Next to “form”, two central concepts in Lukács’ thought are “totality” and “life”. With “totality” Lukács refers to a whole set of elements that are meaningfully interrelated in such a way that the essence of each element can only be understood in its relation to the others. “Life”, as Lukács understands it, is the intrinsic richness and potentiality of experiences and actions of individuals and societies, rather than only the temporal unfolding of empirical lives. Both individual and social life is in principle capable of forming an integrated totality. However, this is only the case if the essential properties of its elements are intelligible in terms of their relations to other particulars of life. Only in this case, life can have a meaningful form which is not a mere restriction. Lukács claims that this was the case in the times of Homeric Greece where a totality of meaning was immanent to life itself. This immanence of meaning and the totality it constituted was, however, lost in the subsequent historical development, transforming form into an external factor to life.