Georg Simmel Between Goethe and Kant on “Life” and “Force”

Abstract

Georg Simmel, sociologist of the edgy, feverish, metropolitan lifestyle, philosopher of modernity, money, and fragmentation, has a decidedly classical background. Consider him not merely a man of his own times, fruit of late 19th-century culture and sociology, but a man who each day reads Kant’s philosophy and Goethe’s poetic and naturalist works, garnering sustenance for his daily reflection. Apart from the particular style of his learning and the results of his research, the interest in and passion for the “classical” period of late 18th-century German culture plays a decisive role in his philosophy. Simmel dedicated several monographs to Kant and to Goethe, the Berlin lectures on Kant in 1904, the important monograph on Goethe in 1913, as well as comparative studies such as Kant und Goethe in 1906 and numerous articles published in periodicals and newspapers upon various aspects of the culture and social lifestyle of his times, springing from his nonacademic reading of their works.