Georg Simmel’s essay on Rome gives paradigmatic expression to an imponderable method that the philosopher practices for years, symbolized by the idea of a plumb line cast from the unstable waters of a sea to its firm foundations. Here Simmel shows how a complex and transhistorical city receives meaning through its multiply tense urban relations, constituting nonetheless a strangely coherent whole. Only circular thinking can adequately grasp this form of coherence. It requires seeing beyond conflicting facts as well as the (...) reader’s own subject positions, in navigation of a space between inner and outer features of perceptual experience. The fragmented and variegated layout of Rome allegorizes that complex space of historical and cultural relations into which interpreting selves must venture to experience totalities that are neither self-evident in things nor in minds that seek their order. (shrink)

The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel made repeated efforts throughout his career to address the crisis of modern culture by drawing on a wide repertoire of scholarly discourses and imaginative fictions. An overlooked and unique feature of his early works include humorous vignettes and free-verse poems in pseudonymous pieces published in the avant-garde journal Jugend. In later writings, he advances his own life-philosophy through an idiosyncratic use of Goethe’s scientific, autobiographical, and literary works in an attempt to articulate what is (...) distinctive about the modern worldview. Focussing on these lesser-known writings reveals the tragi-comic character of his approach to modern individuality in a variety of cultural spheres, and in the life of theory itself. Like Simmel’s vitalist quest for the archetype or “primary phenomenon […] of the idea of Goethe” and in his formulation of “the values of Goethean Life”, this essay offers a kind of theorizing about the “spiritual meaning of Simmelian existence” in its many forms of expression. Although Simmel’s ideas may seem antiquated to us now, recovering what might be called his ‘theory-fictions’ is essential if the humanities and social sciences are to address the most pressing problems we face in the 21st century. (shrink)