Thinking at the Boundaries: Georg Simmel’s Phenomenology of Disciplinarity

Abstract

When Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money was published in 1900, intellectual-institutional divisions among the disciplines were still relatively fluid; it is a liminal work, at once philosophy and social science. That it has been canonized as a work of sociology, its title notwithstanding, exemplifies a disciplining of Simmel’s legacy that obscures his wider theoretical significance. This essay examines the phenomenology of disciplinarity that opens his Philosophy of Money and introduces a modernist philosophical approach centered on money as “relativity itself that has become substance.” Simmel’s critique of the disciplinary ordering of knowledge practices enables a performative demonstration of the value of his perspectivist relativism as a praxis of critical self-reflection on the potentialities and limits of established ways of knowing. In his Philosophy of Money, dialectical thought appears as an open process that embraces the multiplicity and flux of experiential reality and, far from seeking ultimate resolution, intensifies awareness of difference by encompassing the complexities and contradictions of lived experience. Simmel’s work thereby provides a model of enduring methodological significance for diverse efforts to overcome the limitations and constraints disciplinary boundaries exercise in modern intellectual life.