461701

2013

JCS13110.1177/1468795X12461701Journal of Classical SociologyBook review

Book review

Journal of Classical Sociology 13(1) 108112 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI:10.1177/1468795X12461701 jcs.sagepub.com

Georg Simmel The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, trans. John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine; Introduction by John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-2267-5783-4 (hbk). Reviewed by: Thomas Cushman, Wellesley College, USA

Simmels collected writings constitute one of the most astounding bodies of knowledge in the history of social thought. His philosophical genius was an inspiration to a generation of philosophers, including Heidegger, Bergson, Santayana, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas. His Promethean effort ranged across a multitude of topics; he offered a systematic approach to pure sociology that has a lasting impact on the field, and his sociology and philosophy of modernity are virtually unmatched. His lifework appears endless. One can read Simmel seemingly forever and the well never runs dry. So it is difficult to imagine an end to Simmel. Yet, here it is: Simmels last book, a collection of essays and notebook writings called The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, in which he endeavors, with full knowledge of his impending death, to put down his most enduring thoughts in a testamentary. It is a last work, though, that gives rise to many new beginnings. Like all of Simmels work, it opens many avenues and closes none. This collection is no different than Simmels work generally in its sometimes dense prose style penetrated with bursts of clarity. An erudite Introduction by the translators, John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, is crucial to understanding the context and substance of the work. Indeed, the essays are hard going without the Introduction, even to skilled readers of Simmel. The essays are formidable; one has a sense in reading them that Simmel was working at the outer margins of his intensity in a race against his own mortality. The four essays that constitute the book are thematic: on transcendence in life, on ideas, on death and immortality, and on individuality. But as always with Simmel, the essays include a variety of tangential discussions of subjects that concerned him throughout his earlier work: freedom, love, the erotic, time, religion, youth, just to name a few. He revisits and elaborates on these topics, amplifying them as if to say here is what has been most important in my thought and here is what I would like to write more about, but with the awareness that I shall soon be no more. This collection gives us a sense that Simmel really was, at the end of his own life, concerned mainly to develop a philosophy of life. Indeed, the book contains a section of

Book review

109

Simmels inchoate thoughts entitled Notes from Simmels Metaphysics File, which was given over by his wife Gertrude and published here under the title Philosophy of Life. Life, which for Simmel is the constant projection of a vital energy, is always destined to be ossified in form. Thus, the central process of life is the re-expression of spirit in the face of social forms and nature itself, and to transcend boundaries of the latter. In the first chapter, Life as Transcendence, Simmel writes forcefully on boundaries, but not in the macrosociological way that most contemporary sociologists do (that is to say, without reference to the phenomenology of boundaries). He writes:
the boundary is unconditional in that its existence is constitutive of our given position in the world, but no boundary is unconditional since every one can in principle be altered, reached over, gotten around. The inherent displaceability and displacement of our boundaries means that we are able to express our essence with a paradox: we are bounded in every direction, and we are bounded in no direction. (p. 2)

The essay on transcendence (which includes a treatment of the phenomenology of time) sets the stage for the other essays. In writing about ideas, death, or individuality, it is always the same process: forms come into being through our exertions of spirit; these forms then stand against our spirit as something which then must be transcended in an eternally recurring, dialectical process. Typically, Simmel is simultaneously a philosopher and a sociologist, always playing the two roles in close proximity to one another. If there is one overarching theme that occurs throughout the essays, it is the constant and unremitting emphasis on the dialectic between life (Geist) and social forms (Formen). In these final essays, one can see what is most important for Simmel overall: the fundamental duality of the social and metaphysical worlds. Money frees us from domination, but with its steely neutrality strips meaning from the world. Art embodies our life spirit, but then renders that spirit as an object toward which we are almost immediately alienated. What, then, do we make of death? Simmels second essay deals with death, the soul, and immortality. Since the essays were written with Simmels awareness of his own impending death, one expects this essay to be autobiographical, and it is, even though Simmel struggles to be objective in his treatment of death, which he sees as lifes final boundary. What does it mean to cross it? What is the nature of the soul? How do we achieve immortality? There are no religious conversions here. Simmels views on the soul and immortality are secular and humanistic. He was notably resigned about his own end, and there is an acceptance of death in this essay that is testament to his personal strength and the knowledge that a life well lived and thoughts well thought would transcend the death of the physical body. For Simmel, death is merely the extinguishing of individuality as the constant process of the expression of spirit. The forms of life would carry on and Simmel ultimately elaborates a philosophy of secular immortality:
I feel in myself a life that is impelled towards death that in every instant and every content, it will die. And I feel another life that is not headed for death. This dual life is visible in two

110

Journal of Classical Sociology 13(1)

forms: in the species-life that flows through me and in which posterity is propagated into eternity; and in the timeless significance of created thought . (p. 163)

