Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form ELIZA BETH S . GOODST EIN Emory Univ ersity Although recognized as a canonical «founding father» of sociology, Georg Simmel has an unusual status. In contrast to Durkheim or Weber or even Marx, he is remembered not as the source of fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks but rather as an «unsystematic thinker» - albeit a scintillating speaker and writer who produced work that continues to «stimulate the sociological imagination.» 1 The case of theoretical reflection on the third and thirdness is symptomatic for the resulting selective mode of reception, in which the practice of appropriating Simmel’s work by inspiring bits and pieces further perpetuates the prevailing underestimation of the philosophical sophistication and enduring theoretical significance of his oeuvre. Thus, to be sure, Simmel’s 1908 Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung has become a locus classicus in the literature on the third and thirdness. 2 But usually, in line with dominant sociological practice, only selected passages (in this case, from the penultimate chapter concerning the diverse roles third parties play in the dynamics of human social life) are actually cited. While a few readers have attempted to build more encompassing theories of the third and thirdness on the basis of Simmel’s distinctive understanding of the social itself as constituted in and through Wechselwirkung (reciprocal interaction or causation), they too have failed to read the Soziologie in ways that meet the challenge his thinking poses. 3 In fact, this topos affords a valuable opportunity to deepen reflection on Simmel’s writing and its place in relation to the contemporary disciplinary imaginary as a whole. For the problem of the third and thirdness is not simply a theme within his Soziologie; it is central to what Simmel identified as his relativist metaphysics. His friend Margarete Susman drew attention to the significance of the category in her 1959 book Die geistige Gestalt Georg Simmels: «With his disinclination for the system, which was grounded for him in the essence of thinking itself, Simmel never represented the three and the third in systematic form. Nonetheless it permeates his philosophy» (4). 4 Thirdness is, then, a figure 5 for that purportedly unsystematic form that is essential to Simmel’s thought as such - to be more precise, for an occupation with form that is not Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 239 formalist but in the broadest sense aesthetic, in which the legacy of dialectical philosophy is carried into a new sort of theoretical enterprise, one centered on life and existence rather than reason and understanding. Simmel’s approach to thinking the social is remarkably consonant with a still-contemporary wish to overcome the dichotomies of the tradition and in particular (as he put it later in a remark to which we shall return) «the spell of the subject» through a new approach to thinking itself - a modernization, as it were, of philosophy. Taking Susman’s claim as its point of departure, this essay returns to the much-read excursus from the Soziologie known in English as «The Stranger» to resituate Simmel’s sociological efforts in the horizon of this broader striving for a properly modern mode of philosophizing - a search, again in Susman’s words, for a «third, not yet discovered but discoverable spiritual and life-form [Geistes- und Lebensform]» (5). In such a new form of (social) life, one might speculate, reconciliation need not entail sublation since a thoroughgoing metaphysical relativism would have supplanted the absolutes of the inherited metaphysics of the subject, enabling multiplicity and difference, immanence and transcendence, to coexist. Like what we have come to call cultural or more generally critical theory, then, Simmel’s thinking occupies a (third) space between sociology and philosophy and is oriented both practically and theoretically toward an (uncertain) future. As Susman’s remarks underline, thirdness is not simply a sociological topos but a problem internal to Simmel’s approach to philosophizing. Like his avowal of relativism, the anomalous, interor transdisciplinary position he occupies is indicative or symptomatic of his prescience as a thinker. Simmel recognized that the problem of figuration becomes a very concrete, lived issue in a world where appeal to ultimate foundations is foreclosed, as it were, from within. The thirdness proper to Simmel’s own historical and theoretical situation between the modern knowledge formations taking shape during his lifetime finds expression in the interactive relation between the dimensions of conceptual and disciplinary innovativeness in his thinking. Thus in his account, «strangeness» cannot be understood in sociological terms alone, for it registers the insurmountable disunity and internal difference that shapes the (individual and social) being of the (modern) subject. That Simmel himself came to be remembered as a stranger is thus well worth pondering; as I will show, this image leads to the heart of the question of his place in the contemporary disciplinary imaginary. The case of Simmel foregrounds how fundamental questions about what used to be called the history of ideas remain for understanding the disciplin- 240 Elizabeth S. Goodstein ary organization of our own intellectual world. A lavishly published author during his lifetime, he wrote not only sociological treatises and philosophical monographs, but also meditations on canonical and contemporary artists and writers, scores of essays on cultural phenomena from fashion to cities to femininity - and criticism, poetry, and fiction to boot. The sheer complexity of Simmel’s writing makes demands on the reader that call for more thorough conceptualization, while the diversity and range of his oeuvre (or to put it less generously, his lack of clearly defined disciplinary identity) pose challenges of another order. Despite his prolific scholarly output, overflowing lecture halls, and international reputation, 6 the thinker George Santayana dubbed «the brightest man in Europe» (qtd. in Simmel, The View of Life x) did not receive a regular professorship until 1914, only a few years before his untimely death in 1918. Simmel remained a rather marginal figure institutionally during his lifetime, and his marginalization as a thinker endures today despite his nominal canonization in sociology. The vast majority of his writings continue to go unread, particularly in the Anglophone world. All of Simmel’s future readers will remain indebted to those who have labored for over twenty years on the edition of his complete works, the Gesamtausgabe, the twenty-fourth and final volume of which is due out this year. By making the breadth and depth of Simmel’s accomplishments visible, this edition has secured Simmel’s place in the canon of what the late Klaus-Christian Köhnke, the author of the irreplaceable Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen and the editor of a number of volumes in the Gesamtausgabe, called «the classical period of the human and social sciences» (Köhnke 23; emphases in original). But emphasizing canonicity has its perils. To give Simmel his due, we must also grasp the significance of the institutional marginality and disciplinary liminality that shaped both his career and his posthumous reception. 7 In doing so, we must take very seriously Simmel’s own insistence that despite his reputation abroad, he was not, in fact, a sociologist - that, as he wrote to Celéstin Bouglé in 1899, «I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.» 