Georg Simmel and the Philosophy of Religion

Author(s): John McCole

Reviewed work(s):
Source: New German Critique, No. 94, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter, 2005), pp.
8-35
Published by: New German Critique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040949 .
Accessed: 06/11/2011 12:02
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
New German Critique and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New German Critique.
http://www.jstor.org
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy ofReligion
John McCole
The
ordinary
idea is: here is the natural world, there the transcenden-
tal, we
belong
to one of the two.
No,
we
belong
to a third, inexpress-
ible
realm,
of which both the natural and the transcendental are
reflections, projections, falsifications, interpretations.l
The author of this
enigmatic fragment might
be described with the term
Max Weber denied to
himself,
as
religiously musical,
in this case with a
leaning
to
mysticism.
He
belonged
to those central
European
intellectu-
als who circulated in an "interstellar
region"
between academic and bohe-
mian life and
who,
as Paul Mendes-Flohr has
shown,
found themselves
powerfully
attracted to
religion
and
mysticism
in the first decade of the
twentieth
century.2
But while the
resurgence
of a wide
variety
of reli-
gious impulses among
his Wilhelmine
contemporaries intrigued him,
he
was not
among
those
eager promoters
of a "new
religion" being
culti-
vated
by publishers
like
Eugen
Diederichs.3 He
was,
in
fact, Georg
Sim-
mel,
a
figure
better known as one of the founders of
sociology.
To
point
out Simmel's interest in
religion
and
mysticism
is in no
way
to diminish his credentials as a social
analyst. Indeed,
the
founding gen-
eration of
European sociologists,
most
famously
Emile Durkheim and
1.
Georg Simmel, Fragmente undAufsatze.
Aus dem
NachlafJ
und
Veroffentlichun-
gen
der letzten Jahre
(Munich:
Drei
Masken-Verlag, 1923)
3.
2. Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber's
Conception
of God," Divided Passions
(Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1991)
240-41.
3. See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, "Das Laboratorium der
religiSsen
Moderne. Zur
'Verlagsreligion'
des
Eugen
Diederichs
Verlag," Versammlungsort
moderner Geister: Der
Eugen
Diederichs
Verlag,
AuJbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme, ed.
Gangolf Htibinger
(Munich: Diederichs, 1996).
8
John McCole 9
Max
Weber, regarded religion
as a central
object
of concern. But
although
Simmel has been
enjoying
a renaissance
lately,
the same can-
not be said for his
persistent
attention to the
question
of
religion.
In
fact,
his interest in
religion
is often
regarded
as
something
of an embar-
rassment,
even in much of the best recent work.4 In
Germany,
there has
long
been a stream of interest in
it, including
a literature that
emerged
from
theological
institutes
and,
more
recently,
from a revival of the
sociology
of
religion.5
Volkhard Krech's
comprehensive
and
sophisti-
cated
monograph, Georg
Simmels
Religionstheorie,
has
eclipsed
much
of the
previous
literature and has set a new standard for discussion.6
But in
English,
no one has heeded the
pointer by Harry
Liebersohn in
his
chapter
on Simmel in Fate and
Utopia
in German
Sociology.
Lieber-
sohn asserted
that, contrary
to his
reputation
as a
champion
of moder-
nity,
Simmel harbored a
longing
for
unity
in the form of a "secularized
Kingdom
of God." This
utopian longing,
which was
essentially
a subli-
mated form of
Protestantism,
was a crucial element in his
thought
and
Liebersohn claimed that it forces us to revise the received view of Sim-
mel as a
tragic thinker.7
Paul Mendes-Flohr has made the
suggestive
argument
that Martin Buber's
dialogical theology
was
partly inspired by
Simmel's
sociology
of the
"interhuman,"
and that a return to his one-
time teacher's
sociology
enabled him to overcome the
inadequacies
of
his
early "Erlebnis-mysticism."8
But
apart
from Krech's
study,
there has
4. See, for instance, the
surveys
of Simmel's work
by
David
Frisby, Georg
Simmel
(London
and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1984); Frisby, Sociological Impressionism
(New
York:
Routledge, 1992);
Werner
Jung, Georg
Simmel zur
Einfiihrung
(Hamburg:
Junius, 1990); Ralph Leck, Georg
Simmel and Avant-Garde
Sociology (Amherst,
NY:
Humanity Books, 2000);
and Klaus
Lichtblau, Georg
Simmel
(Frankfurt/Main: Campus,
1997). Many
of Simmel's texts on
religion
are collected in
Simmel, Gesammelte
Schrifien
zur
Religionssoziologie,
ed.
Horst-Jtirgen
Helle
(Berlin:
Duncker &
Humbolt, 1989),
and in
English
as
Georg
Simmel on
Religion (New Haven,
CT: Yale
UP, 1997). Unfortunately,
this
collection omits Simmel's
essay
"On Pantheism" as well as an
early analysis
of
spiritualism.
5. From a Catholic
perspective,
Peter-Otto
Ulrich, Immanente Transzendenz.
Georg
Simmels
Entwurf
einer
nach-christlichen Religionsphilosophie (Frankfurt/Main:
Peter
Lang, 1981);
from an
Evangelical perspective,
Hartmut Kret, Religiise Ethik
und
dialogisches
Denken. Das Werk Martin Bubers in der
Beziehung
zu
Georg Simmel, Stu-
dien zur
evangelischen Ethik, Bd. 16
(Gtitersloh:
Giltersloher
Verlagshaus Mohn, 1985).
6. Volkhard Krech, Georg
Simmels
Religionstheorie (Ttibingen:
Mohr Siebeck,
1998).
Krech
argues
that Simmel had a coherent
theory
of
religion
that is relevant to cur-
rent issues in the
sociology
of
religion.
7.
Harry Liebersohn, Fate and
Utopia
in German
Sociology (Cambridge,
MA:
MIT P, 1988)
153-56.
8. Paul Mendes-Flohr, From
Mysticism
to
Dialogue:
Martin Buber
s
Transforma-
tion
of
German Social
Thought (Detroit: Wayne
State
UP, 1989).
10 Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
been little interest in the reverse
question
as to whether reflection on
religion might
have influenced the course of Simmel's work.
Of the
many possible
reasons for this
neglect,
three are worth consider-
ing.
One is that we
may tacitly
be
accepting
a
stereotypical
definition of
modernity
as antithetical to
religion;
since Simmel was a theorist of
modernity,
his attention to
religion
must therefore be a minor
topic.
A
second reason
may
be that we still fail to
appreciate
the
many ways
in
which discourses of
religion
were central elements of the intellectual
field in Wilhelmine
Germany.9
But as Thomas
Nipperdey,
David Black-
bourn,
Helmut Walser Smith and others have
demonstrated, religion
was
anything
but a
fading residue;
as Blackbourn
argues,
it "continued to
color the
way contemporaries thought
about
large
areas of their lives" as
well as to
help shape public debate.l0
In recent historical work an
older,
linear
theory
of secularization has
yielded
to a
picture
that is far livelier
and less
tidy. Particularly among
the educated middle classes, religious
innovation was
rife,
and
declining allegiance
to the established churches
went
together
with an interest in new forms of
religious
belief and
prac-
tice that
Nipperdey
has called
"wandering religiosity."ll
A third
possible
factor concerns Simmel
personally.
His
contemporaries
differed about
whether he had a
religious sensibility: Siegfried
Kracauer
categorically
denied
it,
while
Margarete
Susman insisted that
religion
and even
mysti-
cism were
among
his
deepest impulses.12
Whatever his inclination to
religion
in
general,
what has counted for
posterity specifically
concerns
Simmel's
relationship
to Judaism and Jewish
identity.
The verdict was
issued
by
Franz
Rosenzweig,
who
regarded
Simmel as a
living
carica-
ture of the assimilated, self-denying
German Jew.
Perhaps Rosenzweig's
rejection
has had a
lasting
effect
by disqualifying
Simmel as
competent
to
speak
on issues of
religion.13
9. For various
aspects,
see
Gangolf Hilbinger, Kulturprotestantismus
und Politik
(Tibingen:
J.C.B. Mohr, 1994); Harry Liebersohn, Religion
and Industrial
Society:
The
Protestant Social
Congress
in Wilhelmine
Germany (Philadelphia:
Transactions of the
American
Philosophical Society, 1986);
and Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism
and
Religious Conflict (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1995).
10. David Blackbourn,
The
Long
Nineteenth
Century (New York, Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1997)
283 ff. See also Thomas
Nipperdey,
"Die Unkirchlichen und die
Religion,"
Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918,
vol.
I (Munich:
C.H. Beck, 1990)
507-530.
11.
Nipperdey 521.
12. Siegfried Kracauer, "Georg Simmel,"
Das Ornament der Masse
(Frankfurt/
Main:
Suhrkamp, 1963); Margarete Susman,
Die
geistige
Gestalt
Georg
Simmels
(Tilbin-
gen:
J.C.B. Mohr, 1959).
13.
See Hans
Liebeschiitz,
Von
Georg
Simmel zu Franz
Rosenzweig.
Studien zum
Jiidischen
Denken im deutschen Kulturbereich
(Toibingen:
J.C.B. Mohr, 1970).
John McCole 11
Simmel would
likely
have found this
neglect
of his interest in
religion
puzzling.
He wrote on the
topic throughout
his
career,
and he
taught
courses on the
sociology
and
philosophy
of
religion repeatedly
at the
University
of Berlin.14 He considered his statements about
religion
to be
political provocations.
As is well
known,
Dietrich
Schtifer,
whose
poison-
ous evaluation of Simmel's work
destroyed
his chances of an
appoint-
ment at
Heidelberg, deplored
Simmel's elevation of
society
above state
and church as "corrosive" of
authority.
