Bringing The Social Alive

TURUN YLIOPISTON JULKAISUJA ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS TURKUENSIS
SARJA - SER. B OSA - TOM. 316 HUMANIORA
Bringing the Social Alive Essays on Georg Simmels Social Theory
by Olli Pyyhtinen
ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the assent of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Turku, for public examination in the Pub3 Lecture Hall, Publicum, on February 13th, 2009, at 12 oclock noon.
TURUN YLIOPISTO Turku 2008
From the Department of Sociology Faculty of Social Sciences University of Turku Turku, Finland Supervised by Professor Seppo Pntinen Department of Sociology University of Turku Turku, Finland and Dr. Docent Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland Reviewed by Professor David Frisby Sociology and the Cities Programme London School of Economics London, Great Britain and Dr. Gregor Fitzi Department of Philosophy University of Florence Florence, Italy
Graphic design & layout: Kalle Pyyhtinen
ISBN 978-951-29-3721-9 (PRINT) ISBN 978-951-29-3722-6 (PDF) ISSN 0082-6987 Tampereen Yliopistopaino Oy Juvenes Print, Tampere, Finland 2008
Contents
Key to abbreviations: references to Simmels texts Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Simmel Life and Work 2. Relativism, the Plumb Line, and Life 3. Event Dynamics 4. Being-with 5. Back to the Things Themselves 6. Ambiguous Individuality 7. On Simmels Conception of Philosophy Conclusion: Social Theory After the End of the Social? Notes Bibliography Appendix: abstracts of original articles
6 13 16 48 69 93 111 129 144 166 186 194 221 246
Key to abbreviations: references to Simmels texts

AuSbst Anfang einer unvollendeten Selbstdarstellung (1993), pp. 910 in Kurt Gassen & Michael Landmann (eds.) Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel. Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibiliographie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Briefe 18801911 (2005). Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 22. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Briefe 19121918; Jugendbriefe. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 23. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brcke und Tr ([1909] 2001), pp. 5561 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The Conict of Modern Culture (1997), pp. 7590 & 107 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. The Concept and Tragedy of Culture (1997), pp. 5575 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. The Crisis of Culture (1997), pp. 90101 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen Grundbegriffe ([1892/93] 1991). Erster Band. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen Grundbegriffe ([1893] 1991). Zweiter Band. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe (1911). 3. Auage, Band 1. Stuttgart und Berlin: J. G. Gottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe (1911). 3. Auage, Band 2. Stuttgart und Berlin: J. G. Gottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger. Eros, Platonic and Modern (1971), pp. 235248 in Donald N. Levine (ed) Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms.
Brf I Brf II BrT CmC
CptTrC
CrC
EM1 I
EM1 II
EM3 I
EM3 II
ErPlm
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
EsncC
Fash FcLb
FoIs
FrN
GbrT
Gft
GFSOZ
GgwPPh
GoeIs
Grst
Hfor
Selected Writings. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. On the Essence of Culture (1997), pp. 4045 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Fashion (1957). The American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541558. Der Fragmentcharacter des Lebens. Aus dem Vorstudien zu einer Metaphysik ([1916/17] 2000), pp. 202216 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die beiden Formen des Individualismus ([1901] 1995), pp. 4956 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine moralphislosophische Silhouette ([1896] 1992), pp. 115129 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [A review of:] G. Tarde. Les lois de limitation ([1891] 2000), pp. 248250 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Gesellschaft zu zweien ([1908] 1992), pp. 348354 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Grundfragen der Soziologie ([1917] 1999), pp. 59149 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 16. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ber einige gegenwrtige Probleme der Philosophie ([1912] 2001), pp. 381387 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Goethes Individualismus ([1912] 2001), pp. 388416 in Georg Simmel Gestamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Grostdte und das Geistesleben ([1903] 1995), pp. 116131 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die historische Formung ([1918] 2000), pp. 321369 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13. Frankfurt am
BRINGING THE SOCIAL ALIVE
HPH
HriBgs HSctP IGz
Is
KA KAGOE KaGoe
KMK
KrK
LBA
MethSocW
MetT
NlMMe
Main: Suhrkamp. Hauptprobleme der Philosophie ([1910] 1996), pp. 7157 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 14. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Henri Bergson ([1914] 2000), pp. 5369 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. How is Society possible? (1910) Trans. A. Small. American Journal of Sociology 16(3): 372391. Das individuelle Gesetz ([1913] 2001), pp. 417470 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Individualismus ([1917] 2000), pp. 299306 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universitt (1904). Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Kant und Goethe ([1906] 1995), pp. 119166 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 10. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kant and Goethe. On the History of the Modern Weltanschauung (2007). Trans. Josef Bleicher. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(6): 159191. Der Konikt der modernen Kultur ([1918] 1999), pp. 181207 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 16. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Krisis der Kultur ([1916] 2000), pp. 190201 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lebensanschauung ([1918] 1999), pp. 209425 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 16. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Zur Methodik der Socialwissenschaft ([1896] 2000), pp. 363377 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Zur Metaphysik des Todes ([1910/11] 2001), pp. 8196 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Aus der nachgelanen Mappe Metaphysik ([1928] 2004),
NlPlmEr
NlTb
NMl
PGPH
PGPH2
PHG PHK
PhMod PM
PrF ProbSoc PSoc
PSs
pp. 297301 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 20. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Der Platonischer und der Moderne Eros ([1923] 2004), pp. 176191 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 20. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Aus dem Nachgelassene Tagebuche (2004), pp. 261296 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 20. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nietzsches Moral ([1911] 2001), pp. 170176 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie ([1892] 1989), pp. 297 421 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheorethische Studie (1922). 4. Auage. Mnchen und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Philosophie des Geldes ([1900] 1989). Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 6. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Philosophische Kultur ([1911] 1996), pp. 159459 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 14. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Philosophie der Mode ([1905] 1995), pp. 737 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 10. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The Philosophy of Money (2004). Third enlarged edition, trans. David Frisby and Tom Bottomore. London and New York: Routledge. The Problem of Fate (2007), trans. Ulrich Teucher & Thomas M. Kemple. Theory Culture & Society 24(78): 7884. The Problem of Sociology (1909), trans. A. Small. American Journal of Sociology 15(3): 289320. Das Problem der Sociologie ([1894] 1992), pp. 5261 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Das Problem des Schicksals ([1913] 2001), pp. 483491 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
PSt
PSty PsyKok
RB RBEngl
RbErz
REL SbstGr
SD
SHN
SHNEngl
SocCon SocMl
SocSblt
Das Problem des Stiles 8 ([1908] 1993), pp. 374384 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The Problem of Style (1991), trans. Mark Ritter. Theory, Culture & Society 8(3): 6371. Psychologie der Koketterie ([1909] 2001), pp. 3750 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rembrandt ([1916] 2003), pp. 305515 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 15. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rembrandt. An essay in the philosophy of art (2005), trans. Alan Scott and Helmut Staubmann. New York and London: Routledge. Rembrandt als Erzieher ([1890] 2000), pp. 232243 in Georg Simmel Gestamtausgabe Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Religion ([1912] 1995), pp. 39118 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 10. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Die Selbsterhaltung der socialen Gruppe ([1898] 1992), pp. 311372 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ber sociale Differenzierung ([1890] 1989), pp. 109295 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schopenhauer und Nietzsche ([1907] 1995), pp. 167408 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 10. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1991), trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein & Michael Weinstein. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Sociology of Conict I (1904), trans. Albion Small. American Journal of Sociology 9(4): 490525. Sociology of the Meal (1997), pp. 130135 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. The Sociology of Sociability (1997), pp. 120130 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected
SocSns
SOZ SozAe
SozGskt
SozMzt
SozRaum
SozSi
StfGe
TrnscCL
VstN
WSM
WSHV
Writings. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Sciology of the Senses (1997), pp. 109120 in David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Soziologie ([1908] 1992). Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soziologische Aesthetik ([1896] 1992), pp. 197214 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soziologie der Geselligkeit ([1910] 2001), pp. 177193 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soziologie der Mahlzeit ([1910] 2001), pp. 140147 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe band 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soziologie des Raumes ([1903] 1995), pp. 132183 in Georg Simmel Gestamtausgabe Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soziologie der Sinne ([1907] 1993), pp. 276292 in Georg Simmel Gestamtausgabe Band 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stefan George. Eine kunstphilosophische Studie ([1901] 1995), pp. 3642 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The Transcendent Character of Life (1971), pp. 353374 in Donald N. Levine (ed) Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Zur Verstndnis Nietzsches ([1902] 1995), pp. 5763 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant's Physischer Monadologie ([1881] 2000), pp. 941 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens ([1918] 1999), pp. 151 179 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 16. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
WsK
Vom Wesen der Kultur ([1908] 1993), pp. 363373 in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Acknowledgements
Perhaps even more than being an act of invention, thinking is an act of reception. The one who thinks has received everything; the voice of the tradition and that of the master always already precede ones own, and friendship is a condition of possibility of the exercise of thought itself. Hence, it is not surprising that thinking and thanking have in fact the same etymological root. Indeed, every now and then, there comes a moment when, in return, one must pay with words the gifts received, hoping that a simple thank you will pass for all the invaluable help and kindness. And now that the work is done, now that all there is to say has been said, and meals and feasts at the table dhte of concepts have been nished I nd myself in that impossible yet privileged and pleasant position to utter thank you. My research was funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Turku University Foundation. I thank them for enabling the dissertation nancially. As far as individual persons are concerned, I would rst like to express my gratitude to my two supervisors. I thank Seppo Pntinen for his condence in me as well as for exercising his right to remain unconvinced and require more information when reading the manuscript. To Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen I am extremely grateful for the vast trouble he has taken reading and commenting my various drafts. Besides, I can honestly say that the many discussions weve had have had an enormous impact on the development of my taste for problems and concepts. Turo-Kimmo is also the co-author of one of the essays (On Simmels Conception of Philosophy) included in this book. I thank him for giving me his permission to incorporate the piece into the thesis. I am equally thankful to my examiners David Frisby and Gregor Fitzi for their input and insightful comments at the fairly late stage of the work. Harri Melin, Hannu Ruonavaara and Jukka Laari, in turn, are to be thanked for reading the sections that make up the summary of the thesis. Your sharp observations helped to improve the text. For collegial friendship I wish to give thanks to our petite and ever cosy Foucault circle (perhaps this is nally the place to tell you that Simmel, as it happens, notes that many secret societies have in fact consisted of groups of ve!). Other colleagues at the Department of Sociology, the University of Turku, deserve to be thanked especially for providing a rewarding working environment. Working with you has given a communal sense to frhliche Wissenschaft! In addition, a thank you to all the people at Eetos is in place. I
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feel remarkably fortunate for having had the opportunity to get to meet such wonderful people who, literally, share the same kind of ethos and an equal passion for matters of thought. As for friends, there are just too many to mention each and everyone by name. However, those who particularly should be acknowledged include Jutta Ahlbeck-Rehn, Sami Alln, Mikko Joronen, Liisa Kinnear, Jukka Laitinen, Jussi Parikka & Milla Tiainen, Michael Szurawitzki, Sakari Tamminen, Jarkko S. Tuusvuori, Jukka Vuorinen, as well as Pasi Vliaho & Matleena Kalajoki. Thanks also to Jason Grice for proof reading the summary of the work. Throughout my life, my parents Paula and Seppo have given me their unconditional support in whatever I have ever engaged myself in. Thank you, that is something which I will always cherish. I also truly value the special bond that I have come to form with my brother Kalle. Thanks to him, I have learned to realize that, ultimately, creative work is not that different whether one works in the world of concepts or in that of images and sounds. Kalle is also to be thanked for his superb work with the layout of this book. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my lovely wife Anu, who has stood by me and patiently put up with Simmel as a third over these years. I love you and am deeply grateful for the sheer fact that you exist. * * * Technically, the dissertation at hand is an article-based work. The introduction together with the rst and second essay as well as with the conclusion make up some kind of summary to the articles which introduces their shared topic and sums up their main points. Furthermore, one of the essays, essay no. 7, On Simmels Conception of Philosophy, is a joint publication in which the contribution of each of the two authors is 50%. The original articles have been or are about to be published as follows:
no. 3 Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel. Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2007, no. 15: 111132. Reprinted by permission of Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. Copyright 2007. no. 4 Being-with: Simmel on Dyadic and Triadic Relations. The nal, denitive version of this paper will be published in Theory, Culture & Society by Sage Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Theory, Culture & Society Ltd, 2008. It will be available at: http://online. sagepub.com/
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
no. 5 Back to The Things Themselves: On Simmelian Objects. In Geoff Cooper, Andy King & Ruth Rettie (eds) Sociological Objects: The Reconguration of Social Theory. London: Ashgate (accepted for publication). The essay appears here by permission of the Publishers from Back to The Things Themselves: On Simmelian Objects, in, Sociological Objects: The Reconguration of Social Theory, ed. Geoff Cooper, Andy King & Ruth Rettie (Aldershot etc.: Ashgate, 2008). Copyright 2008. no. 6 Ambiguous Individuality: Georg Simmel on the Who and the What of the Individual. Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 31(3): 279298. Printed with kind permission from Springer+Business Media: Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Copyright 2008. no. 7 On Simmels Conception of Philosophy [co-authored with Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen]. Continental Philosophy Review 41(3): 301322. Printed with kind permission from Springer+Business Media: Continental Philosophy Review. Copyright 2008.
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Introduction
The dissertation at hand addresses the work of Georg Simmel (18581918). Simmels oeuvre covers various elds from philosophy to psychology and aesthetics, but it is above all as one of the founding fathers of sociology along with the names Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx that he has claimed his reputation. Yet it seems that not even in sociology Simmel has ever quite made it to the spotlight. While being a man of many renaissances (Goodstein, 2002: 209; see for example Rossi, 1958; Wolff, 1965; Christian, 1978; Schnabel, 1974: 7; 1984: 282), Simmel, to some extent, has remained somewhat of a marginal gure up to this day. Whereas the theories and key themes of Durkheim, Weber, and Marx belong to the acknowledged mainstream of sociology, Simmels work has continued to reside persistently on the fringes of the discipline. Both his unusual choice of themes (such as coquetry, sociology of senses, secrecy, the bridge and the door, the adventure, etc.) and unorthodox mode of thought (labelled more or less aptly for instance as relativist, essayistic, fragmentary and impressionistic) has tended to make Simmels output too anomalous to t the grand tradition. It is, at least partly, this double position as being at once part of the sociological canon and nevertheless escaping it in many respects that makes Simmels thinking fascinating. I would argue that the subsidiary role Simmel has had is due not only to the slightly prejudiced reception but also to the
16
INTRODUCTION
nature of his work. There is genuinely something in Simmel that cannot be assimilated if we adhere to the standard sociological categories. While a less sympathetic standpoint nds here precisely the reason why we should not bother ourselves with this odd gure in the rst place, a more sympathetic approach would suggest in contrast that we should take Simmels work seriously and, if we do so, it should force us to rethink our perspectives and concepts. Not surprisingly, this book stands in the latter camp. This study turns back to Simmel above all in order to rethink the notion of the social. My main proposition is that, by drawing on Simmel, we are able to redene the concept of the social in a way that endows it with a meaning not only more precise but also wider than the one it takes on in the common parlance of the social sciences today. Considering that the social is the sociological object par excellence, it is curious how vague and equivocal the concept has remained within the discipline. Paradoxically, it is as if the social was at the same time the most obvious and the most obscure thing, something which is both present and absent: it is constantly presupposed in sociological discourses, but it hardly ever comes under discussion as such by itself. Just to take one example, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Abercrombie, Hill & Turner, 2006), presents all in all 19 entries which include the epithet social ranging all the way from social and system integration, social change, and social closure to social reproduction, social structure, and social system yet what is curiously missing is an entry on the social itself. Of course, it is not that there would exist no agreement on the denition of the social among sociologists. On the contrary, as paradoxical as it seems, while the social remains an extremely vague concept in sociology, in time, the meaning of the term has in fact been constantly shrinking. Bruno Latour (2005: 6) has asserted that there is a clear etymological trend in the successive variations of the meaning of social. Starting with the most general denition of the social as coextensive with all associations (stemming from the Latin socius which denotes a companion, an associate, or ally), the meaning of the concept has shrunk as time has passed so that, eventually, it has come to take on a very limited meaning: it designates a distinct domain of reality i.e. society or a particular type of stuff that is assumed to differ from other kinds of materials. That is, a given phenomena is considered to be social if it, as it were, occurs within society (and either expresses, maintains, reproduces, reinforces or subverts its social order) and is not purely natural, biological, economical, linguistic, etc. (ibid.: 3).
17
The idea of society as a kind of container within which all social phenomena take place can be found, to be sure, in a paradigmatic form in Durkheim.1 Taken up later by Talcott Parsons, the midwife of modern sociology (Outhwaite, 2000),2 it has become the prevalent model of society for latterday sociologists (see Schroer, 2006: 19, 161). Indeed, most sociological notions of society share at least implicitly the idea of the nation-state as their basis (Sulkunen, 2007: 325). Recently, however, the concept of society has been seriously challenged in social theory.3 The container model of society may indeed have served well the self-understanding of nation-states in their strivings for political independence and cultural originality (Tenbruck, 1994: 82; Kangas, 2001: 304) as well as the political duties sociologists assumed for themselves as social engineers. However, as we have moved into the 21st century, the traditional boundaries, limits and classications of our world have been observed as being shifting (Featherstone & Venn, 2006: 1). An increasing number of social relationships do not obey territorial nation-state boundaries i.e. those of societies any more, but rather tend to cut across them (Gane, 2004: 23). Therefore, it has become questionable whether these container societies can be examined in isolation, not to speak of considering them as the foundation or principal site of the social relations and processes (Schroer, 2006: 161162). As Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn (2006: 3) point out, societies form a reference group knitted together through a whole wide range of exchanges and ows of information, goods, and knowledge. Accordingly, in this study, I commence from the idea that the social cannot be adequately understood under the aspect of society. And I suggest that we can make the distinction between the two concepts precisely by drawing from Simmel despite the fact that he did not distinguish between the notions of the social (das Sozial) and society (die Gesellschaft) in a consistent manner in his work, but rather used them interchangeably.4 However, importantly, Simmel employs the term society itself in two senses, broad and narrow (see SOZ 23; Spykman [1925] 2004: 32; Frisby & Sayer, 1986: 5660). Whereas the rst designates a specic socio-historical social order, the latter can be interpreted as a principle of associating or group formation: it is coextensive with relations, connections and associations. To discuss the two notions in little more detail, we could say that, understood in the broader sense, society refers in Simmel to a complex of individuals involved in relations of interaction, together with all the interests which unite them, and to their socio-historical actuality (SOZ 22). Society is
18
INTRODUCTION
a third or intermediate element between the abstract-universal and the concrete-individual (NlPlmEr 185; ErPlm 243). However, as a whole it is neither something autonomous nor absolute for Simmel. Rather, he considers society as only a name for the sum of the interactions among individuals and groups (SD 131). In fact, Simmel contends that, to a great extent, adherence to an allembracing notion of society accounts for the internal and external confusion of problems in sociology (SbstGr 311), thus hindering the development of the discipline. Therefore, Simmel thought that sociology could develop into and advance as an independent academic discipline only by abandoning the substantive and all-encompassing concept of society as a frame of reference for analysis (Frisby, 1992: 10). Dissatised with the peculiar fuzziness and uncertainty of the broad notion of society (SOZ 24), Simmel sought to redene it by giving it a more precise meaning. Hence, while everything which takes place in society (SOZ 23) may pass for a subject matter in various other social sciences, sociology, by contrast, cannot content itself with this according to Simmel. In order to qualify for a legitimate study of society, sociology must discover what in society is really society (SOZ 25; see also PSoc 57), that is, investigate the principles on which the unity of society rests. It is for this purpose that Simmel makes his famous distinction into the form and the content of society. By contents, he means, on the one hand, specic psychological contents (i.e., the motives, interests, and drives of individuals), and, on the other hand, factual contents (designating whatever may take place in society). With forms, in contrast, he refers to the types of connections between individuals. Whereas contents are not yet social, but only make its material, so to speak, forms stand for the social as such. Consequently, in the narrow sense of the term, society equals in Simmel forms of Wechselwirkung, which translates for example as reciprocal effect and interaction.5 In Soziologie, Simmel maintains that society exists whenever several individuals engage in interaction (SOZ 17; see also PSoc 54; REL 5455; MethSocW 370). There is no society without specic forms of Wechselwirkung (SOZ 2324). As Simmel writes in Philosophie des Geldes:
Society is not an absolute entity which must rst exist so that all the individual relations of its members [] can develop within its framework or be represented by it: it is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of these specic interactions. Any one of the interactions may, of course, be eliminated and society still exist, but only if a sufciently large
19
number of others remain intact. If all interaction ceases there is no longer any society. (PHG 209210; PM 175.)
In other words, Simmel suggests here that society in the broad sense of the term is not the denitive form assumed by social relations, but only their effect or nished product. Therefore the analyses of the social cannot begin with society but they should only end with it;6 nation-based societies have to be considered on the basis of a theory of the social. It is not that we should refrain from speaking of society as an entity (i.e. Finnish society). We may even talk of society as somehow acting as a whole (investing to education, health, etc.). However, it is important to understand that the expression society is merely a shorthand: society is not always already there, weighing us down. On the contrary, it is something that has to be connected, assembled through the delicate, almost invisible threads that are spun from one person to another (SozSi 292; SocSns 120). In summary, if there is no interaction there is no society.
Social theory
The suggested view on the social necessitates that we redene social theory in a more exact manner than what is typically understood with the notion in English. Referring to its two general meanings, Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knbl (2004) maintain that, at the latest from the end of 19th century onwards the notion of social theory like that of social thought signied, on the one hand, the general eld of study that later sociology reclaimed for itself, namely that of social relations and the regularities of social life.7 On the other hand, social theory has also designated a specic theoretical viewpoint on social and cultural phenomena against the premises of economics, psychology, and political thought. (Ibid.: 9.) As we can see, these two denitions do not yet make any signicant distinction between the social and society. However, the difference between the two concepts is made by the German terms Sozialtheorie (social theory) and Gesellschaftstheorie (theory of society). According to Gesa Lindemann, they represent two different levels or types of sociological theory. Sozialtheorie deals with the basic assumptions of sociological research such as the nature of social phenomena and the question of what should be the key concepts in
20
INTRODUCTION
grasping the social: society, social facts, action, interaction, communication, etc. Gesellschaftstheorie, in turn, pertains to society as a whole. Lindemann further separates these two from what she calls Theorien begrenzter Reichweiter, limited-range theories, by drawing loosely from Robert Mertons notion of middle-range theories. They are theories concerned with specic social phenomena. Unlike Sozialtheorie, they do not ask the nature of the social, but are rather conditioned by such reections. And, unlike Gesellschaftstheorie, they do not intend to cover the whole society, but explore a more limited segment of social reality. As such, the limited-range theories are nonetheless important in the development of Gesellschaftstheorie in that the latter often builds upon these theories and tries to integrate them to an overview of a specic historical society. (Lindemann, 2006: 83; 2008: 339340.) The differences between these three types of theories could be further claried by drawing on the analytical distinction Arto Noro (2007: 137139, 159160) has suggested between general theory and research theory.8 Sozialtheorie and Gesellschaftstheorie can be regarded as general theories in that they deal with problems of constitution, Sozialtheorie that of the social, and Gesellschaftstheorie that of society. Although they may make use of the results of empirical research, they are not immediately connected to or dependent on any empirical evidence. Research theories, by contrast, either get built upon the results based on some empirical data or are used precisely to interpret such results. In fact, it would be perfectly possible to term research theories what Lindemann calls limited-range theories. Yet general theory and research theory do not yet exhaust the existing types of sociological theory for Noro. To these two, he further adds a third type, Zeitdiagnose, diagnosis of the times. It seeks to answer questions such as Who are we? and What is our own time? The epochal interpretations made by the classics, such as Simmels the tragedy of culture, Webers iron cage of rationality, and Durkheims anomie, as well as some of the most salient themes in contemporary sociology, like Ulrich Becks diagnosis of risk society, the theory of reexive modernization by Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, and the notion of liquid modernity by Zygmunt Bauman can be regarded as examples of Zeitdiagnose. According to Noro, these diagnoses are not scientic theories in the sense of being empirically refutable or veriable. (Ibid.: 139153.) On the contrary, the diagnoses of the times have their own rationality, determined for instance by matters of plausibility, insight and internal coherence (Reese-Schfer, 1996; Noro, 2007: 144).
21
By drawing on this distinction between Sozialtheorie, Gesellschaftstheorie, Theorien begrenzter Reichweiter and Zeitdiagnose, in this study I address Simmels social theory as a line of thought distinct not only from his theoretical statements over society as a whole, but also from his analyses of individual social phenomena and diagnoses of modernity. The exploration focuses on how Simmel treats the constitution of the social and the fundamental presuppositions, key concepts, and basic assumptions of sociological reection.9 This is to examine, for instance, the question of the most appropriate manner of conceptualizing the social and the problems of the relation of the social and the non-social, the social and the individual, and sociology and philosophy. This narrow focus separates my approach substantially from the existing studies written in English that take Simmels social theory as their object. For example, Nicholas J. Spykman in his famous book The Social Theory of Georg Simmel ([1925] 2004), the rst monograph ever written on Simmels social theory in English, and David Frisby in Sociological Impressionism. A Reassessment of Georg Simmels Social Theory (1981) (which was the second) as well as in Simmel and Since. Essays on Georg Simmels Social Theory (1992) do not treat Simmels social theory only in the narrow sense of Sozialtheorie, but rather discuss also themes that concern his analyses of specic social phenomena, diagnoses of modern culture, and theorizations about the whole of society, such as Simmels theorizing on money, his conception of modernization as the process of increasing social differentiation and his view of the mature money economy as the prevailing structure of modern society. By taking the notion of the social instead of the territorially xed, comprehensive concept of society as a point of departure, the question of the emergence of social order, for instance, presents itself in a completely different fashion: it is no more a question of normative integration but becomes a question of the stabilization of dynamic interaction into permanent and autonomous forms and of the development of specic organs which are not yet necessary for a group smaller in size. To give an example, in his review of the legal philosopher Rudolf Stammlers Recht und Wirtschaft, entitled Zur Methodik der Socialwissenschaft [1896],10 Simmel criticizes Stammlers view of society as the co-existence of human beings regulated by external norms.11 Simmel claims against Stammler that normative regulation is secondary to the principle of societalization (Vergesellschaftung), merely its parallel phenomenon (Nebenerscheinung); it is hardly the core or the essence of society but only its product or at most co-producer (Mitproduzent) (MethSocW 368369,
22
INTRODUCTION
371). Normative regulation can be a condition for the continuing existence of already present society, not for the very emergence of society, which we can in Simmels view grasp only by examining interaction between individuals (MethSocW 370). In other words, normative principles have to be societalized (vergesellschaftet) rst in order to be able to structure society. For Simmel, they cannot be the formative condition for the emergence or possibility of society, but only reciprocal effect or interaction can. In Philosophie des Geldes, he insists that [t]he starting point of all social formations can only be the interaction between person to person (PHG 208). It is interaction which creates an inner bond between individuals (PHG 209; PM 175). Yet, still further conceptual distinction is required in order to delineate social theory. Simmels social theory is not only distinct from his theory of society, diagnoses of modernity, and analyses of specic social phenomena but, to be exact, it must also be distinguished from sociological theory. Namely, his theorizing about the social is rarely only sociological but, more often than not, it has a philosophical dimension as well. That is, even though Simmel distinguished between sociology and philosophy on a more programmatic level, in his analyses of concrete phenomena and the examination of the basic assumptions of sociology the distinction is often vague, if not completely absent. In Philosophie des Geldes, for example, Simmel not only presents a sociological analysis of the functioning and effects of money in modern society, but equally formulates a philosophical theory of value, outlines a theory of relativism and ultimately aims at erecting even something of a comprehensive metaphysical worldview. Albert Salomon, a student of Simmels, is thus right in stating that Simmels sociological studies[] were never separated from his philosophical concerns. He became a philosopher sociologist, one and indivisible. (Salomon, 1995: 363.) In a similar vein, David Frisby (1981: 23) notes that the absence of a rigid separation between sociology and philosophy would indicate that [Simmels] ostensibly philosophical works might have great relevance for [his] sociology. Furthermore, Antonius M. Bevers (1985: 21) has argued that, Who does not pay attention to Simmels philosophy easily ends up in a onesided account on form-sociology: it appears as purely ahistorical and evinces no unity. Accordingly, I contend that we cannot even begin to understand Simmels social theory adequately unless we take into account Simmels philosophy as well. For instance, the division Simmel made into social form and content in his sociology is to be understood against a (neo-)Kantian
23
background. Likewise, the key concept of Simmels sociology, Wechselwirkung, and his main sociological theme, Vergesellschaftung or societalization, bear interesting afnity with his philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie, Philosophie des Lebens) and its perspective of enlivening (Verlebendigung).12 Simmels plead for a processualist approach on the social can be understood within the context of the German tradition of Lebensphilosophie that poses the question of life (Leben) as its main problem, as we shall see later on. It is crucial to note, however, that Simmels social theory is anything but a systematic framework or a coherent, fully-edged theory about the social. One cannot nd any clearly dened and highly elaborated theory of the social in Simmels texts that he himself might have explicitly subscribed to.13 On the contrary, what I call Simmels social theory and try to reconstruct in the present study is rather a set of various theoretical reections to be drawn from diverse sources. It has to be assembled by following a messy network of concepts, theory fragments, and perspectives dispersed throughout Simmels oeuvre. It is based on concepts which usually do not allow for any unambiguous interpretation; as a result of the fact that he does not always use concepts in a strictly technical manner, more often than not, Simmel may use one concept such as that of form in various and fairly inconsistent ways, and he may also employ various terms to designate approximately one and the same thing.14 Moreover, the theory fragments which prove fruitful range from those which address the social explicitly to those which, in the face of it, hardly speak of the social at all but of other matters. And nally, Simmels social theory has to be drawn from perspectives which may overlap but which are irreducible to one another, such as those of sociology and philosophy. I am fully aware that this is bound to make the undertaking controversial. So, what unies these varying theorizations under the rubric of social theory in spite of their remarkably diverse objects, themes and perspectives then? To put it simply: a certain mode of thought, a method of approach, or a form of questioning. What the various reections have in common could be termed, crudely, with the expression sociological culture as analogous to what Simmel himself called philosophical culture. Namely, in the introduction to the compilation of essays Philosophische Kultur published in 1911, Simmel maintains that what different philosophical schools and doctrines have in common is not, or at least not solely, their content, object of study, nor certain dogmas or results. What is rather more decisive is the fact of sharing a specic spiritual attitude to the world and life, a functional form and manner
24
INTRODUCTION
of picking things and treating them innerly. (PHK 162.) Hence, Simmel is using the word culture in a very specic sense here, as referring to attitudes and to ways of thinking and doing things. At the outset, a philosophical culture is not built upon a system of dogmas or specic theories, but is to be found in the thoroughly spiritual relation with everything that exists expressed in heterogeneous individual variants (PHK 165).15 As regards its contents, philosophy might as well evermore equate to dispute but, as for their form, the competing philosophical stands nd beyond their disagreement a unity in the movement of thought, in the process of doing philosophy. The conicts between them have to do only with the dogmatic crystallization of arguments they do not yet appear within the movement of philosophical life itself (PHK 164). That movement is manifested well in the effort of philosophy to think without presuppositions (HPH 13; PHG 9): it is not reasonable to expect nal answers from philosophy since, as it constantly strives to overcome the presuppositions of thinking, it remains in process. As regards Simmels social theory, I think it is possible to outline something of a sociological culture his theorizations contribute to. And this is past Simmels specications of the three different sociological approaches to the problem of the relation between the individual and society16 in Grundfragen der Soziologie, which Gregor Fitzi (2002: 294295) has interpreted as sketching the sociological culture of Simmels day. The rst of them is general sociology, which studies the societally formed historical life and the problem of the relation between the individual and the social level (Niveauproblem), the social being understood here as referring to the collective behaviour of a group or a mass (GFSOZ 82, see also 7980).17 The second one is pure sociology the sociology for Simmel which he dened as the study of the social as such as it is actualized in the forms of interaction between individuals (GFSOZ 82). The third type is philosophical sociology which, reminiscent of how Simmel denes philosophy in the preface to Philosophie des Geldes, as we shall later see, is located both below the lower boundary and beyond the upper boundary of sociology as an exact science. Whereas the rst equals something like the epistemology of sociology, the latter equals the metaphysics of sociology respectively. (GFSOZ 8485.) While presenting three distinct perspectives on the social world, what these different sociologies nonetheless have in common for Simmel is a similar concern with the individual versus society problem. It is that shared preoccupation which makes them elements of the same sociological culture.
25
I commence from the view that besides the sociological culture of these three sociologies, it is possible to delineate also the sociological culture which Simmels own theorizations about the social contribute to. This is what the present study aims at reconstructing. It seeks to examine the manner in which Simmels texts deal with the conditions and basic assumptions of sociological reection: the problem of the constitution of the social, the manner of approaching and conceptualizing the social, the relation of the social and the non-social, the social and the individual, as well as the sociological and philosophical. Simmel does not regard the social as a safe and self-evident property, but questions it to its very nature. Hence, sociological culture is being understood here in a very narrow and specic sense: it does not refer to a sociological conception or reections of culture (i.e. sociology of culture or cultural sociology) any more than to the characteristics of sociology as a discipline (i.e. the culture of sociologists), but designates an attitude, a custom, a convention, and a practice of thinking and doing things theorizing the social.
On interpreting Simmel
What is peculiar to the relation of sociology to its classics compared to, say, how the natural sciences perceive theirs is that sociologists do not show merely an antiquarian interest in their classical predecessors. This is to say that the same kind of genre of classics that exists in sociology is missing from the natural sciences today (Alexander, 1989: 9). It would be extremely hard to nd a contemporary work in physics that would take pains to argue for the yet undiscovered elements or the continuing vigour of the work of Galileo, for instance. Names like Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, or Einstein make appearance at most in the text books on the natural sciences, hardly in natural scientic studies themselves anymore. In sociology, by contrast, the classical authors are still widely studied and cited, and it is not uncommon for scholars to identify their approach as being Marxist, Simmelian, Durkheimian, and so on (Connell, 1997: 1512). It is no less common to see the actuality of these authors defended in a paper or monograph.18 This is because sociologists not of course all but many do think that their classical predecessors still have something relevant to say sociologically. Besides providing a basis for the mutual understanding for sociological
26
INTRODUCTION
discussion in the form of building blocks and key coordinates for the selfidentication of sociology (Ksler, 1976: 16; Alexander, 1989: 2728),19 the classics are seen as examples or norms of how to sociologize properly. Their work is given a privileged status vis--vis contemporary explorations as it embodies the fundamental criteria within the discipline (Alexander, 1989: 9). In other words, it is considered that the classics works continue to stand as inspiring models of scientic endeavour, providing sharp insights into scientic problems still under consideration, as Peter H. Rossi (1958: 579) noted of Durkheim and Simmel some fty years ago. To a great extent, we have received our problems and the ways of framing them from the classics. Therefore, the questions of demarcation as to what kind of discourse counts as sociological theory, what theoretical language sociologists are to speak in, and what problems are most worth speaking about or are accepted altogether as sociological problems are still reected to a large part in relation to the classics (Connell, 1997: 1512). Of course not all practitioners of sociology readily accept the centrality of the classics within the discipline. On the contrary, some scholars, especially those with a more or less positivist conviction, would indeed be happy to see the whole issue of the classics bygone (see for example Black, 2000).20 To them, it is incomprehensible why a discipline oriented to empirical study and to the accumulation of knowledge should concern itself with past thinkers (Alexander, 1989: 8). After all, a great many of the classics theories either cannot be empirically veried or have been proven to be empirically untenable. Accordingly, quite many positivists might subscribe to the famous idea formulated by Alfred North Whitehead ([1917] 1974: 115) which Robert Merton quotes almost as famously in the beginning of his Social Theory and Social Structure stating: A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. Among others, Weber maintained something of the kind when writing in Science as a Vocation (1989) that: Scientic work is harnessed to the course of progress. [] each of us scientists knows that what one has worked through will be out of date in ten, twenty, or fty years. That is the fate of science []. Every scientic fullment [] asks to be surpassed and made obsolete. (Weber, 1989: 12.) Whereas in Webers time and up till the rst decades of the 20th century, scientic research was still modelled largely in terms of progression, since that this way of thinking has been questioned. It was above all Karl Popper (1969) who, placing falsication at the centre of scientic activity, professed that scientic research is not a matter of organic accumulation of
27
knowledge but of constant trialling and questioning of hypotheses: by way of observations, we have to call our theoretical assumptions into question rather than seeking to verify them. Although it is questionable whether the criterion of falsication provides the best principle to grasp the history of scientic revolutions any more than the best ideal for scientic research practices (Kuhn, 1962), it nevertheless points to an important matter. Namely, besides having the production of positive knowledge (i.e. facts) as its task, scientic research is also about questioning the way we see things and the assumptions we have about the world. And, interestingly, when it comes to sociological assumptions, studying the work of the classics is one way of exploring their foundation and preconditions. Sociologists keep returning to the works of their classical predecessors in the hope of nding new ways to think. There is indeed something unresolved in the relation of contemporary sociology to the classical tradition (Noro, 1991a: 7; 1991b: 157): unlike in the natural sciences, sociologists have not been fully able to incorporate the ndings of their classics to present knowledge (Merton, 1968: 28, 35, 38). While any rst year student of physics, as Charles Gillespie (1960: 8) has noted, knows more of physics than Galileo or Newton ever did, the sociological classics still contain important insights that have not yet been completely absorbed by sociological (or social) theory. In this sense, sociology has not progressed to the extent that the natural sciences have. Although the sociological research done and the teaching given at the university departments is much more exact and methodologically advanced than what classical sociology was like, according to the Finnish sociologist Pertti Ttt (1998: 264), this is not due to any theoretical advancement of sociology itself. On the contrary, Ttt argues that it is rather because of the strides made within other disciplines, mainly in statistical methods and the methods of historical research, that, if ever, one could describe the contemporary sociology as more advanced than its classical heritage (ibid.). Consequently, as long as the question as to how to integrate the classical authors to the overall theoretical framework of contemporary sociology remains open and unresolved, it is evermore relevant to go back to them and study their works.21 However, it is not only positivists who have opposed mixing the interpretation of the classics with the concerns of contemporary sociological research; also the so called historicists have done that. The historicist point of
28
INTRODUCTION
view proposes that the classics should be interpreted in historical terms, that is, within their historical context and as they appeared to their contemporaries. (Alexander, 1989: 89.) The historicist reading attempts to understand the classics of sociology in their own terms and their own right (Baehr, 2002: 100). This argument was launched above all against the so called presentist manner of interpreting the classics in a debate that sparked off in the 1970s. Presentism, as already the term suggests, claims that classical authors should be interpreted from a present-day perspective. It considers the historical context of the classics as far less important than the commonality they share with us (ibid.: 9697).22 So, whereas historicism tries to reconstruct the historical context of past authors, drawing attention to their predecessors and contemporaries, and to the discussions which their problems stem from and relate to, presentists read the classics as if as our contemporaries; presentists nd the contributions of classics still relevant to us in a sociological and not only in a historical sense.23 That is also to say that presentists see the interpretation of the classics as an integral part of social scientic research. Instead of producing what for them seem nothing but sterile exegeses and gestures of reverent reminiscence, presentists see that sociologists should rather try to benet the development of sociological theory with their studies on the classics (Merton, 1968: 30). Accordingly, presentists use the conceptualizations, themes and theories formulated by the classics for their own purposes, project their own problems on them, and try to understand the contemporary world we live in with the help of them. In short, presentists use the classical formulations as tools to understand our own society and its phenomena: they try to make the classics speak to us as if as our own contemporaries, in our own discourse and its concepts, within the frames our own problems, and serving our own research interests (Ttt, 1998: 270; Baehr, 2002: 97). For the presentists, the classics serve as a kind of tool box.24 In addition, a classical author may also serve as a guide cultivating our taste for problems. This could be termed as the educational function of the classics. Contemporary sociologists may learn discernment from their classical forerunners in setting research problems, for instance: in discovering yet undiscovered aspects of phenomena, in choosing the relevant aspects out of the variety of details of phenomena, in questioning self-evidences, etc. This way, reading our precursors may even teach us how to think otherwise. It is not surprising that a distinction between presentist and historicist lines of interpretation can be found also in the secondary literature on Simmel.
29
What is perhaps more surprising is that the two main linguistic traditions in interpreting Simmel can be distinguished from one another in accordance with this distinction. In his doctoral thesis Die soziologische Gesamtkonzeption Georg Simmels (1974), Peter-Ernst Schnabel shows how the reception of Simmels work has typically been divided into two separate traditions: the AngloAmerican and the German. According to Schnabel, the Anglo-American tradition has, from the outset, centred characteristically on the operationability of Simmels theses and on his miniature theories of particular segments of social reality, such as the theory of small groups, conict theory, theory of super- and subordination, etc. At the time Schnabel wrote his thesis, only the most recent reception had begun to pay attention to the presuppositions of Simmels work. (Schnabel, 1974: 40, 148.) Within the German tradition, the exact opposite holds. According to Schnabel, it was only very recently that the German interpretations of Simmels work had begun to use his ideas as theoretical tools. On the contrary, the German reception has been typically characterized by a more philological or historicist approach. (Ibid.: 148.) It has focused on placing Simmels work within the context of the time it was written rather than on the usability of his theses, and also the epistemological and philosophical premises of Simmels thought have been given considerable emphasis. Karin Schrader-Klebert (1968), for instance, has worked on the transcendental foundation of Simmels sociology, and later Andreas Ziemann (2000) has studied the epistemological and topographical implications of Simmels sociology. Overall, Klaus Christian Khnke has made a considerable contribution by exploring Simmels fairly poorly known early work and its key inuences in Der Junge Simmel (1996). More often than not, the historical and systematic study of the premises of Simmels thought has taken the form of specifying his relation to his eminent predecessors and contemporaries, and this holds not only for the German interpretations but to certain recent Anglo-American commentaries as well, thus mixing up the linguistic division into different approaches. Heinrich Levy (1927), Petra Christian (1978), and Ole Goos (2004), for instance, have examined the Hegelian features of Simmels work, Klaus Lichtblau (1984) Simmels Nietzsche reception, Johannes Schwerdtfeger (1995) and Gregor Fitzi (2002) Simmels relation to Bergson, Gary Backhaus (1998; 2003a; 2003b) Simmels afnities with Husserl and phenomenology, whereas Michael Groheim (1991), Hans-Jrgen Gawoll (1993), and J.E. Jalbert (2003) have studied the relation of Simmel and Heidegger, and Christian Papilloud
30
INTRODUCTION
(2002a; 2002b; 2004) has compared Simmels notion of the gift and theory of relations with that of Marcel Mauss. Especially in the Anglo-American discourses, Simmel is nowadays appreciated rst and foremost as a theorist of modernity. A key gure behind this paradigm has no doubt been David Frisby (see for example 1981; 1984a&b; 1985; 1988; 1992; 2001).25 Also, in the 90s, at the highpoint of the discussion on postmodernism, some authors were keen to see Simmel anticipating certain aspects of postmodernity in his work (see Weinstein & Weinstein, 1993), but since that this discussion has waned almost completely. In the past few decades, scholars have also emphasized Simmels relevance to such themes as gender,26 sociology of space,27 time,28 material culture,29 nature,30 and trust.31 Whereas Simmels relevance for various particular themes has been widely argued for in the secondary literature,32 attempts to present an overall interpretation of his sociological or philosophical work, let alone his whole oeuvre are oddities in the secondary literature. One reason for their absence has perhaps been the scant availability of Simmels works, and not only due to the relative scarcity of translations. Also for those who read German all of his works have not been accessible, since many of Simmels pieces were originally published in journals and periodicals that have been fairly hard to nd. Recently, however, things have become a lot better as the publication of the 24 volume Gesamtausgabe series of Simmels works is nearly complete.33 As for the overall interpretations of Simmels sociology, Schnabels (1974) doctoral dissertation is perhaps the most impressive among them. At least equally comprehensive in its scope is Heinz-Jrgen Dahmes thesis Soziologie als exakte Wissenschaft. Georg Simmels Ansatz und seine Bedeutung in der gegenwrtigen Soziologie (1981) published in two parts, the rst dealing with Simmels reception, and the second with the foundation of his sociology. Of other interpretations that strive for an overall hold of Simmels sociology deserve to be mentioned at least La Sociologie de Georg Simmel (2001) by Frdric Vandenberghe and Heribert J. Bechers Georg Simmel Die Grundlagen seiner Soziologie (1971). In the book, Becher puts forth an interpretation of Wechselwirkung as the key notion of Simmels work, a view that has since become common in the secondary literature.34 While Simmels sociology has become relatively widely known over the years, to some extent, Simmels philosophy still remains to be found. Up to this day, Alfred Mamelets Le Relativisme Philosophique chez Georg Simmel, published in 1914, and Rudoph H. Weingartners doctoral thesis Experience and Culture (1960) stand as the only two comprehensive works on Simmels
31
philosophy, and Bevers doctoral thesis Dynamik der Formen bei Georg Simmel. Eine Studie ber die methodische und theoretische Einheit eines Gesamtwerkes (1985) and Franois Lgers La pense de Georg Simmel (1989) are the only ones that aim at an overall interpretation of Simmels whole oeuvre. Bevers seeks the methodological and theoretical unity of Simmels epistemology, sociology, and philosophy of life through two themes: the form/content distinction and the principle of reciprocal effect.35 In Simmels epistemology, Bevers argues, the distinction between form and content appears as a logical principle (a priori forms of knowledge), in his sociology as a methodical principle (forms of societalization), and in the philosophy of culture/life as a metaphysical principle (the contrast of life and form). The principle of reciprocal effect, in turn, manifests itself in the form of epistemological relationism in Simmels epistemology as the relative character of knowledge and truth, in his sociology in the form of sociological relationism as the functional character of social reality, and in his philosophy of culture/life as the dialectical character of life and cultural process in the form of metaphysical relationism. (Bevers, 1985: 2425.) Even though Bevers book admittedly does take an important step towards a comprehensive understanding of Simmels work, it is far from being all-embracing. Simmels theorizing upon individuality, his theory of value, the aesthetic aspect of his work, and his style, for instance, are almost completely absent from it. Lger (1989), by contrast, takes up these issues in his study. He treats various aspects of Simmels work, from relativism to essayism, philosophy of money to philosophy of art, theory of history to sociology, and interpretation of Kant to philosophy of life. Yet an explicit organizing principle that would order these aspects into a unied whole is missing. The book explicates Simmels thought well, but it remains without any forceful new interpretations. In summary, the relatively minor attention paid to Simmels philosophy is unfortunate, since, to a great extent, his sociological and philosophical thinking is intertwined. In order to come to grips with his sociology, it is therefore important to examine his philosophy as well.
The social a processualist viewpoint

