Fate,Experience and Tragedy in Simmel’s Dialogue with Modernity

Fate, Drama and Society

Every play is an imitation of an action which makes manifest a mystery.… The special power of the theatrical metaphor is that it is capable of dealing with those mysteries which … never cease to haunt our imaginations. (Corrigan, 1981: 4–5)

From ancient through to modern drama and literature the idea of ‘fate’ has haunted human consciousness as a concept through which to capture a particular aspect of human life and experience. Fate refers to the relational intersection of human life, will, desire, freedom and action, and supra-personal determining forces, processes, events and powers. It denotes the partial subjection of human life to a world of forces, processes, events and powers which transcend the controlling capacity of human agency. Fate points to the insecurity of human life, to the tendency Aristotle defines as peripeteia – ‘reversal’ or more precisely, ‘a change into the opposite’ (Aristotle, 1996: 18), it points to the limits of our power to control the circumstances and events through which we live, it warns against complacency, pride and arrogance (hubris) and it encourages a disposition of simultaneous heroism and humility. ¹ Ancient Greek drama, especially tragedy, is generally recognized as the drama of fate – of the exploration and elucidation of what we mean when we speak of fate – par excellence. At the same time, fate has accompanied the history of drama and the novel through the centuries as a recurrent, even ubiquitous, problematic. While approached through a somewhat different form, the problematic of fate is as prevalent in, for example, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill, not to mention such novelists as Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy and numerous others, as it is in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

At the same time, of course, fate does not belong exclusively to the province of drama and literature, it recurs as a thematic of theology and philosophy and, as we want to explore in this article, of sociology. Peter Baehr’s recent study Caesarism, Charisma and Fate (2008) has already sought to highlight and utilize the epistemic expedience of the idea of fate – here interpreted through Max Weber – for sociology, and specifically for the sociological understanding of communities in particular situations of duress. Baehr’s application of fate to communities in Hong Kong suffering through the 2003 SARS epidemic represents a continuation of the sociological appropriation of this ancient idea which dates back to classical sociology, and especially to the German tradition and the work of Max Weber, Georg Simmel and their contemporaries. Harry Liebersohn’s perhaps more widely known study, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (1988), focuses on precisely this group of thinkers (Weber, Simmel, Tönnies, Troeltsch and Lukács) and examines the way in which society itself came to be perceived as a kind of fate for these writers. Liebersohn’s study is especially strong and insightful in what it emphasizes of the eschatological tinges to this theme. However, Liebersohn tends to explore fate in rather general terms and does not delve into the specific understanding of the concept evidenced in the writers in question, nor into the dramatic context from which the concept emerges as a sociologically relevant and useful notion.

What Liebersohn’s study does highlight is a relationship between modernity and the re-emphasis on fate in modern German social thought. Indeed, while fate never lost its potency as a concept through which to capture an enduring experience in human life, the development of modernity arguably created an environment highly conducive to a rediscovery of its existential relevance. As Simmel’s own work suggests, modernity involves what Marshall Berman refers to as a ‘body of experience’:

There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity.’ To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are … To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, all that is solid melts into air. (Berman, 1982: 15)

The heroes of the Greek stage know and testify to what it is when ‘all that is solid melts into air’. In tragic drama the experience of fate is often an experience of the dissolution of everything one believed to be stable and true. This is the case perhaps above all for Sophocles’ Oedipus. Radical insecurity is the very stuff of fate and tragedy. The maelstrom of modernity created an environment in which questions of fate, tragedy, and secularized pseudo-eschatology became dominant issues. There is no need to dwell on the fact that Simmel’s sociology emerged in a period marked by change, upheaval, new discovery and excitement, and the passing away of many traditional forms and values. In its own way Simmel’s famous essay on the metropolis (Simmel, 2000b) is already an early panorama of the ‘experience’ of modernity to which Berman points. In this article we want to explore the modernity of fate expressed in Simmel’s work and how this expression involves a translation of fate from tragic drama (and from philosophy) into sociology.

There are numerous references to fate in Simmel’s work. From The Philosophy of Money and Simmel’s predominantly sociological works, to the various writings on culture, religion, art and philosophy, Simmel invokes this ancient and yet enduring concept. Simmel also wrote explicitly on the concept of fate in essay and fragment form, a fact which has attracted little if any attention in existing Simmel scholarship. Simmel’s most detailed and sustained exploration of the idea of fate is to be found in the essay, ‘The Problem of Fate’. This essay was originally published in 1913/14 in Die Geisteswissenschaften, was re-published in the posthumous essay collection Brücke und Tür (1957) and has only recently become available in English translation (2007c). Simmel explores this idea again in the sub-section of the second chapter of Rembrandt (2005 [1916]): ‘Human Fate and the Heraclitean Cosmos’, and in the subsidiary section of the chapter on ‘Death and Immortality: A Note on the Concept of Fate’, in his final work, View of Life (1922 [1918]). There are also a number of fragmentary pieces on fate and tragedy in the posthumously published fragments of Simmel’s Diary (1923). While these latter concepts are in no sense synonymous, fate and tragedy, or more specifically ‘the tragic’, are sister concepts in Simmel’s writings. ² Although in this short article we do not have the opportunity to embark upon a full discussion of the tragic and an analysis of the relation of the tragic and fate in Simmel’s thought, ³ we will nevertheless need to address the ‘tragic’ as a concept through which to clarify and enhance our understanding of Simmel’s approach to the issue of fate, remembering of course the elective affinity of these problematics in drama itself. Tragic drama illuminates fate as a force in human life.

