Prolegomena to an ontology of being Social

Abstract

In the early 1960s, after finishing the first volume of his Aesthetics, Lukács decided to write an Ethics. It was necessary, to give ethics a materialist foundation, to delimit the ontological foundations of the historical process of its genesis and development from work – which led him to investigate the foundations of social reproduction. This investigation resulted in the manuscript entitled Towards an ontology of social being, which was debated with his disciples in Budapest. From this debate, we know little – and its most consistent assessment is Nicolas Tertulian's presentation of the Italian edition of the Prolegômena (published as an afterword to the Brazilian edition of the Prolegômena and, for the first time in Portuguese, in Crítica Marxista n.3). After this debate, Lukács wrote an introduction, a prolegomenon, to the already written manuscript. This Prolegômena to an ontology of social being is the text published by Editora Boitempo. Like Ontology, this work was also unfinished, being more difficult to understand than the text it intends to introduce. Therefore, perhaps it would have been more interesting to start publishing the entire Lukácsian ontology with the Ontology of Social Being – but this, in the long term, should not have much effect importance.