Simmel's Metropolis and Mental Life

• Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" examines the impact of urban environments on individual psychology and social interactions.

Independence vs. Societal Powers

• Modern life's problems arise from individuals trying to maintain independence against societal powers, historical heritage, and external culture.
• This mirrors primitive humans fighting nature for survival.
• The 18th century sought liberation from political, religious, moral, and economic ties to allow the development of man's natural virtue.
• The 19th century promoted individuality and achievements through the division of labor, increasing dependence on others.
• Nietzsche emphasized individual struggle, while socialism focused on suppressing competition.
• Modern life is about how individuals relate to aspects of life that go beyond individual existence and how personalities adapt to external forces.

Metropolitan Individuality

• The psychological foundation of metropolitan individuality is the heightened emotional life from constant external and internal stimuli shifts.
• The mind is stimulated by differences between present and past impressions.
• Rapid changes, distinct differences, and unexpected stimuli characterize the psychological conditions of the metropolis.

Intellectualism

• The mental life of the metropolis is intellectual due to the need for awareness.
• Rationality is in the conscious mind, adapting to shifts and contradictions without inner disturbances.
• The metropolitan type develops a protective organ against disruptions, reacting rationally rather than emotionally.
• Intensified consciousness shifts reactions to a less sensitive mental activity sphere.

Money Economy

• The intellectualistic quality serves as inner life protection in the metropolis.
• The metropolis is the center of the money economy because commercial activity gives the means of exchange importance.
• Money economy and intellect have a matter-of-fact attitude in treating people, combining justice with hardness.
• The intellectualistic person is indifferent to personal matters that aren't completely understood rationally.
• Money focuses on the exchange value, reducing quality and individuality.
• Emotional relationships rely on individuality, while intellectual relationships are with elements of objective interest.
• City dwellers deal with merchants, customers, and servants this way.
• Relationships contrast smaller circles, where knowledge creates emotional tone.
• Modern cities are supplied by production for the market and unknown purchasers.
• Interests become matter-of-fact, with calculated egoism, eliminating personal relationships.
• Money economy dominates the metropolis, domestic and direct barters are eradicated.
• The metropolis is the setting that most encourages the interaction between money and this psychological attitude.
• London has always been the intellect and money bag of England.

Calculating Exactness

• The modern mind is calculating; practical life reflects natural science's ideal of transforming the world into an arithmetical problem.
• The money economy fills daily life with calculating, enumerating, and reducing quality to quantity.
• Money's calculability brings precision to life's elements and certainty with agreements, aided by pocket watches.
• Metropolis conditions cause punctuality due to the complexity and population density.
• Lack of punctuality in the city causes chaos.
• The technique of metropolitan life requires coordination and punctuality, surpassing subjective elements.
• Superficial events connect with the depth of the soul, relating to the meaning of life.
• Complications of metropolitan life require precision, calculability and exactness, coloring life with a capitalistic and intellectualistic character.

Blasé Outlook

• The metropolis is connected to the exclusion of irrational traits and impulses that seek to determine life from within, opposing autonomous lives.
• The blasé outlook is reserved for the city, resulting from rapid and contrasting nerve stimulations.
• The intensification of metropolitan intellectuality is derived from stimulation of the nerves.
• Unlike stupid people, the blasé are not intellectually dead.
• Immoderate sensuous life overstimulates nerves until they can't react, the same as less stimulation depletes reserves.
• The blasé attitude is the inability to react with energy to new stimuli, common in city children.
• combined with the money economy.
• The blasé attitude is indifference toward distinctions, experiencing meaninglessness.
• Things appear homogeneous, flat, and grey.
• It reflects the money economy, where cash replaces manifoldness, expressing distinctions in quantity.
• Money becomes a common denominator, hollowing the qualities of things, reducing incomparability.
• All floats with the same weight in the stream of money.
• The wealthy's relationship demonstrates the de-coloring.
• The metropolis becomes the seat of commerce, where purchasing appears differently.
• Intensification of purchasable things stimulates nervous energy and transforms into the blasé attitude which is an adaptive phenomenon.

Self-Preservation

• Preservation involves devaluing the objective world, leading to feelings of valuelessness.
• Self-preservation requires a negative social conduct type, resulting in formal reserve.
• If the constant external contact of numbers should be met by the same number of inner reactions as in the small town , one would be overwhelmed.
• Suspicion necessitates the reserve, causing people to appear cold and permits ignorance.
• The inner side of external reserve is indifference, aversion, strangeness, and repulsion, leading to conflict.
• Extended commercial life rests on varied sympathies, indifferences, and aversions.
• This sphere of indifference makes minds respond with definite feeling to almost every impression, due to unconsciousness and transitoriness of feelings.
• This reserve and aversion save them from the dangers of immersion.
• Antipathy saves from dangers through distance and deflection.