In the following discussion we work under the assumption that drama represents what we might refer to as the ‘natural habitat’ of the fate problematic: that form through which this problem finds perhaps its purest expression. Drama concerns life and in terms of fate the enduring message of drama is that fate constitutes one of the great problematics of drama and literature because it constitutes one of the great problematics of human life and experience. Simmel himself refers to drama as ‘a channel through which a stream … [flows] from the very fundamentals of being’ (1968: 95). When in 1913 Simmel turned his attention specifically to ‘the problem of fate’ (Schicksal), ⁴ it was precisely this fundamental existential dimension which he sought to emphasize. ‘It is a matter of concern’, he writes, ‘that philosophy, which feels called to interpret life in its totality and depth according to its own as well as popular claims, has hardly engaged with some of the most gripping forces that govern life’ (Simmel, 2007c: 79). Simmel goes on to identify ‘fate’ as one such ‘neglected’ and yet ‘gripping forces’: a ‘persisting existential reality’ which philosophy is therefore duty-bound to explore (2007c: 79).

Simmel does not merely acknowledge fate as an expedient idea then, a descriptive methodological tool relevant to the understanding of human life, but as a ‘gripping force’ and ‘reality’ of this life: something governing and existentially determining. ⁵ Like the issues of ‘love’ and ‘lived experience’ (Erleben), which Simmel mentions in the same essay (2007c: 79), fate may be situated within Simmel’s definitive concern with questions of life and with the metaphysics of life, a concern which finds its fullest expression in Simmel’s final work, View of Life (1922 [1918]). This emphasis on life derives in part from the German tradition of lebensphilosophohie, from a study of, and enduring interest in, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and from an engagement with the philosophy of Bergson. At the same time, this emphasis is more generally emblematic of the emergence of the centrality of questions of life in contemporary European and especially German intellectual culture. As Lepenies points out, ‘in the twentieth century “life” had replaced “society” as the characterizing concept of the epoch; with that there appeared growing repugnance for the closed system, and sociology had to confront the problems deriving from a metaphysics of life’ (1988: 241). Simmel’s treatment of the idea of fate may be perceived in this context: it represents, precisely, a ‘confrontation with the problems deriving from a metaphysics of life’. ⁶

In its ‘love affair’ with Athenian tragedy (Taxidou, 2004: 1), German idealist philosophy had already sought to emphasize the modernity of fate and its significance as a category through which to approach contemporary human life and experience. What we witness in Simmel’s thought is a translation of the issue of fate from drama and philosophy into sociology, but into a sociology replete with a deeply existential and metaphysical consciousness. Here, in the wake of a German philosophical and aesthetic tradition in which fate and tragedy are recognized as paramount epistemic and expressive concepts (Beistegui and Sparks, 2000; Szondi, 2002), fate is perceived as a notion highly relevant to the comprehension of socially contextualized modern life. The ancient category of fate expresses a universal human experience now recognized to be mediated not by anthropomorphic deities, oracles or witches, but by the sociocultural nexus in which human life is situated.

At the same time, this sociological appropriation of fate is not an absolute reduction (and therein rationalization) of fate to social processes. Liebersohn is more or less correct when, in reference to classical German sociology’s re-reading of fate, he writes that: ‘[i]n the ancient world fate came from the gods, in the modern world from humanity itself’ (1988: 1). ⁷ But this does not mean that the sociological appropriation of fate is an out-and-out sociological reduction of fate, for we would argue that, in Simmel’s case, the application of the concept of fate to sociocultural life involves a subtle re-mystification of the social through the existential, that is, through life perceived as a metaphysical force. Fate comes not from the gods or indeed from God, but from life, but precisely herein, mythology and theodicy are translated from religion into life, into the existential. An absolute reduction of fate to the sociological and the natural would be a negation of fate through an absolutist realism, for as Walter Benjamin rightly points out, ‘fate is not a purely natural occurrence – any more than it is purely historical’ (1998: 129). ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in our philosophy’ (Shakespeare, 1987, III: 1131–2). In an intellectual context suspicious of traditional metaphysics (and theology), Simmel, as it were, re-enchants the social and cultural world through emphasizing the metaphysical quality of life itself. We will return to this re-enchantment throughout our discussion and especially in the conclusion.

As Simmel once confessed in a letter to Husserl in 1911, he found ‘in the difficulty of the problems that needed solving but never could be solved “something marvellous”’ (Lepenies, 1988: 242). It is in this context, this openness to the existentially fundamental and the existentially mysterious, that Simmel re-emphasizes and thus rediscovers the philosophical-existential intuition of the tragic drama: the primacy of fate as a lived problematic. Before Simmel, Dilthey had already sought to employ poetics for the study of history: poetry, he believed, ‘offered the invaluable methodological advantage “of revealing with exceptional transparency the psychological processes in the products of history which brought them about”’ (Lepenies, 1988: 216). Simmel’s transposition of the concept of fate from its traditional grounding in drama and literature to social life is a contribution to the application of the aesthetic and indeed the poetic to the study of concrete and socially situated human life and experience. Simmel wrote as sociology emerged between the disciplines of literature and science, at times borrowing from and struggling with both in its bid for epistemic self-definition (Lepenies, 1988). While Simmel scholarship has firmly established the aesthetic dimension of Simmel’s sociology, it is only recently that attention has begun to be directed to the trans-sociological, even metaphysical, strands and concerns very much present in his work, and very much operative in this same aesthetic tendency. We believe that an exploration of Simmel’s understanding of the idea of fate and his application of this idea to sociocultural life represents a timely contribution to this trans-sociological and metaphysical emphasis in Simmel studies and, we hope, sheds some light on an otherwise ignored or at least neglected aspect of Simmel’s work.

