Simmel’s Metaphysics

Abstract

It is not merely rhetorical to ask whether Georg Simmel was a philosopher. Posterity tends to remember him for his sociological insights. Simmel, however, preferred to speak of himself as a philosopher and many of his pupils would have agreed with him. “He was a philosopher”, as Karl Mannheim was to write in his obituary of Simmel, “because the great Socratic heritage of wonder about things was more alive in him than in any of his contemporaries”.¹ Simmers lectures on philosophy at the University of Berlin attracted, to the annoyance of his colleagues, an impressive crowd of students. And yet, the striking contrast between his popularity and lack of academic success indicates that he was thought to violate some fundamental rules of the profession. He provoked not so much criticism as dislike, or hostility even, among his colleagues who found his whole approach to philosophy objectionable. For Simmel, philosophy was not a well-defined discipline with well-defined problems and accepted strategies for posing and solving them. He did not debate the institutionalized forms of discourse; he disregarded them. He saw philosophy as dependent upon the specific stance a thinker adopts with regard to any confronted object. This clearly threatened the inherited security of the philosophical enterprise: instead of time-honoured subjects, the philosophizing subject was called to lend dignity to the discourse.²