selections from simmel’s writings for the journal jugend

8/18/2019 Selections From Simmel’s Writings for the Journal Jugend

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Theory, Culture & Society

29(7/8) 263–278

! The Author(s) 2012

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412457222tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Selections from

Simmel’s Writings for the Journal Jugend

Georg Simmel

Abstract

Originally published in the avant-garde Jugendstil (art nouveau) journal Jugend (Youth)between 1901 and 1902, this selection of six of Simmel’s short experimental piecesillustrates themes of this special section while also showing him playing with uncon-ventional genres of philosophical and sociological writing. The comical sketch‘Beyond Beauty’ anticipates issues Simmel treats more systematically in his essayson the philosophy of art; the poem ‘Only a Bridge’ is concerned with themes of socialseparation and psychic connection discussed in his sociological treatises; and fourpieces collectively titled ‘Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis’ present stories or anec-dotes in the form of satirical commentaries: ‘‘‘Money Alone Doesn’t BringHappiness’’’, a conversation about the psychology of money; ‘The Maker of Lies’and ‘Relativity’, two Faustian fables on the power of truth and knowledge; and ‘LaDuse’, a lyrical appreciation of the famous Italian actress reflecting on how the soul’smovements are expressed through bodily gestures. As in Simmel’s later writings,these allegorical fragments attempt to recover ideal or even absolute values fromthe fleeting forms and fugitive experiences of modern life.

Keywords

aesthetics, autonomy, fragmentation, Jugendstil , thought-experiment

Translator’s note: These selections were originally published in

various issues of the journal Jugend between April 1901 and June

1902; also in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17 (2005: 353–356,

404–406, 409–411, 423–424).

From 1897 to 1907, Georg Simmel published a remarkable variety of serious,

satirical, and humorous pieces for the journal Jugend (Youth), including poems,

short stories, fables, fairy tales, anecdotes, aphorisms, and a series of brief

Corresponding author:

Thomas Kemple, University of British Columbia, 6303 N.W. Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1,

Canada

Email: [email protected]

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epigrammatic sketches which he called ‘Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis’

(‘Snapshots under the aspect of eternity’). Dubbed an ‘Illustrated Munich

Weekly for Art and Life’, this avant-garde journal was a major venue for literary

writers, graphic artists, musicians, and unconventional intellectuals connectedwith the Jugendstil movement, whom Simmel hoped would lead a cultural revi-

val (see Ramstedt, 1991). The pieces translated here have been selected with a

view to how they illustrate or complicate themes discussed in this special section,

such as the tension between money and modernity (Dodd); the conflict between

cultural fragmentation and individual autonomy (Levine, Fitzi, Darmon and

Frade, Lee and Silver); or the chasm between knowledge and ignorance

(Button, Padoksik, Pyyhtinen, and Barbour). At the same time, these anonym-

ous writings (most are signed simply ‘S.’ or ‘G.S.’) exemplify how Simmel’s

unconventional style of sociological and philosophical writing is performedthrough genres which stand in stark contrast to the scholarly essay, the univer-

sity lecture, or the scientific monograph. The drawings that originally accom-

panied these pieces are fairly typical of the designs and decorations that

distinguished the journal throughout its history from 1896 to 1940.

‘Beyond Beauty [Jenseits der Scho ¨ nheit]’ (translated here with Austin

Harrington), for example, proceeds in a comic and ironic voice that proclaims

a kind of anti-aesthetic of ugliness as a more realistic value, norm and measure

in an age of critical contrariness and cultural fragmentation. Different registers

of voice here complement the arguments that Simmel will later put forward in

his essays on the philosophy of art, and that he had presented the previous

year in his programmatic ‘Sociological Aesthetics’ (Simmel, 1968: 68–80).

