In existographies, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) [RGM:1,358|1,500+] (Scott 50:35) (CR:13) was a German sociologist and philosopher, stylized the "brightest man in Europe” (Santayana, c.1913), classified by Werner Stark (1962), as a “secondary form” social mechanism theorist, noted for his 1908 Sociology, wherein he classifies himself as an anti-organist, supposedly, and talks about powerful forces pushing man and woman towards each other, speak of man as the “atom of society” and of people as “elements [that] incessantly gain, lose and shift their equilibrium.”
Overview
In 1893 to 1910, a number of Simmel’s writings began to appear in the American periodicals, especially The American Journal of Sociology, translated largely by Albion Small, many of which were later (1925) criticized by Pitirim Sorokin. [4]
Energy | Money
In 1905, Simmel, in his Philosophy of Money, as discussed (Ѻ) by Yuri Tarnopolsky (c.2015), used an analogy between the exchange of energy in the physical world to describe the exchange of money in the economy. [3]
Associates
Simmel corresponded with Max Weber.
Education
In 1874, Simmel then aged 16, his father, a partner in a well-known chocolate factory de-ceased (died), after which a family friend, the founder of an international music publishing house, became his appointed guardian, who left Simmel with a considerable fortune, enabling him to pursue the path of a scholar. [4]
In 1876, Simmel, aged 18, entered the University of Berlin, where he studied history and philosophy, with focus on a special study of Petrarch.
In 1881, Simmel completed his doctorate with a thesis on “The Nature of Matter According to Kant’s Physical Monadology”. (Ѻ)
Simmel then became a professor at the University of Berlin, lecturing on logic, principles of philosophy, history of philosophy, modern philosophy, Kant, Lotze, Schopenhauer, Darwin, pessimism, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, psychology, social psychology, political psychology, and sociology. [4]
Quotes | On
The following are quotes on Simmel:
“If Carey fancies himself as the Newton of sociology [see: another Newton], Simmel, in so far as he was a formalist, wanted to be its Euclid.”
— Werner Stark (1962), Fundamental Forms of Social Thought [1]
Quotes | By
The following are quotes by Simmel:
“There is no entropy of being.”
— Georg Simmel (1913), “Death and Immortality” (note #6); cited by Wilbur Urban (1929) in “The New Gotterdammerung: Degradation and Value” [2]
“Color, molecules, letters, particles of water indeed ‘exist’; but the painting, the book, the river are syntheses: they are units that do not exist in objective reality but only in the conscious-ness which constitutes them. . . . It is perfectly arbitrary to stop the reduction, which leads to ultimately real elements, at the individual. For this reduction is interminable.”
— Georg Simmel (c.1900), Publication [4]
References
1. Stark, Werner. (1962). The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought (Simmel, 18+ pgs.; esp. pgs. 147-49). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
2. (a) Simmel, Georg. (1913). “Death and Immortality”; in: The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms (§3: 63-98, quote, pg. 84). University of Chicago Press, 2015.
(b) Urban, Wilbur M. (1929). “The New Gotterdammerung: Degradation and Value”, in: The Intelligible World: Metaphysics and Value, Volume 14 (§:12:395-427; Simmel, pg. 395) (thermodynamics, pgs.). Routledge, 2002.
3. Stewart, Janet. (2014). “Sociology, Culture and Energy: The Case of Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘Sociological Energetics’ – A Translation and Exposition of a Classic Text” (abs), Cultural Sociology, 8(3), Apr 14.
4. Simmel, Georg. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel (translator: Kurt Wolff) (Arc) (§:Introduction, pgs. xvii-). The Free Press.
External links
● Georg Simmel – Wikipedia.
