Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
of Art
Efraim Podoksik
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Abstract
The article suggests that Simmel’s thought should be interpreted as a coherent series
of continuous attempts to solve philosophically the dilemmas entailed in the German
ideal of Bildung. By analysing Simmel’s three short essays on Italian cities, and by
placing them in the context of both his own intellectual development and the intel-
lectual context of his time, the article will show how ideas expressed in these essays
reflect this basic character of Simmel’s thought. In other words, far from being
independent momentary images, Simmel’s essays on Italian cities reflect his concern
with whether and how culture in general, and works of art in particular, may help
modern personality reconcile itself with the world.
Keywords
art, Geisteswissenschaften, Germany, individuality, Italy, Nietzsche, Simmel
Corresponding author:
Efraim Podoksik, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel
Email: podoksik@mscc.huji.ac.il
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
102 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
adding though that he doubted whether such a homeland existed for him
at all.
Now, my reading of Simmel is that his essays on Italian cities are much
more characteristic of his thought in general and of his attitude to the
question of urbanity, than his statements on the modern metropolis; that
his diagnosis of modern ‘fragmentation’, instead of signifying his cultural
immersion in the ‘modernist’ experience, points rather to his detachment
from it and to his search for alternatives.
Therefore, I believe that Simmel’s approach towards urban life
requires re-examining, and the aim of this article is to contribute to
such a re-examination. More specifically, three moments related to
Simmel’s works on Italian cities will be discussed here. First, I will
point to the conceptual framework within which Simmel’s essays on
Italian cities are best understood, and more specifically to the ideal of
Bildung,3 the adherence to which characterizes Simmel’s thought in gen-
eral and distinguishes him from the younger generation of thinkers such
as Wilhelm Worringer. Second, I will analyse in detail Simmel’s argu-
ment about the three cities in order to show how the changes in his
approach towards the Bildung ideal are reflected in the differences in
his descriptions of these cities. Finally, I will briefly discuss the effect
this re-examination may have on the question of the relevance of
Simmel’s ideas.
I
In my view, Simmel’s philosophy taken as a whole is characterized by a
significant inner unity which is stronger than usually assumed. This unity
is to a great degree based on Simmel’s immersion in the tradition
and ideal of self-cultivation, or Bildung as it came to be known. This
Bildung ideal underlies not only Simmel’s writings on aesthetics and edu-
cation but also his works on less obvious subjects, such as sociology or
Kant.
Grasping Simmel’s philosophy as a whole is of course an intricate task
due to the great complexity and variety of his writings. For this reason,
I cannot attempt to prove or describe in sufficient detail my understand-
ing of it. This will be accomplished in my future book-length study.
However, in order to make the present analysis of Simmel’s essays intel-
ligible, I would like to offer a concise summary of my understanding of
the Bildung ideal in general and to show what this understanding reveals
about the difference between Simmel’s aesthetic views and those of some
of his younger contemporaries, in particular.
The kernel of the problem of Bildung can be characterized, first, as the
question of how a harmonious individual can feel at home in the modern
world, which is perceived as essentially fragmented or on its way to being
fragmented. In other words, the problem of Bildung is one of a synthesis
104 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
between integrated personality, on the one hand, and the manifold exter-
nal reality, on the other. Second, the modern world is perceived as secu-
larized. This implies that the reconciliation of its fragmentariness with
the demands of personality can no longer be achieved with the assistance
of some extra-natural benevolent force (thus religion can no longer play
the integrative role it played before), and therefore the task of performing
this reconciliation is now left to man himself.
Whatever the differences in nuances among authors, the classical strat-
egy of realizing the Bildung ideal almost always included two stages: first,
objectification, or self-alienation, that is, when a person goes beyond
himself, immersing himself in the variety of the world; and then a
return to himself, with variety now becoming a new unity, though on a
higher level – a unity which involves diversity, conflicts and apparent
contradictions. It is this vision of a person’s development which is sum-
marized in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as ‘drawing men out of themselves,
and leading them, by a circuitous road, back’ (1874: 102). Simmel called
this process ‘culture’ (Kultur) and described it as the way ‘of the soul to
itself’, which leads ‘from the closed unity through the unfolded multipli-
city to the unfolded unity’ (1968a: 27, 29).
