User:Jch02d/sociology

Tragedy Of culture: First defined by George Simmel in 1911 in the first edition of his book Philosophische Kultur. The tragedy of culture is defined as: The condition of modern society that stems from the fact that, over time, objective culture grows exponentially, while individual culture, and the ability to produce it, grows only marginally. Our meager individual capacities cannot keep pace with our cultural products. As a result, we are doomed to having increasingly less understanding of the world we have created and to being increasingly controlled by that world. It is a theory on human culture and how it operates.

Georg Simmel describes culture in terms of Forms: Patterns imposed on the bewildering array of events actions and interactions in the social world both by people in their everyday life, and Types patterns imposed on a wide range of actors by both laypeople and social scientists in order to combine a number of them into a limited number of categories. Jurgen Habermas states that culture refers to both: the objectifications in which is externalized a life broken away from subjectivity, that is, objective spirit - as well as, conversely, the creation of a soul which works upward from nature to culture, that is, the formation of subjective spirit. Simmel believed that culture resided in two distinct forms the subjective culture and the objective culture, humanity should reside in between the two distinct culture. In order to understand this concept more one has to know what George Simmel means by objective and subjective culture. Objective Culture is defined as: The tangible, visible aspects of a culture, including such aspects as the artifacts produced, the foods eaten, the clothing worn. This would mean all technology, food eaten, fashion, anything that is created by a human being. Subjective culture is defined as: The invisible, intangible aspects of a group, including such aspects as attitudes, values, norms of behavior-the things typically kept in people's minds. A persons thought, feelings personality and anything else that is internally created by human beings. Objective culture is brought about because of the increasing division of labor resulting from a switch from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. This switch allows for an improved ability to create the various components of the cultural world. But at the same time, the highly specialized individual loses a sense of the total culture and loses the ability to control it. In George Simmel's mind subjective culture should always retain the upper hand over objective culture. As objective culture grows it becomes more complex and is not easily understood by its creators. The creators are in turn are trapped or at the mercy of the very thing which they have created. Simply put they do not understand nor comprehend their own creation. Simmel's greatest worry was the threat to individual, subjective, culture posed by the growth of objective culture This argument of a tragedy of culture stems from one of George Simmel's earlier works The Philosophy of Money. In this essay Simmel argues that money is not the conscious creation of any political party or entity, however it is an unintended consequence of the evolution of society. As Jurgen Habermas states in his journal George Simmel in Philosophy and Culture; “ Money is of an exemplary nature; it portrays the objectivity of exchange relationships in pure abstraction and yet at the same time it is also the development of a subjectivity that differentiates with respect to both its calculating intellectual powers and its wandering drives”.

George Simmel was a modernist sociologist whose theories largely dealt with society and its internal conflict and workings. Such other theories include the dyad, triad, and the stranger. While the majority of his theories have faded over time the one theorie that seems to stick is his essay on The Philosophy of Money. Simmel has often been linked to another Sociologist of his time, Max Weber. Both Weber and Simmel's work focused on the structure if society and it's inner workings. Weber chose to focus on how human beings rationalize actions and how culture can shape those rationalizations. Weber discusses that there are four types of rationality, formal rationality, practical rationality, theoretical rationality, and substantive rationality each consisting of a different set of rules for obtaining rationality. In pratical rationality, one looks at their options and chooses the fastest way of solving the problems based on ones prior experiences. Theortical Rationality involves trying to understand the world rather than take action in it. Substantive Rationality actions are guided by larger values. Formal rationality involves a complex set of rules and laws that apply to everyone and must be followed by everyone. The closet example of this formal rationality is Webers analysis of bureaucracy. In the most common examples bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects, thus taking away their sense of identity. Bureaucracy is created by humans but after awhile becomes so big and involves so many rules that it's creators are at the mercy of bureaucracy and it's procedures. This is a prime example of Simmels Targedy of culture.