Likewise, ‘Only a Bridge [Nur eine Bru ¨ cke]’, one of four free-verse poems

Simmel published in the journal, introduces the leitmotif of separation and

connection between things and people which he later examined more systemat-

ically in his discussion of the ‘dyad’ in Chapter 2 of his 1908 book

Sociology (2009: 78–99), and from metaphorical and material perspectives in

his masterful 1909 essay ‘Bridge and Door’ (Simmel, 1997: 170–177). Here the

figure of the bridge articulates the tragic pathos of unrequited longing and self-

effacing fantasy, in addition to expressing a bond of intimacy and anonymity,

and a personal relation characterized by both social distance and spatial

proximity.

The four ‘Snapshots’ which follow, taken from the 25 which Simmel

published in eight instalments in the journal, present everyday experiences or

perform thought-experiments regarding tensions that define relationships

between oneself and others in the modern world. In ‘‘‘Money Alone Doesn’t

Bring Happiness [Geld allein macht nicht glu ¨ cklich]’’’, which extends themes

Simmel had reflected on in the chapter on ‘Individual Freedom’ in his 1900

book on The Philosophy of Money (1978: 283–354), a narrator reports on asnippet of an after-dinner conversation concerning the difference between

owning or having something physically versus simply ‘beholding’ it intellectually

and aesthetically. ‘The Maker of Lies [Der Lu ¨ genmacher]’ illustrates a point

made by Simmel in an 1899 essay, ‘On the Psychology and Sociology of

264 Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)




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Figure 1. Image accompanying ‘Beyond Beauty’, by Christian Wild (Munich), in Jugend , 10

April 1897, Nr. 15, p. 235. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.

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the Lie’ (1992), and later discusses in his chapter on secrets in Sociology

(2009: 311–314), here in the form of a Faustian fable illustrating the aporia

between lying to others and deceiving oneself (see the discussion by

Barbour in this issue). ‘Relativity [Relativita ¨ t]’, which combines the conceit of a conversation overheard with the fiction of the diabolic magician who grants

someone’s wish, makes a sociological and moral point about the fateful gap

between one’s own presumed intelligence and the stupidity of others, here illus-

trating a theme Simmel will take up in his 1910 essay on ‘The Problem of Fate’

(2007). Finally, Simmel offers his lyrical appreciation of the Italian actress

Eleanora Duse (1858–1924), famous for her ‘naturalistic’ style of acting (she

wore little or no make-up, for example), in the course of meditating philosoph-

ically on the conflictual process that takes place between the flow of the soul’s

movements and their materialization in the gestures of the body, a theme he

expands on in his 1912 essay ‘The Dramatic Actor and Reality’ (in Simmel,

1968: 91–97).

In each of these fragments, Simmel seems to want to place the fugitive insights

and fleeting impressions of the present under the aspect of the eternal ideals of a

time-honored wisdom, but in a way which revises (or even satirizes) Spinoza’s

faith in the divine light of reason by acknowledging the contingent character of

truth, beauty and goodness:

Whatever the mind understands under a species of eternity [sub species

aeternitatis], it understands not from the fact that it conceives the body’spresent actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the body’s

essence under a species of eternity. (Spinoza, 1994 [1677], Book V,

Proposition 29, p. 174)

These strange poems, curious anecdotes, playful ‘snapshots’ and allegorical

‘stills’ of everyday social and modern cultural life can thus be viewed as literary

experiments which attempt to recover an ideal value or even absolute perspective

from the superficial appearance and often chaotic experience of the here

and now.

Thomas M. Kemple

‘Beyond Beauty’ (10 April 1897)

‘These days the only people who have it easy are those who make every-thing difficult. Admittedly, there’s no art in striving and toiling away atthings, but whoever wants to make light of everything will find things

terribly burdensome. A while back it was probably easy to be intellec-tually dazzling and to find attentive ears. For until a few centuries agoour species had accumulated so many ideas and experiences, so manyconvictions and valuations, that all one needed to do to become veryfamous or to be called witty as often as one could want was to assert the





