Introduction to ‘Soul and Culture’

In the spring of 1918, the young philosopher, Karl Mannheim, was selected to give the introductory program lecture for the second semester of a so-called ‘free school’ organized by the Budapest circle centered on Georg Lukács (Mannheim, 1918). The text, which is not unknown to the specialist literature (Congdon, 1983: 123–5; Gluck, 1985: 170–1; Kettler, 1967: 408–13, 1971: 60–68) and which has previously appeared in German translation (Mannheim, 1964 [1918]: 66–84), is worth publishing in English in the present context because it documents the importance of Georg Simmel’s work as a point of departure for a number of remarkable intellectual figures. If Mannheim is correct in his claim that his presentation represents the common ground among the participants in the lecture series, this includes not only Mannheim, Lukács and his closest associate, Béla Balázs, but also Béla Fogarasi, Zoltán Kodály, Béla Bartók, Frederick Antal, and Arnold Hauser, among others with lesser international reputations. The hallmark of this group within the larger community of progressive intellectuals oriented to the metropolitan centers of European intellectual life was its distinctive and sometimes competitive focus on culture. To get a preliminary idea of the differences in emphasis, it can be noted that the short-lived journal edited by Lukács and his friend Lajos Fülep was called A Szellem, in the sense of the German idealist concept of Geist, while the corresponding longer established journal of the more inclusive group was characteristically called Twentieth Century. Karl Mannheim wrote for both.

Like Lukács and some of the others in that circle, Mannheim was exempted from military service and immersed in the virtually undisturbed and exceptionally vital wartime intellectual life of Budapest. Born in 1893 in a Jewish family whose head was a modest businessman, Mannheim had studied philosophy in university, with a dissertation that followed the lead of local neo-Kantian thinkers, and he had gained acceptance both in the wider circles of individuals dedicated to the modernization of Hungarian thought and society, following the lead of comparable reform groupings in other capitals, and in the more exclusive circle around Georg Lukács, eight years his senior, a cultural figure from whom he had solicited advice by letter before he had even entered university. On one level, the distinction between Mannheim’s two reference groups can be characterized as mainly a difference in interests, with the one sympathetic to ‘advanced’ opinion, including not only Kantian philosophy and naturalist literature but also sociological writings and constitutionalist political thought, and the other preoccupied with more adventurous aesthetic and philosophical aspirations, intrigued by neo-Romantic currents in Germany but not contaminated by their reactionary politics (Karadi and Vezér, 1985).

Given the tolerance of the first group, young people like Mannheim were not forced to abandon the one when they decided to invest themselves in the other. Oscar Jászi, the leading figure of the modernizing group, for example, professed himself to be quite intrigued by the Mannheim lecture introduced here, welcoming its experiment in metaphysical idealism as a welcome corrective to the rigidity of Positivism and Historical Materialism, ‘when they are taken as more than method of research and when they attempt to offer themselves as a superficial solution to all the problems of the human soul’ (Jászi, 2004 [1918]). Although the Lukács group was more inclined to emphasize its distinctiveness, the community of intellectuals overlapped, and a figure like Georg Simmel drew the attention of both. When Lukács was in Germany, moreover, he was an active if also atypical member of the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg, and he negotiated with Weber about writing a Habilitation thesis under his supervision. And both Lukács and Balázs had attended Georg Simmel’s classes a decade earlier. As the mentor of Karl Mannheim, then, Lukács sent him to Berlin to study with Simmel while he was still in university. If Balázs and Lukács had concluded some years earlier that they had nothing more to learn from Simmel (Congdon, 1983, 121; Gluck, 1985: 145–7), Lukács clearly did not think that this was the case for his protégé.

