Soziologie and Lebensanschauung : Two Approaches to Synthesizing ‘Kant’ and ‘Goethe’ in Simmel’s Work

Two False Starts

Whoever interprets the remarkable intellectual career of Georg Simmel needs to remember that diverse points of view can frame such an account. Simmel himself advised us on this – unforgettably – when he said: ‘A view gained at any distance whatever has its own justification. It cannot be replaced or corrected by a view that originates from another distance’ ([1917] GSG 16: 67). The moon looks different in a camera than in a telescope because the two instruments see them from different distances.

So of course Simmel looks different when viewed from one or the other of the two standpoints from which he has most commonly been interpreted. The first of these holds that Simmel was an incorrigibly unsystematic thinker, a precocious man of letters who turned his agile mind from topic to topic dropping assorted aperçus, but whose oeuvre is not to be searched for a coherent perspective on the world. This interpretation has long proved tenacious. Ernst Troeltsch epitomized it when describing Simmel a few years after his death as possessing a ‘wandlungsreichen und grundsätzlich unsystematischen Denken dieses scharf- und tiefsinnigen Kopfes’ – ‘a sharp and profound mind that produced labile and fundamentally unsystematic thought’ (Troeltsch, 1921). This view tends to be associated with the notion of Simmel’s vaunted ‘aestheticism’. One piece of it received monographic treatment in the early study by David Frisby, Sociological Impressionism, which labeled Simmel a ‘flaneur’ (Frisby, 1981).

Against the aestheticist view of Simmel stands a view that sees him as a serious systematic thinker, yet one whose systemic approaches shifted radically over the decades: from a positivistic Darwinist phase through a neo-Kantian phase and finally to a Bergsonian Lebensphilosophie phase. Formulated initially by Max Frischeisen-Köhler in 1919, this schema received iteration from numerous scholars, including Nicholas Spykman (1925), Lewis Coser (1956) and Julien Freund (1981). The view was repeated in 1958 and again in 1968 by no less a figure than our esteemed late colleague and inspired contributor to the renaissance in Simmel studies, Michael Landmann.

The greater accessibility of Simmel’s oeuvre as a whole provided by the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG) forces us to reject both of these standpoints, however – just as one might reject a view of the moon derived from looking at the planet Venus through a straw. In so doing we draw on another keystone of Simmel’s epistemology. Although Simmel insisted that in all domains of culture multiple perspectives are legitimate, he also held that certain perspectives are more appropriate for some subjects than others. If Simmel was arguably the first philosopher (alongside Dilthey) to propound a position of what has been called methodological pluralism (Levine, 1989), this did not amount to endorsing a position of absolute relativism, according to which any hermeneutic construction is as valid as any other. For one thing, certain subjects may not fit in a given perspective because they pass beyond the limits of what is appropriate. When objects become microscopic or extremely large, Simmel points out, they are no longer fit to become subjects of painting. Similarly, trivial nonconsequential events are in themselves not fit as a focus for the attention of historians, which rather requires that ‘historic’ events be those with significant consequences (Simmel, 1892); or, let us say, an account of intimate transactions within a family does not fit within the structural-functional framework of complex organizational analysis. Or the treatment of a subject in a given mode may simply not do justice to what is most important about it. Thus, a portrait of Joan of Arc picking daisies or of Josef Stalin licking gelato would not do justice to the essence of its subject. In all cases, moreover, the facticity of objects sets limits to how they can be represented.

These considerations force us to challenge both the flaneuristic and the tripartite interpretations of Simmel’s oeuvre. For one thing, those schemata simply do not accord with the facts of Simmel’s life work. What is more, they fail to capture the essential features of their subject – much as a telephone directory fails to capture the age structure of a population. However suggestive they may have been in prodding readers to move toward some reflective appropriation of Simmel’s corpus as a whole, both obscure what is perhaps the most characteristic feature of Simmel’s intellectual career. This is the striking continuity both of themes and of interlocutors throughout his entire body of work.

Even someone so attuned to the Darwinian elements of Simmel’s early years as Heinz-Jürgen Dahme concludes that, with regard to Simmel’s sociology at least, ‘it is astonishing to note the constancy of Simmel’s problematic, even down to the choice of words, if one compares his earliest programmatic sketches with his later reformulations’ (Dahme, 1988: 33). These continuities include a fascination with the effects of money, the objectification of art genres, gender relations, sources of individuality, the malaise of modernity, and much else. One could in fact write a gripping intellectual biography of Simmel by tracing one or more of these key topics.

