The aesthetic foundation of the relational approach: Georg Simmel as a critical thinker

Abstract

Asserting the validity of the relational sociology, founded by Georg Simmel in the early twentieth century, entails a rereading of the foundations of the cognitive perspective guided by questions posed from the present. This is the task intended here and to carry it out, it is necessary to dismantle the aestheticizing reading of Simmel's thought that reduces the relational perspective to a mere copy of the aestheticized interconnectivity that characterizes contemporary societies.  Nonetheless, saving Simmel from aestheticism does not mean ignoring his aesthetic concern, but to relocate it, finding a new way of addressing its relationship with his sociology. By proposing a reading of the aesthetic origin of Simmel’s cognitive perspective, we intend to recover the critical character that the insights of the Berlin sociologist risk losing when read as strokes of a modernist brush.