Georg Simmel
Although marginalized for much of his academic career, the German sociologist and
philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918) proved to be a highly original thinker who made
a substantial contribution to establishing sociology as an autonomous field of study.
Antipathy towards his individualized style of writing and unconventional subject matter,
combined with anti-semitism and a resistance to sociology as an academic discipline,
effectively prevented Simmel from obtaining a regular faculty appointment until late in
life. Yet in his studies of seemingly mundane everyday phenomena, such as money,
sexuality and contemporary urban life, Simmel is now recognized as having offered some
penetrating insights into the consciousness of modernity.
In his essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) Simmel provides one of the
most incisive snapshots of life in the modernist metropolis. The modern metropolitan
individual is distinguished by a blasé attitude which is itself a product of the
‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and
internal stimuli’. This engenders a certain autonomy, so that the modern individual
becomes an intellectualized creature whose own disinterested circulation within the
metropolis reflects the circulation of money and commodities themselves. Simmel’s
portrait of the metropolitan individual as overstimulated by sensory experience and
distracted by the fragmentary existence of modern life matches that of Walter Benjamin.
The blasé individual of Simmel’s metropolis is comparable to the flâneur of Benjamin’s
arcade, although, unlike the flâneur he remains a creature of the crowd. The modern
metropolitan type can thus be seen to be both a product of and a defence against the
modern metropolitan existence.
In another famous essay, ‘Bridge and Door’, Simmel discusses the theme of
connectedness and separation. The bridge and the door are concrete manifestations of
fundamental human tendencies to connect and separate everything. ‘The bridge indicates
how humankind unifies the separatedness of merely natural being, and the door how it
separates the uniform, continuous unity of natural being.’ The door, however, is for
Simmel superior to the bridge. It has ‘richer and livelier significance’. Whereas the
bridge tends to emphasize connectedness, the door emphasizes ‘how separating and
connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act’. The door, moreover, reminds us
that ‘the bounded and boundaryless adjoin one another...as the possibility of permanent
interchange’. Simmel’s evocation of the bridge makes a provocative comparison with that
of Heidegger in the essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ also contained in this volume.
BRIDGE AND DOOR
The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external
nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The
uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies bring everything into