Georg Simmel

Based on Wikipedia: Georg Simmel

The Philosopher Who Understood Why Cities Make Us Cold

You know that feeling when you walk past a hundred people on a busy street and don't make eye contact with a single one? When you develop a kind of protective shell, a calculated indifference to the chaos of urban life? Georg Simmel not only knew that feeling—he was the first person to explain why it happens.

In 1903, this German philosopher gave a lecture that would quietly revolutionize how we think about cities and human psychology. He was asked to discuss intellectual life in big cities. Instead, he flipped the question entirely: what do big cities do to our minds?

The answer, Simmel argued, is that they transform us in permanent and irreversible ways.

An Outsider Looking In

Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858, the youngest of seven children in a family that had converted from Judaism—his father to Catholicism, his mother's family to Lutheranism, and Georg himself baptized Protestant. This religious zigzagging perhaps foreshadowed something essential about his life: he would always exist between categories, never quite fitting anywhere.

When his father died, sixteen-year-old Georg inherited a fortune. Then his guardian, Julius Friedländer, founder of a major music publishing house, adopted him and left him even more money. This financial independence proved crucial. It meant Simmel could spend decades as a scholar without needing anyone's approval or a salaried position.

He needed that independence. Despite support from Max Weber, the famous sociologist, and connections to poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Simmel remained an academic outsider for most of his life. The reasons were partly anti-Semitism—he was seen as Jewish regardless of his baptism—and partly his own choices. He wrote for general audiences instead of narrow academic journals. He lectured on topics that didn't fit neatly into any department: art, love, pessimism, psychology.

His lectures at the University of Berlin became legendary. Not just students came—the intellectual elite of the city showed up to hear him speak. But this popularity didn't translate into academic acceptance. In an era when scholarly respectability meant writing in impenetrable prose for tiny audiences, Simmel's accessibility was held against him.

Only in 1914, when he was fifty-six years old, did Simmel finally receive a full professorship. It was at the University of Strasbourg, and he hated it there. Then World War One broke out. Lecture halls became military hospitals. Simmel stopped reading newspapers and retreated to the Black Forest to write his final book. He died of liver cancer in 1918, just before the war ended.

What Is Society, Anyway?

Simmel approached sociology from an unusual angle. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had famously asked "What is nature?"—establishing the framework for how we study the physical world. Simmel asked the parallel question: "What is society?"

This might seem obvious, but it wasn't. Early sociology often treated society as a collection of facts to be measured and counted, like specimens in a laboratory. Simmel rejected this approach. You can't understand society, he argued, by treating it like a collection of objects. You have to understand it as a web of relationships, of interactions, of forms.

Think about a dinner party. You can count the guests, measure the square footage of the room, catalog the food served. But none of that captures what actually matters: the conversations, the tensions, the flirtations, the hierarchies that emerge and dissolve over the course of an evening. Simmel wanted to understand those dynamics—the living, breathing patterns of human connection.

He called these patterns "forms of association." Conflict is a form. So is exchange, and sociability, and subordination. These forms repeat across wildly different contexts. The conflict between two business partners follows similar patterns to the conflict between two lovers or two nations. By studying the forms themselves, Simmel believed, we could understand something fundamental about human social life.

The Magic Number Three

Consider something seemingly trivial: the difference between a conversation with one other person and a conversation with two other people.

With one other person—what Simmel called a "dyad"—you can be fully yourself. There's no possibility of being outvoted. No coalition can form against you. The relationship rises or falls on the two of you alone.

Add a third person and everything changes.

In a "triad," suddenly alliances become possible. Two can gang up on one. A mediator can emerge. The whole dynamic shifts from individual to structural. Simmel saw this as the fundamental transition: the moment when pure personal interaction becomes something we might call "society."

As groups grow larger, this process intensifies. In a city of millions, you become anonymous. The group is too big to exert personal pressure on you, which is liberating. But it's also too big for you to have meaningful relationships with more than a tiny fraction of its members, which is isolating. Simmel saw both sides clearly, refusing to declare big groups simply good or simply bad.

The Blasé Attitude

Now we arrive at Simmel's most famous idea, from that 1903 lecture about metropolitan life.

A city bombards you with stimulation. Every moment brings new faces, new sounds, new demands on your attention. If you responded with full emotional intensity to every stimulus—if you really looked at every person you passed, really processed every noise, really engaged with every situation—you would be overwhelmed within hours. You would have a nervous breakdown.

So you don't. You develop what Simmel called the "blasé attitude."

You learn to not-see. You become reserved, indifferent, calculating. You interact with people instrumentally—as means to ends—rather than as full human beings. The cashier is a mechanism for buying groceries. The bus driver is a mechanism for transportation. You don't wonder about their inner lives because you can't afford to.

This isn't a character flaw. It's a survival mechanism. The blasé attitude is the psyche's way of protecting itself from overstimulation.

But here's what makes Simmel's analysis so nuanced: he didn't think this was simply bad. Yes, city life makes us cold. It also makes us free.

In a small village, everyone knows your business. Your behavior is constantly monitored, judged, regulated by the community. In a city, nobody cares what you do. That anonymity is oppressive in one sense—you're just a face in the crowd—but liberating in another. You can reinvent yourself. You can experiment with who you want to be. The city's indifference to you is also its gift to you.

Simmel saw modern urban life as the stage for an eternal struggle: the individual against society, freedom against belonging, the need for connection against the need for independence. There's no resolution to this conflict. It's simply the condition of being human in the modern world.

The Philosophy of Money

In 1900, Simmel published a massive work called The Philosophy of Money. The title sounds dry, but the book is anything but. Simmel used money as a lens for understanding how modern life transforms human relationships.

Money, he argued, creates distance. And distance, paradoxically, creates value.

