Stud East Eur Thought (2015) 67:229–247 DOI 10.1007/s11212-015-9240-7

The irrational act: traces of Kierkegaard in Luka´cs’s revolutionary subject Richard Westerman1

Published online: 29 July 2015  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract The Hungarian theorist Georg Luka´cs is known for his reintroduction of Hegelian thought to Marxist philosophy—but I argue that his account of the subjectivity of the proletariat owes just as much to the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. Despite strong differences in their outlook, their accounts of subjectivity have strong structural similarities. For both, a division of the self against itself produces suffering that leads in turn to a growing consciousness of the roots of the problem; in the end, the self is restored through a relation to itself grounded in the absolute, and thereby becomes capable of freedom. Luka´cs’s theory of subjectivity is, thus, predicated on changing the orientation of the proletariat towards itself—in ways that are deeply indebted to the peculiar theology of Kierkegaard. Keywords

Luka´cs
Kierkegaard
Subjectivity
Existentialism
Marxism

Georg Luka´cs’s History and Class Consciousness was, in every sense, a revolutionary book. In it, Luka´cs undertook a theoretical investigation of the very practical question of revolutionary class consciousness, and on this basis, he sought to explain why revolution had been successful in Russia, and yet failed in Germany and Hungary in the aftermath of the First World War. The answer, he suggested, was not to be found purely in the objective circumstances, but could, instead, be traced to a failure of class consciousness in the proletariat: Rosa Luxemburg’s faith in the spontaneity of proletarian consciousness in the revolution had shown itself to be as naively impractical as pure determinism, whilst Karl Kautsky and the SPD seemed to have renounced their Marxism entirely. Lenin’s emphasis on the need for & Richard Westerman [email protected] 1

Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 5-21 HM Tory Building, Edmonton, AB T6G 2H4, Canada

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a small, professional party to lead the revolution and form proletarian consciousness itself was apparently supported by the verdict of history; his method alone had been successful in seizing control of a state and beginning the task of building communism. The role of the party must be more than handing capitalism its coat as it departed into the night; revolution must be actively pursued by those best able to see what must be done. Luka´cs’s theory of revolution was itself revolutionary in its method. By emphasizing the importance of Hegel’s understanding of the social basis of all consciousness for Marx’s understanding of society, Luka´cs opened up new avenues for Marxist theory that had remained unexplored by the fairly vulgar materialists of the Second International. His subsequent scholarship on Hegel’s early works illuminates his own sophisticated dialectical methods for analyzing the structures of consciousness in order to get at the objective reality that produced those structures, and thereby explain the discrepancy between the party and the proletariat (Luka´cs 1977). Luka´cs argued that capitalism represented the apogee of reification, through which the rationalised structures of the capitalist economy were seen as an objective and eternally-valid reality (Luka´cs [1923] 1971). This reification, or granting of objective validity to mere structures of thought and freezing of moments of a process into absolute categories, was accompanied by alienation, or the separation of the individual’s subjective consciousness from its objective existence as unit of labour power, and then as commodity produced by that labour power. This, Luka´cs argued, was the root of the unhappiness caused by capitalism; rather than simple immiseration and impoverishment of the working class, the problem was the separation of consciousness and what capitalism presented as objectivity. The individual objectivised himself in his work, but capitalism then alienated this objectivisation from the subject and set it up against him. In this emphasis on the relations between subject and object, and the social grounding of self-consciousness, Luka´cs is undeniably Hegelian; his Marxism and materialism consisted in his insistence that this separation must be overcome in reality, by social transformation, rather than in the mind, by forcing consciousness to surrender to and pass over into its objective manifestation entirely, something as impossibly idealist as it was undesirable. However, in order to accomplish such a revolutionary transformation, it was not enough to stand Hegel on his head, and be materialist instead of idealist. In Luka´cs’s interpretation, this would simply yield a positivist determinism, rather than a logical one; as he put it, Hegel’s system left no freedom beyond ‘that specious freedom to reflect upon laws which themselves govern man, a freedom which in Spinoza a thrown stone would possess if it had consciousness’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 146). Now, more recent readings of Hegel suggest that this reading of his position is somewhat simplistic and unfair. As Christopher Yeomans (2012), p. 6) points out, Hegel directly rejects straightforward causal determinism, along with the determinist metaphysics of Leibniz or Spinoza. Instead, contemporary scholarship has suggested that Hegel’s system is at the very least compatible with free will in some form. For Michael Theunissen (1982) or Axel Honneth ([1992] 1995), this takes an intersubjective form; Robert Pippin (2008) instead concentrates on the institutional sphere of the ethical life that makes possible free actions. Others have gone further:

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Robert Wallace (2005) connects Hegel to Kantian ideas of autonomous selfdetermination, while Yeomans (2012) discovers answers to the classical problem of free will. Yet while such interpretations reveal the scope for individual freedom within Hegel’s system, they do not, by and large, point to the possibility of the collective freedom of the macrosubject of history to transform society completely— which is the sort of subjectivity Luka´cs required for his Marxist interpretation. The Phenomenology concluded with an examination of the laws that had governed history to that point; absolute knowledge came from seeing how the objective reality of society had been created in history up to that point (Hegel [1807] 1977). It did not provide any way to act in order to direct the course of the future; in Hegel’s phrase, the owl of Minerva could only fly at dusk, and could thus not predict what was to come (Hegel [1820] 1991). For a theory of revolution, this was not enough; it was necessary to find some way to account for the freedom to change society, and the possibility of historical action. In Luka´cs’s more deterministic reading, Hegel described how history had taken place; he did not say how we could make it. It was, instead, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on whom Luka´cs modelled his account of how the proletariat came to be ‘the first, and until now, the only subject in the course of history’ (Luka´cs 2000, 53). It was this question of subjective agency that preoccupied Luka´cs throughout the 1920s, as shown by his defence of History and Class Consciousness, only rediscovered some 15 years ago. As John Rees argues in his introduction to the piece, internal evidence suggests it was written in 1925 or 1926, that is, after Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought (Rees 2000). Thus, the persistence of the importance of subjectivity and other arguments from History and Class Consciousness at this time counters the claim by Gareth Stedman Jones (1977) that Lenin represents a significant change in Luka´cs’s position towards materialism. Throughout this period, Luka´cs’s central concern was the meaning and stimulation of proletarian agency—and it was, I suggest, to the theologically-oriented Kierkegaard that he turned to find the basic structure of his explanation. Undoubtedly, it seems prima facie surprising and improbable that Luka´cs, who restored Hegel’s dialectic to Marxism, should have been guided by a thinker he would later (Luka´cs [1952] 1980) denounce as an irrationalist and a reactionary, whose philosophy was formed in horrified reaction to Hegelianism. For Luka´cs, the historical process was central to knowledge of totality; Kierkegaard, under the pseudomym Johannes Climacus, inveighed against purely historical facts as any basis for knowledge of the absolute. Above all, Luka´cs’s subject was to be the proletariat; Kierkegaard, who criticised the loss of individuality in Hegel’s system, would have been horrified at the thought of a social group as subject. Kierkegaard’s subject was an immortal soul, distinct from the material world; for Luka´cs, the subject must be a revolutionary class, defined within the context of a materialist theory of society. However, it was the problem of explaining what subjective agency could mean that compelled Luka´cs to look to Kierkegaard for assistance: how far must the revolutionary class be aware of its world-historical task to bring about the sort of change Luka´cs envisaged? Marx himself was frustratingly ambiguous on the question of whether the proletariat needs to be conscious of its role in historical

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change, rather than aiming at merely relative ends of its own, while Hegel’s insistence that the world-historical individual is neither conscious of nor aiming at social transformation rules out any Party preaching materialist eschatology. Consequently, it is difficult to see how Luka´cs draws a line between the epistemic self-consciousness of oneself in a given situation and the moral subjectivity that entails action. Rather, Luka´cs’s idea that self-consciousness entails a specific way of relating to oneself and thereby becoming free finds clear parallels in Kierkegaard. Indeed, Luka´cs’s interest in the Dane was long-established, as suggested by his essay on Kierkegaard’s abortive love affair with Regine Olsen in the early Soul and Form (Luka´cs [1911] 1974). There is ample prima facie evidence that this fascination only grew in the years leading up to Luka´cs’s decision to join the Communist Party and beyond, as he admitted in the 1967 preface to the reissue of History and Class Consciousness. Indeed, in his application for Habilitation at Heidelberg, he indicated his intention to undertake a study of Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel (Luka´cs 1986, 288). In his notes for a planned work on Dostoevsky written during the First World War, only that novelist himself appears more frequently than Kierkegaard (Luka´cs 1985). Above all, he refers to Anti-Climacus’s works on the formation of the self, The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity: the former book alone is discussed five times, with two lengthy discussions, while the latter appears eight times, with four substantial passages. (In addition, Luka´cs refers to Stages on Life’s Way, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Moment.) Hegel and Marx may have given Luka´cs the historical theory that laid the groundwork for selfhood; to take the step into freedom, I argue, he turned to Kierkegaard. Luka´cs’s goal, then, is to explain the emergence of a collective subject for which self-consciousness is not simply knowledge of a set of instrumentally-useful facts about its objective situation, but is instead experienced as both the possibility of and the call to action that transforms that situation. It is this that is the crux of his debt to Kierkegaard: Luka´cs draws on Kierkegaard’s account of a subject divided against itself in suffering caused by a misrelation to the self that produces passivity and despair; this state can only be transcended when the self grounds its relation to itself in the absolute. For Kierkegaard, this means grounding the relation in God, while for Luka´cs, it is mediated through the socio-historical totality; despite this difference, the structure of selfhood remains the same. As I shall explain, the stages Luka´cs describes in the proletariat’s coming to subjectivity directly parallel those of Kierkegaard. Firstly, for both, the experience of alienation or despair would lead dialectically to consciousness of misrelation to the self as the cause of suffering; this contrasts with Hegel’s closest equivalent, the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, which does not become aware that this is at the root of its problem until after it has been solved. Secondly, neither Luka´cs nor Kierkegaard allowed this problem to be solved merely by consciousness of it; the subject had to take conscious action towards resolution. Thirdly, we shall see that this action, for both, was conditioned as a moment of action; Luka´cs’s understanding of the interaction of past, future, and the present moment is analogous to Kierkegaard’s. Finally, we shall see that the self or subject is created only through this self-consciousness and commitment to action; Luka´cs

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and Kierkegaard alike suggested that only when the subject grounded its subjectivity in the absolute could it be effective. It is in the conscious relation of the self to itself grounded in the absolute as the basis of the overcoming of despair that Luka´cs is at his most Kierkegaardian.

