The Philosopher's Chat column offers readers a way to understand the problems we face in society and to help navigate the culture.
The development of modern society is a history of achievements built upon human reason and creativity. Yet, it simultaneously generates self-contradiction by being dominated by the systems and products humans themselves create, thereby causing human self-alienation.
The thinkers who provided the most profound insights into modernity's self-contradiction and the resulting phenomenon of human self-alienation are Karl Marx (1818–1883), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Georg Simmel (1858–1918). All three addressed the problem of humans becoming alienated from their own creations and losing their subjectivity, although their analytical focus and diagnostic logic differed.
Marx argued for ‘economic alienation’ arising from the relationship between labor and capital; Weber for ‘social alienation’ where rationalized institutional systems suppress human autonomy; and Simmel for ‘cultural alienation’ emerging from modern cities and the monetary economy.
Simmel particularly defines the phenomenon of the human subject's disappearance amid cultural expansion as the 'Tragedy of Culture'. For him, culture is not merely art, but the process by which the human subjective spirit creates objective products and achieves self-fulfillment through them. This is because culture itself demonstrates a dialectical development: the subjective energy of the soul acquires an independent, objective form generated in the creative life process, and this object dissolves back into the subjective life process of humanity.
In other words, culture is a process where subject and object interact to mutually enhance value. It first creates ‘objective culture’—such as art, science, technology, and institutions—which are products of the human spirit, and through this, generates ‘subjective culture’ that fosters its own internal growth. Culture develops continuously when these two realms circulate harmoniously.
However, Simmel argues that in modernity, the cycle between these two cultures breaks down and a cultural tragedy occurs because the objective culture—the systems and institutions humans created for efficiency—determines and controls human life. This cultural tragedy arises from an imbalance between the two cultures: the objective culture overwhelms the subjective culture, and humans become dominated by their own creations, rendering the objective culture incapable of enriching individual lives.
Consequently, this tragedy arises from the self-contradiction within the developmental process of culture, where the generative principle of ‘Life’ confronts the fixed principle of ‘Form’ that Life itself has created. Within this tragedy, humans become trapped within the forms generated by Life, experience a loss of meaning, and undergo internal collapse.
However, rather than being an insurmountable fate, the tragedy of culture becomes a valuable opportunity for rebirth as a cultural subject through its recognition. This is because humans can overcome it by fully exercising inner freedom and creatively renewing the meaning of their own lives, even under the overwhelming pressure of objective culture.
Simmel's tragedy of culture carries a positive message: rather than focusing solely on its negative aspects, it reveals that humans can transcend the structural contradictions of modern society through self-reflection and lead their own cultural world as cultural subjects.
