1. |
The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual
to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face
of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture,
and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has
to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation.
The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical
bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man's nature,
originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition
to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization
{1} of man and his work; this specialization
makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable
to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man
the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others.
Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the
most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression
of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions
the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down
and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner
meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul {2} of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the
equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual
and the super-individual contents of life {3}.
Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates
itself in the adjustments to external forces. This will be my task today.
-What is the deepest problem of modern life as Simmel sees it? |
|
2. |
The
psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in
the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the
swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating
creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary
impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, {4} impressions which differ only slightly from one another,
impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and
habitual contrasts-all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than
does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the
grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.
These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With
each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small
town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic
life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different
amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and
sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly.
Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan
psychic life becomes understandable - as over against small town life which
rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are
rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche {5}
and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations.
The intellect {6}, however, has its locus
in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the
most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and
to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and
inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative
mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan
type of man-which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants -
develops an organ protecting him He reacts with his head
instead of his heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic
prerogative. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and
a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to metropolitan
phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote
from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve
subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life,
and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with
numerous discrete phenomena. against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. -What is the psychological basis of individuality in the metropolis?-Which layer of the psyche predominates in the metropolis?-What other terms does Simmel use as synonyms for metropolis"? What other terms does he use for "rural life"?-What organ protects the "metropolitan man"? |
|
3. |
The metropolis has always been the seat of the
money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange
gives an importance to the means of exchange {7} which
the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money economy
and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share
a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and, in this
attitude, a formal justice {8} is often coupled
with an inconsiderate hardness. The intellectually sophisticated person is
indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions
result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the
same manner, the individuality of phenomena is not commensurate with the
pecuniary {9} principle. Money is concerned only with
what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all
quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional
relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational
relations man is reckoned with like a number, like an element which is
in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest.
Thus metropolitan man reckons with his merchants and customers, his domestic
servants and often even with persons with whom he is obliged to have social
intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature
of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality
as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond
a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of the economic
psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions
production serves the customer who orders the good, so that the producer
and the consumer are acquainted. The modern metropolis, however, is supplied
almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown
purchasers who never personally enter the producer's actual field of vision.
Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful
matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms
of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables
of personal relationships. The money economy {10}
dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic
production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes, from day to day,
the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is
obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant
in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality
first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former.
The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this
reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of
the most eminent English constitutional historian: throughout the whole course
of English history, London has never acted as England's heart but often as
England's intellect and always as her moneybag! -What is the relationship between the money economy and the dominance of the intellect?-What did production for market replace? |
|
4. |
In certain seemingly insignificant traits,
which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically
unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative
exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds
to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic
problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money
economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating,
with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative {11} values to quantitative {12}
ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty
in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements
and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of life-elements
- just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion
of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once
cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical
metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest
punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down
into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by
the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who
must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism.
If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways,
even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city
would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external
factor: long distances, would make all waiting and broken appointments result
in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life
is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and
mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the
general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious namely,
that from each point on the surface of existence - however closely attached
to the surface alone - one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche
so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with
the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality,
calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension
of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with
its money economy and intellectualist character. These traits must also color
the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive,
sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from
within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of
life from without. Even though sovereign types of personality {13}, characterized by irrational impulses, are by no means
impossible in the city, they are nevertheless, opposed to typical city life.
The passionate hatred of men like Ruskin and Nietzsche for the metropolis
is understandable in these terms. Their natures discovered the value of life
alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision
for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged
their hatred of money economy and of the intellectualism of modern existence.
-Why is clock time impersonal? |
|
5. |
The same factors which have thus coalesced
into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced
into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they
have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic
phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as
has the blasé {14} attitude. The blasé
attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting
stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality,
also, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually
alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in
boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates
the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally
cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness
of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses,
tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves
of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no
time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new
sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé
attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared
with children of quieter and less changeable milieus.
-What is a blasé attitude? |
|
6. |
This physiological source of the metropolitan
blasé attitude is joined by another source which flows from the money
economy. The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting
of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived,
as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing
values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.
They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no
one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective
reflection of the completely internalized money economy. By being the equivalent
to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most
frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of
things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference,
becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out
the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their
incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the
constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ
from one another only in the size of the area which they cover. In the individual
case this coloration, or rather discoloration, of things through their money
equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. However, through the relations of
the rich to the objects to be had for money, perhaps even through the total
character which the mentality of the contemporary public everywhere imparts
to these objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of objects has become
quite considerable. The large cities, the main seats of the money exchange,
bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than
do smaller localities. That is why cities are also the genuine locale of
the blasé attitude. In the blasé attitude the concentration
of men and things stimulate the nervous system of the individual to its highest
achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification
of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its
opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude.