In German intellectual life, the concept of ‘culture’, as a means by
which Bildung is realized, gradually took the place which was previously
occupied by religion.4 That is, culture was supposed to show to the
modern secularized and dispersed mind the way out of the fragmentari-
ness of its own existence.5 Yet Bildung, due to its dialectical character,
was a hazardous ideal. Denying the existence of the straight road to
perfection, it postulated the idea of the reconciliation of contrasts.
Conjuring up a fruitful tension and its later resolution, it demanded
strange detours in the process of self-cultivation. Detours, however,
might lead one astray. The main danger was that the stage of self-
alienation would not be followed by return. The modern world was so
complex and diversified that it could not be easily subsumed in its entir-
ety under a unifying image. Immersing oneself in the world might lead
one to remain stuck in only one particular aspect of it, even become
fascinated by it, becoming the prisoner of a fragment, rather than
using the fragment as a gate towards the whole.
This is the danger that the notion of culture was supposed to over-
come, by mapping particular aspects of human activity within the whole.
Yet in the course of the long 19th century, the initial optimism about the
role of culture would gradually recede, to the point where, during the
Second German Empire, and especially in the years immediately preced-
ing the outbreak of the First World War, there was growing talk about
the crisis of culture. As a consequence, within just a few years, following
the shock of the defeat, these two concepts – Bildung and culture – were
openly challenged, and lost their integrative consensual function.6
Podoksik 105
II
It is in this context of searching for unity that Simmel’s essays on Italian
cities should be understood. In his discussion of the characters of these
cities, his major question was whether – seen as aesthetic objects – they
satisfy our quest for unity and, if so, what kind of unity they represent.
Yet, though the question remained the same in all the three essays,
Simmel’s treatment of it and the answers he suggested were different.
The difference sprang from the evolution his thought underwent regard-
ing the problem of Bildung.
This process of change can be roughly divided into three phases, the
main parameters of which I would like to outline.8 In the first phase,
covering the period of Simmel’s young years up to the mid 1890s, his
attitude to the Bildung ideal was relatively unproblematic. He was aware
of the existence of conflicts within the process of self-development of
modern personality, and especially of the conflict between the demand
of universality posited by Bildung, on the one hand, and that of growing
professionalization and the division of labour, which causes the fragmen-
tation of human capacities, on the other. Yet he did not conceive this
tension as unbridgeable in principle. On the contrary, influenced by
Spencer’s optimistic perception of modern differentiation, Simmel con-
sidered the emerging conflicts as congruent with the ideal of unity.
The second phase encompasses the period between the mid 1890s and
1908, as Simmel’s thinking moves into the direction of despairing of the
classical model of Bildung. This change happens gradually, and there is
no specific time at which the break between the first and second phases
takes place. Towards the 1900s, though, it appears that Simmel begins to
suspect that the contradictions (or, as he now prefers to say, dualisms) of
life are irreconcilable. He explores various possibilities that may offer
solutions, such as art, religious sentiment, the feminine, or even the
Alps, but in the end remains unsatisfied with all of them. These are
now merely ad hoc solutions, points of fragmentary release, which are
valid conditionally for a specific time, or for specific kinds of people.
They do not provide the general answer to the problem of modernity.
One gets from Simmel’s writings of that period the impression of aporia.
What is often perceived as their fragmentariness is to a great extent
nothing other than the flow of a constant arrangement and rearrange-
ment of ideas and arguments in search of the point at which the basic
unity of personality can be achieved and preserved.9
Yet in the end he did not accept ‘fragmentariness’ or ‘homelessness’
as the final diagnosis of modernity. The aporia was overcome by Simmel
in the third phase, beginning around 1908, when he formed a new
Podoksik 107
Rome
Rome’s essential mark is the combination of its extreme multiplicity with
its unity, or, more properly speaking, Rome’s unity is based on its multi-
plicity. The immense unity of its manifold ‘is not torn apart by the vast
tension of its elements’; on the contrary, this unity ‘is displayed through
this very tension’ (Simmel, 2007b: 34).
