Georg Simmel Quotes

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

[Nostalgic sentiments] are nothing other than the rosy illumination of a past that has been spared the shadows of the present.

The educated person is one who knows how to find out what he does not know

A man is well educated when he knows where to find what he doesn’t know.

The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.

One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.

Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.

Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.

All feeling of shame rests upon isolation of the individual; it arises whenever stress is laid upon the ego, whenever the attention of a circle is drawn to such an individual — in reality or only in his imagination —which at the same time is felt to be in some way incongruous. For that reason retiring and weak natures particularly incline to feelings of shame.

Since one never can absolutely know another, as this would mean knowledge of every particular thought and feeling; since we must rather form a conception of a personal unity out of the fragments of another person in which alone he is accessible to us, the unity so formed necessarily depends upon that portion of the Other which our standpoint toward him permits us to see.

Our fellowman either may voluntarily reveal to us the truth about himself, or by dissimulation he may deceive us as to the truth. No other object of knowledge can thus of its own initiative, either enlighten us with reference to itself or conceal itself, as a human being can. No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood.

A metrópole é a sede desta cultura, que eliminou todas as características da pessoa

The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture is one reason for the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, above all Nietzsche, harbour against the metropolis.

Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, the fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

What Georg Simmel referred to as "pure sociability" is precisely the occasion in which people get together for no other purpose, higher or lower, than for the "joy, vivacity, and relief" of engaging their personalities beyond the contexts of purpose, duty, or role. As Simmel insisted, this unique occasion provides the most democratic experience people can have and allows them to be more fully themselves, for it is salutary in such situations that shed their social uniforms and insignia and reveal more of what lies beneath or beyond them.

Or qu’est-ce que l’intéressant ? C’est un de nos principaux mobiles, il explique une bonne part des conduites humaines, culturelles et autres, bien qu’il soit souvent oublié dans les énumérations. D’accord, le sexe, l’argent, le pouvoir... L’intéressant, lui, ne s’explique par rien, il n’est pas utile, ni égoïste, ni altruiste, il n’est pas nécessairement rare, plaisant, élevé, précieux ou beau : l’intéressant est désintéressé, nous avons avec lui la relation purement objective dont parle un des grands philosophes allemands du siècle passé – non, ce n’est pas Heidegger, cet ex-chrétien qui, comme saint Augustin, condamne la vaine curiosité, mais bien Georg Simmel. L’humaniste Pétrarque la condamne aussi ; fier d’avoir fait (comme moi) l’ascension du mont Ventoux, il ne s’en blâme pas moins de cette vaine entreprise, dépourvue de piété. Un chercheur, un historien est mû par la valeur de l’objet "vérité", sans que s'y mêle l'idée d'un quelconque profit pour qui que ce soit. Ce qui peut déplaire à des croyants ou à un gouvernement. Il demeure que cet intérêt désintéressé est peut-être le point le plus élevé que puissent atteindre les animaux supérieurs. Tous ont l'étrange faculté de s'intéresser à ce qui ne leur sert à rien.

The exchangeability that is expressed in money must inevitably have repercussions upon the quality of commodities themselves, or must interact with it. The disparagement of the interest in the individuality of a commodity leads to a disparagement of individuality itself. If the two sides to a commodity are its quality and it s price, then it seems logically impossible for the interest to be focused on only one of these sides: for cheapness is an empty word if it does not imply a low price for a relative good quality, and good quality is an economic attraction only for a correspondingly fair price. And yet this conceptual impossibility is psychologically real and effective. The interest in the one side can be so great that its logically necessary counterpart completely disappears. The typical instance of one of these case s is the ‘fifty cents bazaar’. The principle of valuation in the mode rn money economy finds its clearest expression here. It is not the commodity that is the centre of interest here but the price—a principle that in former times not only would have appeared shameless but would have been absolutely impossible. It has been rightly pointed out that the medieval town, despite all the progress it embodied, still lacked the extensive capital economy, and that this was the reason for seeking the ideal of the economy not so much in the expansion (which is possibly only through cheapness) but rather in the quality of the goods offered; hence the great contributions of the applied arts, the rigorous control of production, the strict policing of basic necessities, etc. Such is one extreme pole of the series, whose other pole is characterized by the slogan, ‘cheap and bad’—a synthesis that is possibly only if we are hypnotized by cheapness and are not aware of anything else. The levelling of objects to that of money reduces the subjective interest first in their specific qualities and then, as a further consequence, in the objects themselves. The production of cheap trash is, as it were, the vengeance of the objects for the fact that they have been ousted from the focal point of interest by a merely indifferent means.

