The Change Of Social Forms

This dissertaion focuses on the thoughts of social aesthetics advanced by Georg Simmel (1858~1918), a modern cultural philosopher from Germany. It attempts to stretch a special way of pondering aesthetic phenomena of contemporary society.The social aesthetics advanced by Georg Simmel is an aesthetic cagegory with particular implication, which is in a state of semi-dormancy in the aesthetic study of both the East and the West. According to Georg Simmel,"society"does not mean the overall forms of activities of human beings (as Karl Marx and Max Weber have identified), but merely refers to the forms of social interaction among people. The difference between"social interaction"and"forms of social interaction"is that the former contains rich content of social life, while the latter only emphasizes the meaning of forms. For example, the social interaction between merchants and customers usually relates to experiential content like merchandise types, customer types, trade manners (such as wholesale, retail, cash payment, credit), and so on. But from the perspective of forms of social interaction, there is only one form of relationship between merchants and customers form-exchange. In other words, the exchange is the unique form of social interaction between them. Their correspondent social status must change once their relationship deviates from this form. (Of course,"merchants/customers"is not the only social combination to reflect exchange relationship.) Therefore, the forms of social interaction refer to pure forms excludding the experiential content of social interaction. (Thus Simmel's sociological theory is also called"pure sociology".) In this sense, Simmel adopted the concept of"society". So the exact implication of social aesthetics is"aesthetics of forms of social interaction"(aesthetics of social forms)."Social aesthetics"is the spirit of Simmel's sociological theory. Due to his inflexible and profound feelings towards aesthetics, he kept denying that he was a sociologist and hoped to be regarded as a philosopher in academic circles. The gestation and elucidation of Simmel's"social aesthetics"thouthts not only reflected his of wit, but also represented the mental tendency of the time.From his point of view, the decline of forms of traditional religious imagination and forms of arts led to the universal vacuity of mind in western countries. As a result, to search for a new anchorage of spirit would become the common choice of people in modern times. Following Durkheim, Simmel had a clear understanding that the increasingly active social life began to invade the spiritual space of modern people and become the new center of spirit. The grave spiritual crisis of modern people-external abundance always cannot escape the chase of internal poorness in people's mind,was revealed from three typical aspects: Money worship and fetishism, fashion-chasing, and wallowing in Eros.However, Simmel's concern on people's everyday soul is neither based on moralism nor pragmatism, but aestheticism, which could be analyzed from two levels: for one thing, the overall conception of his theory is filled with spiritual temperament of aestheticism and his basic position is to refuse value averaged, retionalization and homogenization. (In this regard, Nietzsche had a great impact on him.)For another,the pattern analysis he adopted is essentially a aesthetic method,which excludes the moralized and expeiential content under the influence of social forms and only keeps the only dimension-forms.(Simmel affirmed that this method was affected by Kant's idea that"beauty lies in form"). For example, while discussing the eros, one form of social interaction, Simmel focused on the gender relations in activities of prostitution in modern times. He did not refer to the moral value problem of prostitutes and the emotional attitudes of the public towards the prostitutes. In this sense, Simmel is as precise, objective, and calm as scientists.Needless to say, all social activities must present certain social forms. Thus the general analysis without distinguishing the primary and secondary could damage the forward-looking vision of social aesthetics. Aiming at curing the main mental diseases of modern people, Simmel did meticulous experiential analysis of the concrete texts of three social forms, corresponding to money worship and fetishism, fashion-chasing, wallowing in Eros. They were money reflecting the common relations among people, fashion presenting the relations among class (group) and Eros showing gender relations. Through exploring the changes of the three forms, Simmel attempted to feel the pulse of modernity in an individual way.Simmel believes that money is essentially a reflection of social relations. But the social relations, strictly speaking social forms presented by money are quite different at various historical stages. In ancient times, money was divine sacrifices to deities, presenting the exchange relations between human beings and deities. Such exchange had nothing to do with the equivalent consciousness of modern transactions, of which the presentation form was"time delay"(it takes long time to finish the exchange). In pre-modern and modern society, due to the physical and functional changes of money, the social forms presented have become bizarre, which are similar to the modern"cultural logic"(by Daniel Bell)Like money, both fashion and Eros are typical experiential text of social forms. Simmel adopted formal methods to anatomize. Although there was occasional extreme remarks and the random of"impressionist philosopher"(remarks on Simmel by Georg Lukacs), Simmel revealed the basic features of modern social forms presented by money, fashion and Eros, diagnosing the"mental state of the time"(by Jaspers) from a new perspective.Based on the analysis of the three texts, Simmel further generalized the spiritual characteristics and aesthetic function of modern social forms in modern times from theoretical point of view. He also introduced the Game Theory improved by Kant and Schiller and combined aesthetic characteristics of social forms with the non-utilitarian nature game. Thus he endowed the modern social forms with richer and more profound cultural connotation-making it another a salvation of mind, following religions and arts. Meanwhile, Simmel deeply realized that any social form has certain rhetorical function, allowing individual to live in society without sufficient self-awareness and replace the inernal enrichment by external abundance. Thus the essence of life"additional life and more than life", was ignored (by Simmel). Concentrating on the main clue-social aesthetics, this dissertation finally explores the the connection between Simmel and four other thinkers respectively,who are Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Martin Heidegger and Antony Giddens. Even though many ideologists hold different opinions on the relationship between contemporary social life and the significance of individual life, they all realize the special influence of social forms on the mind of modern times. Unfortunately, the nature and significance of this kind of influence has not been fully envisaged, Simmel just opened a window. As a matter of fact, the directive significance of social aesthetics to reality is not confined to the time of Simmel. No wonder Jürgen Habermas keeps naming Simmel"the diagnostician of the time".