“This pleasure remains entirely egoistic”

The philosopher Georg Simmel’s critique of alpinism, c. 1895.

The confusion of the subjective-egoistic enjoyment with educational and moral values finds its clearest expression in high-Alpine sports. In the circles of the Alpine Club the idea persists that surmounting life-endangering difficulties is, as it were, morally commendable-a triumph of the spirit over the resistance of matter, an outcome of ethical strengths: of courage, willpower, and the summoning of all capabilities for one ideal goal. And in the light of these truly expended energies, one forgets that they are a mere means to morally questionable, indeed often utterly immoral ends; they are means for momentary pleasure, which emanates from such exertion of all vitality, from the play with danger, from the elation through the sublime view. Indeed, I would place this enjoyment among the highest that life can offer. The more restless, uncertain and contradictory modern existence becomes, the more passionately we desire the heights that reach beyond good and evil, to which we can look up, we who have forgotten how to look up…

…Yet this is why this pleasure remains entirely egoistic; this is why the immoral risking of life exists for the sake of mere enjoyment, into which one ropes in guides to boot, who, for fifty or one hundred francs, wage their lives for the clumsiness and misfortune of the mountaineer. An Alpinist would likely be indignant if one were to liken him to a gambler; and yet both wager their existence for purely subjective excitations and satisfactions-for the player also does not ask for material gain an incalculable number of times but only for the excitement of vitality through risk, for the gripping combination of cold-bloodedness and passion, of one's own skill and the favour of unpredictable forces. The Alpinist gambles for a stake, which morally should only be wagered for the highest objective values and not for the sake of selfish, incommunicable pleasures. Only the romantic allure attributed to every voluntary risking of life from time immemorial can disguise this wager, when a social or religious commitment could countless times only be fulfilled at the price of life, thereby conferring on it, regardless of its actual ends, the yet-unfaded veneer of ethical dignity.

References

From Georg Simmel (1858-1918), Alpenreisen, first published in Die Zeit (Vienna), July 1895, translated as "Alpine Journeys: in Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (eds), Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541-2009, Camden House, 2020.