In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation
the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan
life. The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at the price
of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end
unavoidably drags one's own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.
-How does money relate to the blasé attitude? |
|
7. |
Whereas the subject of this form of existence has to
come to terms with it entirely for himself, his self-preservation in the
face of the large city demands from him a no less negative behavior of a
social nature. This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another
we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve {15}. If so many inner reactions were responses to the
continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small
town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive
relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally
and come to an unimaginable psychic state. Partly this psychological fact,
partly the right to distrust which men have in the face of the touch-and-go
elements of metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of this
reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our
neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which in the eyes of the small-town
people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. Indeed, if I do not deceive
myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference
but, more often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness
and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a
closer contact, however caused. The whole inner organization of such an
extensive communicative life rests upon an extremely varied hierarchy of
sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well as of the
most permanent nature. The sphere of indifference in this hierarchy is not
as large as might appear on the surface. Our psychic activity still responds
to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling.
The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to
result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just
as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be
unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference
and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy
and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effect the distances and
aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led. The extent
and the mixture of this style of life, the rhythm of its emergence and disappearance,
the forms in which it is satisfied- all these, with the unifying motives in
the narrower sense, form the inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of
life. What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation
is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization.
-What attitude do people in the metropolis have toward one another? |
|
8. |
This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears
in turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of
the metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal
freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. The metropolis
goes back to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life as such,
to one of the few tendencies for which an approximately universal formula
can be discovered. The earliest phase of social formations found in historical
as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small
circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic
circles. However, this circle is closely coherent and allows its individual
members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and
free, self-responsible movements. Political and kinship groups, parties
and religious associations begin in this way. The self-preservation of very
young associations requires the establishment of strict boundaries and a
centripetal unity. Therefore they cannot allow the individual freedom and
unique inner and outer development. From this stage social development proceeds
at once in two different, yet corresponding, directions. To the extent to
which the group grows - numerically, spatially, in significance and in content
of life - to the same degree the group's direct, inner unity loosens, and
the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through
mutual relations and connections. At the same time, the individual gains
freedom of movement, far beyond the first jealous delimitation. The individual
also gains a specific individuality to which the division of labor in the
enlarged group gives both occasion and necessity. The state and Christianity,
guilds and political parties, and innumerable other groups have developed
according to this formula, however much, of course, the special conditions
and forces of the respective groups have modified the general scheme. This
scheme seems to me distinctly recognizable also in the evolution of individuality
within urban life. The small-town life in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages
set barriers against movement and relations of the individual toward the
outside, and it set up barriers against individual independence and differentiation
within the individual self. These barriers were such that under them modern
man could not have breathed. Even today a metropolitan man who is placed
in a small town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind. The smaller
the circle which forms our milieu is, and the more restricted those relations
to others are which dissolve the boundaries of the individual, the more anxiously
the circle guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook
of the individual, and the more readily a quantitative and qualitative specialization
would break up the framework of the whole little circle.
-How does personal freedom differ in the
"small" versus the "enlarged" circle? What accounts for that difference?
|
|
9. |
The ancient polis {16}
in this respect seems to have had the very character of a small town. The
constant threat to its existence at the hands of enemies from near and afar
effected strict coherence in political and military respects, a supervision
of the citizen by the citizen, a jealousy of the whole against the individual
whose particular life was suppressed to such a degree that he could compensate
only by acting as a despot in his own household. The tremendous agitation
and excitement, the unique colorfulness of Athenian life, can perhaps be
understood in terms of the fact that a people of incomparably individualized
personalities struggled against the constant inner and outer pressure of
a deindividualizing small town. This produced a tense atmosphere in which
the weaker individuals were suppressed and those of stronger natures were
incited to prove themselves in the most passionate manner. This is precisely
why it was that there blossomed in Athens what must be called, without defining
it exactly, "the general human character" in the intellectual development
of our species. For we maintain factual as well as historical validity for
the following connection: the most extensive and the most general contents
and forms of life are most intimately connected with the most individual ones.
They have a preparatory stage in common, that is, they find their enemy in
narrow formations and groupings the maintenance of which places both of them
into a state of defense against expanse and generality lying without and
the freely moving individuality within. Just as in the feudal age, the "free"
man was the one who stood under the law of the land, that is, under the law
of the largest social orbit, and the unfree man was the one who derived his
right merely from the narrow circle of a feudal association and was excluded
from the larger social orbit - so today metropolitan man is "free" in a spiritualized
and refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hem in
the small-town man. For the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual
life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly by the individual
in their impact upon his independence than in the thickest crowd of the big
city. This is because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes
the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the obverse
{17}of this freedom if, under certain circumstances,
one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd. For
here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man be
reflected in his emotional life as comfort.
-How does ancient Athens compare to your high school?-Where does the person in the metropolis feel most lonely? What is the positive side of that experience? |
|
10. |
It is not only the immediate size of the
area and the number of persons which, because of the universal historical
correlation between the enlargement of the circle and the personal inner
and outer freedom, has made the metropolis the locale of freedom.