Think about it: things that are too easy to get feel worthless. Things that are utterly impossible to get also feel valueless—why bother wanting them? Value lives in the middle, in things that are difficult but achievable. The effort required to obtain something—the time, the sacrifice, the obstacles overcome—becomes part of what makes it valuable.

Money abstracts all of this. It reduces every transaction to a number, stripping away the personal qualities of buyer and seller. This has enormous consequences. In a pre-money economy, your worth is tied to who you are—your family, your reputation, your relationships. In a money economy, what matters is what you can do. Skills become more important than lineage. Achievement becomes more important than identity.

Again, Simmel refused simple judgment. This transformation is liberating: it frees people from the accidents of birth. It's also dehumanizing: it reduces every interaction to calculation. Modern life, for Simmel, is always both.

The Stranger

One of Simmel's most beautiful short essays is simply titled "The Stranger." It explores the peculiar social position of someone who is both inside and outside a group.

The stranger is near us—physically present, participating in our daily life—but also far from us, not bound by our local ties and loyalties. This creates a unique perspective.

Strangers often become confidants. We tell them things we'd never tell our closest friends. Why? Precisely because they're not entangled in our web of relationships. They pose no threat. They won't gossip to people we know. The stranger's distance is paradoxically what makes intimacy with them safe.

Strangers also bring objectivity. They see our community with fresh eyes, unclouded by the assumptions we take for granted. This is why, Simmel noted, strangers throughout history have often served as judges, traders, and advisors—roles that require impartiality.

But the stranger's position is precarious. Too close, and they're no longer strange—just a regular member of the group. Too far, and they're no longer participating at all. The stranger exists in a perpetual middle distance, close enough to matter, far enough to see clearly.

Love, Art, and Everything Else

What made Simmel unusual among sociologists was the sheer range of his interests. Most academics stake out a narrow territory and defend it. Simmel wandered freely across the entire landscape of human experience.

He wrote about romantic love—its intensities, its illusions, the way it simultaneously exalts and isolates the lovers. He wrote about art, about fashion, about adventure. He wrote about the psychology of adornment, the sociology of the senses, the philosophy of the door and the bridge.

Yes, the door and the bridge. Simmel saw profound meaning in everyday things. A door, he noted, separates and connects. It creates an inside and an outside, but also allows passage between them. A bridge does something similar with physical space—it acknowledges separation while overcoming it. These mundane objects became, for Simmel, symbols of the human condition: our need to both separate ourselves from others and connect with them.

This willingness to find depth in the everyday was part of what made Simmel popular with general audiences and suspect among academic specialists. He refused to stay in his lane. He refused to write in jargon. He refused to pretend that sociology could only study grand structures and forces, ignoring the intimate textures of daily life.

A Secret Life

Simmel practiced what might be called bourgeois bohemianism. He married Gertrud Kinel, herself a philosopher who published under various names. They lived comfortably, hosting salons where Berlin's intellectuals gathered. They had one son, Hans Eugen, who became a doctor.

But Simmel also had a secret. His assistant, Gertrud Kantorowicz, bore him a daughter in 1907. This fact was hidden for decades, only emerging after Simmel's death. The philosopher who wrote so perceptively about the masks we wear in social life, about the gap between our public and private selves, was living that gap himself.

In 1909, Simmel helped found the German Society for Sociology, along with Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies. This was an attempt to establish sociology as a legitimate academic discipline, distinct from philosophy and history. Simmel served on its first executive body, lending his prestige to the effort even as the academic establishment continued to marginalize him personally.

The Legacy of an Outsider

When Simmel died in 1918, he was not famous. His work was scattered across journals and small publications. Much of it wasn't translated into English for decades.

But his influence seeped slowly through the cracks. American sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s—Robert E. Park and his colleagues—discovered Simmel's work and built on it. They applied his ideas about urban psychology to their studies of American cities. The "Chicago School" of sociology, which dominated the field for a generation, had deep Simmelian roots.

The essay on metropolitan life didn't receive wide attention until 1950, when it appeared in an English collection called The Sociology of Georg Simmel. By then, its ideas had already quietly shaped decades of thinking about urban life. Today, you'll find it on reading lists in sociology departments, urban studies programs, and architecture schools around the world.

Simmel also influenced the Frankfurt School—the group of German theorists including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who developed "critical theory" in the twentieth century. Their skeptical examination of modern culture, their attention to the psychological costs of capitalism, their refusal of simple optimism or pessimism—all of this echoed Simmel's approach.

Seeing the Dance of Social Life

What Simmel ultimately offered was a way of seeing. He taught us to notice the invisible structures that shape our interactions: the difference between two people and three, the effect of money on relationships, the psychological adaptations cities demand of us, the strange intimacy we share with strangers.

He was interested in what he called the "sociability" of human life—our fundamental impulse toward togetherness, the pleasure we take in pure social interaction, uncontaminated by ulterior motives. At a party where conversation flows freely, where people are neither too aggressive nor too reserved, where the joy of being together becomes its own reward—that, for Simmel, was society at its most beautiful.

But he knew that such moments are fragile. Larger structures press in. Money quantifies what should be qualitative. Cities overstimulate and estrange us. History and culture weigh on us like debts we never chose to incur.

Simmel's genius was to hold both truths at once: the warmth of human connection and the coldness of modern institutions, the freedom of the city and its isolation, the intimacy of the dyad and the politics of the triad. He refused to simplify. He refused to resolve the contradictions that define our lives.

Perhaps that's why an academic outsider who died over a century ago still speaks to us. We too are navigating these contradictions. We too are developing blasé attitudes to survive the stimulation-flood of modern life. We too are strangers to each other, near and far at the same time, confiding in people we'll never see again while keeping secrets from those closest to us.

Georg Simmel saw all this before we did. He's still helping us see it now.