My own reading of Simmel follows through a strategy which is different from both the historicist and the presentist perspective. This study does not
32
INTRODUCTION
amount to pure history of thought any more than to just using Simmels ideas as tools or stimuli in a more or less freewheeling fashion. Instead of abandoning them to historical analysis and the repetitive gestures of commentary, the themes covered are taken up primarily as questions, if not to be solved once and for all then at least to be reected on. While not scorning the signicance of exegetic work, since I think that any effort to understand our present thought and forms of being demands that we also excavate into history, in the following I nevertheless examine Simmels work above all with the purpose of trying out in which ways his insights might help us to think today. In other words, this is to use history, to look at the past from the perspective of the present.36 What, however, separates my approach from the strongest forms of presentism is that instead of just using Simmels ideas as tools or trying to operationalize his work, the following theorizing rather tries very explicitly to build on his legacy. Simmel himself has said all he is made to say: while making Simmel, as if by mutating his code into a new environment, speak about things in which I am interested myself, the concepts with which I have tried to give him a voice are nevertheless his own. In any case, the (re-)turn to Simmel is made in order to seek alternative and innovative ways of thinking the social. That is, Simmel is not approached in order to x him in a developmental series in history, to reach some Ursprung of the notion of the social, nor in order to attempt any explicit exploration of the historical lineage or trajectory of the notion. Rather, by disclosing certain yet undiscovered and non-assimilated elements in Simmels work, an effort is made to provide sociological thought with new categories and concepts to think the social. Besides taking an interest in Simmels work as such, the essays thus try to make something new out of Simmel: his ideas are put to work, his manner of posing questions is experimented, and his concepts are activated in problems that may not have exercised his mind all with the purpose of creating resonance in our own thought and era. What is at issue is, therefore, not an effort to create full correspondence with Simmels work or person, to produce an exact copy, any more than to just report what he has said. On the contrary, my way of reconstructing Simmel could perhaps be best described as sort of a conceptual portraiture. This bears resemblance to Simmels description of his manner of interpreting the philosophers he deals with, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. Simmel depicts his approach as being comparable to an artistic portrait: instead of the real totality of the object, an ideal interpretation and a meaning derived
33
from the method and the goal of presentation is produced.37 So, rather than pursuing absolute likeness, attempting a portraiture is to select, on the basis of ones interests, some leitmotivs and to place them in focus while excluding other contents. (SHN 171; SHNEngl liv.) Thereby the resulting gure does not hold for each and every detail of Simmels thought, but rather presents a new gure, a more or less one-sided image of his work. The outcome remains, as it were, a stylized Simmel against the lived reality of a real singular person. The validity of the interpretation can be evaluated at the level of discourse by comparing the stylized gure to what Simmel says and not says in his so many texts.38 My main proposition is that Simmels subversive potential as regards thinking the social is the greatest in the processualist aspects of his theorizing. It is a common Anglo-Saxon misunderstanding to see Simmel exclusively as a sociologist of form. This misconception, held by such notable scholars as Theodor Abel, Pitirim Sorokin, Leopold von Wiese and Raymond Aron, for instance, presents Simmel, as Harry Liebersohn (1984: 263) notes, as a formal sociologist who classies society into quasi botanical forms. Of course, Simmel does maintain that sociological investigation should try to encompass the whole scale of social forms from the temporary to the lasting and from the associations between two individuals to the larger groupings.39 He sees it as the task of sociology to identify social forms, order them analytically, ponder their psychological presuppositions, follow their historical development, and also outline their quantitative, temporal and/or spatial factors (SOZ 22; PSoc 5859; see also Bevers, 1985: 19). Nevertheless, Simmel is not primarily interested in attempting some taxonomy of social forms, but he puts emphasis on the dynamics of social life. The emergence, development, and dissolution of social forms are central objects of investigation in his work, as Dahme (1988: 416) argues: he aspires to grasp forms in their making, unfolding and cessation (Fitzi, 2002: 75, 263264). According to Simmel, On every day, at every hour, relations from person to person binding us together are spun, dropped, picked up again, replaced by others or woven together with them (SozSi 277; SocSns 110). It is according to Simmel characteristic of especially the social relations in the modern metropolis that they are eeting by nature, in contradistinction to the lasting relationships of traditional societies (Grst). But Simmels proposition of the dynamics of the social is not only a zeitdiagnostische claim about the nature of modern social relationships in the metropolis but, more fundamentally, also suggests a new concept of the
34
INTRODUCTION
social: for Simmel, the social is not a thing, but uid and shifting relations to be grasped in their constant unfolding. By considering the social in terms of processes and dynamic relations, Simmel, as it were, brings the social alive instead of hypostasizing it into a reied substance: the dynamic relations of reciprocity have to be the starting point for the analysis of all social forms. With its emphasis on relationality and process, Simmels theorizing bears interesting afnity with the philosophical process thinking.40 Both share not only the idea that things cannot do without processes but also the idea that processes are also more fundamental and elementary than things (this point is developed in more detail below). Or, since process philosophy concerns itself typically with the physical world,41 perhaps a better point of comparison to Simmels processualism is the mode of approach in recent social and cultural theory labelled as New Vitalism. Like Simmel, New Vitalism extends process thinking to the social and cultural sphere.42 Drawing philosophical inspiration from thinkers like Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, its main theme and proposition is the notion of process:43 it privileges process over substance and becoming over being (Fraser, Kember & Lury, 2005; Olma & Koukouzelis, 2007).44 To put it bluntly, the opposite of process thinking is substantialism. It denies processes their ontological autonomy by claiming that, in the last instance, any process can be viewed as a property or activity of things (Rescher, 1996: 4344). As regards social reality, the substantialist viewpoint ultimately reduces all processes to social substances or things. In fact, it can be argued that a great deal of sociological perspectives and notions subscribe to a more or less substantialist view of reality. Roughly speaking, in the substantialist approach, the social world is constituted either by self-subsistent actors or by structures or systems which impose their laws upon individual actors. Either way, it is relatively stable entities, whether human agents or structures, that constitute the fundamental units of inquiry. More specically, at least three different versions of substantialism in social scientic thought can be identied. Mustafa Emirbayer has discussed these in his article Manifesto for a Relational Sociology (1997). According to Emirbayer, we can think of, rst of all, certain theories of social action, such as rational-actor and norm-based models. Emirbayer argues that these are fundamentally substantialist by nature, since, in the last instance, they depict individuals as self-propelling, self-subsistent entities. The only difference is in the way they model the action of individuals: it is either that individuals
35
aspire their rational goals (rational-actor approach) or act in conformity with social norms and ideals (the model of norm-following). (Ibid.: 284.) Secondly, a quite different version of substantialism is offered by various forms of holism and structuralism, such as neo-functionalism, system theories, and many historical-comparative analyses. They posit self-subsistent societies, structures, or social systems as the primary elements of the social world. (Ibid.: 285.) A third version of substantialism in social sciences is presented according to Emirbayer by variable-based analysis; it, too, detaches elements (substances with variable attributes) from their spatiotemporal contexts, analyzing them apart from their relations with other elements within elds of mutual determination and ux (ibid.: 288). It tends to ignore the embeddedness of actors within dynamic relationships while treating them with their variable attributes as primary units of analysis and thus substances of certain kind. Emirbayer makes his case against substantialism by trying to lay out the essential features of what he calls a relational point of view. According to Emirbayer, relationalism depicts social reality in dynamic, continuous, and processual terms (ibid.: 281). It rejects any substantialized entities such as pregiven actors or structures as ultimate starting points of sociological inquiry. Instead, individuals are regarded as being inseparable from the networks of relations they are embedded in, structures as empty abstractions apart from the several elements of which they are composed, and societies as nothing but pluralities of associated individuals (ibid.: 287288). The relationalist approach dissolves both substantialized actors and substantialized structures into dynamic relations and processes. While Emirbayer mentions Simmel only briey as the classical sociologist most deeply committed to relational theorizing (ibid.: 288), I see that Simmels work is worthy of much more attention. From Simmel, we can nd all the three points made by Emirbayer: in his sociology, Simmel considers individuals as intersections of social threads, regards structures as consisting in dynamic relations and conceives of society as a manifold of individuals associated to one another. As regards sociological process analysis, it is above all Birgitta Nedelmann (1984) who has acknowledged Simmel as the classic within the eld. According to Nedelmann, there are specically two fundamental elements in Simmels thought that make it so apt for examining the dynamics of social processes. The rst is the notion of reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung) which contains processual components. The second one is
36
INTRODUCTION
his dualistic scheme of thought. For Simmel, social formations become social only through dualistic or ambivalent forces. (Ibid.: 92.) More specically, Nedelmann argues that the vitality of Simmels process analyses results from three features of his work. First of all, Simmel takes seriously the endogenously induced reciprocity of cause and effect without reducing it to subjective meanings, intentions or motivations of action. According to Nedelmann, this should make Simmels ideas useful for analyzing the self-dynamics of as divergent phenomena as the armaments race between superpowers, the escalation of violence, the loss of trust towards ofcials and institutions, and so on. Secondly, Simmel is an empirically radical process thinker. With him, processes do not remain at the level of sheer metaphors such as pendulum, circulation, and perpetuum mobile, but Simmel examines which concrete individuals with what psychological dispositions and modes of activity appear as the carriers of these metaphorical images of processes. Thirdly, and nally, Nedelmann sees that Simmel does not rely on any dogmatic schema of the nature of processes, but his analyses rather attest to an in principle openness towards most diverse empirical manifestations and forms of processes. For her, this radical openness makes Simmels process analyses exceptionally subtle and does not allow them to be placed under any simple schema of thought. (Ibid.: 110111.) It is easy to agree with Nedelmann. My approach differs from her only in terms of focus. While Nedelmann examines Simmels processualism via his concrete analyses of social processes (i.e., theorizations of specic social phenomena) the dynamics of faithfulness and love, the dynamics of cultural change, and the rhythm and tempo of social life in modernity I address Simmels process thinking most of all in relation to the question of the constitution of the social. Simmel desubstantializes the notion of the social by cosidering it in terms of the event (Geschehen). Event thinking dissolves apparently atomic, indivisible beings into dynamic and processual relations. It decentres the source of the social into relations of reciprocal effect in which every cause can become an effect and every effect a cause. The notion of event is explicated later on, but perhaps a few preliminary remarks are in place already here. I have chosen to translate Simmels term Geschehen as event despite the fact that it is normally the word Ereignis that designates event in German philosophy (as in Heidegger, for instance). For most of the time, Simmel does not use metaphysical concepts in a strictly technical manner, and therefore I see that it is justiable to translate his
37
notion of Geschehen too as event in English. However, on the face of it, Simmel seems to make an analytic distinction between Geschehen and Ereignis in the essay Das Problem des Schicksals (trans. The Problem of Fate) by distinguishing between that which merely occurs (bloes Geschehen, blo Geschehenden) and the event (Ereignis), a seemingly peripheral occurrence, which is nevertheless taken up into our own most intrinsic attunement to life and assimilated as fate (PSs 488; PrF 82). In short, within this context, Simmel understands an event (Ereignis) as a dening occurrence (Geschehen) of life. Nevertheless, when one looks at the piece more closely, one will nd out that Simmel in fact refers to this duality as the Doppeleinstellung des Geschehens (PSs 487). In addition, he also uses the term Ereignis in both of these senses, referring both to external and coincidental occurrences (bloen Ereignissen) and to the events that one considers as ones fate. Roughly speaking, an event is something that differs from a substantial thing. Whereas a thing and its properties are wholly and completely in the place that they are, an event, by contrast, does not exist wholly and completely in any given space and time but, at any given moment, only part of the event of a war or a ood, for example is taking place and occurring. This is to say that events have temporal parts; events take time, last for a certain period of time. Consequently, we could state that whereas being is the way that substances and things exist, occurring or taking place, becoming, is the mode of existing for events. However, an event is not just something that happens (Fraser, 2006: 126). On the contrary, as an ontological category, the event is connected to at least two signicant problems. The rst of them is the process/substance controversy. The being of substances or objects and their properties does not exhaust all being. Besides subjects, objects and states of affairs, it seems that we also have to talk of events, changes or processes that they undergo (Macdonald, 2005: 182). Let me take an example. We are able to grasp the miracle of two people falling in love very poorly by considering them rst at the moment when they were separate, and then at the later moment they have ultimately become a couple. This is because falling in love is an event. It is not a xed state of affairs but, as Fransesco Alberoni (1984) has termed it, a nascent, an ignition state, a process of uniting what was separate and separating what was united that Romeo and Juliet fall in love separates them from their families and unites former enemies. Thus an event like falling in love does not merely occur in space and time. Rather, as Mariam Fraser, Sarah
38
INTRODUCTION
Kember and Celia Lury (2005: 4) phrase it, time and space change according to the specicity of an event. The event makes the difference: not in space and time, but to space and time. This is connected to the second problem that the notion of event relates to: the potential or virtuality45 versus the actual problem. Virtuality is not being understood here in its common sense as referring to something less real, to an imitation of the real or to simulation (cf. virtual reality as a technologically simulated environment). In Bergsonism (1991: 96), Deleuze suggests that it is Marcel Prousts formula real without being actual, ideal without being abstract which best denes virtuality. That is, the virtual is not less real or a simulation of the real. Rather, as such it already possesses a reality. Deleuze further elaborates the notion of the virtual by distinguishing it from the possible. Whereas the possible is according to him the opposite of the real, the virtual is not opposed to the real but only to the actual. The possible is something which either will or will not be realized. The real is in the image of the possible, to which realization only adds existence. Given that events involve changes in things and their properties, an event does not merely make real something that was already there all along as a possibility, but it always contains the aspect of the new, novelty. Thus events are to be considered not in terms of a shift from the possible to the real, but from the virtual to the actual. According to Deleuze, actualization does not proceed by eliminating possibilities limited in advance, but it is always creative: the actual does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies, but the virtual must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. (Ibid.: 9697.) So, it is a whole different matter to examine Romeo and Juliet falling in love in terms of the actualization of the virtual rather than seeing it as a realization of some possibles. The rules of the latter are limitation and resemblance. In this case, Juliets falling in love with Romeo would be seen as something that was already there as a possibility; it only had to be realized by limiting other options she could have fallen for other men (or women) as well. When being considered as an event, by contrast, Juliets falling in love with Romeo does not come down to just letting one option pass into the real while repressing others. On the contrary, their falling in love is impossible love which has to create its own possibilities: it has to break families and unite enemies.46 It becomes an event which makes a difference to space and time. What all this means as regards the social is that, when conceptualized as an event, the social retains an openness to re-actualizations.47 Social forma-
39
tions are not xed things but consist in uids, so to speak. The occurrence of each relation when two people shake hands, look at one another, write letters, etc. is an event which has to create its own lines of actualization and thus also brings something new to the world. Moreover, event thinking makes an anti-reductionistic case of conceptualizing the social: it claims that this occurrence is not reducible to actors or structures. An event has primacy both over subject and substance; while some events consist in the activities of substances or substance-like subjects, all events do not: when someone breaks a window this clearly relates to a subject and appears thus as an owned event, whereas a ood, a storm, or a heat wave is subjectless and unowned. The emergence of or a change in social relationships lies somewhere between these two. While the event of the social is not completely devoid of subjects, it is not reducible to any one subject. It rather relates to the activities and passivities of many individuals. Thus, also in its social guise the event presents an ontological category that is irreducible to the subject or substance; the categories of subject and substance cannot account for the event. Attempting to restore the philosophical dimension to Simmels social theory in this dissertation, I interpret Simmels manner of perceiving the social under the aspect of the event as bearing afnity with his philosophy of life. In the essay Der Fragmentcharakter des Lebens, Simmel proposes that life could be seen as an event, a continuing and constantly shifting play of forces (FcLb 203). I claim that the shift from substantial reality to event could, in a broader framework, be understood as an instance of the process of enlivening (Verlebendigung) of thought and its object Simmel portrays in his mature work: Simmel understands social forms as instantiations of process ultimately of life, which stands for him as the emblem of a radical becoming. The apotheosis of the enlivening is Simmels philosophy of life, which shall be explicated further on, along with the notions of enlivening and life.
The social as a porous and contested concept

