From epistemology to cultural criticism: Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer

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History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 365–381

From epistemology to cultural criticism: Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer E. Skidelsky Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, UK

Abstract The sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer developed strikingly similar theories of modernity. Both viewed the transition from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world as the modern age’s distinguishing characteristic. But they interpreted this transition from very different philosophical perspectives. Simmel subscribed to a phenomenalism derived from Mach, whereas Cassirer advocated an objectivism inspired by a particular interpretation of Kant. This epistemological disagreement helps account for the two thinkers’ divergent cultural attitudes. Whereas Simmel viewed the complex structures of modernity as an alienation from the flow of subjective life, Cassirer viewed them as a proper expression of humanity’s symbolising capacity. Simmel’s cultural pessimism developed into an enthusiasm for radical collective action, especially during the First World War. Cassirer’s optimism, conversely, guarded him against this temptation. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction1 Several commentators in recent years have drawn attention to the striking similarities between Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money and Ernst Cassirer’s early philosophy of science. These similarities are unlikely to be coincidental. As an undergraduate in Berlin, Cassirer attended Simmel’s lectures on Kant, and it was on the advice of Simmel that he made his fateful acquaintance with the works of Hermann Cohen.2 Yet Cassirer at no point acknowledges Simmel as a positive 1 I am grateful to John Michael Krois, Gideon Freudenthal, Wilfred GeXner, Rory Stewart and Kate Tunstall for reading and commentating on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Paul Bishop, Roger Stevenson and the faculty of modern languages at Glasgow University for inviting me to read it at a seminar on 27 November 2002. 2 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Hermann Cohen, 1842–1918,’’ in Social Research, Vol. 10, 1943, p. 222.

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influence on his thought. On the contrary, in his later work he repeatedly criticises Simmel as a representative of the cultural pessimism he so mistrusted. How can we explain this curious combination of closeness and distance? Is it simply a case of the ‘‘narcissism of small differences’’? Or is something more interesting at work? The essays written on this subject by Willfried GeXner and Gideon Freudenthal have concentrated on the affinities between the two thinkers’ theories of cultural development.3 They have overlooked the very different philosophical presuppositions that these affinities conceal. It is therefore difficult for them to do justice to Cassirer’s later criticisms of Simmel.4 Cassirer’s rejection of Simmel’s ‘‘tragedy of culture’’ appears simply as a refusal to accept the logical consequences of a position common to both thinkers. Its sources are assumed to be weltanschaulich rather than strictly philosophical; they are sought in what Willfried GeXner describes as Cassirer’s ‘‘desperate optimism’’5 and in his related reluctance to deal with the social and economic dimensions of modernity.6 I shall argue in what follows that Cassirer’s rejection of Simmel’s pessimistic Kulturkritik has its roots not merely in weltanschaulich but in genuinely philosophical differences between the two men. Both Simmel and Cassirer were profoundly impressed by the revolt against materialism in late 19th-century physics; both saw it as offering an insight into the nature of modernity itself. Yet they viewed this revolution from very different perspectives. Simmel accepted the standard naturalistic account of Mach and Avenarius, whereas Cassirer—more ambitiously and controversially—interpreted it in terms derived from Kant. This purely epistemological disagreement lies at the centre of the two men’s divergent cultural attitudes. The relationship between Simmel and Cassirer thus offers a fascinating illustration of the way in which, in early 20th-century Germany, technical debates within the philosophy of science were bound up with broader social and political controversies.

3 Cf. Gideon Freudenthal, ‘‘‘Substanzbegriff und Funktionbegriff’ als Zivilisationstheorie bei Georg Simmel und Ernst Cassirer’’, in Gesellschaft denken—Eine erkentnnistheoretische Standortsbestimung der Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Leonhard Bauer and Klaus Hamberger, Berlin: Springer, 2002, pp. 251–276, and Willfried GeXner, ‘‘Geld als symbolische Form. Simmel, Cassirer und die Objektivit.at der Kultur’’, in . Simmel Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer 1996, p. 1–31, and Willfried GeXner, ‘‘Tragodie oder Schauspiel? Cassirers Kritik an Simmels Kulturkritik’’, in ibid, pp. 57–72. 4 Fr!ed!eric Vandenberghe, (Comparing Neo-Kantians: Ernst Cassirer and Georg Simmel, Manchester: University of Manchester, 1996), has a better appreciation of Cassirer’s critique of Simmel. Yet he too fails to distinguish the philosophical presuppositions of the two thinkers, subsuming them both under the unhelpful label of ‘‘neo-Kantian’’. 5 Willfried GeXner, ‘‘Trag.odie oder Schauspiel? Cassirers Kritik an Simmels Kulturkritik’’, p. 65. 6 Cassirer’s optimism, writes Freudenthal, is purchased by the ‘‘reduction of all the products of human creativity to high spiritual culture’’. (Cf. Gideon Freudenthal, op. cit., p. 276.) ‘‘That Cassirer’s criticism of Simmel’s Kulturkritik misses its target...,’’ argues Willfried GeXner in a similar vein, ‘‘is clearly bound up with... the different cultural fields on which Simmel on the one hand and Cassirer on the other base their . theory.’’ (Cf. Willfried GeXner, p. 66 of ‘‘Tragodie oder Schauspiel? Cassirers Kritik an Simmels Kulturkritik’’.)