We want to begin by exploring Simmel’s definition of the concept of fate as an intersection and synthesis of subjective life and transpersonal events and forces (the subjective and the objective), and by considering the resonance of this definition in tragedy. This definition will then be developed through an emphasis on Simmel’s argument that the purest expression of the fate problematic is found in tragic drama. We will then consider the transition from ancient to modern drama and Simmel’s involvement with Naturalist tragedy. In building on a point made by Peter Baehr (2008), this will be the site for a consideration of how the concept of fate enables a sense of pathos which encourages a consciousness of shared social responsibility. We will then conclude with a general discussion of Simmel’s sociologization of fate as a theme traced through the preceding sections.

Throughout, and as we have already suggested above, we want to argue that Simmel’s application of the idea of fate to modern society involves a translation of fate from its traditional dramatic and philosophical context into sociology – a sociologization of fate. We assert that Simmel’s treatment of this issue represents a rediscovery of the relevance of fate for modern life, and in this way we argue for the modernity and sociological relevance of fate and tragic drama. We are concerned to emphasize the relevance of fate and of Simmel’s reading of fate for contemporary social life and experience. Following Simmel’s argument, we suggest that the concept of fate reorients sociological discourse to the primacy of the existential, and points toward a collective sense of responsibility and social destiny. We argue that Simmel’s application of fate to society and culture involves a subtle re-enchantment of those spheres through a metaphysical interpretation of life.

The Concept of Fate: Subjective Trajectory and Objective Forces

In his sociological work, Religion, Simmel defines fate ‘as the forces affecting the development of the person by that which is not part of himself – whether or not his own actions or being have a role to play in these determining forces’ (1997: 148). We find a very similar definition in Rembrandt: ‘Fate means that a world immanent process, independent of the subject, nevertheless stands in a teleological meaningful relationship – positively or negatively – to the innermost direction of the life of this subject’ (2005: 102). Simmel’s definition is entirely commensurable with the expression of fate in drama. We might think of Oedipus pitted against the curse upon him, Antigone’s sense of familial and religious duty (oikos) in conflict with the laws of the city-state (polis), or Hamlet faced with the murder and events which transpire in his household. In drama fate involves the intersection of an individual life (the tragic hero) and supra-personal forces (the moira of Greek tragedy).

In Simmel’s thought, the problem of fate reveals a broader metaphysical dualism understood to be definitive of the modern human condition: on the one hand inner meaning, determination and necessity and, on the other, supra-personal forces, processes and contexts. The life of each unique human individual is directed by what Simmel perceives as an ‘inner tendency’ (2007c: 80), a kind of immanent trajectory or directionality which, written into the individual, constitutes the unfolding of the essence or soul of this individual and therein their full self-realization. This inner trajectory subsists as the immanent potentiality and indeed reality of the individual and constitutes what Simmel refers to as ‘individual law’. In its ideal form life involves the fulfilling of this potentiality, the becoming real of the person (Simmel, 2000a: 56). The life of the existent is an immanent process of the actualization of the essential apotheosis of itself, to use Nietzsche’s somewhat Hegelian expression, ‘the becoming of what it is’ (Nietzsche, 1992; Simmel, 2007a), or in Simmel’s own words, a journey of ‘the soul to itself’ (2000a: 55). At the same time, the life of the individual cannot on the whole unfold in purely immanent terms. This life is subject to supra-personal events, forces, processes and contexts of dependence, which stand outside of the essential inner life and directionality of the individual, but with which this life is inevitably interwoven (Simmel, 2007c: 80). As Simmel writes, ‘our nature constitutes, as it were, the intersection of itself and an alien sphere of demands’ (2000a: 68). In classical drama, this supra-personal realm is expressed in the world of the gods – a point we will return to in more depth below.

In Simmel’s sociology, this relation of inner directionality and external determination is seen to have become tragically ossified in the modern world as the dualism and estrangement of ‘subjective culture’ and ‘objective culture’, subjective life and development on the one hand, and the now ossified realm of social forms on the other.

Following Simmel’s argument, the idea of ‘fate’ constitutes the conceptual expression of this dual aspect of life in a particular configuration. Fate refers to the teleological intersection of the ‘inner tendency’ or inner self-directionality of the subject and supra-personal forces and processes which are, as Simmel puts it, ‘genetically unrelated’ to this same subjective trajectory (2000a: 80). ⁸ More precisely, Simmel argues that when we speak of fate we refer to a situation in which the latter infringe upon the former in a manner which, vis-a-vis the integrative capacity of conscious human experience, results in the reconfiguration of a life-trajectory and accordingly of the subject’s comprehension of this trajectory – in so far as it can be recognized as such (Simmel, 2007c: 80). In tragic drama, such reconfiguration may be seen to involve the anagnorisis (recognition) which Aristotle identifies as a facet of plot construction: the recognition by the tragic hero of the reality of his situation (Aristotle, 1996: 18–19).