Notwithstanding the attempt to argue for the vitality of Simmels social theory, his work is not discussed here in order to reach a denite, commonly acceptable denition for the social. On the contrary, by drawing on the idea of porous concepts which was introduced to philosophical discussion originally in the 1940s by Friedrich Waismann (1968), I commence from the view that,
40
INTRODUCTION
in the last instance, the social can be seen as a porous concept. With porosity, Waismann refers to the open texture of concepts (ibid.: 37): he argues that most of our empirical concepts are not delimited in all possible directions (ibid.: 38). The social is one of such concepts, all the more so because it is not only an empirical but also a technical concept.48 It is not possible to dene it with absolute precision: when we use the notion is some sense, we limit it in some directions, yet there always remains other directions in which the concept is not dened.49 In ber sociale Differenzierung, even Simmel himself subscribes to such a view. He writes of the notion of society that, In general, I believe that however simple and coherent denition of society one may provide, there will always remain a borderline area which the area demarcated by our conception of society does not cover (SD 132). The porosity of the notion of the social can be illustrated by considering for instance the yawning gap between social interaction and social structure. Against the advocates of social structure, interactionists state that interaction does not merely take place in a ready-made social world but that it signicantly creates and constructs the social. The social is not always already pre-existent but it is enacted in interactions. The people who plead for social structures, in contrast, criticize interactionism by saying that interaction hardly covers all social life. Interaction does not construct the social each time anew, but something must and does exist prior to it; it takes place in a setting that precedes it. (See Latour, 1996: 231232.) It is important to note, however, that the porosity of the social is not necessarily a defect in the concept any more than does it result from a failure of sociologists in grasping the social. I would argue instead that porosity is rather a semantic characteristic of the notion of the social; it is not a negative but a positive component of the concept. Porosity does not render the social unusable as a concept. On the contrary, it is only when we ignore or deny its existence that we run into analytical problems (Gustafsson, 2001: 64). Nor does porosity paralyze sociological theory. On the contrary, one could argue that it is at least partly just because the social is a porous concept that sociological theory is ceaselessly kept in motion. If there were no gulf between interaction and structure, for instance, then sociological theory would nd itself in the rather odd situation of having tried to provide ever more rened solutions to a non-existent problem, as Bruno Latour (1996: 232) has claimed. Another way of approaching the deep-laden ambiguity of the social as a concept is to look at the prevailing disagreement as to its correct use. By
41
drawing on the notion of essentially contested concepts coined by the English philosopher W. B. Gallie (1956), Niels Albertsen and Blent Diken (2003: 1) have specied the social as an essentially contested concept. According to Albertsen and Diken, the social qualies as a contested concept, since we have one concept but multitudinous ways of describing and specifying what it is (ibid.). That is, there is no clearly denable general use [of the concept] [] which can be set up as the standard use (Gallie, 1956: 168). It is rather that each tradition of sociology species their own functions and characteristics to the term which, more often than not, also receive these specications only in relation to other ways of dening the concept. Using the concept is hence always a matter of using it against other uses and the criteria they apply to it (cf. ibid.: 171172). Paradoxically, the difculty of dening the social is connected to the fact that, for most of the time, it has been taken as being self-referential and selfexplanatory. The social appears, curiously, both as the explanandum and the explanans: the main object of investigation sociology is the study of society/ the social and the chief manner of explanation in his famous methodological maxim, Durkheim, for instance, urges sociologists to explain the social only with the social. Since it is seen as the bedrock upon which sociological theory is built, the social itself remains relatively unexplored. Consequently, the substitution of Society for God which Durkheim followed through in his study on religion has lead to the this-worldly divinization of Society: not only is society/the social treated as a sui generis reality but also as the realm taken to be of the most high (Wernick, 2000: 57). Sociology thus seems to be based upon the irreducibility of the social. Durkheim saw that any effort to explain the social with something other than the social would make our reections either psychological or metaphysical both of which he objected. As regards individual psychology, it is in Durkheims view incapable of grasping social facts, since he sees them as being independent of individuals (Durkheim, 1982: 5457; see also Fitzi, 2002: 3841). As Durkheim puts it in The Rules of Sociological Method (1982: 52), for him social facts consist of certain manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise power over him. Thus, he formulates the following rule: The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among antecedent the social facts and not among the states of individual consciousness (ibid.: 134) sociology deals with collective representations which are independent of the psychological processes of individuals.
42
INTRODUCTION
Whereas the opposition Durkheim made between sociology and psychology was perhaps, most of all, aimed at securing sociology a status as an independent science, the dissociation from metaphysics has more to do with the effort of justifying its status overall as a science. According to Durkheim, the task of sociology is not to reect on the nature of society/the social but to observe social facts scientically (ibid.: 6065). The metaphysical question of what is the social itself made of, he believes, has no place in sociology. However, by drawing on Simmels work we can see why the selfreferentiality of the social is problematic. To begin with, Simmel suggests that the conditions for the social can in fact be grasped by examining individual consciousness. The social exists only by way of individuals (EM3 II 120). In Wie ist Gesellschaft mglich? (How is society possible?), the famous excursus to the opening chapter of Soziologie, Simmel states that the unity of society [] is directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units: the consciousness of constituting with others a unity is all there is to this unity (SOZ 43). So, whereas Durkheim failed to acknowledge the problem of subjective meaning in the reconstruction of social forms by scorning it as a part of individual psychology, Simmel pays attention to it (Fitzi, 2002: 33). For Simmel, the possibility of society is based on the subjects consciousness of ones own societalization, which in turn is based on the specic empirical-psychological categories conditioning the encounter of the other as a subject. Even if this makes sociological phenomena ultimately psychological by nature, this is not to say that sociology is reducible to psychology (SOZ 3538). Simmel argues that the social cannot be grasped on the basis of atom-like individuals, since it is not as isolated that individuals make up the material of the social but only in their relations (SOZ 18, 23, 36, 43; see also Frisby, 1984a: 47, 4950). For Simmel, sociology is essentially a study of the relations between individuals, and not of the psychological processes that may have given rise to them. As regards the danger of metaphysics, I contend that a rigid separation of sociology and metaphysics is not sensible, be it only for the fact that empirical observations can never be theory free. Drawing from Jeffrey Alexander, Joas and Knbl (2004: 2526) argue that scientic thinking oscillates constantly between two extreme poles: metaphysical environment and empirical environment. Neither of these can ever be reached, the rst because science cannot be sheer metaphysics, the second because of the impossibility of theory
43
free observations. Even though observations stand near to the empirical environment, they cannot grasp reality immediately, but are bound for example to various methodological assumptions, complex or simple propositions, classications, denitions, concepts, models and general presuppositions. And, from the other way around, social theory as a theory of the constitution of the social may indeed take us to the vicinity of the metaphysical environment, but the questions it treats are never completely separate from empirical research. The claims of social theory may not always be reduced to testable hypotheses, yet it is possible to establish a dialogue between it and empirical analyses: the task of social theory is to create concepts for the uses of sociological analysis and to outline the ontological conditions of sociology. And this is what Simmel does by questioning the self-explanatory and self-evident nature of the social as a property. Instead of relying on its assumed immediate explanatory value, he addresses the issues of what and how the social is.
The structure of the work

This dissertation is a compilation of essays, most of which have either originally appeared elsewhere or are in the process of being published. Only the rst two of them appear here the rst time. Together with the introduction and the conclusion they are intended to provide some kind of summary to the other essays. Because the thesis is technically an article-based work, apart from matters of typography and layout,50 no changes have been made to the essays published or forthcoming elsewhere. Consequently, there is some overlaps and repetition between the essays due to the closeness of their topics. Naturally, these kinds of aws would have been xed were the thesis written in the form of a monograph. The purpose of the rst essay is, above all, to provide background information of Simmel to those readers who are perhaps less familiar with his work. It begins with a short biographic account of Simmels life while, however, presenting also a critical stance towards biographism in order to illuminate the specicity of my own manner of approaching Simmel. To put it simply, with biographism I refer to the tendency to interpret Simmels work in close connection with his life, a line of interpretation that has in fact been quite common in the secondary literature on Simmel over the years. The critique of biographism is followed by an overview of Simmels work. First,
44
INTRODUCTION
I will outline the development of Simmels thinking by drawing on the quite customary periodization of his work and then go through and specify what Simmel has in general written of. The second essay suggests three principles with the help of which a rough sketch of the basic convictions of Simmels work is given. The rst of them is relativism. It is also by far the most crucial and pervasive one. Simmel bases his whole understanding of the world upon it, and it also amounts to something of his method. The second one, pertaining to the task Simmel sets to his philosophical work, is the plumb line. Finally, the third principle appears as the ultimate horizon and image of Simmels thought. Together, these principles are considered in the essay as aspects of what Simmel in a letter terms, in a rather cryptic way, the metaphysics of this-side, which he regards as the general project of his work. By exploring this philosophical foundation of Simmels thinking, the essay aims at highlighting the broader context of his work within which his processualist take on the social is placed. Hopefully, it will also provide the reader with some helpful conceptual background. The third essay forms somewhat of a cornerstone of my argument. The piece scrutinizes Simmels conception of the social as an event (Geschehen) manifesting itself in two dimensions: reciprocal effects and the life/form antagonism. The act of eventalizing dissolves society as a hypostatized, reied generality into dynamic reciprocal relations. The primacy given to the event by Simmel suggests that social formations are not simply existent to be described in their actuality and seemingly xed stability, but the social is best understood in terms of processes its becoming is basic, whereas its thingness which for instance Durkheim insisted on is merely derivative. Event thinking is presented as an anti-reductionistic manner of conceptualizing the social: instead of being reducible to actors or structures, as event, the social is located between actors and has to be understood in terms of processual reciprocal relations between them. The fourth essay elaborates on this notion of the between while discussing Simmels theorizing on the social in the light of his treatment of the dyad (Zweizahl) and the triad (Dreizahl), constellations of two and three elements. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that they express the difference between the primary, dynamic intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals and the objectied social forms in numerical terms, as quantitatively determined. In the essay, it is argued that in its basic, methodologically simplest form, the social amounts for Simmel to dyadic
45
interaction between I and you that can be conceptualized as being-with. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, it is claimed that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The third not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but it is also capable of transforming it into a completely new gure: a social whole, a we, which obtains a supraindividual life independent of the individuals. The remaining essays do not address the notion of the social as directly as the third and the fourth, but rather discuss what perhaps could be called the internal externalities of the social and sociology: materiality, the individual, and philosophy. While materiality and the individual present themselves as internal externalities of the social, philosophy amounts to an internal externality of sociology (another one is psychology, in the sense it was discussed above). The fth essay turns to the rst of these, materiality. It proposes that, instead of perceiving materiality as an out-thereness which is simply exterior to the social, in his pieces theorizing culture and cultural objects Simmel paid attention to the ways it is intertwined both with social relationships and with the experience of subjects, thus placing material heterogeneity at the heart of the social. Human beings are not only in, by, and among themselves but their experience and very being is crucially tied to objects: objects are an integral part of our social life one of its internal externalities. The consideration of objects also importantly indicates that, despite its clear accent on process and becoming, in his social theory Simmel did not concern himself only with what is ephemeral, but with the objectication of the social as well. It is mostly with the help of objects that the shifting social relationships get stabilized into something lasting. Essay number six discusses the second internal externality of the social, the individual. For Simmel, both our relation to the world and to our self are disclosed in the form of individual existence: as individuals, we are at once part of a greater whole, such as society, and self-sufcient beings and wholes in ourselves. This duality is addressed in the essay by elucidating the notions of the what and the who of the individual, developed by drawing from Simmels duplex notion of quantitative and qualitative individuality on the one hand, and from the different notions of type in his work on the other. In the piece, it is also argued that while quantitative and qualitative individuality can be grasped in terms of social relationships, there is also a third notion
46
INTRODUCTION
of the individual in Simmel, namely the singularity of the individual, which cannot be studied sociologically, but is accessible only to philosophical reection. It amounts to a view of the individual life as nite and non-repeatable, which Simmel also posits as the proper denition of the individual in his philosophy of life. It is maintained that while the singularity of the individuals life is brought into the social sphere for instance by the techniques that seek to govern the lives of individuals, life is nonetheless also something that constantly escapes social relationships and such techniques. Insofar as social theory deals with the basic assumptions of sociology, it becomes also relevant to reect on the relation between sociology and philosophy, all the more so because social theory itself is not only sociological but philosophical as well. Thus, the seventh essay strives to contribute to this by outlining Simmels philosophy via discussing his conception of philosophy. The piece also tries to show how processuality is inherently connected both to Simmels idea of philosophy and his own philosophical work: Simmel perceives philosophy not only as something in process in the sense that he thinks that it is pointless to expect nal solutions from it, but also as fundamentally of process, as his philosophy of life exemplies. For Simmel, philosophy is an emblem of living movement: just as life ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the presuppositions of thinking. Of special importance is also Simmels treatment of the type of philosopher, which expands on the discussion of type in the preceding essay and bears some interesting resemblance to my way of addressing Simmel in this study as a conceptual persona. Finally the conclusion section summarizes the main points of the thesis and suggests points which make Simmels social theory particularly applicable. In so doing, the section also discusses how Simmels notion of the social resonates with the more recent critical confrontations and reassessments of the social. Additionally, Simmels event thinking is depicted as a third way which challenges the theories of action and various forms of structuralisms and holisms, and its processualist and anti-reductionist features are summarized.
47
. Simmel Life and Work
Biographic fragments
Attempting an extensive biography of Georg Simmel does not serve our purposes here. Yet perhaps a few notes of Simmels life and time are in place in order to shed light on his personal background as well as on the historical context of his work.51 Simmel was born on March 1, 1858, on the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, of Jewish parents, yet both of whom had early converted father to Catholicism and mother to Evangelism. Commentators have been very keen to lay special importance on this birth place suggesting that Simmels preoccupation with the urban setting was predestined very early on. Theodor Lessing, one of Simmels students, describes the matter in the most vivid expressionistic fashion:
No holy star promising peace shown over his birthplace (on the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse) as it had over Bethlehems manger. No! Garish illuminated signboards boasted about a smuttyworld of metropolitan sex orgies. Trams clanked! Omnibuses chugged by. And the commercial vehicles piled up in the four criss-crossing densely inhabited streets, whose slick sidewalks reected the poisonous green gas light from hundreds of street lamps every evening. And instead of the hallelujah of
48
1. SIMMEL LIFE AND WORK
blessed angels from on high was heard the insane din from an appalling crowd of people. Loiterers [Pastertreter], con men, demimondes, all the scum of Europe streamed along precisely this building, like hell as dened by St. Theresa: This is the fetid place without love. Little Georg, however, slept in probably the noisiest cradle that a philosopher had ever rocked in. (Cited by Jazbinsek, 2003: 103.)
Other commentators as well, Margarete Susman (see Frisby, 1981: 11) and Lewis Coser among them, have stressed the impact of being born in the heart of a metropolis on Simmels later becoming a theoretician of urban life. Coser (1977: 194) compares the corner of Leipziger- and Friedrichstrasse to Times Square in New York and sees it as symbolically tting for a man who throughout his life lived in the intersection of many movements, intensely affected by the cross-currents of intellectual trafc and by a multiplicity of moral directions. However, Dietmar Jazbinsek (2003) has judged the image of the Berlin that Lessing describes and which Susman and Coser assume as being seriously awed and blatantly anachronistic. According to Jazbinsek, Lessings is not an account of the urban Berlin of the middle of 19th century, but it merely projects the Berlin of the years 1912 and 1913 (i.e. the time he wrote the text) into the Berlin to which Simmel was born.52 In fact, Jazbinsek argues that in 1858, the street corner of little Georgs birthplace was still relatively quiet and peaceful. (Ibid.: 103.) It was not yet metropolitan, lively, restless, unlike for instance Susman (born in 1874) presumes it to have been (cited by Frisby, 1981: 11). As Simmel himself noted, Berlins heady growth from a city into a world metropolis rather coincided with the most intensive phase of his own intellectual development (see H. Simmel, 1976: 265). One could thus speculate that accustoming oneself to the tumult of metropolis was for Simmel himself as actual a problem as to the typical urbanite of his essay Die Grostdte und das Geistesleben (see Grst), known more commonly as the metropolis essay. He had anything but habituated himself to the turmoil of metropolitan life. Rather, the place where Simmel was active as a sociologist no longer had much at all in common with the city of his childhood: he was confronted with the strangeness of a city in which nothing today is like it had been yesterday (Jazbinsek, 2003: 103, 104). After graduating from the Friedrich-Werderschen-Gymmasium, Simmel began his studies at the royal Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin during the summer semester of 1876. First he studied history under Johann Gustav
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Droysen, Theodor Mommsen, and Heinrich Treitschke, then also ethnology under Adolf Bastian, psychology under Friedrich Harms, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, and lastly philosophy under Friedrich Harms and Adolf Lasson. After his rst dissertation with the title Psychologisch-etnographische Studien ber die Anfnge der Musik had been rejected in December 1880, Simmel obtained his doctorate in 1881 with the work Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physischer Monadologie, for which he had received an academic prize a year earlier (then entitled Darstellung und Beurteilung von Kants verschiedenen Ansichten ber das Wesen der Materie). In 1883, Simmel submitted a study on Kants doctrine of space and time as his Habilitation work. The permission for Habilitation was given, yet Simmels proof lecture was rejected. A year later, his second lecture (ber die Lehre von den Assoziationen der Vorstellung) was accepted. In 1885, Simmel was appointed Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) at the philosophical faculty of the University of Berlin, a post which he held for an unusually long period of 15 years. In 1890, Simmel got married to Gertrud Kinel (born in 1864), who was a philosophical author herself, publishing the books Vom Sein und Haben der Seele [1906] and Realitt und Gesetzlichkeit im Geschlechtsleben [1910] under the pseudonym Marie Luise Eckendorff. Her other works include ber das Religise [1919] and Kindschaft zur Welt [1927], and an unpublished manuscript of a short story. Gertrud was to outlive her husband for 20 years. A year after they had got married, the Simmels had a child, Hans. With the help of the considerable fortune left to Simmel by Julius Friedlnder, who became his guardian after his father died in 1874, the family got to live a fairly sheltered bourgeois life. In 1904, Simmel had another child, Angela, with Gertrud Kantorowitz resulting from their affair. Kantorowitz was a student of Simmel and the only woman in the so called George circle formed around the poet Stefan George.53 Under Simmels tutelage, Kantorowitz translated Bergsons Lvolution cratrice into German, and later she also edited a part of Simmels literary remains which appeared under the title Fragmente und Aufstze. Both Simmels career and position in intellectual history are full of paradoxes. First of all, while Simmel thought of himself above all as a philosopher, it is his merits as a sociologist that have made him famous. As his letters indicate, he was well aware of this and also troubled by it (see for example Brf I 342). Even today, the wide academic public knows Simmel rst and foremost as the founder of formal sociology and as the writer of a variety of essays theorizing on cultural modernity.
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Equally paradoxical is the fact that while Simmel was one of the leading gures of Berlin intelligentsia, his academic career suffered from constant refutations. On the one hand, Simmel possessed undeniable eminence. First of all, he exercised a considerable inuence on the n de sicle European intellectual culture. Secondly, he also had active relations with such gures as Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Heinrich Rickert, and the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, as well as abroad with Bergson and Auguste Rodin. Thirdly, he was an esteemed lecturer too, a virtuoso on the platform (Coser, 1977: 196) whose lectures were leading intellectual events (Coser, 1965: 3), and his books had a huge success. On the other hand, considering his popularity among contemporaries, the breadth of his oeuvre, or his latter-day signicance, Simmels academic career was anything but a success. One reason for certain was his Jewish background and the antisemitic atmosphere in the Germany of Simmels day (see Khnke, 1996: 122149), but it alone cannot account for the rebuffs. As other possible reasons, Simmels unconventional mode of thought and his vague position between the roles of sociologist and philosopher, researcher and intellectual, have been proposed (see for example ibid.: 2021; Wolff, 1965: xviii xix; Dahme & Rammstedt, 1986: 11; Noro, 2005: 812). Simmels career was determined by one setback after another: the rejection of the rst dissertation, the rejection of the habilitation lecture, 15 years as unpaid Privatdozent, 13 years as Ausserordentlicher Professor (an honorary title to which Simmel was promoted to in 1901), the repeated rebuffs in appointments for a senior position at German universities, so that Simmel received a full professorship only in 1914 at the age of 56 in Strasbourg. It was also in Strasbourg where Simmel died shortly before the end of the war, on September 28, 1918, of liver cancer. Soon after his death, his work was largely forgotten for decades (Susman, [1957] 1993: 278; Frisby, 1981: 1112). Simmel had been a stimulator, not a great educator nor one who brought matters to a close by establishing a unied system (Lukcs, [1918] 1993: 171; trans. 1991: 145). He had not created a school as he did not have any actual students, and it was only very rarely that his work was taken up in scholarly commentaries any more in the next few decades following his death. It is not, however, that his legacy had vanished completely: Simmels ideas continued to exert their inuence on scholars widely not only in Europe but in North America as well. The only thing is that, to a great extent, this inuence was hard to detect because it was quite diffuse and, in many cases
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anonymous. Strangely enough, it is as if Simmel had anticipated this. Namely, just few years before his death, in his diary he compared his legacy to money in a very self-conscious manner: I know that I shall die without intellectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will reveal no longer its indebtedness to this heritage. (NlTb 261; trans. Coser, 1977: 198199.) Simmels sociology had a major and partly anonymous inuence in the United States, especially on the so called Chicago school. After World War II, Simmel was re-imported from across the Atlantic even to Germany as a classic of urban studies, role theory, conict theory, and analyses of social groups (see Coser, 1965: 2425; Levine et al., 1976; Khnke, 1996: 14). Also, many threads in German philosophy since Simmel nd a point of convergence in his work. It is possible to trace Simmels inuence on at least some members of the Frankfurt school, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Of the representatives of critical theory, Walter Benjamin was the one most inuenced by Simmel, taking up some aspects of Simmels work in his Passagen-Werk, to the work on tragic drama, and to his notion of the origin (Ursprung) (Frisby, 2006: 56). Even Adorno, despite his severe criticism towards Simmel, gave him credit not only as the master of the essay form but, more substantially, for turning the attention of philosophical inquiry into concrete objects (Adorno, 1984: 9, 558). As for Jaspers, his concepts of self-being (Selbstsein) and authenticity (Echtheit) have been traced back to Simmel (Susman & Landmann, 1957: vi).54 Simmels thought has also some interesting afnities with phenomenology (see for example Backhaus, 1998; 2003a; 2003b; Owsley & Backhaus, 2003). In fact, Simmels work had a special impact on existential phenomenology, namely Heidegger.55
Against biographism
Notwithstanding the above biographic sketch, it is crucial, however, not to overemphasize the signicance of Simmels life for his work. For a long time there was a common tendency in the secondary literature to see a close connection between Simmels work and life. Coser (1958), for instance, has tried to explain the peculiarity of Simmels style by the fact that he never received full academic recognition. Coser assumes that, for this reason, Simmel be-
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gan more and more to seek appreciation from a non-scholarly audience. To back up his claims, Coser refers to the fact that, of the 180 articles Simmel published in his lifetime, only 64 were published in scholarly journals, while 116 appeared in non-scholarly publications such as newspapers, art magazines, and literary monthlies aimed at a wider audience. Coser argues that the difference becomes even more radical if we compare the periodical articles published before 1900 and those after 1900: whereas over the earlier period the ratio between the texts published in scholarly journals and those that appeared in non-scholarly publications was fty-fty, after the turn of the century only 28 per cent of his writings were published in scholarly journals. The statistical signicance is amplied by the fact that before 1900, Simmel published 62 articles, whereas in the latter period he published almost twice as much, 118. (Ibid.: 638639.) Coser does not go as far as to see the characteristics of Simmels work as a reection of his personality, but opts for a more sociological approach instead. He tries to explain Simmels style by drawing on his role within the academic structure of the Germany of his time as well as his status in the intellectual community (ibid.: 635). The cornerstone of Cosers argument is Simmels ambivalent role-set. According to Coser, Simmel was among those German university teachers who gave considerable emphasis to their activity as lecturers. Academic colleagues and superiors, however, were often rather ambivalent with respect to members of the faculty who spent what they considered excessive time in lecturing. Hence, because of trying to live[] up to expectations distinct from those of his peers and superiors, a teacher who had the ability to be popular was confronted by a possible disturbance of a stable role-set. (Ibid.: 637.) Yet Cosers sociologicism contributes very little to our understanding of Simmels work. Instead of trying to explain Simmels style of thinking and his choice of themes with his life, it seems more plausible to try to base them on his work, as Dahme (1981: 239) has claimed: we cannot explain with his life why Simmel wrote the way he wrote.56 Whatever the banal motives of his work may have been (the need for recognition, for instance), they do not exhaust its substance. Neither does the forum determine the content of an article. Coser should have taken notice of Simmels own testimony to be found in a letter to Georg Jellinek, dated October 11, 1908. In the letter, Simmel writes:
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I have never, that much I can remember, written especially for a newspaper; everything I have put out in such publications were suitable parts of my larger works. I actually consider it as a cultural task not unworthy for a philosopher to bring a certain intellectual [geistige] conception of and absorption in the most supercial and everyday phenomena at the reach of the widest possible public. This is the motive why I have accepted the form of a feuilleton or journal article, which I do not sympathize in and of themselves. That form always takes something to overcome, but I hope to have contributed my share to the intellectual culture with it. (Brf I 657.)
This could be understood even as a programmatic account: Simmel seems to have considered it as his duty as an intellectual to contribute to a broader intellectual culture by treating big problems in a manner that makes them accessible to a larger audience than a strictly academic one. At all events, if we take the statement seriously, the fact that Simmel published most of his articles in newspapers and non-scholarly journals and periodicals does not tell us anything about the waning of his scholarly interests. Linking his work (too) closely with his life can thus be dangerous. In fact, in Kant, Simmel warns that overrating the external life confuses the emergence [Entstehung] of philosophy with the philosophy itself (KA 3).57 Another way to put this is to say that the Simmel after whom concepts, ideas, and theory fragments are signed (Simmels sociology of forms, metropolis, stranger tragedy of culture, etc.) is not to be confused with the person and the life of the real author. The Simmel who we judge by his words and sentences found in Philosophie des Geldes, Soziologie, and Lebensanschauung, for instance, resides only in his works and nowhere else, and is thus not the same Simmel as the one tyrannized with the love of his jealous mother, the one who was a collector of Japanese art, the eternal Privatdozent, or the host who entertained his guests at the salon ran regularly at his home. In other words, there is a gap between the Simmel who keeps returning eternally in commentaries and discourses (the man of many renaissances) and the man who has appeared only once in history. Whereas the latter is historical, the rst is rather always becoming. As such, the Simmel who appears in the essays gathered here in this book is not without resemblance to what Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1994) have termed conceptual persona. Conceptual personae are the personages or gures within philosophical texts to which philosophy gives life; Socrates, for instance, is the main conceptual persona of Platonism, and the idiot who says I that of Descartes cogito. (Ibid.: 6163.) A conceptual persona is not
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the same as the author of the text, nor is it merely a representative of the latter. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari argue:
[T]he philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors [intercesseurs], the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosophers heteronyms, and the philosophers name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. (Ibid.: 64.)
For instance, the true subjects of Nietzsches philosophy are the various conceptual personae from Zarathustra, Superman, Dionysos, and Socrates to Christ, Antichrist, Priest and so on brought to life in his books (see ibid.: 65; Deleuze, 2001: 92101), not the young man who was appointed professor in classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, the man who suffered from severe problems with his health, nor the man who, experiencing a mental collapse, threw his arms around the neck of a whipped horse at the market place of Turin in 1889.58 It is not, however, that the conceptual persona would be completely separate from the author or his or her socio-historical context. On the contrary, we can increase our understanding of the conceptual persona by comparing the authors work to his or her predecessors and contemporaries by treating the author as a kind of socio-historical type (and this is where the historical interpretation comes in). In his Der Junge Simmel (1996: 24), Khnke reconstructs Simmel precisely as a type in this sense, as he examines Simmel as a crystallization of certain theoretical currents of his time and historical surroundings. Khnke presents Simmel as a case example (Fallbeispiel) (ibid.: 22) of the writers who have built our epoch; in other words, as a representative of the theory of the modern or postmodern, as a sociological classic or classical author [Feuilletonisten] and essayist (ibid.: 24). Yet precisely the fact that a conceptual persona is in the state of becoming whereas the socio-historical type is historical is what distinguishes them from one another. In a sense, it can even be said that conceptual personae create new possibilities of existing for historical persons and socio-historical types. The characteristics of historical persons and types are dependent on the concepts and conditions of thought which, when connected to the specic historical state of affairs of a given society and the life-worlds of individuals, make possible certain ways of existing as a person. (See Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 7071, 96, 110111.)59
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Thinking in three (four) phases