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2. From substance to function The contrast between ‘‘substance’’ and ‘‘function’’ plays a central role both in Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes, and in Cassirer’s first work of systematic philosophy, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. These two books were published respectively in 1900 and 1910, making it likely that Cassirer knew his former teacher’s work. However, there is no need to assume that Cassirer derived the opposition of substance and function exclusively from Simmel. The two concepts had already been an object of controversy among physicists for several decades. It was Ernst Mach, above all, who was responsible for popularising the distinction and for making it central to the self-understanding of modern science.7 According to the materialism popular in Germany in the 1850s and 1860s, the ultimate substance or ‘‘stuff’’ of the universe was assumed to be matter. This doctrine—quite apart from its predictable unpopularity with churchmen and idealist philosophers—was soon to receive a decisive blow from within physics itself. The development of thermodynamics by Helmholtz and others showed that matter and energy were convertible into one another without loss. Energy could thus be expressed as a state of matter or—more radically—matter could be expressed as a state of energy. This latter interpretation quickly gained ground.8 Some physicists, most famously Ostwald, wished to elevate energy to the status previously occupied by matter of ‘‘most universal substance’’. A new metaphysics of energy came increasingly to replace the older metaphysics of matter. Ernst Mach drew a different conclusion from these developments in physics. The fact that either matter or energy could be interpreted as the basic ‘‘substance’’ seemed merely to show that the concept, in its traditional interpretation, no longer had any useful role to play. It was quite sufficient that science had discovered functional equations relating quantities of matter to quantities of energy; it was not furthermore necessary to ascribe metaphysical priority to one or the other. The development of modern science, writes Mach, ‘‘consists in the fact that the original, na.ıve concepts of substance (Stoffvorstellungen) are recognised to be unnecessary,y that we acknowledge real constancy and substantiality to lie in discovered quantitative relations, expressed in the fulfilment of equations, and do not seek some ‘lump’ outside of thought.’’9 Mach’s rejection of the traditional concept of substance was to have enormous influence, not least on Cassirer and Simmel. Substance and Function follows Mach in arguing that modern science must be understood in functionalist rather than substantialist terms. This requires that we stand the traditional Aristotelian picture of concept formation on its head. Science does not deal with originally independent, unrelated things, from which it then tries to abstract common properties; it deals rather with functions of the form f ðxÞ from which the individual arguments 7

I am indebted to Gideon Freudenthal for this insight, although the use I make of it is my own. Cf. J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2000, p. 34. 9 Ernst Mach (1882), quoted in Gideon Freudenthal, op. cit., p. 256. 8

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x1 ; x2 ; x3 y are then generated. Its original act is one by which a bare conjunction of objects a; b; cy is transformed into a numerical series x1 ; x2 ; x3 ;y . It is only on the basis of such a transformation that the relations between the individual items become capable of systematic representation. Science is mathematical or it is nothing at all. Cassirer cites the example of chemistry. With Mendeleyev’s discovery of the periodic table, the elements that had previously comprised a mere conjunction or heap suddenly become visible as an ordered series. They lose their heterogeneity, their irreducible singularity. Every element now stands in immediate relation to every other. And with further advances in sub-atomic physics, it becomes possible intellectually to construct the elements out of yet more basic particles. The elements have now lost every last trace of particularity; they are revealed to be nothing more than resting-points in a continuous process of transformation.10 The order of elements ‘‘no longer signifies an order which we accept just as it is presented by nature or the accident of observation but becomes an order created by ourselves, a deductive order’’.11 Substance and Function carries the unfortunate implication that no progress can be made in science without mathematics. Botanical taxonomies such as that of Linnaeus clearly show this to be untrue. In his mature philosophy, Cassirer grants a more positive role to linguistic taxonomies as a kind of propaedeutic to science proper. Because language is inherently substantialistic, this entails an at least partial rehabilitation of the concept of substance. Nonetheless, linguistic taxonomies can never progress beyond certain prescribed limits. The world described by language is a world of largely discrete, uncoordinated things and properties. ‘‘The symbols of language themselves have no definite systematic order. Every single linguistic term has a special area of meaning. It is, as Gardiner says, ‘a beam of light, illuminating first this portion and then that portion of the fieldy’. But all these different beams of light do not have a common focus. They are dispersed and isolated. In the ‘synthesis of the manifold’ every new word makes a new start.’’12 Language can never be truly systematic because it is tied to the world of sensory intuition, and this world is inherently heterogeneous. The colour blue, the taste of cherries and the sound of trumpets are all unique. They possess no common measure. Only when these things are drained of their qualities and assigned a purely quantitative measure can they be brought into relation with one another. Of course, relations of a local kind can be established on the basis of sense-perception alone: hotter or colder, more blue or less blue.13 But such relations exist only within a single sensory modality; they are incapable of generalisation. Universal relations can be established only by means of quantification. Mathematics is that characteristica 10 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1923, pp. 187–203. 11 A. Job, ‘‘Chimie’’, quoted approvingly in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 441. 12 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945, p. 212. 13 For a discussion of this point, cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 425–426.