8 To be sure, Simmel never ceased to reflect on social life or to attempt to promulgate his vision of what the discipline of sociology ought to be. Still, for all his professional tribulations, he was not a heroic voice in the wilderness fighting for a fledgling discipline against its traditionalist enemies but an internationally regarded philosopher and bestselling author who enjoyed very considerable public and professional success. Despite his lack of a chair, Simmel regularly drew hundreds to lecture courses held in the largest halls Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 241 of the Berlin University. He was called to Strasbourg in 1914 with the understanding that his prominence would help build up the university by raising the profile of German philosophy there. Forgetting (or dismissing) the fact that this canonical «sociologist» understood himself and was understood by his contemporaries first and foremost as a philosopher has helped anchor a narrative about the emergence of the sociological discipline that remains important for its continued cohesion. Simmel saw philosophical questions as imbricated with sociological and anthropological issues because he regarded knowledge as constituted in and through categories and modes of perception and valuation that were themselves generated in a sociocultural process. Severing his sociological from his philosophical contributions makes it possible to claim him as founding father while simultaneously distancing the newer discipline from the very questions that Simmel saw as central. This inaccurate or at best misleadingly narrow representation of Simmel’s life and work is part and parcel of an account of sociology’s origins that functions to establish and reinforce disciplinary boundaries. Even today, despite the growing chorus of voices drawing attention to his wide-ranging contributions to cultural and social theory broadly conceived, the institutional hold of this canonizing narrative is barely diminished. In part because the same anachronistic assumptions about intellectual boundaries also inflect the self-understanding and disciplinary memory (as it were) of philosophy, Simmel has been largely disregarded and forgotten in his own discipline, as well. I contend we should negotiate the challenge of thinking Simmel’s distinctive historical and theoretical position - his thirdness - by reading him as modernist philosopher, foregrounding his innovative (and influential) style of thought and drawing attention to the affinity between his methods of interpretation and broader modernist cultural developments. Approaching his texts as modernist in this writerly sense decenters received accounts of Simmel’s significance as a thinker in fin-de-siècle Europe. By emphasizing his marginal, or better, liminal, disciplinary and institutional position, my approach reframes the question of how to situate Simmel in relation to the disciplinary traditions that have shaped his reception. Reading Simmel as a modernist also casts new light on the standard accounts of the history of social and cultural theory, thereby helping us to ask anew what constitutes rigorous inquiry into the constitutive structures of collective existence in the modern world. Simmel is, then, both a theorist and an exemplar of thirdness: a figure between disciplines, or, more precisely, knowledge regimes. In a gesture that at once honors and disowns him, his erstwhile acolyte Georg Lukács famously 242 Elizabeth S. Goodstein declared Simmel to have been «without a doubt the most important and interesting transitional phenomenon in all of modern philosophy.» As such, Lukács (writing in the German-language Hungarian paper Pester Lloyd the week after Simmel’s death) continued, «he was so exceedingly attractive for all those genuinely philosophically talented in the younger generation of thinkers (those who are more than merely clever or industrious specialists in philosophical sub-disciplines) that there is practically no one among them who did not succumb to the enchantment of his thinking for a briefer or longer time» (qtd. in Gassen and Landmann 71). Yet unlike his philosophical contemporaries «Cohen, Rickert, or Husserl,» Lukács underlined, Simmel «had no disciples [Schüler].» In fact, Simmel did not aspire to establish a school at all. As he put it himself: «I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and it is a good thing). My legacy is like one in cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature: whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.» 9 In no small part as a consequence of that anonymization, the breadth and depth of Simmel’s impact on twentieth-century thought has been obscured (notably in the case of Lukács himself! ). During Simmel’s lifetime, modern sociology was still in the process of taking form and was, institutionally speaking (particularly, but not exclusively, in Germany), not yet entirely differentiated from philosophy. As time went on and he came to be remembered as a founding father of sociology, the specifically philosophical nature of Simmel’s theoretical contributions tended to be, quite literally, written out of the story. 10 As we shall see, when, as a consequence, his concept of form is conflated with social structure or his crucial figure for thirdness, the stranger, is construed as a social «role,» Simmel is seriously misunderstood. In an underappreciated essay from 1959 titled «Formal Sociology,» Friedrich Tenbruck argued that Simmel should be credited with initiating a new way of thinking, or more precisely, of disclosing a new way of seeing defined by attention to «forms of association,» Formen der Vergesellschaftung. 11 According to Tenbruck, «Simmel was the first, or among the first, to uncover for sociology a specific ‹layer› of reality, its ‹social dimension›» and therewith a «world of new phenomena» (qtd. in Wolff 65). 12 For him, Simmel’s basic, groundbreaking insight was that «objects and phenomena reveal their full significance only when questioned in respect to their social dimension, a dimension which possesses an order of its own.» «The originality and novelty of this idea,» Tenbruck continues, «have been obscured for us by subsequent advances in sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Today, Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 243 we take Simmel’s basic perspective for granted, no matter how much his particular insights may still impress us. We are used to exploring the social presuppositions and implications of phenomena» (qtd. in Wolff 66). In other words, understood as a way of getting at a freshly disclosed aspect of reality, Simmel’s conception of social form helps clarify what was at stake in the paradigm shift that gave rise to modern social science - and, more generally, to a knowledge regime in which the existence of «society» is taken for granted and «culture» has taken on meanings quite different from the traditional understanding still regnant when he was formulating these ideas. The liminal quality of Simmel’s conception of social form and formation, which he understood as part of a larger «cultural process» in which human subjectivity was also evolving, 13 became obscured when his ideas were assimilated to the discipline of sociology. In fact, by the time he published his Soziologie in 1908, the understanding of both objectivity and subjectivity disclosed by his concept of reciprocal interaction had already led Simmel beyond a sociological point of view. The philosophical implications of Wechselwirkung - that is to say, of regarding the interpretation of phenomena, both external and internal, as requiring attention to a third, transindividual perspective, the «dimension» of their sociohistorical, cultural constitution or formation - had brought about a change in Simmel’s self-understanding. On his own account, the internal dynamics of his distinctive concept of the social gave rise to the major shift in his thinking that culminated in the Philosophy of Money (1900; second, revised edition 1907), where the idea of «living reciprocal interaction» was extended into «an entirely comprehensive metaphysical principle» that then became the basis for his relativist revisioning of the «central concepts» of philosophy: «truth, value, objectivity etc.» as such (GSG 20: 304-05). Moreover, Simmel’s approach to theorizing what he sometimes called the «superindividual,» das Überindividuelle, 14 suggests that the assumption (pervasive, if mostly tacit today) that social-scientific objects and methods can be clearly distinguished from philosophical or more broadly humanistic concepts and approaches is eminently questionable. As Simmel stated explicitly in the introductory chapter to the Soziologie, the «constitution of a special science of sociology» could not resolve or eliminate the questions proper to social philosophy. 15 From a Simmelian perspective, neither discipline could lay claim to absolute authority in reflection on human social and cultural life. As we shall see in the case of the figure of «the stranger,» he regarded social forms as philosophically significant in themselves. In our terms, understanding them calls, disciplinarily speaking, for a double perspective, a way of seeing at once sociological and philosophical. 