Simmel as a "Hidden King"? On his relations to Egon Friedell and Max Raphael

Simmel as a "Hidden King"? On his relations to Egon Friedell and Max Raphael. Egon Friedell, a Karl Kraus disciple, who wrote his famous "Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit" (1927pp.), DOES what Simmel described as the 'hidden King': every epoch, every era - says Friedell - has its specific idea, concept, fashion, even furniture style. He tries to expose this from late Middle Ages up to World War I, with a enormous knowledge, but he doesn't care about empirical validation, just evidence (like Simmel): instead of having no thesis, he prefers to put out even false ones (like, sometimes, Simmel, too). He read Simmel, but found him, strange enough, as "hard to understand". The other case is Max Raphael, art historian and, like Bloch, a Simmel student. Simmel, e.g., managed that he could get in contact with Rodin. Raphael began in "From Monet to Picasso", a dissertation Wölfflin refused because being focused on contemporary art, to demand an "absolute Gestaltung" (total creation) from any particular piece of art. He obviously learned this 'hidden King' from Simmel's "Rembrandt" and overexaggerates it: modern art yet fails, says Raphael, to execute that. Later on, he switched over to Communism, but one still can show that underneath his concept of 'empirical art history' Simmel's ideas on art themselves wound up as a 'hidden King'.

“隐秘之王”便是齐美尔？——试论其与埃贡·弗里德尔（Egon Friedell）、马克斯·拉斐尔（Max Raphael）的关系。

埃贡·弗里德尔是卡尔·克劳斯（Karl Kraus）的弟子，其代表作《近代文化史》（Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit，1927年版）所践行的正是齐美尔笔下的“隐秘之王”范式：弗里德尔提出，每个时代都拥有专属的理念、观念、风尚乃至家具风格。他以渊博学识为支撑，试图从中世纪晚期一直追溯至第一次世界大战，还原这一时代特质的演变脉络；但与齐美尔一样，他并不在意经验实证，仅依赖佐证材料：与其空无立论，他宁可提出甚至带有谬误的命题——齐美尔本人有时亦会如此。尽管他曾研读齐美尔的著作，但却颇为诧异地表示，齐美尔的文字“难以理解”。

另一位与齐美尔相关的学者是马克斯·拉斐尔，他既是艺术史学家，亦与布洛赫（Bloch）一样，曾是齐美尔的学生。譬如，齐美尔曾促成拉斐尔与罗丹（Rodin）建立联系。拉斐尔在其博士论文《从莫奈到毕加索》中提出，每一件艺术作品都应具备“绝对造型（absolute Gestaltung，即整体创作）”的特质；但这篇论文因聚焦当代艺术，遭到了沃尔夫林（Wölfflin）的拒稿。显然，拉斐尔的这一主张源自齐美尔的《伦勃朗》（Rembrandt）一文，但他对此进行了过度阐释：拉斐尔认为，当代艺术至今仍未能实现这一“绝对造型”的要求。尽管拉斐尔后来转向了共产主义，但学界仍可证明，在他的“经验主义艺术史”理论框架之下，齐美尔的艺术理念始终是那位“隐秘之王”。