The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of Simmel’s aesthetic perspective on modernity and metropolis. As announced in his programmatic essay “Sociological Aesthetics” (1896) and elaborated in his major 1900 work (The Philosophy of Money), Simmel seeks modernity in a third space, that is, in the intermediate realm between philosophy and empirical (sociological) science, so his approach to modernity can—as he tentatively did in 1896—be called “sociological aesthetics,” that is, a hybrid viewpoint on the society and culture of his time. Two closely related characteristics of Simmel’s further work are based on this method: he was the first sociologist who was able to start with things—a handle, frame, ruins, jewelry, a bridge, door, chair, and so on—so that he was praised as the inventor of the “sociology of things”, and in the 1890s he found the type of written medium that seemed appropriate for his thinking: the philosophical essay. Herein we consider some significant aspects of Simmel’s sociological aesthetics in order to understand his conception of modernity. First, we try to reconstruct what the aesthetic character of the modern is and how Simmel arrived at it through his adherence to artistic and social movements (primarily naturalism). According to Simmel, naturalism and individualism are the two only seemingly contradictory essential tendencies of modern life, which are expressed in a multiplicity of artistic and social manifestations. From the former flows the importance of modern natural science and socialism with its aspirations for equality. The latter, on the other hand, begets psychologism, the relativism of values, and extreme individualism. Secondly, we analyze his conception of the modern way of life, characterized by the separation between function and content, between the vital process and its conceptual outcome, of which fashion and other playful forms of association are major examples. Finally, we analyze his essays on historic Italian cities. Three essays on Rome, Florence, and Venice summarize with a certain conceptual progression the path of Simmel’s sociological aesthetics from nostalgia as Sehnsucht toward the acceptance of the tragedy of culture, that is, the impossibility of finding for man the lost unity of nature and spirit, form and life.