Simmel Between Pragmatism and Somaesthetics

Reviewed by: The Forces of Form in German Modernism by Malika Maskarinec Josh Todarello (bio) Malika Maskarinec. The Forces of Form in German Modernism. Northwestern University Press, 2018. 199 pages. The Forces of Form in German Modernism takes its title from Heinrich Wöllflin’s 1886 Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, in which Wöfflin coins the term “Formkraft” (in English, “the force of form”) to name the force that opposes gravity and holds human bodies upright. This conflict between gravity and a will that strives, against it, toward uprightness is fundamental to Maskarinec’s book. Out of this opposition comes a concept of form—not the Platonic, ideal form, preexistent, always there, the true and eternal reality—but rather a mechanistic idea of form that emerges out of a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces. It is, one might say, embodied, bound to the earth, always struggling, always precarious, ever seeking a state of upright equilibrium. Maskarinec argues that the concept of corporeal uprightness is integral to German modernism as an aesthetic and corporeal ideal. Early 20th- century aesthetics, Maskarinec says, embraces classical mechanics and the “optimistic” law of the conservation of energy and eschews or rejects the “pessimistic” second law of thermodynamics. Modernism, like the classic aesthetic it brings into the 20th century, rejects a descent into formlessness, entropy, horizontality, and affirms uprightness. The book is divided into three thematic sections: An Aesthetics of Heaviness; Empathy and Abstraction; and Poetic Gravity. These sections explore concepts of heaviness, equilibrium, and force across various media and degrees of the literal and figurative. To this end the book brings philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and literature into conversation around the central theme of weight and will. Each chapter reads a particular thinker, artist, or work of art in these terms of weight and will, force and form. Specifically, Schopenhauer, Rodin, Klee, Kafka, and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz are all read in these terms. The first chapter on Schopenhauer and architecture lays out most of the theoretical language the book will employ throughout the other sections. Essential to this chapter is the aforementioned reciprocally determined concept of form. The book traces this concept from Newton’s ideas of repulsion and attraction, through Kant’s critique of Newton (who could not explain the repulsive force), and into Schopenhauer’s theory of architecture. An architectural structure embodies this reciprocally intensifying relationship: the “will” of the structure strives upward while, at the same time, the structure is pulled toward the ground by the force of attraction, the gravitational force. The structure is thus suspended in a sort of tension between complete dissolution, if it were to succumb to gravity, and a pure levitation or expansion, if it could be free of the attractive force of gravity. It is this precarious state of suspension that all artworks embody, and because we, as humans, also embody this tension, this state of dramatic suspense, we can “empathize” with artworks. The greater the mass, the greater the drama of force. An aesthetics of heaviness, Maskarinec argues, champions the dynamic properties of matter and so casts it as an agent of form. Matter, gravity, force—entwined in each [End Page 798] other—the book argues, make aesthetic experience possible. It is a compelling, if somewhat reductive, idea. The second chapter offers a reading of Rodin’s sculpture that investigates the widely held claim that Rodin’s work epitomizes the modern epoch. Maskarinec’s reading challenges, or augments, traditionally held notions of modernity as an age of anxiety and Rodin’s sculpture, to paraphrase Leo Steinberg, as a passport to this epoch of anxiety. Rodin’s contemporaries, according to Maskarinec, do indeed read Rodin’s work as exemplifying modernity, but they fail to see it as a condition of anxiety. Maskarinec brings to this discussion Georg Simmel and Carl Burckhardt, both of whom wrote as Rodin’s contemporaries about his work. Citing extensively from both Burckhardt and Simmel, the chapter includes detailed discussions of Balzac and Les bourgeois de Calais, two of Rodin’s major pieces, which convincingly support Maskarinec’s alternative reading of both Rodin and modernism. Georg Simmel, for example, writes that we read vertigo (and...

