Individual and society are, both for historical understanding and for normative judgment, methodological concepts. This is so either in that they divide given events and conditions among themselves or in that they deal with the unity of the given, which we cannot directly comprehend, by organizing it under two different points of view, comparable to the way a picture is considered now as a physiological and optical phenomenon, now as a cultural product, or now with respect to the technique of painting, now with respect to its content and aesthetic value.

DEFINE: Simmel reframes individual and society as analytical frameworks rather than tangible things, using the picture analogy to show how the same phenomenon takes on different aspects depending on the lens.

DEFINE: Simmel frames individual and society as methodological viewpoints that divide or organize the same given events, rather than as distinct objects. XREF: Parallels William James's pragmatic method and the observer-dependence of categories; also echoes Weber's ideal types as heuristic tools rather than real entities.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 213