Finally, the inner accessibility and reflectiveness of theoretical knowledge which cannot basically be withheld from anybody, as can certain emotions and volitions, has a consequence that directly offsets its practical results. In the first place, it is precisely because of their general accessibility that factors quite independent of personal capacities decide on the factual utilization of knowledge. This leads to the enormous preponderance of the most unintelligent 'educated' person over the cleverest proletarian. The apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true of the other freedoms accorded by the liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of any kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education - in spite of, or because of it general availability - can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socioeconomic differences) by a decree or a revolution. Thus it was appropriate for Jesus to say to the rich youth: 'Give away your goods to the poor', but not for him to say: 'Give your education to the underprivileged'. There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education. For this reason, attempts to achieve practical equality very often and in so many variations scorn intellectual education. This is true of Buddha, the Cynics, certain currents in Christianity, down to Robespierre's 'nous n'avons pas besoin de savants'. In speech and writing - which, viewed abstractly, are a manifestation of its communal nature - makes possible its accumulation, and, especially, its concentration so that, in this respect, the gulf between high and low is persistently widened. The intellectually gifted or the materially independent person will have all the more chances for standing out from the masses the larger and more concentrated are the available educational materials. Just as the proletarian today has many comforts and cultural enjoyments that were formerly denied to him, while at the same time - particularly if we look back over several centuries and millennia - the gulf between his way of life and that of the higher strata has certainly become much deeper, so, similarly, the rise in the general level of knowledge as a whole does not by any means bring about a general levelling, but rather its opposite.

Primitive man, living in communities of restricted extent, providing for his needs by his own production or by direct co-operation, limiting his spiritual interests to personal experience or to simple tradition, surveys and controls the material of his existence more easily and completely than the man of higher culture. In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. In a much wider degree than people are accustomed to realize, modern civilized life—from the economic system which is constantly becoming more and more a credit-economy, to the pursuit of science, in which the majority of investigators must use countless results obtained by others, and not directly subject to verification—depends upon faith in the honor of others. We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case.

[F]ashion always stands, as I have pointed out, at the periphery of personality, which regards itself as a pièce de résistance for fashion, or at least can do so when called upon. It is this phase of fashion that is received by sensitive and peculiar persons, who use it as a sort of mask. [...] We have here a triumph of the soul over the actual circumstances of existence, which must be considered one of the highest and finest victories, at least as far as form is concerned, for the reason that the enemy himself is transformed into a servant, and that the very thing which the personality seemed to suppress is voluntarily seized, because the leveling suppression is here transferred to the external spheres of life in such a way that it furnishes a veil and a protection for everything spiritual and now all the more free. This corresponds exactly to the triviality of expression and conversation through which very sensitive and retiring people, especially women, often deceive one about the individual depth of the soul. [...] The impossibility of enticing her beyond the most banal and trite forms of expression, which often drives one to despair, in innumerable instances signifies nothing more than a barricade of the soul, an iron mask that conceals the real features and can furnish this service only by means of a wholly uncompromising separation of the feelings and the externals of life.

By reason of its peculiar inner structure, fashion furnishes a departure of the individual, which is always looked upon as proper. [...] It is one of the strangest social-psychological phenomena, in which this characteristic of concerted action is well exemplified, that many fashions tolerate breaches of modesty which, if suggested to the individual alone, would be angrily repudiated. But as dictates of fashion they find ready acceptance. The feeling of shame is eradicated in matters of fashion, because it represents a united action, in the same way that the feeling of responsibility is extinguished in the participants of a crime committed by a mob, each member of which, if left to himself, would shrink from violence.

[N]o matter how decisively the groups may be separated from one another, separation is for the most part hostile in such a way, that the very relation the rejection of which within the classes of civilized races makes fashion reasonable, is absolutely lacking. Segregation by means of differences in clothing, manners, taste, etc., is expedient only where the danger of absorption and obliteration exists, as is the case among highly civilized nations. Where these differences do not exist, where we have an absolute antagonism, as for example between two not directly friendly groups of primitive races, the development of fashion has no sense at all.

What we call the present is usually nothing more than a combination of a fragment of the past with a fragment of the future.