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universalis by means of which all objects of experience can be incorporated into a single system. Simmel, like Cassirer, derives the distinction between substance and function from a Machean interpretation of recent developments in science. ‘‘The basic tendency of modern science is no longer to comprehend phenomena through or as specific substances, but as motions, the bearers of which are increasingly divested of any specific qualities; and it expresses the qualities of things in quantitative, i.e. relative, terms’’.14 But Simmel’s interest is not confined to science. The ‘‘dematerialising’’ tendency of modern science is for him only one particular expression of a ‘‘world formula’’ that can be discerned in all aspects of modern life, including the mature money economy. Simmel is here reinterpreting a Marxist insight in non-Marxist terms. He is trying to establish a connection between intellectual attitudes and economic organisation without deriving one from the other. Causal analysis has been replaced by a kind of aesthetic intuition, which finds ‘‘in each of life’s details the totality of its meaning’’.15 This method held a strong attraction for unorthodox Marxists such as Benjamin and Lukac! s, who wanted to preserve Marx’s insight into the connection between culture and economics while discarding the crude machinery of base and superstructure. The Philosophy of Money was to become a decisive influence on Western Marxism. If the modern ‘‘world formula’’ finds its theoretical expression in Galilean science, it finds its practical expression in money. Both are manifestations of the same quantifying attitude that Weber was famously to designate as ‘‘rationalisation’’. All value, argues Simmel, has its basis in subjective desire. But mere desire is not enough to impart to an object that particular type of value that we designate as economic. In its most primitive form, desire imparts to an object a value that is completely incommensurable with the value of other objects. There is no abstract measure of value that all desired objects possess in common.16 This situation changes when objects begin to be exchanged for one another. If two sheep can be exchanged for one cow, then a cow clearly possesses twice as much value as a sheep. Exchange detaches value from its roots in subjective desire and makes of it something objective, or at least intersubjective. It transforms personal value—or, as we sometimes say, sentimental value—into economic value.17 From being a quality, value has become a quantity. However, the abstract concept of value is only partially realised in a barter economy. A society in one cow is worth two sheep and one pig, ten chickens possesses as yet no universal measure of value. Value remains bound to particular objects of value; it has not yet been abstracted out. The next step is taken when a particular good—grain, salt, or, in more advanced economies, a precious metal—is selected as the medium in which the value of all other goods can be expressed. This good is no longer simply valuable; it now has the additional function of symbolising 14

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 101–102. Ibid, p. 55. 16 Ibid, p. 123. 17 Ibid, pp. 88–92. 15

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value. It has become money. Money represents the final stage in a long process of abstraction. If objects acquire economic value only in being exchanged, then money is the abstract expression of this exchangeability. It is ‘‘not only the absolutely interchangeable object, each quantity of which can be replaced without distinction by any other; it is, so to speak, interchangeability personified.’’18 To assign an object a price is to say that it can be exchanged; to call it ‘‘priceless’’ is to say that it cannot be exchanged. In money, economic value—that is, exchange value—finds its ideal expression. A token currency, which possesses no material value at all, is the one that realises most perfectly the purely symbolic character of money. It expresses the fact—and here one is particularly struck by the affinity with Cassirer—that the value of money resides not in its substance but in its function.19 Value has no fundamentum in re, no foundation in being. The error of mercantilism was to suppose that value inheres in the particular substance of gold; the analogous error of Marxism is to suppose that value inheres in the particular activity of work. But in the mature money economy value is conceived not as the property of a thing but the expression of a relation— specifically, the relation between supply and demand. The function of money is therefore not to embody value but merely to represent it. Simmel had practical reservations about the desirability of a token currency. Along with most economists of his generation, he believed that such a currency would present governments with an irresistible source of temptation. Some link with precious metal was required, in his view, to set ‘‘a necessary limit to the supply of money’’.20 However, these reservations were purely practical; they did not touch on what Simmel considered to be the essence of money. The analogies between Cassirer and Simmel are striking. Simmel, one might say, provides the sociological underpinnings for Cassirer’s more purely intellectual analysis. For both thinkers, the transition to modernity is characterised as a movement from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world. The world of discrete, unrelated things and properties is gradually replaced by a world of functional correlations. This new world finds its perfect expression in number. By means of number, individual perceptions or desires are divested of their specific qualities and integrated into an overarching framework of relations. Any colour or sound can be expressed as an electromagnetic frequency; any desire can be expressed as a willingness to pay a certain amount of cash. By means of number, the heterogeneity of the world is reduced to homogeneity. It might seem at first glance that Simmel’s pessimism and Cassirer’s optimism simply represent different emotional reactions to an identical phenomenon. But this would be a superficial conclusion. The differences between Simmel and Cassirer are philosophical and not merely temperamental. I have already mentioned how both thinkers accept Mach’s functionalist interpretation of modern science. But Simmel follows Mach not only in his functionalism but also in his phenomenalism.21 The 18

Ibid, p. 124. Cf. ibid, p. 168. 20 Ibid, p. 160. 19

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objectivity of the scientific world-picture and the mature money economy is built up out of items—in the one case perceptual; in the other volitional—that are in themselves subjective. ‘‘Elements, each of which is subjective in content, can attain their present objectivity through the form of their mutual relationy . Mere sensory perceptions, by being connected with one another, can indicate or establish the objecty . In this way, objective economic value also crystallized out of subjective individual demands because the form of equality and of exchange was available, and because these relationships had an impartiality transcending subjectivity which the single elements lacked’’.22 Simmel’s subjectivism is of a piece with his more general philosophical naturalism.23 His tendency is always to analyse supposedly objective properties as constructions out of subjective, biological needs. Beauty is a relic of what once proved useful to the species;24 truth is a digest of those beliefs that incite us to useful behaviour.25 It is in the context of this naturalistic subjectivism that we must understand Simmel’s theory of alienation. The subject is the primary reality; the object is its ‘‘alienation’’ or ‘‘reification’’. This sets up an irreconcilable opposition between subject and object. To become objective is to become alien and indifferent to everything subjective. Money—the objectification of subjective values—epitomises this dehumanisation. It is a pure metric, lacking in colour or character.26 To view persons and objects in terms of their monetary value is to empty them of their specific qualities, to reduce them to a single dimension. Cynicism and ‘‘the blase! attitude’’ are the result of this ‘‘reduction of the concrete values of life to the mediating value of money’’.27 The characterlessness of money infects not only the individual psyche but society as a whole. Money is the great leveller of Vornehmheit, ‘‘distinction’’, a term Simmel borrowed with enthusiasm from Nietzsche. ‘‘The more money dominates interests and sets people and things in motion, the more objects are produced for the sake of money and are valued in terms of money, the less can the value of distinction be realised in men and in objects.’’28 The modern age, as the age of money par excellence, is characterised by its lack of distinction. The old castes and guilds, with their individual personalities, have been dissolved in the universal medium of wealth. There are no longer any ultimate differences of status, only gradations of richer and poorer. Money, and not democracy, is the great flattener of the social world.