In a short autobiographical text named later as the incomplete self-portrait (unvollendete Selbstdarstellung),60 Simmel noties that, in his work, I have commenced from epistemological and Kantian studies, hand in hand with historical and social scientic studies (AuSbst 9).61 The account is quite startling for many reasons. For one, neither Simmels publications nor any records of his studies bear evidence of any social scientic or epistemological studies until the year 1888. Only the existence of historical studies can be veried: Simmel began his academic studies as a history student, as was noted above. Furthermore, although Simmel had worked on Kants philosophy at least ever since the essay that had won him the academic prize in 1880, Kant did not yet inuence Simmels own thought at this point signicantly. On the contrary, in his early phase, Simmel was rather critical towards Kant.62 However, the next sentence in the self-portrait reveals why it matches so poorly with the existing records of the early Simmel: in it, Simmel notes that the rst result of his epistemological, Kantian, historical, and social scientic studies was the work Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, which was published not before than the year 1892! In fact, it seems as if Simmel had wanted to forget and quite consciously, one may add his early outputs.63 Khnke (1996: 26) reports that in 1903, Simmel told his friend Harry Graf Kessler that he had been dumb up till the age of 35, the year 1893 that is. As regards the work of the young Simmel, Frisby (1992: 26; cf. 1981: 15) has noted that Simmels early writings [] seem so untypical of our image of Simmel that access to them is made difcult by our own preconceptions. First of all, the natural scientic paradigm of the 19th century that challenged the German consciousness tradition left an imprint on the thought of the young Simmel: his early writings show traces of a positivistic orientation an orientation which is absent in his later work. Simmel considered knowledge as advancing from elementary forms to a higher scientic form. In this development, philosophy, for example, was for him merely a pre-stage, a preliminary science (Vorwissenschaft) (PGPH 367368). Simmel also showed interest in the writings of physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and scrutinized Friedrich Langes inuential book Geschichte der Materialismus, which opposed the early neo-Kantianism. However, instead of fully embracing the natural scientic model, Simmel rather picked elements from the natural scientic doctrines that he saw suitable for his own thinking. (Dahme, 1981: 248249; Jung, 1990:
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27.) Hannes Bhringer (1976: 114), for instance, has detected the inuence of Gustav Theodor Fechners atomism on Simmels idea of reciprocal effects. Also, in the rejected rst dissertation making use of ethnological and ethological material, Simmel drew on Darwins theory of evolution, albeit arrived at exactly the opposite result from Darwin. Besides, in terms of evolution theory, Simmel was inclined towards pragmatism at this point too. In the book ber sociale Differenzierung, which was published in 1890, Simmel subscribes to a pragmatist conception of truth.64 Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie is a signicant work in Simmels oeuvre in that it indicates a shift away from a psychologicist and positivist orientation towards Kants transcendental philosophy. The two-piece work Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, published rst in 1892/93, in turn is Simmels rst larger work, as Simmel himself called it when proposing the book for publication in a letter to the publisher Bessersche Buchhandlung (Brf I 43). As Khnke notes, Moralwissenschaft already experiments with ideas and problems which were to come to full bloom in Simmels later oeuvre in the major works Philosophie des Geldes and Soziologie, thereby creating conditions for the theorizations developed in them. According to Khnke, these works take up and modify many of the much more general and foundational problems introduced in Moralwissenschaft: the relation between means and ends, the meaning of moral ought, obligation and guilt, the problem of valuations, the relation of the individual to a larger whole, individual freedom, and so on. (Khnke, 1996: 167168.) However, it is only from the publication of Philosophie des Geldes in 1900 that the middle period of Simmels thinking has typically been considered in the secondary literature to have begun.65 First of all, the role of philosophy becomes considerably wider in it: philosophy stops being merely a pre-stage of scientic inquiry and is dened now as epistemology, on the one hand, and metaphysics, on the other.66 Accordingly, philosophy has in Simmels view two key tasks, an analytical and a synthetic one: on the one hand, it tries to think without presuppositions and, on the other hand, to offer, with the help of abstract concepts, a unied worldview (Weltanschauung). While the rst domain lies below the lower limit of scientic inquiry, the latter is located beyond its upper limit. (PHG 9.) Moreover, and most importantly, Philosophie des Geldes opens up Simmels relational worldview which will be discussed in more detail below. From Philosophie des Geldes onwards, the sceptical relativism that had had an imprint on Simmels early writings gives way to relational relativism (Dahme, 1981: 252). Instead of signifying a sceptical dissipation
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of all that is solid, Simmel now sees relativism as a positive principle: truth, value, objectivity, etc., express themselves to him as reciprocities (AuSbst 9). The book also reveals the proximity of Simmels theorizations to some of the ideas among the Southwest German School of neo-Kantians, an important point of reference in this phase of Simmels oeuvre. The theory of value Simmel develops in Philosophie des Geldes, and especially his idea of pure contents (reine Inhalte) as a third world besides those of being and valuations (see PHG, esp. 2526, 3132, 38) bears without doubt an afnity to neo-Kantians like Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband. They considered the problem of value to be an essential concern for philosophy. Also, the programme for a philosophy of culture Simmel outlines in Philosophie des Geldes and carries out later in various essays is shared by neo-Kantianism. Although Simmel stood further from Kant than the neo-Kantians,67 his theory of knowledge owes a great deal to Kant and the classical neo-Kantian conception of knowledge. Both lay emphasis on the forms of cognition and on the activity of the subject constituting the world. Simmel opposes nave realism which sees knowledge as a sheer copy or a projection of reality. Whereas historical realism, for instance, assumes to be able to grasp the past as it really was, in Geschichtsphilosophie Simmel treats the question of the possibility of historical knowledge as one of How does the raw material of immediate experience come to be the theoretical structure which we call history? (PGPH2 v.) That is, as nature is for Kant a unity produced by our intellect out of scattered sensuous perceptions, for Simmel the knowing subject organizes singular events and their contents into a historical series. History is thus a form grounded on the a priori conditions of individual experience. The same holds for the conditions of possibility of society discussed in Soziologie. However, what separates Simmel from Kant and neo-Kantians like Windelband, is that unlike nature for Kant and value for Windelband, for Simmel history and society are not anchored in a transcendental subject but are built upon an interplay between the I and the you; for Simmel, the conditions of history and society are both intertwined with the structure of encountering the you. This is also to say that, with Simmel, the a priori conditions are not transcendental-logical by nature, but rather empirical-psychological (Bevers, 1985: 49). Consequently, they are not timeless and eternal, but Simmel argues that they have to be considered as historical constructs (historische Gebilde) (HPH 2122; see also Bevers, 1985: 64). Those who classify Simmel above all as a sociologist, celebrate Soziologie
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from the year 1908 as his magnum opus. Not only does the book display the most advanced and extensive development of his program for the sociology of forms and its epistemological foundation, but it also includes a remarkably wide array of examples of how to analyze social forms in practice, including themes such as conict, the stranger, the signicance of the number of participants for social formations, sub- and superordination, secrecy, sociology of space, sociology of senses, gratitude, and faithfulness. The choice of themes, which seems fairly odd at rst glance because of their unconnectedness, was in fact fully deliberate on Simmels part. He intended them as fragments of what he overall regards as sociology: The further the here presented remains from a unied system, and the further apart its parts lie from one another, the more extensive will the circle be to which the future completion of sociology will tie its already determinable individual points (SOZ 31n). It is quite common in the secondary literature to view the last ten years of Simmels life as a great turn away from sociological study towards philosophy, especially towards Lebensphilosophie and philosophy of culture marked by the inuence of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Bergson (see for example Landmann, 1968: 8; 1976: 45). For instance, Friedrich Tenbruck states of Soziologie that it was published at the time when sociological study was already left far behind him [i.e. Simmel] and he had denitely turned his attention to philosophical and aesthetic questions (cited by Frisby, 1981: 24). However, the turn is perhaps not that radical as Landmann and Tenbruck assume. Frisby is more accurate when claiming that the publication of Soziologie in 1908 signied, in fact, the end of Simmels major occupation with sociology (Frisby, 1981: 4; italics added). That is, Simmel did not concern himself with sociological inquiry to the extent he used to, but he did, however, not abandon sociology completely. Firstly, Simmel gave the opening presentation entitled Soziologie der Geselligkeit (Sociology of sociability) at the rst German sociology conference held in Frankfurt in 1910, and published for example the piece Soziologie der Mahlzeit (Sociology of the meal) the same year.68 Besides, Simmel was also yet to write his last sociological book Grundfragen der Soziologie, published in 1917. Of course, for the most part Grundfragen works with the theoretical material presented already in Soziologie.69 It indeed seems that, when Simmel did concern himself with sociological themes during his last years, they appear almost without exception under his philosophy of culture (Frisby, 1981: 27). To be sure, certain elements of his earlier sociological writings appear in his various philosophical essays on culture, but Simmels
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interest in sociology was increasingly subordinate to philosophical and especially metaphysical aims (ibid.: 31). In addition, some of the themes in the Grundfragen clearly emanate from Simmels philosophy of life, such as the turn of the axis of life (Achsendrehung des Lebens), a theme to appear later in Lebensanschauung (see GFSOZ 105; LBA 245). The above periodization of Simmels work into three phases and thus into three different Simmels: rst the positivistically oriented young Simmel, then Simmel the sociologist exploring social forms under the inuence of Kant, and lastly Simmel the philosopher of life inuenced by gures like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Bergson has become quite customary in the secondary literature. Even if one did not present the periodization as simple as this, it nonetheless has been considered as the most promising formula to outline the development of Simmels thought (see example Landmann, 1968; Mahlmann, 1983; Jung, 1990). However, at least two reservations have to be made to this periodization. To begin with, quite a few of the problems and themes Simmel deals with in the last ten years of his life continue those that had already appeared earlier in his work. In other words, he remains fairly faithful to his basic views and to the theorems he developed in the second period of his work (Dahme, 1981: 254, 257). One example of this is the problem of individuality treated in the sixth essay to be found in this dissertation. Simmel worked on it practically throughout his whole career. He commenced from differentiation theory and the conception of individuality as an intersection of social circles, then changed his focus to the problem of individuality in the modern metropolis and money economy, while at the same time back-pedalling the sociologicism of his earlier views: Simmel introduced the notion of qualitative individuality which was meant to complement the sociological conception of individuality. Finally, Simmel arrived at the theorem of individual law and the idea, coming to full bloom in his philosophy of life, of the nitude and the non-repeatability of the individuals existence as the proper denition of individuality. Retrospectively, the preceding phases can be viewed as preparing and building up the Lebensphilosophical conception of the individual (Dahme, 1981: 256). Therefore, rather than completely abandoning his earlier insights and themes, it is not uncommon for Simmel to take these up in his texts, develop them from a new perspective, and subject them to reassessment, thus also constantly digging deeper into the presuppositions upon which his thinking
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is based (Dahme, 1988: 412; Levine, 1971: xiv; Levy, 1927: 26). For instance, the concept of life that is the main notion of Simmels Lebensphilosophie adds a new layer to the duality of form and content instead of merely dismantling it. Additionally, rather than making a sudden shift from being a sociologist to becoming a philosopher of life, Simmel had worked on the philosophy of life for quite some time before the year 1908: although his philosophy of life admittedly does not come to full bloom until the books of Rembrandt and Lebensanschauung, Simmel had began to develop its themes at least since 1902. That year he published the essay Tendencies in German Life and Thought Since 1870, in which he seeks the unity of different threads of German philosophy in a new theory of life expressed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The essay was followed by Kant und Goethe in 1906 and Schopenhauer und Nietzsche in 1907, both of which are crucial signposts in Simmels journey towards the philosophy of life. The second reservation pertains to Simmels war writings (Kriegsreden), a group of articles dealing with World War I he published after the outbreak of the war. They stand as some kind of excluded other in Simmels oeuvre, as they are not usually included in the accounts of his work (see Dahme, 1981: 257; Watier, 1991: 222). It was no doubt confusing, even painful to his colleagues and friends to realize a thinker who had preserved an intellectual distance throughout his career until then to suddenly become enthusiastic about the war. Simmels former student Ernst Bloch, for instance, reproached Simmel with words that have become famous since: You avoided decision throughout your life Tertium datur now you nd the absolute in the trenches (cited by Coser, 1977: 198). However, there are many misconceptions and prejudices concerning Simmels war writings. To a certain extent, Simmel did thr[o]w himself into war propaganda, as for instance Coser (1977: 198) claims, yet he was also and perhaps above all else preoccupied with the war intellectually: he reected on the causes and the nature of the war, its possibilities and ending Simmel saw the end of the war as a possibility for the dawn of a new Germany and a new Europe (Dahme, 1981, 258261; Watier, 1991: 223). In a sense, the war writings can indeed be seen in a continuum with Simmels other work (Dahme, 1981: 263). Patrick Watier (1991: 219) argues that they draw particularly from many of the points made in Philosophie des Geldes, both explicitly and beneath the surface. For example, Simmel regarded the excessive culture of money and the mammonism, cynicism, and the deep indifference it had given rise to as a particular cause for the outbreak of
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the war (Dahme, 1981: 259). Thereby, Dahme suggests that the war writings should be integrated to Simmels oeuvre as its fourth phase (ibid.: 257, 263).
The elds
Simmels vast oeuvre contains approximately 20 books and 200 smaller pieces. It is also one full of diversity. Landmann (1968: 8) has felicitously stated that Simmels thinking is kindled by the variety of phenomena: he treats topics as diverse as sociability, the picture frame, the adventurer, money, religion, the ruin, female culture, the landscape, death, sociology of the senses, etc. However, to put it roughly, all of Simmels concerns are related, one way or another, to the human condition. Unlike Bergson, for instance, with whom Simmel otherwise had a lot in common, Simmels ideas seem to bear almost no relationship to the natural sciences, as Siegfried Kracauer (1995: 225) notes.70 On the contrary, It is always man [] who stands at the center of Simmels eld of vision (ibid.: 226), be it in ones interwovenness to the fabric of social relations (the social eld), in ones absoluteness as an individual, disentangled from ones entwinement with the world and its phenomena (the microcosmos of the individual), or in ones relation to the objective realm of cultural artefacts and forms (the realm of culture). Whereas the rst dimension pertains to Simmels sociological analyses of social relations of interaction, in which individuals are perceived as intersections of social threads and as belonging to the world as its parts, the second realm of man, the individual as a world unto oneself, can be found in Simmels philosophical writings, mainly in those on art and aesthetics (one can think of here Simmels conceptual portraits of some of the major intellectual gures like Michelangelo, Goethe and Rembrandt) but also in the piece Das individuelle Gesetz and in the form of incidental remarks elsewhere. Finally, the third realm, that of culture, concerns the relationship of subject and object. It is most of all the subject matter of Simmels various diagnoses of modernity as an existential situation where the subject is confronted by an immense amount of objects of human making that have become independent of individual human existence. But it is taken up equally by Simmels analyses of various cultural phenomena, and even his epistemology regarding the relationship between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge (see e.g. PGPH 303338; HPH 8182) and contributions on the eld of ethics regarding the relationship of
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human actions to ethical values (EM1 I & II; IGz) address the problem of the relation between subject and object. The individual problems Simmel concerned himself with in his work cross various elds. Although it would be extremely difcult to enumerate them all, it is possible to say that the elds Simmel contributed to cover at least those of psychology, epistemology, ethics, sociology, aesthetics and metaphysics. It is even more difcult to classify which problems and analyses belong to which eld. This is because Simmel subjects his objects to almost every imaginable condition, thus adopting a multitude of perspectives. For instance, in the essay Die Grostdte und das Geistesleben, Simmel treats the psychological foundation of metropolitan individuality as well as the effects of metropolitan life on the mental life of the individuals, explores the metropolis as the seat of the modern money economy and examines the way money inuences the social relationships and the daily life of the urbanites. In addition, Simmel treats the blas attitude, the exclusively metropolitan psychic phenomenon according to him, and views it both as an adaptive phenomenon and as a pathology, as well as examines reserve as the mental attitude of the people of the metropolis. Furthermore, Simmel shows how the metropolis is connected to the enlargement of social circles, to the division of labour and to the widening gap of subjective and objective culture, as well as discloses how the metropolis both presents a threat to individual freedom and fosters it and how the metropolitan forms of individuality are connected to two contrasting historical forms of individualism, the 18th century individualism of liberalism and rationalism and the 19th century individualism of romanticism and modernity. So, even within the space of a short essay like this Simmel manages to touch at least psychological, sociological, philosophical, and historical issues as well as those of cultural analysis and cultural critique. Occasionally, even the very titles of Simmels writings mix together different elds of study. Take for example ber sociale Differenzierung. Soziologische und psychologishe Untersuchungen [1890] or Zur Psychologie der Mode. Soziologische Studie [1895]. One could also think of the small book Philosophie der Mode here, published in 1905, which is almost identical to the piece Zur Psychologie der Mode word for word, with only slight variation and additions. As was already noted above in the previous section, Simmel worked on psychology in the beginning of his academic career more than he was to do later. At that point still critical towards Kants transcendental philosophy, Simmel for instance interpreted Kant from a psychological perspective.
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Simmels initial interest in psychology has perhaps much to do with the inuence of Moritz Lazarus and Heimann Steinthal, the founders of Vlkerpsychologie, who Simmel named as his two most important teachers (H. Simmel, 1976: 249). Besides this, also Simmels idea of reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung) is indebted to Lazarus and Steinthal to a certain extent, as Frisby (1992: 78) has maintained. Simmels psychological writings include the aforementioned essay on the psychology of fashion, the rejected doctoral thesis Psychologisch-ethnographische Studien ber die Anfnge der Musik, the piece Psychologische und ethnologische Studien ber Musik [1882], the book Dantes Psychologie [1884], and the essays Zur Psychologie der Frauen [1890], Zur Psychologie des Geldes [1890], Psychologie der Diskretion [1906], Psyochologie des Schmuckes [1908], ber das Wesen der Sozialpsychologie [1908] and Psychologie der Koketterie [1909]. However, many of his works which cannot be labelled primarily as psychological often include psychological reections. In fact, one could even say that his writings, as Kracauer (1995: 227) has stated, are a veritable treasure trove for the psychologist. Under the rubric epistemology go for example the book Kant, Simmels studies on the philosophy of history, such as Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheorethische Studie (published rst in 1892 and then in 1905 as a completely revised edition), Das Problem der historischen Zeit [1916], and Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens [1918] and the piece Beitrge zur Erkenntnistheorie der Religion [1901] on the epistemology of religion. In addition, both in ber sociale Differenzierung and Soziologie Simmel deals with the epistemological justication of his sociology. As noted above, Simmels theory of knowledge owes much to Kantian and neo-Kantian formulations: like them, Simmel grounds objects on the a prioris of individual experience it is the activity of the subject which organizes the world into the forms in which it becomes experienced and known. Simmels main study on ethics is Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, a twopiece book published rst in 1892/93, and to be printed later in 1911 as a revised edition. In it, Simmel seeks to overcome the speculative reection ethics (Reexions-Ethik) in order to arrive at a view of ethic as a historicalsociological form, a shift which he saw to belong to the near future of ethics as a science (Brf I 43). Khnke (1996: 167) notes that it is the most important single work of the young Simmel. The highpoint of Simmelian ethics, however, is not Moralwissenshaft, but the piece Das individuelle Gesetz that rst appeared in 1913 in the journal Logos and after that in the book
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Lebensanschauung in 1918 as an extended and revised version. It is not even based on the conception of ethics put forth in Moralwissenschaft, but lies on a completely other foundation, namely the philosophy of life of Simmels later work. In the piece, ethics is not considered as a sociological form anymore but in terms of the individualized ethical ought (Sollen) stemming from the life process of the individual; an individual existence is perceived as law-like in itself. Although his sociological writings cover only a part of his oeuvre, Simmels sociology is by far the best known area of his work. Indeed, Simmel was dedicated to establishing sociology anew as an independent discipline (see PrSoc; SOZ 1341), that is, start[ing] a very comprehensive sociology (Brf I 383; trans. Frisby, 1981: 22) that, unlike other social sciences, would not be limited to the examination of this or that social phenomenon such as religion, economy or politics, but would take the very form of societalization as its object of study. In a letter to Clestin Bougl in 1894, Simmel wrote that the problems of sociology lie for him so much at heart. To Bougls enquiries about the future direction of his work Simmel replied that I dedicate myself completely to sociological studies and will not step into any other eld in the near future. (Brf I 112.) The same year saw the publication of Das Problem der Sociologie which lays down the foundations of the Simmelian sociology of forms. Nevertheless, Simmels rst sociological work, ber sociale Differenzierung, had already been published a few years earlier in 1890. It already deals with the epistemological conditions of the science of the social (centring on such issues as the material of such science, the concept of society based upon reciprocal effect, the notion of the individual, and the impossibility of any sociological laws), and develops the theme of social differentiation which was to nd its most rened treatment within the context of the analysis of the mature money economy in Philosophie des Geldes. However, it is no sooner than with the massive work Soziologie that Simmels most outstanding sociological achievements are articulated. In 1917, Simmel still published his little Sociology, Grundfragen der Soziologie, which sums up the points made in Soziologie, while also contextualizing the sociology of forms by demarcating it from general sociology and philosophical sociology. The beginning of Simmels engagement with aesthetic issues can be detected to the essay Soziologische Aesthetik, published in 1896. Simmels aesthetic writings most of which were published during the period between 1901 and 1907 include a large variety of texts ranging from essays on the
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aesthetic aspects of phenomena,71 on drama,72 on Italian cities,73 and on art and aesthetics74 to philosophical portraits of artists.75 For the topic of this thesis is of relevance especially Simmel interest in discovering an aesthetic dimension in the social (see Salz, 1959; Gronow, 1997; Frisby, 1992; de la Fuente, 2007).76 In the vein of Kant, Simmel considers aesthetics as being based upon form. In The Critique of Judgment (1987: 17), Kant denes beauty as the form of nality in an object so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end. That is, a beautiful object does not serve any purpose outside itself (Gronow, 1997: 93, 145). In an analogous manner, for Simmel, the more autonomous a social form becomes the more aesthetic it becomes. As the prime example of this serves his analysis of sociability (Geselligkeit). According to Simmel, since sociability in its pure form has no ulterior end, no content, and no result outside itself , sociability is the play form of societalization (Spielform der Vergesellschaftung), which is related to the content determined concreteness of societalization as art is related to reality (GFSOZ 108). A similar case is offered to us in the social form of the meal. In the meal, people do not gather together merely for the purpose of eating, but togetherness is sought in it also as a value in its own right (SozMzt 144; SocMl 133). So, in so far as the meal becomes the sociological matter, it arranges itself in a more aesthetic, stylized and supra-individually regulated form (SozMzt 142; SocMl 131). That is, the more the meal is about being together, the more the naturalism of eating loses in signicance and the more aesthetic matters gain in value respectively; according to Simmel, the societalization [Sozialisierung] of the meal elevates it into an aesthetic stylization which now acts back upon the former (SozMzt 142; SocMl 132). As regards the essay Soziologische Aesthetik, published in 1896, it is important in the light of Simmels oeuvre not only as one of the rst if not the rst tokens of Simmels aesthetic turn, but Khnke (1996: 507508) has argued that also Simmels reorientation from alien theoretical inuences to developing his own thinking and thus to a new self-understanding began from that particular piece. When it comes to his philosophy, Simmel considered Philosophie des Geldes as completely his work. In 1904, Simmel wrote to Rickert noting of Philosophie des Geldes that only just this one is really my book (Brf I 472). Following Khnke, this can be interpreted in the dual sense that it is a work (i.e. masterwork) and not merely a study (i.e. sketch) just as it also represents a personal text and not an arbitrary one. Simmels early work, as again Khnke argues, was much more determined by external circumstances, by, in
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this sense, alien theoretical concepts and his position in the social movements of his time. (Khnke, 1996: 508; trans. Frisby, 2004: xxxvii.) Philosophie des Geldes, by contrast, works out the presuppositions and materials of his own thought to a much greater degree. As a philosopher, Simmel was above all an experimentalist and diagnostician, not a systematizer nor judge. Today, of Simmels philosophy is known perhaps best his philosophy of modern culture and everyday life. Simmels philosophical analysis and diagnosis of culture reach their highpoint in the collection Philosophische Kultur (1st ed. in 1911, 2nd in 1919), in the pieces Vom Wesen der Kultur [1908], Die Zukunft unserer Kultur [1909], Weibliche Kultur [1911], Die Krisis der Kultur [1916], Wandel der Kulturformen [1916], and Der Konikt der Kultur [1918] as well as in the collection Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen. Reden und Aufstze [1917] and the small book Der Konikt der modernen Kultur [1918]. However, Simmel also wrote many scholarly works on other philosophers. Books centring on the work of a specic author include the doctoral thesis Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physischer Monadologie [1881], the collection of lectures entitled Kant [1904], the book Kant und Goethe [1906], and Schopenhauer und Nietzsche [1907]. In addition to these, Simmel wrote one essay on Kant and Goethe, four on Kant, three on Nietzsche, one discussing both, one on Schopenhauer, one on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and two essays on Bergson. However, Simmel concerned himself with other philosophers not so much because of their high rank, but rather because of the problems they discussed. Nowhere else does this come more apparent than in Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, which was published in 1910. Hauptprobleme discusses philosophy per se, at the most general level. It focuses on what Simmel regards as the main problems of philosophy: the denition of philosophy itself, the problem of primacy between being and becoming, the relation between subject and object, and the third realm of ideal contents beyond the subjective and objective spheres. The role of any individual philosopher from Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Kant, Stirner and Fichte to Hegel making appearance in the book is only to serve the illumination and treatment of the problems Simmels engages himself in. Starting on an epistemological path, during the last period of his work Simmels writings express a great concern with a metaphysics of life. As Josef Bleicher (2007: 139) maintains, it is above Goethe who stands as an important signpost in Simmels intellectual journey from the intellectual discipline
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of Kants philosophy and parallelism with neo-Kantianism to developing his philosophy of life. Simmels own notion of life owes much to his interpretation of Leben as it manifested in Goethe, as a lived polarity. Besides providing an object of study, for Simmel Goethe was thus also an exemplar of a life where Leben has come to its fullest expression. (Ibid.: 140.) The crowning achievement of Simmels metaphysics is Lebensanchauung [1918], his most beautiful and also most mature book, which Simmel himself called his philosophical testament.77 The title of the book, life-view, is a variant of Wilhelm Diltheys notion of Weltanschauung, world-view (Kemple, 2007: 15). Life-view has to be understood in the most literal sense here: instead of presenting his personal view of life, in the book Simmel sets out to view life as such; he poses the question not only of the life of an individual, but of life itself. He was perfectly aware that the reections were bound to remain somewhat vague and imprecise: life is indenite and thus can never be completely specied. In fact, Simmel sees this as the downright essence of life: to succeed in giving a conceptual denition of it would be to deny its essence (KMK 205206; CmC 107).
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. Relativism, the Plumb Line, and Life
Simmels work does not lend itself to any easy summary; it is just too rich, rhizomic, inconsistent, and multifaceted for that. Notwithstanding his conscious unsystematicity and constant neglect to express his philosophic position, there are nonetheless at least two occasions on which Simmel makes an effort to outline his work. The rst is the aforementioned short autobiographical text called the incomplete self-portrait. While that text has been referred to quite frequently in the secondary literature, the second testimony Simmel gives on his work has, on the contrary, received much less attention. Of course, standing in a letter, the statement is not a detailed analysis but rather a eeting, almost casual remark of the general aim of his intellectual project.78 Nor does it present, to be sure, any nal truth of Simmels work, since it is, after all, merely a reinterpretation that is presented ex post facto, overall only one interpretation among others. Nevertheless, the utterance provides an excellent starting point for the specication of Simmels work and his manner of thought. The letter, dated the 18th of November 1910, was intended as a response to Friedrich Gundolf. It was initiated from Gundolf s attempt to characterize the nature of Simmels work to a mutual friend of theirs. Gundolf had described Simmels thinking as a philosophy of the individual, of the unique (cited in Brf I 873). While considering the statement as very beautiful and apt,
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Simmel nonetheless saw it as capturing only one side of his overall thought. Theorizing the individual is, so Simmel stresses in the letter, merely a partial expression of a much deeper undertaking. He names this undertaking with the slogan metaphysics of this-side (Metaphysik der Diesseits). It means:
[] metaphysics as a certain relation of the spirit to the world, as something functional, or as an expression to a certain profound dimension beneath the immediate phenomena, wherein the spirit nds their sense and interrelatedness but not a substantial, absolute oneness, not one handleable key that would open all the doors. (Brf I 872.)79
The slogan metaphysics of this-side, explicated with this account which is almost like a riddle, could be understood to present something of a hypernym of Simmels overall thought. The concise depiction states something which elsewhere Simmel never explicitly said with the so many words of his works. In what follows, by setting out to deconstruct the riddle I will outline three hyponyms of the metaphysics of this-side which are helpful in analyzing the main lines of Simmels manner of thought and in understanding the processualist aspects of his social theory. I will call these, somewhat vaguely, (1) relativism, (2) the plumb line, and, nally, (3) life. The rst is by far the most fundamental one. Not only his method of thought but also Simmels whole understanding of the world could be characterized as being pervasively relativist by nature. The metaphor of the plumb line, on the contrary, is an image of the task of (philosophical) thinking for Simmel. Finally, the third notion, life, is an absolute principle by means of which Simmel tries to grasp the totality of the world. It is also the ultimate image of thought for him: Simmel suggests a move from the notion of philosophy as dogma to one which views philosophy as life. While each of these three principles has been discussed individually in the secondary literature before, they have not yet been considered together, as aspects of the metaphysics of this-side.
Relativism
Due to its remarkable richness in topics and variation in perspectives, Simmels work appears easily as plural and dispersed rather than as coherent and systematic. Yet at the same time it shows a remarkable unity. Whatever ob-
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2. RELATIVISM, THE PLUMB LINE, AND LIFE
jects and problems Simmel chooses to treat, he always seems to work them in a similar manner: instead of starting from an abstract concept or problem, he begins with a concrete object, then reveals the complexity of its seemingly simple makeup and a deeper meaning beneath its assumed superciality, proceeds by uncovering surprising connections between the object under investigation and objects most distant from it in order to ultimately get a better view not only of the essence of the object but also of the extensive network of relations it is woven into. This manner of seizing objects of study follows, so it can be argued, directly from Simmels relativistic world view.80 The key notion of his relativism is interaction (Wechselwirkung). Serving Simmel initially as a sociological concept, it ultimately grows in his work into a broad metaphysical principle (AuSbst 9). Accordingly, for Simmel, relativism is a regulative world principle according to which everything interacts in some way with everything else (SD 130). Ultimately, relativism aspires to embrace the whole world in its totality, and it commences from the idea that the notion of interaction enables it to do so without losing the diversity of the world: relativism does not view the unity of things as a substantial, absolute oneness (as Simmel notes in the riddle), but as a manifold, a unity of individual, separate elements woven together by relations of interaction. For Simmel, it is only because of the interconnectedness of all things that there can appear something like a unity. As he puts it in Soziologie, we could not say that the world is one, unless its every element interacted somehow with every one else (SOZ 18). Relativism stresses the reciprocal interdependence of phenomena, the connectedness of every element of the world to every other (e.g. PHG 120121; see also Dahme, 1981: 251; Landmann, 1968: 8). For relativism, as Kracauer (1995: 250) notes, there is nothing absolute that exists unconnected to other phenomena and that possesses validity in and for itself .81 Of all of Simmels writings it is Philosophie des Geldes which embodies relativism to the fullest. Nowhere else does Simmel develop such a comprehensive image of the interlocking and entwining phenomena, as Kracauer (1995: 249) has stated. In the book, relativism appears in three different roles. First of all, Simmel treats it as a socio-historical phenomenon, a hallmark of modern thought. In Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Simmel states that modern thought is characterized by a tendency toward the dissolution of substance into functions, of the solid and the lasting into the ux of restless development (EM3 II 359). For Simmel, relativism is fundamentally a reaction to the
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world which has become relativistic itself: the relativistic view of the world seems to express the momentary relationship of adjustment on the part of our intellect (PHG 716; PM 512). In Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel suggests and here he becomes a diagnostician of our time that the increased relativistic nature of the world is due to the increasing importance of money and the pervasiveness of money transactions. According to Simmel: The more the life of society becomes dominated by monetary relationships, the more the relativistic character of existence nds its expression in conscious life (PHG 716; PM 512). Secondly, in Philosophie des Geldes Simmel also makes the bid to provide a theoretical defence of relativism as a metaphysical worldview.82 Elsewhere Simmel notes that his version of relativism is an entirely positive metaphysical worldview that has as little to do with scepticism as does Einsteins or Max von Laues theory of relativity (Brf II 638). In the incomplete self-portrait, he presents his grounds for this claim:
The recent dissolution of everything substantial, absolute, eternal into the ux of things, into historical mutability, into merely psychological reality is, as it appears to me, secured against an unstable subjectivism and scepticism only if one sets in the place of the substantial xed values the living reciprocity of elements, which themselves are subject to the same dissolution ad innitum. The central concepts of truth, value, objectivity, etc. expressed themselves to me as reciprocities, as contents of a relativism that now no longer signied the sceptical dissipation of all that is solid but precisely protection against this via a new concept of solidity. (AuSbst 9.)
So, Simmels defence of relativism proves to be relativist itself. Simmel thinks that every assertion is based on relativity, either in a rising or falling series, as in logical derivation, where every link depends upon another, and a third one is dependent upon it, or in a circular fashion, so that each part of the circle determines the position of other parts (PHG 120121; PM 119). A crucial point in Simmels argument is thus the fact that he sees this relativity of assertions as the basis and not as a diminution of their validity. In other words, by contending that all claims are relative, Simmel does not try to undermine their validity (that is, say that they are only relative), nor is he saying that validity is relative to some frame of reference (such as culture,83 language, or a historical situation), thus contrasting his version of relativism sharply
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with the two ideas scepticism/subjectivism and dependence on some frame of reference commonly associated with relativism.84 He formulates for example his truth relativism in Philosophie des Geldes in the following manner: Relativity does not mean as in common usage a diminution of truth, []; on the contrary, it is the positive fullment and validation of the concept of truth. Truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it. (PHG 116; PM 116.) In other words, Simmel suggests that truth is based on relations (Brf II 637638; Bevers, 1985: 65); his goal is not to loosen the objectivity of singular truths by showing their relativity, but to disclose how truth is founded on relations. This idea could be presented with the formula: the more relative the more true. For Simmel, truth means a relation between contents of which none possesses truth in and by themselves they possess it only in relation to other contents (Brf II 638). Of course, if relativist epistemology is to hold, its own truth has to hold the same claim it makes about assertions in general. And it is according to Simmel indeed here where lies the strength of relativism compared to other epistemological principles. While other principles suffer from the difculty of subjecting their own content to the judgment that they pronounce upon knowledge in general, this does not apply to relativism (PHG 116; PM 116). According to Simmel,
Only a relativistic epistemology does not claim exemption from its own principle; it is not destroyed by the fact that its validity is only relative. For even if it is valid historically, factually, psychologically only in relation and in harmony with other absolute, or substantial principles, its relation to its own opposite is itself only relative. (PHG 117; PM 117.)
Simmel states that in practice, it does not even make any difference whether one thinks that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an innite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an innite process. Either way, the relativistic dissolution is necessarily a never ending process. (PHG 117118; PM 117.) Thus, Simmel arrives at the conclusion that relativism is the most appropriate expression of the contemporary contents of science and emotional currents and decisively exclude[s] the opposing worldview [i.e., absolutism] (PHG 13; PM 56). Thirdly, relativism gures in Philosophie des Geldes not only as an object of study or as a philosophical standpoint to be defended (in a relativist fash-
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ion) but, most importantly, Simmel also applies it in practice. Relativism is for Simmel most of all a mode of thought or a method of thinking. Accordingly, Spykman ([1925] 2004: 6) has stated that Simmel is a relativist, not only in the strictest sense of the term, but in the widest possible sense. Simmel does not investigate objects as sharply demarcated, atomistic substances but in relation to and in interaction with other elements. He sees that only through the continuous dissolution of any rigid separatedness into interaction do we approach the functional unity of all elements of the universe, in which the signicance of each element affects everything else (PHG 120; PM 118). In addition, Simmels writings include a myriad of conceptual pairs (the form/ content dichotomy, in its variations, being the most fundamental one),85 the poles of which are dened only in relation to one another, and he proceeds in his thinking typically by developing opposite standpoints in innite reciprocity, thus establishing his analysis on shifting sands. Simmels relativistic mode of thought operates mainly in two ways: both by tying together seemingly separate objects and by dissolving apparently simple objects into a complex constellation of relations. With regard to this, Kracauer (1995: 232235) distinguishes importantly between two types of relations that Simmel uncovers in his work: relationships of essential congruence [Wesenszugehrigkeit] and relations of analogy [Analogie]. The relationships of essential congruence or real relationships pertain to Simmels aforementioned conviction that there is nothing absolute that exists unconnected to other phenomena. It is among Simmels fundamental aims, as Kracauer notes, to rid every spiritual/intellectual [geistige] phenomenon of its false being-unto-itself and show how it is embedded in the larger contexts of life (ibid.: 233). This relativist outlook has two dimensions in Simmel (a point which Kracauer fails to note). The rst is the metaphysical dimension, which concerns the very way reality itself is enacted. For relativism, reality is constituted in dynamic relations: it dissolves all substantial elements into interaction and processes. The second one, on the contrary, concerns our practical consciousness (praktische Bewutsein). One of the greatest accomplishments of mind for Simmel is that it succeeds in uniting the dynamic and relational processes in which reality is enacted with the substantial existence. Simmel maintains that even though particular objects are themselves substantial entities, they nevertheless receive their signicance for us [] only as the visible representatives of a relationship that is more or less closely associated with them. Simmel illustrates this by means of examples:
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Thus, a wedding ring, but also every letter, every pledge, every ofcial uniform, is a symbol or a representative of a moral or intellectual, a legal or political, relationship between men. Every sacramental object embodies in a substantial form the relation between man and his God. The telegraph wires that connect different countries, no less than the military weapons that express their dissension, are such substances; they have almost no signicance for the single individual, but only in reference to the relations between men and human groups that are crystallized in them. (PHG 137; PM 129.)
The relativity embodied in things strips things off from their isolated individuality and connects them into a wider web of relations. For Simmel, the great philosophical signicance of money lies in the fact that it is the ultimate symbol of this relativity: it is nothing but an expression of the relation between things that constitute value (PHG 124, 129, 131; PM 121, 124; 126). It represents within the practical world the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other and are determined by their mutual relations (PHG 136; PM 128129). In addition, money establishes also other kinds of relationships of mutual dependence between different elements. Money weaves together and relates not only individuals with their divergent interests, needs and desires but also different spaces, cultural contexts and actions. For instance, due to the mediating functioning of money, as Simmel proposes in Philosophie des Geldes, it is possible for a German capitalist but also for a German worker to take part in the swap of a minister in Spain, in the prots of African goldmines and the outcome of a South American revolution (PHG 663664; PM 476; cf. GMoK 179). More generally, also Simmels maxim according to which the relations of reciprocal effect have to be the starting point of the study of all social formations means that one has to reveal the relations of essential congruence that produce them. As was noted above, for Simmel any social unity consists in dynamic reciprocal relations between its elements (SD 129). The second type of relations, relations of analogy, present a very different case from the rst. Simmels writings are full of analogies: he says that boundaries are to social relations what the picture frame is to a work of art, he compares his sociology of forms to geometry, brings out the common element in sociability and in art and play, shows a profound afnity between the alpinist and the gambler, etc. Simmel even gave his evaluation of his legacy,
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as we saw, in the form of an analogy by comparing it to money. Here and there Simmel couples together phenomena most foreign to one another by showing how they share some common features. Indeed, Kracauer notes that Simmel is indefatigable when it comes to establishing analogies. He never misses a chance to show that some of the essential characteristics of an object [...] are realized not only by the very object in which they were covered, but also by an entire series of objects (ibid.: 235). For example, in Philosophie des Geldes Simmel draws a stunning analogy between money and God. Referring to the idea of God as the coincidentia oppositorum by Nicolas de Cusa, Simmel maintains that just as the essence of the notion of God is that all diversities and contradictions in the world achieve a unity in him, so money, by becoming the absolutely commensurate expression and equivalent of all values, becomes the centre in which the most opposed, the most estranged and the most distant things nd their common denominator and come into contact with one another (PHG 305; PM 236). To summarize the above discussion, Simmel does not treat his objects as isolated substances but, guided by his relativist view of the interconnectedness of things, tries to free them from their isolation by showing the way they are intertwined with other objects. And, he proceeds in this by taking two paths: on the one hand, by revealing real relationships, either those in which reality is enacted in a metaphysical sense or those projected onto objects by human minds; on the other, by suggesting afnities between objects seemingly most alien to one another. This at once explains why his more or less arbitrary choice of objects does not lead to eclecticism or fragmentariness. In the last instance, as Kracauer (1995: 251) has maintained, it is doesnt matter which objects Simmel examines, since any individual phenomenon serves as good as an entry point to the web of relations as any other.
The plumb line