In his essay on Death and Immortality, Simmel locates the most general meaning of lifes energy in the omnipresent consciousness of the finitude of death. With death, we lose only our expressive individuality, but the products of that individuality pass into what he calls species-life: the immortality of the species devours the mortality of the individual (p. 82). Knowing that the creative products of ones life will carry on in the life of the species makes death palatable and even defines the authenticity and uniqueness of our lived experience. Indeed, Simmel emphasizes that the knowledge of our finitude, of our being-in-time, is exactly the source of all meaning, a thought that is decidedly Heideggerian before Heidegger. There are some notable omissions in this last work. Surprisingly absent is any real commentary on the stranger, or on marginality more generally, except insofar as Simmels discussion of the inherent degradation of spirit by form can be taken as a commentary on the fundamentally marginal state of individual existence in the face of objectified forms. There is little discussion of modernity, which is not so puzzling since there was little need to elaborate on the masterwork on modernity, The Philosophy of Money. There is little discussion of conflict, which is somewhat surprising given the emphasis placed on it in Simmels work as a whole. Yet, the absence of these sociological themes evidences that Simmel was primarily concerned with metaphysical questions at the end of his life. There is a sense of resignation that is appropriate to a last book, but it is a resignation that is the wellspring of an affirmative and engaged philosophy of life. Individuality is one of the leitmotifs of Simmels work and he is intimately concerned with it in this collection. In the fourth essay, The Law of the Individual, Simmel reasserts his fundamental idea that social forms emanate from the lan vital of the individual and his life force. This essay might be seen as a kind of final statement of Simmels ethic. It is a direct and unabashed refutation of Kants specification of a priori moral categories as constraining of and indifferent to the individual. The law of the individual is precisely that the life process itself generates the categories of the Ought: everything we have ever done and everything we have ever been obligated to is the condition under which our ethical-ideal life rises to the crest of what is currently obligated (p. 154). There is a hint in here of something like a social mind, in Franklin H. Giddingss sense of the term, and the idea of a social mind is also suggested in Simmels constant references to species-life in the essays more generally. This species-life, though, is never, in Durkheims sense, sui generis, and it is never, in Kants sense, a priori. Simmel grounds ethics in individual agency, subject of course to existing social forms of law and morality, but also deeply generative of the latter. Simmels insistence on subjectivity as a determinative force in the ethical obligations that bind us is unquestionable: we are present in our own moralities and universality will always be the expression of individual, autonomous selves in action. This emphasis on life force and individuation in Simmels last writings does much to disabuse us of the idea that the main value of his contribution lies primarily in his

Book review

111

formal sociology. Indeed, this testamentary work suggests that Simmel would have been quite unsatisfied with the stripping away of his phenomenology of life by those who have sought to use his work as the basis of a positivistic sociology. This collection is worth it if only for the selection of Journal Aphorisms that appears at the end of the volume. Simmel was not given to aphorisms in an overt way. Throughout his work, they are nested within his often dense prose. One generally happens upon them serendipitously while searching for something else in in his work. Simmels peripatetic style has been the source of both frustration and inspiration, and this selection of Journal Aphorisms might be read as a distillation of some of his most elemental and enduring thought in crystalline form. Compiled by Simmels former secret lover from his notebooks and published posthumously in German, they are expertly translated by John A.Y. Andrews here for the first time. No one with a serious interest in Simmel can afford to ignore them. As the editors note, they express themes in both The View of Life and his work more generally: metaphysical and sociological reflections on the nature of time, death, aging, morality, freedom, marriage, love, the erotic, art, the nature of concepts, form versus spirit, the nature of the ego, the meaning of life, death, love, marriage, the soul, and a more general philosophical anthropology. It is here, at the beginning of the aphorisms, that we find Simmels last will and testament regarding his work:
I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and that is as it should be). Mine is like a cash legacy divided among many heirs, and each converts his share into whatever business suits his nature, in which the provenance from that legacy cannot be seen. (p. 160, original emphasis)

Simmels outward humility in the face of his evident fame in the intellectual world of his time is reflective of his own experience of strangerhood (Fremdeheit). Unlike the arrogant (in the favorable Latin sense of the word as putting oneself forward) aspirations of his contemporaries Weber and Durkheim and the insufferably egoistic Marx before him, Simmel deliberately wished a nondescript future for his lifes work. We discover in these thoughts that, all along, Simmels theories and concepts were very much about his own experience of life. They are quintessential Simmel, alternating between abject seriousness and playfulness. In regard to the former, Simmel crystallizes his philosophical anthropology: Mans possibilities are unlimited, but so too, in seeming contradiction, are his impossibilities. Between these two the infinity of what he can do and the infinity of what he cannot do lies his homeland (p. 165). In regard to the latter, we see Simmel as marriage counselor: Innumerable love and marriage relationships run aground or at least lead to the deeper disillusionments because we tend to forget that an experience can never be repeated as the same thing even the fact that it was already there once before creates different psychic conditions for the repetition than the original possessed.
(p. 180)

112

Journal of Classical Sociology 13(1)

One feels Simmel as a person much more in this last work than in any other of his works. Ironically, this theorist of the lan vital often suppressed his own voice in his formal writing, but this is decidedly not the case here, especially when the essays are read in conjunction with the aphorisms. In these essays, Simmel is present as an I, and with this we finally see that Simmels brilliant sociology and philosophy was a direct reflection of his own experience with and consciousness of the world. It is hard to imagine the serious ongoing study of Simmel without reference to this superb translation of Simmels last work. Taken together with the recently published de novo translation of Simmels Soziologie (2009), there is much, much more to be gained through engagement with the work of this great thinker. Reference
Simmel G (2009) Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, ed. and trans. Blasi AJ, Jacobs AK, Kanjirathinkal M. Leiden/Boston: Brill.