21 Mach was at pains to distinguish his philosophy from any kind of Humean phenomenalism. But that did not suffice to prevent it from being widely interpreted in that way. So when I refer to ‘‘Machean’’ phenomenalism this should be understood to mean ‘‘according to the popular interpretation’’. 22 Ibid, p. 114. 23 Cf. David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory, London: Routledge, 1992, for a discussion of the influence of Spenser and Volkerpsychologie on the young Simmel. . 24 Simmel, op. cit., p. 74. 25 Ibid, p. 107. 26 Cf. Ibid, p. 216 and 432. 27 Ibid, p. 255. 28 Ibid, p. 390.

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Simmel’s use of concepts such as alienation and reification immediately recalls Hegel and Marx. But there is a crucial difference. For Marx and Hegel, the estrangement of subject and object is not ultimate; they envisage an ‘‘end of history’’ when the two sides will be reconciled, when the subject will ‘‘find itself in its other’’. Simmel holds out no such hope. This is because his subject is not the supreme rational principle of Hegel but the blind force of naturalism and vitalism. It is therefore denied any possibility of finding itself again in its own products; there is nothing there to find. Simmel’s outlook is one of fin-de-sie"cle fatalism; he shares Weber’s gloomy vision of an ‘‘iron cage’’ of objective forces progressively crushing the individual personality.29 These dark ruminations are the germ from which sprang the Lebensphilosophie of Simmel’s later years. Cassirer, as a Kantian, cannot possibly follow Simmel along this path. While he accepts Mach’s functionalism, he fiercely rejects his phenomenalism.30 For Cassirer, subject and object are always correlative; each exists only in relation to the other. ‘‘The thought of the ego is in no way more original and logically immediate than the thought of the object, since both arise together and can only develop in constant reciprocal relation. No content can be known and experienced as ‘subjective’ without being contrasted with another content which appears as objective’’.31 Thus there is no primary stratum of purely subjective experience; all experience, even the most primitive, is experience ‘‘of’’ an objective world. The object cannot be an ‘‘alienation’’ or a ‘‘reification’’ of the subject; it exists alongside and in correlation with the subject right from the beginning. Cassirer expressed this basic Kantian insight differently over the course of his philosophical career. In Substance and Function, written in 1910 when Cassirer was still associated with the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, his primary target is the Mach’s claim that scientific concepts can be reduced to complexes of sense-data. Cassirer retorts—pre-empting Neurath and Carnap by several years—that sensedata are an epistemological fiction. There is ‘‘no phase of experience in which sensations are given as inner states, separated from all ‘objective’ reference.’’32 Even the simple impressions beloved of phenomenalists—patches of colour and such like—are always impressions of something. ‘‘Even here the content of the sensation is separated from its momentary experiencing and is opposed as independent; the content appears, over against the particular temporal act, as a permanent moment’’.33 Science, far from grounding itself on bare sensation, merely carries through with greater rigour the process of objectification begun by everyday 29

Simmel concedes that money has the positive effect of liberating the individual from personal dependencies, an effect seen most clearly in the commutation of feudal services into monetary rent. Yet he is sceptical about the value of such freedom; being purely negative, it ‘‘favours that emptiness and instability that allows one to give full reign to every accidental, whimsical and tempting impulse’’. Cf. Georg Simmel, op. cit., pp. 284–291 and p. 402. 30 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science and History Since Hegel, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 81–117, for Cassirer’s ambivalent attitude to Mach. 31 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, Chicago: Open Court, 1923, p. 295. 32 Ibid, p. 287. 33 Ibid, p. 276.

