Simmel’s Rome: An Essay on Understanding and Self-Transcendence

Abstract

Georg Simmel’s essay on Rome gives paradigmatic expression to an imponderable method that the philosopher practices for years, symbolized by the idea of a plumb line cast from the unstable waters of a sea to its firm foundations. Here Simmel shows how a complex and transhistorical city receives meaning through its multiply tense urban relations, constituting nonetheless a strangely coherent whole. Only circular thinking can adequately grasp this form of coherence. It requires seeing beyond conflicting facts as well as the reader’s own subject positions, in navigation of a space between inner and outer features of perceptual experience. The fragmented and variegated layout of Rome allegorizes that complex space of historical and cultural relations into which interpreting selves must venture to experience totalities that are neither self-evident in things nor in minds that seek their order.