Sociological aesthetics, from Kant to Simmel
Author: Alberto Luis Cordeiro de Farias, albertolcfarias@gmail.com
Department: Department of Sociology
University: Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), Brazil
Supervisor: Frédéric Raoul Nadine Marie Vandenberghe
Year of completion: 2022
Language of dissertation: Portuguese
Keywords:
Georg Simmel
, Kant
, Aesthetic
Areas of Research:
Theory
, History of Sociology
, Conceptual and Terminological Analysis
Abstract
In my doctoral thesis, I focused on reconstructing some systematic connections between aesthetics in the context of theoretical philosophy and social theory, with particular attention to the reception of Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft by classical social theory, especially by Georg Simmel. The work is divided into two parts. The first part is a historical-systematic discussion of some lines of development of the concept of aesthetics in the modern philosophical tradition, in which I elaborate the idea of the “problem of aesthetics”, with a focus on Kant’s critical philosophy, more specifically his Kritik der Urteilskraft. The second part deals with the relationship between aesthetics and social theory. Starting from Auguste Comte, I consider some of the configurations of this overlap between aesthetics and social theory in Georg Simmel. The central question guiding my research at this point is: Why does Simmel need an aesthetic? Since “aesthetics” is a polysemous term encompassing the accumulated traditions of philosophical debates about its interpretation, and considering its evident systematic significance within Simmel’s entire body of work, a second question emerges: how did he understand the problem of aesthetics, especially in relation to his social theory, and how did he incorporate it? Finally, my research examined the ways in which theoretical aesthetics might have conditioned the epistemic development of social theory in the classical period, providing it with parameters for theoretical, historical and institutional thinking about itself, and ultimately also serving as a potential basis for the justification and validation of the specific kind of knowledge that characterizes it.