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opposite of everything which had been left unquestioned, only withouthaving a lot of options in doing so. But then the great battles began.Armed only with a big minus sign, one could negate everything that

everyone else affirmed, and affirm what everyone else negated. The sundoesn’t circle the earth, as everyone can see; rather, the sun stands per-fectly still and the earth strolls around it. The civilization that took thou-sands of years to evolve is not the summit of humanity; rather, Nature,which we conquered long ago, is what is true and we must return to itinstead of progressing forwards. Life is not worth living, but it seemsmost members of our race do not commit suicide; rather, it is a greatbankrupting machine in which everything that happens is only an opticalillusion. Morality is not what is good and reasonable; rather, the immor-

alists are the best men. And so it went merrily on. From the tremendousstock of assertions to which men attached themselves all one had do to bea ‘made man’ was to pick one and assert that such was not the case butrather precisely the opposite. But now this golden age is past, the reserveshave been exhausted, and nothing’s left about which the opposite hasn’tbeen asserted. It is indeed hard for us to have spirit.’

Thus reflected our friend, heavy of heart. He would have all too gladlyturned up one last little certainty in some corner or other, any kind of crystal-clear truth that went its ways sure of itself as sure can be. Hewould gladly pounce on it from behind like an assassin, turning it on itshead and proclaiming: this is how things really are. But that the truth isnot what is true had been said by someone long ago; and that the good isin fact bad, this too had already been asserted. But wait a moment: isn’tthere one ideal that hasn’t yet been dethroned, a value that has not yetbeen de-valued or trans-valued? Beauty?! Sure, there are men who onlyfall in love with ugly women out of some secret pride in having a yearningand a pleasure which others cannot so readily share or easily compre-hend. And sure, there are painters who only paint ugliness because a deepdoubt in things and their intelligibility has gripped them, so that nowonly a discordant sorrow and the painful violation of brutal ugliness canreally convince them of reality, just as frayed nerves eventually onlyrecover their voluptuousness through pain which alone can save themfrom experiencing the most fearful isolation in a world without feeling.But how baroque are the convoluted paths by which even the ugly creepsback into the beautiful. That the beautiful should have no value and noworth as such has not yet been said by anyone. No one has yet dared totear down the flag that protects this arsenal, as colourful and bewilderingas this unconquered banner may be.

So then, what now? What if one of the greatest errors and will-o-the-wisps of humanity consisted in believing that bliss, redemption, and thereward of existence might be found in beauty? A siren-song that beckonsus to some ever longed-for fulfilment, to which we lend our ears so thatevery other tone and allure of life can only sound flat and false beside it?

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For thousands of years each generation handed on to the next a belief inthe ideal of beauty which each cultivated in its own way and rooted initself ever more firmly until finally a tremendous thirst for beauty,

the inheritance of such a long development, becomes innate to thesoul, the gift that the species places in everyone’s cradle – as theDanaans stood to the Pathians. For this indeed is why life is so darkand stale, so poor and distorted, because above it stands the ideal of beauty, radiant and flawless, a sea of glory pouring out wherever the soulexists and wherever ordinary things do not. For how can things staybright and clear when measured by the light of our dreams of beauty?Alas, beauty brooks no compromise; it is the merciless scale on which ourlife is weighed daily and found to be too light. We have made our peace

with half-truths and resigned ourselves to the fact that all knowledge is apatchwork, and that the ultimate truth of things can only be reflected in adivine eye. Indeed, we are quietly consoled that this non-knowledge is thegreat blessing of humanity and that nothing proves the wisdom of fore-sight better than our lack of wisdom. As for an imperfect morality, wehave long made ourselves at home in it and no longer seriously think of moving out, not just because a half-morality is so often equivalent toa whole happiness but because an infinitely higher value and greater rele-vance in life can be found more in the ceaseless struggle of the best withthe worst in us than in the cool chastity and constancy of saintliness. Allthis, however, never lets go of the ideal of beauty, which harbours withinitself the secret promise of full attainability and thereby demands of real-ity an exchange which is never honoured. Unlike truth and morality, itdoes vouchsafe that mild consolation that its ultimate fulfilment and full-ness would be too much for humanity to bear, like a Semele in the arms of Zeus; rather, we could enjoy it entirely and without remainder so long asour senses are developed enough and our mind deep enough. Thedemands that beauty makes upon things are thus absolute, and beautythereby destroys the quiet sufficiency of partial satisfactions. And is therenot also something real about this, as though something minuscule weremissing for the things themselves to be beautiful, just one more wisp orshimmer of light, one more redemptive word, one last climax and culmin-ation? Is it not as though beauty stood closely behind things, ready simplyto reach out for them and inviting us to do the same? Thus it is that thetorment of privation becomes ever more intense through the deceptiveproximity and enticement of happiness.

