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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel'Vnice possesses the ambiguous beauty of adventure, floating rootlessly through life, like a torn flower borne on the sea'Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick 'wandering-priest' left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociologists, including Heidegger and Rilke.The quartet of essays contained in this book includes dazzling portraits of Italy's iconic cities of art and history, as well as Simmel's hugely influential 'The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit', one of the most important analyses of urban life and the alienation of the individual ever written.Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the first generation of German sociologists and an acquaintance of Max Weber. His study of philosophy, his wide reading in history and the sciences and his astute criticism meant Simmel became a renowned intellectual in his lifetime. He was known for his illuminating lectures and rare gifts as a speaker, exploring topics including the effect of the modern metropolis on human psychology, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of money.
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GEORG SIMMEL
THE ART OF THE CITY
Rome, Florence, Venice
Edited, translated and with an introduction by Will Stone
PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON
This translation is dedicated to the memory of my friend Rosamond Richardson (1945–2017), a writer whose relationship to the Italian cities of art was one of the deepest spiritual accord.
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Georg Simmel – European Maverick
THE NAME OF GEORG SIMMEL (1858–1918) is barely known to the reading public of the UK, yet Simmel’s wide-ranging works in the field of sociology and philosophy, a corpus which straddles the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, went on to influence a whole gamut of sociologists, poets and philosophers in Germany and beyond. Simmel is known in the anglophone world only to a certain strain of academics interested in the social architecture of the city, or in those thinkers whose tributaries fed the powerful estuarine forces of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist sociology, whose leading figures, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin, remain relevant today for their criticism of mass culture and mass society. But Simmel, one of the key theorists to emerge at the birth of modernism and to whom these later compatriots owed so much, was a born outsider, a maverick and an urban man through and through, raised as he was at the very heart of Berlin.
Georg Simmel was the youngest of seven children born to a well-off Jewish businessman who died when Georg was very young. His mother proved an overbearing presence and his relationship with her remained cool and distant. The domestic fragmentation and lack of a secure family life instilled in the young Simmel a sense of being apart, self-reliant, an explorer on the margins who would have to strike out alone. A voracious reader, Simmel studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin, dedicated his first dissertation to the study of Kant and steadily became immersed in the fields of social sciences and psychology as well as history, ethics and philosophy. In 1890 Simmel married the philosopher Gertrud Kinel, who wrote under the pseudonym Marie-Luise Enckendorff. They had a son, Hans Eugen, and lived a quiet bourgeois life, from time to time hosting gatherings of intellectuals in their home.
Simmel made the most of this smorgasbord of learning. His varied tastes and compulsion to plumb all areas of culture, the art-historical as well as the philosophical, meant he could alight anywhere and expound with enviable percipience to enthusiastic audiences. José Ortega Y Gasset memorably likened him to a kind of philosophical squirrel leaping from one nut to the other, barely wasting any time on nibbling any of them, but more concerned with his daring acrobatic jumps from branch to branch and relishing the gracefulness with which he performed them.
His courses included lectures on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, Darwin and of course Kant. Among the luminaries who attended his lectures were the philosophers Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch and Martin Buber, the social historian Bernhard Groethuysen and the prominent American sociologist Robert E. Park, but there were many more. The Nazi-stained philosopher Martin Heidegger also owes a considerable debt to Simmel, as do German sociologists such as Karl Mannheim and Hans Freyer. But there were also poets… Rilke attended Simmel’s lectures at various times before and during his crucial period of inner transformation in Paris beginning in 1903. It was Simmel’s thesis on the psychological effects of the modern metropolis, encapsulated in “The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit”, published the same year, which fed directly into Rilke’s great prose work The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). More of this later.
Simmel was a dynamic speaker, a consummate performer who could hold his listeners spellbound, darting from one idea to the next, ever insightful. His lectures became legendary must-attend events, yet he never had an official post in an academic institution. For fifteen years, until the age of forty-two, Simmel worked in Berlin as a Privatdozent or unpaid lecturer supported by student fees, and even when he was offered a professorship in 1901, by which time he was known throughout Europe and even as far away as the USA, it was purely an honorary title. Senior academic figures such as Edmund Husserl and Max Weber did all they could to help Simmel secure the coveted academic post. Despite his repeated attempts to obtain a position, it was not until 1914 that he was offered a paid professorship at the then German University of Strasbourg. The sudden outbreak of war in late summer stymied the plan, since all academic institutions morphed overnight into military hospitals. But all this seemed only to reinforce Simmel’s maverick status, alongside his reputation as a respected thinker, cultural commentator and speaker. It would be erroneous to imagine Simmel as a tortured outsider, or one whose failure to secure a professorship meant penury, since he had inherited a private fortune early in his life, sufficient to relieve him of any financial burden.