Constrained Realism:Representing Social Facts in George Gissing's Fiction Maria Su Wang (bio) over the past fifteen years, studies of the nineteenth-century novel and the rise of the social sciences have proliferated. These studies have revealed the confluence of ideas and shared discourse between Victorian fiction and developments in the emerging fields of anthropology (Buzard 2015), economics (Jaffe 2010), political economy (Gallagher 2006; Steinlight 2018), and sociology (McWeeny 2016). These accounts often describe narrative form and social scientific ideas as mutually shaping or overlapping, productively elucidating one another in their juxtaposition. Writing on the significant intersection of the social mistake and the literary, Kent Puckett has argued that "if worked properly, narratology might emerge as a productive kind of sociology" (10). In this essay, I would like to amend Puckett's claim as follows: expanding our contexts for the Victorian novel beyond immediate materialist or cultural registers, beyond even the periodicity of "Victorian" itself, reveals how early sociology—as founded by Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—might emerge as a productive kind of narratology. That is to say, reading social theory as a type of narrative thinking, similar to Victorian realism, can reveal broader, unexpected histories and disciplinary convergences. This essay thus takes as its starting point the urgency of reading the Victorian novel form alongside and against early sociological theory in order to show how both reflect an interrelated interest in the fact that emerges over the nineteenth century. Today we use "fact" to mean a singular epistemological unit that transcends belief or opinion and corresponds with reality, but that was not always the case. As Mary Poovey has shown in A History of the Modern Fact, it has been a contested term contingent upon epistemological and disciplinary shifts at various historical junctures. Yet while Poovey focuses on the natural and social sciences generally, she glosses over how early sociologists attempted to work through their disciplinary understanding of facticity; this was especially true of Durkheim, who sought to define the "social fact" as a distinguishing methodological concept for sociology. At a parallel moment at the fin de siècle, Victorian novelist George Gissing addresses similar concerns, trying to enact in his narration the constraining [End Page 97] power of social structures and their affective impact on individual subjects. By looking at Gissing and Durkheim together, this essay reinscribes them into their respective traditions and asks what this comparison reveals about Victorian narrative realism and the development of sociology at the fin de siècle. Both the fiction of Gissing and the social theory of Durkheim converge around the idea of constraint—specifically, how social structures impinge on individuals. While Gissing asks what this means for character and narration, Durkheim explores its meaning for understanding the collective dimensions of social life. This comparison reveals fin de siècle realism and early sociology as congruent attempts at grappling with and accounting for the constricting material and affective realities of social existence, what Durkheim has named the social fact. Social facts, according to Durkheim, transcend the individual yet play a crucial determining role in the individual's life. Focusing on social facts enables Durkheim to document both social norms and values (e.g., rules governing etiquette) and structures (e.g., the institution of kinship and marriage). By reading Gissing's fiction as an attempt to translate the constraining social facts of urban life into realist narrative practice, this essay clarifies his place within the history of the novel: as a later realist writer whose narrative mode adopts a Durkheimian realism.1 More broadly, reading Gissing's narrative form alongside and against Durkheim's concept of the social fact shifts us away from considering his novels as primarily documents of fin de siècle social history, whether indexing the changing publishing landscape of the period, in New Grub Street (1891), or annotating debates over gender, in the case of The Odd Women (1893).2 As valuable and insightful as such accounts are, they overlook the longer histories in which Gissing's work partakes, both as a contribution to realism and as part of the longer process of knowledge reorganization that led to our modern understanding of the fact. By...

Heidelberg, around the beginning of the first decade of this century: an intellectual center for the elite in the humanities. Setting the tone: the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Georg Simmel. Gaining status: two brilliant young men, Georg von Lukdics and Ernst Bloch, respected and wooed by the older philosophers, envied by the younger philosophers, and soon to be persecuted by the overwhelming mediocrity of the academic community. Through Georg Simmel the two became acquainted, each unexpectedly recognizing the other's enormous philosophical talent. On January 11, 1911, Lukdics wrote to his then closest confidante, the art critic Leo Popper: Dr. Bloch, the German philosopher, whom Simmel sent to me once, was the first inspiring intellectual after a long hiatus; he is a real philosopher in the Hegelian mold (Correspondence, 146).' Just

