A symposium on Georg Simmel: Essays on art and aesthetics

Elizabeth S. Goodstein: On opening up Simmel’s aesthetics

More than a century after his death, Georg Simmel remains a mostly forgotten founding father of modern social thought. By making the breadth of his writings on the arts accessible in English for the first time, along with an extensive introduction that provides invaluable historical, theoretical, and biographical context, Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics should foster a deeper consideration of an undervalued intellectual and cultural legacy. Harrington’s collection joins distinguished company: Scott and Staubmann’s translation of Rembrandt: An Essay on the Philosophy of Art (Simmel, 2005), Andrews and Levine’s sensitively rendered version of Simmel’s late masterpiece, The View of Life, and aphorisms (Simmel, 2010), and the volume Harrington calls the ‘close companion’ to his own, Frisby and Featherstone’s anthology, Simmel on Culture (Simmel, 1997). With the full range and nuance of Simmel’s evolving cultural interventions between 1890 and 1918 before the Anglophone reader at last, the striving that animated his late work comes into focus: Simmel’s vision of generating a new ‘philosophical culture’ through an innovative approach to theorizing that at once embraced and reflected upon the complexity and ambiguity of modern life.

The collective amnesia that surrounds Georg Simmel is overdetermined; its contours reveal a great deal about the disciplinary faultlines that run through the contemporary theoretical universe. ¹ Simmel, who did not enjoy conventional academic success, has been mythologized in the history of sociology as a figure from his own writings: as outsider and stranger. What is forgotten or repressed in this gesture of remarginalization is not least how prominent Simmel was in his day. A riveting speaker whose lectures drew large audiences, he was a respected and widely read philosopher whose writing on society, culture, and the arts appeared in daily newspapers and popular magazines as well as academic venues. To be sure, he had little taste for acolytes or disciplinary edifice-construction, and was in any case never in a position to create the sort of institutional inheritance that continues to bear fruit to this day for his peers Durkheim and Weber. But Simmel’s modernist mode of philosophizing and distinctive style of thought inspired a wide and diverse range of admirers throughout his life, and his influence as what would today be called a public intellectual extended well beyond the confines of the ivory tower – according to Jürgen Habermas (1991 [1983]: 161), his approach ‘changed the mode of perception, the themes, and the writing-style of an entire intellectual generation’. And yet, as Simmel (2004: 261) himself famously predicted, his ‘spiritual-intellectual legacy [geistige Erbe]’ would be like an inheritance ‘in cold cash’, fated to disappear into diverse undertakings.

In the 1970s, Levine, Carter and Miller Gorman (1976: 813) called attention to the breadth and pervasiveness of Simmel’s largely unrecognized intellectual legacy as ‘the only European thinker who ha[d] had a palpable influence on the discipline of sociology in the United States throughout the course of the twentieth century’. That influence – methodological, topical, stylistic, and very often anonymized – was rooted in Simmel’s considerable philosophical achievements, and it extended to anthropology and allied social science disciplines. Yet nearly a half-century later, his intellectual inheritance continues to go largely unrecognized: Simmel remains marginalized within the history of the social sciences and virtually erased from the history of his home discipline of philosophy; his demonstrably significant impact on 20th-century social and cultural theory is unknown even to many experts in the field. ²

A great deal is at stake. Like other institutions, disciplinary formations are prone to efface the complex and highly contingent processes in which they have taken form historically, substituting simplified accounts of their origins with gaps that further enable the policing of boundaries. Since Simmel’s oeuvre antedates and flouts the historically recent and unstable boundary between philosophy and social science, the historiography that occludes, distorts, and marginalizes his contributions helps maintain that inherently unstable boundary and thus to reinforce one of the founding bifurcations of the contemporary disciplinary imaginary. Troping the modernist philosopher as stranger and rewriting the considerable methodological impact of his strategies of thought on his students and readers as merely stylistic influence helps sustain constitutive illusions about disciplinarity that underpin contemporary knowledge practices and constellations of institutional power.

