2024年1月12日发(作者：)

adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (Trans.)

The Sociology of Georg

Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp.409-424

The Metropolis and Mental Life

by Georg Simmel

1.

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

{1} 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 to 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

{2} 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

{3}. Such an inquiry must

answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself

in the adjustments to external forces. This will be my task

现代生活中获得的最深刻的个人索赔的问题，维护社会的压倒性力量面前的自主权和他的个性的存在，历史遗产，对外文化和生活的技术。与自然的原始人要工资，他在这个现代的形式存在，其最新转型身体达到战斗。 18世纪后，男子要求释放所有在该州历史债券和宗教，道德和经济学自己。人的本性，本来很好，共同所有，应该不受阻碍地发展。除了更多的自由，19世纪要求的人与他的工作职能专业化，这使得一个人无法比拟的专业化到另一个，他们每个必不可少的最高程度。然而，这种专业化使每个人更直接呼吁所有依赖他人的补充活动。尼采认为由个人最无情的斗争调节个人的充分发展，社会主义在所有出于同样的原因竞争抑制相信。尽管如此，因为它可在所有这些职位相同的基本动机是在工作：以人抗拒被夷为平地下来，佩戴一个社会的科技机制来进行。一个进入现代生活的具体内涵及其产品进入灵魂的文化机构，查询，可以这么说，必须设法解决方程，结构之间建立类似的个人和生活中的超个人的内容了大都市。这项调查是必须回答的个性如何在调整自己适应外部力量的问题。这将是我今天的任务。

today.

2.

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of

individuality consists in the

intensification of nervous

stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted

change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating

creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a

momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting

impressions,

{4} impressions which differ only slightly from

one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual

course and show regular and habitual contrasts-all these use

up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid

crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the

grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing

impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the

metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the

tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social

life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural

life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic

life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating

creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural

life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows

more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in

this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan

psychic life becomes understandable - as over against small

town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional

relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious

layers of the psyche

{5} and grow most readily in the steady

rhythm of uninterrupted habituations. The intellect

{6},

however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher

layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner

forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast

of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and

inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the

more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan

rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type of man-which, of

course, exists in a thousand individual variants - develops

an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and

discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot

him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. In this an

increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative.

作者：个性的都市型心理基础包括在神经刺激的加剧而从外部和内部的刺激迅速，不间断变化的结果。人是一个与众不同的生物。他的心是刺激一时之间的印象，一个是之前的差异。持久的印象，展示其中仅略有不同彼此，展示它采取定期和习惯的过程和定期的和习惯的对比表明，所有这些的使用，可以这么说，少意识比不改变图像的快速拥挤，不连续的锐利在一个单一的一瞥把握，不可预测的onrushing印象。这些是都市创造心理条件。每一次穿越街道的节奏，经济，职业和社会生活的多样性，该市建立了小城镇和参照心灵生活的基础，农村生活的深刻感觉对比。从人付出高昂代价的大都市作为歧视的意识不同的生物量也比农村生活。这里的生活节奏和感觉精神意象流动更慢，更经常，更均匀。正是在这方面的心理生活的大都市复杂的性格变得可以理解了 - 因为在对小城镇生活，更应深刻感受和情绪的关系负责。这些后者则是植根于心灵更无意识层和生长在不间断habituations稳定的节奏最容易。智，然而，在透明的，自觉的，更高层次的心灵轨迹，它是最适应我们的内心力量。为了适应和改变的现象相反，智力并不需要任何冲击和内部动乱，它只有通过这样的动荡是较保守的态度可以容纳的事件都会节奏。因此，人为的，当然，在一个1000人的变种存在 - 发展器官免受电流的威胁和他的外部环境不符，他将他铲除大都市的类型。他与他的反应，而不是他的心头。在这个日益认识承担精神的特权。

Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and

a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The

reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ

which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of

the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve

subjective life against the overwhelming power of

metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many

directions and is integrated with numerous discrete

phenomena.