Although flirtation may seem simply a game, the meanings of courtship, flirtation, and sexual signaling are basic to much Western philosophy. In Plato’s “Symposium,” Socrates develops his concept of the ideai—the ideal forms that dwell eternally and unchangeably behind appearances—from an argument called the “Erotic Ascent,” which begins with flirtation and courtship and ends with exalted concepts of ideal and eternal form. Early Christian, especially neo-Platonist, writers transformed the Erotic Ascent into one grounding of orthodox Christianity. By contrast, in “The Art of Love,” Ovid developed his ideas about love and flirtation into a complex system of contingencies that exist not as Pure Idea but in the material world of everyday life. In the early twentieth century, sociologist Georg Simmel linked Hegelian dialectics to the idea of “potential” to develop subtle concepts of social interactivity. Later theoreticians like Barthes and Eco have seen flirtation and courtship as a semiotic system of meanings created and shared among lovers that challenge word-centered descriptions of human activity. Throughout this 2500 year history, flirtation and courtship prove basic to many threads of philosophical and social scientific thought.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, pluralistic tendencies experimented with the deconstruction of traditional artistic forms. The 'classical' notion of form and the 'well-made play' were contested by anti-bourgeois avant-gardes and innovatory practices in theatre (eg. Naturalism). Especially in German Expressionist drama, 'form' in the Aristotelian sense was radically challenged. At the same time, a classical notion of form continued to inspire neo-classical literature. This reactionary tendency in the historical debate on form was, however, mainly neglected by scholarly research after the second World War. Likewise, the practice of the German author Paul Ernst (1866-1933), one of the most important representatives of neo-classical drama, who tried to re-establish a classical concept of form, based on the reception of ancient Greek tragedy, fell into oblivion. By elaborating on his tragedy poetics, I will demonstrate the socio-historical significance of his concept of form for the literary debates of his time. Framed by the intellectual dialogue with the renowned German sociologists Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Georg Lukacs (1885-1971), the concept of form in Ernst's writings had not only aesthetic, but also ethical underpinnings. The classical example of a tragic hero fighting and dying for his ideals in his poetics aims at a moral revaluation of society. I will argue that, whereas Ernst pursues an objectified, anti-modern ideal form, stripped off 'mean' historical influences, his concept of form turns out to exemplify exactly the 'pluralistic' aesthetic and socio-historical conditions he wanted to amend with his moral criticism.

In her 1912 book, Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent Obscurantism, Violet Paget writing as Vernon Lee developed the concept of vital lies through a critique of William James’s theory of truth as presented in his 1896 lecture, “The Will to Believe,” and Pragmatism (1908). Jane Addams cites Lee’s idea several times in her later work as a method used by those in power to supersede democracy. Addams cites the idea of vital lies for several reasons: as a way of identifying a problem to be addressed, as recognition that there is a truth available, and as an affirmation that democracy depends upon access to that truth while rejecting lies. Lee examines the implications of this view, what she calls “applied pragmatism,” in the work of George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads (1909); Ernest Crawley, The Tree of Life, A study of religion (1905) and Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1914). If Lee’s analysis is correct and vital lies are correctly viewed as a consequence of pragmatism, then Addams’s idea of pragmatism also deserves a closer look, especially in relation to the idea of democracy. This chapter first sets out the idea of vital lies as developed by Lee. It then considers Lee’s analysis in relation to Addams’s use of the idea, its relation to democracy, and Addams’s response to vital lies. Finally, the chapter discusses how pragmatism is modified in the face of this analysis and its implications for today’s vital lies.

Drawing may be interpreted as the tool that allows us to recognize, break down and sort the different parts of a phenomenon, translating them into signs, expressing the sense of reality, revealing and transposing in the graphic expression the different meanings you want to state. Distinguishing between the perceived data and the ones derived from interpretation, there is no one single truth, but a plurality of worlds with several parallel representations all equally valid. The perception returns ‘images’ of reality, and the drawing turns on new levels of meaning: everything can be reduced to an image, but graphing only evokes some aspects of physical reality. The path of knowledge can seek a vision of objective, empirical reality, or a symbolic image leading to the recognition of the urban structure as a concept connected to a reference model. In the graphic investigation of the form of Alghero, different approaches have been taken. A first assumption has been that the representation of the city can be understood as a translation of the life space of a community. A second approach has assumed drawing as a tool to emphasize the urban invariants noticeable within a fixed period of time, in order to return a transformations pattern in a historical and morphological context. The third criterion, finally, has been aimed at identifying an ‘ideal form’ representing the ‘archetype’ of the city.

