Style and the Question of Life
This paper focuses on the connections between human life, creativity, and style following Georg Simmel's late thought. The essay examines Simmel's metaphysics of life as presented in his final work, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays (1918). It explores the dialectics inherent in the phenomenon of life, and sheds light on the manner in which the creative-aesthetic realm, and especially, style, serve as a way to genuinely live this inner complexity. The paper first presents the dialectical structure that grounds human life — a structure that keeps the notion of life vague and opaque, calling for an indirect approach, which I take via Simmel's notion of death. The essay reflects on Simmel's understanding of the importance of creativity and singularity for understanding questions regarding finitude, infinity, and eternity. It ties the human ability of transcendence to the inherent tension within the phenomenon of human life and proposes a solution to the difficulty that, according to Simmel, prevents us from existentially upholding this tension. The key for elaborating this solution is a minor notion in Simmel's late work, the notion of “style” that I develop beyond Simmel.
Kibbutzim College
Meirav Almog (PhD, the School of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University, and post-doc at the program for Philosophy and Literature in the philosophy department at University of Haifa), is a philosophy lecturer at Kibbutzim College. She specializes in twentieth-century continental philosophy, in particular phenomenology and aesthetics. Her research interests and publications concern questions regarding corporeality and alterity, dialogue and intersubjective relations, and the relations between style and human existence.
