Messages from Georg Simmel (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 49) [1 ed.] 9789004233683, 9789004235717, 9004233687

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Messages from Georg Simmel

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor

David Fasenfest

Wayne State University Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside G. William Domhoff, University of California-Santa Cruz Colette Fagan, Manchester University Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton Mary Romero, Arizona State University Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 49

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Messages from Georg Simmel By

Horst J. Helle

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

Cover illustration: Teaching Simmel in China, Guest lecture for the School of Philosophy and Social Development (哲学与社会发展学院) of Huaqiao University (华侨大学). Seated from left to right: H. J. Helle (赫 磊), YE Huizhen (叶惠珍), YANG Ying (杨楹) Dean and Professor. © 2010 by the School of Philosophy and Social Development, Xiamen, China. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Helle, Horst Jürgen. Messages from Georg Simmel / by Horst J. Helle. p. cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-23368-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Sociology--Methodology. 2. Simmel, Georg, 1858-1918. I. Title. HM585.H446 2013 301--dc23 2012029702

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4234 ISBN 978 90 04 23368 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 23571 7 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������vii 1. The Message of Interpretation�������������������������������������������������������������������������1  Humanities versus Natural Sciences���������������������������������������������������������1  The Operation Called Verstehen����������������������������������������������������������������6  The Controversy about Pragmatism������������������������������������������������������ 17   Simmel versus Conventional Philosophy���������������������������������������� 17   The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy������������������������������������������ 21   Simmel’s Critique of Subjectivist Pragmatism������������������������������� 29  Tension between Culture and the Individual�������������������������������������� 36 2. The Message of Change: Society Evolves Over Time������������������������������� 43  Evolution and Darwin’s “Theory of Descendency”����������������������������� 43  Change as Differentiation and Individualization������������������������������� 48  Competition promotes Evolution����������������������������������������������������������� 51  Alternative Theories of Evolution����������������������������������������������������������� 58 3. The Message of Interaction: How Reality is Constructed���������������������� 71  Sociology as the Study of Interaction���������������������������������������������������� 71  Society Emerges in Interaction���������������������������������������������������������������� 79  Religion as Interaction������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 84  Strangeness as Form of Interaction�������������������������������������������������������� 97   Encounters between Alien Populations������������������������������������������� 97   The Stranger as Innovator�������������������������������������������������������������������� 99 4. The Message of Alienation: Money and Politics������������������������������������105  Money as a Paradigm of Cultural Processes���������������������������������������105  Evaluation and Alienation����������������������������������������������������������������������108  Construction of Value in Interaction���������������������������������������������������114  Money as a Means of Exchange�������������������������������������������������������������117  Socialism as Result of a Forming Process�������������������������������������������123  Socialism on Happiness���������������������������������������������������������������������������126  Machine – Factory – Government��������������������������������������������������������130

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5. The Main Thrust of the Messages contra Marx and Weber�����������������135  Simmel’s main Thrust against Marx�����������������������������������������������������135  Simmel’s main Thrust against Weber���������������������������������������������������139 6. Background of the Messages: Intellectual Influences���������������������������143  The Platonic Socrates�������������������������������������������������������������������������������143  Plato’s Eternal Ideas����������������������������������������������������������������������������������144  Spinoza���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������152  Kant���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������160  Dilthey ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������166  Summary: Statements about Simmel’s Method �������������������������������177 Appendix 1: Biography of Georg Simmel�������������������������������������������������������181 Appendix 2: Simmel’s Autobiographical Fragment������������������������������������189 References���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������193 Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������199

INTRODUCTION Simmel trained as a philosopher, and sociology started out as a past time for him. But he saw a specific message embedded in sociology, a message so important in its effects on his students and readers that we now consider him a founder of sociology. According to this message things are often not what they appear to be. A hidden agenda may exist in a proposal, a deeper meaning to a sentence. And usually, what something means depends on the context in which it is seen and on the perspective from which it is looked at. Simmel also warns against rushing to any decision about what is real or imagined because if a person acts on the basis of his or her imagination, the action certainly results in something real. Besides, there are to Simmel multiple realities, and he sets out to study the conditions under which people think things are real (Simmel 1892a, vol. 1: 6). Simmel’s message means something for people today. He wrote about the stranger, and large numbers of persons have left the area in which they grew up, moved to a city where they did not know other people and were strangers when they arrived. But Simmel shows how being foreign is not what it appears to be on the surface: It really is a quality of the relationship between the native and the newcomer. He wrote about competition, and many people living today work next to colleagues and companions who strive to be better or perform faster than they, so they have to compete with them. And whether competition exists in a society or not has far reaching consequences that are not visible on the surface. – Simmel wrote about religion, and humans of today have many different ideas on what religion is and whether or not it is still needed. But many of them wonder if their grandfather or mother who died has completely disappeared or continues to exist somewhere in some form. – These few examples show that Simmel’s writings are important because they deal with topics that concern modern man and because Simmel deals with them in a novel way that was frequently not understood in his own days. Simmel observed the enormous social, economic, and political changes that occurred in Europe during his lifetime (1858–1918). The development of Prussia and under its leadership of Germany from a predominantly agrarian society to industrialization, the rise of capitalism, the unification

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of the German speaking territories with the exception of Austria and Northern Switzerland into the Second Empire in 1871 and its demise prior to and during World War I, all evolved while he was looking on; these events happened to him personally. His thinking became in part a reflection of these changes, of the economic advances, the ambivalence of life in big cities, and the political intolerance throughout the nation. His ideas are inspirations today to create fresh interpretations of similar events in other parts of the world (or even in the same parts). In short then, Simmel’s message states that with regard to experiences persons make in dealing with each other things are often not what they appear to be because a. they are in need of interpretation, b. they change over time (evolution), c. they are socially constructed as a reality that was created in interaction (construction), d. they are not recognized as the results of their makers own doing (alienation). From these four aspects of Simmel’s message we take the chapter headings of this text. In the first chapter Simmel’s message will be explained as the need of interpretation and as a way to point to the importance of an interpretive theory of culture and society. In chapter 2 the reader can find Simmel’s theory of social change. Simmel will be shown to refer to Darwin’s evolutionist ideas, but it will become clear that Simmel’s approach is in no way close to biology. Instead Simmel interprets the findings of Darwin as a contribution to a renewed philosophy: In Plato’s philosophy something was real only if it never changes, like the old concept of species. Darwin has shown our idea of species to be but a snap-shot of one moment in the history of biological evolution. Chapter 3 is oriented toward interaction as creation of the social, and also as the crucial source of the reality to be studied by the humanities. Chapter 4 will present money and socialism as constructions of reality. That chapter will also expose the basis for Simmel’s critique of reification or substantialization of social relations as leading toward alienation. Chapter 5 is a brief summary of the main thrust of Simmel contra Marx and Weber. Chapter 6 contains an overview of Simmel’s points of departure in traditional philosophy which serve as background for his own creative thinking. The six chapters will thus deal with interpretation, with change, with the construction of reality in interaction, with alienation, with the differences he has with Marx and Weber, and with Simmel’s reading of

introductionix selected philosophers respectively. Chapter 6 concludes with a list of seventeen topics as a summary of Simmel’s theoretical approach. Appended to the last chapter the reader will find Simmel’s biography. It is in the back of the book to make it easy to locate and to refer back to it occasionally while reading other parts of this text. This volume was written in English by a German. That is a reason for acknowledging in gratitude the competence and kindness of those, who helped make the outcome linguistically acceptable. There was my most remarkable English teacher in high school in the fifties, the German Richard Edens, there was my late first wife Carolyn Craft (1935–1999) from Kansas since the sixties, and there was finally but most importantly the cameraman and fiction writer Jeremy Trylch who helped me review the manuscript when we met on the Island of Hainan in China and in Munich, Germany. Where the English in this book is readable, it is due to the influence of these persons, where on the other hand the English is defective, it is because my last minute additions could not be remedied by Jeremy Trylch.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MESSAGE OF INTERPRETATION Humanities versus Natural Sciences The dominant positions in philosophy prior to Kant suggested that the objects of our knowledge are out there ready to be registered. Simmel does not accept that but instead agrees with Kant in acknowledging our own contribution toward forming images of those objects in the process of trying to grasp them. If we actually make such a contribution it follows then that we must carefully study that process in which it unfolds because it entails the construction of reality. Opponents to this constructivist position will argue that such a process should be minimized or – better yet – not taken into account because it means distortion and falsification of objective reality. They would declare any attempt to interpret what goes on during reality construction as unscientific and as dangerous to the credibility of scholarship. Accordingly they would rely on hard facts only. Simmel provokes them by pointing out how it would be a dangerous fallacy precisely to assume that anyone can reproduce a reality existing in and of itself, without manipulating it in the process. Only if we know what manipulation has occurred and how it influences the outcome can we interpret the objects of our knowledge, and because it is possible for us to know that, Simmel sends the message that we must interpret them. Simmel’s claim that we need interpretation, of course, hinges entirely on our evaluation of man’s faculty of perception: If we believe that sooner or later we humans will have registered and clearly reproduced everything worth knowing, because that, after all, is the goal of scholarship, then we should reject Simmel as an unwelcome source of doubt. If we assume, on the other hand, that reality is too all encompassing and complex for individuals to handle without introducing their own interests in selecting data and that therefore they have no choice but to construct their own image of reality, then we can learn from Simmel and ought to study him (Helle: 2001: 3). Social science research, which operates in close affinity to the natural sciences – as is frequently the case in economics, psychology, and in sociology particularly when making recommendations to politicians – tends

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to be welcomed by those who paid for it because it produces a sense of presumed security in decision making: The sponsor of the research glances over the summary of the empirical results and leans back comfortably because – as he or she assumes – they now know what reality is truly like without any need of interpretation. However, such a person should then not study Simmel because reading his works would probably produce awkward doubts as to the reliability of what has been presented in the research. Simmel was convinced that the humanities cannot excuse themselves from studying processes of forming – as he calls it – from which phenomena of culture and society emerge in interaction. A sociology that refuses to do so must limit itself to counting for instance the number of people residing in a certain territory and generally work in close affinity to a natural science. But even then the problem, which territory should be selected and what its borders ought to be in planning the research can only be solved by introducing an interactive forming process assigning social forms to human content. The distinction between content and form (Simmel 1911: 16ff.) is an epistemological device frequently used by Simmel, however, in quoting from his writing, other authors have sometimes misinterpreted what he had in mind. To look at the strong influence the work of Spinoza (1632–1677) had on Simmel may help avoid such errors. Spinoza was familiar with the division of reality into two types of phenomena by René Descartes (1596– 1650): Material objects which can be measured because they extend in space (extensio) on the one hand, and ideas without any physical characteristic (cogitatio) on the other. To Descartes, the world simply consisted of two separate parts, but to Spinoza, there was just one unified reality, and the impression of a twofold typology existed only in the eyes of the beholders. Thus the extensiocogitatio-dichotomy was to Spinoza a way of looking at the world, it was not an innate characteristic of the world. Applying this distinction between mind and matter to the infinite multitude of phenomena will be helpful, Spinoza argues, but we must remember that we, the observers and analysts, are the creators of this typology. Accordingly we should not try to pretend that we simply discovered something that was already there before we looked at it, or decided to work with it. We do not have the opportunity here to discuss the impact this Spinozistic principle had on the philosophy of Kant. But we can be sure it deeply influenced the method of Simmel, partly via Kant, partly directly from Spinoza himself. And, to come back to Simmel’s confrontation of



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form and content, there too we are dealing with conceptual tools created for the use of gaining insights rather than with characteristic qualities of the objects out there. That is the reason why the same phenomenon (religion, for instance) can appear as content in some social contexts and then again as form in another. To the hurried reader this may simply demonstrate the inconsistencies in Simmel’s thinking. But it is worth the effort to carefully look inside Simmel’s intellectual workshop: Basic human drives and emotions typically become contents for Simmel. Feeling the need to associate with a powerful partner for protection and assistance may be an acceptable illustration for content. It may produce and make use of the form of adoring a dictator in politics or else that of relating to a deity via religion. Looking at it in this way, religion is a legitimate case of giving form to a deep seated emotion. Then again, religiosity may be looked at as a human need and therefore be considered to belong among the contents. The concomitant form would then be a church, a sect, a synagogue. Simmel uses this approach also as a tool for his critical thinking. In his talk The Metropolis and Mental Life of 1903 (Simmel 1903a) he refers to the “products” (Produkte) of modern life. By those he means large scale organizations, bureaucracies, as well as military establishments in the absence of war. Those obviously are forms. The content that is supposed to be served by them may be identified as personal tendencies and emotional needs of individuals, and indeed the legitimacy of the social forms can only be derived from serving the needs of individuals. Unless such service is provided, the “products” of modern life become self-perpetuating instead of legitimate. “All intimate emotional relations between persons  are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number” (Simmel 1950b, adaptation by D. Weinstein, 3). This sentence illustrates Simmel’s critical stance: As Spinoza before him he trusted the intimate emotions of persons but warned of what became of them in the course of the forming process. He warns of the impact of the natural sciences on metropolitan life: “The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas” (ibid: 4). The usefulness of the two concepts form and content can also be exemplified by the following: As reported in the book of Genesis in the sacred texts of Jews and Christians, Joseph was hated by his brothers out of envy because their father loved him more than his other sons. In spite of this

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unfavorable point of departure Josef tells his brothers about a dream he had in which he and his brothers work together during the harvest in a grain field. They bind the grain into sheaves and put them to dry: Joseph’s sheaf “stood up and remained standing” (Genesis 37, 7), whereas he dreamed of his brothers’, that their “sheaves stood roundabout and bowed down to my sheaf” (ibid.). Surprising is the seriousness with which the brothers react to the dream. The mood immediately deteriorates dramatically: They become still angrier at Joseph than they already were, because they see in the dream the announcement of his claim to rule over them. It would have been conceivable that they consider their little brother’s tale unimportant and go over to the day to day agenda, because it had been only a dream. Here the participants, however, recognize a content that cannot be entirely dismissed, and even when put in the form of a dream, the content is not thereby necessarily annulled but survives as the serious meaning of the dream. Maybe Simmel elaborates on the significance of content and form as heuristic tools most convincingly in his Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Simmel 1911, Main Problems of Philosophy). He identifies as content the existing world which we can only perceive in its various forms. Those are mainly (but not exclusively) the following three: Art, religion, and scholarship as the sciences and the humanities put together. Each of them has the potential of capturing all the content there is, rather than specializing in forming certain select types of content. This inclusive responsibility of art, religion, and scholarship is reminiscent of the rejection of the Descartes’ extensio-cogitatio-dichotomy by Spinoza: There are no separate realities to be communicated in art, religion, or scholarship respectively; they are each responsible for presenting the one and only reality in their particular form. Simmel comments on the ideal of scholarship. The hope that someday all there is to know may be known in its final form is utopian: Learned knowledge depends on concept formation, on techniques for collecting and organizing data, on transforming what appears to the senses into natural laws or images of history respectively. It depends moreover on the criteria for truth and error. However, “all the forms and methods via which the contents of the world become contents of scholarship have evolved in the course of human history and will undoubtedly continue to do so” (ibid: 18). This is true because the human being is nothing final but instead involves in a process of change as “a historic-evolutionistic being” (ibid.) Accordingly, “what kind of scholarship humankind has at a given moment depends on what kind of humanity it is at that moment” (ibid.).



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Simmel mentions that this point of view appears to contradict Kant whose fundamental categories are presented with the claim that they refer to contents that are eternal and thus not subject to evolution (ibid: 19). To this Simmel replies, that what we know about things “has not been poured inside us like nuts in a bag… Instead all knowing is an activity of the mind” (ibid.), in the course of which we construct new insight. Therefore, even if contents that Kant refers to may be eternal, the categories we use as “bags” to collect the “nuts”, are subject to evolution and as a consequence the formed results of our research are subject to change no matter how unchangeable the contents may be. Here we encoun­ter Spinoza’s wisdom reaffirmed by Simmel and later accepted also by Weber. Whoever argues in favor of interpretation assuming that there are contents with the potential of giving meaning to forms, as Simmel has done, must expect to be confronted with this question: What benefits can be gained from giving up a sense of objectivity typical of the natural sciences in favor of Simmel’s constructivism. As a partial response the following can be stated: a. A molecule or a living cell under study in one of the natural sciences does not have a consciousness, and therefore cannot be treated as a subject making decisions. A human being, by contrast, under study in the humanities, does have a consciousness and therefore should not be treated as a thing but as an individual endowed with freedom. An increased awareness of this freedom is one of the benefits to be gained from Simmel’s approach. b. The error to extend the epistemology of the natural sciences – as it was seen in Simmel’s lifetime with reference to Kant – to all scholarship, and consequently also to the humanities, must not be repeated in reverse: Simmel did not intend to apply to the natural sciences the constructivist method he suggested for sociology. Rather, he never questioned an intersubjective objectivity for dealing with data in the hard sciences. But he followed Dilthey in pointing out that sciences and humanities devote their efforts to objects so vastly different from each other that it is flatly unreasonable to tie such diverse efforts to the same method. Following the demand that the method applied must fit the task at hand, sciences and humanities ought to each work with their own specific method. This insight is one of the benefits to be gained from studying Simmel in the continuity of Dilthey. c. The humanities, as described by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), devote their attention to the “realm of freedom.” Given the condition of having

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choices to make, humans cannot be prevented from considering a glass either half full or half empty or if there is a crack in it, even broken. To reduce such processes of forming to individual arbitrariness rather than asking what causes them culturally, would be (or is?) the end of any scholarly involvement with art, religion, and other branches of culture. Simmel has emphasized that the study of culture relies on interpretation. d. Differences of opinion in the context of the epistemology of the natural sciences usually lead to proclaiming that one side is in error. In the context of the humanities, on the other hand, the result of a difference of opinion may be this: The same content permits two or more alternative perspectives from which to approach it, and consequently several principles of forming. Thus both conflicting sides may acknowledge the legitimacy of such alternate procedures. A confrontation of the first kind – in the natural sciences – will produce a far more severe conflict than a confrontation of the second kind – in the humanities. This potential of conflict reduction by itself may be reason enough to study the forming process as Simmel did. e. The sponsors of scholarly research, be it a politician, a business man, or a manager of a large commercial or government bureaucracy, cannot shift responsibility to a social scientist once the results of his research turn out to be admittedly ambiguous. However, it is the nature of research in the humanities that such an ambiguity will be part of the new insights gained, since problems in culture and society typically are open to interpretation and therefore admit and legitimize several ways of looking at them. This involves the opportunity for the sponsors of research to acknowledge that not scholars but policy makers (in government, business or in large organization in general) must take full responsibility for their decisions and cannot pin that on the researcher, and certainly not if the researcher concedes that his results are open to interpretation. The Operation Called Verstehen In the English language the interpretive school of sociology has for a long time been associated with the German word verstehen. This is largely due to an article by Theodore Abel (1896–1988). He belonged to the pioneers of “Weberian Sociology” in America. In his Systematic Sociology in Germany (Abel 1929) the first systematic exposure of Max Weber’s ideas was made available in English. It appeared in 1929 when Abel started to



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work as associate professor of sociology at Columbia University. Abel was also the first to use verstehen and verstehende Soziologie in English literature in his publication The Operation Called Verstehen, which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology (Abel 1948). Two years before that article H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills published From Max Weber – Essays in Sociology (Gerth and Mills 1946) which became the Max Weber text for generations of students. Preceding Weber, Simmel assigns the Gestalt of interpretation or verstehen to the question that permeates all of his philosophizing, namely how the human subject can bridge the gap to the objective. Although he unfolds the methodical presuppositions of verstehen in the context of the philosophy of history, he thereby lays the foundations of verstehen-sociology. The problem of a theoretical approach to objective truth – a truth whose existence Simmel takes for granted independently of whether or not it is accessible to perception – remains a theme of Simmel’s search for an interpretive method. His philosophy of history as well is conceived under the assumption of a realm of the absolute, from which values receive their legitimation. His book Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Simmel 1892b) (The Problems of the Philosophy of History) which was published in 1892 – i.e., in the same year as the first volume of his two-volume Introduction to Moral Science [Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft] – contains the methodical foundation for verstehen-sociology. This claim is supported by the fact that Max Weber expressly referred to this work of Simmel: “The logically most developed approaches to the theory of verstehen are to be found in the second edition of Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History (pp. 27–62)” (Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality” [Knies und das Irrationalitaetsproblem], 1905, quoted from Weber 1951c: 92). Max Weber cited Simmel’s second, revised edition from 1905 (Simmel 1905) in an article that Weber himself published in October of that same year. Since the beginning of his studies beyond philosophy, leading him toward the social sciences, the methodical concern in which Simmel was engaged was that of an historian. He addresses the historians in this epistemological essay on the philosophy of history. The methodical consequences that follow from this work, however, are valid not only for them but for all the humanities. Objects of knowledge are the “mental operations of acting persons” (Simmel 1923: 35), i.e., the cognitive and emotional procedures within human beings whose behavior the historian is concerned with. It is these cognitive and emotional procedures that the

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historical researcher attempts to reconstruct. Whether or not he can successfully accomplish this, according to Simmel, can only be determined if verstehen is possible. For this purpose, alongside (or above) the two persons concerned (the historical actor and the historian) he postulates a “third realm” (Simmel 1910: 103) of objective truth. It is to this realm that the creative constructions the historian brings to his or her research, must correspond. “Whether the psychological connecting-links that the historian attaches to the events are objectively true, i.e., whether they really reflect the mental operations of the acting persons would be of no interest for us if we would not understand [verstehen]. Were this not to happen, then correctness could be reached via some other means – for instance, how in some cases this correctness does not seem to require the psychological reconstruction by the historian but rather to be immediately given by utterances and confessions of these personalities – and yet we would still not attribute to it that which we call truth. But what does this verstehen mean and what are its conditions?” (Simmel 1923: 35). The search for the criteria of truth, which had led Simmel to his own pragmatic theory of truth, also concerns him as a philosopher of history. He addresses the historians about whom he says – in a manner we are already familiar with – that they reconstruct something, much as a painter creates a piece of art by inspecting reality and creatively transforming, not merely photographing, it. (Even though of course photography can be an artful transformation as well). The question of whether that result of reconstruction may claim to be a truth could not be meaningfully raised, were it not for the possibility of verstehen [understanding]. For Simmel, therefore, the method of verstehen is so important because only it offers the preconditions that allow one to check the truth-content of what has been cognitively constructed. And because verstehen is so important, one has to deal with it and clarify its background: “But what does this verstehen mean and what are its conditions?” (ibid.). “Apparently the first condition is that those mental operations are reconstructed within ourselves, that we are able, so to speak, to ‘put ourselves into the other person’s mind’” (ibid: 35–37). This formulation by Simmel reminds us of the frequently quoted notion of George Herbert Mead, “taking the role of the other.” For Simmel it is decisive that the creating and combining process which he calls formation has taken place within the person under study, and that the recreation of this process in the mind of the observer is now attempted.



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Simmel explains which processes of reciprocal causation [Wechsel­ wirkungen] he associates with the concept of verstehen and which processes, as a result thereof, are initiated inside the minds of both persons concerned. “Understanding an uttered sentence means that the mental operations of the speaker which led to these words will, via these words, be aroused in the listener as well …” (ibid.: 37). This formulation of Simmel’s is reminiscent of what Mead later wrote in 1922. In his article about the “Significant Symbol,” Mead stressed that the quality of a symbol can be distinguished by the correspondence of the impressions it triggers for the sender as well as for the receiver of the message (Mead 1922). Having clarified, that the item to be understood cannot be in the mind of only one isolated individual, but that it has to be the content of a reciprocal relationship, Simmel turns to a differentiation of various kinds of verstehen. Linked to the idea of the reconstruction of mental operations of one person in the mind of the other, he distinguishes between different qualities of the content of thoughts: “Such a direct reconstruction, however, only takes place and only suffices where theoretical thought-contents are at stake, where it is not essential that they originate as mental operations in this particular individual, but rather contents that present themselves in their logical form to each individual similarly. For objective pieces of knowledge, I orient myself toward the object of knowledge as does someone whose mental operations about them I ‘understand’; he merely transmits to me their content and will afterwards be, so to speak, switched off…” (Simmel 1023: 37). Here Simmel presents the first of two types of verstehen: The information passed on from one person to another is independent of the persons involved. One can illustrate this type with the following example. I listen, for instance, to the news on the radio. The announcer has transmitted something that I have understood, thereby transferring the content that was present in the mind of the newscaster into my mind. If the newscaster mentions his or her name, then this may be motivated by other reasons such as the desire to make one’s name known; but for understanding the message of the broadcast, the identity of the speaker is entirely irrelevant. Here we have a type of verstehen that deals with the transmission of theoretical contents, i.e., contents that are emotionally neutral. Should the newscaster, however, reveal some emotional arousal and cause such among his listeners as well, one would have to judge this occurrence as not belonging to the first of the two types of verstehen distinguished by Simmel. About the transition from first to his second type,

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Simmel writes: “In a way I understand not the speaker but that which is spoken. This changes immediately when anyone is driven to his utterance by a personal intention, by prejudice or anger, by fearfulness or scorn. By recognizing this motive for the utterance, we have ‘understood’ it additionally in an entirely different sense than by grasping its factual content: It is here where this verstehen refers not only to what has been spoken but also to the speaker. This latter kind of verstehen, however, and not the former, is what matters in dealing with historical personalities” (ibid: 38). And leaving the frame of reference of historical research, it of course matters in sociology. This second type of verstehen is to be clearly distinguished from the first. Here we are dealing with that interpretive procedure which Simmel considers to be decisive. In the type of communication to be interpreted we are now not only confronted with linguistic gestures being exchanged. Instead in this type of verstehen the acting person adds to the message a personal contribution – scorn, anger, sarcasm, or fearfulness, signaling the most diverse emotional and evaluative content – which the person attempting to understand must try to grasp together with the factual content of the message. Simmel’s second kind of verstehen or understanding sets itself apart by the fact that the person, who does the understanding, while reconstructing the relevant aspects of reality, can no longer ignore the subject involved in the interaction process. Here subjects as they present themselves in interaction have become objective reality themselves in a new way, and this personal, new formation process must be recreated in the act of verstehen. For Simmel it is here “self-understood that in an historical psychological sense the ‘re-creation’ is by no means an unchanged repetition of the content of the mind of the historical persons. We claim, after all, to understand each kind and each degree of love and hate, courage and despair, wish and feeling, without necessarily experiencing as our own the affects portrayed by the image that communication about those emotions generates within our minds. And yet, that process in our mind that we call comprehending or grasping evidently presupposes a psychological transformation, a condensing, or else a faded mirroring; somehow the content of these affects must be incorporated into it” (ibid.: 39). Objectively given is the Platonic, archaic image of an affect that we as observers recognize in the utterances of another person. And by reinvoking the “psychological transformation” which we experience that our counterpart has carried out, we understand. We are therefore dealing, not with physical effects of bodily behavior, but rather with what is wished



the message of interpretation11

and what is felt. And historians are scholars whose work falls short if they do not attempt, as best they can, to reconstruct, to re-paint for us, for instance, what Alexander the Great or Napoleon or whoever must have felt and wished. Simmel is clearly aware of the considerable methodical difficulties that arise in this process (ibid: 39–52). But he continues to postulate the “third realm” as objective truth, a realm which is perceived in its dynamic by the individual and brought into a form in which it then proceeds “within the subject” (ibid.: 52). This is how it is possible “that mental events take on the form of history, i.e., that the subject carrying them imagines them as if they were carried by someone else” (ibid: 52). What is happening here, when verstehen occurs, is like breaking through toward capturing the objective: “It is not that the completed, subjectively conscious imagination is retroactively worked upon, but rather that the form into which it condenses is the historical one, whose way of proceeding within the subject means, with regard to its psychological aspects, that its content has its reality in another subject” (ibid.). It is here where Simmel reaches the border between the subjective and the objective, with the consequence that his line of reasoning becomes metaphysical. To him the objective is something close to a realm of evolving truth that is, however, not normally accessible to humans. In the context of his methodical treatise he appeals to a feeling of correctness as non-verifiable evidence: “And the epistemological interpretation of this direct translation seems to me to be given by that feeling of transsubjective – but not necessarily physically real – correctness of certain psychic constellations and connections, by the recognition that, as they unfold, one’s own relations of psychic content can be allowed to speak for themselves, independently of their current objectification as thought objects” (ibid.: 53). Objective correctness, therefore, is located in the constellations and connections that through recognition are “allowed to speak,” whereby the individual becomes their medium. Characteristic are “one’s own relations of psychic content,” and it’s here where their relation forms the specific reality. It is typical for Simmel to see the locus of reality in relations. In order to explain his epistemological position in yet another way, Simmel points to the tasks that lie ahead for the history of philosophy. While it does seem as if “direct reconstruction” of the object is particularly easy in this area, “even here one is not dealing with a mechanical, even if mental, mirroring of data; what is called for, rather, is a forming of the contents of thought that were inwardly experienced and created by the

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philosopher and are then re-thought by his historian …” (ibid.: 54). Despite the fact that he illustrates his methodical position with the problems of the historian, when Simmel summarizes it as follows, it is obvious that it can be applied to the tasks of sociology as well: “Historical truth is not a mere reproduction but rather a mental activity that makes something out of its material which is given as an inner recreation. Historical truth thus creates what this material is not yet, in and of itself, and does so not only by summarizing its singularities, but by asking its own questions generated by that mental activity. In this way the singular aspects are tied together in a sense that frequently was not even in the consciousness of its ‘hero’. This happens by digging meanings and values out of its material, shaping this former time into a painting that in its presentation benefits us” today (ibid.: 55). The digging of “meanings and values out of its material” is only thinkable if one postulates an objective meaning behind the particular individual consciousness of the participating persons. Only then can the historian discover something that the hero of the historical action was not even aware of. What is the basic concern that Simmel has in mind in this treatise about epistemology and the philosophy of history? He intends to apply his processual picture of reality and his theory of formation to the work of an historian. He particularly criticizes the naive idea that writing history could grasp things as they really were in the past. “The decisive thing is to break through the barrier of epistemological naturalism which wants to make knowledge into a mirror image of reality …” (ibid: 58). Simmel’s method thereby yields not only a critique of historical naturalism but also, in an analogous way, a critique of historical materialism. But what is important about Simmel’s approach is not just the criticism of those methods which do not take the process of gaining knowledge into account or do so only inadequately. Important as an additional consequence of Simmel’s approach is the implicit picture of the human being. According to it, in the process of verstehen or understanding, the individual also finds him or herself only by proceeding through the “you” that becomes indispensable as a mediator to one’s own “I.” Modern humans increasingly find themselves puzzled by the experience of being unable to understand even their own person. “For the immediate experience, every human being we encounter is only a machine which produces utterances and gestures; that behind this appearance there is a soul and which processes occur therein, we can only infer from the analogy with our own interior that is the sole mental being directly known to us. The knowledge of the ‘I’, on the other hand, can only



the message of interpretation13

grow with the knowledge of other persons; the fundamental partition into a part that observes and a part that is being observed only comes into being via the analogy of the relationship between the ‘I’ and the other personalities” (Simmel 1907b: 76). The familiar problem of a cleavage between the subject and the object is again taken up in a new form. The other human being is initially part of the object-world for me, but since I attribute the mental processes I have observed in myself to this other person (my ‘You’) as well, I gain the opportunity to ‘grow with the knowledge of other persons’. Seen this way, the process of verstehen and the process of socialization are two aspects of the same reciprocal interrelation [Wechselwirkung]. “The structure of all verstehen, internally, is synthesis of two initially separate elements. What is given is a factual appearance that as such is not yet understood. It is joined by a second one, from the subject who perceived this appearance, that either immediately emerges from the subject or is received and pondered over, namely the understanding thought that enters into what was received first and transforms it into something understood…” (Simmel 1918a: 4). This process applies to the understanding of things as well as of persons. But for Simmel the interrelation between persons is the starting point of his thinking about the process of verstehen; the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘You,’ according to its quality, enables or prevents verstehen. It is “the relationship of one mind to another” (ibid: 3); it is at the same time “a basic occurrence of human life” (ibid.) that, according to one’s individual fate, as early childhood experience, brings about either normality or exception. Whenever it can be accomplished, it occurs as a synthesis of a not-yet-understood empirical fact with the thought-process of verstehen that is able to make the essence of the appearance accessible to being understood. The ‘You’ is granted an autonomous existence – this is another ethical consequence of Simmel’s epistemological position. The ‘I’ which wants to be able to understand and itself grow in the process must not demote its ‘You’ to an echo of – or projection-screen for – itself. It has to recognize “that the ‘You,’ rather, is a basic phenomenon, just as the ‘I’ is” (ibid: 10). The notion that one can understand in the other only what one has experienced oneself is a thought that Simmel casts aside as erroneous. Simmel traces this error to the Greek thought pattern that he mentions in connection with Plato, a thought pattern “with its solid substantialism, its clinging to the plastic security of forms” (ibid: 9), according to which “like can only be recognized by like. To us, however, this appears to be a naive, mechanistic dogma” (ibid.).

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Simmel appeals to the reader, whom he expects has had the experience of being able to understand processes in someone else without any doubt, despite never having lived through them personally. One does not have to be Caesar to understand Caesar; one does not have to be married to understand a marriage. The approach to the ‘You’ becomes identical to the approach to the objective world that would remain closed to us without the ability of verstehen. While Simmel wrote about the “relationship of one mind to another” (ibid: 3), he seems to have wanted to refer to the relationship of one soul to another: “The ‘You’ endowed with a soul on the one hand is our only ‘peer’ in the universe, the only being with whom mutual understanding is possible and with whom we can feel a ‘oneness’ as with nothing else, such that we subsume the rest of nature, where we think that we feel unity with it, under the category of the ‘You’. It is for this reason that St. Francis addresses as brothers the animals and creatures not endowed with souls” (ibid: 12). For Simmel the category of the soul contains the quality of unity, of a harmonic connection of all elements, much more explicitly than the category of the mind. The process of verstehen lets unity in the world of objects come into existence according to the pattern of one’s own soul, and it makes the singularities understandable in their interrelationship. One can therefore describe the process of verstehen as a method, in which one describes the ‘You’ one encounters as one addresses the world of objects. “The ‘You’ and verstehen are thus the same, as if expressed once as a substance and once as a function – a basic phenomenon of the human mind as are seeing and hearing, thinking and feeling, or as objectivity in general, as space and time, as the ‘I’; it is the transcendental basis for the fact that man is a ‘zoon politikon’” [a Greek word meaning a being endowed with the ability to engage in community; Aristotle’s definition of a human being] (ibid: 13). Max Weber refuses to work with an approach so deeply indebted to metaphysics. Rather than recommending the construction of the appropriate ‘You’ he introduces the construction of the tool of his ideal type. That tool is neither permitted by him to have normative implications in telling people how things ought to be, nor does he expect the ideal type to reproduce reality as it is out there objectively given. Thus, methodological realism is not his preference, and he is in agreement with Simmel on this. (Weber 1951b: 192). “He who is of the opinion that knowledge of historical reality should or can reproduce ‘unbiased’ and ‘objective’ facts will deny that the ideal types are of any use” (ibid.). To Weber the ultimate source of the ideal type is not empirical fact finding but scholarly imagination:



the message of interpretation15

“We are dealing here with the construction of interrelations which our imagination judges to be sufficiently motivated and therefore ‘objectively possible’ according to our knowledge about social regularities” (ibid.). Since, accordingly, Max Weber’s ideal type is not allowed to tell us what ought to be, and since moreover it is unable to tell us what really exists, there is every reason to fear that it will end up being seen by its critics simply as some kind of an academic toy (ibid: 193). The question “if what we are faced with is” either “purely playing with ideas or a useful contribution to scholarly concepts, can never be decided in advance: There is just one guide post for this: The success in promoting insights into concrete phenomena of culture and into the way they interact with each other, how they originate, and what they mean. Thus the construction of ideal types is not the end but the means for gaining new insights” (ibid.). Here Max Weber subjects his tool of ideal type construction to a necessary test: Did it contribute toward gaining new insights and promoting better understanding of phenomena of culture and society? It is a tool and a tool must justify itself by how useful it turns out to be when it is applied. An additional objection to constructing ideal types as Max Weber recommends them, to some critics just as serious as that of simply playing games with concepts, is the observation that they do not have a claim to permanent validity. Natural laws as discovered and conceptualized by the respective sciences are presented with the well founded expectation that they refer to unchanging facts and will therefore be eternally valid. Max Weber’s critics contribute the lack of everlasting validity of his ideal types to the immaturity of his discipline, originally economics, but applying even more forcefully to sociology. A mature field of research would be able to present results not subject to a consumption deadline, so his critics would argue. Weber, however, contributes the time limit of validity to the youthfulness of his discipline and to the lively condition of development applying to his objects under study. As is typical in debates about youth, immaturity coincides with creativity and drive toward innovation. The latter can often be found lacking in established academic disciplines. “There are sciences endowed, as it seems, with eternal youth. That applies to all historical disciplines because the incessant flow of cultural evolution supplies them time and again with novel problems to be solved. In the context of those fields of research the transience of all ideal typical constructions as well as the constant need for new ones is characteristic for how they operate” (ibid: 206). Thus Weber turns the apparent defect of his ideal type into its very virtue: For scholarship to keep up with a changing reality it must constantly adjust its

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concepts to fit the questions at hand. “The great problems of culture which shone their light on us have moved on. Therefore the time has come for scholarship to overhaul its point of view and its conceptual tools needed to look from the height of the idea down unto the stream of historical reality…” (ibid: 214). The preceding is a sketch of the verstehen method as it was published by Max Weber in 1904. However, this methodological position showing him in close affinity to Simmel was soon to be given up by Weber. During the years 1906–1911, sometimes referred to as “the dark years” (Küenzlen, 1980: 46–55), he distances himself from certain essentials of his position of 1904. In the year 1911 Weber starts working on the manuscripts which his widow was to publish as Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Weber 1956) after his death. Here we clearly find a different Weber, not to be confused with the one who wrote the 1904 texts. Of course both Weber and Simmel are co-creators of the verstehen method in sociology: As we have seen above, in a text of 1905 Weber refers to Simmel’s method as an approach he agrees with (Weber 1951c). (ibid: 92). However, in Economy and Society, written in 1911 or later (Weber 1956) Weber inserts several passages that document in which way he by then disagrees with Simmel. It can be shown that these differences are not superficial, but that they follow consistently from the respective theories of knowledge the two authors used at that time. In Weber’s text on basic concepts in sociology (Weber 1951d) we read about “Simmel’s method (as he uses it in his book Soziologie as well as in Philosophy of Money)” which Weber does not intend to follow. Contrary to Simmel, Weber announces that he will make a clear distinction between meaning that is subjectively ascribed from meaning that is objectively valid (ibid: 527). This distinction is then tied to the special approaches of different academic disciplines: The empirical sciences of social conduct (sociology and history, ibid: 528) are given the task to determine which meaning is subjectively ascribed, whereas the dogmatic fields of learning: Law, logic, ethic, and others must direct their research toward finding the true and valid meaning of a given phenomenon (ibid.). Weber’s text appears critical of Simmel when he writes that the latter “not only neglects to consistently distinguish the two forms of meaning but rather lets them intermingle intentionally” (ibid: 527). However, that observation by Weber should not be attributed to the possibility of any inaccurate way of working on Simmel’s part, rather it follows from the latter’s theory of knowledge. According to Simmel every type of meaning is by necessity the result of a construction. He does not deny the existence of



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an objectively given truth, but to him we cannot access it without changing and forming it in the process of trying to grasp it. Weber only allows such a construction process in the special case of creating the tool of an ideal type. Simmel by contrast claims that it is all we ever do, whether we admit it or not. Weber knows of course as a trained lawyer that in Law corporations and other collectivities are treated as if they were individuals. But he ties sociology to his claim of methodological individualism: Only indi­ viduals are real in the empirical sense of the word (ibid: 539). Large groups, classes, and other phenomena of the macro sphere of society exist only as “imaginations inside the heads of real people” (ibid.). They must therefore be distinguished from the empirical world of real human conduct (ibid: 540). This is the difference between Simmel and Max Weber! For Simmel in culture and society all mental and social reality exists as imagined. If those phenomena cannot be found in anybody’s mind, they simply do not exist anymore. Because of this, the distinction between types of meaning proposed by Weber does not make any sense for Simmel. George Herbert Mead replaces Simmel’s ‘You’ with the concept of perspective (Mead 1927). Thereby he clarifies Simmel’s basic thought, according to which the ‘You’ should be introduced into the method of verstehen as a hypothetical construct. A social scientist who is confronted with the task of verstehen simulates or construes a hypothetical ‘You,’ then conceives the research field from the viewpoint (or perspective) of this ‘You’ and, by communicating the chosen ‘You,’ makes his or her procedure verifiable. A critique of such research may then relate to the questions: a) Was the choice of the perspective adequate for the subject?; b) Was the thought construction of the object to be understood, done in such a way that it would follow from the chosen perspective? In the tradition of verstehensociology, this approach has continued to be influential. The path of its refinement and concretization can be traced through the works of Mead, Charles H. Cooley, Max Weber, Anselm Strauss, Tamotsu Shibutani, and others. The Controversy about Pragmatism Simmel versus Conventional Philosophy Simmel’s work has been controversial from the start. In spite of the reserva­ tions toward his ideas of many philosophers who were his contemporaries,

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he created an alternate version of pragmatism, similar to what Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey developed in the U.S.A.. But any version of pragmatism, whether the one Simmel initiated or the American one, was a highly provocative position in philosophy in his lifetime. The opposition against him eventually culminated in the rejection of pragmatism, but it originated from a number of different points of departure. In the continuity of Spinoza (1632–1677), he confronted the dogmatism of some philosophers, who did not want to permit interpretation, with fresh insights into human nature which were later accepted by Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim and others. Simmel preferred to see sociology in the companionship of philosophy, history, social psychology, and other humanities. This meant of course that to him sociology is not a distant relative to physics, biology, or physiology. As a philosopher of ethics he proposed a dynamic approach to human behavior because he saw culture and society evolve over time. This antagonized Neo-Platonists in whose view what is real must be eternal and therefore unchanging. Like Spinoza before him he was aware of the relevance of human emotions. By acknowledging that actions of women and men are in part driven by emotions and that certainly the process of reality construction is influenced by such sentiments as optimism or pessimism, he unintentionally provoked those who solely view human behavior as subject to eternal, never changing codes of conduct and to rational decision making. To them the commands given to humans, be it by gods or by politicians, are not allowed to imply any semblance of ambiguity. With regard to commands given in the military this is immediately plausible. But the general principles of ethic like: do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you, have different meanings and consequences in different contexts. Indeed, the parable of the Good Samaritan is a very emotional and ambiguous story about the stranger from Samaria doing the good deeds which the natives refused to perform. Simmel’s critics suggest that his diverse subject matter is confusing. Thus, many claim that sociologically he did not know what he was doing. They point out that Simmel simply drifted from one area of interest to the next. This implies the absence of any systematic order in his scholarly activities. However, if we see Simmel as a scholar who spent his entire life searching for a method that would fit the study of culture and society, we can dispel this negative impression and rather ask what his message really is. The diversity of Simmel’s topics is the way he scholarly tested his epistemology. Once he succeeded in devising the proper method for



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social inquiry, it proved fruitful in his investigations on the stranger, the adventurer, and the poor, on art, love, and religion. Decades before Berger and Luckmann (1967), the message that reality is socially constructed is clearly evident in Simmel’s writings. Simmel was a philosopher, yet sociologists consider him one of their classics because he is the founder of the humanist branch of the field: The interpretive school. Contemporary theorists are deeply indebted to him as is amply documented by the frequent references to his work in recent publications. Yet, the interpretive school is controversial by itself. In concluding then that a sociology of culture ought to be an interpretive sociology, Simmel is in his own way a precursor to Max Weber, Robert E. Park, Erving Goffman, Anselm L. Strauss and others. He influenced many contemporary scholars. His sociology has consistently been based on his philosophy. He appears to have picked up and modified statements by Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, as we shall explain in chapter 5. These greats helped Simmel find his own position which he then compares in literary dialogue with those of Goethe, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others. But he creates consternation among the established followers of Plato, or of Kant, or of Marx, by not persisting in some kind of admiration mode, but rather by selectively accepting some of the results those heroes of scholarship came up with while rejecting or criticizing others. This meant that Simmel was at odds with conventional philosophy. In fact, his dealing with established insights is liable to raise objections even today, because the very same idea was in some cases rejected by Simmel in one way, yet accepted in another. This needs some explanation: As shall be detailed in chapter 5, Simmel rejects Plato’s eternal ideas as never changing phenomena that have been observed by everyone in the beyond prior to their birth and then enable them to have intuitive insights here on earth. To Simmel they did not, as Plato assumed, exist in their own right only waiting to be discovered and observed. Rather according to Simmel’s interpretation of Plato, they were brilliant inventions Plato created and introduced then as heuristic tools. It was thus not Plato’s eternal ideas which Simmel rejected but rather Plato’s explanation of how they originated. Or, to take another example: The method of historical materialism by Karl Marx. To claim, as Marx has done, that history is determined by economic factors alone, is absurd to Simmel, because countless his­ torical  developments have religious or other non-material causes. But to study history as if the economy were in fact the all decisive source of development is to Simmel a very fruitful and legitimate approach.

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Accordingly, Simmel rejects historical materialism as a description of history, and at the same time applauds it as a tool and source of novel insights. This was bound to confuse (or enrage) both Marxists and antiMarxists. In addition, Simmel incorporates Marx’s concept of alienation into his philosophy of life: Mental activity produces something which no longer acknowledges its origin but becomes – in Simmel’s terminology – “eigenbedeutsam und eigengesetzlich” (self-significant and self-regulating, Simmel 1918c: 25), and accordingly has the potential of becoming alien to its maker. This happens because human life is continually grasping for the unfamiliar and thereby brings forth that which becomes alien by becoming self-reliant. While Marx considers that a deplorable defect of the production process in capitalist society, Simmel sees in it the inevitable mark of the human condition in general. Like in a parent-child relation the mental product, the idea someone has, the book he or she writes, can be regarded as emancipated rather than alienated: It is not a runaway extension of the subject who made it, but instead may legitimately stand by itself, having started a life of its own. This is what Simmel calls “Mehr-als-Leben-Sein” (to be more than life). It is a controversial position bordering of course on metaphysics, but at the same time opening up new potentials for interpreting modernity. It is not easy to sort Simmel into a specific category: The obvious question would be: Is Simmel a materialist or an idealist? He cannot simply be counted among philosophical idealists: In Plato’s view, the world – including the eternal ideas in the beyond – is what I see. That is not acceptable to Simmel because the consequence would be that what I cannot see does not exist and all that which transcends life becomes an illusion. Instead Simmel wants to accept what is out there as objective reality in its own right even if we cannot fully grasp it, facing us prima facie as alien and yet as created by a life we can identify with because it is our own life or one of the lives of those close to us. To Simmel reality is too vast and too complex for the human mind to grasp. Many of his critics would reject that because they do not share Simmel’s modest expectations of what scholarship can achieve. The only chance men and women have therefore for Simmel, is to create tools for selecting, describing, and placing in context those segments of reality that correspond to their interests and emotions. The construction of ideal types as recommended by Max Weber is for Simmel essentially all we ever do: Scholarship is – whether admitted or not – the creation of heuristic



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tools. This controversial insight and the message that reality is socially constructed are rooted in Simmel’s epistemology. This message is welcome to some but a provocation to others. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy One significant source of controversy about Simmel’s approach resulted from his closeness to philosophical pragmatism. That is a school of thought today typically associated with the American philosophers Charles S. Pierce, William James and John Dewey. It appears, however, that Simmel started his own version of pragmatism earlier. Thus he first anticipated the pragmatism of the three Americans, and later criticized their version of that school of thought. To see in Simmel the founder of pragmatism is so contra-intuitive that in the following an unusually large number of quotations will be used to back up that view. Simmel’s point of departure on the subject is as follows: “If it is true that human knowledge has developed from practical necessities, because knowledge of the truth is a weapon in the struggle for existence, both against non-human elements and within the contest amongst men – if this is true, then such knowledge has long ceased to be bound to this origin, and has developed from the mere service of action, as a means to an end, to being an ultimate end in itself. Nonetheless, knowledge – even in the self-glorified form of science and learning – has not broken off all links to practical interests…” (Simmel, 1908a: 1). The search for reliable insight can only be successful if the subject who strives for knowledge is active. What is demanded is autonomous and potentially creative conduct. Building upon Kant, Simmel creates the epistemology of an active human being, an approach that William James was to name pragmatism. Because in the process of acting, the interests of the subject flow into the process of gaining knowledge, Simmel sees as the central concern of Kant’s system not thinking but the will. What matters to Simmel is this: A given body of knowledge must be assumed to guide and command action, even if its validity cannot be tested, let alone proven. No matter how far removed that knowledge may be from objective reality, it will produce action and nobody can deny that then the results will be real. Since sociology is (also) the study of human conduct, the pragmatist approach as suggested by Simmel makes it plausible to assign types of knowledge a status of reality not according to what has preceded it to bring it about, but rather according to what action may potentially result from it or has resulted from it.