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perception. ‘‘Thus there is an unbroken development from the first stages of objectification to its completed scientific form’’.34 In his mature philosophy, Cassirer expresses himself somewhat differently. While still maintaining that there is no stratum of bare sensation prior to objectification, he abandons his earlier claim that objectification proceeds in an ‘‘unbroken’’ manner. There is no straightforward continuity, he now argues, between everyday perception and mathematical natural science. We must resist the old Kantian temptation to interpret the structures of intuition in the light of the understanding. All perception is cast in a symbolic form, but this form is not predetermined at the outset; it is capable of elaboration in many different directions. ‘‘For beside the logical forms into which conceptual scientific thinking fits the world of phenomena stand forms of a different character and meaning. We find such forms of spiritual vision at work in the concepts both of language and of myth’’.35 This ‘‘insight into the ‘polydimensionality’ of the cultural world’’ is the wellspring of Cassirer’s mature philosophy.36 Yet throughout his career, Cassirer held fast to the basic Kantian insight that every mode of objectification is simultaneously a mode of ‘‘subjectification’’. The various symbolic forms are subjective and objective in equal measure; they differ only in the way they articulate the relation between the two poles. It therefore makes no sense to argue, as did Simmel and many others, that primitive societies are somehow ‘‘subjective’’ or that modern civilisation is uniquely ‘‘objective’’. Such theories involve a kind of metaphysical hypostasis. Subject and object are understood on the model of spatial zones, as an ‘‘inside’’ and an ‘‘outside’’.37 They are related to one another as the sea and the sand, with advances on one side corresponding to losses on the other. But this is false analogy. The relation between subject and object is more akin to the relation between force and resistance. It is a relation of correlation, not competition. Subject and object cannot be in competition with one another, for every new vision of the object is simultaneously a new stance on the part of the subject. A culture can no more be objective than it can subjective.38 In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer challenges the common view of myth as a subjective form of consciousness. Myth, according to this interpretation, is a ‘‘projection’’ of subjective qualities onto the objective world. But the distinguishing characteristic of myth, replies Cassirer, is not that it projects subjective qualities onto the objective world but that it makes no clear cut distinction between subject and object. Myth begins with an undifferentiated intuition of efficacy. ‘‘The mana of the Polynesians, the manitou of the Algonquin tribes, the orenda of the Iroqois etc., all have as their common factor the concept and intuition of an increased efficacy as 34

Ibid, p. 277. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 3, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 14. 36 Ibid, p. 13. 37 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function: Chicago: Open Court, 1923, p. 271. 38 Gideon Freudenthal is thus wrong to claim that ‘‘Simmel and Cassirer regard the process of civilisation as a process of the progressive objectivisation of subjective activities’’ (Freudenthal, op. cit., p. 252.) This is true of Simmel; it is not true of Cassirer. 35

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such.’’ This efficacy ‘‘is attributed equally to mere things and to persons, to ‘spiritual’ and ‘material,’ to ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ entities.’’39 Myth is thus no more subjective than it is objective; it simply does not recognise the modern distinction between subject and object. The achievement of the modern scientific worldview is not that it is more objective than myth, but that it draws the distinction between subject and object with far greater force. This is revealed with particular clarity in the transition from astrology to astronomy. The common interpretation of this as a transition from a ‘‘subjective’’ to an ‘‘objective’’ view of the world seems at first glance plausible: astrology treats the stars as intimately bound up with human life, whereas astronomy regards them as remote and indifferent. Here, it seems, is a prima face instance of Weber’s ‘‘disenchantment of the natural world’’. Yet this, argues Cassirer, is a one-sided view of the matter. Weberian disenchantment is simply the negative aspect of a process which appears on the positive side as the assertion of human freedom. To treat the stars as inanimate matter is simultaneously to affirm our independence of them. ‘‘The pathos that inspires his [Pico de Mirandola’s] work against astrology is not so much an intellectual as an ethical pathos. y The power of Fortuna is confronted with the power of Virtus; destiny is confronted with the self-confident and selftrusting will.’’40 The movement from astrology to astronomy is exemplary, in this respect, of the more general transition from myth to science. This transition implies not only a new view of the object, but also—and even more importantly—a new sense of the subject. Science is not mere ‘‘disenchantment’’ or ‘‘reification’’. It is rooted in a genuinely moral impulse. ‘‘The knowledge of the subject and object are here inextricably intertwined,’’ writes Cassirer in his discussion of Giordano Bruno. ‘‘Whoever does not find within himself the heroic fervour of self-assertion and of limitless unfolding will always remain blind to the cosmos and its infinity.’’41 Had Cassirer taken as much interest in social as he did in intellectual history, he might perhaps have come to similar conclusions with regard to money. He might have picked up the thread that Simmel himself abandoned, and interpreted money not as a purely objective force, alien to human needs, but as the expression of a new morality of individual freedom. Such an approach would have been entirely consistent with his general philosophical outlook; it would have reflected his conviction that cultural forms never confront us as something alien but surround us as the air we breath. However, all this is speculation. Cassirer’s great weakness as a thinker is, as Peter Gay observed, his ‘‘failure to do justice to the social dimension of ideas’’.42 But a Cassirerian ‘‘philosophy of money’’ remains a conceptual possibility; 39 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955, pp. 158–159. 40 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963, p. 120. 41 Ibid, p. 188. 42 Peter Gay, ‘‘The Social History of Ideas: Ernst Cassirer and After’’, in Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore ed., The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honour of Herbert Marcuse, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, p. 117. Cassirer’s ‘‘failure to do justice to the social dimension of ideas’’ is not as complete as is often supposed. His neglected essay of 1930, ‘‘Form und Technik’’ (in cf. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois

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it is false to suggest, as do GeXner and Freudenthal, that Cassirer avoided treating the economic aspects of modernity merely because he could not reconcile them with his optimistic theory of history.

