Georg Simmel, Le concept et la tragédie de la culture

Biographic Information (Universität Zürich)


In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a "blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:

" 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 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 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 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. " ("The Metropolis and Mental Life")

Le concept et la tragédie de la culture

The Metropolis and Mental Life (altruists.org)

The Metropolis and Mental Life (bolenderinitiatives.com)

Texts in English (Universität Zürich)

Textes en français (Uni. Nancy-Metz)



Jürgen Habermas, "Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture"

Nicole Lapierre, De Georg Simmel à Siegfried Kracauer (persee.fr)

Essays on Simmel (bolenderinitiatives.com)


http://ssr1.uchicago.edu/PRELIMS/Theory/simmel.html


Les grandes villes et la vie de l'esprit, notes de lecture (lombreduneville.blogspot.com) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5).