Insofar as life, having become spirit, ceaselessly creates such forms which become self-enclosed and demand permanence, these forms are inseparable from life; without them it cannot be itself. Left to itself, however, life streams on without interruption; its restless rhythm opposes the fixed duration of any particular form. Each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life. As soon as one is fully developed, the next begins to form; after a struggle that may be long or short, it will inevitably succeed its predecessor.

XREF: Echoes Marx's dialectic and Spengler's cyclical civilizations — the perpetual obsolescence of crystallized forms resembles the Hegelian spirit's restless self-overcoming.

DEFINE: Simmel defines the tension between life-as-process and the fixed cultural forms it creates.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 838