The Anatomy of Indifference

In his 1903 essay “Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel writes that “by establishing itself as the common denominator of all values, money, with its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the most terrible leveler, irretrievably hollowing out the core of things, their particularity, their specific value, their incomparability.” To this indifference of money corresponds the modern blasé attitude, which he describes as “the true subjective reflex of a fully penetrating money economy” and as “the blunting of the differences between things.” Building on this diagnosis, the dissertation develops the concept of indifference in two ways: in relation to money in its logical dimension, and as expressed in the blasé attitude in its affective dimension. With this objective in view, it engages with selected writings by Simmel, ranging from his 1890 work On Social Differentiation: Sociological and Psychological Investigations, through his 1900 magnum opus The Philosophy of Money, and culminating in his final 1918 work on the View of Life, published only a few months before his death.

The theory of indifference that Simmel formulates is already latent in German philosophy as well as in Marxist thought, grounded in the dialectic between two distinct German terms for indifference: Indifferenz and Gleichgültigkeit. Indifferenz, on the one hand, stems from the Latinate form of the ancient Greek word adiaphora (ἀδιάφορα) and signifies the negation or neutralization of the duality of difference. Gleichgültigkeit, on the other hand, no longer denotes the negation of difference but rather its absolute absence: the equivalence or equal validity of the same. Simmel does not only show how money and technology historically contribute to the passage from Indifferenz to Gleichgültikeit by tending to mediate all aspects of everyday life but also theorizes the subjective effects of this process on the individual in the condition of the blasé attitude. Both the transition from Indifferenz to Gleichgültigkeit and the movement from overstimulation to the blasé attitude are driven by the scaling up inherent in the mechanization and the globalization of the labor process.

Simmel thus illuminates the economic and technological bases of the phenomenon of indifference and ties them to the formation of an indifferent individual, whose world view is depleted of values and meaning. He understands indifference as an economic—and thus societal and objective—as well as an individual and subjective phenomenon. In light of the contemporary accelerated processes of mediation brought about by the increased use of digital technologies over the past two decades and the growing interest in their desensitizing and immobilizing effects—manifest in conditions such as burnout—Simmel’s theory provides a powerful framework for critically reassessing contemporary conditions.

Fig. above: Visualization of the magnetic field of a bar magnet using iron filings, source: Wikimedia Commons, license: CC BY-SA 3.0