Modern worldview collapsed the transcendent beyond back into subjective life
Evidence
One of the ultimate concerns of the modern world view can be thus characterized. Man has always been aware of certain realities and values, certain objects of belief and validities for which there is no room in the strictly circumscribed life space filled up by his immediate own, self-centered substance. He expresses the certainty of this awareness at first by imparting to all such the character of separate existences outside of life. He sets them in the sharply separated beyond and lets them react back from there onto life (though, to be sure, one does not know just how this happens). … Critical enlightenment, which recognizes nothing “beyond” the subject, rises to oppose this naivete. It throws back within the bounds of subjective immediacy everything located in the beyond, and thus declares as illusion whatever wishes to persist as independent confrontation of man. This is the first step of the great tendency in intellectual history: everything which had been established outside of life with its own existence and which came to life from beyond is placed back in life itself by means of a mighty revolution. … Now here the attempt is made to conceive of life as something which constantly reaches beyond limits toward its beyond and which finds its essence in this reaching beyond. It is an attempt to define life in general by way of this transcendence, where by the closure of its individuality form is maintained, but only in order to be broken through by the continuous process. Life finds its essence, its process, in being more-life and more-than-life. Its positive is as such already its comparative. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 833
Categorization
- XREF: This is the theoretical maneuver the reader can juxtapose against Simmel’s blasé attitude — the same subject-centered reduction of an external world — connecting this chapter’s transcendence argument to the flâneur/urban estrangement thesis. — connects to: Immediate unhappiness combined with reflection generates metaphysical optimism about super-sensible worlds — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1141; Enlightenment-based sociology fragments because theories depend on observers’ beliefs about human nature; Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124 (+3 more)
Related
Broader Connections
- Enlightenment-based sociology fragments because theories depend on observers’ beliefs about human nature
#expands(0.78) - Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling
#expands(0.72) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124 - Immediate unhappiness combined with reflection generates metaphysical optimism about super-sensible worlds
#qualifies(0.65) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1141