Immanent transcendence in Georg Simmel’s sociology of religion

Abstract

This article presents a systematic reconstruction of Georg Simmel's sociology of religion. Following the development of his sociology of religion, it successively analyses religion as a form of interaction, as a symbolic form and as a personal form. The main argument is that all of Simmel's writings are metaphysical and that religion is only one form among others that gathers the fragments of existence into a unified totality. Religiosity is the central category of Simmel's writings on religion. It 'detranscendentalizes' religion and locates its conditions of possibility within the aspirations of wholeness of the soul.

Simmel’s (non-human) humanism: On Simmel’s ‘ethics of endings and futures’

“…In this respect Tom Kemple 2018 Simmel's 'religiosity' (1902Simmel's 'religiosity' ( / 19972013) or even mysticism of wholeness, where self and society come together in a comprehensive unitary form (see Vandenberghe, 2010). Here, Kemple's work focuses on emphasising Simmel's social, rather than individual, ethics and contrasts Pyyhtinen's (2018) between states of sociability -I take it that the purpose of these images is to show that it is possible to subject the endless flux and transformations of modernity to some kind of mapping procedure in order to make sense and imagine a future where society is more than an imaginary monolith that towers over humans who cower before its structures.…”

“…In light of this paradox, Kemple's (2018) challenge is to theorise the creation of forms that hold onto quality and human value, rather than abandon these to quantity, number, and objectivity, and imagine a form of relationality that remains on a human scale. I think that he manages to achieve this and find the possibility of humanised social form in his theological reading of Simmel's work that imagines the possibility of a negative religion without God (Vandenberghe, 2010). shows that the very use of the monetary medium to capture the expression of the state of fundamental uncertainty, which we might think is written into existence itself (think Andre Breton's surrealistic idea of chance from Nadja (1999)), essentially cancels possibility by placing it under the rule of (a) state sovereignty (which guarantees the value of the coin) and perhaps more importantly (b) the regime of meaningless objective exchange, where the arbitrary decision between heads or tails effectively mirrors the purely quantitative distinction between more or less value, devoid of external support, reference, or significance (quality).…”

The ethics of Orthodoxy as the aesthetics of the local church

“…God) to be small and definite instead of infinite, for an infinite transindividuality would, of necessity, also be experienced by the individual as an expansion. Simmel's stance on the trans-individuality of religion is, no doubt, related to his situation of religion within the subject, rather than being grounded in God (Vandenberghe 2010). In an Orthodox Christian setting, with its active dismissal of ecstatic feeling in favour of a life lived in 'the constant experience of the divine reality' (Lossky 1976: 209) This parallelism is potentially problematic for the project at hand, in that it could be argued that the kind of everydayness of the marvels offered by Coote fall firmly into the 'beauty' paradigm (even as he suggests [2006:295]).…”

Simmel’s reading of Nietzsche: The promise of “philosophical sociology”

“…Simmel’s writings offer a variety of vantage points for conceptualizing individuality, pushing the sociological imagination to all kinds of limits, such as the self-referential metaphysics of life (Button, 2012: 153) and the mysticism of negative theology (Vandenberghe, 2010: 7). Regardless of the path we choose to follow, we arrive at some notion of a synthesis.…”