him democracy was embedded in the idea of a social sense of being. One could argue that here he differs from Dewey, not on the substance of the democratic claims for an associative form of living, but on the form that democracy should take, which in Lukács’s socialist sensitivity was still awaiting to be delivered from Stalinism.

What remains key to these approaches to democracy is how far should an associative political system like democracy be mediated, and by what. For someone like Lukács, the immediacy of individualism could never mediate let alone realize democracy. On the other hand, while Dewey recognized the slow decline and distortion of liberalism, he still held to a reassurance that the dynamic relationship between individual and society, underpinned by freedom and intelligence, would ultimately help recover democracy. For Lukacs, freedom and intelligence could only be realized by a social ontology, which is where one begins to explore how autonomy in its many senses, plays a central role in both philosophers’ thinking.

To come close to some understanding of the common grounds in the senses of autonomy that Dewey’s and Lukács’s thought might imply, I would contend that what they ultimately shared was a rejection of immediacy. History confirms how the polity remains endangered by the recklessness of an order of immediacy. To understand the power of the immediate and how we experience it is to engage with how we approach the matter of form and subject. Form and subject retain a degree of centrality in Lukács and Dewey’s work, even when as they draw from common sources of thinking and inquiry, this is played in very different ways.

On a first level of signification form and subject are seen for what they are: forms as the things we make and behold, with “us” as the subjects of such deeds. As such, we are both subjects of and subjects to the world we create for ourselves and each other. Yet on a second level, the relationship between subject and form takes that of subject and object, which in the language of universality and particularity, one becomes engaged by a grammar of understanding (or what, after Kant, we could call a legislative ground). The direction of this grammar is taken either vertically, where one is subsumed under the other, or horizontally, where subject and object are split and taken into separate directions.

In his extensive study of particularity as an aesthetic category, Lukács (1967, 1971a) finds in Kant a point of argument and history where methods of classification and specification (respectively arising from universality and particularity) prompt us to consider the role played by the subject vis-à-vis its physical reality—that is, its objective world. He starts with the “First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement,” where Kant argues that “[t]he logical form of a system consists merely in the division of given universal concepts.” We make this division “by thinking, in terms of a certain principle, the particular (here the empirical) in its diversity as contained under the universal.” The direction from where this is taken will determine whether we are proceeding “empirically and ascend from the particular to the universal” [and thereby] classify the diverse, that is, compare several classes, each falling under a definite concept; or whether, inversely, “we start from the universal concept, so as to descend to the particular by a complete division, we perform what is called the specification of the diverse under a given concept.” (Kant, 1987: 402–403)

A closer look at how in most fields, especially in education, scholarship and methods remain lodged (if not stuck) between these two methodologies, confirms that our interest in Lukács’s discussion holds great relevance to the present. For Lukács, “[i]t is clear that both classification and specification raise the problem of the interrelationship between universality and particularity” (Lukács, 1971a: 20, 1967: 14). This reciprocation is frustrated by what he sees as Kant’s metaphysical approach. Though logically suggesting that Kant finds himself against his “subjective idealist” instincts, taking a dialectical positioning between universal and particular, Lukács regards Kant’s resort to the “affection” (Affektion, affezione) as one which leaves the subject bereft of a proper structure that could effectively mediate one’s physical world. The main question with “affection” in Kant has to do with the direction and agency it comes from, and what does this agency affect. This is not because affection is not cardinal, but because, as one interpretation goes, Kant appears to make of it a form of deferral via the thing-in-itself, while there is an additional ambiguity over whether the thing-in-itself inheres affection (as an internal quality) of what it is supposed to affect (externally).

