Chapter 2 - Sociology as a Sideline: Does It Matter That Georg Simmel (Thought He) Was a Philosopher?

Summary

When Georg Simmel died in September 1918, he was an internationally renowned philosopher and a best- selling author. A famously riveting speaker who vividly brought the legacy of the German philosophical tradition into conversation with the phenomena of everyday modern life, he had drawn large and by no means exclusively academic audiences from his earliest days as a Privatdozent in Berlin. Simmel's frankly modernist mode of philosophizing – from his unusual topics and style of thought to unconventional behavior that included publicly engaging in contemporary political controversies and associating with movements striving for social and cultural change – was hardly conducive to academic success in the rapidly professionalizing academy. Yet he had an impact on contemporaries far greater than his reputation today would suggest, when his name has been all but forgotten in the field in which he was trained and taught throughout his career.

Georg Lukács memorably, if ambiguously, eulogized Simmel as ‘without a doubt the most important and interesting transitional phenomenon [Übergangserscheinung] in all of modern philosophy’. According to Lukács, virtually no one of ‘genuine philosophical talent in the younger generation of thinkers […] failed to succumb to the enchantment of his thinking’, at least for a time, and many other eyewitnesses attest to this bewitching effect. In the presence of his ‘genuinely cosmopolitan intellect’, as another of his former students put it, his hearers felt that ‘the Zeitgeist itself had come to life’.

Locating Simmel's modernist approach to philosophizing within the wider ambit of fin- de- siècle European culture helps establish a broader perspective on the historical and theoretical significance of an oeuvre whose interdisciplinary contributions merit renewed attention today. It also enables us to foreground Simmel's own self- understanding as a philosopher in a fashion that places his achievements, including his foundational work in sociology, in a new light. In this chapter, I critically extend the notion that he was the most significant ‘transitional phenomenon’ in modern philosophy to demonstrate that reflection on the meaning of Simmel's (shifting) disciplinary location enables a more acute reflection on our own intellectual situation today.

Sociology as a ‘Sideline’

Like Nietzsche, Georg Simmel was convinced that the upheavals of the nineteenth century had brought new (intellectual, political, cultural) urgency to problems of meaning and value.