But his
position
on
religion
itself
was heterodox
enough
to have earned him the
enmity
of
conservatives,
had
they
noticed it.15 When he chose a
topic
for Martin Buber's mono-
graphic series,
Die
Gesellschaft,
whose contributors included
Buber,
Werner
Sombart,
Eduard
Bernstein, Gustav Landauer,
and Ellen
Key
among many
other
representatives
of the
progressive opposition
in cen-
tral
Europe,
he settled on
religion
and wrote his most extensive treatment
of the
sociology
of
religion.16
Simmel had
initially
considered contribut-
ing
a book on the situation of
women,
and the
pair
of
possible
choices
suggests
the
importance
he accorded to
religion
and to what he called
"female culture" as transformative forces in the
contemporary
world.
Not
only
was Simmel's interest in
religion politically charged,
it was
also an
important, ongoing problem
in the
development
of his
thought.
He once
expressed
frustration at not
producing
a
comprehensive
treat-
ment of his ideas on
religion,
which were an
integral part
of his
attempt
to come to terms with what he called "the
tragedy
of culture."l7 One
can
begin
to
appreciate
Simmel's ambivalence about
religion,
and its
significance
in his
thinking, by examining
its
place
in the
argument
of
Philosophical
Culture
(1911).
From the time of
Schopenhauer
and
14. See the list of Simmel's
"Vorlesungen
und
Ubungen"
in Kurt Gassen and
Michael Landmann, eds.,
Buch des Dankes an
Georg
Simmel
(Berlin:
Duncker & Hum-
bolt, 1958)
345-349. At one
point
Simmel described his seminar on the
philosophy
of reli-
gion
to Heinrich Rickert as his "most
satisfying," despite (or perhaps
because
of)
its
being
"one of the most difficult at a German
university."
See Buch des Dankes 98.
15.
Schifer's
letter is
published
in Buch des Dankes 26-27. Simmel intended two of
his
short, "popular" pieces
on
religion
that were
published
in a non-academic venue to be
"most
unpopular."
See Simmel, Georg
Simmel
Gesamtausgabe [hereafter: GSG],
Bd.
1, 7,
ed. Otthein Rammstedt
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989-)
363.
16.
For discussions of the
series, see Paul Mendes-Flohr,
From
Mysticism
to Dia-
logue:
Martin Buber
s
Transformation of
German Social
Thought (Detroit: Wayne
State
UP, 1989) 83-92; and Erhard R. Wiehn, "Zu Martin Bubers
Sammlung
'Die Gesell-
schaft,'"
in Jahrbuch
f!r
Soziologiegeschichte [1991] (Opladen:
Leske & Budrich, 1992)
183-208.
17. See,
for
instance,
the letters cited in GSG 10: 413-415.
12
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
Nietzsche
(1907) onward,
he had been
exploring multiple paths
to
address the discomforts of a
modernity
that his
sociology undoubtedly
wished to affirm. Two of these
paths
were art and female
culture,
and
recent critical attention has focused on these. His
hopes
for female cul-
ture,
in
particular,
have been read as a
pioneering
effort to
produce
a
theory
of
gender
at the
inception
of classical
sociological theory.18
But
the
penultimate
section of
Philosophical Culture,
which sets
up
the final
meditation on how female culture
may
show a
way
out of "the
tragedy
of culture," consists of a
pair
of
essays
on the
philosophy
of
religion.
While these
essays,
"The
Personality
of God" and "The Problem of the
Religious Situation,"
were not Simmel's final statement on
religion,
they
do
represent
the most
developed stage
of his
thinking
about it.
Read
together,
their
questions
form a
counterpoint:
to what extent
might
the cultural and semantic resources of
Christianity,
even after its
demise, support
the
complex
forms of
identity
that were
emerging
in
modernity?
And how far
might
one
go
in
interpreting
the new wave of
religious strivings
as
having
a transformative
potential,
one that hinted
at
entirely
new forms and
conceptions
of
subjectivity?
In these
essays,
Simmel
pushed
his
explorations
of relativism, temporality, subjectivity,
and
identity
to their
limits, proposing
"a radical
refashioning
of our
inner life." In the
process,
he
anticipated questions
that Benjamin,
Heidegger,
and others would
pursue
in the next
generation.19
18.
For a
contemporary critique,
see Marianne Weber, "Die Frau und die
Objektive
Kultur," Logos
IV
(1913):
328-363. For
analysis,
see
Heinz-Jtirgen
Dahme,
"Frauen und
Geschlechterfrage
bei Herbert
Spencer
und
Georg Simmel," Kolner
Zeitschriftfiir
Soziol-
ogie
und
Sozialpsychologie
38
(1986): 490-509; Suzanne Vromen, "Georg
Simmel and the
Cultural Dilemma of Women," History of European
Ideas 8.4/5
(1987): 563-579; Klaus
Lichtblau, "Eros and Culture: Gender
Theory
in Simmel,
Tinnies,
and Weber," Telos 82
(1989): 89-110; Lawrence
Scaff, Fleeing
the Iron
Cage (Berkeley:
U California P, 1989)
144-149; Katja Eckhardt, Die
Auseinandersetzung
zwischen Marianne Weber und
Georg
Simmel
iuber
die
"Frauenfrage" (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2000);
Ursula Menzer, Subjektive
und
objective
Kultur
Georg
Simmels
Philosophie
der Geschlechter vor dem
Hintergrund
seines
Kultur-Begriffs
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1992); Ralph Leck, "An Avant-Garde
Sociology
of Women," Georg
Simmel and Avant-Garde
Sociology (Amherst,
NY: Human-
ity Books, 2000)
131-165. Simmel's
writings
on female culture and related
topics
are
gathered
in
Georg Simmel, Schriften
zur
Philosophie
und
Soziologie
der Geschlechter,
eds.
Heinz-Jtirgen
Dahme and Klaus Christian
Kihnke
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985)
and
Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality,
and Love, ed.
Guy Oakes (New Haven,
CT:
Yale UP, 1984);
both collections have valuable introductions.
19. Simmel,
"Das Problem der
religidsen Lage,"
GSG 14: 370; "The Problem of
Religion Today,"
in Simmel, Essays
on
Religion
9.
Though
I have consulted the
published
translations,
I have modified or retranslated most of those I cite.
John McCole 13
I.
Tragedies of
Culture
Simmel's
analysis
of the modern
"tragedy
of culture" is well
known,
but its
religious
referents have often been overlooked. In this
quasi-
Hegelian, expressivist model,
culture is a dialectic of
objectification
and
reappropriation: subjects express
themselves in
objective
cultural forms
in which
they
later
recognize themselves, producing "subjective"
cul-
ture. In its
heightened forms,
and
particularly
in the German tradition of
Bildung,
this
process
is
thought
of as
leading
to an
interweaving
of sub-
ject
and
object
that enables individuals to unfold and
perfect
their inner
totality.
Cultures
regularly outgrow
old
forms,
but
historically, they
have
continued to create new ones that
help produce subjective
culture. In the
experience
of
European modernity,
this
process goes awry, leading
to a
disjunction
between
objective
and
subjective
culture and a failure to
produce subjective
cultivation. But
why
should
modernity
be
incapable
of
generating
new forms of
objective
culture with
binding
force and
instead lead to a crisis of
subjectivity?
Simmel's answer can be traced
back to his Introduction to the Science
of
Morals
(1892),
where he had
argued
that the
modem
ethical
predicament
results from the demolition
of foundational absolutes. His "Self-Portrait" resumed this line of
argu-
ment with a
particular emphasis
on its
religious
dimension. "Criti-
cism,"
he
asserted,
had
simply
demolished the contents of "the
historical
religions."20
This
diagnosis
recalls Max Weber's more evoca-
tive account of disenchantment as the intellectualization of the
world,
and Nietzsche's
description
of the rationalization of
myth
in The Birth
of Tragedy:
cultures
begin
to demand internal
consistency
and eviden-
tiary
soundness from their
myths,
and this Socratic
(or perhaps merely
philological) enterprise
ends
by depriving
individuals of
binding
values
and
leaving
them adrift. In this
account, generic "modernity"
is a
pos-
treligious society facing
the death of God.
The
tragedy
of culture is
ultimately
its failure to
produce subjective
cultivation,
or
even, perhaps,
coherent
subjectivity.
This statement
expresses
the tenor of Simmel's somewhat
different,
more
sociological
analysis
of this failure in The
Philosophy of Money (1900),
which he
summarized more
pointedly
in
Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche
(1907)
in
relation to a
specific religious
situation: the demise of
Christianity.
In
this
account,
the
problem
was not so much the rationalization of
objec-
tive culture as the
increasingly impenetrable
network of
intermediary
20.
"Anfang
einer unvollendeten
Selbstdarstellung,"
Buch des Dankes 10.
14
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
means in social life. Humans are "indirect
beings":
in
"higher
cultures"
we find ourselves
"forced,
in order to reach our
goals,
to
proceed along
increasingly long
and difficult
paths"
that obscure "the
simple
triad of
desire-means-end." While this is
inherently human,
and
potentially
lib-
erating,
cultures
may
reach a
degree
of
complexity
in which the means
become fetishized and the ends vanish behind them. This
"technology"
of means
changes, through
a dialectic of
enlightenment,
from a liberat-
ing
device into an
imprisoning apparatus.21 Entangled
in this
apparatus,
the
subject experiences
a kind of
vertigo
and finds himself condemned to
"restless
searching,"
lost on
"impenetrable criss-crossing paths," asking
"anxious
questions"
and
finding only
"tumultuous confusion."22 In The
Philosophy of Money,
he articulated this
problem
in the formula that
money
has taken the
place
of God. His
point
was not the trivial observa-
tion that modems
worship money,
but that the
relativity
of interminable
chains of means has
replaced
the
finality
and
certainty
of absolute ends.23
In
Schopenhauer
and
Nietzsche,
Simmel describes modern
Europe-
ans'
experience
of this situation as
having
been
decisively shaped by
the
legacy
of
Christianity.
