In The Theory of the Novel of 1916, Lukács takes up some of these themes. At the same time, he turns towards a philosophy of history in order to clarify the relationship between historical changes of transcendental standpoints and the “pure forms” of aesthetic genres. The prime object of his discussion is the epic: Lukács claims that works of art that belong to this genre—for example Homeric epic poetry and the modern novel—must always express the objective reality of social and individual human life as it is (1916: 46). However, because of the distinctive “metaphysical conditions” of different epochs, they express this objective reality in radically different forms. Epic poetry in Homeric times takes its starting point from a world which constituted a closed totality (1916: 33), that is, a world in which life, culture, meaning, action and social institutions formed a harmonious whole. In particular, Lukács claims that in ancient Greece the “essence” of being was immanent to life rather than having to be sought out in a transcendent realm. Furthermore, there was no gap between individual consciousness and objectified meaning in the world that would have required the individual to project meaning onto the world. Individuals in ancient Greece only had to accept the totality of meaning within their world, even if they were, in some particular situation or another, unable to understand it. In contrast, modern society is constitutively alienated: merely conventional social institutions devoid of meaning exist disconnected from individuals and their highly individualized self-understanding. Therefore, in modern society meaning can only be found within the inner life of the individual and cannot become recognized in the world (1916: 61).