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Georg simmel's philosophy of culture:chronos, zeus, and in betweenYoel Regeva Hebrew University, Department of Hebrew Literature, Mt.Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel E-mail:

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To cite this article: Yoel Regev (2005): Georg simmel's philosophy of culture: chronos, zeus, and inbetween, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 10:6, 585-593

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The European Legacy, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 585–593, 2005

Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Culture:Chronos, Zeus, and In Between

Yoel Regev

I

Georg Simmel’s theory of culture and its crises can be read as a modern version

of the theogonic myth, the story of Chronos and Zeus. Just as Chronos, Time, attempts

to prevent his dethronement by one of his children, by eating them, so does the

immanent force of life, according to Simmel, produce again and again fixed and

autonomous cultural forms—only to devour, destroy, and swallow them into its

everlasting flux; and just as Zeus attempts and succeeds to avert being swallowed, and later

on firmly establishes his autonomous rule, banishing his father to the depths of Hades, so

does each of these cultural forms attempt to destroy the bond connecting it to life and to

turn away from it, ruling alone according to its autonomous law and banishing life to the

depths of the irrational.

It should be noted that this story can be related from two perspectives: that of

Chronos and that of Zeus. From Chronos’ point of view, he is an authentic and

legitimate ruler; his failure is disastrous and should be mourned; but, more than that—this

failure is always temporary, and, Zeus, the impostor himself, will ultimately be crushed

and swallowed, like his predecessors. From Zeus’ point of view, the overthrowing of

Chronos, the cruel and irrational dictator, is a righteous deed—it is irreversible and should

be celebrated.

The dominant interpretations of Simmel’s thought can be typologized according

to these two readings of the story. According to the former, Simmel is a tardy romantic,

‘‘a philosopher of life,’’ who nostalgically mourns the destruction of the vital immanence

by the inhuman manifold of mechanistic forms;1 according to the latter, Simmel may be

characterized as a kind of ‘‘flaneur’’ or ‘‘bricoleur,’’ a neo-Kantian, a salon philosopher,

or even as a kind of early postmodernist,2 who rejoices with the disseminated manifold

of forms,3 and sinks into describing its various fragments, without trying to find in them

any original unity.4

While using Simmel’s theory of the crisis of modern culture as an example, this

paper aims to show that although both of these positions can be found in Simmel, neither

of them forms the center of his project. They should rather be seen as two temptations,

which Simmel tries to resist—two extreme points that endanger the essential core of

Hebrew University, Department of Hebrew Literature, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel. Email: yulik@pob.huji.ac.il

ISSN 1084–8770 print/ISSN 1470–1316 online/05/060585–9 � 2005 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

DOI: 10.1080/10848770500254092

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his enterprise. While modernity can be characterized, according to Simmel, as a state of

consciousness, these two temptations are the temptations of the partial consciousness,

the last attempt to save naivety. As such, they give birth to the two forms of modern

individuality, described by Simmel: the qualitative and the quantitative.

We will try to demonstrate that Simmel’s text on culture supposes a third kind

of modern individuality—the fully conscious one, constituted by a figure that is central to

all his thought: that of a resonance and connection without a connection between two

divergent series. Neither Zeus nor Chronos are given priority: the story is told twice; and

it is exactly this ability to release the space of the primary tension of Zeus’ and Chronos’

mutual swallowing that constitutes the essence of a fully conscious modern subjectivity.

II

The first text we will turn to is The Conflict of Modern Culture,5 written in 1918.

Culture here is characterized by Simmel as a process of expression, or of the self-

realization of ‘‘the creative dynamism of life’’ (die shopferische Bewegung des Lebens). The

constant flow of life, which has neither law nor form, needs to express itself in fixed and

unchangeable forms. Simmel does not give an account of this ‘‘need;’’ the structure of

self-expression is just described as one that essentially constitutes life’s essence. The forms,

in which life expresses itself, are different and various, including works of art and

literature, but also social and religious institutions, scientific and technological

developments, and so on. All these serve as vessels (Gehause) for the creative force of life.

The process of self-expression, then, is a foundation for any cultural development;

but a problem, concealed in this process, transforms such a development into a permanent

crisis. From one perspective, the forms mentioned above are vessels created by life

in order to express itself; from the other, these forms have their own laws and logic of

development that is immanent to them. These laws and logic are opposed to the chaotic

flux of life; the opposition leads to a situation in which the forms, which were created

by the flux of life in order to express it, detach themselves from their origin and lose

their expressive character. They betray their original destination and begin to exist

autonomically, according to their own laws.6

This detachment creates a situation whereby the cultural forms, which once served

as an expression for the creative force of life, and now do not realize this purpose,

turn into ‘‘empty vessels;’’ they are felt as a burden, as an artificial and superfluous

constraint. Life then tries to create for itself new forms in order to substitute them for

the old, while pushing the old forms aside and breaking them. This inner dynamic

of expression and breaking is, according to Simmel, the moving force of cultural

development.