Fashion is merely a product of social demands, even though the individual object which it creates or recreates may represent a more or less individual need. This is clearly proved by the fact that very frequently not the slightest reason can be found for the creations of fashion from the standpoint of an objective, aesthetic, or other expediency. [...] Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.

We encounter here a close connection between the consciousness of personality and that of the material forms of life, a connection that runs all through history. The more objective our view of life has become in the last centuries, the more it has stripped the picture of nature of all subjective and anthropomorphic elements, and the more sharply has the conception of individual personality become defined. The social regulation of our inner and outer life is a sort of embryo condition, in which the contrasts of the purely personal and the purely objective are differentiated, the action being synchronous and reciprocal. Therefore wherever man appears essentially as a social being we observe neither strict objectivity in the view of life nor absorption and independence in the consciousness of personality.

[F]ashion — i.e., the latest, fashion — in all these things (social forms, apparel, aesthetic judgment etc.) affects only the upper class. Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.

Among primitive peoples we often find that closely connected groups living under exactly similar conditions develop sharply differentiated fashions, by means of which each group establishes uniformity within, as well as difference without the prescribed set. On the other hand, there exists a wide-spread predilection for importing fashions from without, and such foreign fashions assume a greater value within the circle, simply because they did not originate there. [...] Because of their external origin, these imported fashions create a special and significant form of socialization, which arises through mutual relation to a point without the circle. It sometimes appears as though social elements, just like the axes of vision, converge best at a point that is not too near. The currency, or more precisely the medium of exchange among primitive races, often consists of objects that are brought in from without. [...] Paris modes are frequently created with the sole intention of setting a fashion elsewhere. This motive of foreignness, which fashion employs in its socializing endeavors, is restricted to higher civilization, because novelty, which foreign origin guarantees in extreme form, is often regarded by primitive races as an evil. [...] The savage is afraid of strange appearances; the difficulties and dangers that beset his career cause him to scent danger in anything new which he does not understand and which he cannot assign to a familiar category. Civilization, however, transforms this affectation into its very opposite. Whatever is exceptional, bizarre, or conspicuous, or whatever departs from the customary norm, exercises a peculiar charm upon the man of culture, entirely independent of its material justification. The removal of the feelings of insecurity with reference to all things new was accomplished by the progress of civilization.

The pariah existence to which society condemns the demi-monde, produces an open or latent hatred against everything that has the sanction of law, of every permanent institution, a hatred that finds its relatively most innocent and aesthetic expression in the striving for every new forms of appearance. In this continual striving for new, previously unheard-of fashions, in the regardlessness with which the one that is most diametrically opposed to the existing one is passionately adopted, there lurks an aesthetic expression of the desire for destruction, which seems to be an element peculiar to all that lead this pariah-like existence, so long as they are not completely enslaved within.

The advance beyond this stage is reflected in the circumstance that our thoughts, actions, and feelings are determined by the future as well as by fixed, past, and traditional factors: the teleological individual represents the counterpole of the imitative mortal. The imitator is the passive individual, who believes in social similarity and adapts himself to existing elements; the teleological individual, on the other hand, is ever experimenting, always restlessly striving, and he relies on his own personal conviction.

[F]or this very reason social life represents a battleground, of which every inch is stubbornly contested, and social institutions may be looked upon as the peace-treaties, in which the constant antagonism of both principles has been reduced externally to a form of cooperation.

Thus fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity and the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change.

In the same way and much less mystically we may observe in each period, in each class, and in each individual, either a really permanent proportion of dependence and freedom, or at least the longing for it, where as we can only change the fields over which they are distributed. It is the task of the higher life, to be sure, to arrange this distribution in such a way that the other values of existence require thereby the possibility of the most favorable development. The same quantity of dependence and freedom may at one time help to increase the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values to the highest point and at another time, without any changes in quantity but merely in distribution, it may bring about the exact opposite of this success. Speaking broadly, we may say that the most favorable result for the aggregate value of life will be obtained when all unavoidable dependence is transferred more and more to the periphery, to the externals of life.