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In Simmel’s two-volume “Introduction to Moral Science” from 1892/93, the problems of epistemology that had haunted him before reappear as aspects of evolutionism and lead Simmel to new results. It is typical for him that he portrays the process of gaining knowledge as having parallels to that in practical life. This causes Simmel’s epistemology to resemble philosophical pragmatism of America, whose advocate he had been in his early works but from which he explicitly distanced himself shortly before his death. Wilhelm Jerusalem criticized as erroneous Simmel’s rebuttal of American pragmatism (Jerusalem, 1913: col. 3223f). The eulogy to Simmel by Max Frischeisen-Köhler refers to the relation between pragmatism and evolutionism in Simmel’s work: “This approach to English evolutionism even led him to statements that precede the theory of truth of pragmatism. The world views of living beings are, as functions of a specific psycho-physical organization, no mechanical imitations of the objective world. One cannot attach “truth” to them. But since they are, however, the material of and directive for practical behavior, we differentiate between those that lead us to useful and those that lead us to harmful behavior. Therefore, those images are true that lead us to useful consequences in the context of their specific organization, their force, and their needs. This is why there are, in principle, as many different truths as there are specific organizations and requirements of life.” (FrischeisenKöhler, 1919: 15). Without explicitly quoting Simmel, Frischeisen-Köhler in this statement about Simmel’s contribution to the theory of truth in the context of pragmatism is apparently referring to his “Philosophy of Money” from 1900 (Simmel, 1907b: 56). As we shall see, Jerusalem also seems to refer to the same passage (Jerusalem, 1913: 3223) as Frischeisen-Köhler. Simmel’s position becomes clearer, however, when one takes into account his article, “About a Relationship between the Theories of Selection and Knowledge” (Simmel, 1895c). Neither Jerusalem nor Frischeisen-Köhler take this article into account. In it, Simmel elaborates on what he means by different “organizations and requirements of life,” each of which seemingly have their own truth: “For the animal, the true image is the one according to which it behaves in a way that is, for its circumstances, the most advantageous, because the requirement of this kind of behavior has itself built the organs which form its images. The diversity of the actually existing world of the senses proves, that there have to be many such truths” (Simmel, 1922b: 119). An “organization”, therefore, is a living being that – according to evolutionary thinking – does not belong to an unchanging “eternal species” but



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rather it is but a snapshot of a moment in the gigantic process of the development of life. As a consequence of selection, “organs” have been built that form the images which the living being perceives. And just as the organs develop that determine these images, so too the content of these images and their respective “truths” develop. From this line of reasoning, it becomes apparent how the theory of truth in the context of pragmatism emerges straight from evolutionism according to Darwin. In late 1913 (or early 1914) Wilhelm Jerusalem gave an overview of the state of the art of pragmatism. He deplored the difficulties this theory of truth had faced in the German speaking region and that it continued to be the target of unfair attacks. Such difficulties and attacks may have something to do, Jerusalem writes, with the connection between this theory and evolutionism and hence between pragmatism and Darwin’s thought. The attacks came from supporters of German Idealism, who as neoKantians and neo-Hegelians rejected what they considered to be “American Philistine” endeavors (Jerusalem, 1913: 3205). With his leanings towards the thought of Kant, on the one hand, and his apparent sympathies for Darwin on the other, Simmel must have come early in between the fronts of this controversy. In fact, he seems to have tried to counter the most popular objection to pragmatism, which focused on the short formula “truth = benefit” with the following statement: “The effect of the principle of utility or any other principle that drives us toward knowledge, has, therefore, no formative influence upon the content of this knowledge; it only brings about that this content, which is as it is and cannot be anything else than it is, will be realized psychically – just as utility could lead us to do a mathematical calculation but not lead us to arrive at a mathematical result different from that grounded in the objective relationship among the component factors …” (Simmel, 1922b: 111) Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Jerusalem presents to the German reader the American philosopher Charles Pierce as being the “creator of this line of thought” (Jerusalem, 1913: 3206). According to Pierce, what matters in a judgment is its content relevant to life and that this content is equal to the direct or indirect measures that the subject is taking. Thinking thereby serves to prepare, accompany, and interpret behavior. It is not separate from life but part of it. In general, not the part explains the whole but, inversely, the whole always explains the part; and since thinking is part of life, life can explain thinking and not vice versa (ibid: 3206). According to Jerusalem, the leading thinkers of pragmatism in 1913 where William James from Harvard University, John Dewey from

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Columbia University in New York (formerly at The University of Chicago), and F.C.S. Schiller in Oxford, England. The main literature to which Jerusalem refers the German reader is: John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and other Essays in Contemporary Thought” (Dewey, 1910). In this volume, the importance of the theory of development and selection is explained to philosophers thus: “Dewey finds this influence to begin with therein, that the concept of species – this prototype of solidity and absence of change – is transformed into a process. Philosophy, which labored for 2000 years with the search for rigid unchangeable forms is thereby led in the direction of change and becoming” (Jerusalem 1913: 3210). This is in line with the pragmatists’ claim “that truth cannot mean a static relationship between thinking and being, but that it keeps proving itself through its effects on the process of knowing and acting” (ibid.: 3211). Jerusalem translates (into German) from a book by Ralph Barton Perry of Harvard University (Perry, 1912) the following sentence. “The pragmatist brings life into the intellect, his enemy intellectualizes life” (Jerusalem, 1913: 3212). Jerusalem’s own words demonstrate how easy it is, despite all these clarifications, to misunderstand the theory of truth in pragmatism as merely being oriented to utility: “Images and judgments are, for the pragmatist, not copies of reality but means and tools with which the human mind operates in order to grasp reality and to get along in it and thereby to identify those measures that improve life. A judgment is true when it is corroborated, when the predictions based on it are accurate, when the actions that are taken in accordance with these predictions are successful adaptations to the environment” (ibid: 3213). It seems at this point as if Simmel’s own program, namely to declare the dynamics of developing life as supreme value, has found a specific form in these statements. Simmel had earlier interpreted Plato’s ideas, not as statements about a transcendental reality but as tools used in the philosopher’s workshop. According to Simmel there is a remarkable ability of the knowing subject, to hide the following even to himself: What he or she experiences as given objects is in fact the result of his own creative construction of reality. Those creations of the human mind are mistakenly assumed to be elements of an independent reality, but they must be interpreted as heuristic instruments, as man-made tools in the epistemological process. In pragmatism then, as presented by Jerusalem, images become tools not only of theoretical thought but for the very concrete purpose of determining, which measures improve life and which do not.



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The philosophy of vitalism is also treated by Jerusalem in the context of pragmatist thinking. (On the meaning of vitalism in Simmel’s work, see: Bevers 1985.) Henri Bergson’s works play an important role in inspiring Simmel’s vitalist thinking (Simmel, 1914). According to Jerusalem, the philosophy of Bergson has “two sides, one pragmatic and the other mysticalspeculative” (ibid: 3215). Bergson has, furthermore, a kind of personal relationship with pragmatism. His concept of the intellect had a strong influence on William James. In his book “A Pluralistic Universe” (1909; German Translation, Leipzig: Kröner, 1914), James spends a whole lecture analyzing the philosophy of Bergson (pp. 225–273). He admires the depth of thought and the enchantment of the presentation. James shows full appreciation for the “pure time” or “real duration” (durée réelle) and for the inability of logical thinking to grasp the flowing stream of life (ibid: 3217). This reference to James strengthens the seemingly surprising hypothesis of a connection between Bergson and pragmatism. Jerusalem even draws a line to Nietzsche but apparently only insofar as “life is a basic category” (ibid: 3219). “At the philosophers’ convention in Heidelberg in 1908, pragmatism was the subject of lively debates. Objectively one may say that the discussions were heated, often even fierce, that they revealed very great interest in this new line of thinking, and that the majority of participants were opposed to it” (ibid.: 3220). Five years later, Jerusalem has to recognize that pragmatism – as well as empiricism, psychologism, and positivism – are considered to be inferior to the established philosophy and considered as having been surpassed. In Germany, pragmatism never really could put down roots. This fragile plant had been uprooted before it could gain strength. The fate of pragmatism in the German speaking regions impacted the reputation of Simmel’s scholarly achievements. Five years before the turn of the century, Simmel published a paper in the first issue of the first volume of the journal, “Archiv für systematische Philosophie”. In this article “About a Relationship Between the Theories of Selection and Behavior” (Simmel, 1895c; Simmel, 1922b), he develops what he considers to be the foundations of pragmatism. The introductory sentences contain, in a nutshell, what is important about it to Simmel. He refers to the hypothesis that he subscribes to, “that human knowledge emerges from practical necessities” (Simmel, 1922b: 111). But while he concedes necessity-boundedness, he attributes it to the process of gaining knowledge but not to objective truth. This distinction is of the utmost importance because it characterizes Simmel’s position particularly insofar as he differs from other pragmatists. As will be shown,

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he continued to carry this point through in a consistent manner up to and including his last contribution on this topic (Simmel, 1918b). In this last work he emphatically rejects the American variants of pragmatism, because they do not follow him in making this distinction. The publication of the work “About a Relationship between the Theories of Selection and Knowledge” (Simmel, 1895c) happened at about the middle of the time span during which Simmel worked on the topic of money. Simmel’s contemporary, Jerusalem, had read this Philosophy of Money, first published in 1900, from the point of view of its methodological content and particularly of its contribution to clarifying the pragmatist concept of truth. Jerusalem writes: “Formerly I had counted Georg Simmel among the thinkers who were oriented in the pragmatist direction. I did this on the basis of his discussion of the concept of truth in his book, The Philosophy of Money. In it he says (p. 56): ‘What is the meaning of this truth, in essence, which in its content is different for each species endowed with consciousness and is for none a mirroring of objects as such? Could it be anything else but that image which, in connection with the total special organization, its forces and needs, leads to useful consequences? Originally the truth is not useful because it is true but vice-versa. We attach the honorary title of truth to those images that are effective as real forces or movements in us, and that bring us to behave beneficially.’ It is hardly possible to express the pragmatist concept of truth any more clearly or decisively than Simmel has done in his quotation. Therefore I was justified in having considered Simmel to be a representative of pragmatist thought. But in the meantime this deep-digging philosopher seems to have changed his mind” (Jerusalem, 1913: 3223). From the point of view of Jerusalem, Simmel’s formulations in his The Philosophy of Money fall entirely within the context of pragmatism. Jerusalem does not see a distinction between Simmel’s point of view and the positions as held in the United States and England. Simmel’s later rejection of English-speaking pragmatism provides Jerusalem with the impression that Simmel must have “changed his mind.” It will be shown that Jerusalem erred, that Simmel kept his position unchanged, and that there are significant methodological differences between Simmel and American pragmatism. To begin with, the consistency of the method used in the article on the theory of selection from 1895 with that used in The Philosophy of Money in 1900 shall be demonstrated. The question to which Jerusalem refers was on page 56 of the first edition. In later editions, one finds it on page 69. The text excerpt that was meant to prove Simmel’s membership in the camp of pragmatism follows



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immediately after two sentences that exactly correspond to the line of reasoning used in the article on the theory of selection: “By no means can one decide, on the basis of the content of its image, whether a behavior led and determined by constructs of the imagination has useful consequences for the acting person – regardless of whether this content does or does not correspond with absolute objectivity. It will rather depend entirely upon the success toward which this imagination leads, as a real process within the organism in conjunction with the other physical-psychic forces and according to the specific requirements of life for it. If we say of a human being that he acts in a life-preserving and life-enhancing manner only on the basis of true images, but destructively on the basis of false ones, what is the meaning of this truth, in essence, which in its content is different for each species endowed with consciousness and is for none a mirroring of objects as such? Could it be anything else but that image which, in connection with the total special organization, its forces and needs, leads to useful consequences?” (Simmel, 1907b: 69). The relevance of images for behavior does not depend upon the contents alone. From the article on the theory of selection, we are already familiar with this idea. Against the background of evolutionism, truth cannot be conceptualized statically. It is, rather, no more eternal than is the concept of species, which Darwin has shown to be a snap-shot of one moment in the history of biological evolution. Both in his article of 1895 (Simmel 1895c) and in his book of 1900, Simmel poses the question, on the basis of which circumstances are certain images attributed the quality of being the truth. He does not make the answer easy for himself by simply saying: True is what the actor considers to be true. With such a statement, the subject-object problem would have been eliminated by a one-sided simplification and a mere retreating to the subject. The hasty reader, however, can misunderstand Simmel as having said this, which had apparently happened repeatedly. Despite this, Simmel remained untiring in his efforts to recall for himself and his readers that an objective truth may exist even if we cannot grasp it. Thus the quest for objective truth must not cease and Simmel offers the way toward mutuality of contexts, because images out of context cannot be examined for their truth content. Only in overarching constellations can one detect whether the particulars in question fit to each other, support and confirm each other. “Unless we stick dogmatically to a truth once and for all, truth by definition not requiring any proof, one would be well advised to consider this mutuality of the interconnectedness of items as the emergence of a pattern, as being the basic form of grasping knowledge

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which can be conceptualized as analytically ideal. The process of grasping knowledge is thereby a free-floating process whose elements mutually determine their position, in the same way as the masses of matter do on the basis of their gravity; in the same way as in the latter, truth (like mass) is a relational concept. That our image of the world thus floats in the air is not disturbing, because our world itself does it” (ibid: 68, compare Einstein, relativity). Like a pendulum, Simmel’s thinking swings back and forth between the question of the origin of the objective truth on the one hand and the question of its application to the behavior of human beings on the other. Step by step, the problem for him moves into process-terms: From the form to the process of formation, from the truth to the attribution of the quality of being considered as true. So it is to be expected that he deals with evaluations and it is that which Simmel wants to examine also with regard to money. The isolated individual is unable to evaluate with any expectation of success, using whatever isolated value spontaneously occurs to him or her. In order to safely evaluate, he has to orient himself to a manifold of relations. This is why attribution processes, while enacted by persons, nevertheless are not arbitrary. Truth is relational or, as Simmel writes (somewhat confusingly, perhaps out of a certain desire to shock): it is relative. “What we mean by this term is apparently something entirely different: The relativity is not an additional qualification which waters down a concept of truth that is otherwise independent, but it is the essence of truth itself. It is the way in which images become truths. Relativity does not mean, as such a trivial interpretation might suggest, a lessening of truth, from which – considering the reputation of this concept truth – one could really have expected more. But, to the contrary, it is a positive filling of the term with meaning and validity. There truth exists although it is relative, here because it is relative” (ibid: 81). Simmel has finally expressly made the transition from the theory of truth to the theory of evaluation. Still admiringly, he looks back at Plato’s realm of ideas, which Simmel thinks to be the result of definitional forming. What matters is the quality of being objective, of being removed from the arbitrary grasp of a spontaneous subject, and the model of Platonic ideas for Simmel fulfills this condition just as much in the realm of truth as it does in the realm of values. “The deeper dissatisfaction with the knowable world, to which we nevertheless are tied, led Plato to assume a supra-empirical realm of ideas beyond space and time. This realm of ideas supposedly contains within it the real, self-content, absolute essence of things. For its benefit, earthly



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reality was emptied of all real being and meaning on the one hand; on the other hand, some rays of knowing reflect back to this reality, so that at least as a pale shadow earthly reality could participate in this illuminating realm of the absolute. Via this indirect route it finally did gain some importance after all, which in and of itself it was denied. This relationship, in fact, finds a repetition of corroboration in the area of values” (ibid: 135). Human beings run the risk of evaluating falsely, because they miss what is objectively correct. By no means does Simmel want to be distracted from this uncomfortable insight. Nobody can gain popularity with this message neither today or in Simmel’s lifetime. If one wants to popularize Simmel today, one should not mention this side of the author. And this does happen. Simmel refutes dogmatism and easily harvests applause for so doing. But Simmel also rejects subjectivism and that makes him unpopular with some readers of his work. “These insights are not wanting in normative firmness: Yes, every imagining being possesses a truth that is predetermined in principle, which in any single case his imagining may grasp or miss” (ibid.: 70). Accordingly guilt and failure belong, as possibilities, to human existence. With astonishment and disappointment but undoubtedly correctly, the introduction to an English translation of the “Philosophy of Money” says: “Ultimately then, Simmel’s analysis of the capitalist social order has little in common with that of a socialist critique” (Bottomore, 1978: 29). There appears to be a “‘truth’ that is predetermined in principle” that, when interpreting the texts of Simmel, may be grasped or missed. Simmel’s Critique of Subjectivist Pragmatism Simmel’s critique of American pragmatism is for Wilhelm Jerusalem the signal that Simmel has changed: “In his recently published book on Goethe (Leipzig 1913), there is a chapter entitled Truth (pp. 20–49). Here Simmel opposes the opinion that Goethe had thought pragmatically … but regardless of whether Simmel has or has not correctly captured Goethe’s way of thinking, it is beyond doubt that Simmel has turned his back on pragmatism. He is, of course, entitled to do so, but it is incomprehensible to me how he can come to speak of the ‘crudest forms of pragmatism’ (p. 21). Prag­ matism isn’t crude in the sense of ‘rude’, i.e. without understanding the fine differentiations of the soul. Applied to someone like William James, such a reproach would be simply ridiculous” (Jerusalem, 1913: 3223). From that which he, in a consistent continuation of his methodic position, must have considered crude, Simmel distanced himself most clearly

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and convincingly in a brilliant talk that was published in 1918, the year of his death. Under the title of “The Conflict of Modern Culture,” he deals in 44 pages (pp. 5–48) with the tension between form and life and illustrates the applicability of his thought pattern to questions of art, youth, the new ethic including sexuality, and religion (Simmel, 1918b). Simmel sees youth, with its proclivity toward “outer and inner revolutionaryism” (ibid: 26), as the carrier of historical change. “While old age, with its declining vitality, concentrates more and more upon the objective contents of life (which in the present sense may also be called its forms), what matters for youth is the process of life …” (ibid.: 27). Simmel criticizes an exaggerated inclination among young people toward originality: “What is supposed to be rescued in these cases is not the individuality of life but rather the life of individuality” (ibid: 28). He sees the equilibrium between form and life in danger as a result of a strong shift toward the processual. With regard to its relationship to forms, it could be said about youth that it is “frequently enough disloyal to them” (ibid.: 27). In connection with “modern individualism” (ibid: 28), Simmel sees a neglect of the objective. And the same individualistic behavior that characterizes youth – which Simmel clearly dislikes – he detects as a tendency within American pragmatism as well: “I am attempting now to prove the presence of the same basic intention in one of the most recent philosophical movements, which has most decisively turned its back on the historically fortified patterns of philosophy. I will call it pragmatism, because the best known branch of this theory, namely the American one, has been given this name and which, by the way, I consider to be the most superficial and most limited branch” (ibid.). This diagnosis of superficiality is tied to the impression that “a neglect of the objective” seems to be obvious there. This critique requires further justification: Very different schools of philosophy agree with the position that there exists an independent process of knowing, i.e. independent of “the individualization and fates of life” (ibid: 29). This is the effort of grasping the concept of a thing, which already Socrates had set as his goal. Simmel repeats what he had always stressed in his previous works: There is a knowledge that “remains attached to an ideal realm of truth, an order in its own right with its own laws” (ibid.). But: “Pragmatism denies this independence that was always ascribed to truth. Every journey of life, whether it is an outer or an inner one, rests according to pragmatism upon certain images of knowing which, if true, preserve and improve our life and, if erroneous, lead us toward destruction” (ibid.: 29).



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With regard to truth, Simmel sees two problems: The question of the theoretical approach toward objective truth and the question of the acceptance or rejection of truth on the subjective level. He presented – as we have seen – the example of motivation by vital interests, which could lead a person to execute a certain mathematical calculation but which could not alter or make false the result of that calculation. For Simmel, it is as if truth hovers over us and we potentially work it into our behavior, incorporating or ignoring it. American Pragmatism, however, is individualistic and subjectivistic and is not aware of the existence of an ideal realm of what is true: “Therefore there exists no a priori independent truth that, as if retroactively, is pulled down into the stream of life in order to lead one’s life correctly, but the reverse: Among the countless theoretical elements to which this stream gives birth, are those whose influence conforms to our will to life – by chance, one could say; but without this chance we would not be able to exist – and it is these elements we call the true ones, the ones that grasp knowledge correctly. Neither the objects in and of themselves, nor a sovereign mind in us, determine the truth content of our images; rather, life itself produces, sometimes according to its crude utilities, sometimes according to the deepest needs of the soul, that ranking of values among our images whose one pole we call the full truth and whose other pole we call full error” (ibid.: 30). Reflecting what he considers to be the theory of truth in the context of pragmatism, Simmel mentions, as the sources of the “ranking of values,” the “crude utilities” and the “deepest needs of the soul.” In so doing, there emerges a picture of a gliding transition on a scale from truth to error, on which full truth and full error occupy the extreme positions. But Simmel hesitates. He does not spar with angry blows against an erroneous theory. Not even its “correctness or falsity” matters to him: “I am not about to explicate or criticize this theory. Its correctness or falsity does not matter to me either. What matters is that it has been developed at this particular point in time, that it denies to human knowledge its old claim of being a free-floating realm administered according to ideal laws in its own right” (ibid.: 31). That is the core of Simmel’s critique. Pragmatism, in Simmel’s opinion, signifies a time period during which it becomes fashionable. It is itself a form of truth which seems to be legitimated by life as it was lived, particularly around 1918, and this relativity to a historical condition probably ought to trigger distrust. In conclusion, Simmel distinguishes between an original and the new pragmatism, whereby the original is likely to be Simmel’s own version, which – to his dismay – was then misrepresented or misinterpreted. “While namely the

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original pragmatism dissolved the world view into life only from the side of the subject, the new one did the same from the side of the object as well. Nothing remained of that concept of form that has been considered a principle of the world outside of life and a fixation of existence with its own meaning and own power. What in this picture could still be called form exists only by the mercy of life itself” (ibid: 33). “Form as a principle of the world outside of life” (ibid.) is necessary for Simmel as a prerequisite for his sociology. But if it is permitted to exist “only by the mercy of life itself” (ibid.) it will result merely in a methodological point of departure (as was the case with some of the immediate successors to the three founders of American pragmatism) that may lead to social psychology but hardly to macro-sociology (Strauss 2009). The tension between subject and object is one of the main general topics in Simmel’s works. Knowing about the limited ability of human beings to gain insights corresponds to attributing to this human subject a necessity-boundedness. “Objective truth,” however, stands above such limitations; Simmel does not want to leave the contents of such truth to “the practical necessities of the maintenance and care of life.” The different schools of the theory of knowledge, by the way, seem to agree with this point: An objective truth can be found independently of whether or not the individual who is interested in practical actions accepts it. The different schools of philosophy are not in agreement on how such objective truth comes about. For realism, “the process of gaining knowledge is a direct perception and mirroring of absolute reality” (ibid.), while for idealism truth is determined by “a priori forms of thinking” (ibid.). To Simmel the fallible human being in his action may accept not at all, or only selectively, the truth that in principle is available to him. And insofar as the truth is not accepted, it will lead to false actions. To demand that knowledge must be corroborated in practical behavior leads back to Socrates, and Simmel sees in this demand the ancient and only legitimate root of philosophical pragmatism. Although in the development of the theory of knowledge one has to struggle with ever-changing new means on the path toward objective truth, one should never give up this quest. For Simmel it is clear “that an objective truth exists whose content is not influenced by the practical interest of the subject: Only that we grasp it, that we realize it in our images, happens according to utility which prefers imagining the true to imagining the erroneous” (ibid.). Simmel thus emphatically restricts the reflection of the influence of utility thoughts to the process of accepting an already existent truth, that itself is entirely uninfluenced by this



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process. We have seen the same line of reasoning in the previously mentioned analogy to the mathematical calculation, which may have been executed with certain interests in mind but whose outcome remains independent in its numerical value by these interests. As was already pointed out, Simmel intended to examine in this article the relation between the theory of selection, which goes back to Darwin, and the theory of knowledge. This theory of selection claims to be able to say something about the content of objective truth and the process by which it is generated. “Since only the true thought could be the foundation of a behavior that benefits life, the truth of building images should be cultivated in the same way as are our muscles” (Simmel 1922b: 112). One could talk about a friction-free transition from a biological evolutionism to an evolutionism in the humanities, if the destruction of images that are contrary to life could be supposed to occur in the same way – via breeding selection – as the destruction of bodily characteristics that are not conducive to survival. Very oversimplified, one could say: He who thinks nonsense is thereby prevented from procreation. Simmel entertains this thought as a hypothesis and analyses it in his typical careful manner. Simmel is aware that there is a tension between subject and object according to the hypothesis of selection theory. A subject pursues in this tension those interests that are useful for his or her life; at the same time, there exists an objective truth, whether or not this is perceived. It has arrived at its current form via the evolutionary process. The human being shares with objective life the destiny of being coined by the dynamics of development. If both the current state of the subject (with his interests) and of the objective truth (with its validity beyond individual characteristics) are the result of one and only one developmental process, then one could detect in this a basis for overcoming the subject-object tension. One could identify optimistic points of entry that approach the vital leanings of the subject with less distrust, because they are just as much the products of selection as is the reality in which the subject must act. The idea of an evolutionary process serves here as a bridge between subjective and objective, just as did the realm of ideas for Plato. Simmel himself formulates this thought process as follows: “Faced with this plausible hypothesis, I would like now to ask whether one could not find a unitary principle for the duality contained in this hypothesis, i.e. the practical vital needs on the one hand and a corresponding objectively knowable world on the other; In other words, have these two seemingly opposing independent elements, the outer reality and the subjective

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utility – which only can be related to each other on the basis of getting to know the latter – already met each other at a deeper level?” (ibid.) Simmel inverts Socrates’ demand that one must help a human being to think correctly, in order that he can act correctly, as follows: If the assumption of Socrates is correct, i.e. if correct thinking leads to correct acting, one can reverse the direction and conclude that the person whose conduct turned out to be correct must have thought correctly. But if there is no reliably criterion for correctness other than the success of behavior, then Simmel as a theoretician of knowledge cannot be content with the state of philosophy. So he is thrown back to struggling with Plato’s realm of ideas. Where Plato had seen a transcendental reality, Simmel saw a mental construction. Simmel always admitted the necessity of postulating Platonic ideas, because man tends to consider his thinking to be true only if it is related to an objective thing. And even where an object cannot be grasped reliably, i.e. where it is uncertain whether it exists at all, human beings manage to create it in a mental process. In order to behave correctly, a human subject needs thoughts that he considers to be true; he can only consider his thoughts to be true if they are related to an object. In those cases where the human ability of thinking is not sufficient to reveal the existence of objective truth as given, it is necessary and therefore also legitimate – in order to secure one’s ability to act – to define such truth as given. “One could therefore perhaps say: There is no theoretically valid truth on the basis of which we could proceed to act in a goal-oriented way; rather, we call those ideas true that have proven themselves as motives of goal-adaptive, life-enhancing behavior. Thereby the above-stressed dualism would be removed; the truth of the ideas would no longer be based upon their correspondence with any reality, but would be based upon that quality of the ideas which made them the cause of the most beneficial behavior; and it remains entirely undecided whether the content of such ideas bears a resemblance or possesses a stable relationship to an objective order of things. The only question is whether the concept of truth can live without the image of a corresponding objectivity” (ibid: 113). In this last sentence, Simmel articulates his discomfort: Could one label as truth a thought that owes its existence and content to an act of definition? Unless philosophy escapes the requirement to help human beings to behave effectively, it is mandated to conceive the theory of knowledge in a Socratic manner: The person who is thinking correctly (whether ‘true’ or not) is he whose behavior is beneficial. Then thinking will be measured



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according to what kind of behavior it motivates and thereby the content of thinking can be amazingly diverse. What matters is that a person conceives of something which brings him or her to behave correctly, even if the content of his ideas is perhaps entirely made up, utopian, dreamed up, carried along by blind courage or elementary fear – at any rate, aroused by definitions that certainly are not ‘true’ in the sense that they would correspond to any presence of an objectively testable thing. “Or in other words: the images that guide our behavior are effective, not according to their content but according to the real psychic power which they have at their disposal” (ibid: 115). It is here where emotions come into play. Jerusalem had taken from Perry the sentence: “The pragmatist brings life into the intellect, his enemy intellectualizes life” (Jerusalem, 1913: 3212). For Simmel, bringing life into the intellect occurs by taking into account non-rational motives as contents of images. These contents cannot be called truth in the intellectual sense, but they are effective. Spinoza has prepared the way for this type of thinking. In the theory of knowledge this transition from the question of truth to the question of effectiveness serves as a foundation for sociology as the study of social behavior. Sociologists know: It is in the sociological sense true, that human beings behave because of objectively unfounded joy, fear, love, jealousy, anxiety, etc.. It is also true that they produce as a consequence of such behavior a reality as a sum of behavior-results whose existence one cannot deny. Therefore, sociological research must always assume that phenomena which ought not to be may nevertheless exist. This of course shifts the attention from the question ‘what is true?’ to the question ‘what is real?’ It is important to keep in mind that Simmel published these ideas in 1895. Images are effective as “real psychic forces” for behavior according to their forms, i.e. according to their decisiveness, their firmness, their flexibility or lack thereof, by which they are brought into social reality – and not because of their content. If initially the filling of forms with content may have been almost a question of chance, retroactively such contents were declared as truths whose utility had shown up in behavior: “That the acting person now follows the perceived truth, even with good success, can be understood by the fact that initially the truth followed behavior and its successes” (ibid: 123). Simmel concludes his essay “About a Relationship between the Theories of Selection and Knowl­ edge”  with a reference to Kant, whose methods he claims to have used and whom he at the same time radicalizes and pushes to its extreme consequences:

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“If Kant removed the dualism of images and being by conceiving being as an image as well, then the unification that was presented here goes one step further and deeper: The dualism between the world as an appearance which exists for us logically and theoretically, and the world as a reality which gives answers to our practical behavior, will be removed as a consequence of my analysis that the forms of thinking which produce the world as an image, are determined by the practical effects and counter effects that form our mental constructions as well as our bodily ones according to evolutionist necessities. And if one is permitted to summarize in his own words Kant’s theory in one sentence: The possibility of knowing produces for us at the same time the objects of our knowing – then the theory suggested here means: the utility of knowing produces for us at the same time the objects of our knowing” (ibid: 124). Thus, in the continuity of Kant, this is Simmel’s contribution to pragmatism and his critique of its subjectivist version. Tension between Culture and the Individual For Simmel autonomy and individuality of the person are values which he does not question or discuss; they are taken for granted as goals that must be pursued. Against this background he diagnoses the impact of metropolitan life (in Berlin around 1900) not merely as progress toward modernity, but also as a threat directed precisely against personal autonomy and individuality. That threat which originates in the large cities is the cause for the “deepest problems of modern life” (Simmel 1950b: 409, adapted by Weinstein, D.). Due to urbanization and political movements of emancipation the call for individualization grew louder over time. In Europe during the eighteenth century man felt the need to emancipate himself from suppressive traditions in government and religion. During the nineteenth century the economic development urged further and further specialization in occupational life. This urge to be special resulted in an increasing recognition of the uniqueness of the individual, not simply as an ethical imperative supported by religious ideas, but in addition as an empirical reality, because it became more and more difficult to replace one person with another in real life. But that increased recognition also made the experience of death even more unbearable than in traditional cultures. The trend toward progressive individualization goes on to this day. Urbanization not only frees the person from traditional pressures, it also makes him or her potentially lonely and more dependent on cooperation



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with others. The more highly specialized people become, the fewer skills each can master by themselves and for themselves. There are two sides to this development: a) There is the increased need to purchase services and expertise from each other. b) Specialized people will compete with those who have identical competence to offer. As a result the existence of competition is a condition for modern city life to function. However, as Elman R. Service (1915–1996) has pointed out in the context of his Law of Evolutionary Potential (Service 1975), an increase in specialization will mean a loss in the potential of adaptation and thus will gradually create structural rigidity. That problem, of course, will become visible not at the beginning but at the end of the process of specialization. It shows the scope of the ambiguity of the individualization that drives specialization. The ecological setting for individualism is the metropolis. “With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different level of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable – as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships….” (Simmel 1950b). Simmel contrasts less individualized rural life with life in the metropolis, and he sees in front of his mental eye the conditions in his native city of Berlin on the one hand and the way people lived in small rural communities of the surrounding Prussian heartland on the other. But he does not leave his observation at the confrontation between metropolis and countryside: As a third type of social life he mentions the small town with its “deeply felt emotional relationships” as an intermediary between the lowest level of individualism in the country and the most advanced level in city life. This threefold typology remains important in sociology. With regard to the village communities, dramatic change has taken place: At the beginning of the century into which Simmel was born, roughly three fourths of all Germans led rural lives (comp. Wikipedia “Landflucht”). But by the time he became a student at the University of Berlin, the rural segment of the population had dropped to less than two thirds. With accelerating speed, farmers and their farm hands left the countryside to look for better

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opportunities in the growing small towns and even in the large metropolitan agglomerations. There they became members of what was to be called the labor class. As a result between 1800 and 1900 the number of industrial workers in Germany grew from below 100,000 to almost 8 million. This trend was fuelled by the decreasing pay for work in the countryside combined with the perception that it was more likely to make good money in the big city as urbanization and industrialization progressed in tandem with modern capitalism. Individualization occurred in the context of these massive demographic and structural changes. Simmel’s observations toward the end of the 19th century in Prussia lead him to conclude that the individual minds or selves, as G.H. Mead was to write later, have attained a level of development in the history of culture, at which they see themselves removed from the world as objective reality and as it were confronting it. (Helle 2009: 165). This applies to law, to religion, to various customs, in sum to culture in general as it constitutes the objective mind (objektiver Geist) (Simmel 1949: 311). During a period of transition the persons are still the bearers of the objective mind, and the institutions are for some time still acknowledged as existing legitimately, regardless of how well they serve the individuals subjected to their influence. But increasingly the individual persons experience within themselves each their own life, and have a sense of responsibility with regard to that inner life. This constitutes the confrontation mentioned above between the need to contribute toward the continuity of objective culture on the one hand and the responsibility for protecting and developing the potentials of one’s personal life on the other, as ethic of individuality. Simmel mentions as illustration for the commanding stringency on the culture side the artist who can only perform under conditions of total devotion (Hingabe, see K.H. Wolff 1995), and on the individual side the person who follows his or her conscience in accordance with the inner life as an ongoing project (Simmel 1949: 311). The objective culture more and more evades any attempt by the individual to fully master it intellectually and thus tends to be experienced as alien and even oppressive. Faced with this confrontation Simmel sees the temptation – not for himself but for others like Fichte (1762–1814) and Tolstoy (1828–1910) – to take sides against culture and for the individual. He deplores that view of confrontation between the two and admires Goethe in whom he sees a personal synthesis between culture and individualism. What matters here is not, if Simmel was right in this or not, but rather that he did see it that way. He presents as his normative recommendation a compromise



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according to which objective values of culture ought to be internalized by individuals so they can contribute toward guiding their personal lives, and concomitantly subjective guiding principles should become incorporated into the objective culture in an epoch of individualism to increase the chances for personal creativity (ibid: 312). Simmel expects modernity to supply the conditions that make it possible for the group to try to socialize the individual into becoming its member, while at the same time for the individual to defend the uniqueness of his or her inner life even against the impositions of the group to which he or she may be deeply indebted for having become an independent person. While Simmel likes to see that as a process of compromise between culture and person, he admits that since the 18th century the emphasis was on individualization. He is critical of Rousseau who found the culture to do violence against the person, and he is critical of Fichte and Kant who tended to look at culture simply as created by the person. In order to base his critique of those greats on a solid foundation Simmel finds it helpful to think in sociological terms when deliberating a modern ethic. He sees in individualism both the liberation from the narrow, rather provincial realm of social relationships, as well as the basis for initiating contacts with human beings who live far away, with the tendency toward a global orientation. To him the concept of a world society of mankind is the consequence of an individuality that is ever more widely extended. By no longer reflecting predominantly on memberships in groups within easy reach, a person does not identify primarily as belonging to this province or that city but rather as that incomparable, unique individual that only he or she is; to the extent to which this orientation prevails – so the implicit hope of Simmel – mankind will grow toward a unified society that is cosmopolitan in orientation. This process of cultivation, carried by very individual qualities in every human being, allows a decline in the importance of those contacts which are organized on a small-scale basis, and the rise of the feeling of being allied with all people of the world regardless of where they live. This feeling finds a strong reinforcement today through the internet as a tool of communication. Of course, such change takes time, and comes about only slowly and in consecutive stages. The two-volume introduction to moral science (Simmel 1983a, 1983b) is important for understanding the continuity in Simmel’s thinking. In these volumes he outlines his concept of ethic and combines it with his theory of evolution in society as the transition toward the stage of individualism. This transition drew more and more attention to the relationship between individual liberties on the one hand and

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equality on the other. It leads to the question, if individualism would not result in too large differences in power and wealth. At the beginning of this debate stands the knowledge of a discouraging failure in history. To assume or even dogmatically decree that in a state of natural conditions all humans were equal, was to Simmel an error of devastating proportions. By contrast he states that in the absence of culture, naked nature – if a condition like that can even be imagined – would result in the most brutal form of inequality. He concludes from that more speculative observation the insight into what he calls the tragedy of individual liberty: Should it ever become a reality, it would create in its wake such dramatic inequality that it would immediately have to be revoked and suppressed (Simmel 1949: 313). What made things worse was that during the 18th century the erroneous idea of innate equality was propagated concurrently with the notion of natural law. Simmel opposes that because natural law makes individuality disappear (ibid: 314). By arguing along the ideas of natural law people of that century believed, they had discovered what is essentially and truly human and claimed for that to be the nucleus of every person. In the process they created an abstract human being as the object of natural law and of human rights. This is close to Platonic thinking. It deprives the individual of his or her unique and inalienable qualities while reducing the person to a coincidental and peripheral form of existence. For Kant all individuals are potentially equal and free. The Kantian person has nothing but his or her own representations on the basis of which everything is given form. The person cannot be formed by anything outside itself. Under the influences coming toward him from the 17th century Kant has accepted the ideas of equality and liberty and developed them further (ibid. 315). Humans are thus seen as equal by nature, and anything unequal that is empirically discovered about a person must necessarily be the result of unfortunate cultural influences. This can then be applied even to gender. It is in this context where Simmel’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative is located. While the individual must be free and under no pressure from any other individual, Kant nevertheless does not want the persons to be left entirely to themselves. He therefore introduces the imperative to act freely, but in such a way, that the principles that underlie the action qualify as general rules that apply to everybody. Simmel rejects that with the striking argument: Can I not demand more of myself than from my average contemporary? Should some persons not be looked upon with more leniency, than would be appropriate for others? It is the 17th century



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notion of equality that Simmel rejects in the ethic of Kant, and with this rejection he also dismisses the hope that equality and liberty can be reconciled and realized at the same time. In the course of the 19th century the link between equality and liberty has broken down. Since then there is equality without liberty as typical of – according to Simmel – socialism, and there is liberty without equality in liberalism (ibid. 316). The inability to reconcile the two principles has resulted in disheartening political confrontation even until today. Simmel addresses his lecture of 1913 to nothing less than to this calamity. At the time he delivers it, he is just months away from the outbreak of the First World War, and he seems to sense that one of the most terrible centuries in the history of mankind had just gotten started. Yet he predicts that the option for liberty without equality will be the dominant direction of history for some time to come. Equality had served in a way as crutches on which liberty had been limping into history in Europe. But once liberty found itself to be strong enough to stand on its own, it could throw away those crutches (ibid.). The political cry for liberty had been heard, and thus, the demands for equality could be muted. The call of the leaders of the French Revolution to liberté – égalité – fraternité is not attractive to Simmel because liberty and equality seem incompatible with each other, and fraternity is something we may expect at most in kinship groups and religious circles. Simmel’s social theory can justifiably be called “critical” because by implication it warned of naïve enthusiasms. His remarks about Rousseau as well as his analysis of the ideological background of the French Revolution are sobering. To defend the autonomy and dignity of the individual was more central to his agenda than emotion-based acclamation of novel ideas. His treatment of individualism shows again the need for listening to his message. The divers phenomena which have appeared in history in connection with individualism seem contradictory on the surface. They are in need of interpretation, as Simmel has shown. Looking back at Chapter 1: Why is the message of interpretation a provocation to some? Simmel does not attack anybody head-on because that is not his style, but he puts those in their place who would tend to argue using so-called “hard facts” to silence anyone who presents the results of his or her thinking as a judgment that deserves attention. Ethical imperatives based on physical givens like: “avoid this, it is bad for you health,” or: “you are too young (or too

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old) to do this,” do not count for Simmel because they by-pass the process of interpretation. Preconceived ideas, biases of all kinds come in the disguise of “hard facts” to cut off discussion. Worse even than that: “Hard facts” are produced as reasons for imposing restrictions on other people’s lives. Simmel is the spokesperson of freedom, not in the sense though that anything goes. The critical nature of his work is intended in two directions: Against those who would impose their indisputable knowledge of “facts” on others, but also against those who would rely too much on their spontaneous impulses. Human emotions are facts Simmel respects. To him it is not bad in itself to be emotional. But life progresses according to objective rules which limit the freedom of the individual, and each person is called upon to grasp those as well as realize his or her innate potential. Pragmatism is not acceptable to Simmel unless that insight is part of it, and liberty is a good thing only as long as it does not destroy the ideal of equality.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MESSAGE OF CHANGE: SOCIETY EVOLVES OVER TIME Evolution and Darwin’s “Theory of Descendency” Simmel knew that one of the reasons why social phenomena are in need of interpretation is the fact that they evolve and thus change: What was apparently fully understood and clear at one time, may adopt puzzling characteristics in the process of its development. This applies for instance to institutions as it does to marital relationships. The concept of evolution was central in early sociology and formed an important aspect of theory formation in the writings of Comte and Spencer. However, it also became a critical tool in questioning the existence of the status quo in government and in society, because it was conducive to looking at a given social reality merely as a transitory stage. Since in Western philosophical tradition, following Plato rather than Heraclitus, reality tended to be seen as something constant and unchanging, an evolutionary approach to what people experienced in their daily lives meant that those experiences lost relevance. That conclusion was justified like this: Why get deeply involved and why make serious sacrifices for something which will soon go away? This line of reasoning appeared again as an argument against empirical social research in the context of Marxist sociology in Western Europe and in America in the late sixties and in the seventies: Why perform detailed data collection on conditions that ought to be overcome as soon as possible? Several variants of evolutionism were almost common knowledge among social scientists long before Simmel and up until the beginning of World War I: From Saint Simon to Comte and Durkheim in France and characterized by the organism analogy in Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution in England. German philosophy of social life was oriented toward evolutionism as well. Seen this way, Wilhelm Wundt is the Herbert Spencer of Germany, despite the fact that he criticizes Spencer and his liberal individualistic ethics. But Troeltsch also sees Wundt as an evolutionist: “He (Wundt) is an evolutionist through and through, as observing, comparing, sagacious, universal and constructive as this man [Spencer], but more successful and energetic in breaking through from the positive

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methods to the ideal and genuine contents of the soul and the history of life” (Troeltsch 1919: 70). As the founder of “ethical evolutionism” (Sommer 1887: III), Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) stirred up a lively debate, and through his Ethics of 1886 (Wundt 1912, 2 vols.) he became very influential. He gained his influence in the history of thought as a philosopher and experimental psychologist. This was preceded by his study of medicine and even by a postdoctoral dissertation in physiology. Among the scholars who were impressed by Wundt were Simmel, George Herbert Mead (Mead 1906, 1919, 1973), and Robert E. Park (Park 1904). What started with Comte and Spencer developed further as various sociological theories of social change, but “by the third decade of the 20th century the evolutionary wave was in full retreat…” (Bellah, 1964: 358). While in the United States there was still some admiration for Spencer, in Europe, thinking in terms of evolution had become closely connected with an anti-conservative political camp and was increasingly associated with atheism and Marxism. It was therefore unpopular in many circles. Although Simmel’s evolutionary ideas were designed as a method of theory construction, they too were interpreted by some to be a political ideology. The same fate, to be identified with a political camp to which the author of the idea never wanted to belong, happened to dialectical thinking. Whoever witnessed the seventies could get the impression that dialectics were the prerogative of Marxists and might be prone to ignore that the very conservative Hegel and even the Ancient Greeks used the same method. Simmel of course was not so much concerned with dialectics but rather with his own approach to evolutionary thinking. The two-volume introduction to moral science (Simmel 1983a, 1983b) is important for understanding what Simmel picked up from Wundt, and for identifying what continuity there is in his own theory formation. In these volumes he combines his concept of a dynamic in ethics with his theory of evolution in society. Innovation does not originate from a change in social structure but from a new quality of social relations. Characteristic of Simmel’s approach to change is his idea of the continuity of culture, the inconceivability of an abrupt halt of a value system, and the futility of a total extinction of social forms in a revolutionary action. “The new relations which justify the new acting do not spring forth, as in original creation, out of the just as suddenly disappearing old relations, but rather the alteration begins at any point and from there it takes hold of one area after another and transforms the whole gradually… In other words, the opening up of new relations has to first occur



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someplace as a deed in its own right, whose generalization would be neither thinkable nor permissible under the conditions of the old relations.” (Simmel 1983b: 32) This deed will typically be the accomplished by an innovator with an audience around him. However, any innovator, and particularly the one with an audience, can be cast in the image of a trouble maker or a rebel against the established political order. As we have seen, publishing a theory of change had political implications, particularly in Simmel’s time, a time when Karl Marx (1818–1883) was forced to live in exile in London because he and other German intellectuals were not allowed by the royal Prussian regime to practice anything resembling freedom of speech, a time when the conservative pupils of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) provided the regime with philosophical apologies for political stability. Therefore Simmel, at the very beginning of his career as a scholar, approached the topic in an indirect way, by referring to Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) in a learned text he wrote, and by spelling out in it his disagreement with Darwin in a marginal matter while tacitly taking over Darwin’s basic approach to evolution. The manuscript in which the reference to Darwin occurred was intended by Simmel to be his doctoral dissertation, but it was rejected by the faculty in Berlin. This rejection did occur not explicitly because of its inherent evolutionist tendencies, but, at least officially – as we shall see – for other, more formal reasons. In spite of the initial failure Simmel managed to publish large parts of the manuscript as a journal article on early history of Music (Simmel 1882) in the year Darwin died. In this text Simmel offered an abundance of empirical data about the origins of music, collected in order to refute a hypothesis of Darwin’s. Shocking as that may have seemed to some at the time, his published article starts with the name “Darwin.” Thus, already at the beginning of his career as a 24-yearold, he stepped onto the slippery ice of the passionate debate about Darwinism and the theory of evolution, which was then referred to as the “theory of descendency.” One of the high points of that debate was the Munich speech that Rudolph Virchow (Virchow 1877) delivered as a serious warning against Darwinism, followed by the written rebuttal from the Darwin supporter Ernst Haeckel (Haeckel 1878). Virchow expressed his grave concern as follows: “Well, Gentlemen! This may appear ridiculous to quite a number of you but it is very serious, and I hope that the theory of descendency may not bring for us all those horrors that similar theories have really caused in our neighboring country. After all, this theory too – if it is consistently

