Abstract

The article argues for the relevance of Simmel's life‐philosophy for the contemporary thought about life and death. By considering life, paradoxically, at once as a pre‐individual flux of becoming and individuated, Simmel manages to avoid both reductionism and mysticism. In addition, unlike Deleuze, for example, Simmel thinks that we can experience and know life only in some individual, actual form, never in its pure virtuality, as an absolute flow. During the course of examination, Simmel's insights will also be discussed in connection with Heidegger. The article maintains that what remains on the Simmelian side beyond the striking affinities between the two thinkers is a kind of animal vitality. Though Simmel's life‐philosophy is mainly concerned with the world‐relation of humans, when it comes to death, it places humans on a par with all living organisms. A death that is immanent in life is appropriate to anything that is living. Thus the human individual, too, is dying precisely as a living organism, as some‐body that is alive.