3. Simmel, Cassirer and the ‘‘tragedy of culture’’ Towards the end of The Philosophy of Money, Simmel links economic objectification to the more general process of cultural objectification. In its original meaning, cultivation refers to a development or intensification of the natural processes of life. A cultivated tree is one whose form represents an unbroken development of the natural tree; a cultivated man, by analogy, is one whose learning is congruent with the natural bent of his personality.43 This is what Simmel sometimes calls ‘‘subjective culture’’. Yet culture also has a strictly objective dimension. Its products have a significance over and above the contribution they make to the lives of the individuals who produce and consume them; they develop according to a logic of their own, which may be antipathetic to the needs of life. Objective culture grows at the expense of subjective culture. The refinement of artistic technique hinders the self-expression of the artist; the development of bureaucracy crushes the bureaucrat. Culture comes to seem a sphere of strange and unintelligible procedures, a labyrinth within which we lose ourselves. ‘‘How many workers are there today, even within large-scale industry, who are able to understand the machinery with which they work?y In the purely intellectual sphere, even the best informed and most thoughtful persons work with a growing number of ideas, concepts and statements, the exact meaning and content of which they are not fully aware’’.44 Simmel links this process of cultural objectification to the growth of the money economy and the increased division of labour that it facilitates. But he does not, unlike Marx, reduce it to its economic dimension. The ‘‘division of labour’’ encompasses not only the specialisation of production but also the growth of bureaucracy and the proliferation of scientific knowledge. All these processes are expressions of the same basic impulse; none has causal priority. Simmel has given the Marxist theory of alienation a non-materialist interpretation, one that was to have a great influence on Weber and on western Marxism. In the last decade of his life, between the years 1909 and 1918, Simmel returned again and again to the theme of cultural alienation outlined in The Philosophy of Money. But the emphasis has shifted, in these late works, from the social to the spiritual. Simmel is not trying to describe society from the standpoint of the detached, academic observer so much as to articulate a personal feeling of malaise. (footnote continued) ed., Symbol, Technik, Sprache. Aufsatze . aus den Jahren 1927 – 1933, Meiner, 1995), contains the rudiments of a philosophy of technology. But there is no denying that social and economic considerations play a negligible role in Cassirer’s thought as a whole. 43 Georg Simmel, op. cit., p. 446. 44 Ibid, p. 449.

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A member of the set surrounding the avant-garde poet Stephan George, Simmel was acutely sensitive to the dissonances of modern life. His work, with its flights of fancy, its mania for the trivial and peripheral, was very much part of the tendencies it diagnosed. ‘‘Modernity has found here a direct expression,’’ wrote Thomas Masaryk about Simmel’s Soziologie. ‘‘The totality of fragmentary, centrifugal directions of existence and the arbitrariness of individual elements are brought to light.’’45 It is not surprising that Simmel was popular among the young and rebellious, and that he went on to become one of the formative influences on Lebensphilosophie in the Weimar Republic. Although the language of these late essays is increasingly metaphysical, it has its roots in Simmel’s earlier naturalism. Machean phenomenalism has passed over smoothly into a quasi-Bergsonian vitalism. There is a ‘‘deep estrangement or enmityy between the life and creative process of the psyche on the one hand and its contents and products on the other. The vibrating, boundlessly developing, restless life of the creative soul of any type is confronted by its fixed and intellectually unshakable producty; it is often as if the creative movement of the soul were dying from its own product’’.46 In modern times, the reification of culture has engendered its own antithesis. Life has risen up in revolt, not against this or that cultural form, but against the very idea of cultural form as such. In The Conflict of Modern Culture, an essay published in 1918, Simmel surveys the various manifestations of this ‘‘resurgence of life’’. They include the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the American pragmatists, the art of Van Gogh, the cult of youth and the fashion for free-love and religious mysticism.47 Simmel writes about these movements with sympathy, but concedes that they aspire to something which is in principle unattainable. Life cannot manifest itself in its naked immediacy; it is ‘‘ineluctably condemned to become reality only in the guise of its opposite, that is as form’’.48 This is the ‘‘tragedy of culture’’. Because the tragedy of culture is inscribed in the basic structure of life itself, it appears as an inexorable fate. Yet Simmel’s cultural fatalism leads him, in a paradoxical but not unpredictable chain of reasoning, to political voluntarism. The only agent powerful enough to resolve, or at least to postpone, the conflict of culture is the state. Hence Simmel’s enthusiasm—anomalous in a man of otherwise liberal and progressive views—for the First World War. The war appears, serendipitously, as the solution to the conflict of modern culture. It is the only way to overcome alienation, because it presses the entire machinery of objective culture into the service of a goal that the individual can readily understand. Culture once again acquires a vital meaning; it is absorbed back into the stream of life from which it has sprung. Simmel has a particular enthusiasm for rationing. Echoing the language of The 45 Quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 45. 46 Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone ed., Simmel on Culture, London: SAGE Publications, 1997, p. 59. 47 Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, op. cit., pp. 75–90. 48 Ibid, pp. 89–90.