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carried through – has a genuinely suspicious side, and I hope that it didn’t escape you that with it, socialism has gained strength like spring sap flowing into the trees” (Virchow 1877: 12). Haeckel’s rebuttal contains the sentence: “Darwinism is anything but socialistic! If one wants to attribute to this English theory a certain political tendency – which admittedly is possible – then this tendency can only be an aristocratic one” (Haeckel 1878: 73). What seems remarkable from our present perspective of the third millennium is the close connection between a biological theory and political controversy including even a reference by Haeckel to the horrors of the French Revolution. The dust had not yet settled on the field of the Virchow-Haeckel tournament when the unknown Simmel had the courage to raise his lance. Whoever had read only the beginning of his music article (Simmel 1882) would be under the impression that Simmel set out to refute a very specific (and, incidentally, a very unimportant) hypothesis of Darwin. Whoever reads through the entire text carefully would have to realize that this young would-be doctor of philosophy nonetheless found himself in the camp of the theory of evolution. To stand on Darwin’s side meant at that time, as the quotes from Virchow and Haeckel show, that one was considered to be either a socialist or an aristocrat, and one label was potentially just as dangerous as the other. Simmel begins the article with the sentence: Darwin writes in the Origin of Species (1875, II, 317): “We have to assume that the rhythms and cadences of oratory language are to be deduced from previously developed musical forces. In this way we can understand how it came to be that music, dance, song, and poetics are such old arts. We can ourselves go even further and assume that musical utterances represent one of the foundations for the development of language” (Simmel 1882: 261). Simmel’s opposition to the thesis that language has developed in the course of cultural evolution out of singing, is disarmingly simple: “Were that the case, then it would not be understandable why man ever should have progressed to speech, since he was able after all to express everything in tones” (ibid.: 263). This more amusing than convincing line of reasoning is then augmented with a reference to the “speechless song” that would have to exist if Darwin’s thesis were correct, but Simmel cannot find it anywhere with the exception of yodeling (Simmel 1879). If the speechless song “would be that much more natural than language, would it not have survived at least at the lowest level of culture, such that he (man) somehow, sometime breaks out in that ‘speechless yodel’?” (Simmel 1882: 263). Simmel finds, despite wide-ranging research in the materials of cultural history and of



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cultural anthropology, everywhere (with the exception of a few areas in mountainous Bavaria and Austria) the combination of text and song, and not song without language. He is therefore convinced that music did not precede language in evolution but rather the other way around, that language came first. What Simmel does not mention in this context is the Psychology of Music by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) as well as Herder’s prize winning Treatise on the Origin of Language of 1772 [Abhandlung über die Ursprünge der Sprache] (Herder 1772, vol. 5, p. 35). Herder was a progressive protestant minister and high school principal and one of the most famous students of Kant whose lectures he attended at Konigsberg University. He also was, temporarily, a close friend of Goethe’s in Weimar. Herder was familiar with the work of Spinoza whose influence on Simmel is obvious. It is quite possible that Darwin was familiar with Herder’s writings. Be that as it may, Herder too believed that language developed out of music (Stolzenberg 2009). Music is a form of emotion based on hearing, and since hearing to Herder is closest to the soul, it precedes language in the expression of emotions in communication. That is so because language relies on symbols representing objects outside the soul, whereas music operates with tones which are produced inside the person (ibid: 46). One may or may not find this interesting. What is essential in the context of our argument is the method of the young Simmel: a. He sees culture in analogy to the theory of descendency as having developed in evolutionary steps, and he speaks in this connection also about “early man” and about language as that bridge that “leads the animal to the human being” (Simmel 1882: 265). He picks up the impulses originally emanating from Darwin and applies them to philosophy; from the start, he orients the method of his own work accordingly. In terms of methods, the path that Simmel followed in the course of his scholarly life remains to be researched. But this much is already clear now: One of his starting points was the theory of descendency, was evolutionism. b.  In his rejected dissertation, Simmel also raised the question of how objective culture comes about in the process of formation out of subjective vital emotions. The model along which he thinks this problem through is that of interaction or, in the language of Dilthey and Simmel, of reciprocal effecting [Wechselwirkung] e.g. between a lead singer and a group of listeners who are emotionally touched by the

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song. Members of the group react to the presentation of the individual singer by spontaneously singing along: The mode of transformation – whether it be more elementary or highly complex – of subjective experience into objective culture is seen by Simmel as an evolutionary process. Both methodical concerns – the process of formation and evolutionism – are connected here. c. A third perspective that can be drawn upon to demonstrate the continuity in Simmel’s method is that of the dynamics of exchange between sensory experience and mental formation in the life of the subject. Simmel expressly compares with each other the formations in art and science, and he places alongside them, religion and play. But the process always unfolds according to the same pattern. Dealing with the reality that we perceive with our senses requires both approaches – experience and conceptualization. Over time, by going back and forth between the two, both ways of gaining knowledge continue to grow side by side. In a circular course, which Simmel lets begin with sensory perception, experiences develop new concepts and these new concepts enable us to have new experiences. In the same way human emotions shape into forms and these forms in turn create and reinforce emotions. For Simmel, the social aspect of the process of formation is placed alongside the process of objectification. If, for instance, a person weeps, it is an expression of emotions in a subjective form. If, however, an orthodox priest performs the funeral liturgy, his wailing my sound like weeping, but it now needs to follow prescribed tonal sequences. The weeping therefore becomes objectified and represents no longer a subjective form but rather has become a prescribed part of a religious funeral. As we have seen above, Simmel illustrates the process of objectification also with another example, that of a lead singer and a group of listeners who are spontaneously aroused to sing along, interplaying between subjective emotional mood and the song as an objective form of art. These basic threads of his theory of the process of formation weave into a unified pattern with his evolutionist approach. Change as Differentiation and Individualization Simmel’s first book that contains a clear idea about gradual social change, seen as evolution of culture and society (but not yet explicitly as “ethical” change) appeared in 1890 (Simmel 1890a). Implicitly, this book on social



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differentiation expresses high regard for personal individuality in line with societal development via differentiation. What Simmel introduces as his general concept of change is tied to the connection between regional enlargement and individualization. He sees in individualization both the liberation from the narrow, village type order of social relationships that provide security because of their limited number, and he also sees in it the basis for initiating contacts with human beings who live far away with the tendency toward a cosmopolitan or global orientation. In contrast to Durkheim, who links up with his positivistic concept of biological evolution despite severe criticism of Spencer, Simmel does not associate the processes of differentiation exclusively with the division of labor and the specialization of occupations. Rather, the thought of individualization emerges here as an evolutionary tendency inherent in the mutual exchange among persons. “What is more, with such a differentiation of the social group there will be a growing need and inclination to go beyond its original boundaries in terms of spatial, economic, and mental relationships. There will also be a growing inclination to place next to the initial centripetal character of the single group a centrifugal tendency as a bridge to other groups, with growing individuality and with the repulsion of its elements as a consequence.” (ibid.: 46). For Simmel, the quality of unmistakable uniqueness inherent in the person may either have its origin in characteristics of the individual or in characteristics of the group to which he or she belongs. In the second case, group identity is bestowed upon the member as a reward for conforming to the norms and expectations of his or her group. “Thereby in the one case the whole gains a very individual character but its parts become very similar to each other; in the other case, the whole becomes less colorful and it is less formed after an extreme, but its parts are strongly differentiated from each other” (ibid.: 49). In his example of the Quakers, Simmel shows how the close religious ties uniting the faithful tend toward anchoring individuality in the community rather than in the person. “They are therefore individual only in what they share, but socially tied in what they keep to themselves, and that means: If the circle in which we move about and in which we exercise our interests increases, then there is more room therein for the development of our individuality” (ibid.). In this context, Simmel also looks into the phenomenon of fashion. He deals with it in 1895 (Simmel 1895b), and following in his footsteps also Herbert Blumer (Blumer 1968, 1969) writes about the subject. Simmel suspects that a “slave-like bondage to fashion” (Simmel 1890a: 50) entirely robs the individual of the quality being special and transfers uniqueness

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exclusively into the social form of the group identified by adhering to a certain dress code or fashion style to which the individuals subject themselves collectively. This is reminiscent of some phenomena in recent youth culture. Given Simmel’s interest in the ambivalent quality of all social and cultural reality, he considers in addition to the opportunities also the dangers of promoting individualization. As protection against losing oneself in loneliness in the midst of the activities of every day in modern metropolitan life, Simmel points to the family as a safe haven for individuality: “Hence while the devotion to a narrow circle is in general less favorable to the maintenance of individuality as such, than is its existence in the largest possible generality… it is noteworthy that belonging to a family enhances individuality within a very large cultural community. Against the totality of existence (in public), the individual is unable to salvage himself; only by giving up (in the family) one part of his absolute ego to a few others, by joining together with them, can he still preserve the feeling of individuality, an individuality without exaggerated seclusion, without bitterness, and without becoming a peculiar loner” (ibid.). Simmel here formulates his concern for exaggerated isolation that may lead to bitterness and peculiarity. He holds the family in high esteem as an intermediate social form between the individual and the public. In the context of his theory of evolution the family is needed to fend off isolation, which if excessive – he thinks – will lead to psychic deformation. This is, however, made possible “only by giving up one part of… one’s absolute ego to a few others.” The optimistic faith in an inevitable movement toward a world society – in which the intellectuals, who are cosmopolitan in orientation, feel interconnected with each other – is just as much a motif in this chapter by Simmel as it is in later passages by George Herbert Mead (ibid.: 55; compare Mead 1964: 18). According to Simmel a world society of mankind (now typically referred to as “global”), is the consequence of a developed individuality, a characteristic of the person that will be ever more widely spread. To the extent to which a global orientation prevails – so the implicit hope of Simmel – mankind will grow toward a society that is cosmopolitan. The evolutionary process of cultivation, carried by very individual qualities in every human being, allows, as we have seen, a decline in the importance of those interactions which are organized on a small-scale basis, i.e., with a provincial orientation. It allows the rise of the feeling of being allied with all people of the world regardless of where they live. (Simmel 1890a: 56). This is the dream of brotherhood of all mankind that



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also finds expression in the text of the concluding chorus if Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which describes it as the result of joy and happiness. Competition promotes Evolution Simmel published a journal article on competition in 1903, one year before Max Weber started writing down his ideas on the religious components of modern rational capitalism. Competition “is a form of struggle fought by means of objective performances, to the advantage of a third person” (Simmel 1903b: 1021, Simmel 2008), that third person usually being the customer. However, it is not as simple a phenomenon as this short definition by Simmel suggests. Competition can of course be discussed from a number of different points of view. And in doing that Simmel presented it as a subject closely related to social change. Simmel by implication bases his evolutionary approach to competition on a premise that is also present in the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen: At the animal level control of behavior is guaranteed via rigid instincts. Among humans in the absence of instincts there is the freedom of choice between alternative ways of conduct. That potentially leads to chaos unless culture takes the place of guiding human action in the absence of instinctive rigidity. Building on this model of reasoning, Simmel sees a similar shift within the stages of cultural evolution: early rigidity analogous to instincts, followed by more freedom of choice. Competition, therefore, becomes gradually more and more important, because “to the extent to which slavery, the mechanical taking control of the human being, ceases, the necessity arises to win him over via his soul” (ibid: 1013). The more the individual is liberated from traditionalistic external control, the more he or she becomes – in David Riesman’s terminology – inner directed, the more the individual person must be subjected to competition to guarantee continued contributing toward the community and to avoid being out of control altogether. There is, to begin with, the evolutionist perspective which ties competition to modernity. “What we are dealing with here are stages of evolution in which the absolute competition of the struggle for existence among animals changes gradually toward relative competition. This means that slowly those frictions and rigid forms of wasting energy are excluded from the process because they are not needed in competition” (ibid: 1018). In the human past the emphasis was more toward solidarity. But “the last few centuries have, on the one hand, given to objective interests and

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material culture a power and independence previously unheard of; on the other hand… they have given an incredible depth to the subjectivity of the self…” (ibid: 1023). As a result “competition presents itself as one of the decisive traits in modern life” (ibid.). In this article on competition of 1903 Simmel repeats his ideas on evolution, which he outlined, as we have already seen, in his book on social differentiation of 1890: The process fuelled by competition and carried by very individual qualities in every human being, allows for a decline in the importance of those mutual exchanges which are organized on a village-like basis. The development leads to a dynamic which changes social structure and requires a new assignment of the many functions to be performed by the evolving forms of social organizations: Political action with the goal of economic problem solving will no longer be successful on the regional or even national level, but rather needs to be organized and executed on a continental or global scale. Of course, such change takes time, and comes about only slowly and in consecutive stages. Characteristic of Simmel’s evolutionistic approach is his idea of continuity during change, is the inconceivability of an abrupt halt, of a total extinction of social forms in a revolutionary action. Against this background competition is for Simmel an expression of individualism rather than simply a type of economic behavior. Just as Money is primarily a form of interaction and a phenomenon of culture, so is competition. To understand that, we must consider the following: Marx had reinterpreted Hegel’s philosophy as esoteric economics. Hegel’s world spirit, continuing its autonomous development, is for Marx the all-powerful force of capital. This unmasking of idealistic philosophy as a hidden representation of economic life is reversed by Simmel: He describes economic activity as being determined by the power of human imagination. His text on competition illustrates that convincingly. Max Weber’s famous study on the protestant ethics as the driving force behind modern rational capitalism can be seen in the continuity of this approach. Evaluating the ideal of peace depends on the perspective from which it is seen. In this case as in others we must “acknowledge the completely opposing meanings that can be attributed to one and the same thing” (ibid: 1009). Among the potential critics of the ideal of peace Simmel mentions “the sociologist for whom a group that simply harmoniously attracts its members to a centre would be nothing more than an ‘association,’ not only empirically unreal, but also lacking any genuine life process” (ibid.) Simmel concludes that “society needs a particular quantitative relationship of harmony and disharmony, association and competition, favor and



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disfavor, in order to take shape in a specific way” (ibid.) It is therefore Simmel’s intention in his article on competition, to “demonstrate how fighting is woven into the web of social life, how it is a particular manner of interaction influencing the unity of society” (ibid: 1010). Peace in the sense of the absence of all conflict cannot be a realistic goal. To assure vitality and progress, some type of conflict is necessary, but what type of confrontation should that be? Simmel describes two separate types of conflict: “He who fights with another in order to gain that person’s money, spouse, or reputation conducts his actions in a form, using a totally different tactic, different from that of him who competes with another for making the money of an audience flow into his own pockets, for winning the favor of a woman, for making himself more famous by his deeds and words” (ibid.). He who damages or even destroys his adversary on purpose and directly, is not competing, rather his direct attack would deprive him of a potential competitor. Competition is thus an indirect form of fighting. Next Simmel distinguishes between two types of competition. The first is different from any direct confrontation in that it does not suffice to be the winner, to decide the confrontation in one’s own favour. What matters is in addition to win the approval of the customer or other audience to the struggle between the competitors. “Competition of this kind is distinctly coloured by the fact that the outcome of the fight in no way fulfils the purpose of the fight, as would apply to all those cases in which fighting is motivated by rage or revenge, punishment or victory as an idealistic end in itself” (ibid.). The second type of competition may be seen as one step further removed from direct fighting. Here no one aims any force or energy against his opponent but tries to deploy his best possible performance while – on the surface – ignoring the competing party. Maximizing one’s efforts is motivated, however, by “the mutual awareness of the opponent’s performance; and yet, if observed from the outside, seems to proceed as if there were no adversary present in this world, but merely the goal… One fights the opponent without turning against him – without touching him, so to speak” (ibid.). Already in these opening remarks Simmel chooses his illustrations from different venues of social life: from commerce of course – and that was to be expected – but also from erotic interaction (two men competing for the attention of a woman), from religion (two denominations competing for membership of the faithful), and from the physical performance in sports. What competitive activities in these various areas of human

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ambitions have in common is the transformation of intentions of the potentially selfish individual into some common good: “In this manner, subjective antagonistic impulses induce us to realize objective values, and victory in the fight is not really the success of that fight, but rather precisely the realization of certain values that lie beyond fighting” (ibid: 1011). Simmel sees here advantages for the community, in which the conflict occurs, advantages that only competition can generate. If, however, the conflict is of a different nature, and if “the prize to be won in the fight is originally in the hands of one of the two parties” (ibid.) rather than within the domain of the customer or another kind of audience, then society is left with “only what remains after subtracting the weaker power from the stronger” (ibid.). Competition, of course, leads to better results than that. Simmel expands on the idea that activities undertaken by an individual for purely subjective reasons have the potential of resulting in objective advantages for society as a whole. This is, however, not merely a confirmation of the invisible hand which Adam Smith saw at work behind the façade of selfish actions of individuals, it is for Simmel a philosophical principle of a much more general scope. In fact Simmel illustrates his point by referring to examples from religion, “erotic pleasure” (ibid.), and scholarship. In each of these domains individualistic interests have the potential of resulting in an increase of the common good. “Scholarship, for instance, is a content of the objective culture, and as such a self-sufficient end of social evolution, realized by means of individual curiosity and drive for new insights” (ibid.). All these advantages can only be achieved provided conflict occurs in the specific form of competition. That means, as Simmel has explained before, that “the goal of competition between parties in society is nearly always to attain the approval of one or several third persons” (ibid: 1012). It is achieved in part by “this incredible effect of socializing people: it compels the competitor, who finds his fellow competitor at his side and only as a result of that really starts competing, to approach and appeal to the potential customer, to connect to him, to find out his weaknesses and strengths and to adapt to them, to find or to build all imaginable bridges that might tie the producer’s existence and performance to the potential customer… The antagonistic tension against the competitor sharpens the merchant’s sense for the inclinations of the public into an almost clairvoyant instinct for coming changes in taste, in fashion, in interests” (ibid.) It is the socializing effect of competition that educates people to be good competitors and thereby to be the producers of valuable services for



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society “through artfully multiplied opportunities to make connections and gain approval” (ibid: 1012f.) Simmel’s article becomes more specifically sociological when he suggests that “the … structure of social circles differs from one to another, according to the degree and type of competition they permit” (ibid: 1014). Competition is frowned upon in associations that are based on a shared origin, like the family. While “children may compete for the love… of their parents” such occurrences would be peripheral and normally “not be related to the principle of family life. This principle is rather that of organic life; organic relationships, however, are ends in themselves: they do not point beyond themselves to an external goal for which family members would have to compete” (ibid.). “The other sociological type that excludes competition is exemplified by the religious congregation” (ibid.) There competing is superfluous, because, “at least according to Christian thinking, there is room for all in God’s mansion” (ibid.). Predating Max Weber’s reflections on the Puritan Ethic Simmel here admits, however, that under certain religious conditions people may “compete for one particular prize… Success is indeed tied to some kind of previous performance, but the difference in success is unrelated to the difference in performance” (ibid) because it is the result of either divine mercy or predestination. Simmel risks the somewhat shocking comparison between the struggle for salvation and gambling: “The chosen as the result of religious predestination or the winner in gambling will not be hated by him who was defeated, rather he will be envied; due to the mutual independence of their performance both are separated by more distance and by a priori indifference toward each other than is the case if they compete in business or in sports” (ibid: 1015). This may well be read as Simmel’s spirit of capitalism of 1903. In this context it is also an additional argument in favor of competition, because in the absence of competition “envy and embitterment will prevail” (ibid.). It is striking, not only how frequent reference is made in this article to religious phenomena, but even more so that Simmel deals with competition as a topic in some of his writings in the sociology of religion. This is the case in Simmel’s article A Contribution to the Sociology of Religion (Simmel 1898) and, on a less optimistic note about competition, in his monograph Religion (Simmel 1906) both available in English (Simmel 1997). “Asking members to forego competition entirely occurs in those cases where the socialist principle of a unified organization of all labor and the

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more or less communist rule of equality of all labor contracts become a reality” (Simmel 1903b: 1016). Because competition is based on the “principle of individualism” and motivated by the self interest of the competitor, it is difficult to coordinate it with “the social interest common to all… Therefore competition cannot be confronted and contradicted by making it face off with the principle of a solely dominating social interest, but rather by looking for alternative techniques that may be derived from the social interest, and which we may call socialism in the narrower sense” (ibid.). Simmel associates with socialism something quite different from how the term is used by us a century later. He explains in detail that he means a general suppression of individual impulses and sees it most perfectly realized “among the civil servants of government or among the personnel of a factory” (ibid.). That is what Max Weber was to describe as the trend toward increasing bureaucratization. Discussing it under the label socialism, Simmel writes: “This socialist mode of production is nothing but a technique to achieve the material goals of happiness and of culture, of justice, and of perfection. It must yield to free competition wherever the latter appears to be the more practical and more appropriate means” (ibid: 1016f.). Devoid of any political or ideological point of departure, competition and socialism to Simmel are alternative techniques of organization. “A utilitarian-oriented person, for whom only the concrete results of action count, will be inclined towards socialism which emphasizes the many and propagates desired elements in life, whilst an ethical idealist, who is committed to the – more or less aesthetically expressed – form of doing, is more of an individualist or, like Kant, values the autonomy of the individual above all.” (Simmel 1907b: 287). In a pragmatic way he wants these alternative techniques of organization (competition and socialism) to prove themselves by demonstrating which of the two is more efficient in a particular historical an organizational context. In this way Simmel wants the two to compete with each other for better results. “This has nothing to do with political party preference, but rather with the question of whether satisfying a need, creating a value, shall be entrusted to competition between individual energies or to the rational organization of such energies” (Simmel 1903b: 1017). Simmel suggests a sober rather than an emotional approach toward socialism and “by admitting to the merely technical character of this social order, socialism is compelled to abandon its claim of being a self-justifying goal and arbiter of ultimate values, and thus ought to be put on the same level with



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individualistic competition” (ibid.). Kant and Nietzsche stand for the highest esteem for the peerless individual; they are the antipodes to the socialist state of mind. Simmel is obviously closer to them than he is to Marx. Simmel moves from the question under which conditions competition should be eliminated to the empirical and political problem of accepting competition in principle but as it were purifying it by making certain tools and practices illegal. This brings him “to the formation of cartels… a point at which companies are organized no longer for fighting for a share of the market, but rather for supplying the market according to a joint plan” (ibid: 1019). Simmel points to the difference between the guilds and cartels. He mentions a simple criterion for outlawing certain agreements between competitors and argues that “achieving complete control of the market results in making the consumer dependent and, as a consequence, in making competition as such superfluous” (ibid.). Simmel expects governments and ethical imperatives to purify competition by extracting from it components that are not essential to it. He also expects them to contribute to modern society by leaving competition intact and by guaranteeing “its continues existence” (ibid.) It is Simmel’s considered opinion, that “society does not want to do without the advantages that competition between individuals entails for it, which by far exceed the disadvantages it incurs by the occasional annihilation of individuals in the course of competition” (ibid: 1020). To back up this position he quotes from the code civil of France. For competition to be able to function in society, it needs to be governed by prescriptions that originate from legal as well as moral sources. “From both sources, there spring imperatives that regulate human conduct toward one another, imperatives that are not social in the conventional sense of the word – yet they are sociological – and it is due to them that the whole of human nature finds its proper place in the ideal form of a thou shalt” (ibid: 1022). Here Simmel hints at a fundamental conviction of his that ties sociology to ethic. Reality as experienced by humans is necessarily socially constructed, and the great forms which humans have at their disposal for such construction include scholarship, art, religion, and indeed “the ideal form of a thou shalt” (ibid.) as an integrated concept of ethic. This can be understood against the background of his critique of Kant, particularly his rejection of the Kantian categorical imperative “Whatever advantages accrue to us at the expense of others, whether as the result of favors others grant us or of opportunities that open up,

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of sheer coincidence or of a good fortune that we may experience as foreordained, we will take none of these with such good conscience as when what we have coming to us is simply the outcome of our own doing… This is probably one of the points at which the attitude toward competition presents itself as one of the decisive traits in modern life”. This sentence is the beginning of Simmel’s last paragraph. It should be read in its entirety rather than paraphrased because it is such a convincing conclusion. It summarizes and ends a well organized discussion. Simmel did not want to leave it stand as part of the text, when his 1903 article was later included into his large book Soziologie (Simmel 1908). There we can retrieve the same sentence as a lengthy footnote in the chapter on conflict Der Streit. Alternative Theories of Evolution In his two-volume Introduction to Moral Science [Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft] of 1892 (Vol. 1) and 1893 (Vol. 2) (Simmel 1892a), to which we referred here before, Simmel presents – according to the subtitle – “A Critique of the Basic Concepts of Ethics.” This voluminous work (ca. 900 pages in two volumes) contains an evolutionistic approach to ethics. Little attention has been paid to this early and lengthy work; Kurt Gassen provided many scholars with an excuse for ignoring the work by remarking that Simmel had distanced himself from it. One reads in Gassen’s bibliography: “As this writer has personally heard in a seminar out of Simmel’s own mouth, he later came to view this work as a philosophical ‘sin of youth’ and therefore did not permit further editions” (Gassen and Landmann 1958: 314). It would be quite wrong to doubt this remark by Simmel which Gassen heard. The question is, however, in which situation, with what degree of seriousness, and at what time this utterance was made in the seminar; the remark thus may be open to interpretation: Gassen’s vague term “later” must mean “very much later” than the publication of the first edition, considering that Simmel’s remark would have postdated both the second and third editions which (according to Gassen) appeared in 1904 and 1911, respectively. Furthermore, as late as 1910 Simmel, at the end of a longer footnote in his Main Problems of Philosophy [Hauptprobleme der Philosophie], mentions his “sin of youth” without characterizing it as such: “I have undertaken an extensive discussion of the conflict of obligations in the last chapter of my Introduction to Moral Science” (Simmel 1910: 155).



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Hence, in spite of what Gassen heard him say, Simmel stood by his early work for about two decades. In the pursuit of laying a philosophical foundation for the development of ethical norms, Simmel’s attempt to keep metaphysics at a distance – which he shares with Dilthey – emerges in both volumes in connection with the evolutionistic method. Simmel believes he can escape the necessity of dogmatically positing a guideline taken from this or that established type of metaphysics. This conviction hinges upon the introduction of evolutionism upon which his approach is based. However, he does not introduce his theory of evolution as the claim that it describes the course human history actually took but as an heuristic principle, as a purely methodical and instrumentally expedient tool (see Simmel 1983b: 6). Darwin had dissolved the prototype of a static concept, namely species, into a process of becoming. “The deep connection that exists between the old theory of species and conceptual realism, the estimation of concepts, permits the latter to enter the debate of the former against evolutionism” (ibid: 34). Simmel takes on this challenge in his idea of ethics: As a foundation of ethical demands, he searches for a dynamic approach to the rules for human conduct. The traditional ethical systems postulated one ultimate value, from which they then deduced the particular norms. Such dogmatic imposition, however, was not possible for the highest spokesperson or representative group without resorting to a supposedly unchanging metaphysical system. Simmel, on the other hand, sets out to search for the highest value within evolutionary development itself. Whoever remains tied to static conceptual thinking will see in Simmel’s approach only the dissolution of all reliable steadiness and will expect, as a consequence, a relativism that lets the choice of norms for accepted behavior decline to a mere matter of taste. But Simmel intends neither to replace one statically conceived ultimate value by another one which is equally static, nor to de-dogmatize and offer up a colorful bouquet of static positions among which one can pick and choose. Rather, he wants to tie the highest and final orientation in ethics to the dynamic of change and progress itself. One has to understand that, at the end of the 19th century, this was enough to make many of his readers’ heads spin. Simmel introduces his evolutionist orientation toward ultimate values also with the goal to free himself from the disadvantages of being obligated to a fragile metaphysics: “While the historical perspective teaches us to acknowledge everything given as being deduced, it does not thereby demote it… And this historical perspective is now joined by the psychological perspective, which teaches us that value is nothing objective at all,

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but rather is generated only in the subjective process of evaluation…” (ibid.). In the historical as well as the psychological perspective, Simmel concentrates on the process by which value is attributed, and by which esteem is generated. This is indeed a very topical project: He wants to establish his ethics alongside the dynamics of this process. The theme of this evaluation process then leads him to his Philosophy of Money [Philosophie des Geldes] as well (Simmel 1900). Drawing upon Darwin, Simmel sees humans as deficient beings who are forced to develop culture and society in order to compensate for the absence of reliable instincts and for their physical inadequacies. In this way social evolution presents itself as an uninterrupted continuation of biological evolution: “Darwin himself stresses, for instance, that what humans lack in bodily strength and size has frequently turned out to be beneficial, because a being that is in and of itself sufficiently endowed with size and strength to have done well in the struggle for survival would probably not have become social. “The fact that human beings are compelled to join forces with each other in order to prevail has increased and refined their intellectual and moral properties so much that, in the final analysis, it is to their weaknesses that they owe their power position which surpasses that of all other beings. In the same sense it has been claimed that it is exactly to their weakness that women owe their power within civilized society, and that emancipation, if it would endow them with the same strength as men, would let them enter with the men into a fight for existence, whose successes at least in several respects would not nearly match the prerogatives which they right now already enjoy because they declined to participate in the fight” (Simmel 1983a: 109). The refusal of women to enter into competitive struggles with males obviously belongs to the past in the Occident, but in China that refusal may persist for some time. Unfortunately the traditionalistic input of contemporary women in modern Chinese culture has hardly been researched from an unbiased perspective. The Good Earth, a novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931, will hardly suffice as a source of information. By clearly distancing himself from the anthropology of Rousseau (1712–1778), Simmel subscribes to an image of human nature which is later adopted by Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen. This image already formed the basis of his Introduction to Moral Science of 1892/1893, from which we quoted above (Simmel 1983a, 1983b). The contract theories of Hobbes (1588–1679) or Rousseau, according to which egotists who lived separately, deliberately got together to found society in order to gain



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greater advantages, are not reconcilable with Simmel’s evolutionism. Simmel’s human actor steps out onto the stage of history as anything but a selfish individual. Why Simmel sees it that way becomes clear in the following quotation. “Egotism, in the sense that we deal with it in ethics, can only appear if some kind of human society already exists. We cannot form a specific image of pre-social man. He must have lacked such essential properties that the application of the same name for him is of dubious justification. In society, however, man can only live if he already has restrained his egotism and has learned to more or less live for others. Now it may be that, in the ideal of the highest cultures, all circumstances are ordered such that the contributions an individual makes to the survival of society eventually will benefit himself and that all altruism proves to be a mere means of egotism; primitive circumstances, however, are definitely a very long way from reaching this reconciliation; the harder and explicitly the more unorganized the fight against nature and against hostile groups still is, the more frequently will the survival of the whole demand sacrifices from the individual. In order that the circumstances may come about at all, in which man as such can exist and can unfold his egotism, a certain measure of altruism must already be present, in exactly the same way as mentally the consciousness of the ego could only develop through a separation from and opposition to others” (Simmel 1983a: 91). Simmel viewed the goal of social evolution primarily as an unfolding of individuality and personality on the basis of the dynamics of interaction. But in addition he saw the goal of ethical evolution as tied to the process of attributing value in interaction. This is indeed a long way from traditional philosophical statements about ethics. “When the stoics later demanded, as an ethical goal, to be in harmony with the general supreme reason of the world [Weltvernunft], when the Christian ethic depicted the same as a realization of God’s Kingdom on Earth, then we have to search for the founder of these objective moral principles in Plato, who for the first time cut loose the absolute good from the entanglement with human subjectivity, be it egotistical or altruistic, and who placed that highest objective idea into the center of the world orbit” (Simmel 1983a: 154). It is one of the striking theses of the founder of Chinese sociology, Fei Xiatong (1910–2005) that this turn toward objective moral principles, which Simmel attributes to Plato, never happened in China (Fei 1953). In spite of his obvious admiration Simmel could not accept that Platonic static solution because to him the “general supreme reason of the world” too has to be seen in evolutionary terms and in harmony with a context of

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ethics that evolves. He thus subscribes to a supreme reason of development which, since Darwin, can claim validity. The dynamics here are still based on the dictum that correct acting follows out of correct thinking, for Socrates as for Simmel, even if the criteria of correctness have changed to something that evolves. Correct thinking, however, cannot be the result of data collection in the day to day world, because by carefully observing empirical reality the individual in modern times cannot find out what is right or wrong. Too much uncertainty is imbedded in the daily occurrences of contemporary life to deduce a clear ethical guideline from them. Since, therefore there is no intelligible prescription for what to do in the lives that surround the individual of the present, Simmel points toward the future and postulates an ethical vision oriented toward the goals of evolution, toward what we hope and expect mankind to become. Accordingly, the modern person who is in doubt about what to do or what to avoid should – according to Simmel’s ideas – form an image of the potential of humans, devise a visionary plan for how that might be realized, and then ask himself or herself, what they can contribute toward bringing that to fruition. This is Simmel’s sketch of an evolutionary ethic. In addition the two-volume introduction to moral science contains references to how he envisioned the transition from one stage to another. The idea of continuity during change characterizes his dynamic approach: Certain components of culture continue to exist although they no longer serve a purpose. Having become technically superfluous does not mean that they are useless. They may be preserved, as it were in storage, in case a cultural situation should arise in which society needs to turn back toward them. Simmel sees in them “that demonic charm of the dogmatic… What is supported by reasons may be brought down by reasons…; that which lacks supporting pillars and doesn’t need any, cannot have the supports pulled out from under it” (ibid.). Simmel conceives a cultural element that becomes rudimentary as especially resistant not in spite of, but rather because it has lost its functionality: It simply is not useful anymore, yet it may be experienced as meaningful. Simmel believes that humans still regard certain values of the past as important, even if they do not have an effect in their immediate situation at present. On the basis of this evolutionist approach, Simmel sees the methodical possibility of an objective reality independent of the subject in spite of the fact that he gives strong emphasis to subjective experience: Culture develops in stages or steps (like going up a staircase). If we walk up the stairs, we want to be able to come down again in case we need to.



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So, we do not want to completely give up the steps behind us. It can perhaps be understood against this background that in the evolution of culture there frequently develops a striking degree of nostalgia toward outmoded objects and behavior patterns. In order to keep us from completely letting the steps behind us disappear, we give them a value, independent of the current functional needs of the individual. Meaningful examples may be: Hunting in an affluent society, old fashioned handicraft like weaving, travel by sail boat, hiking on foot, martial arts, playing music on ancient instruments, and the interest in archaic – unreasonable – love stories like Pyramus and Thisbe or Romeo and Juliet. “The greater the time lapse since humans originally attached interest and value to an object due to its usefulness or benefit, to the extent that this has in fact been ‘forgotten’, the greater the quality of purity in the aesthetic pleasure we experience in the mere form and appearance of this object, that is to say the more we invest it with a significance which goes beyond any coincidental pleasure we may take in it, the more we sense the independent value of this object.” (ibid: 24) Where something cannot be valued on the basis of its being useful, it will then be respected on the basis of being beautiful. Development, or moving up to a higher step, must be justified by functionality; it can only become permanent, if it works well. However, to save the lower step from being destroyed, it may be justified with reference to its beauty or sacredness (religion), thus preserving an opportunity for society to revert back to it, in case the dominant culture disintegrates (Jeremy Trylch: Go back to the default culture) (Trylch: Oral communication). The relative speed in the change of mental procedures, the ability of the mind to conserve the forms of its content while the latter itself changes, as well as to maintain the other way around, the same content in different forms, enhances the possibility that its states become rudimentary (ibid.). Simmel’s own examples are “ritual customs, everyday manners, lore.” These evolutionistic tools used by Simmel are not a pre-formation of a sociology that attempts to transmit the methods of the natural sciences to culture and society, but a discipline of the liberal arts in the tradition of Dilthey, which intends – on the basis of epistemological and philosophical challenges originating with Darwin – to enable sociology to be carried out in an evolutionistic way without thereby becoming an offshoot of biology or any other natural science. In addition, a sociology of development as theory of change suggests ethical consequences if it creates or recreates the awareness that the cultural history of all of mankind is a unity, that every step onto a higher

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level of ethics remains inextinguishably preserved, that precisely thereby the path of continuing development can be identified and that – as a result of research in a broadly framed cultural history – it can become obvious which change leads us forward and which leads us backward into regression, decadence, or atavism. The fact that we change conditions does not guarantee we improve them. Humanity has suffered through this sad truth all too often. Simmel admires Kant for having identified the internal energies determining knowledge and conduct. Kant explained where sensuality meets with understanding, where understanding meets with reason, where reason meets with the drive toward happiness and where individuality meets with the interests of wider company. These tensions describe the energies, requirements, and meaning of the evolving things themselves and accordingly of the development of society. Simmel felt the need to create his approach to social change also as an alternative to what was current in his days as the tradition originating from Hegel and Marx. Their concept of evolution of culture and society, and in the case of Marx, particularly of the economy, was also indebted to the sciences, although not to biology but rather to physics. Following the metaphor of the swinging pendulum the idea of a dialectic movement in history was proposed, first by Hegel, then by Marx. Hegel’s writings must have influenced Marx directly. But the swinging pendulum returns in the direction it came from, and this metaphor indicates a fundamental difference between the type of evolution Simmel preferred on the one hand, and the dialectic type on the other: The former presupposes a continual journey through history with no turning back, with the eyes of the travelers fixed on an ultimate goal; whereas the dialectic expects history to move through circles which, although distinct in levels of differentiation, return to previous familiar conditions. This can be exemplified using Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phaenomenologie des Geistes), and especially the passage on the dialectic of the changing relationship between lord and servant. In the course of the dialectic process the servant takes over the position of being in command from the lord, but then he rules as a lord, and nothing has really change in principle. This may also be seen in relation to the lingering question about modern China that puzzles the visitor to Peking who sees the portrait of Mao at the entrance to the ancient residence of the emperors. Hegel had been a protestant theologian. Then he switched from religion to philosophy and – as it were – replaced the creator god with what Hegel



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called the Weltgeist or World Spirit. The text discussed here next as an alternative theory of evolution has the purpose from Hegel’s perspective to show in which various forms the World Spirit can appear in this world. We shall only look at a philosophical reflection on work, which may have interested Marx with particular intensity and which he later applied to economic processes. Hegel examins a relationship between two persons of whom one works for the other. The person who accepts the services is the lord or master, and the other, who works for the master, is the servant. The master’s ability to demand obedience depends on the servant’s consent, or, in other words, the servant accepts the rule of his master over him. This relationship can be stable only if there is an ongoing dialogue between the two. If master and servant no longer talk with each other, what happens then is called by Hegel the alienation of the servant. In the initial stage of the dialectic movement the servant produces a material product to which meaning is attached by someone else, namely by the master. As long as this is the case, the servant does not materialize in his work the content of his own consciousness, but instead the content of what his master thinks. At first, the servant finds that in order and does not protest it. The master then has power over the material things or products which the servant makes via the mediation of his servant. In addition, the master has power over his servant via the material world. The relationship between the two is thus asymmetrical but stable. If at a later stage the degradation imposed on the servant by his master advances to the point, at which the servant – from the perspective of his master – becomes part of the material world, we can no longer look at it as an interaction between two persons, and we can also no longer expect that there will be a ‘meaningful’ dialogue between master and servant. Without successful communication, however, the consciousness of the master is no longer tied back to the servant in a functioning feedback and therefore cannot adjust or initiate any meaningful changes. Thus the master does not even notice that to him his servant has ceased to be a person and has been by him pushed into the realm of material objects. On the other hand, the servant learns more and more to think on his own, to find meaning in his own work, without any involvement of the master in his thinking. Eventually then the servant learns to arrive at a correct judgment of the situation at hand. This gives the servant the opportunity to become the subject of his own consciousness and to develop his consciousness in a flexible way so as to correspond properly with his actual situation. As a result, the servant recognizes that he is

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dependent upon his master, and this insight henceforth becomes the content and meaning of his work. The things which the servant produces become symbols of this new consciousness of dependency and he himself, not the master, now gives the product of his work their meaning. He no longer needs the master; he himself now has become the master. At this point a stage has been arrived at in which comes (in German) “das dienende Bewußtsein zum Fürsichsein”, or in English, the subservient consciousness arrives at existing for itself. That in Hegel’s reasoning is the achievement of emancipation as the outcome of a dialectic process. As Marx studied this text by Hegel, two insights may have occurred to him. First, the two individuals, master and servant, should be replaced by two classes, the capitalist class and the working class. Secondly, Marx realized that Hegel pretended to philosophize about the spirit, but in reality reasoned about economic facts, like work and wages to be paid for work, and capital in the hands of a master as the result of somebody else’s work. In order to illustrate this shift in the thinking of Marx from philosophy to economics in more detail, we select from the multitude of secondary literature on the writings of Marx a book by Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. (Tucker 1963) In it Tucker explains that Marx connected the idea of alienated man with the notion that the proletariat is the highest stage of development toward alienation. He sees the proletariat as a class into which the rest of the humans gradually sink by becoming more and more alienated. This means that more and more humans become members of the proletariat as a social class the members of which are fully conscious of how alienated they are. This form of consciously being dehumanized brings about the end of dehumanization (Tucker, 1963: 146f, Tucker 2001). This line of reasoning is reminiscent of Hegel’s dialectic of master and servant. All of this is still intellectually created in the context of the philosophical thinking of Karl Marx. But more and more Marx becomes interested in the economic aspects of alienation. Humans translate what constitutes their humanity into material objects which become money. Tucker believes that while thinking along these lines Karl Marx suddenly, in late spring or early summer of 1844 arrived at the colossal insight that the philosophy of Hegel – while pretending to be philosophy – really deals with economic reality. From then on Marx reads Hegel with other eyes, from a different perspective. The famous system of idealistic philosophy had already been unveiled by Feuerbach as really being esoteric Psychology: Dreamed up pseudo-realities in the imagination of people are



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not objectively true and existing outside the individual, but they are really only a symptom telling us something about the state of the psyche of that person. This is meant by the statement that Hegel’s metaphysics is in fact esoteric psychology. Accordingly, if we listen to a person talking about his imagined metaphysical realities, we find out about his or her psychic condition. But this is just one step on the way from Hegel toward Marx; this is the step which Feuerbach had taken. Marx goes one step further: The idealistic philosophy of Hegel is really esoteric economics. When Hegel writes about the World Sprit he secretly deals with the life of the human person involved in economic production. This notion was inspired by Hegel’s text on master and servant, in which – due to dialectic evolution – the servant ends up being the master. This Marx has taken over from Hegel. In addition, Marx also thinks that he can find in Hegel’s philosophy the key for the critique of the bourgeois economy. This creation if this idea is – according to Tucker – the birth of ‘Marxism’ in 1844. The component of Marx’ theoretical heritage most frequently mentioned is historical materialism. It is to Simmel a failed attempt by Marx to explain social change – and in fact to explain the course history has taken – totally on the basis of material, primarily economic, living conditions. We have seen before that historical materialism does not present itself as a heuristic device, but rather – according to Simmel – deceives the reader with the erroneous claim of accomplishing a realistic description of reality. Simmel’s own contribution toward a theory of social change must be seen against the background of this – from his point of view – failed attempt. To clarify his critique Simmel reminds us that the re-creation of reality in a work of art is an “isolating abstraction” and thereby comparable with what the cultural and social scientist has to accomplish when dealing with his or her objects of study. In art there is also one dimension of meaning being isolated: Painting is only about what the eye can see, music appeals to the ear. Reality, however, is multidimensional, filled with noises and smells. Painting concentrates on the objects of optical perception and it attempts in this area alone to creatively remold reality. Music is another example. It focuses entirely upon the acoustical form of sense perception and it tries to creatively generate reality in this area alone. According to Simmel, research on culture uses a similar approach and, analogously; it is entirely legitimate to reduce historical reality to the dimension of the economy. But Simmel’s reservations about historical materialism rest on something else.

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Simmel identifies the mistake which he thinks he has discovered, as a case of “quaternio terminorum”. These Latin words mean that four terms or concepts are seen in a certain relationship, as will become clearer later. In order to fight that “illusion that confuses the idea with causality,” historical materialism calls mechanical naturalistic events “immediately effective causes” [unmittelbar wirksame Ursachen]. It can thereby count upon the basic approval of many intellectuals who, in a science-oriented atmosphere of being weary of metaphysics, are open-minded toward realistic, or rather naturalistic approaches. That makes it easy for historical materialism to sail under a false flag. “With the opposition between metaphysical ideas as the moving force of history versus singular natural causes of its singular natural process, historical materialism illegitimately identifies another opposition: Ideal interests as moving forces versus material interests as moving forces of history. The restricting of the decisive and solely effective historical events to the economy is therefore based upon a quaternio terminorum, the logical mistake of making, out of the restriction of historical understanding in principle to empirically concrete causes, at the same time a restriction of these latter to a certain singular province of interests …” (Simmel 1905: 225). Here Simmel identifies a fundamental methodical mistake of historical materialism. The line of reasoning so far helped clarify the importance of the opposition between metaphysical ideas as the moving force of history on the one hand and concretely present moving forces in the objective reality on the other hand. Simmel thinks that this opposition is useful but he charges historical materialism with illegitimately and surreptitiously joining it with another opposition, offering it so to speak under a false label – namely, the opposition of ideal interests with material interests, i.e., with economic needs as ever-driving forces of history. Historical materialism, according to Simmel, thereby takes advantage of the fact that, at least since the Enlightenment, there has existed in science the tendency to eradicate metaphysical connections and to concentrate upon its empirically perceivable elements in the hope of gaining knowledge about reality that way. Historical materialism claims, according to Simmel’s reading, that it would be in line with this tendency to separate metaphysics from the explanatory environment of scientific procedure, if one would see as driving forces of history no longer idealist interests but only economic material interests. Simmel regrets that there are far too many people who believe this and who do not see through to the bottom of this



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juxtaposition, this block of four terms (quaternio terminorum), in its complexity. This quaternio terminorum refers to the following four suggested driving forces of history: 1. metaphysical ideas 2. empirical reality 3. idealist interests 4. material interests It is here where Simmel sees a “logical mistake of making, out of the restriction of historical understanding in principle to empirically concrete causes, at the same time a restriction of these latter to a certain singular province of interests …” (ibid: 225). We are talked into the notion that – if we don’t want metaphysics anymore, but rather to carry on a science that stays clear of metaphysics, a science that explains reality out of itself as it is – then in order to be empirically consistent we would have to restrict ourselves, for the explanation of the course of history, to the study of economic interests as driving forces of the economy. If we are unable to distinguish between metaphysics as a prejudice beyond discussion within the process of gaining scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and the driving forces of ideas in everyday life that are active by way of religious or cultural ideals, on the other hand, then we fall into this trap of historical materialism. Simmel is convinced that human beings who are concretely acting in history can be motivated by religious or other cultural ideas. One should not confuse such a conviction, however, with the claim that history would be driven by the Weltgeist (Hegel’s world spirit) or by an iron law; for this would be an impersonal force that intrudes as a deus ex machina (a Latin term, meaning the god out of a machine in a theater) out of nowhere into the course of history, i.e., this would be metaphysics. When Max Weber shows, in his sociology of religion, that the entrepreneur as a pious Calvinist can be willing to act ascetically, not to dissipate his money on luxury but to keep on investing it in the firm he is already directing, then it follows that the moving force of history may be the religious motive of the single acting human being. This is entirely different from metaphysics as an explanatory crutch in cultural science. Historical materialism, however, takes advantage of the trend away from metaphysical explanatory tools and toward accepting only rational causal patterns of explanation; therefore one would also have to assume, historical materialism suggests, that history is being molded not by idealists but rather by the agents of economic interests. This is what Simmel means with the concept of quaternio terminorum.

