TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION By: Kurt H. Wolff
SIMMEL’S READERS MAY well find themselves puzzled once they try to analyze their impression: does it come from an extraordinary mind or from its product, from a process or from an achievement, from an attitude or from the discoveries made by virtue of it? The dichotomies may be clarified by testimonials of Simmel’s hearers, who “too, helped build”; Simmel took “his students down an oblique pit into the mine”; he was not a teacher, he was an “inciter.” “Just about the time when . . . one felt he had reached a conclusion, he had a way of raising his right arm and, with three fingers of his hand, turning the imaginary object so as to exhibit still another facet.” A lecture by Simmel was creation-at-the-moment-of-delivery: the essence of Simmel’s spell seems to have been the spontaneous exemplification of the creative process.
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