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Analysis Of Simmel 's ' Simmel '

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Simmel first examines the possibility of history. He sets up a critique saying that the realism of history commits the same error as realism in art, which he says “pretends to copy reality without being aware how thoroughly this act of copying in fact stylizes the contents of reality” (3). I take this to mean that as we copy, or capture the qualia, as the qualia moves from its state as a phenomenon outside the perceiver, and then is enveloped by the perceiver, the perceiver undergoes a change as the qualia goes through the conditions of the mind. The conditions of the mind, which I believe are the perceiver par excellence, change the natural phenomena into something which can be understood in the mind itself, this understanding encapsulated in the mind, is what I take to be consciousness. This change does not diminish or embellish the natural phenomena in itself. For the change does not take place within the natural phenomena, rather the change takes place within the perceiver. The perceiver sees this natural phenomena, or qualia, and then copies it. As a result, I read Simmel as adopting an ideology from Hume’s Fork and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and applying this epistemological disconnect of natural phenomena, to the understanding of the natural phenomena, phenomenologically, to history. Further I find this is a valid problem to address, the problem I believe to be specifically-- if we cannot fully know a natural phenomena in itself, but only through which the

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