To clarify: we encounter certain significant events, circumstances or forces. These events, circumstances or forces subsist in that flow of causality which transcends the immediate controlling powers of our agency and thus, ostensibly at least, the inner design of our life as we have lived, felt, or perceived it thus far. In turn, in so far as these events come to be integrated and assimilated by our subjective life, so they inexorably result in the reconfiguration of the unfolding of that life. As Simmel makes clear in the ‘Fate’ (2007c) essay, and in more or less Kantian terms, the crucial factor is the capacity of the human mind to integrate and assimilate external processes, even if these processes threaten destruction. ⁹ For Simmel fate is a concept defined chiefly as a synthesizing capacity. The Ghost brings to Hamlet news of events which have transpired in court – the murder of his father by the man who has now married his mother and claimed the throne. These events occur before the curtain goes up and Hamlet has played no integral role in their process; they have happened above his head and thus, as it were, despite him. Now that these events are brought to light however, Hamlet’s life-trajectory comes to be inevitably and necessarily reconfigured in their context. According to Simmel’s understanding (2007c: 82), Hamlet’s fate is determined by the intersection of who he is as an individual, as a unique identity, and the imposition on his inner life and directionality by these events.

Fate and the Ideal of Tragedy

We have sketched out Simmel’s definition of fate as an intersection of inner directionality and external determination and we have briefly suggested the resonance of this definition with tragic drama. Given what we have established, it should come as no surprise that Simmel perceives the purest expression of the synthesis or, indeed, ‘sublation’ or ‘resolution’ (Aufhebung) operative in the fate concept, to be found in tragic drama. For according to Simmel, in the tragic drama the subjective and the objective, the inner and the external, come to be sublated in the absolute necessity found in the life of the tragic hero, and thus any alien and dark residue which clings to the external is dissolved in the ultimate meaningfulness of a life-trajectory (Simmel, 2007c: 83), ‘embraced by his life’s teleology’ (2007c: 84).

By way of illustration, we might consider Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the middle play of Sophocles’ Theban trilogy although written last. Here, the self-blinded and exiled Oedipus is depicted as one who, though wretched, angry and vengeful, has become one with his fate in a kind of metaphysical-theological acquiescence which establishes him in a state of holiness. This is represented by the decree of the gods stating that the body of Oedipus will bring blessing to whichever city it is buried within, and in the nature of Oedipus’ death at the end of the play: ‘Certain it is that he was taken without a pang, without grief or agony – / a passing more wonderful than that of any other man’ (Sophocles, 1974: 121). In Simmelian terms, Oedipus represents a unity of life-trajectory and external processes and forces such that even his death involves a synthesis of his own will and that of the gods. This unity is premised upon Oedipus’ acceptance of suffering. Toward the end of the play Oedipus is quite literally beckoned by the gods to a peaceful death which he accepts in a gesture that affirms his personhood and life-trajectory while reconciling him to the Olympians (the objective). Oedipus becomes his fate and through this he, as it were, becomes himself, affirming his life even in death and uniting subject and object: He is ‘made man in the hour when … [he] ceases to be’ (Sophocles, 1974: 83). As Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin and Nietzsche had respectively argued (although of course in rather differing forms), the tragic hero overcomes fate through fate and in fate such that he becomes his own fate. To use Nietzsche’s expression: amor fati. ¹⁰

Following Simmel’s interpretation, the concept of fate facilitates the drawing of meaning from the otherwise ‘accidental’ aspect of the intersection of the inner meaning of a life and externality. It is in this way that fate renders tragic suffering meaningful. One of the implications of Simmel’s argument is that the tragic hero represents a kind of exemplar ¹¹ for the unification of the otherwise disparate and even conflictual spheres of the subjective and the supra-personal or objective expressed in the fate problematic. Oedipus at Colonus portrays the reward, as it were, of assimilation, of making fate one’s own. Oedipus becomes an exemplar for the synthesis of the subjective and the objective. Indeed, as Simmel asserts, the concept of fate involves the dialectical sublation of the potential antithesis of the existential dimension of the duality of the subjective and the objective: ‘in regarding something as fate we overcome [aufheben] the arbitrary relationship that exists between events and the real meaning of our life’ (2007c: 81). ¹² Under the concept of fate, ‘[w]e are … in a kind of passive relation to ourselves in which the central activity of our life is being assimilated and determined while it likewise appears to be reflected as something meaningful and teleologically ordained’ (Simmel, 2007c: 82).

In Simmel’s thought, the modernity of fate resides, in part, in its capacity as an existential category through which to synthesize the tension and conflict of subjective life and the supra-personal in modern society. This capacity does not, to be sure, circumnavigate suffering and alienation (think of the exiled Oedipus), but it does point to the tragic reconciliation and sublation of the subjective and the objective in the life of the individual and/or community. In a society where ‘all that is solid melts into air’, fate allows for the drawing of meaning from uncertainty, insecurity and peripeteia. Through drawing supra-personal forces and events firmly into the sphere of subjective life, fate emphasizes the primacy of life in a culture otherwise dominated by ossified social forms. Fate and the anagnorisis it involves reorients social experience to the existential and life is identified as a force which subsists in dignity and integrity even in the face of suffocating and negating objective powers. ¹³