The variety of Rome, its contrasts and oppositions, is displayed in
everything. It appears spatially in the city’s hilly landscape with its con-
trast of below and above, and temporally, due to Rome’s immensely long
and multi-faceted history. Those contrasts were not part of some precon-
ceived design. The city acquired its current form in the course of a for-
tuitous development. It was built throughout generations, none of which
cared much about the aesthetic appearance of the city. Yet, with all this
accidental variety, the feeling of unity comes naturally to us. The hilly
terrain allows the buildings to enter into a reciprocal spatial relationship
with each other, whereas the integration of older buildings into newer
ones endows the city with great dynamism. The continuity of times,
instead of separating what belongs to distinct periods, draws them all
together, as ‘everything historical does play a part in it, but not in such a
way that it would turn an object into a separate antiquity’, but ‘by
entering in the unity of Rome . . . as if the fortuitousness of history
had disappeared and the pure, dissolved contents of the things . . . had
emerged to exist next to another’ (2007b: 33–4).
In Simmel’s Rome, unity exists not versus but in variety. It is the other
side of the manifold reality of the world. Unity and variety are the two
sides of the same vision. This is what I consider to be the traditional
Bildung approach to unity. Simmel does not use the word Bildung in this
essay. Yet the interpretative parallel between the city and the ideal of
108 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
Simmel would pursue the same idea in his Goethe monograph (Simmel,
1989g [1913]: 163): ‘Goethe’s hero does not stand by himself . . . he is a
work of art presented by the author . . .’ A hero is grown, so to speak,
‘out of the living activity of Goethe, his artistic and world volition’.
Furthermore, by being a reflection of Goethe’s personality, each hero
appears to reflect the totality of the world (Simmel, 1989g [1913]: 162).
What is important in these parallels is not a hypothetical influence of
Simmel on Weininger, or vice versa (which may or may have not existed,
as these kinds of ideas were quite popular at that time), but the very fact
that, when Simmel was speaking about Goethe in his ‘Rome’ essay, he
alluded to the set of connotations immediately recognizable by any
German-speaking reader who, like him, was preoccupied with the ideal
of the formation of the most universal and harmonious personality. To
compare Rome with Goethe would unambiguously bring this pattern of
thought to the surface, and suggest that Rome as a city may provide the
example of how the ideal of Bildung – forming a harmonious and con-
sistent whole out of the greatest possible variety – can be realized.
Florence
Turning to the next essay, ‘Florence’, published eight years later, we
notice, first, that Simmel’s major concerns remained the same. He con-
sidered Florence too in terms of a work of art, and the central question
was still that of unity, even if what now was supposed to be unified was
not multiplicity but dualism: ‘Ever since that unified sense of life in
antiquity was split into the poles of nature and mind [Geist]’, the essay
begins, ‘a problem has emerged the awareness and attempted solution of
which has preoccupied all of modernity: the problem of restoring this lost
unity to both sides of life’ (Simmel, 2007a: 38). And Florence is a city
which, like Rome, seems to have accomplished this. It is described as a
wonderful work of art, successfully combining life’s opposites. ‘Here
nature has become mind without surrendering itself.’ Nature rose ‘every-
where toward the crowning of the mind’ (Simmel, 2007a: 39). This pro-
cess is symbolized, for example, by Florence’s hills, as each of them lifts
itself up to a villa or a church.
Yet, on second reading, the differences in perspective begin to emerge.
Their first indication is that Simmel explicitly contrasts Florence with
Rome. In Rome, he hints, the emphasis is on duality within unity,
whereas in Florence it is rather on ‘unity within duality’ (Simmel,
2007a: 41). This contrast by itself explains little. It possesses all the fea-
tures of that rhetorical vagueness for which Simmel was sometimes
reproached. Yet it shows that Simmel was aware that the unity of
Florence somehow represented unity of a different sort. But what was
the nature of that difference?