The evolved
society
of the Roman
Empire
was
similarly
afflicted
by
a
proliferation
of
means,
and
Christianity
had
offered a solution to such
problems; now,
the Christian solution has
ceased to convince
modems. Nevertheless,
its
ghost
continues to haunt
modernity
in the form of a
deep longing
for absolute
goals:
"This
long-
ing
is the
legacy
of
Christianity,
which has
bequeathed
to us the need
for a definitivum in the movements of life
-
a need that
persists
as an
empty urge
toward a
goal
that has become inaccessible."24 We are
haunted
by
the
longing
not
only
for an absolute
goal,
but also for a
strong
form of
unity.25
This
longing
for
unity
had become so
thoroughly
21.
Simmel, Schopenhauer
und Nietzsche,
GSG 10:
176; Schopenhauer
and
Nietzsche,
trans. Helmut
Loiskandl,
Deena Weinstein,
and Michael Weinstein
(Urbana:
U
Illinois P, 1991)
3-4. As Michael and Deena Weinstein
point
out in their introduction,
Sim-
mel's use of the term
"technology"
to describe this
apparatus
of means adumbrates
Heidegger's analysis (xxviii).
22.
Schopenhauer
und Nietzsche 177-178; Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche 4-5.
23.
Philosophie
des Geldes, GSG 6: 305 f.
24.
Schopenhauer
und Nietzsche 178; Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche 5
(translation
modified).
The motif of a
longing
left behind
by Christianity
also
appears
in The Philoso-
phy of Money,
GSG 6: 491-492. Simmel's view recalls Weber's
implicit argument
about
the Protestant ethic: its
unrecognized force, woven into the fabric of culture, lives on.
25. "Vom Heil der Seele,"
in GSG 7: 110; "On the Salvation of the Soul," in
Essays
on
Religion
30. Simmel's
descriptions
of formal social
processes
have often been charac-
terized as ahistorical when
compared
with Weber's
particular
historical
trajectories.
In this
case, however, Simmel identified a
specific,
historical source of the
longing
for
unity.
John McCole 15
embedded in
European
culture that it survived belief in
Christianity.
Modem Europe
was not
just generically postreligious
but
specifically
a
post-Christian society.
What, then,
was left of
religion?
And
what,
if
anything,
did Simmel
think was to be made of
Christianity's
remains? In his work before
Philosophical Culture,
Simmel had
already
made two moves that
asserted the
autonomy
and the
continuing presence
of the
religious.
The first was
epistemological:
Simmel
argued
that the corrosive effects
of
"enlightened"
criticism do not
destroy religion
without
remainder;
instead, they purify
it. His
writings
on
religion
balance two assertions:
not
only specific dogmas,
but all
religious
contents will
collapse
under
the
scrutiny
of
criticism; however,
it is shallow to think that the
Enlight-
enment has
thereby exposed religion
as a mere falsehood or
projection.
Confidence in the historical
religions
has
eroded,
and this was a soci-
etal fact that must be confronted. What
survived,
unscathed
by critique,
was
something
Simmel called
"religiosity,"
the
purely subjective
atti-
tude of belief. In the
opening pages
of
Religion (1906/1912),
he
defended the
autonomy
of
religiosity
with one of his most radical state-
ments of
epistemological pluralism.
His
gambit
was to demote
empiri-
cal
"reality"
to
just
one
reality among many
-
one of
many possible
ways
of
world-making:
Reality
is
by
no means the world as such, but
only
one world, along-
side the worlds of art and of
religion.
It is built
up
out of the same
materials but with different forms and
presuppositions.
The
empiri-
cally
real world is
probably
the
ordering
of elements
pragmatically
best
adjusted
to
promote
the survival and
development
of the
species
...
Thus it is our
purposes
and our
categorical presuppositions
that
decide which "world" the soul creates, and the real world is
only
one
of
many possible
worlds.26
On other occasions Simmel included
Epicureanism
and the view of the
world as a
game
in his series of
possible
and
equally
valid
ways
of
world-making.
His
pluralism
recalls Weber's
conception
of value-
spheres
in the "Intermediate Reflections" on the
sociology
of
religion.
But unlike Weber's
value-spheres,
Simmel's "worlds" do not conflict.
"Theoretically,
these different
interpretations
of the world then would be
no more
likely
to hinder each other than would musical sounds be
likely
26. Die
Religion,
GSG 10: 43-44; "Religion," Essays
on
Religion 140.
16
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
to clash with colors."27
Nothing
forces us to make a
choice,
as
long
as
we are inclined to tolerate the inner
multiplicity
of the soul
-
and
per-
haps
even to find value in it. This radical
epistemological pluralism
suggests
that
religion might
survive in
contemporary culture, though
perhaps
in an
unprecedented
form.
II. A
Religion of Modernity?
Functionalist
Temptations
Simmel's second move was to
argue
that the
religious
attitude cannot
be debunked as an error or an illusion because its foundations
persist
in
social interaction. This is the burden of his
sociology
of
religion,
which
offers a
theory
of what Durkheim
provocatively
called "the eternal in
religion."
Simmel's
sociology
of
religion
was first sketched in "A Con-
tribution to the
Sociology
of
Religion" (1898)
and most
fully
devel-
oped
in the second edition of
Religion (1912).
He
argues
that
subjective
religiosity
is
omnipresent,
albeit
latent,
in all social
relationships.
Under
particular conditions,
it
may crystallize
and become visible in its own
right;
for
instance, periods
of intense
patriotism
make visible the latent
religious
moment in the individual's
relationship
to the
group.28
His
para-
digmatic example
is the
experience
of
"faith,"
whose
originary
form he
finds in
interpersonal relationships.
To have an
ongoing relationship
with
someone
requires (in varying degrees
of
intensity)
a belief in them
-
not
just
that
they exist,
but that one can
depend
on them in
ongoing recipro-
cal interaction. For
Simmel,
this
interpersonal
faith is
analogous
to reli-
gious
faith. In
Sociology,
he described this faith as an
acknowledgment
of
the irreducible
alterity
of our interlocutors
-
"the fact of the Thou
[die
Tatsache des
Du]."29
Without it, "society
as we know it would not exist.
Our
capacity
to have faith in a
person
or
group
of
people beyond
all
demonstrable evidence
-
indeed,
often in
spite
of evidence to the con-
trary
-
is one of the most stable bonds
holding society together."30
At
times,
Simmel's
exposition
of
"belief'
as
something necessary
and
beneficial for
maintaining
social bonds takes on a functionalist tone and
27. Die
Religion 42; "Religion"
138.
28. Die
Religion 57; "Religion"
153-154.
29. "Exkurs
tiber
das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft
m6glich?" Soziologie,
GSG
11:
45. For the influence of this
conception
on Buber, see Mendes-Flohr,
From
Mysticism
to
Dialogue
25-47.
30. Die
Religion 73; "Religion"
170. Simmel stresses that it is "interindividual
forms of life," not individual
psychological characteristics,
that manifest this
relationship
with
religiosity.
For instance, see "Zur
Soziologie
der
Religion,"
GSG 5: 278; "A Contri-
bution to the
Sociology
of
Religion," Essays
on
Religion
112-113.
John
McCole
17
begins
to sound like a
sociological explanation
of the
origin
of
religion.
This functionalism sits
uneasily
beside his assertions about the auton-
omy
of the
religious.
Simmel would have
regarded
this as a misunder-
standing.
He
was,
he said
repeatedly, only examining analogies
between
the
religious
and the
social;
the
logical sequence
of terms was
"religios-
ity
-
social
phenomena
-
objective religion,"
which
preserves
the
autonomy
of
religiosity.31
But we should not discount this functionalist
moment too
easily.
It is the
legacy
of an
older,
deterministic model in
Simmel's work: the
Spencerian
model of social evolution as a
progres-
sion from
unity through
social differentiation to a differentiated
unity.
Simmel's turn to neo-Kantian
thought
and to Nietzsche had led him to
assert the
autonomy
of
subjectivity
and culture
vigorously,
but the
ghost
of
Spencer
was never
quite
laid to rest.
This
Spencerian
scheme remains visible in Simmel's middle and even
his late work. It recurs in
Philosophical Culture,
where he describes it as
the
developmental path
of culture rather than of
society.32
It also
guides
his account of the individual and the social in
Religion. There,
Simmel
first treats the elements of
religiosity
that
promote unity,
then those con-
flicting
tendencies that
promote
the distinctiveness and
autonomy
of
individuals,
and
finally
the conflicts that arise between the forces of
cohesion and differentiation. "In
purely conceptual terms,"
he
suggests,
a solution
[to
these
conflicts]
is
possible here, namely
a structure of
the whole that is oriented toward the
independence
and the stable
unity
of its
elements,
a structure indeed that such
independence
and
unity
make
possible...
The
perfect society
would then be that which
consists of
perfect
individuals ...
Conceivably
... this
supraindivid-
ual entity
might be such that it
accepts
constructive contributions
only
from individuals who are centered
harmoniously
within
themselves.33
Simmel's
hypotheticals
are not
empty placeholders.
He had been devel-
oping
an
interpretation
of
Christianity
that described it as
providing just
such a vision of differentiated
unity.
The
key
text was "On the Salva-
tion of the Soul"
(1903),
where he had described this
concept
as demand-
ing
the realization of "the ideal of his own self" that
"every person
has
31. Die
Religion 68, 115; "Religion" 165, 211.
32. "Der
Begriff
und die
Trag6die
der
Kultur,"
GSG 14:
387;
"On the
Concept
and
Tragedy
of Culture" in Simmel, The
Conflict
in Modern Culture and Other
Essays,
ed. K.
Peter Etzkorn
(New
York: Teachers
College P,
Columbia U, 1968)
29.
33. Die
Religion 89-90; "Religion" 186.
18
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy ofReligion
within him."34 The Nietzschean overtones of "become who
you
are"
[werde,
wer du
bist]
were not accidental: Simmel
argued
that
Nietzsche's
hostility
to
Christianity
rested on a
misunderstanding,
since
Christianity
had
actually pioneered
a form of radical individualism that
was
compatible
in some
ways
with his intentions.35 In the Christian
conception, however,
the
flourishing
of individual
perfection
does not
lead to an
anarchy
of
unregulated subjectivism,
because the fulfillment
of one's inner
nature,
the "law of the
self,
is the same as
being
obedi-
ent to God's
will, living according
to His
principles,
and . . .