244 Elizabeth S. Goodstein Simmel’s conception of social form as inhering in philosophically significant performative interactions between human beings thus makes visible the theoretical and historical significance of his own liminality or thirdness as a thinker. The figure of Simmel - his work, but also his person - provides a crucial missing link between the preoccupations of «theory» (in the broader sense in which that term is used in the contemporary, increasingly «interdisciplinary» humanities and qualitative social sciences) and the regnant questions and problems of a hundred years ago; that is, of the philosophical and historical moment in which the modern disciplinary order was coming into being. In my reading, what is generally framed in anachronistic terms as Simmel’s disciplinary marginality is better understood as theoretical and methodological liminality. The problem of how to situate Simmel is by no means extrinsic to his thought. Throughout his life, he himself strove to locate the shifts involved in his work in larger historical and theoretical context. This liminality is intraas well as interdisciplinary. Simmel has often been labeled a Neo- Kantian, and there is no disputing the importance of Kant for his thinking. For good reason, though, he was hardly an unambivalent Kantian, as the existence of a radically different competing characterization of Simmel as a Lebensphilosoph underlines. 16 In a letter from 1908, the year he finally completed his long labors on his Soziologie, Simmel confided to one of his philosophical interlocutors that he had become embroiled again in the sort of «epistemological-metaphysical questions» that had occupied him earlier in his career, «once again with the feeling that we are just going round like squirrels on a wheel in this whole epistemology that rests on Kantian presuppositions. What a thing this man did to the world by declaring it to be a representation! When will the genius come along who frees us from the spell of the subject as Kant freed us from that of the object? And what will ‹the third› be? » (GSG 22: 666). 17 This is a lived, not an academic dilemma: the lament of a thinker pursuing philosophy not as an «expert» or «specialist» but as a human being. To pigeonhole Simmel as a Neo-Kantian is to discount the depth and significance of his epistemological crisis, to ignore his recurrent attention to materiality, embodiment, and the emotions, to historical specificity and cultural difference, to the challenges of thinking a world gripped in flux. For Simmel is by no means an epigone of Kant’s; he is, rather, one of Nietzsche’s finest and most subtly influential readers. In his modernist approach to culture, as Simmel struggles to overcome «the spell of the subject» without sacrificing epistemological self-reflexivity, the inherited resources of the philosophical tradition are transformed before our eyes. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 245 The philosophical sophistication of Simmel’s approach has been consistently misread or ignored by his sociological heirs. Thus Lewis A. Coser appeals quite directly to one of Simmel’s most often-read texts to anchor his reading of Simmel as «unsystematic» thinker. Treating the excerpt from the Soziologie concerning «der Fremde» (the foreigner or stranger) as both theoretical and biographical authority, he writes: «As in the case of ‹The Stranger,› of whom he wrote so perceptively and so movingly, his relations to the academy were a compound of nearness and remoteness» (Masters 213-14). Coser relates Simmel’s intellectual accomplishments to his marginal institutional status, linking his «nonconformist behavior» to Simmel’s originality and inventiveness as a thinker via a typological characterization of him as at once «Academic Outsider» and «Virtuoso on the Platform.» 18 Coser thereby synthesizes the basic lines of what became the dominant sociological interpretation of Simmel as a sort of free-floating intellectual avant la lettre, going so far as to assert that he developed his remarkably «acute analytic skills» (215) as a consequence of his status as internal outsider in the academy. In a single stroke, text and author become classics of a peculiarly alien type. For, according to Coser, «Simmel, the marginal man, the stranger, presented his academic peers not with a methodical, painstakingly elaborate system but with a series of often disorderly insights, testifying to amazing powers of perception» (214). It is worth noting that Coser’s divisio is dubious: a mode of writing that does not aspire to the status of a «system» might nonetheless well be something more than the trace of unrelated flashes of insight. As the remarks by Margarete Susman cited at the outset attest, further reflection on this matter leads directly to the question of the existentialtheoretical significance of Simmel’s modernist conception of form. But the point for now is simply that depicting Simmel himself as «stranger» in this way authorizes considerable hermeneutic license. As Coser, with remarkable candor, went on to describe his practices as a reader: «Despite the unsystematic and often willfully paradoxical character of Simmel’s work, it is possible to sift and order it in such a way that a consistent approach to the field of sociology emerges» (215). Coser was one of Simmel’s most influential readers and advocates in twentieth-century sociology, and it is hard to overestimate the influence of his strategy for transmuting theoretical writing into a form of testimony. With striking frequency, such sifting and ordering of his oeuvre into a coherent contribution to the (contemporary) discipline of sociology is, even today, framed by identifying Simmel as «the marginal man, the stranger.» 19 In identifying Simmel with the figure of the stranger, Coser simultaneously ushered Simmel into the sociological canon and set aside the question 246 Elizabeth S. Goodstein of how his mode of analysis and conceptual vocabulary relate to and engage with the philosophical tradition to which he belonged and out of which he had developed his distinctive vision of sociology. But these are matters that from an historical as well as conceptual point of view are in fact decisive for the constitution of social science as such. How much is at stake here for the institutional and conceptual organization of social theory in general and for efforts to theorize the third and thirdness in particular will become clear when we look more closely at the text itself. Like all of his most famous and influential writings, «The Stranger» is almost always read out of context. What has come to be known as an «essay» is a text of barely seven pages that was originally published as an excursus at the end of Chapter IX of the Soziologie, «Der Raum und die räumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft.» Labelled simply the «Exkurs über den Fremden» by its author, it entered the Anglophone sociological canon as «The Stranger» via its inclusion in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology in 1921. The text quickly took on a life of its own, in which the question of the methodological as well as metaphysical (and metasociological) significance of the «Exkurs» and its relation to Simmel’s larger arguments in the Soziologie (not translated into English in its entirety until 2009) were rendered moot. The «essay,» which quickly came to be regarded as a classic contribution to sociology, has been repeatedly anthologized, taught, and cited for nearly a century. The reception of «The Stranger» illustrates how these questionable textual practices established an image of Simmel that has become a sociological commonplace. It also underscores the theoretical significance of the fact that he tends to be remembered, if at all, as an outsider to, rather than a famous and cosmopolitan participant in, a vibrant and in many ways very modern cultural and intellectual world. The figure of Simmel as sociological stranger reveals and conceals at once. It erases the historical and philosophical complexity of his position while rereading him in a way that reframes and appropriates his methods. It thereby metaphorically enables the assimilation of Simmel to a discipline that assumes precisely what he did not: that there is such a thing as the social or society outside of its performance by human beings. For that performance is the phenomenon of form as Simmel understood it. The «Excursus on the Foreigner,» or «The Stranger» follows directly on an extended and fascinating treatment of questions of mobility and social order in which Simmel discusses the impact of spatiality on the evolution of the labor market since the Middle Ages 20 and the resulting modalities of wan- Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 