Question

How does urban life affect human freedom according to Weber, Simmel and Spengler?

Answer 1

According to Max Weber- cities are linked to larger processes, e.g. economic or political orientations, instead of city itself being cause of distinguishing qualities of urban life, i.e. different cultural and historical conditions will result in different types of cities, same as with Marx & Engels who argued that human condition of cities was result of economic structure. There are two sociological propositions pertaining to the idea of civilization. These are: ‘civilization is an agricultural phenomenon’; ‘civilization is an urban phenomenon’. Both are equally correct and relevant for comprehension of the concept of city since it is generally considered as the centre of civilization. These statements actually refer to the nature and growth of human civilization. Max Weber himself probably poses this question from that perspective when he appears to maintain that the two ancient civilizations of the Occident are “coastal” (i.e. classical Antiquity of Greece and Rome) while the four ancient civilizations of the Orient are “reverine” (i.e. Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and India). The former are located on the coasts of the Mediterranean sea whereas the latter’s corresponding locations are the valleys of the great rivers of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Huang Ho and the Indus. The development of the coastal civilizations of the West is mainly attributed to the relatively quicker introduction of commerce and trade. On the other hand, prosperity of the river-valley civilizations of the East is primarily facilitated by the easier beginning of agriculture in the fertile land of the river-valleys. But the cities everywhere emerged as the locus of civilization in the ancient period of world history.

According to Georg Simmel- Considered importance of urban experience, i.e. chose to focus on urbanism (life within the city) rather than urbanization (development of urban areas), "The Metropolis and Mental Life" is an essay detailing his views on life in the city, focusing more on social psychology. Unique trait of modern city is intensification of nervous stimuli with which city dweller must cope, from rural setting where rhythm of life and sensory imagery is more slow, habitual and even, to city with constant bombardments of sights, sounds and smells. Individual learns to discriminate, become rational and calculating, develops a blasé attitude – matter-of-fact, a social reserve, a detachment, respond with head rather than heart, don’t care and don’t get involved. Simmel further explained- 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.

According to Oswald Spengler- The Decline of the West is described in the subtitle as a “morphology of history.” History is not the study of a coherent evolution (Spengler contra Hegel); it is a comparative study of cultures. Spengler dismissed with vehemence the traditional periodization of world history in terms of ancient, medieval, and modern. Instead he concentrated on eight separate cultures: those of Egypt, India, Babylon, China, classical antiquity, Islam, the West (Faustian culture), and Mexico. Each one of these “powerful cultures” imprints upon mankind its own form, has its own idea, passions, life, and death (Spengler’s historical relativism). Each one, like a plant, goes through the appointed course of youth, maturity, and decline (Spengler’s determinism). Each “culture,” in Spengler’s terms, produces its “civilization,” the latter representing a late, declining phase of that culture: a civilization is “a conclusion, the thing become succeeding to the thing becoming, rigidity following expansion,” intellect replacing the soul. For the linear view of history Spengler thus substituted a cyclical theory such as had last been elaborated in the West by Vico in the early eighteenth century (though one had been propounded in the nineteenth century by the Russian writer Nikolai I. Danilevskii).

According to this theory, historical events are symbolic of the “metaphysical structure of historical mankind.” There is a “morphological relationship” between diverse expressions of human activity—between differential calculus and the dynastic state of the time of Louis xiv, for instance, or between the ancient polis and Euclidean geometry. Furthermore, Spengler saw “contemporaneity” in phenomena widely separated in time—in the Trojan war and the crusades, in Homer and the song of the Nibelungs, and so forth. Napoleon was not a pupil of Alexander the Great but his alter ego. Altogether, historical data, instead of being subject to the law of cause and effect, follow a compelling “fate.” Spengler called his work grandiloquently a “philosophy of fate.” In effect, while he could hardly pass for a philosopher, he was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding visionaries.