Simmel was a presence in Mannheim’s work through most of his years in Germany, most obviously in the echoes of Simmel’s ‘stranger’ in the ‘intellectual’ of Ideology and Utopia, until Mannheim felt compelled by the need for greater professionalism upon assuming his professorship in Frankfurt in 1930, and, later, by the conditions of exile after 1933, to put aside the central themes of cultural sociology, on the borderline between sociology and philosophy of history and culture, where Simmel counted most for him as interlocutor (Kettler et al., 2008; Mannheim, 1982). These are topics for a different occasion. At present, the aim is simply to provide the immediate context for Mannheim’s 1918 lecture. Before the lecture on ‘Soul and Culture’, Mannheim wrote a review of Simmel’s collection of wartime essays and, shortly thereafter, both Mannheim and Lukács published critical articles to mark Simmel’s death. A brief look at these texts will complement the self-evident importance of Simmel’s ‘tragedy of culture’ as starting point for the lecture reproduced in this issue.

Mannheim’s 1917 article in Twentieth Century about Simmel’s wartime essays is mostly an appreciation of Simmel’s analysis of the crisis in pre-war culture, as well as his diagnosis of present possibilities for a new cultural departure in the future (Mannheim, 1995 [1917]). The former, according to Mannheim, is a function of the tendency for the forms of culture to become objectified and alienated from the human spiritual forces they are meant to express: means become ends. Symptoms of the crisis are impromptu attempts by individuals to overreach existing forms, as in pre-war Futurism, Expressionism and mysticism, which result in futile constructs without form or style – a characterization of these trends by Simmel which Mannheim clearly welcomes. The war cannot solve the crisis, but it can, according to Simmel, help to gain distance and time for deeper understanding and the ripening of new possibilities, especially because it renders relations between means and ends more transparent, as in new insights into the merely contingent and instrumental character of the state or of money. The one hopeful finding that Mannheim takes out of Simmel’s profoundly honest but deeply pessimistic and regretful reading, as he judges it, is the as yet inchoate idea of a new man to come, which Simmel somehow extrapolates, according to Mannheim, from a constellation of such cultural ‘facts’ as the presence of Nietzsche, naturalism in literature, Socialism, a renewed grasp of Romanticism, a revival of metaphysics and religion. Not things, but humanity will gain new form. Yet Simmel cannot stand for more than the reality of this wish, Mannheim says: he has no substantive beliefs to proclaim. Mannheim mentions the Stoa, Pauline Christianity and the French Revolution as moments pregnant with such new men, but the appearance of Simmel, as Mannheim presents him here, is at best the moment of Diogenes, John the Baptist, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Almost a year later, Mannheim writes quite a different kind of piece, as he attempts to characterize ‘Georg Simmel as Philosopher’ (1985 [1918]), once again speaking to the readership of Twentieth Century, but speaking now from a judgmental height to make an overall assessment, which has many of the qualities of a somewhat overhasty leave-taking. Written as an obituary tribute, it nevertheless takes the paradoxical form of a rather mannered essay in criticism of essayism. The judgment is stated at the outset. Simmel was profoundly philosophical in the archetypical Socratic sense of possessing unlimited wonder at things and the deepest engagement in their contemplation in search of meaning, Mannheim asserts, but he lacked the capacity to ‘believe’ in the things he saw because his concept of truth lacked ultimate grounding. Afflicted by the skepticism and relativism of his generation, he could not, according to Mannheim, purge his understanding of truth of the psychological consideration of the conditions under which things are held to be true – a view that entailed the judgment as well that different things may be held to be true when conditions or perspectives change. Mannheim contrasts Simmel’s mentality with that of the principal representatives of the neo-Kantian philosophical school to which his best thinking came near (Lask, Windelband, Cohen), in that they did have the capacity to lay down idealistic teachings as a system, but lacked Simmel’s ability to explicate the constituent principles in relation to the rich details of life and culture.

