Simmel - The Metropolis and Mental Life PDF (1903)

“The Metropolis and Mental Life” from Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (1950)...

“The Metropolis and Mental Life” from Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (1950) Georg Simmel Editors’ Introduction Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was born to a prosperous Jewish family, at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, the very heart of Berlin’s commercial and theatrical bright light district, the equivalent of New York’s Times Square or London’s Piccadilly Circus. Simmel obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1881 at the University of Berlin. Marginalized by the German academic system because of Jewish ancestry and intellectual radicalism, Simmel did not obtain a regular academic appointment until the last four years of his life. For most of his career, he maintained a recurring lecturing position at the University of Berlin, where his lectures influenced an extraordinary legacy of students, including Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, and Robert Park. Despite being somewhat an academic outsider, he was nevertheless an engaged public intellectual who frequented fashionable salons and enjoyed the friendship of eminent sociologists like Max Weber and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a nonobservant Jew in Weimar Berlin, he was a rootless cosmopolitan while being a public figure. Simmel’s seminal essay (“Die Grossstätde und das Geistesleben”) was originally delivered as a lecture within a series during the winter of 1902–03 connected to an exhibition held in Dresden by the Gehe Foundation on the emergence of the modern metropolis. This First German City Exhibit (Erste Deutsche Städte- Ausstellung) was following upon the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, part of a historical vogue in world city expositions, such as those held in Paris in 1886 and Chicago in 1893. The lectures and exhibits examined the intellectual, economic, and political dimensions of German urbanism, and addressed planning problems and social issues related to public transportation, housing, employment, health, welfare, and cultural institutions. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Simmel’s essay focused more upon the philosophical and psychological implications of these transitions. Simmel was interested in the social construction of the modern urban self. The commercial emporium of the world city expositions framed Simmel’s view of the metropolis as the nexus point for the circulation of capital, commodities, and people. That commerce was central to the great transformations of modernity was not lost upon Marx in his writings on the political economy of capital, but what Simmel explored in this essay as well as his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Money (1909), were the philosophical and psychological dimensions of money in modern culture. Simmel discussed the triumph of the money economy over traditional society, the rise of objectification and quantification. He saw the capitalist city as a sensorium of psychic overstimulations and commodity temptations. The decline of fixed, ancient, and venerable traditions with the rise of flux, transitoriness, and arbitrary value is what Marx described with his famed adage: “all that is solid melts into air” (see The Communist Manifesto). Simmel’s detached and capricious urban cosmopolitan is much similar to the “flaneur” of philosopher Walter Benjamin (Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century) and poet Charles Baudelaire, the Parisian pedestrian The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  24 GEORG SIMMEL who sumptuously wandered the shopping arcades and boulevards, intoxicated by the spectacle of commerce and the anonymity of the urban crowd. The notion of the loneliness of life in the crowd reflects the particular reserve and impersonality that is displayed by the pedestrian dandy, the bourgeois shopper, or the urban com- muter. The barrage of lures, stimulations, and choices in the modern city of commerce has induced a kind of monkish self-reflection that can be seen as transcendence as much as retreat. Freed from the prejudices and obligations of family and community, the bourgeois urbanist experiences the restlessness of liberation, a new condition of self-consciousness and inner emotional development. For all his liberation from the communal society, the urban modernist is now embedded in the iron cage of a world of work and bureaucracy, and the consumer’s dilemma of a search for identity in a soulless mass society. Simmel’s seminal essay on “The Stranger” further elucidates his interpretation of the soul of the metro- politan man who is more marginal to the axes of power. The short but powerful essay expresses some of the outsider status Simmel experienced in the academy, while communicating some general properties of Simmel’s thought regarding the dialectic between the individual and the society. Simmel’s wandering Jewish trader bears the stigmata of the quintessential outsider who is not regarded as an individual, but as a social type or category. This status may be extended to other social types such as the black underclass, immigrant foreigner, the social or sexual deviant as Simmel suggests: “the stranger, like the poor and like sundry ‘inner enemies,’ is an element of the group itself.” The presence of the stranger establishes spatial rules and social etiquettes of social distance. Differentiation of the “other” as well as the “deviant” establishes rules of con- duct in a secular society, sustaining the solidarity of the in-group. Simmel’s interest in micro-sociological realms, the minutiae of everyday life, has attracted sociologists asso- ciated with the “cultural turn” in sociology since the 1960s. The British sociologist David Frisby has recently done much in the translating and popularizing of Simmel in this way. His writings include Georg Simmel (London and Chichester: Tavistock /Ellis Horwood, 1984), Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), and a reader of original translated writings titled Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997). An excellent biography of Simmel can be found in Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Second Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). The deepest problems of modern life derive from more directly dependent upon the supplementary the claim of the individual to preserve the auto- activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full nomy and individuality of his existence in the face development of the individual conditioned by the of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism of external culture, and of the technique of life. The believes in the suppression of all competition for Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. fight with nature which primitive man has to wage the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these posi- for his bodily existence attains in this modern tions the same basic motive is at work: the person form its latest transformation. The eighteenth cen- resists to being leveled down and worn out by tury called upon man to free him of all the histor- a social–technological mechanism. An inquiry into ical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and the inner meaning of specifically modern life and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so common to all, should develop unhampered. In to speak, must seek to solve the equation that addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century structures like the metropolis set up between demanded the functional specialization of man the individual and the super-individual contents of and his work; this specialization makes one life. Such an inquiry must answer the question individual incomparable to another, and each of of how the personality accommodates itself in the them indispensable to the highest possible extent. adjustments to external forces. This will be my task However, this specialization makes each man the today. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  “THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE” 25 The psychological basis of the metropolitan metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ type of individuality consists in the intensification of which is least sensitive and quite remote from nervous stimulation that results from the swift and the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man seen to preserve subjective life against the over- is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated whelming power of metropolitan life, and intel- O by the difference between a momentary impression lectuality branches out in many directions and N and the one that preceded it. Lasting impressions, is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. E impressions which differ only slightly from one The metropolis has always been the seat of another, impressions which take a regular and the money economy. Here the multiplicity and habitual course and show regular and habitual concentration of economic exchange gives an contrasts – all these use up, so to speak, less importance to the means of exchange that the consciousness than does the rapid crowding of scantiness of rural commerce would not have changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp allowed. Money economy and the dominance of of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share onrushing impressions. These are the psycholo- a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and gical conditions that the metropolis creates. With with things; and, in this attitude, a formal justice is each crossing of the street, with the tempo and often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. The multiplicity of economic, occupational and social intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small all genuine individuality, because relationships and town and rural life with reference to the sensory reactions result from it that cannot be exhausted foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts with logical operations. In the same manner, the from man as a discriminating creature a different individuality of phenomena is not commensurate amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery only with what is common to all: it asks for the flows more slowly, more habitually, and more exchange value, it reduces all quality and individ- evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated uality to the question: How much? All intimate character of metropolitan psychic life becomes emotional relations between persons are founded understandable – as over against small town life, in their individuality, whereas in rational relations which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional man is reckoned with like a number, like an el- relationships. These latter are rooted in the more ement that is in itself indifferent. Only the objective unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most measurable achievement is of interest. Thus readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted metropolitan man reckons with his merchants and habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus customers, his domestic servants and often even in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the with persons with whom he is obliged to have psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner social intercourse. These features of intellectuality forces. In order to accommodate to change and to contrast with the nature of the small circle in the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a through such upheavals that the more conservative behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing mind could accommodate to the metropolitan of service and return. In the sphere of the economic rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type of psychology of the small group it is of importance man – which, of course, exists in a thousand indi- that under primitive conditions production serves vidual variants – develops an organ protecting him the customer who orders the good, so that the against the threatening currents and discrepancies producer and the consumer are acquainted. The of his external environment which would uproot him. modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost He reacts with his head instead of his heart. In entirely by production for the market, that is, for this an increased awareness assumes the psychic entirely unknown purchasers who never person- prerogative. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a ally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. heightened awareness and a predominance of Through this anonymity the interests of each party intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  26 GEORG SIMMEL intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both even if only by one hour, all economic life and parties need not fear any deflection because communication of the city would be disrupted for of the imponderables of personal relationships. a long time. In addition an apparently mere external The money economy dominates the metropolis; it factor, long distances, would make all waiting has displaced the last survivals of domestic pro- and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded duction and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes, waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan from day to day, the amount of work ordered by life is unimaginable without the most punctual customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously integration of all activities and mutual relations so intimately interrelated with the money economy, into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody again the general conclusions of this entire task can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first of reflection become obvious, namely, that from promoted the money economy or whether the each point on the surface of existence – however latter determined the former. The metropolitan closely attached to the surface alone – one may drop way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely the most banal externalities of life finally are con- by citing the dictum of the most eminent English nected with the ultimate decisions concerning the constitutional historian: throughout the whole meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, course of English history, London has never acted exactness are forced upon life by the complexity as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and extension of metropolitan existence and are not and always as her moneybag! only most intimately connected with its money In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie economy and intellectualist character. These traits upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents must also color the contents of life and favor the characteristically unite. Modern mind has become exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign more and more calculating. The calculative exact- traits and impulses which aim at determining the ness of practical life that the money economy has mode of life from within, instead of receiving the brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural general and precisely schematized form of life science: to transform the world into an arithmetic from without. Even though sovereign types of problem, to fix every part of the world by math- personality, characterized by irrational impulses, ematical formulas. Only money economy has are by no means impossible in the city, they are filled the days of so many people with weighing, nevertheless opposed to typical city life. The pas- calculating, with numerical determinations, with a sionate hatred of men like Ruskin and Nietzsche for reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. the metropolis is understandable in these terms. Through the calculative nature of money a new Their natures discovered the value of life alone precision, a certainty in the definition of identities in the unschematized existence that cannot be and differences, unambiguousness in agreements defined with precision for all alike. From the same and arrangements has been brought about in source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their the relations of life-elements – just as externally hatred of money economy and of the intellectual- Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. this precision has been affected by the universal dif- ism of modern existence. fusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions The same factors that have thus coalesced into of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of the exactness and minute precision of the form of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical life have coalesced into a structure of the highest metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that impersonality; on the other hand, they have without the strictest punctuality in promises and promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is services the whole structure would break down into perhaps no psychic phenomenon that has been so an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has brought about by the aggregation of so many people the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from with such differentiated interests, who must the rapidly changing and closely compressed con- integrate their relations and activities into a highly trasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the complex organism. If all clocks and watches in enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality, also, Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid people The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  “THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE” 27 who are not intellectually alive in the first place objects has become quite considerable. The large usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless cities, the main seats of the money exchange, pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it bring the purchasability of things to the fore much agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for more impressively than do smaller localities. That such a long time that they finally cease to react is why cities are also the genuine locale of the blasé O at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and attitude. In the blasé attitude the concentration of N contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless men and things stimulates the nervous system of E impressions force such violent responses, tearing the individual to its highest achievement so that the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative last reserves of strength are spent; and if one intensification of the same conditioning factors remains in the same milieu they have no time to this achievement is transformed into its opposite gather new strength. Incapacity thus emerges to and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the react to new sensations with the appropriate blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last in fact, every metropolitan child shows when com- possibility of accommodating to the contents and pared with children of quieter and less changeable forms of metropolitan life. The self-preservation of milieus. certain personalities is bought at the price of This physiological source of the metropolitan devaluing the whole objective world, a devaluation blasé attitude is joined by another source that that in the end unavoidably drags one’s own flows from the money economy. The essence of the personality down into a feeling of the same blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrim- worthlessness. ination. This does not mean that the objects are Whereas the subject of this form of existence has not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, to come to terms with it entirely for himself, his self- but rather that the meaning and differing values of preservation in the face of the large city demands things, and thereby the things themselves, are from him a no less negative behavior of a social experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the nature. This mental attitude of metropolitans to- blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no ward one another we may designate, from a formal one object deserves preference over any other. point of view, as reserve. If so many inner reac- This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of tions were responses to the continuous external the completely internalized money economy. By contacts with innumerable people as are those in being the equivalent to all the manifold things in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one and the same way, money becomes the most one meets and where one has a positive relation frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitat- to almost everyone, one would be completely ive differences of things in terms of “how much?” atomized internally and come to an unimaginable Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, psychic state. Partly this psychological fact, partly becomes the common denominator of all values; the right to distrust that men have