The cultural turn renewed interest in Simmel’s work thanks to his complex and multivalent deployment of the focal, contested, category of culture. European sociologists and philosophers collaborated on the critical edition of his works (the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, begun in 1989 and completed in 2015 with the 24th densely printed volume) that has rendered the thinker’s full range of accomplishment accessible. Thanks to the devoted efforts of Levine and others, notably David Frisby, a much fuller corpus of Simmel’s writings is now available in English. However, much of his oeuvre, including many of his most significant books and essays, remains unavailable. ³ What has been translated continues to go mostly unread, and Simmel’s philosophical legacy continues to be obscured by a highly truncated reception. ⁴ His reception in Anglo-American philosophy has yet to begin in earnest, and even in contexts where historical perspectives and critical theory have been more salient for the intellectual and institutional trajectories of social science than in the US, Simmel’s considerable influence on modern social thought continues to go largely unrecognized – not least thanks to self-serving attacks by Lukács, Bloch, and Adorno on their predecessor.

Let us hope, then, for a wide readership for Harrington’s volume, which opens new vistas by broadening the corpus of Simmel’s cultural writings available in English. Here is Simmel contemplating Kant’s influence on modern aesthetics and musing on the notion of art for art’s sake, unpacking the philosophical significance of Alpine retreats, reflecting on portraiture and acting, illuminating Michelangelo’s import for ‘the metaphysics of culture’ – to mention the foci of just a few of the selections that appear in English for the first time here, a great many in Harrington’s own translations. Like its 1997 ‘companion’, Harrington’s collection also invites us to reexamine received views and to reconsider the implications of the gaps in Simmel’s reception for social and cultural theory today by reprinting, with modest editorial adjustments, a number of older translations that have not received the attention they deserve.

To be sure, as Harrington (2020: 1) puts it in his Introduction, ‘scholars…have long recognized the importance of art and aesthetics to Simmel’s vision’. But with all due respect for the contributions of the first English translators of his Philosophy of Money (1978) or Sociology (2009), the readers who struggle their way through these tomes are only occasionally able to glimpse the dynamic thinker we see here. In Simmel’s cultural writings, we encounter not the thwarted academic but the riveting lecturer who drew overflowing crowds both inside and outside the university; not the marginalized sociologist but the internationally renowned essayist whose writing appeared in popular illustrated papers and magazines in Germany and abroad: Simmel the European intellectual, the modernist philosopher and interpreter of the rapidly changing world of the European fin-de-siècle, the student of the Renaissance and art history, the music lover who remained deeply engaged with culture and the arts and with artists throughout his life – the cosmopolitan conversationalist whose salons and private seminars were celebrated for their refined sociability, whose interlocutors included the likes of Rodin, Rilke, and Stefan George.

However, like every English collection of Simmel’s writings going back to Kurt Wolff’s initial creation of The Sociology of Georg Simmel in 1950, Harrington’s volume reframes Simmel’s writing into a form adapted to the disciplinary conventions and theoretical practices of its own time. ⁵ In this case, texts are arranged according to thematic categories that subsume rather than reflect the author’s own vocabulary (for example, classing his reflections on ‘artistic personalities’ under sculpture or literature). Other editorial reframings include elisions, retitlings, and, as is customary in such anthologies, creating new texts out of thematically defined selections from longer works.

Such are the editor and translator’s exchanges of value: greater legibility for the target audience comes at the expense of precision in rendering the original hermeneutic context. Recontextualization or appropriation is not as such a flaw. Translation involves alienation, and at least some degree of reinterpretation is unavoidable in moving ideas and texts among different linguistic, disciplinary and cultural contexts. Still, we need to ask what is at stake in such reorganization, and more generally in creating an anthology that foregrounds Simmel’s relevance for ‘art and aesthetics’ today. What is foregrounded, what obscured, by subsuming his writings into categories borrowed from contemporary art history – yet another discipline he influenced and to which, in its current professionalized form, his philosophical approach is decidedly alien? As in previous anthologies, when his texts are subdivided and retitled to fit into an organizational framework generated by contemporary categories, the editorial approach can come into tension with Simmel’s own philosophical views and theoretical perspective.

A crucial locus is the titular term ‘Aesthetics’, which also gives its name to the opening section. Here we find a diverse selection: Simmel’s 1896 ‘Sociological Aesthetics’, an excerpt from his famous Kant lectures published in 1903 in a Berlin newspaper, and two late pieces: Simmel’s meditations on ‘L’art pour l’art’ and ‘Lawfulness in the Work of Art’ (the latter rechristened ‘Autonomy in the Work of Art’). But the titles of four of the five essays in the anthology’s next section, ‘Functions, Materials, Institutions’, also refer to the aesthetic in diverse senses, and the category appears in other titles as well – in essays on the Alps and on the human visage, both actual and as depicted in portraits, that appear here in sections devoted to painting. As discussed in the editorial introduction, Simmel’s invocations of the aesthetic are not without internal complexity, and changes in his thinking over time are particularly salient for his thinking about the philosophical significance of art. But that chronological development is obscured in this rearrangement. Moreover, in his own collection, Philosophical Culture (1911, revised and expanded in 1918), Simmel groups entirely different essays under the category ‘zur Aesthetik’, bookmarking his influential essay on the ruin with the meditation on the Alps and the piece on the handle that would occasion Adorno’s notorious posthumous attack on Simmel as an idealist. The latter two essays appear here, but under ‘Landscape Painting’ and ‘Functions, Materials, Institutions’ respectively. However useful such categorial reframing may be from the point of view of the present, as in Simmel on Culture, such editorial interventions risk obscuring Simmel’s own vocabulary and approach.

Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics is an important and timely contribution; the texts newly available here give us fresh access to a key interlocutor and a model for publicly engaged intellectual and cultural theorizing. If I may be permitted a wishful suggestion for the translator and editor’s next step: a full and cohesive English translation of the fascinating and wide-ranging volume in which Simmel set out his own vision of ‘Philosophical Culture’ – of what he called, echoing Kant, Philosophie als Weltbegriff, a worldly conception of philosophy, could be transformational. Most of the essays in Philosophische Kultur are available in English translation, but dispersed and often retitled, in uneven renderings that cry out for updating. Such textual dispersion underpins the reception in fragments that obscures Simmel’s modernist conception of philosophy and therewith his intellectual legacy (Goodstein, 2017). By enabling the Anglophone reader to experience Simmel’s perspectivalist vision of ‘philosophical culture’ through a free exploration of the juxtapositions and relations that arise in and through his own distinctive form of presentation, a complete English version of Philosophische Kultur would underline the contemporary significance of Simmel’s generative strategies of thought.

Thomas Kemple: Simmel on naturalism and representation in Rembrandt

Since Austin Harrington’s introduction covers the whole of Simmel’s concerns with art and aesthetics, I thought it would be interesting to take up a few points in one section, ‘Naturalism and Representation’ (Harrington, 2020: 55–61), and see how they illuminate Simmel’s method in his only published monograph on art: Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art (Simmel, 2005).

In the ‘Preface’ to this book, Simmel describes his approach to Rembrandt as one that departs from both the ‘low road’ that examines the historical conditions allowing a work to be classified in a certain way and another path that analyses only particular combinations of form, composition, color, and subject-matter. His philosophical approach, he says somewhat elusively, begins from ‘behind’ the work of art by locating the ‘existence and experience’ of art within ‘the movements of the soul, the height of conceptuality […] and the depths of world-historical antitheses’ (Simmel, 2005: 2). More precisely, his aim is to evoke the singular experience and impression ‘emerging out of or standing above’ Rembrandt’s work by dropping a plumbline (Senkblei) into its depths, so to speak (an image he also employs in the famous essay on metropolises). Perhaps with one of Rembrandt’s most well-known group portraits in mind, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1635), he contrasts this philosophical attitude with the analytical treatment of art, which he compares to the technique of dissecting bodies and souls on canvas: ‘But no more than a living being can be animated from the dismembered limbs on a dissection bench can a work of art, reassembled out of such elements, be recreated and thereby rendered intelligible’ (Simmel, 2005: 2). Like the hand of the corpse in the scene of Dr Tulp’s anatomy lesson, which directs the gaze of the men in attendance – and by extension the viewer – to the anatomical atlas in front of them, Simmel argues that a strictly aesthetic analysis cannot explicate the experience of wonder and insight evoked by Rembrandt’s paintings. At most, he admits, the pages of his own essay might recall or evoke the overall emotional effect of the work on the viewer, without breaking the corpus of the artwork or the experience of the view apart into their elements (Simmel, 2005: 3). As the double meaning of his subtitle suggests, we might say that Simmel is not just writing ‘an essay in the philosophy of art’ but also conducting ‘an art-philosophical experiment’ (ein kunstphilosophischer Versuch).