110 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
Perhaps the most profound appeal of beauty lies in the fact that
beauty always takes the form of elements that in themselves are
indifferent and foreign to it, and that acquire their aesthetic value
only from their proximity to one another. . . . Our perception of
beauty as mysterious and gratuitous – something that reality
cannot claim but must humbly accept as an act of grace – may be
based on that aesthetic indifference of the world’s atoms and elem-
ents in which the one is only beautiful in relation to the other. . . .
Podoksik 111
the masses. In order to advance the ideal of humanity then, man should
stand apart from society (Simmel, 1950a: 63–4). Therefore, in ‘Florence’,
the Bildung ideal of harmonious personality is not abandoned, it just
characterizes only a special kind of individual, living in a special kind
of city.
The impression of Simmel’s departure from his earlier view is also
reinforced by the new description of Rome in ‘Florence’. He claims
here that Rome has managed to leave its mark on Florence in the
form of the Medici Chapel (partly designed by Michelangelo).
Referring particularly to Michelangelo’s statues, Simmel argues that
the creation is more Roman than Florentine, as it conveys the sense of
the tragic tension between its parts. Michelangelo captured ‘each figure at
that very moment in which the battle between the dark burden of earthly
severity and the mind’s longing for light and freedom had come to a
standstill’. The unity which is formed here is that of a ‘life consisting
of two irreconcilable parts’ (Simmel, 2007a: 42).
There is a clear difference in how Rome’s contrasts are presented in
this essay, compared to Simmel’s comments in the previous one. If earlier
they were understood as a necessary condition for the accomplishment of
comprehensive unity, now they are supposed to convey a sense of tra-
gedy. Tragedy always signified for Simmel the idea of inner irreconcilable
conflict. It appears, therefore, that in ‘Florence’ he does not conceive
Rome as a harmonious combination of unity and multiplicity. He implies
rather that comprehensive unity previously considered to be represented
by Rome has turned out to be unachievable. The best we can now hope
for is the model of harmony represented by Florence.
Thus ‘Florence’ reflects the mood of the second stage of Simmel’s
intellectual development. Although Simmel does not abandon the ideal
of unity and harmony in the fragmented world, he no longer postulates
the possibility of total reconciliation. The most one can achieve is to hold
on to a moment which symbolizes unity, or find a repose within a certain
aspect of existence in which unity is achieved (but only for a specific
place, or a specific kind of people, or a specific time). Florence may be
a happy release, but it is still a release and not a comprehensive solution
to the fragmentary character of modernity.
Venice
Yet another attempt at release is represented by Venice. This attempt is
alas less successful as it reveals a problematic character of the post-
Bildung modernity. Like Rome and Florence, Venice is a work of art,
and like them, it presupposes the ideal of unity. Yet Venice’s unity is not
real. It is a lie, and its purpose is not to remove but conceal the basic
dualism of existence. This is the core difference between it and Florence.
Florence’s unity may not be universal, and it may not be available to the
114 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
fallen, immature man, but at least it is the true unity between nature and
art. Venice’s sort of unity, by contrast, does not aim at reconciliation
with nature at all.
To exemplify this, Simmel compares the palaces of both cities. He
argues that the exteriors of Florence’s palaces are the exact expression
of their inner meaning, whereas ‘Venetian palaces are a precious game,
their uniformity masking the individual characteristics of their people, a
veil whose folds follow only the laws of its inner beauty, betraying the life
behind it in the act of concealing it’ (Simmel, 2007c: 43). Or, more gen-
erally, Venice is a city of appearance, artifice, mask. While Florence
expresses the true inner life, in Venice ‘all that is cheerful and bright,
free and light, has only served as a face [Fassade] for a life that is dark,
violent and unrelentingly functional’ (Simmel, 2007c: 44).
Venice – a work of art as appearance – differs in yet another aspect
from a work of art which expresses truth: its unity is based not on var-
iety, but on singleness. The life of Venice is carried out fully ‘in a single
tempo’, as ‘no draught animals or vehicles attract the attentive eye with
their alternating speeds, and the gondolas entirely follow the pace and
rhythm of people walking’ (Simmel, 2007c: 44). Venice is a dream-like
city, in which one is surrounded not by the things themselves, but by
monotonous appearances, devoid of any lively excitement.
