SIMMEL, GEORG

SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918), German philosopher and sociologist. Born in Berlin of converted parents, in 1885 Simmel became a lecturer at Berlin, but his appointment as professor (extracurricular) at Strasbourg was delayed until 1911 because of his Jewish origin and because he followed no religion. In 1914 he finally became full professor. In his early work Ueber soziale Differenzierung (1890) Simmel sees the essence of the modern development in the dissolution of the substance of society in a sum of interrelationships of participating individuals. Another early book, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (1892), which he later rejected, sought to construct a system of morals describing man's moral life psychologically without evaluating it. Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (also 1892), greatly altered by Simmel in later editions, had considerable influence. In this work Simmel postulates that events must be distinguished from history. The philosophy of history seeks out those a priori assumptions of historical consciousness, the foundations on which "the historical world is built." Simmel pursued this idea in "Das Problem der historischen Zeit" ("The Problem of Historical Time") and "Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens" ("The Essence of Historical Comprehension"), which are included in the collection Bruecke und Tuer (1957). He suggests there is no road to objective reality itself, only diverse subjective worlds, dependent on their categorical assumptions. Simmel's relativism reached its peak in Philosophie des Geldes (1900), in which he tried to discover the relation of money to all spheres of our life – its influences on all branches of culture – and expose the spiritual, moral, and religious assumptions of historical materialism in order to overcome it. He especially emphasized the intellectual character of monetary economy. Simmel published his research on Kant in his book Kant (1904). Besides Kant's expression of intellectuality, others, no less true, are possible, as Simmel indicated in Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907), Goethe (1913), and Rembrandt (1916). Influenced by the antipsychological views of the neo-Kantians and Husserl, Simmel saw culture as a process itself, an objective view through which the contents moved from the soul into an objective framework having its own laws. Cultural values have autonomous validity separated from their creator's spiritual source. The soul's or life's essence is to produce the objective contents of culture from itself. "Life is more than life." Thus objective culture becomes the soul's path back to itself. His studies on art, religion, and philosophy tried to show that each is a world in itself, not a derivative of another, because it depends on special subjective functions of life. In his books Soziologie (1908) and Grundfragen der Soziologie (1917), as well as in numerous essays, Simmel analyzes all processes of association and dissociation as psychic phenomena, but he also constitutes the science of sociology by separating the forms of association from their content in such a way that purely formal concepts of relationships become generalizable and thereby scientific in character. They remain constant in a multitude of concrete events. In this sense, Simmel has analyzed the formal nature and significance of numbers ("The Dyad and the Triad"), space, conflict, poverty, fashion, adornment, secret societies, and a host of other formal relationships, always recognizing the dialectical interplay of the individual and the group as the essence of all relationships. But he has not arrived at a systematic ordering of these relationships. Buber, in turn stimulated by Simmel, described Jewish existence as manifesting itself not so much in substance but in relationships, that is, as essentially social in character. In this fashion, Simmel's approach to sociology has become a cornerstone of the sociology of the Jews. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: H. Liebeschuetz, Von G. Simmel zu F. Rosenzweig (1970); L. Coser, Georg Simmel (Eng., 1965), incl. list of his works; R.H. Weingartner, Experience and Culture: the Philosophy of Georg Simmel (1962), incl. bibl.; K.H. Wolf (ed.), Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography (1959); M. Susman, Die geistige Gestalt G. Simmels (1959); K. Gassen and M. Landmann (ed.), Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel (1958). (Samuel Hugo Bergman and Werner J. Cahnman)