From Ancient to Modern Drama: Fate, Pathos and Social Consciousness

As we have seen, tragic drama constitutes a kind of ideal type for the expression and working out of the fate problematic. Simmel identifies tragedy as involving the purest expression of the fate relationship. As long as we allow for the possibility of the heuristic transposition of modern conceptualizations to ancient works, then we can say that the relationship involved in the concept of fate is expressed par excellence in Greek tragedy, although in a somewhat pure and that is to say simplistic form. We have already suggested as much in our comments on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The gods of Greek tragedy constitute anthropomorphic expressions of the ‘otherness’ to which, in Simmelian terms, human life is subject, and tragic action is invariably a dialogue between human lives and intentions and the supra-personal – now become the supra-personal personal, in the shape of the gods and their various decrees and wills. As William Chase Greene observes in his landmark study of fate and Greek thought, the Greek gods ‘are causality realizing itself in a world where processes demand some sort of propitiation in myth or speculation’ (1944: 6). As Simmel comments:

The simultaneous appearance of satire, biography and drama in their first forms exhibit a naturalistic style that centres upon the individual as such.… Even at the high point of Greek culture we find a quite objective view of the world that is close to the laws of nature as one side of their view of life, the other side of which embraced the complete inner-freedom and self-directedness of the personality. (1978: 302)

Contemporary sociology is arguably more comfortable with the ideas of chance and accident than it is with fate. Chance and accident chime gaily with the fashionable epithets of postmodernism, while fate is too dangerously reminiscent of the arch-villain of a supposedly dying age, the ‘meta-narrative’. At any rate, tragedy violently expresses the reality of what in contemporary sociological jargon we might refer to as ‘risk’: the ‘fear’ which Jocasta confidently denies, the concretization of the modern insecurity and uncertainty noted in Berman’s (1982) vision of modernity. Indeed, as George Steiner observes, ‘[i]nstead of altering or diminishing their tragic condition, the increase in scientific power leaves men even more vulnerable’ (1998: 144, emphasis added). The ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) might be viewed as the tragic nexus filtered through, and reduced to, the mundane and the quotidian. It is a modern tragic nexus vanquished of gods and transpersonal forces, a disenchanted and angst-filled spectre of the classical tragic community – the Thebes of Sophocles’ Theban plays or the family of Argos in the Oresteia. In this modern society (late-modern, reflexive-modern, postmodern – whatever we wish to label it), fate itself is vanquished to be replaced by the hegemony of chance and accident, ‘the ultimate rulers of the world’, as Schopenhauer once pessimistically put it (1966, I: 252–3), and by the constant anxiety over risk and risk management (Giddens, 1990: 30; Lupton, 1999: 75).

In losing a sense of fate, in banishing fate as a concept which resounds too uncomfortably with the din of mythology, determinism, theology and the meta-narrative, perhaps modernity subjects itself instead to the rational totalitarianism of the arbitrary: of chance and accident and to the illusion of their ‘management’ by unlimited human agency, paradoxically expressed in a Weberian nightmare of gargantuan bureaucracy. Risk and risk management purvey the rationalization and bureaucratization of modern insecurity and, in their own way, re-expresses the tragic hubris of Jocasta – the illusion of the self-sufficiency of agency.

As Peter Baehr (2008: ix) points out, however, while the concept of fate might well be ‘unfashionable’, we need to recognize that this concept is imbued with a singular capacity to enrich social experience by creating a sense of meaning, of shared suffering and shared destiny, and, most importantly, of pathos, unavailable to more accepted social science concepts. Pathos involves the intuition of communal responsibility and the anamnesis, as it were, of a shared destiny. In this sense, pathos is already a critique of the excesses of modern–postmodern individualism and subjectivism. It encourages a collective empathy which sensitizes social agents to their co-responsibility and to the impending weight of a shared future. In Greek tragedy this is expressed in and through the chorus. Simmel’s thought already points in this direction, re-casting modern socially situated experience in the mould of fate and positing fundamental questions of life as the underlying concern of the sociological project. In the late 1890s Simmel became involved with the Naturalist avant-garde. In his interpretation and promotion of Naturalist tragedy, Simmel sought to identify tragic drama as a vehicle for social consciousness and for the formation of a new social ethics (Leck, 2000, 2005) – a point we will return to in more depth below.

According to Simmel’s argument, the emergence of tragic drama – which is importantly if not exclusively a drama of fate – presupposes the existence of the idea of fate as a concept referring to the interplay of the human and the divine – even if the concept of fate in Greek tragedy is weighted on the side of an intractable supra-human necessity and thus on the side of what Simmel (1978: 30) would term the ‘objective’ as in Oedipus Rex. Following Simmel’s understanding of the process of differentiation in human life, the movement from the ancient to the modern corresponds with an increase in psychological differentiation and thus an increasing internalization of the concept of fate, such that in modern drama fate is conceived in more or less internally immanent terms – thus immanent tragic self-destruction (Simmel, 1978: 30). In line with Schelling’s thesis in The Philosophy of Art as indeed with the general character of the German philosophical interpretation of tragedy (Szondi, 2002) in its comprehension of the shift from ancient to modern drama, Simmel internalizes fate in the necessity of character and personhood.

