Georg Simmel and Individual Consciousness Sumblog 9

I personally find Georg Simmel's belief of free will to be one of the more interesting theories that we have discussed so far throughout the year. Georg Simmel unlike many other Social theorists beliefs that individuals have more free will instead of just being products of society and our parents. I happen to agree that on some issues individuals do have free will. For example most of us can dress how we want to, vote for who we want to, listen to the music we want to or go to school for what we want to. While I agree these are all things were free will can occur, I often don't think it does. I believe individuals minds are shaped to follow what is looked at as acceptable and the "in" thing in society and that is how we decide what hair style to have, what music to listen to and what way to dress, etc. I think most people would agree we often like to follow what others are doing with their personal appearance. Not only do I think society shapes our minds, but I think our parents are the main factor in individuals making decisions. We like to follow the things our parents are doing and we look up to them as role models. Some examples in my life of things I follow my parents on is the way I vote, the foods I eat, and the way I talk. In my family I have the free will to eat whatever I want, talk however I want and vote for whoever I want, but I still decide to follow the way my parents do things. It's very easy to see how your parents do things and to want to follow in their footsteps. I believe that Simmel is very relevant with his idea of individual free will because I do think it is prevalent in our society with many issues. Most people would agree that they have the freedom to make choices for themselves and that no one tells them what exactly they have to do. However, many people will tell you they choose to follow a lot of things that their parents believe in or do. Another great example of following your parents lead is parents who own a family business and their children often go to school to eventually take over the family business. I strongly agree that we like to make the choice to follow our parents and that we are not forced to follow them. This is another reason why I think Simmel brings up a great point that free will is very attainable, but are we willing to stray away from our parents beliefs and ideals is the real question. I personally follow my parents on almost everything except for a few things and this is all by choice not because i am a product of them and society. I do however believe that parents and society can be influential and sometimes may make it seem like we are just products of them. When I look at this theory I mainly picture people having the freedom to make choices and choosing to follow the safe route and the only route they really know and that's to follow in their parents footsteps. So because I see free will present in society I tend to partially agree with Simmel, however I don't think we embrace the free will and choose that option like he thought we would.

I wanted to use this quote to illustrate why I think we have the freedom to make choices, but like to follow our parents instead. This shows we are not forced to be products of our parents, we just respect how they live and the decisions they make. We like to watch how they do things and follow their lead.This quote shows that Simmel was right that we have free will. However like I said above we choose to follow our parents over free will and this quote helps show that.