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Georg Simmel And Morality

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Both Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin acknowledged the fact that the spirit of modernity is in the form of a ‘seductive narrative of infinite progress and ceaseless growth’ in which human agency and collective will are abandoned. People are denounced to participate in the endless cycle of production and consumption of goods and services. Henceforth, they agree that the dialectics of civilization center on material culture and the built environment particularly, the capitalist society. In relation to this setting, is the impact on human psychology, bodies and social interactions. For Simmel, the constant urgency and commotion of life in the midst of capitalism result to a person’s adaptation to an attitude of emotional distance and self-interestedness. Benjamin coincides with this, nonetheless he put much focus on how the capitalism in the society amends the human psyche and corporeal habitus. For him, people’s actions become increasingly ‘massified’ that leads to ‘amorphous crowd of passer-by’, in lieu of a true community. Albeit, …show more content…

He defines it as a social form which combines ‘the attraction of differentiation and change with that of similarity and conformity’ which is often located within social classes that express social differences. Additionally, the fast-phasing dispersion of this phenomena constitutes the illusion that fashion itself is an independent movement. “It becomes less dependent upon the individual and the individual becomes less dependent upon fashion. Both develop like separate evolutionary worlds.” Fashion’s influence does not only stops on the notion that it is part of the prehistory of modernity and the objectification of modern culture, which exhibits commodity production. Rather, for Simmel, it also pertains to the ‘dualistic nature’ of mankind, ‘the psychological tendency towards imitation’, the reflection of society’s history, and others. In the abstract of his essay entitled Fashion, he

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