1.
The revival of interest in Georg Simmel's thought that has occurred in the English-speaking world since the early 1970s has brought to the forefront of attention his contributions to cultural theory.  Among the commentators on Simmel's work Donald Levine (1971b) has integrated Simmel's sociological studies and his philosophy of life around the dialectical tension between "life" and "form;" Peter Lawrence (1976c) has provided fresh translations of some of Simmel's major essays on culture and has interpreted them in the context of the European civilization of his time; and David Frisby (1981) has given a careful and rich account of Simmel's intellectual spirit in light of contemporary hermeneutical categories.  The growing literature on Simmel's legacy is characterized by a welcome tendency to consider his thought as a whole rather than to abstract from it particular substantive or methodological contributions to sociological inquiry, and to establish firmly that a concern with the problematicity of modern culture is a unifying theme in his varied studies in philosophy, aesthetics, and sociology.  Contemporary Simmel scholarship offers a sound basis for a further project of making some of the critical nuances of his reflections on culture more precise.  A more intensive examination of key aspects of Simmel's cultural theory will not only provide a more adequate picture of his thought, but will show its relevance to present interpretations of culture.

2.
Current scholarship on Simmel is characterized by the legitimate aim of placing his work in the context of the times in which it was written.  The approach of cultural history performs the salutary function of preventing misplaced abstractions, but it often fails to grasp the significance of a thinker for future generations.  Any thinker is embedded in his age, sharing with his contemporaries participation in distinctive discursive formations which are intelligible both in terms of regnant social conditions and the given level of cultural development in all of the phases of what Simmel called, in the manner of Hegel, "spiritual life."  However, a thinker may also push beyond the confines of his era and anticipate the problems which will preoccupy future reflection.  Cultural history, as it is practiced today, with the guiding intention of circumstantializing a thinker, tends to neglect fruitful anticipations.  Although it is difficult both to make a thinker intelligible through his socio-cultural circumstances and to show how he transcended them those two endeavors are essential to a complete interpretation: history must strive to be adequate to the temporal determinations of its object, but historiography rejoins that the past is necessarily interpreted through present concerns.

3.
Lawrence (1976c:5) evinces the present direction of Simmel scholarship when he writes that "Simmel is of interest as a representative, though not always a typical representative, of both European culture before the war of 1914-18 and of Wilhelminian Germany, though there is some opposition between these two environmental forces."  That understanding of Simmel will tend to assimilate his thought to the special problems of German national unification and the "cultural pessimism" which arose in Germany as the Bismarckian formula of a thinly-disguised authoritarianism fell apart in the years preceding World War I.  Frisby (1981), indeed, makes Simmel into the arch cultural pessimist by interpreting his spirit through the free-floating retreatism of Robert Musil's Ulrich, "the man without qualities."  One need not deny that Simmel reacted painfully against "the First World War which shattered the civilization he revered," or even that he sometimes "displayed a characteristically German apathy towards contemporary politics."(Lawrence, 1976c:6)  Much of Simmel's temperament is fully attuned to his period and he acknowledges that fact in his late writings.  However, among his famous contemporaries such as Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies,  and Werner Sombart he was distinguished by a decided lack of nostalgia and by a penetrating interest in emerging cultural phenomena, for example, expressionism in art and pragmatism in philosophy, which casts doubt on the picture of him as a man who could not summon the nerve to engage himself in the great struggles of his time.  If Simmel was a representative of his epoch, both as German and as European, he was also a pathfinder beyond it, most particularly in his late works on cultural theory, written during World War I.  As Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner (1988:16) note, he "may be regarded as the first sociologist of post-modernity."

4.
The anticipations of future discourses in Simmel's work are articulated with greatest precision in two of his most sensitive essays on cultural theory, "The Crisis of Culture"(1917) and "The Conflict of Modern Culture"(1918).  In these writings Simmel emerges not as a cultural pessimist but as an internal critic of modernism, anticipating in "The Crisis" the existentialism of Martin Heidegger and in "The Conflict" contemporary "postmodernist" perspectives.  The following discussion will suggest that far from suffering a failure of the will to engagement, Simmel in his later years struggled deeply with the tensions of modern life, agonizing over them and introjecting them into the core of his intellectual personality, and seeking restlessly, though unsuccessfully, to overcome them.  Simmel's unwillingness or inability to take a stand in any of the movements of his period or to found a school or a movement of his own do not bespeak, as Frisby (1981) has it, the spirit of the "flâneur" or the impressionist, who distances himself from the currents of life because he finds them too multifarious and fluctuating to embrace in a consistent praxis; or, as Lawrence (1976c) claims, a "characteristically German apathy."  Instead, the absence of partisan commitment in his intellectual life stems from his placement of the problematicity of modernity in cultural conflict rather than in economic, political, or social dynamics.  Simmel traced the crisis of modernity to an internal contradiction in culture and he strove to discern signs of its possible reconciliation:  he was not so much "the man without qualities," the victim of a cultural pathology, as a Nietzschian diagnostician and therapist seeking cultural health, an agonistic healer, similar to his Spanish contemporary Unamuno.

