Georg Simmel’s Critical Thought Of Urban Culture And Its Contemporary Value Research

In the middle and late 19 th century,with the vicious expansion of European capitalist economy and the intensification of social contradictions,economic and political problems gradually penetrated into the cultural field,resulting in a deep crisis in urban culture.As a foreign Marxist,Simmel inherited Kant’s transcendental philosophical thought,Schopenhauer’s philosophy of life and Marx’s critical spirit and the beneficial elements of problem consciousness,and put Marxist dialectical thinking and critical methods Applied to the criticism of urban cultural issues,a unique idea of urban cultural criticism has been constructed.On the whole,Simmel’s critical thought of urban culture is a theoretical system with strict logic and interlocking links.Under the background of a specific era,Simmel intensely criticized the problems existing in capitalist urban culture in response to real problems.On this basis,he analyzed the causes of urban cultural problems and sought solutions to these problems.A relatively systematic criticism of urban culture has been formed.First of all,Simmel,starting from the real problems of urban culture and aiming to pay attention to the living conditions of the main body of the city,diagnosed three major problems in urban culture through a critical examination of capitalist urban culture,namely “cultural tragedy”dilemma,technological rational expansion,and individual spiritual alienation.He believes that the main body of urban culture is people,and the urban cultural predicament caused by these cultural problems is essentially the life predicament of the urban subject.Secondly,in response to the problems in urban culture,Simmel analyzes the reasons at different levels and from multiple perspectives.First,the over-refinement of the division of labor leads to the separation of subject and object and the alienation of the relationship between subjects,which is the direct cause of urban cultural problems;Second,currency has evolved from a material entity to a symbolic form,and has risen from a means to an absolute purpose,which has a direct and close impact on the subject’s values,psychological states,emotional characteristics,etc.This is the cause of urban cultural problems.the immediate cause;Third,Simmel believes that life is creative and transcendental,the essence of life lies in transcending the constraints of form,but life can only express itself by relying on form,and the eternal conflict between life and form is the internal cause of urban cultural problems.Finally,based on the philosophy of life and aesthetic art,Simmel proposed three possible solutions: one is to seek the return of subjectivity in daily life such as adventure and tourism,and the other is to realize the uniqueness and integrity of individual life.Spiritual transcendence,the third is to reconstruct the aesthetics of the main body of the city from fashion and art.In a word,Simmel’s critical thinking on urban culture fully embodies the Marxist critical logic of "deconstruction-construction",but as a product of the times,it inevitably has ideological limitations,which are embodied in the incompleteness of the theoretical level and the Practical strategies are utopian.And China’s urban culture construction,only on the basis of its own reality,and only by dialectically viewing and selectively drawing on Simmel’s urban culture critical thought,can it provide more constructive realistic enlightenment for promoting the development of my country’s urban culture.