Paper presentation in: Environmental Humanities meets History of Knowledge Workshop / 20-21 November 2025, Konstanz University
In his later works throughout the 1960s, Georg Lukács sought to develop an ontological framework for the critical study of society. The result was The Ontology of Social Being, a monumental and posthumous work that revisited the question of the relationship between nature and society. Lukács conceived this project as an alternative to two dominant tendencies: the marginalization of nature within Western critical theory, and the naturalistic reductionism characteristic of much Eastern European Marxist literature on the dialectics of nature. The present paper aims to situate Lukács’s ideas on the relationship between nature and society within the broader intellectual debates of the mid-20th century and to discuss their relevance and limitations in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions on ecology. To this end, I intend to put Lukács’s ontological emergentism into dialogue with contemporary critical realism, with eco-socialism (primarily Ted Benton, John Bellamy Foster, and Kohei Saito), and with political ecology (Bruno Latour).