Relation On Alienation Between Simmel And Young Lukács

The early twentyth century when the young Lukács first met Georg Simmelprovided an opportunity for Lukács to learn from Simmel. The middle-class backgroundensured their similar interests, and the jewish identity gave them a same kind of racialunconscious, although they grew up merely without any factor of jewish. Neo-Kantiandid great help to form their similar ethos, which guided their interests toculture-philosophy.Simmel pointed out the growing gap between the subject and the object, whichbrought alienation to modern society. Like Simmel, Lukács also made a diagnosis to thecrisis of modern culture. For both of them, modern culture was filled with alienation, andwas the representation of alienation. Simmel took the division of labor as the resurt of theseparation between subjective culture and objective culture, by which the modern culturegained its objective process. Although Karl Max had expounded the division of laborbrilliantly, and Lukács got in touch with Max even in his middle school, but youngLukács understood the division of labor though the eyes of Simmel. The essence ofSimmel’s cultural tragedy lied in the conflict of life and form, which was inherited byLukács as the basic structure of his early thought. Facing the capitalist alienation, Lukácstried to break the barriers between mind and reality, explore and create new forms to endthe capitalist cultural tragedy.After the period being fascinated by Simmel, Lukács began to criticize Simmel, ashis censure for Simmel’s immediacy in History and Class Consciousness. Lukács tried toreverse Simmel’s irrationalism by Max Weber’s rationality, so he treated rationality andalienation as two sides of the same process actually. Marx was also important source toLukács’ alienation, in which Marx’s analysis of commodity structure was put at thestarting point, and Marx’s analysis of historical materialism and class was recommendedwhich brought Lukács some critical colour. At last, Lukács proposed the problem ofovercoming the alienation, which made him transcend Weber and Simmel. As theovercome to alienation, Lukács’ proletarian consciousness was practical andrevolutionary but utopian inevitably. However, Lukács opened up another way toovercome alienation beyond Simmel’s hesitant art-distance undoubtedly.