Endre Szécsényi points out that many kinds of histories of aesthetics are possible, but there is not much sense in one like Dénes Zoltai’s Brief history of aesthetics. Zoltai’s categories are not clearly outlined, nor can one tell what his aims really are. According to Szécsényi Zoltai should have expounded his own theoretical position before passing judgement on others. He neglects to tell us that he merely repeats the language and concepts of Georg Lukács. Mentioning the political sympathies of the authors discussed, drawing ideological conclusions from their theories, or refering to the social class to which they belong, not to mention the idea of steady progress or the relation of particular authors to it, the historical or generic import "expected" from a work of art, or required realism are all familiar from Lukács’s work. When this book first appeared in 1972, the old Lukács could still appear as the author of an unfinished aesthetics that could have been the fulfillment of this brief history, in the fourth edition he figures merely as one of many 20th century aestheticians. The fact itself that this book could run to four editions offers food for thought. Reducing Lukács to scale eliminates the moving spring and aim of earlier editions, which was to establish the primacy of Marxist aesthetics. That was done, everything else, however, remained in place.

The body which bears the subtitle Social progress, theories of culture has now appeared in Hungarian translation. The approach is sociological. The authors interpret the body as an historical and social transfiguration, or else as a post-modern metaphor, which, according to Márta Csabai, who reviews the book, is not really satisfactory. If, in keeping with the above, the body is seen as the mere objective of the operation of society, as an empty sheet, there is no satisfactory explanation regarding the way in which the inscription of the message, of the text, actively produces the body itself. There must be some sort of resistance on the part of the body, of mere flesh. A textual approach to the body as surface leaves out of account the expression of active inner, that is mental meanings, or the conveying of private, individual messages. If we interpret the body as merely a web of surfaces, energies and forces, as a link-up of organs, processes and material phenomena, then we leave out of account that wholeness, that one, which is able to express subjectivity, which knows how to feel and experience, which has attitudes and opinions and can express all these. The phenomenological and psychoanalytical approach must be considered too, in addition to textological and discursive models. The two approaches in fact mean two kinds of bodily surfaces: an inner surface, a psychic reality, where a concealed message must be decyphered, and an outer surface, that tells more direct tales. According to Márta Csabai what however decides in the last resort what the body model of the social sciences must look like is not this, but the problem of the limit, of that limit whose permeability or impermeability determines the status of identity at any one time. If there is no limit then there is neither inner nor outer. If the limit is tight and throttling then the body becomes the prison of souls. Should it become too permeable, then its order is shaken, and the subject finds itself in jeopardy.

Operetta in Austria-Hungary at the fin de siècle and early this century is the subject of a book by Moritz Csáky which Nicholas T. Parsons writes on under the heading "Laughter and oblivion." The age started frivolously, just like an operetta and ended in disaster and humiliation. Csáky discusses contradictions in the way critics have judged operetta, establishing the formal characteristics of the genre, and listing many of its typical features, such as irony, social and political comment, exotic folksiness, romanticism and escapism but he also presents the operetta as the motor of modernisation and of changing attitudes. He stresses the role of operetta in the coming about of Central European cultural pluralism, pointing out the ways in which operetta aided and abetted the propagation of this pluralism and the cultural unity of these many nations. He goes on to outline the decline and fall of the genre, and the way it became superfluous when effective demand for it ceased as its public lost its wealth. Parsons mentions that Csáky argues that the success of the operetta was due to its ability to depict the world of its audience, doing so by producing a refined bitter-sweet melange. It was a world that appeared blindly mendacious, empty and flighty in its good cheer, and so lewd and irresponsible that it could be called childish, and yet at the same time melancholy and sadly pessimistic. According to Csáky all this is deeply rooted in the Central European, particularly the Austrian cast of mind. Good music knows no barriers between peoples and unites a mixed public in shared sentimentality. In the Habsburg Empire music offered the sentimental experience of a shared identity which could only be provided with difficulty, or not at all, by a feeble ideology.

Gábor Borbély discusses a ruling by Bishop Etienne Tempier, issued on March 7th, 1277 in Paris, which, according to scholars, in its importance went well beyond the occasion and the subject. The bishop there condemned a book which discussed the nature of sexuality. What was odd about the whole thing was that not only the bishop but the author of the book as well took a poor view of sex both from the moral and physiological point of view, condemning it outright in the closing chapter. This being the case, Gábor Borbély asks, why then did the churchman condemn On love by Andreas Capellanus outright? The bishop’s ruling took note that some of the trains of thought in On love derived from Greek thinkers, and that, Borbély argues, may offer an explanation. The church wanted to avoid theological errors due to methods alien to Christian ways of thought. Furthermore the Church wanted to ensure that, as regards Christian doctrine, there should be harmony between faith and knowledge. In the church’s judgement this harmony was threatened as soon as fides and scientia represented two distinct universes of discourse of wisdom. If this is the case, then we are aware that scientific knowledge may be contrary to faith and nevertheless valid to a limited degree. Bishop Tempier presupposed that the thinkers he condemned took the truths of Holy Scripture and the truths of heathen philosophers to be mutually incompatible and nevertheless both of them true to some extent. He considered this to be shocking and wrong, as something that had to be put an end to. It is for that reason that he issued his ruling.

THE Editor