In The Anatomy Lesson the animating principle of Rembrandt’s artistry is dramatized and intensified in the juxtaposition of clothed bodies and a naked corpse, and in the play of facial expressions with one another, rather than in any suggestion that there is some invisible essence behind any of these aspects of the scene (which in any case would be impossible for the dead man!). In contrast to Simmel, who largely ignores the sociohistorical context of Rembrandt’s work, the novelist W.G. Sebald (1998: 13–17) remarks about this painting that it is odd that the dissection does not begin in the customary way by opening up the abdomen, but rather with the hand of the corpse of the criminal, the typical specimen for anatomical demonstrations at the time, and a symptom of bourgeois anxieties about the disruptive potential of the laboring poor (McNally, 2011: 32–6). In fact, the arm seems too elongated and even purposefully presented as a double of the right hand of the dead man, the doctor, or even the painter himself. Like a manicule on the margins of a medieval manuscript, the dead hand of the corpse seems to gesture to the medical textbook at the foot of the dissection table. The textbook itself serves as an index of how the scene graphically depicts a significant moment in the history of modern medicine, when the gaze of science was turning away from the eye of God and penetrating beneath the surfaces of Creation to inspect the inner tissues and explore the complex structures of the human body (O’Neill, 1995). In contrast to Descartes, whose anatomical studies in Amsterdam at this time aimed at rendering perception transparent, with light ‘reading through the geometry of bodies’, as Foucault (1975: xiii) puts it, Dr Tulp seems poised to descend into the dark folds of the flesh, as if on the verge of discovering the obscure inner workings of life itself and thus the very nature of human mortality.

In an excursus later on in the book Simmel considers how light provides the medium through which Rembrandt conveys this sense of soulfulness and religiosity in nearly all his work. Elaborating on the question ‘What do we see in a work of art?’, Simmel (2005: 142–51) does not focus on the play of light and shadow or the combination of colors that allow a painting to represent something. Somewhat surprisingly, he answers the question through an extended discussion of Rembrandt’s skill as a draughtsman and his remarkable talent in elevating etching to a true art form. Despite having no overtly religious content, Rembrandt’s early drawing of his mother from 1628 comes under particular scrutiny, specifically the detail of ‘a fur collar that is a true miracle [ein wahres Wunder] of the art of etching’ (Simmel, 2005: 142). We ‘see’ the fur not because it is ‘telegraphically’ transported to us as a fragment of reality via the surface of the canvas, but nor do we ‘supplement’ what has been left out with something we supply from our memory. Rather, this sketch succeeds so brilliantly because it is self-sufficient as a work of art, subsisting in a world of its own at the same time as it draws from a sphere of reality and perception that is distinct from the artistic realm. Simmel describes this paradox in terms of the relative autonomy and mutual influence of the sphere of aesthetic perception with respect to the realm of reality:

The artistic vision and the arrangement of the configuration [Gebilde] that, in those three-dimensional and practical contexts [Zusammenhängen] is a ‘real’ fur collar, emerges – in terms of its origin, form, and sense – in a precisely autochthonous way within the artistic spirit and its creative categories, just as the three-dimensional fur collar does within all other genetic and correlative elements by which we label it ‘real’ [wirklichen]. (Simmel, 2005: 145–6; trans. modified)

Without claiming that the world of art is either dependent on or entirely separate from the world of reality, Simmel argues that the miracle or ‘wonder’ of the fur collar lies in how the lines follow the powers and laws of drawing while still belonging to the plane of actuality: ‘Appearance still belongs to reality, just as a shadow still belongs to the physical world, because it is only through the latter that it exists’ (Simmel, 2005: 148). In a sense, each realm speaks its own language, with art translating the ‘mother-tongue’ of reality into its own terms, but without ‘redeeming’ or ‘overcoming’ reality through a kind of magic trick.

Like the question Simmel asks in the famous excursus from the first chapter of his monumental Sociology (2009: 40–52), ‘How is society possible?’, his answer to the question ‘What do we see in a work of art?’ hinges on a Kantian understanding of how knowledge, perception, and representation cannot provide an exact copy, record, or replica of reality. The painting or drawing does not just convey the corporeal presence of the original, as in a photograph, a movie, or some other mechanical reproduction. Instead, the material reality of the image articulates the vision of the artist while at the same time reflecting back on and appealing to the observing eye of the viewer. The drawing of a fur collar cannot replicate a real fur collar in the way that a photograph of Simmel’s wife Gertrud wearing a fur stole realistically reproduces or ‘naturally’ represents light and shadow in realistic proportions through chemical and mechanical means (see Kemple, 2018: 12–17 for a discussion of the earlier excursus). As Harrington (2020: 60) notes, in occasional critical remarks Simmel does not object to photography as such, or even to considering the photograph as a work of art; he is interested rather in taking a critical approach to ‘problems of photo-realistic ways of thinking about representation in an industrial age’. As if to anticipate what Roland Barthes (1981: 94–6) would later call the punctum of the photographic image, Simmel fixes on a detail in Rembrandt’s drawing that punctures through the field of cultural interest (the studium), like the hand of the corpse gesturing toward the medical text in The Anatomy Lesson. In constantly refining his technique over time, Rembrandt has learned to see that every object and each feature has its own splendor – the collar as much as the veil, the eyes as much as the smile, all lovingly portrayed with the hand of the artist. In Simmel’s (2005: 6) words: ‘the entire human being…is inherent in each separate experience’. With age and practice, Rembrandt channels his existence into the activities of his gaze and his hand, so that the canvas itself, even more than the figures depicted on it, becomes the substance of his passion to behold the whole of life.