The emergence of ‘modern’ drama with its psychological internalization of the tragic in the immanence of self-destruction, expresses the emergence of modernism itself, where dialectical paradox, differentiation and flux become the hallmarks of modern urban life (Berman, 1982). The intuition of Schelling and Hegel regarding the development of drama points to the ‘modernizing’ transformation of society, that which Simmel famously scrutinizes through the example of metropolitan life. In a social environment conducive to a consciousness of instability, impermanence, uncertainty, dialectical shift and immanence, fragmentation, plurality and relativism, fate and tragedy come to be reinterpreted and therein rediscovered. Fate becomes valuable as a way to conceptualize the interrelation of personal life and the seemingly objective realm of the social and cultural world with all its insecurity and ‘risk’. In both ancient and modern drama the point remains that tragic fate concerns the existential relationship between the inner and the outer worlds, the subjective and the objective. At the same time, in a disenchanted culture increasingly dominated by scientism and rationality, fate becomes valuable as a concept through which to reassert the ‘mysterious’ and ‘sacred’ quality of life, and to lend a certain mythic pathos to the mundane struggle of modern social existence. The application of the idea of fate to social life represents a dimmed philosophical and sociological consciousness of the transparency of social life to eschatological themes, now uprooted from their Christian foundations and presented in the light of a more or less atheistic social theory. In a secularized culture of change, uncertainty, insecurity and ossified social forms, fate asserts the existential as a kind of cosmic foundation and focus, and therein, it tends to reorient sociological discourse to the immediacy of lived experience, to the ‘drama’ of everyday life.

In drama itself fate is already a social issue, for the social constitutes the context in and through which personal and/or collective fate is played out. We may observe that Greek drama is already situated in a clearly ‘social’ interactive context, usually centred on or within a number of interconnected families and social groups – although it would be anachronistic to perceive such drama as being ‘sociological’ per se. The point is that fate is played out in the sociocultural context. As ‘the social’ becomes a discernible modern category and as sociology emerges as a discipline, so drama itself comes to deal with the specifically social quality of fate. While we might think here of the bourgeois tragedies of Germany in the 18th century, the clearest modern expression of this phenomenon – and most relevant and contemporary to Simmel himself – is arguably Naturalist drama. In much Naturalist drama, especially Naturalist tragedy, we witness the conflict between the aspirations and life of the individual – a microcosm of subjective life and energy – and the ossified realm of social conventions and institutions which invariably threaten, suppress and contradict that life. In Naturalist drama, with its critique of the social conditions of modern bourgeois society, fate purveys a sense of pathos for social tragedy, that is, for tragic suffering realized in and through sociocultural conditions and processes.

Simmel’s personal involvement with Naturalist drama in the Berlin of the late 19th century and with, among others, the work and person of Heinrich Ibsen, has been explored in the work of Ralph Leck (2000, 2005). Leck perceives an elective affinity and even a formative reciprocity between Simmel’s sociology and his exposure to, and involvement in, the Naturalist avant-garde of the Berlin scene of the 1890s. According to Leck, Simmel’s thought expresses ‘the same crushing conflicts between the individual and social institutions that one finds in the novels of Zola and the dramas of Hauptmann’. The dominant Naturalist theme of ‘[t]he tragic subjugation of the free-willing individual by the forces of social convention … was the central presupposition of Simmel’s sociology and philosophy’ (Leck, 2000: 25). Simmel’s sociology expresses the tragic problematic of Naturalist literature (as a modern expression of the tragic per se) in the alternative idiom of sociology and cultural philosophy, and herein, fate is tacitly translated into Simmel’s sociocultural dialogue with modernity as a concept which captures a particular aspect of modern experience.

As we have already stressed, the concept of fate is especially apt to create a sense of pathos (Baehr, 2008: ix). The use of this concept facilitates a ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘social consciousness’, as it were, of shared experience and destiny, or at the very least it points toward such a consciousness. In Naturalist tragedy the pathos of fate facilitates a kind of existential critique of contemporary social existence by invoking a common experience of suffering, injustice and ossified social convention. We must remember that in tragedy fate does not involve a passive acceptance of the status quo in and of itself – the social, political and religious order – but rather an active acceptance of a suffering mediated through these spheres. In tragedy suffering is invariably a mode of commentary and critique; it is something which encourages reflexivity. Sophocles’ Antigone is the most obvious ancient example. For Simmel (1968: 94), art moves ‘never toward a finished reality, but towards new demands’. The invocation of fate in the sociology of modernity is not necessarily, then, a withdrawal into cultural pessimism; ‘fate’ is not, ipso facto, the same as pessimistic ‘fatalism’. Instead, the application of the concept of fate to modern society and culture may be understood to encourage a reflexive engagement with the conditions of modernity as a shared experience and a shared responsibility. The chorus of classical tragedy is already a figure for the ‘reflexive’ voice of the social, collective, experience of fate which, perceived retrospectively, suggests the communal negation of modern individualism and isolation.

Walter Benjamin argues that the essence of Attic tragedy is sacrifice. On the one hand the tragic hero is a sacrifice to the gods and on the other he is a sacrifice for the community, for ‘the life of the nation’ (1998: 107). Through the sacrifice (usually death) of the tragic hero, ‘new aspects of the life of the nation become manifest’ (1998: 107). In relation to this social emphasis, we must remember that the Greek tragedians themselves were understood as teachers of the people (Boedeker and Raaflaub, 2005: 109). In Aristophanes’ comedy, Frogs, Dionysus descends to the underworld to bring back a skilled tragedian to redeem the current state of the art. In this capacity he judges a competition between the great tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides. Aeschylus asks Euripides what it is a poet (tragedian) should be admired for, to which Euripides responds: ‘For skill and good advice, and because we make men better in their cities.’ Dionysus chooses Euripides and the inhabitants of Hades bid him farewell: ‘Save our city with your good counsels’ (Aristophanes, quoted in Boedeker and Raaflaub, 2005: 109–10). In a more modern fashion, the Naturalist tragedy of Simmel’s period would utilize tragic fate as a means to encourage a sense of collective responsibility and collective power in the face of the exploitation and authoritarian propensities of ossified bourgeois convention and, as Leck (2000, 2005) suggests, would forward this as the basis for a new social ethics. The spectacle of tragic suffering constitutes a sacrifice for the social community – only in the Naturalist form this sacrifice plays a perhaps more explicitly didactic function than in the Greek form, and one which more directly engages the audience as a social body and a socio-political power. Thus, Simmel would identify Naturalism, especially the drama of Gerhardt Hauptmann, as constituting the ‘aesthetic education of the people’ (Leck, 2005: 142).