To find a reasonably consistent answer to the questions that arise here, Kant must go beyond the relationship between thinking and being which he established in the Critique of Pure Reason. For here every form, every formative principle, stands exclusively on the subject’s side; the content stems from that “affection” by which the thing-in-itself exercises the subject through the [physical] senses. But since all categories (all forms) are products of transcendental-creative subjectivity, Kant must consequently deny the content, the world of things as such, in any form, and conceive it as fundamentally unordered chaos that can only be ordered by the categories of the transcendental subject. (Lukács, 1971a: 20–21, 1967: 14–15)

From Lukács’s perspective, the relationship between classification and specification depends on the measure that one takes of reality—that is, from objective-subjective accounts to what is often seen as measurable claims made on everything we have, behold, do, make, regard, etc. Here we enter the notion of form and subject, where, for Lukács, the idea of ontology is social and not just a matter of metaphysical being. If we are to speak of being, it is a being that works, thus delineating a social ontology of labour. Here the term work does not stand for function (it works) but for the act (he, she or they work). If we presume form as that which is made by us, and of which subjects we become through work and labour—to which Hannah Arendt would add action in the precedence of vita activa over vita contemplativa (Arendt, 1998: 289ff)—we could follow Lukács’s approach to an ontological dimension of social transformation characterized by our teleological projects (see Lukács, 1980: 3–20, 1974: 74–83). This comes into play with the agency of subjects gaining a central role.

All those determinations which we shall see to make up the essence of what is new in social being, are contained in nuce in labour. Thus labour can be viewed as the original phenomenon, as the model for social being, and the elucidation of these determinations already gives so clear a picture of the essential features of social being that it seems methodologically advantageous to begin by analysing labour. (Lukács, 1980: v)

When it comes to subject and object, Dewey reminds his readers that “[p]hilosophy, like all forms of reflective analysis, takes us away, for the time being, from the things had in primary experience as they directly act and are acted upon, used and enjoyed. Now the standing temptation of philosophy, as its course abundantly demonstrates, is to regard the results of reflection as having, in and of themselves, a reality superior to that of the material of any other mode of experience.” (Dewey, 1958: 19 emphasis added)

Dewey takes to task the whole idea of “a reality (that is) superior to …” as this would suggest a split between objects and subject that would appear hierarchical. In Dewey’s application, the dynamic between materiality and experience is horizontal, which is in direct contrast with a division between the “hard” sciences and the “emotional” arts, where the latter is tucked away in a subjective category and the former seen as an objective endeavour. Dewey’s comments on philosophy’s temptation come close to Lukács’ positive critique of Kant’s attempts to bridge the chasm in his Third Critique where, amongst other, he insists on Kant’s unintended dialectic between universals and particulars wavering between metaphysics and materialism.

[T]he Critique of Judgment is a compromise compared to the “First Introduction.” In contrast to the radical separation of the two paths mentioned above, their allocation to different “faculties of the soul” [Seelenvermögen] the task of knowledge, is in both cases, now assigned to the power of judgment. (…) The power of judgment is decisive in the transition from the universal to the particular; it is merely reflective when the universal is sought from the point of view of the particular. One must not simply equate this opposition with the statement found in many logical works that induction yields less certain results than deduction. (Lukács, 1967: 19, 1971a: 23)

It is interesting how to Lukács’s mind, Kant seems to find a sufficient logical foundation in the general laws which are prescribed to nature through a “transcendental derivation of the categories.” But Lukács is still preoccupied by a “concrete application” whose problematic appears unmistakably concise “when finding and defining any concrete peculiarity (be it a particular group or a particular legality)” (Lukács, 1971a: 24, 1967: 20). To clarify this, he would move his consideration of particularity within the aesthetic field, and ultimately into the (special and peculiar) specificity of the artwork’s “world” which, as explained below, comes close to art’s own reality which far from just being reclaimed, comes to assert the subject from art’s sense of autonomy.

On the other hand, Dewey (1958: 19) gives a “technical example of the [Cartesian] view (…) that emotion as well as sense is but confused thought which when it becomes clear and definite or reaches its goal is cognition.” In this, Dewey finds a major fault in terms of how the real is limited to hard objective rational thought, which by implication dismisses the aesthetic realm. On this, he pushes back, stating, “[t]hat esthetic and moral experience reveal traits of real things as truly as does intellectual experience, that poetry may have a metaphysical import as well as science, is rarely affirmed, and when it is asserted, this statement is likely to be meant in some mystical or esoteric sense rather than a straightforward everyday sense” (Dewey, 1958: 19).