Nicola Marcucci: Style and cohesion in Simmel’s philosophical vision of art

Anyone familiar with Simmel’s vast intellectual production knows that his ‘impressionistic’ style and kaleidoscopic interests entailed a variety of genres and subgenres that are hard to synthesize in an uncontroversial and objective way. The works of Simmel on art and aesthetics are no exception in this regard; indeed they epitomize the living complexity at stake in his entire production. If addressing systematically Simmel’s writings on art and aesthetics was not an easy task, Harrington’s volume has accomplished this successfully, presenting for the first time for global English readers a unified and thoughtfully organized edition. But the merit of the volume is more than this, for it not only gathers these materials together but also arranges them in conceptual subfields – style, modernism, autonomy of art, naturalism, sculpture, and so on – and, in doing so, gives the reader a holistic understanding of Simmel’s theoretical engagement. This has been done not in a compartmentalizing fashion but in a way that brings to the fore the fil rouge – the key threads – underlying Simmel’s reflections as a whole. This is especially true of the book’s informative introduction, which both situates Simmel’s work in the history of thought and foregrounds its relevance to current debates.

In order to make explicit some of the issues I consider important, I will focus here on three questions that seem relevant.

Firstly, I want to address a question that has often been thought to imply criticism of Simmel’s microsociology. The question concerns the clarity of Simmel’s account of social-historical transmission and development over time. This brings me first of all to the comparison we can draw between Simmel’s sociology and Émile Durkheim’s conception of symbolization as the source of evolutionary social-historical transmission. In order to fully grasp what is at stake in this question we have to recognize an often unseen similarity, rightly underlined by Harrington: ‘Closely related are the parallels Simmel also suggests in his early work between social relations of form in art and social relations of religious life. Adopting an approach not dissimilar to Émile Durkheim’s later, more comprehensive work in the area, Simmel writes of religious beliefs and practices as largely the products of feelings of special common belonging in social interaction.’ This interest is partly abandoned by Simmel in consequence of the gradually more philosophical preoccupations of his later thinking after around 1900: ‘The a priori or a priori-like “forms” that “make society possible,” in the sense in which he speaks in his earlier writings, are now more saliently the world-making ideal categories of mental synthesis that shape experience into unitary frames of meaning’ (Harrington, 2020: 13).What could be interesting to notice in this regard is that from Durkheim’s ostensibly contrasting perspective in his lectures on ‘moral education’, art can be considered at most a reduced form of symbolization because art, as Durkheim writes, ‘conveys neither percepts nor concepts, but images’ (Durkheim, 1961: 270). There is, in other words, for Durkheim, a deficit of objectivity in the work of art that is not at stake in moral life where collective representations notably excite and constrain the life of individuals. As Durkheim continues (1961: 271): ‘from this point of view, there is a genuine opposition between art and ethics.’ Thus Durkheim recognizes a partial autonomy of art from collective symbolization, albeit that he sees this as a limitation of art’s uses for education because of its inability to constrain human action in ways fundamental for moral life.

Without taking sides on the matter, either for Durkheim or Simmel, I think it would be important to probe the reasons for the problems hindering a fully comprehensive understanding of the relation between art, modernity and symbolization in both authors. In Simmel’s case, art seems to remain confined in its role as an autonomous form of synthesis in the life of the mind, while for Durkheim, on the other hand, art tends to appear only as a diminished kind of symbolization unable to produce the kind of education at stake in moral life. Perhaps one way of resolving the mutual limitations of these two visions might be to say that both thinkers allow for a sense of art being a part of collective processes of symbolization, such that in a modern age of gradual independence from religious authorities, art’s social function becomes one not only of preserving and reproducing symbolization in secular terms but also of realizing a practice of reflexivity in the activity of symbolization as such. This could underpin the reasons why, as Harrington shows, Simmel tends to invoke art and the aesthetic in order to illuminate some of most basic philosophical problems of ‘life and form’, the meaning of ‘individuality’ and the idea of ‘culture’. In this regard, perhaps Simmel can be viewed as having recognized the uniqueness of modern aesthetics and modern works of art – differently from Durkheim – but as having stopped short of clarifying and explaining this uniqueness in fully sociological terms.

