Over the past few decades, the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has again become of interest. Its reception, however, has been fairly one-sided and selective, mostly because Simmel’s philosophy has been bypassed in favor of his sociological contributions. This article examines Simmel’s explicit reflections on the nature of philosophy. Simmel defines philosophy through three aspects which, according to him, are common to all philosophical schools. First, philosophical reasoning implies the effort to think without preconditions. Second, Simmel maintains that in contrast (...) to other sciences, only philosophy is oriented toward constructing a general view of the world. Third, Simmel claims that philosophical work worthy of the name creates a sphere of a typical way of being in relation to world, a third sphere that is between the personal and the objective. According to Simmel, what has made philosophy’s eminent figures great is that they have advanced a type of thinking and developed it into a particularly interesting form, and this type can still correspond with the way we experience the world. It is significant that these three aspects through which Simmel defines philosophical activity emphasize the forms of questioning, not the contents or objects of thought. Still, he thinks that an interaction with concrete examples is always required in order to make philosophy a meaningful activity. This stance is reflected in the wide variety of topics studied by Simmel himself. In his last works Simmel began to emphasize another aspect of philosophy, its nature as a living movement of thought related to fundamental human limitedness: just as life itself ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking. (shrink)

The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the “what” and the “who,” between the qualities which make one something individual and (...) one’s non-repeatable and finite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the first dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a “philosophical turn” for sociology is called for. (shrink)

For reasons that have more to do with the historiographical traditions of modern Jewish history and the history of critical thought than history itself, Georg Simmel – of Jewish descent – is rarely discussed within the frame of modern Jewish history. Bringing the two together as a theoretical contribution to Simmel studies and modern Jewish history alike, this article explores Simmel’s logic of contingency in the context of modern Jewish history. Which forms and types could Jews realistically seek to fulfill (...) from the perspective of Simmel’s thought? Which could they hope to escape and what could they expect from the future? The author suggests that in answering these questions we disclose a peculiar notion of ‘bounded contingency’ embedded in Simmel’s positing of a non-binary, ‘gray area’ between the necessary and the impossible. This hypothesis is tested in several distinct contexts: a letter on Zionism from around 1900; an odd passage on love in the excursus on ‘The Stranger’ (1908); and a letter on individuals of Jewish background in German academia (1906). Simmel’s coherency lies in the ‘realist’ approach he adopts to reality as the domain of the contingently possible. When applied to Jewish history in general and Zionism in particular, this notion not only explains why Zionism is unfeasible but also demystifies its emergence as an attempt to escape the status of stranger in Europe. It also evinces why this Jewish national enterprise inevitably carried within it the seeds of the problem it sought to solve. (shrink)