Simmel

“The world can best
be understood in terms
of conflicts and contrasts
between opposed categories.”
--- Georg Simmel

Simmel’s work had four levels of concern, the first are his assumptions on the psychological components of social life. The second is his interest in the sociological components of interpersonal relationships. The third, is his work on the structureof, and changes in, the social and cultural spirit of his time (Ritzer, 266). And the fourth being the metaphysical. Simmel adopted the principle of emergence which is the idea that higher levels emerge out of the lower levels, “If society is to be an autonomous object of an independent science, then it can only be so through the fact that, out of the sum of the individual elements that constituteit, a new entity emerges; otherwise all problems of social science would only be those of individual psychology (Ritzer, 266).” Simmels way of explaining interrelationships is described as dialectical thinking because it rejects the idea that there are hard and fast dividing lines between social phenomena. He believed that everything interacts in a way with something else and he used thismethodology to analyze his surroundings as well as the social and cultural components of his time.
One of Simmel’s most influential works was that of The Philosophy of Money where he discusses the broad issue of value and illustrates money as a specific form of such value. In his work, Simmel describes money as the purest form of exchange by performing the function of creating distance between peopleand objects and then providing the means to overcome that distance (Ritzer, 280). He argues that money as a form of exchange is one of the root causes of the alienation of people in a modern reified social structure. This means that as the objective culture grows, through money, individuals become less powerful. By alienation I believe Simmel is referring to an individuals freedom, where anindividual is so captivated by the increasingly coercive objective culture that they are alone and enslaved. An example of this is online banking, money contributes to this intellectual tool but as this tool expands the individuals subjective culture declines. A dependency is created and the individual is slowly being alienated, disappearing into the cracks of objective culture.
In his work, Simmelmentions that we can “buy” beauty, truth and intelligence. Any individual can alter their appearance, persuade media, bribe another individual or obtain a GED with money. According to Simmel, this induces cynicism; everything has a price. This leads to a blasé attitude where individuals begin to see everything as grey or dull. The way I see it a blasé attitude can be obtained in two ways: Either byan individual acquiring such an excessive amount of wealth they can obtain almost any object in the world therefore being left with nothing to look forward to and everything being nothing more than a price to them, or by an individual settling for less and by having the means to acquire everything they actually care for they too don’t look forward to anything else aside from what they can afford.Another negative effect that money has is the increasingly impersonal relations it fosters among people. The book mentions that rather than dealing with people we deal with positions such as the delivery person and the baker. I see this with my family, every Christmas we make a list of recipients, on the list you will actually see the words “trash men”, “bank teller”, “mail man”, “baker” and“principal.” These are individuals that we interact with on a daily basis yet we have a completely impersonal relationship with them. We don’t know their name, their marital status, whether they have children or not, what their interests are, but because they provide a service for which we value, we reciprocate a relationship with their position. But I believe this works both ways, the mail man, the...