Style as Substance: Georg Simmel's Phenomenology of Culture

Georg Simmel is a man of many renaissances. Discovered and rediscovered with disheartening regularity by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists of all stripes, he seems ever on the verge of bursting into the mainstream without ever quite doing so. This posthumous fate is an unfortunate repetition of his own professional frustration: Simmel spent most of his adult life on the verge of receiving the professorship that, with his twenty-five scholarly books and hundreds of articles, he so richly deserved.

What is missing? His work is fascinating and innovative, addressing topics such as gender that were previously unheard of in academia. He profoundly influenced several generations of scholars, including Lukács, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Cassirer. And his personal relations with figures as diverse as Rilke, Weber, George, and Durkheim are themselves reason enough for closer inquiry. Yet Simmel seems always to slip out of focus; intellectual history pays homage to him, only to dismiss him as (in the words of Lukács's oft-cited obituary) "the most important and interesting transitional phenomenon in all of modern philosophy" (Lukács 1958, 171). The enormous influence he had, not only on students and colleagues but also on a broader public, has been rendered virtually invisible. It is worth noting that Simmel himself predicted this obscurity. His legacy, he wrote, would be "like one in cold cash that is divided among many heirs," each of whom invests "according to his nature" in diverse undertakings that render the common origin unrecognizable (Simmel 1923, 1). ¹

Indeed, Simmel's influence is poorly suited to detection by the usual tools of intellectual history, for his lectures and writings inaugurated a new style of thought. It is this mode of reflection, which disclosed a whole new range of concerns and questions to philosophical reflection for the first time, that both makes his work so influential and makes his influence so difficult to discern. Embodied in discontinuous and even fragmentary texts with only scattered and lapidary methodological remarks, Simmel's style of thought has itself encouraged a tendency to appropriate elements of his work without coming to terms with him as a thinker. However, in this case, style is anything but superficial. Simmel's method inheres in the apparently fragmentary character of his writings; though his analyses can be appropriated into other contexts, they are often rendered banal in the process.

In what I call his phenomenology of culture, Simmel links "life's particularities and superficialities and its deepest and most essential movements" (GSG 6: 13). His legacy was this strategy of thought: as it is put into historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives, each "seemingly insignificant trait on the surface of life" (GSG 7: 119) can be made to reveal a deeper meaning. I shall argue that we need to return to Simmel as the inaugurator of a new way of thinking about cultural reality—not as a sociologist but as a modernist philosopher. Simmel's texts combine symbolic and empirical dimensions in cultural analyses that remain fascinatingly up-to-date, for his innovative style of thought was a response to epistemological dilemmas that have grown no less pressing in the hundred years since the publication of the Philosophy of Money (Philosophie des Geldes). Insofar as his work demonstrates that it is possible to reconcile the profoundest skepticism about human powers of interpretation with a commitment to inquiry into the meaning of human existence, Simmel can provide us with a methodological orientation for an era without metanarratives.

The Phenomenology of Culture:
Money and Meaning

As a writer, Georg Simmel was a modernist in the broadest sense, an elegant stylist with intellectual interests that spanned the full range of high and low modern culture. His highly aesthetic mode of theorizing in essayistic tours de force that leap dizzyingly from idea to idea embodies a modernist commitment to self-reflection on the significance of form. In the preface to his 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, Simmel...