Society, Being and Consciousness

This chapter explores Lindsay’s contentious study Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) which elaborates a vision of society as a unity constituted by myriad, interconnected, diverse individual voices; and of individual being and consciousness as constituted by that engagement. In After the ’Thirties (1956) he applies this understanding directly to the production of art, referring also to his anthropological model of culture that bases human being and consciousness in the relationship with nature—a connection broken by capitalist industrial and economic practice. The artist, he argues, must ground their work in their own time and explore the kinds of being and consciousness enabled by their own society, as did writer George Meredith.