Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)

The pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel spent most of his life as a private scholar, sustained [Page 1159]by a small inheritance. Although he was permitted to lecture after receiving his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1881, his Jewish origins sufficed to deny him an academic chair until 1914, when he was offered a professorship at the University of Strasbourg. A penetrating thinker and brilliant essayist, Simmel is best known for his Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money, 1907); Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (Introduction to Moral Philosophy, 1893); and Soziologie (Sociology, 1908).

In his last work, Lebensanschauung (Life Views), Simmel broaches the issue of time in order to explicate his concept of life, which was of central relevance for all his work after 1908. According to Simmel, time (like life) is characterized by the notion of continuity. Therefore, the subdivision of time into past, present, and future is an artificial one. The present as such cannot be experienced, just as little as past or future. Rather, the present experienced by humans “is always composed of a little piece of past and a little piece of future,” which means that the concept of the present is closely linked to the concept of the experienced timely moment (Augenblick), which is constituted by the vital functions of remembrance and anticipation. Simmel focuses especially on the former by analyzing how remembrance constitutes the past. According to Simmel, the previously experienced moments “live in us, not as a timeless content but bound to the very special point of time.” Therefore, very much unlike the mechanistic concept of time, which Simmel often criticizes, these previously experienced moments are not absorbed and dissolved in the present as the cause is absorbed and dissolved in its effect. The mechanistic conception of causality destroys the cause by dissolving it, the vital notion of time, on the other hand, stores the experience. Simmel holds that the mechanistic concept of time leads into logical aporia because it remains unable to explain the “continuity of changing.” Thus, Simmel's theory of time is one of the first approaches toward a conception of “organic time.”

It is not only this criticism of mechanism but also the vital concept of time itself which Simmel adopted from his reading of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In his essay titled “Henri Bergson,” published in 1914, Simmel states that the mechanistic conception is principally timeless “because no formula, no state would change if all motions of the world would run two times as fast or a thousand times as fast or even slower than they actually do.” Thus, the physical concept of time is a relational one. Time, understood as a physical term, can be contracted or expanded (or sometimes even be reversed) without changing the underlying physical processes. In contradistinction to that, the vital concept of time Simmel has in mind is characterized by the irreversible process of life for which the timely progress is essential because, according to Simmel, “to live means to age.” Time, thus understood as the central category of life, transcends every given momenton the one hand by remembering the past and on the other hand by fulfilling voluntary actions pointing into the future (in which way the past can be represented in an instant view, as analyzed in Simmel's book Rembrandt). Thus, according to Simmel, the distinction between past, present, and future is an artificial one and belongs to the physical concept of time.

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