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His methodological critique of historical materialism culminates in the reproach that conclusions are jumped to in a logically illegitimate way [i.e., by skipping a step]. It stands to reason that Simmel, probably for the remaining decades of his life, carried with him the apprehension that the arguments of historical materialism could be justified – if not philosophically then at least politically – by the increasing number of people whose actions are purely economically motivated and whom everybody can clearly observe at work. Be that as it may, the weaknesses, the epistemological untenabilities of historical materialism were exposed very early – not by putting forth political polemics, but rather by providing with expert precision Simmel’s opinion – that Karl Marx was a charismatic revolutionary but a weak philosopher. This cannot impress contemporary Marxists in China, most of whom are not familiar with the writings of Karl Marx anyway (Rockmore 2000, 2002). Looking back at Chapter 2 Any observation in conjunction with theories of social development pointing in the direction that change cannot be avoided causes fear among those who believe different conditions would deprive them of what they have achieved. The fear of Darwin poses as defense of religious faith, the fear of Marx poses as defense of political stability, the fear of Freud poses as defense of a human dignity that would not want to see men and women subject to sexual drives. The critical nature of Simmel’s work rebuffs those who block progress out of fear. His theory of change is rooted not in Darwin but in Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 bc) of whom Plato lets Socrates make the statement: “It was Heraclitus who said: ‘Everything flows on, nothing stays in place’ and by comparing what exists to a flowing river, he said that one cannot climb into the same river twice”. From that ancient Greek insight there is a continuing path of thought all the way to Hegel and Marx. To give Darwin alone credit for the theory of evolution is the result of a view narrowed down to the natural sciences as the sole sources of orientation. It is of course not Simmel’s view. Simmel identifies progress with the shift from outside social control by the group, requiring conformity from its members and in return bestowing identify on them, to internalized self control of the individual striving to utilized his or her inner resources and finding its personal identity in its uniqueness. Parallel to this change the importance of competition increases as a tool society uses to channel individual energies into serving the community.

CHAPTER THREE

THE MESSAGE OF INTERACTION: HOW REALITY IS CONSTRUCTED Sociology as the Study of Interaction Humans pay attention to each other in what they do, and out of their actions performed with regard to their neighbors originate lasting relationships, groups, institutions and social structure in general. These in turn become points of departure for new actions. It is reminiscent of the question whether the chicken came first or the egg, to decide whether sociology ought to start its efforts with the study of social action or of social structure. What makes this alternative more complicated it the reality status ascribed to large scale social structures as either existing as some form of physical reality or merely as a mental concept in a person’s imagination which produces patterns of conduct. To deal with society as reality and as an integrated whole is to regard it as a system, and as a consequence one must then regard the individual as a function of the system, as Durkheim did. If, on the other hand, one starts with the independent individual in dynamic interaction with other individuals and considers this to be the root cause of social reality, then this results in a different type of sociology where the system is secondary. In the face of these different approaches, Simmel writes that the choice to be made here is one of method, and the criterion for this decision is not inherent in the objects of study itself. If we only consider the given objects we face in our daily lives, one position is as tenable as the other. Therefore, to opt for one of these methodical positions remains a task for the sociologist. Simmel takes sides here in favor of seeing interaction as the root cause of social reality but he never insists that this the only correct way. The German language referent to “interaction” is the word “Wechselwirkung” in the writings of Dilthey and Simmel which Park and Burgess in their path breaking text book of 1924 translated as “reciprocity of relationships” (Park and Burgess 1924: 585) and which only later was reduced to “interaction”. We shall take a look at Simmel’s publications that were crucial for him in regarding interaction as the point of departure for reality creation.

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The first book to be published after the successful doctoral thesis on Kant, and the first work of Simmel’s to include the word “sociological” on its title page, was the study “Ueber sociale Differenzierung” (“On social differentiation”) with the subtitle “Sociologische und psychologische Untersuchungen” (“Sociological and psychological studies”), published in 1890, (Simmel, 1890a) as was mentioned here before. It indicates already in which direction Simmel intends to go. This publication is volume X (ten), number 1 of a series of studies entitled “Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen” (old German spelling! “Studies in political and social science”) edited by Gustav Schmoller. Just as the subject of “money” had occupied Simmel for several years (1889–1900) and in a number of publications, he also examined in tandem to this – from 1894 to 1908 – the methodical basis for the new discipline of sociology which turns out to be his interactive approach. Apart from the book of 1890, we also have access to the following: “Das Problem der Sozi­ologie” (“The problem of sociology”) in Schmoller’s yearbook of 1894 (Simmel, 1894a), “The problem of sociology” of 1895 (Simmel, 1895a), the lecture which Robert E. Park apparently noted down in when he listened to Simmel in the University of Berlin in 1899 (Park, 1899), the incorporation of Simmel’s manuscript of that lecture in the book “Soziologie” (“Soci­ology”) with the subtitle: “Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung” (“Studies on the forms of socialization”) in 1908 (Simmel, 1908a, Simmel 2009), and finally the publication in Chicago in 1931 of Park’s lecture notes of 1899 (see above). It is possible to use these texts to trace the development of Simmel’s thought between 1894 and 1908. In the introduction to “Ueber sociale Differenzierung” (“On social differentiation)”, entitled “On the epistemology of the social sciences”, Simmel introduces sociology as a science of the second order with the task of developing new hypotheses. “There is another important factor relating to sociology. It is an eclectic science insofar as the products of other scholarly disciplines provide its material. It processes the results of historical research, anthropology, statistics and psychology rather as semi-finished products: It does not address itself to the original material which other sciences deal with; instead it is a science of the second order, so to speak, in that it creates new syntheses from that which is already synthesis for the other disciplines. In its present state it merely offers a new perspective for the examination of well-known facts” (Simmel, 1890a: 2). Thus sociology does not have its own object of investigation, but it does have a method of treatment, distinctive and peculiar to itself, which it



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applies at a typically high level of abstraction. Simmel describes sociology as a field which uses the results of other branches of scholarship rather like “semi-finished products”. The other disciplines like history or cultural anthropology are suppliers of components, so to speak, and the final assembly takes place in the great manufacturing hall of sociology. The basis for the production is provided by the research results of historians, psychologists, statisticians, ethnologists, and others all of whom work at a much more concrete level. The sociologist must accept these, since – from Simmel’s point of view – he has no other data which might provide him with a new source of knowledge, only facts which somebody else has studied previously. Facts, known due to the work of other disciplines, are raised by the sociologist to a new and higher level of abstraction of knowledge. They are thus given a new conceptual form to produce new insights based on the creation of reality in interaction. In principle this is not peculiar to sociology, because Simmel reminds us “that ultimately the content of any scholarly discipline does not consist of mere objective facts but always contains an interpretation and shaping of these facts according to categories and norms which are a priori for the individual discipline concerned” (ibid: 3). The formative process is necessary even in those fields working at the source of data. But for sociology or for the social sciences generally, he regards the process of construction as being particularly important. “As far as the social sciences are concerned, there is simply a quantitatively larger proportion of the element of mental construction as compared to other fields of scholarship. One is thus especially justified here in seeking to bring to theoretical consciousness the principles according to which that construction process occurs” (ibid.). One important question of method is the construction of unity out of isolated empirical data. The scholar involved in research in sociology looks for the links between contributing components to form an image of reality. Those components would otherwise be left unrelated, since their interrelationship is not inherent but the result of a constructive process. Hence one is justified in asking the question: Is it legitimate to construct unity even where empirical findings suggest unrelated diversity? “One can plausibly show that the world possesses ultimate unity, and that all individualization and differentiation is mere illusion, just as one can plausibly believe that each and every element of the world is absolutely distinctive, that not even one leaf of a tree is exactly the same as any other, and that all efforts to impose unity on it is a subjective addition imposed by our minds, merely the result of a psychological urge to integrate and unify for which there is no objective justification…” (ibid: 4).

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These reflections are directed to what happens in the workshop of the sociologist, not primarily to the dynamics of everyday life. But while to Max Weber the construction of ideal types is the prerogative of the researcher, in Simmel’s perspective there is not really that much difference: Reality construction to him occurs in everyday life as it does in the study or in the library. Thus he draws his reader’s attention to the importance of creative combinatory techniques or formative interactive processes also to be accepted as a methodical feature of the social sciences. In his attempt to determine a legitimate task for sociology in the family of related academic disciplines, particularly in connection with research on history, Simmel points out that the position of methodological individualism (preferred by Max Weber) has become unsustainable. This raises the question of whether Simmel position on these issues is contradictory for the following reasons: He describes social development as a gradual increase in individualism, and at the same time he justifies sociology as the study of historic forces rooted in classes, nations and other collective bodies instead of in the actions of lonely heroes. At the same time Durkheim criticizes the consequences of excessive individualism and points to the social defects he described as anomie which he sees resulting from over-individualized conditions. Simmel by contrast predicts more individualization as progress, but then on the level of method Simmel declares that “the individualistic perspective has been superseded” (Simmel, 1894 a: 271). Nonetheless, even if individualism is going to dominate modern life, it does not follow that methodological individualism is a useful way of doing sociology. The essay which opens with the striking statement that the individualistic perspective has been overcome, was published in translation in the USA in 1895 (Simmel, 1895a). Simmel backs it up with convincing arguments: In research about the starting points of historical events he thinks that the epoch of individualistic thought has come to an end in which individuals were seen as initiators of historical developments and changes. Hence sociology had become necessary in order to shed light on those supra-individual forces which were from then on to be regarded as the driving force of history: “The overthrow of the individualistic point of view may be considered the most important and fruitful step which historical science and the humanities [Geisteswissenschaften] generally have made in our time. In place of the individual careers which formerly stood in the foreground of our picture of history, we now regard social forces and national movements as the real determining factors. Out of these forces the parts which individuals play cannot be evaluated with complete



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definiteness. The science of human beings has become the science of human society.” (Simmel, 1895a: 412). Simmel rejects any definition of sociology as a collective term for the accumulation of certain facts, empty generalizations, and abstractions. This accumulation of empty concepts detached from concrete life has brought about the “doom of philosophy” (Simmel, 1894a: 272) and would mean exactly the same ruination for sociology. Almost prophetically, he anticipates the dead end which certain areas of sociological theorization would reach. If sociology is to establish itself as a serious and respectable discipline, it must differentiate itself within the broad field of the social sciences, which includes economics, psychology and history, and be in a position to emphasize the distinctiveness of its interactive method of seeing reality located in relationships. For this there are enough worthy examples within the sphere of the other humanities: “Economic history, for example, accordingly isolates from the totality of events everything which is connected with the physical needs of man and the means of satisfying these needs – even though there may be nothing within this totality that is in reality not connected in some way with these needs. Similarly, sociology as a distinctive discipline will adopt the same procedure: It detaches for separate consideration the purely social aspects from the totality of mankind’s history, i.e. the events in society; or, to express it with rather paradoxical brevity, it investigates that which is ‘society’ in society” (ibid: 274f., compare: Hoefnagels 1966). Simmel takes examples such as “religious community,” “band of conspirators,” and other social groupings in order to identify the phenomena they all share: In all of them there is some kind of leadership, there is the definition of membership to distinguish the insider form the outsider etc. These phenomena are objects of sociology at a high level of abstraction not customary in other disciplines: “If we examine social groupings of the most diverse purposes and moral character, we find that they display the same forms of subordination and domination, of opposition, of division of labor, we find the formation of a hierarchy, the representation of the group-forming principle in symbols, separation into parties, we find all degrees of freedom or subjection of the individual to the group, crossconnections or stratification of groups, certain types of reaction of these to external influences” (ibid.: 273). This catalogue of research tasks for sociology was way ahead of its time in 1894. From our point of view today, all this is taken for granted, at least as far as the sociologist is concerned: In spite of the huge differences between social groupings, all of them share domination, competition, the search

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for solidarity. Simmel’s problem was that his contemporaries at the universities believed all specialists’ fields were clearly and conclusively delineated. Individual disciplines were separated according to their object of study and not according to methods or degree of abstraction. Thus there was no object left which had not already been assigned to an academic field: The authority lay with the discipline of whatever specific subject was in question – be it history of art, history of religion or history of economics. Simmel accounts for the need for sociology by introducing a new level of abstraction, and at this level there would be an opportunity for developing for example a sociology “of domination and subordination” (Simmel, 1895a: 415) as Max Weber was to do later. The philosophers and historians who took any interest at all in sociology during this period (1890–1900) understood it to denote either the positivism of Comte and Spencer (as for example the early Dilthey did) or the theory of Karl Marx. In the face of this kind of confrontation, Simmel’s emphasis on interaction showed a third path that would neither side with positivism nor with Marxism. Simmel accused his critics of narrow-mindedness for not recognizing the wealth of research questions that can be generated from the perspective of interaction: “The scope of this academic field is moreover in no sense so narrow, as it appeared to a number of my critics… The importance, for example, of a common mealtime for the cohesion of individuals is a real sociological theme, likewise the differences in socialization which are connected with variations in the number of associates; the importance of the ‘non-partisan’ in the conflict of members (in German: Genossen); the ‘poor’ as organic members of societies; the representation of corporations by individuals; the primus inter pares (the first among equals) and the tertius gaudens (if two quarrel, then the third will be happy). (ibid. 422). It is hard to judge the influence of this work by Simmel on the developing American sociology of the time. However, Simmel quite clearly argues once more at the end of the essay that it is time to get out of the dead-end of historicisms and its constant referring back to art history, economic history and other specific branches of history; he argues that the research program relating to interaction and pursued by sociology should not just be tolerated but given full recognition. Sociology is always ‘sociology of the social’ (Hoefnagels, 1966); it may not have its own empirical, concrete objects, but it does have its own method of investigation, for example the subject of power and domination (bearing in mind that these occur both in church parishes and in criminal gangs); sociology must develop this level of abstraction for itself as a source of its identity.



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Just as economic history interprets historical objects by abstracting from the wealth of actual events that which is important to its own particular path of enquiry, so sociology must draw out those forms which are produced as a result of dynamic interaction. It is in the nature of the task of sociology to “show the particular forces at work within groups which are completely heterogeneous in material terms as an area of study which justifies abstraction, socialization as such and its forms. These forms develop from the interaction of individuals, relatively independent of the reasons for this interaction; the sum of these forms is that which is denoted by the abstract term society” (Simmel, 1894a: 273). The abstract concept ‘society’ does not denote the sum of unrelated elements for Simmel, but rather as its main object it is for sociology a unified whole. His theory of the formative process gives rise to a meaningful concept of society, which corresponds to the underlying principles of his epistemology. Whereas in a work of art, culture is objectified as the result of the creative activity of an individual, the formative processes in society take place as a result of a large number of interactions, to which Simmel assigns the status of ‘objective reality’. He derives his notion of how social reality comes about, from the thesis that reality is embodied in relations. And indeed the interactions between individuals constitute life itself. The reality with which social science is therefore concerned does not only consist of elements which are, as it were, anatomically dissected, lifeless entities; instead we are to perceive life as a unified whole, integrated through interaction. This approach applies to the psychical unity of the individual as well as to the unity of society and other complex social groupings which sociology investigates. Simmel finds it necessary to define further criteria for correct methodical procedure relating to this perspective: A selection must be made from amongst the immense diversity of possible interactions between those which are to be singled out for consideration and others which must be disregarded. As a solution to this methodical problem, Simmel suggests searching in society not for laws as in the natural sciences – which he had explicitly rejected – but for interactive relationships which occur with certain regularity as trends or tendencies. Following this line of thought, Simmel comes to a tentative conclusion as to the question of the status of the objects of sociology in terms of reality: He still regards physical, material reality as being of primary importance. In this context each thing stands for itself and by itself. A secondary element, of a different quality but nevertheless unquestionably a part of reality, is the sphere of the interaction of parts; this interaction is a dynamic

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process producing relationships as phenomena to which sociology must address itself if it is to fulfill its task properly and fully. Sociology then has as its topic of study what goes on between persons. If interaction constitutes unity, would not unity come about also in confrontation or conflict – which can also be regarded as a form of interaction? If two societies come into hostile contact with one another, do they then not become parts of a larger unit which encompasses both of them? There is agreement with this view in the literature on conflict theory, and, what is more, Simmel is specifically referred to in this context. However, if we read Simmel carefully, we see that his reflections on the unifying effect of conflict are expressed only as a tentative ‘experimental’ argument; at the conclusion of this experiment he puts forward reasons which show that this idea is mistaken, and should therefore be rejected. As far as Simmel is concerned, conflict is a case of interaction for which his definition of a whole, a unity formed by interaction, is simply “inappropriate” (Simmel, 1890a: 15). “One would have to look for the specific difference to be added to the concept of interactive individuals or groups in order to reach the common notion of society as opposed to that of antagonistic groups. For example, one might say that it was an interaction in which acting for one’s own good also promotes the good of others at the same time” (ibid.). He elaborates on this idea in his text on competition, but in conflicting encounters of large groups as in wars, this condition of promoting the good of others while promoting one’s own interest is clearly not met (even though war propaganda typically suggests that). Simmel returns to the problem of creating reality in interaction: “One can perhaps perceive the limit of social being as such to be at the point where the interaction of individuals amongst themselves does not only manifest itself in a subjective state, but creates an objective form which possesses a certain independence from the individuals partaking in it. In other words, where there has been a unification or integration of which the form remains even when individual members leave and new members join; …” (ibid: 16). Here, then, “social being as such” is defined as the creation of “objective forms” which, as far as Simmel is concerned, exist when the individuals involved can leave the social group due to death or desertion without the group itself ceasing to exist. Interaction may have stopped but it leaves its traces behind. The principle of interaction transcends the idea of a duality between the individual and the group. In 1908, Simmel explicitly rejects this choice, according to which an idea either exists in the mind of an individual or in a “social mind” of a group (Simmel, 1908c: 287). This simple choice of one



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or the other Simmel regards as fragile. “There is in fact a third element: The objective intellectual content” (ibid.) like the rules of mathematics. Simmel mentions language and the legal code as examples of such objectivity. And it is indeed true that the classical languages remain intellectual realities, even though they are no longer spoken in any living society. They are of course not the object of sociology, but they are an “objective intellectual content” (ibid.). The key criterion for deciding what should be considered as sociological and what should not is the relationship in interaction or mutual influence. If for instance statistical data are arrived at that a particular phenomenon occurs in 20% of the population, this by no means guarantees that it is a sociological fact. It will only be sociological insofar as it is the result of interactions (ibid: 290). Society Emerges in Interaction The most complex form under study in sociology, society, too emerges from the processes of interaction. Simmel defines it as a living whole. But instead of merely presenting his own ideas and disregarding other scholarly viewpoints, he undertakes to describe and tentatively represent the positivistic position in opposition to his own, with the predictable result that he refutes them in the end: “The concept of society obviously only has meaning if it stands in some kind of contrast to the mere sum of individuals; if society was merely this, then it could surely only be the object of a science in no other way than for example the ‘night sky’ is the object of astronomy; whereas in fact this is only a collective term, and what astronomy actually researches is the movements of the individual stars and the laws governing such movements” (Simmel, 1890 a: 10). Simmel compares sociology to the natural sciences, particularly astronomy. The “night sky” as a whole is not astronomy’s object of investigation; it is merely an unspecified collective term embracing the specific elements, which can alone be objects of research, specifically in how they relate to each other. Society, on the other hand, is real as a totality, and it ought to be possible for the sociologist to show that society is more than the sum of its parts. “If society is just our way of considering individual elements together, whereas individual elements are what constitutes reality itself, then it is these elements and their behavior which form the actual object of scientific investigation, and the concept of society disappears. And this does indeed seem to be the case” (ibid.). When Simmel writes, that this “seems to be the case” he indicates that it is in fact not so.

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There are of course branches of sociology which adopt an analytical, rather than interactive, approach and conduct empirical research accordingly, typically at the micro level of small groups. This produces results for which Simmel’s words are true: The concept of society disappears, because such a concept is not assigned any reality of its own. The positivistic position, which Simmel does not wish to adopt, is outlined by him as follows: “That which exists empirically is nothing but individual people, their conditions and movements: Thus it can only be a matter of understanding these, whereas the idea of society is then an intangible product of purely conceptual synthesis and ought not therefore be the object of any enquiry which seeks to investigate reality” (ibid.). What Simmel described in these sentences coincides largely with the point of view of the English and French sociology of the late 19th century, which Dilthey (Dilthey 1883) rejected as methodically impossible. Aware of the objections raised by Dilthey against a sociology conceived along the lines of the natural sciences, particularly physics and biology, Simmel sets out to argue in favor of a social science as an area of study following the path of research in history or economics, or a psychology not based on the natural sciences. “We must indeed distinguish as sharply as possible between real things, which we can regard as objective unities, and their combination into complex entities, which only exist as such in our synthetic thinking” (ibid.) What the analysts propose to do, what seems appropriate to the advocates of a sociological nominalism is quite right for them as a basic idea. Simmel does not in fact adopt the distinction between a correctly perceived reality on the one hand and terms which are “stuck on” rather like labels on the other hand; he considers the distinction between these two views as a recognition of two types of reality, rather than as two alternative methodical positions. Thus to Simmel, they are both real, but each is real in a different way. This conviction about two types of realities leads him to distinguish between real entities, which we can regard as objective unities – such as individuals or small groups – and the combination of these into complex entities, which as such only exist in our “synthetic thinking”. Simmel sees this distinction as valuable and necessary for defining his own concept of society. “But when methodical individualism turns this critique against the concept of society, one need only reflect at greater depth to realize that, in so doing, it is only condemning itself. For even an individual person consists of components, that are not united beyond any possibility of disintegrating. But such unity would be required by a type of knowledge willing to



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accept only ultimate reality. To comprehend the multiplicity as such which even the individual displays in himself is, as I see it, one of the most important requirements for a rational basis of sociology, which I would thus now like to go into further” (ibid.: 10f.). Simmel calls ‘individualism’ what he rejects here as a method. Again, he criticizes his opponents on their own terms. He takes the arguments in favor of methodical individualism seriously – so seriously that he is able finally to turn its own reasoning against this position. He shows that the idea of the distinctiveness of the individual has religious roots: “As long as mankind, just as all organic species, was regarded as God’s creation, a being which entered the world ready-equipped with all its qualities, it was obvious and almost necessary to regard the individual person as a completely integrated whole, an indivisible personality whose ‘unique soul’ found expression and analogy in the uniform identity of its physical organs. The view of history as a development renders this impossible.” (ibid: 11). Simmel explains how that which is “indivisible” in religion, an “individual” fixed for all eternity, becomes after Darwin an isolated moment within a process of evolution. This applies to both Darwin’s view of biological evolution of mankind and to the development of the individual in the course of a lifetime. From this perspective, we combine – without being conscious of doing that – into what we experience as individuals, an immense diversity of socialization effects, together with information passed down to us in our genetic make-up. Thus Simmel draws the conclusion that the multiplicity of specific data is just as impenetrable or complex, or at least similarly complicated, at the level of the individual as it is at the level of society. At both levels, the formative process produces a unity that does not exist by itself. Accordingly, a scholarly point of view, like ‘methodical individualism,’ will contradict its own premises if it limits its concept of reality to an unambiguously fully-unified pre-existing whole. For in this case, even the individual would slip through the analyst’s fingers and dissolve into an unintelligible multiplicity of isolated details. This argumentation deserves attention as a rarely presented plea in favor of the position of realism and thus of interpretive sociology which sees society emerge as the result of interaction. The question of unity as the fundamental problem of a concept of society remains an issue throughout Simmel’s work, and he eventu­ ally  asks the question in this form: “How is society possible?” This occurs in the introduction to the first chapter of his book “Soziologie.

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Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung” (“Sociology. Studies of the forms of socialization”; Simmel, 1908a, Simmel 2009). This work was originally published in 1908. In order to give sociology a well defined content, Simmel mentions society as its primary field of investigation. And the most thorough method to clarify what he understands by society is to enquire into the preconditions for its existence. In his answer to the similar question “how is nature possible?” Kant had sought to identify the “forms which make up the essence of our intellect,” (Simmel 1908a: 28) claiming nature, for instance, is nowhere to be found as a given but as a form is always the product of intellectual activity. By posing the analogous question for society, Simmel emphasizes that the forming process does not follow the same path as in Kant’s description of nature. Therefore he points to the “completely different methodical intention” (ibid: 30) of this question relating to society in comparison to the question relating to nature. “I stated that the function of realizing synthetic unity lies, in the case of nature, in the investigating subject, but in the case of society has been passed on to its own elements” (ibid: 31). What are the mental processes which individuals, as the elements of society, must have undergone in order for society to be possible? The philosophy of nature is concerned with processes which do not directly influence nature, because the components of nature are unconscious. Social philosophy by contrast must take account of processes of the conscious minds of humans, processes which themselves are already social reality. Transitioning from nature to society, epistemology becomes empirical science. Simmel says that “one might well call this the epistemology of society” (ibid: 32). By 1908, his epistemology had reached a form which was capable of immediate adaptation to a theory of society and henceforth be valuable as sociology. Simmel attempts “in the following to outline… some of these a priori conditions or forms of socialization” [Vergesellschaftung] (ibid.). The qualitative threshold that divides natural philosophy from social philosophy can be described like this: When dealing with data relating to nature, unity is merely created in the mind of the researcher and the objects of research remain unaffected by this. Society, in contrast, consists of conscious individuals, and their mental constructs create a unity (in circumstances that are the very object of investigation) not only within the individual but also as the immediate reality Simmel calls society. What then are the cognitive processes, which individuals, as the elements of society, must have undergone in order for them to make society



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possible? Simmel attempts to outline some of the a priori conditions or forms of socialization that must exist in order to make society possible. a. The image, which one person gains of another person through interaction is skewed in the direction of generalization using familiar categories. This image cannot be the mirror-like reflection of an unchanging reality, but is socially constructed in a particular way. That is a necessary consequence of the fact that complete knowledge of the individuality of others is not accessible to us. For society to be possible, we form generalized impressions of our fellow humans and assign each of them to a general category despite the singularity of each. It is then possible to designate each person to a particular sphere. Within the spheres of military officers, people of religious faith, civil servants, scholars, and family members, each individual makes a certain assumption in how he or she sees the other person by implying: This person is a member of my social circle. b. Every individual is “not only a part of society but also something else besides” (ibid: 35). There can be no total social engulfment; the individual must always hold back a part of personal existence from total identification with society or else risk pathological developments both in the person and in social structure. Simmel sees the relationship between personal existence on the one hand and identification with society on the other as a dynamic process leading to a wide variety of different forms. In the context of those “the nature of one’s being social is determined or partly determined by the nature of one’s being not completely social.” This means, how I appear in interaction with others depends on how I cultivate my independent, individual existence (ibid: 36). Simmel illustrates that in his studies and mentions as examples the stranger, the enemy, the criminal, and the poor as forms of interaction. The quality of the encounters of people within social categories would be quite different, were each person to confront every other person exclusively as what they appear to be in a particular category, as representative of the particular social role one happens to be seen in. But that is not the case: The waiter who brings my food in the restaurant is something else besides being my waiter, and I am of course aware of that. c. “Society is a combination of dissimilar elements… for even where democratic or socialist forces plan or partially realize an ‘equality’ it can only be equality in the sense of being equal in value” (ibid: 41). There can be no question of the elements (and by that Simmel means the

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It may be appropriated to state that Simmel’s account of social a prioris does not possess normative status. He also repeatedly mentions that those theoretical fundamentals do not describe social conditions. He thus neither requires that these a prioris should empirically exist, nor does he claim that they do. If in any concrete individual case the condition of the a priori is not fulfilled, then that particular person does not contribute toward constituting and stabilizing society. But society as a whole is only possible because people generally speaking realize these a priori conditions through the way they interact with each other. Religion as Interaction To believers, religion becomes reality as a result of the interaction they engage in with a person in the beyond. A god or other immortal is real only to those faithful followers who interact with him or her. To others his reality status is like that of Cinderella or of Santa Claus, not reality, but fiction. “Any conceivable relationship between God and the world must be real! In mysticism this is the form adopted by the ens realissimum, replacing the objective God with a relationship with God – the one religious fact that offers itself as the most immediate objectification of the subjective life process of religion (Simmel 1997: 150). Like society, religion is possible because the content of the conscious mind not merely reflects on something untouched by thought, but itself contributes to the shaping of reality. Thus religion and society are not different in principle; religion too is a social formation. Its specific effect is that it serves as a bridge between the here and the beyond. The question “How is religion possible?” is answered by Simmel thus: Religion is possible because human beings, associated in lively interaction, give concrete shape to religious forms on the basis of social forms.



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The sacred texts which Jews and Christians share, contain the two books of Samuel. In the first one of those, the third chapter reports about a dream which occurs to young Samuel three times in a row (1 Samuel 3, 3–18). The first two experiences he interprets as dreams, but then in a conversation with the aged office holder Eli, Samuel is instructed by Eli to approach a possible third occurrence not as dream but rather as a “real” encounter with the deity (ibid, verse 9). Thus Samuel is confronted with three comparable events, and defines the first two as dreams and the third one as reality, the change occurring as the result of his interaction with Eli. From a sociological perspective the initiative to create religious phenomena by means of the formative process does not emanate from an outer-worldly sphere – as theology would teach – but from the shared experience of social life, in our illustration shared by Eli and Samuel. For the sociologist who studies it, religion is reality because it is not disprovable; for “the religious person habitually experiences things in such a way that they cannot be any different from what his religiousness allows them to be” (Simmel, 1906: 16). Simmel compares the religious person to somebody in love: “It has often been observed that the emotion of love creates its own object… as an object of love, the beloved is always the creation of the one who loves. In love, a new form emerges, which, though of course bound to the fact of a personality, nevertheless lives in a world which is completely different in essence and conception and totally separate from the actual reality of this person.” (ibid. 31). Simmel draws this comparison between the creativity of love, which enables love itself to generate a new form, and the creative act of the religious person necessary for the content of faith to become factual. Of course, the believer links faith to concrete phenomena open to varying interpretations guided in part by emotions. As a consequence religious feelings and faith are never a necessary conclusion to be drawn from the facts, contrary to arguments seeking to prove the existence of God; the adoption of faith is a free choice, in fact the question of whether a person is able to adopt such faith is a question of his or her own experiences and feelings. Simmel also describes the reactions of human emotion to fate – Hope, despair, rebellion, and satisfaction – all these are emotional reactions to experienced events. Whether any reaction has a religious quality or not, is a matter of the person’s own creative interpretation of the reality of his or her life. Simmel notes here that this is a matter of a “particular quality of emotion” (ibid: 16). In interaction with fellow believers the faithful create

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their own religion as if resulting from sensory perception. “However our emotions may react to fate; whether submissive or rebellious, with hope or despair, with need or contentment – this reaction may be completely irreligious or else entirely religious.” (ibid. 15). According to Simmel “the religious quality does not emanate from a believed transcendental power onto experience, but is a particular quality of emotion itself – a concentration or impulse, dedication or remorse – which is religious as such; this emotional quality creates a religious object as its objectification, a separate entity, just as sensory perception has its object which is separate and yet is filtered through it” (ibid.: 15f.). The expectation of some good in everything the faithful encounters influences perception and interpretation in such a fundamental way he actually sees what he expects to see; in the words of William I. Thomas, he defines the situation according to what he expects. If one were only to read Simmel’s book “Die Religion”, one might be confused or entertained, but it is the author’s epistemology which provides the explanatory background to the book. One example of this is the sentence: “Just as knowledge does not create causality but causality creates knowledge, in the same way religion does not create religiousness but religiousness creates religion” (ibid: 17). The causality of scientific phenomena exists prior to and independent of the knowledge of it. Therefore Simmel claims that “knowledge does not create causality”, but that, on the contrary, causality exists and hence provides the potential of gaining knowledge of it. He draws a comparison between this relationship and that of religion and religiousness, and states that religion does not exist in the natural world perceivable by the senses, like causality, but is only possible as a result of the impulse given by man’s religiousness. Religion and society have in common that they are conceivable as social realities only. They are objectified forms resulting from interactive processes. Simmel illustrates this by pointing to social norms which were developed into religious norms. “Everywhere in society there are conditions which, without their social significance, would never have developed further to become religious in character. And it is in the course of this development that they acquire energies and forms deriving from their inner tension and meaning, not from some transcendental source. These conditions would not have claimed this transcendental association – just as many other often parallel norms have not done so – if their specific emotional state, their power of integration, their particular constraints did not make them project these norms onto a religious level by their very nature.” (ibid. 22) In ancient Judaism, hygienic precautions are seen to be



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a divine command at the religious level, princes demand obedience since they claim to rule by divine right, etc. Simmel includes in his sociology of religion the confrontation between objectivity as an opposite pole to subjectivist, interactionist thinking. The wording “they would never have claimed this transcendental association …” (see above) assumes the existence of an autonomous transcendental field which is ‘summoned up’ in the process of man’s inter­ preting the world around him, like a shaman summons up the soul of a deceased. Accepting or rejecting a world of social experience happens first and then it may or may not subsequently be assigned religious meaning. Simmel quotes an author here without specifying his source: “The archetypal religious community was the tribe, and all the duties and obligations amongst relations were also components of religious life. Even if the tribal god was almost forgotten, the main essence of tribal religion asserted itself in the strength of the blood bond” (ibid: 24). The social and the religious are mutually dependent. For Simmel, religious formation is not conceivable without social formation as a basis and a parallel process. This leads him to a conclusion which is surprising, though plausible in the light of his premises: Buddhism should not be described as a religion, for this reason: “It completely lacks the social aspect… it teaches complete withdrawal from social life. Self-redemption here is merely separating oneself from existence, whether social or natural: Buddhism knows no duties toward itself… But then Buddhism is not a religion. It is the doctrine of that type of salvation which is to be gained in complete isolation through sheer individual will and thought” (ibid. 25). As far as Simmel is concerned, the condition for interaction being objectified into a religious form does not pertain to Buddhism. He perceives no social dimension in Buddhism. Whether he is right or not, we shall leave open. What is important for our purposes is that his concept of religion can be derived from the epistemology he has adapted as sociology. We can see quite clearly what Simmel means by religion when he describes specific features: “Otherwise, in every religion, and especially ancient Semitism, and the Greek and Roman religions, the religious duty to sacrifice and pray, in fact the entire cult, is not a personal matter but the responsibility of the individual as a member of a particular group, and this group is then seen as responsible for the religious failings of the individual” (ibid: 26). Religiousness is a creative contribution of the individual to the religious interpretation of the world, but ritual and sacrifice, etc. are the responsibility of the community. By placing himself in this community,

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the individual can take part in the interactive processes, which provide his religiousness with concrete objects. Interaction as a social reality does not only apply to empirical persons in this world. In fact, Simmel’s definition of religion includes the relationship between deity and believer. He shows this in his concept of faith. Faith is not merely a matter of theoretical content of a theological and dogmatic nature, but is, first and foremost, a feeling of vital and personal closeness. Simmel points out the importance of man’s social-emotional commitment; for we feel “that when a religious person states ‘I believe in God,’ this does not mean that person merely considers the existence of God to be a fact. It does not mean that this existence is accepted even though it is not strictly provable; what it means is a certain inner relationship toward God, a spiritual dedication to him, an orientation of life toward him.” (ibid: 34). Social reality only arises from living relationships. Simmel defines reality as existing within relations: For the person of faith, it is thus not merely a question of whether this God exists somewhere or not, but whether or not he has “a certain inner relationship to him” (see above). The presence or the lack of such a vital relationship is the key criterion for the existence of religiousness. Hence Buddhism is for Simmel a subjectivist doctrine of salvation, but not a religion. Simmel draws a line between what humans experience as given externally on the one hand and how they think about what happens to themselves as an inner event on the other. His view of faith is subject to the epistemological transformation from intellectualtheoretical reflection on something external (in the case of the deity – external to the world) to direct formation within subjective experience. As an illustration we may consider the following: I cannot sit opposite someone who is personally close to me – or indeed any fellow human being – and merely engage in theoretical reflection on this person. This would be just as (or even more) inconceivable in the case of a god who is seen to be a member of the community. “Practical faith is a basic attitude of the soul which is in essence sociological, i.e. realized as a relationship to a being facing the self. This is based on the fact that it is possible for man to ‘split’ himself is a result of his ability to divide himself into subject and object and to view himself as he does another person. This ability is a phenomenon which has no analogy outside humankind; it determines the entire form of our thought” as social (ibid: 38). Simmel explains that there is a built-in social dimension in the human being because of his or her ability to conduct an inner discourse. Thus humans have the potential to interact with themselves as they can do with a god.



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Faith then as seen by Simmel is not merely theoretical but a form of behavior; it is “in essence sociological” (see above). Faith thus creates a lasting relationship that is personal rather than rational. Similar to Max Weber’s reflections on the legitimacy of domination as being rooted in the faith the dominated person has in his or her ruler, Simmel writes: “Relationships requiring the obedience or subjection of one party to another, for example, are very often not based on the knowledge that the other person is rightfully superior, nor are they based on love or suggestion, but instead on this ‘belief’ in his power, merit, irresistibility and virtue, – a belief which is by no means mere theoretical, hypothetical supposition but a quite distinctive spiritual pattern which develops between individual human beings” in interaction (ibid: 38f.). The relationship between two people is described by Simmel as a “mental pattern,” a formation which results from interactive processes. Not only is faith, seen in this way, endowed with a relational quality, but also the deity. Simmel in no way denies the possibility that a given deity possesses the quality of being real. But this reality, conceived of as a point of departure for action, is not something which the deity has on its own, but rather as the consequence of a relationship between people, particularly as members of a group. “It is not the individual member but the group as such which is under a particular god; and this group shows that in the god, a unity is being expressed which collectively binds the individuals together. The god is the name given to the sociological unity of the group, so to speak…” (ibid: 44). Almost the same wording is used by Durkheim (Durkheim 1912). The image of the deity as a member of the community is in keeping with the idea that religion is a social form. Simmel examines the transition from the empirical-sociological unity of the social group to the absolute unity of the concept of a god: “This progression has a stage which is often characteristic of the pre-Christian eras. For here the deity is not a separate entity from the individual and his sphere, but is included in the latter, an element of the immediate totality of life upon which the individual is dependent. In ancient Judaism, for example, the god of the victim of sacrificial slaughter sometimes participates in the feast, so that the latter is more than simply a tribute. In all cases there is a direct relationship between the god and his worshippers. And wherever the god is tribal father, king or indeed in any way the god of this particular social group or city – whereas other gods of equally unquestioned existence are peculiar to other groups – in all such cases, the god is a member of the community” (ibid.: 49).

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As the “highest member of the community”, the deity can potentially have a dynamic relationship to its believers – indeed the deity must maintain such a relationship in order not to lose its quality of realness. However, whether or not this relationship is actually maintained depends on the believers. In keeping with the idea that deities are members of their communities, transcendental societies like Olympus – or whatever the respective “heaven” may be called – have social structures identical to those of mortal society. The beyond of feudal stages in history is not egalitarian but knows distinctions in rank like those between angels and archangels. “In Greece and Rome, where the monarchy was overpowered by the aristocracy at an early stage, an aristocratic order imposed itself on religion too, with a hierarchy of several gods of equal standing … In Asia, on the other hand, where the monarchy remained powerful for much longer, the form of religion tends to consist of a god with monarchical power. Indeed, the strength of tribal unity which dictated the social life of the ancient Arabs itself prefigured the monotheism of that group” (ibid. 50). “An important factor in the social life of the Syrians, Assyrians and Lydians was the psychological blurring of gender differences, and this finds expression in deities who uniformly integrate such differences within themselves: The half-male Astarte, the male-female Sadon, the sun god Melkarth who exchanges gender symbols with the moon goddess. This is not merely an illustration of the trivial saying that man projects himself into his god – which is of such generality that requires no proof. We must appreciate that gods are not merely an idealization of individual characteristics – strength, moral or immoral qualities, the likes and needs of individuals – but that inter-individual forms of social life often determine the form of religious images” (ibid.: 50f.). Thus Simmel sees these gods represent qualities of relationships. These “inter-individual forms of social life” (see above) become the content of religious faith. It is for this reason that certain cultures are not yet able to accept certain beliefs (a theme of mission studies), or are no longer able to accept them (e.g. the decline of Christianity in industrial societies): This is bound to occur in the absence of a minimum level of compatibility between the secular social forms and the transcendent dogmas taught by the respective religious body. Having outlined observations on faith referring to religions in general, Simmel turns to the particular qualities of Christianity which distinguish it from other religions. One of the a priori conditions for society to exist is that the individual must reserve a part of his or her being to himself in order to keep from being totally absorbed by the social environment.



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This was the second a priori requirement which Simmel formulated in answer to the question “How is society possible?” He applies this to religion which for Simmel shares with society the quality of being a social form. The churches and communities devoted to Christianity have been confronted with the conflict between their teaching freedom of the baptized individual on the one hand and the conformity required of him or her by their community on the other. “Because the freedom we have in mind cannot simply mean that something arbitrary should happen independent of social control, indeed its meaning amounts to full self-responsibility, which we strive for but only possess when our individual actions are the pure expression of our personality. This is the case if our self is expressed in what we do, unaffected by any authority or influence external to ourselves. We desire that the periphery of our existence be determined by its centre and not by external powers, with which our existence is bound up, and which are then transformed into inner impulses of our own being; and yet often enough we sense that such impulses do not originate from our self. (ibid: 53).” The freedom of the individual means that he or she can determine their existence from the center of their being, and that this existence is not subject to the peripheral influences of an external power: A human being can subordinate himself grudgingly to a powerful deity (or government), but then that deity’s influence remains at the periphery of the believer’s existence. Religion which is adopted in freedom, on the other hand, according to this conception of Simmel’s, requires that the deity concerned is at the very center of the individual’s existence, which is clearly only possible as the result of a vital and positive exchange – or interaction – involving the person’s center. The question of freedom of course extends to the relationship with god: Can or should a part of personal existence be held back from total identification with this relationship? Simmel’s ideas on the subject needs no comment: “The dignity of individual freedom, the strength and defiance of self-responsibility, desiring to bear the full consequence even of sin, conflict with the relief of this burden from the self by a supreme divine power, with the sense of comfort or even ecstatic release in the knowledge that one is a part of an absolute whole, imbued and borne up by its power and will” (ibid: 54). “But if salvation is to consist of nothing but that each and every soul should express and become totally immersed in its innermost being, the pure image of itself whose contours are imposed invisibly upon its mortal imperfection – how, then, is it possible to reconcile the infinite variety of

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souls in their stature and depth, breadth and limitations, brilliance and darkness, with equality of religious accomplishment and equal worthiness before God? How, if our concept of salvation singles out as its very vehicle those elements of a person’s being which are most individual and which distinguish him most from others? Indeed, the difficulty of reconciling equality before God with the immeasurable diversity of individuals has led to that uniformity of religious achievement, which has turned a good deal of Christian life into mere schematism.” (ibid: 64). This is a sharp, but convincing critique of decades or even centuries of mistakes made in institutionalized religion. “We (Christians) have failed to take account of all the individualism inherent in the Christian concept of salvation, the idea that each person should make the most of his own potentials; we demand of everyone a uniform goal and identical behavior, instead of asking every person simply to give of himself. It is impossible for anything, which is globally uniform, to be an integral part of an individual’s personality…” (ibid: 64). Here, the idea of center and periphery is extended to the consequence that any tendency to make everybody equal or to blur individuality, will necessarily “externalize” or shift attention to the periphery. At the center of his being, man is unique and totally distinct from others, and therefore anything which is intended to move his innermost being must be tailored to his own individual character. Simmel also addresses the problem of the universality of a god: “As soon as the god worshipped by a particular group has a relationship to this group which excludes all other gods, the religion must recognize that there are other gods – the gods belonging to other groups. The worshippers of one particular god are not allowed to worship any other gods, not because they do not exist but – to put it somewhat paradoxically – because they do exist (otherwise the danger would not be so great) – but are not the real, genuine gods for this particular group” (ibid: 71). Simmel is convinced that the Christian religion’s claim to universality is one of the main reasons for its special status in comparison to other world religions. It states that their God is not a tribal or national god of a limited population, but a god responsible for the whole of mankind. “It is only the Christian God who encompasses both those who believe in him and those who do not. Of all the powers within life, he is the first to break out of the exclusivity of the social group, which until then had bound together all the interests of its individuals in a single spatial and temporal unity. It is thus contradictory that the relationship to the Christian God should exist indifferently alongside the relationship other people have with other gods.



