Adventure in the social world: Georg Simmel’s appeal to a theory of creative action

Abstract

Reconstructing the logic of everyday action between reproduction and invention of forms is a growing concern in contemporary debates on the praxeological foundation of sociology. This article argues for a renewed understanding of action in its contingency and creativity. Building on current developments on the role of projectivity and imagination in the emergence of the new and unexpected in action, it turns to Simmel’s undervalued essay “The Adventure” to examine a style of conduct characterized by deviation from predicable patterns and background assumptions in everyday life. To understand the emergent properties and intrinsic complexity of creative action, one must consider the philosophical discoveries of Simmel concerning the form of adventure in the subjective flow of time. The adventure is elaborated as an action involving curiosity, unfamiliar detours, and a sense of presentness as striking features that benefit insights from his later work on life’s transcendence.

Introduction

In this article, I focus on the contribution of an undervalued piece of classical sociology to the understanding of action in its contingency and creativity. Simmel’s (1911/1997a) essay “The Adventure” is shown to offer crucial analyses to flesh out the emergent properties and intrinsic complexity of action. I consider how Simmel provides key insights to address the question of creative action, and to further claim that contemporary sociology can ignore creativity only at the peril of building a concept of action unsuited to the complexity of our modern world.

The first section of the article situates “The Adventure” essay within Simmel’s (1917/1964) broader project of “philosophical sociology,” as outlined in Fundamental Problems of Sociology (Individual and Society). This interpretation is based on the idea that Simmel’s analysis is primarily concerned with the general features that make adventure possible as a basic form of human existence. The second section attempts to clarify the phenomenon of creative action, that is, of how something new can emerge in action, by considering Joas (1996) idea of situated creativity in connection with scholarship in social phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge (Cristiano, 2017; Knoblauch, 2014; Straßheim, 2016a, 2016b), relational sociology (Archer, 2007; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Hitlin and Johnson, 2015; Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013; Wagner-Pacifici, 2017), life-philosophy (Fitzi, 2016; Jankélévitch, 1963/2017; Kemple, 2018; Lash, 2005; Pyyhtinen, 2018; Silver and Brocic, 2019), and classical and contemporary phenomenology (Derrida, 1962/2010; Husserl, 1928/1991; Tengelyi, 2004). The third section shows how Simmel’s “Adventure” essay offers detailed analyses of a form of experience characterized by deviation from the predicable regularities and seemingly inescapable alternatives of everyday life. I argue that to understand the emergent properties and intrinsic complexity of creative action, one must consider the philosophical discoveries of Simmel concerning the special unity of adventure in the subjective flow of time. I draw an outline of the Simmelian theory of creative action that includes curiosity about overlooked aspects of social relations, unfamiliar detours from commonplaces, and a sense of presentness as striking features. The fourth and last section develops and integrates key moments of Simmel’s last work The View of Life—self-transcendence, birth, and death, imagination, and the rise of ideal constructs—to uncover how the adventure can be conceived of creating something new in the life-course. Concluding remarks focus on life’s projectivity as an essential component of action.

Simmel’s “philosophical sociology” of adventure

First published in the journal Der Tag, and reprinted in 1911 in the book Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essays, “The Adventure” is an undervalued piece of Simmel’s corpus. The fact that the third and last edition came up in 1923 and that no new edition was available until 1983 has certainly prevented a full grasp on the breadth of Simmel’s reflections. But what strikes even more is the book’s somewhat bizarre structure, which conveys an image of Simmel as an unsystematic thinker, mingling contributions to “philosophical psychology,”“philosophy,” and “esthetics” with concrete descriptions of artistic personalities and everyday objects, while gleaning on disparate topics, such as fashion, gender, modernist art, spiritualism, handles, ruins, and seascapes. That would explain why “The Adventure” piece has been adapted to suit various theoretical agendas and publication outlets. While an early English translation by David Kettler appeared in 1959 in Kurt Wolff’s edited volume Georg Simmel, 1858–1918, alongside a mix and match of essays drawn from different works of Simmel on sociology, philosophy, and esthetics, Donald Levine’s 1971 translation (Simmel 1911/1971b) chopped off the last pages of the piece, in which Simmel (1911/1997a: 229–232) drops his analogies between empirical adventurous types to examine “from the most general point of view [how] adventure appears admixed with all practical human existence,” and even changed the original title to “The Adventurer” to advance his sociological preoccupation with social types or roles. ¹

It is worth noting that the title of the essay, “Das Abenteuer,” means “the adventure,” understood as a “form of experiencing,” in Simmel’s (1911/1997a: 229) words, instead of referring to the “social type” of “the adventurer” (Der Abenteurer), as in Levine’s anthology, which is pushing the “social types” theme. In my reading, the latter distracts from Simmel’s philosophical vision of sociology. Simmel’s analytical commitment to the form instead of the contents of experience shifts focus to the general implied in the particular. Social types and typical patterns of conduct serve as limit cases for extracting the distinctive features which forms the basis of adventure in human existence. Simmel makes it clear toward the end of the piece that his ultimate aim is not the sociological morphology of empirical social types when he states that “[w]e are the adventurers of the earth; our life is crossed everywhere by the tensions which mark adventure” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 232). In his postscript to the 1983 reedition of the collection of essays Philosophische Kultur, Habermas touches this point when he notes that Simmel’s mode of philosophizing on adventure finds in it an “exemplary entity” that manifest “the embodiment of the basic features of the human spirit” (Habermas and Deflem, 1996: 406). But his characterization of Simmel as “a creative although not a systematic thinker—a philosophical diagnostician of the times with a social-scientific bent rather than a philosopher or sociologist solidly placed in the academic profession” merely serves to make a case about Simmel’s remoteness from the next generations of thinkers and to introduce his critical theory of communicative action both as a philosophical remedy to the conflict of modern culture diagnosed by Simmel and a revision of the fundamental concepts of life-philosophy (see Habermas and Deflem, 1996: 412–413).

