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DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084474 2007 24: 72 Theory Culture Society Georg Simmel The Metaphysics of Death
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The Metaphysics of Death Georg Simmel T RANSLATORS’ NOTE: Originally published as Parts I and II of ‘Zur Meta- physik des Todes’, Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, Band I (Tübingen), April 1910: 57–70; also in Georg Simmel Gesam- tausgabe, vol. 12, Rüdiger Krammer and Angela Rammstedt eds, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (2001). This essay anticipates Simmel’s later concerns with such ultimate philosophi- cal questions as ‘being and becoming’, ‘autonomy and transcendence’, ‘embodiment and immortality’. Simmel later revised this essay and combined it with a revised version of ‘The Problem of Fate’ under the title ‘Tod und Unsterblichkeit’ (Death and Immortality) which appears as the third chapter of one of his last published books, Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). The broadly metaphysical concerns of this work are sketched in its opening chapter, ‘The Transcendent Character of Life’, where he argues that ‘Life in the absolute sense is something which includes life in the relative sense and its respec- tive opposite, or discloses itself to them as to its empirical phenomena’ (in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, Donald N. Levine trans., ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, at p. 368). The distinctively social and cultural dynamics of the issues addressed in these essays are outlined in ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’ (in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone eds, Simmel on Culture, London: SAGE, 1997). Some of these ideas are also illustrated in the discussion of ‘Death’ in his 1916 monograph, Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art (Alan Scott, Helmut Staubmann trans., ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2005). As in the pieces on ‘The Social Boundary’ and ‘The Problem of Fate’, Simmel plays on the range of meanings that the word ‘Grenze’ can have in German, includ- ing the idea of a ‘boundary’, ‘barrier’, ‘border’ or ‘frontier’ with two sides, although in Part I of the present essay he more frequently suggests the more restricted sense of a ‘limit’ beyond which there is nothing, or which in transgressing one runs the risk of non-existence or a loss of identity. The expression ‘das Ich’ used in Part II has been consistently translated as ‘the I’, although it might also have been rendered as ‘the Self’, especially in contexts where he discusses how subjective experience is objectively recognized, or even in Freudian terms as ‘the ego’. Throughout the essay Simmel implicitly leans on Hegel to develop a dialectics of existence where, ■
Vol. 24(7–8): 72–77 DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084474 072-077 084474 Simmel 10 (D) 6/2/08 11:22 Page 72 at Bobst Library, New York University on October 17, 2012 tcs.sagepub.com Downloaded from in the human imagination, (temporal) life and death exist apart as thesis and antithesis, only to be sublimated in the experience of Life (which we occasionally distinguish in this translation by capitalizing) as it exists in its immediacy and unfolds in complete unity with its contents. * * * I N EVERY age, the cultivation of the innermost dimension of life inter- acts closely with the meaning it ascribes to death. How we perceive life and death are merely two aspects of a fundamentally unified attitude. Although the reflections offered here derive their abstractions from a variety of different conceptualizations of death, the method of this endeavour is meant to exemplify how a way of thinking that has its roots in contemporary culture relates to these problems. I The inorganic body differs from the living one above all in this respect: that the boundary of its form is determined from the outside. In general, it is restricted, either by ceasing where another form begins, checks its expan- sion, and bends or breaks it open, or as a result of molecular, chemical or physical influences, as for example when the form of a rock is fixed through erosion or lava through solidification. By contrast, the organic body derives its form from the inside. It ceases to grow when innate forces of growth reach their limits [Grenzen]. These innate forces determine the specific character of its circumference at all times. Indeed, the conditions of its essence are also those of its apparent form, whereas such conditions remain outside inorganic bodies. The secret of the form lies in its being a limit or boundary [Grenze]; it is both the thing itself and that in which the thing terminates, that area in which the being and being-no-more of a thing are one. In contrast to non- living nature, organic nature does not need an other to set limits to it. To be sure, its boundaries are not only spatial but also temporal. Because the living thing must die, because dying is in its nature (whether or not this is understood to occur out of necessity), its life is given a form – one in which, of course, quantitative and qualitative meanings mix differently than in the spatial form. To understand death we must detach ourselves from the common image of it which is expressed in the three ‘fates’ [Parzen]. It is as if there were a specific moment at which the thread of life – which defined and was life until that point – was suddenly ‘cut off’; as if death puts an end to life in the same way that an inorganic body finds its spatial limit in being opposed by another to which it is unrelated, which thereby determines its form, as a ‘termination’ of its being. In such imagery, death appears to most humans as a dark prophecy that hovers over their lives, but which only affects them when it becomes a reality, not unlike the prophecy that one day Oedipus will strike his father dead. In reality, however, life and death are from the outset and inherently conjoined. Simmel – The Metaphysics of Death 73 072-077 084474 Simmel 10 (D) 6/2/08 11:22 Page 73 at Bobst Library, New York University on October 17, 2012 tcs.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Here I do not consider the biological dispute over whether one-celled life-forms are immortal because they always divide into other one-celled life-forms without leaving behind a dead corpse (unless they meet with violence from without); this would mean that death comes into being only with multicellular life-forms. Nor do I consider whether in the end some kind of death affects one-celled organisms either as a whole or in part. Here, we are concerned only with those beings in whose nature it is to die and whose life stands in intimate connection with death, while other life-forms may not share this restricted condition. The attunement of our lives with death is hardly refuted by the fact that ordinary life surges upward for a while and becomes more ‘alive’, so to speak. Only after reaching a highpoint of its development – which to a certain extent appears to be further away from death than any earlier point – do the first signs of decline set in. However, that very life which is becoming fuller and stronger must be seen in the overall context that is defined by death. Even if the advancement of death were not to be found in progressive signs such as the hardening of blood vessels, ‘pro rata’ as it were, life would be different if it were not placed in a line that unmistak- ably moves towards death. Just as the cause of success need not live on or persist substantially in its intrinsic form, and just as one structure may produce a qualitatively different condition in another, so too may death be seen from another direction as linked from the outset with life, even if it – or a part of it – cannot be identified as a reality at each moment. However, in every single moment of life we are those who must die, and each moment would be different if this were not in effect our predetermined condition. Just as we are hardly already present at the moment of our birth, but rather something is continuously being born from us, so too do we hardly die only in our last moment. These considerations simply clarify the form-giving significance of death. Death limits, that is, it gives form to life, not just in the hour of death, but also in continually colouring all of life’s contents. The limitations of life’s totality by death influence each of life’s contents and moments; the quality of each would be different were it to extend beyond this immanent boundary. It is one of the tremendous paradoxes of Christianity to remove this a priori significance from death and to place life, from the outset, under the aspect of its own eternity. In fact, the soul’s eternal fortune [Geschick] depends upon the whole sequence of life’s contents and is not just connected to earthly life in its last moment as its prolongation. The ethical significance of each one of these contents is extended into the infinite as a determining factor of our transcendental future and thus breaks through its inherent limitation. Here, death can be viewed as having been overcome, not only because life (as a line that extends through time) reaches beyond the formal limitation of its end, but also because it denies death as that which acts from within and which limits all individual moments of life by virtue of the eternal consequences of each of these moments. 74
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But viewed from the other side, death also appears to give shape to life. Organisms can stay alive moment to moment within their given worlds only through continuous adaptation (in the widest sense of the term). A failure to adapt would mean death. Just as any automatic or voluntary movement can be interpreted as a desire for life (and for more life), it can also be inter- preted as a flight from death. In this respect, each one of our movements can be viewed symbolically as an arithmetical sum arrived at by adding on from below or subtracting from above. Or perhaps the essence of our activity presents us with a mysterious unity which, like so many others, we can only comprehend by reducing it to the dualism of conquering life or fleeing from death. Each of life’s steps is revealed only as a temporal approximation of death, but is positively and a priori shaped through death as a real element of Life. And this shaping is co-determined precisely by an aversion from death, insofar as earning a living and enjoyment, work and rest, and all other activities considered to be natural, are instinctively or consciously flights from death. The life that we use up as we approach death is used up to flee death. We are like people who walk in the opposite direction of a moving ship: as they walk towards the south, the ground on which they are doing so is being carried to the north. These two directions of their movement determine their respective position in space. II Up to this point in the discussion, this shaping of life in its entire course by death has been developed in an illustrative way that does not lead to any conclusions. At issue so far has been to replace the common idea of death as a life-ending cut, like the fates, with a more organic conceptualization in which death is understood as a shaping moment of the continual course of life from its beginning. Without death, even beyond its plain appearance in the hour of death, life would be completely and unfathomably different. Whether one sees life’s biotic dispersal [enbiotische Verbreitung] as a prior effect or foreshadowing of the singular event of death, or as the indigenous shaping or colouring of each of life’s moments, along with the urgency of death this dispersal substantiates a set of metaphysical conceptualizations of the essence and fate of the soul. Here I do not explicitly differentiate those variations in meaning which either way of conceiving death may contribute to the following reflections; it would be a simple matter to distin- guish what these ideas have in common. The Hegelian formulation according to which something demands its opposite and joins it in a higher synthesis – where, on the one hand, it is sublated [aufgehoben], and on the other hand, it ‘comes to itself’ – reveals its deeper meaning in the relationship between life and death. Life demands death as its opposite, its ‘other’, which this something becomes and without which it would not have its specific meaning and form. To this extent, life and death occupy one level of being as thesis and antithesis. Something higher must therefore emerge, values and tensions in our existence which exist beyond life and death and which
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are not affected by their opposition, and in which life truly comes to itself in its highest meaning. The basis for this way of thinking is that Life as it exists in its immediacy is a process that unfolds in complete unity with its contents. This factual unity can only be lived rather than mastered intellectually. However, the analytic capacity of reason dissects this unity into these two elements through a line of demarcation that need not correspond to the objective structure of the object any less than to the emotionally grounded unity of experience (albeit on another level of reality). However, the objective as well as psychological possibility of this separation seems to me to reside only in the fact that its carrier [Träger], its process, is subject to death, especially among certain highest values. Were we to live eternally, life would likely remain fused with its values and contents, and there would be no real impetus to think of them outside the only form in which we may know and often experience them in their infinity. We must die, however, and thus we experience life as something acciden- tal, transient and which could be otherwise, so to speak. From this probably emerged the idea that the contents of life need not share the fate of its process, that one may be attentive to the validity of certain contents that are independent of these fluctuations and terminal points beyond life and death. Only the experience of death will have severed this fusion, this solidarity of life’s contents with life. Nevertheless, it is through these timelessly meaningful contents that temporal life reaches its own purest heights. As life absorbs or flows into these contents that exceed it, it moves beyond itself without losing itself but rather while attaining itself. Only in this way can its development, under- stood as a process, achieve meaning and value and come to know why it exists. Life must first be able to separate its contents ideally so that it can consciously rise toward them, and it achieves this separation with respect to death, which can annul the process of life but cannot attack the meaning of its contents. While the separation between life and its content that takes place in death may let the contents survive, the same emphasis may be placed on the other side of the demarcation line as well. Through its development, the life-process of the soul in its entirety reveals ever more clearly a certain structure that one may call the I [das Ich]. At issue is the essence and the value, the rhythm and the inner meaning that accommodate our existence as a special part of the world. This I is what we are from the beginning, but also not quite yet in the fullest sense. It stands in a peculiar category which still needs to be defined more clearly, a third term beyond any given reality and any unreal ideal value which is merely demanded. However, at the beginning of its development, the I is intimately fused with the individual contents of the life process with respect to both its subjective consciousness and its objective being. Just as this life-process separates its contents from itself (as we just saw) and remains significant beyond the dynamism of its experience of becoming [Erlebtwerdens], in the 76
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same way it releases, on its other side, as it were, the I from within itself. In a certain sense, this I differentiates itself in one stroke (uno actu) from the life process, and detaches itself as a particular meaning, value, exist- ence and challenge from these contents, which exclusively fill the naive consciousness at first. The more we experience, the more decisively the I demarcates itself as a unity and continuity among all the pendulous fluctuations of fate and views of the world. Not only in a psychological sense does the perception of what is similar and persistent become easier as the appearance of dissimilarity numerically increases, but also in an objective sense the I gathers itself more purely as it crystallizes out of the fleeting accidents of experience and develops toward its own sense and idea with increasingly more assurance and independence. Here is where the idea of immortality emerges. As death allows life to subside (as in the case mentioned above) in order to free the timelessness of its contents, so from another point of view does death put an end to a series of experiences with particular contents. This does not mean that the demand that the I must eternally fulfil itself or continue to exist (the opposite of that timelessness) would be cut off as a consequence. Immortality, which many sincere human beings long for, means that the I may fully accomplish its separation from the contingency of individual contents. Within religion, immortality appears to have a different meaning. Most often it entails a possession: the soul desires blessedness or a vision of God or perhaps merely a continued existence. Or, given a stronger ethical sublimation, the soul might want one of its qualities: to be saved, justified or purified. However, none of this applies to the present meaning of im- mortality as a state in which the soul is devoid of lived experience, in which its being is no longer achieved through a content situated outside itself. As long as we live, we experience objects. Although the I increasingly emerges through the advance and consolidation of the years as a pure process – as invariable, persistent and above the multitude of passing contents – it never- theless remains fused with these contents. The soul which stands out as an I is itself an asymptotic approximation of the I which exists not by means of something else but only in itself. Among people who believe in im- mortality and reject (as either ethically superficial or merely unknowable) the notion that any material content can serve as a means to immortality – where, as it were, pure immortality is sought – death will tend to appear as the boundary beyond which all identifiable contents of life fall away from the I, and where its being or its process is a pure belonging-to-itself, a pure determination by itself.
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