This thesis explores the transformation of Greco-Arabic medical teachings of Salerno 1050-1200 in a broader political context. It argues that the skills of key individuals and their pedagogic innovations not only created learned medicine but also contributed to new habits of mind in northern Europe in the twelfth century. The eleventh and twelfth centuries are at the very dawn of a Western understanding of logical truth from personal observation in medicine as distinct from received wisdom. The incorporation of natural philosophy and Aristotelian analytics from Alexandrian medicine into Salernitan medicine was an important step by which the West learned to interpret the experienced world. The world, as perceived by human senses and interpreted by human reason had, itself, to be validated as a source of reliable information in contrast to Augustine's Neoplatonist view. Augustine taught that the real world existed only as more or less imperfect copy of the ideal Form in the mind of God and that truth can only be known through contact with God. In the mid eleventh century, Salernitan doctors were widely respected as skilled empiricists, but lacking in theory. Their knowledge, from the relatively scanty medical texts surviving from antiquity, was collated and edited before 1059 into the Passionarius by Gariopontus, an experienced Salernitan doctor. His succinct clinical attenuated theory of humoural medicine. In about 1062, in Constantinople, Alfanus, Archbishop of Salerno and a learned physician, translated a fourth-century treatise on the Nature of Man which contained a much more complete exposition of Galenic medicine than had been seen in the West. After he returned, Alfanus and his group collated a primer of brief treatises from the old masters, but it lacked a good introduction to Galenic medical theory. Many key texts of Galenic medicine, as it had evolved in the curriculum of the medical school at Alexandria, had been translated into Arabic under the ninth-century Abassid Caliph, al-Mamun. Constantine the African, a Saracen physician recruited as an expert translator provided a concise Introduction (lsagoge) for Alfanus' collection from an Arabic authority. Constantine also made a number of other translations from Arabic, including the encyclopaedic Pantegni. Over the twelfth century, Salernitan teachers, particularly the unknown author of the Second Salernitan Demonstration, Bartholomaeus and Ursa, expounded and embellished the new Greco-Arabie theory. The new translations, their theories and their commentaries soon attracted intense interest in northern Europe where they provoked a vigorous reaction from conservative churchmen. Salernitan medicine was itself taken to Paris by Giles of Corbeil in about 1194, when he returned to become physician to King Philip Augustus. Giles became an important early teacher of Medicine at the evolving University of Paris at the very beginning of the thirteenth century. This thesis argues that Salernitan medicine thus provided the learned canon by which the craft of medicus became the profession of physicus. Salernitan texts and teachers helped set the scene in Paris for the rejection and then acceptance of Aristotle's teaching on logic and natural history.

Ramsey was the translator of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and understood it better than any other philosopher. He peppered Wittgenstein with pragmatist objections to his picture theory of meaning and truth, arguing, amongst other things, that it could not account for philosophical, general, or causal beliefs and that it resulted in an unacceptable solipsism. In the early 1930s, in the dictated notes known as the Blue and Brown books, Wittgenstein turned his back on the Tractatus and towards the pragmatist ideas that meaning is use and practice is primary.

With interdisciplinary approaches leading to new and enriched perspectives, we argue that an encounter between information technology (IT) and sociology will result in a heightened understanding of the problem of textual ambiguity in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC)1 in general and in group support systems (GSS) in particular. Such approaches where IT meets sociology have already been taking place in other areas of group research (e.g., see Ahuja & Carley, 1998). “[W]ith the global and technological transformations of the workplace” (Aakhus, 2001, p. 341), as IT and the Internet gain wide acceptance throughout society as well as the global economy (e.g., see Friedman, 2000) and as CMC and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) become commonplace, both information systems (IS) scholars and sociologists have increasingly studied the patterns of human behavior in virtual groups. This article2 is an attempt to advance that effort. Specifically, the purpose of this article is to apply the insights of Georg Simmel—an early and oft-neglected German theorist of sociology working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—on written communication to text-based GSS, which are interactive computer-based information systems that support and structure group interaction and intellectual teamwork (see also Ackermann & Eden, 1994; Fjermestad, J., 2004; Klein, 2000; Klein & Dologite, 2000; Nunamaker, 1997; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990; Zigurs & Buckland, 1998), “promot[ing] communication, collaboration and coordination among teams of people” (Ahalt, 2000, p. 1159).

