Ruskin and Nietzsche hated the metropolis for its schematized reduction of life
Evidence
It is in the light of this that we can explain the passionate hatred of personalities like Ruskin and Nietzsche for the metropolis—personalities who found the value of life only in unschematized individual expressions which cannot be reduced to exact equivalents and in whom, on that account, there flowed from the same source as did that hatred, the hatred of the money economy and of the intellectualism of existence. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 751
Categorization
- SHARE: For a reader interested in Nietzsche or Ruskin’s aesthetics—their anti-urban stances share a common root in rejecting calculable equivalences.