Fragments Of Feeling: An Aesthetic Research On Simmel

As an established sociologist, Simmel's social theories, on the other hand, are heavily imbued with aesthetical characteristics, which greatly differs him from his contemporaries. This thesis attempts to deliver new interpretations of Simmel's theories on the basis of an over view of Simmel from the perspective of aesthetics.Following the line of social forms--human cultural outlook--art philosophy, thisthesis aims at presenting the richness and enlightening uniqueness of Simmel's theories.In the preface, I will briefly introduce Simmel's uniqueness as an theoretician and the writing purpose of this thesis.in the text, I will elaborate my argument as follows:In the first chapter, I will explain the possibility of interpreting Simmel's theories from the perspectives of aesthetics, and introduce the aesthetic content by following the keywords such as human interaction, social forms and feeling. At the same time, I will trace the research history of interpreting Simmel from the perspectives of aesthetics by both Chinese and foreign scholars.In the second chapter, I will first analyze the main object of Simmel's aesthetics, then follow up with the analysis on social forms, interaction and human feelings in interaction, which should be taken as a main clue in Simmel research.In the third chapter, I will further interpret the cultural outlook of Simmel, the contrast between subjective culture and objective culture. By referring to the spiritual map centered around "metropolis", I will go deep into examining his views on money economy and finally explain his theory of cultural tragedy.In the fourth chapter, I will give some arguments of his artistic views, that is, from artistic works' internal automaticity to their external transcendentality, the final redemption scheme of cultural tragedy can be achieved.In the conclusion part, I will give a brief argument on his research values in present context.