A founding sociologist’s early attempt to ground ethics in empirical inquiry
What the Work Is
Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft — rendered in English as Introduction to the Science of Morality — is a two-volume work by the German sociologist, philosopher, and critic Georg Simmel. It was published in Berlin by the publisher Hertz in 1892 and 1893, the first volume appearing in 1892 and the second in 1893. The work belongs to the early phase of Simmel’s career, written while he was a privatdozent at the University of Berlin, where he lectured not only in philosophy but also in ethics, logic, pessimism, art, psychology, and sociology. It stands as one of his major monographic works and reflects his characteristic ambition to examine human affairs through a philosophical and analytical lens rather than a purely doctrinal one.
What the Book Is About
The title itself announces the book’s central project: to treat morality as an object of scientific inquiry — that is, to examine ethical life as a phenomenon to be studied rather than as a set of commandments to be asserted. Simmel’s aim is not to prescribe what people ought to do but to investigate how moral ideas, judgments, and norms actually arise, function, and change. This places the work within a broadly naturalistic and analytical tradition of thinking about ethics, one that asks after the origins and workings of moral phenomena instead of grounding them in fixed, transcendent principles. The book thus belongs to Simmel’s lifelong concern with the “forms” and “contents” of social and cultural life — the idea that social and cultural phenomena can be analyzed in terms of forms and contents whose relationship is transient, with form becoming content and vice versa depending on context.
Key Ideas and Themes
The governing idea of the Introduction to the Science of Morality is that ethics can and should be studied as a science — that moral life has a structure, a history, and a logic that can be examined empirically and philosophically rather than merely preached. Simmel’s approach is analytical and relativistic in spirit: rather than assuming a single, eternal moral law, he treats moral values and obligations as human phenomena that emerge from social life and are subject to change.
This concern connects directly to the broader theoretical commitments that run through Simmel’s work. He approached social and cultural phenomena through the interplay of “forms” and “contents,” a relationship he understood as transient — form becoming content and content becoming form depending on context. In the same way, moral life can be seen as a domain in which particular contents (specific values, duties, customs) take on general forms, and general forms are filled with particular contents. This way of thinking made Simmel a forerunner of structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences and helped establish the relational and antipositivist currents in sociology.
Simmel’s intellectual orientation was consistently dialectical. His method focused on social relations, integrated facts and values, rejected the notion of absolute dividing lines between social phenomena, and attended to conflict and contradiction as much as to harmony. He was drawn to dualisms, conflicts, and contradictions in whatever realm of the social world he examined. A work devoted to the “science of morality” is a natural expression of this temperament: it treats morality not as a settled system but as a field of tensions, competing claims, and shifting forms.
The book also reflects Simmel’s rejection of rigid academic orthodoxy. He broadly rejected academic standards and was known for writing for a general audience rather than for academic sociologists alone — a habit that contributed to his marginalization within the university system even as his lectures attracted the intellectual elite of Berlin. The Introduction to the Science of Morality belongs to this same independent, essayistic, and philosophically wide-ranging mode of inquiry.
Structure and Approach
The work is a two-volume study, published in successive years, and its title signals its function as an introduction — a foundational inquiry into what a science of morality would look like and how it might proceed. Simmel’s method is philosophical and analytical rather than empirical in the narrow sense; he examines concepts, distinctions, and the logic of moral phenomena. Consistent with his general approach, the book proceeds by way of analysis and reflection on the forms and contents of moral life rather than by constructing a deductive system of duties. Its two-volume scope indicates a substantial and sustained treatment rather than a brief essay.
Significance and Influence
The Introduction to the Science of Morality holds a place among Simmel’s major monographic works, standing alongside On Social Differentiation (1890), The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892), and The Philosophy of Money (1900) as one of the substantial books of his early and middle periods. It belongs to the body of work through which Simmel helped establish sociological antipositivism and a relational style of reasoning in the social sciences — an approach that asked “What is society?” in analogy to Kant’s “What is nature?” and that treated social and cultural phenomena as analyzable in terms of forms and contents. His nonpositivist theory, developed across works such as this one, informed the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and his influence extended to figures such as Max Weber, with whom he was acquainted. The book is thus part of the intellectual foundation on which Simmel’s reputation as a founding figure of sociology and a pioneering analyst of individuality and social fragmentation rests.