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Philosophy of Money, he claims that rationing has shattered the belief that all values can be expressed in monetary terms. ‘‘Food, which used to be freely accessible provided one had money, has become scarce and its provision unreliable, and this has re-established its status as an absolute value.’’ Simmel hopes that the experience of rationing will create a ‘‘more sensitive, less blase! —I would even go so far as to say a more reverent—relationship to commodities’’.49 The illiberalism of these sentiments may seem surprising, but they find a parallel in the wartime writings of many other German liberals. Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Cassirer’s Marburg colleague Paul Natorp—to name but a few—all greeted the war with enthusiasm.50 These men belonged to the group of academics designated by Fritz Ringer as ‘‘modernists’’. Their liberalism was skin-deep, pragmatic. Bound at heart to the traditional mandarin values of idealism and aristocracy, they reconciled themselves to the growing commercialisation of German society as a bleak inevitability. Their favourite pose—perfected by Max Weber—was that of heroic pessimism. The war shattered this pose. It offered the intoxicating hope of postponing, or even reversing, the march of modernity. Such a hope was vain according to the modernists’ own theory of history. It represented a kind of willed credulity. But no one can live in despair forever, and we should not be too surprised that most of the modernists did not have the courage of their pessimism. Cassirer’s critique of Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie is very much of a piece with his earlier critique of Machean empiricism.51 It is, in essence, the same critique; only the terms of reference have changed. Lebensphilosophie borrows from empiricism, and invests with a heavy weight of emotional significance, the notion of direct, unmediated experience. The entire edifice of objective culture is presented as an abstraction from this experience, just as language, for the British empiricists, is an abstraction from sense-perception. It then becomes easy to denigrate culture in the terms used by Berkeley to denigrate language. Culture is a mask, a ‘‘curtain’’, hiding from us the face of pure experience.52 But if, as Cassirer insisted throughout his career, there is no such thing as pure experience, if all experience, even the most primitive, is to some degree mediated by concepts, then the opposition between experience and culture—or, to use Cassirer’s terms, between life and form—is an intellectual mirage. ‘‘The question of how life ‘achieves’ form, how form comes to life, isy unsolvable. This is not because there is an unbridgeable gulf between them, but because the hypothesis of ‘pure’ form (as well as the hypothesis of ‘pure’ life) already contains a contradiction within itself. No matter how deeply we enter into the realm of organic processes or how high we go into the sphere of intellectual 49

Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Crisis of Culture’’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, op. cit., pp. 97–98. Cf. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 169, pp. 180–199. 51 Cassirer’s critique of Simmel is contained in two essays written in 1928 and 1940. The first, ‘‘‘Geist’ and ‘Life’’’, was published posthumously as part of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 4, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 3–33. The second, ‘‘The ‘Tragedy of Culture’’’, is the last chapter of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 103–127. 52 For Cassirer’s critique of Berkeley, cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1, New Have: Yale University Press, 1955, pp. 136–137. 50

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creativity, we never find these two subjects, these two substances, so to speak, whose ‘harmony’ and metaphysical relationship are being questioned here. We meet up with completely formless life as seldom as we meet up with a completely lifeless form’’.53 Cassirer’s critique of Lebensphilosophie is thus rooted in what is perhaps his central philosophical idea: the boundlessness of the symbolic. There is no stratum of bare sensation prior to symbolic organisation. Every perception contains within itself ‘‘a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents’’. It is, to use Cassirer’s metaphor, ‘‘pregnant’’ with meaning.54 Meaning is never something added on to perception from the outside; it is always ‘‘already there’’.55 Human life, as distinct from animal existence, is a life in meaning. Everything that Cassirer says about meaning applies a fortiori to culture. Culture is not something external to life; it is the sphere within which life unfolds. Culture, you might say, is our nature. Thus Simmel’s vision of a ‘‘deep estrangement or enmity’’ between life on the one hand and its contents and products on the other is radically incoherent. ‘‘How could life ‘turn to’ this objective content if the relationship and tension, the ‘intention,’ toward it did not originally lie enclosed within it, indeed if this very intention were not an aspect of it, its being, and its final fulfilment?y [Life] possesses and grasps itself in the imprint of form as the infinite possibility of formation, as the will to form and the power to form. Even life’s limitation becomes its own act; what from the outside seems to be its fate, its necessity, proves to be a witness to its freedom and self-formation.’’56 Willfried GeXner has justly objected that Simmel’s actual position is far closer to Cassirer than Cassirer acknowledges.57 Simmel is not Bergson; no more than Cassirer does he believe that life can become immediately visible to itself. It is ‘‘ineluctably condemned to become reality only in the guise of its opposite, that is as form’’.58 But then by what rights—we might reply on behalf of Cassirer—does Simmel speak of tragedy? Simmel is still close enough to Bergsonian vitalism to think of the pure immediacy of life as a goal at which one can at least coherently aim. Only thus can the inevitable failure to attain it count as a tragedy. But if it is not even a goal at which we can coherently aim, then neither can we ‘‘fail’’ to attain it. (One likewise cannot ‘‘fail’’ to go back in time or jump to the moon.) In this case all talk of tragedy is mere self-indulgence. Cassirer’s own attitude to the ‘‘human condition’’ is best described as stoical rather than tragic. He recognises that there is something discomforting in our alienation from nature, but insists that ‘‘there is no remedy 53

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 4, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 15. 54 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 202. 55 Cf. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 55. 56 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 4, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 19. 57 . Cf. Willfried GeXner, ‘‘Tragodie oder Schauspiel? Cassirers Kritik an Simmels Kulturkritik’’, p. 60. 58 Ibid, pp. 89–90.

