Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2019, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (2): 214-241.

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Tönnies and Simmel: The Divide of Social Ethics and Cultural Ethics

ZHANG Weizhuo   

  1. Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
  • Online:2019-03-20 Published:2019-03-20

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Abstract:

As two founders of German Sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel laid the foundation of the opposite pattern of modern ethical life. Their divide of the ethical view of life stemmed from their experience of the age and the explanation of the intellectual history respectively. From the context of the natural law theory, the essence of Tönnies' social ethics is reestablishing the order and custom of modern political society, every cultural value must meet the needs of society, therefore he traces back to the social history of German people and has portrayed a new ethical life of German society by reinterpreting the family spirit. By contrast, Simmel's sociological thought made the critics of social ethics the precondition from the beginning. In his view, the scholars who share the worldview of social ethics have not noticed the fate of externalization and ambiguity of modern politics and social development. So, he regards the individual life that transcends the society as the end of the ethics. The head-on confrontation between Tönnies and Simmel begins from their interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche's moral doctrine and then ascends to the debate on Kant's ethics. Tönnies' social ethics is the derivative of Kant's ethics, form individual rational self-discipline to collective normative psychology. Simmel believes that Kant had presupposed a pure rational other outside the individual, so he fell into the abyss of heteronomy. Tönnies' social ethics have now enlarged this paradox to the wealth position and power domination by the social authority. Thus, the social ethics obliterates the value of individual's life. Simmel thinks that life not only means individual being in the society has his full personality, but also gives birth to the objective ethical responsibilities applied to himself. From the period of the German Reich to the Weimar Republic, the divide and the converging of the social ethics and cultural ethics have provided us a principal line to understand the history of German sociological theory.

Key words: Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, life, social ethics, cultural ethics, community