Simmel was born in Berlin on 1 March 1858, the youngest of seven children in an assimilated Jewish family. His father, Eduard Simmel (1810–1874), was a prosperous businessman and convert to Roman Catholicism who had founded a confectionery store called “Felix & Sarotti,” later taken over by a chocolate manufacturer. His mother, Flora Bodstein (1818–1897), came from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism, and Georg himself was baptized as a Protestant in childhood. His father died in 1874, when Georg was sixteen, leaving him a sizable inheritance; he was then adopted by Julius Friedländer, founder of the international music publishing house Peters Verlag, who endowed him with the large fortune that enabled him to become a scholar.
Beginning in 1876, Simmel studied philosophy and history at the Humboldt University of Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1881 for a thesis on Kantian philosophy of matter titled “Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physischer Monadologie” (“The Nature of Matter According to Kant’s Physical Monadology”). In 1885 he became a privatdozent at the University of Berlin. Although his applications for vacant chairs at German universities were supported by Max Weber, Simmel remained an academic outsider; with the support of his guardian’s inheritance, he was able to pursue his scholarly interests for many years without needing a salaried position. He had a hard time gaining acceptance in the academic community despite the support of well-known associates such as Max Weber, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, and Edmund Husserl — partly because of anti-Semitism, but also simply because his articles were written for a general audience rather than for academic sociologists, which led to dismissive judgments from other professionals. He nevertheless continued his intellectual and academic work and took part in artistic circles.
Personal Life and Later Career
In 1890, Georg married Gertrud Kinel, a philosopher who published under the pseudonym Marie-Luise Enckendorf as well as under her own name. They lived a sheltered and bourgeois life, their home becoming a venue for cultivated gatherings in the tradition of the salon. They had one son, Hans Eugen Simmel, who became a medical doctor; their granddaughter was the psychologist Marianne Simmel. Simmel also had a secret affair with his assistant Gertrud Kantorowicz, who bore him a daughter in 1907, but this was hidden until after Simmel’s death.
In 1909, Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and others co-founded the German Society for Sociology, and he served as a member of its first executive body. In 1914 he received an ordinary professorship with chair at the then-German University of Strassburg, but did not feel at home there. Because World War I broke out, all academic activities and lectures were halted and lecture halls were converted to military hospitals. In 1915 he unsuccessfully applied for a chair at Heidelberg University. In 1917, Simmel stopped reading the newspapers and withdrew to the Black Forest to finish the book The View of Life (Lebensanschauung). Shortly before the end of the war in 1918, he died from liver cancer in Strasbourg.
The Four Levels of Concern in Simmel’s Work
There are four basic levels of concern in Simmel’s work: the psychological workings of social life; the sociological workings of interpersonal relationships; the structure of and changes in the zeitgeist (the social and cultural “spirit”) of his time — he would also adopt the principle of emergentism, the idea that higher levels of conscious properties emerge from lower levels; and the nature and inevitable fate of humanity.
Forms of Association
The furthest Simmel brought his work to a micro-level analysis was in dealing with forms and interactions that take place with different types of people. Such forms would include subordination, superordination, exchange, conflict, and sociability. Simmel focused on these forms of association while paying little attention to individual consciousness. He believed in the creative consciousness that can be found in diverse forms of interaction, observing both the ability of actors to create social structures and the disastrous effects such structures had on the creativity of individuals. He also believed that social and cultural structures come to have a life of their own.
Simmel refers to “all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a ‘society’,” whereby society is defined as a “higher unity,” composed of individuals. He was particularly fascinated by humanity’s “impulse to sociability,” whereby “the solitariness of the individuals is resolved into togetherness,” referring to this unity as “the free-playing, interacting interdependence of individuals.” Accordingly, he defines sociability as “the play-form of association” driven by “amicability, breeding, cordiality and attractiveness of all kinds.” In order for this free association to occur, Simmel explains, “the personalities must not emphasize themselves too individually … with too much abandon and aggressiveness.” Rather, “this world of sociability … a democracy of equals” is to be without friction so long as people blend together in the spirit of pleasure and bring “about among themselves a pure interaction free of any disturbing material accent.” Simmel describes idealised interactions in expressing that “the vitality of real individuals, in their sensitivities and attractions, in the fullness of their impulses and convictions…is but a symbol of life, as it shows itself in the flow of a lightly amusing play,” adding that “a symbolic play, in whose aesthetic charm all the finest and most highly sublimated dynamics of social existence and its riches are gathered.”
