Article

Selections from
Simmels Writings for
the Journal Jugend

Theory, Culture & Society

29(7/8) 263278
! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412457222
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Georg Simmel

Abstract
Originally published in the avant-garde Jugendstil (art nouveau) journal Jugend (Youth)
between 1901 and 1902, this selection of six of Simmels short experimental pieces
illustrates themes of this special section while also showing him playing with unconventional genres of philosophical and sociological writing. The comical sketch
Beyond Beauty anticipates issues Simmel treats more systematically in his essays
on the philosophy of art; the poem Only a Bridge is concerned with themes of social
separation and psychic connection discussed in his sociological treatises; and four
pieces collectively titled Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis present stories or anecdotes in the form of satirical commentaries: Money Alone Doesnt Bring
Happiness, a conversation about the psychology of money; The Maker of Lies
and Relativity, two Faustian fables on the power of truth and knowledge; and La
Duse, a lyrical appreciation of the famous Italian actress reflecting on how the souls
movements are expressed through bodily gestures. As in Simmels later writings,
these allegorical fragments attempt to recover ideal or even absolute values from
the fleeting forms and fugitive experiences of modern life.
Keywords
aesthetics, autonomy, fragmentation, Jugendstil, thought-experiment

Translators note: These selections were originally published in

various issues of the journal Jugend between April 1901 and June
1902; also in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17 (2005: 353356,
404406, 409411, 423424).
From 1897 to 1907, Georg Simmel published a remarkable variety of serious,
satirical, and humorous pieces for the journal Jugend (Youth), including poems,
short stories, fables, fairy tales, anecdotes, aphorisms, and a series of brief
Corresponding author:
Thomas Kemple, University of British Columbia, 6303 N.W. Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1,
Canada
Email: kemple@interchange.ubc.ca
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
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epigrammatic sketches which he called Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis

(Snapshots under the aspect of eternity). Dubbed an Illustrated Munich
Weekly for Art and Life, this avant-garde journal was a major venue for literary
writers, graphic artists, musicians, and unconventional intellectuals connected
with the Jugendstil movement, whom Simmel hoped would lead a cultural revival (see Ramstedt, 1991). The pieces translated here have been selected with a
view to how they illustrate or complicate themes discussed in this special section,
such as the tension between money and modernity (Dodd); the conict between
cultural fragmentation and individual autonomy (Levine, Fitzi, Darmon and
Frade, Lee and Silver); or the chasm between knowledge and ignorance
(Button, Padoksik, Pyyhtinen, and Barbour). At the same time, these anonymous writings (most are signed simply S. or G.S.) exemplify how Simmels
unconventional style of sociological and philosophical writing is performed
through genres which stand in stark contrast to the scholarly essay, the university lecture, or the scientic monograph. The drawings that originally accompanied these pieces are fairly typical of the designs and decorations that
distinguished the journal throughout its history from 1896 to 1940.
Beyond Beauty [Jenseits der Schonheit] (translated here with Austin
Harrington), for example, proceeds in a comic and ironic voice that proclaims
a kind of anti-aesthetic of ugliness as a more realistic value, norm and measure
in an age of critical contrariness and cultural fragmentation. Dierent registers
of voice here complement the arguments that Simmel will later put forward in
his essays on the philosophy of art, and that he had presented the previous
year in his programmatic Sociological Aesthetics (Simmel, 1968: 6880).
Likewise, Only a Bridge [Nur eine Brucke], one of four free-verse poems
Simmel published in the journal, introduces the leitmotif of separation and
connection between things and people which he later examined more systematically in his discussion of the dyad in Chapter 2 of his 1908 book
Sociology (2009: 7899), and from metaphorical and material perspectives in
his masterful 1909 essay Bridge and Door (Simmel, 1997: 170177). Here the
gure of the bridge articulates the tragic pathos of unrequited longing and selfeacing fantasy, in addition to expressing a bond of intimacy and anonymity,
and a personal relation characterized by both social distance and spatial
proximity.
The four Snapshots which follow, taken from the 25 which Simmel
published in eight instalments in the journal, present everyday experiences or
perform thought-experiments regarding tensions that dene relationships
between oneself and others in the modern world. In Money Alone Doesnt
Bring Happiness [Geld allein macht nicht glucklich], which extends themes
Simmel had reected on in the chapter on Individual Freedom in his 1900
book on The Philosophy of Money (1978: 283354), a narrator reports on a
snippet of an after-dinner conversation concerning the dierence between
owning or having something physically versus simply beholding it intellectually
and aesthetically. The Maker of Lies [Der Lugenmacher] illustrates a point
made by Simmel in an 1899 essay, On the Psychology and Sociology of
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Figure 1. Image accompanying Beyond Beauty, by Christian Wild (Munich), in Jugend, 10

April 1897, Nr. 15, p. 235. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.

