Fundamentals of religious estrangement in György Lukács’ ontology

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the general aspects of György Lukács’s thinking about religious estrangement from
the work For an Ontology of Social Being. In this direction, it starts with the central elements about the phenomenon of estrangement to, then, understand the historical genesis of religion in the light of the Lukacsian approach. In the wake of Marxian thought, religion appears, in the investigated work, as a specific form of estrangement and, at the same time,
an ideology that expresses, in the daily life of the singular being, the historical process of individual-human gender split consolidated, above all, by the mismatch between the development of the productive forces and that of the human personality. Thus, it is not a question of a religious critique in the theological sense, but of understanding the genesis and social function of religion, replacing the question of the “from where” and “to where” of the human at other levels, with a view to the practical overcoming of the estrangement.