Deeply immersed in the academic life of Germany’s capital, Simmel wrote prodigiously across a range of disciplines. He produced some twenty works in the fields of philosophy, ethics, sociology and cultural criticism. In addition, he published around two hundred articles in a variety of journals and newspapers. His major works included The Philosophy of Money (1900), which straddled philosophy and sociology, then Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation (1908). Despite his impressive writerly output, his passionate lectures and lively social network in the scholarly community of his time, Simmel’s legacy was of an author weaving a singular path through his inexhaustible reserves of learning. Simmel never created a distinct school of thought or left behind a major philosophical system, which may explain his relative lack of recognition in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness of the early twenty-first century. He tends to elude canonical orthodoxy; there is no definite theory or movement with which to categorize him.
The only crack in Simmel’s impressive character appears to have occurred late in life when he joined that group of European writers who were knocked off-kilter by the dangerously alluring spirit of nationalism engendered by a war whose nature and implications they did not yet understand. Simmel was a proud German, and as the war mentality took hold of Germany he became an ever more zealous patriot, finally, shamefully, devoting himself to propaganda writings, the jingoistic tone of which shocked his friends and colleagues. It was as if all that Simmel had worked for, to gain a higher perspective across cultural and historical boundaries, was destroyed at a stroke when he made disastrous declarations such as: “I love Germany and therefore I want it to survive. To hell with all the ‘objective’ justification of this will in terms of culture, ethics, history or God only knows what else.” Such a final howl seems a far cry from the Nietzschean tenets of the “Good European”, a cause Simmel appeared to serve across two decades. He did not endure to see a radically transformed post-war Europe. He died of liver cancer in 1918.
Rome, Florence, Venice
Georg Simmel’s legacy in the twenty-first century rests on his role as a key thinker on urban modernity. But in the essays he dedicated to three iconic Italian “world” cities of art and history, we experience a very different Simmel: a flâneur-philosopher studying the ancient city as a work of art and thereby entering the literary domain of what is now loosely termed “psycho-geography”. Here Simmel explores the psychology of the city in a manner that appears to point towards Walter Benjamin’s “culturalist” approach to the metropolis and his now widely disseminated writings on the modern urban experience. Here again we observe Simmel’s thought exerting a hold on Rilke. In 1898, the year Simmel’s essay “Rome: An Aesthetic Analysis” was published in Vienna, Rilke, then twenty-three, also published his still under-appreciated Notes on the Melody of Things.* These “Notes” are saturated with Rilke’s recent reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and his philosophically/poetically inclined observations on Italian Renaissance art. It surely cannot be a coincidence that they also reveal the thought of Simmel around the universality of the soul as reflected in “Rome”. Rilke’s constant use of the terms “common soul”, “common melody”, “community” and “isolated figure” tend to echo Simmel. As in the later The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke is in debt to Simmel for theories which accord with and elucidate his own evolving sense of the relationship between art and humanity in the modern world.
Renaissance art in Italy had long held a fascination for Simmel and he even considered pursuing the study of early Italian art before opting for philosophy. Nevertheless, he became immersed in the subject, and the Italian Renaissance figured prominently in the intellectual zeitgeist of the mid to late nineteenth century in Germany. Goethe’s Italian Journey (1816–17) was a celebrated text and the great polymath is mentioned in Simmel’s essay on Rome as the supreme human example of the harmonious and all-encompassing personality. But it is the landmark study The Civilizationof the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt which is crucial here. It is this work we hear Nietzsche reading to a rapt audience on the long evenings at the Villa Rubinacci in Sorrento in the winter of 1876–77. Like Nietzsche, Burckhardt held a professorship at the University of Basel. His writings were hugely influential in framing the Renaissance as the threshold of the modern world, the birth of an individualist egotism which would seep out of politics and surge through culture and the arts. It is no coincidence that Burckhardt’s study focuses on the same three city states of the Renaissance as does that of Simmel, for these were the supreme European repositories of art and culture, major destinations on the Grand Tour, where the past remained highly visible.
Simmel was well travelled and had visited the three cities on numerous occasions, savouring their art treasures and identifying the characteristics of their widely differing landscapes. Of them it was Florence he admired most as a city poised between past and present, which could resist the toxic side effects of modernity and remain authentic. For Simmel, Florence was a Heimat, a homeland for the soul, an admiration which colours “Florence”. The essays contained in this book reflect Simmel’s preoccupation with finding a refuge for the individual spirit in a time of massive cultural upheaval and social change. It is important to understand that Simmel was brought up in a Germany permeated with the tradition of Bildung that flourished during the period of the Enlightenment and was popularly dispensed through the writings of Kant, Goethe and Schiller. The petals of Bildung