5.
The following discussion will interpret "The Crisis of Culture" and "The Conflict of Modern Culture" as parallel texts which address the same phenomena of modernist culture - expressionism, post-metaphysical philosophy, and post-Christian religiosity - in distinctively different ways.  "The Crisis," which is Simmel's most careful reflection on World War I, interprets modernism in terms of the categories of his pre-War thinking, recalling The Philosophy of Money and "The Metropolis and Mental Life" but infusing those categories with a moral commitment leading out to the existentialism of the post-War generation.  Here Simmel's thought is a bridge between the past and the immediate future, anticipating the drive away from relativism and skepticism, and toward commitment that would mark the inter-war period.  "The Conflict," which is the most unique and original work in Simmel's canon, pushes beyond the parameters of his other writings, leaving off from the past and breaking entirely new ground in its profound acknowledgment of the positivity of modernism and of its essential failure:  in this text the postmodernist discourse erupts.  In "The Crisis" Simmel is still a representative, though certainly not a typical one, of his generation, though he is struggling painfully beyond it.  In "The Conflict" he is intellectually contemporaneous with our own cultural situation, which gives us the privilege of understanding him more fully than previous generations have been able to do.
The Exhaustion of Form

6.
"The Crisis of Culture," which is one of four essays collected in Simmel's The War and Spiritual Decisions, has been generally ignored by commentators, who find the notes of German nationalism that are sounded in his writings on World War I to be uncharacteristic of his supposed cosmopolitan bias and, perhaps, embarrassing.  Lawrence (1976c), however, points out that Simmel's "war enthusiasm" in "The Crisis" is "reasoned rather than rabid."  The essay, indeed, far from being a defense of the war spirit is exemplary of Simmel's late cultural theory, framed in the context of how the War affects the basic dialectical tensions in modern life.  Simmel shows in "The Crisis" how war reveals the presuppositions of peacetime life in a "highly developed objective culture."  His project is similar to that of "The Metropolis and Mental Life"(Simmel, 1971c), in which he traced the impact of the social form of the modern urban setting on individual subjectivity, only now the form mediating cultural conflict is war.  The basic terms of that conflict are the same in both essays - the opposition between objective and subjective culture - and recur to his masterwork The Philosophy of Money (Simmel, 1978).

7.
Throughout his mature writings on culture, until the radical break which he makes in "The Conflict," Simmel's fundamental description of modernity is constituted by the tension between objective and subjective culture.  Working within the parameters of a naturalized Hegelian dialectic he defines man as a being who objectifies his life in cultural forms, such as technology, science, art, philosophy, and religion, which then demand that life conform to their constraints and standards.  Under ideal conditions the form-giving activity of human life is able to appropriate its objectified creations to fill out and enhance individual subjectivity, that is, the objective culture of things serves the subjective culture of personal development.  In "The Crisis" Simmel(1976a:253) gives one of his best accounts of the normative grounds of his cultural theory, arguing that "improvement of the soul" is culturally achieved indirectly "by way of the intellectual achievements of the species, the products of its history:  knowledge, life-styles, art, the state, a man's profession and experience of life - these constitute the path of culture by which the subjective spirit returns to itself in a higher, improved state."  The foundation of Simmel's cultural theory, then, is a triadic relation of form creation - objectivized form - form appreciation, which functions ideally as a self-reinforcing process through which human products come back to their creators to enrich their lives.  Simmel's descriptive analyses and his criticisms of culture all trade off his normative ideal, showing the various ways in which the reciprocal relation between the three moments of the fundamental dialectic is broken in modern life.