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In fact this is a positive offence against his claim to be absolute and allembracing; the belief in other gods means a rebellion against him, since he is in reality also the God of the unbeliever” (ibid.: 72). In keeping with his evolutionist ideas Simmel shows the peculiarities of the Christian religion as being the final stage of a long historical development. (A consistent application of this is the idea of Christianity possibly dissolving into individualism, which appears in the later writings of Max Weber.) “Thus it might well be that the sociologically developed image of God grows in such a way as to expand his being to embrace more and more, thereby increasing his stature. However, as soon as this process reaches its final stage in the Christian God, the content of religion then changes to the very opposite of that sociological character which provided the exclusivity originally integral to the idea of god” (ibid.: 73f.). Simmel considers faith in a god as dependent on being a member of a group. To a large extent in anticipation of Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion, he regards such membership of a group as being identical to interacting with the deity specific to that group. But when in Christian­ ity  this deity is universalized, with group membership theoretically extending to all living human beings in the world, the group boundaries disappear and with them the clear identification of a god who is the representative of a concrete group as a clearly delineated part of humankind. Thus Simmel indicates that the only potentially global religion may have a mechanism of self-destruction or self-dissolution built into it. This prediction of a possible demise of the Christian religion is of course very low-key compared to the critique of religion in general that was current in the nineteenth century. Sociology had the reputation at first of being a discipline primarily atheist in orientation. And against that background, Simmel’s writings on the subject appeared to be pro-religion. Yet in his sociology of religion he took over some of the views that had been published and received considerable acceptance, namely some of the ideas of Feuerbach and Marx. Philosophy was an important area of scholarly activity during Simmel’s lifetime. In Germany the names of Kant and Hegel signal, that great man of international acclaim had been working in philosophy with considerable success and influence. When Marx decided to give up being a student of law and become a philosophy student instead, one of the crucial problems in 19th century European society was the loss of tradition and stability. Many ideas that had been considered firm and reliable for centuries, now became questionable. This was true in the 18th, and even more so in the 19th century in which Marx lived. The implicitness was lost, according

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to which decisions were taken as a matter of course and never questioned. This had the ambivalent effect of producing much more freedom, but also much more uncertainty and fear. Before Marx and Engels together wrote the Communist Manifesto, Marx alone wrote a philosophical text in 1845–46, which (like the earlier text, which he co-authored with Engels and which was never printed) he called The German Ideology (Marx 1964). In this publication which was produced early in his life, Marx dealt with the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). In 1823 Ludwig Feuerbach (and there are other famous Germans by the name Feuerbach) started to study Protestant theology at the University of Heidelberg, but after only one year there, he was frustrated by that field of study and went to Berlin to hear lectures by Schleiermacher and Hegel. He admired Hegel very much and considered him somewhat like a second father. As was typical for students at that time, he changed universities again and continued his academic work at the University of Erlangen near Nurnberg. In Erlangen he received his doctor degree in 1828. Two years later, in 1830 Feuerbach published his first book, but because of the intolerance of the Prussian state, it was published not under his name, but anonymously. The title was: Gedanken ueber Tod und Unsterblichkeit or in English: Thoughts about Death and Immortality. In this book Feuerbach denied that there is something immortal about the human being which will live on even after the body dies. He tried to prove that the religious belief in life after death is wrong. This was an enormous provocation of the official state church in Protestant Prussia, and the police started looking for the man who wrote this book as they would try to find a criminal. As a result, like Karl Marx, he no longer had a chance to become a professor of philosophy for political reasons. Marx, 14 years younger than Feuerbach, felt attracted to the man because of his new ideas. Marx knew of course the two important books by Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums or in English: The Essence of Christianity from 1841, and his critique of Hegel in Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, or in English: Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future in 1843. It is easy to imagine how Marx could have been influenced by Feuerbach, because in the book of 1843 Feuerbach wrote: “While the old philosophy started out with the sentence: I am an abstract, merely thinking being, my body is not part of my existence; the new philosophy starts out with the sentence: I am a real, a sensual being, the body belongs to my essence; indeed, my body in its totality is my self, my very



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essence.” Marx most likely agreed with that statement by Feuerbach, which may be seen as the beginning of 19th century philosophical materialism. Marx rejected the dualism that coincides with the distinction between this world and the world beyond. The objects of religious thought, gods in the beyond, and souls of people who have died, angels or spirits and saints, all these objects do – according to Marx – not exist. They are not a real world, which under certain conditions we may experience in the beyond; they are – for Marx – fantastic attempts to cope with problems that exist in this world. But Marx is of the opinion that Feuerbach accepts that dualism between this world and the beyond in principle. This point of view led Marx to want to go even beyond Feuerbach, as we shall see in the following. Feuerbach does think that concepts like gods and spirits stem from the fantasy of individuals, but he gives them the status of a reality of their own. They are then – to Feuerbach – a reality into which human persons project all those hopes and wishes which they fail to realize in this world. Theology or the thinking about religious subjects is then – for Feuerbach – a process in which humans have the chance to recognize themselves, and the results of theological efforts demonstrate not what gods or spirits are like, but rather under what conditions humans live. Feuerbach’s approach can therefore be described as an anthropologization of religion: Religion does not tell us something about gods but it tells us something about humans. This way of looking at religion has deeply influenced Marx as well as Engels. It was the step from religion to philosophy, Marx’ first important step, to which later followed his second step from philosophy to economics. Marx thought that Feuerbach was on the right path, but that he did not go along that path far enough. To think that there are two types of reality is not acceptable for Marx. There can be no dualism, because – to Marx – there is only one reality, the reality of this life in which we eat and drink and sleep. Therefore any type of beyond, in which spirits and gods may live, cannot be real to him. The text The German Ideology by Marx contains several theses on Feuerbach’s work, and in his fourth thesis Marx writes: “Feuerbach starts out with the fact of religious alienation, or of the duplication of the world in a religious world and an empirical world. Feuerbach’s achievement is to dissolve the religious world into its empirical foundation. However, the fact that this foundation produces out of itself an independent empire of ideas up in the clouds, this fact can only be explained by looking at how

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torn apart and how full of inner contradictions this worldly foundation is. It must therefore be understood in itself in order to explain its inner contradiction as well as its need for revolutionizing it in its practice.” (Marx 1964: 340). For Marx, the contents of human thinking which are called religious should not be considered as part of another world, which is separate from our empirical world, instead – for Marx – religion is an aspect of this empirical world, and moreover it shows, how sick this world is. In order to illustrate that, he writes at the end of his fourth thesis, from which we already quoted: “Thus after for instance the worldly family has been discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must be annihilated theoretically as well as practically” (ibid.). Apart from the aggression and the fighting spirit which characterizes the young Marx, the following can be maintained as the sober outcome of his thinking: Religion must be overcome because it keeps people from forming a correct image of the real world. Human persons cannot act adequately unless they have a clear and correct image of reality. Because religion stands in the way of forming such a correct image, it must be done away with – thinks Marx. If we contemporary academics today, more than a century after his death, look at modern society from the perspective of the concepts and theories of Karl Marx, we see people in the developed nations of the West work and live under the conditions of capitalism. One of the characteristics of capitalist society is – from the perspective of Karl Marx – the social stratification in two conflicting classes. The members of one class are owners of the means of production, and they are called capitalists, the members of the other class are excluded from ownership of the means of production, they are the wage earners, who are called the working class. The theoretical division of the members of society in wage earners and capitalists or – to use the political terms instead of those oriented toward the economy – the division in the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is – according to Marx – the result of the way in which humans deal with their material environment. But class struggle or class conflict not only creates the division of society in two classes, it also leads to the end of the condition, due to the dialectic of its own inner tension. According to historical materialism capitalism will be overcome the sooner, the quicker human persons recognize its unjust and inhuman quality. Religion has the potential of hiding from persons the shortcomings of capitalism, and therefore religion must be done away with.



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The attitude which Marx took toward religion was in agreement with the view held by most cultural anthropologists in the 19th century. Almost all of them were evolutionists who looked at the undeveloped societies, which were discovered during the lifetime of Marx, as precursors of highly developed cultures. Religion to them was a form of human thought that was left over from primitive times as a transient substitute for scientific knowledge. Due to the progress of science, religion would soon be superfluous and slowly disappear. This consensus among intellectuals was widespread before and during the activities of Marx, and his own reasoning fit well into the spirit of the time. He therefore had a very good chance to find acceptance among his contemporaries, particularly among the highly educated persons and the intellectuals of more than a century ago. Simmel needed to take that into consideration when describing religion as a form of interaction that appeared to be part of the human condition. Strangeness as Form of Interaction Encounters between Alien Populations Simmel examines the status of religious, racial, or ethnic minorities in society under the concept of the stranger. He sees a remarkable dynamic in the contact between two groups, the ‘natives’ and the newcomers, which are initially distinct, but as the result of increasing contact between them each group provides the other with individual aliens, first as visitors, then as permanent guests. This dynamic process initiates change in both groups with a compelling predictability. William Isaac Thomas (Thomas, 1966: 9) later adopted this idea. Simmel writes of the “convergence of hitherto separated circles” (Simmel, 1908 a: 710), and he illustrates that in some detail: “Let us imagine we have two social groups, M and N, which are sharply distinct from one another, in terms of both their typical characteristics and their attitudes and beliefs, but each consisting of homogeneous and closely related elements within them. The quantitative extension of such a group gives rise to an increasing differentiation: What were originally minimal differences amongst individuals, in terms of outward and inner disposition and its expression, become more exaggerated by the necessity of surviving in the face of fiercer competition with increasingly uncon­ ventional means. This competition induces individual specialization in proportion to the numbers involved. However different the points of

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departure may have been in M and N, the two will gradually come to resemble each other. However, there are only a relatively limited number of essential human ‘formations’ available, and their number can only be increased at a slow rate. The more such formations are to be found within a group, i.e. the greater the homogeneity of M or N in themselves, the greater the probability that there will be an increasing number of formations which are similar to those of the other group: the departure from the hitherto valid norm within each group, the development away from it in all directions, must necessarily bring about a convergence of the members of one group to those of the other – a convergence which will initially be qualitative or ideational” (ibid: 710). Simmel here returns to his theory of cultural and social evolution. The elements of this theory are as follows: a. Two populations are distinct from one another in important characteristics; that is to say that all the members within each group are similar to each other in one particular respect and different from the members of the other group. The requirement of solidarity within each of the two groups initially means members must suppress personal peculiarities or distinctive features and preferably demonstrate those qualities, showing them to be typical or even model representatives of the particular group they belong to. They would thus be required to dress and behave in a uniform manner. b. The increase in population intensifies competition in the struggle to survive. Under the influence of this increased competition, individuals gradually develop much more distinctive characteristics of their own. This happens in both of the originally distinctive groups in a similar way, since, according to Simmel, the number of “human formations” is limited. This fiercer competition thus forces both groups to depart increasingly from their traditional uniformity, so that these various “human formations” can assert themselves as individual deviations from the group norm. c. This process of departure from uniformity in a process of increasing individualization affects both groups of this theoretical model in the same way, and thus brings about a decrease in the differences between them. Almost totally independent of the original nature of the difference between the two populations, therefore, eventually considerable convergence occurs between them.



the message of interaction: how reality is constructed99 The Stranger as Innovator

The stranger plays an important part in this process of change. Depending on his or her origins, he may come from a faraway country, and yet he is now close at hand. He demonstrates different forms of life in a concrete and practical way that, not only as a distant, utopian theory but personified in the here-and-now as an alien person. The stranger thus signifies broader horizons to the native. Of course, the benefit in terms of new life forms as represented by the very presence of the stranger also involves a loss of uniformity, consensus, solidarity and inner unity of the groups. To use a textile metaphor, one might say that the groups become frayed at the edges. Since the peculiarities of the groups become increasingly worn away, they become so similar it almost does not matter to the individual whether he belongs to one group or the other. The population becomes individualized and the state of being a stranger more or less applies to everyone. In Simmel’s now famous “Exkurs über den Fremden” (“Excursus on the stranger”; Simmel, 1908a: 685–689, Simmel 2009), the author defines the state of being “alien” as “a particular form of interaction” (685f.). Wherever and whenever human beings come to encounter one another, Simmel assumes that elements of closeness and distance are both present. Set against this general assumption, the interaction between native and alien represents a rather exceptional and particularly interesting case. “The integration of closeness and distance contained within any interpersonal relationship here reaches a constellation which might briefly be put as follows: The element of distance within a relationship means that something close is distant, whereas being confronted with something alien means that something distant has come close” (ibid: 685). Thus as far as Simmel is concerned, a stranger is a person from afar, now close at hand because he has come to stay, although he might possibly leave again. The concept of two populations, which originally inhabit their own living spaces, underlies these reflections on the phenomenon of being a stranger. The individual newcomer is thus regarded as a stranger insofar as one sees in him a representative of the other group. Initially, this quality of being the representative of the other population suppresses the perception of any individuality. While a confrontation with the whole of the other group would presumably be considered threatening, contact with an individual representative is interesting, perhaps instructive, in any case out of the ordinary.

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In the literature of the ancient classics, the figure of the wanderer Odysseus is presented as an impressive personality who appears as a stranger to his various hosts, for example Nausikaa and her father Alkinoos (Clarke, 1967). Thomas Bargatzky has examined “The role of the stranger in cultural change” (“Die Rolle des Fremden beim Kulturwandel”; Bargatzky, 1978) drawing on several case studies from the 18th and 19th centuries, showing the transformations caused by Europeans in Hawaii, the Iles de la Société, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji and (the only example from outside Polynesia) in Buganda. Bargatzky’s empirical findings illustrate Simmel’s theses concerning the stranger and point to Robert Ezra Park’s marginal man as a modified version of Simmel’s concept. (Park, 1928; Levine, 1977). The stranger is not “the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow; he is the one who comes today and stays tomorrow – the potential wanderer, as it were …”(Simmel, 1908b: 685). His status in the social environment he has joined is characterized by the fact “that he does not originally belong to it, and that he brings qualities to it which do not and cannot originate from this new environment” (ibid.). As a potential wanderer, the alien’s consciousness and forms of conduct are not limited to a particular locality. He has no home, so to speak, or, to put it positively, his home is nowhere, in the land of ‘Utopia’ (which should actually be called ‘A-topia’, having no topos = location). This is why the stranger’s thought can be ‘u-topian’, not bound to any ‘topos’ – that is to say not bound to any restraints of locality. The arrival of the stranger repeatedly shatters native society’s sense of being a universal society. Self-satisfied society witnesses how the alien, who has joined it unexpectedly, cannot be forced to acquiesce in its order. His very presence thus makes society see the falsehood of its claim to universality. In the presence of the stranger, a supposedly universal orientation is revealed as locally restricted and provincial. Thus the alien has both a destructive and constructive effect at one and the same time, as a representative of alternative patterns of thought and an initiator of social change. He destroys for many what Karl Mannheim called “instruments of concealment in everyday life,” which cause “the coincidental nature of everyday existence to become solidified into an absolute value” (Mannheim, 1929: 43). The stranger reveals this as an ideology, a false awareness by which the native population delude themselves into believing they have achieved their goal as a society. At the same time, as an alien he or she also provides a new, constructive goal, demonstrates a Utopia to them toward which they can orientate their future efforts. Thus while providing an impulse to innovation the stranger can also cause offence.



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Initially and principally the host society does not integrate the alien individual, and very often he does not wish for such integration. In many historical instances he will compensate for the burden, which this places on him with a strong belief in predestination or divine election. Alfred Weber has examined this phenomenon and describes the historical events, which led to the “Jewish people appointing themselves to be the guest population of the whole world” (A. Weber, 1950: 105). In this way, Jews have become universal and permanent strangers (except in the state of Israel, which Alfred Weber did not discuss). They are popular and sought-after individuals in the established social orders, just like the great example set by Joseph in Egypt as advisor to the Pharaoh. As a religious group, they form that unique collective unit, which maintains itself precisely because it can only organize temporarily and potentially in the world. Unable to develop a concrete structure which might degenerate to a fetish, the people no longer physically journey as nomads, but spiritually travel toward the advent of its Messiah, not regarding itself as having achieved its goal because it has not yet “arrived.” Alfred Weber examines the particular features of the ancient Jews and asks: “What distinguished them from other Bedouin peoples who had previously moved into these areas from different directions, and who had all been sucked in by the apparently captivating power of this atmosphere within a short time and had all become totally devoid of any individuality” as a group? (ibid: 96) There may be an important difference between the Jewish culture and other nomadic cultures. The former gained its particular identity by going back and for through the ages between temporary settlement and nomadic life. Thus both these sources of strength that of being attached to a particular locality and that of travelling, have been adopted by this culture in what seems to be a unique combination. It is quite clear that, in his essay on the stranger, Simmel has the Jew in mind and therefore himself. The renunciation of a long-term abode has important social consequences, which Simmel describes. The “effect of wandering… on the form of association is typically” as follows: “suppression or suspension of any inner differentiation within the group, therefore a lack of political organization as such, though this can often coexist with monopolistic, despotic power” (Simmel, 1908a: 671). The lack or low level of differentiation in political or other social structures protects the collective unit, united only by tradition and faith, from becoming self-sufficient individuals and from having its social forms degenerate into ‘fetishes’. Marx and Simmel are both “strangers” who emerged from this cultural tradition. No matter how extreme the difference between them, whether

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in aims or method, nevertheless they have a remarkable intellectual ability in common, the ability to detach themselves from the general tendency to substantialize social forms. Of course the difference in their respective personalities means that this detachment is expressed in a completely different way by each man: Marx expresses it as a bitter critique of capital as a self-sufficient dynamic which has broken away from the acting subject, and as a rejection of objective conditions; Simmel, writing at the turn of the century, expresses it as a critique of philosophical realism and a repudiation of any approach that describes social interactions merely as manipulations of physical realities. Late in his life, and having experienced the First World War, Simmel generalizes Marx’ concept in a more pessimistic way, embracing not only economic life but culture as a whole. “The ‘fetish character’ which Marx attributed to economic objects in the era of industrial production is simply a specifically modified form of the general fate of the contents of our culture. The material of which culture consists is subject to a paradox – the more advanced a culture happens to be, the greater the paradox: It is true that the contents of culture have been created by and for subjects, and yet, in the transitional objective form which they adopt before and after this subjective state, they pursue a certain immanent logic which alienates them from their origins as well as from their purpose” (Simmel, 1919b: 246). In his book Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money; Simmel 1900) Simmel addressed this process of alienation in the context of industrial production – and the economy as a whole – as a “specifically modified case” of culture. In that work, he shifted his emphasis from interaction as source of reality, which still is his point of departure, to the social construction of value and to the problem of reducing relationships to things. As shall be discussed in the next chapter, this process is identified as alienation because the creation of value is not seen – or not admitted – by its creators as an effect of their own activities. Looking back at Chapter 3 Reality is created in interaction, it is co-created. In the influential textbook assembled by Park and Burgess and first published in 1921 (Park and Burgess 1924) the distinguished editors prefer to call reciprocity of relationships what later is commonly referred to as interaction. Simmel describes social forms, religion, and even society as being co-created in interaction



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as the result of the reciprocity of relationships. His interactionist theory of the macro-structure should be read as critical alternative to the functionalist naturalism that persists from Durkheim to Parsons. There society is some kind of super-organism reminiscent of the Leviathan, originally a sea-monster, but better known as title of a book of 1651 by Thomas Hobbes. It presents a pessimistic description of the necessity to establish human government following the pattern of the natural sciences. The critical nature of Simmel’s interactionism is directed against that and at the same time against the methodological individualism of Max Weber. Simmel raises sociological theory to a higher level of abstraction, showing for instance that domination is a phenomenon occurring in church parishes as well as in criminal gangs. He uses everyday experience as point of departure for his view of society. The parent who tells his offspring: “Do not play with those children!” knows full well that interaction creates social reality. Finally, being a stranger, means participating in a relationship marked by the quality of strangeness. That quality too has been co-created due to the reciprocity of relationships.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MESSAGE OF ALIENATION: MONEY AND POLITICS Money as a Paradigm of Cultural Processes Like a father in denial who begets a child and then pretends to have nothing to do with it, humans attribute value to banknotes and then claim to be disassociated from the process of valuation. Simmel’s theory of valuation would compare to genetic testing with the goal to identify the originator of value as the begetter of the worth of money. The fact that money is typically looked at as value in its own right is to Simmel the most striking example of alienation. He reveals this by pointing to the importance of interaction as a precondition for attributing value to money. In the absence of interaction with reference to the money in question, it turns out to be worthless because nobody uses it and nobody wants it. Leading up to this insight Simmel dealt with the subject of money in his book Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money; Simmel, 1900) because of its obvious importance for the functioning of the modern economy. The book gave him the opportunity of looking at money and the economy as a specific case study of culture. Producers and consumers do of course engage in activities, which one can rightly term economic, but how they do it – whether with enthusiasm or indifference, dedication or inner detachment – is not something decided within the economic sphere alone. Every individual belongs to a particular culture, which influences his character and which he passes on to others. The attachment of the individual to his or her culture determines which notions of economic activity they have. Their notions may not at all be taken for granted by people with different backgrounds. Therefore, what money means to this or that person is relative to culture-specific contexts of interaction. The frequently heard reasonable explanation for the use of money describes it as an activity to provide oneself with goods, rights and services possessing a positive value beyond combating the feelings of hunger and thirst. For this reason, too, economic activity and culture are closely associated. On being introduced to a particular type of culture, a person learns to assign values to certain things, and his or her activities in the

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economic sphere are determined by such evaluation. Of course, nobody can (or should) confine his life to economic activity alone. The tendency to do so, we can describe as pathological, because the ultimate meaning of economic activity is rooted in vital interests external to the economic sphere. It would thus seem appropriate to examine the phenomenon of money in the context of culture, since every person engaged in economic activity has noneconomic motives, for example, economic success may be important for the sake of another member of the family whom that person loves, or for the sake of an acquaintance he wants to impress or even for the god he or she worships. The Philosophy of Money (1900. 4th edition 1922a) is primarily a reflection on highly complex forms of interaction. The social principle by which interactions between subjects (persons or companies) have the effect that objects are considered valuable, acquires a concrete form in money. People’s shaping sensory impressions into objects by telling stories or painting pictures about them, allows them to experience reality; their distance or detachment from objects means that, in their wish to overcome this distance, they experience the value of an object: The harder it seems to get it, the more valuable it seems to be. Since in exchanging objects they assess the expectations of the individuals involved of overcoming the distance and since they then compare values, they become aware of the value relations of the goods exchanged. These relations will be separated from the goods whose comparison they originated from, and will appear as an independent factor: They are given the form of money. “To put it briefly: money is the expression and means of the relationship and interdependence of people, their relativity, by which the satisfaction of one person’s wishes is always mutually dependent on another person” (Simmel 1922a: 134). Money is the most general form of social relationship. The conscious mind, occupied with the social construction of reality, makes money appear with such a well-defined sense of independent existence, that people forget what the origin and effect of money is: An expression of the interdependence of people. Where interpersonal relationships are not social, where individuals are not interactive and do not enter into exchanges with one another but instead treat each other as objects, money becomes meaningless. In Simmel’s opinion the same applies to law: It is nothing but an empty abstraction until it becomes the form of a living relationship. People can only treat each other rightfully or do each other wrong if they are interacting with one another. “In reality, law is merely a relationship between people and is executed only in the interests, objectives or power play…” (ibid: 95 f.).



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In his review of the book “Philosophy of Money” (Simmel, 1900), Gustav Schmoller recalls a presentation about the psychology of money that Simmel gave in 1889 in Schmoller’s graduate seminar (Schmoller, 1901). A journal article with this same title appears in the same year (Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 325). In 1896, Simmel gives a talk about “Money in Modern Culture” to the Society of Austrian Economists (ibid: 326). In 1897 the journal “Neue Deutsche Rundschau” publishes his article, “The Importance of Money for the Tempo of Life.” In both of the years that follow, there appear parts of his coming book as “Fragments from a ‘Philosophy of Money’” (ibid: 327f). In the introduction to an English translation, it is correctly noted that Simmel had spent 11 years thinking about the topic of money before this voluminous book appeared at the outset of the new century (Bottomore, 1978: 1). Another prominent reviewer of this book, George Herbert Mead, understands the methodological motivation of Simmel: “The starting point of the discussion lies in the contrast between the objective characteristic and validity of value and the subjective characteristic of desire and the impulse from which it springs” (Mead, 1901: 616). Mead points to the fact that, in his Philosophy of Money, Simmel continues to struggle with the subject-object problem. As was self-understood for American scholars at the time, Mead had read and reviewed the original German text. The characteristics of translating and the dependence upon translation are often a serious source of errors. Mead, as a former student at the University of Berlin, was spared such erroneous translations as “changing effective phenomena” (for Wechselwirksamkeiten) and “eternal constellation” (for Formzusammenhang) (Bottomore, 1978: 25, 31). In justifying this large-scale project of his, Simmel recommends close collaboration between the various scholarly disciplines due to the diversity inherent in the nature of reality; for none of these disciplines can fully treat the issues relating to this subject. According to Simmel, therefore, the task must be distributed amongst the various academic fields, with each specialized area concentrating on the particular aspects within its scope. This can only be done if other aspects are neglected, however. Thus scholarly analysis creates an object which does not in fact exist in reality. Simmel illustrates this with the example of the exchange of goods without the use of money: “Thus it is true that the situation of two people exchanging their products with one another is by no means only a phenomenon relating to economics; such a phenomenon, which is fully defined as relating to economics, does not exist. An exchange can just as legitimately be treated as related to psychology, history of ethics or even aesthetics.” (Simmel, 1907b: VII).

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To treat the subject of ‘money’ as might be appropriate to the perspective of what today we call macro-economics is for Simmel a reduction of reality to a small section of it. This view only takes in the façade of real life. Simmel does not object to drawing attention to economic activity, bringing it to the foreground, as it were, in areas where it might otherwise remain hidden at first sight. “The aim and purpose of the whole under­ taking is simply to draw a connection between the surface of economic activity and the ultimate values and underlying influences of everything human” (ibid.). The methodical ambition to see through the façade, to penetrate the surface of the phenomenon of money as an expression of economic interaction, and to reveal the real diversity of the subject leads to a confrontation with the sheer multiplicity of the various aspects. If cultural problems and political and religious influences are to be incorporated, the area of study soon becomes unwieldy and impenetrable. Thus the question arises of how to avoid losing the unity of the phenomenon of money in the very analysis of it. In his cultural sociology, Simmel states that the search for the meaning of life unifies the diverse aspects of the economy (ibid: VIII). The concrete quality which might be attributed to a service or merchandise can be described by scientific analysis. That quality, just as its weight or color, does not depend on cultural context. In the process of interaction meaning is ascribed to it like a ‘stuck on’ label. It is this process of attributing value, so important to culture in general, that Simmel examines in money as the process of evaluation. This process has relevance far beyond the economic sphere. Simmel studies money to increase understanding of culture as a whole, of which the economic sphere is only one sector. The drama of evaluation finds a particular concentration in money and its dynamic, a drama in which we participate as actors on the stage of culture. This is why sociology of the economy can and should be conducted as sociology of culture; hence Simmel’s “Philosophy of Money” is at the same time a “Sociology of Money”. Evaluation and Alienation Money becomes a facet of culture by being assigned to two separately conceived levels: On the one hand to the level of natural events as a dynamic of physical reality, on the other hand to the level of value attribution as a cultural process. The two levels are of course insolubly bound up



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with one another, and one must first examine how this association of thing and meaning comes about. “One could give an absolutely complete description of all the events of the natural world without mentioning the values which things possess – just as our scale of values maintains its significance and meaning independently of how often or whether at all its content actually occurs in reality” (ibid: 4). The conceptual separation of the area of material reality from that of cultural values is characteristic of Simmel’s method. Material objects can generally be described without value judgment. On the other hand, values do not depend on physical reality, and they cannot therefore originate from material things alone. In fact they are the result of cultural processes, they are judgments which people make about things and which then come to be directly applied to these things. “A thing does not gain any new quality if I judge it to be of value; for it is valued according to the qualities it already possesses; its intrinsic nature, already completely defined, is raised into the sphere of value” (ibid: 5). The process of evaluation does not bring about any change in the existing physical qualities of the object concerned; it is simply placed in a different context – just as one might take an object off a table to place it inside a cupboard. As long as an evaluation does not occur, because an object that can potentially be evaluated is not related to a subject, one can conceive of a neutral and purely factual description of the object. This is, however, purely theoretical, since objects typically have a history tying them to people as subjects that have had an influence on their evaluation. On the scale between the highest and lowest value Simmel allows the possibility of indifference as a neutral transitional stage in the middle. However, this neutral stage cannot permanently avoid the inevitable process of evaluation; “for indifference means declining to attribute a value to something, and can thus be of a very positive nature, underlying such indifference is always the possibility of interest which is simply not being made use of at that moment” (ibid.). Its function is then that of providing a potential for future value attribution, maybe like a storage space in the warehouse of culture. The subject can ignore things it has no need for at any given moment. These things are then akin to a reserve of objects not needed to relate to in the immediate present, but known to be there, and that one day, at some particular time, his interest may turn toward them. Even this potential interest means that these objects are included indirectly in the context of the subject’s action and cannot therefore avoid being evaluated.

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The distinction between two levels of reality, the level of objects and that of subjects may be possible as an intellectual experiment; however, as a real fact such a separation is inconceivable. For if there were no subjects, there would be no-one to have real experiences; if there were no objects, the subjects would have nothing to encounter as reality. Just as reality can only come about as the result of subjects and objects being in a state of dynamic co-existence, it is also true that evaluation can only take place within the context of this co-existence. Simmel distinguishes between reality and value as the results of different processes, but he also sees certain prerequisites as applying to both. We base our experience of reality on a chain of objects. We claim that one thing is real because we already know that something else is real which is related to it. This second thing is also only real because again something else is real which is related to that. Simmel sees a long chain of associations by things being related or connected to one another confirming each other’s reality status. And for the whole to be experienced as real there must be a final link at the beginning of the chain which was originally experienced as real: A person who has never undergone the experience of reality as a living certainty must surely doubt the reality of the whole of his or her own experience. Just as the experience of reality as actual fact is a subjective feat which each individual may or may not achieve, the same can be said of value. The individual can only experience something as being of value if he can relate it to other experiences of value. At some point he reaches the final link, and this must be where the person originally underwent a feeling or experience that there are such things as values. He can only attribute value to other things if he has had this experience of value. “If there is a value in the first place, then the ways in which it is realized and developed can be rationally comprehended, for from this point follows – at least partially – the pattern of reality itself. The fact of the existence of value, however, is a primordial phenomenon” (ibid: 6). In this quotation, the term “primordial phenomenon” reminds us again that Simmel was an adherent of the theory of evolution. Darwin’s idea that the forms of life as described by biology evolved apart from one another in the course of an inconceivably long process, is applied by Simmel to the components of human thought and to culture in general. By tentatively tracing human thought backwards in time, he comes upon the idea of a primordial, archaic form of consciousness, which was characterized by the fact that reality as an objective fact on the one hand and value as a subjective-creative feat on the other were not yet experienced as separate.



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From the perspective of primordial humans they still formed a single unity. And also, from this evolutionist point of view, this state of consciousness existed prior to the division of subject and object, as is the case in a small child who experiences the objects as out there, but does not experience himself as perceiving them. This division is introduced gradually step by step into the life of the individual in the course of the various stages of socialization: As we saw, we assume that a young child has not yet acquired the consciousness of separating his own individuality from the wealth of sensory experiences to which he is exposed. Simmel relates the tension between subject and object to that between reality and value; or he adds to the opposition of thing versus subject that of being versus value. “In whatever empirical or transcendental sense one might talk of ‘things’ in contrast to the subject, value is in no sense a ‘quality’ of them, but instead a judgment made by the subject and remaining in the subject” (ibid: 8). What then leads to alienation as seen by Simmel, is the individual’s inability to recognize, or his or her unwillingness to acknowledge, that a judgment was made in the first place. Simmel does not feel at ease with the dichotomy between existence and value, between thing and subject. For him, reality manifests itself in relations. Value results from the dynamic interaction between things and the subject. “The separation of subject and object is not as radical as the quite legitimate division of these categories, which both the practical and the theoretical world would have us accept” (ibid: 8f.). The separation of subject and object is thus a conceptual trick. The same is true of value. The origin of value is a judgment the subjects make themselves, yet they persuade themselves that value is an inherent quality of given objects, denying that value exists primarily as a construct of human consciousness. Without shaping or molding objects in consciousness, it is, however, impossible to have experiences: “Experience means our consciousness shapes sensory data to objects. In the same way the possibility of desire is the possibility of the objects of desire. The object created in this way – characterized by its distance from the subject, which both registers the desire for the object and seeks to overcome this desire – is what is meant by value.” (ibid: 12). With this remarkably brief definition of value as action, Simmel comes back to the idea that the separation of subject and object is a conceptual feat. Value is a side effect of this separation. Experience means the ability to shape sensory data into objects. The experience of a value results from

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the subject’s effort to establish and overcome a distance between itself and the object. This assigns a value to an object. The value, importance, and meaning something has for a person depends on what he intends to do with it, what distance he plans to overcome between the object and himself. Not until he has experienced the division between subject and object as painful and felt a strong desire to overcome it, is he able to call the content of this experience “value”. “It is thus not difficult to obtain things because they are valuable: It is instead the case that we describe those things as being of value for which there are obstacles blocking our possession of them. The fact that this desire is obstructed or delayed, so to speak, means that they gain an added importance, which the unobstructed will would never have apportioned them” (ibid: 13). Just as objects can only be experienced because of the subject’s ability to shape them, value can only be experienced – and for Simmel this is always meant in a concrete sense – because the subject perceives the distance between itself and the object and attempts to overcome this distance. Simmel sees consciousness as creating an objective value, based on the facts that are actually experienced, just as consciousness creates objective reality. The conscious mind uses its ability to disregard itself in order to hide the fact that any objective value can only be the result of subjective experience. This denial of the creativity of the conscious mind is alienation, is ascribing being the ‘father’ of valuation to another source. This kind of value theory does of course have important consequences for the sociological interpretation of economic activity. “It can be pursued right down to the economic quantum of value, which we attribute to the object of an exchange, even if no-one is willing to pay the price in question, indeed even if it remains generally unwanted and unsalable. Here, too, this fundamental power of the mind asserts itself: The power to separate itself from the elements of its imagination, to imagine things as if they were independent of such imagination.” (ibid: 14). Precisely this imagined independence is the root cause of alienation in Simmel’s sense. In totally different contexts he will apply this insight as well: In his sociology of love he explains that the extremely high value and uniqueness of the beloved person is quite obviously the result of the process of value attribution performed by the lover, who, however, will strenuously maintain that he or she simply discovered an innate goodness and beauty that was already a quality of the other person before falling in love. Whether or not he or she still see it that way in case the relationship breaks up, is another matter. We may be happier with, than without our illusions.



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As the argumentation moves to money and therefore to economic values an analysis needs to be made of the quantitative aspect of value. At first it was apparently the experienced distance between subject and object which determined the measure of value, and it seemed that the value quantities of this obstructive distance were proportional. In dealing with concrete experience, applying his value theory to the economy, Simmel modifies and refines this concept of proportionality by introducing the idea of a U-shaped curve. “The distance between the self and the object of its desire can be extremely great – whether because of the physical difficulty of obtaining it, the exorbitant price, or reservations of a moral or other nature which hinder its being acquired. This distance may in fact be so great that there is no act of volition as such, but that instead the desire either disappears completely or remains merely a faint wish. Thus the distance between subject and object, which, at least in the economic sense, increases value the greater it is, has an upper and lower limit; and so it is not in fact true to state that the measure of value is the same as the measure of resistance, which prevents the subject from gaining the desired objects.” (ibid: 20). From a psychological point of view, this is immediately plausible. At the same time, his point of view rejects those theories of value close to Karl Marx, which mechanically state that the measure of value is determined by the quantity of work invested. In order to illustrate his thesis of the U-shaped curve tracing the relationship between value and resistance to its fulfillment, Simmel cites the example that people virtually prevented from being able to acquire gold legally, eventually stop wanting to acquire it (ibid.). Although Simmel wants to anchor his value theory in subjective experience, he does not leave it at that. He leads his reader on to the question of whether or not objective values exist, regardless of whether these are subjectively recognized or not. According to Simmel, just as there are sentences which we imagine to be true and at the same time produce the idea “that their truth is independent of this imagining – in the same way we feel that things, people, or events are not only felt by us to be of value, but that they would be of value even if nobody appreciated their worth” (ibid: 13). Against the background of his theory of evolution, Simmel undertakes to examine the origins of potentially superior values, which might be independent of subjective judgment and thus possibly represent the exceptions to a rule. The whole of mankind’s cultural history is present when the subject undergoes experiences and feelings. That which possessed functional

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significance in the very earliest stirrings of the history of man – for the purpose of prolonging life and preserving the species, for example – might have actually lost its functional use since the primitive age, or else the awareness of it may have been lost. Nevertheless, Simmel believes that humans still regard certain values of the past as important, even if they do not have an immediate positive effect in their present lives. On the basis of this evolutionist approach, Simmel sees the methodical possibility of an objective reality independent of the subject. He illustrates this in a religious context. He takes the example of the deistic view of God the creator as a watchmaker who constructs the world like a watch, sets it in motion, but then leaves it to tick away on its own and does not interfere with it any more: This image allows him to summarize once again how he models his theory of reality on his theory of the processes of consciousness. “It was said of the divine principle that, after it had invested the elements of the world with their forces, he stepped back and left these forces to interact with one another, so that we can now speak of an objective world, which is tied to its own relations and laws; the divine power elected to extract itself from the world in this way, since it considered this the most effective way of fulfilling its purpose with the world most completely. In the same way, we invest the objects of the economy with a quantity of value as if with a quality of their own, and then we leave them to the processes of exchange. These processes constitute a mechanism objectively determined by the values the objects have been assigned, a series of reciprocal relationships based on these impersonal values. The objects then return, enhanced and more intensely pleasurable and desirable to their ultimate purpose which was their starting point: The feelings of the subjects” (ibid: 28f). For Simmel the feeling and experiencing subject has the creative power to assign value to economic objects, just as in a religious metaphor God has the creative power to originate the world. The person has the ability to invest things with value, things which then become “more intensively pleasurable” once they find their ultimate purpose and meaning in the “feelings of the subjects” (ibid.). Construction of Value in Interaction When the processes of value attribution are examined in the context of the interaction between subjects, transitioning from the psychological to



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the sociological dimension of money, Simmel turns his attention to the topic of exchange. At the beginning he asks how it was at all possible for a self-contained sphere consisting of the reciprocal giving and taking of goods to develop. Economic activity becomes possible in that “a realm of values” (ibid: 30) receives such a degree of independence from the subjects – by way of the processes of objectification and alienation – that it “becomes more or less completely separated from its subjectivepersonal base” (ibid.). From the point of view of Simmel’s method, therefore, the question arises of how, in the context of the economy, this “realm of values” gains such a degree of objectivity, and why it becomes so independent that the individual is left with the choice of either subjecting himself to it or else – at least in theory – withdrawing from any participation in economic activity altogether. In answer to this question, Simmel cites the objectifying effect of exchange – based on the arguments mentioned in connection with the theory of evolution. “The object does not gain its actual value just by being desired, but by being desired by another person. Its value is not characterized by being related to the sensitive subject, but by the fact that this relationship is only achieved through a certain sacrifice; whereas this sacrifice is seen by the other side as a desirable value, the subject itself sees it as a sacrifice. In this way, the objects gain a quality of reciprocal balance, and this particularly makes their value appear as a quality which they objectively possess” (ibid: 31). The quality upon which the economically evaluated object’s resistance to the individual’s desire is based and which appears to be “objectively possessed” (ibid.) is real because it appears to be real. The relationship between object and subject which has already been referred to becomes doubled in an exchange, since there are now two subjects and two objects. Thus the economically evaluated object becomes part of a twofold value relation: From the perspective of its original owner it possesses a value not only due to the benefit it provides him, but also due to the benefit he expects to gain from the object by exchanging it. When in the course of the exchange the benefit derived from the originally owned object is given up, Simmel terms this sacrifice. The subjects involved will only carry out the exchange if both judge the required sacrifice as being less than the expected benefit provided by the newly acquired object. “Of course, the significance which objects acquire in an exchange is never completely isolated and separated from their direct subjective signi­ ficance which originally determined their relationship to the subject; in fact, the two are bound together like form and content. It is the objective

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process, very often asserting itself more strongly within the individual’s consciousness, that abstracts the idea that the objects consist of values, acquiring its own distinctive nature from the equality of these values – rather like geometry focuses its attention on the sizes and proportions of its objects, without taking account of their substance or material – though the existence of such objects in the real world can only be realized in material form.” (ibid: 32). Here, Simmel believes he has revealed the origin of objectivity emerging from the development “toward a neutral relationship between objects over and above personal relationships” (ibid: 30). The “direct and subjective” (ibid: 32) significance of the objects is incorporated in the objectified exchange relation and contained within it rather like the content of a form. And this form – the exchange itself – Simmel regards as a product of consciousness, whereby the creative contribution of consciousness remains invisible since it abstracts the form “exchange” from all the subjective elements. But Simmel does not only see the importance of exchange as purely economic. Instead he sees this formative process of consciousness, presenting itself as objective reality, as a universal social phenomenon. “We must realize that most relationships between individuals can be regarded as an exchange; exchange is the purest and most sophisticated form of interaction which goes to make up human life, in the search to acquire material and content. For example, it is often overlooked that there are many instances where we might first assume that merely a onesided influence is being exerted, whereas in fact an interactive dimension is at work: The speaker and his assembly, the teacher and his class, the journalist and his audience – in each case the former appears to the latter to be the sole influential force; and yet in actual fact, anybody in such a situation senses the very strong determining and guiding influence being returned by the apparently passive group” (ibid: 33f.). From the point of view of economic activity, of course, there is a very clear-cut distinction between exchanging an apartment in the city for a small house in the country, and the situation of the teacher giving a lecture. In the economy, the exchange refers to physical objects, which only the rightful owners can legitimately control; an intellectual exchange involves ideas or concepts, which may belong to any person and never to the teacher in a material sense. In the course of such interaction, therefore, the teacher gives of something he himself does not possess. Simmel is particularly concerned not to limit his observations to the physical-material sphere. The personal feeling of the individual involves



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the spontaneous, subjective component, and this undoubtedly distinctive personal element every individual puts into an exchange, conveying it to the other and receiving their commitment in return. Yet the person so deeply involves his own consciousness in the process of creating objectivity that he completely conceals involvement. Thus exchange is made onto a thing removed from the individuals involved and personal participation seems unimportant. “By combining the two acts or changes of condition which actually happen within the single term ‘exchange’, there is an obvious temptation to regard the exchange itself as separate or distinct from the process which occurs within one or other of the individuals involved” (ibid: 35). In continuation of this constant effort to clarify the relation between subjective and objective components, Simmel returns to the previously developed thesis that value is a consequence of the distance between subject and object and the desire to overcome this distance. “In exchange, i.e. in economic activity, the values of the economy are created because it is this exchange which produces the distance between subject and object, thus transferring subjective feeling into objective value… Objects can be part of our experience and experienced by us, because they are images within us, and because the shaping and fashioning of these images is an expression of the same force as that, which shapes and determines experience. In the same way we can state here: The possibility of economic activity is at the same time the possibility of economic objects” (ibid: 45). This quotation demonstrates Simmel’s method quite clearly. Marx had reinterpreted Hegel’s philosophy as esoteric economics. Hegel’s world spirit, continuing its autonomous development, is for Marx the allpowerful force of capital. This unmasking of idealistic philosophy as a hidden representation of economic life is reversed by Simmel: He describes economic activity as being determined by the power of human imagination. This unmasking enables him to reinterpret Kant’s statements on epistemology as points of reference for the understanding of economic activities, leading him to link the mental exchange of ideas with the exchange of things. “For if materialism states that mind is matter – transcendental philosophy states that matter is also mind” (ibid: 158). Marx turned Hegel upside down; Simmel sets him back on his feet. Money as a Means of Exchange Simmel develops the concept of ‘money’ gradually and in a number of stages of discourse. His epistemology serves to explain how reality can be

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experienced. He derives his theory of value from his theory of reality and truth. He then extends his theory of value to a theory of exchange and finally comes to a definition of what we now understand by the concept of money. The exchange of goods by payment, though money’s prime value, is not the only purpose of money; it also transfers and conserves value: “The value of money as such is acquired through its function as a means of exchange; where there is nothing to exchange, money has no value. It is quite clear that its importance as a means of transferring and conserving value does not share the same origin as its exchange function, but is a derivative thereof” (ibid: 134). Money acquires a concrete form through interactions between people. The social principle of culture empowers them to invest objects with value in money. Shaping sensory impressions into objects allows persons to experience reality; their distance or detachment from objects means that, in their wish to overcome this distance, they feel the value of an object. Therefore, value is not a quality of an object but a judgment about it. Since in exchanging objects, people assess the expectations of overcoming distance and then compare value; they become aware of the value relations of the goods exchanged. These relations then become separated from the goods whose comparison they originated from, and appear as an independent factor: they are given the form of money. “To put it briefly: Money is the expression and means of the relationship and interdependence of people, their relativity, by which the satisfaction of one person’s wishes is always mutually dependent on another person; accordingly there is no place for money in a situation where there is no interdependence among people – whether because one desires absolutely nothing of other people, or whether one stands in complete supremacy above them – in other words in which one is in no relation to those below – and one can thus satisfy any desire without giving anything in return” (ibid.). Money is the most general form of social relationship. The conscious mind, occupied with the social construction of reality, invests money with such a well-defined sense of independent existence that due to the process of alienation we forget in the course of everyday life what the origin and effect of money is: An expression of the interdependence of people. Where interpersonal relationships are not social, where individuals are not interactive and do not enter into exchanges with one another but instead treat each other as objects, money becomes irrelevant, it loses its meaning. “Money is a solely sociological phenomenon, utterly meaningless when limited to a single individual, and it can therefore only bring



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about some change to a given status as a change in the relationships amongst individuals. The increased dynamism and intensity of activity following a plethora of money is caused by the fact that this leads to an increase in the desire of individuals for more money” (ibid: 143). This statement points to the sociology of money. In order to interpret money as a paradigm of the objects and processes of culture, Simmel decides to present once more the epistemological starting point of his theory of money. “The value of things – ethical and eudaemonistic, religious and aesthetic – hovers over them like Platonic ideas above the world: Alien to the things themselves, intangible, a realm ordered according to its own internal norms, but nevertheless giving the other its contours and colors. Economic value is derived from these primary, spontaneously sensed values by weighing up these objects against one another, insofar as they are exchangeable” (ibid: 135). Value is a universal cultural phenomenon rooted in spontaneous feeling, and economic value is a specific form of it, since the desired objects are experienced as being mutually exchangeable. An exchange does not necessarily have to take place; the very assessment or weighing up of potential exchange value is sufficient to create an awareness of the value relations of goods. Simmel regarded value not as a quality of things but as a judgment of them. Money then, is an expression of the relations between such judgments. In money, consciousness creates a yardstick for the relative weight of these judgments. Thus money is a paradigm of culture: In money, the world of values and the world of concrete things converge. Simmel held the view that Plato’s realm of ideas was a theoretical construction intended as an instrument for the acquisition of knowledge; Simmel believed that Plato deluded himself as far as this process of construction was concerned and erroneously held that he had simply discovered objective reality. Simmel applies this critique of Plato as a conceptual motif to his criticism of the substance theory of money. “If money really were nothing but the expression of the value of things separate from itself, it would be related to these things like the Platonic idea – which Plato also sees as material, as a metaphysical entity – relates to empirical reality. Its movements – compensation, accumulation, expenditure – would be an exact reproduction of the value relations of things. The world of values, hovering apparently unconnectedly and yet exercising absolute power, would thus have in money the representation of its ‘pure form’. And just as Plato, having developed ideas from an observation and sublimation of reality, then interprets reality as a mere

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reflection of these ideas – in the same way, the economic conditions, levels and fluctuations of concrete objects appear as derivatives of their own derivatives: That is to say as vague, shadowy representations of their monetary equivalents” (ibid: 136). This is a convincing rejection of reification and alienation as a consequence of ignoring the origins of ideas. Simmel applies his critique of Platonism to the subject of money because he wants to show that money does not have its own material value, but that its importance stems from its suitability as the form of a relationship. “Nevertheless, it cannot shake off a limited quantity of material value” (ibid.). This much Simmel concedes, but it remains a phenomenon of only peripheral importance. Not the physical quality of money, so to speak, is important but its effect as a form of social interaction in which value relations are expressed. However, in the history of theories of money, the biased emphasis of the material value of money as a precious metal has tended to dominate, and this gave rise to ethical ideas relating to interest and usury. “All the misgivings of the Middle Ages concerning the charging of interest arose from the fact that money appeared at that time to be much more rigid and material and as having its own separate identity in comparison to other things; in the modern period, however, it creates the impression of a more dynamic, fluctuating, and adaptable force” (ibid: 152). Simmel’s epistemological approach also allows him to interpret the historical development of money. Plato had held the realm of ideas to be metaphysical reality; Simmel saw this as a theoretical construct. This step from Plato to Simmel is an instance of philosophical progress. In analogy to this: Most monetary theories of the past have seen only the material value of money, whereas Simmel discovers its symbolic and social function. This step is progress in the theory of money. Money as a material can be owned, kept, or given away by one person. The point Simmel makes about money as a relational tool is that two people conjointly make it become real, expressing their relationship within it. An interest ban, as was justified by Christian as well as Islamic teachings, must have a discouraging effect on the creditor. Simmel’s theory of money illustrates the force which money develops due to the “double existence of loaned money” (ibid: 155). It can be effective firstly in its imagined form as the creditor’s claim against the debtor, and secondly as “a reality in the hands of the debtor” (ibid: 156). It is thus active with both: “By being loaned, therefore, the effectiveness of money is split into two parts and the productiveness of its economic energy is remarkably increased.