It is rather in transcending this visible expanse that any given city becomes
the seat of cosmopolitanism.{18} The horizon
of the city expands in a manner comparable to the way in which wealth develops;
a certain amount of property increases in a quasi-automatical way in ever
more rapid progression. As soon as a certain limit has been passed, the
economic, personal, and intellectual relations of the citizenry, the sphere
of intellectual predominance of the city over its hinterland, grow as in
geometrical progression. Every gain in dynamic extension becomes a step,
not for an equal, but for a new and larger extension. From every thread
spinning out of the city, ever new threads grow as if by themselves, just
as within the city the unearned increment of ground rent, through the mere
increase in communication, brings the owner automatically increasing profits.
At this point, the quantitative aspect of life is transformed directly into
qualitative traits of character. The sphere of life of the small town is,
in the main, self-contained and autarchic. {19}
For it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows
by waves into a far-flung national or international area. Weimar is not
an example to the contrary, since its significance was hinged upon individual
personalities and died with them; whereas the metropolis is indeed characterized
by its essential independence even from the most eminent individual personalities.
This is the counterpart to the independence, and it is the price the individual
pays for the independence, which he enjoys in the metropolis. The most significant
characteristic of the metropolis is this functional extension beyond its
physical boundaries. And this efficacy reacts in turn and gives weight, importance,
and responsibility to metropolitan life. Man does not end with the limits
of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather is the
range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him
temporally and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects
which extend beyond its immediate confines. Only this range is the city's
actual extent in which its existence is expressed. This fact makes it obvious
that individual freedom, the logical and historical complement of such extension,
is not to be understood only in the negative sense of mere freedom of mobility
and elimination of prejudices and petty philistinism. The essential point
is that the particularity and incomparability, which ultimately every human
being possesses, be somehow expressed in the working-out of a way of life.
That we follow the laws of our own nature-and this after all is freedom-becomes
obvious and convincing to ourselves and to others only if the expressions
of this nature differ from the expressions of others. Only our unmistakability
proves that our way of life has not been superimposed by others.
-What does Simmel mean by cosmopolitanism?-What is freedom, in its negative sense? What is freedom, in its positive sense? |
|
11. |
Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic
division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris
the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons
who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at
the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon
if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its
expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division
of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse
variety of services. At the same time, the concentration of individuals and
their struggle for customers compel the individual to specialize in a function
from which he cannot be readily displaced by another. It is decisive that
city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an
inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by nature but by
other men. For specialization does not flow only from the competition for
gain but also from the underlying fact that the seller must always seek to
call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. In order to
find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function
which cannot readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize in one's
services. This process promotes differentiation, refinement, and the enrichment
of the public's needs, which obviously must lead to growing personal differences
within this public.
-What are some contemporary equivalents of the quatorzième?-What is the basis of the struggle of the traditional versus the modern society? |
|
12. |
All
this forms the transition to the individualization of mental and psychic
traits which the city occasions in proportion to its size. There is a whole
series of obvious causes underlying this process. First, one must meet the
difficulty of asserting his own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan
life. Where the quantitative increase in importance and the expense of energy
reach their limits, one seizes upon qualitative differentiation in order
somehow to attract the attention of the social circle by playing upon its
sensitivity for differences. Finally, man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious
{20} peculiarities, that is, the specifically
metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness. Now,
the meaning of these extravagances does not at all lie in the contents of
such behavior, but rather in its form of "being different," of standing out
in a striking manner and thereby attracting attention. For many character
types, ultimately the only means of saving for themselves some modicum of
self-esteem and the sense of filling a position is indirect, through the
awareness of others. In the same sense a seemingly insignificant factor is
operating, the cumulative effects of which are, however, still noticeable.
I refer to the brevity and scarcity of the inter-human contacts granted to
the metropolitan man, as compared with social intercourse in the small town.
The temptation to appear "to the point," to appear concentrated and strikingly
characteristic, lies much closer to the individual in brief metropolitan
contacts than in an atmosphere in which frequent and prolonged association
assures the personality of an unambiguous image of himself in the eyes of
the other.
-If you know anything about rock stars, how can you explain their "tendentious peculiarities"?-Why is being noticed more important in modern society than in traditional society? |
|
13. |
The most profound reason, however, why the metropolis
conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence - no matter
whether justified and successful - appears to me to be the following: the
development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of
what one may call the "objective spirit" {21} over
the "subjective spirit." {22} This is
to say, in language as well as in law, in the technique of production as
well as in art, in science as well as in the objects of the domestic environment,
there is embodied a sum of spirit {23}. The individual
in his intellectual development follows the growth of this spirit very imperfectly
and at an ever increasing distance. If, for instance, we view the immense
culture which for the last hundred years has been embodied in things and
in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts, and if we compare all this
with the cultural progress of the individual during the same period-at least
in high status groups - a frightful disproportion in growth between the two
becomes evident. Indeed, at some points we notice a retrogression in the
culture of the individual with reference to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism.