The socialization of fate that we witness in Naturalist drama corresponds to a sociologization of fate in Simmel’s thought. In both Naturalism and Simmelian sociology, ‘[t]ragic necessity is to be seen above all in the essence and essential relations of the inevitability and inescapability of things founded in society’ (Scheler, 1981: 25). And in both Naturalism and Simmelian sociology, a consciousness of tragic fate encourages pathos and a sense of communal social responsibility.

Conclusion: The Sociologization of Fate

In his short book, An Essay on the Tragic, Peter Szondi includes Georg Simmel among a number of largely German thinkers ¹⁴ whose work, he argues, expresses a ‘philosophy of the tragic’. This distinct philosophy is identified as a tradition embedded within German philosophy, aesthetics and social theory. Its unifying principle is a dialectical understanding of the idea of the tragic – a ‘tragic dialectic’. Through this philosophy, the tragic dialectic is revealed in art, the metaphysical fabric, and in society and culture, as an abiding motif.

Interestingly, the tragic dialectic is more or less defined by the movement of peripeteia, ‘a change to the opposite’, which Aristotle (1996: 18) identifies as a crucial facet of tragic plot construction and tragic effect. As Szondi writes: ‘There is only one tragic downfall: the one that that results from the unity of opposites, from the sudden change into one’s opposite, from self-division’ (2002: 55). As the characters of the Greek stage found out, peripeteia points to instability, insecurity, vulnerability and risk: Oedipus had the very carpet of his identity and social position rudely swept from under his feet, and he lost his family and his eyes in the process. Peripeteia points to a situation where ‘all that is solid melts into air’, the experience which Berman (1982) identifies with the very essence of modernity. In this sense, the philosophy of the tragic is a philosophy of modernity: it is the philosophy of the modern experience of radical insecurity, instability, mutability, risk, rise and tragic fall, which finds such a ready home in the tragic motif of peripeteia. The philosophy of the tragic suggests a discovery – often tacit – of the modernity of tragedy.

In this context, fate subsists as the interweaving of personal life and supra-personal forces, mere mortal life and the Olympian realm of the supra-personal. Fate refers to the process of life as it engages with supra-personal forces which, whether positively or negatively, profoundly affect its flow and realization for the individual and the community. Tragedy utilizes fate as the process and configuration of forces and subjects through which it unfolds itself; fate is the dynamic through which peripeteia operates, the condition, as it were, for the tragic environment. The modernity of tragedy coincides then with the modernity of fate and the philosophy of tragedy involves a philosophy of fate.

Simmel’s translation of fate from drama and philosophy into sociology represents an integral part of both his own contribution to the tradition of the philosophy of tragedy and his particular sociological dialogue with modernity. Simmel’s sociological project concerns the precarious situation of the human individual caught between the subjective determinacy of his inner life and the now autonomous realm of the objective which makes its own powerful demands on his life and action. Here, the tragic conflict between oikos and polis characteristic of the Antigone and made famous by Hegel’s well-known interpretation, is translated into the sociological conflict of the subjective and the objective. Like the dramatis personae of tragic drama, especially Naturalist tragedy, the modern individual is subject to the practical experiential conflict and dialectic of the internal and the external, of subjective determinacy and objective determination. This is the modern sociocultural context for the mundane tragedy and tragedies of contemporary life. The modern individual (as indeed the late-modern or postmodern individual) stands at the cross-roads of his own will and intention unfolded from within and the nexus of transpersonal forces, processes and powers which contextualize and circumscribe his life. More than this, he stands against a horizon which is constantly moving, he stands in the midst of the incredible differentiation and excessive stimulation of modern urban life, he stands on shifting sands, subject to an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’ (Simmel, 2000b) with which Hamlet might have felt at home.

In the introduction to the English translation of Simmel’s essay ‘The Problem of Fate’, Thomas Kemple writes that:

Simmel’s primary concern is not primarily with the ancient notion of a tragic destiny (moira) or divine providence under the control of sacred beings, or with the traditional sense of predestination or impending doom in the face of unintended consequences. Rather, he is interested in observing the more mundane and, for the most part, distinctively modern ways in which everyday ‘occurrences’ (Geschehen) – an encounter, an illness or a decision, for example – take on meaning as ‘events’ (Ereignisse) which determine the direction of a course of action and its outcome. (Kemple, 2007: 11)

We must point out that while Simmel draws fate into society he does not thereby reduce fate to society; he does not bow to the reifying temptations of materialist absolutism. Instead, he grounds fate in the mystery of life itself, the mystery of the existential. In the wake of Naturalist tragedy, this is the direction in which Simmel reorients our understanding of fate. Naturalism would reduce fate to society, but such an absolute sociological reduction does a certain violence to the mythical and mystical quality proper to the idea of fate in its traditional dramatic and philosophical form. While at one time sympathetic with the Naturalist project, Simmel nevertheless displays a certain discomfort with this hyper-rationalizing tendency and ultimately parts company with Naturalist aesthetics, ¹⁵ seeking to locate fate in the metaphysics of life and in an existential absolute. This metaphysics of life takes its fullest shape in Simmel’s final work, View of Life (1922 [1918]).

