To read the work of Georg Simmel is submerge yourself in a torrent of ideas. Some of these ideas fly, they trigger the imagination and provoke thoughts of how they might be applied or what they might reveal. Simmel undoubtedly had an unusual sensitivity and feeling for the sociology buried in the world around him. Other ideas, some of his more speculative leaps, fall flat. Perhaps this is an inevitable outcome of the range of insights he offered, the way he sought to stretch his analysis beyond the obvious and, of course, the passage of time. Simmelâs flights of analysis bring both insights and difficulties. There are bits that are hard to decipher, momentary ambiguities and even the occasional crass or crude generalisation. On Simmelâs speculative edge, CĂ©lestin BouglĂ©, writing around 1912, argued that:
Even though Simmelâs formulations may not go beyond the realm of probability, they are profound and intricate, and they should definitely be codified, classified, and offered for examination. And it is beyond doubt that, had Simmel chosen to be a more objective sociologist, he would have found it much more difficult to be so suggestive a âmoralistâ.1
The message is clear, we can value the things that Simmelâs speculations offer whilst still being attentive to their limits and problems. The shortcomings of Simmelâs approach are perhaps obvious, but it seems that BouglĂ© was more interested in what those lines of thought provide the reader, in the threads, the ideas and the connections. By looking closely at Simmelâs later works, this book attempts to tap into the incisive and intricate accounts of social life contained within them. In the following pages I pick up on some of these threads, explore them and seek to bring to the surface the possibilities they offer for social analysis today.
Putting the limitations to one side for the moment, there remains a richness to Simmelâs writings, they provoke a sense of possibility for the reader. The challenge within these texts is to locate those possibilities. This book is written with this ambition, to see how Simmelâs writings might be worked-with and explored to locate conceptual nuggets and to think through their possibilities and potentials.2 To make the project manageable, given both how prolific Simmel was and also the density and vibrancy of his works, a line needed to be drawn. Some artificial parameters were needed to afford the ideas space to breath. Here I focus most directly on the works published or written between 1914 and 1918, the final four years of Simmelâs life, with particularly close attention paid to what might be considered his last two major works: Rembrandt and The View of Life. To understand these choices and these writings, we should begin with some context.
In a talk given in New York in January 1963 Albert Salomon described one of Simmelâs lectures , he paints a picture of a speaker with significant appeal:
I attended in 1910 classes at the University of Berlin for the first time. I remember vividly the lecture course Simmel gave. In the widest classroom which stretched from the Southside of the university with a view to Unter den Linden to the Northside looking over the old chestnut trees to Dorotheenstreest, he lectured at the godless time from 2-3 pm in order to deter the hundreds of people who crowded his classes. He was disgusted with the fact that he was fashionable; but even at such an hour, there were hundreds of listeners in the largest classroom of Berlin University.3
This lively and energetic environment in which he was embedded as a key figure, with an interested and even adoring public, was a context that Simmel was soon to leave behind when he was to relocate his life and work away from Berlin . Salomon tellingly described Simmel, who appeared to be thriving in this vibrant context, as an âadventurer in ideasâ.4 However uncomfortable he may have seemed with his relative fame, his upcoming move away from Berlin was still a physical and intellectual uprooting.
Simmel was born on the 1st of March 1858 at the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse in the centre of Berlin, 5 he went on to study, live, write and teach in the city until the latter years of his life. Drawing the curtain on his long Berlin residency, Simmel sent a letter to Otto Back on the 18th of January 1914 indicating his acceptance of his new post in Strasbourg (GSG23 280). As such, 1914â1918 was a time of personal change for Simmel, with his move from Berlin to take up, at the age of 56, a permanent chair of philosophy post Strasbourg. 6 It was his first permanent academic post. Having not achieved such a permanent position until this point is evidence, for Levine, of the âinstitutional manifestationâ of Simmelâs âmarginalityâ in the academy even despite his profileâindeed, Simmel has been evocatively described as âthe stranger in the academyâ.7 It was also, obviously, a time of social unrest and turmoil in Europe with the raging of the First World War. Simmelâs move was part of a personal story of that period, set against both the war and prevailing prejudice.
Simmelâs own views on the war changed significantly during this period.8 Elizabeth Goodstein describes the impact of the war on Simmel in the following terms:
During the final years of Georg Simmelâs life, the Great War raged on seemingly without end. Exiled, as it were, from Berlin beginning in March 1914, he had landed, ironically, right back in the midst of things â in what almost immediately became the âcitadelâ (Festung) Strasbourg . Like so many others, Simmel was swept up in the patriotic fervor of August 1914. By early the next year, though, he was already â very publicly â expressing deep concern about the disastrous cultural consequences of the war for Europe as a whole.9
The war then was a significant part of Simmelâs final years, it would inevitably impact on his work and thinking . He was actually formally warned for what was perceived to be âunpatrioticâ thinking , which he did little to heed10âhe also admitted to struggling to think of anything beyond the war.11 Goodstein , who seeks to read Simmelâs work as closely as possible to its context, argues that his later works and particularly his âmature philosophy of life must be read in this context â in a very real sense, a tragic oneâ.12 Simmel had, of course, long been interested in the modern and this war represented, Goodstein adds, the âfulfilmentâ of its âdarkest potentialsâ.13 As such, the importance of context is painfully obviously. Take for example Symonsâ reflections on Simmelâs book on Rembrandt (which will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) in which he claims that âwe see Simmel indulge in rich descriptions of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every individual, while at the same time the first industrialized war in the history of humankind is wreaking its brutal and dis-individualising violenceâ.14 The forces of the time push their way, it would seem, into Simmelâs writings and, perhaps inevitably, into the interpretation of those writings. So even Simmelâs text on Rembrandt , which on the surface is a long essay on the philosophy of art , may be interpreted and understood in light of these violent circumstances. His reaction to the war may well be found implicitly as well as explicitly in the writings, it is not always clear. Although, we should still be cautious in making any direct connections, especially as, according to Wolff, Gertrud Simmel had indicated that in his final months Georg did not like to be distracted from his thoughts by the news and tended to avoid reading the newspaper.15 This is not to suggest that the context does not matter, but that we need to be careful in how the texts are situated.
Goodsteinâs key argument is that Simmel was responding to the âcrisis of meaning in European lifeâ, the lack of appeal of âtranscendent truthâ and the âdestruction of the cultural world that had giv...