大都会的生活，因此，基础的高度来认识和都市人的智力优势。对都市现象的反应是转移到该机构是最不敏感，并从人格深度相当遥远。因此，人们看到知性是保留对大城市生活压倒性力量主观生活，知性分行在许多方向进行，并与众多离散现象结合起来。

都市一直是货币经济的座位。在这里，多重性和经济交流提供了一个集中的重要性，交换手段（7）其中农村商业缺乏的也不会允许的。货币经济和智力优势的内在联系。他们分享了，其实在男性和做事，态度，在这种态度下，正式的司法（8）往往是一个轻率的硬度与耦合。复杂的人的智力是漠不关心，一切真正的个性，因为从它的关系和反应的结果，不能用逻辑运算用尽。以同样的方式，个性的现象是不与金钱（9）原则相称。金钱是只关心什么是共同的：它的交换价值要求，它减少了所有质量和个性的问题：多少钱？所有的人之间亲密的情感关系是建立在他们的个性，在人类理性的关系，而忽视的是像一个数字，如1元，这本身是漠不关心的。只有客观衡量成就的利益。因此，大城市的人估计与他是有责任的社会交往与他的商家和客户，他的家庭佣人甚至常常与人。的知性与小圆圈的性质相反这些功能在其中的知识，个性必然不可避免地产生一种行为温暖的音调，一个行为，超出了单纯的服务和回报是平衡的目标。在小群重要的是它的原始条件下生产服务于经济心理学领域的客户订单谁好，使生产者和消费者所熟悉。现代大都市，然而，提供几乎完全由市场生产的，也就是说，对于完全未知买家谁从未亲自进入生产者的视野实际领域。通过这个匿名的每一方的利益获得一残酷物的，factness以及双方智力计算经济利己主义3.

The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.

Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange

gives an importance to the means of exchange

{7} which the

scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money

economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically

connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing

with men and with things; and, in this attitude, a formal

justice

{8} is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness.

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all

genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions

result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical

operations. In the same manner, the individuality of phenomena

is not commensurate with the pecuniary

{9} principle. Money

is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the

exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to

the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations

between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas

in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number, like

an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective

measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan man

reckons with his merchants and customers, his domestic

servants and often even with persons with whom he is obliged

to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality

contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the

inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces

a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere

objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of

the economic psychology of the small group it is of importance

that under primitive conditions production serves the

customer who orders the good, so that the producer and the

consumer are acquainted. The modern metropolis, however, is

supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that

is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter

the producer's actual field of vision. Through this anonymity

the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful

matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating

economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection

because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The

money economy

{10} dominates the metropolis; it has displaced

the last survivals of domestic production and the direct

barter of goods; it minimizes, from day to day, the amount of

work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is

obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy,

which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say

whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the

money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The

metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil

for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely

by citing the dictum of the most eminent English

constitutional historian: throughout the whole course of

English history, London has never acted as England's heart but

often as England's intellect and always as her moneybag!

不用担心，因为个人关系的不确定因素任何偏转。货币经济占主导地位（10）的大都市，它已经取代国内生产的最后残余，货物直接易货贸易，它最大限度地减少，从一天又一天，由客户订购了大量工作。这个问题，是实在的态度，显然如此密切相关的货币经济，这在大都市占据主导地位，没有人可以说是理智的心态，是否促进了货币经济第一，还是后者决定了前者。生命的都市方式当然是这个互惠最肥沃的土壤，这一点我将文件所引用的最杰出的英国宪法历史学家格言只是：整个英国的历史全过程，伦敦从来没有像英格兰的心脏，但行事经常被英格兰的智力和她的钱袋永远！

4.

In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the

surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically

unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The

calculative exactness of practical life which the money

economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural

science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem,

to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only

money economy has filled the days of so many people with

weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a

reduction of qualitative

{11} values to quantitative

{12}

ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision,

a certainty in the definition of identities and differences,

an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been

brought about in the relations of life-elements - just as

externally this precision has been effected by the universal

diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of

metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait.

The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan

usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest

punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would

break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this

necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people

with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their

relations and activities into a highly complex organism. If

all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in

different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life

and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long

time. In addition an apparently mere external factor: long

distances, would make all waiting and broken appointments

result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique

of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual

integration of all activities and mutual relations into a

stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general

conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious

namely, that from each point on the surface of existence -

however closely attached to the surface alone - one may drop

a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most

banal externalities of life finally are connected with the

ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life.

Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life

by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and

are not only most intimately connected with its money economy

and intellectualist character. These traits must also color

the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those

irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which

aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of

receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life

from without. Even though sovereign types of personality

{13},

characterized by irrational impulses, are by no means

impossible in the city, they are nevertheless, opposed to

typical city life. The passionate hatred of men like Ruskin

and Nietzsche for the metropolis is understandable in these

terms. Their natures discovered the value of life alone in the

unschematized existence which cannot be defined with

precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred

of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and of

the intellectualism of modern existence.

5.

The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness

and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into

a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand,

they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is

perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so

unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the

blas?{14} attitude. The blas?attitude results first from the

rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting

stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of

metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem.

Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually alive in

the first place usually are not exactly blas? A life in

boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blas?because it

agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a

long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same

way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their

changes, more harmless impressions force such violent

responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither

that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one

remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new

strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new

sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that

blas? attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows

when compared with children of quieter and less changeable

milieus.

6.

This physiological source of the metropolitan blas?attitude

is joined by another source which flows from the money economy.

The essence of the blas?attitude consists in the blunting of

discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not

perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that

the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the

things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They

appear to the blas?person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no

one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is

the faithful subjective reflection of the completely

internalized money economy. By being the equivalent to all the

manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most

frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative

differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all

its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common

denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core

of things, their individuality, their specific value, and

their incomparability. All things float with equal specific

gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things

lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the

size of the area which they cover. In the individual case this

coloration, or rather discoloration, of things through their

money equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. However,

through the relations of the rich to the objects to be had for

money, perhaps even through the total character which the

mentality of the contemporary public everywhere imparts to

these objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of

objects has become quite considerable. The large cities, the

main seats of the money exchange, bring the purchasability of

things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller

localities. That is why cities are also the genuine locale of

the blas?attitude. In the blas?attitude the concentration of

men and things stimulate the nervous system of the individual

to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through

the mere quantitative intensification of the same

conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its

opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the

blas?attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the

refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of

accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life.

The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at

the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a

devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one's own

personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.

7.

Whereas the subject of this form of existence has to come to

terms with it entirely for himself, his self-preservation in

the face of the large city demands from him a no less negative

behavior of a social nature. This mental attitude of

metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a

formal point of view, as reserve

{15}. If so many inner

reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts

with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where

one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a

positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely

atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.

Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust

which men have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of

metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of

this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who

have been our neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which

in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold

and heartless. Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner

aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more

often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual

strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and

fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused. The

whole inner organization of such an extensive communicative

life rests upon an extremely varied hierarchy of sympathies,

indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well as of the

most permanent nature. The sphere of indifference in this

hierarchy is not as large as might appear on the surface. Our

psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of

somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The

unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression

seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this

indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of

indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be unbearable. From

both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference

and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A

latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical

antagonism effect the distances and aversions without which

this mode of life could not at all be led. The extent and the

mixture of this style of life, the rhythm of its emergence and

disappearance, the forms in which it is satisfied- all these,

with the unifying motives in the narrower sense, form the

inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of life. What

appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as

dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of

socialization.

8.

This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in

turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental

phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the individual a

kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy

whatsoever under other conditions. The metropolis goes back

to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life

as such, to one of the few tendencies for which an

approximately universal formula can be discovered. The

earliest phase of social formations found in historical as

well as in contemporary social structures is this: a

relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring,

strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. However, this

circle is closely coherent and allows its individual members

only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities

and free, self-responsible movements. Political and kinship

groups, parties and religious associations begin in this way.

The self-preservation of very young associations requires the

establishment of strict boundaries and a centripetal unity.

Therefore they cannot allow the individual freedom and unique

inner and outer development. From this stage social

development proceeds at once in two different, yet

corresponding, directions. To the extent to which the group

grows - numerically, spatially, in significance and in content

of life - to the same degree the group's direct, inner unity

loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against

others is softened through mutual relations and connections.

