Abstract
2018 marked the centenary of Georg Simmel’s death, coinciding with the publication of several monographs dealing with his oeuvre and legacy. The four monographs discussed here deal with Simmel from the perspective of scholars who have specialized in cultural and sociological theory and/or philosophy whilst addressing the intellectual and social challenges of our times. These problems, questions and even anxieties are beyond those Simmel ever knew or could have envisioned, despite his extraordinary capacity to detect tendencies and to analyse potentialities in his own present.
The Challenge of Modernity: Simmel’s Sociological Theory Gregor Fitzi New York: Routledge, 2019 Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary Elizabeth Goodstein Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017 Simmel Thomas Kemple Cambridge: Polity, 2018 The Simmelian Legacy: A Science of Relations Olli Pyyhtinen Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Elizabeth Goodstein’s Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (2017) seeks to free Simmel’s thought from any disciplinary corsets. She does so by highlighting its intrinsically transdisciplinary character and by contextualizing his work in its historical moment, when the disciplinary imaginary of the 20th century was in the making and one could still move from one discipline to another, thus building bridges of dialogue and fruitful interconnections. Goodstein depicts a time when it was possible to think out of conventional intellectual specialties and to produce knowledge beyond boundaries that were not yet fully established. In his practice as a theorist and in his narrative style as a writer, Simmel resisted the disciplinary compartments we have been locked into in the 20th century and from which many are vigorously trying to break free.
Goodstein criticizes the reception of Simmel, above all in the English-speaking world in the 20th century and early 21st century, which tries to pigeonhole him as either a philosopher or a sociologist. His voluminous oeuvre is then forced into a disciplinary path that Simmel neither intended nor desired. She views Simmel as a modernist thinker of cultural theory in the most general sense whose thought is liminal and whose contribution to our current times resides in how it can help us to think differently (Goodstein, 2017: 11, 27, 92). Biased and fragmented readings of this work have rendered most contemporary scholars incapable of finding traces of Simmel in the cultural and social thought of the 20th century. If his legacy had not been dismembered by his heirs, she argues, the contemporary relevance of Simmel’s thought would be much more palpable and clear to us all.
Goodstein illustrates how we can read Simmel as a modernist thinker through her own reading of Philosophy of Money. (She makes a fair claim that the original title did not include the definite article used in the English translation of Philosophie des Geldes, thus hiding the humble gesture of suggesting only ‘a’ philosophy of money instead of ‘the’ philosophy of money – a point also made by Kemple (2018: 24).) Goodstein’s analysis of Philosophy of Money is accurate and nuanced while offering a renewed perspective on the important contributions this text still has to make. To her, ‘Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is not simply inter- or transdisciplinary. It is a metadisciplinary, self-consciously and conceptually liminal undertaking: “speculative” in the concrete sense that we associate today with the category of theory as an enterprise at once epistemological and strategic’ (Goodstein, 2017: 155).
Centering her attention on the connections between the relative character of money (and its value) and Simmel’s metaphysical worldview, she argues that: ‘Money, as “relativity itself that has become substance”’ (GSG 6: 134), has provided the basis for rethinking the foundations of truth and value under the sign of a new, relativistic ‘concept of solidity’; Simmel had come to believe that the only way to avoid nihilism, to prevent the slide into bottomless ‘subjectivism and scepticism’, was to affirm the relentless process of relativization – the ‘contemporary dissolution of everything substantial, absolute, eternal into the flux of things’ – as the expression of a more fundamental life process. Simmel thereby converted the problem into a solution, affirming metaphysical relativism ‘as a cosmic and epistemic principle that replaces the substantial and abstract unity of the world-image with the organic unity of reciprocal interaction’ (Goodstein, 2017: 160; GSG 20: 305). Goodstein’s emphasis on Simmel’s relativism dialogues very well with Olli Pyyhtinen’s view of Simmel as a relational author.
The title of Pyyhtinen’s book, The Simmelian Legacy, makes a twofold use of the term ‘legacy’: on the one hand it relates to ‘the posthumous reception’ of Simmel’s work; on the other it implies the ‘not yet fully actualized creative potential’ of Simmel’s contributions (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 6). Regarding the first use of the term, Pyyhtinen’s genealogical efforts are remarkably wide ranging in tracing Simmel’s reception during the 20th century in Germany, France, and the US. Regarding the second use of the term, Pyyhtinen claims that Simmel is of historical interest not just because we can trace much of what happened in the fields of sociology and philosophy during the 20th century back to his legacy, but also (and more importantly) because his works are still relevant and contemporary from a historical as well as from a theoretical perspective.
