The ruin georg simmel pdf free download

The creation of a work of resistance to the activity of the spirit: nature creates new art, in contrast to the simple production of forms and integrity, a new work of art. Simmel says that "the essence of the created by the spirit, but it is nature that makes it: "But what work of art, however, is to be a whole for itself, not requiring we can see in the ruin is a new unity, which comes from the any relation to an exterior, spinning each threads back into energy of nature and shows the common roots of nature and its own center"[7].

So, the main properties of a work of art spirit. In that can be seen its charm: nature shows itself as if will be the inner unity and the fact that it is surrounded by a it were spirit"[13].

The ruin in such an interpretation does not sphere separated from its real environment. How, then, does an aesthetic quality A key example of such a tactical retreat of the artwork different from the beauty of a picturesque rock appear in the from the world of immediate life is the Simmel's description ruins?

The frame not only excludes the work of art from reality, which surrounds it but also III. The picture is a closed world, of handling the material.

While in other art forms natural and it exists on the other side of reality. Aesthetic dimension materials are absorbed and their significance is leveled out, in a work of art arises due to its exclusivity, the ability of the architecture retains a strong dependence on them: "Although work of art to transcend, through which it is only possible for architecture, too, uses and distributes the weight and carrying the work of art to be "aesthetically enjoyable" [8].

The material in architecture has its own strength, and its spiritual form in a unity which is no longer grounded given from within, to act according to its essence. Thanks to in human purposiveness but in that depth where human the material, architecture protects itself from alienation and purposiveness and the working of non-conscious natural maintains a connection with the surrounding material reality.

But in a destroyed building, nature is unable to create similar meanings that Due to this correlation with the material, only the man articulates in his activities, the ruin does not exist for building not sculpture, painting, music may disintegrate, service and human dwelling.

Nature is present aesthetic object must be abandoned and uninhabited, not in architecture through the material reality legally, so simply destroyed by human activity or passivity. He destruction is a process inherent in the existence of the considers the participation of man in the destruction of the building, not an accidental one. Such places, sinking from life, Material is the component of the architecture that makes it an still strike us as settings of a life.

The same forces that give a mountain its shape through weathering, erosion, faulting, growth of Aesthetic does not arise from nostalgia for the past, for vegetation, here do their work on old walls". But at Another important feature of the architecture is its strong the same time, the ruin represents an aesthetic different from dependence on the surroundings in which the building is the beauty of a rock. The man contemplates the absence of located. Forces of nature collide with the building and life, which is not there anymore.

It is a question of the eventually absorb it, turning it into a ruin. It is the site of life from which life has house, even where they fit perfectly into the mood of their departed-but this is nothing merely negative, added to it only landscape, always stem from another order of things and by thought, as it is for the countless things which, once blend with that of nature only as if in afterthought"[17].

But immersed in life and accidentally cast on its bank, are by Simmel interprets the environment or context in which the their very nature capable of being again easily caught by its building is located only as a set of active and impersonal current. In the case of the ruin, the fact that life with its forces of nature, inevitably opposing the building. It is not a natural object due to the relates directly to nature as its surrounding.

The building properties of the material that it consists of — its materiality encloses a space and, in that way, sets the boundaries of a only indicates the "broken unity"[23] has lost the battle with place that is human, against nature" [18].

The ruin shows not the dwelling that was once carried out here, but only that there was once a dwelling here. The material of the ruin is specific, which creates a "But a ruin is not a ruin of a past building as a picture of it is. The The ruin does not represent the building as it once was. Ruins, had previously served as material for art"[19]. For Simmel, however, embody the impossibility of action. They do not ruin is not a human creation reduced to shapeless matter — it belong to the past world, but show the loss of that world".

The nature over the embodied creation of the spirit, the tragedy of ruin points to the absence of a human dwelling. But in the ruin, the expediency present in the building is replaced by another — natural expediency and the strength of IV. Unlike the inanimate, it contains its temporal and purpose which the spirit has embodied in palace and church, spatial boundaries in itself and does not need anything castle and hall, aqueduct and memorial column, the form in external for this purpose.

The inanimate does not contain its which they appear when decayed is a meaningless incident. Both of them are whether in the most extreme sense that it ends because connected with the definition of mortality as individuality another body begins, by reacting against its expansion, but belong to different worlds — the world of ideas and the bending or breaking it; or through molecular, chemical, or world of nature.