In this article, I focus on Simmel’s development of life-philosophy and its limits to highlight how his “Adventure” piece does not merely provide the sociological imagination with a catalog of adventurous social types or roles for empirical research. Simmel’s aim is theoretical-philosophical in examining what makes adventure possible as a specific form through which the basic categories of life come to being. Those features serve as precondition for the existence of adventure and must be established if it is to take place both as culture and experience. I question the preconception that life-philosophy amounts to catchy yet obscure thoughts and expressions to consider instead the theoretical and philosophical foundation it lays for sociology (Goodstein, 2017; Kemple, 2018; Pyyhtinen, 2018; Lafontaine, 2021). In this regard, a philosophical sociology of adventure is shown to provide a kind of third answer to the “tragedy of culture” and the bipolar alternative between the growing estrangement of the subject from its products and formless, unbound subjectivism.

In Fundamental Problems of Sociology (Individual and Society), Simmel (1917/1964: 23–25) resorts to the phrase “philosophical sociology” to describe a trans- or meta-sociological mode of reflection on founding questions of sociology. The conjugation of sociology and philosophy names more than the persistent claim that philosophy occurs in specific historical formations and social relations that are products of human activity. Simmel’s reflections reveal that sociology in its provenance and prospects is paralleled by a new genre of philosophical interest, which sets open-ended investigations into the constitutive features of social experience in the modern world (Goodstein, 2017). In the sense of promoting the modernist project of critical thinking and wakeful self-responsibility about the conditions of human existence, philosophical sociology exhausts positivist assumptions concerning the incongruity of transgressing the boundaries of observable experience by realizing the existence of compelling grounds for probing their liminal conditions (Harrington and Kemple, 2012: 10–11). Carrying out philosophical reflections in sociology thus aims at obtaining a fuller understanding of social phenomena by looking into dimensions of reality that remain unthought by empirical observation and require other means of disclosure.

Linking Simmel’s “Adventure” piece to his philosophical sociology denotes, moreover, the striking convergence in his work of the sociological morphology of empirical types with ultimate reflections on orientation toward otherness in human experience. The primary meaning of an adventure lies in its “dropping out of the continuity of life” and its engagement with “something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary,” which accentuates the experiential qualities of the adventure being lived through (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 222–223). Whereas socially integrated types, such as the bureaucrat, the layman, the priest, and the officer, manifest the historical necessity and institutional stability of social organizations and group memberships, excluded social types, such as “the stranger,” but also “the pauper,”“the criminal,” and “the adventurer,” reveal means of exploring how social forms come into being prior to crystallization: “the a priori for empirical social life, as Simmel (1908/2009: 47) names it in his ‘Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible?’, is that life is not entirely social.” Standing “outside” is a condition for standing “inside” society, insofar as it adverts to what the individual could become but is not yet outlined by social and cultural forms. It presents facets of being “freed of the entanglements and concatenations which are characteristic of those forms” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 222). Simmel’s view of adventure can thus be read as an attempt to grasp the condition for the birth of a new form, for the “advent” of its “event,” as Jankélévitch (1963/2017: 47) puts it to distinguish the virtuality of an event that is on the verge of happening both from the actual event as it takes place and the event that has already happened.

This line of inquiry into the apriorities of social life owes to Kant, yet coasts along Husserl and Bergson. For Simmel, forms are not immediately categories of knowledge constructed in the mind of an observer, but features of interactions. As Scott Lash (2005: 5) clearly states, “Kant’s question is epistemological. Simmel’s is ontological.” Although in essays from the mid-1890s, which were merged later into his 1908 book Sociologie, Simmel believes that a conceptual dualism between contents of “interaction” (Wechselwirkung) and “forms of socialization” (Vergesellschaftungsformen) would provide meaningful and coherent categories for the new scientific province of sociology, he soon discovers that the concept of interaction by no mean defines the basic phenomena for the realization of the unity of society. It involves intrinsic living and form-making dynamics calling for further study of life’s being (Goodstein, 2017; Lafontaine, 2021).

While following Kant’s view of philosophy as an inquiry into apriorities, his late work of life-philosophy departs from the epistemological question regarding the condition of access to knowledge, and turns to the “things themselves,” in reference to Husserl and Bergson (Simmel et al., 1912/2019: 115). He therefore adapts the Kantian method to the specificity of his research topic, while relating to the vitalist and phenomenological perspectives of his time (Backhaus, 2003; Jacob, 2010; Kemple, 2018; Pyyhtinen, 2018; Silver and Brocic, 2019). Forms are always already involved in the understanding life has of its vital relation to the world and its objects (see Simmel, 1918/1980: 124–126, 1918/2010: 1–17). Their apriority is “experiential-immanent, since they are inherent in interactions” (Kemple, 2018: 11). What might be termed a “vitalistic” notion of form courses through Simmel’s whole work as a kind of reminder that, as systematized and embedded they may become, social forms involve “vital dynamics,” that is, “an active process of forming, creating, maintaining, being suffocated by, and seeking to move beyond what results” (Silver and Brocic, 2019: 122). Simmel thus uncovers forms as intrinsic to life, channeling its flow and setting conditions for creating new ones.

Simmel’s (1911/1997a: 225) assertion that “life as a whole may be perceived as an adventure” gestures toward the more philosophical ambition of the piece. In the course of examining the social types of the artist, the conqueror, the gambler, and the philosopher, but also the typicalities of dream experience, play, religious belief, youth, and old age, and after identifying the “essential form of every ‘adventure’, even that of the non-adventurous person,” with the distinctive feature of “eccentricity” as a decentring within life, he essays a speculation on a “more profound inner configuration,” which exceeds the fact of being an adventurer or of having undergone many adventures, but which enables nevertheless a well-founded philosophical reflection.

Perhaps we belong to a metaphysical order, perhaps our soul lives a transcendent existence, such that our earthly, conscious life is only an isolated fragment as compared to the unnamable context of an existence running its course in it. The myth of the transmigration of souls may be a halting attempt to express such a segmental character of every individual life. Whoever senses through all actual life a secret, timeless existence of the soul, which is connected with the realities of life only as from a distance, will perceive life in its given and limited wholeness as an adventure when compared to that transcendent and self-consistent fate (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 225).

