Todellinen elämä: Bergson ja koettu luonto

Bergsonin elämänfilosofia liittyy laajaan suuntaukseen, joka syntyi biologian mullistuksien myötä 1800-luvun loppupuolella (Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Menyhert Palágyi, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, William James...). Sikäli kuin naturalismi tulkitaan tämän päivän keskustelussa usein yksipuolisesti materialismiksi, elämänfilosofia voi antaa toisen kiinnostavan näkökulman ihmisen asemaan luonnossa. Suuntaus on tässä suhteessa vahvasti vaikuttanut fenomenologisiin teorioihin subjektin ruumiillisuudesta ja yleensäkin embodiment-käsitteeseen. Artikkelin tarkoitus on valaista filosofisen psykologian ja luonnonfilosofian suhdetta Bergsonin tuotannossa, temaattisesti syventää tätä suhdetta sekä historiallisesti ja ontologisesti taustoittaa Bergsonin filosofiaa, muun muassa suhteessa hänen edeltäjänsä Félix Ravaissonin aristotelismiin.

“Dangerous modernity!”, or the shadow play of modernity and its characters: instrumental rationality - money - technology (part 1)

The article is an essay on the critical analysis of one of the fundamental issues of social theory of the 19th - 20th centuries - alienation and its manifestations in modern societies. Alienation is interpreted not in one of its special meanings (such as alienation of labor, etc.), but in the broadest way - as the transformation of products of individual and collective activities into an independent force that subjugates a person and transfers him from the position of the subject to the position of the object of social relations. Such a definition makes alienation a universal feature of social life. However, in different societies and in different historical periods, alienation can have variable specific forms. The historically specific manifestations of alienation in modern societies can be explained by referring to the classical theme of their genesis. The originality of their institutional organization is largely associated with the originality of their culture and spiritual life (in particular, with the radical demarcation between human and nature, subject and object in the modern era). The multifaceted phenomenon of scientific and technical rationality, the product of the post-Renaissance Western-European culture, becomes a source of social realities and practices fraught with alienation. The article illustrates it by a number of examples, including the logic and mechanisms of the capitalist money economy. The author refers to the heritage of world philosophy and social thought, which problematized and conceptualized the considered issues in various ways: the Frankfurt School, existentialist philosophers, pillars of theoretical sociology - Karl Marx and Georg Simmel.

O LUGAR DA PSICOLOGIA SOCIAL EM GEORG SIMMEL

O artigo pretende trazer a discussão acerca do lugar da psicologia social na obra de Georg Simmel. O texto abordará a problemática a partir dos seguintes ângulos: a) a reconstrução geral do lugar da psicologia social na obra simmeliana; b) a apreciação do elo entre a emergência da cultura moderna e o adensamento psicológico da experiência individual; c) reconstruir como direções teóricas semelhantes são tomadas em sua teoria do valor, na qual sujeito e objeto se diferenciam por meio da distância entre o gozo e seu objeto; e, por fim, d) traçaremos como Simmel esteve preocupado em compreender a dialética entre sujeito e objeto a partir de uma ótica capaz de relacionar cognição e pulsão. Espera-se que este debate esclareça o significado sociológico do interesse de Simmel pela psicologia por meio da teoria do desenvolvimento cultural, da gênese dos valores e da personalidade.

Georg Simmel as an explorer of reality: historico-philosophical localization. Fitzi, G. (2020). The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies. London: Routledge.

Review of Fitzi, G. (2020). The Challenge of Modernity: Simmel’s Sociological Theory. Routledge.

Von der formalen Soziologie zur formalen Literatursoziologie: Georg Lukács

The paper reconstructs a crucial moment in the history of literary studies: the transference of formal sociology, as developed by Georg Simmel around 1900, into literary studies by his pupil, the young Georg Lukács. First, formal sociology will be explained in order to outline the ways in which Lukács adapts it. Then the formal method Lukács developed will be illustrated using the drama as an example. Finally, the paper will analyze Caroline Levine’s highly acclaimed study Forms (2015) in the context of the history of the formal method outlined, and briefly discuss the impasse in which this method currently finds itself.

Review: Georg Simmel, Essays on Art and Aesthetics

With the publication of Georg Simmel’s Essays on Art and Aesthetics there is now an illuminating collection of Simmel’s essays that makes a decisive dimension of Simmel’s thought available to English readers. Austin Harrington’s masterfully curated selection, introduced with a thorough and informative discussion, presents Simmel’s thought on art and aesthetics in a way that makes it now for the first time possible to fully appreciate the essayistic yet coherently critical thrust of Simmel’s thought in its extraordinary range and detail.