The Metropolis and Mental Life

Author: Georg Simmel
Year: 1903 ("Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben")
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/simmel_1903-the-metropolis-and-mental-life.md

Summary

Simmel diagnoses the mental life of the modern metropolis: the intensification of nervous stimulation produced by the "swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli" forces the metropolitan type into a rational, calculating, "blasé" attitude as a protective organ against the "profound disruption" of the urban milieu. This psychology is bound up with the money economy — which reduces all quality and individuality to quantity, making money "the frightful leveller" — and with the hypertrophy of an "objective culture" (things, institutions, techniques) that outstrips the individual's "subjective" development. Simmel reads these conditions as the ground of the individual's paradoxical metropolitan freedom and cosmopolitanism, and of a deep antagonism between the individual and the social-technological mechanism that frames modern life.

Key Claims

• The metropolitan psyche: "the psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli." The city's tempo and multiplicity make the metropolitan type react "primarily in a rational manner," creating "a protective organ" — a "mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness."
• Money economy and the intellect: "money economy and the domination of the intellect stand in the closest relationship to one another"; both have "a purely matter-of-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things." Money "is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e. with the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level."
• Calculability and punctuality: the modern mind "has become more and more a calculating one"; the exactness of the money economy (the diffusion of pocket watches, punctuality in a many-membered organism) colours the whole content of life and excludes "those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses."
• The blasé attitude: "the essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things" — not that they are unperceived, but that their value is "experienced as meaningless"; it is "the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy," in which money as "the frightful leveller ... hollows out the core of things." Self-preservation is "obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world, ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness."
• Reserve and antipathy: metropolitan social conduct is "formally ... one of reserve," with a latent "slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion"; "antipathy is the latent adumbration of actual antagonism" and is itself "only one of the elementary forms of socialization." Bodily closeness makes "intellectual distance really perceivable for the first time."
• Freedom and cosmopolitanism: the reserve and indifference of the metropolis assure "a type and degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances"; the city is "the seat of cosmopolitanism," its inner life extended in a wave-like motion over a broader national or international area, with the individual's horizon enlarged "in a geometrical progression" beyond physical boundaries (the "unearned increment" of ground rent; the quantitative becoming qualitative).
• Division of labour and being-different: the advanced division of labour (e.g. the quatorzième) forces specialization and "ever new and unique needs"; metropolitan life drives "the striving for the most individual forms of personal existence," including eccentricity and "being different" as a mere form of making oneself noticeable.
• Objective vs. subjective culture: the "predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective"; the individual "is reduced to a negligible quantity," becomes "a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces." The result is "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture" — the root of the (Nietzschean) hatred of the metropolis.
• Historical frame: the 18th century sought freedom and equality (the "general human quality" in every individual), the 19th century qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability (Goethe, the Romantics, the division of labour); "it is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both."

Connections

Concepts: Blasé Attitude · Everyday Life · Spectacle · World Alienation · Modernity
Authors: Georg Simmel · Walter Benjamin · Friedrich Nietzsche
Debates: Simmel's Hypertrophy of Objective Culture vs. Arendt's World Alienation · Spectacle vs. Function (indirect — the money economy of indifference vs. lived everyday experience)
Related source notes: Benjamin for Architects · The Society of the Spectacle · The Urban Process under Capitalism · Consumerism and Identity

Direct Quotes

"The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli."

"Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e. with the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level."

"The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things."

"Money ... becomes the frightful leveller — it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair."

"The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis."

Open Questions

• How does Simmel's "blasé attitude" and the levelling of distinctions by the money economy relate to the later critique of the spectacle (Debord) and of the image economy — is metropolitan indifference a precursor or a separate lineage?
• Is Simmel's "hypertrophy of objective culture" continuous with Arendt's "world alienation," or are they distinct diagnoses of the modern individual's relation to the objective world?