The decisive requirement of these problematic heroes, for Lukács, is that they be capable of shouldering the moral burden of sinful action to achieve the redemption of the community. He lays out the problem most clearly in his letter to Ernst outlining the Dostoevsky project. His concern here with specific individuals — the politician and the revolutionary exemplifies his formulation of ethics in terms of the type of person who might take action:
“The order of priorities always includes characteristic dialectical complications when the soul is not directed toward itself but toward humanity, as is the case with the politician and the revolutionary. Here the soul must be sacrificed to save the soul. One must become a cruel Realpolitiker out of a mystical ethic and has to violate the absolute commandment: ‘Thou shall not kill,’ which is clearly not an obligation towards structures.”
Note here the apparent contrast between the “mystical ethic” (of universal love) and the demand to be a “cruel Realpolitiker”: it is the willingness to take on this dilemma that characterizes the Second Ethic. In order to explore the problem further, he asked Ernst to help procure The Pale Horse, a novel by Ropshin, the pseudonym of writer and Socialist Revolutionary Boris Sarinkov. First published in 1909, the book had been a succès de scandale for its apparent justification of revolutionary terror at key historical moments. The central figure, George, was a clear mirror image of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov — but with the opposite conclusion. Lukács called it “a new manifestation of an old conflict between the first ethic (duties toward social structures) and the second (imperatives of the soul).” As he put it to Ernst, the problem was “expressed most pointedly by Hebbel’s Judith: ‘and if God had placed sin between me and the act ordered for me to do, who am I to be able to escape it?’” There is an instructive contrast here with Zosima’s statement that “each single one of us [i.e., the monks] is indubitably guilty in respect of all creatures and all things upon the earth, not only with regard to general guilt, the guilt of the world, but also individually — each for all people and for each person on this earth.” Zosima’s is a Christian guilt, accepting sinfulness and shouldering the responsibility of past sins; Lukács, in contrast, calls on the hero to commit an act that brings guilt, in full knowledge thereof. As he formulated the problem in his notes, “the real sacrifice of the revolutionary is (literally): to sacrifice their soul; out of the Second Ethic, to do only the First.”
Richard Westermen, “From Myshkin to Marxism: The Role of Dostoevsky’s Reception in Lukács’s Revolutionary Ethics”, 2017, in “Modern Intellectual History”, Vol. 16, No. 3, November 2019, pp. 19-20.
