Only the particular purpose of cognition determines whether reality, as it emerges or is experienced in its immediacy, is to be investigated in a personal or in a collective frame of reference. Both frames of reference, equally, are "standpoints." Their relation to one another is not that of reality to abstraction. Rather, since both are interpretations, though different ones, both are detached from "reality," which itself cannot be the immediate subject matter of science.

DEFINE: Clarifies that both personal and collective frames of reference are interpretative standpoints, not reality versus abstraction.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 1327