Every particular psychic content is exceeded by lived experience itself
Evidence
Insofar as psychic life is perceived in terms of its contents, it is finite. It consists then of these ideal contents, which now have the form of life. But the process reaches beyond them. We conceive, feel, desire this and that—such are clearly defined contents, something logical realized only now, something in principle completely definite and definable. Yet as we experience it, we feel something else to be present, something unformulable, indefinable: we feel of every life as such that it is more than every assignable content. It swings out beyond every content, regarding it at once from within (as is the nature of logical description of content) and from without. We are in this content and at the same time outside of it. In taking up this content into the form of life, we have by that very fact more than the content. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 829
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Lived life always experiences the present as stretched with past and future — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 803; A person’s life experience equals what they have paid attention to — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 22