It is important to understand that Simmel is uncovering connections between things not only to replace the futile search for the being-unto-themselves of absolutes with the search for relations but, ultimately, he aspires to get the whole world in its entirety in view. This separates him from the empiricist who, eschewing any attempts to reveal ultimate meanings, merely tries to carefully establish the relations between facts (Kracauer, 1995: 252). Simmel,
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by contrast, always seeks to embrace the totality of life and thereby to detect a deeper meaning in the seemingly insignicant objects. Even the sociological forms are for him themselves accomplishments of deeper lying, more general mental [seelischer] basic functions (SOZ 492). Indeed, Simmel thinks, as he writes in a passage of his famous metropolis essay Die Grostdte und das Geistesleben:
from each point of the surface of being, however much it may appear to have merely grown in and out of this surface, a plumb line can be dropped into the souls depth such that all of the most banal supercialities are in the end bound to the nal determinations of the meaning and style of life via indications of direction (Grst 120; trans. Scott & Staubmann, 2005: xiii).
This hermeneutic idea of demonstrating the possibility [] of nding in each of lifes details the totality of its meaning (PHG 12; PM 55) guides almost all of his studies (Kracauer, 1995: 252; Goodstein, 2002: 211).86 In the preface to Rembrandt, Simmel even names the plumb line dropping as the main task of philosophy: What has always seemed to me to be the essential task of philosophy [] [is] to lower a plumb line through the immediate singular, the simply given, into the depths of ultimate intellectual meanings (RB 309; RBEngl 3). Importantly, Simmel also regards the task as ontologically uncommitted or neutral (Goodstein, 2002: 218) in the sense that it can serve a substantive diversity of basic philosophical convictions:
It is possible to relate the details and supercialities of life to its most profound and essential movements, and their interpretation in accordance with the total meaning of life can be performed on the basis of idealism just as much as realism, of a rational as much as a volitional or an absolutist as much as a relativistic interpretation of being. (PHG 13; PM 56.)
The basis of Simmels own interpretation of totality is, as we saw, the last of these convictions, relativism. In Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel uses money to uncover the relativity of all being. Therefore, in the last instance, money serves him only as an example:
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money is simply a means, a material or an example for the presentation of relations that exist between the most supercial, realistic and fortuitous phenomena and the most idealized powers of existence, the most profound currents of individual life and history. The signicance and purpose of the whole undertaking is simply to drop from the surface level of economic affairs a plumb line that leads to the ultimate values and things of importance in all that is human. (PHG 12; PM 55; translation altered.)
The idea of dropping a plumb line also forms the core of Simmels critique of historical materialism in Philosophie des Geldes. He does not simply reject materialism and embrace idealism but, via idealism, Simmel strives to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism. He bases his theorizing upon the innite reciprocity of the two levels: Every interpretation of an ideal structure by means of economic structure must lead to the demand that the latter in turn be understood from more ideal depths, while for these depths themselves the general economic base has to be sought, and so on indenitely (PHG 13; PM 56). The metaphor of the plumb line is relevant not only as it reveals Simmels interest in totality but also because it illustrates what Simmel considers to be the best way to it. What sets Simmel apart from a pure metaphysician (of whom the example sui generis for him is Hegel) is that he does not wish to reduce the multiplicity of phenomena to a single concept of their unity but, in accordance with his relativist worldview, rather tries to demonstrate how each fragment expresses the totality of being from its own perspective by being connected to everything else. In other words, as Kracauer (1995: 240) has beautifully put it, Simmel attempts to master the totality by spreading out in all directions from the individual phenomenon: he begins with the particulars and advances from them into increasingly remote regions of the manifold, gradually forcing the entirety into the eld of view. Instead of trying to capture the entirety of the world with the help of a few general and abstract concepts, as Kracauer argues that thinkers in the stream of transcendental idealism set out to do, Simmel snuggles much closer to his objects in order to pay regard to their individuality as much as possible (ibid.: 242). Indeed, Simmel holds that [t]he view that the philosophical guidelines attached to [] [an object] necessarily converge at one ultimate point, and thus must be made to t into a philosophical system, is a monistic prejudice that contradicts [] the essence of philosophy (RB 310; RBEngl 3). Attempting to uncover the absolute meaning of the world in its entirety by means of one
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concept under which to place all particulars, a pure metaphysician does not nd ones way back to the plenitude of things (PGPH 367368; Kracauer, 1995: 252). So, in Simmels view the true challenge for philosophy is how to be able master the totality without losing the multiple. As he phrases it in the preface to Rembrandt:
Philosophical concepts should not always keep only their own company; rather, they ought to give to the surface of existence what they are able to give, and not attach the condition to it, as Hegel did, that this existence as such should be elevated to the level of philosophical nobility. It would be better to leave it simply as it is and subject to its own immediate laws. Only in this way does it become enveloped by the network of lines that mediate its connection to the realm of ideas. (RB 309; RBEngl 3.)
In Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel presents the matter in even stronger terms and argues that, by beginning with the totality, one not only loses the individuality of its elements but also the totality itself. He thinks that it is unattainable to our experience and knowledge already in principle: the totality of existence is accessible to no one and can act upon no one (HPH 17). Therefore, the philosopher, too, can hope to grasp the totality only by proceeding from individual fragments. The methodological guidelines of this approach are laid out in the essay Soziologische Aesthetik. In the piece, Simmel suggests that we only have to engage ourselves deeply enough in the most common phenomena to nd out in what seems banal or repulsive a ray and image of the nal unity of all things from which beauty and meaning ow. Consequently, The worldview becomes aesthetic pantheism, every point carries the possibility of redemption to aesthetic meaningfulness, from every point radiates the whole beauty, the whole sense of the unity of the world for the gaze that is sharp enough. (SozAe 198199.) Of course, this seems to capture also the nature of Simmels relativist worldview. After all, the Simmelian relativism commences from the idea that, in their interconnectedness, each point is in principle capable of revealing the totality of the world. Indeed, there is a close congruence of form between the just described Simmels aesthetic pantheism and what Landmann (1968: 7) has called Simmels relativist pantheism. Both are motivated by the effort to nd the totality in individual details. In fact, by merely substituting relativist worldview for aesthetic observation in the following famous passage
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from Soziologische Aesthetik we get to the core of Simmels philosophical concerns: For us, the essence of aesthetic observation and interpretation lies in the fact that the typical is to be found in what is unique, the law-like in what is fortuitous, the essence and signicance of things in the supercial and transitory (SozAe 198). Indeed, in Simmels view, the preoccupation with totalities is what distinguishes the philosophical interest from other interests that we have:
In general, men are always turned towards particulars things the practical aspect of life alone makes sure of that. Whether these particular are very small or very great ones livelihood or a church dogma, a love affair or the discovery of the periodicity of the chemical elements it is always particulars which awaken contemplation, interest, and activity. (HPH 16; trans. Weingartner, 1960: 150.)
Philosophy, by contrast, does not treat only particular facts but it goes beyond the momentary particulars and concerns the whole knowledge and, indeed, the whole of life (HPH 14; see also SHN 188, 193194; Weingartner, 1960: 149). For Simmel, the basic intention of [] philosophy [is] [] to elevate our sense of the value and the interconnectedness of the world as a whole into the sphere of abstract concepts (KAGOE 125; KaGoeEngl 162). This is also what the account of metaphysics of this-side as an expression to a certain profound dimension beneath the immediate phenomena in the riddle referred to. As Georg Lukcs (1993: 172; trans. 1991: 145) has stated, Simmel views the smallest and the most inessential phenomenon of daily life so sharply sub specie philosophiae that it becomes transparent and behind its transparence an eternal formal coherence of philosophical meaning becomes perceptible. Hereby becomes also evident the difference between scientic, empirical research and philosophical reection: whereas the rst remains, as it were, in front of objects, philosophical reection, in contrast, also tries to get behind them. Thus, while for science singular cases tell something about the world, it is only for philosophy that they express a relationship to its totality.
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Life
If in Philosophie des Geldes Simmel used money as a means to penetrate the surface of economic life in order to uncover the pervasive relativity of all being, the level Simmel aspires to reach in his mature Lebensphilosophical phase is, ultimately, that of life (Leben) itself. So, what excites Simmel in the book Rembrandt, for instance, is Rembrandts solution to the problems of movement to be found within the frame of his notion of life; with Rembrandt, so Simmel thinks, the impulse of movement is the basis of his art (RB 314315; RBEngl 67): Rembrandt seeks form via life (RB 381; RBEngl 54). The aim of Simmels book is, at bottom, to give a theoretical expression to this idea of movement. As it happens, the notion of life as a ux of becoming that Simmel regards as the basis of Rembrandts art is also the foundation of Simmels philosophy of life. Just as in Rembrandts art, so in Simmels philosophy of life a form is only the accidental way in which its essence that is its becoming turns outward. For both Rembrandt and Simmel, form is only the respective moment of life. (RB 381; RBEngl 54.) Life presents itself for Simmel as an absolute principle: he understands life as true absoluteness, in which the contrast between the absolute and the relative is collapsed (LBA 224; TrnscCL 364). In other words: Life in the absolute sense is something which includes [both] life in the relative sense and its respective opposite (LBA 228; TrnscCL 368). Again, in his notes led in a folder entitled Metaphysics, Simmel phrases this by stating: Life is the indifference of process and content. Both of these are abstractions of lifes unity. (NlMMe 298.) Nevertheless, Simmel thinks that life can never be grasped in itself, but only through the relative contrast of life and form: Life is the opposite of form, but obviously an entity can be conceptually described only if it has a form of some sort (KMK 205; CmC 107). That is: If we wish to express the unied character of life in abstract terms, our intellect has no alternative but to divide it into two [] parts, which appear as mutually exclusive and only subsequently merge to form that unity (LBA 230; TrnscCL 369). The dualism of form and life is the very way in which [the unity of life] exists (LBA 233; TrnscCL 372). It also permeates Simmels whole image of the world: for Simmel, life and form are the metaphysical parties, the great sensegiving categories that divide up the essence of any given structure between themselves (RB 384385; RBEngl 57). According to him, any phenomenon
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can be interpreted in terms of the differentiated perceptibility of living and being formed. Social phenomena do not make any exception here, as Simmel perceives the social as inextricably both becoming and form. As principles, life and form also amount to the two major milestones in Simmels oeuvre. It can be claimed that, over the years, Simmel began to distance himself more and more from a Kantian inuenced thinking dominated by the principle of form87 to move closer to the tradition of Lebensphilosophie. The shift from form to life is not a sheer epistemological adjustment but a dislocation of epistemology itself (see e.g. KMK 198). With the transition, philosophy does not begin with epistemological questions for Simmel any more, as was the case in Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, for instance, but in his mature phase, ontology precedes epistemology; the metaphysics of life grounds also the theory of knowledge. The following holds thus especially for the late phase of Simmels thought, and does not claim to cover his whole work. The reason why I do not give as much emphasis to the principle of form as to that of life is my focus on the processualist aspects of Simmels thinking in this book. Ultimately, the notion of life can be interpreted as a way of addressing the pervasive processuality of things and the world, including the social world: Simmel perceives movement as something life-like and life as something moving. In this sense, life amounts in Simmel to an emblem of movement, a radical becoming. In Rembrandt, Simmel notes of life that It never is; it is always becoming (RB 321; RBEngl 11). It would be precipitate to discard Simmels philosophy of life based on the idea that the notion of life cannot have any place within scientic reasoning. Notwithstanding the fact that Simmel occasionally above all in his mature phase and under the inuence of Bergson does speak of a life as a force, it is also possible to nd another notion of life in Simmel that takes the concept of Wechselwirkung as its starting point. Indeed, it can be argued that there are two notions of life in Simmel: the one centring on inner subjectivity (Innerlichkeit), the other centring on intersubjectivity and the notion of interaction (Lash, 1999: 131). The rst has the notion of Erlebnis, inner experience, as it central gure. By means of the notion of Erlebnis, Simmel strives to overcome Kants intellectualism (see KA 47, 4950): like will in Schopenhauer and the will to power in Nietzsche, in Simmel Leben and Erlebnis precede reason. That is, Simmel does not see consciousness (Bewutsein) as being dependent on the a prioris of reason, but on the a prioris of Erlebnis (Bevers, 1985: 4849): it is only through being rst experienced in Erlebnis that an object can become
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known. For Simmel, Erlebnis is thus the expression of our primordial relation to the world, the response of our total existence (Gesamtexistenz) to the being of things: In Erleben, life, the most intransitive of all concepts, sets itself in an immediate functional connection with objectivity and, indeed, in a unique mode, the activity and passivity of the subject, regardless of their mutual logical exclusiveness, are connected to the unity of life (Hfor 321322). The other notion of life, or perhaps one could speak of the other aspect of Simmels notion of life, does not emphasize the inner sphere of the individual to the same extent as the rst but, as said, rests on the notion of interaction. For instance, in Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft Simmel states that it would be a mistake if one posited, beyond the individual effects and interactions of organic cells, some specic force of life [Lebenskraft] (EM1 II 275). Life, in its biological form, is for Simmel nothing but the sum of interacting forces among the atoms of the organism (PHG 210; PM 175). In Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie [1892], Simmel notes that there is no law of life nor any force of life (PGPH 344). It would thus almost make a tautology to say that the interaction between atoms brings about life or that life animates these atoms for their interaction already is life. Yet Simmel does not understand life only in terms of living organisms, but he extends the notion of life beyond the connes of the life sciences. What is important within the context of this study is that fact that he considers the social too in terms of life. Simmel contrasts the living interaction among individuals to the structures of higher order in which or to which that interaction is crystallized (SOZ 32; GFSOZ 6869). For example, in the piece Soziologie der Sinne he asserts that,
aside from the connecting forms that are elevated to the level of those comprehensive organizations, this pulsating life which links human beings together displays countless other ones, which, as it were, remain in a uid, transitory condition, but are no less agents connecting individuals to social existence. (SozSi 277; SocSns 109.)
There is a further point connected to this. Namely, in one respect, the principle of life concerns the question of nding a suitable principle of explanation for the human sciences. Simmel thinks that human beings cannot be understood without residue in mechanistic terms, but the processual and evental character of our social lives evades the mechanistic manner of explaining things. The notion of life is to stress this. According to Simmel, our
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life takes the form of a process with changing contents (RB 313; RBEngl 5): lifes totality is not is not a mechanical summation of singular moments but a continuous and continuously form-changing owing (RB 315; RBEngl 7). Consequently, in Simmels work, life appears not only as a theme, but it relates to a completely new image of thought he extracts from the latest developments of philosophy. Roughly speaking, he portrays the historical trajectory of western thought as a path leading from substance philosophy to the enlivening (Verlebendigung) of both philosophy and scientic knowledge. As Simmels own philosophy of life places itself within this process of enlivening as its culmination, so to speak, in order to understand his philosophy of life it is rst relevant to examine the manner he conceives of the progression of the enlivening. In the enlivening of thought, Greek philosophy, premised on the concept of substance, presents itself for Simmel as the rst stage. It rested on static essences at the base of all changeability of phenomena, and on xed forms reected in eternally valid concepts.88 (GgwPPh 386; HriBgs 53.)89 The thought of late Renaissance, the second stage of the development, found the decisive form of existence in mechanism. Reality was not conceived of as eternal, static, and xed anymore, but it was considered to be constantly changing in terms of mechanical movement. Knowing the world was no more a matter of revealing logically binding concepts and the metaphysical eternity of substances, but of calculating the laws of motion governed by a causality. (GgwPPh 386; HriBgs 5354.) Events were perceived in terms of to-and-fro of matter and energy determined by natural laws (KAGOE 122; KaGoeEngl 160). According to Simmel, Kants philosophy did not alter this the least bit, notwithstanding the fact that it conceived of the external world as a representation within the representing subject (KAGOE 129, 131): the world remained for Kant mechanical movement (GgwPPh 386387), something external, consisting exclusively of spatial and mechanical relationships (KAGOE 131; KaGoeEngl 166). Finally, the philosophy of life (Philosophie des Lebens) presents itself for Simmel as the third and most recent stage of western thought (GgwPPh 387), and the notion of life as the key concept of the modern worldview (Weltanschauung): Simmel believes that the dynamic vital character of the modern life-feeling[] is manifest to us as a form of the movement of life, consumed in a continuous ux in spite of all persistence and faithfulness, and adhering to a rhythm that is always new (NlPlmEr 179; ErPlm 238; translation altered). Further, in the essay Die Krisis der Kultur
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from the year 1916, he remarks: The concept of life now seems to permeate a multitude of spheres and to have begun to give, as it were, a more unied rhythm to their heartbeat (KrK 197; CrCult 99). According to Simmel, it is as if life would have had to depart from itself in order to get a hold of things and the substantively xed rst, only then to be able to come back into itself and realize itself as the ultimate generating force (HriBgs 127). This is why Simmel can suggest that perhaps the philosophy of life is, notwithstanding all its incompleteness, so far the purest expression of the enlivening of thought and the world it studies (GgwPPh 387). Simmel sees the process of enlivening beginning in Goethes lifetime (Bleicher, 2006: 343). Even though Goethes writings lack even the basic intention of philosophy, Simmel holds that Goethes sense of the world nonetheless brings forth philosophical utterances, just as a root gives rise to owers (KAGOE 126; KaGoeEngl 162). For Goethe, both nature and human soul emerge from life. Both are manifestations of the unity of being nature in the external dimension and human soul in the internal dimension (KAGOE 131). Yet according to Simmel it was only Schopenhauer who was the rst philosopher to philosophize on life as such. Schopenhauer did not examine the value and meaning of this or that experience or aspect of life but the meaning and value of life itself, purely as life (GgwPPh 384; KMK 188). Simmel considers this yearning to a nal goal and meaning of life as being connected to the relation of means and ends in modern culture.90 According to Simmel, modern individuals are surrounded by a whole multiplicity of means in which the most important means are constituted by other means and these again by others (SHN 176; SHNEngl 3). Our strivings in life take the form of long and complex teleological chains where it becomes ever more difcult to keep the ultimate goal in sight; our consciousness is focused solely on the means, whereas the nal ends lose in signicance correspondingly (SHN 176177). Simmel sees that not even philosophy has remained unaffected by this general tendency. He takes as his example Kants philosophy, which redirected the attention of philosophers from objects the contents of the world and their being, essence, meaning, and purpose to our means of knowing them. (GgwPPh 381.) It is in this cultural situation of the growing signicance of the means and the corresponding loss of nal goals and denite values that according to Simmel there appears the desire for an absolute goal. And, placing life at the heart of his work, Schopenhauers philosophy is thus
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for Simmel the absolute philosophical expression for this inner condition of modern man (SHN 178; SHNEngl 5).91 Schopenhauer rejected the possibility of nding any absolute purpose or value outside of life. Life could not obtain any meaning and purpose outside itself, since it was to nd everywhere nothing but itself as willing. This folding or bending of life solely on itself is for Simmel the source of Schopenhauers deep pessimism. As life has no absolute purpose outside itself, the inner rhythm of life appears as an unremitting monotony (SHN 183; SHNEngl 8), leading thus to the pain of ennui: if we are occupied by nothing, [] then we feel, solely and purely, life itself and exactly this experience causes an unbearable situation (SHN 183; SHNEngl 9). Thus, for Schopenhauer, the only redemption from this ennui and meaninglessness of life is the negation of life, Nicht-Leben. Interestingly, as Simmel shows, the unlimited optimism of Nietzsche stems from the exact same source as Schopenhauers pessimism: the negation of any absolute goal or purpose outside life. Nietzsche manages to escape from the pessimism of a life without meaning through nding the redemption within life itself. He sees in the augmentation of life its ultimate purpose and absolute value, the possibility for saying yes to life. Hereby, we see that Nietzsche operates with a completely different notion of life than Schopenhauer did. Instead of running in monotony, for Nietzsche life appears as a constant drive towards more life (mehr Leben) (SHN 377378; HPH 154155; KMK 189). In Nietzsches philosophy, life is seen as an immeasurable sum of powers and potentials which, in themselves, are aimed at the augmentation, intensication, and increased effectiveness of the life process (SHN 180; SHNEngl 6). Thereby, Nietzsches concept of life presents for Simmel nothing but a poetical-philosophical absolutization of the Darwinian idea of evolution (SHN 179; SHNEngl 6); between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche lies Darwin (SHN 179; SHNEngl 5). Whereas Goethe appears in Simmels work as an exponent of organicism that opposes mechanicist thought, Simmels notion of life is originally signicantly inuenced by Nietzsche. Simmel subscribes to Nietzsches view that life constantly transcends itself (LBA 222224, 228), yet he dispenses with the Nietzschean axiological interpretations. Simmel sees that life cannot exist otherwise than by producing more life. The epithet of more-life is essential to it: life is that which at all points wants to go beyond itself, reaching out beyond itself (RB 385; RBEngl 57). Life is a constant movement which at
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every moment draws something other to itself and transforms it into its own life it can only exist by virtue of its being more-life. Already sheer selfmaintenance inevitably involves in Simmels view regeneration. (LBA 229; TrnscCL 369.) Hence, becoming is the essence of life, its peculiar way of being. Life is potential (or virtuality), a course of becoming that determines the actuality of phenomena (see RB 377378; Lash, 2006: 325). However, besides Nietzsche Simmels notion of life is also considerably inuenced by Bergson. In fact, with the preoccupation with Bergsons philosophy beginning around 1908, Simmels concept of life goes through a considerable modication. Indeed, rather than being interested in the inner composition of Bergsons work and its method, Simmel interpreted Bergsons key concepts duration, memory, and lan vital in the light of the notion of life; ultimately, Simmel equates lan vital with life (Schwerdtfeger, 1995: 92). What separates Bergsons vitalism from Nietzsches notion of life as more-life is that whereas in Nietzsches work the category of life appears as anthropomorphized and anthropocentric (Bleicher, 2007: 152) in that it concerns only human existence and its values,92 in Bergson the idea of life as constantly striving for more-life becomes something cosmic: for Bergson, all existence, whatever its content, is a particular development of lan vital (HriBgs 132133; GgwPPh 385). Not only does this imply that evolution is devoid of any external goal but it also suggests that life does not consist of only the maintaining of life. If it did, the process of evolution would have already stopped with the most elementary organisms capable of adapting themselves to external conditions. For Bergson, as Thomas A. Goudge argues, life has kept on evolving because lan vital is constantly driving it towards higher levels of organization. This impulse constitutes the unique nature of all that is animate. (Goudge, 1999: 17.) The extension of the notion of life to the cosmic level is what Simmel imbibes from Bergson. That is, unlike in Nietzsche, and more in the vein of Bergson, the notion of life is for Simmel not anthropomorphic by nature, but Simmel understands life ultimately as a cosmic fact. In the piece Der Fragmentcharakter des Lebens, Simmel proposes that we have to understand the spatial and temporal existence of all nature in terms of continuity: as ceaseless ows of energy, an interaction of everything with everything else (FcLb 203). So, unlike Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Simmel does not consider the process of self-transcendence as being restricted to the activity of the will. On the contrary, in his view it holds for all dimensions of lifes movements
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(LBA 229). Simmel thus establishes a continuum between physiological-vital life and spiritual or mental life. As Gertrud Kantorowitz (1923: vi) has noted, Simmel sees the spirit merely as the strongest expression of the metaphysical might [Macht] which leads to the shaping of organisms, [as] only the symbol or demonstration of the entire cosmic reality. Notwithstanding its inuence on his own philosophy of life, Simmel nonetheless notes that Bergsons philosophy has the shortcoming of failing to bridge the gap between becoming and being, ux and xity, subject and object. Instead of standing beyond this grand dichotomy of western thought that runs all the way from Parmenides and Heraclitus, Bergsons work is conned within it by giving precedence to the constantly owing over the permanent and the xed. (HriBgs 69.) In this respect, Bergsons philosophy stands under the sign of modern Heracliteanism (cf. RB 445; RBEngl 105): the Bergsonian lan vital is lacking a denite, persisting something (LBA 222; TrnscCL 363). In it, as in Rodins art, another example of the modern Heraclitean worldview for Simmel, all substantiality and solidity of the empirical perspective has turned into movement. In restless transformation a quantum of energy ows through the material world, or, rather, is the world. (RB 445; RBEngl 105.)93 In the end of his essay on Bergson, Simmel speculates that perhaps the next step of the enlivening of philosophy will occupy a notion of life which would include both sides of the contrast processuality and stability (HriBgs 69). And, not surprisingly, this is precisely what Simmel aspires with his own notion of life, not, however, by reconciling the two terms, but rather by drawing a disjunctive synthesis between them. For Simmel, life, as a cosmic fact, does indeed amount to process and continuous ux, yet a completely new image emerges as soon as the process of life becomes more conscious-spiritual [bewutgeistiger] (FcLb 203). Conscious human life is not sheer absolute ow, but it has contents (Inhalte), as individuals create objects, such as words and deeds, images, law, social formations, technology, works of art, philosophical doctrines, scientic ndings, and so on (KMK 183, 184; LBA 230). Hereby, the world receives a new centre: the individual I (Ich) who connects what is separate and separates what is connected, creates accentuations and shifts perspective (FcLb 203). In Lebensanschauung, Simmel writes that:
human life [] stands under the double aspect: on the one hand, we are thrown into and adapted to cosmic movement, yet on the other hand we
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feel and conduct our individual existence from our own centre, as selfresponsible and, as it were, in self-enclosed form (LBA 319).
Thus, a problem arises as to how to specify the relation between organic life as a cosmic fact (i.e. a life) and the life of an individual: that is, how can we conceptualize life at once as indenite and singular, as unrestrained ux and the existence of an individual as a self-enclosed form? The dualism between the categories of life and individuality (form) remains without any truly satisfying solution in Simmels work (Schwerdtfeger, 1995: 92). Indeed, Simmel thinks that the conict between life and individuality cannot be solved, but only replaced by another conict in another form. Yet this does not make vain any effort to think it. Simmel sees that problems and conicts are not pointless, even if no solution to them was ever found. He argues instead that it would amount to pure philistinism to assume that all conicts and problems are meant to be solved. Both have other functions in history and the makeup of life which they full independently of any solution. (KMK 206.) Human life is for Simmel never sheer ow also because individuals create objects. Subjects do not exist solely in and by themselves, but Simmel stresses that the development of subjectivity always involves something external to the subject (WsK 367368). The creation and assimilation of objects is an obligatory point of passage in becoming a subject: we develop ourselves only by developing things (PHG 622; PM 449). Therefore, Simmel can state that human life is always pitted against itself in the objects or forms that originate from life. It can realize and manifest itself only in forms: Forms are inseparable from life; without them it cannot be itself (KMK 183184; CmC 375). That is, human life is expressed only in forms that have an objective validity and a meaning in their own right, independent of the lives of the individuals who have created them (LBA 230; GFSOZ 106; PHK 408). Forms are the transvital and transcendent element of life which Simmel calls more-thanlife (Mehr-als-Leben):
Just as transcending its current, limiting form within the plane of life itself constitutes more-life, which is nevertheless the immediate, inescapable essence of life itself, so does transcendence into the level of objective content, of meaning that is logically autonomous and no longer vital, constitute the more-than-life, inseparable from life, and the very essence of spiritual life (LBA 232; TrnscCL 371).
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The notions of more-life and more-than-life thus mark the distinction between physiological-vital life and spiritual life. Whereas physiological or organic life has only the quality of more-life, with more-than-life life becomes conscious and cultural: Just as life at its physiological level is ceaseless creating, so that, with a concise expression, life is always more-life, so life creates at the level of spirit something that is more-than-life: the objective, the product, the in itself meaningful and valid LBA 295; cf. 232); life produces something with a meaning and law unto itself (LBA 232; TrnscCL 372). For Simmel, every philosophy which expresses the relation between the spirit and the world (cf. the idea of metaphysics of this-side designating metaphysics as a certain relation of the spirit to the world) must ultimately become philosophy of life,94 an inquiry into the processes of life becoming spirit (Geistwerden des Lebens) and spirit becoming life (Lebenwerden des Geistes) (see Brf I 873). It is only in the act of self-transcendence that the spirit shows itself to be living (LBA 217). To unify the categories of more-life and more-than-life in one view, and to grasp the duality of human life, Simmel proposes the idea of absolute life (see RB 403, 419; LBA 232) as a wider concept of life which includes the relative contrast between life in the narrow sense and content independent of life. (LBA 232; TrnscCL 373.) So, instead of having unrestricted life on the one hand, and restrictive form on the other, the notion of absolute life is an attempt to combine both being and becoming into a unied worldview; not, however, by overcoming of the dualism by unity, but Simmel sees absolute life as a third principle beyond dualism and unity (LBA 228; TrnscCL 367). The self-transcending life is one life which is then divided into form and life, individuality and continuity, being identical with itself and being other. In other words, life contains that which is more than life (NlPlmEr 185; ErPlm 243). What is original in Simmels philosophy of life is that it deduces the striving towards more-life from the same formal structure that restricts life (Fitzi 2002, 271). The key to Simmels philosophy of life is thus the concept of boundary (Grenze): in the process of more-life, every boundary, every xed form is transcended, but only insofar as there exists something to be transcended (LBA 217). As a boundary, form is thus a necessary element of life: boundaries are indispensable in that they help us to orient ourselves in the world and discern the given order of things by nding our place and that of our feelings, deeds, experiences, thoughts in it, yet every single boundary can be stepped over. Consequently, Simmel notes that we are boundary beings who have no boundaries. (LBA 212214). For Simmel, life is thus
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dened ultimately in terms of transgression. In the act of self-transcendence, breaking through boundaries and setting up boundaries are united: every stepping over of a boundary also nds and creates a new boundary (LBA 213). It is precisely in its self-transcendence which however remains immanent to life that life is absolute: it is at once centripetal and centrifugal, a bounded form and a ux without boundaries. This is why Simmel can state that, for life, transcendence is immanent (LBA 223).95 That is, even when transcending itself life remains itself:
[A]s soon as something exists as a unity unto itself, gravitating toward its own cent[re], then all the ow from this side to that side of its boundaries is no longer agitation without a subject. Rather, the ux remains somehow bound up with the centre. Even the movement outside its boundary belongs to the cent[re]; it represents a reaching out in which the form always remains subject and yet which goes out beyond this subject. (LBA 222223; TrnscCL 363.)
However, life, in the absolute sense, does not belong to a subject any more than it does refer to an object. It rather makes the subject and object dependent on a form of the beyond (LBA 234, 295296) and is thus immanent only to itself: as the metaphysical foundational principle, life absorbs everything and generates [also] subject and object from itself (GgwPPh 387; trans. Bleicer, 2007: 150). As Simmel writes in Schopenhauer und Nietzsche with reference to Nietzsches notion of life:
Life, in its primary sense, beyond the opposition of corporeal and spiritual existence, is seen here as an immeasurable sum of powers and potentials which, in themselves, are aimed at the augmentation, intensication, and increased effectiveness of the life process. It is impossible to describe this process through analysis, however, because its unity constitutes the ultimate and basic phenomenon of ourselves. (SHN 180; SHNEngl 6; italics added.)
Now also the meaning of this-sideness announced in the riddle metaphysic of this-side should nally become clear. It marks the operational eld of Simmels philosophy. Simmel does not deduce life any further to the transcendent, but treats it in its immanence, as a basic fact that cannot be constructed (RB 314; RBEngl 6). There is no outside to the process of
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life, no supplementary dimension that would transcendently determine the multiplicity of relations, as Olma & Kokouzelis (2007: 3) dene the immanence characterizing new vitalism. Simmel does not try to locate phenomena in the realm beyond experience. Rather, in the vein of Charles Baudelaires modernism Simmel sees it as the great problem of the modern spirit [] to nd a place for everything which transcends the givenness of vital phenomena within those phenomena themselves, instead of transposing it to a spatial beyond.96 Simmel does not aspire any synthesis of the nite and the innite, but a grown unity of life. (NlPlmEr 185; ErPlm 243.) The eternal (i.e. form) is considered as something which dwells within the transient (i.e. life) (NlPlmEr 179; ErPlm 238). Accordingly, life stands for Simmel as the ultimate beyond beyond which he does not want to go anymore. As he puts it in Rembrandt, he is following the structure of the concepts with which we divide up the idea of the world [Weltbild] not beyond that point at which the polarity of form and life underpin at all the even unity of substance (RB 387; RBEngl 5859) the domain of Simmels thought is rather the transcendental lived reality.97 Thissideness can thus be understood as the transcendental determinability of subject and the world by the form of life. Life is their disclosure, an innity which constitutes them not, however, an abstract one (which amounts to the transcendent or to the absolute ow), but an immanent innity. Standing at the same time both within and outside, life constitutes for Simmel the ultimate horizon of thought: it is something which must be thought and yet constantly escapes thought.
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Conclusion: Social Theory After the End of the Social?

At the outset as the task of this dissertation was determined to redene the notion of the social in a manner that would respond to the recent transformations of society and social life. The return to Simmel was made above all with this ambition in mind. Rather than engaging in a hermeneutics of Simmels work concerned with what he really meant, his project has been discussed in order to try out how Simmels concepts might serve the purposes of contemporary sociological theory, and thus contribute to the revitalization of sociological culture. By drawing from Simmel, the thesis tries to bring to life the critical engagement in rethinking the social. Recently, the notion of the social has been under serious attack in the avant-garde of sociological theory. While some scholars have discarded the sociology of the social in favour of a sociology of associations (Latour, 2005), others have pleaded for postsocial relations (Knorr Cetina, 1997; 2001), and still others have even announced that the social is dead (Baudrillard, 1983). As regards the last form of refutation, Jean Baudrillard has presented three alternative scenarios: it is either that the social has never existed in the rst place, that the social now exists everywhere and thus nowhere, or that it really did exist in the past but does not exist anymore (ibid.).171 Nevertheless, the proposition about the end of the social should not be understood as a simple negation, but it suggests a much more subtle idea.
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CONCLUSION: SOCIAL THEORY AFTER THE END OF THE SOCIAL?
Rather than dispensing with the social completely, most of the deniers only reject the traditional ways of using the concept. It is only Baudrillard who not only pronounces the end of the traditional category of the social, but also the end of any project of transforming, improving or reviving the social (Wernick, 2000: 67). However, Baudrillard, as Nicholas Gane (2004: 57) has argued, bases his view on a fairly one-dimensional reading of Marx, which identies the social with class and production. The non-Baudrillardian claim of the end of the social, by contrast, takes issue with mainly two dimensions of the traditional notion of the social. Firstly, it opposes the idea that the social would be a specic domain of reality or some kind of stuff , a thing, or an item, in the sense that we could make a distinction between ties that are made of social stuff and those of some other stuff like material, biological, or economical. Instead, scholars like Latour regard the social as nothing but a name for movement, ows, translations, and associations (Latour, 2005: 6466). The second reason why the notion of the social is rebuffed is its anthropocentricism: the deniers of the social do not seem to oppose the idea of humans as social beings as such, but only the idea that humans would be the only social beings. The scholars contend that relations and connections are not made between human beings alone but between humans and nonhumans too, as our relations and practices depend on various objects or quasi-objects (Serres, 2007) from money to technology, commodities, texts, architecture, and so on. Coming back to Simmel, it is possible to maintain that, to a great extent, the debates on the nature of the social and the end of the social can be seen to be in line with Simmels theorizing on the social. Not only does Simmel call into question the self-explanatory nature of the social as a property by taking up the social as a problem, as an explanandum instead of an explanans, but, more specically, he also employs a notion of the social which the contemporary social theory in its attempts to redene the concept could protably draw from. In Simmels work, the social receives at the same time a more precise and wider meaning than it takes on in the mainstream social scientic discourse today: Simmel considers the social in terms of various types of relations and associations, connections and contacts. Furthermore, a case can also be made of Simmels treatment of the interaction between humans and nonhumans, as was argued in the essay on Simmelian objects. As regards the notion of the social as relations, Simmel could justiably be acknowledged as a founder of a sociology of associations172 or sociology
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of relations173. With him, the theory of relations precedes the sociological theory of beings (individuals, societies). Instead of identifying the social with the action of atom-like individuals, Simmel thinks that it is on the relations between individuals that the sociologist should focus. Nor does Simmel regard society as the dening feature of the social, as a general framework for social phenomena which the notion of the social would always already presuppose, but society is for him only a result of the interactions among individuals and groups, something which has to be produced and connected rather than being always already there. Thereby, instead of the being of The One (i.e. Society), Simmel privileges the becoming of the many (i.e. concrete relations): society is for him a manifold of intertwined individual elements, not an absolute, indivisible term. Simmels relativist view of the social, as we saw, goes hand in hand with the processualist aspects of his thinking. In Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel proposes that whereas unity and being belong together, the multiple (Vielheit) is always coupled with becoming and movement (HPH 61). In its elementary form, the social amounts for him to relations and is primarily by way of becoming. It is only by tracing relations that the sociologist is able get the whole of society in view without losing the multiplicity of individuals and concrete social forms. So, instead of being particularly static, as for instance the label formal sociology might easily mislead one to think, Simmels work is rather extremely uid and exible (which is also something that the labels essayism, relativism, impressionism, and vitalism suggest). From the contemporary movements in philosophy, Lebensphilosophie (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey) and the French vitalism (Bergson) above all others, Simmel extracted the idea of a radical becoming and introduced it into his very image of thought and the world. In Lebensphilosophie and vitalism, overall in the currents of thought imbued with a modern sense of life, Simmel nds the culmination of the repudiation of the principle of form (KMK 198199; CmC 85): they posit forms as nothing but instantiations of process, as accidental ways in which the process of life turns outward. Accordingly, in alike manner Simmel rejects any coherent systems of thought which aim at making all knowledge subordinate to one fundamental principle. Such systems designate for him the nal culmination of the principle of form: they make intrinsic formal perfection and completeness the ultimate touchstone of truth (KMK 199; CmC 86). Simmel sees the preoccupation with form as the characteristic of
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classicism something which he perceives himself in his mature phase as being most distanced from. Besides from authors like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Bergson, Simmel rather drew inspiration from, even identied himself with Rembrandt: whereas the essential problem of classicism is form, with Rembrandt and consequently with Simmel form is only a respective moment of life (RB 380381; RBEngl 54). Accordingly, in his work, Simmel may be said to execute, as it were, a shift from the sociology of the social as substance or thing to the sociology of the social as life: the social world does not consist for him in substances and their properties, but in processual relations, ows, and exchanges. The social does not assume a lasting and substantial existence by itself, but is processual by nature and comes into existence in the brief instant of the event. Thus, with this inclination to grasp the social in processual terms Simmel, as it were, brings it alive; his preference for process oriented notions such as Wechselwirkung and Vergesellschaftung is an emblem of this. According to Simmel, as we recall, the examination of all social formations must take the living interaction between individuals as its starting point. However, to be precise, the idea of the social as process-like was only one of the two ways that the notion of life gured in the above essays. The other articulation of the social and life was manifest in the dyadic relation between two living, and thus nite, individuals, I and you. It was argued that, unlike supraindividual social formations, the dyad is immediately dependent on the individual: the dyadic relation cannot outlast the death of an individual, but it ceases to be at the very moment when either one of the partners departs. These different ways in which the notion of life was linked to the notion of the social reect the distinction into the two different foundations of the concept of life in Simmels work, discussed in the essay on the key principles of his thought: on the one hand, Simmel bases his concept of life upon the notion of interaction and, on the other, he understands life in terms of inner subjectivity, as the non-repeatable existence of the individual. Accordingly, while the rst implementation of the notion of life pertains to Simmels effort to inquire into social forms of interaction in statu nascendi, in their becoming, the second reveals how the basic unit of the social, the dyad, is for Simmel fundamentally limited and shaped by something which escapes exchange, and is therefore independent of and alien to interaction: the nitude of the individuals life. The dyad amounts to the being-with of two nite, singular and non-repeatable individuals.
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So is it that it is all ephemeral, eeting and contingent with Simmel and all that is solid melts into air? Not quite. While Simmel clearly gives primacy to becoming over being in his social theory, he does not concern himself only with the transitory and the processual. On the contrary, besides dissolving beings into dynamic relations, Simmel also examines how relations are transformed into beings: the stabilization of the social from the uctuating reciprocal interaction to relatively stable supraindividual formations is one of the key themes in his sociology. Major organs and institutions such as the state, classes, family forms, the industrial division of labour and trade unions present for Simmel forms in which or to which the real concrete life of societalized individuals is crystallized [kristallisiert] (SozSi 276277; SocSns 109). Simmel shows that there are various degrees to this crystallization and respective autonomization of forms. The rst is that of institutionalized forms, such as language, money, religion, law, cities, and the state. They are characterized by a relative endurance: many of the institutional norms and organizations that surround us both precede us and outlast our limited existence. In the institutional forms, as Simmel puts it in Soziologie, the forces of interaction have already withdrawn [auskristallisiert] from their immediate bearers (SOZ 32). The autonomous play forms, the purest example of which is for Simmel sociability (Geselligkeit), the play form of society, present the second degree of autonomization of forms in his work. In their vivacity and playfulness they are not so much crystallized but rather only autonomous. While being oriented completely about persons, sociability, for instance, is autonomous in the sense that it does not serve any practical purpose external to itself, but is itself its own purpose (e.g. GFSOZ 120). Finally, the third level of autonomization is the generic form of society itself. Society is merely an abstract form compared with the living interactions of individuals. In fact, for all the emphasis put to process above, sociologically, the signicance of process thinking lies, ultimately, in the extent it may or may not help us to understand the stabilization of social ties as well as the maintenance of already stabilized formations. That is, my point has not been to assert that there are no durable social ties but everything is eeting, bursting violently from shock to shock in an incessant state of becoming. Rather, what I have wanted to stress is that, instead of beginning with the nished products, with the already stabilized social formations, we should try to avoid their reication as far as possible by beginning with the very processes that produce, uphold and also transform these formations. In this sense, there is
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nothing more mundane than events: The fact that people look at and are jealous of one another, that they write each other letters or have lunch together, that they have sympathetic or antipathetic contacts, [...] that one person asks another for directions and that people dress up an adorn themselves for one another (SozSi 277; SocSns 110) the spinnings of all these threads that bind us together count as events. According to Simmel, such associations arise [o]n every day, at every hour, and on every day and at every hour they are also dropped, picked up again, replaced by others or woven together with them (SozSi 277; SocSns 110). The crucial point addressed by Simmels social theory is precisely that the crystallized formations emerge from dynamic and processual relations. For Simmel, institutionalized forms are derivative from the elementary forms of reciprocal effects. Nor do the autonomous play forms cut their umbilical cord to life for good, but remain closely tied to practices and carry an internal relation to life. If not, they are according to Simmel in danger of becoming merely empty forms, deprived of life and meaning. Sociability, for example, tends to transform into a desultory playing-around with empty forms, a lifeless schematism when devoid of interesting conversation (GFSOZ 119; trans. Wolff, 1965: 56). Finally, Simmel does not grant the generic form of society the status of an absolute entity which is fully enclosed within itself , but sees it merely as the result of relations of reciprocal effect, that is, only as a secondary phenomenon [c]ompared with the real interaction of the parts (SD 130). Therefore society is not the genuine object of Simmels sociology, but merely the sum of the relations which unite individuals. So, the crystallized social forms may have withdrawn from the living reciprocity between individuals as much as possible, but without this processual sociality there would not occur any such forms at all. Indeed, at the most basic level, there exist only processes, processes of emergence and disappearance, of augmentation and diminution, of association and dissociation, of establishing connections and creating redistributions. They are at work even behind and in the most stable and invariable things. Just as social formations would never come into existence were it not for the dynamic reciprocity between individuals, neither would these formations be able to gain solidity without ongoing processes of reciprocity. As regards the stabilization of the social, I tried to argue in the essay dealing with Simmelian objects that, in many cases, it takes place with the help of objects. And it is equally here that Simmels social theory bears interesting
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afnity to the more recent theoretical projects which strive to redene the social by stressing the signicance of non-humans in and for the formation of our collectives. Social relationships are always inscribed into, supported by and stabilized with the help of objects. Overall, one could make even a stronger claim that were it not for objects, our uctuating social relations could not be stabilized into durable social formations in the rst place. In this sense, objects are an internal externality of the social. As Michel Serres (1995) puts it: Our relationships, social bonds, would be airy as clouds were there only contracts between subjects. According to Serres, the object slows down the time of our revolutions: instead of social changes aring up every minute, our relationships gain persistence precisely due to objects. The object[...] makes our history slow. (Ibid.: 87.) However, Simmel was too much a thinker of the revolutionary and life of revolutions, either gradual or more acute ones (see KMK 185) to become seriously preoccupied with the stabilizing function of objects. For Simmel, that which brings stability and makes our history slow appears ultimately as oppressing, and is therefore something which life is bound to burst, sooner or later. Nevertheless, even Simmel would have had it that objects prove to be excellent tracers of social relationships. Simmels methodological fetishism signalled by the slogan back to the things themselves accounts for this. Money, for one, proved in Philosophie des Geldes to provide a useful means to trace the network of relations. It is not only a prism through which to look at modern society but, functioning as one of its focal points and articulations, money has weaved the network of modern economy and ultimately the whole of society. Beginning with the social and cultural context of money, the resulting image of that context would be bound to remain abstract and vague. By following the circulation of money instead, Simmel is able to make the context something practical and living. By way of conclusion, we could nally try to situate event thinking on the map of social theory. Roughly speaking, event thinking can be posited as a third between theories of action and holisms and structuralisms. Or, to be more exact, it does not in fact lie at all between them, but is rather equally remote from both it does not have much to do with either one, but presents an independent viewpoint. I have called the rational action and norm based theories of action, on the one hand, and structuralisms and holisms, on the other, with the common denominator substantialism. The theories of action identify and isolate self-subsistent subjects as the source of the social.
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Basically, they view the social as something that we as acting and thinking substances ourselves have made. Various holisms and structuralisms, such as neo-functionalism, systems theory, and many historical-comparative analyses, in contrast, consider the social in terms of a supraindividual substance that is not of our making but rather has made us: not only is it transcendent and surpasses us innitely, but it also considerably determines us from above.174 In contrast to the theories of action as well as to holisms and structuralisms, the Simmelian event thinking makes an anti-reductionistic case of conceptualizing the social. It calls into question mechanistic thinking and causal explanations. The event signals that about social reality which cannot be explained with causes nor grasped in mechanistic terms. The event is not caused by actors any more than being reducible to action; for Simmel, Wechselwirkung is not only inter-action but the inter-play of activity and passivity in which every cause may become an effect and every effect a cause.175 Instead of identifying an actor as the source of the social, event thinking disperses the social into relations by drawing on the notion of Wechselwirkung. Given this, action itself is always dislocated: it is a property that is attributed to an entity relationally (and becomes thus an event itself). Equally, instead of perceiving the social as a reied thing, Simmel inquires into the forms of its emergence in and through reciprocal relations. Unlike holisms and structuralisms, Simmel stresses that the social is irreducible to a substance pre-existing the dynamic reciprocal relations. Event thinking rather gives primacy and priority to process over substance. In its basic, primordial form, the social is for Simmel sheer functional reciprocity, dynamic associations between entities. What is shared in the social is not a common identity or being, but literally nothing, nothing but the space between. It is this between, Zwischen, which marks the disclosure of the social with Simmel.
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NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
Notes
Introduction
1 For instance, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1982: 52) Durkheim notes of social facts that, it is clear that, not having the individual as their substratum, they can have none other than society. 2 In Societies (1966: 9), Parsons writes: A society is a type of social system, in any universe of social systems, which attains the highest level of self-sufciency as a system in relation to its environments. This denition refers to an abstracted system, of which the other, similarly abstracted sub-systems of action are the primary environments. This view contrasts sharply with our common-sense notion of society as being composed of concrete human individuals. 3 William Outhwaite (2006) has identied four separate lines of critique of the concept of society: rst, the neo-liberal critique and action theory which, based on an individualistic approach, reject the concept of society altogether; second, the critique launched by evolutionary psychology/sociology suggesting the replacement of the anthropocentric concept of society with conceptions more continuous with the social patterns of other animal species; third, postmodernism arguing for the fragmentation and dissolution of society (with Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, as its representatives); and fourth, globalization theory (by John Urry, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Martin Albrow, for example) which asserts that the concept of society is destined to wither away along with the nation-state which is its implicit basis. 4 No doubt, I have not always been able to make a distinction clear enough between the concepts myself; see the third essay Event Dynamics in this dissertation. 5 For the problems in translating the concept of Wechselwirkung in English, see p. 100. 6 This idea draws from the argument Latour makes in Reassembling the Social (2005: 8). Indeed, in certain respects, what I attempt in this book can be seen as being parallel to Latours project. The slight difference which nonetheless makes all the difference being, however, the fact that unlike Latour, I do not wish to make the bold Tardean move and assert that all associations are societies (or social), be the connected elements atoms, cells, trees, ants, stars or whatever, which at the same time also implies that all sciences studying the associations of these elements must become sociologies. Nevertheless, when it comes to his aims theres an anthropocentric bias in Latours work as well. It is the human which remains as his reference point in all of his studies, if only in order to be connected with other things (for this, see Pyyhtinen & Tamminen, 2007).
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Non-humans become relevant actors for Latours only insofar as they participate in the collective lives of humans: it is not the collectives of trees and non-trees or ants and non-ants that he concerns himself with but those of humans and non-humans (Latour too acknowledges the anthropocentric bias of the expression non-humans; see Latour, 2005: 72n). 7 Even though the concept social theory itself was not used until the end of the 19th century, its etymological root is nevertheless ancient. It stems from the Latin term socius, companion or ally, and the Greek theoria, a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, and also a sight, a spectacle. Literally understood, social theory would thus mean the contemplation of companionship or the reection of the possibility and forms of existing and acting together in the world. If we accept this crude denition, then we can see that as regards its object of study, there has existed social theory even before the term itself was invented. We can think of here the relation between the individual and society and the pathologies of that relation, for instance. The preoccupation with it dates back at least to the works of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke among others (see for example Horster, 2005: 4850). They were all concerned with the problem of how to constitute a state out of free individuals, whether by way of social contract (Rousseau), subordinating themselves under a sovereign, Leviathan (Hobbes), or in terms of natural rights (Locke). 8 Noros concepts of general theory and research theory are indebted to the notions of theoreticians theory and researchers theory by Ken Menzies (1982). 9 To be sure, the theories of society too deal with such questions, but premised on a different basis, namely the notion of society. 10 If the year of publication of the used edition of the works that are referred in the text is different than their original year of publication, or if the work mentioned is not included in the bibliography section, the original year of publication is given in square brackets. 11 Kurt Rttgers (1995) regards Stammler as one of the three founders of social philosophy (Sozialphilosophie) along with Simmel and Ludwig Stein. 12 In the third essay entitled Event Dynamics, I criticize the translation philosophy of life and employ the term Lebensphilosophy instead. However, since the time that the essay was written, I have toned down my criticism and come to see that it is quite justiable to translate Lebensphilosophie as philosophy of life as well. 13 In fact, to my best knowledge, in his published writings Simmel mentions the term Sozialtheorie only once, in passing in Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (EM3 I 420). 14 For example, when discussing the effort to accomplish a comprehensive worldview as a dening aspect of philosophy, Simmel uses various expressions such as the totality of being (Ganzheit des Seins, Ganzheit des Daseins) (HPH 16, 17), the whole of being (Gesamtheit des Daseins) (PHG 12), the totality of life (Ganzheit des Lebens) (PHG 9; PM 53), the whole of the world (Ganze der Welt) (SHN 188), the totality of the world (Ganzheit der Welt) (HPH 18), the totality of reality (Ganzheit einer Realitt) (PHG 11; PM 55), the totality of things (Ganzheit der Dinge) (HPH 19), the whole of life (Ganze des Lebens) (HPH 14) and the totality of all multiplicity (Totalitt aller Mannigfaltigkeiten) (SHN 193) to refer to what philosophy is after in his view.
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15 Besides in the collection of essays, Simmel employed the notion of philosophical culture also in another context. Namely, in 1914, Simmel wrote to Heinrich Richkert suggesting a student exchange between Strasbourg, Freiburg and Heidelberg. According to Simmel, this would contribute to the creation of a south-west German corner of philosophical culture that would ultimately enable one to enlarge the concept of philosophical culture. (Brf II 284; trans. Frisby, 1997: 4.) 16 For Simmel, it was above all the 19th century which gave rise to the individual/society dualism. While stating that the century was too colourful in its intellectual movements to create a single comprehensive idea, Simmel claims that for many authors in the 19th century, the reality of life was nevertheless epitomized by the concept of society (KMK 188). At the same time, in the works of Goethe, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche there developed the modern form of individualism, based on the idea of the qualitative singularity of the individual standing opposed to society. (FoIs 5253; Grst 131; SOZ 812813; GFSOZ 137146; PHG 493.) As principles, society and the individual are thus oppose to one another: while society tend as to be a whole, a unity of which single individuals are merely parts, these parts too demand to be acknowledged as wholes and unities in themselves (GFSOZ 122123). 17 Arto Noro (1991a: 149) has argued that general sociology can be interpreted for Simmels part as a great concession to his contemporary fellow sociologists, especially Durkheim, as well as to mass psychology. 18 Bevers (1985: 1314) discusses the matter in terms of Kulturwissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften and their different historical distance to the classics. 19 For instance, Jeffrey Alexander (1989: 27) has argued that classics provide a common point of reference for sociological discourse: a name like Durkheim, Simmel, or Weber presents a symbol which condenses stands for a range of diverse general commitments. Alexander identies four functional advantages that this condensation has. It is the rst two which are relevant here. According to Alexander, the condensation rst of all simplies sociological discussion by allowing a small number of works to substituting for [] [a] myriad of nely-graded formulations. Secondly, classics also concretize sociological discussion by allowing generalized commitments to be argued without the necessity for making the criteria for their adjudication explicit. (Ibid.: 28.) 20 Positivism, of course, has been given various meanings throughout its history, the main lines being nonetheless the Comtean positivism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Here I refer with the term positivism, to put it simply, to the view that, instead of being the outcome of theoretical reasoning, authentic knowledge can only be achieved through direct experience (in science: scientic observation making use of scientic methods) of what is posited. 21 See Goldthorpe (1969: 12) for a fairly similar view. 22 On the basis of what was noted above, we could thus say that whereas the natural sciences, for the most part, show merely a historicist interest in their classical founders, in sociology, there appears both historicist and presentist attempts to reconstruct the classics. 23 Alan Dawe (1978: 366), for example, states that what makes the classics still momentous for us is the continuing relevance of their concepts to our experience. When Weber
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speaks to us of his bureaucratic nightmare of a world, he is also speaking to us of our world. So, too, is Marx speaking to us of our world when he speaks of his world of alienation and dehumanization; and Durkheim, speaking of his and our worlds of anomie. Through the creative power of their thought and work, they reveal the historical and human continuity which makes their experience representative of ours. 24 This is not that dissimilar from Simmels manner of dealing with the thinkers he wrote on. Rather than trying to show delity to a master, Simmel used the thinkers he commented upon as instruments to develop his own thoughts. See the essay On Simmels Conception of Philosophy in this book for more on this topic. 25 To the Finnish social sciences Simmel was brought almost single-handedly by Arto Noro. Up to this day, his doctoral thesis Muoto, moderniteetti ja kolmas (1991) also stands as the only monograph on Simmel written in Finnish. Although not being primarily a work on Simmel, also Jukka Gronows The Sociology of Taste (1997) deserves to be mentioned here due to its exposition of Simmels sociological aesthetics. The existing body of translations of Simmel in Finnish is fairly small. The rst of them, a translation of Simmels essay Die Ruine as Rauniot by Raija Sironen, appeared twenty ve years ago in the Taide magazine in 1983. This was followed by Muodin losoa (Philosophie der Mode) in 1986 translated by Antti Alanen (with an Introduction by Noro). In 1997 came out a partial translation of Philosophie des Geldes (Rahan losoa) by Panu Turunen. The Finnish edition covers the preface and about a third of the latter, synthetic part of the German original. Pieni sosiologia, translated by Kauko Pietil and published in 1999, in turn, is a translation of Grundfragen der Soziologie, preceded by a translation of the programmatic introduction of Soziologie and of the excursus attached to the chapter. The translation Suurkaupunki ja moderni elm (2005) by Tiina Huuhtanen, edited by Noro, presents a collection of Simmels essays mainly from the middle phase of his thought that more or less centre on modernity and modern life. The latest Finnish translation of Simmel is that of the essay Philosophie der Landschaft, Maiseman losoa, published in the literature magazine Nuori Voima in 2006 and translated by the author of this book. The same year, there also appeared an ensemble of texts on Simmel in the philosophical magazine Niin & nin. They include four articles on Simmel written by Finnish scholars, an interview with David Frisby, and two translations of Simmel (ber einige gegenwrtige Probleme der Philosophie and a selection of Simmels aphoristic diary notes published in the edition Fragmente und Aufstze aus dem Nachla und Verffentlichungen der letzten Jahre) by the author. 26 See e.g. Oakes, 1984; Dahme, 1988; Kandal, 1988; van Vucht Tjissen, 1991; Witz, 2001. 27 See e.g. Lechner, 1991; Frisby, 1992; 2001; Ziemann, 2000; Lw, 2001: 5863; Schroer, 2006: 6081 28 See e.g. Scaff, 2005. 29 See e.g. Miller, 1987; Appadurai, 1988. 30 See e.g. Gross, 2000; 2001; Giacomoni, 2006. 31 See e.g. Accarino, 1984; Mllering, 2001. 32 In recent years, it is especially Simmels Philosophie des Geldes which has been at the centre of focus in many monographs and articles on Simmel. Giancarlo Poggi, for instance, explicates the main arguments of Philosophie des Geldes in his Money and the Modern Mind
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(1993). Natlia Cant Mil, in turn, has focused on Simmels relativist theory of value in her A Sociological Theory of Value: Georg Simmels Sociological Relationism (2005), Roberta Sassatelli (2000) has interpreted Simmels theorizing upon money as a contribution to the sociology of consumption, and Mathieu Deem (2003) has compared Simmels work on money to Weber and Marx. In her The Social Meaning of Money (1994), Viviana Zelizer starts from Simmels analysis on the cultural signicance of money, yet emphasizes that it needs to be supplemented by stressing the differentiation of multiple monies. 33 At the time this was written, 23 volumes of the total amount of 24 had come out. 34 See for example Christian, 1978: 125133; Dahme, 1981: 253, 368375; 1988: 415; Nedelmann, 1984: 9396; Frisby, 1981: 8; 1992: 7, 910; Bevers, 1985; Ziemann, 2000: 113116; Gross, 2001: 397398. 35 Fitzi (2002), too, has sought to connect Simmels sociological reections with his philosophy of life by asserting the interconnectedness of social experience (soziale Erfahrung) and life-experience (Lebenserfahrung), but an explicit effort to grasp the whole of Simmels work is missing in Fitzis study. 36 What sets my method apart from what Nicholas Gane (2004: 9) has called the agonistic strategy of revitalizing present thought, then, is that whereas the agonistic strategy amounts to push[ing] current ideas and theories as far as possible to open new ways of thinking, I try to do this by looking at the past. 37 In a fashion quite similar to Simmel, Deleuze suggests that, instead of being particularly reective, as a practice, the history of philosophy is about [p]roducing mental, conceptual portraits. As in painting, you have to create a likeness, but in a different material: the likeness is something you have to produce, rather than a way of reproducing anything (which comes down to just repeating what a philosopher says). (Deleuze, 1995: 135136.) 38 Another way to describe the implementation of Simmels ideas sought here might be to call it an act of translation. It translates Simmels thoughts into a language other than his; not only in the sense of translating them from German to English, but in that of from Simmels time to ours. Thus it breaks delity with Simmel. And this is precisely what a translation inevitably does. While trying to establish connections between ultimately disparate elements, forge a passage between two domains (our contemporary world and that of Simmels), a translation always also transforms and distorts what it mediates and transports (for the notion of translation, see Brown, 2002). In this sense, my reading is even a betrayal of Simmel, as is suggested later on. This, however, is not the same as to violently make Simmel something else than he is. The seizure of his concepts and ideas is attempted in Simmels terms, without violating his thinking excessively: the ideas developed are already folded as potentialities in Simmels own work another point made in the following essays on a couple of occasions. 39 Moreover, there is a vast amount of social forms that Simmel examines in his work. Leopold von Wiese has identied all in all more than 650 social forms in Simmels texts (Levine, 1971: xlvii). 40 Nicholas Rescher (1996) tells that process philosophy has two closely related aspects, the one epistemic and the other ontological. Whereas process epistemology pertains to
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the idea that the category of process presents the best tools to grasp the world, process ontology emphasizes that this is so precisely because what exists is not only derived from and sustained by processes but constituted and characterized by them. That is, for process ontology process is the most pervasive, characteristic, and crucial feature of reality. Even though process ontology includes also process epistemology, accepting process epistemology does not necessarily mean that one would embrace process ontology as well. Therefore Rescher calls process epistemology the weaker version, and process ontology the stronger version of process philosophy. (Ibid.: 2728.) The different versions of process philosophy vary also in terms of what type of processes they take as central and paradigmatic. Whereas Bergson, for instance, sees biological processes as paramount, other prominent gures, such as Whitehead, consider physical processes as paradigmatic, whereas still others, especially William James, one of the classical pragmatists, modelled his view of processes in accordance with psychological processes (ibid.: 3, 1418, 2023). 41 According to Rescher (1996: 2), broadly understood, process philosophy holds that physical existence is at bottom processual; that processes rather than things best represent the phenomena that we encounter in the natural world about us. 42 To be sure, the extension of process philosophy beyond physical reality was also made by the classical pragmatists such as James, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. 43 Following Rescher, the notion of process could be dened as a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally. Furthermore, a process does not necessarily mean a change in or a of an individual thing, but it can also refer to a transformation in or of states of affairs or conditions of things. (Rescher, 1996: 38.) 44 This is not to say, however, that it relied on a categorical divide between nature and culture. One of the starting points of new vitalism is rather to call such a separation into question: by thinking in terms of processes, it considers the ontological differentiations between nature and culture as an effect of particular relations (Fraser et al., 2005: 3). The work of Latour is perhaps the most inuential representative of the line of thought problematizing the nature/culture dichotomy (see for example Latour, 1993). 45 Though this is by no means unproblematic I use here the notions the potential and the virtual as interchangeably. 46 In Vom Wesen der Kultur (On the Essence of Culture), Simmel makes a difference between the processes of cultivation and culturalization in a manner that, as it happens, corresponds to a great extent to the difference between the realization of the possible and the actualization of the virtual (see WsK 366; EsncC 41). Simmel thinks of cultivation in terms of a realization of tendencies inherent in the cultivated object. According to Simmel, the raising of garden fruits, for example, develops the fruit to a state which already exists as a possibility (Mglichkeit) in its own underlying tendencies. Cultivation involves thus a limitation by which only some of the tendencies pass into the real, while others are thwarted or eliminated. The building of a log cottage or ship of a tree trunk, by contrast, presents a very different case. Instead of merely developing tendencies inherent in the tree, building is creative: in the process, a positive difference is produced
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and the tree is made into something other. 47 In Simmel, the specicity of an event is not obvious. As I maintain in a note (no 110) to the third essay, Simmel thinks that, according to their pure and ideal meaning, social forms are valid whether they are realized a thousand times or not even once. So, this would seem to suggest the event does not generate anything new as it merely realizes eternally valid forms. On a closer look, however, the event retains its specicity and its capability of making a difference. In Lebensanschauung, Simmel maintains that there exists for instance no art as such (any more than knowledge or, say, religion as such), but only historically specic forms of art characterized by a certain technique, certain possibilities of expression, and characteristics of style (LBA 240). The idea could be applied to the social as well. There exists no social as such, devoid of concrecy, but only concrete, historically changing forms of interaction. Thereby one could say that also the event of social relations does not merely realize in a sterile manner something already there, but it creates new relations, new modes of being-with. 48 Of course not even empirical concepts correspond to reality. On the contrary, concepts have an entirely other structure than the world. Simmel too touches on the matter in Soziologie: No scientic discipline can describe or formulate the richness of real existing events [Vorgnge] or the qualitative determinations of some thing exhaustively. When we therefore employ concepts which crystallize that immensity in themselves and, in a sense, make it tractable, the whole is not represented in the concepts as if in parts made of essentially identical matter. On the contrary, concepts have another inner structure, another epistemological, psychological and metaphysical sense than a whole consisted of the things underlying it. Concepts project this whole on a new level; they do not express the extensive nature of the world with the same albeit minor extensity, but in a form which is already in principle different. The syntheses of those forms do not form a miniature image of the totality of immediate phenomena, but are autonomous formations made of the materials of the forms. (SOZ 606607.) 49 Consequently, it indeed seems much more easier to list all the things that the social is not than to dene the concept in positive terms: typically in sociology, the social has been separated from the natural, the psychological, the economical, the political, and so on. 50 To specify further, for the sake of coherence, the English US spelling of the original versions of essays no. 6 and 7 have been transformed into UK English spelling (with the exception of -ize spellings which are used throughout the book), the abstracts of essays no. 3, 4, 6 and 7, and the subtitles of essays no. 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 have been omitted, the bibliographies of the essays have been merged into one common bibliography section, and all footnotes have been converted into endnotes.
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NOTES TO 1. SIMMEL LIFE AND WORK
. Simmel Life and Work

51 In this section, I draw from the biographical details presented by Landmann ([1958] 1993); Wolff, (1965: xviiixxiv); Coser (1977: 194199); Schnabel (1976: 270276); Dahme (1981: 234247); Dahme & Rammstedt (1986: 912), Frisby (1984a: 2141); Jung (1990: 1121), and Khnke (1996: 9166). 52 According to Jazbinsek (2003: 103), Friedrichstrasse did not have a bus line until a decade later [after Simmels birth], at which time it still operated with horse-drawn vehicles. The road could not reasonably be called a thoroughfare until March 22, 1873, when the rst shopping arcade opened on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Behrenstrasse in celebration of the birthday of Emperor William I. The elegant Caf Bauer in 1884 courted customers with the rst illuminated signboards far and wide after the German Edison Company for Applied Electricity set up a signal box in the cellar of the building next door. 53 The position of the George circle in the German intellectual atmosphere around the turn of the century, the circles hostile relationship to sociology, and the ambivalence of the relationship between Simmel and George has been well documented by Wolf Lepenies in Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (1988: 258296). 54 For a comparison of Simmel and Jaspers see Tennen (1976). 55 Heidegger was familiar with Simmels philosophy of life, as well, and took up some ideas of it. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger acknowledges that, Nowadays also G. Simmel has notably included the phenomenon of death in the determination of life, though at the same time he criticized Simmel for not making a clear distinction between the biological-ontic and the ontolocial-existential life (Heidegger, 1972: 49n). As Jalbert (2003) argues, Heideggers argumentation here does not acknowledge the degree of closeness their writings on death had the kind of closeness and even inuence by Simmel that Heideggers own earlier lectures had made explicit. For a comparison of Simmel and Heidegger see also Groheim (1991) and Gawoll (1993). 56 Besides, Schnabel (1976) has argued that Coser does not specify what he means by non-scholarly publications, nor, what is more crucial, the fact to what extent the recognition of the texts published in these was distinct from their scholarly signicance. The role-set model also carries with it certain behaviouristic presuppositions which are not without problems. (Ibid.: 275.) 57 Susman echoes this by stating: Biographical raw material is, according to him [i.e. Simmel], without value for the presentation of philosophy. Yet she continues by stressing that, no matter what, the biographical plays a signicant role in Simmels work too. Not only the time but also the place of his birth in the heart of the then already metropolitan, lively, restless Berlin on the corner of Leipziger- and Friedrichstrasse was decisive for his life and thought. (Cited by Frisby, 1981: 11.) 58 Simmels treatment of the relation of the individuality of the philosopher and his or her personal circumstances might bring further light to the matter. For Simmel, what is individual in Schopenhauer, for instance, is precisely Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and not his external life: Schopenhauers incomparable individuality does not lie in his
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personal circumstances that he was born in Danzig [Gdansk], that he was a bachelor unworthy of love, that he fell out with his family, and that he died in Frankfurt because each of these traits is merely typical. Rather, his individuality, that which was personal and unique about Schopenhauer, is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung []. (RB 375; RBEngl trans. 50.) In other words, Simmel holds that, What we like to call the personal aspect of people the external circumstances of their lives (their social position, whether married or unmarried, rich or poor) is precisely that which is not personal about them. As these features are shared with countless others, they cannot mark the more or less unique personality of the individual. (RB 374; RBEngl 50.) None of them are particular for this specic individual. 59 There is nothing outrageous in this claim. Our practices of naming, for instance, as Ian Hacking has shown (2000: 99114; 2002: 3132), make up people by interacting with the people they name. For example, depression as a classication interacts with people in a way that they can come to think of themselves as that kind and modify their behaviour accordingly. Moreover, the classication inscribes itself into institutional practices and material things too. A depressed is not only a kind of person, but also a medical object, a problem for the national health-service, and a paralegal entity being monitored, diagnosed, medicated, treated with therapy, etc. within the network of schools, workplaces, homes, social workers, hospitals, professionals of pharmacology, media, and so on. 60 The exact date when the text was written is unknown, yet it cannot have been written before the year 1910, as Torge Karlsruhen and Otthein Rammstedt (2004: 549) point out. 61 Ich bin von erkenntnistheorethischen und kantwissenschaftlichen Studien ausgegangen, mit denen geschichtliche und sozialwissenschaftliche Hand in Hand gingen. 62 For a more extensive and detailed discussion on the self-portrait see Khnke (1996). 63 In 1904, Simmel wrote to Rickert that i am so dissatised with the products of my early years that new, revised editions would be needed []. my differenzierung and moralwissenschaft are sold out over the years, and [...] it is painful for me that these antiquarian exemplars are sold at a price that i hold as completely unreasonable []. (Brf I 471472.) 64 Simmel also discusses pragmatism explicitly in some of his later works (see for example KMK 196198; LBA 259260). In addition, they include formulations which strike as quite pragmatist. For instance, in Lebensanschauung Simmel states of truth that alone that which is fruitful is true (LBA 260). However, the pragmatism of Simmels mature phase is more a function of his philosophy of life than something actually stemming directly from the pragmatist tradition: he thinks that knowledge is not independent vis--vis life, but belongs to the scene of life and serves its overall intention (LBA 258). Simmel also expressed explicit criticism towards pragmatism. In Lebensanschauung, he stresses that the aw of the pragmatist theory is that it leaves the essence of truth itself unclear (LBA 259): the usefulness of a truth claim cannot account for the meaning of truth; what truth means is not touched by how it fosters our lives or brings us to ruin (LBA 260). Consequently, truth, however one sees it, is according to Simmel something innerly independent of life, something that lies there only virtually to be grasped by life (LBA 259). Indeed, Simmel does not reduce everything to the ux of life, but pays regard to
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the transvital meaning of forms too signalled by the idea of the turn of the axis of life (Achsendrehung des Lebens) (see LBA 244245). Truth as well is for Simmel something that should be perceived in this manner: while it originates in life, it also gains an independent status. 65 Besides the fact that Moralwissenschaft prepared the ground for Simmels later reections, also the fact that Simmel had already published some bits of Philosophie des Geldes as essays (Zur Psychologie des Geldes [1889], Das Geld in der modernen Kultur [1896], Die Bedeutung des Geldes fr das Tempo des Lebens [1897], and Die Rolle des Geldes in den Beziehungen der Geschlechter [1898]) implies that Philosophie des Geldes does not present that clear a watershed in Simmels work as it rst might seem. 66 This duality is not completely without resemblance to certain distinctions made between scientic philosophy and philosophy understood as a view of life. Edmund Husserl, for instance, distinguished between wissenschaftliche Philosophie (i.e. phenomenology) and Weltanschauungsphilosophie, Bertrand Russell between scientic philosophy and philosophy based on religious and ethical motives, and Ludwig Wittgenstein between wissenschaftliche Fragen and Lebensproblemen. However, what separates Simmels conception of philosophy from these is that, on the one hand, he did not try to develop philosophy into a rigorous science, but rather cultivated a relativistic or relationistic line of philosophy (Lger, 1989: 3642) and, on the other hand, he understood the task of producing a worldview in a much more specic sense than of just discussing general problems of life, religious beliefs, or ethical motives. 67 For Simmels own testimony on this, see his letter to Rickert in Buch des Dankes (Brf II 637); see also Bevers (1985: 30). 68 English translations of both can be found in the collection Simmel on Culture (1997). 69 The fact that the very initiative for the book was made by the publishing house Gschen, which had released Simmels Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (1910) a few years earlier (see Fitzi & Rammstedt, 1999: 432), might indicate that Simmel was not that passionate about his programme of sociology any more. 70 Rather than merely refusing to concern himself with matters of the natural sciences, Simmel also genuinely felt he was lacking a proper cognizance on them. In reference to Bergsons knowledge of these matters, Hans cites his father to have stated once: The fact that Bergson knows more than me makes me happy, but the fact that I know less than him is, however, agonizing (H. Simmel, 1976: 263). 71 These include Die sthetische Bedeutung des Gesichts [1901], Aesthetik der Schwere [1901], Der Bildrahmen. Ein sthetischer Versuch [1902], ber sthetische Quantitten [1903], Die sthetische Quantitt [1903], Der Henkel. Ein sthetischer Versuch [1905], Die Ruine. Ein sthetischer Versuch [1907], Zur sthetik der Alpen [1911], and Philosophie der Landschaft [1913]. 72 See Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers [1908], ber den Schauspieler. Aus einer Philosophie der Kunst [1909] Der Schauspieler und die Wirklichkeit [1912], and Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers [1923]. 73 Rom. Eine sthetische Analyse [1898], Florenz [1906], and Venedig [1907]. 74 See Bcklins Landschaften [1885], Kant und die moderne Aesthetik [1903], Aesthetik
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der Portrts [1905], ber der dritte Dimension in der Kunst [1906], Schopenhauers sthetik und die moderne Kunstauffassung [1906], Christendum und die Kunst [1907], Der siebente Ring [1909], Lart pour lart [1914], ber die Karikatur [1917], and Das Problem des Portrts [1918]. 75 See for example Rodins Plastik und die Geistesrichtung der Gegenwart [1902], Das Abendmal Lionardo di Vincis [1905], Die Kunst Rodins und das Bewegungsmotiv in der Plastik [1909], Michelangelo. Ein Kapitel zur Metaphysik der Kultur [1910/11], Goethe [1913], and Rembrandt [1916]. 76 The aspiration to reveal the aesthetic character of social life also immediately reveals that Simmels interest in aesthetic matters is not reducible to his philosophical concerns. 77 Simmel had already introduced the themes of Lebensanschauung in some of his earlier writings. Three out of the four chapters of the book had appeared in the journal Logos as previous versions, and Simmel had worked on the notion of life extensively in the book Rembrandt.
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NOTES TO 2. RELATIVISM, THE PLUMB LINE, AND LIFE
. Relativism, the Plumb Line, and Life

78 In Soziologie, Simmel contrasts a letter to literature and published treatises in the sense that unlike the latter, a letter is rst and foremost subjective and personal in its content. For Simmel, the letter is a peculiar form of written communication that mixes secrecy with publicity: being something wholly subjective, momentary, solely-personal (SOZ 431), it nonetheless involves, at least potentially, an unlimited publicity (SOZ 429). 79 Metaphysik als ein bestimmtes Verhalten des Geistes zur Welt, als etwas Funktionelles, oder als der Audruck fr eine gewisse Tiefdimension unterhalb der unmittelbaren Erscheinungen, in der der Geist deren Sinn u. Verknpftheit ndet aber nicht ein Substantielles, ein Einheitlich-Absolutes, nicht ein zu handhabender Schlssel, der alle Tren ffnete. 80 Alfred Mamelets Le Relativisme Philosophique chez Georg Simmel, published in 1914, is up to this day perhaps the best and most comprehensive study of Simmels relativism. It leads the principle of relativism through all the various aspects of Simmels work from moral philosophy, value theory, epistemology, philosophy of history, sociology, philosophy of religion, and his conception of philosophy to philosophy of life. 81 I deviate here from the formulation given in the English translation of Kracauers essay published in The Mass Ornament and follow an alternative translation provided by Frisby (1981: 7). In The Mass Ornament, the excerpt goes there is nothing absolute that exists outside any links to the remaining phenomena and that has validity in and for itself . 82 In 1896, four years before the publication of Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel wrote to Rickert that, In the course of the decade I hope to present you with a Theory of Relativism []. In the meantime, other things have been commenced. (Brf I 214; trans. Frisby, 2002: 16.) However, the enterprise ran into difculties, and no monumental Theory of Relativism was ever nished. For instance, in 1898, Simmel complained to Rickert in a letter that he was struggling with his relativist theory of value he was working on in the manuscript Philosophie des Geldes: I am groaning over and doubting my theory of value. Even the most elementary point up to now provides me with insurmountable difculties. (Brf I 305; trans. Frisby, 2002: 16.) 83 Cultural relativism, for instance, is based on the idea that there exist different cultures, and the views and practices of one of them cannot be seen as being more true or better than any of the others, since there exists no common yardstick to measure this that itself would not be dependent on some cultural frame of reference. 84 Therefore, for the sake of clarity, it might perhaps be better to call Simmels relativism relationalism (see e.g. Gangas, 2004) or relationism (see e.g. Bevers, 1985; Mil, 2005), or even relational relativism (see Dahme, 1981 II: 252). However, I choose to use the term relativism for mainly two reasons. The rst is that relativism is also the one Simmel himself employs (for a similar choice of term see e.g. Papilloud, 2004). Secondly, and more substantially, to favour the terms relationalism and relationism over relativism would in fact blur the fact that, instead of just using the word in a different sense than what is commonly understood by it, Simmel tries to take relativism very
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seriously: whereas relativism in its conventional form sees the relativity of things as a diminution of their validity, Simmel, on the other hand, sets out to ground that validity upon relations. Already Simmels contemporaries, even colleagues and friends like Rickert, often misconceived of his relativism as a sceptical dissolution of certainties and solid foundations. Accordingly, Simmel was considered as an exclusively critical, even destructive spirit whose thinking leads only to negation, as Simmel complained in a letter to Weber in 1908. However, in the letter Simmel stresses that, for many years in all his work he has rather tended exclusively toward the positive. (Brf I 615; trans. Frisby, 1981: 25.) And so it is with his relativism as well. Nevertheless, when it comes to his conception of cultural forms such as science, art, religion, language, law, society, etc. Simmel can be argued to hold a view that comes close to what is usually meant by the expression conceptual relativism: that reality is dependent on the chosen system of concepts. Namely, Simmel regards these different cultural forms as not competing with let alone refuting one another: each of them provides one perspective to reality which is annullable or correctable from the view point of any other form (LBA 238). Bevers (1985: 6364) has called this view Simmels ontological relationism (ontologische Relationismus). According to Bevers, it also pertains to the historicity of forms: for instance, there is no art as such, in itself, but we have only historical and specic forms of art tied to a certain time and place and dependent on matter of a specic style, technique and the possibilities for expression related to them (see LBA 240241). 85 In Soziologie, Simmel writes that, Overall, form and content are merely relative concepts, categories of knowledge for the conquering of phenomena and organizing them intellectually so that the very same thing that in one relation, as if seen from above, appears as form, must be described as content in another (SOZ 492). 86 Other examples are cited below, so let it sufce here to refer to the piece Soziologie der Geselligkeit (Sociology of Sociability): In art, in all the symbolism of religious life, in great measure even in the complex formulations of science, we are thrown back upon this belief, upon this feeling, that autonomies of mere parts of observed reality, that the combination of certain supercial elements possess a relation to the depth and the wholeness of life, which, although often not easy to formulate, makes such a part the bearer and the representative of the fundamental reality. (SozGskt 192; SocSblt 129.) 87 In Hauprprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel explicitly states that [t]he Kantin reection [] has its main question in the concept of form (HPH 24). 88 For Simmel, the medieval philosophy only gave the Greek substance philosophy a Christian-theological colouring by putting God and the divine order of things into the place held by substance for the Greeks. Therefore in his view it does not account for a proper, independent stage of its own in the development. 89 Simmel traces substantialism back to Parmenides. Parmenides philosophy is for Simmel substantialist par excellence. In it, being is not yet an abstract concept, a form, but appears as if as matter (Materie), stuff (Stoffe): it is an emblem of the emptiest abstraction being is something which is common to all beings become perceptible and tangible. (HPH 4647.)
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90 The concern with means and ends runs almost throughout Simmels whole career, beginning from Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft in 1892/93 all the way to his mature phase to play a crucial role in his various essays on culture and its concept, tragedy, crisis, conict, essence, and so on. It is, however, in Philosophie des Geldes where the means/ends problem nds its most profound treatment. In modern culture, Simmel argues, means often gain a preponderance over ends. One example of it is the enthusiasm for modern technology: It is true that we now have acetylene and electrical light instead of oil lamps; but the enthusiasm for the progress achieved in lighting makes us sometimes forget that the essential thing is not the lighting itself but what becomes fully visible. Peoples ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraphs and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared to this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation. (PHG 671672; PM 482.) The most perfect example of the preponderance of the means over the ends is for Simmel money (PHG 302; PM 235). According to him, money presents the purest form of the tool (PHG 263; PM 210), an abstract and absolute means: since it is not related to any specic purpose, it can serve all possible economic purposes (PHG 266267; PM 212213). It is precisely the fact that money is the absolute of means that it becomes, at the same time, the absolute purpose for some people. According to Simmel, the ultimate craving for money must increase to the extent that money takes on the quality of a pure means. (PHG 298; PM 232.) 91 Yet again, the feeling of the meaning of life being just in front our eyes without, however, exposing itself is, according to Simmel, the innermost condition of the deep restlessness of modern individuals: I believe that this secret restlessness, this helpless urgency that lies before the threshold of conscience, that drives modern man from socialism to Nietzsche, from Bcklin to impressionism, from Hegel to Schopenhauer and back again, not only originates in the bustle and excitement of modern life, but that, conversely, this phenomenon is frequently the expression, symptom, and eruption of this innermost condition. The lack of something denite at the center of our souls impels us to search for momentary satisfaction in ever-new stimulations, sensations and external activities. Thus it is that we become entangled in the instability and helplessness that manifests itself as the tumult of metropolis, as the mania for travelling, as the wild pursuit of competition and as the typically disloyalty with regard to taste, style, opinions and personal relationships. The signicance of money for this kind of life follows quite logically from the premises that all the discussions in this book [i.e., Philosophie des Geldes] have identied. (PHG 675; PM 484.) 92 This is also the reason why, for Simmel, Schopenhauer is without doubt a greater philosopher than Nietzsche: whereas the latter is challenged only by moral questions, not metaphysical ones, the rst has a mysterious relation to the absolute of all things and to the abyss of existence. Unlike Nietzsche, Schopenhauer is concerned not only with the basis of human beings and their values, but also with that of existence itself. (SHN 188189; SHNEngl 13.) 93 For Simmel, a symptom of the aw of modern Heracliteanism is that it makes time
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strictly atemporal. Whereas the mechanistic worldview of Kants philosophy eliminates time by making it something ideal and abstract (see LBA 219221), the neo-Heraclitean worldview too obliterates it, but for completely other reasons. As modern Heracliteanism perceives life as an absolute ow, it abandons all solidity in which a before and after that is, time could mark itself . It makes the identication of singular moments or events impossible; absolute becoming is therefore just as atemporal as absolute non-becoming. Simmel nds a solution to this in Rembrandt. In Rodins art, the human being only exists, as it were, in the Heraclitean moment of becoming, but we do not feel the coming into being of this moment. Rembrandt, in contrast, makes visible the connection between individuality and becoming: the moments of absolute becoming are no longer nonlocalized atoms of being, but rather states of one and the same individual (which is not to be interpreted as a solid substance, but as the peculiar identity of the living being with itself), as the moments of the development of an individuality. (RB 445446; RBEngl 105106.) 94 Hereby Simmel, in a sense, tries to complement Hegels philosophy of the spirit. Analogous to this, in the essay Die historische Formung, Simmel states that Hegels denition that only the spirit has history should be complemented be adding that only the living spirit has history (Hfor 322323; italics added). 95 Simmel hails critical enlightenment for having refuted the idea of the transcendent. The tradition of the transcendent places certain realities, values, objects of belief, and validities such as God for which there is no room in the subjectively circumscribed life into the realm of the beyond while, however, letting them act back onto life. However, for Simmel critical enlightenment is awed by the fact that it jumps to the other extreme: it reduces everything located beyond the subject back within the connes of subjective life. As a line of thinking, it remains completely within the realm of absolute immanence, thus failing to recognize anything beyond the subject. (LBA 234.) 96 For Simmels afnity to Baudelaire see Frisby, 1984b. 97 I make a distinction between the terms transcendent and transcendental in order to underline how in Simmels philosophy of life the transcendental does not imply a consciousness, a transcendental subject to whom the transcendental eld appears. On the contrary, the transcendental eld is presented as a life that is not dependent on a subject nor an object, but grounds both subject and object from itself. This is of course something very different from Descartes, Husserl, or Kant, for instance: whereas for the rst two it was the cogito which opened up the transcendental eld, Kant understood it in the personal form of an I. (Cf. Deleuze, 1991; 1994.)
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NOTES TO CONCLUSION: SOCIAL THEORY AFTER THE END OF THE SOCIAL?
Conclusion: Social Theory After the End of the Social?

171 Of course, the question of the end of the social is a long-standing issue, which originally had to do with the concern, addressed among others by such thinkers as Ferdinand Tnnies and Max Scheler, of the inner decomposition and loss of the warm and harmonious small-scale community, Gemeinschaft, in the face of the alienating society, Gesellschaft. However, there are distinctively other things at stake in the recent discussion on the end of the social. Instead of dealing with an assertion that individuals would somehow remain disconnected to or alienated from one another, the updated version of the end of the social rather suggests that we should re-think that which connects them. 172 This along with Gabriel Tarde, perhaps, who Latour (2002; 2005) celebrates as the progenitor of the sociology of associations. 173 On the issue of Simmel and Marcel Mauss as the founders of a sociology of relations, see Papilloud (2004). 174 Latour (1993: 3032, 53) has described the immanence/transcendence controversy as the modern paradox of society. 175 This circularity of cause and effect makes the process of reciprocity between individuals in principle innite. The process may thus appear as self-reinforcing (eigendynamisch) in the sense that it creates its own momentum, as Renate Mayntz and Birgitta Nedelmann (1987) have proposed.
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Appendix: abstracts of original articles

Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel Commencing from Georg Simmels notion of the general tendency of modern thought as the dissolution of substance into functions, the article analyzes Simmels own thought as an apotheosis of that dissolution. The focus is on Simmels conception of society as an event (Geschehen), which rejects the reifying conception of society as a substantive entity, but does not reduce the social to action nor actors either event has primacy both over subject and substance. The article asserts that the Simmelian event has two main aspects: that of reciprocal causation and inner antagonism. Along with clarifying the event dynamics in accordance with these aspects, the key sociological implications of Simmels philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) are also unfolded: it is claimed that the event expresses the deep continuity between the vital and the social in Simmels thought. In the end, the uses of the notion of the event are elaborated by connecting Simmels reections to more recent insightful conceptualization of the social. Keywords Causation; event; form; Georg Simmel; life; social action; society; sociology. Being-with: Simmel on Dyadic and Triadic Relations The essay discusses Georg Simmels theorizing on the social in the light of his treatment of the dyad and the triad, constellations of two and three elements. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that they express the difference between the primary intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals and the objectied social forms in numerical terms, as quantitatively determined. In the essay, it is argued that in its basic, methodologically simplest form, the social amounts for Simmel to dyadic interaction between I and you, that can be conceptualized as being-with. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, it is claimed that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The third not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but it is also capable of transforming it into a completely new gure: a social whole, a we, which obtains a supraindividual life independent of the individual. Keywords: Being-with; Simmel; The Social; the dyad; the triad.
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APPENDIX
Ambiguous Individuality: Georg Simmel on the Who and the What of the Individual The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmels theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmels ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the what and the who, between the qualities which make one something individual and ones nonrepeatable and nite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the rst dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a philosophical turn for sociology is called for. Keywords Individuality; Philosophy; Singularity; Simmel; Sociology; Type. On Simmels Conception of Philosophy Over the past few decades, the work of Georg Simmel (18581918) has again become of interest. Its reception, however, has been fairly one-sided and selective, mostly because Simmels philosophy has been bypassed in favor of his sociological contributions. This article examines Simmels explicit reections on the nature of philosophy. Simmel denes philosophy through three aspects which, according to him, are common to all philosophical schools. First, philosophical reasoning implies the effort to think without preconditions. Second, Simmel maintains that in contrast to other sciences, only philosophy is oriented toward constructing a general view of the world. Third, Simmel claims that philosophical work worthy of the name creates a sphere of a typical way of being in relation to world, a third sphere that is between the personal and the objective. According to Simmel, what has made philosophys eminent gures great is that they have advanced a type of thinking and developed it into a particularly interesting form, and this type can still correspond with the way we experience the world. It is signicant that these three aspects through which Simmel denes philosophical activity emphasize the forms of questioning, not the contents or objects of thought. Still, he thinks that an interaction with concrete examples is always required in order to make philosophy a meaningful activity. This stance is reected in the wide variety of topics studied by Simmel himself. In his last works Simmel began to emphasize another aspect of philosophy, its nature as a living movement of thought related to fundamental human limitedness: just as life itself ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking. Keywords Georg Simmel; Conception of philosophy; Type of philosopher; Philosophy of life.
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TURUN YLIOPISTON JULKAISUJA ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS TURKUENSIS

SARJA - SER. B OSA - TOM. 316 HUMANIORA

Bringing the Social Alive Essays on Georg Simmels Social Theory

TURUN YLIOPISTO Turku 2008

Graphic design & layout: Kalle Pyyhtinen

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Key to abbreviations: references to Simmels texts

Brf I Brf II BrT CmC

HriBgs HSctP IGz

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The social a processualist viewpoint

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The social as a porous and contested concept

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The structure of the work

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. Simmel Life and Work

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Thinking in three (four) phases

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. Relativism, the Plumb Line, and Life

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