This approach offers a philosophical grounding to the sense of adventure that shapes individual existence in modern societies. Rejecting the traditional views of fate as an inevitable destiny controlled by an omniscient god, who from all eternity could foresee the flow of world events to come, he suggests that fate denotes instead a sort of meaning that escapes reflexive consciousness, bestowing a mysterious feeling upon the decisive events that shape the life-course: “a something not only ungrasped by our understanding, but also indeed adopted by our life-intention, albeit not assimilated to the ultimate degree” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 81). In other words, fate not just fixes contingencies into meaning, but involves a multiple and fluctuant meaning, containing fragments that are rarely noticed, if not rejected, but that nevertheless excerpt a nocturnal influence, leading potentially to unexpected coincidences and unlikely orientations. The “modern notion of fate entails a sense of adventure, the expectation that we might conduct our own lives onward into the unknown, or that life as a whole may take shape inwardly as something as yet unimaginable” (Kemple, 2019: 166).

Simmel’s philosophical sociology of adventure offers analyses to flesh out the meaning structure of emerging events. As will be noted, his definition of the adventure’s form of experiencing as sharply discontinuous from the regular course of life, and thereby as uniquely “present” focused, “ahistorical,” and “of the moment” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 223–224), even though it retains some connection with past and future action, leaves unclarified the articulation of the adventure in the “living present,” which enables the flowing unity of what is encountered in everyday experience through the interplay of retention and protention, of recollection and anticipation. For this purpose, I will highlight points of convergence with Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, but also with Edmund Husserl’s and Jacques Derrida’s, to clarify the precondition for the birth of a new form in the life-course. Although Simmel does not provide a systematic phenomenological analysis, his work can be read as a precedent of Schutz (Lafontaine 2021; O’Neill, 1973). My aim, however, is not to scrutinize the connection between these thinkers in intellectual history. Instead I follow the phenomenological dictum and return to the things themselves so as to uncover the ultimate features of human consciousness that characterize the act of adventuring. From a phenomenological perspective, the emergence of the new is closely related to time-consciousness, that is, to the subjective flow of time through which the experience of action is constituted and have its specific meaning.

Creative action and the “advent” of the new

That an action can create something new is a complex phenomenon that arouses efforts in social theory and philosophy, and gives rise to lasting debates across those fields. Joas (1996) is one of the few thinkers that has explicitly addressed the phenomenon, showing that its conceptualization must be perfected by avoiding the attribution of a creative dimension to particular empirical types of action in opposition to the established ideal types of rational, normatively oriented, and dramatic action. ² Joas’ important contribution is to ascribe a paramount status to creativity over rationality, normativity, and performativity. Drawing on key notions of philosophical pragmatism, he introduces a theory of “situated creativity” by uncovering the intentional character of human action as embodied in primary sociality. Our dispositions and bodily ability to cope with the everyday situations that confront us is challenged over and over again by “unexpected obstacles” and “crises,” for which we have to “redefine” action situations in a “new and different way” (Joas, 1996: 133).

While his contribution has undeniably advanced the topic, it draws almost exclusively on philosophical pragmatism, while ignoring other potentially relevant philosophical traditions. In this vein, Cristiano (2017: 24–27) argues that Joas’ account culminates in an “undefined idea of creativity,” where allusions to openness, activity, dynamism, and indeterminacy stand alongside references to cardinal notions of pragmatism linked to creativity without further articulation. ³ As a result, it remains unclear how creativity, which is first encountered as something exceptional and atypical, restricted to extraordinary actions (i.e. poetic and revolutionary) and only accessible to specific types of personalities (i.e. geniuses, distinguished individuals, and visionaries), can be fully grasped as an existential precondition of all action and, above all, of everyday action.

To complement Joas’ seminal work, Cristiano makes use of concepts provided by Alfred Schutz, a philosopher and sociologist overlooked by Joas, even though he had integrated the notions of pragmatism to his analyses as soon as the 1930’s (see Belvedere, 2011: 32–34; Perreau, 2011: 47–50; Srubar, 1988: 132–133). What draws attention to Schutz’s analyses is the importance given to the projective dimension of action, namely its orientation toward an anticipated future to be brought about according to life choices and commitments that are evolving and changing in time, as new experiences come to stand out, while remaining more or less vague until it has actually taken place.

This line of thinking has also been picked up by Knoblauch (2014) as a starting point for addressing the question of how actors can be conceived of creating something new. The crux of the matter is not how creativity relies on labels of what is socially regarded as new, but following Schutz, the actor’s subjective orientation in projecting something new in action and in typification made in situ, thereby validating, clarifying, or superseding previously given typicalities. Knoblauch recovers the central role of imagination as an activity of consciousness through which we “place ourselves [. . .] at a future time when this action will already have been accomplished, when the resulting act will already have been materialized” (Knoblauch, 2014: 35; Schutz, 1959/1964c: 290). The sociological findings on the social construction of newness is thus complemented by the description of the a priori features of the subjective constitution of human action (Knoblauch, 2014: 32–33).

While most experiences are determined by their relation to past experiences, action is significantly different due to its reflexive forward-looking activity or anticipation of fulfilment. Knowledge of past actions is not merely transposed in the future mode, but needs to be recombined and transformed through subjective accomplishments of imagination. Yet Schutz’s emphasis on the cognitive and typifying aspects of action underplays the magnitude of imagination in action projection and ends up confining it to an order of reality distinct from the practical sphere of everyday action—in Schutz’s words, the “finite province” of phantasms, daydreams, play, fiction, jokes, and so on (see Schutz, 1943/1996, 1945/1962b). Following Joas’ notion of situated creativity, Knoblauch (2014: 44–45) considers instead how the actor’s perception of the situation prompts “recombinations” while acting: “creativity in this sense consists in the continuous deviation from projected courses of action – as vague or as clear these courses may have been projected.”

