Indivíduo e Realidade
This article is about the influence of Georg Simmel on Siegfried Kracauer’s thought and analysis method, and also on the difference between the two. Kracauer was Simmel’s pupil at Berlin in 1907, and exposed his thought and method in an essay (Georg Simmel) published for the first time in 1963, forty-two years after being written, in a collection of papers intituled Das Ornament der Masse. Starting from a heuristic principle - which could be put like this: all expressions of spiritual/intellectual life are interrelated in countless ways; no single one can be extricated from this web of relations, since each is enmeshed in the web with all other such expressions - , Kracauer distinguished, in Simmel’s method, two different ways of linking the different phenomena: discovering its essential congruence [Wesenszusammengehörigkeit] or by analogy [Analogie]. The first method shows how disparate phenomena could have the same source. The second tries to demonstrate similitudes between phenomena, and it is, in a certain degree, an abstract construction. This double approach of reality synchronizes Kracauer’s worries on the culture fragmentation and his attempt to overcome it. This is most clear when he criticizes Simmel, in a forward step, of being in default of metaphor [Gleichnis]. Metaphor is, in Kracauer’s point of view, not only a relation between objects, like Simmel tries, but a relation between subject and object, and the representation by a particular image of individual things as much as of the entire world. Metaphor carries in it itself the philosophical intuition that is lacking in Simmel’s oeuvre.