Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Dämon of Goethe’s “Urworte.” Lukács characteristically glosses the Dämon 

idea with the word soul (Seele, TdR 56) and explains it as an experience in 

which the external world is able to become the extension and medium of 

the soul: “for the soul itself is the law” (denn die Seele selbst ist das Gesetz, 

TdR 56). The life of this soul is not that of modernity, but of Greek antiq-

uity; it refers to a soul that does not (yet) encounter anything fundamentally 

opposed or foreign to it, which does not (yet) know the “searching” quality 

that Lukács attributes to the novel’s hero:

The human world that comes into view is one in which the soul is at 

home [zu Hause], whether as man, god or demon [Mensch, Gott oder 

Dämon]. In this world the soul finds everything it needs [alles, was 

not tut]; it has no need to create or animate something out of itself 

[aus sich selbst heraus zu schaffen], because its existence [Existenz] is 

copiously fulfilled [überreichlich erfüllt] in the finding, collecting and 

shaping [Finden, Sammeln und Formen] of that which is immediately 

given and related to it as a soul [was ihr unmittelbar, als Seelenver-

wandtes, gegeben ist]. (TdR 56)

The fact that this “soul” may ambiguously be that of “man, god or demon” 

indicates a prelapsarian existence more superhuman than human. Its lan-

guage reconceptualizes Goethe’s Dämon.

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 Thus, more implicitly than in the 

Heidelberg Aesthetics, Lukács here also relies on Goethe to theorize the uni-

fication of subject and object.

A comparison with Goethe makes the one-sidedness apparent with which 

Lukács focuses on the Dämon (or “soul”) without regard for the balancing 

powers of Tyche, Eros, Ananke, and Elpis.

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 For Lukács as well as Goethe, 

however—at least in the modern state of the world—the idea of a completely 

unchecked Dämon is only a foil, a momentary ideal standing for everything 

that human life generally is not. Lukács’s next paragraph thus posits an 

impeding if not malicious Tyche:

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Interiority’s life of its own [das Eigenleben der Innerlichkeit] [inte-

riority split off from a coherent connection to the outside world] is 

only then possible and necessary . . . when the gods are silent [wenn 

die Götter stumm sind] . . . , when the world of deeds [die Welt der 

Taten] has disconnected itself from humans. The independence [Selb-

ständigkeit] of this form of interiority has made it hollow [hohl] 

and incapable of receiving the true meaning of deeds within itself 

[unvermögend, den wahren Sinn der Taten in sich aufzunehmen]. 

Interiority has become unable to make a symbol of itself in deeds [an 

ihnen ein Symbol zu werden] and to dissolve them into symbols [und 

sie in Symbole aufzulösen]: the connection between interiority and 

adventure [die Innerlichkeit und das Abenteuer] is forever severed 

[abgetrennt]. (TdR 57)

For Lukács, this disconnection between the authenticity of the Dämon and 

a godless, meaningless world of contingent forms defines the modern world 

and its characteristic epic genre. Older epics told of heroes who symbolically 

represented communities—who did not search, but were led. This idea of 

heroism presumed the unity of “interiority and adventure”; whereas Tyche 

in antiquity was opportune and auspicious, in the modern world she is a 

hindrance to the Dämon’s self-actualization.

Lukács reproduces of the basic schema of Goethe’s Dämon-Tyche opposi-

tion, but he reads it very differently. Instead of viewing Tyche as a potentially 

productive socialization, he interprets her exclusively as an agonistic oppo-

nent of Dämon; he resists Goethe’s attempt to bridge antiquity and modernity 

in the enduring validity of the “Urworte.” Whereas Goethe saw in them a 

timeless analytic system, for Lukács they express a unified relation of life and 

world that only existed in Greek antiquity. On this point, Lukács is close to 

Benjamin’s reading of the “Urworte,” which argues that the imagined unity 

of Tyche and Dämon—of fate and character—is always a regression to the 

mythic concept of the hero. Lukács sees it that way too but inverts the val-

uation. Where Benjamin posits the unity of life and world as a perpetual 

phantasm of “myth,” Lukács supposes a primordial whole, which not only 

actually existed, but which remains the only possible goal of history. He thus 

characterizes modernity and the modern novel in the absent connection of