in the face of irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life, Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. individuality, their specific value, and their incom- necessitates our reserve. As a result of this reserve parability. All things float with equal specific we frequently do not even know by sight those who gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. have been our neighbors for years. And it is this All things lie on the same level and differ from reserve that in the eyes of the small-town people one another only in the size of the area that makes us appear to be cold and heartless. Indeed, they cover. In the individual case this coloration, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this or rather discoloration, of things through their outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often money equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual However, through the relations of the rich to the strangeness and repulsion, which will break into objects to be had for money, perhaps even hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, through the total character that the mentality of the however caused. The whole inner organization of contemporary public everywhere imparts to these such an extensive communicative life rests upon objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of an extremely varied hierarchy of sympathies, The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  28 GEORG SIMMEL indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well extent to which the group grows – numerically, as of the most permanent nature. The sphere of spatially, in significance and in content of life – to indifference in this hierarchy is not as large as the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity might appear on the surface. Our psychic activity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarca- still responds to almost every impression of some- tion against others is softened through mutual body else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The relations and connections. At the same time, the unconscious, fluid and changing character of this individual gains freedom of movement, far beyond impression seems to result in a state of indiffer- the first jealous delimitation. The individual also ence. Actually this indifference would be just as gains a specific individuality to which the division unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual of labor in the enlarged group gives both occasion suggestion would be unbearable. From both these and necessity. The state and Christianity, guilds and typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and political parties, and innumerable other groups indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. have developed according to this formula, however A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of prac- much, of course, the special conditions and forces tical antagonism affect the distances and aversions of the respective groups have modified the general without which this mode of life could not at all be scheme. This scheme seems to me distinctly re- led. The extent and the mixture of this style of life, cognizable also in the evolution of individuality the rhythm of its emergence and disappearance, the within urban life. The small-town life in Antiquity forms in which it is satisfied – all these, with the and in the Middle Ages set barriers against move- unifying motives in the narrower sense – form ment and relations of the individual toward the the inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of outside, and it set up barriers against individual inde- life. What appears in the metropolitan style of life pendence and differentiation within the individual directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its self. These barriers were such that under them elemental forms of socialization. modern man could not have breathed. Even today This reserve with its overtone of hidden aver- a metropolitan man who is placed in a small sion appears in turn as the form or the cloak of town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind. a more general mental phenomenon of the The smaller the circle which forms our milieu is, metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and and the more restricted those relations to others an amount of personal freedom which has no are which dissolve the boundaries of the indi- analogy whatsoever under other conditions. The vidual, the more anxiously the circle guards the metropolis goes back to one of the large develop- achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook mental tendencies of social life as such, to one of of the individual, and the more readily a quantitat- the few tendencies for which an approximately ive and qualitative specialization would break up universal formula can be discovered. The earliest the framework of the whole little circle. phase of social formations found in historical as well The ancient polis in this respect seems to have as in contemporary social structures is this: a rel- had the very character of a small town. The con- atively small circle firmly closed against neighbor- stant threat to its existence at the hands of enemies Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. ing, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. from near and afar effected strict coherence in However, this circle is closely coherent and allows political and military respects, a supervision of the its individual members only a narrow field for the citizen by the citizen, a jealousy of the whole development of unique qualities and free, self- against the individual whose particular life was responsible movements. Political and kinship suppressed to such a degree that he could com- groups, parties and religious associations begin in pensate only by acting as a despot in his own house- this way. The self-preservation of very young hold. The tremendous agitation and excitement, the associations requires the establishment of strict unique colorfulness of Athenian life, can perhaps boundaries and a centripetal unity. Therefore they be understood in terms of the fact that a people cannot allow the individual freedom and unique of incomparably individualized personalities strug- inner and outer development. From this stage gled against the constant inner and outer pressure social development proceeds at once in two of a deindividualizing small town. This produced a different, yet corresponding, directions. To the tense atmosphere in which the weaker individuals The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  “THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE” 29 were suppressed and those of stronger natures passed, the economic, personal, and intellectual were incited to prove themselves in the most relations of the citizenry, the sphere of intellectual passionate manner. This is precisely why it was that predominance of the city over its hinterland, there blossomed in Athens what must be called, grow as in geometrical progression. Every gain in without defining it exactly, “the