A devil must have invented beauty in order to make life a torment forus. Oh, how tender, stable, and lovely is the ideal of ugliness! With what

inner satisfaction would our eye register the world, with what undisturbedharmonies would this world gratify our ear, if we were to measure it bythe desire for complete ugliness instead of complete beauty! Then betweenideal and reality there would no longer be any dissonance to hurt our ears,and we would no longer read any unfulfilled expectations between the





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lines of the world; instead, we would see the natural development of menand things quietly and steadily reaching their ideal, certain that what isnot managed today will be reached tomorrow. A calm, sated peace will

greet a world which ceases to treasure appearances by the erroneousdream of beauty and instead by the clear absoluteness of the ugly, nolonger asking with perverse intransigence what appearances cannot grantand instead reverting to their unequivocal meaning. Only when we nolonger make ourselves suffer under the insolent demand for the beauty of things can we construct our ideals in such a way that reality will find aplace for – and our inner pilgrimages validate – the all-holiest of the uglyand the all-ugliest of the holy. Then the world will really belong to us andwe will enjoy the spectacle of a reality which no longer lags behind theideal, and sometimes even that of an ideal which trails reality.

Only when the ideal of ugliness has become the norm and measure of all things for us, only when superficiality has taken the place of depth,barrenness that of plenitude, dissonance that of consonance – only thenwill the irreconcilable tragedy of the demand for beauty make way for theorganic adaptation of souls to their world, and give rise to joy on thisearth and pleasure for human beings.

Deeply moved by the solemnity of this new gospel, and from an irre-pressible desire to be its first blood-witness, our friend got up and took alook in the mirror.

‘Only a Bridge’ (13 March 1901)

‘Nur eine Bru ¨ cke’Im Herbst, auf o ¨ dem Wege, regengrau verhangen,

Sah ich zuerst Dich gehen, still in eigener Scho ¨ nheit.

Dein Fuss verlangte wohl nach gru ¨ nen Blumenwiesen

Und Dein Gewand nach leicht betwegter Winde Spiel

Und auch Dein Ohr nach still durchsonnentem Sommerschweigen.

Wie eine grosse Frage nach der Dinge Scho ¨ nheit

Gingst Du durch eine Welt, die keine Antwort gab

Und wie in’s Leere fiel Dein Schritt und Blick und Athem.

Es war ein Abgrund zwischen allem Sein und Dir,

So bru ¨ ckenlos, – wie Ja und Nein es von einander sind,

Dass Sehnsucht selbst nicht weiss, wohin die Arme strecken.

Und wie Du mich erblicktest, der ich traurig ging

Und liebend – und Dich ein Erro ¨ then u ¨ berkam,Der warmen Welle, die Dir auf zum Herzen stieg,

Abglanz und Scham – ich wusst’es, ach, so gut und tief:

Es war doch nur, dass plo ¨ tzlich Dich die Hoffnung regte,

Ich sei vielleicht die Bru ¨ cke – nur die Bru ¨ cke.

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Figure 2. Image accompanying ‘‘‘Money Alone Doesn’t Bring Happiness’’’, by Leo Putz, in

Jugend , 24 April 1901, Nr. 19, p. 300. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.





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In autumn on a desolate path, grey and overcast with rain,

I first saw you amble, reposing within your own beauty.

Your foot seemed to desire the flowery green meadows,

And your robe the softly whirling play of the wind,And also your ear the sunlit stillness of summer’s silence.

Like a great question concerning the beauty of things

You walked through a world which gave no answer,

As if your step and gaze and breath were falling into emptiness.