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against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life’’.59 Cassirer does not want to deny that we can experience a conflict between life and culture. He writes movingly about the failure of language to do justice to our thoughts and feelings; he quotes Schiller: ‘‘Why can the living spirit not appear to spirit? When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks!’’60 This failure is felt most keenly by great artists, thinkers and religious visionaries. What Cassirer says about ‘‘the prophet’’ is particularly revealing. In seeking to give utterance to his vision of the divine, the prophet must draw upon words and doctrines handed down by tradition. ‘‘So long as he is still inspired and filled with the inner force of vision, these are nothing other than symbols for him. But for those to whom the proclamation is imparted, the symbols will once again become dogmas.’’61 Hence the despair of the prophet when he realises that all he has bequeathed to the world is a new jargon. But although Cassirer acknowledges the possibility of such a conflict, he resists the temptation to absolutise it. The tension between life and culture is always local, never universal. A body of literature, a ritual or an institution can become something alien and oppressive. But culture as such can never be so regarded. It is the specifically human mode of being; to throw it off would be to cease to be human, to revert to a purely animal existence. And no cultural object can ever become utterly, irredeemably alien. However much it is venerated or abused, however much cliche! accrues to it, it always retains traces of the human life from which it has sprung. Cultural objects are not an absolute ‘‘into which the I bumps’’ but a point of passage, a bridge between the I and the thou.62 What applies to individual objects also applies to epochs. ‘‘The truly great cultural epochs of the past are not like erratic blocks that reach into the present as witnesses of a bygone time. They are not inert masses, but the conglomeration of huge potential energies, which are only waiting for the moment when they are to come forward again and make themselves manifest in new effects.’’63 In face of the pessimistic tendencies of the modern age, Cassirer holds faith with Vico’s conviction that no product of the human mind can ever become entirely alien and incomprehensible to the human mind.

4. Conclusion Cassirer’s critique of Simmel may strike some readers as a very laborious exercise in missing the point. Simmel is using the universal language of metaphysics expressively or poetically; his real purpose—as the references to Van Gogh and Nietzsche make abundantly clear—is to articulate an anxiety particular to his age. 59

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944, p. 25. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 53. 61 Ibid, p. 125. 62 Ibid, p. 110. 63 Ibid, pp. 112–113. 60

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This is philosophy as cultural commentary. But Cassirer treats Simmel’s arguments sub specie aeternitatis, completely ignoring the contemporary malaise which they are trying to express. Nowhere does he suggest that the modern age raises problems peculiar to itself. His cultural references are conspicuously old-fashioned; he gives the impression of not having read any literature written later than 1830. Nor—as Gideon Freudenthal and Willfried GeXner both point out—does he address the social and economic questions that are at the forefront of Simmel’s concern. This failure to ‘‘speak to the age’’ is the basic explanation for Cassirer’s lack of widespread influence. His irenic, classical outlook found no resonance in the troubled Germany of the interwar years. But what might appear as Cassirer’s failure to speak to his age can also be interpreted, more sympathetically, as the expression of a positive moral stance. Cassirer’s singular optimism was the product not of wishful thinking but of a clearheaded determination not to ‘‘give in’’ to the fatalistic tendencies of the Weimar years. It was, to paraphrase Gramsci, an optimism of the will as well as of the intellect. Indeed, the two forms of optimism are hard to disentangle. A certain subdued ethical pathos infuses all of Cassirer’s writings, even his most abstruse works of scholarship or epistemology. Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of practical reason has rarely found a more committed exponent. Thus while it is true that the difference between Simmel and Cassirer is not purely moral but also theoretical, it is equally true that it is not purely theoretical but also moral. Intellectual and ethical issues are closely intertwined. What Cassirer ultimately objects to in Simmel’s theory of the ‘‘tragedy of culture’’ is its fatalism. It elevates the conflict between man and his creations into an ineluctable, a mythical destiny. Not that Cassirer is a metaphysical optimist. Culture, he writes, ‘‘can never abandon itself simply to a na.ıve optimism or to a dogmatic belief in the ‘perfectibility’ of man. For all that it has constructed continually threatens to collapse under its very eyes’’.64 But if progress is not automatic, neither is decay. Hegelian optimism and Spenglerian pessimism must equally be rejected. The choice, the responsibility, is always ours. The products of culture escape our control only to the extent that we allow them, to the extent that we adopt a purely passive attitude towards them. The danger of theories such as Simmel’s is that, by encouraging such an attitude, they help bring into existence the very situation they predict. What Cassirer says about Spengler holds true also of Simmel. ‘‘If we accept this system of Spengler’’, he writes, ‘‘we feel as if all our individual mental powers were suddenly paralysed. We are curbed under the yoke of a dire and inexorable fatality’’.65 Such an attitude represents, in terms of Cassirer’s theory of culture, a retrogression from philosophy to mythology. The first duty of philosophy is to combat the fatalism of myth, to awaken man to his freedom and his responsibility. Thus in spite of its apparent inconsequence, Cassirer’s critique of Simmel serves a purpose that is in essence moral and political. Cassirer accurately discerned that 64

Ibid, p. 109. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Philosophy and Politics’’, in Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 228–229. 65

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Lebensphilosophie, even in its most progressive guise, threatened the fragile institutions of liberal Germany. It deprived them of any deep moral or existential import; it assigned them to the realm of alienated, reified existence, to the realm of fate. A liberalism erected on the basis of Lebensphilosophie could never be any more than pragmatic and provisional. As the enthusiasm of Simmel and many other German ‘‘modernists’’ for the First World War demonstrated, it was always liable to turn into its opposite. Cultural despair was always prone to seek relief in radical political action, because the power of the collective appeared as the only antidote to the impotence of the individual.66 The ‘‘politics of cultural despair’’ was, of course, to find its supreme expression in Nazism. It is in this context that all Cassirer’s strictures against Simmel must be read.

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Cassirer interprets Nazism in just this way, as a ‘‘magical’’ response to feelings of individual impotence. ‘‘Man feels a deep mistrust in himself and his individual abilities. But on the other hand he has an extravagant trust in the power of collective wishes and actions. What gives to the magician, to the wizard and sorcerer his real force is that he does not act as an individual, but that in him the power of the whole tribe is condensed and concentrated’’. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘The Technique of our Modern Political Myths’’ in ibid, p. 250.