Immediacy and mediation

It does not take much to appreciate how Dewey pushed against those who across the empirical and social sciences, sustained common-held prejudices (and misconceptions) when it came to the arts, aesthetics, and their engagement with the rest. The splits and hierarchies between subject and object were convenient, especially when some seemed intent on sustaining such splits and contrasts between either field. Those sustaining such splits claimed the upper hand and often an exclusive authority on what they called real-world problems. But this was not true of Dewey’s concerns. Perhaps, more practically, he regarded this split as a construct that leaves us bereft of nothing but reality itself. This presents us with several problems, mostly for reasons which in Dewey’s case were evidently pragmatic, while, as shown above, for Lukács, the problem was dialectically related to the methods by which this would transpire in the ultimate concern of our teleological projects in our daily living (see Lukács, 1980, 1974). In their attention to the realities of experience and social ontology, both Dewey and Lukács refused to see the world as a game played between the abstract and concrete categories that presume two hermetically sealed domains. As Dewey puts it,

When real objects are identified, point for point, with knowledge-objects, all affectional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from the “real” world, and are compelled to find refuge in the privacy of an experiencing subject or mind. Thus the notion of the ubiquity of all comprehensive cognitive experience results by a necessary logic in setting up a hard and fast wall between the experiencing subject and that nature which is experienced. The self becomes not merely a pilgrim but an unnaturalized and unnaturalizable an alien in the world. The only way to avoid a sharp separation between the mind which is the centre of the processes of experiencing and the natural world which is experienced is to acknowledge that all modes of experiencing are ways in which some genuine traits of nature come to manifest realization. (Dewey, 1958: 24, emphasis added)

Dewey’s objection to the split between subject and object comes from his valorization of experience in a way that becomes characteristically tied to the realization of what he sees as an outcome of associated forms of living in his claims for democracy. Lukács’s objection to the split comes from his recognition of an ontological mediation that emerges from one’s sense of social being, which is historically tied to an aspiration for a democratic horizon that is freed from manipulation to which “the working person is forcibly distracted from considering how he could transform his free time into genuine leisure.” (Lukács, 1974: 55)

Lukács articulates this ontological reality by dint of this distancing from the manipulative, which those who are familiar with his early work, would recognize as ensuing from his rejection of reification (see Lukács, 1971b). Simply put (though Lukács never simplified the concept itself), reification stands for a process of objectification and commodification where life and its attributes become things. While this seems to suggest that one should then hold onto a world that gives precedence to the subjective domain in contrast with what appears to be objectified, and while he sustains the world of subjects, Lukács never resorts to the positivist’s reduction of subjectivity into what he sees as the neo-positivist’s formulaic approach to the act of living.

Someone is crossing the road. He might be the most obstinate neo-positivist in his epistemology, denying all reality, but he will nevertheless be convinced that the pedestrian crossing that, if he does not remain where he is, he will really be run over by a real car, rather than some kind of mathematical formula of his existence being run over by the mathematical function of the car, or his idea by the idea of the car. I have deliberately taken such a brutally simple example in order to show that in our actual life various different forms of being always converge, and that the relationship of these forms of being is the primary thing. (Lukács, 1974: 13–14, emphasis added)

As one might argue that Lukács’s characterization of neo-positivism is rather reductive, in his objection to neo-positivism one senses the roots of his own philosophical formation, which is not that different from the early Dewey. In Dewey and Lukács, there is a common lineage, especially in the dialectical approach that they drew from Hegel. Their take on subjectivity and subjectivism gains a degree of concreteness beyond what some would dismiss as mere theoretical ruminations. In this case, what is concrete is what Evald Ilyenkov (1982: 32) defines as a “universal form of development of nature, society and thinking,” which is neither an opposition of abstraction nor a preclusion of difference. Ilyenkov discusses Marx’s take on the concrete as being “the unity of diverse aspects,” in which one would imply the same dialectical—and I would add pragmatic—array of possibilities which move beyond anything fixed or static. “In the system of Marx’s views, ‘the concrete’ is by no means a synonym for the sensually given, immediately contemplated” (Ilyenkov, 1982: 32). In its portent, this notion of the "concrete" remains Hegelian.