Despair and reification For Luka´cs and Kierkegaard, despair or the sense of powerlessness caused by reification are symptoms of misrelation to the self, and lead dialectically to awareness of that misrelation. The subject, whether religious individual or proletariat, suffers from being divided in and from itself; it suffers because it seems to have lost that which makes it essentially itself. This is suggested by Kierkegaard’s Danish term for despair, Fortvivlelse, which carries an implication of ‘becoming two’ (Hannay 1998, 329) that is echoed in the German Verzweiflung that Luka´cs knew it as. At every stage he describes, then, Kierkegaard’s despair is despair over something lost: one feels hopeless because of this loss. This may be something trivial; it is possible to despair over something earthly, but Kierkegaard finds this to be a rather low-grade form of despair (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 51–60). We still see, however, the basic structural feature of despair; the ‘man of immediacy’ who clings to earthly things finds that ‘the portion thereof to which he especially clings is taken from him; in short, he becomes, as he calls it, unhappy, that is, his immediacy is dealt such a crushing blow that it cannot reproduce itself: he despairs’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 51). What is crucial here is Kierkegaard’s argument that the true despair is not the mere feeling of unhappiness over loss of the earthly thing; instead, the individual ought to despair, or is already unwittingly despairing over his excessive attachment to earthly things. That is, the despair is not caused by relating to an earthly object, but by failing to relate correctly to what one really is—in Kierkegaard’s eyes, an immortal soul. At a higher level, one may also despair consciously, aware of despairing over the self. This may take the form of a suicidally-despairing desire to do away with oneself: the sufferer endures ‘despair over his weakness’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 61). To remain in such despair is simply to be this nothingness of a self immediately, without attempting any relation to it. The problem, in Kierkegaard’s diagnosis, is that the individual despairs over its weak devotion to the earthly; it fails to see its ability to move beyond that, because it has lost sight of what is eternal in itself. At the highest level of despair, the individual deliberately defies God, and seeks ‘to be master of itself, to create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, to determine what he will have or not have in his concrete self’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 68). The defiant despairer effectively tries to create itself ex nihilo; it cannot suffer any externality. It seeks to be a pure will, not affected by anything outside itself: ‘in its hatred toward existence, it wills to be itself, wills to be itself in accordance with its misery’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 73). It seeks to neutralise all that is external to itself. In effect, it becomes folded in upon itself in order to be itself; it cannot tolerate anything outside. Yet, for Kierkegaard, this is its greatest error: like all despair it ignores the essential duality of the self. In his words, ‘the self is a relation that

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relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 13). The true self ought, then, recognise that it is never immediately itself: it only becomes itself in this attempt to relate to itself by comprehending itself as that which is a constant self-relation. This relating must be grounded specifically on God, who has grounded or made possible the relation by granting the eternal to humans. Despair denies this both by dividing the individual from God, and from its own relational quality: it fails to see how the self is something that is not known immediately, but only comes to be in its process of knowing itself. Its reduction of the self to something immediate (both in the sense of something earthly, and the Hegelian sense) is a division of the self, and a loss—above all, a loss of the soul. Luka´cs’s description of the suffering of the individual in capitalist society at first seems far removed from such explicit religiosity. To condemn the shattering effects on the individual of work in a modern industrial concern seems straightforwardly humanist-socialist. However, the root of Luka´cs’s complaint is a loss of self through an inappropriate stance towards existence. This is visible both in the way the individual perceives its social existence, and in the way it experiences its own inner life. In the first case, Luka´cs complains that the commodity form, dominant in capitalist society, quantifies everything giving it ‘a ‘‘phantom objectivity’’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 83). This is accomplished by compelling the worker to sell himself to the capitalist in the form of labour hours: his individual qualitative time is reduced to the abstract unit of quantified time. Moreover, this abstract form is his very social existence: society functions by treating him, not as an individual, but as a set number of objective labour hours without any freedom. (In contrast, the capitalist appears to have a determinative role in the system, as the one apparently making decisions.) Therefore, society appears to be some impersonally-functioning machine; as a result, ‘the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 90). This leads to the second point, the individual’s perception of himself as individual. The system that treats the individual merely as an objective cog in the reproduction of capital ‘stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘‘own’’ or ‘‘dispose of’’ like the various objects of the external world’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 100). Individuals are divided from their qualities. For the bourgeoisie, this is not catastrophic; they participate in society through money; changes in quantity seem merely external. Therefore, ‘for his consciousness [society] necessarily appears as an activity (albeit this activity is objectively an illusion), in which the effects emanate from himself’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 166). However, ‘the quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental, and moral existence.’ Thus, society appears set up against the proletariat, for ‘in every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that

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is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 165). The proletariat’s labour power seems objectively separated from it; in reification, it confronts the proletarian as something opposed to him. The problem of reification is a problem of powerlessness against the world, brought about by the division of the proletarian from himself and the product of his labour; as a result, everything in capitalist society seems to be subject to the necessary and natural laws of economics, rather than the result of human social practices. [I use ‘practices’ here broadly in an anthropological sense as suggested by Andrew Feenberg in his interpretation of Luka´cs, as the collective repeated practices by a which a community reproduces itself (Feenberg 1981, 71)]. Note here, then, the close parallel between Luka´cs’s complaint that the reified consciousness misrecognizes itself as powerless and passive with Kierkegaard’s despair of necessity that lacks possibility. Similarly, the contented bourgeoisie, unaware of itself as divided and alienated, is parallel to Kierkegaard’s unconscious despair, in that it is unaware of its true nature, and that this is violated. Indeed, Westphal argues that for Kierkegaard, it is in modern society that consciousness of despair is hardest to obtain, and that the self-satisfied bourgeois individual, unthinkingly confident in the rightness of society, is the least likely to despair (Westphal 1987). Above all, then, Luka´cs interprets the problem of reification as being division from oneself: the impersonal forces of society divide the individual into a subjective and objective aspect. As Hannay too has briefly argued, this misrecognition of oneself and others is at the root of the problem for both Luka´cs and Kierkegaard (Hannay 1995). It sets the individual against itself and generates a sense of impotence, leading to despair or alienation.

The dialectic of despair So far, so Hegelian, it might be argued: the parallel between Luka´cs and Kierkegaard in their use of self-division to explain despair extends to Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, which suffers because of its self-division against itself, holding itself to be imperfect and impermanent when placed against a posited absolute divinity which is in truth no more than its own essence posited as different from itself. However, the Unhappy Consciousness never exactly realizes that this misrelation to its own essence is the root of the problem; even the final alleviation of its misery is achieved only through surrender of its will to the priest as representative of the universal and unchanging will (Hegel [1807] 1977, 138). It is not until spirit reaches Absolute Knowledge that the underlying explanation for the much earlier phase of Unhappy Consciousness is retrospectively clear. In contrast, for both Luka´cs and Kierkegaard suffering brings direct consciousness of the nature of the problem. The sufferer is able to see that the problem is misrelation to itself and resolve it directly, rather than fumbling through progressively closer approximations of a solution. In Kierkegaard’s words, whilst ‘despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination’ for the sufferer, ‘the possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the

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Christian’s blessedness’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 15). As has frequently been noted, Kierkegaard presents the escape from despair as a movement through despair, rather than dogmatic acceptance of the church’s word; this is, as Theunissen rightly explains, a dialectical movement of increasing consciousness and learning (Theunissen 1993; Kim 1992; Bo¨sch 1994). For Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus, ‘precisely because the sickness of despair is totally dialectical, it is the worst misfortune never to have had that sickness: it is a true godsend to get it, even if it is the most dangerous of illnesses, if one does not want to be cured of it.’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 26). Kierkegaard distinguishes unconscious and conscious despair. The former is dealt with briefly; ‘an individual is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit when he is ignorant of being in despair. But precisely this—not to be conscious of oneself as spirit—is despair’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 44). Instead, ‘despair must be considered primarily within the category of consciousness; whether despair is conscious or not constitutes the qualitative distinction between despair and despair… The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 29). For example, the one who has despaired over one earthly thing may move up to despair over all that is earthly, then to despair over his weak attachment to the earthly, and so on. Despair progresses from despairingly not wishing to be oneself, growing ever more conscious (though not by necessity) through to demonic despair, conscious of itself as misrelation, but refusing to be corrected, like a writer’s error refusing to be erased, that insists on standing forever to show that the writer is incompetent (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 74). There is not yet a solution—but the first glimmers of despair allow the possibility of an increasing awareness of the root cause of the entire problem. For Luka´cs, ‘it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man’s achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness,’ for it is only in his situation that the social forms of capitalism become clear (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 171). Proletarian labour has the pure form of the commodity, whereas for the bourgeois it has deceptive forms, for example, of duty: While the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanises him and cripples and atrophies his ‘soul’—as long as he does not consciously rebel against it—…his humanity and his soul are not themselves changed into commodities. He is able therefore to objectify himself completely against his existence, while the man reified in the bureaucracy, for instance, is… mechanised and reified in the only faculties that might enable him to rebel against reification (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 172). Luka´cs’s use of ‘soul’ here unintentionally highlights the parallel with Kierkegaard. Workers seem divided against their selves only because, through reification, their suffering shows itself in this division in a way that is not true for other classes. As we saw above, the commodification of the individual’s time in the form of labour is at the root of the problems of modern society. Luka´cs also sees this as the basis of the proletariat’s possible overthrowing of that misrelation. Because the worker is so thoroughly overwhelmed by this reification, he ‘perceives the split

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in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its whole tendency a slavery without limits… But this very fact forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 166). The apparent scientific objectivity of the rationalising machine that is the capitalist economy is unveiled, in Luka´cs’s argument, as something pertaining to real people; the alienated abstract category is shown to describe real individuals—and, specifically, the worker. Furthermore, ‘this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 169). That is, the object’s objectivity is sublated; rather than appearing as something alienated from the subject, which therefore disempowers the subject, it becomes the very sphere of the subject’s capacity for action. As with Kierkegaard’s dialectic of despair, Luka´cs’s reification brings the proletariat through suffering to consciousness of the problem, allowing them to consider resolving it. Given that Luka´cs and Kierkegaard emphasised the clear awareness of the self’s misrelation to itself, it is not surprising that both criticised what they saw as Hegel’s assumption of a logically-necessary transition out of unhappiness that did not consciously aim at a direct solution to the problem. What was essential was the morally subjective element, the moment of the leap: neither a mechanicallynecessary process, nor, crucially, the simple purification of the epistemological subject’s standpoint so that it could see the situation clearly were considered sufficient. Therefore, for both, self-consciousness is something qualitatively different from mere epistemological consciousness: it entails not just awareness of the correct relation to the self, but also concrete action. In Kierkegaard’s argument, this took the form of the individual’s leap of faith, or decision to accept God—necessarily an individual action, not something that one did automatically, as a member of a community. The Resurrection allowed one to realise that the time for choice was here—in Anti-Climacus’s words, ‘the miracle can make aware—now you are in the tension, and it depends upon what you choose, offense or faith; it is your heart that must be disclosed’ (Kierkegaard [1850] 1991, 97). It would be possible not to repent by taking offence at the offer of salvation; the individual might refuse to accept that God could have taken on human form, or that God could forgive sins. This implicitly denied Christ, and left the individual in despair. For Kierkegaard, despair brought consciousness, not just of the problem, but of the need for the subjective action to bring oneself out of despair, by acceptance of one’s relation to the absolute, and the miracle of the Resurrection. Indeed, ‘every state of sin is a new sin, or, to express it more precisely… the state of sin is the new sin, is the sin;’ every unrepented sin kept one in despair for longer; only through subjective repentance could salvation be found (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 105). It was the subjective choice to repent individually that brought faith and escape from despair. Luka´cs shared Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Hegel by similarly interpreting his historical dialectic as allowing no role for genuine subjectivity; every end is relativised by being shown inadvertently to promote the World Spirit (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 146). In Kierkegaardian terms, Luka´cs suggested that such a system would lead to inactivity; as he put it, ‘the reified world appears henceforth quite definitively… as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world… Whether this gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair,

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whether we search for a path leading to ‘‘life’’ via irrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971). Interestingly, Kierkegaard too highlights ecstasy, resignation, mysticism, and despair as mistaken responses to the problem of selfhood (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980). Because of the apparent imperturbability of society, bourgeois thought rejected the responsibility to change society; it concentrated on the pure inwardness of deontological Kantian morality. In contrast, ‘only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of the impasse of capitalism. As long as this consciousness is lacking, the crisis remains permanent’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 76). This consciousness was necessary—but not sufficient, for ‘every contemplative, purely cognitive stance leads ultimately to a divided relationship to its object’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 205). For Luka´cs, subjectivity was essential in order to escape mechanism; ‘the significance of the subjective moment is only banished from the world by Kantians who inflexibly and undialectically separate out subject and object, by making the subject’s appearance, the possibility of its effectiveness, the possibility of its decisive significance, rest on objective causes. In fact the opposite is true.’ (Luka´cs 2000, 52). Mere acceptance of objective processes was not enough; the proletariat must act consciously to change its situation; ‘the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the—free—action of the proletariat itself’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1979, 209). What is especially striking here is the stress Luka´cs gives at this point to the ‘necessity’ of change, due to society’s having fallen into an evil state analogous to that of sin and despair in Kierkegaard. This is to be expected from the fact, as noted above, that Luka´cs seems to have paid closest attention to Kierkegaard’s works as Anti-Climacus, Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity. Subjectivity is, of course, Kierkegaard’s central theme, but some of his other pseudonyms describe freedom in a way that is more forward-looking, as it were. For example, in Concept of Anxiety (as Vigilius Haufniensis), it is a fear of sinning that indicates freedom; writing as Johannes Climacus, he gives a more conventionally-philosophical explanation of freedom and determinism (Kierkegaard [1844a] 1980, [1844b] 1985). Though Luka´cs’s account overall draws broadly on Kierkegaard’s paradigm, the particular similarities between his acount of reification and the Anti-Climacan works of despair are noticeable.

Self-consciousness and the relation to the self Luka´cs and Kierkegaard agreed in seeing despair or unhappiness as being symptomatic of misrelation to the self, and as, therefore, leading to consciousness of that misrelation. Furthermore, both emphasised the need for free and subjective action to overcome this. As Dietz argues, Kierkegaard differs from Nietzsche (and from twentieth-century existentialists) in refusing to accept despair as a basic fact of human existence; its point is to bring about the movement to a better way of living (Dietz 1993, 5, 343). In the same way, Luka´cs refused to accept the alienation of capitalist society as an unalterable fact, seeing it rather as the occasion prompting

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social change. When considering the nature of that subjective action, the extent of Luka´cs’s similarity to Kierkegaard becomes much more striking. This is seen firstly in the way in which the subject obtains a correct understanding of and relation to itself as subject, and secondly in the way this understanding is then used to mediate the moment and freely take decisive action. A false relation of the self to itself led, as we have seen, to despair or alienation. In both Luka´cs and Kierkegaard, this could be overcome only by acquiring a mediated relation of the self to itself, grounded on the absolute. For Kierkegaard, the leap out of despair meant a leap into faith—specifically, a decision to entrust oneself to a God one could not actually know to be there. Not to leap was sin, for ‘sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself.’ (Kierkegaard [1849] 1980, 77). The conception of God, or being before God, constitutes the imperative to take subjective action. Freedom is thus only truly be understood in relating to God; it lies in accepting salvation, or taking offence at the offer and rejecting it. As McCarthy (1985) argues (in showing the parallels with Schelling’s account of human freedom), it is this element of choice in accepting or rejecting God wherein human freedom resides. By relating to God, then, the individual acquires strength and freedom. For example, Anti-Climacus understands the Christian’s relating to God as that which motivates him to action; he holds God’s image before himself, and is thus able to suffer great indignities, for ‘because of this image before his eyes, the Christian perseveres in abasement, drawn to him who from on high will draw all to himself’ (Kierkegaard [1850] 1991, 198). It is through relating to God, moreover, that the individual is able to pull himself beyond everyday life—thus, ‘if a human life is not to be loafed away in inactivity or wasted away in busy activity—then there must be something higher that draws it… Therefore a Christian’s life is properly structured, is oriented toward what is above’ (Kierkegaard [1850] 1991, 152). From this, Kierkegaard is able to identify God as the guarantor of selfhood: the human’s relation of itself to itself is established by and grounded in God. Consciously denying this leads to the worst form of despair, the demonic despair of defiance described above. The individual in such despair seeks to create its own self ex nihilo—but such a self is unstable, built purely on whim, and could be overthrown at any moment. For Kierkegaard, the attempt to deny the poles of possibility and necessity, of infinity and finitude, without grounding one’s self-creation in the absolute power of God will inevitably end in failure. Instead, one must be oneself before Christ for ‘at this point the intensification of the consciousness of the self is the knowledge of Christ, a self directly before Christ…the more conception of Christ, the more self’ (Kierkegaard [1850] 1980, 113–114). For Anti-Climacus, ‘in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula in turn, as has been frequently pointed out, is the definition of faith’ (Kierkegaard [1850] 1991, 131). The correct relation to the self, and hence true selfhood, can only be achieved in relation to God: thus, as Lee (1994) notes, eternal happiness is both a task requiring our activity, and a gift offered by and in God. At first glance, Luka´cs’s account of the correct relation of the self to itself seems diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard’s. As Adorno noted, Kierkegaard ends up with pure interiority; by basing the self in God, it is detached from the real world.

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Selfhood is based in a pure, free act that steps beyond the world of determinism— placing Kierkegaard in the Kantian tradition. Where Kant (and, of course, Kierkegaard’s twentieth century existentialist heirs) is unable to prove the substantial existence of the self as rational ‘I think’ beyond experience and must merely insist on it, Kierkegaard depicts it as existing in God—a stunt of equal ontological profligacy. In contrast, Luka´cs insists that the self or subject must find its true relation to itself as being something social. His totality is, indeed, explicitly Hegelian. It is entirely based in society, for ‘when the proletariat furthers its own aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realisation of the—objective—aims of society,’ and his claims that ‘the developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical facts’ or that ‘the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them’ are plainly not Kierkegaardian (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 149; 181; 47). This sort of objectivist grand narrative was clearly in contrast to Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual, and it would be wrong to try to paint Luka´cs as a pure and uncomplicated Kierkegaardian at heart. Despite this, Luka´cs’s description of the relation to self shows Kierkegaardian tendencies in two ways. Firstly, Luka´cs insisted that knowledge of the totality of this process can have practical importance, for ‘this situation creates the possibility of praxis in the individual consciousness’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 19). The objective social forms of capitalism produce a situation in which class consciousness could ‘become conscious’—but only for the proletarian class, for it alone is able to ‘see society from the centre, as a coherent whole… [which] means that it is able to act in such a way as to change reality’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 59; 69). Contrast this with Hegel: for him, the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and knowledge of totality is no help in bringing about grand social change. Even at the end of the Phenomenology, there is no claim that realised absolute Geist will use its total knowledge to act in a certain way—let alone that philosophers or politicians who recognise themselves within it could do so. For Luka´cs, such self-consciousness is definitively practical. In the first place, it has an instrumental importance: our actions are more effective through a knowledge of the constant reproduction of social forms and structures. Thus, ‘only the dialectical conception of totality can enable us to understand reality as a social process. For only this conception dissolves the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 13). It was for this reason that he admired Lenin; criticising vulgar Marxists who refuse to accept revolution, Luka´cs applauded Lenin’s ability to relate every single thing to totality, for ‘individual actions can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the sociohistoric whole’ (Luka´cs [1924] 1997, 13). Luka´cs’s suggestion that a knowledge of totality helps guide action sharply contrasts with the Hegelian claim that absolute knowledge could be no guide to socially-transformative action. It is in the exact definition of this totality, and the way in which the proletariat’s self-understanding rested on it, that Luka´cs parallels Kierkegaard most closely. For Luka´cs, the proletariat is the absolute class: it must, in every respect, relate to itself

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by, through, and as the heart of the social totality. Contrast this once more with Hegel ([1820] 1991), for whom individuals, groups, social orders, and nations would pursue only their own unique ends within civil society. It is through these particularist ends that the absolute logic of World Spirit is realized behind their backs, as it were; to aim directly at this absolute, or to hope for a more than retrospective understanding of it, would be erroneous. Even if (as recent scholarship suggests) there is scope for individual free will within Hegel’s system, this does not allow the sort of conscious and collective subjective freedom Luka´cs sought in proletarian revolution. For Luka´cs, however, the proletariat’s self-understanding must be grounded in the absolute, and its ends must be equally conditioned by the totality. Its self-consciousness within the totality was its world-historical role. There are two facets to Luka´cs’s argument. In the first place, the relation to oneself means that the individual must be superseded by the class. That is, understanding oneself as a merely immediate individual is false. Rather, by understanding oneself as social, by interpreting oneself through a synchronic social totality, one comes to awareness of one’s class situation: what one is is determined by class position. For this reason, Luka´cs rejects as false any self-consciousness based on individuality: Class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual—and these actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 51). What is important for my case about this passage is Luka´cs’s argument that the immediate, individual perspective is false because it relies on the immediate feelings of the individual, rather than grounding the individual’s relationship to itself on totality and therefore on class situation. Class consciousness—and, by extension, the self-consciousness of the individual member of the class—is only ‘true’ insofar as it relates back to itself through the absolute, and thereby sees the interests of the class (and the individual) not according to some temporary interest, but in the light of the whole socio-historical process. Secondly, Luka´cs sees this relationship to the self grounded on totality not simply in epistemological terms—‘this is what the class truly is, and only now do I see it’— but also in existential terms—that is, relating to the self in this way constitutes or creates the class. For Luka´cs, if there was to be a supreme subject of history, it must be shown to have been produced within history—thus, he criticised Hegel for falling back on a transcendental Geist as his subject, merely reconciling it to history at the eleventh hour; consequently, ‘history is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in ‘‘absolute spirit’’’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 147). Instead, the subject appeared historically when the totality of the historical process was seen as the basis of consciousness. Thus, when he states that ‘the act of consciousness [by the proletariat] overthrows the

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objective form of its object,’ Luka´cs emphasises that the attempt to relate to oneself through totality in fact overcomes the division from self discussed previously, and leads to the proletariat’s ‘own emergence as a class’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 178; 171). It is only by being aware of itself that the proletariat is able to become ‘the identical subject-object of the historical process, i.e. the first subject in history that is (objectively) capable of an adequate social consciousness’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 199). The importance of this relation to self is made even clearer by the way Luka´cs decribes the role of the Communist Party. Far from being a Blanquist avant-garde charged with seizing power ‘on behalf of’ the sluggish workers, it is there as an ‘autonomous form’ of class consciousness that ensures that ‘the whole class may become fully aware of its own existence as a class’ (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 326). Through engagement in a grass-roots Party of the entire class, the workers come to relate to themselves through the absolute; it is in this work that the dialectic of selfconsciousness takes place. In other words, it is exactly understanding the ways one relates to oneself—the ways one has self-consciousness—as being grounded in totality that gives the proletariat the edge; it relates, in effect, to the relation to itself. However Hegelian or Marxist Luka´cs’s totality undoubtedly is, his emphasis on the existential need to relate practically to that totality is distinctly Kierkegaardian.

The moment of action Relation to oneself as grounded in the absolute showed only the possibilities of action; Luka´cs and Kierkegaard alike went further, insisting on the crucial importance of action itself. In describing the way the Party must assess the situation in order to take revolutionary action, Luka´cs takes on Kierkegaard’s concept of the moment as outlined in The Concept of Anxiety (to which there are several references in his notes for the Dostoevsky book). For both, the decisive ingredient is the recognition of the objective situation as something created in the past, and of the present moment as something that will determine objectivity for the future—and hence as the locus of choice and freedom. For Kierkegaard, anxiety arose from fear of the possibility of sin in the future. Through anxiety, we have an indication of our ability to sin; we would not be anxious about something that happened out of necessity, nor would we feel guilty about it. In the first place, the importance of subjectivity was indicated by the objective situation around action: what appeared to be objective and necessary was in fact the result of freedom in the past; thus, ‘the past has indeed come into existence; coming into existence is the change, in freedom, of becoming actuality. If the past had become necessary, then it would not belong to freedom any more - that is, belong to that in which it came into existence’ (Kierkegaard [1844a] 1985, 77–78). Obviously, practical freedom for Kierkegaard requires recognition of the objective situation. He insists, however, that this has only become necessary because it was in the past; at previous moments, this situation itself was undetermined, and was created out of freedom. It was not something that we could, with Hegel, comprehend retrospectively as the product of logical necessity, for ‘necessity stands all by itself. Nothing whatever comes into existence by way of

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necessity, no more than necessity comes into existence or anything in coming into existence becomes the necessary’ (Kierkegaard [1844b] 1985, 74–75). Implicitly renouncing total determinism, Luka´cs himself defended this interpretation of the objective situation in Tailism and the Dialectic, arguing against Rudas that the failure of the Hungarian Council Republic had been due to the failure of the subjective element of the Communist Party: Obviously, the fact that there was no Communist Party in Hungary during the Dictatorship of Workers’ Councils has objective causes. However, these objective causes were, on the one hand, in part previously subjective ones (sic!) (moments from the history of the workers’ movement). On the other hand, the significance of the subjective moment is only banished from the world by Kantians who inflexibly and undialectically separate out subject and object, by making the subject’s appearance, the possibility of its effectiveness, the possibility of its decisive significance, rest on objective causes. In fact the opposite is true. (Luka´cs 2000, 52.) That is, ‘people actually—and not only in their imagination—make their own history’ (ibid). This is a crucial reinterpretation of Marx’s dictum that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’ (Marx [2001] 1852, 329). For Marx, the central concern is that bourgeois revolutions invariably clothe themselves in the forms of the past; thus Louis Bonaparte shadowed the actions of his uncle in his seizure of power. Luka´cs goes further, and moves towards Kierkegaard, in that he uses this to show the proletariat that the form of social totality was produced by human activity; thus, realising that it had created the present in the past, the proletariat could act to order the future in full consciousness. For Marx, past forms imprisoned consciousness; for Luka´cs, a proper understanding of the forms of past action might allow us to understand the moments that had produced them, and to reveal the possibility of freedom in the very times it had been missed. In this way, Luka´cs and Kierkegaard were able to stress the importance of the moment of decision in the present. The moment could only be perceived through the standpoint of totality; it was the gathering together of the tendencies of society such that they could be employed to remake the future. For Kierkegaard, we must consider the moment as more than just an ‘atom of time’; this would wrongly suggest the substantial identity of past, present and future, and interpret the moment as no more than a point on a line, or the boundary in the constant slipping-by of time (Kierkegaard [1844a] 1980, 91). Rather, the moment goes beyond time; it is where the temporal and the eternal meet: The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above-mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time (Kierkegaard [1844b] 1980, 89).

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The moment is an ‘atom of eternity,’ transfiguring past and future too into the eternal. The past becomes something that we need not be anxious over (though we might despair over our guilt). The future is no longer inescapably determined; instead, ‘the possible corresponds exactly to the future. For freedom, the possible is the future, and the future is for time the possible’ (Kierkegaard [1844a] 1980, 91). Positing the eternal in the moment thus changes the phenomenology of past and future, generating an individual’s relation to him or herself as free. Luka´cs took Kierkegaard’s understanding of the moment as the requirement for the subjective element to explain the importance of conscious proletarian action. For him too, the relation between past and future is concentrated in the moment, as he explains in remarkably Kierkegaardian terms: Becoming is also the mediation between past and future. But it is the mediation between the concrete, i.e. historical past, and the equally concrete, i.e. historical future. When the concrete here and now dissolves into a process it is no longer a continuous, intangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable ‘pernicious chasm’ of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 203–204.) Just as Kierkegaard insists that the moment is not just a point travelling along a smooth temporal line, so too does Luka´cs describe it as more than ‘immediacy slipping away’; for both, the moment demnands a radical transfiguration of past and future, so that they are understood in terms of human activity instead of alien and objective inevitabilities. For Luka´cs, though, the moment is not the element of eternity, but rather of totality. By seeing society from the standpoint of totality, the proletariat comes to understand that its social structures are constantly reproduced through the circulation of capital, rather than having a fixed and unalterable existence (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, 180). This allows us to understand capitalist society as the result of a discontinuous series of choices, rather than an unalterable machine. As with Kierkegaard’s account, this refraction of past and future in the moment changes our very stance towards being. Thus, in Tailism and the Dialectic, he attacked the deservedly-forgotten Hungarian Marxist La´zlo´ Rudas, who ‘speaks of ‘‘process’’ in opposition to ‘‘moment’’, for his tailist-fatalist concept of process really does exclude any moment of decision’ (Luka´cs 2000, 54). He clarifies this, asking ‘what is a ‘‘moment’’?’ and answering thus: it is ‘a situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken over the future direction of the process’ (Luka´cs 2000, 55). In this case, Luka´cs’s account is more akin to Kierkegaard’s elaboration of anxiety than that of despair: stating that ‘at a particular point, the situation demands that a