Pyyhtinen’s approach to Simmel, and to theoretical knowledge in general, is as respectful as it is open minded. He does not stop at taken-for-granted assumptions and, like Simmel himself, tries to see beyond the limits of his particular time and place. Understanding sociology as one way among others of apprehending the world and comprehending human experience rather than as a closed arena of selected contents, Simmel is above all the thinker of relations (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 33). Thus, Pyyhtinen’s account provides us with a unique perspective and theoretical insight into a brilliant, unconventional and multifaceted relational thinker (a point on which the other works under discussion here agree).
Simmel has often been portrayed as an inspired observer of modernity who lacked method, and so Pyyhtinen’s decision to begin the book with a chapter on Simmel’s ‘Method and Key Principles’ is already a claim to change the tone of Simmel reception in a decisive way. He points at the central role that thinking in dualities, contrapositions, and paradoxes has for Simmel, and argues that Simmel’s method is ‘dialectical’, but without arriving at a resolution (following Landmann, 1958). He suggests further that there are two key principles in Simmel’s work: the ‘form-content distinction’ and ‘the principle of Wechselwirkung’ (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 26), and highlights the crucial methodological and theoretical importance of the figure of the ‘third’. In providing ‘an underlying unity that preserves the tension between the contrasting poles in all its vigour’ (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 13), the third is crucial in understanding Pyyhtinen’s approach to the whole of Simmel’s oeuvre: in the dyad and the triad, in the stranger (which Pyyhtinen understands as a kind of third), and in how Simmel locates his own thinking between Kant and Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Pyyhtinen is not alone in claiming Simmel’s thinking is dialectical (as Goodstein does), albeit a special kind of dialectics that is without reconciliation. On this matter, I share Willi Goetschel’s reservations in pointing out that ‘Simmel pointedly refrains from the use of the term dialectic. […] Dialectic, we can say, presents for Simmel a somber notion that signals risk, danger, and possible disaster and destruction’ (Goetschel, 2019: 135; Kemple and Fitzi do not characterize Simmel’s thought as ‘dialectical’). Likewise, we might question the usefulness of associating Simmel’s processual mode of thinking in terms of paradoxes, contrasts, and plane changes – such as his notion of Achsendrehung (axis rotation) – with dialectics, with or without reconciliation. Rather than thinking dialectically, Simmel sets boundaries to the flux of thought in an effort to overcome them, and then sets new boundaries in an endless process of discovery and analysis. Beyond settling into any particular ‘third’, Simmel’s thought always posits another third, a continuous movement that crystallizes in forms that are overcome, integrated, left behind. This is not dialectics, but something different, more interesting and specific to Simmel’s legacy. Of course, Pyyhtinen is certainly aware of the processual character of (and in) Simmel’s thought. In fact, he is one of the main authors who has argued his case since the publication of his Simmel and the Social in 2010. In The Simmelian Legacy, Pyyhtinen emphasizes this processuality anew and with great clarity (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 35–9), although the issue of dialectics remains something that Simmel scholars will have to analyse and debate further.
Dialectics aside, Pyyhtinen is especially concerned to elaborate on the link between Simmel’s concept of Wechselwirkung (sometimes translated ‘interaction’, but more precisely, ‘reciprocal cause and effect’) with his idea of the ‘third’ as a key figure in Simmel’s thought. A passage from Pyyhtinen’s book is worth quoting at length in light of the importance of this insight for the reception of Simmel in the non-German speaking world: [W]echselwirkung presents a ‘third’, as it were, in relation to the actions of each party. What is more, for Simmel, Wechselwirkung consists not only of what the individuals involved actively ‘do’ (tun), but also of how they are influenced. It refers to the dynamics and interplay of affecting and being affected [emphasis added]. Further, Simmel also insists that individuals affect each other not only actively, but passively, too: for example, the way one receives a gift – whether by being grateful or ungrateful, by having expected it or by having become surprised by it, by loving it or feeling humiliated by it ‘has a crucial effect […] on the donor’, as Simmel remarks in his Sociology. (Pyyhtinen, 2018: 22; GSG 11: 663n1)
These figures and images allow the reader to make connections within the Simmelian oeuvre that go beyond the established canon. With its originality, systematicity and panoramic perspective on Simmelian thought, Kemple’s Simmel shows the reciprocal relations between sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, ethics and aesthetics, building a bridge toward Simmel’s ‘philosophical sociology’ or ‘sociological metaphysics’ (Kemple, 2018: 12; Harrington and Kemple, 2012) while critically portraying Simmel’s position as a link from the scholarly fields of his time to the world of his predecessors and our own. In this original synthesis, Kemple manages to highlight the systematicity of Simmel’s theories, with a particular focus on ‘the mental experience of the modern money economy and metropolitan life’ (Kemple, 2018: 12). At the same time, Kemple articulates these themes in an inviting language that makes even Simmel’s most complex ideas seem appealing, awakening in the reader the wish to go further into the depths of Simmelian thought.