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the Lie (1992), and later discusses in his chapter on secrets in Sociology
(2009: 311314), here in the form of a Faustian fable illustrating the aporia
between lying to others and deceiving oneself (see the discussion by
Barbour in this issue). Relativity [Relativitat], which combines the conceit of
a conversation overheard with the ction of the diabolic magician who grants
someones wish, makes a sociological and moral point about the fateful gap
between ones own presumed intelligence and the stupidity of others, here illustrating a theme Simmel will take up in his 1910 essay on The Problem of Fate
(2007). Finally, Simmel oers his lyrical appreciation of the Italian actress
Eleanora Duse (18581924), famous for her naturalistic style of acting (she
wore little or no make-up, for example), in the course of meditating philosophically on the conictual process that takes place between the ow of the souls
movements and their materialization in the gestures of the body, a theme he
expands on in his 1912 essay The Dramatic Actor and Reality (in Simmel,
1968: 9197).
In each of these fragments, Simmel seems to want to place the fugitive insights
and eeting impressions of the present under the aspect of the eternal ideals of a
time-honored wisdom, but in a way which revises (or even satirizes) Spinozas
faith in the divine light of reason by acknowledging the contingent character of
truth, beauty and goodness:
Whatever the mind understands under a species of eternity [sub species
aeternitatis], it understands not from the fact that it conceives the bodys
present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the bodys
essence under a species of eternity. (Spinoza, 1994 [1677], Book V,
Proposition 29, p. 174)
These strange poems, curious anecdotes, playful snapshots and allegorical
stills of everyday social and modern cultural life can thus be viewed as literary
experiments which attempt to recover an ideal value or even absolute perspective
from the supercial appearance and often chaotic experience of the here
and now.

Thomas M. Kemple

Beyond Beauty (10 April 1897)

These days the only people who have it easy are those who make everything dicult. Admittedly, theres no art in striving and toiling away at
things, but whoever wants to make light of everything will nd things
terribly burdensome. A while back it was probably easy to be intellectually dazzling and to nd attentive ears. For until a few centuries ago
our species had accumulated so many ideas and experiences, so many
convictions and valuations, that all one needed to do to become very
famous or to be called witty as often as one could want was to assert the
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opposite of everything which had been left unquestioned, only without

having a lot of options in doing so. But then the great battles began.
Armed only with a big minus sign, one could negate everything that
everyone else armed, and arm what everyone else negated. The sun
doesnt circle the earth, as everyone can see; rather, the sun stands perfectly still and the earth strolls around it. The civilization that took thousands of years to evolve is not the summit of humanity; rather, Nature,
which we conquered long ago, is what is true and we must return to it
instead of progressing forwards. Life is not worth living, but it seems
most members of our race do not commit suicide; rather, it is a great
bankrupting machine in which everything that happens is only an optical
illusion. Morality is not what is good and reasonable; rather, the immoralists are the best men. And so it went merrily on. From the tremendous
stock of assertions to which men attached themselves all one had do to be
a made man was to pick one and assert that such was not the case but
rather precisely the opposite. But now this golden age is past, the reserves
have been exhausted, and nothings left about which the opposite hasnt
been asserted. It is indeed hard for us to have spirit.
Thus reected our friend, heavy of heart. He would have all too gladly
turned up one last little certainty in some corner or other, any kind of
crystal-clear truth that went its ways sure of itself as sure can be. He
would gladly pounce on it from behind like an assassin, turning it on its
head and proclaiming: this is how things really are. But that the truth is
not what is true had been said by someone long ago; and that the good is
in fact bad, this too had already been asserted. But wait a moment: isnt
there one ideal that hasnt yet been dethroned, a value that has not yet
been de-valued or trans-valued? Beauty?! Sure, there are men who only
fall in love with ugly women out of some secret pride in having a yearning
and a pleasure which others cannot so readily share or easily comprehend. And sure, there are painters who only paint ugliness because a deep
doubt in things and their intelligibility has gripped them, so that now
only a discordant sorrow and the painful violation of brutal ugliness can
really convince them of reality, just as frayed nerves eventually only
recover their voluptuousness through pain which alone can save them
from experiencing the most fearful isolation in a world without feeling.
But how baroque are the convoluted paths by which even the ugly creeps
back into the beautiful. That the beautiful should have no value and no
worth as such has not yet been said by anyone. No one has yet dared to
tear down the ag that protects this arsenal, as colourful and bewildering
as this unconquered banner may be.
So then, what now? What if one of the greatest errors and will-o-thewisps of humanity consisted in believing that bliss, redemption, and the
reward of existence might be found in beauty? A siren-song that beckons
us to some ever longed-for fullment, to which we lend our ears so that
every other tone and allure of life can only sound at and false beside it?
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For thousands of years each generation handed on to the next a belief in