Individuality

• Dissociation is an elementary form of socialization, making the overtone of aversion is the wrappings of a psychic trait of the metropolis.
• This assures the individual of personal freedom, growing with social life.
• Historically, there is a small circle closed against foreign groups, with narrow cohesion that allows little room for individual development.
• Social evolution proceeds in divergent directions.
• As the group grows, the original demarcation weakens, and freedom of movement goes beyond delimitation.
• Peculiarity and individuality are both given to division of labor in larger groups.
• States, Christianity, guilds, and parties develop in accord with this formula.
• Individuality within city life is also clear in development.

Small Towns

• Small town life set limits on movements and differentiation, today a person, or city dweller placed in a small town would feel narrow.
• Limited relationships, narrow community oversight over actions and attitudes.
• Quantitative and qualitative individuality is beyond boundaries.
• Ancient polis had a character of a small town.
• The constant threats caused strong cohesion, constant supervision, and jealousy toward individuals.
• Constant inner and external oppression created tension: the weaker were held and impelled the stronger to self-protection.
• Individualized personalities caused the unique life to be in constant struggle against a de-individualizing city.
• Broad and general contents of life bond with the most individual ones.

Individual Freedoms

• Both were in conflict with narrow formations, and whose striving for preservation set them in conflict.
• Free men derived legal rights from the largest unit, those who derived legal rights from the small circle of community were unfree
• Citizens of the metropolis are free unlike small town persons.
• Conditions of life in social units are appreciated, but the bodily closeness and lack of space make intellectual seem really perceivable.
• Freedom reflects emotionally being a pleasant experience in the loneliness and metropolitan crush.

Cosmopolitanism

• The metropolis is the locus of conditions.
• The area and population size increase freedoms, the metropolis transcend to cosmopolitanism as wealth grows and grows the individual enlarges.
• Dynamic growth becomes not only preparation for something of the same but much bigger than that.
• Dynamic growth may be the rent that brings increasing traffic.
• The quantifiable becomes quality, a small town's life is enclosed within itself.
• Decisive inner life extends in a wave over a broader national area, whereas the metropolis independence and individualism are two different things.
• Functional magnitude is a significant one.
• Person- to- person contact matters and not just being limited to areas.
• The extent in which existence is expressed. Individual freedom and extension are logical and historical, with both understood negatively and emancipation of prejudices.

Division of Labor

• The most economic advanced division of labour rests in cities.
• Division of labor of extreme has created the lucrative vocation in Paris of someone who is on standby if there are 13 people and they need someone to be the 14th to dine.
• The city offers determining conditions for the division of labor.
• The city is a unit with a large size, being receptive to a highly diversified plurality while the same occurs where struggling agglomeration is occurring where the individual must specialize.
• Struggle with nature has become a conflict with humans, fought gain happens in man, not nature.
• There is a need to sell and produce to unique needs, products specialize, functions differentiate to a point.
• Those increase needs, allowing personal variation, and leading to the increasing of intellect and mentality that cities create.

Intellectual Individuation

• Giving one's personality in the city is difficult compared to a small city.
• When energy hits its limits, qualitative distinctions are what matter and come to forefront.
• Attention of the word can be won though eccentricity, extravagances, and caprice through the strangeness of being different.
• Gaining attention in some sort is all that matters.
• Brief meetings with people are more apparent in the city compared to small cities.
• It is clearer to appear quickly, in the beginning appear clear, be unambiguous, be clear, be as quick so that they are ambiguous.
• Effort to appear to-the-point, with extra-ordinary frequency so that a person gains is better than those who associate.

Dominance of Objective Culture

• The metropolis puts emphasis on individual form regardless of success
• The objective spirit is superior, for example, language, art law, etc. there are embodiments in a spirit that is daily to imperfectly develop.
• Growth shows culture over the century
• Individual progress is a frightful rate of growth between spiritualism, delicacy, and idealism.
• Division of labor requires one-sided culture.
• Overgrowth of culture doesn't satisfy the individual and as a result, is a transformation from subjectivity to objective.
• Metropolis is made for one that has outgrown personal elements.
• There is a tremendous person culture that can't maintain itself.
• From all sides time is taken and is infinitely easy in that sense that interests are presenting all sides and are carried scarcely require and effort.

Individual Extremities

• There are impersonal elements that seek to suppress interest and the lack of that need.
• Personal parts needed for extremity, peculiarity, and individuality that must be produced and exaggerated merely being brough to awareness.
• The hyperthropy of objective is at the root with bitter hatred.
• The most extreme form is indeed found by the Metropolis.
• The 18th century had powerful bonds that had political, religious, and agrarian delimitation while at the same imposing both unjustness and imposing a form that was at the same time unnaturally.
• In this was freedom and the belief that freedom would allow the same Nobel essence.
• Along with the Liberal ideals came individual who distinguished for others and who had historical bounds wanted to seek how to get away from that.
• It's no longer a “general human quality.” But rather the qualitative uniqueness and Irreplaceability that became The Criterion.
• The metropolis function is to make a place for the conflicts, the attempts, and unification.
• Unique place is with an source if fruitfulness.
• Those find equal legitimacy regardless that the sphere which we judge is appropriate that exist.
• Task it not to complain but only to be integrated.