Starting from this description of a closed totality, Lukács claims that the intellectual history of the world is already prefigured in the cultural history of ancient Greece within the movement from epic poetry to tragedy and then to philosophy. In the course of this movement, the sources of meaning became increasingly more external to immediate life. As a consequence, Lukács argues that these three genres inhabit three different “transcendental loci” (1916: 36) concerning the question of totality. Tragedy and philosophy have already realized the loss of a meaningful totality, whereas the possibility of epic poetry depends on its immanence. As Lukács claims, this is the reason for why “art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic” (1916: 39).