georg simmel on association
I was recently thumbing through my heavily marked-up copy of Simmel’s On Individuality and Social Forms (ed. Levine) and I ran into this curious passage again:
Mankind has created association as its general form of life. This was not, so to speak, the only logical possibility. The human species could just as well have been unsocial; there are unsocial animal species as well as social ones. Because of the fact of human sociality, however, we are easily misled into thinking that categories which directly or indirectly are sociological ones are the only, and universally applicable, categories in terms of which we may contemplate the contents of human experience. This notion, however, is completely erroneous. That we are social beings subjects these contents to a certain point of view, but it is by no means the only possible one. To name a completely different contrasting point of view, one can observe, study, and systemize the contents which, to be sure, exist and are realized only within society purely in terms of their objective content. The inner validity, coherence, and objective significance of all sciences, technologies, and arts are completely independent of the fact that they are realized within and find their preconditions in a social life, just as independent as their objective sense is of the psychological processes through which their discoverers found them. They can naturally also be considered under the latter psychological or the former social point of view.
I think it may be wrong to state that “The inner validity, coherence, and objective significance of all sciences, technologies, and arts are completely independent of the fact that they are realized within and find their preconditions in a social life”. Surely, the only possible way to distinguish between objective and subjective beliefs is in terms of the opinions of others?
For example, I might think that it is objectively true that just as grass is green, Justin Bieber songs are fantastic. Only through association with others I can meaningfully distinguish my belief concerning the color of grass to be an ‘objective fact’ and my belief concerning the enjoyability of J.B. to be a ‘subjective taste’. It is not possible, in the first place, to distinguish what is ‘objective content’ without associating with the others.
In any case, without associating with others, humans would most likely never developed language and sapience. To the extent we can now identify anything that is independent of our associations, it is through the vocabulary and knowledge that has evolved through associations. Nothing can be comprehended without the benefit of culture.
Henri
November 8, 2011 at 8:43 am
It is intriguing. Absent any other traces of us – cemetaries, for instance – if all that were found were the museums of science and art, would it be suggested that these were the works of a small number of people (as indeed they were), who lived on widely isolated estates, such as Isaac Asimov’s “Spacer” worlds?
The objective truth of the works of Beethoven (and the Beatles or, Justin Bieber) is also putative, though, again, intriguing. In Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction, Sparrow, the Jesuits launch an expedition to another planet after a message from there is decoded as music. Only later did they discover that it was a war chant. Still, martial music is internally consistent, and may well be an objective statement, no less so than a recovered physics textbook.
It might also be an objective fact of xenobiology that social species produce different art (and science) than individualized sapients. Here, we only have the Neanderthals against which to compare ourselves. Would an eagle’s nest be mistaken for the work of a flock of pigeons?
I am currently reading from and about Karl Popper, so I have to ask if Georg Simmel’s claim is falsifiable in any way? A young Objectivist thinker, Stuart Hayashi, has an essay, “The Argument from Arbitrary Metaphysics” posted on two boards, Rebirth of Reason and Objectivist Living, in which he suggests that just because you can imagine something does not give it philosophical validity. We can posit a race of intelligent creatures who are widely separated Da Vincis. I am not sure that such is possible.
Michael E, Marotta
November 8, 2011 at 9:51 am
This nothing
“This notion”, presumably?
Simmel seems to be making two distinctions here: the main one is something like what later comes to be called the distinction between the manifest and scientific images of the world—there’s a clear connection to Husserl in what he says. (Though Simmel includes the arts in his list of things one can examine just with respect to their “inner validity, coherence, and objective significance”.) The second is subsidiary to the first, saying that the social point of view is like the psychological one, both in contrast to the objective one. Perhaps because Simmel thinks his readers would find it easy to understand the contrast between (what me might now call) the psychological context of discovery and the context of justification, which he wants to apply to the social case, too.
Kieran
November 8, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Kieran – thanks, you’re right, I changed that.
I’m still not quite clear on the quote – the first two sentences surprise me, though I do agree with the “sociologize everything”-point (in fact, Simmel is great in terms of this, considering internal factors as well — and the objective-subjective issue is there as well). Seems he is making a methodological point of sorts (and something of a thought experiment, I guess) rather than statement of fact, though the two get confounded.
teppo
November 9, 2011 at 9:45 pm