[there-
fore]
in
harmony
with the ultimate values of
being
itself."36 A
modernized
Christianity
could
provide
an
appropriate
vision for mod-
em
society,
a sustaining ideal of the ultimate
reconcilability
of individu-
ation and social
unity.3
One
might
call this the functionalist
temptation
in Simmel's work. He was
certainly
not a functionalist in the sense that
he assumed that
evolving
social structures would
automatically gener-
ate
appropriate
forms of culture. In
fact,
he was
arguing
that the
prob-
lem resulted from a dissonance between the
ways
social and cultural
processes promoted individuality. However,
he was
tempted
to
put
forth
a
modernized, agnostic
form of Christian monotheism as a vision that
reconciled the
conflicting
demands of individualization and social inte-
gration
-
in Liebersohn's
terms,
as a
modem utopian
vision. The
prob-
lem was that when Simmel took a closer look at the
unity
of the
individual in the
pieces
on
religion
in
Philosophical Culture,
the
pros-
pects
for this sort of
religion
of
modernity
broke down.
III. "The
Personality of
God"
Simmel wrote in his
"Beginning
of an
Incomplete
Self-Portrait" that he
was
wrestling
with the
problem
of
securing
"values"
against
their com-
plete
dissolution
[Auflosung]
into "the flow of
things,
historical mutabil-
ity,
a
merely psychological reality."
He cited
"truth, value, objectivity,
34. "Vom Heil der Seele" 110;
"On the Salvation of the Soul" 30.
35. "Vom Heil der Seele" 114-115; "On the Salvation of the Soul" 34-35. Simmel
makes this
argument
at
greater length
in
Schopenhauer
und Nietzsche 352 ff.; Schopen-
hauer and Nietzsche 140 ff.
36. "Vom Heil der Seele" 112;
"On the Salvation of the Soul" 32.
37. This is the thesis of Volkhard Krech,
"Zwischen
Historisierung
und Transforma-
tion von
Religion. Diagnosen
zur
religiisen
Lage
um 1900 bei Max
Weber, Georg
Sim-
mel, und Ernst
Troeltsch," Religionssoziologie um 1900, eds. Volkhard Krech and
Hartmann
Tyrell (Wiirzburg: Ergon, 1995), developed
more
fully
in Krech, Georg
Sim-
mels
Religionstheorie.
John McCole 19
etc." as
having
become
problematic,
but
identity
was
surely
also
among
those
dissolving
values.38
Indeed,
his own earlier work had
helped
com-
plicate
the
understanding
of selfhood in modern
society. Beginning
with
"On Social Differentiation"
(1890),
his
sociology
redefined the individ-
ual as the intersection between
multiple
social
circles,
which created
problems
of
agency
and relativism that he
eventually
addressed with his
conception
of an "individual law."39
Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche
(1907)
took the
subject's
inner
multiplicity
-
its
entanglement
in multi-
ple
series of
interests, concepts, images,
and
meanings
-
as its
point
of
departure.40
What threatened these values? It was not
relativism;
in
fact,
Simmel's
philosophical experiment
in the
years
around 1910 was to
reject
the recourse to foundational absolutes and instead to venture an
avowedly
relativistic
philosophy
of
reciprocal interactions,
or Wechsel-
wirkungen.
In the
"Self-Portrait,"
Simmel identified the
pitfall
as
"unmoored
[haltloser] subjectivism
and
skepticism.''41
But
part
of the
problem
was even more
far-reaching. "Subjectivism"
suggests
an
unregulated
world of otherwise coherent
subjects.
Behind this
lurked the
prospect
that the
very
coherence of
identity
was
dissolving,
producing
not
just
unstable theories but
disoriented, perplexed
individu-
als
-
haltlose Menschen. Earlier,
in his
sociological work,
Simmel had
asked,
"how is
society possible?"
He answered
by identifying
a set of
"sociological
a
prioris,"
such as the fact that relations
among
individu-
als are both made
possible
and distorted
by
their social
roles,
or that
38. Simmel, "Anfang
einer unvollendeten
Selbstdarstellung"
9-10. As the editors of
the Simmel
Gesamtausgabe report,
this text was not
really
a
self-portrait
but the draft of
an introduction to a never-realized collection of his
"Investigations." (GSG
14:
479)
The
evidence in the text
suggests
that it
might
have been written around 1910. Kthnke sensi-
bly
cautions
against reading
it as a reliable
guide
to Simmel's
development, particularly
his
early
concerns. Rather, it shows how Simmel wished to
present
himself at a later time
(in response,
K6hnke
argues,
to a
long
series of failed and frustrated
hopes).
It is also
closely
related to the
program
of
Philosophical
Culture. See Klaus Christian K$hnke,
Der
junge
Simmel in
Theoriebeziehungen
und sozialen
Bewegungen (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1996)
149
ff.
39.
Georg Simmel, "Das individuelle Gesetz," Das individuelle Gesetz. Philoso-
phische
Exkurse
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987)
174-230. This
argument
is recon-
structed and examined in Kdhnke's
pathbreaking study,
Der
junge
Simmel in
Theoriebeziehungen
und sozialen
Bewegungen.
40.
Schopenhauer
und Nietzsche
192; Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche 15.
41. Simmel's student Karl Mannheim later
proposed
the same
path:
not backward to
foundational
absolutes,
but forward to what Mannheim called "relationism." Mannheim
would
argue
that anxieties about relativism
betrayed
a
nostalgia
for absolutes. See the dis-
cussion in
KShnke, Derjunge
Simmel 473-489.
20
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
individuals are absorbed to a
greater
or lesser
degree,
but never
totally,
by any given
role or even
by
the entire constellation of their roles.42
In
effect,
he was
asking:
in
light
of these
sociological precepts,
how is
identity possible?
Part of his motive for
leaving sociology
behind in the
years
after 1908 was to
explore
this issue
by focusing
on new materi-
als. In his
"Self-Portrait,"
he cited two lines of
inquiry
-
his interest in
metaphysics
and his
philosophy
of
religion.43
But how could
reflecting
on
religion help
to illuminate this
problem
if its
dogmas
and even its
contents had been
fatally
undermined?
"The
Personality
of God" is one of Simmel's most
important attempts
to "take the
concept
of
personality seriously" by pushing
it to its lim-
its.44 In a move that resembles one made
by Weber, Troeltsch,
and oth-
ers,
it looks back to Protestant traditions which saw the
workings
of
divine
purpose
in the
unfolding
and
perfection
of the
personality,
a tra-
dition that Troeltsch called "the secret
religion
of the educated classes"
in
Germany.45
Simmel describes his
enterprise
as a
philosophy
of reli-
gion,
rather than a
sociology
of
religion.
His
essay attempts
to accom-
plish
two
quite
different tasks. On the one
hand,
the
philosophy
of
religion
is to avoid
any
"unfair
competition"
with
religion
and remain
strictly agnostic
about the existence of the
objects
of belief. In fact,
Simmel's
agnosticism goes
more than
halfway
to meet the concerns of
believers
by insisting
that the
concept
of
personality
is not a
projection
of human
qualities
but instead
"belongs
to that
conceptual
order which
is not characterized
by
a human
perspective
but which rather confers
meaning
and form on
everything
below it."46 On the other
hand,
he
also
pursues
his
own,
constructive aim of
elucidating identity
in
gen-
eral and both the
possibilities
and fault-lines of modern
identity
in
par-
ticular. The
essay gives
what seems like a clear answer to the
question
of whether we can have the sort of coherent
identity implied by
a
strong concept
of
"personality."
We
can,
he
asserts,
but
only
if our con-
cept
of
personality incorporates
two of the constitutive
principles
of his
42. See "Exkurs iber das Problem: Wie
ist
Gesellschaft
miglich?"
43. Simmel, "Anfang
einer unvollendeten
Selbstdarstellung"
10.
44. "Die Pers6nlichkeit Gottes,"
in GSG 14:
357; "Personality
of God," in
Essays
on
Religion
53.
45. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social
Teachings of
the Christian Churches
(New
York:
Macmillan, 1931)
794-795. Troeltsch saw this tradition, and the "fertile soil" it had found
in Lutheranism, as
part
of the
explanation
for the
contemporary resurgence
of interest in
mysticism
and
spiritualism.
46. "Die Persinlichkeit Gottes" 366; "Personality
of God" 62.
John
McCole
21
sociology:
that
subjects
are constituted
by
relations with others and
by
reciprocal
interactions. If the
personality
is to have
any unity,
it can
only
be as a
dynamic unity
of
reciprocal
interactions
[Wechselwirkun-
gen].
There is no
way
to return to an
understanding
of the self as an
unproblematic,
foundational
unity.
If we are to avoid unmoored
subjec-
tivism and
skepticism,
we can
only go
forward to a new relationism.
Simmel sets
up
his
argument
with a
conception
of
individuality
as the
unfolding
of an inner, organic unity:
What does
personality
mean? It would seem to me to mean the
height-
ening
and
perfection
that the
corporeal organism
achieves
by
its exten-
sion into
spiritual being [das
seelische
Dasein].47
With its
emphasis
on
"perfecting"
the soul
by developing
its inner
unity,
this
passage
evokes the notion of selfhood that underlies the mandarin
tradition of
Bildung.48
The rest of Simmel's
essay
can be read as a fare-
well to this
conception,
its dissolution into a series of
reciprocal
interac-
tions that can never be
totalized, unified,
or
perfected; yet
it is a
farewell that wishes to rescue the
possibility
of
perfection
and
unity
in
some form. That
form,
unattainable for
humans,
is a
possibility
made
intelligible by
the idea of the
personality
of God.
Simmel
presents
the self as embedded in three sets of relations that
undermine
any
notion of it as a
perfectly
unifiable
entity,
much less a
"substantial" one. The first set involves the
body:
because the self is
rooted in a
body
that is not
self-sufficient,
but
engaged
in
ongoing
exchanges
with its
physical environment,
it can never achieve closure or
coherence
[Geschlossenheit]
on its own
terms,
or
"unity
in the strict
sense."49 The
unity
of the self fares no better when he turns to the idea of
the soul in a
higher,
non-material sense. To show
this,
Simmel discusses a
second set of
reciprocal
relations
-
not, surprisingly,
the inner
multiplic-
ity
of the self that results from social
interaction,
but
memory
and its con-
stitutive role in
creating
and
maintaining identity.
At
any given moment,
Simmel
asserts, personality
is constituted
by representations
fuirnished
by
two streams:
memory
and current
inputs.
Remembered contents
make
up
the
larger part
of what we
are;
more
significantly,
the two
47. "Die Pers.nlichkeit Gottes" 351; "Personality
of God" 47.
48. This tradition itself had
origins partly
in
religion.
49. "Die
Persinlichkeit
Gottes" 352; "Personality
of God" 48, which renders
Geschlossenheit simply
as
"unity." Throughout,
it is this
strong
sense of
unity
as
requiring
perfection
and
Geschlossenheit
that is at stake for Simmel.
22
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
streams interact and
mutually
influence one another.
Thus,
the
personal-
ity
is not a self-enclosed
entity
which can recall elements of a
distinct,
separate past. Rather,
it is the
product
of a
continuous, reciprocal
inter-
action
[Wechselwirkung]
of
past
and
present.50
The contents of mem-
ory
are further
complicated by
the nature of memories themselves. The
contents of
memory
are
preserved
as an unconscious
process;
but
they
are
not the discrete
packages
of transcribed information envisioned
by
mech-
anistic
psychology. Instead, they
interact and form
new,
multifarious com-
binations in this latent state.51
Finally, remembering "always
contains its
contrary, forgetting";
and therefore "it furnishes its contents
only
in
frag-
ments to the interactive
process
of the current state" of consciousness.
Summing up
this
point,
Simmel's terms
subtly
shift the
emphasis
from
memory
to
temporality
as the decisive element:
The
very
fact that the form of our existence
[Dasein]
is that of a tem-
poral process,
that it must therefore 'remember' in order to
bring
the
contents of
memory
into an interaction
[Wechselwirkung]
that
always
remains
fragmentary, prevents
the
unity
of contents that would make
us
personalities
in the absolute sense.5
In this
passage,
Simmel formulates in the
negative.
Such limits would
not constrain a divine
memory,
which would not be bound
by
the limi-
tations of the
human, temporal form; "thus,
the
concept
of God is the
true realization of
personality."53
The
self, then,
is not an
entity,
much
less a
unity,
but rather a form of existence
[Dasein] thoroughly
consti-
tuted
by
its
temporality
and not
merely placed
in time.
Personality
is
"that
process [Geschehen]
that we
designate
with the formal
symbol
of
reciprocal
influence
among
all its elements." It is
only
in the
concept
of
the
personality
of God that we find the true realization of
personality
-
the formal
unity, totality,
and
perfection
that are not
possible
for
humans.
Explicitly,
Simmel uses the
concept
of a divine
personality
in
order to elucidate a
conception
of the self that has the
dynamic unity
of
a relational work in
progress and, by implication,
to vindicate a distinc-
tively
modemrn
conception
of
individuality.
One should note the
implicit,
obverse side of this
argument,
which he
actually
states at one
point.
The
concept
of God's
personality
could also be cited
against any
claim that
50. "Die
Persinlichkeit
Gottes" 353; "Personality
of God" 49.
51. "Die Pers6nlichkeit Gottes" 354; "Personality
of God" 50.
52. "Die
PersSnlichkeit
Gottes" 355; "Personality
of God" 51.
53. "Die
Pers~inlichkeit
Gottes"
355; "Personality
of God" 51.
John McCole 23
reciprocal
interaction
provides
an
adequate
basis for
personality
in the
strong
sense:
"just
as little as we fulfill the
pure concept
of an
organism
with our
bodies,
so little do our souls fulfill the
concept ofpersonality."54
Almost half of Simmel's
essay
is devoted to a third set of relations
that creates a barrier to the
unity
of
personality,
which he describes as
relations between the self and
something
that is over
against it,
a
Gegeniiber
or alter.55 Like
memory,
the existence of this alter is simul-
taneously
an
enabling
condition for
personality
-
selfhood would not
be
possible
without it
-
and a limitation on its
ability
to achieve
unity.56 (Its
function thus resembles the
sociological
a
prioris
that make
sociation
possible
but also
preclude
full
knowledge
of the other in
social
relations.)
And like the
principle
of
reciprocal interaction,
this
principle
-
which we
experience intersubjectively
as "the fact of the
Thou"
[die
Tatsache des
Du]
-
has its roots in Simmel's
sociology.
This
Gegeniiber
takes
many
forms: for the
believer,
it is God
(and
for
God,
God's
creation);
for the
lover,
the loved
one;
for the
personality,
its own multifarious
"contents";
and in
self-consciousness,
which Sim-
mel calls the
personality's
most concentrated
form,
the alter is the self
as a
whole,
or "its inner division of itself into
subject
and
object,
which
is one and the same
thing
as its
ability
to address itself to itself as it
does to another."57 Simmel's
argument equates
the self's relations with
these rather different sorts of alters
by finding
their common
qualities
at
a
high
level of abstraction. His
description
of self-consciousness as the
self's
"ability
to address itself to itself as it does to another" comes
close to
suggesting
that
interpersonal, intersubjective
relations are the
paradigmatic
form of our
experience
with all alters or
counterparts.
But Simmel does not make that
argument,
which he
might
have con-
sidered an
unacceptable
form of
sociological
reductionism.
Rather,
in a
thoroughly
characteristic
move,
he declines to
explain any
form in terms
54. "Die
Pers6inlichkeit
Gottes" 355; "Personality
of God" 51.
55. This train of
thought
can be traced to his brief
essay
"On Pantheism"
(1902),
where he had asserted that in all our relations, including
interhuman
relations,
"what stim-
ulates our
activity, produces
our
feelings,
and determines our
position
in our milieu is our
reciprocal
difference" and that the sense of life is
"inextricably
bound
up
with the form of
alterity
and distinction
[die
Form des
Gegentibers
und der
Besonderung]" (GSG
7:
84).
56. Simmel also
argues
that the existence of the
Gegeniiber
makes
pantheism
a self-
defeating conception,
and much of the second
part
of his
essay
concerns this
theological
point. According
to Simmel, the
aporias
of the
pantheistic conception
of God can be
resolved
by
his
conception
of the
personality
of God.
57.
"[S]eine
Fihigkeit
zu sich selbst so Ich zu
sagen,
wie zum andern Du." "Die
Persinlichkeit Gottes" 361-62; "Personality
of God" 58.
24
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
of another and
simply
likens them to one another. There are alters who
are other
subjects;
we are alters to
ourselves;
and we have
multiple
inner alterities as well. It is
simply
inherent in the "form of existence of
a soul that has been
shaped
into a
personality"
to
experience
the con-
stant, manifold,
almost erotic tensions of "nearness and
distance,
con-
trast and fusion."58 The ineluctable tension created
by
what he
evocatively
calls "the barrier of otherness"
-
die Schranke des Ander-
sseins
-
both constitutes the richness of the
personality
and sets its
limit.59
Only
in a
formally perfect personality,
in the
personality
of
God,
would such limits be lifted.
"The
Personality
of God"
presents
a
complex
defense of the
possibili-
ties of selfhood in
modernity. "Religion"
-
an
extremely
abstract and
decidedly
monotheistic
religion
-
provides
a cultural resource that can
help
make
modernity
more
intelligible;
and if the
personality
must be
reconceived
relationally,
as a
dynamic,
interactive
unity
of
reciprocal
effects,
then the idea of the
personality
of God can also
help
reconcile
us to this
modernity. This,
at
any rate,
is Simmel's
explicit argument.
But there is an undercurrent in the
essay
that
occasionally
surfaces to
suggest something quite
different and
decidedly
less
reassuring:
the
pos-
sibility
of a
deeply perplexed personhood, opaque
to itself.
Throughout
the
piece,
there are moments when Simmel
struggles
to find
language
that
captures
the
possible unity
and
coherence;
in the
end,
it_eludes him
more than is convenient for his
argument.
As we have
seen,
the self and
its
heightened form,
the
personality,
become
something
he can
only
des-
ignate
with the
strikingly impersonal term,
"ein Geschehen,"
a
process
or occurrence. The
unity
of the
personality,
he assures us at one
point,
is
nothing
like "the
simple persistence
of a
center,"
but the
proliferation
of terms that
immediately
follows this assurance
betrays
a discomfort in
describing
the alternative: it is "an
interpenetration,
functional
adapta-
tion, transference, interrelationship,
a fusion of
psychic
contents."60
When we no
longer
think of the self
simply
as a
persistent entity,
but
instead consider it as
something
constituted
by
its
temporality,
the
imperfections
of
memory
and time have more serious
consequences
than his relationist solution
suggests.
In
memory,
which does so much
to constitute the
self, past
and
present
moments not
only constantly
58. "Die Pers6nlichkeit Gottes" 360; "Personality
of God" 56.
59. "Die
Persfnlichkeit
Gottes" 357; "Personality
of God" 53, where the
phrase
is
rendered
simply
as "barrier."
60. "Die
Pers6nlichkeit
Gottes" 354; "Personality
of God" 50-51.
John
McCole
25
interact but
change
one another as well. As a
result,
the
dependence
of our existence on
memory
. . .