There was an abyss between all existence and you,

So bridgeless, – just as Yes and No are from one another,

That longing itself does not know what the arms are reaching for.

And as you glanced at me, I who walked sadly by

And loving – and the blush that came over you,

A reflection of and embarrassment from the warm wave

that rose up in your heart, – alas, I knew it so well and profoundly:

It was just a hope, which suddenly stirred you,

That perhaps I might be the bridge – only the bridge.

Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis‘Money Alone Doesn’t Bring Happiness’ (24 April 1901)

I heard a conversation among some well-fed people after a sumptuousmeal about the blessings and curses of money. With affluent expansive-ness and confidence, one group stressed that money is the great culturalvehicle of far-flung pleasures, since everything may be exchanged foreverything else, and because it gives the individual an independence inwhich the finest fruits of solitude can grow. Above all, they emphasized

that wealth is transferable, and that its proper calling is to do good andrelieve distress. They said this with complete objectivity, carried away asthey were by a hallowed cultural seriousness and motivated by moralconcerns. Nevertheless, it was noticeable that out of politeness the otherswere suppressing a certain feeling of superiority, since they believedwealth to be a curse. Although it is supposed to be our slave, moneyenslaves us. Property inescapably makes us greedy to own more andmore things and inextricably entangles us in a thousand things that arealien to the salvation of the soul. The first group felt that this secondgroup might be blamed for lacking a certain idealism, but that this lack

was nevertheless compensated for by the wisdom of their standpoint, andby the rather painful yet unavoidable knowledge (stemming from worldlyexperience) that idealism is ultimately not the only force in life.

This conversation first showed me how the miracle of banality works,namely, that you only have to elevate opposing positions to the point of

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Figure 3. Image accompanying ‘The Maker of Lies’ and ‘La Duse’, by G.E. Dodge, in

Jugend , 8 May 1901, Nr. 21, p. 326. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.





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absolute banality in order to defend them with equal force. From theseheights the requirements of the intellectual low-road vanish, whichdemand that you must be wrong when your opponent is right.

A particularly earnest man seemed to feel compelled to express howthese divergent opinions might conceivably be unified and reconciled.As he emphatically summed things up, ‘Money alone doesn’t bring hap-piness; you also have to have it!’

The comment was not just profound, but also correct. To be sure,money and everything it stands for may be nothing to us, unless wehave it. The stars and other heavenly bodies remain in the sky evenwhen we have no need or desire to possess them. Likewise, regardingthe beauty of women, men are divided over whether one must ‘have’

them in order to be happy, or whether one may be blessed without pos-sessing them, simply by looking and knowing that this unspeakablebeauty is real and experienced as such. As with human beings, thingsmay also display their rank in much the same way, insofar as they makeus happy both when we have them and when we don’t. Herein lies theeternal aspect of things. Through ownership, sooner or later we destroywhat we must thoroughly possess in order to enjoy: a roast, wine, andanything we relish with the senses. But intellectual things, and anythingwhose value consists in its form, lie beyond any question of having or

not-having. A landscape by [the symbolist painter Arnold] Bo ¨ cklin jeersat anyone who shuts it away as his own property and only brings hap-piness to someone who knows how to enjoy it without ‘having’ it. Here isthe most immoveable dividing line between plebeian and aristocraticvalues: we may have the former without their making us happy, andthe latter may make us happy even though we do not have them –

‘The Maker of Lies’ (8 May 1901)

There once was a man to whom a magician gave the power to make

people lie as often as he wished. Just when the truth seemed to passautomatically from people’s lips, the man would constrain them by hiswill in such a way that their thoughts would be reversed and tainted atthe source. Thus the most superficial, confounding lie would send theword somewhere else than where their thoughts were heading. Such a liehardly belongs to the person himself, but only arises at the borderbetween the person and the external world. A proper lie occurs whenthe word corresponds to the thought, and yet the thought itself contra-dicts the deeper sense of truth in us. Here the soul itself is inwardly

divided in the belief that it does not believe what it nevertheless knows.With the wantonness of a torturer, the man broke people apart in thisway and left them with the shameful scar of having lied.