From a certain viewpoint, Simmel’s Venice could be seen as the aes-
thete’s release, for it represents an aesthetically complete form, which is
disconnected from life and belongs solely to the realm of pure appear-
ance. It seems, however, that the aesthete who would enjoy such a city
would be one fully emancipated from the appeal of Bildung, one who
would accept Worringer’s postulates of abstract art, immersing him or
herself in Venice’s rhythmic monotony and forgetting about organic
totality.
Such an attitude of complete resignation from the world was foreign to
Simmel. Therefore, he did not accept this sort of release, arguing that the
realm of appearance never suppresses the feeling that it is a mere appear-
ance. And such awareness unmasks the release as a deception. Thus,
instead of bestowing on us the feeling of unity, Venice radiates an air
of ‘ambivalence’ [Zweideutigkeit] (Simmel, 2007c: 45). One can notice this
ambivalence in everything: in the crowding of people on its narrow
streets, so that any touching between them, while giving the impression
of sociability, is, in fact, devoid of any true emotional closeness; or in the
double life of the city, since it can be perceived either as a system of lanes
or of canals, so that it ‘belongs neither to land nor to water’ (Simmel,
2007c: 45), but constantly changes its own appearance.
This observation provides Simmel with an opportunity to make a
more general point, namely to emphasize the idea of duality of life as
such: for life is merely a foreground behind which stands death as the
only certainty. When torn out of ‘being’, life is in a constant danger of
Podoksik 115
becoming a rootless appearance. Salvation can come only from art, but
art can perform this role only in those rare moments in which it brings
‘being’ into appearance. This happens when art, though remaining itself,
goes beyond artifice, connecting itself with reality – when it is ‘more than
art’ (Simmel, 2007c: 45). Florence could be an example of this. Venice, by
contrast, is understood by Simmel as insisting on the illusion of existing
merely for the sake of beauty. Therefore, the most it can offer to life is an
ambivalent beauty of adventure that flows, rootless, in the stream of life.
And although our soul can thus find in Venice an adventure, it cannot
build a home [Heimat] for itself (Simmel, 2007c: 46).
Five years later, German readers would be offered a startlingly similar
picture of the city in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1965
[1912]). All the elements of Simmel’s description of Venice as the city
of lie are there. Lie is everywhere: in the attire (Aschenbach is first
appalled by an elderly man making himself appear younger, yet in the
end succumbs to a similar masquerade); or in a pleasant monotony of
service (in the first journey in a gondola, or in the hotel), behind which
there is a ruthless functionality, deception, the lack of emotional attach-
ment. Then the greatest lie – the beauty of Tadzio, whose innocent age
suggests singleness (exemplified by his teenage fanaticism regarding the
Russians), rather than variety and complexity which are the mark of
maturity. This is a dream-like beauty – a distant appearance, or a
sweet illusion. And death is a necessary counterpart of it.
I am not aware of any evidence that Mann had read Simmel’s essay
before he completed his novella. Yet he was certainly familiar with
Simmel’s writings, for he approvingly quoted from Simmel’s
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (published in the same year as ‘Venice’ –
1907) in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1983 [1918]: 58). In a
letter from 1932, he specifically referred to Simmel’s characterization of
Venice as ‘the ambivalent city’.14 Earlier, Mann’s close friend Ernst
Bertram (1919: 266) mentioned Death in Venice just before quoting
from ‘Venice’. And earlier still, in November 1912, several months
after the completion of Death in Venice, Mann (2002: 501) wrote to
Bertram: ‘I am even more indebted to you for the quotation from
Simmel, with which I was not familiar and which is in fact very beautiful
and ingenious.’ Since Bertram would later quote from Simmel’s ‘Venice’
right after mentioning Mann’s novella, it appears very likely that Mann
referred in his letter to the same quotation, after Bertram had apparently
drawn Mann’s attention to the parallels between the two texts. If this is
correct, one might conclude that Mann had not been familiar with
Simmel’s essay until his work on the novella was already over. Yet alter-
native interpretations are also possible. Mann started working on Death
in Venice in 1911, whereas Simmel’s essay appeared in 1907. Mann could
have read it then (it was published in a popular art magazine, Der
Kunstwart) and simply forgot about it. Or, worse, he may have
116 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
remembered it but did not wish to reveal this. The question mark remains
because none of the known sources of the philosophical inspiration for
the novella (such as Plato’s or Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Nietzsche’s
notions of the Dionysian and Apollonian, or Lukács’ idea of yearning
[Braches, 2008; Hoffmann, 1995]) suggests that Venice should be
described in this particular manner, whereas Simmel’s short essay per-
fectly fills the gap. Therefore, ‘Venice’ may have been in the back of
Mann’s mind when he was writing his own book. I would posit at
least a scholarly hypothesis that Simmel’s text was one of Mann’s sources
of inspiration.