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But the intellectual abstraction which brings about this split can only come into effect in the context of a social order so well-established and refined as to make the lending of money a relatively secure transaction and making it possible to base economic actions on these specific functions of money” (ibid.). Above all the legal system must be sufficiently reliable to provide the lasting security without which monetary and capital transactions would not be possible. But law is subject to its cultural context just as the economy is, so that social change as a form of cultural and social evolution can be studied by analyzing the development of economic activity. Max Weber pursued this course of enquiry both in his studies in social history and in his writings on the sociology of religion. “These sophisticated phenomena demonstrate particularly clearly just how little the true nature of money is bound to its physical substance; but as it is completely and utterly a sociological phenomenon, a form of interaction amongst men, it adopts a purer form the more condensed, reliable, and unforced the associations within society. Indeed, the general stability and reliability of the economic culture shows its effects right through to the very external aspects of money” (ibid.). The “associations within society” also become “more reliable, more unforced” (ibid.) as an expression of political renewal, and Simmel looks forward optimistically toward the time of democratic political orders. He pursues the development of political history from the perspective of the extent to which the individual’s opportunities for self-fulfillment can be realized: “When liberal tendencies led the state into an increasingly freer flow, an increasingly unhindered adaptability and an increasingly unstable balance of its elements, the material basis for Adam Smith’s theory was provided: Gold and silver were mere tools, no more than cooking utensils, and their import for its own sake did as little to increase the prosperity of nations as would the increase in the number of cooking utensils increase the amount of food” (ibid.: 158). Simmel himself gives his program a name: He calls his own cultural-sociological theory of money “transcendental” and writes: “Adam Smith’s view set the course for the theory of money put forward here, which, in contrast to the materialistic theories, can be termed transcendental” (ibid.). Simmel’s is constantly able and willing to see the ambivalence of historical processes. Here is another example: Money allows the emergence and development of new forms of human co-existence within society. This brings about liberation and widens the individual’s scope for action, but at the same time releases him from protective support and

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creates a sense of alienation. Simmel avoids both a naive belief in progress and a polemic critique of the money economy. He examines the opportunities afforded for the individual’s personal fulfillment by economic development. “All advanced economic technique is based on the development of economic processes to becoming self-contained, distinct phenomena: They become abstracted from the spontaneity and directness of personal interests, they function as if they were ends in themselves in a mechanical fashion, less and less affected by the irregularity and unpredictability of personal elements” (ibid: 358). Here we see Simmel’s view of the human condition: The element of individual personality is ambivalent too, a factor which must be constrained if a rational money economy is to develop. “And this is precisely what money alone can do. It is only when the company’s profit takes a form which allows it to be transferred to any other point that it creates a distance between proprietor and property; it is this distance which gives both sides a high degree of independence, of freedom of movement, so to speak; For one it means the possibility of being managed solely according to its own functional requirements, for the other it means the possibility of organizing one’s life without having to take account of the specific requirements of one’s possessions” (ibid.: 359). Alienation as the growth of detachment is obviously not always something of negative value in Simmel’s view, but is also characterized by ambivalence: Property and proprietor are separable from one another, under the conditions of the money economy they are not eternally shackled to one another, come what may. And Simmel continues moreover to view the industrial workers’ development of their relations with their superiors as an ambivalent one. Taking the example of the German iron and steel industry, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Heinrich Popitz, Ernst August Jüres and Hanno Kesting clearly showed (Popitz, Jüres, Kesting, Bahrdt 1957a, 1957b) how hierarchically delegated authority was being substituted by the dictates of technology; Simmel formulated this in theoretical form at a time when such a development was far from apparent: “The economic organization of the early centuries, and now the surviving forms of it in the crafts and in small trade, are based on the relationship of personal subordination of the apprentice under the master, the employee under the shop owner, etc. Thus the economy functions according to the interaction of very direct, personal factors; it is the superior who imposes his will in each individual case, with the remaining individuals dominated by this subjective element. This relationship acquires a different character in an era when the objective, technological elements



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gain in importance over the personal elements. The production supervisor and the lower workers, the director and the salesman in a large store – both sides are now equally subject to an objective purpose, and it is only within this joint relationship that subordination remains as a technical necessity in which the requirements of an object – production as an objective process – find expression” (ibid.: 361). While remaining aware of the ambivalent tendencies of the money economy, Simmel also perceives the opportunities it affords for the objectification of the relationship between employers and employees, in the sense that it favors the development of individuality and personal value: “The growing confidence of the modern-day worker must have something to do with this: He no longer feels subordinated as a per­ son,  but  provides a service – precisely fixed according to the monetary equivalent – which allows a greater degree of freedom at a personal level, the more impersonal, technical, and neutral the work he is doing and the company which it supports” (ibid: 362). This was visionary at the time it was written, because it predicted the disappearance of the working class as it existed in Western societies a century ago. Socialism as Result of a Forming Process Like religion, the stranger, and money, Simmel sees socialism as a form that emerges out of an interactive context, real only in living relations. In his essay on competition he compares socialism and competition as alternate techniques of organization in the public realm. This allows us to consider the effect of his method on a sociological approach to politics as another area of possible alienation. That is also justified because he is aware that socialism, just as religion and money, tends to become a thing in itself: substantialized. He voices his protest against tearing social realities out of the interactive contexts within which they could stay alive and retain their ability to develop. Accordingly he warns against reducing relationships to a substance. The methodical contrast between a relational and a substantive approach becomes his instrument for criticism. Simmel remonstrates party politicians who support socialism for allowing their concept of order to attain absolute proportions, reducing order to a thing, a fetish. “This occurs, for instance, with the contrast of individualistic and socialistic tendencies in society. There are historical eras during which the latter dominate the circumstances – not only in reality, but also as a consequence of idealism and as the expression of a

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social constitution continuously progressing toward perfection. However, if party politics at such a time conclude that, since all progress now depends on the growth of the socialist element, the most progressive and ideal state will be the most perfect form of domination by that element, – then they overlook that the whole success of socialism depends on integrating it into an economic system which is otherwise still individualistic in nature.” (Simmel, 1907b: 147f.). The success of socialist party politics in Simmel’s days was in his opinion dependent upon the existence of the predominant economic system, which – as Simmel writes in 1900 – was in opposition to socialism. Arguing in favor of thinking in relationships, coupled with a criticism of the tendency to substantialize, Simmel also rejects the socialist doctrine in which value appears much like a physical quality of material goods, similar to their color or weight. The phenomena of money and socialism, not seen as things but as a social reality, occur only in the vital interaction of those exchanging goods. The “exchange” itself is not material, but a form of interaction. Law for instance, is nothing but an empty abstraction until it becomes a living relationship. People can only treat each other rightfully or do each other wrong if they are interacting with one another. “The error arising from this substantializing point of view is methodically the same as if one were to claim a direct connection between an individual and the content of a particular law in such a way that the disposition of that person, being the way it is, irrespective of anything beyond himself, would have a ‘just’ claim to this sphere of competence – as has indeed happened in the individualistic concept of ‘Human Rights’. In reality, Law is merely a relationship between people and occurs only in the interests, objectives, or power play… (ibid: 95 f.). Socialism, like law and religion, is one such form of relations. Simmel compares cultural formation to the processes of artistic creativity. He conceives the shaping of such forms in relation to social aspects, which in the course of interaction assume a religious quality, for instance. He then sees socialism as a form of interaction, colored with a particular political hue. Socialism is first and foremost a phenomenon of political and intellectual culture. “I believe that this secret unrest, this confused urgency beneath the surface of consciousness that drives people today from socialism to Nietzsche, from Böcklin to the Impressionists, from Hegel to Schopenhauer and back, is not a result of the outward haste and exaltation of modern life but, vice versa, it is often the expression, the manifestation and the discharge of that inward state” (ibid: 551). Socialism belongs among the intellectual forms with which it competes as a political alternative.



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According to Simmel, sociology would have to show the concrete interactions in society that induce us to create that characteristic form of relationship we call socialism. In fact, Simmel sees the economy as the root cause, not so much with regard to the conditions of production, but rather in the uniformity of the products. “Large-scale industry is an encouragement for socialism, not just because of the situation of the workers, but also because of the objective quality of its products: Modern man is surrounded by so many impersonal things that the concept of a completely anti-individual order of life must appear increasingly attractive – and of course also the opposition to such a concept” (ibid: 520). Simmel considers the money economy – like many other things – with ambivalence: On the one hand it facilitates an ever-increasing degree of substantialization and, at the same time, greater internalization. Money (as relationship) becomes the “guardian of the innermost depths” (ibid: 532). “However, whether it allows the person concerned to become more refined, unique and differentiated or, conversely makes him or her into a tyrant over other people – precisely because of the easiness with which it is obtained – has nothing to do with money, but people. Here, too, the money economy appears in its formal relationship to socialist conditions” (ibid.). Both forms of relationship – that of money and of socialism – are expected to bring the same blessing: “Deliverance from the individual struggle for existence” (ibid.). They can be substituted one for the other: He who has money does not need socialism. Money on one hand and socialism on the other, both have positive and negative consequences: When money works well, it leads to autonomy of the individual, negatively, it leads to isolation; when socialism works well, it leads to solidarity, negatively, it leads to uniformity with loss of the opportunity of self-development. Simmel scans the culture of his time for the mental fields from which such states of mind arise. “Herein lays the most profound connection between Nietzsche’s theory of values and his aesthetic state of mind: In his opinion the quality of a society is determined exclusively by the elevation of its values, irrespective of how isolated those may be who represent them. Thus it is not regarded according to how widespread its calculable qualities are; just as the significance of an artistic era is not measured by the standard and quantity of good, average performances, but by its highest achievements. A utilitarianoriented person, for whom only the concrete results of action count, will be inclined toward socialism which emphasizes the many and propagates desired elements in life, whereas an ethical idealist, who is committed to the – more or less aesthetically expressed – form of doing, is more of an

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individualist or, like Kant, values the autonomy of the individual above all.” (ibid: 287). Simmel feels that where “concrete results of action count” (cf. above) socialism is the obvious mode of being, whereas when the emphasis is on “aesthetic expression in the form of doing” (cf. above) preference is given to the mode of being geared to individual autonomy. Kant and Nietzsche stand for the highest esteem for the peerless individual; they are the antipodes to the socialist state of mind. “What distinguishes Nietzsche from all socialist values is most clearly illustrated by the fact that for him it is only the quality of humanity that is of significance. This means that the value of an epoch depends on the single best example, whereas in socialism it is the overall distribution of desired conditions and values which counts.” (ibid: 293) In the socialist mode of relationship, supreme happiness as a political goal must be reformulated as the happiness of the greatest number. For Nietzsche it is not the numbers that count, but the highest possible degree, and it is sufficient if it is realized in one individual only, representing the whole of the human species. The great number of those who do not stress their diversity by any marked differentiation makes it easy to order them according to rational criteria, e.g. in hundreds (ibid: 556) or in some other symmetrical order which is easy to distinguish and control. “For this reason both despotism and socialism have strong inclinations toward symmetrical constructions in society; in both cases it is because a extreme degree of centralization of society is involved, for the sake of which the individuality of its forms and circumstances have to be leveled down” (ibid: 556). The tendency toward uniformity is a characteristic of socialism which marks not only the cultural side; it also causes in it the tension between the rational and the emotional. Socialism on Happiness Referring to the supreme happiness of the greatest number, Simmel points out that apart from the material dimension (availability of food, clothing etc.), happiness as an experienced social reality has not just a political but also has an emotional dimension. As everybody knows, a modest person with a minimum of material possessions can be happy, while another, more demanding type can be miserable even in the most luxurious surroundings. Given this, problems inevitably arise for socialism in the implementation of its goal of a social equality which has only rational



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roots. By implication people’s experiences of happiness can gradually be made more and more similar to each other. “However, because it is always only a question of distribution, or equalization of the external causes of such feelings, one is immediately faced with the fact that different people react differently to the same conditions of happiness” (Simmel, 1894b: 264). If, however, the rational goal of equality should be an equal degree of a sense of happiness, then, with regard to the amount of material goods to which the individual is entitled, “in view of the great differences in the subjects’ predispositions”, one would be forced to the conclusion that “the external distribution of this amount would have to be very unequal” (ibid.). Clearly, man’s happiness is not only dependent upon the provisions for his material well-being. The ideal of equality propagated by socialism (both Marxist and Christian) always strives toward eliminating the suffering, which is engendered by experiencing asymmetrical interaction in power relationships of subordination and domination. This inequality, experienced particularly at work has painful emotional components as long as the position within the performance hierarchy is the measure of personal value. According to Simmel’s analysis, the advance of the money economy offers the chance that the general trend toward objectivity, inherent in the interactive form of money, applies to the achievement-oriented, employeremployee relationship. Superiority and subordination at work, and within similar functional relationships, would thus become de-emotionalized and more objective when converted to the social form money and the positive consequence would be the avoidance of suffering. “By thus giving performance and its organizational prerequisites an objective status, all the technical advantages of the latter could be retained, whilst the disadvantages in terms of subjectivity and freedom could be avoided, which are today the basis for anarchism and, in part, for socialism. This is the general direction of the culture, which, as we saw above, is preparing the ground for the money economy. The separation of the worker from his means of production, i.e. the question of possession, which is considered the crux of the social dilemma, could then be seen to be a form of liberation in a different sense, provided the worker as a person is regarded as being totally separate from the purely material conditions into which the technology of production places him.” (Simmel, 1907b: 365). To give performance an objective, measurable character, which Simmel regards as a possible solution, is unthinkable in socialism, since socialism

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is at war with money as a form of interaction (at least in Simmel’s days). A plausible motive for this battle is the degree of objectivity the money economy brings to social forms. Ferdinand Tönnies describes this battle as the era of “community” (Tönnies, 1887). Thus associations, in which being emotional was traditionally expected, become stripped of their emotional component with all its positive and negative consequences. “However, the nature of the special-purpose association, which community life is increasingly assuming, makes it become more and more inanimate; the whole heartlessness of money is thus reflected in the social culture it determines. It may be that the force of the socialist ideal is at least in part a reaction to this; by declaring war on the money system it seeks to overcome the isolation of the individual from his group, which the special-purpose association symbolizes. At the same time it appeals to all the loving and enthusiastic feelings for the group, which can be aroused in the individual.” (Simmel 1907b: 375 f.). Simmel makes very clear the contradiction, which exists between rationalism and emotionalism within the socialist forms of interaction. In the course of this analysis, he discovers components in the object of his study which he calls “communist”. “Socialism is, indeed, geared toward rationalizing life, toward dominating its accidental and unique elements by means of the intellectual capacity to recognize patterns and make calculations; however, at the same time, it has an affinity with the dull, communist instincts still lurking in the farther corners of the mind, the heritage of times long gone. This duality of motives, the psychological roots of which are diametrically opposed to one another, and, which on the one hand makes it the most extreme product of the rationalist money economy, and, on the other, the personification of undifferentiated instinct and emotional life, probably accounts for its unique powers of attraction: It is both rationality and the reaction to rationality.” (ibid: 376). The yearning for community-type social relationships is one of the powerful driving forces behind the socialist search for solidarity – the search for a form of familism beyond the family. Money as an expanding system increasingly represses these forms, stimulating the polarization between private and public, enhancing the tension between community and society. Simmel sees communal forms being pushed completely inward (family, friendship) or completely outward (humanity). “Socialism has found reason for enthusiasm in the antiquated order of the clan with its communist principle of equality, while the money system makes the individual revert to concentrating on him or herself, leaving him or her, on



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the one hand only the closest individual relationships, e.g. family and friends as objects of personal and emotional devotion and, on the other, the very largest unit, such as one’s country or the whole of humanity” (ibid: 376). The inner contradictions of socialism become more and more critical because they radiate a strong drive toward rationalizing production. As Simmel goes on to show, the factory worker is for the most part prepared to accept standing at a machine. However, in the production of agricultural goods, great value is still placed on the non-rational components of the work process. “A further major theme of modern socialism is to confront the old-fashioned landowning-collective with something utterly heterogeneous and which completely alienates the farmer from his innermost inclination in life; namely the perfect domination of production by reason, willpower, and the human capacity to calculate and organize… Such absolute mastery of overall production by reason and willpower is, of course, only feasible if the means of production are completely centralized in ‘society’s’ hands.” (ibid: 384). One rational aspect of socialism is its character as a scientific form. It is precisely this aspect which appears to provoke Simmel to criticism, because he sees it as a challenge in his own field. The protagonists of scientific socialism are social philosophers like Simmel himself and their inclination for this (socialist) kind of interaction is mainly at home in the emotional realm. In the same way that religious feelings create their own object, a political conviction will give rise to a scientific form. “There are today extreme individualists who are nevertheless practical adherents to socialism because they regard it as an indispensable preparation and extremely rigorous school for a purified and just kind of individualism (ibid: 407). This means that Simmel saw in his days contemporaries who sided with socialism for other reasons than purely political. Their motif was also based on the hope to overcome the feudal order existing in Europe at the time. In the same context Simmel wrote: “I am well aware that contemporary scientific socialism rejects the mechanical communist form of egalitarianism, seeking only to achieve the equality of working conditions as a basis for the different talents, strength and endeavor to give rise to different positions and pleasures.” (ibid: 460 f.). However, Simmel has no doubts about the causal relationship between historical materialism and socialist  theory, and Simmel’s misgivings about the former will be explained here later.

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As a political form of social construction in interaction, socialism, as Simmel saw it in his days, plans activities intended to reshape society, and, in particular the state. Simmel infers the distinct content of the action program from the fact that machine, factory, and state have become parallel. “It has to do with exactly the same aesthetic appeal as emanates from a machine. The absolutely functional nature and dependability of the movements, the extreme avoidance of resistance and friction, the harmonious coordination of the smallest and the largest components: All this gives the machine its very own kind of beauty, which is perceptible even at a glance. The factory repeats this on a larger scale and the socialist state is meant to repeat it again on an even larger scale” (ibid: 561 f.). Today the sense of beauty is hardly inspired by either machinery or political organizations, but the principle of absolute predictability and reliability coming at the price of total rigidity has spread to additional areas of experience, including computer software. The interesting conclusion at which Simmel arrives by lining up the three complexes: machine – factory – state, is that socialists do not reject conditions because they oppose them, but rather they adapt to innovations of which they are by no means themselves the initiators. Simmel is convinced that there is a congruity between the functionalizing of human beings in their jobs in modern industry and the regulation of individual behavior in state socialism. “The modern division of labor causes the numbers of dependencies to increase and makes personalities disappear behind their functions because it allows only one aspect to flourish whilst all those others have to yield which together go to make up a whole personality. The social structure, which would be bound to evolve if this tendency were pursued, would exhibit a definite, formal relationship to socialism. For the latter it is of the utmost importance to transform all forms of activity that involve social aspects into objective functions. A civil servant today assumes a ‘position’ which is objectively pre-shaped and allows flexibility only for specific aspects or energies within his personality. Similarly, an absolute form of state socialism would raise a world of objective forms of socially effective behavior above the world of personalities; this world of objective forms would allow and demand only totally accurate and objectively correct statements; this world would relate to the first rather like a geometrical figure to empirical bodies.” (ibid: 313).



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By mentioning the civil servant, Simmel conjures up the modern state bureaucracy; Namely the fact that the political organization of production as the aim of socialism entails not only central planning but, indeed, a central, state administration of all professional work. Consequently, the state must be organized just as rationally as a machine or a factory. The theoretical impulse emanates from the labor theory of value which requires the centrally controlled deployment of all labor. This shows the profound connection between the labor theory of value and socialism, which indeed aspires to a situation in society in which the utilitarian value of objects, related to the working time required to obtain them, represents a constant factor. In the third volume of his “The Capital” Karl Marx states: The basic requirement of all value – also in labor theory – is being of practical use [Gebrauchswert]. This simply means that the amount of the overall labor time of a society is used for a given product, which is in proportion to its practical significance (ibid: 476 f.). Put into practice, this kind of theory would require the elimination of differentiations with the consequence that society would change beyond recognition. Work would no longer be an expression of the lives of unique individuals, but a homogeneous stockpile, comparable with a nation’s wealth measured in terms of money. This homogenized reservoir of nationalized (and thus impersonalized) work is then administered by the State. Thus a kind of qualitatively uniform overall requirement is postulated for a given society. This is in keeping with the motto of the theory of labor: Work is work and, as such, of equal value; similarly, need is need and, as such, of equal value. The equality of all work is achieved by working only so much to precisely fill previously defined demand. Under such circumstances, of course, no kind of work would be less useful than another (ibid.). This, indeed, is society transformed into a machine. Simmel’s thesis of the contradictory nature of adaptation on the one hand and the imitation of technical, rational structures in state and society on the other is strong enough to support his line of reasoning. The necessary order, which would have to be enforced politically, cannot be founded on this or another variant of rationality alone. From the point of view of the emotional values of experience, the morphological triad (machine, factory, government) would find little support. It would have to be enforced by suppression irrespective of any feelings of the persons involved. The objective would be an economic system “in which all work is done according to a plan and in absolute knowledge of the demand and of the

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amount of work necessary for each product – the kind to which socialism aspires. The only approach to this utterly utopian state which would seem technically possible is for only those things to be produced which are definitely indispensable, i.e. indisputably vital. Only where this is the case are all jobs equally necessary and useful. However, as soon as one aspires to higher realms, where on the one hand, demand and the evaluation of the utilitarian aspect are inevitably more individual, and, on the other hand the degree of intensity of work is measurable, no kind of regulation of production quantities will be able to achieve an overall equality in the ratio between demand and the amount of work done” (ibid. 478). Simmel integrated his analysis of the efficiency of the centrally planned economy within his philosophy of money in 1900. In his lecture on “Socialism” in 1918, Max Weber voiced his agreement with Simmel with regard to mistrusting the administration of enterprises run by the government. Weber also agreed with Simmel’s findings: “In public and special purpose enterprises, it is exclusively the civil servant, not the worker who, in the case of a strike, can achieve far more than in private industry. The dictatorship of the civil servant is – at least for the time being – on the advance.” (Weber, 1918: 22) Weber of course was alluding to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which to him was far less likely to happen than a domination of society by civil servants. Looking back at Chapter 4 The main thrust of Simmel’s critical stance may not be directed against any particular view or way of doing things but against the general shallowness of human thinking. He is particularly upset about the ideas people commonly have about money and about how value is attributed. Value to him is the most general form of social relationship and it is constructed in interaction. Money has the potential of enabling a welcome distance between capitalist and wage earner; they each deliver performance and payment respectively in exchange and otherwise enjoy having nothing to do with each other. Socialism too is the result of interaction. Simmel’s recommends – in vain as we know – to beware of formalistic notions of equality. If people are expected to be equally happy they cannot be expected to feel comfortable under identical external conditions, like the same uniform in China under Mao or the same amount of pay in Western countries. Modern man has been fascinated by the way a machine works, he has been organizing



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factories according to that model, and he tends to expect government too to operate like a machine. Imposing uniformity on the person appears plausible against that background. This coincides with the bias in favor of the natural science and their application in factory-technology. Simmel’s warning of that trend is clear enough. It comes of course with a heavy load of responsibility for the humanities in general and for sociology in particular to spread the messages Simmel has for us: Reduce alienation by increasing the level of awareness.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MAIN THRUST OF THE MESSAGES CONTRA MARX AND WEBER Simmel’s main Thrust against Marx In several segments of our report here on the messages which Simmel has been sending, reference was made to the work of Karl Marx. The lives of these two overlapped: Marx was 40 years old when Simmel was born in 1858. The first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867. The other two volumes appeared from unpublished notes after Marx died (1883): Volume II in 1885, the year Simmel started teaching at the University of Berlin as Privatdozent, and volume III in 1894. Intellectuals and labor leaders in Europe and beyond engaged in heated debates about these books, and of course Simmel got involved in the discussion. The intolerant Prussian monarchy had censored what Marx published as a journalist in Germany and forced him into emigration. It was probably this shared fate caused by political backwardness which created sympathy and a feeling of solidarity with Marx in Simmel no matter how much division there was otherwise in political opinion. In spite of obvious difference there must have been a shared hope for change. Simmel, Marx, Engels and other great names of that period were clearly members of the bourgeoisie. Simmel and Engels as sons of suc­ cessful business men, Marx as son of an attorney, and both of them were well equipped with academic credentials. The difference between them started with the expectation in the case of Marx and Engels that the labor class would bring about change, while Simmel and many others expected the bourgeoisie to lead toward freedom and democracy. This distinction amounted to the following alternative: Marx and Engels planned to become revolutionaries as leaders of a class to which they did not belong, whereas Saint-Simon, Simmel and others as intellectuals felt it was their responsibility to raise the consciousness of the bourgeoisie to the level where it would take over political power from the ruling nobility. Keeping in mind this point of departure, it is understandable that much of traditional sociology has been identified as bourgeois thinking. From the perspective of the class consciousness of the proletariat that bourgeois thinking appeared as reactionary, from the perspective of the

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then existing feudal system ruled by members of the nobility, it was dan­ gerously progressive. That is why Simmel could perceive his own work as bourgeois and as progressive at the same time. But it was not only the question of which class will lead toward change that separated Simmel from Marx. Simmel resented the reductionist method used by Marx leading to the central thesis of historical material­ ism according to which the human condition is determined by material interests. According to this Marxian notion religion was merely a source of misperception, nothing but opium of the people. The idea that history might have been influenced or even shaped by religious interests would have meant acknowledging an aspect of the human condition that Marx wanted to overcome. Marx could not interpret religious interest in any other way than as delusion because he was convinced he knew that there was nothing real in a beyond to which religion could reasonably refer. Simmel by contrast left himself more open on that front: If the human ability of perception and critical thinking were unable on methodological grounds to prove that the content of religion was real, then Simmel con­ cluded they were also unable to prove that there was nothing there to believe in. It was to him simply not the business of scholarship to prove or disprove the existence of God. Then, in conjunction with developing his version of pragmatism, Simmel recognized that religious ideas create forms of conduct, social structure, and even types of societies that become very much a reality. The genesis of those, however, cannot be explained by historical materialism. According to that school of thought capitalism will be overcome the sooner, the quicker human persons recognize its unjust and inhuman quality. Religion, on the other hand, has the potential of hid­ ing the shortcomings of capitalism even from persons affected by it, and therefore religion must be done away with. To claim, as Marx has done, that history is determined by economic fac­ tors alone, is plainly absurd to Simmel, because countless historical devel­ opments have religious or other non-material causes. Yet Simmel is willing to acknowledge that to study history as if the economy were in fact the all decisive source of development is to Simmel a very fruitful and legitimate approach. Accordingly, while Simmel rejects historical materialism as a description of history he applauds it at the same time as a heuristic tool and source of novel insights. One of the methods used by the humanities prior to the 18th century was metaphysical explanation. That procedure meant the philosophical inquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence. But the striking success of the natural sciences based on empirical research as well



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as the expectation of rendering detailed and precise description of the object of study in history, cultural anthropology and other humanities has united the leading scholars in their increasing rejection of metaphysics. It is Simmel’s conclusion that Marx took advantage of that trend away from metaphysical explanatory tools and toward accepting only empirical and rational causal patterns of explanation by erroneously identifying non-material interests that people may follow in real life with metaphysics as well. Simmel, however, wanted to make a distinction between religious motivation in a person’s daily life on the one hand, and the use of religious explanation in philosophy on the other. Marx saw no reason to make such a distinction. According to him it is safe to assume, that history is being molded not by idealists but rather by the agents of economic interests, which alone are free of metaphysics. In addition, Simmel and Marx disagreed on the concept of alienation. It originated in ancient Latin legal language as a description of transferring property rights from one person to another. Simmel saw alienation occur as mental activity of a person producing something which that person then refuses to acknowledge as his or her creation. Projecting evil inten­ tions into another who is perfectly innocent or defining a normal and average contemporary as extremely lovable would be examples of alien­ ation in Simmel’s thinking. They are not alienation because they may be unfounded but because the producer of the respective value judgment refuses to see the cause of his evaluation anywhere else than in the other person. Transferring as it were property rights from the prejudiced accuser or the blind lover to the person he or she is facing is in analogy of the ancient Latin wording, alienation. While Marx considered alienation a deplorable defect of the production process in capitalist society, Simmel saw in it the inevitable mark of the human condition in general. In the continuity of this thinking Simmel also developed his concept of valuation as alienation. His most striking example is of course money. The bank note and even the coin minted of a precious metal have no innate value. Rather value is attributed to money in the course of a process of social construction. Yet none of the persons involved in the construction process acknowledge their own creative contribution. To Marx, by con­ trast, the value of money depends on the blood, sweat, and tears invested into the material production process by the members of the working class; it represents their labor, and alienation is the result of them being exploited. The political answer to that deplorable condition was of course social­ ism. Simmel’s use of the word had very little to do with the meaning it has

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taken on in current political discourse. It was then in his view one of the two paths humanity was in a position to take toward social development. The other was the one Simmel clearly preferred: competition. The latter is for Simmel an expression of individualism rather than simply a type of economic behavior. Just as Money is primarily a form of interaction and a phenomenon of culture, so is competition. It does not seem convincing at first sight, how Simmel could put social­ ism and competition side by side as alternative tools for achieving prog­ ress. They can indeed both be seen as types of social control, socialism functions via external control of the person, competition by internalizing social norms that lead to individual success or failure and at the same time urge the individual to perform in the service of the community. Simmel suggests, as we pointed out above, a sober rather than an emo­ tional approach toward socialism and “by admitting to the merely techni­ cal character of this social order, socialism is compelled to abandon its claim of being a self-justifying goal and arbiter of ultimate values, and thus ought to be put on the same level with individualistic competition” (Simmel 1903b: 1017). Kant and Nietzsche represent the highest esteem of the peerless individual; they are for Simmel the antipodes to the socialist state of mind. Simmel is obviously closer to them than he is to Marx. Simmel, the Protestant who late in his life left his church, had high regard for religion. It is to him one of the three great forms, next to art and scholarship, which can capture the whole of reality on their specific terms. Since there is no division of labor between them, since they are responsible not for a certain segment of the world but rather for repre­ senting the whole in their own way, it follows that there can be no conflict between them, just as it would be pointless to argue whether a painting or a poem dealing with the same topic was more correct. There can be as little conflict for instance between religion and scholarship as there can be twee tones (in a composition) and color (in a painting) (Simmel 1906: 8). As we have seen, to Simmel we as scholars cannot decide if there is anything in the beyond, what it may be like, or if there is nothing. For Marx religion is an aspect of this empirical world, and moreover it shows how sick this world is. It can be compared to a fever or any other symptom that signals the presence of a disease. Religion must be overcome because it keeps people from forming a healthy and correct image of the real world requiring change. Human persons cannot act adequately unless they have a clear and correct image of reality. Religion stands in the way of forming such a correct image, it must be done away with. It seems to be on the



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issue of religion that the difference between Marx and Simmel is most explicit. Simmel’s main Thrust against Weber As is well known about the time Weber and his wife spent in Berlin, they both were frequent guests at gatherings of intellectuals and artists in the home of Georg and Gertrud Simmel. What influence went back and forth between Weber and Simmel, both only about six years apart in age, is of course impossible to tell. However, Simmel, not only slightly older, but also well versed in philosophy, may have contributed to giving Weber, the specialist in the history of law, a philosophical foundation for his work. It is in line with this assumption when Weber writes about his own method­ ological position: “The logically most developed approach to the theory of verstehen can be found in the second edition of Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History (pp. 27–62)” (Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality” [Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem], 1905, quoted from Weber 1951c: 92). But this closeness beween the two does not last. In man­ uscripts later to be incorporated in Weber’s Economy and Society, written in 1911 or later (Weber 1956) Weber inserts several passages documenting that he now disagrees with Simmel. It can be shown that these differences are not superficial, but that they follow consistently from the respective theories of knowledge of the two authors. In Weber’s text on basic concepts in sociology (Weber 1951d) we read about “Simmel’s method (as he uses it in his book Soziologie as well as in Philosophy of Money)” Weber’s statement that he does not intend to follow Simmel’s usage of the term meaning. Contrary to Simmel, Weber announces that he will make a clear distinction between meaning that is subjectively ascribed by the acting individual from meaning that is objectively valid (ibid: 527) no matter who accepts or rejects it. This distinction is then tied to the special approaches of different academic disciplines: The empirical sciences of social conduct (sociology and history, ibid: 528) are given the task to determine which meaning is subjectively ascribed, whereas the dogmatic fields of learning: Law, logic, ethic, and others must direct their research toward finding the true and valid meaning of a given phenomenon (ibid.). According to Simmel every type of meaning is by necessity the result of a construction. He does not deny the existence of an objectively given truth, but to him we cannot access it without changing and forming it in

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the process of trying to grasp it. Weber now, in the years between 1907 and 1911, allows such a construction process only in the special case of creating the tool of an ideal type and recommends using it as a heuristic tool. Simmel by contrast claims that constructing and ascribing meaning is all we ever do, whether we admit it or not. Simmel and Weber can also be compared on how they approach the subject of music. Since neither Simmel nor Weber wanted to be consid­ ered as musicologists, it must have been a matter of course to both of them, to write about music with an intention that went beyond the art of music. Music gave them an opportunity to test a hypothesis and try out a method. Simmel was working on a philosophy of forms mediating between subject and object: “The work of art is always an objectification of the sub­ ject and finds its place beyond that reality which is attached to the object as such or the subject as such. However, as soon as it gives up the purity of this otherworldly position, be it to simply display an object, be it to merely address the subject, it slides in this very measure out of its specific cate­ gory and becomes reality” ( Simmel, 1919a: 29). This sliding back to the level of reality means that there are still audible sounds, a real cheer or a real sob, but not music as art form anymore, or – depending on the per­ spective taken – they are not yet music as art. Weber is still read primarily as a theorist of rationalization – despite some notable corrections by Martin Albrow (Albrow 1990) and others. For him, music is an example to show that certain steps in the process if ratio­ nalization were completed only in the West. But he also wanted to point out that the unique form of art there, as everywhere else, escapes com­ plete rational systematization. In music, there are mathematically describ­ able regularities, but the art component itself remains elusive at least with a non-rational remainder. Simmel was inclined to see the process of creating art in analogy to the construction of scholarly theories. He illustrated that using the work of the historian undertaken by him to produce the “historical truth” beyond subject and object: “The historical truth is not a mere reproduction, but a mental activity, creating something from the given material – accessible as internal replica – which that material is not as such, not only by systemati­ cally summarizing its details, but by confronting it with questions, by coordinating individual facets into a meaning of which often the ‘hero’ of that ‘historical truth’ himself was not even conscious, by digging up its meanings and values, and thus forming this past into the presentation of an image that is worthwhile for us” (Simmel, 1923: 55). This description of a scientific activity has clear echoes of artistic creation. While Simmel



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examines music to find parallels between art and scholarship, Weber uses the case of that art to demonstrate the limits of its scientific treatment. For Simmel, even scholarship is an art; for Weber art can never become a science. In his study of music Weber examines the issue of rationalization at two very different levels: at the level of musicology as the theory of harmony and at the other level as tendencies in the evolution in music. It is rather obvious that the two influence each other, but equally of course, is their treatment as separate trials of a scientific nature. The selfrationalization of music necessitates a narrowing of affective expression, but it also enhances the chance of transition to harmony and musical notation. The rationality of harmony triggers distinct boundaries and produces in some areas its own failure. This happens if rationalization approaches art with the implicit claim to make it scientific. Simmel and Weber differ in their understanding of scholarship. For Simmel science is a way of seeing reality. At least at this point it is compa­ rable to art. Therefore, Simmel looks at music as an art, and believes the humanities can learn from how art works. Weber sees science as the duty to rationalize its objects under study and shows where this duty meets its limits on the specific features of music. The difference between Simmel and Weber can also be seen as follows: Weber promoted methodological individualism. Only the individual person is real, associations are mere images existing only in the heads of people. For Simmel in culture and society all mental and social reality exists as imagined. If those phenomena cannot be found in anybody’s mind, they simply do not exist anymore. Because of this, the distinction between types of meaning proposed by Weber does not make any sense for Simmel. A specialist in the history of philosophy in Europe and particularly Germany may someday follow up on what here can be presented merely as a rather vague hypothesis: The climate of philosophical debate between 1900 and 1910 was impacted by the condemnation of modernism by the pope in Rome. An encyclical letter starting with the words Pascendi dominici gregis was promulgated by Pope Pius X in September 1907. It had been preceded by various restricting and condemning actions by the Catholic Church against catholic scholars who tended to emphasize the relativity of knowledge and the process of construction and evolution. On the other hand, according to the pope, the Church cannot err in interpreting scrip­ ture. Much of what went on in philosophy at that time was seen as a threat to the faith and accordingly condemned as modernism.

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Catholic monthly periodicals which we researched had been carrying consistently positive book reviews of Simmel’s publications until that time. After 1907 we found negative comments on Simmel in the same monthly journals which had praised him for years. This may have influ­ enced the scholarly dialogue between Simmel and Weber, even though neither of the two was a catholic. Anyone wanting to follow up on this speculation is referred to a well researched publication on the subject (Neuner 2009). The book by Father Neuner has the advantage of present­ ing an inside view of events which even a century later represent a consid­ erable embarrassment for the Catholic Church. But Simmel does not confuse churches with universities. Those two venerable institutions ought not to be confronted with the same episte­ mological rigor. Maybe churches must claim to be able to tell their follow­ ers what is real objectively. However, to Simmel reality is too vast and too complex for the human mind to grasp. Many of his critics would reject that because they do not share Simmel’s modest expectations of what scholarship and the university can achieve. The only chance men and women have therefore for Simmel, is to create tools for selecting, describing, and placing in context those segments of reality that corre­ spond to their interests and emotions. The construction of ideal types as recommended by Max Weber is for Simmel essentially all university work amounts to: Scholarship is – whether admitted or not – the creation of heuristic tools. This controver­ sial insight and the message that reality is socially constructed are rooted in Simmel’s epistemology. This message is welcome to some but a provoca­ tion to others. And it seems that Weber identified with it in his twenties and thirties, but distanced himself somehow during his forties when he became “more realistic”. It is of course the prerogative of anyone to change his views during his or her lifetime. And certainly that is nothing peculiar to Weber. On the contrary, we can observe similar changes in the writings of Dilthey and Rickert. The young and dynamic Dilthey influenced Simmel and Weber and, in addition, was probably important for American pragmatism and the Chicago school as well. But Dilthey himself later left the position of his text of 1883 (Dilthey 1883, Gerhardt 1971: 279). Heinrich Rickert and the later Max Weber apparently followed the transition that Dilthey made in the development of his philosophical thinking. On the other hand, it seems that Simmel stayed with his position and that he neither followed nor endorsed the changes in Dilthey’s line of argument.

CHAPTER SIX

BACKGROUND OF THE MESSAGES: INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES The Platonic Socrates At the beginning of this book the reader was reminded that Simmel trained as a philosopher. His sociology grew out of that background. The following pages show how that occurred. It is not desirable or possible to try and present the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Kant and other great thinkers here, but it is possible to show how Simmel looked at these authors, where he agreed or disagreed with them, and particularly, which of their ideas he decided to incorporate into his own thinking. Socrates and Jesus – in spite of all the highly significant details that separate the two – have this in common: Neither wrote a line on what they taught. What we know about them today therefore, depends entirely on what others wrote down about their teachings. In the case of Socrates we depend on his disciple Plato for information. Accordingly, whatever is presented and discussed as a thesis or opinion of Socrates is normally seen through the eyes – or rather the pen – of Plato. In the following, however, we will not be one step removed from Socrates but two, because we look at what Plato wrote about him from the perspective of what Simmel read in Plato’s texts. Lack of consideration for the autonomous self is one of the most serious reproaches Simmel made against Plato. But before he tackled that problem, he described Plato’s achievements in the continuity “of the Socratic basic motifs” (Simmel 1910: 105): In light of the insecurity which characterized Greek behavior during the time of Socrates, moral and political life was threatened by “subjectivist arbitrariness” as well as by “reactionary” regressions to older forms of “authority, instinctive security, and tradition” that had lost their effectiveness. Socrates wanted to show the way toward clear guidelines for behavior and hence tried hard to “regain norm-building firmness and security” (ibid.). The bridge that had formerly carried the weight connecting subjective inclination with objective cultural norms had collapsed. A gap had emerged between subject and object, a gap that became a challenge for the philosopher. Socrates saw no other way out of this dilemma but this

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one: Behavior in moral and political realms had to be steered by “intellectual knowledge” in the same way as had long been the case in the area of technical craftsmanship. It is here where Simmel discerns, in Plato’s picture of Socrates, a principle of pragmatism. The demanding claim that knowledge be corroborated in practical behavior – in the handicrafts, in horse breeding as well as in the arts, in other words in everything which in ancient Greece fell under the rubric of the “technical” – is analogously transferred to ethics and politics: “here as well, isolated and subjective opinions have to be replaced by an objective and generally valid knowledge” (ibid.). With this goal before his eyes, Socrates searched for the concept behind each object of his attention. He did this, on the one hand, because he wanted to avoid any one-sidedness and instead get the fullest grasp possible of the whole phenomenon. Mere subjective specification of a phenomenon is vulnerable to chance, to emotional disposition, to moods, and to personal interests of individuals. Intellectual work, however, which should open the access to concept, as Socrates used the term, can serve no interest other than objectivity, which – insofar as it escapes subjective errors – can be called truth. But on the other hand Socrates was in search of the concept also because he intended to deduce from it prescriptions for correct behavior, again in two respects: For one, in handling “all that is singular, personal, and arbitrary about experience” (ibid.) in order to enable understanding and interpretation of experienced events; for another, in preparing us to make decisions about what to do. Socrates examined the concepts of the ruler, of justice, of the statesman, of fortitude, always with the conviction that from a correct concept will follow correct behavior (ibid.). Plato’s Eternal Ideas Plato refocused Socrates’ predominantly-ethical concern toward a theoretical emphasis. For Socrates, it sufficed to derive from the concept “a firm and clear norm… for practical ethical behavior” (ibid: 106). Plato, however, was much more concerned with the question of truth itself, namely whether the term has been correctly conceived, regardless of how it may later influence actual behavior. The criterion of truth for Plato was the correspondence of a concept with its empirical referent. Simmel mentioned other possible meanings of truth, namely “that it is a relationship of our images among each other – an absence of contradictions, or a



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mutual-causal foundation – or a symbolic relationship of thought to a world of realities not directly comparable with it” (ibid.) which shows that Simmel did not feel he should necessarily follow Plato’s notion of truth. Plato was not yet prepared to grant that much autonomy to thought; “he is still far from” these other criteria of truth mentioned by Simmel. Furthermore, according to Simmel, it is characteristic of the ancient Greeks that their conceptualizations were geared toward “the substantive and observable.” Accordingly, an image is considered to be true if it corresponds to its empirical referent in the same way as “a perfect painting with its model” (ibid.) or as we would maybe say today, as a photograph with its object. For Plato objectivity, namely independence from subjectivity, meant that truth had to be something reliably constant. It does not evade being pinned down in the process of conception or appear in an ever-changing form. Something firm and stable, however, was not to be expected in “the world of sensory givens” (ibid.). Heraclitus had shown that empirical reality is in a state of constant flux, that it changes its appearance “according to the changing points of view and special circumstances of the observer” (ibid.). Reality could not directly and by itself have the quality of being true. Therefore the referents of concepts or of truth have to be constructed somewhere other than in the world of senses. These referents Plato called ideas, which are therefore only images postulated for the purpose of grasping the existence of truth (ibid.). Simmel’s addition to Plato’s notion of the determination of the concept of ideas contains two insights important for understanding Simmel’s works. On the one hand, ideas are merely postulated images and therefore, like Max Weber’s ideal types, created ad hoc as tools for thought by human beings but do not have an independent existence. On the other hand, they serve the purpose “of grasping the existence of truth” (ibid.), a truth that must exist regardless of whether or not human beings can grasp it. Interpreted in this way, Plato has designed with his eternal ideas an ingenious methodical tool but – according to Simmel – did not directly discover the truth itself in these ideas. Simmel made his position clear with a comparison with religious emotions. For him what comes first is not the existence of a god, who is then sought after, loved, and adored, but rather an emotional condition that then finds its fulfillment in a god: “A searching, a love, an adoration are there as experienced and rightfully existing facts, and God is the name for the referent that has to exist in order that this experience has a right, a hold, and a logical possibility” (ibid: 107). Numerous misunderstandings of

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Simmel’s statements stem from the fact that examples such as this one about the love of God, which were included for purposes of illustration, have been misread as substantive statements on a specific topic such as religion. Simmel simply uses examples as this one to clarify his method of thinking. Thus he makes the epistemological point that Plato’s eternal ideas correspond to the name God. Just as God’s name should not be confused with the reality of God, to which the name may lead, so – according to Simmel – Plato’s ideas may not be considered as already constituting the truth, but they may help conceptualizing it. That is how Simmel saw it. For Plato himself, however, it was different. For him there were two separate realities: The empirical one of sensual perception and the transcendent one of eternal ideas. The bodily eye of humans could perceive the first, and the spiritual eye the second. Simmel, however, does not share this dualism of two realities. When the Greeks saw the referents of concepts not in the “physics” of this world but in the “metaphysics” of another world, then Simmel explains this with their “style of thought that required visual perception and substance” (ibid.). Such thinking led to the conclusion that, if two realms are as different from each other as the mental concept, on the one hand, and the empirical sensory perception, on the other hand, and both can claim to be true, then they must refer to different species of objects. Simmel, however, rejects this interpretation expressly as false. To him there is just one reality, the world in which we live and act. The rational conceptualization on the one hand, and the physical perception on the other, do not have as referents two different species of objects (metaphysics for the ideas and physics for the empirical world); both jointly refer to the concrete visible world in which man must conduct his life. Simmel again comes up with an illustration, this time drawing a comparison not from the world of religious emotions but from the world of art. Art is another special form “in which we capture reality” (ibid.), but it would obviously be erroneous if one would “demand a special and different object for it other than the objects for practical empirical perception.” Thus art is not a separate reality for Simmel but a way to tell the story about the one and only reality. At least that is what Simmel believed art ought to strive for. The theoretical position of Simmel, which can be inferred from this 1910 text, may be summarized as follows. Knowledge must be based on experience in order that it can assure itself of its truth. Human beings encounter the objects from which they make their experiences only in the realm of this world, the world of the senses; hence they are not – as with Plato – divided between this world and a transcendental world. Experiences with



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objects can only turn into knowledge when they are shaped by human beings into a specific form. The sensory impression of a picture of the mother remembered by her child, the portrait created by an artist, and the concept by which a scientist summarizes his object – all are for Simmel in principle, equally valid variations of this process of formation. Hence the greater part of his life work was dedicated to a comparative study of such forming. The naïve person acting in everyday life tends to consider his own view of the world simply as the reality given for everybody else. But when he or she realizes this is not the case, an abyss appears between the person and the object confronting him in such a strange way that he cannot grasp it. When Plato bridges the gap between the isolated subject and his object by introducing the realm of ideas as a generally valid truth, then Simmel initially praises this as “the great metaphysical deed of Plato” (ibid: 104). Plato’s theory of ideas is based upon the myth according to which the soul had, in the transcendental world before its birth, the opportunity to view the ideas and thereby to memorize them, such that all adult human beings in this world can remember them in the same way while looking at the objects because they re-collect them. In that way, objects lose the impression of being alien, because in their empirical appearance glimmers a reflection of the eternal idea. This Simmel admired. According to him, Plato has “discovered the fact of a spiritual world,” and he has “gained beyond all hitherto-found single truths the principle of scholarship per se” (ibid: 105). What for Plato was the discovery of a transcendental reality, Simmel interpreted as the creation of a mental form. Alongside the various “singular truths” stands the spiritual world as a fact, which apparently for Simmel is objectively given. But it can only be worked on and communicated if one succeeds in giving it the Gestalt of a mental form. In short, perception presupposes objects. If we perceive something for which we are unable to identify an object, we experience an anxiety about our state of mind or we speak of a dream. If we can see the object, feel it, clasp it to us, or thrust it away from us, only then are we sure we have correctly perceived (taken as truth) and not misperceived (taken as erroneous). Consequently, with his theory of ideas Plato had endowed concepts – for which Socrates had a deep concern – with the quality of objects: the Platonic ideas. “The latter are just as secondary as the empirical objects. In both cases, something is initially held to be true: At the onset I only know that something is true because I have experienced it. In order to confirm this to myself and to others, as a second