The man fell in love with a young woman, though he knew that shewas aloof and cold to him and would always remain so. Between them

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Figure 4. Image accompanying ‘Relativity’, by H. Nilse, in Jugend , 25 June 902, Nr. 27,p. 446. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.





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lay an abyss that love could have gladly leapt over, and yet there was nobridge. She was not indifferent to him in a way that could be overcome orthrough lack of feeling, but rather with an indifference which is entirely

positive, a kind of third term beyond love and hate which cannot becomeeither. He knew she would simply refuse him, but he could not resist thetemptation to use his power: he compelled her to say yes to him, not inspite of the fact that it was a lie but precisely because it was so. And shehad to say so not just with her lips but also with some part of her self which lay close to her heart, with some layer of her soul which she couldnot deny and yet would constantly be betrayed with lies. Soon he couldsense that the woman next to him led an unbearable life of unhappinessburied in unhappiness, since she was incapable of mustering any heartfelt

hatred but only a mendacious feeling for him. And thus he deceivedhimself in the way that all people do who are in a confining relationship,and who believe that a person can be happy at the expense of another.Since they were both so miserable together, it occurred to him that hecould try his power for making lies on himself by making himself believethey were both happy. It worked quite well, and now everything was asfine as could be – or at least almost so. Only now did he realize how wellintentioned the magician had been toward him.

‘Relativity’ (25 June 1902)

Fate occasionally fulfils our desires, but only in its own way.

(Goethe, Elective Affinities)

I overheard a conversation in which someone said: ‘The happiest personis the stupid one who nevertheless believes himself to be intelligent. Buthe must not stray from this belief, no matter whether fate may bringgood or evil. Then he, and he alone, will gain the happiness which comesfrom being both stupid and intelligent.’

‘Quite right’, said the other. ‘The most intelligent person does notremain that way for very long.’

The first man grimaced a bit, since he felt that the second man thoughthimself intelligent by scorning intelligence. ‘You know’, said the firstman, ‘I heard a good story about someone whom the devil had agreedto make the most intelligent man ever. But the devil knew his business.When that ambitious man awoke the next morning, the household, whichhis intelligent servants had previously taken care of with serene compe-tence, was instantly turned topsy turvy. His son came home from school

crying, having understood nothing and done everything wrong. The tea-cher had punished him severely, thinking it was simply due to laziness,for no one who understood everything the day before could suddenlyhave become so stupid. That evening, when the man mentioned the pro-gress of his work to his wife, with whom he shared his whole intellectual

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life, he noticed an uncomfortable strain in her face, followed by a kind of languishing, painful, and resigned weariness. It was evident that shehadn’t understood him, although he knew quite well that he hadn’t

said anything more difficult than either had said to one another a thou-sand times before. Only now an intellectual abyss had opened up betweenthem, which left him with the horrifying feeling that some values otherthan intellectual ones might be buried deep in their life together. For it’strue that the most profound union of souls may grow between two peoplewhen they reach a total understanding of the mind. But when such anintellectual union becomes second nature, then it cannot be torn out of the whole without bleeding to death. Now the man was no more able tocome to an understanding with those close to him than he could with

those who were distant. He had always prided himself on getting alongwith both his clever superiors and his clever inferiors, but now he couldno longer find any bridge with any of them. Where the former mistrustedhim, the latter trusted him so blindly that he was at a loss. And witheveryone he had the uncanny feeling that he himself hadn’t changed atall, and that there was no consolation in gaining a deeper wisdom and nohappiness in having a broader intellectual comprehension of things! Thenone day it became clear to him that the devil had kept his word: admit-tedly he had made the man the most intelligent person, not by making

him more intelligent, but only by making everyone else more stupid!’‘Very good’, the other man said very earnestly. ‘Now I understandwhy certain parties are against elementary schools and the enlightenmentof the masses. It’s not that other men are so stupid, heaven forbid! It’sthat they want to be the only intelligent ones, which is an entirely legit-imate wish. And since stupidity and intelligence are relative, as your littlestory has taught me, it makes no difference whatsoever whether they raisethemselves up or push others down. To call them lawyers of stupidity istherefore a slanderous insult. On the contrary, the whole process simply

pays homage to the principle of intelligence.’

