Simmel defined modernity as psychologism reacting to acceleration with blasé indifference and stimulus addiction

Evidence

Simmel thus follows Baudelaire in defining modernity as an experience of the transitory and the fleeting and he explains it in terms of functional differentiation and especially the effects of money. Yet for him modernization also primarily means a transformation of individual personality structures. These react to the social demands of an accelerated modernity with a change in their inventory of feelings (Gefühlshaushaltes), their attitudes (Gemütsstruktur), their patterns of stimulation (Nervenlebens), and the relationship between feeling and intellect. This is the basis of Simmel’s rather idiosyncratic-sounding definition of the essence of modernity in his essay on the art of Auguste Rodin, where he writes: “The essence of modernity in general is psychologism, experiencing and interpreting the world in accordance with our interior reactions and, in fact, as an interior world, dissolving fixed contents in the fluid element of the soul, which is purified of everything substantial and whose forms are only forms of movement.” Simmel thus conceives of the modernization process as a shifting of the balance between the universal principles of movement and inertia in favor of the former, and thus also as the dissolution of fixed rhythms in favor of permanent change. … Individuals react to this shift with, on the one hand, a blasé attitude and indifference toward the contents of the world, and, on the other, in a kind of dialectical inversion, with an addiction to ever newer and more extreme experiences and arousing stimuli: in short, with all the symptoms of the “neurasthenia” that very much characterized Simmel’s own personality, according to his contemporaries Ernst Troeltsch and S. P. Altmann. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the blasé attitude and money dynamics already familiar from direct Simmel reading (The Philosophy of Money); also foreshadows Rosa’s own thesis about acceleration producing a changed relationship to experience. — connects to: Simmel defined modern life by accelerated tempo across city, intellect, and fashion. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 205; Cultural modernity as a whole is a reaction to accelerated time — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 154; Baudelaire defined modernity as half transient and half eternal — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 105 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural modernity as a whole is a reaction to accelerated time #corroborates (0.82) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 154
• Simmel reads human experience as creative, fragmented, conflictual, and individualistic #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 86
• Modernity’s defining trait was living time as progress toward improvement #complicates (0.73) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1294
• Baudelaire defined modernity as half transient and half eternal #qualifies (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 105