As Dewey (1958) puts it, “[t]hings are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized.” (21, emphasis added). This does not reduce things to a positivist epistemology which, in its reductive attempts, does away with the subject. In his essay “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge,” Dewey captures this distinction clearly as he explains how, “[s]eeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full meaning of the smell as the odour of just this beautiful thing is not knowledge because it is more than knowledge” (Dewey 1906: 297 emphasis added).

In a Lukácsian sense, this is where mediation enters the fray of meaning, and by which a beautiful thing means more than knowledge. Mediation does not simply “redeem” one’s sense of knowing from the immediate and reducible practices (and manipulations) of a reified world, but it gives a greater sense to a reality that is accrued (added) to experience itself.

If I start from the categorical imperative, I will not be able to understand the simple practical behaviour of people in everyday life. I believe therefore that we must follow the genetically determined path, and here we are already in the thick of ontological problems. In other words, we must attempt to investigate conditions in their original forms of appearance, and to see under what conditions these forms of appearance become ever more complicated, evermore mediated. (Lukács, 1974: 13–14, emphasis added)

Perhaps, the best way to frame Lukács’s sense of mediation comes from his approach to particularity, its role in everyday living, and how in the artistic process it is transformed into what comes close to the speciality of its own “world” [eigenen “Welt”; “mondo” speciale].

If the originary immediacy of everyday life is abandoned, the particular’s universalization will not destroy it. Rather, on the contrary, a new immediacy will emerge at a higher level. In this way, the [art]work becomes its own “world” [eigenen “Welt”; “mondo” speciale], not only to who beholds it, but also to its creator: they create it, but it helps to reach the heights of aesthetic-social subjectivity, to the heights of this particularity, which only makes possible its artistic completion. (Lukács, 1967: 263, Lukács, 1971a: 180, emphasis added)

There are echoes of this directional pattern between particularity and subjectivity in Dewey, especially when he insists on distinctions between feeling and knowledge. The distinction is not moving inwards but is found out in any attempt to confuse the meanings of feeling. This takes us back to his discussion of the flower’s scent and how we come to know more than knowledge.

Feeling is its own quality; is its own specific (whence and why, once more, subjective?) being. If this be dogmatism, it is at least worth insistent declaration, were it only by way of counter-irritant to that other dogmatism which asserts that being in consciousness is always presence for or in knowledge. So let us repeat once more, that to be a smell (or anything else) is one thing, to be known as smell, another; to be a ‘feeling’ one thing, to be known as a ‘feeling’ another. (Dewey, 1906: 295)

It would not be odd to follow Dewey with a reference from Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, where he argues that “[o]nly through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form—in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being” (Marx, 1977: 102–3). This is qualified by Marx’s insistence on the difference of the senses by dint of human sociality. In a clear stance on the social ontology of human labour, Marx argues that social humans would sense the world differently from non-social humans.

Autonomy and two forms of subjectivity

As we live at a time where the sense of the social is often obfuscated by the assumed non-existence of society and the predominance of an individualist moral imaginary, one could begin to appreciate how here, speaking of subjects and subjectivity becomes challenging, particularly when this enters a discussion of autonomy in its plural sense of both being and location. This plural sense of autonomy gains specific value and relevance when autonomy is discussed in contexts like education, where it is poised and understood both as a way of being (the sense and scope of educational autonomy) and in its operative context of education’s autonomy, understood in its institutional (the School’s) and epistemological (the curriculum’s) contexts.

When discussing Lukács and Dewey on matters related to form and the subject, all of this paper’s strands come to one central question, as suggested by the title, where a subject’s autonomy poses questions like, “What subject?” and “Whose autonomy?” To claim that mediation, as presented in this discussion, must be qualified as undidactic would also presume that in contrast, mediation is invariably didactic. This is best exemplified by schooled structures which claim prominence, validity, and power in what they presume to mediate, and how they do so by enforcing their own claims of autonomy.

Just as a discussion of autonomy opens us to various meanings in terms of location and being, to speak of the subject’s autonomy would pose at least two questions that would indicate two forms of subjectivity. While I have discussed this extensively elsewhere (Baldacchino, 1996/2018: 79–84), here I am focussing on the implications to be had on autonomy vis-à-vis the arts and education.

These two forms of subjectivity do not pit Lukács against Dewey. Nor do they suggest a parallel approach to reality, and less so an ideological pairing such as that between socialism and liberalism. Rather, here I am proposing that as we engage with what emerges from the discussions that were afforded to us by Lukács and Dewey as brought together in this essay. The discussion of subjectivity begins to lend itself to a plurality of meanings which, as found in the plural senses of autonomy, we are equally lent with at least two senses from the notion of subjectivity. Perhaps, to illustrate this, we can pose two questions:

1. Can we differentiate between the subjectivity which Marx defines as a form of mediation (which I am here calling subjectivity₁ and which Lukács expands in his ontology of social being), and a form of immediate subjectivity (subjectivity₂) that, as we have seen in anti-politics, as well as the libertarian assumptions of detached individualism, fragments the relationship between individuals and their social ontology (i.e., their existence in the world as social humans)?

2. If we can differentiate between a mediational subjectivity₁ and a subjectivity₂ that is trapped on a misconstrued notion of immediate experience, does this (i) open new dualisms over and above the subject-object binary; but also (ii) suggest a pedagogical, aesthetic, and moral order of preference which ultimately requires us to privilege and thereby (un)learn one approach over/beyond the other?

These two questions leave us with a notion of subjectivity in two forms: (a) as a form of mediation and (b) as immediate (and therefore unmediated) experience. While Lukács critiques the idea of immediate/unmediated subjectivity as leaving us open to a fragmentation of reality that leads to forms of oppression (because as he would argue this would fatally impair the ontology of social being), the Deweyan perspective proposes a way out of the cycle that traps subjectivism between didactic and fragmentary forms of being through an associative understanding which pragmatically leaves itself open to a plurality of subjects. As a plurality, this implies a dispositional approach to how subjects and subjectivities work together without having to be isolated in unmediated individualism, while at the same time it prevents any attempt to make of mediation a didactic affair. Both Lukács and Dewey, in their different ways, are fearful of forms of mediation which neutralize the subjective. Equally they are aware that immediacy also takes a plurality of meanings, and this must be made clear before one goes on making presumptions on both immediacy and mediation.

Dewey differentiates between (i) “genuine immediacy” which is “thinghood; being, absolute, indubitable, direct; in this way all things are that are in consciousness at all,” and (ii) “a pseudo-immediacy,” which “is reflected being, things indicating and calling for other things—something offering the possibility of truth and hence of falsity” (Dewey, 1906: 295).

For Lukács, the possibility of what could be termed a higher immediacy (which is not that different from Dewey’s genuine immediacy) is found in the speciality of the art work’s own “world” [eigenen “Welt”]. This “world” takes particularity to new heights (Lukács, 1967: 263, Lukács, 1971a: 180), where “forms of appearance become ever more complicated, evermore mediated” (Lukács, 1974: 14), as “both singularity and universality appear suspended in particularity” (Lukács, 1967: 210, Lukács, 1971a: 147).

To bring this into the specific context of art and education and the ensuing meanings of autonomy, one must first ask whether the subject could mediate without proposing a form of learning that presumes reality as a fixed ground. In other words, could mediation not be didactic, even when one presumes that education is practiced on social constructivist grounds? This is where the location and being of autonomy come into play. If we presume to “impose” a sense of mediation by assuming that education’s autonomy gives us the authority to do so, then any form of mediation that is scaffolded into teaching and learning will remain didactic and self-neutering—which ultimately would mean that educational autonomy itself (which is inherently non-didactic) will have no place nor relevance in one’s sense of being.

This leads to a second question: Could we predicate subjectivist immediacy by what Dewey, in Experience and Nature calls “the recognition of ‘subjects’ as centres of experience” that are, in effect, “equivalent to the emergence of agencies equipped with special powers of observation and experiment”? (Dewey, 1958: 13). If by subjects as centres of experience one claims an educational autonomy (in the case of mediation) that would sustain Dewey’s idea of a genuine immediacy which in turn leads to that sense of being and doing that enters an own “world” as envisaged by Lukács’s notion of the artwork’s specificity, then we are getting closer to a notion of a subject’s autonomy which counters the danger of didactic mediation.

The binding horizon for both questions will be that of the process of art making, which elsewhere I contextualize within the formative sense of autonomy (see Baldacchino, 2021) and the dilemmas that it creates when it comes to terms with education’s autonomy. But if art as an occasion for our aesthetic experience implies a relationship between its formative and educational autonomies (using Lukács’s parameters of particularity and Dewey’s qualified distinctions of feeling and knowledge in the objects of experience), where does this leave us? If we hold onto a claim for autonomy (in its many senses), how could (or should) freedom and intelligence (as discussed vis-à-vis Dewey’s sense of associative living) play their role as basic ingredients within the political, especially when this is overshadowed and threatened by anti-politics?

The dilemma of autonomy in a world of subjects is not limited to art’s place in education as a system, institution, or even as a creed (as some sort of socialized paideia that claims to lead the youth). Rather it goes to the heart of autonomy and how or whether art’s autonomy is also a form of educational autonomy. The latter relates to both art and education in their own autonomous senses. Such claims are faced with the same questions: is education autonomous from what it is expected to do (as an avenue for aesthetic formation, amongst other) or does education’s autonomy denote the formative (and social ontological) sense by which we as free persons claim our very sense of being? As for art, would its placing in education mean that its autonomy becomes an instrument of didactic mediation, where even the most benign of constructivist assumptions such as the adage of an education through the arts, would subsume the one under the other under either classification or specification as often happens when the arts “enter” the hierarchical structures of schooled and curricular systems?

In his essay “The objectivism-subjectivism of modern philosophy,” Dewey reminds us how “Greek philosophy subordinated its account of things in terms of ‘efficient’ causation to the account of them in terms of ‘formal’ and ‘final’ causation: that is, it was concerned with stating, by means of definition and classification, what things are and why they are so (in terms of the answer they serve), rather than with a quite subordinate question of how they come into being.” (Dewey, 1941: 538) Similarly, Lukács argues that the contingency of things implies a heterogeneous series of development, which is “an aspect of things that must be emphasized, because human thinking has supposed that the existence of rationality and lawfulness involves an ontological domination of rationality, while in reality, if I may put it this way, there is only an ‘if-then’ necessity.” (Lukács, 1974: 23) However, a plurality of senses—be they contingent or pragmatic—reveal the caution by which Lukács and Dewey threaded the idea of subjects and their relationship with a world that comes to us in forms of immediacy which, while requiring us to make sense of them, come with a cautionary note about the ways by which they could be mediated and thereby known without foreclosing knowledge with itself.

By way of concluding this essay, I would defer to two further questions, which here I would offer as a way of opening the discussion further and at this stage leave it at that. Firstly, if, as Dewey argues, “the recognition of ‘subjects’ as centres of experience” are, in effect, “equivalent to the emergence of agencies equipped with special powers of observation and experiment” (Dewey, 1958: 13), could this happen without a mediating subjectivity? If so, do we learn subjectivity in one or its two forms? And by what constructs? On the other hand, if, as Lukács argues in his aesthetic theory, that there is a “necessity [that] equally imposes the universalization of the subjective in the particular, and the supersession of each pure universal into the humanized subjectivity of the particular,” (Lukács, 1971a: 180) how do we come to terms—indeed learn or perhaps unlearn—what, where, and how one could locate the “if-then” condition of particularity without mediating it (via education, art, ethics, the law)?

Reading these questions back into the arguments which this paper brings together via Lukács and Dewey, would cast some new light on autonomy as a matter that must be had on the horizon of particularity. This is to say that at this stage, this theoretical insight gains a fresh set of referential possibilities, just as these same possibilities regale us with insights and questions which, with the benefits of historical reflection, would help us extend the discussion of how the concept of autonomy is far wider and comprehensive than the social scientific constructs of education allow us to see.