While Lukács only makes his ontological commitments explicit towards the end of his life, they inform the development of his aesthetics from the 1930s on. From the general materialist premises of his ontology and from his rejection of the epistemology of History and Class Consciousness in favor of the Leninist alternative (see 1938), it follows that cultural and mental phenomena must always be seen as reflections (or “mirroring”, Widerspiegelungen) of an objective reality (GW 11: 22, 55).