At the same time, the individual gains freedom of movement,

far beyond the first jealous delimitation. The individual also

gains a specific individuality to which the division of labor

in the enlarged group gives both occasion and necessity. The

state and Christianity, guilds and political parties, and

innumerable other groups have developed according to this

formula, however much, of course, the special conditions and

forces of the respective groups have modified the general

scheme. This scheme seems to me distinctly recognizable also

in the evolution of individuality within urban life. The

small-town life in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages set

barriers against movement and relations of the individual

toward the outside, and it set up barriers against individual

independence and differentiation within the individual self.

These barriers were such that under them modern man could not

have breathed. Even today a metropolitan man who is placed in

a small town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind.

The smaller the circle which forms our milieu is, and the more

restricted those relations to others are which dissolve the

boundaries of the individual, the more anxiously the circle

guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook

of the individual, and the more readily a quantitative and

qualitative specialization would break up the framework of the

whole little circle.

9.

The ancient

polis

{16} in this respect seems to have had the

very character of a small town. The constant threat to its

existence at the hands of enemies from near and afar effected

strict coherence in political and military respects, a

supervision of the citizen by the citizen, a jealousy of the

whole against the individual whose particular life was

suppressed to such a degree that he could compensate only by

acting as a despot in his own household. The tremendous

agitation and excitement, the unique colorfulness of Athenian

life, can perhaps be understood in terms of the fact that a

people of incomparably individualized personalities

struggled against the constant inner and outer pressure of a

deindividualizing small town. This produced a tense

atmosphere in which the weaker individuals were suppressed and

those of stronger natures were incited to prove themselves in

the most passionate manner. This is precisely why it was that

there blossomed in Athens what must be called, without

defining it exactly, "the general human character" in the

intellectual development of our species. For we maintain

factual as well as historical validity for the following

connection: the most extensive and the most general contents

and forms of life are most intimately connected with the most

individual ones. They have a preparatory stage in common, that

is, they find their enemy in narrow formations and groupings

the maintenance of which places both of them into a state of

defense against expanse and generality lying without and the

freely moving individuality within. Just as in the feudal age,

the "free" man was the one who stood under the law of the land,

that is, under the law of the largest social orbit, and the

unfree man was the one who derived his right merely from the

narrow circle of a feudal association and was excluded from

the larger social orbit - so today metropolitan man is "free"

in a spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the

pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small-town man. For

the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual

life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly

by the individual in their impact upon his independence than

in the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because the

bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental

distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the

obverse

{17}of this freedom if, under certain circumstances,

one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan

crowd. For here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that

the freedom of man be reflected in his emotional life as

comfort.

10.

It is not only the immediate size of the area and the number

of persons which, because of the universal historical

correlation between the enlargement of the circle and the

personal inner and outer freedom, has made the metropolis the

locale of freedom. It is rather in transcending this visible

expanse that any given city becomes the seat of

cosmopolitanism.{18} The horizon of the city expands in a

manner comparable to the way in which wealth develops; a

certain amount of property increases in a quasi-automatical

way in ever more rapid progression. As soon as a certain limit

has been passed, the economic, personal, and intellectual

relations of the citizenry, the sphere of intellectual

predominance of the city over its hinterland, grow as in

geometrical progression. Every gain in dynamic extension

becomes a step, not for an equal, but for a new and larger

extension. From every thread spinning out of the city, ever

new threads grow as if by themselves, just as within the city

the unearned increment of ground rent, through the mere

increase in communication, brings the owner automatically

increasing profits. At this point, the quantitative aspect of

life is transformed directly into qualitative traits of

character. The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main,

self-contained and autarchic.

{19} For it is the decisive

nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves

into a far-flung national or international area. Weimar is not

an example to the contrary, since its significance was hinged

upon individual personalities and died with them; whereas the

metropolis is indeed characterized by its essential

independence even from the most eminent individual

personalities. This is the counterpart to the independence,

and it is the price the individual pays for the independence,

which he enjoys in the metropolis. The most significant

characteristic of the metropolis is this functional extension

beyond its physical boundaries. And this efficacy reacts in

turn and gives weight, importance, and responsibility to

metropolitan life. Man does not end with the limits of his body

or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather is the

range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating

from him temporally and spatially. In the same way, a city

consists of its total effects which extend beyond its

immediate confines. Only this range is the city's actual

extent in which its existence is expressed. This fact makes

it obvious that individual freedom, the logical and historical

complement of such extension, is not to be understood only in

the negative sense of mere freedom of mobility and elimination

of prejudices and petty philistinism. The essential point is

that the particularity and incomparability, which ultimately

every human being possesses, be somehow expressed in the

working-out of a way of life. That we follow the laws of our

own nature-and this after all is freedom-becomes obvious and

convincing to ourselves and to others only if the expressions

of this nature differ from the expressions of others. Only our

unmistakability proves that our way of life has not been

superimposed by others.