Social Geometry
In a dyad (a two-person group), a person is able to retain their individuality, as there is no fear that another may shift the balance of the group. In contrast, triads (three-person groups) risk the potential of one member becoming subordinate to the other two, thus threatening their individuality; furthermore, were a triad to lose a member, it would become a dyad. The basic nature of this dyad-triad principle forms the essence of structures that form society. As a group (structure) increases in size, it becomes more isolated and segmented, whereby the individual also becomes further separated from each member. In respect to the notion of “group size,” Simmel’s view was somewhat ambiguous: on one hand, he believed that the individual benefits most when a group gets bigger and exerting control on the individual becomes harder; on the other hand, with a large group there is a possibility of the individual’s becoming distant and impersonal. Therefore, in an effort for the individual to cope with the larger group, they must become a part of a smaller group such as the family. The value of something is determined by the distance from its actor. In “The Stranger,” Simmel discusses how if a person is too close to the actor they are not considered a stranger; if they are too far, however, they would no longer be a part of a group. The particular distance from a group allows a person to have objective relationships with different group members.
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”
One of Simmel’s most notable essays is “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (“Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben”) from 1903, which was originally given as one of a series of lectures on all aspects of city life by experts in various fields, ranging from science and religion to art. The series was conducted alongside the Dresden cities exhibition of 1903. Simmel was originally asked to lecture on the role of intellectual (or scholarly) life in the big city, but he effectively reversed the topic in order to analyze the effects of the big city on the mind of the individual; as a result, when the lectures were published as essays in a book, the series editor himself had to supply an essay on the original topic to fill the gap. The essay was not well received during Simmel’s lifetime: the organisers of the exhibition overemphasised its negative comments about city life, but Simmel also pointed out positive transformations. During the 1920s the essay influenced the thought of Robert E. Park and other American sociologists at the University of Chicago who collectively became known as the “Chicago School.” It gained wider circulation in the 1950s when it was translated into English and published as part of Kurt Wolff’s edited collection, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. It now appears regularly on the reading lists of courses in urban studies and architectural history. However, the notion of the blasé is actually not the central or final point of the essay, but is part of a description of a sequence of states in an irreversible transformation of the mind — Simmel does not quite say that the big city has an overall negative effect on the mind or the self, even as he suggests that it undergoes permanent changes. It is perhaps this ambiguity that gave the essay a lasting place in the discourse on the metropolis.
In the essay, Simmel writes that the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man’s freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labor) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition — but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
The Philosophy of Money
In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel views money as a component of life which helped people understand the totality of life. He believed people created value by making objects, then separating themselves from that object and then trying to overcome that distance. He found that things which were too close were not considered valuable and things which were too far for people to get were also not considered valuable; considered in determining value was the scarcity, time, sacrifice, and difficulties involved in getting the object. For Simmel, city life led to a division of labor and increased financialisation. As financial transactions increase, some emphasis shifts to what the individual can do, instead of who the individual is. Financial matters in addition to emotions are in play.
“The Stranger”
Simmel’s concept of distance comes into play where he identifies a stranger as a person that is far away and close at the same time. The Stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human nature; he is far from us insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people. A stranger is far enough away that he is unknown but close enough that it is possible to get to know him. In a society there must be a stranger: if everyone is known, then there is no person that is able to bring something new to everybody. The stranger bears a certain objectivity that makes him a valuable member to the individual and society. People let down their inhibitions around him and confess openly without any fear, because there is a belief that the Stranger is not connected to anyone significant and therefore does not pose a threat to the confessor’s life. More generally, Simmel observes that because of their peculiar position in the group, strangers often carry out special tasks that the other members of the group are either incapable or unwilling to carry out — for example, especially in pre-modern societies, most strangers made a living from trade, which was often viewed as an unpleasant activity by “native” members of those societies; in some societies, they were also employed as arbitrators and judges, because they were expected to treat rival factions in society with an impartial attitude. Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given. On one hand the stranger’s opinion does not really matter because of his lack of connection to society, but on the other the stranger’s opinion does matter, because of his lack of connection to society; he holds a certain objectivity that allows him to be unbiased and decide freely without fear, simply able to see, think, and decide without being influenced by the opinion of others.
On Secrecy
According to Simmel, in small groups secrets are less needed because everyone seems to be more similar; in larger groups secrets are needed as a result of their heterogeneity. In secret societies, groups are held together by the need to maintain the secret, a condition that also causes tension because the society relies on its sense of secrecy and exclusion. For Simmel, secrecy also exists in relationships as intimate as marriage: in revealing all, marriage becomes dull and boring and loses all excitement. He saw a general thread in the importance of secrets and the strategic use of ignorance: to be social beings who are able to cope successfully with their social environment, people need clearly defined realms of unknowns for themselves. Furthermore, sharing a common secret produces a strong “we feeling.” The modern world depends on honesty and therefore a lie can be considered more devastating than it ever has been before. Money allows a level of secrecy that has never been attainable before, because money allows for “invisible” transactions, due to the fact that money is now an integral part of human values and beliefs; it is possible to buy silence.
