ABSTRACT
The article examines a heretofore rather unattended aspect of Georg Simmel’s writings: the concept of mood (Stimmung). It claims that Simmel’s radically subjective concept of Stimmung conditions his insights on the dialectics of subject and object. To sustain such a claim, the article intends to shed light upon the development of the notion throughout Simmel’s intellectual life. In his early essays, mood emerges as a category of landscape theory, it then constitutes a mode of strictly subjective valuation, and finally it plays, towards the end of the philosopher’s life, a decisive role in his metaphysics of modernity, entailing apologetic factors.
Keywords
Philosophy of Life; First World War; Subjectivism