the ideal of beauty which each cultivated in its own way and rooted in
itself ever more rmly until nally a tremendous thirst for beauty,
the inheritance of such a long development, becomes innate to the
soul, the gift that the species places in everyones cradle as the
Danaans stood to the Pathians. For this indeed is why life is so dark
and stale, so poor and distorted, because above it stands the ideal of
beauty, radiant and awless, a sea of glory pouring out wherever the soul
exists and wherever ordinary things do not. For how can things stay
bright and clear when measured by the light of our dreams of beauty?
Alas, beauty brooks no compromise; it is the merciless scale on which our
life is weighed daily and found to be too light. We have made our peace
with half-truths and resigned ourselves to the fact that all knowledge is a
patchwork, and that the ultimate truth of things can only be reected in a
divine eye. Indeed, we are quietly consoled that this non-knowledge is the
great blessing of humanity and that nothing proves the wisdom of foresight better than our lack of wisdom. As for an imperfect morality, we
have long made ourselves at home in it and no longer seriously think of
moving out, not just because a half-morality is so often equivalent to
a whole happiness but because an innitely higher value and greater relevance in life can be found more in the ceaseless struggle of the best with
the worst in us than in the cool chastity and constancy of saintliness. All
this, however, never lets go of the ideal of beauty, which harbours within
itself the secret promise of full attainability and thereby demands of reality an exchange which is never honoured. Unlike truth and morality, it
does vouchsafe that mild consolation that its ultimate fullment and fullness would be too much for humanity to bear, like a Semele in the arms of
Zeus; rather, we could enjoy it entirely and without remainder so long as
our senses are developed enough and our mind deep enough. The
demands that beauty makes upon things are thus absolute, and beauty
thereby destroys the quiet suciency of partial satisfactions. And is there
not also something real about this, as though something minuscule were
missing for the things themselves to be beautiful, just one more wisp or
shimmer of light, one more redemptive word, one last climax and culmination? Is it not as though beauty stood closely behind things, ready simply
to reach out for them and inviting us to do the same? Thus it is that the
torment of privation becomes ever more intense through the deceptive
proximity and enticement of happiness.
A devil must have invented beauty in order to make life a torment for
us. Oh, how tender, stable, and lovely is the ideal of ugliness! With what
inner satisfaction would our eye register the world, with what undisturbed
harmonies would this world gratify our ear, if we were to measure it by
the desire for complete ugliness instead of complete beauty! Then between
ideal and reality there would no longer be any dissonance to hurt our ears,
and we would no longer read any unfullled expectations between the
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lines of the world; instead, we would see the natural development of men
and things quietly and steadily reaching their ideal, certain that what is
not managed today will be reached tomorrow. A calm, sated peace will
greet a world which ceases to treasure appearances by the erroneous
dream of beauty and instead by the clear absoluteness of the ugly, no
longer asking with perverse intransigence what appearances cannot grant
and instead reverting to their unequivocal meaning. Only when we no
longer make ourselves suer under the insolent demand for the beauty of
things can we construct our ideals in such a way that reality will nd a
place for and our inner pilgrimages validate the all-holiest of the ugly
and the all-ugliest of the holy. Then the world will really belong to us and
we will enjoy the spectacle of a reality which no longer lags behind the
ideal, and sometimes even that of an ideal which trails reality.
Only when the ideal of ugliness has become the norm and measure of
all things for us, only when superciality has taken the place of depth,
barrenness that of plenitude, dissonance that of consonance only then
will the irreconcilable tragedy of the demand for beauty make way for the
organic adaptation of souls to their world, and give rise to joy on this
earth and pleasure for human beings.
Deeply moved by the solemnity of this new gospel, and from an irrepressible desire to be its rst blood-witness, our friend got up and took a
look in the mirror.