The ruin as a material object, the form of physical influences, as when rocks form through weathering which is conditioned by the external forces of nature, and not or lava through solidification"[25]. For this reason a good many Roman ruins, however interesting they may be otherwise, lack the specific fascination of the ruin-to the extent, that is, to which one notices in them the destruction by man; for this contradicts the contrast between human work and the effect of nature on which rests the significance of the ruin as such.

Such a contradiction is engendered not only by man's positive action but also by his passivity when and because he strikes us as an element of mere nature. This characterizes a good many urban ruins, like those, still inhabited, often found in Italy off the main road.

In these cases, what strikes us is not, to be sure, that human beings destroy the work of man-this indeed is achieved that men let it decay. From the standpoint of the by nature-but idea of man, such indifference is, so to speak, a positive passivity, whereby man makes himself the accomplice of nature and of that one of its inherent tendencies which is dramatically opposed.

Here the inhabited ruin loses for us that sensuous-suprasensuous balance of the conflicting tendencies of existence which we see in the abandoned one.

This balance, indeed, gives it its problematical, unsettling, often unbearable character. Such places, sinking from life, still strike us as settings of a life. In other words, it is the fascination of the ruin that here the work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature.

The same forces which give a mountain its shape through weathering, erosion, faulting, growth of vegetation, here do their work on old walls. Even the charm of alpine forms-which for the most part, after all, are clumsy, accidental, artistically insipid-rests on the felt counterplay of two cosmic tendencies: volcanic eruptions or gradual stratification have built the mountain upward; rain and snow, weathering and landslides, chemical dissolution and the effect of gradually intruding vegetation have sawed apart and hollowed out the upper ledge, have cast downward parts of what had been raised up, thus giving the contour its form.

In this form, we thus feel the vitality of those opposing tendencies-and, instinctively sensing these antitheses in ourselves, we notice, beyond everything merely formal and aesthetic, the significance of the configuration in whose serene unity they have their synthesis. In the ruin, these antitheses are distributed over even more widely segmented parts of existence. What has led the building upward is human will; what gives it its present appearance is the brute, downward-dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature.

Still, so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not of a mere heap of stones, this power does not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere matter. There rises a new form which, from the standpoint of nature, is entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated. Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression, as she had previously served as material for art. According to its cosmic order, the hierarchy of nature and spirit usually shows nature as the substructure, so to speak, the raw material, or semi-finished product; the spirit, as the definitely formative and crowning element.

The ruin reverses this order: what was raised by the spirit becomes the object of the same forces which form the contour of the mountain and the bank of the river. If in this way there emerges an aesthetic significance, it also ramifies into a metaphysical one, in the manner revealed. In patina, too, a merely natural process is set off on the surface of a human product and makes for the outgrowth of a skin which completely covers up the original one.

That the product becomes more beautiful by chemical and physical means; that what is willed becomes, unintentionally and unenforceably, something obviously new, often more beautiful, and once more self-consistent: this mysterious harmony is the fantastic fascination of patina which cannot be wholly accounted for by analyzing our perception of it.

This is the fascination of the ruin, too; but in addition, the ruin has another one of the same order: the destruction of the spiritual form by the effect of natural forces, that reversal of the typical order, is felt as a return to the "good mother," as Goethe calls nature.

Here the saying that all that is human "is taken from earth and to earth shall return" rises above its sad nihilism. Between the not-yet and the no-longer lies an affirmation of the spirit whose path, it is true, now no longer ascends to its peak but, satiated by the peak's riches, descends to its home.

This is, as it were, the counterpart of that "fruitful moment" for which those riches which the ruin has in retrospect are still in prospect. That the overwhelming of a work of the human will by the power of nature can have an aesthetic effect at all suggests that nature has a never completely extinguished rightful claim to this work, however much it may be formed by the spirit.

In its material, its given state, it has always remained nature, and if now nature becomes once more completely mistress over it, she is merely exercising a right which until now has remained latent but which she never, so to speak, has renounced. For this reason, the ruin strikes us so often as tragic-but not as sad-because destruction here is not something senselessly coming from the outside but rather the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed.

