ABSTRACT
David Frisby famously pronounced Georg Simmel a flaneur and a "sociological impressionist." Simmel's influence could be subterranean. Erich Przywara placed Simmel among those "great and forgotten" figures who "today are wells from which people secretly draw water, without running the danger that anyone else will discover these wells". The corpus of Simmel's thought in this genre has never been systematically analyzed. Two shifts in Simmel's outlook took place in 1914: his increasing preoccupation with Henri Bergson's philosophy of life and his reaction to the outbreak of World War I. In the modern era, Simmel observed already in 1900, the experience of cultivation through cultural forms is being disrupted. Whatever the biographical factors involved, the shifting formulations prompt to come to terms with the two apparently contradictory diagnoses of modern culture that Simmel offered within the space of a few years. The easiest way to do so is to deny the contradiction.
