Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel (born March 1, 1858 in Berlin, Germany; died September 28, 1918) was one of the first generation theorists in German sociology. .
Life
Simmel was born in Berlin and lived there most of his life. He was the youngest of seven children. His father, a Jewish businessman who converted to Christianity, died when Georg was very young, and a guardian was appointed for him. Georg’s didn’t have close relationship with his mother, and this probably influenced his sense for marginality and insecurity.
Simmel studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin. In 1881 he received his doctorate for his thesis "The Nature of Matter According to Kant's Physical Monadology". He became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) at the University of Berlin in 1885. His lectures, on a wide variety of topics – logic, history of philosophy, ethics, sociology and psychology - were not only popular inside the university, but as well, attracted the intellectual elite of Berlin.
Although his applications for vacant chairs at German universities were supported by Max Weber, Simmel remained an academic outsider. Only in 1901 was he elevated to the rank of extraordinary professor (full professor but without a chair). At that time he was well-known throughout Europe and America and was seen as a man of great eminence.
A failure to gain a full-time professorship didn’t discourage Simmel. He continued his intellectual and academic work, taking part in artistic circles as well as being a cofounder of the German Society for Sociology, together with Max Weber and Ferdinand Toennies. This life at the meeting point of university and society, arts and philosophy was possible because Simmel had been the heir to a fortune from his appointed guardian.
He befriended many well-known men, e.g. Max Weber, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Edmund Husserl.
In 1890 he married Gertrud Kinel. Being herself a philosopher, she published under the pseudonym Marie-Luise Enckendorf. They lived a sheltered and bourgeois life, their home becoming a venue for cultivated gatherings in the tradition of the salon. They bore a son, Gertmund, a combination of their names. He was frequently mentioned in Simmel's work.
In 1914 Simmel finally receive an ordinary professorship with chair, at then German University of Strasbourg. However, because of the outbreak of World War I, all academic activities and lectures were halted as lecture halls were converted to military hospitals. In 1915 he applied - without success - for a chair at the University of Heidelberg.
Shortly before the end of the war in 1918, he died from liver cancer.
Work
Unlike the contemporary scholars, Simmel was not interested in current affairs of his time. He didn’t’ plunge into politics or socio-economical issues like most of his friends. Rather, Simmel was a passionate and diverse writer. He wrote more than two hundred articles that were published in numerous journals or magazines, on a whole variety of topics, including philosophy, ethics, religion, art, social psychology and sociology.
Some of his major monographic works include:
- On Social Differentiation (1890)
- The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
- Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
- The Philosophy of Money (1900)
- Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation (1908)
- Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
- Lebensanschauung (1918)
The article Simmel first published On Social Differentiation was dealing with sociological problems, the topic he will return to only in the later period of his life. Even though sociology was what Simmel remained the most famous after, he didn’t fixate only on that area. During his career he worked on issues mainly in philosophy and ethics. In the middle period of his career, Simmel also published several minor works in religion and on Kant, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. In 1908 Simmel published his seminal work Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation. In that work Simmel summarizes his critique on both organicist (Comte, Spencer) and idealist (whole German philosophical tradition) schools in sociology, and offers his formal view of this science. In the tradition of Comte and Spencer, organicist school sees development of society in terms similar as the development of human, or organic being. Social processes are seen as biological processes – in a natural chain in which simple social phenomena making the more complex ones. As any other organic beings societies also have birth, live and eventually die.
Against this idea stood idealistic school of German philosophy, that saw natural world essentially separated from the world of ideas, i.e. the world of human affairs. Since human spirit (due to its free nature and uniqueness) cannot be studied, any attempt to measure human phenomena, in terms of history or sociology, is futile.
Simmel rejected both schools of thought, and offered the third view. According to him, society is a sum of all interactions between individual parts that consist that society. In another words, society is made of individual phenomena that interact and form more complex ones. Sociation, the term Simmel uses, is a particular pattern or a form that particular social interaction assumes. For example, the smallest social phenomenon takes place between two individuals. It can be in the form of a trade or a family. Complex forms take place when simpler phenomena interact with each other. Family, tribe, clan, city, or state is the results (or the final forms) of such interactions. According to Simmel, sociology thus needs to study human phenomena in the terms of interaction, and not final forms. "Sociology asks what happens to men and by what rules they behave, not insofar as they unfold their understandable individual existences in their totalities, but insofar as they form groups and are determined by their group existence because of interaction."
In addition, through his study of social psychology, Simmel identified some “typical” interactions within a society. That is, interaction within a group or between two or more groups is “typical” to a certain level. There is certain uniformity, for example, when observing human interaction in leader-follower, as well as in group-newcomer interaction. Thus interaction, not the form, need to be the object of sociological inquest.
At the latest period of his life, with the outbreak of the war, Simmel became a passionate patriot. He got involved with war propaganda, and devoted himself to writing the justification for the war. Simmel wrote: “I love Germany and therefore want it to live. To hell with all 'objective' justification of this will in terms of culture, ethics, history, or God knows what else”. Many of his friends and fellow scholars were stunned with the passion Simmel was using in his articles. But it was not only passion, but also a lack of objectivity that amazed people who knew Simmel. His friend Ernst Bloch told Simmel: "You avoided decision throughout your [whole] life – Tertium datur – now you find the absolute in the trenches." Was it the desire for belonging that led Simmel to this side? After the long period of rejection from the side of the academic community and the inability to obtain any permanent professorship post, it could be that Simmel wanted finally to belong somewhere, and the war became an opportunity to join the patriotic community. Or was it that because he spent so much time writing about abstracts that war reminded Simmel of the reality, and he thus wanted to contribute somehow to that reality, and leave something substantial behind himself. Or was it that due to the fact that he never focused on only one issue, and wrote on the whole variety of topics, what left Simmel unable to develop any major philosophical system, or a school of thought. Simmel thus didn’t have any direct disciples. He wrote in his diary: "I know that I shall die without intellectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will reveal no longer its indebtedness to this heritage." Probably all the previously mentioned factors played role in the latest phase of Simmel’s life.
Legacy
Even though he didn’t leave any established school of thought or any direct disciples, Simmel influenced further development of both sociology and philosophy. His ideas, dispersed through different areas that he wrote in, left mark on the future generations of scholars. Robert Park, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Max Scheler are among those who were inspired with some of Simmel’s ideas. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, are two followers of the Frankfort school of neo-Marxist sociology, who built up on Simmel’s work, especially in their criticism of mass culture and mass society. Modern German philosophers like Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger are also indebted to Simmel. With his phenomenology of human interaction Simmel can be seen as one of the important participants of the phenomenological movement in general. Simmel’s study on groups and group-behavior has gained some important insights that will later be used in social psychology.
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