The intellectual history of creativity at the basis of Joas’ theory is explicitly intended to overcome Talcott Parsons’ alternative between rational and normatively oriented action, and to expose the seeds of a model that overarches both. Here the figure of Simmel stands out in a unique way. Although Parsons excluded Simmel from his reconstruction of the sociological tradition for tactical reasons, it did not prevent the next generations of thinkers to disallow his “theoretical imperialism” and “theoretical exclusivity” (Alexander, 1983: 160; Levine, 1991; see Silver, 2011). While Joas’ examination of life-philosophy is meant to overcome Parsons’ ignorance of a philosophical school which, much like philosophical pragmatism, runs alongside classical social thought and had influence on its development, one might be left unsatisfied with his conclusion that the “nexus between creativity and action is not upheld [by] the metaphor of ‘life’ [because] [. . .] creativity is, so to speak, given a position at too deep a level, that is, deeper than human action” (Joas, 1996: 71).

When he examines life as a metaphor of creativity, Joas devotes most of his efforts to the roots of the life-philosophy movement in the thought of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The trade-off is that Simmel’s (1918/2010) development of life-philosophy and its limits is not fully addressed, even though his notion of life critically engaged with these thinkers and went on further by emphasizing the vital connection of creativity with the human interdependencies making and remaking societies. What can be termed “life-sociology” considers in a non-mechanistic perspective both the differentiation of new forms (more-life) and their inevitable objectivation (more-than-life) (Fitzi, 2016; Lash, 2005). The focus, as Simmel (1917/1964: 58–59) puts it in Fundamental Problems of Sociology (Individual and Society), is the “conflict between society and individual [which] is continued in the individual himself as the conflict among his component parts [. . .] [and thus] does not derive from any single, ‘anti-social’, individual interest.” In this regard, his approach contrasts sharply with Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s “antisociological” tendency to oppose the “will to life” or “power” and the sovereign development of individual ideals to socially shared principles, institutions, and cultural artifacts (Partyga, 2016). The tragedy of such insoluble conflict between the stubbornness of roles imposed to the individual parts of the whole, and the part, which strives to exist as whole, finds a third answer in the philosophical sociology of adventure. By highlighting the thresholds, points of intersection, and passageways where pre-existing social and cultural forms lose influence on reality and are replaced by new ones, Simmel advances a deeper reflection that ascertains life’s pleasure of discovering or constructing its objectivity within and beyond socially sanctioned life lines.

I follow an integrative and systematic approach to Simmel’s work in order to overcome the postmodern reduction to an unsystematic essayist steeped in the flair of the metropolis, piecing together traces of the modern sensorium (Frisby, 1981/2014; Weinstein and Weinstein, 1991). I rather emphasize his contribution to perennial problems of social theory. For that matter, Simmel considers modernity as both a culture and an experience of the new and the unexpected from the perspective of everyday life (Frisby, 1992/2011: 116; Kemple, 2018: 133). The disruption of historical necessity by unexpected events, accidents, and crises in the metropolis and the money economy, but also by the vital impulses and life postures of modernist art, philosophical pragmatism, open marriage, prostitution, and the persistence of spiritualism and mysticism, manifests life’s “longing for a new form [. . .], in particular, the opposition against the principle of form as such.” (Simmel, 1918/1997b: 80). This underlines the fluctuant and proliferating aspect of action over predictability and sameness.

When they reflect on the actor’s openness for contingencies and situational flexibility in modern societies, contemporary sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: 4) stress that decision-making processes pervade modern life, which requires individuals to “organize and improvise, set goals, recognize obstacles, accept defeats and attempt new starts [. . .] [with] initiative, flexibility, and tolerance of frustration.” This “acceleration” of the life-course and of social change, as critical theorist Rosa (2013: 238) states, favors a “situational logic” of action that “forces one to maintain, both synchronically and diachronically, flexible and variable time horizons and perspectives.” And, according to sociologist Swidler (1986: 282), “unsettled lives” do not leave much power to the reproduction of inherited values, projects, and life lines, as new choices of action are often created to cope with challenging situations instead of fostering continuity in style or ethos. The emphasis on short-term effects obscures the long-term influence of action, which becomes increasingly unpredictable, open to sudden changes in meaning and radical turns in the life-course.

In the phenomenological tradition of Schutz, Berger, and Luckmann, Knoblauch (2014: 47) remarks that when they look for a major resource for social innovation processes, modern societies seem even to identify with the subjectivity of imagination, namely the “subject and the difference of its meaning from socialized knowledge.” This line of analysis invites us to clarify modernity’s sense of adventure by uncovering the experiences of change in interest, of projecting something new, and of typifying in situ, while highlighting how differences in meaning are not fully conditional on outer events materializing independently of the actor, but in line with a phenomenological and constructivist approach, on the actor’s mode of apprehension and interpretation of those situations as they take place. These processes involve “sensitivity to novel, as yet unfamiliar phenomena, to chances and risks which arise beyond routine expectations and also beyond the few ‘problematic possibilities’ in our choices of action” (Straßheim, 2016b: 508). ⁴ Since there is an incalculable number of possible ways to experience a situation, the actor’s perspective cannot passively abandon itself to so-called “objective” facts: an act of selective articulation is already assumed and performed to differentiate and interpret relevant aspects, phases, and boundaries of experience and to discard others. The correlated facts or meaning constructs suppose reliance on and effectiveness of typified past experiences, but also of the perception in situ of their disturbance and of the resulting change, which can make the actor anxious about further hindrances to action and prompt to look out in advance for atypical occurrences.

Knoblauch’s (2014) and Straßheim’s (2016b) critical reassessments of Schutz’s theory of action advance understanding of the often neglected phenomenon of future consciousness, albeit cardinal in modern societies, by moving beyond Schutz’s historicist conception of the future as anticipated past and the resulting primacy given to identity of meaning over difference (see also Lafontaine, 2018, 2020, 2021:24–31). This coincides with current scholarship on agency in the modern life-course (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), which suggests attending to the reflexive power of projectivity (Archer, 2007; Hitlin and Johnson, 2015), its function in the shaping of events in their restlessness (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017), as well as to “protentions (the ‘feel’ of the immediate future)” in tandem or tension with enduring projects and temporal landscapes (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013).