Two Interlocutors, Two Principles

In this essay I highlight the continuity in Simmel’s thought by focusing on a preoccupation with certain philosophers across his life span. Perennially in touch with the ideas of Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Simmel chose Immanuel Kant above all others as his primary interlocutor. Engagement with Kant appeared by no means only during his middle years, as the tripartite perspective would have it. Kantian associations and ideas pervade the early period. Consider Simmel’s 1881 dissertation on Kant; courses on Kant at the University of Berlin taught regularly from 1885 onward; the two major epistemological discourses stimulated by Kant, on the social sciences (1890) and on the philosophy of history (1892). References to Kant pervade the most substantial treatise of his early years, the two-volume Introduction to Moral Science of 1892–3. Publications continue to appear alongside the lecture courses, including the 1896 essay ‘What Does Kant Mean to Us?’ and the first ‘Kant and Goethe’ article of 1899.

To be sure, the high point of Simmel’s published Auseinandersetzung with Kant is the 1904 book made up of what he had long offered as a course of lectures on Kant. Simmel continues to draw on Kant in various writings, including ‘Vom Wesen der Philosophie’ (1910) and the three editions of Kant und Goethe (1906). But again, Kant remains prominent in Simmel’s late writings as well. These include the revised edition of Kant and Goethe (1916), the late essays on the epistemology of history – ‘Die historische Formung’ (1917) and ‘Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens’ (1918) – and all four chapters of his testamentary Lebensanschauung. At many points, moreover, Kant is present without being mentioned by name, as in Simmel’s treatment of ethical conduct based on autonomous self-direction; conditions under which lying is justifiable; the inexorability of prejudice in human relations; social ambivalence, which mirrors Kant’s notion of unsocial sociability; and boredom, in the wake of Kant’s discourse on boredom in the Pragmatic Anthropology (Silver, 2008, 2010).

More critically, the claim that Simmel’s engagement with Kant occurred chiefly in his middle years obscures something fundamental: the centrality of the notion of Form for more than three decades. Commentators from Steinhoff in 1925 and Weingartner in 1960 to Levine (1959, 1971), Coser (1965, 1977) and Oakes in 1980 have shown how the concept of Form pervades Simmel’s corpus. ‘If you want to understand Simmel’, Lewis Coser used to exclaim, ‘you have got to understand Form. Form! Form! Form!’ Although the concept of Form figured prominently in Western philosophy from the time of Plato and Aristotle on, it was Kant who inspired Simmel to embrace this concept, and Kant’s distinction between forms and contents which arguably comprised the conceptual leitmotif of Simmel’s career. His 1881 dissertation on Kant cites ‘the critical notion… which dissects external things into two factors: their matter and their form’ [‘die kritische Ansicht… die die Vorstellung äusserer Dinge in zwei Faktoren: ihre Materie und ihre Form, zerlegt’]; Simmel’s preoccupation with the dichotomy reaches a climax in two masterpieces of 1918, ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’ and Lebensanschauung. In the three dozen years between those termini, the notion appears passim: in all the masterworks as well as in numerous short essays on subjects like Rembrandt, sociability, ruins, fashion, and adventure. On the primacy of this analytical distinction, Simmel asserts, in an essay on the nature of philosophy:

There is perhaps no necessity of thought which is so hard to cast off as the analysis of things into content and form, even though this analysis has neither logical force nor the force of sensibly given data. In countless modifications, under this and other names, this division cuts across our image of the world. It is one of the organizers and flexible instruments with which the mind gives structure to the mass of all that is, a mass which, in its immediate unity, is structureless. ([1910] GSG 14)