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step I have to determine the corresponding object and retroactively call it the cause of my experience” (ibid: 107). Plato “was the first to bring to consciousness that everything spiritual, in its content, creates one self-contained context and that our individual thinking borrows from it its whole sense of truth and objectivity – as incomplete and fragmentary as the grasp of this context may be in our individual thinking” (ibid: 104). For Plato to encounter an arousing experience as true comes first, and then the realm of eternal ideas is referred to for interpretation, in order to fulfill the following principle: There can be no correct perception without an object. The Platonic ideas serve the purpose of stepping in as objects, even though for Simmel they are Plato’s constructions. It can be shown in Simmel’s works how consistently he maintained the idea of various approaches to formation – in scholarship, religion, art, etc. In his search for the origins of music, for instance, he presented a plethora of historical and ethnological material. Thereby he showed that music originated out of language and out of the basic need of human beings to communicate emotions: The experience comes first, the cultural object is then created to give it a form others will understand. In singing for instance, this “natural” (Simmel 1882: 281), empirically perceivable, behavioral reality of highly subjective jubilation, sobbing, and yodeling (Simmel 1879) gains the status of musical art when it becomes a composition, realizing the goal of objectivity (ibid: 282). Nevertheless, the “hot and passionate” feelings must not “disappear from the music” (ibid.). “But music and its style of presentation should not directly follow from these feelings. It should only be an image of them refracted from the mirror of beauty” (ibid.). In and of itself, as in its raw state, reality may be experienced but cannot be represented or passed on to others. For Simmel the art of music is a forming process, which becomes objective by absorbing the subject into it. The same process can be observed in play (ibid.) and certainly in a play on a theatrical stage. Art and play, as realms of formation, compete with science – each in its own way – to bring out of one shared pool of life experience that which is objective, in such a way that the subjective parts can discover themselves in it and that therefore the created form may claim authenticity; that is, it may claim to be a truth. For the method of sociology as an empirical social science, Simmel’s concept of truth is meaningful. Truth or falsity is seen as a quality of a relationship. Due to the diversity and the constant flux in it (Heraclitus), natural reality as it appears to the senses is not true. The mental formation



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cannot be checked for validity when divorced from what it is supposed to represent. The question of truth can only be answered on the basis of the relation between the form (i.e., the portrait or composition) and the material object it represents. If the portrait convincingly gives form to a particular side of the personality of the model who had posed for days before the artist, truth lies in that congruence between form and model. Just as the same melody may be sung in various keys, so too can empirical reality be shaped and put into form via a variety of ways of representation. Therefore Simmel thought it desirable that each of the various realms of formation (scholarship, art, religion, play, etc.) perform its specific kind of presentation in harmonious concert with each other. As far as religion is concerned he thinks that it will – after a certain transitional period – keep emerging as a central orienting perspective (Simmel 1906: 8). He proceeds to restrict the scope of this claim, however, by noting the centrality of an orienting perspective “does not mean a monopoly for religious thought, such that these other provinces of interest [scholarship, art, play, etc.] are being suppressed. Every one of the great forms of our existence can be shown to be capable of expressing in its own language the totality of our life” (ibid.). Simmel’s idea on “Religion and the Great Forms of Existence” is so important to him that he reformulates it for a “changed and expanded” edition of his book Die Religion of 1912. He now explicitly worries about the threat that even in its “fundamental possibility” life remains “hopelessly divided” (Simmel 1912: 8, compare also Simmel 1997: 137). He therefore postulates a “stuff of which existence is made, that remains identical within all realms of formation … and each of these categories is in principle capable of forming the totality of this stuff according to its own laws” (ibid.: 9). There are no tensions necessary among religion, scholarship, and art: “In principle, they may cross each other as little as do tones with colors” (Simmel 1906: 8). Despite Plato’s turn toward epistemology, the ethical concern of Socrates remains alive in Plato’s method. “Each concept of human practice contains in it and in its logical consequences the norm which our conduct with its manifestations has to follow; the conceptual content of the act includes our sense of what we are supposed to do…” (Simmel 1983b: 68). Whoever contradicts the concept, i.e., the mental objectification of behavior, is also in violation of the norm that should guide behavior. Simmel saw simply “an elaboration of that Platonic teaching” in this statement and in the conclusion “that each thing has a corresponding idea, which signifies

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its content but whose complete realization simultaneously also forms its ideal” (ibid.). But Simmel also recognizes “the peculiar inconsistency of Plato’s theory of ideas” (ibid: 89). On the one hand, Plato’s ideas are conceived as corresponding to material objects that lead a substantive existence in a life beyond ours [Jenseits], and that – because of the devaluation of this life relative to the life beyond (as in Buddhism) – claim to be “the highest reality of these objects, their real being” (ibid.). On the other hand, human beings create these concepts processing in their thoughts this reality of life and permitting the “practical social evaluations, tendencies, and necessities of development” (ibid.) to enter into the dynamics of concept formation. While Plato’s theory of ideas is inconsistent, Simmel saw it as an opportunity: Contrary to Plato’s opinion, according to Simmel, these ideas are created by human beings and thus are not a direct reflection of material objects. Before such objects can be included in the realm of Platonic ideas, humans must first reflect about them and form concepts of them. Only then are they potentially acknowledged as ideals, and as a consequence they cannot be foreign to our world. Rather, they imply the likelihood that “the empirical and the normative aspects of objects may touch each other” (ibid.), because whenever humans form ideas they cannot avoid letting their hopes and wishes enter into the forming process. Simmel does not conceal his aversion to Plato’s collectivistic concept of the state: Plato’s ideal picture of societal relations deserves very explicit criticism “because every child should already from the time of its birth be removed from the individualistic atmosphere of its parental home, transferred to public education, and thereafter, placed by the authorities into the function, the position, where it has to remain” (ibid.: 104). In the same context, the inclination of the state toward equalizing the responsibilities of women and men, and the tendency to take away from women their “domestic preoccupation that carries with it a personalized character” (ibid.) are seen in terms of the community prescribing the content of existence for the individual. Yet Simmel did not take this opportunity to engage in polemics against Plato’s works, something that almost nobody since Karl Popper (1957) has failed to do. Instead, Simmel made use of the chance to illustrate, in Plato’s theory of the state, how concrete normative concepts logically follow from epistemological premises. One of the more striking applications of that position is the following: The visible objects of this world are only used “to represent the ideas” (Simmel 1983b: 104), because Plato did not consider – as Simmel did – the



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realm of ideas to be a heuristic tool in the service of scholarly insight but rather as a reality beyond this world. One of these visible objects in the service of eternal ideas is the living human being for whom this line of reasoning has the consequence that “each individual is only supposed to serve the abstract artificiality of the state” (ibid.). That of course can be used as a convenient point of departure for asking an individual to sacrifice himself or herself for the collective. According to the epistemology of Plato, the person “lets the light of the idea shine through himself only in dimmed and distorted form, making it more difficult for the idea to appear. In addition the individual confronts the idea, as it were, with the clumsiness and confusion of his special existence. Plato does therefore not expect the mass of these singular human beings to submit easily and completely to the purposes of the whole” (ibid.). Accordingly – and this is another alarming connection between epistemology and ethics – for Plato, when the state deals with its citizens it is certainly justified “in realizing, even against their will, the ideal of a state in them” (ibid.). Statements like this one in Plato’s writings make the polemics understandable and possibly justified, which Karl Popper directed against Plato as a suspected apologist of totalitarian regimes (Popper 1957). The cautious manner in which Simmel dealt with Plato’s work is characteristic of him. He praised the ingenious discovery of a genuine realm of objective knowledge while at the same time criticizing its political consequences. Throughout the entire work of Simmel, we find as a guiding principle the wisdom that light and shadow always appear together, that everything vital is also ambivalent and that reality cannot correctly be reconstructed in white and black only, but there are always shades of gray. This may have alienated him from the various camps of black-and-white painters, however diverse their positions in other respects may have been. Simmel harshly criticized Marx’ historical materialism as description of historical reality and, at the same time, openly applauded it as an admirable heuristic tool. Therefore he was rejected by both Marxists and anti-Marxists. In judging Simmel’s position on Plato’s works, it may be useful to compare it in more detail to that of Karl Popper. Less even-tempered than Simmel, Popper rejected Plato’s epistemology as politically dangerous. It is true that Popper conceded some positive aspects of Plato’s works: “Plato’s sociology is an ingenious mixture of speculation and precise observation of facts” (Popper 1957: 64). But Popper saw in this mixture a danger, because the speculation leads toward ideas that claim to be

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unchangeable. According to Plato, everything understandable must have an eternally valid character. It would be the purpose of scholarship to grasp and describe only what is eternally valid as the true nature of the objects. The comprehension of a hidden reality as the essence of what is knowable would then be lost. Therefore Popper labeled the research perspective, which is in the tradition of Plato, as “methodological essentialism” (ibid: 59) and rejected it as anachronistic. The counter-position to essentialism is “methodological nominalism,” which Popper supported; it does not purport to reveal essences and does not search for the true nature of an object but expressly aims to concentrate on observing the behavior of objects and describing them in as unbiased and precise a manner as possible. Popper welcomed the fact that the position of methodological nominalism is generally accepted in the present-day natural sciences. “The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part dealt with by essentialist methods. In my (Popper’s) opinion, this is one of the main reasons for their backwardness” (ibid: 61). In rejecting the question about the essence of objects, Popper linked up with Comte and positivism. He established the methodological base of that school of sociology that calls itself “critical rationalism,” while Simmel founded the “interpretative method” (verstehen) in sociology. Following Simmel and his own message, sociologists should maybe take a fresh look at Plato in spite of Popper’s convincing warnings. Spinoza The influence of Spinoza’s philosophy on Simmel is obvious and recognized explicitly by Simmel himself. One of Spinoza’s better-known works is his Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus theologico-politicus, 1670, Spinoza 1976). He recommends how a Jew ought to read the Torah or how a Christian the “Old Testament”. Spinoza points out for instance that whenever God called a prophet to serve him, prior to that divine intervention the future servant of Yahweh worked in some worldly occupation. When the newly elected prophet, after considerable hesitation and sincere refusals finally gives in to God’s will, he is necessarily going to proclaim his prophecies using the metaphors of his previous daily work environment: If he had been a peasant, God’s intentions will become visible to him in connection with cattle and fertile fields, if he had been a soldier, he will place God in the context of the Heavenly Host as commander in chief. If he had been a courtier, he will prophesize about a throne and the rituals around a monarch.



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These metaphors are familiar from the sacred texts. Nobody can know, let alone describe the will of God as a divine reality. The only possibility open to any prophet is the creation of a construction performed by himself with the use of metaphors familiar to him (and, hopefully, to his listeners). From that Spinoza draws the conclusion that what matters when reading scripture is neither to take sentence after sentence verbatim nor to register every metaphor with positivist accuracy. Instead, he recommends distinguishing between language as a tool for the transport of content on the one hand, and intended meaning as a reference point for interpretation on the other. Spinoza’s advice culminates in the exhortation, the reader of the Bible should focus on what God wanted to share with his faithful rather than on the imagery used by the prophet as a result of his previous occupational routine. Millennia after the sacred texts were written, what may make them appear dated is that imagery, but not necessarily the transported meaning. As was to be expected – and certainly under the terms of the 17th Century – with this recommendation for how to read sacred texts Spinoza encountered very grave difficulties: He appeared to many of his contemporaries as a heretic and infidel. The truth is, however, that in order to return to what to him seemed the genuine religiosity of his Jewish people, he felt he needed to break away from the medieval synagogue and even from the orthodoxy of the Pharisees (Santayana, 1916: XVI). He was convinced he was called to proclaiming this message even if it meant almost total isolation and rejection. Spinoza lived from 1632 to 1677. He died prior to what would have been his 45th birthday, comparable to C. Wright Mills who was 45 when he died in 1962 (Trevino 2012: 7). Spinoza’s book Ethica is usually referred to as his main work. It was published as: Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata. He has written it during the years 1665–1675. In 1675 he began to read selected portions of the manuscript to close friends. The book was not published until after his death in November 1677. Only two of Spinoza’s works were published when he was still alive. They were written in Latin and their titles of course reflect that: 1. Renati des Cartes principiorum philosophiae geometrico demonstrata mori. The title can be translated as: A treatise on the principles of the philosophy of Descartes, which are set out in geometric manner. This book was published 1663. 2. Tractatus theologico politicus, appeared in 1670 and was mentioned here above. Spinoza did not dare publishing this pamphlet in his own name, but only anonymously. A first translation into English was

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already available in 1689 under the title A Treatise, partly Theological, partly political. Whether or not translations were available was not nearly as significant then as it is now. In those days the learned persons in Bologna, Prague, Heidelberg, and Oxford all knew Latin. It was then the language not just of the Catholic Church but also of all the universities in Europe. Spinoza was relieved that not everybody could read his texts, and that being fluent in Latin was a prerequisite for having access to them. This sentiment was shared by many of his contemporaries: René Descartes mentioned in the preface to his Meditationes de prima philosophiae (meditations on the principles of philosophy) of 1641 that he made a deliberate decision not to write this text in French but in Latin instead, in order to keep the “morons” from reading it who might feel called upon to join his philosophical orientation (Descartes, 1960: 7). The hope of authors in those days to keep certain persons from read­ ing  what they have published by writing in a language those cannot master, can certainly be understood in the case of Spinoza: He was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632. As early as 1656 he was excommu­ nicated from his synagogue, and as a result of that, the magistrate of Amsterdam banished him from the city. Nevertheless, he continued to live in the Netherlands. In 1673 he received an invitation to the University of Heidelberg as professor of philosophy. Spinoza did not accept the invitation and pointed out the great difficulties he had with the various religious communities. He feared that the plots against him would only get worse by the acceptance of a professorship in Heidelberg and that the entire university would be affected. Four years after the invitation to teach at the University of Heidelberg, he died in The Hague on 21 February 1677. The debate about Spinoza’s work continued through the centuries. It includes a publication by Ferdinand Tonnies, titled “Study on the history of development of Spinoza” (Tonnies, 1883). In 1905 a new edition of Spinoza’s major work Ethica was published in German by Otto Baensch who begins the introduction to his translation with the words: “The philosophy of Spinoza is the most impressive summary of the ideas of the seventeenth century about world view and philosophy of life” (Baensch, 1905: ix). Prior to Baensch a first German translation of the Ethica had become available as early as 1744. This shows that prior to Simmel much attention has been paid to Spinoza’s ideas in parts of Europe. Spinoza was raised in the strict faith of the synagogue and felt closely attached to the texts of the scriptures. His first name is Baruch not very



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well known in the present time. The Hebrew word means the Blessed One, in Latin Benedictus. In the Hebrew Bible, the name Baruch appears repeatedly in the book, which is associated with the prophet Jeremiah. It can be found there in chapters 32, 36, 43 and 45. Similar to Jesus and Socrates who did not write down anything themselves but left that task in the case of Jesus to the Evangelists, in the case of Socrates to Plato, apparently the prophet Jeremiah himself has written nothing: He delegated that to Baruch, his companion and secretary. Just as posterity owes to the philosophy of Plato what is known about Socrates, the biblical tradition owes to Baruch the knowledge of the prophecies, warnings, and instructions of the great prophet Jeremiah. The Old Testament of the Christian Bible also contains a separate Book of Baruch. The existence of this text means – not for the believing Jews, but for the Christian – the elevation of Baruch to the rank of prophet. Whether and to what extent Spinoza may have identified with the Baruch mentioned in the book of Jeremiah, is pure speculation. In that book Jeremiah, and his companion and scribe Baruch with him, had to endure serious suffering to the point of prosecution and imprisonment for having preached demands attributed to God, that were most unwelcome to their listeners. For Spinoza the 44th Chapter of the Book of Jeremiah may have been of particular importance because it shows two different interpretations of the struggle and misery into which the people of Judah had fallen. It was the time when Nebuchadnezzar had defeated the Judeans and driven them out their homes and laid their cities in ruins. The prophet Jeremiah interprets this deplorable state as God’s punishment for apostasy and sinfulness of the Chosen People. On the other hand, some of the Israelites, and according to the text, especially their women, worshiped a “Queen of Heaven”, offered her their incense, and poured libations in her honor. Contrary to the interpretation of the prophet the people – and, again, especially the women – pointed out that this cult had guaranteed the welfare of the Jews for a long time in the past. Therefore they demanded the worship of the “Queen of Heaven” be resurrected and continued in order to find a way out of the then current crisis with her help. Here are two opposing constructions of reality competing with each other: Punishment for sinful behavior on the one hand, and distress as a result of insufficient devotion to a goddess on the other. The wrathful God of Israel announces to the impenitent nation further misfortune that arrives promptly. From the point of view of the biblical text that prompt arrival of more misery may have refuted all hopes for help from the Queen of Heaven. At the same time the general misery becomes

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so depressing that Baruch dares asking God to be spared. Baruch’s words are: “Woe is me, for the Lord added grief to my sorrow. I am tired of sighing and can find no rest.” (Jeremiah 45, 3). The response of an angry God is: “See what I built, I tear down, and what I have planted I pull out, and the whole earth I shall strike, but you are asking miracles for yourself? … For behold. I bring disaster upon all flesh, saith the Lord, but I’ll give you your life as a prey in all places whither thou goest” (Jeremiah 45.4f). This passage can be read as an urgent request to the individual to understand his life as an opportunity granted individually, and although difficult, to make something of it, as he constructs his reality from a perspective of utmost simplicity. In any case, the text signals willingness to bare suffering needed also by Spinoza, the faithful with the same name as Jeremiah’s scribe. His suffering resulted from more and more attacks by members of the synagogue and the two Western branches of Christianity – at that time three very unlikely bedfellows indeed – who all agreed on denouncing Spinoza’s way of reading scripture. In that situation of persecution Spinoza did not dare publish his main work in his own name, in fact he did not have the courage to publish it at all. Only after his death his friends published his Ethica. It appeared in print in November 1677, but even then, respecting Spinoza’s own wishes, there was no name of an author mentioned on the title page of the book. Before we turn to Spinoza’s main work on ethics, a few words on his incredibly courageous method should be inserted while mindful of the historical situation of the 17th century when the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648) was fought primarily in what is now Germany. Spinoza sees in front if his faithful eye a God who is not only aware of the limited intellectual abilities of humankind, but who in addition takes those limita­ tions  into account in his own divine behavior. God knows – Spinoza thinks – that humans can only imagine sacred facts in their mortal fashion. God and Spinoza thus both are aware that it is totally impossible for humans to grasp God the way he really is. This is due to the fact that the living do not have access to the beyond, that mortals do not usually share the reality of the immortals. However, human conduct in this world can be geared toward the beyond and thus has the potential of producing a special empirical reality in the world of the living which points to the other world. This type of reality, firmly anchored in inner worldly experience, and yet connecting somehow to something infinitely more real, is the point of departure for the epistemology of both Spinoza and Simmel.



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Spinoza implies that even God himself uses the reality of this world as a starting point in his dialogues with the people in order to be close to them. The following examples may show how surprising – and from the perspective of traditional theology, how provocative – the results are that come out of this way of thinking,: The belief in one of the most sacred events of the Judeo-Christian tradition, handing over of tablets of the Ten Commandments by God himself to Moses, is commented in Spinoza’s words as follows: “At last, descending from heaven on the mountain God revealed himself, because it was believed that God dwells in heaven, and Moses also rose on the mountain to talk with God, which certainly would not have been necessary if he could have imagined God just as easily at any other place” (Spinoza, 1976: 44). This is a striking way of looking at the event! The disarming simplicity of the quote says, God appeared to Moses on a high mountain for no other reason than because Moses could not imagine a manifestation of God at any other place. God took into consideration the limitations of the abilities of Moses to believe! This way to argue triggered mostly horror among Spinoza’s contemporaries. But describing him as a heretic was based on a misunderstanding: Spinoza does not question that Moses has met God on the mountain. Just why this event took place on the mountain Spinoza explains in a manner that was quite offensive to his readers, “because it was believed that God dwells in heaven.” God does not come to the summit of the mountain because it is his supreme and totally autonomous will, and then, by virtue of his omnipotence, orders the mortal Moses to be there to meet him. Instead God considers the imagination of his people, “because it was believed that God dwells in heaven,” God as it were agreed to meet half way between heaven and earth, and therefore Moses needed to climb to the mountain top. This brings us back to Spinoza’s observations about how God calls a mortal to be his prophet. It is God’s way to contact his people as described by Spinoza. The same applies to dealing with the prophets, whom he uses to communicate important messages to the faithful. Again, Spinoza – and after his conviction God himself – not only considers the specific and always limited power of imagination of the people of God, but even that of the individual to be appointed to be prophet: “In terms of imagination, the difference was this: was the prophet a man of taste, he conceived the meaning of God’s message in a tasteful style, unclear, however, when he was a confused head. The same is true also of the revelations that were reported by using pictures. Was the prophet a peasant, then his imagination showed him oxen, cows, etc., was he a soldier, then an army

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commander and hosts, or was he a courtier, then a king’s throne, and similar things. Finally, the prophecy was also different depending on the different conceptions of the prophets: The Magi (Matthew, chapter 2), who believed in the astrological antics, received the revelation of the birth of Christ through the appearance of a risen star in the east” (ibid: 34f). Obviously, Spinoza’s opinion of astrology was much lower than would have been typical for his time (and probably for ours today). A few pages further in his text he sums up his thoughts in this way: “The prophets were more suited for this than for that revelation depending on the difference in their temperament… All this shows, after careful consideration, that God does not use any special style of language, but that he merely speaks according to the education and the ability of the respective prophet, tasteful, flush, strict, uneducated, or diffuse” (ibid.: 36). In Spinoza’s time this must have given an unbearable leeway for interpretation when reading the Scriptures. God does not speak in his own divine language style, but he recognizes the inner closeness to those who believe in him in using the language with which they are familiar. ‘Language’ here does not only refer to a way of communication, but rather the entire assemblage of metaphors is adapted to the imagination of the person referred to by God! These and similar statements have served as proof of Spinoza’s presumed infidelity and atheism. From the perspective of his critics he lacked reverence before the Holy Scriptures, which – according to them – should not be handled, as he dared. But whether or not his method does result in unbelief, is a question of the image of God a person may have. One familiar alternative is to think of God as an absolute ruler along the lines of an autocratic monarch, whose will is autonomous and not influenced by other subjects when implemented in worldly reality. The mortal person in his or her powerlessness then has no choice but to look for the closest possible approach to the objective reality that is God alone. Here, the individual struggling for faith will grasp or fail to grasp a reality that exists by God’s fiat no matter what the mortal’s thoughts and actions are. This notion comes close to the epistemology of the natural sciences where objective reality is a given. Another alternative, different from the image of an autocratic God, is that of the interacting God. He is the deity whom Spinoza and Simmel both visualize. To them the border between the sacred and the secular is not the one between God and humans, rather there is some sacred quality in the interaction with the divine in which humans participate. Spinoza writes against the background of this image of God that Moses went to the top of the mountain because it was only there that he could imagine



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meeting God. Spinoza has the prophets preach about God in images familiar to them for merely secular reasons because they related to their former occupational lives. Against the background of the interacting God it is plausible that the deity meets his faithful half way. However, supporters of the autocratic God would be inclined to complain that Spinoza defines the ideas of the people as sacred and denies God’s quality of Supreme Being. In all of that Spinoza’s philosophical interest remains focused on the inaccuracies of knowledge production. He mentions the importance of emotions as intervening effect, because humans tend to see what they want to see and vice versa. He then elaborates on that in connection with a theorem which can be seen as the early formulation of a theory of prejudice in his book Ethica: “Proposition 16: We will love or hate something because we imagine it to resemble an object that tends to bring joy or sadness to the soul. We do this even if what makes it appear similar is not the cause leading to such emotions as a consequence” (Spinoza, 1905: 114). Accordingly, the object that in the context of Spinoza’s reasoning can also be a person is not given justice, because one judges that “object” on the basis of purely superficial resemblance or analogy, and emotions are thus projected on very shaky grounds. The theory of projection summarizes in more detail much later what has here already been recognized by Spinoza. It is also remarkable about Spinoza’s approach that he does not depreciate as irrational those affective characteristics of human cognition. On the contrary, he can clearly be distinguished from those authors who classify human emotions as weakness and unreliability. In his Ethica he tries to justify the emotional influence on human cognition in terms of regularities, or even laws (but not as laws in the sense of the natural sciences). This way of looking at the feelings of males and females does not denounce them as deviant from proper behavior. Rather Spinoza points to reasonable (but not rational) and responsible ways of dealing with emotions and even develops methodological tools for predicting them reliably. Along this same line of reasoning Spinoza writes in his Ethica in Proposition 22. “If we imagine that someone makes an object of our love happy, we will be moved to love that person. If we imagine, however, that someone brings sadness to him or her, we are will inversely be moved to hate that person” (ibid: 119). Here the origin of love and hate is traced to a relationship that, in the terminology of Simmel, has the form of a triad. Spinoza uses the model of three persons, two of which are present and one absent. To generate love or hate in these examples, nothing concrete is happening that might be empirically tangible, but the deep emotions will be triggered by the contents of what one person merely imagines. A man

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who is permanently in love with someone absent, imagines a person who is present putting the absent beloved one in a stage of joy or in sorrow. Reacting to his own imagination that man will develop positive or negative affects toward the not so well known person in his presence, whose contents can be predicted accurately. In the various portions of the text selected here, Spinoza deals with the process of reality construction, even though that term is not yet used by him. Proposition 25 in part III of his Ethica contains a description of the emotions causing us to form an image of a certain person. Again he refers to that person as an “object”: “We are eager to affirm about ourselves and about a thing those characteristics of which we imagine that they would bring joy to the beloved object. Conversely we would negate everything of which we imagine that it would bring sadness to the object we love” (ibid: 121). This notion predates what Simmel sees in front of him when he writes about being in love and about what to him is the fact that the lover constructs the reality of his beloved in the precise way that is required to be compatible with his emotional makeup. Moreover, Spinoza describes a kind of automatism of generating empathy in Proposition 27: “If we imagine that an object similar to ourselves for which we feel no particular emotion is brought to experience a certain sentiment, then we ourselves, simply be imaging that, will be caused to experience a similar sentiment” (ibid: 122). Here again, a process we would be inclined to describe as unreasonable, is dealt with in a way that makes it appear perfectly regular and even predictable. This identifies the unusual contribution Spinoza makes toward the development of an epistemology of emotional and social processes by not excluding but rather considering as crucial the peculiarities of the persons involved. In his texts Simmel has frequently mentioned his indebtedness to Spinoza (Simmel, 1989; Simmel 1997: 5, 60, 115, 124, 138, 143), or dealt with Spinoza’s ideas in a critical stance (Simmel 1911: 53, 56, 59, 60). Via Simmel’s mediation the influence of Spinoza’s philosophy has had an impact on contemporary humanist sociology that has hardly been recognized. Kant Kant’s epistemological hypothesis – that we create an object in the process of dealing with it – was the starting point of Simmel’s line of reasoning in his sociology and in is theory of culture. Kant had formed this insight in the example of the scientific procedure of the natural sciences, and Simmel transplanted Kant’s concept to the cultural and social sciences.



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We are already familiar with examples thereof: The religious experience creates for itself an image of God; more generally, each perception requires in the process of vital existence its object and, because it needs this object, it postulates it and gives it shape. A general epistemological principle emerges, namely that Plato’s ideas are reinterpreted from a pre-given reality toward a mental formation, i.e., from something which human beings find ready-made toward some-thing that they themselves create. Kant’s principle of the formation of an object in the process of dealing with it became, for Simmel, the red thread which runs through his main epistemological work: The Problems of the Philosophy of History [Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie] (Simmel 1892b). Here Simmel criticized those scholars in the liberal arts who are of the opinion that they could mirror reality in its true nature, as it were. Time and again, Simmel pointed out that what happens in the process of scholarship is more nearly comparable to the accomplishment of an artist who paints a picture, a portrait or a landscape; while one recognizes the similarity between the art object and reality, one would have to admit that an unmistakable qualitative difference exists between the work of art and the reality. In this sense Simmel’s conception of the cultural and social sciences corresponds well with the English concept of the “arts” as opposed to the “sciences.” In his “Toward Preliminary Thoughts which Every Future Metaphysics That Wants to be Considered as Scholarship Would Have to Follow” (Kant n. d.: 1–122), Kant examined the question of how the genesis of knowledge could be conceivable, other than on the basis of sensory perception alone. He distinguished here between understanding [Verstand] and reason [Vernunft], and declared – following Plato’s postulate of two separate realities – that understanding would be responsible for dealing with those objects about which we can have knowledge via our senses, while reason would be in charge of the ever-greater penetration into the world of ideas. By rejecting with Plato the concept of sensualism, Kant considered it to be irresponsible to restrict scholarly efforts to the empirical realm. The objects of sensory perception may not directly give us access to truth (or, as Popper would say, insight into the essences) – not according to Plato because everything is too much in flux, not according to Kant because the overwhelming complexity of reality makes a clear overview impossible. Kant was convinced that it has been assumed for too long a time that all our cognition must conform to the objects; instead of that he suggested to assume by contrast that the objects must conform to our cognition. Since Kant, in accordance with Plato, did not want to renounce speculative thinking which goes beyond the experience accessible to the senses,

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he distinguished two different types of insights and saw them existing side by side: “Just as understanding required categories for gaining experience, so does reason contain in it the basis for ideas, by which I mean necessary concepts whose objectification, however, may not be represented in any empirical experience” (ibid.: 40). Sensory experience is only possible for that person who works with categories, categories that owe their existence not to the empirical world but rather to the accomplishments of a theoretical classification – as every sociologist who has ever done empirical work knows. But subsequently, the tenability of such categories can be tested empirically, which is not the case for speculative concepts. “The distinction between ideas, i.e., pure concepts of reason, and categories, or pure concepts of understanding, as insights of an entirely different kind, origin, and use” (ibid.: 41) corresponds to the already mentioned distinction between insights that may be tested in the empirical world and those that are inaccessible to experience: “All pure insights of understanding may be characterized by the fact that their concepts are gained in empirical experience and that their basis may be corroborated by experience; the insights of transcendental reason, however, may neither in their ideas nor in their propositions be either given by experience or corroborated by it or even rejected by it …” (ibid: 42). If the insights of reason – inaccessible to empirical examination – had their sources within the thinking subject, while the insights of understanding had to restrict themselves to dealing with the empirical world, then the gap between subjective speculation and objective reality would be insurmountable in Kant’s approach. Then, reasonably, only the conclusion that positivism has drawn would remain. But the decisive move by which this was avoided is the following: Kant saw in the accomplishment of reason a continuation of sensory experience with other means of thought. Already according to Kant (and later also according to Simmel), the world of ideas, in which reason dwells and travels, does not refer to contents other than those of sensory experience. Those contents can then be formed in a variety of different ways. In addition we must acknowledge that these contents, which in the empirical world always appear in a fragmentary and unsystematic way, are completed and systematized in the realm of reason via the accomplishments of the subject’s thinking (ibid: 43). Kant expressly formulated the thought that Simmel later would pick up and elaborate on, about the postulated object “which however is only an idea” (ibid: 44): “Pure reason does not have, among its ideas, special objects for consideration which would



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lie beyond the field of experience, but merely demands completeness in the use of understanding in conjunction with experience. This completeness, however, can only be a completeness of principles…” (ibid: 44; Helle 1977: 14–16). This reads like a description of the construction of ideal types according to Max Weber. Simmel saw Plato partly through the eyes of Kant. There is not a separate realm of objects each in this world and a world beyond it. Rather, scholarship is geared toward the one-and-only realm of objects of an empirical world. Kant admitted, however, that reason creates its own objects, in order to achieve completeness and a systematic order – objects that are not empirically given. Simmel generalized this achievement of thought, viewed it in analogy to artistic creation, and conceptualized science, religion, art, play – and yes, also society – as formations that may be understood as results of this process. For Simmel it is thereby not only and not even foremost the scholarly endeavor which yields such formations. Each experience, and especially each vital and emotional experience, creates its object by which it can see itself as being true. Simmel commented on Kant’s position as follows: “The distinction between the appearance and the thing-in-itself, as we find it in Kant’s work, is mostly very much misunderstood as being metaphysical and taken as a distinction that would correspond to the difference between the I and the non-I; … This distinction is not about the opposition between appearance and non-appearance but rather about the difference between empirical and purely intellectual presentation. Kant did not write the critique of pure reason to teach us that the non-I is not the I, but in order to show that all of our knowledge is bound to sensory impressions as material and that via pure reason alone, lying beyond sensory appearances, no knowledge of reality is possible (Simmel 1983b: 149). Simmel took the concept “presentation” (vorstellen, which figuratively means placing some-thing in front of one’s mental eye, but also imagining) in the literal sense; one presents something in front of oneself, to which one has a relationship. Dealing with sensate, perceivable reality almost demands both approaches: experience and pure thinking. Both of these ways of generating knowledge continue to develop alongside and with each other in the course of life. In a circular motion, that Simmel sees as starting out with the sensory world, out of experience there grows pure thinking and this in turn leads to new sensory experiences. This circular movement keeps leading the subject through the world of appearances because “via pure reason alone, lying beyond sensory appearances, no knowledge of reality is possible” (ibid.). It is this close affinity with the

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empirical world of action which makes Simmel’s method suitable for sociology. “The difference between appearance and the thing-in-itself does therefore not correspond to the absolute difference between presentation and non-presentation, but rather to the relative difference between experience and pure thinking. The thing-in-itself also belongs under the general concept of presentation as the intelligible object of Kant that, while it is not knowable, is nevertheless imaginable or presentable” (ibid: 150). Pondering the empirical world in a timely interchange between the presentation of appearance and the presentation of its essence can only be successful if the subject who strives for knowledge is active. To be busy in an arbitrary way will not suffice. What is demanded is autonomous and potentially creative conduct. Building upon Kant, Simmel created the epistemology of an active human being. He wrote about Kant: “… the exclusive object of knowing is, for him, the sensory appearance of things, and only their pictures within us and never their own inner-most being that exists in and for itself. And there is only one point where we may gain access to such, namely in our acting, an acting that is not just receptive but rather creative, i.e., free. We are really only ourselves, therefore, when we act …” (Simmel 1924: 6). And since in the process of acting, the interests of the subject flow into the process of gaining knowledge, Simmel saw as the central concern of Kant’s system not the thinking but the will, “because practical behavior, as he [Kant] declares it to be the main objective goal of life, is also the subjective interest which in the final instance directs his thinking” (ibid.). Here we find pronounced the connection between knowledge and interest that in the sociology of knowledge since Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim has become a topic of research. Simmel’s Kantianism remained tied to the concept of formation, according to which various realms of creation (art, play, science, etc.) supplement rather than compete with each other, allowing the raw reality to become imaginable. Following Dilthey, Simmel particularly kept in mind history and psychology. Simmel stressed “the diversity which already the individual human being, in and of himself, displays” (Simmel 1890a: 11), and he also talked about “the dissolution of the societal soul into the sum of the mutual effects of its participants …” (ibid: 13). The concept soul signifies the idea of unity. But the conceptualization of unity on the basis of the diversity of sensory appearances was, for Simmel, one of the epistemological difficulties of the psychologist, the historian, and the sociologist as well.



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“Kant says someplace that to conceive an object means nothing else than creating unity out of the diversity of one’s observations. Likewise one can say, at least with respect to the soul, the reverse, namely that its unity means that we can gain knowledge and understanding from the diversity of its contents, i.e., that we can reconvey these contents onto each other according to rules. Lacking all deeper knowledge of the real forces, however, that connect the psychic appearances, as far as the content of these rules is concerned we are left only with the observable, timely relationship of empirical soul processes” (ibid: 368). Beyond every necessity for proof, Simmel was convinced that one can find in the soul the quality of unity directly. While mental conception almost always has to construe unity out of the incoherence of appearances, we are confronted with an already formed unity in the soul and “its unity means that we can gain knowledge and understanding from the diversity of its contents” (ibid.). But the soul does not appear to us! Does Simmel here fall back to the metaphysics that he had labored so arduously to strip away? In order to explain the process in the course of which unity can be created out of incoherent impressions, he refers to an invisible entity, the soul. The depth of his thinking led Simmel to a realization of the limits to the possibilities of gaining knowledge. So he took upon himself “Kant’s insight into the imperceptibility of the world as his bequest” (Susman 1959: 3). On the other hand, the following words from Simmel have come down to us: “Certainly there lies a deep secret therein, that there is such a thing as truth and that it is discovered by us and not created, as if it were pre-drawn in us by ideal lines” (ibid.). It is either open to being misunderstood or false, depending upon the meaning that the person attaches to that concept, to call Simmel a relativist. Margarete Susman, who knew him well, mentioned his close relation to the absolute (ibid: 4). He probably did not see before his eyes a multiplicity of possible ultimate values, but rather many presentations of the one. “His relativism did not stem from doubt but from an entirely different grasp of truth …” (ibid.). As he had done with Plato, Simmel gave precise reasons where he did not want to follow Kant and specified what his critique was based on. Simmel’s criticism of Kant is so rich in facets that it cannot be covered here. Particularly unpopular probably were his fundamental objections to Kant’s categorical imperative (see Gallinger 1901). Simmel unequivocally objected to the categorical imperative, the demand that we act as if the principle upon which this acting is based were valid for all human beings (Simmel 1983b: 22). Although it would thereby be excluded that one usurp

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rights for oneself that one would not want to concede to others, it would also exclude the making of special sacrifices and taking obligations upon oneself that one would not want to demand of others (ibid.). The basically egalitarian tone in Kant’s ethic was not to Simmel’s liking. “Just as a personal ruler can impose upon a subject a responsibility from which all others are exempted, or may exclude a subject from it whereas all others would have to comply, this can also be done by an impersonal ruler [the ruler from within] in whose voice the moral demand appears” (ibid.). The impersonal ruler whose voice brings the moral demand to the attention of the individual’s consciousness, according to Simmel, does not legitimate itself in a democratic way but instead remains independent of the consensus of a majority. Rather Simmel entrusts the autonomous individual with cultural and social progress. Simmel’s individualism led him to sharply distance himself from Plato’s idea of the state, because there, as already mentioned, the individual was entirely subjected to serving the realization of the objective idea. This same individualism also led Simmel toward his rejection of the categorical imperative: “For this individualism by no means has to be a concealed immorality, a selfish blissfully exclusive desire that masquerades as a morality of a very special and unique kind and content. Rather, it can be an entirely genuine and sincere morality that represents, relative to the generally valid ethical demand, not a minus but a plus, but which is conscious of the fact that no other human being either may act that way or may be required to act that way” (ibid.). Dilthey The philosopher from whom Simmel learned directly by being face to face with him at the University of Berlin, was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). He became a professor of philosophy at that University in 1882, after having been professor at other European institutions of higher learning. In his 1883 book, Introduction to the Liberal Arts [Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften], he set out to create a secure methodical base for academic disciplines outside of the natural sciences. He was of the opinion that this epistemological project must be prepared by looking at and thinking through the history of philosophy from a certain perspective: “The emancipation of the individual sciences started at the end of the Middle Ages. But among these sciences, those of society and history remained for a long time, until well into the last century, in the old servitude to metaphysics” (Dilthey 1883: XIII).



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The historical school has to be credited with having been the first to lay a foundation for an empirical access to the study of history and society (ibid: XIV). But unfortunately the historical school proved to be philosophically weak and its methodological bases were not, in Dilthey’s opinion, sufficiently thought through. It lacked, he said, a healthy relationship to epistemology and psychology (ibid: XV). Hence when scholars such as August Comte (1798–1857), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), and Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) began to solve the epistemological problems of history with the methods of the natural sciences, there was a much too weak and ineffective protest on the part of the liberal arts, a protest that would hardly have impressed these masters of natural-science-like analysis. As a consequence thereof, research in the area of history and society was soon confronted with the alternative of either following the direction of the natural sciences’ positivism or restricting itself to the tasks of mere description. Those scholars who rejected both these alternatives, and the solutions contained therein, frequently gave in to the temptation to put too much trust in their subjective intuition and so gradually, without noticing it, sank back into the soft embrace of metaphysics (ibid.: XV). Dilthey gave this illustration of the state of methods in the liberal arts in 1883. The frustration described in the text that led him to write his “Introduction” (ibid.) remains surprisingly timely up until today. One does not have to be a pessimist to raise the question, whether the method of the liberal arts really has advanced since then. And one can profitably turn again to Wilhelm Dilthey’s text today, particularly so since he clearly inspired scholars such as Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, Max Weber, and others who so decisively influenced early sociology. Simmel and Dilthey had in common the endeavor to make the process of gaining insights in the liberal arts independent from metaphysics. The historical school was necessary for Dilthey, despite its drawbacks. It was correct in its basic intention and was only, as already mentioned, standing on an insufficient methodical foundation. Therefore Dilthey took on the task of giving the historical school a sound philosophical basis, a methodical foundation that would not so easily sway under pressure. At the same time, he wanted to make himself a mediator between the historical-descriptive and the abstract-theoretical domains within liberal arts research. Hence from the start Dilthey placed the utmost importance on the conditions under which the contents of consciousness come into being. He dedicated himself to the study of the conditions under which human insights gain Gestalt (ibid: XVII).

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In the liberal arts we are presented with “our image of all of nature as a mere shadow” (ibid.), a shadowy veil that we cannot lift away because it is not immediately accessible as reality. Therefore the inner experi­ ence  remains the only type of reality that we can hold onto, because the facts which are given to us as data – when each is analytically viewed as a singularity – have no apparent inter-connections. The step from a singular datum to an integrated whole is therefore the genuine and most serious methodical problem. We either create an image of the totality of history and of society as a whole, which would necessarily be shadowy and unclear, or we undertake an analysis of the facts that are given to us in experience and arrive thereby at incoherent, singular pieces of data. Dilthey addressed his work to all those who are concerned with the “branches of scholarship that have as their objective the historical societal reality” (ibid: 4), i.e., with those disciplines whose objective is the reality of history and society. He wrote that these fields, at the time his book was written, had entered a decisive stage of development. They were then concerned with moving closer to each other, with helping one another to discern the connection that exists among them, and with working out a joint position for a united methodology for the liberal arts (ibid.). The repercussions of the French Revolution had initiated this process because people started thinking about continuities or discontinuities of society: “The importance of the sciences of society grows, therefore, relative to those of nature…” (ibid.). Dilthey even had the conception of a paradigmatic revolution that, in his time, unfolded in a way similar to what happened in ancient Greece during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. (ibid.). For Dilthey, the task of the liberal arts initially was to come to terms with the reality of history and society, in order to grasp what happens in this area of reality; it is not – or at least not primarily – the task of the liberal arts to also change reality (ibid.: 5). We are therefore dealing with the study of “reality that we do not want to master but first of all want to grasp” (ibid.). This type of reality represents the one half of the globus intellectualis, and Dilthey called this half the liberal arts [Geisteswissenschaften], because he felt this term was already widely accepted since it had been used by John Stuart Mill in his Logic (ibid.: 6). From our current perspective as sociologists living more than a century later, however, it was Dilthey who introduced the term Geisteswissenschaften into German parlance and especially so via his discussion of the special methods of these academic disciplines in comparison to the natural sciences. But Dilthey himself did not claim credit for this contribution.



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It is freedom that sets human beings apart from the rest of nature and, in Dilthey’s view this constitutes the division of the globus intellectualis into two separate hemispheres. It falls upon the liberal arts to research this realm of freedom, within which human beings gain knowledge of that which exists as reality only before their own consciousness (ibid: 7). It is here where Dilthey referred to Spinoza, who said about human beings: “And since for them only that exists which is a fact for their consciousness, here in their lives in this mental world that unfolds within them in its own right, here lies that value, that goal of life, that goal of their actions in the producing of mental facts” (ibid.). The process by which this type of reality constitutes itself, which is genuinely reserved for the liberal arts, is identified with the process by which human consciousness comes into being. While the natural sciences study that reality which is, in its essence, independent of human beings and which can demonstrate an objective existence – namely independent of whether or not anyone knows about it, whether or not human beings reflect about it – this is not the case for the liberal arts. The scholar of the liberal arts researches that reality which is man-made and which thereby can only be real insofar as it is the content of human consciousness. Despite this, however, what human beings socio-culturally create as an objectification of the mind has the potential to take on a life of its own, to stand on its own two hind legs and rise up against its creator, as is vividly illustrated in the Marxist discussion of alienation. Dilthey, however, did not primarily deal with this aspect of cultural reality, this process of taking on a life of its own and becoming alienated. But he was well aware that the potential of an independent mental world has to be considered, and that human beings experience it as the center of all value and of all goals in life. According to Dilthey, it is always the goal of human conduct to participate in it. How such mental facts come about and are created needs to be studied by the liberal arts (ibid.). About a free human being, Dilthey wrote: “So he separates a realm of nature from the realm of history in which, amidst an objective neces­ sity  which is nature, freedom flashes up at innumerable points in this whole …” (ibid.). That is, the realm of history – driven out of the realm of nature – is surrounded by it, by an objective necessity in which flashes of innumerable points of freedom nevertheless flare up over and over. And it is this realm of freedom which has to be surrendered to the study of the liberal arts. In contrast stand the mechanical processes and events which the natural sciences study in their search for laws, against whose background freedoms would have to appear as irregularities or aberrations.