Secondly, I would like to take up a question about the relation of art and critique in Simmel. What can be the role of critique in social theory in relation to art if, in order to respect the autonomy of the latter, social theory cannot pretend to make explicit the social and political meaning of artworks, in the sense of any standpoint normatively external to artistic practice? This bears on the difference between Simmel and Hegel’s legacy in Marxian critical social theory. Here Harrington (2020: 77) reminds us that Simmel’s thinking stands generally in opposition to any kind of crypto-Hegelian narrative about the historical ‘sublation’ of art into philosophy. Rather than any ‘sublation’ or Aufhebung of art in thought, it is a sort of intellectual alliance between the activity of thinking and the conceptuality of art that seems at stake in the aesthetical ‘snapshot’ of life forms that characterize the practices of both the artist and the social theorist according to Simmel. In line with ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s relativistic reworking of Hegel’s vision’ (Harrington, 2020: 15), Simmel refuses the idea of an absolute spirit, manifesting itself in the art field and revealed by the philosopher; and he diverges from ‘the kinds of more explicitly political positions in modernist theorizing taken up by Hegelian-Marxist writers in the orbit of the Frankfurt School, viewing works of art as special carriers of insight into the class struggle in world history’ (Harrington, 2020: 77). This work of clarifying Simmel’s relationship to, as well as difference from, critical theory seems important. A question that remains, though, concerns what kind of critique would be still possible in this regard, once any externality of cultural and political critique has been removed. Can the ‘lived experience’ of art autonomously provide the significance of its own critique? Or must there inevitably be some further work of translating in theory what remains normatively unthought in art?

Lastly, I would like to raise a question about the relation between social theory and philosophy in Simmel’s thinking about art, including specifically in regard to residues of Spinoza in Simmel’s vision. This is implicitly suggested by Harrington when he refers to a possible convergence between Simmel and Deleuze:

In the sense of the already noted commonality between Simmel’s and Deleuze’s vitalist conceptual styles, much of the vocabulary of creative flux in Simmel’s writings can be said to illuminate a space of the global in art as a theater of incessant struggle between emancipatory creative agency in world politics and society and monetary objectification. If, for some commentators writing in this idiom, a power of generative ‘immanence’ exists in global social affairs that, while chronically recuperated by capital, is never entirely stifled by it, something similar can be said to hold for Simmel’s vision. (Harrington, 2020: 78)

This observation seems right and accounts well for the vitalist moment in Simmel. Nonetheless, we are bound to wonder about how well it comports with the established centrality of Kant for Simmel’s thinking. As we know, the kind of Spinozism that is at stake in Deleuze is in part inhabited by the same kind of tension between immanent and non-immanent or ‘transcendent’ criticism. Could it be that what looks like an opposition between Spinoza and Kant appears also as an inherent tension in Simmel’s vision of art and aesthetics? Was Simmel able to offer a way of defusing this tension or does a certain disparity remain in his work between a Kantian inspired sociology of forms and a Spinozist inspired philosophy of life?

Austin Harrington: Simmel’s aesthetics, past and present

The preceding three sets of reflections by Goodstein, Kemple and Marcucci represent a highly wide-ranging discussion to which I can at best respond somewhat cursorily in what remains. This applies perhaps particularly to Nicola Marcucci’s complex and searching questions. I would like to conclude with a reprise of a few themes I take to be pivotal to Simmel’s thinking about art, weaving into this my replies to some points raised by the three readers.

As I sought to make clear in my introduction to the volume, we can, to a limited extent, see Simmel as applying his early sociological theorem of the ‘forms’ and ‘contents’ of social interaction to the domain of art, where historically specific artistic practices and institutions appear as substantive instances of recurring social forms and dynamics of the group – such as forms of conflict, rivalry, assimilation or exclusion among different artistic actors, and so on (Harrington, 2020: 9–12). However, in his output as a whole, Simmel does not develop this proposal very explicitly. More predominantly, Simmel’s concerns are with more philosophical questions of the origin of ideas of art and the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere of values, and with notions of the work of art as causa sui or ‘purposive without a purpose’, in Kant’s famous phrase. The sociological contours of Simmel’s thinking appear more in his answer to this question, which unfolds by way of an historicizing and sociologizing reconstruction of Kant’s precept of the three categorial realms of value signified by knowledge, morality and aesthetics (‘pure reason’, ‘practical reason’, ‘judgement’) (Simmel, 2010a: 43–52; 2020: 108–20).