Brutal violence is hereby committed against the individuality of things; all variation is destroyed by the curious supremacy of this one category of expressions, for example, when we designate all things that happen to please us for any reason whatsoever as "chic", or "smart", even though the objects in question may bear no relation whatsoever to the fields to which these expressions belong. [...] It cannot be denied that inasmuch as violence is done to objects treated in this way, and inasmuch as they are all transformed uniformly to a category of our own making, the individual really renders an arbitrary decision with respect to these objects, he acquires an individual feeling of power, and thus the ego is strongly emphasized. [...] Only the noblest persons seek the greatest depth and power of their ego by respecting the individuality inherent in things. The hostility which the soul bears to the supremacy, independence, and indifference of the universe gives rise — beside the loftiest and most valuable strivings of humanity — to attempts to oppress things externally; the ego offer violence to them not by absorbing and molding their powers, not by recognizing their individuality only to make it serviceable, but by forcing it to bow outwardly to some subjective formula. To be sure the ego has not in reality gained control of the things, but only of its ow false and fanciful conception of them.

Concentration of the limbs is characteristic of classic plastics: the tout ensemble is absolutely governed from within, the spirit and the feeling of life governing the whole embrace uniformly every single part, because of the perceptible unity of the object. [...] It is due exclusively to the concentration of the object, which concentration permits no part to bear any relation to any extraneous powers and fortunes and thereby incites the feeling that this formation is exempt from the changing influences of general life. In contrast to this everything odd, extreme and unusual will be drawn to fashion from within [...] The widely projecting limbs in baroque statues seem to be in perpetual danger of being broken off, the inner life of the figure does not exercise complete control over them, but turns them over a prey to the chance influences of external life. Baroque forms in themselves lack repose, they seem ruled by chance and subjected to the momentary impulse, which fashion expresses as a form of social life.

Changes in fashion reflects the dullness of nervous impulses: the more nervous the age, the more rapidly its fashions change, simply because the desire for differentiation, one of the most important elements of all fashion, goes hand in hand with the weakening of nervous energy. This fact in itself is one of the reasons why the real seat of fashion is found among the upper classes.

Occasionally these negative elements have consciously prevented the setting of a fashion even at the very heights of civilization. It is said that there was no ruling fashion in male attire in Florence about the year 1390, because every one adopted a style of his own. Here the first element, the need of union, was absent; and without it, as we have seen, no fashion can arise. Conversely, the Venetian nobles are said to have set no fashion, for according to law they had to dress in black in order not to cal the attention of the lower classes to the smallness of their number. Here there were no fashions because the other element essential for their creation was lacking, a visible differentiation from the lower classes being purposely avoided.

We can discover one of the reasons why in these latter days fashion exercises such a powerful influence on our consciousness in the circumstance that the great, permanent, unquestionable convictions are continually losing strength as a consequence of which the transitory and vacillating elements of life acquire more room for the display of their activity. The break with the past, which, for more than a century, civilized mankind has been laboring unceasingly to bring about, makes the consciousness turn more and more to the present. This accentuation of the present evidently at the same time emphasizes the element of change, and a class will turn to fashion in all fields, by no means only in that of apparel, in proportion to the degree in which it supports the given civilizing tendency. It may almost be considered a sign of the increased power of fashion, that it has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life.

The real variability of historical life is therefore vested in the middle classes, and for this reason the history of social and cultural movements has fallen into an entirely different ace since the tiers état assumed control. For this reason fashion, which represents the variable and contrasting forms of life, has since then become much broader and more animated, and also because of the transformation in the immediate political life, for man requires an ephemeral tyrant the moment he has rid himself of the absolute and permanent one.

Freedom, likewise, after having put a stop to tyranny, frequently becomes no less tyrannical and arbitrary. So the phenomenon of conscious departure from fashion illustrates how ready the fundamental forms of human character are to accept the total antithesis of contents and to show their strength and their attraction in the negation of the very thing to whose acceptance they seemed a moment before irrevocably committed. It is often absolutely impossible to tell whether the elements of personal strength or of personal weakness preponderate in the group of causes that lead to such a departure from fashion. It may result from a desire not to make common cause with the mass, a desire that has at its basis not independence of the mass, to be sure, but yet an inherently sovereign position with respect to the latter.

It seems that there exists for each class of human beings, probably for each individual, a definite quantitative relation between the tendency towards individualization and the desire to be merged in the group, so that when the satisfying of one tendency is denied in a certain field of life, he seeks another, in which he then fulfills the measure which he requires. Thus it seems as though fashion were the valve through which woman's craving for some measure of conspicuousness and individual prominence finds vent, when its satisfaction is denied her in other fields.