247 dering and their implications for social order. Afterward, Simmel steps back to reflect on «the sociological form of the ‹stranger›,» which he situates in relation to the two extremes of the human relation to space: the Gelöstheit (detachment) of those who wander as opposed to the Fixiertheit (fixity) of those who remain in the same social space all their lives (GSG 11: 764). Simmel is sensitive to the ways mobility and class are connected, to the social function of very concrete relations to space that condition and enable class-differentiated forms of mobility. However, his analysis of strangeness emphasizes the importance of dimensions of existence that cannot be understood in these terms, which indicate the constitutive impact of (transindividual) sociality on the spatial organization of human life. Unlike the wanderer who «comes today and goes tomorrow,» he writes, the stranger «comes today and stays tomorrow»; he is «so to speak, the potential wanderer who […] has not entirely overcome the dissolution of coming and going» (GSG 11: 764). As this description signals, Simmel’s excursus concerns not the social «role» of the stranger but rather the figure in a very general sense. Thus he invokes explicitly philosophical language to introduce what he underlines is an analytic construct, «the sociological form of the ‹stranger›,» and anchors his interpretation via a phenomenological observation about human cultural life as such. That sociological «form,» Simmel writes, «represents in a certain sense the unity of the two determinations» - that is, the poles of detachment and fixity that constitute human spatiality as a social phenomenon - thereby offenbarend (revealing) an even more general hermeneutic principle. As a sociological form, the stranger embodies one of the basic and quite general lessons of Simmel’s Soziologie: «that the relation to space is on one hand the condition, on the other hand the symbol of relations to human beings» (GSG 11: 764). This doubling constitutes the thirdness of Simmel’s conception of social form itself. The sociological form of the stranger - though by no means of this form alone - is at once symbolic and concrete, ideal and material. The stranger, qua stranger, is a figure of symbolic significance: one not simply other or different, but a being in and for whom a particular Konstellation (constellation) of transpersonal interaction, the «unity of intimacy and distance» (GSG 11: 768-69) that is a feature of every human relation, takes on the symbolic form of otherness. The sociocultural position of the stranger, the potential wanderer, cannot be understood in privative terms, as a lack of identity, nor is strangeness the otherness of one who fails to belong to the community. On the contrary, as Simmel elaborates, 248 Elizabeth S. Goodstein Being-strange [das Fremdsein] is of course an entirely positive relation, a specific form of reciprocal interaction [Wechselwirkungsform]; the inhabitants of Sirius are not actually strange to us […] rather they entirely do not exist for us, they stand beyond near and far. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and the manifold «inner enemies» - an element whose immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed. (GSG 11: 765) It is well worth reflecting on the distinctive topology of this subject position. «Being-strange» is not a role but a relationship of reciprocal interaction, a form of social life that implicates both subject and other. What this form reveals, as already noted, is even more general: Simmel’s «stranger» or «foreigner» figures «the unity» of the apparently opposed poles of «detachment» and «fixity» that constitute human spatiality as a social phenomenon and thereby reveal the human being’s «relation to space» to be «on one hand the condition, on the other hand the symbol of relations to human beings.» (GSG 11: 764) In Simmel’s account, spatiality is at once social and material, simultaneously product and condition of human existence. Space is social: not, pace Kant, a «form of intuition,» but both the material and ideal effect of movement in and out of human collectivities. For Simmel, human spatiality reflects the complex interplay of historical, social, psychological, and cultural context that defines all human interaction as such. It is, in a word, a culturally constituted category, and thus both a material and ideal condition of possibility for social life as such. The conception of social form in play here accords with Simmel’s mature understanding of the significance of Kantian insights, in which the a priori has received a Hegelian twist. On that view, spatiality is constituted and shaped historically - that is to say, culturally, socially, psychologically. As usual, Simmel’s sociological reflections are shot through with a philosophical effort to understand how subjects and objects come into being, interact, change, and evolve. Thus spatiality is both Bedingung - condition of possibility - and Symbol - symbolic framework for understanding human (that is to say, interbut also transsubjective, social, cultural, psychological) relations. Simmel eschews any claim to completeness for his discussion (GSG 11: 765). But the sociopolitical issue that often motivates contemporary theorists to return to this text - the question of how those who are construed as strangers are perceived by the majority community - clearly interests him far less than the philosophical problems he saw the figure of the stranger as representing and exemplifying: the ways sameness and difference in general constitute identities for both groups and individuals. Simmel’s «Stranger» Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 249 resonates with Plato’s Eliatic Zeno, with the alienated subject depicted by fellow modernists such as Nietzsche and Strindberg, and with politically significant discourses on foreigners and foreignness in contemporary Germany. In its mixture of philosophical universality and sociological and historical particularity as well as its preoccupation with the ways that «beingstrange» (Fremdsein) constitutes both self and other, Simmel’s discussion of the figure anticipates the discourse on «alienation» (Entfremdung), with its central trope of «spiritual homelessness» (geistige Obdachlosigkeit), in the next generation. 21 To return to the passage already cited, for Simmel, the stranger is «an element of the group itself.» As noted, what is in play sociologically has a very distinctive topology: «being-strange» is a «specific form of reciprocal interaction» in which the stranger’s «immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed» (GSG 11: 765). In the next sentence, Simmel describes the entire social formation as a dialectical whole in which «the repelling and distancing moments […] constitute a form of being together [Miteinander] and of reciprocally interacting unity [wechselwirkende Einheit]» (GSG 11: 765). Stranger and other, that is, are co-constitutive. Social formations, in Simmel’s understanding, resemble Aristotelian or indeed Hegelian dialectical wholes. But this is merely a resemblance. In Simmel’s vision, conflict is not eliminated within the social totality; difference is not subordinated to identity, which remains external to itself. Thus the sociological form of the stranger, whose «immanent position as member» of the group «simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed,» makes visible - is a figure for - something quite fundamental about human existence. Strangeness turns out, as it were, not to be strange but to be internal to subjectivity itself. Here, Simmel extends and as it were inverts a basic dialectical point that the relation to the other reflects and is partly constituted by a relation to self. As he puts it in a passage from earlier in the Soziologie to which we shall return, it is only apparently paradoxical that human beings must «understand themselves and view one another» under such categories in order to become subjects who «so formed, can produce [ergeben] empirical society» (GSG 11: 51-52): «The fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society forms the positive condition for his being so with other sides of his being: the human «mode of being-social [or being-in-society: Vergesellschaftet-Seins] is determined or codetermined by his mode of not-being-social [Nicht-Vergesellschaftet-Seins]» (GSG 11: 51). For Simmel, then, «the stranger» is both a constitutive element of the group and a figure in whom the interpenetration 250 Elizabeth S. Goodstein of symbolic and