INTRODUCTION
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is best
known as a micro sociologist who played a significant role in the development
of small-group research. Simmel's basic approach can be described as
"methodological relationism," because he operates on the principle
that everything interacts in some way with everything else. His essay on
fashion, for example, notes that fashion is a form of social relationship that
allows those who wish to conform to do so while also providing the norm from
which individualistic people can deviate. Within the fashion process, people
take on a variety of social roles that play off the decisions and actions of
others. On a more general level, people are influenced by both objective
culture (the things that people produce) and individual culture (the capacity
of individuals to produce, absorb, and control elements of objective culture).
Simmel believed that people possess creative capacities (more-life) that enable
them to produce objective culture that transcends them. But objective culture
(more-than-life) comes to stand in irreconcilable opposition to the creative
forces that have produced it in the first place. (I.
S. Kon, 1989)
THE CONCEPTS OF REALISM AND
NOMINALISM
Nominalism
is the philosophical view that abstract concepts, general terms,
or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. It also
claims that various individual objects labeled by the same term have nothing in
common but their name. In this view, it is only actual physical particulars
that can be said to be real, and universals exist only post res, that is,
subsequent to particular things.
Nominalism is best understood in
contrast to philosophical or ontological realism. Philosophical realism holds
that when people use general terms such as "cat" or
"green," those universals really exist in some sense of "exist,"
either independently of the world in an abstract realm (as was held by Plato,
for instance, in his theory of forms) or as part of the real existence of
individual things in some way (as in Aristotle's theory of hylomorphism). The
Aristotelian type of realism is usually called moderate realism. As a still
another alternative, there is a school called conceptualism, which holds that
universals are just concepts in the mind. (Bacon,
John, 2008).
Loux (2001) goes on to note that the
realist school claims that universals are real-they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate
them. Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct
entities in order to account for various phenomena. For example, a common
realist argument, arguably found in Plato, is that universals are required for
certain general words to have meaning and for the sentences in which they occur
to be true or false.
THE REALISM-NOMINALISM CONTROVERSY
Ever since the philosophers of
ancient Greece there has been an ongoing debate about metaphysics, a debate
that has moved through into the medieval era and even into modernity. The
nature of this debate is whether the philosophic school of metaphysical realism;
as upheld by Plato; or the philosophic school of nominalism; as upheld by
Aristotle; shows us the true nature of reality. On the one hand we have
the belief that reality consist of things ordered by their abstract
counterparts whilst on the other side of the debate it is believed that reality
only consists of concrete things and to talk of such abstract ideas is an
absurdity. (Klima, 2008).
ORIGIN OF THE REALISM-NOMINALISM CONTROVERSY
The origin of the
realism-nominalism controversy can be traced back to the Middle Ages. It arose
from a passage in Boethius's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge sive quinque voces ("Introduction
to Aristotle's Categories"), which raised the problem of genera and
species:
1) as to whether they exist in nature or only in the mind;
2)
whether, if they exist in nature,
they are corporeal or incorporeal; and
3) Whether they exist outside sensible particular things or are
realized in them.
Adherents to "realism"
such as Bernard of Chartres, Saint Anselm, and William of Champeaux held, like
Plato, that universals alone have substantial reality, existing ante res (prior to
particular things). Proponents of "nominalism" such as Berengar of
Tours and Roscellinus, however, objected that universals are mere names,
existing post res (subsequent to particular things) without any reality. The
controversy was prominent in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the
issue was not only philosophical but also theological because it was quite
evident that while realism represented a more spiritual type of worldview,
nominalism showed a more anti-spiritual view. Realism, which recognized the
substantial reality of universals separable from this world, was favourable to
the theological teachings of the Church on God, heaven, soul, afterlife, etc.
Realism was also favourable to the Church's other teachings such as the
Trinity, the Eucharist, and original sin, which presupposed the substantial
existence of universals. By contrast, nominalism turned out to be less favourable
to the teachings of the Church. For example, the nominalist Roscellinus argued
that "God" is no more than a name, and that the divine reality is
only found in the three different individuals called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In 1092, Roscellinus was condemned for being a tritheist. (Quine, 2006).
SIMMEL’S
CONTRIBUTION TO THE RESOLUTION OF THE REALISM-NOMINALISM CONTROVERSY
In order to mediate between
realism and nominalism, Georg Simmel suggested a position called "conceptualism."
It rejects realism in favour of nominalism, when it says that universals have
no substantial reality separable from the world of sensible things. However, it
disagrees with nominalism, by maintaining that universals still exist as
"concepts" in our minds, more than as mere names, thus being able to
express real similarities in individual things themselves. But this position of
conceptualism seems to be letting us come back to the same debate over the
relationship of universals and individuals—albeit at a level—instead of
answering it.
Johnson cited in John, Essien
(2010) summarizes Simmel’s contribution towards resolving the controversy thus:
“Simmel focuses on the process of interaction as a sine qua non
for the establishment of society. To him, society emerges as a result of
reciprocal interaction. His image of the nature of social reality is, like that
of Durkheim, more than the sum of the individuals making it up. Patterns of
interaction link individuals together into one whole. Nevertheless, Simmel
realized that society cannot exist as an objective reality independent of its
members. Simmel’s bridge-building approach strikes a balance between the
opposing claims of those who believe only on individuals as real (nominalism)
and those who believe that society is real and independent of the individuals
who make it up (realists).
CONCLUSION
This
paper has been able to x-ray the meaning of realism as well as nominalism. We
have also examined the controversy that emanated as a result of varying
positions on the subject of concern. Simmel, in his philosophic position attempted
to do justice to the antitheses that have occupied philosophers since the
pre-Socratics. He succeeded in doing this by proposing conceptualism
which admits the existence within us of abstract and universal concepts, but it
holds that we do not know whether or not the mental objects have any foundation
outside our minds or whether in nature the individual objects possess
distributively and each by itself the realities which we conceive as realized
in each of them. The concepts have an ideal value; they have no real value, or at
least we do not know whether they have a real value.
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