Georg Simmel
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 165th anniversary of the birth of Georg Simmel (01 March 1858–26 September 1918), who was born in Berlin on this date in 1858.
Simmel is primarily remembered as a sociologist, but he thought and wrote widely, including philosophy, and the philosophy of history in particular. While Simmel’s philosophy of history is not well known, it touches upon many of the major points of conflict that have defined the discipline, and his contributions line in “a lineage ranging from Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber to R. S. Collingswood, Robert Darnton, and other contemporary cultural historians.” (Barry Schwartz).
In a 1983 review of Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History, Deena Weinstein writes:
“Simmel’s entire project in his essays in philosophy of history may be conceived of as an effort to interpret historical inquiry within the context of ‘epistemological idealism’ and vitalistic metaphysics. As in the case of sociology, which is ‘founded upon an abstraction from concrete reality, performed under the guidance of the concept of society’, history is based on a similar abstraction, but one which is guided by the concept of meaningful or intelligible development.”
Gary Backhouse gives a different interpretation of Simmel’s overall project in the philosophy of history:
“For Simmel, showing the legitimacy of history as a science appeared to be an important strategy. Human life unfolds in its history; thus without history having legitimacy, the other sciences, which deal with contents of an historical nature, are inherently problematic sciences. History had to be wrested from metaphysical speculation as well as mere storytelling. Its interpretative methodologies had to be justified as an epistemologically sound component of historical science, otherwise the legitimizing course would be caught in the errors of realism. And finally, history had to contain a logical or existential component such that it could be wrested from historicism.”
Weinstein attributes vitalistic metaphysics to Simmel; Backhouse says that Simmel tries to wrest history from metaphysical speculation. Who is right here? Simmel himself does not seem to explicitly exclude metaphysics, but he does distance himself from it as a kind of prelude to actual knowledge:
“The metaphysical idea really only identifies superficial aspects of reality; it is an initial, subjective impression. But the metaphysician rotates this subjective impression upon its axis. He mistakenly locates it behind reality as its ultimate or absolute ground. As a result, inquiry is petrified at its initial stage. This impedes and infinitely complicates progress to a more exact form of knowledge; that is, a form of knowledge which approximates more closely the real properties of things. Nevertheless, metaphysics represents an initial attempt to make sense of phenomena. It represents the first intellectual conquest of the empirical world. To regard metaphysics as worthless simply because it is a beginning and not an end is only a species of empiricist arrogance.”
On the next page Simmel continues to develop this idea, but also bringing in the familiar idea of “laws of history,” which are propounded by many philosophers even as other philosophers deny the very possibility of laws of history:
“The evolutionary fate of our knowledge of the cosmos as a whole is reproduced in the various provinces of our knowledge of the cosmos. The properties of the metaphysics of the cosmos are duplicated in the metaphysics of its parts. I believe that the so-called laws of history function as precursors of exact knowledge of historical processes in the same way that metaphysical ideas are precursors of exact knowledge of the cosmos as a whole. Of course laws of history do not represent the climax or conclusion of an inquiry; on the contrary, they represent points of departure or transitional stages. Suppose that the laws which describe the real relations of the ultimate constituents of history — the laws which are responsible for the constitution of historical life — remain unknown. In that case, we must be satisfied with the discovery of certain regularities in the surface properties of historical life. Without attempting to determine what lies beneath these regularities, we describe phenomena in the form of abstract rules or generalizations. In a more profound sense, of course, these generalizations explain nothing. Nevertheless, they provide an initial perspective on the totality of historical life.”
One of the key concepts in Simmel’s philosophy of history is empathy — to what extent we can authentically empathize with the past, and to what extent our attempt to so empathize and deluded and misleading. Thus any attempt, as in Collingwood, to enter into the “interior” of past events by reenacting the thoughts of part participants in historical events is called into question by his inquiry, though it should be noted that he is a part of the tradition that he critiques. Here is Simmel on historical empathy:
“Consider this entity that produces one mental content as the logical consequence of another and establishes a relationship between the two. With a similar sort of coherent force, it produces a content that, as such, is irrelevant to all logical criteria, and yet the result seems so certain that the entire structure is constructed on the basis of a minimum of given facts. The characteristics of an historical person and the complex of ideas behind an historical act form a coherent and understandable entity. From the standpoint of epistemology, however, neither cause nor reason, neither the real law that governs the event nor the ideal content of the event itself is responsible for this. On the contrary, its source is completely different. The coherence and unity of these purely factual elements is a result of the concrete import and shading of their meaning. This unity is not grounded nomologically, but only empathetically. In consequence, a coherent relationship is established between the contents of each of these facts, but only insofar as this concerns the concrete definition of their content.”
And…
“Consider the element of personality and subjectivity which informs the act of empathy in history. We are quite willing to acknowledge its influence when we are dealing with single individuals. However the problematic of idealism and historical materialism can easily conceal its influence. Suppose we make socio-psychological processes the subject matter of our investigation and attempt to reconstruct them empathetically. In this case, we do not have the impression that we are dependent upon our subjectivity and the arbitrariness of our own inner experience. On the contrary, we think that we encounter an entity which has objectively ascertainable properties.”
Barry Schwartz in his “How is history possible? Georg Simmel on empathy and realism” (2017) gives a contemporary scientific twist to Simmel’s use of empathy in the philosophy of history:
“Empathy never ceased to be a concern of social scientists, but their renewed interest in the concept was triggered in the 1990s by the discovery of mirror neurons. Italian scientists observed that the same neural cells in macaque monkeys’ brains were activated when (1) a monkey performed an action and (2) when that same monkey observed another monkey perform the same action (Rizzolatti, 2007). Because neural mirroring enables understanding of what another is experiencing, it makes intersubjectivity inexorable: historians empathize with their subjects whether they want to or not. Emotions as well as physical movements can be objects of empathy. In the contagion of yawning, laughing, mourning, enthusiasm, and the like, individuals’ gestures reciprocally excite their own neurons as they excite the corresponding neurons in others.”
If empathy is inevitable and unavoidable, that would seem to call into question any objectivity in history, but if all human interaction over history time is empathetic, then what is the difference between universal empathy and universal lack of empathy?
Further Resources
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/053901886025004005?journalCode=ssic
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468795X17717877?journalCode=jcsa
Schwartz, B. (2017). How is history possible? Georg Simmel on empathy and realism. Journal of Classical Sociology, 17(3), 213–237. doi:10.1177/1468795x17717877
Weinstein, D. (1983). The dialectic of life and thought: Georg Simmel’s philosophy of history. History of European Ideas, 4(1), 91–95. doi:10.1016/0191–6599(83)90044-x
Backhaus, G. (2003). Simmel’s Philosophy of History and Its Relation to Phenomenology: Introduction. Human Studies, 26(2), 203–208. doi:10.1023/a:1024064306256
