George Simmel
THE ADVENTURE
Each part of our conduct and experience bears a twofold
meaning. It revolves about its own center, contains as much breadth
and depth, joy ,and suffering as the immediate experiencing gives it;
and at the same time it is a segment of a life-course--not only a
circumscribed entity but also a component of an organism. Both as–
pects, in various configurations, characterize every occurrence in life.
Events which may be widely divergent in their bearing on life as a
whole may nonetheless be quite similar to one another; or they may
be incommensurate in their intrinsic meaning but so similar in re–
spect to the roles they play in our total existence as to be inter–
changeable. . . .
We ascribe to an adventure a beginning and an end much
sharper than those to be discovered in the other forms of our exper–
ience. The adventure is freed of the entanglements and concatena–
tions characteristic of those forms and is given a meaning in and of
itself. Of our ordinary experiences, we declare that one of them is
over when, or because, another starts; they reciprocally determine
each other's limits, and so become a means whereby the contextual
unity of life is structured or expressed. The adventure, however, ac–
cording to its intrinsic meaning, is independent of the "before" and
"after"; its boundaries are defined regardless of them. We speak of
adventure precisely when continuity with life is thus disregarded on
principle--or rather when there is not even any need to disregard
it, because we know from the beginning that we have to do with
something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary. The adventure
• This essay, appearing here in slightly abridged form,
will
be
included
in
Georg Simmel,
1858-1918:
A Collection of Essays,
edited by Kurt H. Wolff,
to
be
published by The Ohio State University Press.