For this reason, too, the aesthetically satisfying impression, which is associated with the tragedy or secret justice of destruction, is so often lacking when we describe a person as a "ruin. Rather, such a right does not exist at all. Reflections and complexities in other contexts aside, man as a ruin, therefore, is so often more sad than tragic, lacking that metaphysical calm which attaches to the decay of a material work as by virtue of a profound a priori.

When we speak of "returning home," we mean to characterize the peace whose mood surrounds the ruin. And we must characterize something else: our sense that these two world potenciesthe striving upward and the sinking downward-are working serenely together, as we envisage in their working a picture of purely natural existence.

Expressing this peace for us, the ruin orders itself into the surrounding landscape without a break, growing together with it like tree and stone-whereas a palace, a villa, even a peasant house, even where they fit perfectly into the mood of their landscape, always stem from another order of things and blend with that of nature only as if in afterthought.

Very old buildings in open country, and particularly ruins, often show a peculiar similarity of color to the tones of the soil around them. The cause of this must be somehow analogous to that which constitutes the charm of old fabrics, too: however heterogeneous their colors may have been when new, the long common destinies, dryness and moisture, heat and cold, outer wear and inner disintegration, which they have encountered through the centuries produce a unity of tint, a reduction to the same common denominator of color which no new fabric can imitate.

In a similar way, the influences of rain and sunshine, the incursion of vegetation, heat, and cold must have assimilated the building abandoned to them to the color tone of the ground which has been abandoned to the same destinies. They have sunk its once conspicuous contrast into the peaceful unity of belonging.

The ruin conveys the impression of peace from yet another perspective. On the one side of that typical conflict stood the purely external form or symbolism of peace: the contour of the mountain as defined by the building up and the breaking down. But in respect to the other pole of existence, peace lives entirely within the human soul-that battlefield between nature, which the soul is itself, and spirit, which the soul is itself.

The forces which one can designate only by the spatial simile of upwardstriving are at work continuously in our soul, continuously in-. But neither by the most decisive victory of one of these two parties nor by their compromise does it ever arrive at a definitive state.

For not only does the restless rhythm of the soul not tolerate it; but, more important, behind every single event, every single impulse that comes from one or the other of these two directions, there is something which lives on, and there are claims which the decision just made does not put to rest.

This gives the antagonism between the two principles something unfinishable, formless, breaking every frame. The unending demands of both principles impose on the soul an interminability of the moral process, a profound absence of a well-rounded organization palpably at rest.

In this lies perhaps the ultimate formal ground of the animosity of aesthetic against ethical natures.

Wherever we perceive aesthetically, we demand that the contradictory forces of existence be somehow in equilibrium, that the struggle between above and below have come to a standstill. But this form which yields only a perceptionis rejected by the ethical-psychic process with its unceasing up and down, its constant shifting of boundaries, with the inexhaustibility of the forces playing in it against one another.

By contrast, the profound peace which, like a holy charmed circle, surrounds the ruin, conveys a sense of this constellation: the obscure antagonism which determines the form of all existence -now acting among merely natural forces, now only within psychic life, and now, as in the present case, taking place between nature and matter. This antagonism-although here too it is in one side as the other sinks disequilibrium-letting preponderate into annihilation, nevertheless offers us a quietly abiding image, secure in its form.

The aesthetic value of the ruin combines the disharmony, the eternal becoming of the soul struggling against itself, with the formal satisfaction, the firm limitedness of the work of art.

For this reason, the metaphysical-aesthetic charm of the ruin disappears when not enough remains of it to let us feel the upward-leading tendency.

The stumps of the pillars of the Forum Romanum are simply ugly and nothing else, while a pillar crumbled-say, halfway down-can generate a maximum of charm.

To be sure, we may well be inclined to ascribe this peacefulness to another motif: the character of the ruin as past. It is the site of. In the case of the ruin, the fact that life with its wealth and its changes once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of a past life, not according to the contents or remnants of that life, but according to its past as such.

This also is the charm of antiquities, of which only a narrowminded logic can assert that an absolutely exact imitation equals them in aesthetic value. No matter if we are deceived in an individual case: with this piece which we are holding in our hand, we command in spirit the entire span of time since its inception; the past with its destinies and transformations has been gathered into this instant of an aesthetically perceptible present.