Within the individual soul the relations of equalizing unification and individual demarcation are to a certain extent repeated. The antagonism of the tendencies which produces fashion is transferred as far as form is concerned in an entirely similar manner also to those inner relations of many individuals, who have nothing whatever to do with social obligations. The instances to which I have just referred exhibit the oft-mentioned parallelism with which the relations between individuals are repeated in the correlation between the psychic elements of the individual himself. [...] We might call this a personal fashion, which forms an analogy to social fashion. The former is supported on the one hand by the individual demand for differentiation and thereby attests to the same impulse that is active in the formation of social fashion. The need of imitation, of similarity, of the blending of the individual in the mass, are here satisfied purely within the individual himself, namely through the concentration of the personal consciousness upon this one form or content, as well as through the imitation of his own self, as it were, which here takes the place of imitation of others. Indeed, we might say that we attain in this case an even more pronounced concentration, an even more intimate support of the individual contents of life by a central uniformity than we do where the fashion is common property.

A certain intermediate stage is often realized within narrow circles between individual mode and personal fashion. Ordinary persons frequently adopt some expression, which they apply at every opportunity — in common with as many as possible in the same set — to all manners of suitable or unsuitable objects. In one respect this is a group fashion, yet in another respect it is really individual, for its express purpose consists in having the individual make the totality of his circle of ideas subject to this formula. [...] In this manner the inner world of the individual is made subject to fashion, and thus reflects the aspects of the external group governed by fashion, chiefly by reason of the objective absurdity of such individual manners, which illustrate the power of the formal, unifying element over the objective rational element.

The fashionable person is regarded with mingled feelings of approval and envy; we envy him as an individual, but approve him as a member of a set or group. [...] The moment we envy an object or a person, we are no longer absolutely excluded from it; some relation or other has been established — between both the same psychic content now exists — although in entirely different categories and forms of sensations. This quiet personal usurpation of the envied property contains a kind of antidote, which occasionally counter-acts the evil effects of this feeling of envy. The contents of fashion afford an especially good chance for the development of this conciliatory shade of envy, which also gives to the envied person a better conscience because of his satisfaction over his good fortune. [...] From all this we see that fashion furnishes an ideal field for individuals with dependent natures, whose self-consciousness, however, requires a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity.

In reality, however, what is so frequently true of the relation between individuals and groups applies also to him: as a matter of fact, the leader allows himself to be led. Democratic times unquestionably favor such a condition to a remarkable degree, so much so that even Bismarck and other very prominent party leaders in constitutional governments have emphasized the fact that inasmuch as they are leaders of a group, they are bound to follow it. The spirit of democracy causes persons to seek the dignity and sensation of command in this manner; it tends to a confusion and ambiguity of sensations, which fails to distinguish between ruling the mass and being ruled by it. [...] It is not only the mixture of individual peculiarity with social equality, but, in a more practical vein, as it were, it is the mingling of the sensation of rulership with submission, the influence of which is here at work. In other words, we have here the mixing of a masculine and a feminine principle.

From an objective standpoint, life according to fashion consists of a balancing of destruction and upbuilding; its content acquires characteristics by destruction of an earlier form; it possesses a peculiar uniformity, in which the satisfying of the love of destruction and of the demand for positive elements can no longer be separated from each other.

Strangers are not perceived as individuals…their remoteness is no less general than their nearness.

Die Lebensbedingungen der Mode als einer durchgängigen Erscheinung in der Geschichte unserer Gattung sind hiermit umschrieben. Sie ist Nachahmung eines gegebenen Musters und genügt damit dem Bedürfnis nach sozialer Anlehnung, sie führt den Einzelnen auf die Bahn, die Alle gehen, sie gibt ein Allgemeines, das das Verhalten jedes Einzelnen zu einem bloßen Beispiel macht. Nicht weniger aber befriedigt sie das Unterschiedsbedürfnis, die Tendenz auf Differenzierung, Abwechslung, Sich-abheben.

One of the strangest mistakes in the history of morals is that Nietzsche's doctrine could have been understood as a frivolous egoism and as a sanctification of Epicurian laxity.

Not only because of the fact that . . . oppression usually increases if it is suffered calmly and without protest, but also because opposition gives us inner satisfaction, distraction, relief . . . Our opposition makes us feel that we are not completely victims of the circumstances. GEORG SIMMEL, 1858–1918

The idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy.

Whereas in the correlation of separateness and unity, the bridge always allows the accent to fall on the latter, and at the same time overcomes the separation of its anchor points that make them visible and measurable, the door represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act.