BRAINWASHED - Culture 01
Tragedy of Culture – Georg Simmel (2)
Culture makes us happy. Civilization makes our lives worthy and valuable. At least, a creator aims to create more joy for life all the time.
However, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) points out the tension between “objective culture” and “subjective culture” in modern society.
The vast accumulation of products, technology, and knowledge produced by society grows too large and too complex, and overwhelms the ability of individuals to internalize and utilize these developments for our own self-development.
“The material products of culture – furniture and cultivated plants, works of art and machinery, tools and books – in which natural material is developed into forms which could never have been realized by their own energies, are products of our own desires and emotions, the result of ideas that utilize the available possibilities of objects. It is exactly the same with regard to the culture that shapes people’s relationships to one another and to themselves: language, morals, religion and law.” (6. The Style of Life, The Philosophy of Money. Georg Simmel)
The tragedy of culture happens when the products of creativity ultimately dominate the creators, causing them to feel insignificant and alienated.
When Culture alienates the Individual
● Objective culture
“Objective culture is the historical presentation or more or less perfect condensation of an objectively valid truth which is reproduced by our cognition.” (6. The Style of Life, The Philosophy of Money. Georg Simmel)
Georg Simmel defines objective culture as the objectification of the mind. It consists of the accumulated mental labor of generations that has become embodied in external, impersonal forms such as tools, transport, scientific products, technology, art, language, custom, and law.
Objective culture is an enclosed world of objects and historical manifestations that exist independently of our ability to fully assimilate them.
“The objectification of the mind provides the form that makes the conservation and accumulation of mental labour possible; it is the most significant and most far-reaching of the historical categories of mankind.” (6. The Style of Life, The Philosophy of Money. Georg Simmel)
Our creativity is fluid, personal energy, and alive inside as subjective culture. But to share or preserve creativity, we have to pour it into a concrete container, such as a book, a piece of software, a law, or a work of art. Once the creativity is represented in the container, it takes a fixed shape as objective culture. It is NO longer fluid, but a thing that exists outside.
● Subjective (individual) culture
Subjective (or individual) culture refers to the process of personal development and the refinement of human energies beyond their natural state.
Subjective culture represents the extent to which an individual absorbs, internalizes, and uses the objective cultural heritage for their own spiritual and intellectual growth.
“By cultivating objects, that is by increasing their value beyond the performance of their natural constitution, we cultivate ourselves: it is the same value-increasing process developing out of us and returning back to us that moves external nature or our own nature.” (6. The Style of Life, The Philosophy of Money. Georg Simmel)
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| Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) |
Modern life features too rapid, unstoppable growth and snowball accumulation in objective culture. The sheer volume of this output grows far faster than our capacity to assimilate it. This lag makes the individual feel passive, overwhelmed, and subordinated to our own creations.
This social tension is quite similar to Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and Simmel's student, György Lukács (1885–1971)’s Marxist concept of reification.
In a similar way, Georg Simmel noted that goods or ideas start as personal creations, but become independent forces later that dictate how we live, work, and express ourselves, ironically.
So eventually, we are controlled by objective culture, which we ourselves had initially created in order to develop ourselves as subjective culture.
“If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say – subject to many individual exceptions – that the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined.” (6. The Style of Life, The Philosophy of Money. Georg Simmel)
Creativity devours the Creator — the Tragedy of Culture
The tragedy occurs when we keep rapidly accumulating objective culture more and more, but our ability to assimilate ALL of them is very limited.
By the division of labor, people focus on producing ONLY small, niche components of a larger, unfamiliar system. Due to the specialization, we lose the sense of creating a holistic culture.
Individuals become blasé overwhelmed by the sheer pace and sheer volume of modern urban life. This leads us to a detached, indifferent, and cynical demeanor to protect ourselves from emotional overload.
People become alienated from the products we ourselves have produced. Our personal growth is hindered rather than helped by technological and cultural progress.
Georg Simmel's Real-Life Alienation and Anti-Semitism
Georg Simmel’s pessimistic view of modern industrial society resonates with his own bitter real experiences.
Simmel’s deeply personal experiences of alienation were characterized by long-term professional marginalization despite Simmel’s brilliance, unparalleled uniqueness, and popularity as a lecturer.
As a unique and insightful sociologist in Berlin during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Georg Simmel faced significant obstacles in his academic career.
Due to his Jewish background in an anti-Semitic environment in then Germany, Simmel was hindered from securing a full professorship, remaining a Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer relying on student fees) for 15 years, most of his academic career.
Max Weber (1864–1902) is known to have advocated several times to secure a professorial chair for Simmel. But the attempts failed and were confronted each time with hostility not only from state authorities, but also from eminent academics in Berlin.
I should note here that Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm Windelband were among those who concertedly blocked the call to a full professorship for Georg Simmel.
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| Georg Simmel (1858–1918) |
Georg Simmel’s academic position was marginalized. Despite being one of the best-known lecturers at the University of Berlin and a popular sociologist among students, Simmel struggled for years to gain a permanent professorship.
Simmel’s bitter personal experience of discrimination would influence his theorization of the stranger as a marginal figure within a group, who is both an insider and an outsider in the social structure.
Intellectual Marginality
Moreover, Georg Simmel’s unprecedented, groundbreaking approach did NOT conform to the conventional established structures of academic disciplines in Germany at the time.
Simmel’s style was considered too essayistic and interdisciplinary, that is to say, non-academic or lacking systematic rigor for conservative, traditional sociological or philosophical disciplines. Also, Simmel’s unique sociology was viewed as a destructive or marginal discipline compared to established fields.
Anti-Semitism and Discrimination
While personally, Georg Simmel is one of my most admired philosophers, there are so many Jewish philosophers among them, such as Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Henri Bergson,...
But I do NOT believe that’s a mere coincidence, but rather, ultimately, it would be evidence that Jewish people are excellent not only in business.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by a shift in Germany from religious to racial, ideological anti-Semitism.
Due to Jewish descent, Simmel faced significant institutional prejudice and discrimination, excluded from the core, conservative academic elite in the German academic society of that era.
Despite being baptized as a Protestant, this predicament contributed to cultivating Simmel's sense of an outsider. Having said that, it was a common experience for Jewish intellectuals in then Germany.
Simmel’s famous essay "Exkurs über den Fremden" (1908) (The Stranger) can be read as a reflection of his own complex position as an intellectual insider-outsider in German society.
Simmel’s analysis of abstract intellectuality and money in his sociological works tackled the concepts that anti-Semitic discourse used to marginalize Jews as nomadic or un-German stereotypes, attempting to turn these anti-Semitic concepts into a philosophy of modern individuality.
In this connection, Simmel’s contemporary prominent Jewish intellectuals, who encountered the same anti-Semitic discrimination, are social psychologist Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), philosopher and Simmel's student Martin Buber (1878–1965), Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), sociologist Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903), and so on…
Georg Simmel warned that the process of alienation toward the tragedy of culture is self-destructive and inherent to modernity. The objective cultural tools initially designed to enhance our life and happiness ironically end up dictating and limiting it.
Simmel's personal real-life alienation ran parallel to his intellectual focus on the tragedy of culture. Simmel’s modern, philosophical life became increasingly impersonal and detached from the individual Georg Simmel.
In addition, Simmel’s concept, the tragedy of culture, and his student György Lukács (1885–1971)’s theory of reification are both foundational and interrelated concepts in critical theory to analyze the alienation and loss of human agency within modern capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic societies.
(sponsored by Amazon)
Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedy film “Modern Times” (1936) satirically depicts the Tragedy of Culture as Little Tramp’s struggling in a rapidly growing industrial society with humor and pathos. It's so funny even after watching it repeatedly!
Further reading (sponsored by Amazon):
● Georg Simmel (2011, originally published in 1900). “The Philosophy of Money” (Routledge Classics). 596 pages. Routledge.
(sponsored by Amazon)
In “The Philosophy of Money,” Georg Simmel puts money on the couch. In “The Philosophy of Money,” Simmel provides us with a classic analysis of the social, psychological, and philosophical aspects of the money economy, full of brilliant insights into the forms that social relationships take. Simmel analyzes the relationships of money to exchange, human personality, the position of women, and individual freedom! As an immense and profound piece of work, “The Philosophy of Money” demands to be read today and for years to come as a stunning account of the meaning, use, and culture of money!
Table of Contents
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Introduction to the Translation
Preface
Analytical Part
1: Value and Money
2: The Value of Money as a Substance
3: Money in the Sequence of Purposes
Synthetic Part
4: Individual Freedom
5: The Money Equivalent of Personal Values
6: The Style of Life
Afterword: The Constitution of the Text
Name Index
