Tragedy And Hope

It is men's destiny to aspire towards the absoluteness or totality, whereas, as a limit, how can the individual face the gap between "real world" and "ideal world"? The mission of the thinkers is to pursue the method to fill the gap between "daily life and authentic life". As a western Marxist, Lucien Goldmann's method is tragic dialectics. At the earlier stage, from the viewpoint of the tragedy, he thought that Pascal and Kant were the forerunner of Marx and Lukacs's dialectics. Then, due to the influence of Piaget's "genetic epistemology", he formed his own "genetic structuralism". He tried to explain the gap between individual and class consciousness by using the concept of "trans-individual subject" and theory of "mental structures". Although the methods emphasized different elements in different times, they remained essentially the same despite all apparent changes and further, they constituted the true and whole thought system. As a tragic dialectician, he insisted on "Yes" though haunted by "No." He bet on human "hope" and "possibility", and he held the view that the realization of "the authentic human community" was a matter of objective possibility instead of historical law. "Risk, possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition." A dialectic of tragedy and hope structured Goldmann's whole thought.Goldmann's tragic dialectics is not only the most prominent aspect, but also the kernel of his whole thought. Through Goldmann himself and his constructive dialogues with the existentialism and structuralism, the author points out that these two thoughts lead the maturity of Goldmann's idea. Goldmann may be situated between the antitheses of Lukacs and Adorno. Similar to Kant's urge towards an unattainable totality, Goldmann was impelled to surpass partial identity, while finally realized that it was not possible.