[means that]
no
moment is
truly self-enclosed, each one
depends
on the
past
and the
future, and so none is
really quite
itself.61
No moment is ever
quite itself;
and
so,
no one is ever
quite
himself or
herself
-
Keiner
ganz
sich selbst. In a similar
vein,
Walter
Benjamin
would later
wryly
recall his discomfort at
being expected
to resemble
himself when
being photographed
as a child. And in "On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,"
he
posed
the
question why,
under modern
conditions,
it has
become a matter of chance whether one ever
grasps
one's own
image.62
One of the most
powerful passages
in Simmel's
essay
evokes this
enigmatic
moment in selfhood:
Just as we concentrate
[verdichten]
our own
imperfect unity
into the
ego [Ich]
that
mysteriously
bears it, so the true
unity
of the
being
of
the world
crystallizes
itself in the form of an
ego [Ichform]
with no
remainder
-
the absolute
personality.63
We have somehow condensed
[verdichtet]
or even fabulated
[gedichtet]
the
complex
interactions that constitute us into
something
that we can
bear,
but even then it remains
mysterious
how this
shifting unity
can be
attached to a
persisting
sense of self.
Here, identity
is not a comfortable
dialectic of
reciprocity,
but
something inherently enigmatic. Moreover,
if
this is so, then the
relationship
between the human and the divine
per-
sonality figures quite differently
in this
passage
than the rest of the
essay
would have it. Instead of the
comforting image
of our
imperfec-
tions
being
lifted and
guaranteed
in a
higher,
divine
unity,
the divine
would be distant and unfathomable to
us,
as we are to ourselves. In this
case,
the
philosophy
of
religion
tells us
something
more
troubling
about
modernity
than Simmel would seem to wish.
61.
"[K]ein
Moment
jener
wirklich in sich
geschlossen, ein jeder
auf
Vergangenheit
und Zukunft
angewiesen
und so keiner wirklich
ganz
er selbst." Simmel's
rhythmic
and
elusive
phrasing,
one of the
essay's
rhetorical
high points, gets
lost in translation. "Die
Persi6nlichkeit
Gottes"
356; "Personality
of God" 52.
62. Walter
Benjamin,
"Berliner Kindheit um
Neunzehnhundert,", Gesammelte
Schrifien
IV
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 261; Benjamin,
"Ober
einige
Motive bei
Baudelaire," Gesammelte
Schriften
I
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974)
610.
63. "Die
Pers6nlichkeit
Gottes" 356; "Personality
of God" 52.
26
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
IV
"The Problem
of
the
Religious
Situation"
In
Philosophical Culture,
Simmel
paired
his
essay
on "The Personal-
ity
of God" with one on "The Problem of the
Religious
Situation." He
described them as
addressing
the two sides of
religion
-
the first treat-
ing
the content of
religious beliefs,
the second the
subjective
attitude of
religiosity
-
but the tone struck
by
the two
essays
differs
dramatically.
The difference becomes evident in the
opening
words of "The Problem
of the
Religious Situation,"
which
depict
the state of
religion
as not
merely problematic
but dire. We find
ourselves,
he
declares,
"in an
unspeakably unsettling
situation" with
respect
to
religion.
The first
essay
is written from the
relatively
comfortable
perspective
of a con-
structive
critique
of
religious
traditions. Theistic
religious
traditions still
speak
to
us,
even to
nonbelievers,
if taken at a
deep
level of abstrac-
tion. But in the second
essay,
Simmel unbrackets the issue of belief and
insists that the historical contents of
religion
have ceased to sustain
any
conviction. A troubled and
emphatic
rhetoric
replaces
his
carefully
weighed agnosticism: religion
faces fateful
problems,
and the issues are
marked with enormous and
unsettling question
marks.64
Eight years
earlier,
in "The Salvation of the Soul"
(1903),
he had described the
rediscovery
of
religion
as
instinctive,
but tentative.65
Now,
the
problem
was more
urgent,
because the force of new
religious
needs was
produc-
ing
a
"confusing,"
even
"threatening"
situation. In
response,
Simmel
categorically
rejects
"any way
out other than a radical
refashioning
of
our inner life."66 The second
essay
thus takes the first
essay's
undercur-
rent of
perplexity
and doubt as its
point
of
departure.
At stake is not
only
the future of
religion
as a resource for
modem
culture, but moder-
nity
itself. Whereas the first
essay
tries to show how
religious
resources
can
help
elucidate the chances for a rich form of
individuality
in moder-
nity,
the second
starkly highlights
the
problematic
side of
religion
in
modernity
and hints at a "a
truly
fundamental
turning [Wendung]
of our
worldview,"
an
"axial
rotation" toward radical
subjectivity.67
Sim-
mel's account makes it difficult to decide whether this
turning
would
create a
religiosity
suited to
modernity,
or one that
points beyond
modernity.
If the crisis
opens
the door to a new form of "intensive and
64. "Das Problem der
religi6sen
Lage" 381, 383; "Problem of
Religion Today" 16, 18.
65. "Vom Heil der
Seele,"
GSG
7:115;
"On the Salvation of the Soul" 35.
66. "Das Problem der
religiLsen Lage" 367-70;
"Problem of
Religion Today"
7-9.
The translation mutes the tone of Simmel's assertions.
67. "Das Problem der
religiRsen Lage" 378, 380;
these
passages
are omitted in the
translation. In the
concluding paragraph
of the
essay,
Simmel
emphasizes
the
prospect
of a
"turning" by insistently
and
rhythmically repeating
the term
Wendung,
but this is lost in the
translation
("Das
Problem der
religidsen Lage" 383-84; "Problem of
Religion Today" 18).
John McCole 27
creative
individuality,"
what sort of
subjectivity
will
emerge
from
it?68
Simmel's
point
of
departure
seems to strike a familiar balance. The
contents of the
existing
historical
religions may
have
collapsed, yet
a
"superficial Enlightenment"
that would dismiss
religion
as a dream we
have outlived is untenable.69 The disenchantment of the world does not
simply
release us into a
postreligious
world:
The
extraordinary gravity
of the
present
situation is that not this or that
particular dogma
but the transcendent
object
of faith
per
se has been
tarnished as
illusory.
What now survives is no
longer
the form of tran-
scendence, striving
for a new fulfillment, but
something
more
pro-
found and more
helpless:
the need
[Bediirfnis]
once satisfied
by
the
transcendent,
a need that has survived
any
such fulfillment and
now,
because the
objects
of faith have been abrogated,
appears paralyzed
and as if cut off from the
path
to its own life.70
While this idea had
appeared
in Simmel's earlier
work,
here he set it in
a new rhetorical
key.
We find ourselves stranded,
like
survivors, "cut
off" and
"paralyzed,"
in a situation of
profound helplessness
and
per-
plexity,
afflicted with a
yearning
that has lost its
proper object
-
indeed, perhaps
even the
possibility
of
finding
an
object.
Simmel's
spirit
is
emphatically post-Nietzschean
in his insistence
that,
when faced
with the death of
God,
half-measures based on bad faith were bound to
fail. He shuts the door on a series of false
ways
out.
Echoing
Nietzsche's
critique
of
historicism,
he
rejects
the
possibility
of a
sterile,
Alexandrian collection of the faiths of the
past;
a
philosophy
of "as if"
merely
evades the inevitable
by positing
the truth of
religion
for moral
purposes;
and the Catholic church tries to
interpose
its
authority
between
believers and the inevitable intellectual
judgments.71
He reserves some
particularly
acerbic comments for the eclectic
mysticism being promoted
68. "Das Problem der
religi6sen Lage" 383; "Problem of
Religion Today" 18.
69. Simmel is at
pains
here and, at
greater length,
in "The
Personality
of God," to
distinguish
his view from the Feuerbachian
interpretation
of
religion
as a
projection,
and
thus an inverted
anthropology.
His
critique
takes aim not at the
Enlightenment per se, but
at its
"superficial"
dismissals of
religion. "Enlightenment
would be blindness" if it
thought
it had
destroyed
the
religious
need
by eroding
the
possibility
of belief in transcendental
religious objects. ("Das
Problem der
religiasen Lage" 369; "Personality
of God"
8-9)
But
Simmel's own
analysis
and defense of
subjective religiosity,
which
depend
on neo-Kan-
tian and
sociological categories,
is
nothing
if not a
product
of
Enlightenment.
He never
broaches the
possibility
of
reversing
the disenchantment of the world.
70. "Das Problem der
religi6isen
Lage" 369; "Problem of
Religion Today"
9.
71. "Das Problem der
religitsen Lage" 384; "Problem of
Religion Today"
19.
28
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
by
"certain
spiritually prominent
circles."72 He is far more
respectful,
but
no less
firm,
in
distancing
himself from
religious liberalism,
which offers
more latitude for individual beliefs while
dodging
the
question
of
whether
any
beliefs in transcendental
objects
remain tenable.73
In the first
pages
of the
essay
Simmel
steadily
builds the rhetorical
force of this
threat,
until he
suddenly
resolves the tension
by locating
the
facticity
[Tatsaichlichkeit]
ofa fixed
point:
the undoubted
presence
of a
religious
need -
or,
to
put
it more
cautiously,
of a need that until
now has been satisfied
by religious
fulfillments.74
Our feet
suddenly
touch
ground
-
or
rather, they
seem
to,
for no sooner
does Simmel name a clear solution than he takes it back with a
qualifi-
cation. His Archimedean
point
is the
subjective religious
attitude
itself,
religiosity
without
any object.
This
religiosity
will do without transcen-
dental content,
much less
dogmas
and
institutions,
as no other
previously
has.
Only
individual
mystics
-
Simmel was
particularly
taken with
Meister Eckhart
-
offer a
guide;
as a more
widespread
form of
belief,
it
would be a radical
departure
from the
previous history
of
religion.75 Yet
his
qualification
leaves
open
a back
door,
an alternative that
deprives
us
of the
clarity suggested by
the
"facticity
of a fixed
point."
Instead of
the
emergence
of a
purely subjective religiosity
without content, we
might
see its "satisfaction in channels other than the
religious," just
as
historically
it has
always
also been fulfilled within
moral, aesthetic,
and
intellectual culture.