material dimensions in human sociality becomes uniquely visible. As Simmel shows, reflection on the (interand transsubjectively constituted) social form of «strangeness» sheds light on an important «constellation,» a key mode of differentiation not only within social groups but also within intimate relations: what we might call the thirdness of human (social) being. The analysis of strangeness can thus help us parse a variety of social and cultural phenomena, some of which we have come to think of as features of subjective identity, others as aspects of group dynamics. For Simmel, these are consequences or effects of the a priori feature of human existence just noted: human identity is in itself external to itself; being-social is internally fractured, wrought with difference, and constituted in and by relations that reveal the subject’s own otherness to itself. In one of Simmel’s recurrent metaphors, being-fragmentary is the human way of being: «we are all fragments» (as he puts it a few pages earlier) «not only of human being in general, but also of ourselves» (GSG 11: 49). The particular mode of being-between that defines the stranger is linked to what Simmel calls «the special attitude of the ‹objective one› [des ‹Objektiven›],» who is in but not entirely of the group. This attitude, he continues, «does not signify a mere distance and impartiality [Abstand und Unbeteiligtheit], but rather a specific configuration [besonderes Gebilde] out of distance and intimacy [Nähe], indifference and engagement» (GSG 11: 766- 67). Although he is often misread on this point, Simmel does not conflate the special «attitude» of objectivity with a «social status» or role at all. He is, rather, providing a phenomenological description of the sociocultural and intersubjective specificity of the stranger’s subject position. The stranger’s «objectivity» reflects the complex interpersonal and psychic situation of one whose belonging to society is characterized both by the (quasi)spatial qualities of distance and closeness and by the (more clearly) psychic or symbolic aspects of indifference and engagement. What is being described is not a psychic or social structure, nor is it an institution that orders society into rigid camps. Rather, the stranger’s attitude of objectivity is the (embodied, subjective) «expression» of what Simmel calls a Gebilde, a configuration in which spatial relations take on symbolic social significance and shape modes of interpersonal interaction. It is this emblematic formation or configuration of interand transsubjective relations, not the other or otherness but social organization itself, that is at stake. For Simmel, objectivity is not something separate from subjectivity; it is, rather, a mode in which that interand transpersonal, sociocultural dimension (das Überindividuelle) constitutes, even in a sense inheres in, the subjectivity of Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 251 the subject. The tendency to objectivity directly «expresses» the stranger’s conditions of existence: a complex, internally conflicted mode of belonging to the community or society that comprises both «distance and intimacy, indifference and engagement» (GSG 11: 766-67). Simmel’s stranger is not a role or an identity but a social form that arises in and through a transand interpersonal configuration: the name for a position in an interactive field of human (sociohistorical, cultural, symbolic) practice. Again, for Simmel «being-strange» is «an entirely positive relation, a specific form of reciprocal interaction […] the stranger is an element of the group itself» (GSG 11: 765). The stranger’s objectivity is a function of that particular constellation, an attitude that expresses a reciprocal relationship that is neither a being-inside or a form of exclusion or difference, but rather a way of being the boundaries, a mélange of distance and intimacy, indifference and engagement. For Simmel, there is no absolute outside or utter exclusion involved; strangeness is, rather, a distinctive mode of being-related to the dominant perspective. It is embedded in a social relation or configuration that includes both perspectives. Thus it is that the objectivity proper to the social form or constellation of strangeness makes possible the institutionalization of the dominant position of the Gruppenfremden, of people foreign to the group, under certain circumstances, as (in Simmel’s example) in the Italian city-states where outsiders were brought in as judges for intragroup conflicts. In the larger context of the Soziologie, the figure of the stranger serves to catalyze the reader’s recognition that internal difference constitutes both human identity and sociality. For not only does «[t]he fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society form the positive condition for his being so with other sides of his being» (GSG 11: 51). The same holds of the inter-and transsubjectively constituted world as well: «the a priori of empirical social life is that life is not entirely social» (GSG 11: 53). We are all strangers in the strange land of social life. In considering the significance of Simmel’s «Stranger,» we have thus far followed the sociological reception in focusing on the text that originally appeared as the third excursus to the penultimate chapter of the Soziologie. Let us now take a step back to situate this figure and the «Excursus on the Stranger» itself both thematically and formally within the book as a whole. Doing so will make clearer how consequential the theoretical and methodological effects of the strategies of reading I call «appropriation by fragments» have been for the understanding of Simmel’s thought. For while this fact does not play a role in the literature on the stranger, the figure actually 252 Elizabeth S. Goodstein makes its initial appearance in the very first chapter of the Soziologie. Or rather, to be more precise, in an «Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible» that supplements the book’s introductory chapter on «The Problem of Sociology.» 22 As I will show, this is a very significant context indeed. Simmel initially introduces the category of «the stranger» in a fashion that is doubly noteworthy in light of the reception of what has been construed as an independent essay on the topic. The figure of the stranger (or foreigner) appears alongside «the enemy,» «the criminal,» and «the pauper» as an example of one of those «types» whose «sociological significance is fixed in its very core and essence by their being somehow excluded from the society for which their existence is significant» (GSG 11: 51). That is, the meaning of «the stranger» in particular in and for Simmel’s understanding of the social is, as it were, already quite general. It is paradigmatic for a way of meaning that, as the text makes clear, does not inhere in such figures themselves but rather exists in and through the interactive social configuration as a whole in each case. These forms exemplify a mode of mutual relations between subjects and society tout court. In Simmel’s Soziologie, the stranger functions, then, as a figure in the technical, rhetorical sense. It is, in particular, the exemplification or embodiment of a feature of human subjectivity that constitutes it as social (and by the same stroke makes «society» possible). Simmel’s way of thinking about the role of otherness in human sociality conjoins phenomena that are now theorized in quite different ways. The figure of strangeness encompasses both psychological and cultural dimensions, both the preand the nonor extrasocial. Simmel is not failing to distinguish between (to simplify for the sake of clarity) the internal and the externalized other. To be sure, he can be criticized from an anachronistic point of view that lays claim to certainty concerning theoretical priority, whether of unconscious or of sociohistorical processes. But given that so much contemporary cultural theory is absorbed with attempts, having begun from one or the other, to make the connection to the opposed sort of otherness - and given that the underlying reductive agenda at work in the vast majority of these efforts seems doomed to fail - it is worth considering suspending, at least hypothetically, the certainty that it is possible to distinguish between the preand the postsocial, das Unterand das Überindividuelle. For Simmel does not simply happen not to draw the lines as we would. His theoretical and methodological framework precedes our bifurcations - between reflection on subjectivity and intersubjectivity and theories of the social, between philosophy and sociology, between humanistic and social scientific thought practices more generally, because they had not yet solidified. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 253 Thus what is figured as strangeness is not just doubled or ambiguous, but a third in the sense that in Simmel’s thinking, the boundary between subjects’ unconscious and the (linguistic, cultural, historical) context cannot really be demarcated - nor for that matter can the line between description and interpretation, phenomenology and theory. The doubling and ambiguity so clearly inscribed in the «stranger» as a particularly exemplary constellation of sociability reflect the circumstance that, in Simmel’s understanding, subjects are constituted as social in a way that involves both the preand the superindividual. On the one hand, the presocial (precultural, prelinguistic) outside, das Unterindividuelle: what used to be called nature but is today more usually conceived in the language of the unconscious (a vocabulary Simmel sometimes uses, albeit not in a Freudian sense). On the other, the properly supersubjective, transindividual realm, das Überindividuelle. Otherness, difference, involves both sorts of «outside,» and both constitute the extrasocial existence of the individual, albeit not necessarily in a clearly distinguishable way. On Simmel’s account, what brings the social into being simultaneously subtends the process of subjectivation - human beings and their world are co-conditioned. As we have already noted, in the «Excursus on the Stranger» itself, Simmel calls «being-strange» «an entirely positive relation, a specific form of interaction. […] The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and the manifold ‹inner enemies› - an element whose immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed» (GSG 11: 765). The constellation exemplified by figures such as the stranger manifests a positive characteristic of the social as such, its being constituted by beings who are in but not entirely of it. But this constellation is a sociological form also in the sense that it makes visible a fundamental feature of subjectivity as such. It is, in fact, a synecdoche of becoming-social, for the socialization process as a whole in both objective and subjective senses. This brings us back to the passage cited earlier, which it is now possible to place in a larger context. At the point in «How is Society Possible? » where Simmel first introduces the figure of the stranger, he writes: «[E]very element of a group is not only part of society [Gesellschaftsteil] but also in addition something else» (GSG 11: 51). But this something else, the nonor incompletely social aspect of individuality, is «not merely a [being] outside of society» (GSG 11: 51). In the dialectical tradition to which Simmel belongs, subjectivity depends on intersubjectivity; the notion of a simply nonsocial form of identity is incoherent. He articulates this principle, which has crucial consequences for his understanding of social life, in an admirably straightforward fashion, continuing 254 Elizabeth S. Goodstein (in the passage already cited): «The fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society forms the positive condition for his being so with other sides: his mode of being-social is determined or codetermined by his mode of not-being-social» (GSG 11: 51). These modes or kinds of «being-social» are practices or forms of life or experience. Simmel is among other things warning against hypostasizing «parts» of the self. Just as, after Kant, we must recognize that we cannot understand nature independently of critical reflection on our own practices of thought, we can only assure our knowledge of the human world if we remain reflective about the difficulties of thinking our own role in its symbolic constitution. In Simmel’s view, the challenges of scientific reflection on the human are inherently greater and deeper than in the case of the science of nature. The unity of the social is not imposed by the «observing subject» on «sensory elements that are in themselves unconnected [an sich unverbundenen Sinneselementen]» (GSG 11: 43). Rather, «since they are conscious and synthetically active, the social unity is realized directly by its elements and requires no observer. […] Here the consciousness of forming a unity with the others is in fact the whole unity in question» (GSG 11: 43). Crucially, what constitutes the unity of the social is not, Simmel continues, «abstract awareness of the concept of unity,» but rather «countless singular relations, the feeling and knowledge with respect to the other of this determining and being determined» (GSG 11: 43-44). Such lived awareness of being-social is categorically distinct from scientific or synthetic knowledge that arises from the perspective of «an observing third party» (GSG 11: 44). Knowledge of the social is differently, more intimately structured than knowledge of nature; it is constitutive for the subject itself. Simmel is no idealist. Both society and subjectivity are external to their own concepts; their being is constituted in part by their non-being. Still, as Simmel was trying to indicate, the differentiation of these differences is probably not entirely graspable in concepts. The distinction between society and the subjects that constitute it is not an ideal or psychological distinction even though it is a function of the fact that the elements of society are thinking beings. As spiritual, historical, and cultural existences, their very identity is constituted by the social and cultural world that, although it comes into being through human activity, is experienced as an opposed and even alien force over and against subjective individuality and the will to freedom and autonomy. The intersubjectively configured, performative and experiential knowledge of being-social is enacted in «social forms,» the lived configurations and constellations of (interand transsubjective) «superindividual» exis- Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 255 tence. There is no human subjectivity for Simmel without a relation to the dimension or function of sociohistorical objectification that constitutes human culture. A noteworthy invocation of the objective genitive underlines that Simmel’s apparently Kantian conception of the subject has taken an idiosyncratic «Hegelian» turn: «Die Gesellschaft aber ist die objektive, des in ihr nicht mitbegriffenen Beschauers unbedürftige Einheit» (GSG 11: 44). Human subjectivity is constituted through intersubjectivity, but this intersubjectivity is not the same thing as the social. One of Simmel’s great and largely unrecognized theoretical contributions - once again the consequence or expression of the liminal place of his thought between the post- Kantian philosophical tradition and what would come to be the social or cultural sciences - is to have articulated so clearly the tensions between the two. That is, to have identified the theoretical importance of the «third» as figure for or dimension of understanding, conceptualizing human existence both in its individual and in its sociocultural dimensions. A passage elaborating what is at stake in this nonidentity of intersubjectivity and the social and that also suggests Simmel’s significance for what would come to be known as existentialism is worth citing in full. «The feeling of being I has an unconditionality and imperturbability» unlike any «representation of a material externality,» he writes, but this very certainty also includes for us, whether justifiably or not, the fact of a you [des Dus]; and as cause or as effect of this certainty, we feel the you as something independent of our representation of it, something that is just as much for itself as our own existence. That this for-itself [Für-Sich] of the other does not stop us from making it into our representation, that something which is in no way resolvable into our representing nonetheless becomes the content, thus the product, of this representing - that is the most profound psychological-epistemological schema and problem of becoming-social [Vergesellschaftung]. (GSG 11: 44-45) To ask «how is society possible? » is, then, to ask about the implications of representation and of our existence as beings who represent ourselves to ourselves, who are others for ourselves. This includes the objectifications of that process: the various modes in which human (historical, cultural) existence endures in the diverse realms and spheres, defined ultimately by value (legal, cultural, religious, etc.), that form the «third» dimension of sociality, the superindividual dimension that exists in and through but also beyond, before, and above the interactions of individual human beings. The existence of social figures or types such as the stranger thus exemplifies one of the quasi-transcendental features of human sociality that Simmel calls «sociological a prioris» - the principle, as he puts it a few pages later, that «the a priori of empirical social life is that life is not entirely social» 256 Elizabeth S. Goodstein (GSG 11: 53). This formulation makes clear that what is at stake philosophically in the translation discussed above is by no means limited to its implications for social and cultural thought. As Simmel’s invocation of the category of life illustrates, and as he underlines in his reflections, these implications are (in his sense of the term) quite directly metaphysical. Human beings are not simply (socially formed) subjects; this fact and the (lived, if not necessarily conscious) awareness of the limits to one’s belonging to society are crucial both for the experience and the reality of society. «Societies are configurations [Gebilde] out of beings [Wesen] that stand simultaneously inside and outside of them» (GSG 11: 53). Thirdness is a sociocultural phenomenon with existential-ontological implications. Reflection on the social thereby opens up new dimensions for philosophical reflection in and on those aspects of existence that Heidegger, who rejected the category of social science, would later place under the category of Mitsein, «being-with.» In contrast, too, to Hannah Arendt, who regarded the emergence of the category of the social as obscuring the problems of reflection on human existence, for Simmel, society, social being, generates perhaps the most conscious, at least the most universal expression [Ausgestaltung] of a fundamental form of life as such: that the individual soul can never stand inside a relation that it does not simultaneously stand outside of, that it is not placed in any order without finding itself juxtaposed to it. This holds from the transcendent and most universal contexts all the way to the most singular and accidental. (GSG 11: 53) Simmel developed these ideas in the first chapter of the book he thought of as his philosophical testament, the Lebensanschauung of 1918. There he extends his account of human being as Grenzwesen, as a being constituted equally by boundaries and transgressions of boundaries. This text, which takes up and elaborates his thinking about the relations between life and form, makes explicit both the epistemological and ethical implications of the relativist ontology Simmel is espousing. In this context, let us simply attempt to note what is distinctive about Simmel’s claim that what is at stake is of the order of a «sociological a priori» that can cast new light on our understanding of human subjectivity. «The standpoint out of which the existence of the individual can be ordered [angeordnet] and conceived of can just as well be taken from inside as from outside itself» (GSG 11: 55). «The totality of life» encompasses both perspectives: «The fact of association brings the individual into a doubled position […]; it is comprised by it and at the same time juxtaposed to it, is a member of its organism and at the same time itself a closed organic whole, a being for [society] and for himor herself» (GSG 11: 56). Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 257 Yet however great it may seem, the apparent opposition between our individual and social being is an illusion: [B]etween individual and society the inside and the outside are not two determinations that persist alongside one another […]; they refer to the entire unified position of the human being living socially. His existence is not only, in a dividing up of its contents, partially social and partially individual; it stands under the fundamental, formative [gestaltenden], category of a unity that we cannot express in any other way than through the synthesis or simultaneity [Gleichzeitigkeit] of the two logically opposed determinations of membership and being-for-oneself. (GSG 11: 56) Here, in the midst of an argument that seems to wear its Hegelian heart on its sleeve, Simmel takes a rather surprising turn, one that, again, anticipates developments in twentieth-century thought well beyond sociology - developments that, although in many cases galvanized by his students and readers, have generally been seen as entirely unrelated to Simmel’s thinking. The passage continues: [S]ociety consists not only of beings that are partially not socialized but of those that feel themselves to be on the one hand fully social existences, on the other, while preserving the same contents, fully personal. And these are not two standpoints that lie without any relation alongside one another, as when one regards the same body now with respect to its mass and again with respect to its color, but rather the two form a unity that we call the social being […]. (GSG 11: 56) This inherently conflicted and ambiguous «social being» is, he adds, the «synthetic category» that unifies the elements of individual and society into an «a priori unity» just as the category of causality unifies cause and effect. Thus an argument that begins, as it were, from Kant and Hegel ends with Nietzsche: Strangeness, which, it should be recalled, might be better translated by foreignness, figures the way individual subjectivity tout court is inseparably intertwined with social being. Human beings live a life that is at once fully social, «produced and encompassed by society,» and entirely individual, a life «for itself» lived «out of one’s own center and for the sake of that center» (GSG 11: 54). Simmel’s stranger is a synecdochic expression of the decentered quality of human identity and a microcosm of the form or configuration that defines the (modern, internally differentiated and fragmented) social totality. As such, it is a figure of philosophical as well as sociological significance. Not only are the combinations of movement and fixity, nearness and remoteness, inclusion and exclusion that define strangeness constitutive for the social or society as such. The figure of the stranger, like the other «types» whose «sociological significance» is defined precisely «by their being somehow 258 Elizabeth S. Goodstein excluded from the society for which their existence is significant,» exposes what Heidegger would describe as an Existentiale of human «being-in-theworld,» Mitsein: being and existing with others. 23 Just as sociology cannot evade the philosophical questions that frame all reflection on human being, philosophy cannot begin from the individual alone. Questions concerning subjectivity are simultaneously sociological, political, psychological; questions concerning social, political, psychological reality are simultaneously philosophical. The fact that the individual human being is at once «a being for [society] and a being for himor herself» (GSG 11: 56) is constitutive for society as well as the individual. If Simmel’s importance for cultural and social theory is to be appreciated, the liminal position of his thinking between sociology and philosophy must be taken into account. As the case of «Stranger» illustrates, he was grappling with fundamental and still unresolved questions about the nature and limits of reflection on human being and sociocultural and historical life. Simmel’s reception reflects the way the systematic - historical as well as theoretical - importance of these questions is imbricated with his liminality - thirdness - from the perspective of the contemporary disciplinary order, with its seemingly self-evident distinction between humanities and social sciences. We cannot reestablish the long-lost scholarly imaginary proper to the moment the cultural and social sciences took their leave of philosophy any more than we can recover the (relative) political innocence still possible before the cataclysms of the twentieth century. Nor, in advocating that we (re-) read Simmel, am I suggesting that we may find in his work a point of origin for an alternative postor interdisciplinary theoretical canon. What are in Nietzschean terms antiquarian or monumentalizing efforts must equally fail to disclose what is most urgently needed today: ways of thinking differently, approaches that help us move beyond the ultimately misleading tacit assumption that the world itself is divided up along the lines of our disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. I am suggesting that contemporary theory return to Simmel once again, anew, as a stranger, as an exemplary figure of both historical and theoretical thirdness. Reading him as at once philosopher and sociologist, canonical and foreign, can help establish a more adequate critical perspective on our own practical-intellectual situation. In particular, by exposing the historical and theoretical contingency of our (disciplinary) habits of thought, such a return to Simmel may help enable us to reframe the categories and inherited bifurcations - between society and culture, mind and body, ideal and material - that shape contemporary understandings of self and world and, Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 259 perhaps, to develop new conceptual and methodological strategies and approaches that are more adequate to the complexity and multiplicity of the problems we face. As I have tried to illustrate in the case of «The Stranger,» in asking what has not been read and what remains illegible in Simmel’s protean oeuvre, we may discover the unthought resources of our own past. An imaginative return to this other modernity, to a theoretical landscape strange in its familiarity, at once very different from and intimately related to our own, opens new perspectives on the received certainties that make up the contemporary intellectual world. And perhaps it is not too much to hope that such work may help, to evoke once again Susman’s description of her friend’s lifelong striving as a thinker, to disclose a «third, not yet discovered but discoverable spiritual and life-form» that points the way beyond the deadly bifurcations of the present. Notes 1 In Lewis A. Coser’s classic formulation (Masters 215). 2 Otthein Rammstedt’s critical edition of the Soziologie appeared in 1992 as volume 11 of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe. 3 Thomas Bedorf describes Wechselwirkung as the «varying intertwining [Verflechtung] of individuals through which society first comes into being»; Joachim Fischer sees Simmel’s «third as the source of originary forms of Wechselwirkung» (Bedorf et al. 15, 139). See, however, Bröckling’s critique of Fischer’s foundationalist reframing of Simmel’s conception in the same volume (194-95 and particularly 205-06). See also Marotta’s reflections on the «third element,» which he identifies with «cosmopolitan aesthetic sensibility» (Marotta 675). 4 Translations here and throughout are my own. 5 Regarding the figure of the third, see Eßlinger et al., especially Koschorke’s introductory essay, «Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.» 6 For example, as early as 1894, when Simmel was still a Privatdozent, Célestin Bouglé singled him out as one of Germany’s prime intellectual attractions in the pseudonomously published «Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne.» See Breton, «Notes.» 7 These meditations draw on my forthcoming book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford UP), which approaches Simmel as a thinker with the aspiration of disclosing the unrealized - the unand perhaps anticlassical - potential of the same modernist moment that gave birth to the modern social sciences. As Köhnke shows, the very failure to fit in with a modernizing and professionalizing discipline that was the source of Simmel’s professional woes became the condition of possibility of his originality - what enabled him «in contrast to many other successful, tenured [ordinierten] colleagues - to become a classic» (Köhnke 21). 8 Letter to Célestin Bouglé, 13 Dec. 1899 (GSG 22: 342-43). Simmel had stronger things to say on this point on other occasions; consider his remark in a letter (20 Mar. 1908) to Georg Jellinek that it was an «idiocy» to regard him as a sociologist (GSG 22: 617). 260 Elizabeth S. Goodstein 9 This passage (which serves as the motto for the collection of aphorisms Gertrud Kantorowicz presented as selections from Georg Simmel’s «diary,» which appeared posthumously in Logos in December 1919) is worth citing in the original: «Ich weiss, daß ich ohne geistigen Erben sterben werde (und es ist gut so). Meine Hinterlassenschaft ist wie eine in barem Gelde, das an viele Erben verteilt wird, und jeder setzt sein Teil in irgend einen Erwerb um, der seiner Natur entspricht: dem die Provenienz aus jener Hinterlassenschaft nicht anzusehen ist» (GSG 20: 261-96; here 261). 10 Thus, crucially, his magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, was redefined as a work of sociology. In the words of Coser, «[a]lthough this large book does contain certain important philosophical ideas, it is mainly a contribution to cultural sociology and to the analysis of the wider social implications of economic affairs» (Masters 193). 11 Simmel’s 1894 «The Problem of Sociology» is the locus classicus of Simmel’s argument that these forms should provide the proper, specific object of the discipline of sociology. 12 Tenbruck’s essay was first published in Wolff (61-99) and later partially reprinted in Coser, Makers. In attempting to remedy the injustice of Simmel’s marginalization within sociology, Tenbruck emphasizes the closeness of his conception of form to Weber’s ideal types. Whatever Simmel’s influence, largely unacknowledged, on Weber’s thinking, from our point of view, what is more essential is the complex relation between his breakthrough conception of or perspective on form and the philosophical tradition proper. 13 Resonating with both philosophical and evolutionary perspectives on history, Simmel’s conception of the Kulturprozess plays a key role in the Philosophy of Money. 14 In a letter to his teacher Moritz Lazarus from 5 Nov. 1894, Simmel credited him with having «directed me to the problem of the superindividual and its depths [des Überindividuellen u. seine Tiefen], whose investigation will probably fill out the productive time that remains to me» (GSG 22: 132). 15 «The philosophy of society has no justification [Rechtsgrund] for evading the advantages or disadvantages of its belonging to philosophy as such by constituting itself as a particular science of sociology» (GSG 11: 41). 16 See Weingartner for a reading of Simmel as a philosopher of life. 17 Letter to Count Hermann Keyserling (13 Oct. 1908). 18 This line of argument, in which Coser deploys Robert K. Merton’s schema for interpreting social innovation - Simmel was engaged in a «quest for originality» in which he «conformed to the goals of the academy, but he rejected the norms governing the ways and means for their attainment» (Masters 214) - may itself be regarded as a demonstration of the value of the cold cash of Simmel’s thinking for the discipline of sociology. 19 See Donald N. Levine’s by now classical - that is to say, too little read - discussion of the issues in this reception in «Useful Confusions: Simmel’s Stranger and His Followers.» For a recent example of an appropriation of the «Stranger,» see Alexander. 20 First elaborated in an excerpt from his work in progress Simmel published in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch in 1903 («The Sociology of Space,» now in GSG 7: 132-83), this discussion remains of considerable interest in an era of mass migrations accelerated by the ongoing transportation revolutions of the intervening century. 21 Regarding the genealogy of the «homeless» modern subject, see Webb. 22 This text itself, a radically revised version of Simmel’s 1894 essay, was, like «The Stranger,» first published in 1908 as part of the Soziologie. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 261 23 See Sein und Zeit, Part I, Chapter 4, where Heidegger discusses his probing of phenomena that disclose «Strukturen des Daseins, die mit dem In-der-Welt-sein gleich ursprünglich sind: das Mitsein und Mitdasein,» the mode of being [Seinsart] in which, in Heidegger’s (decisively un-Simmelian! ) view the everyday mode of subjectivity he calls «das Man,» «the they,» is «grounded» (114). Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C. «Despising Others: Simmel’s Strangers.» The Dark Side of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Breton, Jean (Célestin Bouglé). Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne. Heidelberg-Berlin-Leipzig-Munich. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895. -. «Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne.» La Revue de Paris 1 June 1894: n. pag. Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. -. ed. Georg Simmel: Makers of Modern Social Science. 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