That said, it is crucial to note that exclusive attention to the place of Kant – and to the Kantian notion of form – in Simmel’s thought in turn obscures what must figure as an equally compelling corrective to the tripartite periodization. This derives from challenging the claim that Simmel’s engagement with Goethe (and Nietzsche), and the related theme of Life, appeared only in the last decade of his life. As Joseph Bleicher noted recently, there is ‘continuity in Simmel’s work… in his sustained effort to capture Leben in its continuous flow and endless manifestations’ (Bleicher, 2007: 139). ¹ Although Bleicher associates this attention to Life primarily with Simmel’s appropriation of Goethe, one does more justice to the point by noting how robustly Darwinian ideas figure in the first decade of Simmel’s work. His early writings on the conservation of energy and the struggle for existence as factors in social evolution manifest a deep-rooted interest in the pulsation of life energies. Beyond that, Goethe is referenced directly in Simmel’s early philosophical writings. A couple of those references deal with aspects of Goethe’s Farbentheorie, but most deal with Goethe as a symbol of vital self-affirmation and fearless autonomy, as an advocate and exemplar of what it means to be a free spirit. And in one passage at least Goethe is associated with a like-minded spirit, Nietzsche, when Simmel describes the two of them as ‘very individualized, autonomous spirits’ (sehr individualistische, selbstherrliche Geister). ²

Around the turn of the century Simmel became increasingly interested in the problematic relationship between the principle of Forms, represented by Kant, and the principle of Life, represented by Goethe and Nietzsche. Those juxtapositions came to a head in 1906, when Simmel published in one and the same year an article devoted to comparing Nietzsche with Kant and another in which he compared Kant and Goethe. From then on, Simmel’s engagement with Goethe quickened. Between 1907 and 1917 he issued a book and nearly a dozen articles about Goethe together with expanded versions of his comparison of Kant and Goethe. As this occurred, the distinction between forms and contents, associated with Kant, became transformed into a contrast between Form and Life Process. Bleicher interprets Simmel’s changes at that time as a response to heightened tensions between the ‘Back to Kant!’ and the ‘Back to Goethe!’ movements, in which Simmel becomes increasingly partisan on the side of the latter. Yet Bleicher’s conclusion totally misses Simmel’s point. Far from dismissing Kant in favor of a whole-hearted identification with Goethe, as Bleicher seems to propose in his paper ‘From Kant to Goethe: Georg Simmel on the Way to Leben’, we had better recall the words with which Simmel himself concludes his Kant and Goethe essay:

Whatever we retain of the worldview of the epoch that is coming to a close remains bound up with opposing parties whose slogan is: Kant or Goethe! The coming epoch, however, is likely to stand under the sign of Kant and Goethe. Rejecting every lame mediation between them, it will not ‘reconcile’ the conceptual oppositions between them but will negate those oppositions through the fact of experiencing them. (Erlebwerden) ([1916] GSG 10: 116)

This formulation resonates with the way in which Simmel concludes his treatise on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where he writes of the futility of searching for peace between those two adversaries: ‘it is worse than useless because it falsifies the meaning of their opposition and, thus, the meaning of each one of them’ ([1906] GSG 10: 407). Both writings manifest Simmel’s mature position: to accept a plurality of views in a way that avoids either bland mediation between them or subsumption of one under another.

Kant and Goethe: now that is interesting! But let us not be seduced into attempting a fine-grained account of the entire field of relationships between Simmel and Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of Simmel’s relationships with Goethe. Recall Simmel’s caution about the dangers of comparing eminent thinkers:

Every precise parallel between two great personalities involves a violation of some sort. The inner essence of each one of them contains something incomparable. Each will be distorted by being subsumed with the other under a general category. All the details of their respective teachings, which form the usual material for such comparisons, actually show their true color and meaning only when connected with the total center – the point of unity and distinctiveness – of the creative personality. In contexts that lie external to those centers they lose, strictly speaking, their more profound and telling nuances. ([1906] GSG 8: 15)

Heeding that caution I shall stand at a further remove, and speak there not of those towering figures but of abstract themes that have been linked with them. Instead of Kant, we address the principle of mental and other forms; and for ‘Goethe’, the principle of Life. My heuristic assumption, then, is that both principles animate Simmel throughout his career. In saying this I draw upon a recent, path-breaking paper by Daniel Silver et al., which adduces the metaphor of the jellyfish – deployed by Simmel himself in Das individuelle Gesetz – to suggest a way of how to move beyond the conventional tripartite periodization of Simmel’s work. They write:

For Simmel, it makes little sense to determine the course of the jellyfish’s life by asking how an early circular phase gave way to a later elliptical phase, and then on to a final quasi-square phase. The jellyfish is not a sequence of discrete phases or forms, each one with its own principles. Rather, its shapes are various constellations through which the entire jellyfish expresses itself in the world, its many activities revealing its existence as a whole. (Silver et al., 2007: 267)

