La sociología como mirada estética de las formas de vida: el arte según Georg Simmel

Abstract

In the present paper we will analyse the perspective of Georg Simmel, which is of special interest for us since it postulates a sociology that is inseparable from aesthetics. As we will see, the sociological outlook is always also an artistic outlook on the world. The consequences of this postulation for theoretical work inside the sociological discipline are radical, for if sociology
is a kind of "art", then the sociologist is a kind of "artist", and the social world itself can be conceived as a "work of art". Sociology is, for this author, a particular outlook that, like every other human outlook, holds an artistic element, given its intimate connection with thetotalizing experience of the originary aesthetic unity, and with the appretiation of the heterogeneity of its manifestations. The specificity of the sociological discipline is the study of the forms, with independence of the contents, of social life; the forms of social life, in so far as they are stylizations of such life in its unfolding, are apprehensible in an aesthetic way; in so far as they are expressions of human culture, they are apprehensible in an artistic way; and this is why, in conlusion, the possibility of capturing the cultures and the styles of the forms of social life is given by sociology as an aesthetic and artistic outlook on them.