The inner crisis is, then, immanent to the very notion of culture. But this crisis,

which results in the substitution of old cultural forms with new forms, does not endanger

cultural development; on the contrary, it serves as its necessary condition. The crisis of

modern culture, however, is essentially different from this ‘‘foundational’’ crisis and can

be described precisely as the fundamental impossibility of crisis, which therefore threatens

the very essence of culture as an endless series of crises.

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The crisis immanent to cultural development is constituted by the conflict

between the creative force of life and fixed forms. But from the inner perspective of

cultural development, this antagonism is transposed to the antagonism between the new

cultural forms and the old ones. What opposes the old ‘‘artificial’’ and alienated forms

is not life, but the new forms, which are supposed to be ‘‘authentic.’’ We have to

conclude, then (although Simmel himself does not formulate this clearly), that cultural

development is enabled by a kind of illusion: an illusion that makes it possible to see

the essential betrayal by the fixed form of its original expressional function as a problem

of this or that specific form. This lack of awareness of the real nature of the conflict as

a conflict between life and form, as such, is the source of the desire to create a new,

more successful, form, which will be more ‘‘faithful’’ to life and will not be detached

from its origin.

The crisis of modern culture is caused exactly by the loss of this naivety; the situation

of modernity is characterized by the full awareness of the essence of the conflict. The

desire now is not to substitute old cultural forms with new and more authentic ones. The

very principle of form becomes suspicious, and is felt (correctly so) as being opposed in its

essence to the free flux of life.7 This feeling is the source of the effort to destroy the form

as such, and to give the creative force of life the possibility to express itself freely,

without being limited by any form whatsoever. Such a striving for an unlimited self-

expression of life and for the destruction of form is, according to Simmel, a fundamental

feature of different cultural movements in the beginning of the twentieth century: from

Expressionism in painting to the claim for free love in ethics.

But this striving is self-destructive and cannot succeed, for, according to Simmel,

life cannot express itself immediately without the means of form:

Life is ineluctably condemned to become reality only in the guise of its opposite, the

form . . . . Thus life here aspires to the unattainable: to determine and manifest itself

beyond all forms, in its naked immediacy. But knowledge, volition and creation,

though wholly governed by life, can only replace one form for another; they can never

replace the form itself for the life that lies beyond it.8

The crisis of modern culture, then, is caused by a consciousness, albeit only a partial

one. What is realized is the nature of the conflict between life and the forms, but not

the inevitability of this conflict. Simmel’s analysis continues the movement of the deliver-

ance from naivety, which constitutes the essence of modern consciousness; and this

continuation causes an apparent impasse: life must express itself, but it cannot do so.

Is not this impasse ‘‘chronidian’’ in essence? Simmel’s sympathies seem to clearly

lie on the side of ‘‘life.’’ The fact that the autonomous forms of life betray their original

destination seems to be just a tragic accident; if it were only possible to avoid this betrayal,

to save the original unity of life and form, or, conversely, if it were possible for life

to express itself immediately, without any form—we would certainly prefer it. As it is,

however, we can only mourn the ruin of the creative force of life by alien and cruel forces,

and seek consolation from the fact that life surely will find a way out of the impasse.

In order to fully appreciate this conclusion, we have to ask ourselves the following

question: are we really dealing here with a kind of accident? Or, in other words, is

the essential structure of culture as a permanent crisis just a fact, a given anthropological

reality, as Simmel describes it in The Conflict of Modern Culture—or, from the inner

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perspective of Simmel’s thought, can it accept further explanations, which will make it

more than just a regrettable ‘‘human condition?’’

III

In order to arrive at these further explanations we will turn to another two of

Simmel’s texts: The Concept and Tragedy of Culture9 and ‘‘The Transcendence of Life,’’ the

first chapter of Lebensnanschauung.10 These texts, written during different periods of

Simmel’s philosophical development (the conceptual ground of the first is neo-Kantian,

while the second is the most complete expression of Simmel’s later philosophy of life),11

provide, though in different terms, a very similar picture of the basic scheme that lays

the foundation for Simmel’s model of culture and its functioning, thereby enabling us

to understand the unity of his thought.

The Concept and Tragedy of Culture provides the ontological ground for the concept

of culture as a series of immanent crises: culture is seen as an expression of the basic

subject–object dualism. In culture this dualism attains its highest form, and at the same

time is overcome. It attains its highest form because it is here that the spirit itself turns

into an object, for cultural works are the products of the spirit, but these products

have become autonomous, and have become an objective reality that is fastened to the

subject from the outside; it is overcome because it is exactly this form of objectivity

that can be transformed back into the ‘‘expanded’’ and ‘‘developed,’’ ‘‘culturalized’’

subjectivity—when the spirit recognizes itself in its alienated and objectivized form

and reappropriates it in the process of individual Bildung.

Culture, according to Simmel, is ‘‘the path of the soul to itself.’’ The unity of the

subject is not a kind of simple, fixed and defined unity. The subject is always more than

itself, and this state of being more than itself forms its essence:

The unity of the psyche is not simply a formal bond that forever encloses the

elaborations of its individual forces in the same way, but rather that a development as

the totality is carried by these individual forces . . . here we see the first determination

of the following concept of culture . . . culture is the path from the closed unity

through the developed diversity to the developed unity.12

The unity of the subject is apparently broken when it steps outside of its own boundaries

when encountering the objectivized forms of culture. But in the final account, it is

exactly this exit out of itself that forms the essence of subjectivity. Or, otherwise stated:

culture is a kind of auto-transgression—but a controlled auto-transgression; the subject

here breaks its own limits—but only in order to find itself outside of itself, to become

a real subject, ‘‘a developed unity.’’

But in order for a transgression to retain its transgressional character, the subject

exiting out of itself—on its way to itself—must contain some element of risk: in order

that a way out of itself will prove to be a way to itself, there must be a chance of losing

the way. This risk is provided by the autonomous and objective existence of the cultural

forms. Their existence according to their proper law enables a situation whereby the spirit

will not find in them its own expression, and will see in them only a scope of alien

contents. In other words, it creates a distance, which a subject has to overcome in order to

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become itself. Culture, then, is a mechanism of creating distances and their overcoming, which

enables the subject to become itself.

‘‘The tragedy of culture,’’ the autonomization of cultural forms, and their deviation

from their original destination of being an expression, is not accidental; it is a consequence

of the tension, which constitutes the very essence of subjectivity: the subject wants to be

its own master, to keep itself under control—but at the same time, in order to be

itself it has to lose itself. Culture is a mechanism that provides a possibility for control

in the very process of losing control, which makes it possible to rule over the

unruled—a possibility to unfold this original tension in the diachronic form of two discrete and

distanced steps: creating an autonomous form and breaking its autonomy, while

recognizing in it an alienated force of the spirit.

This function of culture as a means of a diachronic unfolding of simultaneous

tension, by way of isolating its constituent parts, is made even clearer in ‘‘The

Transcendence of Life’’. Here, the primordial tension is conceptualized as a central

characteristic of life, as a basic ontological category. Life is defined as a unity of the limit

and of its transgression. We are conscious of being limited; but the very existence of this

consciousness proves that we are able to overcome this limit (otherwise, we would not be

able to see it as a limit); we are able to transgress any given limit—but cannot stop being

limited. Our primordial disposition in the world is constituted by the paradoxical fact of

being simultaneously on both sides of the limit; life is the act of auto-transcendence,

whereby we realize our being ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘out’’ all at once.13

The process of cultural development is the most prominent expression of this

fundamental auto-transcendence of life. This process is described according to the

model, which is already familiar to us: life expresses itself in a particular fixed and limited

form—but only in order to break it and create a new one. This process of creating and

breaking the forms is an expression of the paradoxical structure of life: being limited and

unlimited all at once. We see once more that culture serves as a mechanism that deploys

diachronically a primary given and synchronous tension: the creation of a fixed form and

its breaking are the distanced expressions of the duality of life as being simultaneously

limited and unlimited.

One motive, then, proves to be constant, in the conceptual changes in Simmel’s

thought: subjectivity as a developed unity, and life as a unity of the limited and the

unlimited, are just different ways to conceptualize the initial tension, which remains a

basic ontological fact. Culture, as a series of permanent crises, is a way to turn this tension,

whatever its definition, into something different: the indiscernible initial tension is

divided here into two distinctive stages, that of creating a form and that of breaking it,

and the endless interchange of these makes it possible to ‘‘stretch’’ into a continuous

process what was originally a one-moment unity.