This,
he
insists, "certainly
does not mean the diver-
sion or
numbing"
of the
religious
need.76 These substitute fulfillments
may, however, prove dangerous.
He worried that the
religious urge,
if
diverted,
could unleash
"despair,
or an iconoclastic fanaticism of
denial... in which
religiosity
would live itself out with the same
energy
as
before, only
now with a
negative
character."77 Simmel did not
spell
out what he
meant,
and he did not name
politics among
the alternative
72. "Das Problem der
religiasen Lage" 368, 384; "Problem of
Religion Today" 8,
19.
The "circles"
go
unnamed. While Simmel denounced
trendy
revivals of
mysticism,
he main-
tained
a
long-standing
interest in the relevance of
genuine mystics
such as Meister Eckhart.
73. He
appears
to mean the sort of liberal Protestantism
represented by
Troeltsch.
74. "Das Problem der
religiSsen Lage" 369;
"Problem of
Religion Today"
8-9.
75. It has sometimes been
argued
that Simmel's
conception
of
religion
was
inspired by
Eckhart. See the
thoughtful
discussion in Krech, Georg
Simmels
Religionstheorie
210-226.
76. "Das Problem der
religiSsen Lage" 372;
this
passage
is omitted in the translation.
77. "Das Problem der
religi6sen
Lage" 382; "Problem of
Religion Today"
17.
John
McCole
29
channels of fulfillment. In
light
of the
history
of the twentieth
century,
it
is
easy
to
imagine
that one such
negative
outcome
might emerge
if ideo-
logical politics
became a substitute
religious object.
What would this
purely subjective religiosity
be like? In
answering
this
question,
on which so much
depends,
Simmel found that words
failed
him.78
This is not
peculiar
to
him,
but characteristic of this his-
torical moment. It
expresses
the mood of the
years
before World War
I,
when
many
intellectuals believed that a
dramatic,
but ineffable cultural
transformation was imminent.79 But the
ways
that his words fail are
instructive. He had little trouble
explaining why religiosity
should be so
hard to describe: the various modes of
pure subjectivity
are
expressions
of "our
spontaneous,
inner formative
powers";
we know them not in
themselves,
but in their
psychological
effects.80 In this
respect, religion
is less like
cognition,
whose
categorical
structure can be
described,
than
it is like eroticism
-
an
analogy
Simmel
frequently
invoked. At best it
can be described
phenomenologically,
which he sometimes did with
musical
analogies.
It is "the
original tonality
of all the harmonies and
disharmonies of life in their
sounding
and
fading away,
their tension
and release."81 In
Religion,
he described it as a
"rhythm
of inwardness":
a
purely
inward tension and release of the soul, a
hovering
between
boundless extension of the self and the
confining
constriction of life
that cannot find
release, a combination of
power
and
powerlessness
that
cannot be defined in
logical
terms. The self-contained state of
religious
being..,. finds a form of
expression
in the
interplay
between freedom
and
obligation
as
displayed
in
empirical
human
relationships.82
78. Deena and Michael Weinstein
interpret
this to mean that Simmel's
concept
of
subjective religiosity
is an "undecidable
term,"
an
"empty signifier."
"The Liberation of
Religiosity
from
Religion," Georg
Simmel Between
Modernity
and
Postmodernity,
eds.
Felicites
Ditrr-Backes
and
Ludwig
Nieder
(Wiirzburg: Ki$nigshausen
+
Neumann, 1995)
133 and
passim.
But
they go
on to liken it to other
conceptions, including
"Zen
practice,
C.S. Peirce's and Josiah
Royce's
devotional Calvinism,
and Martin Buber's Hasidism,"
(138)
and
surely they
all involve
subjective
orientations that can be described.
79. For characterizations of this attitude, see Robert
Wohl,
The Generation
of
1914
(Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1979)
and Anson Rabinbach, In The Shadow
of
Catastrophe:
German Intellectuals between
Apocalyse
and
Enlightenment (Berkeley:
U California
P,
1997).
Simmel's
expectation
of a new, but ineffable
religiosity
in the
offing
is akin to the
pathos
of Walter
Benjamin's expectation
of a
"coming" philosophy.
80. "Das Problem der
religi$sen Lage" 370-371; "Problem of
Religion Today"
10.
81. "Das Problem der
religi5sen Lage" 378,
"Problem of
Religion Today"
15.
82. Die
Religion 69, 89; "Religion" 165, 185.
30
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
The state of the
religiously-attuned
soul can be described as a tension of
opposites,
a tradition rooted in German
mysticism.83
Such dualisms
translate
purely subjective religiosity
into an
intelligible language; they
are a
language foreign
to the soul itself
-
a
projection,
a
falsification,
or an
interpretation,
in the words of the
fragment quoted
at the
begin-
ning
of this
essay
-
but
they
are nevertheless a
way
of
"loosening
its
tongue." Ultimately, "pure"
modern
religiosity
amounts to a
particu-
larly
intensive
way
of
attending
to the tensions inherent in cultural and
social life. This
free-floating piety curiously
resembles the aim-inhib-
ited libido which Freud described as
having
been withdrawn from
par-
ticular
objects
and
spread
out over creation
by religious
virtuosos like
St. Francis.84 In the modern
context,
it would be the
religious person's
alternative to the
aesthetic,
aristocratic ideal of Vornehmheit,
or
dignity
and
distinction,
which Simmel had derived from Nietzsche. The new
religiosity
would not re-enchant the modern
world,
but would relate us
to it in a
distinctive, heightened
form.
Simmel finds that
language
fails him in another
way
when he tries to
interpret
the status of
religiosity philosophically. Previously,
he had con-
fidently
described it as
pure subjectivity,
but now he
began groping
toward a new account. He did so
by invoking
the
language
of Leb-
ensphilosophie: religiosity
is a mode of "life," which means
living
reli-
giously
rather than
"having" religion.85
This would
ground subjectivity
(and objectivity,
for that
matter)
in
something
more
encompassing,
lead-
ing
him to
question
the
conceptual straightjacket
of a dualistic
language
of
subjectivity
and
objectivity.86
To
deny
the character of
objectivity
to
this
new,
contentless
religiosity
seemed to him
questionable. Perhaps
it
would be more
fitting
to consider it "an
objective
fact" in its own
right;
this,
he
noted,
was
"quite
a
far-reaching way
of
representing it, though
one that can
hardly
be
expressed
clearly."87
What if one were to free
83. In The
Philosophy of Money,
he referred to Nicolas of Cusa's
conception
of God
as the coincidence of
oppositions [coincidentia oppositorum] (GSG
6:
305).
84.
Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents (New
York: W. W.
Norton,
1961)49.
85. "Das Problem der
religiSsen Lage" 376;
"Problem of
Religion Today,"
14.
86. In
appealing
to "life" Simmel was not so much
invoking
the
authority
of a fixed
doctrine as
using
its
language
to
try
to work
through
his own
problems. By
the time of the
war, his
appropriation
of
Lebensphilosophie
tended to lose this creative tension. Even
then, it never
entirely replaced
his neo-Kantian
conceptions
and
metaphors.
87. "Das Problem der
religitsen Lage" 379-380; passage
omitted in "Problem of
Religion Today."
John
McCole
31
the
concept
of
subjectivity
from the
conceptual apparatus
of
metaphysi-
cal dualisms and think of
religiosity
as
"spared
from the
opposition
of
subject
and
object?"
As a
way
of
being
rather than the
having
of an
object,
it
might
be better described as a Sein or Dasein:
Subjective religiosity
does not
guarantee
the
presence
of a
metaphysical
being
or value
beyond
itself. It is itself
immediately metaphysical.
Its
own
reality brings
with it all the
transcendence,
all the
profundity,
abso-
luteness, and consecration that
religious objects
seem to have
lost.88
The
"facticity
of a fixed
point"
makes
possible
a return to
metaphysics,
or
rather,
a
turning
to a new
metaphysics
rooted in the human form of
inextricably temporal
existence described in "The
Personality
of God."
Simmel's desire for a
metaphysical
turn is not remarkable in
itself;
it
took mandarin and non-mandarin forms. "The Problem of the
Religious
Situation" was
originally published
in a collection entitled
Weltanscha-
uung [World-View]
that was dedicated to a return to
metaphysical
and
religious
issues in
philosophy
and the
study
of culture.89
However,
Sim-
mel's formulations do not so much look backward to idealist
metaphys-
ics as
they
foreshadow the
radically temporal conceptions
of
Benjamin
and
Heidegger.
Simmel would later
pull
back from this
position.
In
"The Conflict of
Modemrn
Culture," (1918)
he doubted whether he had
been
right
about the new
religiosity:
I wonder whether the fundamental will of
religious
life does not inevita-
bly require
an
object...
While
[pure religiosity] appears
to
represent
the
definitive
meaning
of so much
religious feeling, perhaps
it is no more
than an intermediate
phenomenon
that remains
purely conceptual...
Here,
life wishes to obtain
something
that it cannot reach. It desires to
transcend all form, determining
itself and
appearing
in its naked immedi-
acy.
Yet the
processes
of
thinking, wishing
and
shaping
can
only
substi-
tute one form for another; life can never
replace
form as
such..90
In these
words, published
in the
year
he
died,
Simmel returned to
asserting
the
inevitability
of dualisms that he had tried to undermine in
"The Problem of the
Religious
Situation." But was this retraction in fact
his
final,
definitive word? Before his
death,
he also revised the text of
88. "Das Problem der
religiSsen
Lage" 374; "Problem of
Religion Today"
13.
89. Max Frischeisen-KThler, ed.
Weltanschauung (Berlin: Reichl, 1911).
90. Simmel, "The Conflict in Modern
Culture,"
in The
Conflict
in Modern Culture
and Other
Essays
24-25.
32
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophical
Culture for what turned out to be a
posthumous
second
edition,
and there he let his
earlier,
more venturesome reflections stand.