Only a Bridge (13 March 1901)

Nur eine Brucke
Im Herbst, auf odem Wege, regengrau verhangen,
Sah ich zuerst Dich gehen, still in eigener Schonheit.
Dein Fuss verlangte wohl nach grunen Blumenwiesen
Und Dein Gewand nach leicht betwegter Winde Spiel
Und auch Dein Ohr nach still durchsonnentem Sommerschweigen.
Wie eine grosse Frage nach der Dinge Schonheit
Gingst Du durch eine Welt, die keine Antwort gab
Und wie ins Leere el Dein Schritt und Blick und Athem.
Es war ein Abgrund zwischen allem Sein und Dir,
So bruckenlos, wie Ja und Nein es von einander sind,
Dass Sehnsucht selbst nicht weiss, wohin die Arme strecken.
Und wie Du mich erblicktest, der ich traurig ging
Und liebend und Dich ein Errothen uberkam,
Der warmen Welle, die Dir auf zum Herzen stieg,
Abglanz und Scham ich wusstes, ach, so gut und tief:
Es war doch nur, dass plotzlich Dich die Honung regte,
Ich sei vielleicht die Brucke nur die Brucke.
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Figure 2. Image accompanying Money Alone Doesnt Bring Happiness, by Leo Putz, in
Jugend, 24 April 1901, Nr. 19, p. 300. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.

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In autumn on a desolate path, grey and overcast with rain,

I rst saw you amble, reposing within your own beauty.
Your foot seemed to desire the owery green meadows,
And your robe the softly whirling play of the wind,
And also your ear the sunlit stillness of summers silence.
Like a great question concerning the beauty of things
You walked through a world which gave no answer,
As if your step and gaze and breath were falling into emptiness.
There was an abyss between all existence and you,
So bridgeless, just as Yes and No are from one another,
That longing itself does not know what the arms are reaching for.
And as you glanced at me, I who walked sadly by
And loving and the blush that came over you,
A reection of and embarrassment from the warm wave
that rose up in your heart, alas, I knew it so well and profoundly:
It was just a hope, which suddenly stirred you,
That perhaps I might be the bridge only the bridge.

Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis

Money Alone Doesnt Bring Happiness (24 April 1901)
I heard a conversation among some well-fed people after a sumptuous
meal about the blessings and curses of money. With auent expansiveness and condence, one group stressed that money is the great cultural
vehicle of far-ung pleasures, since everything may be exchanged for
everything else, and because it gives the individual an independence in
which the nest fruits of solitude can grow. Above all, they emphasized
that wealth is transferable, and that its proper calling is to do good and
relieve distress. They said this with complete objectivity, carried away as
they were by a hallowed cultural seriousness and motivated by moral
concerns. Nevertheless, it was noticeable that out of politeness the others
were suppressing a certain feeling of superiority, since they believed
wealth to be a curse. Although it is supposed to be our slave, money
enslaves us. Property inescapably makes us greedy to own more and
more things and inextricably entangles us in a thousand things that are
alien to the salvation of the soul. The rst group felt that this second
group might be blamed for lacking a certain idealism, but that this lack
was nevertheless compensated for by the wisdom of their standpoint, and
by the rather painful yet unavoidable knowledge (stemming from worldly
experience) that idealism is ultimately not the only force in life.
This conversation rst showed me how the miracle of banality works,
namely, that you only have to elevate opposing positions to the point of
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Figure 3. Image accompanying The Maker of Lies and La Duse, by G.E. Dodge, in
Jugend, 8 May 1901, Nr. 21, p. 326. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.

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absolute banality in order to defend them with equal force. From these
heights the requirements of the intellectual low-road vanish, which
demand that you must be wrong when your opponent is right.
A particularly earnest man seemed to feel compelled to express how
these divergent opinions might conceivably be unied and reconciled.
As he emphatically summed things up, Money alone doesnt bring happiness; you also have to have it!
The comment was not just profound, but also correct. To be sure,
money and everything it stands for may be nothing to us, unless we
have it. The stars and other heavenly bodies remain in the sky even
when we have no need or desire to possess them. Likewise, regarding
the beauty of women, men are divided over whether one must have
them in order to be happy, or whether one may be blessed without possessing them, simply by looking and knowing that this unspeakable
beauty is real and experienced as such. As with human beings, things
may also display their rank in much the same way, insofar as they make
us happy both when we have them and when we dont. Herein lies the
eternal aspect of things. Through ownership, sooner or later we destroy
what we must thoroughly possess in order to enjoy: a roast, wine, and
anything we relish with the senses. But intellectual things, and anything
whose value consists in its form, lie beyond any question of having or
not-having. A landscape by [the symbolist painter Arnold] Bocklin jeers
at anyone who shuts it away as his own property and only brings happiness to someone who knows how to enjoy it without having it. Here is
the most immoveable dividing line between plebeian and aristocratic
values: we may have the former without their making us happy, and
the latter may make us happy even though we do not have them

