ABSTRACT
Sociological anthropology that is aware of the cultural and societal dimension of human life, especially in modernity, must take into account the circumstance that human beings steadily provide portions of the never-ending extension of their 'experienced temporality' with sociocultural forms in order to instil them with meaning. In The View of Life, Georg Simmel aims at founding an integrated theoretical and methodological approach to relate together the different studies, which he developed concerning the specific a priori that mould social action in the different domains of qualitative differentiated societies. Reconstructing the individual mechanisms that condition the inversion of the causal relationship between social action and social structure becomes one of the major priorities of Simmel's research programme in sociological anthropology. The conclusions of Helmuth Plessner's analysis for the anthropological preconditions of social interaction have specific normative consequences for social ethics as well as for political philosophy.