In this vein we can say that, for Simmel, the themes of Form and Life are always compresent. The theme of vital forces engaging with mental forms appears already in both of Simmel’s dissertations but in strikingly different ways. The dissertation on music moves from the vital need for expression to the use of musical sounds for practical purposes like celebrations, mourning, and morale in battle to the production of music for its own sake in forms that exist above and beyond daily necessities. The second dissertation held that Kant’s ‘fundamental insight [was that] Matter is not a substance but a phenomenon consisting of dynamic forces’ (Dahme, 1988: 21) – forces that for Kant of course are conceived through mental forms. And so it goes. What changes is how Simmel configures these contrasting principles, which he does in accord with whatever his substantive intellectual agenda is foregrounding at the time. On this assumption let us proceed to connect two of Simmel’s major publications, the Soziologie of 1908 and the Lebensanschauung of a decade later, works generally thought to bear no relationship whatsoever to one another. ³

Connecting Life Energies and Social Forms, I: The Soziologie

Soziologie opens with a discourse that repeats the bold programmatic statement that Simmel set forth in ‘Das Problem der Soziologie’ of 1894, the piece that inaugurated his ensuing series of investigations regarding conflict, hierarchy, exchange, secrecy, fashion, adornment, sociability, and the like. To drive home his point about the primacy of form in what he considered the mission of sociological analysis, Simmel drew analogies to the forms analyzed in geometry and linguistics. He proceeded to depict forms that lent themselves to spatial configuration – triangles, pyramids, networks, circles, and the like. Parameters of distance, boundaries, and intersections figure prominently in his sociological analyses.

Yet for all that geometrical abstraction, Simmel’s forms are never disembodied (as they sometimes seem to be in certain derived network analyses). They are presented more like apples than as spheres. Indeed, what Simmel designates as the contents of interaction includes a more concretely agentic entrée into social life than we can find in most sociologists. And that is because the ‘contents’ that are linked through the forms of association include a rich and vivid array of motives: erotic drives, religious yearnings, impulses to play, quests for power, hunger for gain, desires to attach, dispositions to defend, motives to know, and innumerable others. These motives are what drive all social interaction, the energies and impulses of Life that gives rise to Forms, which together constitute what he calls Society.

For Simmel, the structures of human association derive from subtle, invisible threads that tie humans to one another, and these threads are spun from ‘generative, form-giving forces’ (erzeugenden, formgebenden Kräften) ([1907] GSG 8: 292). The phrase recalls the influential term coined by the 18th-century anatomist and anthropologist J.F. Blumenbach, Bildungstrieb. In the complex composition of organized matter, Blumenbach had discerned a number of ‘common or general vital energies that exist more or less, in almost all, or at least in a great many parts of the body’. Foremost among these was what he termed the Bildungstrieb, defined as a power which directs the formation of bodies, preserves them from destruction, and compensates them through reproduction for any mutilations the body may incur. Simmel was surely familiar with the concept: it had been discussed by both Kant and Goethe, and later by Lotze. ⁴ It is plausible that he was stimulated thereby to articulate his notion of a structuring and forming moment inherent in Leben-as-process – not to mention the parallel language he uses when talking about the concept of subjective culture.

Vital forces generate forms, moreover, in two distinct modalities. For the most part, the forms exist in an instrumental modality. It is for the sake of diverse ends set by an array of vital motives that humans form alliances, leagues, circles, hierarchies, and networks. Persons partner up to pursue gain; they form hierarchies to exert power; they compete for the sake of love; they construct alliances to protect territory. On the other hand, some drives can exist in a consummatory modality, producing forms that exist purely for the sake of expressing the motive itself. The impulse to ‘socialize’, as we say, manifests in social parties; the impulse to fight appears in purely combative games; the erotic impulse can be played out in the form of coquetry.