The Maker of Lies (8 May 1901)

There once was a man to whom a magician gave the power to make
people lie as often as he wished. Just when the truth seemed to pass
automatically from peoples lips, the man would constrain them by his
will in such a way that their thoughts would be reversed and tainted at
the source. Thus the most supercial, confounding lie would send the
word somewhere else than where their thoughts were heading. Such a lie
hardly belongs to the person himself, but only arises at the border
between the person and the external world. A proper lie occurs when
the word corresponds to the thought, and yet the thought itself contradicts the deeper sense of truth in us. Here the soul itself is inwardly
divided in the belief that it does not believe what it nevertheless knows.
With the wantonness of a torturer, the man broke people apart in this
way and left them with the shameful scar of having lied.
The man fell in love with a young woman, though he knew that she
was aloof and cold to him and would always remain so. Between them
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Figure 4. Image accompanying Relativity, by H. Nilse, in Jugend, 25 June 902, Nr. 27,
p. 446. Courtesy of Universitaets-Bibliotek Heidelberg.

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lay an abyss that love could have gladly leapt over, and yet there was no
bridge. She was not indierent to him in a way that could be overcome or
through lack of feeling, but rather with an indierence which is entirely
positive, a kind of third term beyond love and hate which cannot become
either. He knew she would simply refuse him, but he could not resist the
temptation to use his power: he compelled her to say yes to him, not in
spite of the fact that it was a lie but precisely because it was so. And she
had to say so not just with her lips but also with some part of her self
which lay close to her heart, with some layer of her soul which she could
not deny and yet would constantly be betrayed with lies. Soon he could
sense that the woman next to him led an unbearable life of unhappiness
buried in unhappiness, since she was incapable of mustering any heartfelt
hatred but only a mendacious feeling for him. And thus he deceived
himself in the way that all people do who are in a conning relationship,
and who believe that a person can be happy at the expense of another.
Since they were both so miserable together, it occurred to him that he
could try his power for making lies on himself by making himself believe
they were both happy. It worked quite well, and now everything was as
ne as could be or at least almost so. Only now did he realize how well
intentioned the magician had been toward him.

Relativity (25 June 1902)

Fate occasionally fulls our desires, but only in its own way.
(Goethe, Elective Anities)
I overheard a conversation in which someone said: The happiest person
is the stupid one who nevertheless believes himself to be intelligent. But
he must not stray from this belief, no matter whether fate may bring
good or evil. Then he, and he alone, will gain the happiness which comes
from being both stupid and intelligent.
Quite right, said the other. The most intelligent person does not
remain that way for very long.
The rst man grimaced a bit, since he felt that the second man thought
himself intelligent by scorning intelligence. You know, said the rst
man, I heard a good story about someone whom the devil had agreed
to make the most intelligent man ever. But the devil knew his business.
When that ambitious man awoke the next morning, the household, which
his intelligent servants had previously taken care of with serene competence, was instantly turned topsy turvy. His son came home from school
crying, having understood nothing and done everything wrong. The teacher had punished him severely, thinking it was simply due to laziness,
for no one who understood everything the day before could suddenly
have become so stupid. That evening, when the man mentioned the progress of his work to his wife, with whom he shared his whole intellectual
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life, he noticed an uncomfortable strain in her face, followed by a kind of

