Georg Simmel


Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. A founding figure of sociology, his neo-Kantian approach helped establish sociological antipositivism, asking "What is society?" in analogy to Kant's "What is nature?". He pioneered analyses of individuality and social fragmentation.
Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship, wherein form becomes content, and vice versa dependent on context. In this sense, Simmel was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences.
Through "The Metropolis and Mental Life" Simmel was a precursor of urban sociology, symbolic interactionism, and social network analysis. An acquaintance of Max Weber, Simmel wrote on the topic of personal character in a manner reminiscent of the sociological ideal type. He broadly rejected academic standards, however, philosophically covering topics such as emotion and romantic love. Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory informed the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Biography

Early life and education

Georg Simmel was born in Berlin, Germany, as the youngest of seven children to an assimilated Jewish family. His father, Eduard Simmel, a prosperous businessman and convert to Roman Catholicism, had founded a confectionery store called "Felix & Sarotti" that would later be taken over by a chocolate manufacturer. His mother Flora Bodstein came from a Jewish family who had converted to Lutheranism. Georg, himself, was baptized as a Protestant when he was a child.
His father died in 1874, when Georg was 16, leaving a sizable inheritance. Georg was then adopted by Julius Friedländer, the founder of an international music publishing house known as Peters Verlag, who endowed him with the large fortune that enabled him to become a scholar.
Beginning in 1876, Simmel studied philosophy and history at the Humboldt University of Berlin, going on to receive his doctorate in 1881 for his thesis on Kantian philosophy of matter, titled "".
In 1885, Simmel became a privatdozent at the University of Berlin, officially lecturing in philosophy but also in ethics, logic, pessimism, art, psychology and sociology. His lectures were not only popular inside the university, but attracted the intellectual elite of Berlin as well. Although his applications for vacant chairs at German universities were supported by Max Weber, Simmel remained an academic outsider. However, with the support of an inheritance from his guardian, he was able to pursue his scholarly interests for many years without needing a salaried position.
Simmel had a hard time gaining acceptance in the academic community despite the support of well known associates, such as Max Weber, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Edmund Husserl. This was partly because he was seen as a Jew during an era of anti-Semitism, but also simply because his articles were written for a general audience rather than academic sociologists. This led to dismissive judgements from other professionals. Simmel nevertheless continued his intellectual and academic work, as well as taking part in artistic circles.

Later life

In 1890, Georg married Gertrud Kinel, a philosopher who published under the pseudonym Marie-Luise Enckendorf, and under her own name. They lived a sheltered and bourgeois life, their home becoming a venue for cultivated gatherings in the tradition of the salon. They had one son, Hans Eugen Simmel, who became a medical doctor. Georg and Gertrud's granddaughter was the psychologist Marianne Simmel. Simmel also had a secret affair with his assistant Gertrud Kantorowicz, who bore him a daughter in 1907, though this fact was hidden until after Simmel's death.
In 1909, Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and others, co-founded the German Society for Sociology. He served as a member of its first executive body. In 1914, Simmel received an ordinary professorship with chair, at the then German University of Strassburg, but did not feel at home there. Because World War I broke out, all academic activities and lectures were halted and lecture halls were converted to military hospitals. In 1915 he applied - without success - for a chair at the Heidelberg University. In 1917, Simmel stopped reading the newspapers and withdrew to the Black Forest to finish the book The View of Life. Shortly before the end of the war in 1918, he died from liver cancer in Strasbourg.

Theory

There are four basic levels of concern in Simmel's work:
  1. The psychological workings of social life
  2. The sociological workings of interpersonal relationships.
  3. The structure of and changes in zeitgeist of his time. He would also adopt the principle of emergentism, the idea that higher levels of conscious properties emerge from lower levels.
  4. The nature and inevitable fate of humanity.

    Dialectical method

A dialectical approach is a multicausal and multidirectional method: it focuses on social relations; integrates facts and value, rejecting the idea that there are hard and fast dividing lines between social phenomena; looks not only at the present, but also at the past and future; and is deeply concerned with both conflicts and contradictions. Simmel's sociology was concerned with relationships—especially interaction—and was thus known as a relationalist. This approach is based on the idea that interactions exist between everything. Overall, Simmel would be mostly interested in dualisms, conflicts, and contradictions in whatever realm of the social world he happened to be working on.