Simmel’s essay “The Adventure” begins with philosophical considerations on the “twofold meaning” of our conduct and experience that precede and complement the notion of creativity: either we live in the flow of life running off its course or we detach from it to apprehend a segment from a certain standpoint. Both meanings appear throughout all experience of life, though they are of a different sort. While the inner depth and appearances of life’s running-off involves an ever-changing, multiple, and discrete meaning that lies beneath the thresholds of consciousness, the framing of an experience brought by “dropping out of the continuity of life” lights upon the fluctuations of life and articulates a meaningful form (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 222). In the case of adventure, the latter operation takes the distinctive feature of “eccentricity [. . .] [to] produce a new, significant necessity of [. . .] life in the very width of the distance between its accidental, externally given content and the unifying core of existence from which meaning flows” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 224). Embarking on an adventure involves breaking away from the practical interests and predictable regularities of everyday life and engaging with “something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 223). This intensifies the experiential qualities of the decentred segment and generates unforeseen possibilities of recombination with elements of the centralized inventory of social experience.

Acts of separation and recombination are not merely accidental, in the sense of being triggered by external events. They are rather motivated by the subjectivity of adventure and its form of experiencing. The adventure is not constituted by the “substance which it offers us and which, if it were offered in another form, perhaps would receive little heed, but rather by the adventurous form of experiencing it, the intensity and excitement with which it lets us feel life” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 230). In an adventure, one looks forward to the happening of something exciting, out of the ordinary, which enters in tension with purposive rationality, seriousness, and the all-encompassing normativity of collectivist mechanisms.

This mode of subjective apprehension of situations and the resulting “experiential tension” (or feeling of excitement: Gespanntheit des Lebensgefühls) toward the life-course advance the question of creative action by highlighting how “the peculiar color, ardor, and rhythm of the life-process become decisive and, as it were, transform its substance […] from mere experience to adventure” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 229). This “principle of accentuation,” as Simmel names it, is presented as an a priori feature of subjective orientation through which experience becomes adventurous and contrasts with the regular course of life. Accentuation runs counter to the principle of “contextual unity” to enable a “perception of contrast” and “sharp differentiation,” by which disparate life contents are brought out with greater affective and emotional intensity (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 223, 227, 229). An adventure begins precisely when one regards life and its possibilities with excitement, and takes a leap from the seeming requirements of everyday life.

What makes Simmel’s approach interesting with regard to the link between future temporality, deviation, and the emergence of the new is that his route to the problem of creativity, I think, focuses on the process of emergence itself, namely, the experiencing of what is on the threshold of happening and has not yet been attended to as such by consciousness. The adventure’s form of experiencing, or what Jankélévitch calls “the infinitesimal adventure” to distinguish a priori features from empirical types, is linked to “the advent of the event” (l’avènement de l’événement) with emphasis on the advent itself: “not actuality as it takes place, nor in stages, but on the verge of taking place” (Jankélévitch, 1963/2017: 47–48). In an adventure, the virtuality of an event that is on the verge of happening is logically prior to the ongoing event and the finished event or already elapsed phases.

When looking at human acts as ongoing subjective processes in his lectures on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, Husserl remarks how crucially important is the emerging experience of the “now”: it is the moment in which our apprehension of things, people, and events begins to exist. This “primal impression,” as he names it, ‘is primal creation [. . .]—the “new,” that which has come into being alien to consciousness, that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity (Husserl, 1928/1991: 106). In this case, the new is a primary creation of passive synthesis and merely arouses an insight that has not yet been picked up and actively posited as such. The event of meaning has not yet happened; it is still fluctuant, proliferating, and indeterminate. Freshly aroused meaning fragments emerge behind the back of consciousness by frustrating previous anticipations and, if appropriated, may open up new orientations in the life-course (Tengelyi, 2004).

Simmel (1911/1997a: 230) gestures toward this dimension of creative action when he stresses that the “atmosphere [of the adventure] is absolute presentness, the sudden rearing of the life process to a point where both past and future are irrelevant.” The accentuation of life makes adventurers uniquely focused on the “feel” of the moment, where others would survey motivations, goals, and effects, sometimes to the cost of delaying their action. In my reading, Simmel’s approach sells short the relationship of the adventure to past and future action only if we understand the present as a fixed temporal point within a linear, nonflowing series. Considered phenomenologically, this objective concept of time is not immanent to consciousness, but becomes constituted through its flow. In what Husserl (1928/1991: 56, 1931/1999: 102–103) sometimes calls the “living present,” the experienced Here and Now does not exist in itself, but connects with the past and future to form the horizon in which every temporal objects is given and through which one exists as a subject “in the form of a certain all-embracing life of some sort or other.”

The living flow of time is the absolute form in which human acts unfold, including the adventures described by Simmel. It is “absolute” because it is the unsurmountable origin and ground of every experiencing in its beginning, its passing away and its coming to be. As Derrida (1962/2010: 171, 149–150) remarks, however, an “original difference” lies at the core of the living present, in the irreducible alterity of the Now from the maintenance of time’s flow by the double envelopment of retention and protention. In our everyday experience of things, people, and events, we are never fully present to ourselves, but always a wee queered and deferred by our fragmentary projections and inability to entirely frame the eccentric insights of our experiencing. By focusing on the “feel” of the moment over its insertion within the concordant progression of a life, the adventure suggests an idiom of thinking to address creative action from the standpoint of life-philosophy.

The distinctive features of adventure

“The Adventure” essay makes it possible to address questions of de-routinization, reformation and dropping out of a course of action, while advancing the basic insight that creativity is not determined by antisocial ideals, but rather takes part in the process of culture as a vitalizing and driving force opposed to the tendency to objectivation and systematization of forms. In what follows, I approach Simmel’s philosophical sociology not by taking up the conventional sociological understanding in terms of the “interactions” or “reciprocal effects” (Wechselwirkungen) between individuals and the realized “forms of socialization” (Vergesellschaftungsformen), but by looking at “the thresholds of existence” through which new facets of being exceed society and the points where life’s “transcendence of itself” creates more-life and more-than-life (Kemple, 2020: 196; Pyyhtinen, 2018: 102–124; Simmel, 1918/2010: 13). Advancing Simmel’s 1918 monograph The View of Life as a philosophical foundation of his earlier concept of interaction invites a multi-layered approach to the emergence of life forms, from purposeful movement to the most considered action and the rise of ideals (see Lafontaine, 2021). Before tackling these issues, I elaborate the distinctive features of adventure and the related act of breaking away. The latter results from the adventure’s “eccentric” dynamics toward novel, yet unfamiliar objects which arise beyond regular routine. These dynamics take place within the basic social, spatial and temporal forms of everyday experience. As will become clearer later, however, the unity of adventure is in itself, for Simmel, essentially temporal.

Curiosity

Socially, breaking away involves releasing oneself from the picturing and labeling of people after pre-existing types. Eccentricity transcends “life’s more narrowly rational aspects” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 224): it counteracts the generalizing power of typical constructs, by which individuality and uniqueness are glossed over to channel accessibility to others in accordance with focused practical interests and habitual patterns. Whereas common-sense typification overcomes our inability to ever access the pure individuality and uniqueness of ourselves and others, and thus compensates for the inadequacy of our knowledge and imagination in respect to one another (O’Neill, 1973: 96), the adventure allows considerable insights of type, deviating from the predictable regularities and alternatives.

Embracing this adventurous sense of action is a feature underscored by Simmel (1911/1997a: 227) when he draws attention to the “‘sleepwalking certainty’ with which the adventurer leads his life [. . .] whereby he considers that which is uncertain and incalculable to be the premises of his conduct, while others consider only the calculable.” This sort of certainty is distinct from the quest for control over the outcome of action involved in recollecting the past and anticipating the future to make plans. In an adventure, one trusts an inclination rather than attempt to rationalize a range of options. This “unshakable” certainty, as Simmel (1911/1997a: 227) also presents it, involves a sense of conviction in the validity of one’s life choices “even when it is shown to be denied by the facts of the case.”

The adventure thus moves beyond social and individual boundaries by reaching “extra-social imponderables” which, following Simmel (1908/2009: 46) in his “Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible?,” make each one of us potentially more than the roles and typical courses of action under which he or she is classified by others. To the extent that these imponderables are contingent and do not have known effects on social action and everyday understanding, they are not a serious matter to the practical life standpoint. They are merely irrelevant for the purpose at hand and, therefore, are kept out of focus. Alternatively, the adventurous life standpoint attends to imponderables as something exciting in itself. This allows adventurers to gain distance to and better appreciation of the taken-for-granted character of social types by discovering their fragmentary structure as potentiality. ⁵ What had previously to follow a certain course of action and interpretation through the weighting of a few competing alternatives is now cleared from that typical construct, and becomes a frontier to redraw the boundaries of everyday experience and relationality.

Unfamiliar detours

In explicating how the adventure breaks off the taken-for-granted network of typical patterns, a reference is made to space. Accessibility to overlooked aspects of everyday experience involves “a long and unfamiliar detour” from commonplaces and established pathways (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 222). This special sort of movement from here to an unknown there somehow connects the most eccentric objects with life’s central components.

While accessibility is commonly viewed as that which is within reach and defines the practicable portion of the world, adventurous beings take interest in what is missed when staying within these boundaries. This does not mean, however, that to encounter something unfamiliar and atypical, an adventure must necessarily spread across remote territories. We may experience a “strain of strangeness” in the most intimate relationships just as much as among many people at a party, in the subway, or in city traffic (Simmel, 1908/2009: 603, 79). ⁶ What makes an adventure’s radicalness owes not to objective and measurable distance, but to its way of experiencing life with intensity and excitement. From the perspective of the living body, the spatial form of the adventure is not determined by external “mechanical” conditions, such as the guidelines and obstacles that set a serious direction for the practical life standpoint, or the place left and the place that can be reasonably expected to be reached on a planned itinerary (Simmel, 1911/1997: 223). Rather, the adventure has its own “formative powers,” configured by the “organic,”“propelling force of a life forming from inside out.” The emotional impact of steering out of line and along slanted paths opens up a space for new orientations and reaches.

Sense of presentness

Interrelated with space is the temporal form of adventure. The insulated feature of adventure is correlated to its “radical being-ended” in time: the adventurer “lives in the present [. . .], is not determined by any past [. . .]; nor, on the other hand, does the future exist for him” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 223). Although an adventure’s concrete flow of life “connects” with the outer world, its unity is, for Simmel (1911/1997a: 224), essentially temporal. In explicating how the adventure shapes and organizes the flow of life, a contrast is made between rhythms of ordinariness and the notorious Venetian adventurer Casanova, whose life’s tempo is set by untamed love affairs and erotic conquests. Practical forms of experiencing are determined by the relation of “before” and “after,” which enables us to experience various aspects and phases of life both as succeeding one another and as occurring among others simultaneously occupying the same experiential space. This constitutes the flowing infrastructure of everyday experience and action. In contrast, Casanova’s style of conduct is oriented toward the “rapture of the moment” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 224) in its individuality and difference from the continuity of life’s flow. The suddenly upsurging, yet abruptly receding excitement of the moment gives the adventure the form of an eternal beginning anew, as Simmel (1911/1997a: 228–229) notes in his discussion of the erotic. Casanova’s focus on the “feel” of entering new relationships thus prompts a relentless series of withdrawals and fresh starts, which does not leave room for recollections of past conquests which were also losses, nor to any future perspective. The “feeling of the present” has obscured the experiential modalities of memory and anticipation, and made him unable to be with someone for even two weeks (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 224).

All is, however, a question of perspectives. The “miserable consequences” of Casanova’s style of conduct indeed lead his friend the memoirist Charles-Joseph Lamoral to depict him as someone who “believes in nothing except in what is least believable,” but Simmel (1911/1997a: 224, 227) evokes this fact to contrast the adventurous life standpoint with the practical one. For those living from a practical standpoint, the irruption of the “least believable” poses a threat to commitments and ongoing actions. It is therefore a potential source of crisis, insofar as it represents possibilities that are not rooted in focused practical interest. These consist of ignored circumstances that are normally held at the margins of attention by the realization of the purpose at hand. As Schutz (1943/1964a: 72–74) explains in his undertaking of “the problem of rationality,” the organization of everyday knowledge is full of “gaps, intermissions, discontinuities” which are concealed by our assumption that formerly successful principles, rules, and habits can be reasonably expected to succeed in the future. While adventurers may appear typically fatalistic because of overwhelming trust in their inclinations and abandonment to the coincidences of the world, they also seem to counterweight the seriousness and reasonableness of the practical life standpoint by reconnecting commitments and ongoing actions with the basic uncertainty of the future. A critical life juncture or unexpected encounter may be an occasion to delay doing our usual routine and go on a hunch. Whereas surveying all the motives and clearing up all ambivalence could lead to missing one’s chance, the adventure highlights a distinct move toward creativity and self-knowledge, that of cultivating trust in one’s own insights and formative powers.

Adventurous temporality: Birth, death, and new life projects

Throughout his reflection, Simmel not only provides analogies with adventurous types and typical life experiences, such as dreaming, believing, playing, and aging. His aim is clearly theoretical-philosophical in examining the a priori features of human existence that make adventure possible. Eccentricity transcends life’s reasonableness and seriousness, but remains meaningfully and intrinsically connected with the adventurer’s character and identity. In more general terms, Simmel considers how necessity and meaning originate in the experiential flow of the subject embarking on an adventure. The present focused aspect of adventure suggests that the creation of a new meaning is in the course of happening, but has not yet been recognized as such. In other words, the adventure’s restlessness marks life as being already beyond itself. Jankélévitch (1963/2017: 46) names this dimension of newness “the advent of the event” (l’avènement de l’événement), which refers not to the actual event or the finished event, but to the event on the threshold of existence. Whereas the event is already happening, thereby filling in or disappointing what has been anticipated, the advent is a future that has not yet come into being. What has not yet happened exceeds the anticipation of future events, and, therefore, remains an open horizon of experience.

Simmel’s analysis of adventure thus coincides with the basic concepts of his life-philosophy. This incites us to focus on his description of moments of vitality where the stream of life stretches over the boundaries of social and individual life into more-life and more-than-life (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 102–124). In his late monograph The View of Life, he attempts to conceive life’s being as the primal grounding of all forms of existence. In its absolute immanence, as he argues, life reveals itself as an ongoing process of “self-transcendence,” of “reaching beyond any given [personal and cultural] form and indeed beyond itself” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 15). Life self-accentuates itself by drawing something new into its flow, transforming it into its own life, and eventually letting it die away to reach out beyond what has already flowed by. Through this ongoing process of self-transcending, not only “more-life” (Mehr-Leben) is created. In order to exist, life must also transcend itself into “more-than-life” (Mehr-als-Leben), that is, individual forms that configure and direct the living flow while setting the condition for transcending their boundaries. Life’s generative power or vitality lies in this twofold character of self-transcendence, understood as a unity between forming boundaries and border-crossing, what Simmel (1918/2010: 3) sometimes calls “the unified act of life.”

“The Adventure” essay raises similar considerations when the focus shifts from analogies with empirical social types and experience patterns to examine how the relationship between the externally coincidental and the intrinsically meaningful in the life of a subject entails a “more profound inner configuration,” stating that “[n]o matter how much the adventure seems to rest on a differentiation within life, life as a whole may be perceived as an adventure” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 225). This view coincides with the later notion of self-transcendence, especially with the function of inactual or even potential experiences in the life-course: “life at any given moment transcends itself and its present forms a unity with the ‘not yet’ of the future” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 8). It is “a continual reaching out by life into what is not its actuality, but such that this reaching out nevertheless shapes its actuality” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 8), or alternatively stated, “a potentiality insofar as it is always not yet, always in the making, and virtual insofar as it creates its own lines of actualization” (Pyyhtinen, 2012: 84).

In defining the projectivity of human beings, Simmel (1918/2010: 7) describes “goal-setting” both as a primary articulation of life’s flow and as a kind of threshold between the purposeful behaviors of the organism and human action. Direction toward a goal is “the immediate carryover (Hineinleben) of present will—and feeling and thought—in the future,” thereby sorting out a “goal-point” and an in-between “gap” from a “present-point” to gain some control over what could occur in ‘the stretch of the uninterrupted temporal life between “now” and “later,” especially when one attempts to satisfy “most of the demands of rationalism and of practice.” On the other hand, as he argues in the chapter “The Turn toward Ideas” of The View of Life, that means-end series remains arbitrary and prone to falling back into life’s flow if human beings do not break through purposiveness and rise as bearers of “ideal constructs,” that is, as “pure being-for-themselves” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 27–29). This threshold where life moves beyond itself into more-than-life captures a distinct feature of transcendence.

Though seemingly radical, these clarifications concern life in the course of becoming, as an ongoing movement of reaching out beyond temporal, spatial, and social boundaries into unknown elements implied in the living present. Interestingly, with its focus on eccentricity and boundedness, Simmel’s understanding of adventure is in line with his subsequent view of life as a self-transcending process. For Simmel (1911/1997a: 224), the adventure is defined by “the capacity, in spite of its being isolated and accidental, to have necessity and meaning.” In fact, he goes as far as claiming that the capacity to have necessity and meaning in those conditions enables “a particular encompassing of the accidentally external by the internally necessary” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 225). The more adventurous individual beings are, the more inclined they are to recombine contingencies into new meanings, and indeed, into cardinal experiences of their life-history. Whereas practical, everyday relations “are connected with the general run of our worldly life by more bridges, and thus defend us better against shocks and dangers through previously prepared avoidances and adjustments,” in the adventure, as he points out, “the interweaving of activity and passivity which characterizes our life tightens these elements into a coexistence of conquest, which owes everything only to its own strength and presence of mind, and complete self-abandonment to the powers and accidents of the world” (Simmel, 1911/1997a: 226). Life’s accidental happenings intensify the relevance of the “feel” of the moment and connects with meaning arousals that have never taken shape before.

Simmel’s philosophical reflection on birth and death completes these insights by expanding the notion of a tension between life and forms. As he argues in the chapter “Death and Immortality” of The View of Life, life is not only shaped by spatial boundaries, but also by the temporal boundaries of “birth” and “death,” undertaken as life-forming and form-giving processes rather than the dated beginning and end of a lifetime: “In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant” (Simmel, 1918/2010: 64–65). The unexpectedness of birth and death is immanent to our ongoing accomplishments as living subjects. This classical understanding of birth and death as produced by life complements Simmel’s philosophical sociology of adventure. While death shapes what has been accomplished by the individual into recognizable ideals and values, birth marks this accomplishment as it takes place through an inward “reaching out” of difference. Death thus overcomes life’s fluxions and flows into more-than-life by supporting one’s uniqueness and constancy, whereas birth struggles against death by creating more-life, such as new desires, orientations, and prospects. In modern culture, however, birth and death are not experienced as life-forming and form-giving processes of existential significance, but in generic, culturally disembedded, lonely enclosures uprooted from human commitments and projects by technologies of living (Elias, 1982/2001; see Lash, 2001). When Simmel (1911/1997a: 229) interprets the adventure as placing “its end in the perspective of its beginning” because of its “abrupt climax,” he suggests that the growing paradox between systematization of value-spheres and life’s restless mobility in modern culture finds an alternative in reconnecting with a sense of birth through which individuals feel as makers of their life orientation.

Conclusion

Simmel’s philosophical sociology of adventure captures much of the ambivalence surrounding the concept of creative action. In the “Adventure” essay, adventurous beings appear at once aroused by eccentric objects, abandoning themselves to the powers and accidents of the world, and yet are able to make those elements coincide into the meaningful accomplishments of a life. They trust their insights instead of pondering the premises of their action. And while life commitments and projects are constantly brought to an end and become taken for granted, their unique sense of presentness lets them assume that chance occurrences, ungovernable events, and momentary disorientations are ingredients of destiny. In sum, it seems that, for Simmel, adventures are the work of distinguished individuals, geniuses, and visionaries, who manage to connect the most recondite insights with the course of life in its ordinariness.

However, I argue that it is precisely by offering a trans- or meta-sociological reflection on adventure in human experience that Simmel’s philosophical sociology not only manages to prevent what Joas (1996: 116) calls the “concretist tendency” to restrict creativity to an empirical type of action. Simmel’s analyses also complement the “enactivism” of Joas’ notion of creative action. To conclude that life-philosophy’s reflections on creativity lie “at a position at too deep a level, that is, deeper than human action” leads the latter to insist on the reflexive and transformative aspects of action highlighted by philosophical pragmatism. Simmel, on the other hand, suggests that creative action may be inspired or shattered by the adventure’s spontaneously emerging meanings. In this regard, he calls attention to other facets of creativity than the active production of the new mainly discussed in action theory. To do justice to the richness of Simmel’s understanding of creative action, it is fruitful to turn to classical works in phenomenology. What I am especially thinking here is Schutz’s (1959/1964c) description of a tension between action projection, which establishes meaning through “future-perfect” experiences’ of anticipation and imagination of the accomplished act-to-be, and action as it takes place and coincidentally disturbs the future of what will have been. ⁷

This suggests a way to conceive of adventurers’ presence of mind, wanton self-abandonment, and trust in their own insights. Schutz, who draws and expands on Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness, notes that reflection (including anticipation and imagination) is always in delay and thus can only grasp experiences that have been lived through, not as they flow through. Derrida (1962/2010) goes as far as calling into question our idealizing ability to gloss over differences of meaning aroused by the fulfillment and disappointment of action projections, which are always a bit skewed due to their vagueness and ambivalence. And meaning “in the making,” as Tengelyi (2004) underscores, follows not a linear logic of accumulation in which well-defined meanings are objectivated and stored for future reactivation. Rather it must be interpreted as a multiple and fluctuant process, containing meaning arousals that are pushed aside by the commitments and interests defining our ever given self-identity, but that do not cease to exist, upsetting life’s established order and sometimes bringing about an unexpected twist.

This supports the view maintained by Schutz against rational choice theory that in anticipating their future and carrying out actions, individuals are most of time not pursuing utility-maximizing ends, but “constructing choices out of fluid and shifting fields of possibilities” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 987). Projective imagination is unceasing and relentless, attending to multiple inflections and recombining typifications from past experiences with possible futures. It thus plays a crucial function in activating objective structural or cultural properties, but also in challenging them by dreaming up new responses (Archer, 2007: 12). The reflexivity of projective imagination has the deeper sense of clarifying concerns and creating new and unreal objectivities. The creation of the new is “triggered” by the situation, though not something “objectively” given and happening independently of the actor, but a new subjective perception of the situation (Knoblauch, 2014: 44–45). Here the aroused meaning is logically prior to the event of actively creating something new through projective imagination: “it affects us, imposing itself upon the ego. Thus, it stimulates the ego to turn to the object, to attend to it, and this turning to the object is the lowest form of activity emanating from the ego” (Schutz, 1951/1962a: 79). Yet meaning arousal is not to be regarded as merely awakened, since “it has come into being alien to consciousness” (Husserl, 1928/1991: 106). It is originally created and hence defies fixation by ripping up previous expectations. This emotionally charged process may involve “problematical moods,” such as anxiety (Silver, 2011: 214–215), which can be “unsettling” (Swidler, 1986) and loosen up taken-for-granted adherence to broader progressions of events or “temporal landscapes” (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). In tracking those eventful dynamics, an analysis in terms of form and flow seems appropriate (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017).

Though usually sided with philosophies of existence, most significantly Heidegger’s Being and Time (see Jalbert, 2003; Krell, 1992; Pyyhtinen, 2012), Simmel’s (1918/2010: 8) treatment of life’s being as “truly both past and future” also bears affinities with the foregoing social-phenomenological approach, and offers ways to envisage the mobile temporal loci of creative action. Adventurers’ sense of presentness transmutes unchosen, uncontrollable events in their lives into meaningful elements, rather than afflictions befalling them, by way of the eccentric insights of their experience, self-abandonment to impenetrable things and powers, and conviction that, in any moment, reality may hinder the exigencies of past recollections and the promises of future expectations. In this sense, Simmel initiates a kind of “theory of creative action” which accounts for the sudden twists, unexpected events, and improbable relationships in the life course.