The rest of the essay is devoted to an attempt to characterize the richness and subtlety of Simmel’s engagement in the details of life’s manifestations, his brilliant explications of meaning, his kinship to every present-day tendency in aesthetics, politics, art, and literature. The concept and tragedy of culture belong to this work, as do the exemplary social psychology in his study of the Philosophy of Money and his grasp of moral psychology. All this work is uniquely correlated, according to Mannheim, to the style of the essay, which examines individual things until their meaning beyond themselves – their symbolic expressivity – becomes manifest, so that a reader can gain an intuition of life as a whole. Yet Mannheim takes back much of this praise. The fluidity of Simmel’s writing undermines its own claims and it always opens the possibility that everything could also be altogether different. Reading Simmel, Mannheim asserts, we encounter the personality of the author rather than the substance of the matter. Mannheim judges surprisingly harshly in his capacity as philosopher of the guild: we are left with a wealth of entertaining matter, he concludes, but not with the conceptual understanding for which Simmel awakens a longing. Simmel mobilizes his readers against the static truisms of the past, Mannheim says, but he then abandons them.

The contrasts between this rather stern and seemingly definitive farewell to Simmel as possible interlocutor for Mannheim’s primary project and his earlier willingness to build on Simmel, both in the 1917 review and in the basic premise of the lecture on ‘Soul and Culture’, have several explanations. And the issues are not without interest for this effort to frame the lecture, especially in view of the fact that Mannheim can be understood to resume his negotiations with Simmel in his later work, as noted, and to move closer to him, it might be said, precisely with regard to the philosophical themes about which he here voices such a negative judgment. Instead of the demand for certain metaphysical and epistemological grounding that marks the assessment at the time of Simmel’s death, Mannheim too comes to urge his readers – most clearly in a letter written near the end of his life (Kettler and Meja 2007; Wolff, 1974: 557–9) – that the time for philosophical guarantees for the findings of his sociological inquiry is yet to come. By then, Mannheim himself has ceased to write ‘as philosopher’, and this shift matters greatly because of the emphasis on pluralism in diverse ‘systematizations’ of thinking – roughly equivalent to disciplinary structures – that he shares with Simmel (Mannheim, 1964 [1920]). He begins to write as a sociologist, he says, only approaching at times the borders of philosophy of history; and these are dimensions of Simmel’s work that are praised even by Georg Lukács, whose own obituary article on Simmel is in general more categorically censorious than that of Mannheim (Lukács, 1994 [1918]); and Lukács’ authority is quite probably an important clue as well to Mannheim’s similar attitude at the time. Lukács likens Simmel’s work to that of the impressionists, which he treats primarily as a transitional symptom that an old classicism has become obsolete and a new classicism has not yet taken form. To show the contrast to his own cohort, he remarks that Simmel has not recognized his Cézanne (Gluck, 1985; Wessely, 1990). A striking feature of Lukács’ article is that, with all its emphasis on the need to recognize the classic of the times, there is not the least hint that Lukács was only about a month from pledging his full allegiance to Marxism and Béla Kun’s Communist Party. In fact, Lukács expressly praises Simmel’s sociology for his refusal to join Marxist sociology in ‘the tendency to resolve everything timelessly unconditional (religion, philosophy, art) into the temporally conditioned’ (Lukács, 1994 [1918]: 101). On the other hand, Lukács’ almost angry rejection of impressionism and his celebration of classics interestingly foreshadows his doctrinaire stand in the cultural politics of the Stalinist era, both during the ‘expressionism’ debate in the Moscow exile years and in the flare-up of these issues during the cultural purges of the early German Democratic Republic (Bunge, 1991; Schiller, 2002).

Marxism in this sense was not a classic that Mannheim ever accepted, and his own eventual retreat to a position closer to Simmel’s watchful – and hopeful – uncertainty in philosophical matters may also have had something to do with the choices that Lukács made. For Mannheim in 1918, the question was not about social class or political formation. It was about a generational unit whose destiny seemed clear. The 30 years to come would dim that view (Mannheim, 1982: 121–2, 2001 [1930]: 32–5).