The social Theory of Georg Simmel

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1024612627

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-166627

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Spykman, Nicholas J. http://d-nb.info/gnd/124229867

Title:: The social Theory of Georg Simmel

Place of publication:: Chicago

Publisher:: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Year of publication:: 1925

Scope:: XXIX, 297 S

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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10 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL objective truth, there would result an irreconcilable con- flict and mutual negation; but in the form of alternation an organic unity is possible. Each of them becomes then merely a heuristic principle, that is, each will have to search for a foundation and a justification at every point of its application. In this way every exact science has to submit to an investigation of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions themselves will have to be submitted to a psychological and historical investigation. This mutual dependence of the two methods is also manifest in the most general opposition within our knowl- edge, the opposition between what is a priori and what is experience. All experience results from an active, forma- tive functioning of the mind on the immediate sense im- pressions, and it is only through this transformation that the immediate data of experience become knowedge. But the certainty that there are such a priori thought forms is not accompanied by the certainty of what they are. What has been accepted as an a priori form at one time has been proven to be an empirical and historical struc- ture at a later time. Not only are the a priori categories not permanently fixed and static, but what is empirically obtained in one field of inquiry may function as a priori for another field of inquiry. A complete understanding of experience involves, therefore, the double task of finding the aprioristic norms which shape it and of tracing for each single a priori its genetic growth out of former experience. Each of these two methods still contains something sub- jective, but in the form of a mutual determination they can picture that which we call objectivity. The great advantage of this relativistic over other epistemological doctrines is that it does not need to ask for exemption from application to itself. The doctrine is not destroyed by the fact that it is itself relativistic.

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