The big cities and the intellectual life
The big cities and the intellectual life is an essay by the sociologist Georg Simmel , published in 1903 , with whom he laid one of the foundations of urban sociology .
According to Georg Simmel, the individual refuses to be leveled and consumed in a socially technical mechanism. Especially since the industrialization of emerging division of labor seems to be harmful to the individual at first glance. Georg Simmel takes the exaggeration of nervous life as the psychological basis of urban individuality . Man is stimulated by different external impressions. He crosses z. For example, a street in Piccadilly Circus in London results in a different picture than in the country in a 3000-soul village like Schöftland . Accordingly, people in Piccadilly Circus are almost "raped" by dozens of different impressions. Simmel sees this fact as the cause of how psychological life, or the intellectualistic character, is formed. The small town dweller can face the environment, which he is so familiar with and which is not subject to great changes, with his mind and emotional relationships. In the case of the city dweller, the mind must be placed over the form of the mind, as a protective organ against one's own uprooting.
As the mind is factual, so is the money economy, which treats people (e.g. restructuring: in order to achieve a cost reduction of Y, X employees must be laid off) and things purely factually. Therefore, the money economy has its roots in the big city and not in the country. The objectivity shows in the production of goods, where for a mostly completely unknown buyer - for money - is produced. As a result, Simmel speaks of how modern man has become more and more calculating. The character of a big city like Berlin or Tokyo shows in the dependence of the technology of the inhabitants. Without punctuality the machine could not work. Predictability, accuracy, etc. rub off on people. Simmel sees this in the smugness that the city dweller shows. To come back to the nervous life mentioned at the beginning, the nervous life in the big city is stimulated to the utmost. Man is incapable of processing everything appropriately. However, this blunting is necessary for your own protection. This even goes up to a certain aversion to (long-standing) neighbors who are then hardly greeted.
This quality of the city gives the city dweller the freedom that he would not have in the country. Simmel justifies this with the social circle. The earliest bonds consist of a relatively small circle in which the group painstakingly watches over the conformity of its members. This can be seen in parties and religions, which in the initial stage thus secure their existence from outside (enemies). This constriction loosens the larger the group then becomes.
The division of labor is also evident in the character of the individual. In order to survive in the market, the individual is forced to specialize more and more. According to Simmel, this fact leads to the fact that in the big city life one's own personality and appearance want to be emphasized much more. This justifies the many city originals (e.g. Mr. Z in Geneva, who would never leave his house without a parrot on his back), including the caprice of some contemporaries. Because the encounters are always so short, the individual wants to be special, pointed.
statement
According to Georg Simmel, the deepest problem of modern life is the claim of the individual to the independence and character of his existence against the superior powers of society, to preserve the historical inheritance of the external culture and technology of life.
The big city dweller is - in contrast to the small town dweller - exposed to an "increase in nervous life". This is the basis for the type of urban individuality.
The necessity and simultaneous inability to process the uninterrupted stream of big city stimuli leads to the increased “intellectual character” of the city dweller and to the “smugness” ascribed to him. The blasphemy becomes recognizable in the dullness in relation to the differentiation of things. Temporal precision, intellectual character and smugness lead to reserve and a "structure of the highest impersonality".
However, the functional size of the city allows freedom of movement and encourages people to express their personality.
The preponderance of the objective over the subjective spirit is the reason why the big city in particular suggests the drive to the most individual personal existence, because the simultaneous development of the subjects follows objective development (in language, technology, science, etc.) only at a distance.