8.
Had Simmel followed in Hegel's footsteps he would have endeavored to show how the idealized dialectic of culture was the actual form of historical development, but his deepest insight into human life was that the three terms of the relation were inherently unbalanced.  "The Crisis" culminates Simmel's tragic sense of culture by bringing together his major arguments about how the objective culture of modernity fails to serve the development of the individual's personality.  His radical claim is that the form-giving activity tends to perfect its objective creations indefinitely through differentiating them into autonomous cultural realms, which then are developed according to their own inherent norms, and through generating ever more intensive and extensive means to fulfill those norms.  Meanwhile finite individual subjectivity remains bound within its natural limits and becomes progressively incapable of assimilating and appropriating the vast array of cultural objects for its own perfection, and increasingly lost within the jungle of means to the point at which it even loses sight of its native goal.  The crisis of an impoverished subjectivity confronting an overwhelming objectivity is further exacerbated by the demands for service that each realm of objective culture makes upon the individual spirit.  Objective culture, rather than serving the individual as it is supposed to in the normative order, becomes the oppressive master of subjectivity in the actual order of historical development.  According to Simmel there is no exit from this tragic predicament, which is grounded in the relation between the indefinite perfectibility of objective culture and the inherent limits of individual subjectivity:  the highly developed objective culture is in a state of "chronic crisis."

9.
The crisis of culture is enacted in a wrenching conflict within the individual between the demands of objective culture and the struggle of the self for its own expression of its life.  The typical reaction of subjectivity to chronic crisis is defensive and protective, that is, to withdraw into a blasé attitude and to withhold commitment to objective forms.  The forms become exhausted of any meaning that they might once have had for individual life and various pathologies appear such as the equation of technological with cultural progress, overt covetousness and craving for pleasure, and a desire for money that far exceeds the desire for the things it can buy.  Subjectivity trivializes itself as a defense mechanism against the demands of the objective spirit, suffering from a sense of futility rather than caring for its own enrichment.  But it also initiates more positive resistances such as war, which provides an overriding end of group survival for life, and modernism, which in "The Crisis" is a struggle for subjective culture in an age of exhausted forms.  War, for Simmel, is a temporary recovery of vitality and seriousness in the persistent context of futility, and in the midst of its devastation it may reveal to people how their values have been inverted by their resentment against the overbearing demands of a fragmented objective culture.  Modernism, in contrast, is the extreme pathology of peacetime life, the self-contradicted resistance of impoverished subjectivity, the flaring up of an endemic cultural disease.

10.
Although Simmel does not use the term "modernism" he identifies "a number of contemporary cultural phenomena" which would later be grouped under that term. Indeed, he may be considered as one of the first to discover the affinity between the various tendencies in diverse spheres of culture that self-consciously attempt to rupture received conventions and to give free play to immanent creative process.  In "The Crisis" he interprets such phenomena as futurist art, post-Christian religiosity, and post-metaphysical philosophy, as responses to an environment of inherited cultural forms which were "eroded and lacking in self-assurance."  Modernism here is the kind of creativity that occurs when there is "a passionate desire for the expression of life, for which traditional forms are inadequate, but for which no new forms have been devised, and which therefore seeks pure expression in a negation of form, or in forms that are almost provocatively abstruse."(Simmel, 1976a:257)  The modernist impulse is described here negatively as a spirit in a cultural interregnum that has lost allegiance to old models but that is incapable of creating new ones.  In light of its deprivation it falls back upon itself and seeks to present itself "formless and naked."  But such an effort, according to Simmel(1976a:257), is doomed to failure because the inner life can only be expressed "in forms which have their own laws, purpose and stability arising from a degree of autonomy independent of the spiritual dynamics which created them."  Expressionism, which tries to objectify psychological processes directly, ends in "a chaos of fragmentary vestiges of form as a substitute for a form which is unified."  Futurism, which is Simmel's touchstone in "The Crisis," has created "prisons," not "pure expression."

11.
Post-Christian religiosity, which is best exemplified by a "formless mysticism" through which the soul attempts to stand "naked" before its God or to be "its own inmost metaphysical life not moulded by any forms of faith whatever" is also traced by Simmel(1976a:259) to an "historical moment when inner life can no longer be accommodated in the forms it has occupied hitherto, and because it is unable to create other, adequate forms, concludes that it must exist without any form at all."  Simmel(1976a:258) places the new piety, which would later resonate in the movement of process theology, against the backdrop of pre-War culture, a "peaceful age of gradual transitions, of hybrid forms, of that pleasant twilit zone where one can indulge alternately even in mutually exclusive attitudes."  He believes that the War has ended that era of trivialized faith and ushered in a time which "demands from each and every man a decision as to where he ultimately stands."  Anticipating Heidegger's (1962) notion of "resolute choice" in Being and Time, Simmel hopes that the "resoluteness" that the Germans have shown in the war effort "will also penetrate to this inmost area of decision."  Here Simmel adopts a decidedly existentialist outlook, speaking of a "radical eruption of man's religious depths."  He is moving along the line of Karl Jaspers's existenz and Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern," breaking out of the idea of religion as a cultural form without falling prey to "formless mysticism."  With his notion of radical choice he is on the brink of discovering the forms of personal existence; Heidegger's "existentials" and Jaspers's "ultimate situations," both of which were forged in the effort to renew culture in the wake of its collapse by revealing intimately real forms.

12.
The idea that modernism is a sign of what Heidegger called the interregnum between gods, that it bespeaks the impotent yearning for new forms, carries over into Simmel's discussion of post-metaphysical philosophy.  Anticipating Heidegger, Simmel suggests that the system of philosophy which has been "elaborated since classical antiquity" is "beginning to become an empty shell."  Ideal antinomies such as free will and determinism, and absolute and relative "no longer permit a clear decision to allocate any dubious case definitely to the one concept or the other."(Simmel, 1976a:260)  There is a "demand for an as yet indefinable third possibility," because "our resources for mastering reality by giving it intellectual expression are no longer adequate to their task."  The "philosophical instinct" quests for "new forms, which as yet announce their arcane presence only as intuition or perplexity, desire or clumsy gropings."  In the inter-war period there would be an effort throughout the West to engender those new forms.  Ludwig Wittgenstein would find in ordinary language the matrix out of which philosophical abstractions escaped, Heidegger and later existential phenomenologists would coordinate the classical antinomies in the category of being-in-the-world, and the late Heidegger would make the daring attempt to break through metaphysics altogether to the thought of Being itself.  None of those efforts has proven adequate to the traditional task of philosophy, which, for Simmel, is to make reality intelligible, but they show that the very problem he identified during the War would become the center of philosophical reflection after it was over.

13.
The discussion of modernism in "The Crisis" is framed within the primal understandings of the exhaustion of received cultural forms and of the deprivation of subjective culture.  Modernism, as a failed mediation between form-creating activity and form appreciation, occupies a gap between a past and a possible future culture, both of which provide a modicum of satisfaction to the subjective demand for coherent personal development.  Although the essay concludes with an assertion that the "chronic crisis" of highly developed objective culture cannot be reversed in the long run Simmel(1976a:265) still nurses a hope that the tendency of such a culture to "disintegrate into futility and paradox" will be recurrently arrested by "the fundamental dynamic unity of life."   He senses that the "concept of life now seems to permeate a multitude of spheres and to have begun to give, as it were, a more unified rhythm to their heartbeat."(Simmel, 1976a:263)  Simmel here endows the form-giving activity of life with its own meaningful integrity, its own inherent pre-intellectual and self-preservative and self-renewing direction.  The crisis of culture is the exhaustion of form and its pathological manifestations are the currents of modernism which attempt to dispense with form only because they are unable to create it.  Indeed, in "The Crisis" life and form are held in tension with each other in a "process of interaction" - they are not antithetical forces, but are defined reciprocally in terms of the polarity flux and fixed, each one a necessary moment in the totality of the life process.  The real antithesis here, as it is through all of Simmel's work from The Philosophy of Money until "The Conflict of Modern Culture," is between objective culture (objectivized form) and subjective culture (form appreciation).  Life itself as form-giving activity is not problematized and, thus, can be dogmatized, can remain a repository of hope for spontaneous renewal, encircling the tragic opposition between the two cultures.  In "The Conflict," however, the ground shifts altogether and Simmel problematizes the relation of form-giving activity to objectivized form, abandoning the last vestiges of his metaphysical optimism and opening the door to postmodernist perspectives on culture.  He abandons the waiting game of the interregnum and enters the age of radically contradicted life.

The Rebellion of Life

14.
Georg Simmel was the leading philosopher of life in Germany in his generation, performing the function of assimilating the idealist tradition into the ground of lived experience as it is seized directly from within by a conscious finite self.  Like his French contemporary, Henri Bergson, with whom he is often compared, he philosophized from a vision of life's structure which he achieved by a reflective review of the various human activities, guided by his intuition of life's process.  Far from taking the pose of the detached ego who floats above life observing it indifferently or of the flâneur who mingles in society but can take it or leave it, he experienced to the depth all of the conflicts of his time.  He was acutely aware of the multiplicity and relativity of forms, but he took each one of them seriously, pondering its internal meaning and its relations to the others.  He did not commit himself to the perfection of any special form as a Weberian vocation, but concerned himself with the problematicity of form itself:  he was, on the contemplative side, a cultural theorist, and, on the active side, a cultural critic.  He was a man of forms, not of form; a man of many qualities, not a man without them.  He understood and was loyal to a moral ideal of a culture in which human beings express their lives in objects which return to them to fortify their personal development, but he did not believe that this ideal was capable of realization.  Rather, in his review of life as a whole he discovered irremediable paradoxes, ironies and contradictions.

15.
Simmel's vision of the dialectic of "form creation - objectivized form - form appreciation"  governed his entire mature intellectual development, but he placed emphasis on different tensions within that dialectic over time.  Through the middle period of his career (1900-1910) he was concerned with the conflict between objectivized form and form appreciation, arguing that the objective culture of things had outrun the ability of individuals to incorporate it into a satisfying subjective culture of personal enrichment.  He did not attend during this period to the moment of form-giving life, leaving it as an unanalyzed ground and taking for granted the "chronic crisis" of the highly developed objective modern culture.  In his late writings, however, a decisive shift in his focus occurs which culminates in "The Conflict of Modern Culture."  Whereas in the preceding phase of his thought objectivized form was the protagonist overwhelming form appreciation, which adopted a multitude of compensatory and defensive measures to maintain some semblance of integrity, in his thought during the War period the form-giving activity of life itself becomes the protagonist, seeking to deconstruct objectivized form; to capture it, assert sovereignty over it, and assimilate it into itself.  Concern with subjective culture drops out of his thinking, as though it had become anachronistic, and the creative spirit confronts its products without the mediation of the appreciation of culture:  creative life seeks to become the self-sufficient appreciator of itself, of its own creativity.

16.
Simmel began "The Crisis of Culture" by defining culture subjectively as "the improvement of the soul" attained indirectly through "the intellectual achievements of the species."  The ground shifts decisively in "The Conflict," which he initiates with the reflection that "we speak of culture when the creative dynamism of life produces certain artefacts which provide it with forms of expression and actualization, and which in their turn absorb the constant flow of life, giving it form and content, scope and order."(Simmel, 1976b:223)  Culture is here primarily a product of creative life, not an object of appreciative life.  In light of this new focus the site of the conflict of culture moves to an antagonism between creativity and its creations.  According to Simmel(1976b:223), form-giving life produces objectivized forms which "have their own logic and laws, their own significance and resilience arising from a certain degree of detachment and independence vis-a-vis the spiritual dynamism which gave them life."  The independence of objectivized form from the life which creates it is the root of cultural theory.  The forms created by the life process stand over against it, demanding that the process contain itself within them.  Life as creative activity, however, immediately departs from them and seeks to engender new forms in which to express itself.  Objectivized form necessarily tends to become hostile to life, which constitutes itself as cultural history by ceaselessly creating and abandoning a succession of forms, none of which ever fully satisfies its restless and multifarious drive for self-expression.

17.
The history of spiritual life, which is cultural history, does not have, for Simmel, a formal unity or meaning, but it does reach an intelligible crisis in the twentieth century.  Until the present era the conflict of culture had been fought out by the replacement of one form of meaning by another, each one commanding obedience as an objective imperative and then ceding to others after a struggle.  But during the nineteenth century a unique and far-reaching eruption occurred in modern culture:  life began to take itself as its own object of meaning, first in the thought of such philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (cf. Simmel, 1986), and then in every region of culture; that is, life at last understood itself as the generator of all of the forms to which it had pledged obedience and could no longer tolerate subservience to objectivized form which it knew to be its own product.  By the twentieth century cultural movements were in process that not only sought to replace exhausted forms with new ones, but that rebelled against the submission to any objective demand:  "We are at present experiencing this new phase of the age-old struggle, which is no longer the struggle of a new, life-imbued form against an old, lifeless one, but the struggle against form itself, against the very principle of form."(Simmel, 1976b:225)  Simmel here breaks through the confines of the "cultural pessimism" of much of his generation.  He no longer interprets modern history through the exhaustion of form but has discovered the rebellion of life, toward which he experiences a deep ambivalence.  Indeed, Simmel's cultural theory in "The Conflict" is an expression of that ambivalence.

