Codes and culture. Simmel’s paralogism

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century Georg Simmel had predicted that the development of technology would become so important as to change not only the living conditions of humanity but to overwhelm its own level of culture and intellectuality of the population. Subjectivity would have been incorporated into objects while the human one would have decayed and become barred. In a certain sense it is, even if on another plane, what the advances of artificial intelligence foresee. Apart from the sociological findings, the defense of subjectivity and of human culture has been focused and fully justified with the arguments put forward by Martin Heidegger.