In both modalities, forms continue to exist insofar as they are satisfying the motives that gave rise to them. But there are times when ongoing life energies find the existing forms inadequate. At such times Life assumes a conflictual relation with Form. In addition to numerous ways in which social forms accommodate vital energies, Soziologie also illuminates certain kinds of tensions between Life and Form when that fit no longer holds. The chapter on secrecy and secret societies refers to periods in which existing social forms no longer fit certain Life energies. ‘Periods in which new life-contents emerge in opposition to the powers that be… are predisposed to the formation of secret societies’, he writes:

To cite only one example, the elements of the liberal party were present in Germany at that time. Their emergence in a permanent political structure was postponed by the power of the civic conditions. Accordingly, the secret association was the form in which the germs could be protected and cultivated, as in the case of the orders of the Illuminati. The same sort of protection which secrecy affords to ascending movements is also secured from it during their decline. (Wolff, 1950: 347; GSG 11, 423)

And the essay on loyalty, incorporated as part of an excursus in Soziologie, speaks of ‘an absolutely fundamental dualism, which pervades the essential form of all associations’:

A social relationship, which is a fluctuating, continuously developing Life process, takes on a relatively stable external form. Sociological forms entail mutual activity, collectivity formation, and presentation to external parties cannot follow with any exactitude their inner vicissitudes, that is, the processes in each individual that relate to others. These two layers [Life process and Form] develop at different tempi, and it is often the nature of the external Form simply not to develop at all. (Levine, 1971: 351; GSG 11: 659)

In sum: every chapter of the Soziologie involves some kind of synthesis between the principle of Form and the principle of Life – between ‘Goethe’ and ‘Kant’, if you will. Every sociological phenomenon exhibits a fruitful conjunction when the form at hand is sufficiently attuned to the form-giving energies that generate it. When the form is no longer suited to those energies, tensions arise that produce frustrations, stultifications, and suppressions, tensions that often lead to re-forms or displacement of old forms with new ones.

In a domain parallel to that of social forms, Simmel also examines the relationship between life forces and forms of culture. His doctoral essay on music analyzed the steps by which vital emotional needs gave rise to musical forms that satisfied them and led eventually to the enjoyment of the forms for their own sake, a conception stimulated by his professor of anthropology, Moritz Lazarus, as Klaus-Christian Köhnke has pointed out (Köhnke, 1996: 304). This progression parallels precisely the treatment of social forms as instrumental and then certain play forms in which solidary or conflictual interaction is undertaken for its own sake. And then, famously, Simmel also examined axes of increasing tension between the forms of objective culture and the processes of personal cultivation – a discussion adumbrated in 1900 in a Neue Deutsche Rundschau article, ‘Persönliche und sachliche Kultur’, expanded in the first edition of Philosophie des Geldes and incorporated a few years later in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. ⁵

Connecting Life Energies and Emergent Forms, II: The Lebensanschauung

By the time of the Lebensanschauung, Simmel’s emphasis on particular social forms and diverse cultural forms serving to channel vital impulses had shifted to a more abstract consideration of forms in general and their generic relations to vital processes. Chapter 1, ‘The Transcendent Character of Life’, delineates the vicissitudes of life processes in general. All vital processes generate what he calls More-Life (Mehr-Leben), rather equivalent to what has been termed the drive toward reproduction, common to all organic species. For humans, moreover, a second modality inheres in the life process, More-Than-Life (Mehr-als-Leben). This is the tendency to generate forms out of the life process that immediately transcend the ongoing life process and take on an existence of their own. This would include the whole universe of cultural forms, to which Simmel was so attuned, but also the universe of institutionalized social structures, which he lacked the conceptual resources to analyze.

The second chapter, ‘The Turn toward Ideas’, takes this point further by noting how those transcending forms can re-engage vital processes by returning to the ongoing life process in ways that redirect it. Simmel designates this process as an ‘axial turning’ (Achsendrehung), a term that may be, I have suggested, the inspiration for Karl Jasper’s seminal formulation of the Axial Civilizations (Levine, 2005). It also stands to represent the ‘tragedy of culture’ – whereby the objectively developing cultural forms overwhelm the personal cultivation of individual persons – not as a tragedy that might conceivably be averted in the imagination but as an integral part of the life process.

