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Simmel deftly formulates Rembrandt's poetics of individual law and trans-phenomenal intuition as

collaborative principles engaged in a robust critique of Renaissance, Baroque, and (to a lesser
degree) Gothic aesthetics. Juxtaposed within and against those contexts, Rembrandt's unique
accomplishments--especially the exceptional characteristics of his late portraits--warrant the
phenomenological expertise that Simmel brings to this volume. Whereas Renaissance portraiture
represents personality from an allegorical distance, as manifesting neo-Platonic forms (if merely
general types) of human behavior, Rembrandt's paintings "appear to us as though shaken out of the
depths of life, interwoven with long-running strands of late". If Baroque art supersedes the abstract
ideality of Renaissance character-forms with "living being, but however, only with the mechanical
movements" of life that are ultimately just "theatrical and inwardly unconvincing" (37-38), then
Rembrandt gives us the vitality of "complete inner life". And while the pure Gothic "has no
individuality" because of an excessive preoccupation with the transcendental, "Rembrandt's
religious paintings" limn a genuine piety that "lives in all the abundance, colorfulness--yes,
coincidence--with that which is characteristic of its form of life".
Throughout the book, Simmel punctuates grand arguments such as those, with fine attention to
detail and painterly technique, aptly connecting those discrete insights to bold reassessments of
scientific methodologies and philosophical paradigms. In chapter three, "Religious Art," for
example, Simmel's meditation on Rembrandtian light (in various paintings and etchings) yields two
overturnings: the first, of empirical form/content sociological analysis; the second, of Plato's
doctrine of ideas. Extrapolating from his reflections upon Rest on the Flight [to Egypt] and The
Good Samaritan (1648; Gemaldegalerie, Berlin), among other works, Simmel observes:
Rembrandtian light is restricted to the space and action of each
respective painting, but this means ... the elevation of the
picture over each particularity into its own highest generality;
into the highest possible expression of its pure and sublime
nature. It replaces, so to speak, the external generality with the
inner one. It displays ... not the unity of the painting with
something that is external to it, but the final and simplest unit
of the painting itself. This is the context through which
Rembrandtian light achieves that unique animation.

Rembrandt's light originates within the idiom of each particular portrait, emanating from the
singularity of every individual soul, because each painting conveys the transience of becoming, not
a rendering of some unattainably perfect, general principle for being. What follows next in Simmel's
thought unfolds with clarity and elegance: "reality and art ate two coordinated possibilities for
shaping the identical content" and their "resulting structures have no relevance for each other" Just
as the "mathematical circle as such has nothing at all to do with round objects in the real world" ,
empirical form/content analysis stands apart from the eidetic autonomy of art. Plato's mistake was
likewise to deduce 'permanent' reality (Being) from general mathematical and logical principles,
thus subordinating 'impermanent' worldly human experience (becoming) to transcendental
signification. Plato could have taken a further step, asserts Simmel, because art creates a separate
reality.
Those sweeping critiques emerge from a context of disputations with Kant, which recur
intermittently throughout the volume. (Simmel studied philosophy and history at the University of
Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1881 for his thesis, "The Nature of Matter According to Kant's
Physical Monadology"). As noted above, Rembrandt marks a decisive turning of Simmel's thought
away from Kant's transcendental reduction of human experience to the pure intuitions of a priori
reason alone. Kant's key notions, from "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements" in his Critique of
Pure Reason (1781), for example, call for the separation between reason (form) and sensation
(content):

I term all representations pure (in the transcendental sense) in


which there is nothing that belongs to sensation. The pure form of
sensible intuitions in general, in which all the manifold of
intuition is intuited in certain relations, must be found in the
mind a priori. This pure form of sensibility may also itself be
called pure intuition.

Simmel touches upon Kant's philosophy in several instances, most thoroughly in a discussion of
Rembrandtian time and transience in chapter one, "The Expression of Inner Life." More attentive
and generous than in his challenge to Plato, Simmel nonetheless chides Kant for a small, but
significant oversight: "the concomitant turn of thought with which Kant neglected the apparent
necessity first to deduce the object of external perception" . If Kant grasps external reality as
ultimately grounded upon prior, purely rational forms of transcendental intuition that may be frozen
in time, then Simmel embraces the flow of human becoming as a manifold of intelligible and
sensible experiences. For life, he affirms,
is immediately nothing other than the past becoming present, and
where we really see life, only a pure prejudice will allow us to
claim that one merely sees the frozen present moment. It is in
principle all the same whether we acquire the view of the whole
life by and by, whether particular experiences and conclusions have
psychologically preceded it, whether it remains always incomplete
and merely an approximation.

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