11.

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic

division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena

as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the

quatorzi鑝e. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their

residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct

attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner

party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of

its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive

conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which

through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of

services. At the same time, the concentration of individuals

and their struggle for customers compel the individual to

specialize in a function from which he cannot be readily

displaced by another. It is decisive that city life has

transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an

inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by

nature but by other men. For specialization does not flow only

from the competition for gain but also from the underlying fact

that the seller must always seek to call forth new and

differentiated needs of the lured customer. In order to find

a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a

function which cannot readily be displaced, it is necessary

to specialize in one's services. This process promotes

differentiation, refinement, and the enrichment of the

public's needs, which obviously must lead to growing personal

differences within this public.

12.

All this forms the transition to the individualization of

mental and psychic traits which the city occasions in

proportion to its size. There is a whole series of obvious

causes underlying this process. First, one must meet the

difficulty of asserting his own personality within the

dimensions of metropolitan life. Where the quantitative

increase in importance and the expense of energy reach their

limits, one seizes upon qualitative differentiation in order

somehow to attract the attention of the social circle by

playing upon its sensitivity for differences. Finally, man is

tempted to adopt the most tendentious

{20} peculiarities, that

is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism,

caprice, and preciousness. Now, the meaning of these

extravagances does not at all lie in the contents of such

behavior, but rather in its form of "being different," of

standing out in a striking manner and thereby attracting

attention. For many character types, ultimately the only means

of saving for themselves some modicum of self-esteem and the

sense of filling a position is indirect, through the awareness

of others. In the same sense a seemingly insignificant factor

is operating, the cumulative effects of which are, however,

still noticeable. I refer to the brevity and scarcity of the

inter-human contacts granted to the metropolitan man, as

compared with social intercourse in the small town. The

temptation to appear "to the point," to appear concentrated

and strikingly characteristic, lies much closer to the

individual in brief metropolitan contacts than in an

atmosphere in which frequent and prolonged association

assures the personality of an unambiguous image of himself in

the eyes of the other.

13.

The most profound reason, however, why the metropolis conduces

to the urge for the most individual personal existence - no

matter whether justified and successful - appears to me to be

the following: the development of modern culture is

characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the

"objective spirit"

{21} over the "subjective spirit."

{22}

This is to say, in language as well as in law, in the technique

of production as well as in art, in science as well as in the

objects of the domestic environment, there is embodied a sum

of spirit

{23}. The individual in his intellectual development

follows the growth of this spirit very imperfectly and at an

ever increasing distance. If, for instance, we view the

immense culture which for the last hundred years has been

embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in

comforts, and if we compare all this with the cultural progress

of the individual during the same period-at least in high

status groups - a frightful disproportion in growth between

the two becomes evident. Indeed, at some points we notice a

retrogression in the culture of the individual with reference

to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism. This discrepancy

results essentially from the growing division of labor. For

the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more

one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a

one-sided pursuit only too frequently means dearth to the

personality of the individual. In any case, he can cope less

and less with the overgrowth of objective culture. The

individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less

in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality

of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this

practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous

organization of things and powers which tear from his hands

all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform

them from their subjective form into the form of a purely

objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the

metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows

all personal life. Here in buildings and educational

institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering

technology, in the formations of community life, and in the

visible institutions of the state, is offered such an

overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized

spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain

itself under its impact. On the one hand, life is made

infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations,

interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it

from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and

one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand,

however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal

contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine

personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in

the individual's summoning the utmost in uniqueness and

particularization, in order to preserve his most personal

core. He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to

remain audible even to himself. The atrophy

{24} of individual

culture through the hypertrophy

{25} of objective culture is

one reason for the bitter hatred which the preachers of the

most extreme individualism, above all Nietzsche, harbor

against the metropolis. But it is, indeed, also a reason why

these preachers are so passionately loved in the metropolis

and why they appear to the metropolitan man as the prophets

and saviors of his most unsatisfied yearnings.