Be this as it may, the parallels between the two works help me illus-
trate what I take to be Simmel’s own view. Venice signified for him the
dead-end of Bildung. Initially, in ‘Rome’, the multiplicity of the world did
not appear as a principal obstacle to unity; on the contrary, it led to unity
or presupposed unity. When later such architectonic unity was perceived
as not possible, Simmel attempted to claim the place for unity in a par-
ticular fragment. This is the significance of ‘Florence’. Although here the
work of art does not bestow comprehensive unity on the world, the
world’s ideal of unity is at least symbolized. The standpoint of aestheti-
cism, postulating the full autonomy of art, is more clearly felt in
‘Florence’, as the work of art achieves here its unity through rejecting
what is foreign to it. Yet somehow, miraculously (or one could say, by an
act of grace), art remains connected with the truth and reality.
Aestheticism, the notion of art for its own sake, remains incomplete.
The completion takes place in ‘Venice’. This city is a perfect work of
art, whose extreme beauty, with its absence of organic variety, is directed
fully towards itself. This is, so to say, a narcissistic beauty. Yet the prom-
ise of release implied in Venice’s accomplished aestheticism turns out to
be a deceit. The city can never fully succeed in concealing its own unreal-
ity. This is why Aschenbach’s adventure ends with death, and why
Simmel says that in Venice one cannot find a home. And whereas
Mann’s approach towards Venice is coloured with the aesthete’s ambi-
guity and irony, Simmel is less ambiguous in imparting us the impression
that he dislikes Venice.15 Florence was his favourite Italian city, the one
in which the dream of Bildung – of being at home in the world – was still
possible, thanks to the atmosphere of homeliness which that city pro-
vided. Venice represented the rejection of that homeliness and thus the
abandonment of Bildung altogether.
Acknowledging Simmel’s uneasiness about Venice may help us avoid
attributing to him the kind of thinking with which he was often, though
falsely, charged. One of the first examples of such attribution appears in a
book published just a few months after ‘Venice’: a very ingenious philo-
sophical work by a young art historian, Richard Hamann (1907), entitled
Impressionism in Life and Art. A graduate of Berlin University, Hamann
attended Simmel’s classes, and Simmel is said to have been a major
Podoksik 117
influence on him and his book (Hermand, 2009: 33–4, 38). Hamann’s
starting point was impressionism in painting, yet he applied this term to
the modern culture and style of life in general. All the major phenomena
of modern life carried, in his view, the characteristics which we find in the
impressionistic painting: momentary glance, superficiality, characterless-
ness, fragmentariness, etc. Modern aestheticism was just another aspect
of this spirit of impressionism, a spirit exemplified by Simmel and his
Philosophy of Money (Hamann, 1907: 217). Just a few pages before the
reference to Philosophy of Money, Hamann mentioned the modern
metropolis and then moved to discuss Venice: another example of
impressionism, described by him as ‘the city of the most perfect aestheti-
cism, of the most cultivated life of senses’ (1907: 209). He called it the
‘free city of adventurers’ (1907: 210), using basically the same expression
that had been used by Simmel: the ‘classical city of adventure’ (Simmel,
2007c: 46).
