and mental life process in which the reality of humankind takes place and gathers the
emotion of that reality, flowing and ebbing away in time, into a single timelessly stable
visualization which reality never displays and never can display. The bridge confers an
ultimate meaning elevated above all sensuousness, an individual meaning not mediated
by any abstract reflection, an appearance that draws the practical purposive meaning of
the bridge into itself, and brings it into a visible form in the same way as a work of art
does with its ‘object’. Yet the bridge reveals its difference from the work of art, in the
fact that despite its synthesis transcending nature, in the end it fits into the image of
nature. For the eye it stands in a much closer and much less fortuitous relationship to the
banks that it connects than does, say, a house to its earth foundation, which disappears
from sight beneath it. People quite generally regard a bridge in a landscape to be a
‘picturesque’ element, because through it the fortuitousness of that which is given by
nature is elevated to a unity, which is indeed of a completely intellectual nature. Yet by
means of its immediate spatial visibility it does indeed possess precisely that aesthetic
value, whose purity art represents when it puts the spiritually gained unity of the merely
natural into its island-like ideal enclosedness.
Whereas in the correlation of separateness and unity, the bridge always allows the
accent to fall on the latter, and at the same time overcomes the separation of its anchor
points that make them visible and measurable, the door represents in a more decisive
manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act. The
human being who first erected a hut, like the first road-builder, revealed the specifically
human capacity over against nature, insofar as he or she cut a portion out of the
continuity and infinity of space and arranged this into a particular unity in accordance
with a single meaning. A piece of space was thereby brought together and separated from
the whole remaining world. By virtue of the fact that the door forms, as it were, a linkage
between the space of human beings and everything that remains outside it, it transcends
the separation between the inner and the outer. Precisely because it can also be opened,
its closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this
space than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the door speaks. It is
absolutely essential for humanity that it set itself a boundary, but with freedom, that is, in
such a way that it can also remove this boundary again, that it can place itself outside it.
The finitude into which we have entered somehow always borders somewhere on the
infinitude of physical or metaphysical being. Thus the door becomes the image of the
boundary point at which human beings actually always stand or can stand. The finite
unity, to which we have connected a part of infinite space designated for us, reconnects it
to this latter; in the unity, the bounded and the boundaryless adjoint one another, not in
the dead geometric form of a mere separating wall, but rather as the possibility of a
permanent interchange—in contrast to the bridge which connects the finite with the
finite. Instead, the bridge removes us from this firmness in the act of walking on it and,
before we have become inured to it through daily habit, it must have provided the
wonderful feeling of floating for a moment between heaven and earth. Whereas the
bridge, as the line stretched between two points, prescribes unconditional security and
direction, life flows forth out of the door from the limitation of isolated separate existence
into the limitlessness of all possible directions.
If the factors of separateness and connectedness meet in the bridge in such a way that
the former appears more as the concern of nature and the latter more the concern of
Georg Simmel 65