Modern life imposes new constraints even as it claims to expand choice

Evidence

Kant’s answer provides release from one of the two oppressions which threaten modern man, nature and history. Both appear to stifle the free, self-possessed personality: the former, because its mechanicism subjects the soul to the same blind forces as the falling stone and the sprouting stalk; the latter, because it makes of the soul a mere point of intersection of social threads spinning through history and reduces its whole creativity to a matter of administering the inheritance of the race. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 163 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: In the commodity age, natural need has been replaced by artificial stimuli — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 197; Modern life became an open-ended discovery rather than a preordained enactment — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 104; Decisions are historically conditioned, so past choices constrain current ones — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence: Opening…, 11 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Both nature’s mechanism and history’s determinism oppress the modern self #complicates (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 163