Thus, for Hamann, the style of modern life was impressionistic in the
sense that it represented superficial flux and aestheticistic fragmentari-
ness. Simmel was a major philosopher of this style of life – and Venice
was a perfect urban example of it. This was a powerful image, and it was
entirely justifiable that Hamann would try to co-opt every major cultural
element of his time to it, be it city life or Simmel’s philosophy. This does
not mean, however, that his description of Simmel’s worldview was cor-
rect. On the contrary, if one accepts the logic of Hamann’s argument, one
can derive from it the opposite conclusion regarding Simmel. The text of
‘Venice’ makes it clear that Simmel disliked precisely that feature of
Venice which Hamann made into the essence of modern impressionism:
its aesthetic superficiality. Instead of immersing himself in the flux,
Simmel was desperately looking for something solid to get hold of in
the condition of modernity. Nor was Hamann himself happy with what
he called the spirit of impressionism. He ended his book with the call:
‘More Hegel!’ (1907: 320)
Simmel, hardly an impressionist, whatever Hamann might have
thought, would not disagree with what was implied in this call: the
yearning for a comprehensive philosophical Weltanschauung. Shortly
after the publication of ‘Venice’ he began to rearrange his ideas in
accordance with the conceptual apparatus of life-philosophy. This phil-
osophy was not Hegelian in the precise meaning of this word, but its
quasi-dialectical movement as well as its quest for eternity did endow it
with a Hegelian flavour (Christian, 1978).
III
That ‘impressionism’, or ‘avant-garde’, or ‘modernistic urbanism’ do not
really characterize Simmel’s aesthetic sensibilities, which are rather ‘clas-
sicist’ at their core, has been noticed by perceptive commentators. One of
118 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
Notes
1. This article is part of my research on Georg Simmel’s philosophy supported
by the Israeli Science Foundation (grant no. 220/05) and by the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation.
2. These essays have recently been translated into English and until now have
remained relatively unexplored. For one exception, see Giacomoni (2008).
3. On the notion of Bildung, see Bollenbeck (1994). Simmel is rarely analysed
in the context of this notion. For a few exceptions, see Witsch (2008),
Geßner (2003: 194–6) and Ringer (1989).
4. On Kultur as a secularized substitute for Christentum, see Rauhut (1953: 83).
My own position, however, is not that culture can be reduced to religion,
and that culture is somehow a secularized religion. The only thing I am
prepared to claim here is that religion and culture may share at least one
common function – the person’s reconciliation with the world, with the
important difference that, in Kultur, this reconciliation is performed through
the human effort itself.
5. On the significance of the term ‘culture’ and on the hope that cultural sci-
ences would open the way to a new integration, see vom Bruch et al. (1989).
6. Hans Freyer (1931: 597), for example, asserted that ‘the problem of Bildung
is not topical’.
7. For example, in ‘On the Third Dimension in Art’ (Simmel, 1968b), he saw
the illusion of the dimension of space as that which enriches and strengthens
a painting and indicates its organic unity.
8. My schema should not be reduced to the usual division of Simmel’s devel-
opment into the positivistic, neo-Kantian and life-philosophical periods
(Landmann, 1976). It overlaps with that division chronologically, but pos-
tulates a different organizing principle.
9. See also the interpretation of Klaus Lichtblau (1997: 80–1).
10. For an analysis of Simmel’s understanding of individuality in his third phase
see Podoksik (2010).
120 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)
11. This is just one example of what may scare a scholar into resignation con-
cerning the possibility of finding a comprehensive logic in the development
of Simmel’s views. The difficulty should not, however, be exaggerated. What
is required in such cases is the exercise of judgement combined with a close
attention to the text.
12. On Hegel’s philosophical meaning of Bildung and its connection with the
educational ideal of the age see, for example, Schmidt (1996).
13. On the community of foreign lovers of art in fin-de-sie`cle Florence, see
Roeck (2009).
14.
15. Simmel spoke quite often about his love for Florence; as for Venice, I am
unaware of any expression of his that would contain even the slightest trace
of sympathy.
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