14.

If one asks for the historical position of the two forms of

individualism which are nourished by the quantitative

relation of the metropolis, namely, individual independence

and the elaboration of individuality itself, then the

metropolis assumes an entirely new rank order in the world

history of the spirit. The eighteenth century found the

individual in oppressive bonds which had become

meaningless-bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and

religious character. They were restraints which, so to speak,

forced upon man an unnatural form and outmoded, unjust

inequalities. In this situation the cry for liberty and

equality arose, the belief in the individual's full freedom

of movement in all social and intellectual relationships.

Freedom would at once permit the noble substance common to all

to come to the fore, a substance which nature had deposited

in every man and which society and history had only deformed.

Besides this eighteenth-century ideal of liberalism, in the

nineteenth century, through Goethe and Romanticism, on the one

hand, and through the economic division of labor, on the other

hand, another ideal arose: individuals liberated from

historical bonds now wished to distinguish themselves from one

another. The carrier of man's values is no longer the "general

human being" in every individual, but rather man's qualitative

uniqueness and irreplaceability. The external and internal

history of our time takes its course within the struggle and

in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining

the individual's role in the whole of society. It is the

function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this

struggle and its reconciliation. For the metropolis presents

the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the

opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both

these ways of allocating roles to men. Therewith these

conditions gain a unique place, pregnant with inestimable

meanings for the development of psychic existence. The

metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical

formations in which opposing streams which enclose life

unfold, as well as join one another with equal right. However,

in this process the currents of life, whether their individual

phenomena touch us sympathetically or antipathetically,

entirely transcend the sphere for which the judge's attitude

is appropriate. Since such forces of life have grown into the

roots and into the crown of the whole of the historical life

in which we, in our fleeting existence, as a cell, belong only

as a part, it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon,

but only to understand.

ENDNOTES

1 functional specialization is the division of labor, or work,

into separate tasks, each of which contributes to the total

result (like an anaesthesiologist, surgeon, surgical nurse,

etc. participating in an operation); the contribution of each

specialized task to the total result is its function

2 what gives something meaning

3 super-individual contents of life are what the individuals

in a society share; the term includes culture (for example,

money, which is the same thing for all of those who exchange

it and exchange for it)

4 sense data: what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted

and felt

5 the entire conscious life of an individual; its "highest

level" is the intellect; its "lowest level" is mute feeling

6 the part of the psyche (mind) that thinks things out and

calculates the causes and consequences of action

7 means of exchange are the ways things (goods and services)

are transferred from one individual to another; eg., by money,

by barter, or by custom (eg. birthday gifts)

8 formal justice means that who gets what is strictly

determined by rules that pay no attention to individual

differences

9 having to do with money

10 in the money economy, things and services are produced for

money and acquired by paying money for them (as opposed to

barter and common sharing)

11 expressed in non-numerical characteristics - eg., color,

emotion

12 expressed in numbers

13 sovereign types of personality are personalities that will

not change or compromise their distinctive attitudes,

behaviors and desires

14 unresponsiveness to stimulation; refusal or inability to

be emotionally moved by or involved in people and things

15 holding back from responding fully to other people

16 the unit of ancient Greek society; the city state (Chicago,

without the U.S. or Illinois, ruling itself completely)

17 the other side of the story

18 the attitude that nothing human is foreign to me; that the

whole realm of culture, wherever it originates, is open to me

- I draw no boundaries around parts of culture that make those

parts belong only to separate groups (eg., "Italian culture

is only for Italians")

19 self-sufficient

20 imposing an agenda, imposing one's will

21 objective culture - the collection of rules, tools, symbols

and products created by human beings

22 subjective culture - what individuals have been able to

absorb and integrate into themselves from objective culture

23 spirit is mind or consciousness, and the results of

conscious activity (culture) (for example, composing music

and the music that has been composed are types or modes of

spirit)

24 wasting away

25 over-development