Simmel’s thinking is that in a modern age, commerce and the growth of cities foster this process of autonomization, or Verselbstständigung, of aesthetic value (Simmel, 1978: 429–79; 2010b: 143–53). Money creates attitudes of distance from substantial qualities of things, which in turn stimulate attitudes of aesthetic distance; and money generates a constant search for differences of appearances in things, as values for emerging marketplaces of cultural goods, with the consequence that cities as centers of trade also become centers of socio-cultural creativity and innovation. The objects emerging institutionally as ‘objects of art’ are crystallized from practical flows and contexts of exchange and in this process become gradually self-subsistent ‘ends in themselves’ (Simmel, 2010a: 43–52).

Social systems of exchange give rise to the production of values of symbolic difference and distinction, materialized in phenomena of style, stylization, images and artefacts (Simmel, 1997: 187–218). Markets pull and recuperate those differential values back into relations of sameness and equivalence in the circuit of capital. Yet those values also militate against assimilation into exchange, most especially when crystalized in the form of autonomous works of art (Simmel, 2020: 121–34). Money economies nurture creativity on the stage of socio-cultural life, even as they also commodify and prey upon that creativity. And precisely insofar as money economies prey upon such creativity, they depend on it – with the implication finally for Simmel that not money but art in the widest sense has ‘the last word’. Not capital but creative expressive ‘life’ stands as the last deciding agency over the shaping of social possibilities of the future – and this agency plays itself out unceasingly through and against existing boundaries of social life, be these the boundaries around conventional art forms, styles and movements or the boundaries of prevailing moral, political, cognitive and techno-economic orders of the age (Harrington, 2020: 78).

Simmel’s observation is that in the culture of the cities, style, fashion and ornament represent a first level or stage of this drive toward particularization or individualization of the societally general in exchange, expressed as outward charm of the agent or object (Simmel, 1997: 211–18, 2020: 148–53, 159–65). In this sense one might say – using 21st-century vocabulary – that Simmel is concerned centrally with how urban advanced capitalism in an industrial as well as post-industrial age becomes increasingly ‘aesthetic’ and ‘cultural’, and with how such processes of ‘aestheticization’ and ‘culturalization’ of the economy revolve around a quest for singularities of value or for singularization – to deploy a phrase I take here from the work of the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2019), fully in line with the scholarly work on Simmel of figures such as Frisby (1981, 1985, 1992), as well as with the numerous empirical engagements with Simmel’s work appearing over the past 40 years or so in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society and elsewhere. ⁶

Yet for Simmel, there exists a further level of this drive toward singularization in culture which is accomplished only authentically by the autonomous work of art. The autonomous work stands amid all global flows of exchange and holds out an image of the self as unified ideally with the cosmos of things in a higher state of sovereign life – even if only for one momentary event of lived experience (Simmel, 2020: 126–34). The autonomous work is the reflected image or organon of inner freedom of the person in the aspect of his or her ‘individual law’. As such, the work inwardly refuses absorption into the flow of exchange, as with the more functionally stylized artefact or fashionable item, which remains at most partly or superficially unique (Simmel, 2010a: 43–52; 2010b: 177–83).

I take it that much of this forms the grounding for the implied distinction in Simmel’s oeuvre between fine art and ‘mass culture’, later thematized in a more programmatically Marxian direction by associates of the Frankfurt School such as Horkheimer and Adorno. Indeed arguably by no means so dissimilar in character to Adorno’s better-known later formulations, Simmel’s position seems fairly clearly recognizable as a view that to the extent that a work of art remains genuinely autonomous, it shows itself to be inwardly conscious of its material conditions of possibility as a socially produced artefact, and consequently stands in this regard as the or a source of critical awareness of its social world (cf. Simmel, 2010b: 177–83). This is the rough direction of an answer I would suggest to Marcucci’s question concerning art and ‘critique’ in Simmel.