general human dynamic extension becomes a step, not for an O character” in the intellectual development of our equal, but for a new and larger extension. From N species. For we maintain factual as well as histor- every thread spinning out of the city, ever-new E ical validity for the following connection: the most threads grow as if by themselves, just as within extensive and the most general contents and the city the unearned increment of ground rent, forms of life are most intimately connected with the through the mere increase in communication, most individual ones. They have a preparatory brings the owner automatically increasing profits. stage in common, that is, they find their enemy in At this point, the quantitative aspect of life is narrow formations and groupings the maintenance transformed directly into qualitative traits of of which places both of them into a state of character. The sphere of life of the small town is, defense against expanse and generality lying with- in the main, self-contained and autarchic. For it is out and the freely moving individuality within. the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner Just as in the feudal age, the “free” man was the life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or one who stood under the law of the land, that is, international area. Weimar is not an example to the under the law of the largest social orbit, and the contrary, since its significance was hinged upon indi- unfree man was the one who derived his right vidual personalities and died with them; whereas merely from the narrow circle of a feudal associa- the metropolis is indeed characterized by its tion and was excluded from the larger social essential independence even from the most eminent orbit – so today metropolitan man is “free” in a individual personalities. This is the counterpart to spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the the independence, and it is the price the individ- pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small- ual pays for the independence, which he enjoys in town man. For the reciprocal reserve and indiffer- the metropolis. The most significant characteristic ence and the intellectual life conditions of large of the metropolis is this functional extension circles are never felt more strongly by the individ- beyond its physical boundaries. And this efficacy ual in their impact upon his independence than in reacts in turn and gives weight, importance, and the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because responsibility to metropolitan life. Man does not end the bodily proximity and narrowness of space with the limits of his body or the area comprising makes the mental distance only the more visible. his immediate activity. Rather is the range of the It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom if, person constituted by the sum of effects emanat- under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as ing from him temporally and spatially. In the same lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd. For way, a city consists of its total effects that extend here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that beyond its immediate confines. Only this range is the freedom of man be reflected in his emotional the city’s actual extent in which its existence is Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. life as comfort. expressed. This fact makes it obvious that individ- It is not only the immediate size of the area and ual freedom, the logical and historical complement the number of persons that, because of the universal of such extension, is not to be understood only in historical correlation between the enlargement of the negative sense of mere freedom of mobility and the circle and the personal inner and outer freedom, elimination of prejudices and petty philistinism. has made the metropolis the locale of freedom. The essential point is that the particularity and It is rather in transcending this visible expanse incomparability, which ultimately every human that any given city becomes the seat of cosmo- being possesses, be somehow expressed in the politanism. The horizon of the city expands in working-out of a way of life. That we follow the laws a manner comparable to the way in which wealth of our own nature – and this after all is freedom – develops; a certain amount of property increases becomes obvious and convincing to ourselves in a quasi-automatical way in ever more rapid and to others only if the expressions of this nature progression. As soon as a certain limit has been differ from the expressions of others. Only our The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  30 GEORG SIMMEL unmistakability proves that our way of life has not form of “being different,” of standing out in a strik- been superimposed by others. ing manner and thereby attracting attention. For Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest many character types, ultimately the only means economic division of labor. They produce thereby of saving for themselves some modicum of such extreme phenomena as in Paris the re- self-esteem and the sense of filling a position is munerative occupation of the quatorzième. They indirect, through the awareness of others. In the are persons who identify themselves by signs on same sense a seemingly insignificant factor is their residences and who are ready at the dinner operating, the cumulative effects of which are, hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly however, still noticeable. I refer to the brevity and called upon if a dinner party should consist of scarcity of the inter-human contacts granted to thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the metropolitan man, as compared with social the city offers more and more the decisive con- intercourse in the small town. The temptation to ditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle appear “to the point,” to appear concentrated and that through its size can absorb a highly diverse strikingly characteristic, lies much closer to the variety of services. At the same time, the concen- individual in brief metropolitan contacts than in tration of individuals and their struggle for customers an atmosphere in which frequent and prolonged compel the individual to specialize in a function from association assures the personality of an unam- which he cannot be readily displaced by another. biguous image of himself in the eyes of the other. It is decisive that city life has transformed the The most profound reason, however, why the struggle with nature for livelihood into an inter- metropolis conduces to the urge for the most human struggle for gain, which here is not granted individual personal existence – no matter whether by nature but by other men. For specialization justified and successful – appears to me to be the does not flow only from the competition for gain following: the development of modern culture is but also from the underlying fact that the seller must characterized by the preponderance of what one always seek to call forth new and differentiated may call the “objective spirit” over the “subjective needs of the lured customer. In order to find a spirit.” This is to say, in language as well as in law, source of income that is not yet exhausted, and to in the technique of production as well as in art, in find a function that cannot readily be displaced, science as well as in the objects of the domestic it is necessary to specialize in one’s services. environment, there is embodied a sum of spirit. The This process promotes differentiation, refinement, individual in his intellectual development follows and the enrichment of the public’s needs, which the growth of this spirit very imperfectly and at an obviously must lead to growing personal differences ever-increasing distance. If, for instance, we view within this public. the immense culture that for the last hundred All this forms the transition to the individual- years has been embodied in things and in know- ization of mental and psychic traits that the city ledge, in institutions and in comforts, and if we occasions in proportion to its size. There is a compare all this with the cultural progress of the whole series of obvious causes underlying this individual during the same period – at least in high Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. process. First, one must meet the difficulty of status groups – a frightful disproportion in growth asserting his own personality within the dimen- between the two becomes evident. Indeed, at sions of metropolitan life. Where the quantitative some points we notice retrogression in the culture increase in importance and the expense of energy of the individual with reference to spirituality, reach their limits, one seizes upon qualitative delicacy, and idealism. This discrepancy results differentiation in order somehow to attract the essentially from the growing division of labor. For attention of the social circle by playing upon its the division of labor demands from the individual sensitivity for differences. Finally, man is tempted an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of frequently means death to the personality of the indi- mannerism, caprice, and preciousness. Now, the vidual. In any case, he can cope less and less with meaning of these extravagances does not at all lie the overgrowth of objective culture. The individual in the contents of such behavior, but rather in its is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.  “THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE” 31 his consciousness than in his practice and in the in oppressive bonds that had become meaningless – totality of his obscure emotional states that are bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and religious derived from this practice. The individual has character. They were restraints that, so to speak, become a mere cog in an enormous organization forced upon man an unnatural form and out- of things and powers which tear from his hands all moded, unjust inequalities. In this situation the O progress, spirituality, and value in order to trans- cry for liberty and equality arose, the belief in the N form them from their subjective form into the form individual’s full freedom of movement in all social E of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be and intellectual relationships. Freedom would at pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine once permit the noble substance common to all arena of this culture that outgrows all personal life. to come to the fore, a substance which nature Here in buildings and educational institutions, had deposited in every man and which society in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering and history had only deformed. Besides this technology, in the formations of community life, and eighteenth-century ideal of liberalism, in the nine- in the visible institutions of the state, is offered teenth century, through Goethe and Romanticism, such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and on the one hand, and through the economic impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to division of labor, on the other hand, another ideal speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact. arose: individuals liberated from historical bonds On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the now wished to distinguish themselves from one personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of another. The carrier of man’s values is no longer time and consciousness are offered to it from all the “general human being” in every individual, but sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and rather man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplace- one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other ability. The external and internal history of our time hand, however, life is composed more and more takes its course within the struggle and in the of these impersonal contents and offerings that changing entanglements of these two ways of tend to displace the genuine personal colorations defining the individual’s role in the whole of soci- and incomparabilities. This results in the indi- ety. It is the function of the metropolis to provide vidual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation. For particularization, in order to preserve his most the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal which are revealed to us as the opportunities and element in order to remain audible even to the stimuli for the development of both these himself. The atrophy of individual culture through ways of allocating roles to men. Therewith these the hypertrophy of objective culture is one reason conditions gain a unique place, pregnant with for the bitter hatred that the preachers of the most inestimable meanings for the development of extreme individualism, above all Nietzsche, harbor psychic existence. The metropolis reveals itself as against the metropolis. But it is, indeed, also a one of those great historical formations in which reason why these preachers are so passionately opposing streams that enclose life unfold, as well loved in the metropolis and why they appear to the as join one another with equal right. However, in Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. metropolitan man as the prophets and saviors of this process the currents of life, whether their his most unsatisfied yearnings. individual phenomena touch us sympathetically or If one asks for the historical position of the two antipathetically, entirely transcend the sphere for forms of individualism that are nourished by the which the judge’s attitude is appropriate. Since quantitative relation of the metropolis, namely, such forces of life have grown into the roots and individual independence and the elaboration of into the crown of the whole of the historical life individuality itself, then the metropolis assumes an in which we, in our fleeting existence, as a cell, entirely new rank order in the world history of the belong only as a part, it is not our task either to spirit. The eighteenth century found the individual accuse or to pardon, but only to understand. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:54:46.