A central figure in contemporary Turkish cinema, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a director who uses cinema to develop, consider and communicate ideas about the world he films. Although language has long been the dominant vehicle for thought in Western scholarship, this thesis will argue that the image is an equally effective tool for the development and communication of thought, using the presentation of nature and technology in Ceylan’s work as an example. Through a method of visual study devised from the theory of Nicole Brenez, Andrew Benjamin and Alain Bergala and the film work of Harun Farocki, this thesis examines the ways nature and technology diverge, intersect and merge in Ceylan’s films, to argue that, in his view, technology and nature are rhythms of experience. Despite the concentration on a single director, this work is not an auteur study and does not seek to establish a map of the director’s style. It does, however, pay particular attention to the aesthetic dimension of his work. Concentrating on medium, materiality, rhythm, and the presence of space, light and colour, I demonstrate how Ceylan uses these elements to think about nature and technology. This approach is without precedent in existing accounts of his ouevre. From the ecological anxiety of Clouds of May to the sublime synthesis of natural world and digital colour in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan presents a range of perspectives on the experience of technology and nature. The thesis contributes to two key areas of film studies: the growing body of work on Ceylan and Turkish cinema and the argument for cinema as a method of complex and philosophical thought. The idea that images can be both immanently critical and critical tools has precedents in books like Yvette Biro’s Turbulence and Flow, which takes up Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ arguments for science and philosophy as “‘open systems’ that endlessly dialogue with the cultural environment, effecting change and in turn being marked by the exchange” and in Nicole Brenez’s comparative analyses, where one film speaks back to another, challenging, supporting and completing it. My work contributes to this area and offers a further example of the image as critical tool. It also challenges traditional notions of photographic ontology and seeks to contribute to a non-oppositional ontology of digital cinema, arguing that the ‘truth’ of an image does not lie in its indexicality. This places the work in a growing field of study that is moving away from critical theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and semiotics, choosing instead to revive early film theory and ask questions of cinema’s ontology via the cinema itself. Two dominant positions emerge from the analyses. The first is of nature and technology as quotidian experiences. The second is of them as overwhelming and in excess of the space made available for them in the lives of the characters. Both constitute rhythms that are absorbed by the films and influence their pace and rhythmic design.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, pluralistic tendencies experimented with the deconstruction of traditional artistic forms. The ‘classical’ notion of form and the ‘well-made play’ were contested by anti-bourgeois avant-gardes and innovatory practices in theatre (eg. Naturalism). Especially in German Expressionist drama, ‘form’ in the Aristotelian sense was radically challenged. At the same time, a classical notion of form continued to inspire neo-classical literature. This reactionary tendency in the historical debate on form was, however, mainly neglected by scholarly research after the second World War. Likewise, the practice of the German author Paul Ernst (1866–1933), one of the most important representatives of neo-classical drama, who tried to re-establish a classical concept of form, based on the reception of ancient Greek tragedy, fell into oblivion. By elaborating on his tragedy poetics, I will demonstrate the socio-historical significance of his concept of form for the literary debates of his time. Framed by the intellectual dialogue with the renowned German sociologists Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Georg Lukács (1885–1971), the concept of form in Ernst’s writings had not only aesthetic, but also ethical underpinnings. The classical example of a tragic hero fighting and dying for his ideals in his poetics aims at a moral revaluation of society. I will argue that, whereas Ernst pursues an objectified, anti-modern ideal form, stripped off ‘mean’ historical influences, his concept of form turns out to exemplify exactly the ‘pluralistic’ aesthetic and socio-historical conditions he wanted to amend with his moral criticism.

L'A. defend la these selon laquelle les interpetations de la theorie bouddhiste de la verite dans le sens de la verite-correspondance et de l'utilitarisme constituent les deux voies metaphysiques que l'enseignement de Bouddha se propose d'eviter. Le message soteriologique (elimination de la souffrance, accomplissement de la liberte), la doctrine de la production dependante et la theorie de l'experience propres au bouddhisme ne prennent leur sens que dans le cadre d'une interpretation contextualiste et pragmatique de la theorie bouddhiste de la verite

While nowhere does he use the term to refer to his own theory, Aristotle is often thought to exemplify an early correspondence theory of truth. In the paper, I examine the textual evidence used to support the idea that Aristotle holds a correspondence theory of truth, and to infer the nuances of this theory. I hold that Aristotle’s theory of truth can account for terms that signify non-existent things, i.e., that on Aristotle’s account, an assertion is not automatically false given its subject term’s “failure to refer”. Terms do not refer for Aristotle, they signify (and his use of the concept of signification extends far beyond linguistic reference).

Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger resolves interpretive difficulties in Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment.