Alberto Luis Cordeiro de Farias
Derzeitige Beschäftigung
Postdoctoral researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil), and postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Soziologie at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (funding: CNPq and Georg-Simmel-Gesellschaft).
Kurzer Lebenslauf
2026 - Postdoctoral researcher,
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Institut für Soziologie,
Germany.
supported by National Council for Scientific and Technological
Development (CNPq), Brazil, and Georg Simmel Gesellschaft
(GSG), Germany.
2024 to the present - Postdoctoral researcher,
Santa Catarina Federal University, Brazil, supported by National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil.
2015 to the present - Associate Researcher,
Sociofilo Research Group, Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil.
2017 - 2022 - Doctoral degree in Sociology (Social Theory),
Rio de Janeiro State University - Brazil
2015 – 2016 - Master’s degree in Sociology (Social Theory),
Rio de Janeiro State University - Brazil
2010 – 2014 - Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences,
Federal University of Pernambuco – Brazil
Wissenschaftliche Schwerpunkte im Allgemeinen
Research at the intersection of sociology and philosophy. His work focuses on the history and sociology of ideas, theories of the human sciences, Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), Georg Simmel, and neo-Kantianism.
Wissenschaftliche Schwerpunkte im Rahmen der geplanten Assoziation am IZEA
In the context of the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA), he would like to conduct research on historical and sociological patterns in the Enlightenment, as well as more systematic studies of theories, categories, and systems in the work of authors such as C. Wolff, I. Kant, M. Mendelssohn, and G. Simmel.
Kurzkonzept der für das IZEA vorgesehenen wissenschaftlichen Aktivität
- Cultural Patterns of the Enlightenment;
- Enlightenment Thought: Concepts, Categories, Systems;
- Theorizing the Enlightenment as a transhistorical rational-critical attitude and
a normative program.
Title: Simmel and the Enlightenment - Simmel's reconfiguration of Autonomie and Bildung, from self-legislation to self-binding.
Abstract
This project proposes to investigate how Georg Simmel received and reworked the traditions of the Enlightenment. I first intend to reconstruct Simmel's characterization of the Enlightenment as, on the one hand, a transhistorical rational-critical attitude and, on the other hand, a normative program. Second, I wish to reflect on the main features of this reception, identifying the inherited categories that structure Simmelian semantics. Particularly, I wish to examine how Simmel develops two of these categories, Autonomie and Bildung, explaining the continuities and breaks with the traditions of the Enlightenment. The guiding argument is that Simmel formulates a cultural variant of Enlightenment modernity in which, in addition to recognizing himself as the heir to these traditions, he theorizes about them by translating the ideals of Autonomie and Bildung into theoretical-social terms. His analyses articulate the self-legislation of moral doctrine and classical formation with socially produced self-binding techniques, through which individuality is constituted through forms that simultaneously enable and limit freedom. These central issues of the Enlightenment traverse two interconnected traditions (Lumières and Aufklärung) and are condensed in Simmel's vocabulary, recodified in his readings of money, association, and the life-form nexus, in many books and essays.
Keywords: Autonomie. Bildung. Enlightenment. Georg Simmel.
1. Introduction and rationale
This research proposal is organized around Georg Simmel's reception and theorization of the Enlightenment. The theme is justified twofold. First, there is, in fact, a reception, in the strong sense of the term, of the Enlightenment by Simmel. Not only do we find constant references to all the most relevant names of the Enlightenment (and of the Aufklärung, in the context of classical German philosophy) in the 24 volumes of Simmel's Gesamtausgabe, but, above all, practically the entire theoretical-categorical apparatus employed by Simmel can be traced back in some way to Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Mendelssohn, Goethe and Lessing, among others. Determining the continuities and ruptures in Simmel's use of concepts and categories vis-à-vis the traditions of the Enlightenment can be comprise important agenda for Simmel Studies, constituting more than an intellectual exercise, insofar as the terms Simmel uses are often the same, but the meanings (the content of the applied concepts) can be totally different, obscuring any systematic innovations. The second reason is that research on the theme of Georg Simmel's reception and theorization of the Enlightenment is also important for philosophical-systematic and historical-sociological studies of the Enlightenment itself and, in his elaborations, one can infer a reading of the Enlightenment both in the sense of a characterization and a theorization and development of its main themes from Simmel. In the latter case, Simmel seems to have understood the Enlightenment both as a transhistorical rational-critical attitude and as a normative program, which in any case must be reconstructed from the corpus of his work.