Another particularly striking aspect of Kemple’s book is its beautiful structure, which is well conceived and flows almost naturally. Kemple’s opening chapter outlines three main areas of interest that his book will deal with: Simmel’s method (again, a pathbreaking approach, as with Pyyhtinen); Simmel’s sociology; and Simmel’s metaphysics of (modern) life. He establishes a dialogue between these three themes and suggests parallels with Simmel’s three apriorities of social life. His aim is therefore ‘to follow Simmel in showing how social life is not always or entirely social and how life itself is never completely alive’ (Kemple, 2018: 18). Expressed in the beautiful language that characterizes Kemple’s prose, this objective reminds the contemporary reader how current and relevant Simmel’s thought may be today, and highlights (in the context of the relational approach I take up here) the complementarity and complicity between Kemple and Pyyhtinen’s readings of Simmel.
Gregor Fitzi (2019) approaches Simmel by looking for a grand and coherent sociological theory, which he elaborates on from five different perspectives: a theory of modernity; a sociological epistemology; a sociological anthropology; a social ethics; and a sociology of culture (Fitzi, 2019: 4–6). From his detailed analysis of ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), Fitzi also proposes five distinct theoretical assumptions that serve as the guiding threads of Simmel’s theory of modernity: (1) a parallel process of differentiation in social structure and individual personalities; (2) the growth of monetary economies; (3) the growing gap between objective and subjective culture; (4) a theory of urban life that examines how relationships grow in density (and therefore, as a whole, in intensity) in the metropolis; and (5) a theory of neurasthenia derived from these increased social contacts (Fitzi, 2019: 9). At the same time, he presents ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ as elaborating on the two most important modern transformations: the development of intellectualism and the development of capitalism (Fitzi, 2019: 24). Fitzi takes the reader on a journey through a great variety of Simmel’s texts and topics: fashion, the city, money, women, women’s movements, reification, and social differentiation – illustrating how these diverse topics are entangled with each other so as to weave a complete theory of modernity, which he defines as ‘the sum of the life conditions that characterise complex societies’ (Fitzi, 2019: 4).
Fitzi claims that Simmel founded a sociological epistemology on ‘the apriori[s] of social action’ (Fitzi, 2019: 46), and thus that Simmel’s sociological works until 1908 were aimed at achieving this milestone. Therefore, these are not the scattered works of an impressionistic author, but together form a sociological research programme that led to the creation of a sociological epistemology capable of approaching the ‘difficulty of aligning social action and social structure’ (Fitzi, 2019: 45). In this way, ‘[t]he issue of “social validity” (soziale Geltung) vis a vis “social legitimacy” (soziale Legitimität) was born’ (Fitzi, 2019: 45). According to Fitzi, Simmel addresses the coordination and relation between social structure and social action in the following terms: Sociology must examine the ‘conditions of possibility’ of sociation that allow the social actors to become the bearers of the macrosocial formations by ‘holding in their hands’ the fine strands of sociation, which they entertain in the most diverse social circles. The crucial requirement for a theoretical account of how social action and social structure can converge empirically, or the matter of ‘social validity’, thus leads to the heart of sociological epistemology. (Fitzi, 2019: 59–60)
This point is worth pausing over for a moment: Is Simmel’s sociological epistemology based on a critical neo-Kantian theory of a priori consciousness? And if so, does it proceed from a strict social action perspective? Although one can argue that a sociological epistemology based on a critical neo-Kantian (or simply Kantian) theory of consciousness requires the formulation of a priori conditions which can be narrated from a social actor perspective, I think there is more to Simmel than this argument suggests. Simmel does not deliver an answer to the ‘micro-macro problem’ from a strict social actor perspective. As do Pyyhtinen, Goodstein, Kemple, and Fitzi himself, Simmel puts relations at the focus of his attention and enquiry (Fitzi, 2019: 124–8; Cantó-Milà, 2005, 2018, 2019, 2020). Thus, his epistemology veers away from the ‘social actor’ in focusing on the relations that make the social actor possible, along with many other things. In the digression ‘How Is Society Possible?’ from the first chapter of Sociology, which is key to any understanding of Simmel’s ‘sociological epistemology’, relationality is presented as the central object of sociology and also serves as Simmel’s metaphysical principle (see also Goodstein, 2017: 238). One can even read this digression from the perspective of relational sociology and see how relations are at the very heart of the apriorities. In fact, in his monograph, Kemple interrelates his analysis of the three apriorities with the symbolism of the door, which he elaborates on by highlighting their primordially relational dimension (Kemple, 2018: 13–17).