The last two chapters of Lebensanschauung relate this theme to the domain of individual biography and, in particular, to the ideal of authentic individuality. ‘Death and Immortality’, the third chapter, approaches this theme by arguing that living beings, as opposed to inorganic matter, determine their boundaries from within rather than from without. Death gives Form to the lives of persons by presenting a constant sense of boundedness to their ongoing life, just as, Simmel elsewhere writes, the picture frame is needed to provide a boundary to a painting. Not something that suddenly happens to one at the terminal point of life, death figures as an immanent feature of life, interwoven into its every moment. Heightened consciousness of this promotes a finer sense of individuality. ⁶

The ideal of integral individuality forms the theme of Simmel’s final chapter, ‘The Norm of Individual Personhood’ (Das individuelle Gesetz). In this essay, toward which in a sense Simmel’s entire life had been pointing, Simmel returns to the Kantian theme of self-legislation – autonomy – as the essential source of ethical commands. Against the Kantian notion of a universal categorical imperative that is universal in scope, he argues that such an abstraction cannot do justice to the claims of lived experience, which is unique and different for each individual. If a law is in actuality to be legislated by and for oneself, it must take into account the particular features of each person as its frames suitable laws. And those laws must be able to change in accord with the emerging boundaries and directions of personal selfhood. Duty still constitutes the formal structure of morality, as with Kant, but for Simmel now it consists of duties to pursuing the ever-emerging ideal of one’s authentic self.

Do Simmel’s Sociology and Metaphysics Have Mutual Implications?

To this point my argument consists of seven claims.

Rather than view Simmel’s work as a congeries of random impressionistic essays or as divided into three discrete periods, it is more fitting to conceive him as pursuing certain continuous lifelong interests, albeit with different emphases and configurations at different times.

Simmel generally confined his analyses to the internal properties of forms rather than trace their dynamic interrelations in the manner of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons. Similarly, like Kant, he inclined to draw clear and distinct boundary lines to separate disciplines rather than explore their interconnections. In particular, he took pains to identify the lines that bound empirical disciplines. Every empirical discipline, he noted, is flanked by two philosophical disciplines: an epistemological discipline, which analyzes the concepts and assumptions that are prior to the positive science in question, and a synthetic part, which builds upon the empirical findings of the discipline and links them with normative and existential questions – questions that we cannot answer but cannot stop asking.

In practice, however, Simmel transgressed these demarcations. And why not? After all, did not he himself insist that although boundaries are necessary, every single specific boundary can be stepped over? And did he not intermix empirical sociological observations with both analytic and synthetic philosophical discourses in Philosophie des Geldes, as Dahme (1993) demonstrated? Did he not cross boundaries constantly – from fields as far apart as jurisprudence, aesthetics, logic, and social relations, by comparing forms in each of these spheres? Not to mention the rule that the kind of sociology he espoused required investigators to compare social forms across such diverse fields as politics, religion, and love.

In that spirit, let us consider what happens when we attempt to cross the boundaries between Simmelian metaphysics and the discipline of sociology. We could, on the one hand, treat the sociological investigation of metaphysics as a subfield in the sociology of knowledge. We would investigate the effect of competition on the size and organization of the universe of metaphysicians at a given period, as Randall Collins has done in The Sociology of Philosophies (1998). We might analyze hierarchies of deference within and among different schools of philosophy. We could explore the social circles in which metaphysicians relate to one another, and the relations between those circles and other clusters of academicians. Simmel himself exemplified one tack when he pointed to large metaphysical ideas like Being, God, Nature, Ego, and Life as symbols that govern the thoughtways of an epoch ([1918] 1971).

On the other hand, what would it look like to infuse sociological research with concepts, methods, and assumptions about human life formulated in the Lebensanschauung? That is a more daunting proposal. Bold steps in that direction were taken by Scott Lash in his suggestive paper ‘Lebenssoziologie: Georg Simmel in the Information Age’ (2007). These include what Lash calls the link between life energies and the transcending of local territorial boundaries through globalization.

Given the recent availability of a complete English translation of Lebensanchaung, it will be easier for Anglophone scholars to mine its four metaphysical chapters for ideas about how to proceed further. In so doing they may want to avoid the label ‘vitalism’ as an adequate representation of Simmel’s philosophy. Lash’s use of that label runs the risk of suppressing Simmel’s sharp critique of Bergson for being a partisan of ‘flow’ against ‘fixity’. Simmel quite rejects the Bergsonian view of form as inherently antagonistic to life, and objects to Bergson’s failure to thematize death or tragedy as internal to life. ⁷ Instead, they will surely follow Simmel’s text and insist on adhering to the distinction between Mehr-Leben and Mehr-als-Leben, More-Life and More-than-Life, which Lash neglects. Following that counsel, let me suggest four pertinent lines of exploration, one corresponding to each of the chapters of The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays.