Simmel's
attempt
to envision a
radically
new form of
religion paral-
lels the
hope
for an alternative form of culture that is
expressed
in his
conception
of female culture. He had been interested in both
gender
and
religion
since the
1890s;
in
Philosophical Culture,
his reflections on
them flank his
essay
on "The
Concept
and the
Tragedy
of Culture" at
the conclusion of the volume. Simmel's
analysis
of the
fundamentally
gendered
nature of
European
culture and his
limning
of the
possibility
of an
"objective
female culture" have been
extensively
examined over
the
past
fifteen
years,
and
usually
found to be either
questionably
essen-
tialist, covertly (if perhaps unintentionally) patriarchal,
or so contradic-
tory
as to be unrealizable.91 These
critiques
need not be rehearsed here.
But,
as Lawrence Scaff has
pointed out,
the
deepest
reason for Sim-
mel's interest in the idea of female culture was that in
it,
he saw "a
qualitative leap
out of
history
. . . the cultural
equivalent
of a
path
toward salvation,"
a transformation more radical than the
promise
of
socialism.92 It
expressed
a mood much like that of the most radical
moments in his
religious thought.
Simmel's idea of female culture exhibits some of the same
ambigu-
ities as his vision of
religious
transformation. His
conception
of an
"objective
female culture" vacillates between two
possibilities.
On the
one hand,
it could refer to a culture that is
parallel
to that of the male
who "externalizes
himself,"93
but is nevertheless
fundamentally
differ-
ent: female culture would follow a similar dialectic of
objectification
and creation of
forms,
but
they
would be new forms
-
a female
jus-
tice,
a female
science,
a female
politics.
On the other
hand,
an authenti-
cally
female culture
might
not follow the model of
subjects
who
objectify
themselves. In this
case,
in order to understand what female
culture could
be,
one must
re-conceptualize
and
re-imagine
the mean-
ing
of
subjectivity.
Simmel's
attempt
to do so for female culture is usu-
ally regarded
as a dead end. Those
critiques
assume that he never
questioned
the
subject-object
schema derived from Kant and German
idealism. But this is
part
of what he was
struggling
to do in "The Prob-
lem of the
Religious
Situation." The result was
anything
but
conclusive,
91. See the literature cited in note 17.
92.
Scaff, Fleeing
the Iron
Cage
146.
93. "Weibliche Kultur," in GSG 14:
445;"
Female Culture" in On Women, Sexuality,
and Love 88.
John McCole 33
and soon afterward he turned to the ostensible certainties of Leb-
ensphilosophie.
Simmel's
philosophy
of
religion
does not
provide any
of the answers
missing
from his
thinking
about female culture.
My
point
is the more modest one that Simmel
recognized
and
grappled
with
the need to reconsider
subjectivity,
and that in some
respects
he went
further in this direction in his
writings
on
religion
than in his work on
gender. Reading
Simmel is not a matter of
reconstructing
a static doc-
trine that he
played
out in various materials but of
capturing
the
open-
ended drama of his
thinking.
In this
case,
it is also a matter of
recogniz-
ing
that his reflections on
religion
were a central thread in his work.
"The Problem of the
Religious
Situation" ends with two
open ques-
tions about an uncertain
future, questions
that arise when we ask who
will make Simmel's turn to a
pure religiosity.
He answers
differently
for
two
groups.
The first concerns those who are "musical" with
religion or,
in Simmel's own
terms,
those who are
religious by
their nature. Will
they
find the same satisfactions in
"living religiously"
without a tran-
scendental
object
as
they
did in traditional
religions?
Can we be sure
that we have left behind the
age
of "brilliant and creative
personali-
ties," religious
natures whose
energies
have
always expressed
them-
selves in
objective
contents? Must we fear the
despair
and fanaticism of
religiously-gifted types
devoted to substitute satisfactions? Simmel envi-
sions a new sort of virtuoso
religion (to
use Weber's
term)
for an aris-
tocracy
of the
spirit.
What direction will it take? Simmel offers no
prediction.
But it is worth
noting
that his
hopes
had
changed
since writ-
ing
"The Salvation of the
Soul," when he had
emphasized
-
in
opposi-
tion to Nietzsche
-
the
universal,
democratic
potential
of a
modemrn
religion
of
individuality.94 Now,
he was more troubled
by
the
question
of what would become of the
religiously ungifted "average types"
who
constitute the vast
majority
of
people. They represent
"the enormous
question
mark of the
present
and the
future,"
since their weaker
urge
to
religion
means that when
they
lose
God,
the transcendental
object
of
belief, they
have lost
"everything."95
He leaves
open
the
possibility
that
they, too, might participate
in the new
religiosity,
but little in his
argument suggests
that
they
would. If even
religious
virtuosos will be
tempted by
substitute
fulfillments,
and
prey
to the
despair
and denial that
94. "Vom Heil der Seele" 113-115; "On the Salvation of the Soul" 33-35.
95. "Das Problem der
religiisen
Lage" 383; "Problem of
Religion Today" 18.
34
Georg
Simmel and the
Philosophy of Religion
result,
then it is
unlikely
that
religiously "average" types
would resist.96
Simmel's
attempt
to conceive of a form of
religiosity
that would lead
beyond
the contradictions and tensions of
modernity
falls short. As
Weber
might
have
objected,
his virtuoso
religion might
at most
produce
a sect or a
subculture,
but not a
general
social transformation.
Conclusion
Simmel's
thinking
about
religion
reveals a
complex
and
equivocal
attitude,
one that reflects his ambivalence about
modem
culture more
generally.
He took the demise of the historical
religions
and their tran-
scendental beliefs to be a
given,
to this extent
accepting
Nietzsche's
analysis
of the death of God and
agreeing
with Weber about the disen-
chantment of the world. Yet he also
proposed
a
theory
of "the eternal in
religion,"
albeit one
very
different than Durkheim's. For
Simmel,
the
perpetuity
of
religion
is
guaranteed by
its
grounding
in the structure of
interpersonal relations, though
now it must survive in a new
form,
as a
purely subjective religiosity
without
object,
or else find its fulfillment
channeled into other activities. Simmel's
writings
on
religion
are thus
animated
by
the unusual combination of two
impulses
that were usu-
ally parceled
out
among
different thinkers in his
generation
and later.
On the one hand,
he declared the
unity
of culture to be a dream that we
have outlived and
proposed
instead that we
accept
a decentered, post-
metaphysical pluralism.
On the other
hand,
he also
hoped
for a radical
cultural transformation that would restore
unity
and
metaphysical
grounding
-
or, perhaps,
obviate the
problem entirely.
It is not
necessarily helpful
to
try
to force these moments in Sim-
mel's
thought
into a
single,
consistent
theory.
Nor can we
easily
ascribe
them to different
phases
in his
development;
in
Philosophical Culture,
he set them beside one another and let the dissonance stand.
Though by
no means a traditionalist,
he found resources in tradition worth activat-
ing, particularly
Christian
concepts
and
experiences
relevant to under-
standing
the
contemporary possibilities
of
selfhood, personal autonomy,
and social
integration.
But at the same
time,
his reflections
placed
him
decidedly beyond
liberal Protestantism as
represented by
Troeltsch.
While
rejecting
Nietzsche's
analysis
of
Christianity,
he
thought
it was
96. For a different
interpretation,
see
Bradley
E. Starr,
"The
Tragedy
of the
King-
dom: Simmel and Troeltsch on
Prophetic Religion,"
Journal
of Religious
Ethics 24
(Spring, 1996):
149
ff.
John
McCole
35
futile to
attempt
to save the historical
religions by liberalizing
and mod-
ernizing
them. The demise of
Christianity
had left behind a desire for
unity
that was
increasingly
unable to find a
footing
in the world. In
"The
Personality
of
God," Simmel
thought
he could bind this
longing
together
with the inexorable
complexity
of
identity
in
modemrn
society
to
produce
a vision of
dynamic unity-in-difference
under the master rubric
of
reciprocal
interaction
[Wechselwirkung].
But even in that
essay,
his
attempt
to describe this solution
betrayed
his fears that
modemrn
culture
faces a far less tractable sort of
perplexity.
"The Problem of the Reli-
gious
Situation" took
up
these worries and fashioned them into a vision
in which
religion
and modern
identity
would take a radical turn toward
a new form of
subjectivity.
Ultimately, then, Simmel's ideas on
religion
do not amount to the
functionalist view that
Christianity's
semantic resources can
help
bal-
ance the demands of difference and social cohesion in
modernity
with-
out a
disruptive
remainder.97 For the same
reason, they
elude
description
as a
utopian religion
of
modernity,
a
hope
Simmel embraced
in his
middle, sociological period.98
Read
closely,
the
essays
on reli-
gion
in
Philosophical
Culture
betray
his doubts about the neatness of
functionalist and
utopian
solutions alike,
and his
language begins
the
radical
rethinking
of
subjectivity
that was to flourish in the
following
generation. Perhaps
it is best to take the
program
of
Philosophical
Cul-
ture at its word: these two
essays
were in fact Versuche, thought experi-
ments,
undertaken without
regard
for their
systematic consistency
and
united
only by
a common
sensibility.99
If
anything,
Simmel's
program
was not radical
enough,
for the
essays
reveal not a unified attitude but
instead someone who was
decidedly
of two minds about
religion,
iden-
tity,
and
modernity. Perhaps
this
embracing
of
principled
contradictions
was the
sensibility
Simmel meant to cultivate after all.
97. Volkhard Krech, "Zwischen
Historisierung
und Transformation von
Religion,"
and
Krech, Georg
Simmels
Religionstheorie.
98.
Liebersohn,
Fate and
Utopia
in German
Sociology
155. Liebersohn
clearly
stated that he was
considering only
this middle
period (238,
n.
91).
99. See Simmel's introduction to
Philosophical
Culture in
Frisby
and Featherstone,
eds. Simmel on Culture
(London: Sage Publications, 1997) 33-36; GSG 14: 162-167.