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 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. 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.
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!
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 blasé {14}
attitude. The blasé 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 blasé. A life in boundless pursuit
of pleasure makes one blasé 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 blasé
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 blasé attitude is
joined by another source which flows from the money economy. The essence
of the blasé 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 blasé 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 blasé attitude. In the blasé 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 blasé 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
quatorzième. 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