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It is characteristic of the “mechanical flow of natural changes” that it “already contains from the outset everything that unfolds …” (ibid.). In history, by contrast, there is the potential for creativity. Dilthey thereby confronted the study of the creations of the human mind with the empty and infertile repetitions of natural processes in human consciousness (ibid.: 8). He denounced the positivistic ideal of historical progress as a calculable process; for this method cannot take away “the empty and dull repetition of nature’s flow in consciousness, which the idolaters of intellectual development delight in when they imagine an ideal of historical progress” (ibid.). In view of the great successes of the natural sciences in the 19th century, it was an important task to strengthen the self-confidence of the scholars in the liberal arts. It was Dilthey’s goal to present the differences between the liberal arts and the natural sciences. Not only do we need different methods to study these two types of realities, but furthermore the principles upon which the isolated singular facts are joined together into a coherent system have a fundamentally different character in the two areas. Therefore mental facts cannot and may not be subsumed under a system of natural or material realities, because the relations among the facts of the mental world have nothing in common with the monotony of the process of nature. Only when the relations among the facts of the cognitive world prove to be incomparable in that way with the uniformities of nature’s course, only when a subordination of mental facts under those which the mechanical study of nature has ascertained can be excluded, only then are we not presented with inherent limitations of seeking knowledge, but rather with barriers at which knowledge of nature ends and an independent scholarship of the liberal arts [Geisteswissenschaften] begins, which forms itself out of its genuinely own center (ibid: 14). Dilthey’s tirade against “the empty and infertile repetitions of natural processes in human consciousness” (ibid: 8) and against “a subordination of mental facts under those which the mechanical study of nature has ascertained” (ibid: 14), however, also hit that which – by borrowing from physics and biology – presented itself as sociology under Comte and Spencer. Dilthey meant only the positivistic variant when he rejected sociology as being quite impossible. In a footnote, he confronted the sociology of Comte and Spencer with the concept of the science of society from the German scholars of public law (ibid: 44f). He agreed with the efforts toward a science of society and later even “revised his categorical verdict against sociology, in the additions to the new edition of the Introduction,



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on the basis of Simmel’s program with which he agreed …” (Tenbruck 1958: 591). Dilthey referred to the high complexity of society, but he saw the possibility of gaining insights by recreating reality within us. This methodical concept, which we find again in Simmel, stands in obvious contrast, however, to that of the natural sciences since – as Dilthey wrote – “nature remains mute and is alien to us” (Dilthey 1883: 45f). By contrast: “Society is our world. We partake in the interplay of reciprocal interrelations [Wechselwirkungen] within it” (ibid: 46). Dilthey pointed out that value judgments are necessary in order to be able to critically reflect our image of society: “We are compelled to master the image of its constitution by ever-active value judgments and to transform it, at least in our imagination, with a never-resting drive of the will” (ibid.: 46). Individuals are themselves a part of society and hence find access to its interior. Therefore the individual can understand [verstehen]: “I understand the life of society. The individual is, on the one hand, an element in this interplay of the reciprocal relationships of society, a point of intersection of the various systems of these reciprocal interrelations…” (ibid: 47). This quote out of the Dilthey text anticipated the title of a chapter of Georg Simmel, “The Intersection of Social Circles” (Simmel 1890b). It appears as if Simmel was very much in agreement with the position that the young Dilthey took in his “Introduction” (Dilthey 1883). Uta Gerhardt, however, stressed particularly the “thoughts of the late Dilthey” (Gerhardt 1971: 279 footnote), that from about 1907 onwards leaned toward an explanation of life out of the subject-object dualism and that determine the categories of life as “forms of perception of life” (ibid.). She also mentioned “that Simmel’s works on this topic were in part already available before this turn in Dilthey’s approach” (ibid.). Grasping knowledge of the total picture, of the interrelation of the whole, remained Dilthey’s goal. From the perspective of methodology one can here identify the basic contours of the procedure of understanding or interpretation [verstehen]. While Dilthey on the on hand rejected what he called sociology, with reference to Comte and Spencer’s positivistic  approach, he outlined on the other hand a concept for a family of “sciences of society” and counted among them, for instance, “grammar, rhetoric, logic, esthetics, ethics, jurisprudence” (Dilthey 1883: 48). Political science as well belongs in this circle of “sciences of society.” Dilthey emphasized the importance of the Italian Renaissance for the history of the liberal arts. According to him, it was then that the cord

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between religion as a source of reality constructions and empirical reality itself was severed. “By giving up the subordination under the medieval scheme of religious imagination, science snaps the cord between religious ideas as means of construction and reality; one becomes aware of them with an unprejudiced mind and thereby, objective perception and positive science emerge, where up until then a metaphysical deduction had kept the phenomenon connected with the innermost depth of total spiritual life” (ibid: 451). The result of this snapping of the cord between religion and empir­ ical  reality was therefore, on the one hand, the beginning of positive natural science and, on the other hand, an increasing process of independence and detachment of religion, natural science, and the liberal arts from each other. Once these three became detached from each other, the next stage in this evolutionary process was the transformation of metaphysics: It changes from a quasi-religion into a “private system” of knowledge (ibid: 455). This loss of collective integration led to what Dilthey called “free multiplicity of metaphysical systems” (ibid.) or, as one might say in modern language, it led toward pluralism of values and orientations. For Dilthey it was one of the most important challenges of the liberal arts (Dilthey 1883: 483) to solve the following tasks: a)  the “explanatory bases for judgments about reality have to be ascertained”; b) the “explanatory bases for value statements and imperatives” (ibid.) have to be worked out; and finally it is necessary that c) both are related to and connected with each other. d) This was the consequence of the transformation of philosophy, according to which the old opposition between theoretical and practical philosophy was being replaced by the counter positioning, as suggested by Dilthey, of natural sciences and liberal arts (ibid.). Close to the end of his Introduction (the book under review here), Dilthey tells about a fairy tale by Novalis, in which a man falls passionately in love but then leaves his girl in order to go into the world in search of truth. After many false turns and much suffering, he finally succeeds in encountering the enshrouded goddess Isis. Eventually he discovers behind her veil the kindhearted girl whom he had left in order to search for the truth. Dilthey’s interpretation thereof comes as a surprise. He did not say, as Simmel might have suggested, that this was a depiction of the unique opportunity to find one’s You, to recognize one’s significant other (Mead); instead Dilthey



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wrote, eventually everyone always rediscovers in everything only their own selves: “He finally stands in front of the goddess of nature, he lifts the lightly shimmering veil and – his lover sinks into his arms. When the soul seems to succeed in recognizing the subject of nature’s course itself, bared of its garments and veil, then it finds in this – itself” (ibid.: 517). Why “itself,” one could ask Dilthey. He does find his “you”, doesn’t he? But this perhaps is already a hint about the difference between Dilthey the philosopher and Simmel the sociologist. In addition, Simmel was a scholar of the liberal arts with a living relationship to the absolute; Dilthey on the other hand, although called upon by his family to become a protestant minister, lost his faith and became a philosopher and a skeptic instead. At the end of the text he wrote: “The legal heir of the skeptic is the epistemologist. Here we have arrived at the borderline where the next book will begin …” (ibid: 519). But that next book mentioned here was never written. Dilthey himself was “the legal heir of the skeptic” who pursued epistemology to reorient himself and his contemporaries. His text represented an attempt to replace faith and metaphysics with epistemology, a task which Dilthey later had to realize he could not solve. A reference to a text by Dilthey, which strongly influenced the development of the liberal arts in the last part of the 19th century, is intended to serve here to further lead into the works of Georg Simmel. An intensive study of all of Dilthey’s publications – although beyond the scope of the current text – would be necessary and desirable to correctly judge his importance. Our treatment of Dilthey has unavoidably been sketchy, focusing on his “Introduction”; however, the position of this work in terms of the history of scholarship speaks in favor of our having stressed it here. Its title page mentions that the author, Wilhelm Dilthey, is “Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin.” During the second half of the 19th century, this university was an important intellectual center. It was there where Georg Simmel, at the age of 18, began his study of history and philosophy. And it was there where five years later, in 1881, he received his doctoral degree and – after weathering some menacing difficulties – where he received the postdoctoral degree [Habilitation] in 1885, two years after Dilthey’s Introduction was published in Berlin. It was here where George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park spent time as doctoral candidates. We know that Dilthey was a supporter and advisor of Simmel and that, without his support, Simmel’s postdoctoral dissertation probably would never have been accepted. A scholar-to-be usually devoted the years

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between the doctoral and the postdoctoral degrees to particularly intensive study and research, which in all likelihood would fundamentally influence that person’s later scientific orientation. One can safely assume that this was also the case for Georg Simmel in his contact with Wilhelm Dilthey. To demonstrate the temporal connection, one should again recall the following dates: 1881 Simmel’s doctoral degree; 1883 publication of Dilthey’s Introduction to the Liberal Arts; 1885 Simmel’s postdoctoral degree as a Privatdozent. In the context of describing the situation at the University of Berlin, it should also be pointed out that in 1889 George Herbert Mead arrived in Berlin and that he became a student of Wilhelm Dilthey. We hear that Mead not only occasionally attended Dilthey’s lectures and seminars but that he apparently began his dissertation under Dilthey’s guidance. Although he did not finish it, because his stay in Berlin was cut short, one may safely assume that – once someone decides to write a dissertation under the guidance of an important philosopher – that person will closely inspect that scholar’s publications, particularly a major book such as the one we have discussed here. Therefore it is plausible to assume that Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead both knew Wilhelm Dilthey’s Introduction to the Liberal Arts very well. A decade after Mead, in the fall of 1899, Park (1864–1944) arrived in Berlin (Raushenbush 1979:30). He moved there with his wife and their three children. The name of the university then was of course not Humboldt University, as it is today, but rather Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität, named after the emperor. Raushenbush reported about Park: “In the spring of 1900 he took three courses with Georg Simmel who was then forty-one and a docent in the university. The courses were in ‘Ethics,’ ‘History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century,’ and ‘Sociology.’ This was the only course in sociology Park took in his entire life. Years later Park was to say that Simmel was ‘the greatest of all sociologists’” (ibid.). Simmel’s popularity with the students at that time makes it difficult to reconstruct the development of his personal relationship with Dilthey. Simmel had been a student at the University of Berlin since 1876. Then, in 1882, Dilthey came from Breslau and assumed a vacant chair in Berlin, thereby returning to the University where he had earned his doctoral and postdoctoral degrees. Here he found the young and unusually bright Simmel, with whom he felt united in basic methodical questions from the time of his arrival from Breslau. He helped Simmel when, in 1885, Simmel got into serious difficulties in his attempt to the pass his postdoctoral examinations. In 1890 Simmel’s book, On Social Differentiation [Ueber



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sociale Differenzierung], appeared and it contained numerous passages that were inspired and influenced by the Dilthey of the time before 1890 (e.g., see Simmel 1890a: 7). In the course of the years, however, the distance between the two philosophers must have increased. What began as the helpfulness of a full professor (his position strengthened by having been “called” by several universities) to the postdoctoral student whose degree chances were in jeopardy became a relationship of competition for preeminence in the field of philosophy. Dilthey had announced a second volume to his Introduction to the Liberal Arts, which promised to solve the epistemological problems following the dissolution of metaphysics, but he never wrote it. Simmel, however, actually completed a book, The Problems of the Philosophy of History [Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie], which had the subtitle, “An Epistemological Study.” Dilthey had intended to give a solid methodical foundation to the study of history and society. But students who were interested in the study of society went in large numbers to the lectures of Simmel, who seemed to offer this foundation. Everyone who studied philosophy at the thenrenowned University of Berlin was forced to compare Dilthey with Simmel. Simmel was a financially independent, entirely autonomous Privatdozent who could allow himself the luxury of not holding examinations, apparently because he disliked the unpleasant situation of the examiner (Gassen 1958: 208). As a full professor, Dilthey had the status of a civil servant and was of course obliged to give exams because this was part of the duties of his office. On November 3, 1897, in a letter to Rickert, Simmel wrote that his lectures were more overcrowded than ever and at the same time reported that Dilthey would apparently not be happy to see him get a professorship in Berlin (ibid.: 92f). This remark could only have been a reference to an associate professorship, since it would have been against the German tradition anyway to invite a member of the local department to a full professorship. In his memoirs, Paul Ernst reports about a personal encounter in which Simmel jokingly said of the University of Berlin, that there are two professors who teach philosophy – Zeller, who doesn’t even know what philosophy is, and Dilthey, who knows but is not about to let anybody in on the secret (ibid.: 141). Directly comparing Dilthey and Simmel, Paul Fechter writes: “In more than one way they were figures who stood in contrast to each other, one the counter piece of the other” (ibid.: 162). Another contemporary, N.J. Spykman, suspected that “certain difficulties with Dilthey” played a role in the problems of Simmel’s career

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(ibid: 186). Ludwig Curtius (1874–1954) frankly admits that he preferred going to the lectures of the Privatdozent Simmel over those of Dilthey (ibid: 222). In view of the apparent competition of these two university teachers from the point of view of students, it is plausible, when several witnesses agree, that Dilthey presumably may have stood in the way of Simmel’s job promotion to associate professor. But we also know that Dilthey had several calls as full professor to universities in Switzerland and in Germany. It is an old principle of German academic conventions that a Privatdozent is not promoted to the rank of professor by the same faculty which granted that person’s postdoctoral degree, but rather must first try to change universities. It could have been an entirely rational argument of Dilthey against Simmel to say that he – even if deserving – had not yet received a call to another university. Over the course of his lifetime, Simmel published 24 books and more than 200 articles. Dilthey died in 1911, that is, seven years before Simmel. And while Dilthey left a multitude of unpublished manuscripts, he had published only three books and a number of articles, of which none of the latter captured the extent of his philosophical importance (Rickman 1979: 13). Rickman mentioned that Dilthey’s philosophy was rejected during National Socialism (ibid: 15). His philosophizing was too anti-dogmatic for the taste of that totalitarian regime. According to Rickman, it is known that Dilthey had jotted the following remark on his copy of John Stuart Mill’s Logic: Mill is a dogmatic because he lacks historical knowledge. Dilthey’s anti-dogmatic position is probably also the reason why a century later many Marxist philosophers of the seventies and eighties saw in him the most dangerous opponent of dogmatic Marxism (ibid: 18f). On the question of the possible influence of Dilthey on Simmel, we come to the following preliminary conclusion. The “Introduction”, the text we have inspected here in excerpts, represents the position of a young and dynamic Dilthey who has influenced Simmel and Weber and who, in addition, was probably important for American pragmatism and the Chicago school as well. Dilthey himself later left the position of this text (see Gerhardt 1971: 279 footnote). Heinrich Rickert and the later Max Weber apparently followed the transition that Dilthey made in the development of his scientific thinking. On the other hand, it seems that Simmel stayed with the position as outlined in this text and that he neither followed nor endorsed the later change in Dilthey’s line of argument. In the Dilthey text of 1883, it is presumably decisive – from his point of view – that with the onset of the Italian Renaissance the cord between the



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religious sources of reality construction on the one hand, and empirical reality on the other hand, was torn asunder. In this text, Dilthey still has the hope of repairing this break by means of the philosophy of life. In the future, constructive ideas would have to be gained out of the reality of life itself – so he means and so he hopes (Dilthey 1883: 541). This is Simmel’s topic as well, for whom the search for criteria of truth led from the reality of life to philosophical pragmatism. Summary: Statements about Simmel’s Method Simmel starts his message with the insight that the purpose of knowledge is to improve action: Man should gain knowledge in order to inform and enrich his conduct and improve his life. A knowledge firmly placed in the service of action cannot elicit the criteria for its value from itself. These criteria must be determined according to what services knowledge provides for humans. This fundamental principle is so important that Simmel’s work remains inaccessible if one fails to grasp its significance. The following is a list of points intended as a reminder of the typical traits of Simmel’s method: 1. Action, as Socrates requires, is to be guided by “rational knowledge” (Simmel, 1910: 105): This applies in the moral and political sphere in the same as in the sphere of craftsmanship and technique. Simmel derives the principles of pragmatism from Plato’s Socrates. 2. According to Simmel, the ancient Greeks directed their knowledge “toward the material and concrete.” Thus an idea was said to be true if it corresponded to its object “like a perfect image to its model” (ibid: 106). 3. The claim to objectivity, to independence from subjective bias, meant for Plato, truth had to be something constant and reliable, which did not repeatedly elude cognizance or change its appearance. Objects which fulfilled this requirement were termed ideas by Plato. 4. From Simmel’s point of view, Plato’s ideas are simply conceptual products which are postulated, created ad hoc as tools of thought, like Max Weber’s ideal types, and do not exist independently of this. They also serve the purpose of “understanding the existence of a truth” (ibid: 106), a truth which therefore must exist, whether grasped by man or not. Thus Simmel’s method is caught up in the conflict of only accepting the realm of ideas as the product of human creation, and yet anticipating that it might provide access to an objective truth.

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5. Rational conceptualization and sensory perception do not refer two distinct types of objects (ideas as the object of metaphysics and empirical experience as that of physics): instead, both refer concurrently to the concrete material world in which actions must be performed. Simmel adopts this theory from Kant (Simmel, 1922b: 124): The objects of man’s experience are encountered only in this one empirical, material world; they are not separated into this life and an after-life. Sociology as an empirical science would be inconceivable to Simmel without this epistemological premise. 6. As far as Simmel is concerned, fresh knowledge can only be acquired from actual life experience and not by means of intellectual reflection alone: Initially, I simply know that something is true because I have experienced it. Not until after this, in order to confirm this to myself and others, do I then take the secondary step of defining the object, which I then specify as being the cause of my experience (ibid.: 107). 7. Experience in relation to objects cannot become knowledge until man gives it a certain form. The sensory impression of a picture of the mother remembered by her child, the portrait created by an artist, and the concept by which a scientist summarizes his object – all are for Simmel in principle, equally valid variations of this process of formation. Hence the greater part of his life work was dedicated to a comparative study of such forming. 8. The central fields of forming, art, religion, and play compete with science and learning in taking the objective experiential field of life common to all and shaping it while preserving the subjective element in creating an authentic form. 9. An answer to the question ‘what is truth?’ is only to be found in the relation between the form, for instance a portrait or an ideal type, and the object it aims to represent. The criterion of truth has thus been shifted to relations. It is in relations where reality is located. 10. Simmel believes, contrary to Plato’s view, that since ideas are created by man and then recognized as ideals, they cannot be as otherworldly as Plato assumed. On the contrary, they offer the possibility of “a point of contact between what things are and what they ought to be” (Simmel, 1983b: 89) because humans are conscious of their unlived potentials. 11. Simmel applies Darwin’s evolutionism to culture and history and subjects the ability of the person to acquire knowledge and objective truth to the same dynamic progression. “The development of our species is continuously creating new ways of perceiving the world both in



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sensory and intellectual terms; similarly, new categories for its evaluation are constantly being created” (Simmel, 1907b: 431). 12. The reinterpretation of Plato’s ideas from existing reality to a rational formative process, from something which man discovers and encounters as a finished product to something he creates himself is for Simmel a universal epistemological principle applied consistently in the context of sociology. 13. There are two means of access to perceivable reality: Experience and pure thought. Alternating with the passage of time, these two methods of acquiring knowledge take turns in promoting each other: The cycle begins with experience (cf. 7 above), giving rise to pure thought as a reflection on the experiences, and this in turn leads on to new experiences. This cyclical development constantly guides the person through the world of phenomena. 14. The actions of the subject, characterized by his interests, determine the process by which knowledge is acquired. For this reason, Simmel assigns central importance within the Kantian system – not to thought, but to will. If there is little effective will, there will be little knowledge worth acquiring. As one of his premises, Simmel adopts Kant’s notion that interests determine thought, a notion that has since become an issue in the sociology of knowledge. 15. Quite apart from the reality resulting from the will of humans, Simmel proposes the existence of an objective truth. Knowledge of this truth can be attained by studying the relations of its parts: “If we do not wish once and for all to cling dogmatically to a single truth, which according to its very nature requires no proof, it seems reasonable to regard this reciprocity of verification as the fundamental form of knowledge – its purest form. The acquisition of knowledge is thus an unstable process whose elements mutually define their positions, in the same way as matter is affected by gravity; in the way same as the latter, therefore, truth is a relational concept” (Simmel, 1907b: 68). This approaches a sociological theory of relativity. 16. Simmel’s message comes full circle: Man should gain knowledge in order to inform and enrich his conduct and improve his life. As life and action form the central pivot of Simmel’s thought, he sees an energetic will, whatever its specific object, as giving the impulse to activity. The action induced creates results, which may be judged successful or unsuccessful. The theoretical content of any successful desire will subsequently be defined as truth. Simmel thus regards the substance of truth as being the result of such judgments. “The fact that the agent is

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now guided by the truth he has very successfully come to recognize is understandable since the ‘truth’ was originally based on the success of his actions” (Simmel, 1922b: 123). 17. It would be a gross misinterpretation of Simmel to read into his epistemological shift from the substantial to the relational a departure from all objective solidity. In Simmel’s view there is indeed a single objective truth, located not in things but in relations. The inherent danger of human existence lies in the risk of making the wrong judgment by failing to recognize the objective truth at a certain time and in a certain place. Simmel’s “knowledge certainly does not come without normative stability: In fact any being endowed with imagination is in possession of a fixed ‘truth’ which in their thinking they may either hit upon or fail to grasp in any particular case” (Simmel, 1907b: 70). This rigorous methodical conclusion provides him with a basis for a sociology with an ever present ethical dimension.

APPENDIX ONE

BIOGRAPHY OF GEORG SIMMEL From 1858 until 1914 Simmel’s home was Berlin. He spent the last four years of his life, which coincided with World War I, as professor at the University of Strasbourg where he died of liver cancer on September 26, 1918 (not on September 28, as several sources report). Simmel was of Jewish origin and belonged to a Protestant Church. He grew up the youngest of seven children and received a sizable inheritance after the death of his father. This allowed him to pursue his inclinations toward intellectual autonomy. Simmel earned his doctorate degree from the University of Berlin, which enjoyed considerable international reputation then. Among those intellectuals who came from abroad to study were George Herbert Mead and Robert Ezra Park. In Berlin as well as elsewhere in Austria, Germany, and other parts of Europe it has long been the tradition not to promote a scholar from within his or her department to the rank of full professor. This old custom, by which intellectual inbreeding was to be minimized, excluded Simmel from eligibility to a professorship at the university where he had been a student, a Ph.D. candidate, and a Privatdozent. That is one of the reasons, why Max Weber tried to get him a professorship at Heidelberg, which failed, most likely due to anti-Semitic prejudices. Trying to produce a reconstruction of Simmel’s life would have been met with strong reservations from himself. To him, it is unreasonable to portray a person and then to claim that the result would be the only possible accurate reproduction and that every other portrayal would necessarily be less fitting and less correct. One should specifically keep in mind Simmel’s conviction that a photo-like reproduction of reality is impossible in general. “If one describes a personality with an interest in the history of culture, then that never means simply a point-by-point copy of their entire lived life, but rather that, depending upon the specifics of one’s interest, one will eliminate many things, focus on others and – what really is important – one will combine the relevant parts into one coherent picture which, as such, does not have a correspondent object in reality. Rather, comparable to an artistic portrait, one has instead of the real totality of the

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object an ideal elaboration of it which gains its meaning and importance from a specific purpose of presentation” (Simmel 1907a: VIII). To Simmel the truly unmistakable qualities of an important person are not that person’s biographical data but rather his or her creations, which transcend the individual insofar as they are accessible to all. Following his epistemological principle, the object of study takes shape for the researcher only in the process of thinking about it. Only then does the inclination to search within individual characteristics for the general, and vice-versa, to seek within the general for that which is individual becomes apparent. “What for mankind or culture is the most general, is for its producer his most personal, that which marks the very uniqueness of this individuality; the incomparable individuality of Schopenhauer does not lie in his personal circumstances: that he was born in Danzig, that he was an unpleasant bachelor, that he broke off ties with his family, and that he died in Frankfurt; for each of these traits is only typical. His individuality, the personal uniqueness in Schopenhauer, is rather The World as Will and Imagination” (ibid: 64). According to Simmel, Schopenhauer’s biography could be brushed aside with good reason: because the uniqueness of this man lies entirely in his work. On the other hand, as Dilthey has stressed, history becomes alive in biographies and the general coming and going of an historical epoch becomes, in the life of an individual, personal destiny. This holds for the peaking of German self-confidence in the nationalism of the German empire in Simmel’s days, for the great intellectual movements which are linked with the names of Darwin (1809–1882), Marx (1818–1883), and Freud (1856–1939), and for the universal catastrophe of humanity in World War I, a war that Simmel could only experience as the German he was. If one tears biographical data and life decisions out of their historical context, one should not be surprised at how incomprehensible they then appear. In spite of Simmel’s reservations against writing biographies, we now turn to some data on his life. Isaak Simmel, the grandfather of Georg, had lived in Silesia and there he received, as a mature man, citizenship rights in Breslau around 1840. He was the founder of a successful merchant family. His son Edward, Georg Simmel’s father, was born there in 1810. Edward was a merchant himself. During one of his numerous travels, between 1830 and 1835, he converted in Paris from the Jewish faith to Christianity, becoming a Roman Catholic. In 1838 Edward Simmel married Flora Bodenstein, who also came from Breslau. Her family had converted from Judaism to the Christian faith, but she had been baptized not as a Catholic but as a Protestant. Georg Simmel’s parents moved to Berlin where Edward Simmel founded the chocolate



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factory called Felix & Sarotti, which he later apparently was able to sell advantageously (Gassen and Landmann 1958: 11). When Edward Simmel died early in 1874, he left a sizeable estate. Since his wife and seven children, of whom Georg was the youngest, survived him, the early death of the father would have otherwise meant not only an emotional and personal but also a financial catastrophe for the family. Julius Friedlaender, a friend of the family and an important music publisher, became the legal guardian of Georg Simmel. Later on, Simmel dedicated his doctoral dissertation to him “with gratitude and love” (ibid: 11). Like his mother, Georg Simmel was baptized as a Protestant. During World War I he left the church, not so much because he wanted to turn his back on the Christian faith, but out of a “need for religious independence” (ibid.: 12. See also Becher, H., 1984: 3–17). Gertrud Kinel, whom he married in 1890, also came from a religiously mixed family. Like her father but unlike Simmel, she was baptized as a Catholic. Since her mother was in charge of her religious upbringing, however, Gertrud was raised in the Protestant faith. Georg and Gertrud Simmel had a son, Hans, who became an associate professor of medicine in Jena; he died in the late 1930s as an immigrant in the United States (Käsler 1985). Georg and Gertrud Simmel’s household in Berlin became a cultural centre: it was here where personalities such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Edmund Husserl, Reinhold and Sabine Lepsius, Heinrick Rickert, Max and Marianne Weber and others were regular guests. Georg Simmel’s presence at the University of Berlin had a great attraction for audiences from quite diverse social circles: Simmel’s lectures about problems of logic, ethics, esthetics, sociology of religion, social psychology, and sociology were sometimes acclaimed as cultural events, announced in news­ papers and occasionally even critiqued. As many colleagues scornfully noted, his audiences included many foreigners, intellectually interested non-academics, students from all disciplines, and especially numerous women. Those who had heard his lectures unanimously told of Simmel’s fascinating style of presentation, of his ability to attach almost physical substance to his train of thought, and to make the objects of his lectures appear in the mental eye of the audience, instead of presenting ready-made, seemingly undeniable results as did many of his colleagues (Schnabel 1976: 272). His entire schooling and university education, which contributed to Simmel’s later successes as a university teacher, he received in Berlin. At the age of 18 he passed his Abitur (final examination at a secondary

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school). He enrolled in the summer semester of 1876 at the University of Berlin, where he studied for five years. Here he attended courses in history under Theodor Mommsen, attended lectures about cross-cultural psychology by Lazarus und Steinthal, and finally studied philosophy as a student of the less-well-known professors Zeller and Harms, who introduced him to the works of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; of these, Kant had the strongest influence on Georg Simmel. The importance of the University of Berlin can be inferred from the fact that during his studies Simmel had as his teachers such influential scholars as Droysen, von Sybel, von Treitschke, Jordan, and Hermann Grimm (Simmel 1881: 33; Tenbruck 1958: 588). During 1881 Simmel applied for permission to take the doctoral examinations. The topic of his dissertation was “Psychological-Ethnological Studies about the Origins of Music.” This dissertation was not accepted! According to the available documents and written evaluations, the professors in charge cited as reasons for the rejection the patchwork-like sketchiness and the insufficient precision of the line of reasoning. While admitting that the topic of research was extraordinary, they criticized the manner in which it was carried out – many typographical errors, illegible quotations, etc. In other words, one would have to assume that the dissertation Simmel wrote and submitted was somewhat sketchily done. On the other hand, shortly before he applied for opening the formal procedures leading to his doctoral degree, he had won a prize with another scholarly work. This successful work carried the title, “Presentation and Examination of Several of Kant’s Perspectives on the Essence of Matter.” Those professors who were dissatisfied with his “dissertation” suggested Georg Simmel withdraw his work on the origin of music and present in its place this prize-winning work he had written on another occasion. Simmel gladly accepted this friendly advice and he was granted the doctoral degree. The oral doctoral examinations were in the fields of philosophy, history of art, and medieval Italian. His dissertation became Simmel’s first book, published in 1881 in Berlin under the title, The Essence of Matter According to Kant’s Phsyical Monadology (Simmel 1881). Despite the successful completion of his doctoral exams, Georg Simmel’s degreeprocess was characterized by extremely unusual events. Two years after receiving his doctoral degree, Simmel applied to the same faculty of philosophy at the University of Berlin for the formal permission to teach in the area of philosophy. During this application procedure, which should have promoted him to the rank of an inde­ pendently teaching faculty member (Privatdozent), even more difficult



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problems arose. For his postdoctoral dissertation, he had again written a work about Kant, this time about Kant’s theory of space and time. The professors whom the dean had appointed to judge this dissertation – among them Wilhelm Wundt – turned it down. According to them, this work was not bad from a scientific point of view but it circled around the topic without fully dealing with it. Only after Professors Dilthey and Zeller forcefully came to Simmel’s defense was it finally accepted as a Habilitationsschrift [post-doctoral dissertation]. After the academic trial lecture (Probevorlesung) that Simmel had to deliver, the oral examination of the candidate by the faculty members was marked by an unheard-of and dramatic event; Professor Zeller remarked that he considered a specific lobe of the brain to be the seat of the human soul, whereupon Simmel – ignoring the social situation he was in – uncompromisingly declared Zeller’s point of view to be nonsense. As an immediate consequence, Simmel did not pass this examination on his first try (Schnabel 1976: 273). The extraordinary circumstances with regard to his doctoral and postdoctoral examination procedures presumably left a mark in the memory of the faculty members in Berlin, although in both cases Simmel finally succeeded in obtaining the degree. In addition to anti-Semitism, which is widely mentioned in the literature and would have played a role especially in the social circles of the Ministries of Cultural Affairs, one can safely assume these occurrences contributed to preventing a smooth academic career path for Simmel. At any rate, in January of 1885 Simmel passed the postdoctoral examinations in philosophy and thereby became a Privatdozent at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Berlin. The style of work and life, which he then adopted, was described as follows: “Simmel used to work in the mornings and evenings, whereas he preferred to see guests and friends in the afternoons. His closest friend was the economist Ignaz Jastrow. Both talked to each other in such a manner that the one hardly listened to what the other said; despite this, they always had the impression of having understood each other well. Simmel’s production came easy to him. For his lectures, he made almost no notes and improvised as he talked. He wrote articles one after the other, without second drafts or corrections, as if he already could see them take form in his mind’s eye. Behind the mental brilliance and human warmth, however, there was a hidden, irrational interior”(Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 13). In 1898, the faculty to which he belonged as Privatdozent requ­ ested   Simmel be promoted to associate professor (Extraordinarius), which would have been equivalent to giving him a permanent position.

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The Ministry of Cultural Affairs, however, did not grant this request. In February 1900, the same academic body repeated its attempt to make Georg Simmel an Extraordinarius, this time finally with success. Then: In 1908 the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg had an opening, its second full professorship in philosophy. Following the recommendation of Gothein and Max Weber, Dean Hampe suggested on February 17th to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Karlsruhe as a first choice (primo loco) the name of Rickert and as a second choice Simmel. The passage referring to Simmel reads as follows: “Should these difficulties [i.e., to win Rickert] be insurmountable, the faculty suggests that the government of the Grand Duke give a call to the Extraordinarius at the University of Berlin, Dr. Georg Simmel. At the age of 50, Simmel is, among the middle generation of the current academic teachers of philosophy, by far the most peculiar countenance. One cannot assign him to any of the general schools of thought; he has always gone his own way, at first with very astute but essentially negative and destructive criticism in his two-volume Introduction to Moral Science, then with an ever-deeper and comprehensive grasp of philosophical social science. With sensitivity to nuances, he dealt with methodological questions in Problems of the Philosophy of History (2nd edition, 1905) which shows manifold connections with ideas of Windelband and Rickert; but his main impact lies in sociological works which show everywhere an unusual command over the research materials from very diverse disciplines and a philosophical penetration of this rich material” (ibid.: 24f). Although Rickert declined the call for this chair, Georg Simmel did not get the chance to go to Heidelberg. The position remained vacant for a while until a certain Schwarz was called to fill it. Georg Simmel is said to have had an offer to teach in the United States, which probably because of World War I, did not materialize. Finally, in 1914, Simmel got a call to the University of Strasburg. As much as he may have been delighted to finally become a full professor, the farewell from Berlin must have been painful for him because he had become part of its cultural and scholarly life. “That Simmel now leaves the university where he had worked for thirty years not only means a loss for it, but also for himself. Such a personal, such an irreplaceable style of teaching as Simmel’s has its audience, as in a theater, and one knows: the audience does not necessarily follow the stage director whom it holds in high esteem into a new house”(Ludwig 1914: 413). Simmel belonged to those who are not willing to accept artificially created forms of intellectual discipline as rituals. He made full use of the economic independence that he was fortunate to have, in order to remain



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intellectually independent as well. This is one of the keys towards understanding the admirable creativity and diversity that characterized his scholarly work up until his death. When he felt himself to be incurably ill, he asked his doctor: How long do I still have to live? He needed to know because his most important book still had to be finished. The doctor told him the truth and Simmel withdrew and completed: Perspectives on Life [Lebensanschauung]. He confronted death like an ancient philosopher. “I await the delic ship,” he wrote to a friend. “On September 28” (Gassen is mistaken, it was September 26), “1918, he died from cancer of the liver in Strasburg, where he had been appointed four years before. Death at this point in time was perhaps a blessing because many former Strasbourg professors fell into utter poverty shortly thereafter, when Alsace became French again” (Gassen and Landmann 1958: 13). Following the already mentioned published dissertation about Kant, Simmel started his publishing activity in 1882 with an article in the Journal of Ethno-Psychology and Linguistics [Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft] under the title, “Psychological and Ethnological Studies about Music” (Simmel 1882). These are the rescued fragments of the dissertation, which had been declined. In 1884 another article under the title “The Psychology of Dante” appeared in the same journal. Three years later, in 1887, he published the article “On the Basic Question of Pessimism in Methodological Perspective.” Shortly thereafter, the articles “Michelangelo as a Poet” (1889) and “Moltke as a Stylist” (1890) appeared. During the next years (1891 and 1892) he published “Humanist Fairy Tales” and “On Spiritism.” Reviewing these titles in sequence shows how unusual and diverse the publishing activity of Simmel was; even at the beginning of his academic career. His message was not popular nor was it easy to accept. That has not changed much since the publication of these titles. But the interest in Simmel’s work persists and seems to increase.

APPENDIX TWO

SIMMEL’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT In 1958 in their ‘Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel’ [‘Book of thanks to Georg Simmel’], Kurt Gassen and Michael Landmann published an autobiographical fragment from Simmel’s unpublished writings. In this unfinished self-portrait, Simmel defines two levels of reflection which formed the basis of his work: the philosophical level and the level of the individual discipline. For each of these he specifies two areas of study: for the former epistemology and Kant, for the latter history and the social sciences. “I took as my point of departure studies on epistemology and Kant which were directly related to history and social science” (Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 9). From this wording one can assume that Simmel did not dedicate separate creative periods or phases of his life to each of the two levels, but that his philosophical work went “hand in hand” with his historical and sociological enquiries. It is characteristic of Simmel’s position in the history of ideas that he regards as real only that which is present in the conscious mind of the individual. Reality is no longer to be found in material objects, but in consciousness. In the same vein, Dilthey had written of Spinoza: “And as for him only that exists which is a fact of his consciousness, every value and every purpose of life is contained in this conceptual world which has its own independent existence within him, every goal of his actions is oriented towards the creation of intellectual facts” (Dilthey, 1883: 7). Dilthey draws a distinction between that intellectual sphere only existing in the conscious mind, that is to say the sphere of scholarly study not relating to the natural world, and nature – a distinction he also applies in terms of method. But Simmel does not accept this tendency to psychologize reality. He cannot work on the basis of an epistemology which permits no fixed object outside the psyche of the individual. “In the contemporary world, everything which is substantial, absolute and eternal is being dissolved into a constant flux of historical change and purely psychological reality. It seems to me that the only way of preventing this development from turning into unfounded subjectivism and skepticism is to replace these fixed, immutable values with the vital interaction of elements – elements which are equally subject to disintegration ad infinitum” (Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 9).

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Simmel writes of himself that the path he chooses to follow is not meant to take him from substance to psyche but to interaction. Reality, apparently abandoned, is given a new home: the dynamic relation. This new epistemological orientation does not make reality relative but relational. “The central concepts of truth, value, objectivity etc. presented themselves to me as interactive forces, the content of a relativism which no longer meant the skeptical erosion of all that was steadfast and stable, but instead offered a safeguard against precisely such an erosion by means of a new concept of stability (‘Philosophie des Geldes)” (ibid.) Simmel mentions his book on money here, but does not quote any particular passage from the text. Simmel’s unfinished self-portrait here contains a reference to the book ‘Philosophie des Geldes’ (‘The philosophy of money’) in which he applies according to his own judgment the methodical program outlined here. Previous to this, he had discovered the formative process, in the course of which there is a reshaping and molding of objective experience. “The first result was the fundamental thesis (argued in the ‘Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie’ – ‘Problems of the philosophy of history’); that ‘history’ means the forming or shaping of actual events – which need simply be experienced – according to the a priori principles of the scholarly mind, just as ‘nature’ is the forming of the material that the senses perceive by categories of reason” (ibid.). Simmel bases his sociology on the combination of the two basic categories of his thought: Interaction and the formative process. In society, the formative process leads to the emergence and development of social forms, and living reality is the dynamic interaction itself, which carries along with it the process of formation. “The only conceivable point of departure for the creation of social forms is the interaction between individuals. Whatever the obscure historical beginnings of societal life may actually have been, any genetic and systematic consideration must take as its basis this most simple and most direct relationship. And after all, this relationship is still today the instigating force behind countless new social forms. Thus ideational products of human reflection and judgment are formed which we view as going far beyond individual will and action, rather as if they were ‘pure forms’ of the latter” (Simmel, 1907b: 159). Although it is interaction in which ‘pure form’ manifests itself, this concept is by no means mere social-psychological interactionism. The interacting subjects create through their interaction objective culture which existed before them and will continue to exist after them, since it “goes beyond individual will and action” (see above). Simmel’s insistence that



simmel’s autobiographical fragment191

there is an independent objective world, familiar to us from his epistemology, thus leads to a world of “pure forms”. In his unfinished self-portrait he writes: “This separation of the form and content of historical representation, which I came upon from a purely epistemological point of view, was then to develop in my thinking as a methodical principle within an individual discipline: I was able to reach a new concept of sociology by separating the forms of socialization from the content, i.e. the motives, purposes and actualities, which are not social until they are seen as interactive processes between individuals; it was thus the treatment of these types of interaction as the object of a pure sociology which I undertook in my book” (Gassen and Landmann, 1958:9). The phrase “by separating the forms of socialization from the content” (see above) has led to disastrous misunderstandings. The entire school of formal sociology, which was founded by Leopold von Wiese, regarded Simmel as a representative of formal sociology, purely on the basis of such misinterpreted sentences. What Simmel wanted was not formalism but the preparation of a new method. This is why he himself speaks of pure sociology and not of formal sociology. The former is based on a new, higher plane of abstraction, where the concrete, empirical becomes secondary (e.g. company power, power within the Church, military power) and the concept can be studied as a “pure form” of domination (in German: Herrschaft). Simmel does not want to adopt Dilthey’s program of freeing epistemology from metaphysics. He is not disturbed or perplexed about the existence of improvable truth. He observes how he himself grows into a new metaphysical position, as it were, as he works at the new discipline, sociology: “But from this sociological significance of the concept of interaction, I gradually came to see it as a general, all-embracing metaphysical principle” (ibid.). A scientific discipline which aims to serve does not lose anything by subjecting itself to metaphysical principles: “Our intellect can only grasp the measure of reality as a limited form of pure concepts, which, however much they diverge from reality, draw their legitimation from the service they provide to the interpretation of reality” (Simmel, 1907b: 150).

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INDEX Abstraction 67, 73, 75–77, 103, 106, 121, 124, 191 Alienation 20, 65, 66, 95, 102, 105, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118, 120, 122, 123, 133, 137, 169 American 7, 18, 21–23, 26, 76, 107, 142, 176 Pragmatism 17, 21–26, 29–32, 142, 176, 177 Sociology 7, 21, 32, 76 Autonomy 36, 41, 56, 125, 126, 145, 181 Bourgeoisie 96, 135 Christianity 90, 91, 93, 94, 156, 182 Class 17, 66, 74, 116, 123, 136, 137, 159, 162 Conflict 96 Labor 38, 135 Working 66, 96, 123, 137 Classics 19, 100 Comte, Auguste 43, 44, 76, 152, 167, 170, 171 Confrontation 2, 6, 37, 38, 41, 53, 76, 78, 87, 99, 108 Construction 1, 8, 9, 11, 14–18, 20, 24, 44, 57, 73, 74, 102, 114, 119, 126, 130, 137, 139–142, 148, 153, 155, 160, 163, 172, 177, 181 Mental 34, 36, 73 Of ideal types 15, 20, 74, 142, 163 Of reality 24, 106, 118 Critical 3, 16, 39, 41–43, 70, 103, 129, 132, 136, 152, 160, 171 Analysis 41, 128 Nature of Simmel 70, 103 Culture 2, 6, 15–19, 30, 36, 38–40, 44, 46–48, 50–52, 54, 56, 60–64, 67, 77, 90, 97, 101, 102, 105–110, 118, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 138, 141, 160, 178, 181, 182, 190 Darwin, Charles 21, 23, 24, 27, 33, 43, 45–47, 59, 60, 62, 63, 70, 81, 110, 178, 182 Descendency (theory of) 45, 47 Dialectic 44, 64–67, 96 Dilthey, Wilhelm 5, 47, 59, 63, 71, 76, 80, 142, 164, 166–177, 182, 185, 189, 191 Durkheim, Emile 43, 49, 71, 74, 89, 93, 103

Economic 1, 15, 19, 36, 37, 49, 52, 65–70, 75–77, 80, 95, 102, 105–108, 119–122, 124, 131, 136–138, 186 Activity 52, 105, 106, 108, 112, 115, 116, 121 Objects 102, 114, 117 Value 113, 119 Economy 3, 16, 19, 64, 67–69, 96, 102, 105, 108, 113–117, 121–123, 125, 127, 128, 132, 136, 139 Evolution 4, 5, 15, 22, 23, 27, 33, 36, 37, 39, 54, 67, 70, 81, 93, 97, 110, 111, 113–115, 141, 172, 178 Cultural 15, 46, 51 Social 54, 60, 61, 98, 121 Fashion 31, 49, 50, 54, 63, 117, 122, 129, 156 Feuerbach, Ludwig 66, 67, 93–95 Germany 6, 25, 38, 43, 93, 135, 141, 156, 176, 181 German 37, 45, 66, 71, 72, 76, 93–95, 107, 122, 135, 154, 168, 170, 175, 176, 182, 191 Happiness 51, 56, 64, 126, 127 Material goals 56 Supreme 126 Hegel, Friedrich 23, 44, 45, 52, 64–67, 69, 70, 93, 94, 117, 124, 184 Historical materialism 12, 19, 20, 67–70, 96, 129, 136, 151 History 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 27, 38, 40, 41, 44–46, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67–69, 73–77, 80, 81, 90, 107, 109, 113, 114, 120, 121, 136, 137, 139, 141, 154, 161, 164, 178, 181, 182, 184, 186, 190 Historical change 30, 189 Historicism 76 Human formations 98 Humanities 1, 2, 4–7, 18, 33, 74, 75, 133, 136, 137, 141 vs natural sciences 1, 5, 6, 136 Ideal types 14, 15, 17, 20, 74, 140, 142, 145, 163, 177, 178 Individual 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11–13, 17, 28, 30–33, 54, 56, 57, 61–64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 87–93, 95, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 115–119, 144, 148, 150, 151, 156–158, 164, 171, 182, 189–191 Consciousness 12

200

index

Individualism 17, 30, 37–41, 52, 56, 74, 80, 81, 92, 93, 103, 129, 138, 141, 166 Individualization 30, 36–39, 48–50, 73, 74, 98 Interaction 2, 10, 47, 50, 52, 53, 61, 65, 71, 73, 76–79, 81, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 114, 116, 118, 120–122, 124, 125, 127–130, 132, 138, 158, 189–191 Interpretation 1, 2, 5–7, 11, 18, 19, 28, 41–43, 58, 73, 85–87, 112, 144, 146, 148, 153, 155, 158, 171, 172, 179–191 Kant, Immanuel 1, 2, 5, 19, 21, 23, 35, 36, 39–41, 47, 56, 57, 64, 72, 82, 93, 117, 126, 138, 143, 160–166, 178, 179, 184, 185, 187, 189 Liberalism 41 Mannheim, Karl 18, 100, 164 Marx, Karl 19, 20, 43–45, 52, 57, 64–66, 67, 70, 76, 93–97, 101, 102, 113, 117, 127, 131, 135–139, 141, 151, 169, 176, 182 Mead, George Herbert 8, 9, 17, 38, 44, 50, 107, 167, 172–174, 181 Metaphysics 14, 20, 59, 67–69, 137, 146, 161, 165–167, 172, 173, 175, 178, 191 Method 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 26, 29, 32, 35, 44, 47, 48, 59, 62, 63, 68, 70–77, 80–82, 102, 103, 107–109, 114, 115, 117, 123, 124, 136, 139–141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 156, 158, 159, 164, 166–168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 186, 187, 189–191 Verstehen 8, 14, 16, 17 Modernity 20, 36, 39, 51 Metropolis 3, 37 Modernism 141 Money 3, 16, 22, 26, 28, 29, 38, 52, 53, 60, 66, 69, 72, 102, 105–108, 113, 115, 127, 128, 131 Philosophy of 16, 22, 26, 29, 60, 102, 105–108, 132, 139, 190 Value of 118, 120, 137 Moral 7, 22, 39, 44, 57, 58, 60–62, 75, 90, 113, 143, 144, 166, 177, 186 Morality 166 Native 6, 18, 37, 51, 56, 58, 64, 65, 71, 80, 97, 99, 100, 103, 124, 135, 138, 158, 167 Newcomer 97, 99 Objectivity 5, 14, 27, 34, 79, 87, 115, 116, 117, 127, 128, 144, 145, 148, 177, 190

Park, Robert 19, 44, 71, 72, 100, 102, 173, 174, 181 Plato 10, 13, 18–20, 24, 28, 33, 34, 40, 43, 61, 70, 119, 120, 143–152, 155, 161, 163, 165, 166, 177–179 Play 15, 25, 35, 48, 63, 74, 75, 81, 99, 103, 106, 124, 140, 148, 149, 163, 164, 171, 175, 178, 185 Politics 3, 123, 124, 144 Pragmatism 17, 18, 21–26, 29–32, 36, 42, 136, 142, 144, 176, 177 Proletariat 66, 96, 132, 135 Religion 3, 4, 6, 19, 30, 36, 38, 48, 53–55, 57, 63, 64, 69, 76, 81, 84–93, 95–97, 102, 121, 123, 124, 136, 138, 139, 146, 148, 149, 163, 172, 178, 183 Revolution 30, 41, 44, 46, 52, 70, 96, 135, 168 French 41, 46, 168 Revolutionary action 44, 52 Science 1–7, 15, 16, 21, 22, 38, 39, 44, 48, 58, 60, 62–64, 68–70, 72–75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 97, 103, 133, 136, 139, 141, 148, 152, 158–161, 163, 164, 166–172, 178, 186, 189 Natural sciences 1, 3, 5, 6, 63, 70, 77, 79, 80, 103, 136, 152, 158–160, 166–172 social 6, 7, 13, 15–19, 21, 29, 32, 35, 37, 43, 44, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 96–98, 100–103, 106, 116, 118, 120, 121, 141, 142, 148, 150, 152, 160, 161, 166, 171, 174–176, 183, 185, 186, 189–191 Constructed 19, 21, 57, 83 Evolution 54, 60, 61, 98, 121 Forms 2, 3, 44, 50, 52, 84, 89–91, 101, 102, 127, 128, 190 Life 37, 43, 53, 84, 85, 87, 90 Reality 17, 35, 43, 71, 77, 82, 88, 103, 124, 126, 141 Relationships 39, 49, 128 Socialism 41, 46, 56, 123, 124–132, 137, 138, 176 Socialization 13, 72, 76, 77, 81–86, 111, 191 Structure 44, 52, 71, 83, 130, 136 Sociology 5–7, 10, 12, 15–19, 21, 32, 35, 37, 43, 55, 57, 61, 63, 71–82, 108, 112, 119, 125, 133, 135, 139, 143, 148, 151, 152, 160, 164, 167, 170, 171, 174, 178–180, 190, 191 Of religion 55, 69, 87, 93, 121, 183 Socrates 30, 32, 34, 62, 70, 143, 144, 147, 149, 155, 177 Solidarity 51, 76, 98, 99, 125, 128, 135 Spencer, Herbert 43, 44, 49, 76, 170 Stranger 18, 19, 83, 97, 99–101, 103, 123 Style 41, 50, 146, 148, 157, 158, 183, 185, 186

index201 Truth 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 21–35, 64, 113, 118, 139, 140, 144–149, 153, 161, 165, 172, 177–180, 187, 190, 191 Utopia 4, 35, 99, 100, 132

Measure of 113 Objective 112, 117 Ultimate 59 Verstehen 6–14, 16, 17, 139, 152, 171 Vitalism 25

Value 12, 24, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 39, 44, 54, 56, 59–63, 83, 100, 122–127, 129, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 165, 169, 171, 172, 177, 189, 190 Attributing 61, 105, 108 Construction/creating of 102, 114 Material 120

Weber, Alfred 101 Weber, Max 5–7, 14–17, 19, 20, 51, 52, 55, 56, 69, 74, 76, 89, 93, 103, 121, 132, 135, 137, 139–142, 145, 163, 167, 176, 177, 181, 183, 186 Wechselwirkungen 9, 171