On Flirtation
In a series of essays published in 1923, Simmel discusses flirtation as a generalized type of social interaction. According to Simmel, “to define flirtation as simply a ‘passion for pleasing’ is to confuse the means to an end with the desire for this end.” The distinctiveness of the flirt lies in the fact that she awakens delight and desire by means of a unique antithesis and synthesis: through the alternation of accommodation and denial. In the behavior of the flirt, the man feels the proximity and interpenetration of the ability and inability to acquire something; this is in essence the “price.” A sidelong glance with the head half-turned is characteristic of flirtation in its most banal guise.
On Fashion
In the eyes of Simmel, fashion is a form of social relationship that allows those who wish to conform to the demands of a group to do so; it also allows some to be individualistic by deviating from the norm. There are many social roles in fashion, and both objective culture and individual culture can have an influence on people. In the initial stage, everyone adopts what is fashionable, and those that deviate from the fashion inevitably adopt a whole new view of what they consider fashion. Ritzer wrote that Simmel argued that not only does following what is in fashion involve dualities, so does the effort on the part of some people to be of fashion: unfashionable people view those who follow a fashion as being imitators and themselves as mavericks, but Simmel argued that the latter are simply engaging in an inverse form of imitation. This means that those who are trying to be different or “unique” are not, because in trying to be different they become a part of a new group that has labeled themselves different or “unique.”
Aesthetics and Cultural History
Simmel’s work on European art history spans the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, including books on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rembrandt and essays on artists from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to Auguste Rodin. He also wrote on art forms and media, aesthetics after Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, and the sociology of art in modern culture. These are important to Simmel’s view of society’s modern forms. He used symbols, metaphors, tropes, and analogies exploring structures of mind and behavior. From 1901 he planned an unrealized volume integrating his philosophy of art, which he told philosopher Heinrich Rickert was a “burning” and “dominant interest.” He asked Kantorowicz to edit his unpublished manuscripts posthumously. Suhrkamp Verlag issued many unknown texts in a 1989–2014 Gesamtausgabe (collected works).
Works
Simmel’s major monographic works include, in chronological order: Über sociale Differenzierung (1890, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot) [On Social Differentiation]; Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft 1 & 2 (1892–1893, Berlin: Hertz) [Introduction to the Science of Ethics]; Die Probleme der Geschichtphilosophie (1892, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; 2nd ed., 1905) [The Problems of the Philosophy of History]; Philosophie des Geldes (1900, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; 2nd ed., 1907) [The Philosophy of Money]; Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903, Dresden: Petermann) [The Metropolis and Mental Life]; Kant (1904, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; 6th ed., 1924); Philosophie der Mode (1905, Berlin: Pan-Verlag); Kant und Goethe (1906, Berlin: Marquardt); Die Religion (1906, Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening; 2nd ed., 1912); Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot); Soziologie (1908, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot) [Sociology: inquiries into the construction of social forms]; Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (1910, Leipzig: Göschen); Philosophische Kultur (1911, Leipzig: Kröner; 2nd ed., 1919); Goethe (1913, Leipzig: Klinkhardt); Rembrandt (1916, Leipzig: Wolff); Grundfragen der Soziologie (1917, Berlin: Göschen) [Fundamental Questions of Sociology]; Lebensanschauung (1918, München: Duncker & Humblot) [The View of Life]; Zur Philosophie der Kunst (1922, Potsdam: Kiepenheur); Fragmente und Aufsäze aus dem Nachlass (1923, edited by G. Kantorowicz, München: Drei Masken Verlag); and Brücke und Tür (1957, edited by M. Landmann & M. Susman, Stuttgart: Koehler).
Works in periodicals include “Alpenreisen” (Die Zeit, Wiener Wochenschrift für Politik, Vollwirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 13 June 1895); “Rom, eine ästhetische Analyse” (Die Zeit, Wiener Wochenschrift für Politik, Vollwirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 28 May 1898); “Florenz” (Der Tag [magazine], 2 March 1906); “Venedig” (Der Kunstwart, Halbmonatsschau über Dichtung, Theater, Musik, bildende und angewandte Kunst [magazine], June 1907); and “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur” [“The Concept and Tragedy of Culture”] (Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 2, 1911–1912: 1–25).