‘La Duse’ (8 May 1901)

Among the many trials which take place between soul and body, butfrom which appeal is made directly to a higher authority after each deci-sion, is the one which is pending in an aesthetic court of justice. Theessence of the soul is movement. If a Greek philosopher denies that wecould step into the same current while another says that this could not bedone even once, because the stream becomes a different one while we are

stepping into it – in any case this stream is none other than our soul.Thus it seems that the body could only be the correct expression of itsbeauty in movement, in the blink of an eye, in the flow of speech, in theslippery beauty of a gesture. But we can imagine yet another require-ment: each moment for itself, detached from what came before and from





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what comes after rather than as a point of transition of an uninterruptedoccurrence, requires its own peculiar beauty. What has meaningfulbeauty in the context of a flowing movement often loses it when con-

gealed into a lasting structure that is an end in itself. Also, the signifi-cance contained in the image does not withstand being exchanged anddissolved in the rapid flow of action. The beauty of appearance, as in astatue, follows other ideals than the charm of the gesture. And yet bothare demanded by every moment in which we present ourselves: as amoment of action each moment must adorn itself with the whole mean-ing and depth of the soul, and likewise grant mere figural beauty tosimple perception.

For anyone who has not yet suffered this conflict between both kindsof legislation, the eye fills in the aesthetic inadequacy (out of which,nevertheless, the deepest soulfulness speaks), and the inner emptinessof appearance (as if ‘aghast at a statue’ [to borrow a phrase fromSchiller]), with the euphony of its lines. Yet I once saw La Duse on anevening when she was tired or indisposed, thereby granting us more free-dom to marvel at her art, whereas on other occasions she conveys to us apassionate excitement that obscures purely artistic pleasure. And so theunique quality of this artist became clear to me: that she is inconceivablybeautiful in each moment that we separate from her movement, which wecan hold onto as a lasting image indifferent to any particular soul; and

likewise that in the sum of all these moments, in her movement, she is themost perfect, complete expression of the soul and its flows. Insofar as thespiritual meaning of life turns into the vivid beauty of the image, we areleft wondering whether what we call beauty may be the unity of thoseconflicting powers. What then do soul and body have in common other-wise? Only beauty can turn one or the other into a part; it is the point atwhich they meet, elevated above themselves. Philosophers might havealso have come up with that; but what the entire human being compre-hends, and not just the philosopher, was first taught to me by La Duse.

Selected and translated by Thomas M. Kemple

References

Ramstedt, O. (1991) ‘On Simmel’s Aesthetics’, Theory, Culture & Society 8(3):125–144.

Simmel, G. (1968) The Conflict of Modern Culture and Other Essays, ed. andtrans. P. Etzkorn. New York: Teachers College Press.

Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby.London: Routledge.Simmel, G. (1992) ‘On the Psychology and Sociology of the Lie’, pp. 406–416 in

Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.Simmel, G. (1997) Simmel on Culture, eds D. Frisby and M. Featherstone.

London: SAGE.

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Simmel, G. (2005) Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17, eds. K.C. Kohnke, C.Jaenichen and E. Schullerus. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.

Simmel, G. (2007) ‘The Problem of Fate’ (trans. U. Teucher and T.M. Kemple),Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 78–84.

Simmel, G. (2009) Sociology, trans. A.J. Blasi et al. Leiden: Brill.Spinoza, B. (1994 [1677]) Ethics, trans. E. Curley. New York: Penguin Books.

Thomas Kemple teaches social and cultural theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His recent work on the inter-sections of classical and contemporary theory has appeared in Theory,Culture & Society (including the special section on Simmel’s aesthetics,ethics, and metaphysics in 2007), Journal of Classical Sociology,Sociologie et socié té s, and Max Weber Studies.

http://tcs.sagepub.com/

selections from simmel’s writings for the journal jugend

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