We are now better able to understand the essence of consciousness that characterizes

the situation of modernity. In order to function as a mechanism of the diachronical

stretching of the primordial tension, the process of culture must be an endless interchange

of creating a form and of breaking it: each stage must be immediately followed by the

other. But this endless process must be concealed from those who take part in it, because

the motivation for the creation of the new cultural form is the confidence that it will be

authentic and will succeed in being a faithful expression of the inner creative force of life.

The development of culture is the endless process that is enabled only by the inherent

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illusion that the end can be reached; the condition of the diachronical deployment

of the simultaneous is what those who take part in it are unconscious of: the essence of

the process they are involved in.

It is this illusion of the possibility to create a perfect form that is lost in the situation

of modernity, but it is exactly this loss that enables an understanding of the essence of

culture. The opaqueness, which divides the two stages of the diachronic process of

cultural development, disappears: the one who creates a form knows that he does so only

in order that it will be broken in the future, which consciousness prevents him from

creating. The interchange of the stages can no longer continue.14

This situation of the unexpected halt, caused by the loss of illusions, engenders

the two forms of modern individuality: the quantitative and the qualitative.15 Both are

merely an attempt to fix one of the stages of the process, which can no longer continue.

The quantitative individuality tries to retain the stage of the form: it creates a concept

of universal humanity, common to everyone and formal in its nature. The qualitative

individuality is, conversely, an attempt to retain the stage of the breaking of all forms:

it is characterized by the negation of all limits and restrictions (we have already seen the

description of this in The Conflict of Modern Culture).

However, as has already been mentioned concerning the demand of life for an

immediate expression, the consciousness that creates these two forms of modern

individuality is only partial. And we can now give a more precise definition of this

partiality, too. The illusion of the possibility to finish the endless process of cultural

development is grounded in a more profound one: the illusion of the possibility to get rid

of the initial tension, which this process deploys. This illusion stays untouched in the two

attempts to stop the process at its critical points. Simmel’s analysis seems to destroy this

illusion as well; but does not this shattering of illusion ruin all possible individuality,

leading to a total collapse?

IV

Let us summarize: culture, according to Simmel, is the process of the diachronic

stretching of the initial tension, which can proceed only into a total unconsciousness of its

own nature; the crisis of modernity is a crisis of the loss of illusion. Exactly at the moment

when we understand what we are doing, we lose the possibility to do it. The permanent

crisis of cultural development expresses the initial tension, which constitutes the very

essence of subjectivity and ‘‘life,’’ while not being conscious of it; the modern individuality

in both its forms is conscious of the tension, but for this exact reason it is unable to express

and deploy it any more. Is there a third way?

The answer seems to be simple: a fully-conscious modern individual is one who

participates in the process of cultural development in spite of being free from illusions:

a kind of ‘‘flaneur,’’ who enjoys viewing the infinite flux of fragmental cultural forms,

while being fully conscious of their fragmentarity. We are exposed to a fully ‘‘zeusian’’

and ‘‘postmodern’’ position: the endless game of the signifiers must be joyfully accepted,

because it produces the inexpressible, which cannot be given in any other form.

But aren’t we dealing here with the position, which is based on the last and the

deepest illusion—that the only way to express the primal tension is to diachronically

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deploy it into a series of interchanging stages?16 It seems that Simmel himself proposes

another model of a fully conscious modern subjectivity—and another way of overcoming

the crisis of modern culture—a way that allows for the expression of the primary tension,

but not by means of its diachronic stretching.

Let’s turn once again to ‘‘The Transcendence of Life’’. The primordial tension of life

as a creative force seems to be contrary to the world of fixed and autonomous cultural

forms. But this concept of life is only a partial one: an absolute life is not one side of the

opposition, but the opposition as a whole, including both the creative force that invents

the limits only in order to break them, and the autonomous and self-supporting forms;

it is the unity of more-life (mehr leben) and more-than-life (mehr als leben).17 The duality of

life as creating and breaking the forms, and of the form that detaches itself from its origin,

should not be overcome, not by the affirmation of the totality of life nor by the triumph

of the autonomous form; this duality should be preserved in all its sharpness, for it is the

only way in which the absolute unity of life can be provided.18

In other words, the same story must be told twice from two different points of view:

once as the story of Chronos and once as the story of Zeus’s victory. The juxtaposition of

the two simultaneous, and differently directed processes of swallowing creates the space

of the middle, in which a primary tension can be given without being reduced.

It is this ability to tell the story twice that characterizes a completely conscious

modern individuality that can express the original tension in a simultaneous, non-

diachronic way. The primordial tension is concealed in both variants of the story: it is

dissolved both in the unity of the creative flux of life and in the unity of the autonomous

law of cultural forms. But both of these unities lead to a duality: the expressed is lost in the

very moment of expression, and the attempt to preserve it leads to an endless movement

between the opposites. Modernity is, essentially, a demand to stop this movement, but

the primary impulse of this demand is to save, not to lose, the expressed. The fully

conscious modern individuality exists as a resonance of two mutual swallowings, while

resisting the temptation to give primacy to one of the two sides; this resistance enables

the givenness of the tension as it is, without stretching it into the differentiated stages

of cultural crisis.

Did Simmel himself succeed in resisting this temptation? His entire work can be seen

as a constant fight against the bias toward one of the sides. The early, positivistic period

is marked by a clear preference of Chronos’ side, the neo-Kantian—of the Zeuses, and

Simmel’s late philosophy of life once again moves closer to Chronos. But in spite of

these biases, at the core of Simmel’s thought there is always the idea of the middle.

The clarification of this fact will demand an analysis of the series of concepts invented by

Simmel in order to conceptualize the resonance between the two series, such as that of

history, of fate, of adventure, and, finally, of life.

This project of reconstructing Simmel’s philosophy as a struggle for the middle can

be only hinted at here. Its accomplishment will enable, on the one hand, to place him in

the context of German thought, starting from Leibniz, whose attempt to create a new,

non-Aristotelian kind of substantiality is connected with Simmel’s schema of a resonance

between the divergent series and serves as a mode of givenness of this substantiality.

On the other hand, this project will make it possible to regard Simmel as a precursor of

the contemporary fight for the ‘‘in between’’ as a way of overcoming the modern/

postmodern dichotomy, led by philosophers such as Deleuze and Desmond.

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Notes

1. See, for instance, Lukacs’s nekrolog on Simmel in Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel: Briefe,Erinnerungen, Bibliographie, ed. Kurt Gassen and M. Landmann (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,1958), 171–6; and Habermas’s presentation of Simmel’s thought in Jurgen Habermas, ‘‘Simmelals Zeitdiagnostiker,’’ in Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais. Mit einemvorwort von J. Habermas (Berlin, 1986).

2. The opposition between a ‘‘Chronidian’’ and a ‘‘Zeusian’’ perspective can easily betransformed to the terms of ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘postmodern.’’ According to a definition by Jean-Francois Lyotard [Le postmoderne explique aux enfants (Paris: Galilee, 1988)], modernity ischaracterized as a ‘‘lack of the reality into the real,’’ as a situation in which each signifierbetrays (in a Zeusian way) its signified and develops an autonomy of its own. ‘‘Modernism’’and ‘‘Postmodernism’’ are two possible reactions to this situation: a modernist is nostalgic forthe lost fullness of representation and attempts to convey at least the inability of representation,while a postmodern position is characterized by an acceptance of this inability and a cheerfulsinking into the production of the unsignifiable by means of the everlasting change ofsignifiers.

3. It is important to note that for Simmel, one can never speak of the victory of one law and oneform; we will see that culture is a manifold of forms, each of which has its own autonomy.Zeus never rules alone over the whole universe. Nevertheless, this does not make our modelinvalid: the fight of Zeus with Chronos should simply be seen as a cyclical process, wherebyeach of Zeus’ victories is followed by the destruction of his universe by Chronos, and viceversa; the endless character of this chain of victories and defeats is the source of the manifoldof forms, for each of Zeus’ victories gives birth to a new kind of law.

4. For a significant support of such a view on Simmel, see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity:Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1986); and David Frisby, Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory,2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1992); see also Deena Weinstein and Michael A. Weinstein, Post-Modern(ized) Simmel (London: Routledge, 1993). The traditional account of Simmel as afounder of formal sociology [see, for instance, Lewis A. Coser, Georg Simmel (Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965)], although opposed by Frisby, can be seen as just another branch ofthis ‘‘zeusian’’ perspective.

5. Georg Simmel, Der Konflikt der Modernen Kultur (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918).The English translation is by D. E. Jenkinson, quoted from Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisbyand M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997).

6. Simmel extends here the Marxist notion of alienation of the product of labor, while regardingthe conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production as a particular caseof a more general conflict between the creative force of life and the cultural forms created by it.See the beginning of his ‘‘Wandel der Kulturformen,’’ in Brucke und Tur: Essays (Stuttgart:K. F. Koehler, 1957).

7. ‘‘Und dies kann sich schließlich zu einer Gesamtnot der Kultur akkumulieren, in der das Lebendie Form als solche wie etwas ihm Aufgedrungenes empfindet, die Form uberhaupt, nichtnur diese und jene, durchbrechen und in seine Unmittelbarkeit aufsagen will, um sich selbs anihre Stelle zu setzen . . . So kam es nicht zu der Kulturnot, die wir kennen, die wir Alterenallmanlich wachsen sahen, bis zu dem Grade, daß uberhaupt nicht mehr eine neue Formden Kampf gegen eine alte aufnahm, sondern auf allen moglichen Gebieten das Leben sichdagegen emport, in irgendwie festen Formen verlaufen zu sollen’’ (Simmel, Der Konflikt derModernen Kultur, 5–6).

8. ‘‘Dieses Leben mu entweder Formen erzeugen oder sich in Formen bewegen . . . Hier willalso das Leben etwas, was es gar nicht erreichen kann, es will sich uber alle Formen hinwegin seiner nackten Unmittelbarkeit bestimmen und erscheinen—allein das durchaus vonihm bestimmte Erkennen, Wollen, Gestalten kann nur die eine Form durch die andere,niemals aber die Form uberhaupt durch das Leben selbst, als das der Form Jenseitige,ersetzen’’ (Ibid., 29).

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9. Georg Simmel, ‘‘Der Begriff und die Tragodie der Kultur,’’ in Philosophische Kultur (Potsdam,1923), first printed in Logos 2 (1911–12): 1–25; the English translation is quoted from Simmelon Culture.

10. Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung: vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munchen: Duncker undHumblot, 1918).

11. The account on periodization of Simmel’s thought can be found, for instance, in MichaelLandmann,‘‘Georg Simmel: Konturen seines Denkens,’’ in Aesthetik und Soziologie um dieJahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel (Frankfurt A. M.: Klostermann, 1976).

12. ‘‘Dies ist eine . . . metaphzsische Voraussetzung unseres praktischen und gefuhlsmaßigenWesens . . . daß die Einheit der Seele nicht einfach ein formales Band ist, das die Entfaltungenihrer Einzelkrafte in immer gleicher Weise umschließt, sondern daß durch diese Einzelkrafteeine Entwicklung ihrer als eines Ganzen getragen wird . . . Hier zeigt sich die erste . . .Bestimmung des Kulturbegriffs . . . Kultur ist der Weg von der geschlossenen Einheit durchdie entfaltete Vielheit zur entfalteten Einheit’’ (Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, 238).

13. ‘‘Die konstitutionelle Verschiebbarkeit und Verschiebung unserer Grenzen bewirkt, das wirunser Wesen mit der Paradoxe ausdruken konnen: wir haben nach jeder Richtung hin eineGrenze, und wir haben nach keiner Richtung hin eine Grenze’’ (Ibid., 3).

14. We must mention here the rather paradoxical character of this conception of modernity asa halt: in opposition to the current opinion, which sees permanent change as a characteristicof modernity, according to Simmel, modernity represents exactly the impossibility of change.

15. For a distinction between these two forms of modern individuality, see, for instance, thesixteenth lecture on Kant in Georg Simmel, Kant: sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der BerlinerUniversitat (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1905).

16. We disregard the fact that the very possibility of such a position seems to be highly dubious,for, as has already been mentioned, the illusion of the finitude of the process is a necessarycondition for the very attempt to create a cultural form.

17. ‘‘Will man aber zunachst die eine Seite des Dualismus als Leben schlechthin, die andereals individuelle Geforrnthelt und einfachen Gegensatz zu jenem bezeichnen, so gilt es nunweiter, einen absoluten Begriff des Lebens zu gewinnen, der jenen, noch von einernGegensatz sich abhebenden, als einen deshalb nur relativen unter sich begreift . . . Und darumerscheint die Transzendenz seiner selbst als der einheitliche akt des Aufbauens undDurchbrehens seiner Schranken, seines Anderen, als der Charakter seiner Absolutheit—derdie Auseinanderlegung in verselbstandigte Gegensatze sehr wohl begreiflich macht’’(Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, 19–20).

18. ‘‘Der Dualismus, soller Scharfe beibehalten, widerspticht nicht nur nicht der Einheit desLebens, sondern ist gerade die Art, wie seine Einheif existiert’’ (Ibid., 25).

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