The distinction between Mehr-Leben and Mehr-als-Leben stakes out terrain that has never quite been explored in sociology. Sumner’s important distinctions between folkways and mores, and between crescive and enactive institutions, lie adjacent to that terrain (Sumner, 1907). This topos would imply investigating mechanisms, dynamics, and cases of how processes of generation differ from processes of reproduction. It would examine the relation between ongoing processes of social interaction and processes of the institutionalization of social and cultural patterns. Taking the vitalist underpinning of Simmel’s thought seriously, moreover, would redirect the sociological perspective from static representations toward one that from the outset regards the seeds of change – becoming, evolving, transforming, and dying – as essential elements of all social and cultural formations.

Beyond such potential points of departure suggested by the several chapters, Simmel’s View of Life offers the possibility of a synthetic discipline that might reanimate the quest for overviews of the human condition. Had Simmel not died so prematurely, there is evidence that he would have developed such a discipline, to be known as ‘The Philosophy of Life’ – a discipline pointed to consider the basic forms which channel the universe of vital processes and animating contents (Levine and Silver, 2011: xxvii). Ironically, the only other scholar to have taken large steps toward the fulfillment of such a program was Talcott Parsons, who vehemently opposed the appropriation of Simmel by American sociologists and did much to obscure the Simmelian legacy. ⁸ The fact is that, since Hegel, virtually no one besides Simmel and Parsons has sculpted an intellectual structure that encompasses in so differentiated and integrated a manner (a) the physical conditions of vital organisms, (b) the differentiation of structures of human action in terms of consistent differentiation among self, social interactional, and cultural forms, and (c) a domain of supra-human reality to which cultural systems are ultimately directed. This points as well to the possibilities of a future synthesis of core ideas of the two master theorists regarding a reconstructed analytic approach to human evolution, in which biologically-grounded emergent levels of self, culture, and society can be identified and tracked.

Postlogue: Simmel’s Life as Exemplar of His Philosophy

Simmel’s career reveals a distinctive structure. In contrast to other notable classic social theorists, including Comte, Marx, Spencer, and Durkheim, it does not exhibit a continuous working out of a single deep originating notion or insight. Nor does it unfold with rather conspicuous breaks, as with Pareto and Weber. Rather, it consists of the working and reworking of certain distinctive themes – among them conflict, freedom, individuality, dualism, aesthetic styles, and distance.

If any notion could be said to dominate his life and thought, it is the Nietzschean dictum, Werde was du bist – Become What You Are. Time and again Simmel considers social forms with respect to the presence within them of persons of great individuality; and he is drawn to the lives and works of great personalities and artists as exemplifying that ideal. From the luminous sentence of the Einleitung of 1892 to his testament in ‘The Law of the Individual’ a generation later, Simmel refers to authentic individuality as a kind of regulative ideal. To validate the fact that the vicissitudes of Simmel’s life manifest an exceptional exemplar of that ideal, one can scarcely do better than cite the poignant words of Karl Hampe, dean of faculty at the University of Heidelberg, whose vain attempt to bring Simmel to Heidelberg called attention to the ‘brilliant lecturer’s’ determination to pursue his own path. ⁹

In the course of pursuing his own way Simmel differed from his younger contemporary Thomas Mann, who found himself and others caught in an unending conflict between the claims of life urges and the claims of spirituality. Simmel found an enduring resolution of that conflict by giving each its turn to absorb and integrate the other. The path he followed was one of continuous stimulation and growth, and ultimate harmony of opposites, not unending strife. Of his artistic contemporaries perhaps the poet Rilke can best be drawn on to help summarize the essence of Simmel’s own life. Simmel knew all of the forms, and appreciated them, but would be absolutely beholden to none of them – including raw unformed life itself. He understood that humans cannot live without categories but that we cannot be slaves to any one for long. With Rilkean imagery one might say:

Ach Du Simmel, was für einen reinen Widerspruch!

Lust, unter so vielen schönen Categorien,

Niemandes Categorie zu sein.

[Simmel, you pure contradiction!

Knowing so many great categories

You want to fall under none of them.]

To the last, Simmel lived in keeping with his view of Life and Death. In truth, and thanks be to God – Gott sei Dank! – just as he lived his own authentic life, and in contrast to so many in the generation that followed him, he did finally have his own death – er hat ja seinen eigenen Tod bekommen.