On Simmel's Aesthetics: Argumentation in the Journal Jugend 1897-1906

Rammstedt O. On Simmel's Aesthetics: Argumentation in the Journal Jugend 1897-1906. Theory, Culture & Society. 1991;8(3):125-144.This article provides an overview of the writings of Georg Simmel which appeared in a Munich, Germany-based Jugendstill illustrated artistic review entitled Jugend from 1897 to 1906. Simmel's publications in Jugend are strikingly different from his other publications in periodicals and newspapers. His contributions to Jugend are indebted to the spirit of this Illustrated Munich Weekly for Art and Life, which after 1896 soon became an organ against artists and authors who considered their narrow themes surpassed by the Jugendstil conceptions of the work of art, and who joyfully joined in with the credo that Georg Hirth had intoned in the preface of the third volume of Jugend. Simmel took up themes in Jugend which must seem marginal to empirical science. By problematizing aesthetics, religion or love as a relativizing assessment of theories and methods, he appeared to be subordinating his own modern sociological, Darwinist-evolutionary, theoretical approach. Indeed, when treating these themes, he consciously declined to build upon that which he had already discussed; instead, he started afresh each time. And the results do not overlap. The connection is in almost all cases the author's own involvement, the personal aspect of the problematic under discussion