Forms of association

The furthest Simmel has brought his work to a micro-level of analysis was in dealing with forms and interactions that takes place with different types of people. Such forms would include subordination, superordination, exchange, conflict and sociability.
Simmel focused on these forms of association while paying little attention to individual consciousness. Simmel believed in the creative consciousness that can be found in diverse forms of interaction, which he observed both the ability of actors to create social structures, as well as the disastrous effects such structures had on the creativity of individuals. Simmel also believed that social and cultural structures come to have a life of their own.

Sociability

Simmel refers to "all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a 'society'," whereby society is defined as a "higher unity," composed of individuals.
Simmel would especially be fascinated by man's "impulse to sociability," whereby "the solitariness of the individuals is resolved into togetherness," referring to this unity as "the free-playing, interacting interdependence of individuals." Accordingly, he defines sociability as "the play-form of association" driven by "amicability, breeding, cordiality and attractiveness of all kinds." In order for this free association to occur, Simmel explains, "the personalities must not emphasize themselves too individually...with too much abandon and aggressiveness." Rather, "this world of sociability...a democracy of equals" is to be without friction so long as people blend together in the spirit of pleasure and bringing "about among themselves a pure interaction free of any disturbing material accent."
Simmel describes idealised interactions in expressing that "the vitality of real individuals, in their sensitivities and attractions, in the fullness of their impulses and convictions...is but a symbol of life, as it shows itself in the flow of a lightly amusing play," adding that "a symbolic play, in whose aesthetic charm all the finest and most highly sublimated dynamics of social existence and its riches are gathered."

Social geometry

In a dyad, a person is able to retain their individuality as there is no fear that another may shift the balance of the group. In contrast, triads risk the potential of one member becoming subordinate to the other two, thus threatening their individuality. Furthermore, were a triad to lose a member, it would become a dyad.
The basic nature of this dyad-triad principle forms the essence of structures that form society. As a group increases in size, it becomes more isolated and segmented, whereby the individual also becomes further separated from each member. In respect to the notion of "group size", Simmel's view was somewhat ambiguous. On one hand, he believed that the individual benefits most when a group gets bigger and exerting control on the individual becomes harder. On the other hand, with a large group there is a possibility of the individual's becoming distant and impersonal. Therefore, in an effort for the individual to cope with the larger group they must become a part of a smaller group such as the family.
The value of something is determined by the distance from its actor. In "The Stranger", Simmel discusses how if a person is too close to the actor they are not considered a stranger. If they are too far, however, they would no longer be a part of a group. The particular distance from a group allows a person to have objective relationships with different group members.

Views

The Metropolis and Mental Life

One of Simmel's most notable essays is "The Metropolis and Mental Life" from 1903, which was originally given as one of a series of lectures on all aspects of city life by experts in various fields, ranging from science and religion to art. The series was conducted alongside the Dresden cities exhibition of 1903. Simmel was originally asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the big city, but he effectively reversed the topic in order to analyze the effects of the big city on the mind of the individual. As a result, when the lectures were published as essays in a book, to fill the gap, the series editor himself had to supply an essay on the original topic.
"The Metropolis and Mental Life" was not particularly well received during Simmel's lifetime. The organisers of the exhibition overemphasised its negative comments about city life, because Simmel also pointed out positive transformations. During the 1920s the essay was influential on the thinking of Robert E. Park and other American sociologists at the University of Chicago who collectively became known as the "Chicago School". It gained wider circulation in the 1950s when it was translated into English and published as part of Kurt Wolff's edited collection, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. It now appears regularly on the reading lists of courses in urban studies and architecture history. However, it is important to note that the notion of the blasé is actually not the central or final point of the essay, but is part of a description of a sequence of states in an irreversible transformation of the mind. In other words, Simmel does not quite say that the big city has an overall negative effect on the mind or the self, even as he suggests that it undergoes permanent changes. It is perhaps this ambiguity that gave the essay a lasting place in the discourse on the metropolis.