The German Genius

there could never be enough for total understanding. “Man does not discover what he is through speculation about himself or through psychological experiments but through history.” The historical dimension—and the education on which it is based—underlines the need for interpretation and this, like understanding, to which it was linked, was another insight of Dilthey’s. 9 Because the activity of the mind was the chief phenomenon of the human world, Dilthey said that understanding in that world was always more likely to resemble literary or legal interpretation than physics or chemistry. In saying this, Dilthey challenged head-on the claims of modern science to be the paradigm of all knowledge.
    Dilthey therefore derived five important principles by which human studies were to be guided. First, individual cases are intrinsically interesting and it is beside the point to generalize from such cases “because their differences are just as important as their similarities and are due to their historical character.” General laws, applicable within science, have no place in human studies. Second, the relationship of parts to wholes is different so far as people are concerned. The sense in which people are part of communities is nothing like pistons in a machine. Third, investigation must start at the level of complexity we find in nature. Nothing is gained by attempting to understand the poet’s imagination through simple processes that may be observed in animals or small children. Fourth, we are free to switch disciplines “whenever that helps.” Fifth, man is both subject and object. Circumstances have made him—he is an object. But he also knows himself and controls his actions. 10
    We are left with an important conclusion. Because assumptions and interpretations are involved, knowledge of the human world “can never be a kind of photograph of reality.” It is always a construction, constantly under revision. 11
    M ENTAL L IFE IN THE M ETROPOLIS
     
    Despite Dilthey’s very great influence, formally the first German sociologist of note was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), whose study of the German peasant was especially interesting to foreigners, where such a way of life had died out owing to the industrial revolution fifty years earlier. The peasant’s idea of constitutional government, he found, was very tenuous. He also identified important differences between Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany (Middle Germany being more “individualistic” than the other two areas), and he conceived the notion of the “social philistine,” the individual “indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests.” This was not the “inwardness” of the Bildung classes but its petit bourgeois equivalent and much more problematic.
    But Riehl is now overshadowed by a raft of bigger names, still read with profit today, of which the first was Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Born in the very center of Berlin, Simmel was in every sense a modern urban man. After he had read Simmel’s first book, Ferdinand Tönnies wrote to a friend, “The book is shrewd but it has the flavour of the metropolis.” As someone else said of him, “Simmel suffers from modernism.” 12
    Simmel was the youngest of seven children. His father, a successful Jewish businessman who had converted to Christianity, died when Georg was still a boy, and a friend of the family, a music publisher, took over as his guardian. Simmel studied history and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he was taught by a wide raft of luminaries—Mommsen, Treitschke, Sybel, Droysen, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and the anthropologist Moritz Lazarus (who also taught Dilthey and William Wundt.) 13
    In 1885, he became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) at the University of Berlin, giving courses on ethics, sociology, Kant, Schopenhauer, “The Philosophical Consequences of Darwinism,” and Nietzsche. He was a superb performer, and his lectures became one of the socio-intellectual attractions of Berlin, attended not only by students but by the cultural elite.
    Despite this success, despite the fact that the reception of his books brought him eminence throughout Europe and as far afield as Russia and the United States, where he was an advisory editor of the American Journal of Sociology , despite the fact that he had the friendship and support of leading academic figures like