18.
Just as his contemporary Unamuno (1954) was the agonist of Christianity, Simmel is the agonist of modern culture.  His agony cuts as deeply as can be possibly imagined.  His great sensitivity enabled or, perhaps, condemned him to experience the spiritual currents of his time more profoundly than his contemporaries did, and his brilliant intellect allowed or even coerced him to express those currents with acute clarity.  He was the premier German philosopher of life in his generation, that is, he did more than most others to propagate the rebellion of life, yet he understood that the fate of life was to submit itself, even if only temporarily, to its own products.  An uncompromising will to truth prevented him from seeking comfort in the aestheticism of dwelling in the exhausted forms, but he also had to acknowledge the special or, as he called it, "peculiar," quality of form, its demand to constrain life.  So, he could not embrace the modernist rebellion against the principle of form, its normative autonomy.  And, further, he could not, like Emile Durkheim, take normative constraint for granted as constitutive of actual culture because, somehow, it was not.  In his thought, just as in Unamuno's, lucidity bred agony and paradox, from which he could not escape, but which he could express by a strategic distancing in the form of cultural history and criticism.

19.
As Simmel turns in "The Conflict" to a fresh interpretation of the currents of modernism which he had analyzed in "The Crisis" he breaks through to the set of ideas that are associated with the contemporary rubric of "deconstruction."  His criticism is not itself deconstructionist - it is a pure descriptive analysis - , but it details how the modernist movements are themselves deconstructions of their objects or, better, of the objectivity of their objects.  The essence of modernism is the deconstruction or de-objectivization of objectivized form; the attempt to assimilate form to the process which generates it and to keep it there, immanent to the process, so that it can never gain sufficient independence to constrain creative expression.  In general, modernist deconstruction proceeds by the two-step process of rejecting the objectivity of form and then of striving to make form an immanent function of life.  Simmel's ambivalence shows through in his description of the impulse to make form subservient to form-giving life.  In his discussions of expressionist art, pragmatic and vitalist philosophy, and post-Christian piety he is careful to affirm their intelligibility in terms of their positive vitality, but he is equally concerned to show the problematicity of their rebellion against the principle of form.  His interpretation is an articulation, an objectivization, of his ambivalence as a philosopher of life, a step, therefore, beyond the modernist pretension and into a postmodernist acceptance of broken form, failed mediation, and a subjectivity decentered by the irreconcilable motives that constitute it.  As he wrote in concluding "The Crisis," cultural conflict is "consciously or not, the crisis of our own soul."

20.
Simmel's ambivalence appears clearly in his interpretation of expressionist art, which, unlike his treatment of it in "The Crisis," is sensitive and even approving when it is contrasted to impressionism, which retains the immediately perceived datum as an objective model.  Expressionism performs its deconstruction of objectivized forms of art by taking seriously "the insight that a cause and its effect can have wholly dissimilar external manifestations, that the dynamic relationship between them is purely internal and need not produce any visual affinity."(Simmel, 1976b:230)  The expressionist artist "replaces the 'model' by the 'occasion,'" translating the impulse awakened in him by a datum into a representation rather than attempting to communicate the significance of the datum for itself.  Although the product of expressionist art is necessarily a form it does not have the conventional work of art's "significance in itself," which requires "creative life merely as the basis of its actualization."  Instead, the expressionist's form is an "unavoidable extraneous appendage" of the form-giving process:  form is present, but it has been deconstructed, deprived of independence from creativity and, therefore, of regulatory authority over it - it is a by-product of the function of expressivity.  The positivity of vital impulse here gains a triumph, but at a severe cost:  "Life, anxious only to express itself, has, as it were, jealously withheld ... meaning from its product."  (Simmel, 1976b:230)

