Self vs. soul …

… Ibsen's Soulcraft by Algis Valiunas | Articles | First Things.

… Ibsen’s vision inclined toward the tragic. He subjected all the good things he praised—freedom, self-fulfillment, love, nobility, happiness—to the acid test, which revealed every flaw and sometimes dissolved every shred of the ideal. Impediments to happy endings abounded. Ibsen knew how difficult it could be to escape one’s past, even when the failing was not one’s own. The sins of the fathers were indeed visited upon the children, and pain was transmitted in the blood, sometimes literally, down the generations. He also understood that certain goods, most desirable in themselves, may be incompatible with one another—that self-realization in one’s chosen work may preclude love, or nobility foreclose happiness. He proved, in the lives he imagined, the tragic nature of the liberal order as Isaiah Berlin would later describe it, in which there is no fixed hierarchy of virtues, and ideas evidently of equal worth, such as freedom, nobility, and equality, might not agreeably coexist.