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Selections from
Simmels 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 Simmels short experimental pieces
illustrates themes of this special section while also showing him playing with unconventional genres of philosophical and sociological writing. The comical sketch
Beyond Beauty anticipates issues Simmel treats more systematically in his essays
on the philosophy of art; the poem Only a Bridge is concerned with themes of social
separation and psychic connection discussed in his sociological treatises; and four
pieces collectively titled Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis present stories or anecdotes in the form of satirical commentaries: Money Alone Doesnt Bring
Happiness, a conversation about the psychology of money; The Maker of Lies
and Relativity, two Faustian fables on the power of truth and knowledge; and La
Duse, a lyrical appreciation of the famous Italian actress reflecting on how the souls
movements are expressed through bodily gestures. As in Simmels later writings,
these allegorical fragments attempt to recover ideal or even absolute values from
the fleeting forms and fugitive experiences of modern life.
Keywords
aesthetics, autonomy, fragmentation, Jugendstil, thought-experiment
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the Lie (1992), and later discusses in his chapter on secrets in Sociology
(2009: 311314), 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 [Relativitat], which combines the conceit of
a conversation overheard with the ction of the diabolic magician who grants
someones wish, makes a sociological and moral point about the fateful gap
between ones own presumed intelligence and the stupidity of others, here illustrating a theme Simmel will take up in his 1910 essay on The Problem of Fate
(2007). Finally, Simmel oers his lyrical appreciation of the Italian actress
Eleanora Duse (18581924), famous for her naturalistic style of acting (she
wore little or no make-up, for example), in the course of meditating philosophically on the conictual process that takes place between the ow of the souls
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: 9197).
In each of these fragments, Simmel seems to want to place the fugitive insights
and eeting 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) Spinozas
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 bodys
present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the bodys
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 supercial appearance and often chaotic experience of the here
and now.
Thomas M. Kemple
Simmel
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lines of the world; instead, we would see the natural development of men
and things quietly and steadily reaching their ideal, certain that what is
not managed today will be reached tomorrow. A calm, sated peace will
greet a world which ceases to treasure appearances by the erroneous
dream of beauty and instead by the clear absoluteness of the ugly, no
longer asking with perverse intransigence what appearances cannot grant
and instead reverting to their unequivocal meaning. Only when we no
longer make ourselves suer under the insolent demand for the beauty of
things can we construct our ideals in such a way that reality will nd a
place for and our inner pilgrimages validate the all-holiest of the ugly
and the all-ugliest of the holy. Then the world will really belong to us and
we will enjoy the spectacle of a reality which no longer lags behind the
ideal, 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 superciality has taken the place of depth,
barrenness that of plenitude, dissonance that of consonance only then
will the irreconcilable tragedy of the demand for beauty make way for the
organic adaptation of souls to their world, and give rise to joy on this
earth and pleasure for human beings.
Deeply moved by the solemnity of this new gospel, and from an irrepressible desire to be its rst blood-witness, our friend got up and took a
look in the mirror.
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Figure 2. Image accompanying Money Alone Doesnt Bring Happiness, by Leo Putz, in
Jugend, 24 April 1901, Nr. 19, p. 300. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.
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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 these
heights the requirements of the intellectual low-road vanish, which
demand that you must be wrong when your opponent is right.
A particularly earnest man seemed to feel compelled to express how
these divergent opinions might conceivably be unied and reconciled.
As he emphatically summed things up, Money alone doesnt bring happiness; 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 we
have it. The stars and other heavenly bodies remain in the sky even
when we have no need or desire to possess them. Likewise, regarding
the beauty of women, men are divided over whether one must have
them in order to be happy, or whether one may be blessed without possessing them, simply by looking and knowing that this unspeakable
beauty is real and experienced as such. As with human beings, things
may also display their rank in much the same way, insofar as they make
us happy both when we have them and when we dont. Herein lies the
eternal aspect of things. Through ownership, sooner or later we destroy
what we must thoroughly possess in order to enjoy: a roast, wine, and
anything we relish with the senses. But intellectual things, and anything
whose value consists in its form, lie beyond any question of having or
not-having. A landscape by [the symbolist painter Arnold] Bocklin jeers
at anyone who shuts it away as his own property and only brings happiness to someone who knows how to enjoy it without having it. Here is
the most immoveable dividing line between plebeian and aristocratic
values: we may have the former without their making us happy, and
the latter may make us happy even though we do not have 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 no
bridge. She was not indierent to him in a way that could be overcome or
through lack of feeling, but rather with an indierence which is entirely
positive, a kind of third term beyond love and hate which cannot become
either. He knew she would simply refuse him, but he could not resist the
temptation to use his power: he compelled her to say yes to him, not in
spite of the fact that it was a lie but precisely because it was so. And she
had 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 could
not deny and yet would constantly be betrayed with lies. Soon he could
sense that the woman next to him led an unbearable life of unhappiness
buried in unhappiness, since she was incapable of mustering any heartfelt
hatred but only a mendacious feeling for him. And thus he deceived
himself in the way that all people do who are in a conning 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 he
could try his power for making lies on himself by making himself believe
they were both happy. It worked quite well, and now everything was as
ne as could be or at least almost so. Only now did he realize how well
intentioned the magician had been toward him.
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References
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