21.
The same pattern appears in such currents of post-metaphysical philosophy as pragmatism and vitalism.  In this phase of his discussion Simmel replaces his reflection in "The Crisis" on the exhaustion of classical metaphysical categories with a positive account of the deconstruction of what Jacques Derrida (1974) calls the "metaphysics of presence," the description of a realm of objective truth which the knower must acknowledge and seek to discover.  Pragmatism, according to Simmel, denies "the independence of truth" by interpreting the object of knowledge not as a descriptor of an autonomous reality but as an imagined idea which is called true if it supports vital demands and false if it does not.  The pragmatic philosopher carries out the same sort of procedure of de-objectivization as the expressionist artist, holding that "our ideas are dependent on our mental make-up, they are by no means a mechanical reflection of the reality with which our practical life is interwoven."(Simmel, 1976b:234)  There is, then, "no independent, pre-existent truth which is merely later incorporated, as it were, into the stream of life in order to guide its course."  Instead, life seeks to guide itself through an imagination disciplined by the consequences of its hypotheses:  it reasserts "its sovereignty over a sphere which hitherto appeared to be separate and independent of it."  Here Simmel does not even enter a reservation about the modernist impulse to deconstruct objectivized form and to engender forms which are fully immanent functions of its own vital dynamic.  Indeed, his own philosophical doctrine of the objectification of life into form was a contribution to modernism, differing from the pragmatic interpretation mainly in its insistence on the "peculiar" autonomous imperative of form and not on any independent realm of truth.

22.
Simmel concludes his interpretation of modernist tendencies with a reflection on post-Christian piety, which also displays a deconstructionist impulse, this time aimed at any articles or doctrines of faith which would command the believer's assent.  Here the deconstruction proceeds even more radically than it did in the cases of expressionism and pragmatism, to the point at which life would "itself produce the sense of absolute value which, in the past, appeared to be derived from the specific forms of religious life, the particular articles of faith in which it had crystallized."(Simmel, 1976b:238)  Religious modernism seeks to make faith an "intransitive concept;" it is life seeking to produce out of itself "that unique inner blend of humility and exaltation, tension and peace, vulnerability and consecration, which we can describe in no other way than as religious."(Simmel, 1976b:238)  Simmel shrinks from the implication of this tendency, which is simply narcissism, the self-worship of life.  At the only point in "The Conflict" at which he retreats to the interregnum thinking of "The Crisis" Simmel(1976b:239) doubts "whether a fundamental religious need does not inevitably require an object ..., whether this is not merely an interlude of an ideal nature which can never become reality, the symptom of a situation where existing religious forms are being repudiated by the inner religious life, which is, however, unable to replace them with new ones." Religious modernism poses such a challenge to Simmel because for him, as for Unamuno, a sentiment of life is at the core of religion and there have always been mystics who have rejected its objectification into imagery and doctrine.  A mysticism of life, the final and radical outcome of modernist deconstruction, would substitute immanent feeling for transcendent meaning, putting into question the necessity of Simmel's dialectical vision of the inevitable tension between life and form, the need for life to confront itself as other to itself.  It is just that tension which is questioned and problematized by certain postmodern thinkers who recur to Nietzsche. (Allison,1985)  The conflict in modern culture persists today, perhaps even more intensely than when Simmel wrote.

23.
Simmel ends "The Conflict" equivocally and far more soberly than he did "The Crisis."  No longer does he repose any trust in a "unified dynamic" of life to heal even temporarily the modern agony, which is not a struggle between two forms of culture but of life against what is deemed to be its own inherent structure, an attempt of life to deconstruct itself.  In "The Crisis" he had suggested the most "perilous" project:  "to salvage the values of the former life and carry them over into the new life."  (Simmel, 1976a:260)  At the end of "The Conflict" he observes that "the link between the past and the future hardly ever seems so completely shattered as at present, apparently leaving only intrinsically formless life to bridge the gap."(Simmel, 1976b:241) But then he adds that "it is equally certain that the movement is towards the typical evolution of culture, the creation of new forms appropriate to present energies."  That has not happened in the generations since his death.  Indeed, those generations have witnessed ever renewed attempts of life to enslave form.  One need only think of the totalitarian rejections of the independence of law and their milder counterparts in the industrialized democracies to grasp the expansion of the rebellion against autonomous and demanding form, or of mass entertainment in which life seeks an undemanding appreciation of itself through the replication of its vanity.  The rebellion of life has become far more extensive since Simmel's time.  Indeed, one might conclude that autonomous form is not a need of the vital spirit but one of its greatest goods, which must be self-consciously affirmed if it is to exist at all.