Here, as in the case of the ruin, with its extreme intensification and fulfillment of the present form of the past, such profound and comprehensive energies of our soul are brought into play that there is no longer any sharp division between perception and thought. Here psychic wholeness is at work-seizing, in the same way that its object fuses the contrast of present and past into one united form, on the whole span of physical and spiritual vision in the unity of aesthetic enjoyment which, after all, is always rooted in a deeper than merely aesthetic unity.

Thus purpose and accident, nature and spirit, past and present here resolve the tension of their contrasts-or, rather, preserving this tension, they yet lead to a unity of external image and internal effect.

It is as though a segment of existence must collapse before it can become unresisting to all currents and powers coming from all corners of reality. Perhaps this is the reason for our general fascination with decay and decadence, a fascination which goes beyond what is merely negative and degrading. The rich and and the undermany-sided culture, the unlimited impressionability, of decadent are characteristic which standing open to everything, epochs, do signify this coming together of all contradictory strivings.

An equalizing justice connects the uninhibited unity of all things that grow apart and against one another with the decay of those men and works of men which now can only yield, but can no longer create and maintain their own forms out of their own strength. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd?

Georg Simmel - The Ruin. Uploaded by mbssaldanha. Document Information click to expand document information Description: About roman ruins. Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. While the canvas and the pigment on it are parts of reality, the work of art constructed out of them exists in an ideal space which can no more come in contact with actual space than tones can touch smells. This holds for every utensil, for every vase, in so far as it is looked upon as having an aesthetic value.

As a piece of metal which is tangible, weighable, and incorporated into both the ways and con texts of the surrounding world, a vase is a segment of reali ty. At the same time, its artistic form leads an existence completely detached and self-contained, for which the material reality of the metal is merely the vehicle. A vessel, however, unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose-if only symbolically.

For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of practical life. Thus the vessel stands in two worlds at one and the same time: whereas reality is completely irrelevant to the "pure" work of art and, as it were, is consumed in it, reality does make claims upon the1 Georg Simmel, "Der Henkel" and "Die Ruine," Philosophische Kultur , 2nd ed.

Reproduced by permission of Else Simmel, M. This dual nature of the vase is most decisively expressed in its handle. The handle is the part by which it is grasped, lifted, and tilted; in the handle the vase projects visibly into that real world which relates it to everything external, to an environment that does not exist for the work of art as such. But then the body of the vase is certainly not alone in being subjugated to the demands of art; for were this the case, the handles would be reduced to mere grips, unrelated to the aesthetic value of their form, like the hooks and eyes of a picture frame.

Rather, the handles connecting the vase with the world outside art also become components of the art form; they must be justified purely as shapes and as constituting a single aesthetic vision with the body of the vase, irrespective of the fact that they have a practical purpose. By virtue of this double significance, and because of the clear and characteristic way in which this significance emerges, the handle as a phenomenon becomes one of the most absorbing aesthetic problems.

Our unconscious criterion for the aesthetic effect of the handle seems to be the manner in which its shape harmonizes these two worlds-the world on the outside which, with the handle, makes its claim on the vessel, and the world of art which, heedless of the other, demands the handle for itself. Moreover, not only must it be possible for the handle actually to perform its practical function, but the possibility must also be manifest in its appearance, and emphatically so in the case of apparently soldered handles, as opposed to those apparently shaped in one movement with the body of the vase.

The first of these types indicates that the handle is attached by external forces and comes from an external order of things; it brings into prominence the meaning of the handle as something reaching outside the pure art form.

This contrast between vase and handle is more sharply accentuated when, as frequently happens, the handle has the shape of a snake, lizard, or dragon. These forms suggest the special significance of the handle: it looks as though the animal had crawled on to the vase from the outside, to be incorporated into the complete form only, as it were, as an afterthought.

The fact that the handle belongs to the quite different realm in which it originated, and which now uses the handle to claim the vase for itself, becomes apparent through its visible aesthetic.

In complete opposition to this, the strongest accent in some vases is on the tendency toward unity. They appear to have been whole forms first, the material extending to the periphery without a break; only afterward was enough material removed so that what remained constituted the handles.

We find such modeling done to perfection in certain Chinese bowls, the handles of which are cut out of the cold metal. A similar incorporation of the handles into the aesthetic unity is more organically accented wherever the handle seems to be driven out of the body of the vessel in an uninterrupted transition, and by the same forces that shaped the body itself.