languishing, painful, and resigned weariness. It was evident that she
hadnt understood him, although he knew quite well that he hadnt
said anything more dicult than either had said to one another a thousand times before. Only now an intellectual abyss had opened up between
them, which left him with the horrifying feeling that some values other
than intellectual ones might be buried deep in their life together. For its
true that the most profound union of souls may grow between two people
when they reach a total understanding of the mind. But when such an
intellectual union becomes second nature, then it cannot be torn out of
the whole without bleeding to death. Now the man was no more able to
come to an understanding with those close to him than he could with
those who were distant. He had always prided himself on getting along
with both his clever superiors and his clever inferiors, but now he could
no longer nd any bridge with any of them. Where the former mistrusted
him, the latter trusted him so blindly that he was at a loss. And with
everyone he had the uncanny feeling that he himself hadnt changed at
all, and that there was no consolation in gaining a deeper wisdom and no
happiness in having a broader intellectual comprehension of things! Then
one day it became clear to him that the devil had kept his word: admittedly he had made the man the most intelligent person, not by making
him more intelligent, but only by making everyone else more stupid!
Very good, the other man said very earnestly. Now I understand
why certain parties are against elementary schools and the enlightenment
of the masses. Its not that other men are so stupid, heaven forbid! Its
that they want to be the only intelligent ones, which is an entirely legitimate wish. And since stupidity and intelligence are relative, as your little
story has taught me, it makes no dierence whatsoever whether they raise
themselves up or push others down. To call them lawyers of stupidity is
therefore a slanderous insult. On the contrary, the whole process simply
pays homage to the principle of intelligence.

La Duse (8 May 1901)

Among the many trials which take place between soul and body, but
from which appeal is made directly to a higher authority after each decision, is the one which is pending in an aesthetic court of justice. The
essence of the soul is movement. If a Greek philosopher denies that we
could step into the same current while another says that this could not be
done even once, because the stream becomes a dierent one while we are
stepping into it in any case this stream is none other than our soul.
Thus it seems that the body could only be the correct expression of its
beauty in movement, in the blink of an eye, in the ow of speech, in the
slippery beauty of a gesture. But we can imagine yet another requirement: each moment for itself, detached from what came before and from
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what comes after rather than as a point of transition of an uninterrupted

occurrence, requires its own peculiar beauty. What has meaningful
beauty in the context of a owing movement often loses it when congealed into a lasting structure that is an end in itself. Also, the signicance contained in the image does not withstand being exchanged and
dissolved in the rapid ow of action. The beauty of appearance, as in a
statue, follows other ideals than the charm of the gesture. And yet both
are demanded by every moment in which we present ourselves: as a
moment of action each moment must adorn itself with the whole meaning and depth of the soul, and likewise grant mere gural beauty to
simple perception.
For anyone who has not yet suered this conict between both kinds
of legislation, the eye lls in the aesthetic inadequacy (out of which,
nevertheless, the deepest soulfulness speaks), and the inner emptiness
of appearance (as if aghast at a statue [to borrow a phrase from
Schiller]), with the euphony of its lines. Yet I once saw La Duse on an
evening when she was tired or indisposed, thereby granting us more freedom to marvel at her art, whereas on other occasions she conveys to us a
passionate excitement that obscures purely artistic pleasure. And so the
unique quality of this artist became clear to me: that she is inconceivably
beautiful in each moment that we separate from her movement, which we
can hold onto as a lasting image indierent to any particular soul; and
likewise that in the sum of all these moments, in her movement, she is the
most perfect, complete expression of the soul and its ows. Insofar as the
spiritual meaning of life turns into the vivid beauty of the image, we are
left wondering whether what we call beauty may be the unity of those
conicting powers. What then do soul and body have in common otherwise? Only beauty can turn one or the other into a part; it is the point at
which they meet, elevated above themselves. Philosophers might have
also have come up with that; but what the entire human being comprehends, and not just the philosopher, was rst taught to me by La Duse.
Selected and translated by Thomas M. Kemple

References
Ramstedt, O. (1991) On Simmels Aesthetics, Theory, Culture & Society 8(3):
125144.
Simmel, G. (1968) The Conflict of Modern Culture and Other Essays, ed. and
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London: Routledge.
Simmel, G. (1992) On the Psychology and Sociology of the Lie, pp. 406416 in
Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1997) Simmel on Culture, eds D. Frisby and M. Featherstone.
London: SAGE.
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Simmel, G. (2005) Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17, eds. K.C. Kohnke, C.
Jaenichen and E. Schullerus. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (2007) The Problem of Fate (trans. U. Teucher and T.M. Kemple),
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Simmel, G. (2009) Sociology, trans. A.J. Blasi et al. Leiden: Brill.
Spinoza, B. (1994 [1677]) Ethics, trans. E. Curley. New York: Penguin Books.

Thomas Kemple teaches social and cultural theory at the University of

British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His recent work on the intersections of classical and contemporary theory has appeared in Theory,
Culture & Society (including the special section on Simmels aesthetics,
ethics, and metaphysics in 2007), Journal of Classical Sociology,
Sociologie et societes, and Max Weber Studies.

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF ILLINOIS URBANA on March 10, 2015