In this sense, the central and guiding argument of the research proposal is that Simmel represents a cultural variant within Enlightenment modernity, which not only explicitly influenced this author, but which he also theorized about. The main evidence for this would be provided by Simmel's characterizations of historical and social transformations, on the one hand, of the ideal of Autonomie of the Enlightenment, attempting to reconcile “self-legislation” in the register of moraldoctrine (as in: Simmel, GSG, Bd. 7, esp. “Die Lehre Kants von Pflicht und Glück” and “Die beiden Formen des Individualismus”; Bd. 9, esp. “Kant und der Individualismus”; Bd. 12, esp. "Das individuelle Gesetz. Ein Versuch über das Prinzip der Ethik"; among others); and, on the other hand, the classical Bildung with the register of socially produced self-bindings, where individuality is constituted through forms that both enable and restrict freedom (i.e., Simmel, GSG, Bd. 5, esp. “Persönliche und sachliche Kultur”; Vol. 8, esp. “Vom Wesen der Kultur”; Vol. 14, esp. “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur”; among others).
With this in mind, the research will follow an analytical-synthetic approach, first by clarifying concepts, with Simmel and Hans Blumenberg, to establish criteria for distinguishing between Enlightenment, Neuzeit, and Capitalism, so that they are maintained analytically separate, although historically intertwined. Next, my intention is to reconstruct the categories of Autonomie, inherited from Kant, and Bildung, inherited from Mendelssohn, in Simmelian terms, that is, as programs of self-legislation, self-binding, and formation, rather than purely legal formalism. Subsequently, I will reread Simmel's corpus as a scattered but coherent theory of forms of Autonomie and the construction of Bildung, each linked to a distinct milieu and situated at the intersection between the normativity of the Enlightenment, the self-understanding of the modern era, and capitalist operability. Finally, I will articulate Simmel's understanding of Autonomie and Bildung with his sociological theory on three levels: at the social theory, theory of society, and diagnosis of the times levels. Two guiding ideas organize the research. First, Autonomie in Simmel is a relationship, not a psychological or metaphysical property, comprising the cumulative effect of self-bindings whose legitimacy can be read along Blumenberg's axis of reoccupation, in which legal obligation reoccupies the place of theological command, punctuality reoccupies the place of liturgical time and monetary equivalence reoccupies the place of metaphysical measure, among others, so that the Neuzeit asserts itself by reusing the same spaces in which tradition once anchored heteronomy. Second, capitalism neither exhausts nor guarantees modernity; it in fact provides powerful means for self-commitment that often surpass the promise of the Enlightenment, although the normative horizon of the Enlightenment remains available as a critical standard internal to these means.
2. Objectives and methodology development
The research will continue through a detailed textual analysis of some of Simmel's main texts, mapping the semantics of Autonomie at the points where moral doctrine, Bildung, and the sociological production of “self-bindings” intersect, comprising precisely the junctions where freedom becomes both a condition for the creation of forms and a product of forms that exceed the subject. This reading is framed by studies that situate Simmel in the German intellectual constellation of Kant and Goethe and in the debates on Kultur (in addition to Simmel works referenced above, see Frisby, 2002; Podoksik, 2021), and involves French and German receptions that clarify how Simmel transforms the legacies of the Enlightenment rather than simply invoking them (in this regard, see: Vandenberghe, 1997; 1998; 2009; Watier, 2003). The expected result is a theoretically and historically grounded account of Simmel's perspectives on Autonomie and Bildung, which follows both the continuities with the Enlightenment, i.e., its commitment to critique, form, and self-legislation, as well as the decisive shifts toward a theoretical-social understanding, in which the ideals of Autonomie and Bildung emerge within the forms that make modern freedom and self-development thinkable and experienceable, and are limited by them.
Requiring a better definition of the paths and objectives to be pursued in each case, the research begins with an analytical discussion. I wish to start by reading Simmel alongside Hans Blumenberg (Blumenberg, 1987) to separate three, often confused, horizons: Enlightenment as a normative program of maturity and criticism; the Neuzeit as an epochal self-understanding and repertoire of legitimations; and Capitalism as a specific socioeconomic order with its own means of generalization. Associated to this, the first objective (O1) comprises conceptual cartography: based on Simmel and Blumenberg's descriptions of modernity as Selbstbehauptung and “reoccupations,” the study disambiguates these three horizons so that, first, there is no confusion between the mechanisms of capitalism and the essence of modernity; and, secondly, no interpretation of the ethos of Autonomie of the Enlightenment as merely an ideological alibi for these mechanisms. In Blumenberg's case, he provides us with a metastructure: Enlightenment names a polemical style and a normative demand (maturity, criticism, departure from tutelage); Neuzeit names a claim to legitimacy and a semantics of temporality (novelty, beginning, progress) that “reoccupies” problematic theological spaces; Capitalism names a historically peculiar social order that operationalizes abstraction, competition, and calculability. Simmel is then read as the analyst of the microforms through which these horizons meet and interfere.
The second step aims (O2) to reconstruct Simmel's categories of Autonomie and Bildung vis-à-vis Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn, respectively. I understand them as a theory of self-binding and formation, and not just as a universal legislation of the will, in which Kant's self-legislation becomes empirically treatable when one observes the techniques by which agents bind themselves in time, space, and to each other. Mendelssohn's Bildung, in turn, becomes the historical matrix of these techniques as a pedagogy of self-formation. This allows a clear path for Simmel: Autonomie in Neuzeit appears as an economy of bonds whose means he anatomizes, comprising fidelity, gratitude, secrecy, exchange, style, and money, so that individuality is not only a given inner property, but the stabilized result of these practices.
Next, I wish to articulate both categories, Autonomie and Bildung, with Simmel's sociological theory (O3). At the level of social theory, I wish to regard Simmel's reinterpretation of the category of Autonomie as a normative grammar through which agents acquire the ability to respond for themselves over time and with others. Kant's Autonomie, read in this way, is de jure a rule of self-legislation, but becomes intelligible to social theory when reformulated as a practice of committing to maxims that can be maintained, revised, and justified within shared ways of life. Mendelssohn's Bildung, in a Simmelian interpretation from social theory, provides the historical pedagogy for this practice, incorporating self-legislation into reading, conversation, discipline, and aesthetic cultivation habits. The result is that Autonomie and Bildung do not consist of internal substances but, instead, relational achievements, in which a person becomes responsive and formed by entering into economies of commitment that stabilize conduct. This is precisely where Simmel's reception of the Enlightenment can take a decisive turn. He translates Autonomie into an “economy of ties,” analyzing the means (fidelity and fulfillment of promises, gratitude and reciprocity, secrecy and boundary setting, exchange and calculability, style and self-presentation, money and abstraction) through which a life binds itself and is bound by others. The Enlightenment, therefore, persists in Simmel not as universal legislation hovering above experience, but as the formalization of the means that make self-governance practically possible.
At the level of society theory, these bonds can be specified as mechanisms that produce individuality by associating temporal commitments with social forms. Fidelity converts the future into obligation by transforming a declaration (as in “I will do”) into a lasting bond that organizes expectation; gratitude circulates remembered benefits as symbolic credit, sustaining cooperation through a ledger of recognition that is felt, not just counted. In this sense, secrecy constructs selective asymmetries of information that define circles of trust and allow roles, positions, and identities to align; exchange establishes equivalence as a common measure, making disparate practices commensurable and thus expanding the radius of action; money radicalizes this by becoming the general equivalent, freeing actors from particularistic ties and, at the same time, subjecting them to impersonal forms of calculation; style, finally, codifies self-formation into visible regularities, allowing individuality to be readable as a pattern rather than a private essence. Each mechanism is structured temporally (promises extend into the future, gratitude recalls the past, secrecy calibrates disclosure over time, exchange and money synchronize transactions, style iterates forms) so that the “self ” appears as the stabilized result of temporal techniques embodied in shared forms. Simmel’s formal sociology adds that these mechanisms carry a double valence: the same means that emancipate (by expanding discretion, mobility, and reflexivity) also heteronomize (by intensifying standardization, comparison, and dependence on abstract systems). In this sense, Simmel sociologizes the Enlightenment by relocating Autonomie from the inner forum of the will to the morphologies of society, through which wills become mutually binding and empirically treatable.