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decision be taken and the day after tomorrow might be too late to make that decision,’ he emphasises our subjective responsibility for the future rather than our lamenting over past errors (Luka´cs 2000, 55). For both, then, our freedom is shaped by the phenomenology of the moment: it changes the way both past and future appear to us through relation to an absolute (eternity or totality) that transcends both, and in so doing transforms our relation to ourselves as beings within time. The reified consciousness that leads us to relate to ourselves as the passive victims of naturalistic forces beyond our control is shattered; we now see both past and future as undetermined, and so relate to ourselves as free.

Conclusion To sum up, we have seen a number of structural similarities between Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood and Luka´cs’s description of the proletariat’s coming to freedom. Both understood despair or the pain of existence in capitalist society as being rooted in misrelation to the self; both argued that the problem could only be overcome by revealing that misrelation directly; both emphasised that the correct relation to the self must involve an explicit relation back to oneself based on some absolute— either God, or the totality of society; finally, both stressed the importance of the moment of decision with their account of the present as the locus of decision based on an objective situation created by past subjective action, and with the possibility of shaping the future. Luka´cs’s attempts to base the proletariat’s activity on the absolute, then, is obviously not Hegelian: it shows strong traces of his earlier interest in Kierkegaard. Of course, this is not to claim that Luka´cs was an outright Kierkegaardian; plainly, he owed much to Hegel. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself must be understood at least in part as arising out of Hegelianism; even without going so far as to accept Stephen Dunning’s sophisticated interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a dialectic of inwardness with a distinctly Hegelian structure, it is easy, as Lo¨with does, to see Marx and Kierkegaard as parallel reactions to Hegel (Dunning 1985; Lo¨with 1941). However, Luka´cs acknowledged later that ‘even Hegel’s effect upon me was highly ambiguous. For, on the one hand, Kierkegaard had played a significant role in my early development and in the immediate prewars years in Heidelberg I even planned an essay on his criticism of Hegel’; this, along with his interest in Sorel, left ‘a highly contradictory amalgam of theories’ within him for some years after the war (Luka´cs [1923] 1971, ix–x). To present a single, unified reading of History and Class Consciousness, then, would be false: there are, quite obviously, a number of distinct philosophical strands in it. Lucien Goldmann, attempting to unify Luka´cs and Heidegger, suggests that Soul and Forms is Luka´cs’s ‘existential’ book; it is here that Luka´cs treats the question of authenticity and limit, he suggests, related to Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein. History and Class Consciousness, in contrast, with its analysis of totality, is for Goldmann the equivalent of Heidegger’s analysis of Being in general (Goldmann 1977, 7–8). However, Luka´cs’s objective analysis of totality does not account for the significance of self-consciousness in changing that totality; moreover, there is nothing in Hegel, for whom self-consciousness is retrospective rather than the

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source of action, to explain this. Indeed, Luka´cs’s very insistence on free action marks a distinct break from Hegel’s logically-necessary unfolding of history as a whole. To explain this connection between self-consciousness and freedom, then, Luka´cs drew on Kierkegaardian ideas. In that History and Class Consciousness seeks also to show how knowledge of totality can lead to moral agency, it continues his earlier existential interests. Merleau-Ponty hinted at this in his chapter on Luka´cs in Adventures of the Dialectic: suggesting that the proletariat, unveiling the formal relationship between capital and labour as being between individuals, can penetrate the forms of reification to come to consciousness; without mentioning Kierkegaard, he uses his phrase to describe Luka´cs’s method, saying that this is ‘the relation of the self to itself’ (Merleau-Ponty [1955] 1973). What is at stake for both Luka´cs and Kierkegaard in this relationship is more than just an epistemic knowledge of oneself; it means a radically-different stance towards existence and towards oneself within the world, a phenomenological transformation that brings about an ontological one. Kierkegaard calls the individual to leap actively to faith, and to take responsibility for belief; we should not rely on our passive participation in the rites of the Danish church to ensure our salvation. For Luka´cs too we must stand differently towards ourselves: where the reified consciousness of capitalist society rendered the workers passive and helpless in the face of social processes, a stance towards the self grounded in the totality of society would reveal the present instant as a moment in which the future could be transformed. By emphasising the necessity for action based on a relation to the self grounded in an eternal or a total absolute, both Luka´cs and Kierkegaard make selfhood a task, something that one must become; neither Kierkegaard’s individual, nor Luka´cs’s proletariat are selves in the first instance, but instead they emerge as a result of their choice to become, and to stand actively towards themselves. In this sense, although History and Class Consciousness certainly does rediscover Hegelianism in Marx, it makes use of it in a decisively Kierkegaardian way. Acknowledgments I would like to thank in particular Raymond Geuss, George Pattison, Martin Ruehl, Nicholas Walker, and the staff of the Luka´cs Archive in Budapest for their help and advice at various points in this project. I am also grateful to the trustees of the Robert Owen Bishop Fund at Christ’s College, Cambridge, who supported the initial stages of research from which this piece emerged. Needless to say, any remaining errors or misrepresentations are entirely my own.

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