At various points in his life, Lukács had rejected the pessimism of his youth. First, he had endorsed an optimism concerning the capacity of the proletariat to constitute such a totality in society through a revolutionary overcoming of reification; later on, this optimism was modified to encompass the ever increasing human capacities to become self-conscious of their universal character through a reflection of the existing social totality in the totality of the work of art. Thus, even at his most conservative moments as a proponent of Socialist Realism, Lukács is motivated by a keen intuition concerning the tragic consequences of this aspect of modern culture and, as the constant revisions of his position show, by a sensitivity to the inappropriateness of all conceptions of the human condition which do not appropriately deal with this problem.