Of great value and importance is how Fitzi delivers an elegant line of argumentation by moving Simmel’s sociological epistemology to the centre of his sociology of culture, for he claims it is culture that makes the Simmelian third apriority possible. This third apriority forges the link between individual social belonging and social structure or, in Fitzi’s terms, a ‘relationship between the objective logic of social structure and the subjective logic of social action’ (Fitzi, 2019: 89). This relationship ‘is of cultural character because it produces, in whatever way, a “meaning” relating the objective needs of social structure with the subjective motivation of the social actors, becoming their bearer (third a priori, GSG 11: 58f)’ (Fitzi, 2019: 89). The crucial importance of culture in making society possible is an extraordinary argument. Culture cannot be considered a secondary result of economic or social action in Simmel’s oeuvre, but has to be considered the ‘constitutive performance holding society together, by relating the logic of social structure and social action to each other’ (Fitzi, 2019: 90). In Fitzi’s reading of Simmel the concept of culture thus becomes the grounding category of sociology. Cultural sociology cannot count as a special sociology among others, but rather becomes the central pillar of sociological theory. Following the logic of the third a priori of sociology, meaning or sense must be considered as the cohesive material of social reality that allows for the steady production, reproduction and change of the social fabric. Accordingly, sociology must enquire into the mechanisms that permit these processes by reconstructing the everyday cultural work that interrelates social action and social structure. (Fitzi, 2019: 90)
The processual character of Simmel’s thought discussed by the other authors under review here is also addressed by Fitzi, and becomes a crucial part of what he calls Simmel’s ‘sociological anthropology’: ‘The key to formulating an anthropological concept linking together the different spheres of life, i.e. the human attitudes to the different spheres of culture, lies in the interpretation of the “limit character” (Grenzcharakter) of human life experience (GSG 21: 988–1011)’ (Fitzi, 2019: 124–5). It is also crucial that Fitzi devotes his last chapter to discuss issues of ethics, which deeply moved and interested Simmel throughout his life and career. Here he focuses on the normative dimensions of the crisis of modernity and how this crisis may be overcome through an ethical proposal of ‘the individual law’ that unites Kant and Goethe as a symbol for a new age – an age we may now look upon from an unforeseeable future (Fitzi, 2019: 8, 160–4; Simmel, 2007).
It is important to note that the four books under discussion here are written in English. As anyone who has worked on Simmel (and not only on him) knows, reading in one language and writing in another one, or having access to an author’s thoughts only via translations can be misleading or at least complicated, and a small translation mistake can lead to a significant theoretical misunderstanding. In the case of Simmel’s English reception, two crucial concepts have caused translation problems for many languages, namely, Vergesellschaftung and Wechselwirkung. Translating Wechselwirkung as interaction is problematic, even when the qualifier ‘reciprocal’ is added to emphasize one of the meanings of ‘inter’. The terms in German and English are difficult to reconcile, and each can have very different theoretical and epistemological implications. Simmel’s social theory requires us to look beyond any reduction of human beings to ‘actors’, and our relationships with the world, with each other, and with ourselves are not reducible to ‘social actions’. He invites us to ask ourselves: why should we renounce the senses, emotions, or experiences, and ignore not just the effects of others’ actions but also their mere co-presence?
Regarding Vergesellschaftung, Kemple argues for the use of ‘association’ as a translation, thus discarding the more commonsense translation ‘socialization’ and also the invented word ‘sociation’ that some Simmel scholars have favoured (myself included). The latter coinage follows the late David Frisby’s suggestion to differentiate Simmel’s concept from a sociological tradition shaped by Weber and Tönnies, and from its everyday usage as well. Kemple argues, however, that ‘association’ brings with it the processual dimension which is essential to the concept of Vergesellschaftung and frees Simmel’s prose in the English language from strange sounding and invented words such as ‘sociation’. While I do not particularly mind invented words, as long as scholars can agree to use the same terms and not create so many different versions of the same German concept, I see that the tendency now seems to favour ‘association’. I shall not be building walls when we should be building bridges, although I hope Simmel scholars may continue to work together to clarify the subtle nuances in his words and works, taking account of their intended meanings while exploring what new things they may signify.
