Georg Lukacs' Theory of the Novel

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"The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. If the individual is unproblematic, then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realization of the world constructed by these given aims may involve hindrances and difficulties, but never any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual's ideas and the ideas become subjective facts - ideals - in his soul. The positing of ideas as unrealizable and, in the empirical sense, as unreal, i.e. their transformation into ideals, destroys the immediate, problem-free organic nature of the individual. Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that makes its life autonomous - even if what it finds can never be a firm possession of as the basis of its life, but is [only] the object of a search." - Georg Lukacs - Theory of the Novel