Finally, in terms of a diagnosis of the times, Simmel's update of the Enlightenment reveals a modernity in which subjective freedom expands under conditions that incessantly convert qualities into quantities and relationships into forms. The monetary nexus expands Autonomie by dissolving status and allowing choice, but also amplifies the excessive growth of objective culture, flooding individuals with means whose ends are difficult to unify, i.e., gratitude and loyalty remain indispensable, but are mediated by metrics of reputation, contractual routines, and organizational schedules that compress the horizon of trust; secrecy no longer belongs only to discreet circles, but to infrastructural architectures of visibility and invisibility that recalibrate what it means to maintain or relinquish control; exchange is accelerated through generalized equivalence, intensifying freedom as the power to choose, while binding actors to schedules, prices, and protocols; style multiplies elective affinities, but also routinizes self-formation into reproducible grammars that tie distinction to the very codes that level it. In short, the Enlightenment's promise of Autonomie persists, but as a balance dependent on practice within an increasingly differentiated economy of ties. To diagnose our present in Simmel's terms is to think of it as a precarious achievement forged at the intersection between temporal self-commitment and the forms that make mutual responsibility possible. The critical task, then, is not to abandon the Enlightenment, but to refine its theory of Autonomie and pedagogy of Bildung for a world in which the very means that enable both become increasingly powerful, increasingly abstract, and therefore increasingly in need of reflexive regulation.
4. Selected bibliography
(1) Backhaus, Gary. “Simmel on Kant: The Limits of Enlightenment Rationality.” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 117–133. (2) Beebee, Thomas O. “Form as Mediation: Simmel’s Answer to the Enlightenment Problem of Subject and Object.” New German Critique 112 (2011): 103–125. (3) Blomert, Rainer. “Mit Georg Simmel über einsinnige Begriffsgehäuse hinaus.” Beiträge zur GeschichtswissenschaftXXVIII (2021): 103–125. (4) Blumenberg, Hans. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. (5) Bohn, Christoffer. “Twofold Freedom and Contingency.” Simmel Studies 24 (2018): 59–75. (6) Bürgi, Markus. Die Moderne im Verständnis von Georg Simmel. Zurich: Chronos, 2003. (7) Deflem, Mathieu. “Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture (Postscript to a Collection of Essays by Jürgen Habermas).” Geo Simmel Review (2009). (8) Gothein, Eberhard. “Bildung und Kultur bei Georg Simmel.” In Bildung im Wandel, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et al., 213–231. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014. (9) Kavka, Martin. “Enlightenment, Estrangement, and Simmel’s Religious Sociology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 74, no. 4 (2013): 573–596. (10) Kettler, David. “Simmel’s Philosophy of Culture and the Transformation of Enlightenment Rationality.” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 1 (2000): 29–53.(11) Neuhouser, Frederick. “Freedom, Self-Realization, and the Limits of Enlightenment: Simmel’s Philosophy of Life.” In The Cambridge Companion to Simmel, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 7–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. (12) Podoksik, Efraim. “Simmel on Culture and the Crisis of Enlightenment.” European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 3 (2020): 289–308. (13) Podoksik, Efraim. Georg Simmel and German Culture: Unity, Variety and Modern Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. (14) Rammstedt, Otthein. “Georg Simmel und die geistige Kultur der Moderne.” In Georg Simmel: Soziologie der Moderne, edited by Otthein Rammstedt, 11–43. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. (15) Simmel, Georg. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Otthein Rammstedt. 24 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989–2015. (16) Vandenberghe, Frédéric. Une histoire critique de la sociologie allemande: Aliénation et réification. Tome I: Marx, Simmel, Weber, Lukács. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1997. (17) Vandenberghe, Frédéric. Une histoire critique de la sociologie allemande: Aliénation et réification. Tome II: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1998. (18) Vandenberghe, Frédéric. A Philosophical History of German Sociology. Translated by Carolyn Shread. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.