Fate permeates society and culture because these spheres are ultimately the product of life. Let us recall, Simmel understands drama as ‘a channel through which a stream … [flows] from the very fundamentals of being’ (1968: 95). Drama already speaks from and of being, and thus in its dramatic robes fate already expresses an element of life: ‘a persisting existential reality’ (Simmel, 2007c: 79). Translating fate into society Simmel nevertheless sublimates the mystical and mythical resonance of the concept, by rooting fate in a metaphysical understanding of life. Here, Simmel’s sociology is an open door, not to the irrational, but to a deeper metaphysical understanding of social life and, therefore, of ‘those mysteries which … never cease to haunt our imaginations’ (Corrigan, 1981: 4–5). In this sense at least, Simmel’s sociology and philosophy suggest a kind of metaphysical re-enchantment, an interpretation of social life concerned with the revelation of the mysteries hidden within the ordinary, with the metaphysical meaning of day-to-day life (Simmel, 1978: 55, 2000b: 177). Simmel comes to locate this metaphysical dimension in the concept of life itself – a ‘modern’ post-idealist and essentially atheistic reinterpretation of the absolute. It is partly in this context that the ancient notion of fate resurfaces in Simmel’s thought: ‘Understanding this concept becomes indispensable as soon as we take the objective (and not just the psychological) structure of life as our problem’ (2007c: 79).

Perhaps the claims of postmodernism might assert that the concept of fate dissolves in a culture of fragmentation which rejects becoming as a narrative. Fate is all about the life, development and continuity of an individual and/or community. But we would want to suggest that the mask of such nihilism falls away in the context of the day-to-day lives and, especially, the day-to-day tragedies of social and cultural life itself. As Simmel points out, the existential is crucial and fate is an experiential-existential mode. The rejection of becoming is in a certain sense the rejection of life itself, the rejection of being, and, like tragedy, fate is an acknowledgement – often expressed in the negative – of the fullness of life. This is the pre-Christian affirmation of the value of suffering found in Greek tragedy. Fate is an affirmation of becoming, personal and supra-personal, micro and macro, individual and social – even in the midst of destruction. While as Peter Baehr (2008: ix) points out, the idea of fate might well be ‘unfashionable’ these days, it is nevertheless imbued with a capacity to encourage a sense of shared responsibility, of shared past, present and future, and a sense of pathos which enriches our understanding of contemporary social life and perhaps, we might add, our commitment to it. ¹⁶ Postmodernism’s discomfort with meta-narratives should not obscure for us the existential and sociological value of the ancient and yet enduring concept of fate. Indeed, Terry Eagleton (2003) has already pointed to the resonance of tragedy with postmodern thought itself, and Baehr has made important steps in the practical sociological re-appropriation of the idea of fate – but there is insufficient space to develop these ideas further in this discussion. What we want to emphasize is that Simmel’s sociology points to the relevance of fate for modern human life, rediscovering, as it were, the modernity and sociality of fate and tragedy. Society and culture are recognized as the tragic theatre in which fate is played out in the day-to-day lives of modern individuals and communities.

As it is expressed in and through tragedy, the experience of fate sensitizes social agents to their radical insecurity, to the limits of their powers of agency and of the at times adversarial and destructive potency of transpersonal forces. Through fate tragedy expresses radical insecurity and sociology perceives in this predicament a socially mediated phenomenon. We should remember that the chorus of Greek tragedy is usually a social body which, in itself, represents the wider community. We might think of Sophocles’ ‘Theban elders’ or Aeschylus’ ‘old men of Argos’. The tragic chorus represents the voice of the social context in which fate unfolds and herein points to the properly social nature of the experience and consequences of fate. As the Naturalist drama contemporary to Simmel makes plain, in modern drama society itself becomes the explicit theatre for the tragic action of day-to-day life, and the experience of fate, which in tragedy invariably involves suffering and essentialization through suffering, becomes a kind of existential critique of the bifurcation and injustices of the social world, and of the self-satisfaction and ‘bourgeois’ complacency which clings to the illusion of stability.

Like the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, where personal and social decay are fundamentally intertwined – a theme as common in Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – suffering through a socially mediated fate becomes a critique of the social nexus which shapes the specificity of that fate. In the modern context, the sacrifice of the tragic hero in and through fate takes on an explicitly social dimension. Even here we are reminded of Greek tragedy and, for example, Sophocles’ Antigone, where the heroine’s dedication to familial and religious values – the oikos – represents a critique of a de-humanizing and ossified social law. Antigone dies (as a sacrifice) for the city in defying it, for she dies in order to uphold the familial and religious element which Sophocles implies to be a necessary facet of city-social life. Fate is social, and its fruit in the drama, as well as the ‘catharsis of pity and fear’ (Aristotle, 1996: 10), is a reflexivity and critique which encourages a social consciousness and a sense of shared responsibility, shared guilt, and a shared future.

As Simmel writes: [T]he concept of fate as I have interpreted it here, contains the true lot [Los] of humankind’ (2007c: 84). With this in mind we might conclude with the words of William Chase Greene:

If centuries of Greek thought did not solve all the questions that it raised, if indeed some of them are likely to remain forever unsolved, nevertheless they are necessary questions both for ancient Greeks and for modern men to ask. (1944: v)