The problem

This paper attempts to enrich the picture of the Marxist-based theory of art and literature developed by Arnold Hauser. To fulfill this task, I will elaborate the following two theses:

  1. 1.

    First, Hauser’s oeuvre is at its best when we read it as an account of the structure and functioning of human cognition and not as an essay on European art history. In this way, art and literature themselves could be appraised also for their cognitive value (as a way of experiencing the world we live in) and not only as a controversial synthesis of rich creative traditions developed amidst the process of civilization. Recent scholarship (Gelfert 2012: 137–141) reflecting on Hauser’s general conception on the difference of art and science has also stressed that his philosophy of art history and, subseqently, his sociology of art have a cognitive value.

  2. 2.

    Second, Hauser’s epistemological tenets are mostly of Kantian origin with certain parallels in twentieth century phenomenology. In this interpretive framework, classical phenomenology is also partly considered to be philosophy of knowledge. Hauser is particularly relevant for our discussion, because he builds his epistemology on a weaker Marxist theory of science. Or, to put it differently: he reads and uses Marx as a theory of art and scientific knowledge, but refrains from orthodox Marxist views on the one-dimensionally material determination of artistic and scientific productivity. Hauser’s philosophy and epistemology of art history accomodate such an antidogmatic (and we must add: also authentic) Marxism. This way, his views travel down a path similar to Kant’s balanced anti-intellectualism and anti-dogmatism.

These balanced, antidogmatic theories I call the multilayer theories of knowledge (MT), based on the idea that human cognition is a conglomerate made up of cooperating faculties. Each of these are indispensable constituents in setting up cognition, equal in value (Kant), and correlative in their functioning. A non-equal and non-correlative analysis of these mechanisms leads to certain philosophical errors, such as strong (reductive) psychologism and unilateral (likewise reductive) determinism. Hauser follows this tradition in exposing the social background of art as a value-equal factor with matters of style and artistic creativity. He developed a Marxist and antidogmatic, balanced and epistemologically conscious philosophy of art history.

In this paper, I will proceed as follows. First, I will present the interpretation of Marxism used in my case study. Next, I will show some basic features of MT as the epistemological background against which Hauser adopted an antidogmatic Marxism. The final chapter, dedicated mainly to some characteristic textual excerpts from Hauser’s works, will hopefully clarify the basic conundrum: he developed an MT with anti-deterministic Marxist overtones.

The meaning of Marxism

Marxism is conceived here as a critical discourse approaching the works of culture and not as a materialistic philosophy explaining the social basis of political changes. A critical discourse is per definitionem anti-deterministic because it deals with the interpretation of how a certain work of culture documents the social practices, which constitute the context of its emergence. It is neither an objectivistic theory about the objects analyzed (that objects fall under this or that category or kind), nor a subjective manner of speaking, which considers certain individuals as the creators of these objects. Works of culture (1) “do not represent” how their social basis determined them to be. They call for (2) the “hermeutics” of social conditions where the ultimate source of meaning are those joint contexts that enclose the relationship of creative subjects and created objects. This form of Marxism came from the reinterpretation of Marx’s early works and is relatively well-known in the history of human sciences. It is a discourse that Marx himself favored, but was first explicitly formulated by Georg Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness as an account of “Marx before Marx” and before the publication of the relevant texts, his manuscripts from the 1840s (n.b. the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts). This is considered to be a non-orthodox Marxism, because it refuses to exclusively explain the social-political superstructure through an economic and material base. Consequently, this old framework of classical Marxism has been demolished since the 1950s, but the early Lukács was a clear forerunner of this interpretive turn. Even in his—evidently not Marxist—1911 workFootnote 1 entitled History of the Development of Modern Drama, he suggestively writes about an unwholesome tendency in sociology of literature to explain artistic productivity from economic premises. As Lukács posits, sociology of literature “seeks contents in the works of art and establishes a direct connection between these and some economic conditions” (Lukács 1911 [1981]: 10). Instead of this, the authentic sociological dimension of literature is what he calls “form”, referring to the means of possessing the integral sense of a certain cultural identity, which reflects the conflicts and struggles of social actors (Congdon 1983: 15–40).

The bearer of this critical discourse in Marx’s early papers is the proletariat, which, due to its totally alienated position, has a perfect view on interpreting the function of the other classes of society. This position is also shown to be emancipatory: deprived completely of any leading or meaningful role, the proletariat tends to change the general condition of human alienation (Márkus 1986: 132–135). Fulfilling this position is not a full-time contemplative undertaking: Proletarians solely to the endeavour of unveiling the hidden and unseen aspects of a certain cultural product. They also intend to redefine the conditions of social existence by pinning down the limits of social practices and the limits of the actors taking part therein. As a prominent commentator on Marx’s concept of ideology-critique puts it, ideologies are not one-sided objective or subjective determinations of cultural products:

They were dealt with as objectivations of social practices, whose primary function is the creation, transmission, and imposition of meanings through which individuals can collectively comprehend their own life situation, its limits, and possibilities (Márkus 1995 [2011]: 458)

This process has three methodological cornerstones. It is epistemologically conscious, it fulfills a transcendental role, and it is also dialectical. It is epistemologically conscious, because it depicts both the subjective-creative capacities and the objective-material means that jointly set off a specific action. Furthermore, it also communicates some seemingly meaningless and hitherto unnoticed motives of those subjective–objective connections. These unnoticed motives could only be uncovered by reflecting on the cooperation of subjective and objective sources of the ideologies in question. It is transcendental, because the knowledge of the limits of social practices is an account of possible knowledge. Ideologies objectivate the conditions of how a certain social activity is to be executed, how works of culture could and should be produced in the rich context of active (subjective) and passive (objective) factors. And finally, it is dialectical in two relevant senses. (a) It balances the polarity of a subjective–objective analysis. It describes how these elements of knowledge are able to cooperate with each other: through the third and mostly unseen factor making their cooperation feasible. It is also dialectical (b) as a third methodological program that mediates between scientific ‘explanation’ and ‘historical’ understanding in order to overcome “the unreflexive moment of our historical existence” (Apel 1971: 47, also cited by Márkus 1995 [2011]: 459). This mediating-dialectical role of Marxism as a critical discourse stresses the explicitly antidogmatic intentions of Marxism in the philosophy of science, and has also been accepted by prominent figures examining the role of dialectic in human sciences.Footnote 2

The further development of this critical discourse reinforced the original idea of a mediating-interpretive theory through a strong shift in the disciplinary position that philosophy has taken: it cannot be considered as the sole epistemological authority in investigating knowledge. The theory of human consciousness needs to be corrected through the other (e.g. material and social) factors that characterize the picture of the world we live in. Representatives of traditional philosophy must surrender to the idea of a seminal interdisciplinarity: their field of research is not autonomous and self-sufficient any more. As Marx formulates it in the first (Feuerbach-) chapter of The German Ideology:

Empty phrases about consciousness end, and real knowledge has to take their place. When the reality is described, a self-sufficient [selbstständige] philosophy loses its medium of existence. At best, its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of men. These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have no value whatsoever. (Marx 1845 [1998]: 43)

This is also the realm where “real, positive science starts” (ibid.). This science has to be a new and highly conscious theory with a constant self-reflection on its own subject matter. Since in Marx’s conception science is a cultural product of social development (Márkus 1995 [2011]: 456) this new form of non-autonomous philosophy becomes a self-aware cultural product, which thematizes the conceptual abstractions it is dealing with and reflects on the very grounds of these abstractions. Accordingly, philosophy remains a relevant and practical form of interpreting and changing the world it is connected with, constituting the beginning of a science about abstractions, enlighting how these abstractions are detached from the practical world they were developed in. The loss of proud philosophical autonomy though is regained by unraveling the historical and social genesis of concepts, and by appropriating concrete acts to amend and to change this history.

This reflecting-antidogmatic character of Marxism, however, has been preceded by an organic development in German philosophy clipping the wings of philosophical dogmatism and metaphysical determinism. Except for a modern theory of social action, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant had already set a certain standard for epistemological consciousness and self-awareness in building philosophy, and theories in general.

The beginnings of a multilayer theory of knowledge

MT is a theory about the structure and functioning of human cognition, set up as a layered architecture of simple and complex factual capacities and faculties of knowledge. This web of cognitive faculties is certainly not piled up as a result of a cumulative process expanding the limits of knowledge. They are separate faculties fulfilling separate cognitive roles that must communicate and cooperate with each other in order to implement a coherent way of perceiving and understanding the world. Admittedly, such communicating layers could be unequal in their concrete workings (in everyday or enclosed scientific cases), or that a specific faculty could dominate the other(s), but their tendency to cooperate is of utmost importance. This is why it is a theory about the possible grounds of knowledge, of how knowledge should be brought together, and not of a current state of representing something through a unique source of knowledge. It must be labeled as a transcendental theory of cognition, where the one-sided priority of a specific faculty is considered to be strongly reductive and, consequently, philosophically erroneous.

A first formulation of this idea about the transcendental role of communicating faculties can be found in Kant’s (1770) inaugural dissertation and lecture at the University of Königsberg. This work is an early account of the cooperation between the two sources (stems) of knowledge, or as he puts it: the principles of a simultaneously sensible and intelligible world. The idea of cooperation is already present in this text from Kant’s precritical period, tracing the difference between subjective and objective contradiction. He further describes the illusion of considering the subjective to be objective, where the former has taken the place of the latter. This illusion is grounded in the unclear delimitation of two intertwined and equally necessary faculties of cognition, which were later canonized as “sensibility” and “understanding”.Footnote 3 Kant says the following:

For this lack of accord between the sensitive faculty and the faculty of understanding […] points only to the fact that the abstract ideas, which the mind entertains when they have been received from the understanding, very often cannot be followed up in the concrete and converted into intuitions. But this subjective resistance often creates the false impression of an objective inconsistency. And the incautious are easily misled by this false impression into taking the limits by which the human mind is circumscribed to be the limits within which the very essence of things is contained. (Kant 1770 [1992]: 379)

The basic fallacy according to Kant is the illusion of taking the subjective limits of our knowledge to be the limits of things is general. But the real error consists in something other than a sheer confusion of two connected principles (sensibility and understanding) constituting objectivity. The dogamtic position of objectivity is rather what matters for this illusion: it is subordinated to some intellective activities of the mind, when in fact we are never able to exclude the set of possible impressions, which could be discovered and arranged by the faculty of understanding. Passive, receptive impressions make their arrangement possible. Certain philosophers (who could be labeled as empiricists or as rationalists) give a priority to just one of the multiple layers of human cognition, when in fact those layers are set up equally well for generating knowledge. This is the outset of Kant’s anti-dogmatic approach to the philosophy of knowledge and theory of science.Footnote 4 However, the issue is not settled by the clear differentiation of two sources of grasping the world we live in, rather only by stressing the equality of their values.

We therefore have to mention that the idea of the two stems of knowledge is not completely Kantian. Specifically, the law-giving function of understanding that completes our incapability of intuitively grasping great numbers or abstract entities had already been touched upon by David Hume,Footnote 5 but the general thesis of thorough-going equality and cooperation between these two stems was systematically developed in Kantian philosophy (Höffe 2009: 83). Jointly considering both sources will convey the only real possibility of constituting the theoretical-epistemological subject, which is the underlying condition of any subsequent and more complex phenomena.

Kant’s theory of cooperating sources of knowledge was analyzed in recent scholarship as the “discursivity thesis”, which borrows this term from a naïve concept of a communicative-practical relation between the two emblematic stems (Allison 2004: 12–16, 27–28). This description of Kant’s philosophical mindset is, however, fully cognitive and epistemological. It follows the line of argumentation in which even primitive intuitions are more than simply receptive: in their description they could be separated from understanding, but in their actual fulfillment this is utterly impossible. Intuitions are crafted to be suitable for further conceptual activities: they are “capable of being ordered” (CPR: B34). To prove that these descriptively distinct and irreducible human capacities are actually intertwined, Kant investigates the assets of intuition and formulates the claim that the well-known pure forms (space and time) of the intuitive stem are constantly preparing our receptive capacity for necessary mental operations. Intuitions are therefore “suitable for conceptualization” (Allison 2004: 14, 2008: 10).

The above-mentioned difference between the actual-real and descriptive accounts of knowledge is the basis of our analysis. It depicts the same situation from two different, but connected perspectives. In the actual-real perspective, sensibility and understanding or intuitions and concepts (the two sources of knowledge) are naturally intertwined, but in a descriptive account an effort is exerted to separate them methodologically. MTs generally employ this double perspective to characterize the structure and functioning of human knowledge.

Hauser and the cornerstones of MT

In this last section I present three important topics mentioned above and emphasize their presence in Hauser’s works, using textual evidence. These three topics are in charge of creating the aspect of a balanced Marxist MT when speaking about Hauser’s very own philosophical views. They will be examined as follows: (1) the descriptive-methodological separation of the intertwined layers of cognition (the most comprehensive context of which are Hauser’s investigations on cinema as a relatively fresh phenomenon in art); (2) the general claim that an epistemologically conscious methodology (based on the balance of all the constituting layers and capacities) is anti-dogmatic sui generis; (3) the dialectical view of the structure and functioning of human activities.

Hauser’s view on the theory of art and art history has been frequently criticized for its allegedly “orthodox” Marxism (cf. Orwicz and Beauchamps 1985), and for its tense quest for actuality and the devaluation of history when it does not help us grasp what the actual really is (Gombrich 1953). But after publishing the main theoretical works The Philosophy of Art History (1959—henceforth referred as: PAH), and The Sociology of Art (=SA; the German original is from 1974), and his case study in seeking the origins of modern art (Mannerism—originally in 1964), he could only have been unfairly charged with a dogmatic instrumental or material view (Gelfert 2012: 137–138). The cognitive dimension took such a dominant position in his approach that an early appraisal of Hauser‘s book on mannerism made “him a worthy successor of Kant and Hegel in his architectonic treatment […] putting art, where it belongs, in the center of human life” (Riepe 1966: 124). In other words, he made an effort towards a comprehensive view of art as a major form of knowledge (continuous with and value-equal to the other important forms). This conception is based on a rather pragmatist interpretation of Kant that could be termed after Dewey as “unified aesthetics” (cf. Goldman 2005: 258–259).

In addition, I have to stress that Hauser generally concentrated on depicting art and literature as a form of humanistic and social self-defense. We create certain forms of art to preserve ourselves in a continuous struggle with different sorts of hostile conditions (social and natural): “Culture serves to protect society. Spiritual creations, traditions, conventions, and institutions are but ways and means of social organization. Religion, philosophy, science and art all have their place in the struggle to preserve society” (Hauser 1959: 6). Thus, the aim of creating a balanced and epistemologically conscious theory of art has evident humanistic goals: better knowledge of the structure and functioning of artistic products contributes to the healthy economy and subsequently to the preservation of human nature.

(1) Hauser’s oeuvre was notably influenced by an academically circumstantial fact and he seized almost every opportunity to emphasize it. After moving to Vienna in 1924, he took a job at a film company where he became the executive of its “department for propaganda” (Hauser 1976: 62), supervising the promotion of films, and therefore influencing the official selection of motion pictures that should be kept on the market by the distributor. This factor catalyzed his “practical sociological orientation”,Footnote 6 and it reflected a specific “reciprocal dialectic” (ibid.) of film and public, the outcome of which was never fully predictable. Although it has not been sufficiently discussed in the relevant literature, Hauser says in his interviews that the initial plan before the wider project, which finally came to fruition in The Social History of Art (1951), was a book on the newly developing art of film. Hauser recalls in his autobiographical reflections that midwifing the growth of a new art form has been presented to him as a chance, which occurs “probably once in a thousand years” (Hauser 1973: 34).

This new art was strongly based on and conditioned by the technical facilities of the period. It was also influenced by the technique of mechanical reproduction and by the rather prompt public reactions to the product. Hence, it was also a perfect training ground for historical, social, and epistemological investigations. This context was respectively favorable for a comparative analysis between the birth of ancient drama and the conception of cinema (both depending on an intense effect exerted on the public—cf. Congdon 2004: 44–45). The book, which existed only in notes made from carefully collected material, should have been titled Dramaturgie und Soziologie des Films [Dramaturgy and Sociology of the Film]. Hauser did not really abandon the project, he merely incorporated it into the broader plan—undertaken after 1938—of making the first synthetic social history of art and literature spanning almost all historical eras (Hauser 1973: 35).

Hauser’s interest in film as new art is far from being a startling discovery. Apart from the very precise and explicit recollections on the importance of film in his theoretical development, almost all of his works result in investigating film language and the social background of movie makers and consumers. Most importantly though, the medium of film in general offers an excellent deposit of experiences about the cognitive layers all necessary for constituting art as a form of knowledge. This is why his interest in film cannot be taken to be a collateral inquiry concerning contemporary phenomena. Films accurately display the three factors which set up the agenda of an artefact becoming a work of art pursuing social and humanistic self-defense (see also Gelfert 2012: 131–132):

Among the circumstances governing the occurrence of the change, social conditions are probably pre-eminent; but it would be a mistake to suppose that social conditions produce the forms in terms by which the artistic revolution expresses itself; these forms are just as much the product of psychological and stylistic as of sociological factors. (Hauser 1959: 14)

In considering the functioning of film (like of any other form of art) it is crucial to bind intentions and intuitions of a person (the artist, scriptwriter, director) to the stylistic-conceptual conventions shaping them. Thus, what really counts is the way the social–institutional-material context catalyzes this twofold system of intuitions and conventions (styles and concepts). The layer of social context is now adduced to explain the situation of the cooperating faculties of creativity and conventionality.

This conception has also been articulated by him on other occasions, for instance, at his inaugural lecture at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences an year before his death in 1977. In his account, the value of an artwork is yet again the product of three different factors. The third one reconfigures the other two, complementary poles. “Inward inspiration” (a) and “the artificial form of its design” (b) are two basic components that have no permanent causal effect on each other. They have a differentiated structural relation (Hauser 1977: 89). The outcome of their encounters though rests with the third element, which Hauser describes very emotively as the “encounter of trying struggles and lucky happenstances” (ibid.). His belletristic phrases are intentionally dim. He wants to introduce a balanced concept of social context and social environment that facilitates the interaction of spontaneity and conventionality in art and literature. This context is not deterministic, it has no primacy over the other two factors, but still remains indispensable for the formation of an artistic product. It is analoguous to the social layer of constituting knowledge, where subjective inspiration and material, subsequently objective forms of categorization and expression are related through a series of unique contextual motives. He has also emphasized this uniqueness of specific conditions formerly in PAH:

The work of art is similarly underivable and irreducible; it is not contained in its elements. Even if this were completely ascertained, its most essential quality would be missing; for what makes anything a work of art is just the circumstance that its genetically derivable components, all of which might occur in the combinations, in fact occur in this particular, unique, unrepeatable complex. (Hauser 1959: 257)

What makes film a very special issue is the fact that it allows the historian of art to make a sharper distinction between intuition and intuition-ordering concepts; the latter standing also at the origins of strong conventional prescriptions and requirements. They could be—just to borrow Hauser’s expression from above—“completely ascertained”. This is due to the fact that the art of motion picture was too young (at the time of Hauser‘s investigations even younger) to build up a register of reigning concepts and conventions capitalizing on the former set of intuitions ordered through a naïve chain of conceptual elements. To put it in a facile manner: determining conventions are still hard to find in the realm of the cinematic arts. Because no layer of its cognitive architecture is given priority over the others (concepts in form of filmographic conventions over intuitions), it is easier to investigate the genesis of concrete concepts from the interplay of artistic creativity and conceptual-cognitive ordering. This process—as we have already stressed—is decisively influenced by the third major factor: the social and material context, which gives us the necessary grounds to interpret and reinterpret the cooperation of intuitions and their mental patterns. At the early stages of its existence, cinema rarely made the “claim to be art” (op.cit.: 358). It was just a new and interesting experimental mixture of intuitive and conceptual capacities caught in the act.Footnote 7

Two circumstances may help articulate the above mentioned complex problem.

  1. (a)

    A historical one: in the case of the cinema not enough time had passed for it to be able to choose the very concepts and norms a film-artist should settle for; consequently, there was no room for “a” convention to bring about a leading role in early cinema. There were not even weak (but productive) conventional elements that would have had to be learnt and temporarily obeyed only to be corrected or entirely vanquished later on. “Only a rather young art can be generally intelligible without necessarily being superficial; a more highly developed form of art requires for its understanding some familiarity with earlier stages, which, though superseded, have left their traces” (op cit.: 359).

  2. (b)

    A methodological requirement is even more important. Convention-setting and concept-building are utterly positive and mandatory layers of human cognition. They also have a positive role in shaping scientific knowledge, which usually makes some highly functional simplifications of a given matter. This is not, however, the unilateral and definitive substruction of the originally given phenomena. In a methodically reflected way, we can go back to the original, real set of events and objects and present another kind of conceptual architecture for them. Alternatively, we can provide a new description of what the basic elements of such an experience consist of. In summarizing this real/descriptive duality of argumentation, Hauser even alludes to classical phenomenology and Edmund Husserl’s method (one of the few references to Husserl in the text of PAH). The text also makes a sarcastic remark about the account of clamorous philosophical problems. The monster of unilateral determinism is not easy to defeat, but victory could still be realized through methodological sobriety.

Once the sphere of direct experience is left behind […] the unity of the work, inapprehensible conceptually, begins to disappear. But the fear that explaining a spiritual creation, artistic or other, genetically is to destroy its inmost structure beyond repair is just a bogy of the philosophers. Such an ‘explanation’ puts the phenomenon’s intrinsic character ‘in brackets’ to use Husserl’s phrase; it does not abolish it. […] provided that one is aware of that loss (op. cit.: 259)

To conclude the first subsection: through the analysis of film and cinema one can take a better position to give an unbiased description of knowledge-constituting cognitive layers in art,Footnote 8 of which Hauser identifies three: style (convention and concepts), psychology of the actor (his creativity and intuitions) and the social-material contexts.Footnote 9 This project remains feasible if supported by a twofold method: real recognition and scientific description of the main layers of knowledge.

(2) Hauser’s theory of art history and sociology of art is an anti-dogmatic enterprise due to its epistemologically conscious, self-reflecting character. Hauser admittedly stands with one foot in the Kantian tradition, and also reveals his relation to the allegedly dogmatic forms of the human sciences (orthodox Marxist materialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Bergsonian life-philosophy), making the Kantian approach a means for correcting and amending them. In Hauser’s intentionally simplified view, these dogmatic formations have the common fault of misinterpreting the problem itself, but the main issues he has with them is their options to solve it: a single frame of interpretation (social determination, the effect of unconscious processes, manifestations of the life-force) is responsible for all the solutions given. Hauser thinks that Kantian philosophy gives a much more complex, less naïve, and definitely sound answer to all these challenges, because it uses its own account on the functioning of human cognition. Evidently, this account is relevant as a theory of knowledge, which in itself, also produces numerous new results.

Neither the diagnosis nor the therapy recommended is altogether convincing. The Kantian philosophy offers a much more realistic account of the trouble and a much more promising attempt to remedy it. According to Kant, we do not have to unveil a spiritual ‘thing-in-itself’ but to recognize that the forms within which all thinking, feeling, and acting move are limitations upon and also enabling conditions for the functioning of the mind. (Hauser 1959: 375–376)

The theory of knowledge governed by the equality and cooperation of cognitive faculties is now an unalienable element of the realistic perspective. A theory is ‘realistic’ in the sense that it restores the rights of sensibility by depicting its necessary conditions (concepts and forms of artistic expression). These are also transcendental conditions setting the course of possible knowledge, of cognitive acts to be fulfilled. Theories of art generally assume “an identity of experience underlying the various art-forms, whereas in reality the experience itself, not just the artistic form it takes, is moulded by the available means of expression.” (op. cit.: 263)

A further step in this development consists in stressing the well-known function of an epistemologically conscious theory: to clarify the basis, in terms of abstractions, of how the sciences in general were set up. Reading the Philosphy of Art History we can easily get the impression that natural sciences have a clear advantage over human or historical ones. This advantage is explained by the highly complex and comprehensive stage of epistemological consciousness natural sciences have managed to reach throughout their development. Epistemologically speaking they have already reached the stage of “adulthood”.

Epistemological reflection has long familiarized Western thought with the idea that not merely objective, but also subjective preconditions of knowledge must be reckoned within the natural sciences, which do not simply mirror reality. In the historical sciences on the other hand, we are far from having reached the same stage of epistemological reflection, of getting beyond ‘naïve realism’; the methodological preconditions of historical knowledge are still insufficiently clarified, and the boundary between reproduction and reconstruction of the historical realities is still indefinite. (Hauser 1959: 149)

Historical studies are not conscious in interpreting their raw material, e.g. objects, documents, records of past events. They do not possess enough theoretical instruments to weigh appropriately what has to be considered a relevant source of historical investigation. This is not the single problem with historical sciences. More importantly, they do not recognize the level of abstraction their concepts are hovering at. Most of the familiar concepts in the everyday vocabulary of the human and historical sciences share unclarified abstractions:

[…] indeed, the idea of a work of art that possesses all the essential aesthetic attributes is the most far-fetched abstraction in this whole field […], only by way of art criticism or art history do they turn into comparable, compatible, comprehensible examples of one unitary human activity (op. cit.: 151)

The methods that must be applied here by a conscious theorist consist must go beyond unveiling experiences that build the base of theoretical abstractions. They also have to provide the description of communicating cognitive faculties, each of which has its specific roles and contributions. Giving a detailed description of these faculties will help remedy or balance their asymmetric evolution. These asymmetries could have been triggered by concepts that took the place of underlying intuitions, and by the social factors of a certain phenomenon that took on a universal, determinative role. Hauser often chose to criticize classical writers of sociology (see Scheler 1924)Footnote 10 for conferring (albeit unknowingly) such a determining role to social and material factors. The social context reflecting the elementary economic conditions is thus necessary, but we do not need to take a certain socio-economic monist position. Such a standpoint is usually taken when “external influence” and “internal logic” are separated too radically (Hauser 1959: 27–28). In his critique of Scheler, Hauser explains:

Primum vivere, deinde philosophari is a truth one does not need any theory of social materialism or of ideology to recognize. The remarkable thing is that even well-tried thinkers in this field represent the economic dependence of art in terms of a purely external tie. Even a writer such as Max Scheler falls into this way of thinking, when he speaks of the material conditions of artistic creation. Raphael requires a paintbrush we read. […] It is extraordinary that a sociologist of the rank of Scheler should have failed to note that the artist glorifies the ideals of potential, as well as of actual patrons; the ineluctable character of ideology […] leads the painter to represent the ideas and aims of the predominant, culture classes even when he has no patrons – or better, in spite of his not having the right patrons or representing social groups with whom he would feel really in harmony. (op. cit.: 28–29)

Socio-economic factors or psychological processes, such as personal creativity and stylistical conventions, have the same value. As he put it while referring to some evidently strong and complacent dichotomies (such as that of “spontaneity” and “causality”), we will face all the time the reciprocal dependence of two “equally constitutive principles” (Hauser 1982: 23).

(3) Hauser’s balanced epistemology, tempered and “conciliatory spirit” (Gelfert 2012: 131) in his last books (PAH and SA) is often considered a “retreat” from the strong, deterministic Marxism (esp. Congdon 2004) formerly held in his academic bestseller, The Social History of Art. Despite the very obvious signs of Hauser distancing himself from his earlier views, we also have to consider the disciplinary position of “social history” in the late 1940s in the scholarship on aesthetics and art history. In a 1949 essay, the congenial Frederick Antal was still lamenting on the fact that while human sciences had already been treating social factors as unreducible strata of their researches, art historians became even more ignorant of the sociological point of view. Even if their treatment of artistic phenomena was outdated and led to mere absurdities, they still have chosen a biased method which only preserved the dignity of art history on the face of it. Antal was very confrontational with those theories openly committed to the idea that art history “at least theoretically, should be reserved to masterpieces”. These theories were openly content with “the diversity of styles being explained by the diversity of styles” (see Antal 1949 [1966]: 74).

Taking this account as characteristic for Hauser’s contemporary situation, we should not be so eager to treat him as an unbending Marxist. He was only trying to summarize and accentuate those social factors which contributed to a better understanding of art history. What he did afterwards was not really a retreat from Marxism, but rather a thoughtful re-evaluation of his own views and a characteristic self-placement on the palette of socially conscious theorists of art. He enriched his former, less theoretical, considerations with the interpretive role of the sociology of art. This idea came, I think, not only from an evident connection to such sociologists of knowledge like Karl Mannheim,Footnote 11 but through his finally crystallized epistemological insights based on a multilayer theory of cooperating strata of knowledge.

(a) Two kinds of Marxism. He began by making the necessary distinction between two kinds of Marxism: a political and a theoretical discourse. On the one hand, Hauser spoke about Marxism as a social and political commitment resulting from the strong conception of material determinism, while on the other hand, he viewed Marxism as a form of uncommitted and reflected, anti-dogmatic philosophy of cultural products.Footnote 12 He holds that his last synthetic work—the SA—is still Marxist, but in the following meaning:

Among the fundamentals of the perception which is developed here is the apparently heretical principle, that we may agree with Marxism as a philosophy of history and society without being a Marxist in the political activist sense, indeed, without being a socialist in the narrower sense. (Hauser 1982: xx)

Marxism, as a philosophy of history and philosophy, is also a full-fledged philosophy of knowledge, where the constituting factors have their own roles and rights. In the same work, Hauser speaks about the three sources of knowledge in the philosophical treatment of art history:

The [Marxist] thesis that every ideology and every intellectual attitude which is ideologically conditioned is materially […] established was naturally retained; however emphasis was placed on the point of view which has previously been mentioned: that the ‘infrastructure’ upon which the ‘superstructure’ rests consists not entirely of material and interpersonal constituents, but also of intellectual, conscious, and individual ones. (ibid.)

This variety of factors in evaluating cultural products leads to a specific kind of hermeneutical inquiry concerning the structure of our knowledge about these cultural products, and also concerning those missing or seemingly missing elements of it, which the speaker/actor is not already aware of. In this view, his hermeneutical Marxism is not only the conscious uncovering of instrumental-propagandistic uses of art, but a long-term struggle with the distortions in our knowledge. Hauser formulates this thought as an explicit critique of the late Marx, rebuking him for not approaching a sufficiently balanced form of inquiry.

Marx however, was the first to formulate explicitly the conception, that spiritual values are political weapons. He taught that every spiritual creation, every scientific notion, every portrayal of reality derives from a certain particular aspect of truth, viewed from the perspective of social interest, and is accordingly restricted and distorted. But Marx neglected to note, that we wage a continual war against such distorting tendencies in our thought, that in spite of the inevitable partialities of our mental outlook, we do possess the power of examining our own thought critically, and so correcting to a certain extent the one-sidedness and error of our view. (Hauser 1959: 7)Footnote 13

This new, epistemologically conscious, self-corrective conception also rules out some metaphysically loaded notions such as “classless society”—an orthodox element of Marxist activism. Being non-political and non-deterministic, Hauser’s Marxism is much more “scientific”. As far as socially nested cultural phenomena are concerned, the strong deterministic error has always consisted in an overestimation and artificial prioritization of social premises. In order to avoid this kind of error, one has to be familiar with the means of epistemological-methodological reflection of “pulling oneself out of the mud by one’s own bootstraps” (ibid.). A correct theory of artistic production has to cut back the ambitions of a strong sociological standpoint or has to ‘neutralize’ (Demeter 2011: 146–154) the sociological approach giving plenty of place to conventional and psychological sources of production or simply to the factors of aesthetic value. Aesthetic value cannot be reduced to the working of the social background (1), but the sociological view could be rejected only if it functions as a symptom of a tendency toward material determinism (2):

  1. 1.

    “All art is socially conditioned, but not everything in art is definable in sociological terms. Above all, artistic excellence is not definable.” (Hauser 1959: 8)

  2. 2.

    “The sociological view of art is to be rejected only if it claims to be the sole legitimate point of view, and if it confuses the sociological importance of a work with aesthetic value.” (op. cit.: 11)

(b) Reconsidering dialectic. Hauser also fueled the talk about a reflected and positive use of dialectic, a basic element of Marxist argumentation. He treated it as the vehicle of a balanced, self-conscious epistemology about the various sources of cognition. Dialectic is clearly neither the reconciliation of two conflicting poles in a cognitive process, nor synthesis of antithetic elements. It is a reflection on how a certain type of knowledge is constituted through the cooperation of multiple sources.

In his 1977 lecture, Hauser explicitly talked about the historical origins of this view and connected Marxism to the Kantian approach in general (as he had already done in SA—Hauser 1982: 26). According to Hauser, Marx and Engels‘ historical materialism had been a theory of the structural concatenation of “sensible impressions” and “conceptual categories”:

They have already managed to recognize that in reality, which is the object of experience and knowledge, neither the external, impressions transmitted by our senses, nor our inward life, nor the means and methods of our thought have primacy and supreme influence over the others. Experience, and Kant knew it before, comes not from us but comes into being with us. (Hauser 1977: 89–90)

The idea depicted here is the so-called principle of tertium datur (op. cit., 163–164), a characteristic stance against the polarity of apparently conflicting theories in philosophy and of seemingly conflicting styles in art and literature. Considering a further (third or fourth) layer of cognition is always permitted in the case of complex phenomena, such as the outcomes of philosophical and artistic production. This is not to be understood as an artificial and external augmentation of former considerations, but as a way to underscore the potential cooperation between the relevant sources of these theories as relevant sources of knowledge.

In the preface to SA, Hauser formulated this idea very clearly: sociology in general is a “dialectical doctrine”, but as sociology has certain limits in explaining the structure of knowledge, dialectic also comes to certain ends:

There are certain stages of developments which are not dialectical in nature and which lead to constellations in which the possibilities which open up, do not contradict one another, but ramify and permit us to make a choice between more than two alternatives. (Hauser 1982: xxi)Footnote 14

The paradigmatic example for this historical ramification is Mannerism. It is a form which accentuated the differences between the Renaissance and the Baroque age, and helped researchers to better understand how the unity of the constituting layers of the sixteenth century worldview disintegrated and reconfigured at the end of the same century. This ramified-dialectic description of Mannerism is in Hauser’s synthetic approach a role model for all epistemologically conscious historical accounts on philosophical thinking, sciences and arts (cf. Hauser 1959: 163–165, 1977: 94–96).

Conclusion

In the present study, I have made a suggestion regarding the treatment of Arnold Hauser’s theory of art. Considering just a limited set of textual evidence, this theory of art could be viewed as a theory of the cognitive role of artistic productivity that uses the pattern of a classic epistemological tradition. This is what I call MT: the heritage of eighteenth–nineteenth century German philosophy of knowledge, which still flourished in the first part of the twentieth. Hauser creatively added Marxism to this line of philosophical considerations and elaborated an anti-dogmatic, anti-deterministic, transcendental, and dialectical “philosophy of art history”. This theory is focused on the idea that our picture of the world is constituted by some equal layers of cognition that must cooperate with each other to realize a possible comprehensive form of knowledge. The separate use of these sources of cognition is—according to Hauser—of no consequence at all.

In PAH he compared this very complicated matter to the rules of a soccer play, which in themselves are just uninteresting and isolated forms of concepts detached from a set of equally barren movements.

The purely formal laws of art are not essentially different from the rules of a game. However complicated, subtle and ingenious such rules may be, they have little significance in themselves, that is to say, apart from the purpose of winning the game. (Hauser 1959: 5)

Thus, winning the game here is merely to constitute a view on art and on all creative human enterprises as an expression of our capacity to understand and to change the world we live in.