In his comments on figures such as Gerhart Hauptmann and the Belgian social-realist sculptor Constantin Meunier, as well as at length on Rembrandt, Simmel (2005: 142–51; 2020: 259–60, 298–301) clarifies that modern aesthetic autonomy arises in art not essentially in a preoccupation with otherworldly matters of the spirit, in the vein of any unmediated idiom of romanticism, but rather in a concern with the phenomenal character of everyday earthly social life and labor. But Simmel’s point is also that to the degree that such ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realist’ impulses in art do indeed express autonomy in art, they rest on an inherently creative, interpretive undertaking on the part of artists and are not the bare mechanical relay of their object or content (Simmel, 2010b: 177–96; 2020: 176–84). The naturalist or realist artist examines sensuous life precisely as this life appears subjectively to the artistic soul. As Thomas Kemple underscores in his comments on Simmel’s Rembrandt study, artistic representation in Simmel’s thinking forms a holistic work of disclosing the expressive whole of the object in inner ‘movement’ of life over time – this word ‘movement’ (Bewegung) being a key term for Simmel, akin to Bergson’s ‘duration’. Representation is not a search for essential analytical components of the object ‘behind’ sensory appearances – like the anatomy of the corpse on Dr Tulp’s table – and artists go awry if they attempt to emulate in this way the procedures of natural science or (positivistic) social science (Simmel, 2010b: 177–96; 2020: 302–18).

Rembrandt in Simmel’s account is the expressive painter par excellence of such transitory ‘motion of life’; and the Dutch visionary’s sense of the individual in relation to society and the cosmos contrasts with that of Michelangelo as a Renaissance artist of tragic struggle and strife between ‘soul’ on the one hand and inhibiting ‘gravity’ (Schwere) of the world on the other (Simmel, 2020: 143–7, 279–97). Different such configurations of ‘soul’ and ‘gravity of the world’ play themselves out throughout art in Simmel’s narrative, according to different social forms of period style and convention. In his essays on the medium of sculpture in Rodin, in particular, Simmel (2020: 302–22) speaks of the entire corporeal surface of the sculptor’s works as the site of soul or ‘animation’ in art – not only the head or face of a figure, as with portraiture – and further of ‘movement’ in Rodin as the reflecting mirror of an entire modern age in incessant flux, indeed as this mirror itself in limitless movement.

It is in these writings on Rodin – perhaps a highlight of the entire corpus of his essays – that a commonality of style seems most palpable between Simmel and Gilles Deleuze’s vitalist metaphysics of immanent ‘becoming’ of the world in art and philosophy, as I tried to spell out in a few remarks in the volume. Yet if this coupling is a valid one, might not a tension appear here between such monistic (‘Deleuzian’) contours of Simmel’s vision and the more Kantian residues of his analysis? A response to Nicola Marcucci’s question must, I think, draw from Simmel’s thematic of ‘life’ as the historicizing recalibration of Kant’s conception of a priori concepts and categories of the intellect after Wilhelm Dilthey (Simmel, 2010a: 43–52; 2010b: 143–53). From the Kantian angle, knowledge and experience of the world remain impossible without categorial form; yet from the more vitalist aspect of Simmel’s thinking, categorial form is itself constantly dissolved and recreated in the flux of life. Similarly, regarding art and religion – also at issue for Marcucci – Simmel’s understanding seems to be most broadly that art and religion show precisely this same double aspect, at once of enabling ‘vision of the world’ as categorial form and constantly dispersing and reemerging from the flow of life in world-historical being and becoming (Simmel, 2010a: 43–52; 2010b: 143–53).

This leitmotif of ‘form’ in Simmel’s thinking brings me now to one concluding remark I would like to make in reply to Elizabeth Goodstein’s considerations on the risks of artifice and anachronism pervading any attempt to arrange Simmel’s diverse texts under some kind of thematic structure governed by current disciplinary categories. We know that before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 60 in 1918, Simmel had always intended to produce some kind of integrated volume on ‘the philosophy of art’, as he called it (Philosophie der Kunst). Although it is true that Simmel’s chapter groupings in Philosophische Kultur are to some extent a guide to his intentions in the project, they do not help us very much with the rest of his expansive corpus; and thus it was my view that if we wish to honor at least the spirit of his thinking as faithfully as possible, we must ‘take a leaf from his own book’ and simply affirm creatively our own sense of the most authentic presentational form for his themes today. Not only is this the approach taken to good effect by Frisby and Featherstone in Simmel on Culture; it is also, I think, the best instruction we can take away from the motto – surely close to Simmel’s heart – conveyed to the world by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and constantly reiterated by figures from Foucault and Deleuze to Derrida and Harold Bloom, that we are most true to the master when in some way we break with him.