This discrepancy results essentially from the growing division of labor.
For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided
accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too
frequently means dearth to the personality of the individual. In any case,
he can cope less and less with the overgrowth of objective culture. The individual
is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than
in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that
are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an
enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all
progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective
form into the form of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed
out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows
all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the
wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of
community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such
an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the
personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact. On the
one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations,
interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides.
They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for
oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these
impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal
colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual's summoning
the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most
personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain
audible even to himself. The atrophy {24} of individual
culture through the hypertrophy {25} of objective
culture is one reason for the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most
extreme individualism, above all Nietzsche, harbor against the metropolis.
But it is, indeed, also a reason why these preachers are so passionately loved
in the metropolis and why they appear to the metropolitan man as the prophets
and saviors of his most unsatisfied yearnings.
-What does Simmel mean by the phrase: "the hypertrophy of objective culture"? |
|
14. |
If
one asks for the historical position of the two forms of individualism which
are nourished by the quantitative relation of the metropolis, namely, individual
independence and the elaboration of individuality itself, then the metropolis
assumes an entirely new rank order in the world history of the spirit. The
eighteenth century found the individual in oppressive bonds which had become
meaningless-bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and religious character.
They were restraints which, so to speak, forced upon man an unnatural form
and outmoded, unjust inequalities. In this situation the cry for liberty
and equality arose, the belief in the individual's full freedom of movement
in all social and intellectual relationships. Freedom would at once permit
the noble substance common to all to come to the fore, a substance which
nature had deposited in every man and which society and history had only
deformed. Besides this eighteenth-century ideal of liberalism, in the nineteenth
century, through Goethe and Romanticism, on the one hand, and through the
economic division of labor, on the other hand, another ideal arose: individuals
liberated from historical bonds now wished to distinguish themselves from
one another. The carrier of man's values is no longer the "general human
being" in every individual, but rather man's qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability.
The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the
struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining
the individual's role in the whole of society. It is the function of the
metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation.
For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to
us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these
ways of allocating roles to men. Therewith these conditions gain a unique
place, pregnant with inestimable meanings for the development of psychic
existence. The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical
formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as
join one another with equal right. However, in this process the currents
of life, whether their individual phenomena touch us sympathetically or antipathetically,
entirely transcend the sphere for which the judge's attitude is appropriate.
Since such forces of life have grown into the roots and into the crown of
the whole of the historical life in which we, in our fleeting existence,
as a cell, belong only as a part, it is not our task either to accuse
or to pardon, but only to understand.
-How does the "aim" of the Romantic Revolution of the 19th century differ from the "aim" of the French Revolution of 1789? |
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ENDNOTES1 functional specialization is the division of labor, or work, into separate tasks, each of which contributes to the total result (like an anaesthesiologist, surgeon, surgical nurse, etc. participating in an operation); the contribution of each specialized task to the total result is its function2 what gives something meaning 3 super-individual contents of life are what the individuals in a society share; the term includes culture (for example, money, which is the same thing for all of those who exchange it and exchange for it) 4 sense data: what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted and felt 5 the entire conscious life of an individual; its "highest level" is the intellect; its "lowest level" is mute feeling 6 the part of the psyche (mind) that thinks things out and calculates the causes and consequences of action 7 means of exchange are the ways things (goods and services) are transferred from one individual to another; eg., by money, by barter, or by custom (eg. birthday gifts) 8 formal justice means that who gets what is strictly determined by rules that pay no attention to individual differences 9 having to do with money 10 in the money economy, things and services are produced for money and acquired by paying money for them (as opposed to barter and common sharing) 11 expressed in non-numerical characteristics - eg., color, emotion 12 expressed in numbers 13 sovereign types of personality are personalities that will not change or compromise their distinctive attitudes, behaviors and desires 14 unresponsiveness to stimulation; refusal or inability to be emotionally moved by or involved in people and things 15 holding back from responding fully to other people 16 the unit of ancient Greek society; the city state (Chicago, without the U.S. or Illinois, ruling itself completely) 17 the other side of the story 18 the attitude that nothing human is foreign to me; that the whole realm of culture, wherever it originates, is open to me - I draw no boundaries around parts of culture that make those parts belong only to separate groups (eg., "Italian culture is only for Italians") 19 self-sufficient 20 imposing an agenda, imposing one's will 21 objective culture - the collection of rules, tools, symbols and products created by human beings 22 subjective culture - what individuals have been able to absorb and integrate into themselves from objective culture 23 spirit is mind or consciousness, and the results of conscious activity (culture) (for example, composing music and the music that has been composed are types or modes of spirit) 24 wasting away 25 over-development Return to the top of the page |