Main Points
Ernst Kirchner, Nollendorfplatz, 1912
- Simmel notes the transient nature of feelings, soon become indifference.
- He examines the nervous stimuli and the matter-of-factness that the anonymity of a city can generate.
- Simmel focus on the key theme of freedom in this text.
- He highlights the personal freedom a city can provide.
- However he notes that with freedom can come loneliness.
- Simmel believed that true freedom is when people can follow the laws of their own inner nature.
- Being unique, different and noticeable provides meaning and generates self esteem for people in a metropolis.
The Metropolis and the individual
- Simmel compares fast paced urban living to slow rural life.
- He explains how the urban individual is rational in contrast with the emotional individual from a small town.
- Metropolitan dewellers have blase attitudes and unusual reactions.
- They are calculating - reducing qualitative values to quantitative terms.
- He examines the importance of money and time-management in the city and how they are interconnected with intellect.
- Monetary value labels and denotes how much everything is worth.
- The city is an economic hub.
- It is where the most advanced division of labour can be found - because of its large size is highly diversified.
Quote
"Wenn alle Uhren in Berlin plötzlich in verschiedener Richtung falschgehen würden, auch nur um den Spielraum einer Stunde, so wäre sein ganzes wirtschaftliches und sonstiges Verkehrsleben auf lange hinaus zerrüttet"
- Punctuality is necessary for the system to function.
- Simmel regards this one of the key problems with modern society - the determination to turn everything into a mathematical problem that can be solved with a formula.
City Chaos by Gill Turner
Quote
Further Questions
"das Geld, mit seiner Farblosigkeit und Indifferenz, sich zum Generalnenner aller Werte aufwirft, wird es der fürchterlichste Nivellierer, es höhlt den Kern der Dinge, ihre Eigenart, ihren spezifischen Wert, ihre Unvergleichbarkeit rettungslos aus"
- The monetary value of things strips them of their uniqueness.
- The purchasability of objects in the metropolis is unprecedented.
- This leads to the "devaluing of the entire objective world"
Conclusion
- 'In the city you are one of many, but in the country you are one of few'
How could this impact on a person's mentality towards objects and/or other people?
- Do money and intellect interconnect?
- Do you agree that Simmel's text is as relevant today, as when it was written?
Georg Simmel
Interesting points
- Almost everything Simmel said is still applicable in today's metropolitan society.
- Money still influences the value and meaning of things today.
- Similarly people today are over-exposed to many different stimuli - which can have consequences on their mentality and outlook.
- Simmel was born in Berlin in March 1858.
- He was a German sociologist.
- His religious background is very complicated.
- He received a large inheritance and became a scholar.
- He studied history and philosophy at the University of Berlin.
- He follows a neo-Kantian approach in his work.
Summary
- He wrote the Metropolis and Mental life in 1903.
- The essay was originally from a series of lectures that Simmel gave.
- The text examines the individual within the modern city.
- It compares the lifestyle and culture within the Metropolis with a small rural town.
- Simmel explores how intellect and money effect the mentality of the individual living in the city.
- He highlights the increased rationality and suppressed emotional behaviours of the cosmopolitan citizen.
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel