Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

Georg Simmel first published Philosophische Kultur in 1911; the third and last edition appeared in 1923. The fact that this collection of essays has not been available for over sixty years and only reappears today could indicate that Simmel as a critic of culture is in a peculiar way both near to, and far away from, us.1

...After the Second World War, the philosopher and sociologist Simmel did not achieve an intellectual presence in Germany, or in America, that would have in any way foreshadowed his contemporary influence. ...Simmel did not manage to become a "classic"; because of his intellectual orientation he was not predestined for this.

Simmel represents a different type. Despite his influence on the philosophical climate in the period before the First World War, despite his significance for German and, almost even more so, for American sociology during their respective periods of formation, Simmel was a creative although not a systematic thinker--a philosophical diagnostician of the times with a social-scientific bent rather than a philosopher or sociologist solidly placed in the academic profession.

Simmel was reproached for a relativistic attitude towards Christianity, his unorthodox way of thinking and teaching came across as provocative, his success with students and his influence on the public at large aroused envy, and anti-Semitism went hand in hand with a resentment against literary intellectuals. More than anything else, what distanced him from the academic world was Simmel's mentality, which was characterized by a sensitive awareness of the attractions typical of his times; of aesthetic innovations; of spiritual shifts of disposition and changes of orientation in the metropolitan attitudes to life; and of subpolitical transformations of inclination and barely tangible, diffuse, but treacherous phenomena of the everyday. In short, for Simmel the membranes of the spirit of the age were wide open.

Simmel's pieces vacillate between essay and scientific treatise; they roam around the crystallizing thought. He never asked himself whether a single, sharp sentence, such as "the antique sculpture, so to speak, searched for the logic of the body, Rodin for its psychology,"2 could have been developed into an article of twenty pages on Rodin as an artistic personality. The short aesthetic pieces come closer to disclosing something of the similarities that exist between the condensed essay and the explosive aphorism. But even here a distance is revealed that warrants the outdated book title Philosophische Kultur.

It is the neo-Kantian notion of culture that signals what separates us from Simmel. Simmel is a child of the fin de siècle; he still belongs to that epoch during whose intellectual formation Kant and Hegel, Schiller and Goethe were contemporaries--contemporaries, of course, who had already been overshadowed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The fundamental concepts of Kantian-Schillerian aesthetics--freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, form and substance-are the ones Simmel used in order to elucidate Rodin's victory over classicism and naturalism.

Simmel still stood on this side of the rupture that would open up between Rodin and Ernst Barlach, between Giovanni Segantini and Kandinsky, between Emil Lask and Lukács, and between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger. He wrote about fashion differently from Benjamin.3 And yet it was Simmel who made the connection between fashion and modernity; who impressed the young Lukács even in the choice of his titles; who inspired Benjamin to observations on the overflow of stimuli, the density of contact, and the acceleration of movement in the metropolitan space of experience; and who changed the mode of observation, the themes and style of writing of a whole generation of intellectuals. How can one explain the potential for stimulation, coming to the fore during the time of the Weimar Republic, in a man whose roots were embedded so deeply in the historically enlightened nineteenth century? I think that Simmel owes his astonishing, although often anonymous, impact to the diagnosis of the times, founded on the philosophy of culture, that he first developed in the final chapter of The Philosophy of Money. He continued this theory of the contemporary age in the essay "On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture," and he subsumed it under a dubious metaphysics in his later presentation, "The Conflict in Modern Culture."4

1. See Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter, und die Krise der Moderne: Gesammelte Essais (Berlin, 1983); hereafter abbreviated PK.

2. Simmel, "Rodin," PK, p. 152.

3. See Simmel, "Die Mode," PK, pp. 26-51.

4. See Simmel, "Der Begriff und die Tragšdie der Kultur," PK, pp. 183-207 and "Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur," Das individuelle Gesetz, pp. 148-73; trans. K. Peter Etzkorn, under the titles "On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture" and "The Conflict in Modern Culture," The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York, 1968), pp. 27-46 and 11-26.

The original version of this paper was published under the title"Simmel als Zeitdiagnostiker" ("Simmel as Diagnostician of the Times") as a postscript to Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter, und die Krise der Moderne: Gesammelte Essais, p. 243-53. It was reprinted under the title "Georg Simmel über Philosophie und Kultur: Nachwort zu einer Sammlung von Essays," adopted in this translation, in Jürgen Habermas, Texte und Kontexte (Frankfort am Main, 1991), pp. 157-69. Footnotes referring to essays in the Simmel volume and to available English translations have been added for this translation. I would like to thank Jürgen Habermas and Suhrkamp Verlag for granting permission to publish this translation. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. --Mathieu Deflem, translator.