No More Learning

The middle class can expand upward or downward, but the nobility repulses both. Even if the nobility tends to move its boundaries upward more readily than downward, for obvious reasons there are enough historical examples where it nevertheless also has positioned itself in opposition to the ruler as quite self-sufficient, enclosed, and centered on its own interests. It has thus brought about a position independent from both sides in a twofold sense: It derived itself like a wedge between the ruler and a large portion of the population, paralyzed the action of the former for the interests of the latter (as often at the time of the peasants' hereditary subservience and frequently during the feudal governments), but also has exercised a unifying effect, a mediating representation of the one to the other (especially so in England). In monar- chical countries where the setting of the two boundaries is not clear-cut, the formation of a nobility also remains rudimentary. Thus a real nobility never developed in Turkey. This is due on the one hand to the Islamic perspective that allows the whole people to feel like an aristocracy, as something select compared to the unbelievers; on the other hand, because the absolute grandeur of the Sultan that was not to be mediated through anything did not allow to come into existence an authority that would stand closer to him in principle and in its own right than any other one. The fact that in Russia there is no aristocracy as a cohesive stratum but only isolated aristocrats who occasionally form groups--to be discussed later in more detail--results similarly from the absolutist position of the czar, but also because of the fact that the subject population forms no such practically united stratum as to provoke an asso- ciation that would position itself above it. Conversely, the two-fold boundary of the nobility--which is still also a two-fold relationship--will nevertheless become diverse in lands having a developed stratum and richer relationships of strata, mixed in various ways in syntheses and antitheses--which must push the nobility from its actual position, though a new significance may develop for them. The life motives that Napoleon I imputed to the group that he created as his new nobility shows this to the point of caricature. Of this intermediary caste8 he is reported to have said to the democrats, it is thoroughly demo-
7 Of course, the second form applies only to the nobility in monarchical states; but in the context of this chapter, I am discussing only that, not the nobility of a govern- ing aristocracy as such.
8 Simmel uses the French: caste intrme? diaire--ed.
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cratic because it is open at any time to anyone without hereditary prejudice; to the great lords: it will support the throne; to the moderate monarchists: it will counter any absolute regime because it will become a power in the state itself; to the Jacobins: the old nobility will actually be completely destroyed by it for the first time; to the old nobility: once it is decorated thus with new dignities, your old ones will be revived in them. So here the double position of the nobility was inflated into an ambiguity, which reveals precisely the specific duality as right and essential for it alone.
The two-front position of the nobility, which rests precisely on its self-con- fidence and being for itself (to be treated later in more detail), is mirrored again in its distinctive, more inwardly directed duality. It originates from the personages who always, for whatever reasons, are better off than others; but once it exists, personages who are already better off thus have it retroactively, as it were, because they belong to it. There is no need for examples of the 'prerogatives' of the nobility. But there probably is, for the other side of its position, its limitations and disadvantages. Around the year 1300 there was an extensive democratic movement in Florence, in the course of which quite specific, clear restrictions and burdens were imposed on the nobles, so that at the time one could be made a noble as a penalty. The original precedence of the nobility was extended, as it were, with a negative sign: The exceptional position of the nobility would remain as already existing, just that instead of the special advantages that it otherwise owed to this position, it found the content of that position in a very particular sacrifice and restriction. Something similar is found in a regulation in the eighteenth century in the very democratic Thurgau Canton in Switzerland. It was a matter at the time of eliminating all stratum-specific prerogatives, and the rule was subsequently accepted in the constitution that whoever wished to occupy a public office had to first renounce any nobility. The penalty, so to speak, thus weighed on the nobility, not to be able to hold public office. That was the limitation that was imposed on it, the counterbalance against the social prerogative. Such disadvantages of the nobles are expressed most characteristically if their criminal exemptions were turned into the reverse. While countless times the crime of the noble was punished more lightly than that of the common person, we nevertheless also encounter phenomena as the following. In medieval Dortmund, there was an extraordinarily distinguished guild, called the Reinoldsgilde, which was always called the Major Gilda. If any of its members committed a crime against the body and life of any other member, he had to pay an extra fine to the council in addition to the usual fine that anyone generally faced for that offense. An ordinance of the city law of Valenciennes from the twelfth century goes even further. It sets a certain fixed penalty for a theft committed by a page, apprentice, or citizen. But if a knight steals, the matter is quite different. A noble does not actually steal, but he robs; stealing does not fall within his competence, so to speak. If he appropriates something by injustice, it is pre- sumed that it occurred by force, as robbery--and because it becomes robbery under that law, it is punished more severely than theft! The noble position of the knight thus prevents him from suffering the milder penalty. He stands on a height from the outset, where one can only sin more fundamentally, where
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one cannot so much as commit so petty a sin such as theft that is settled with a lower penalty. Rights and burdens exist for the Brahmanic priestly aristocracy in a subtler way, but perhaps with the most radical tension. Perhaps there was never a hierarchy that dominated as unconditionally and possessed such fantastic prerogatives as these. But then one examines the life of the Brahman who was provided with this unheard of power and against whose word there was no appeal at all, who appeared as the only authoritative person in the whole population so that even the king was nothing but the subject of the priest--it was a so unbearably hard existence, of one enlaced in forms and formula, self-chastisements and limitations, that there would probably have been remarkably few Europeans who would have wanted to obtain the unheard of rights of the Brahman priest at this price. He was the most powerful but also the least free person in India. But maybe--as according to Giordano Bruno, necessity is of inferior value to God, and freedom of inferior value to a human being--even freedom seemed contemptible to him since it would have meant that every element of life would be something of equal value. It may be of equal value, whether the rabble did this or that; for a person of the highest nobility every moment must be arranged by a law because every moment is completely important. The phenomena of this type are summarized in noblesse oblige. All such difficulties or subtractions from the advantages of the position of the nobility in reality only fully signify its prominence and exclusivity. Only in allowing the masses of the many to do what is forbidden to the nobility is there the deepest contempt and indifference toward the masses. It lies in the fact that they are permitted many things that the nobility is forbidden to do: The masses are not considered to be worthy of the more stringent regulations. The non-noble may, if desired, make the same renunciations, but that does not belong to their social position; it is an irrelevant private matter. But for the noble it is a social duty, or more correctly: It is the prerogative of one's social stratum not to be allowed to do many things--perhaps the prohibition against commerce of is of that type, which runs through the whole history of the nobility from the ancient Egyptians onward. If the nobility has emphasized that Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi,9 in its principle there is still also the reverse, Quod licet bovi non licet Jovi. 10 If the sociological form of the nobility is built at first on its clear group demarcation, which involves the whole being of person- hood--so that all individual differences are only the symbol of an absolutely self-sufficient and closed kind of being--so this differentiation from the entire non-nobility will specify fully that the nobility may do what others may not, and what it may not do the others may.
Obviously the collective life of a group generated the nobility's particular structure from the inner conditions of its interaction, which reveals its formal character through the similarity of essential traits among endless differences of these groups in their otherwise formal and material characteristics. The
9 Latin: What is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox--ed.
10 Latin: What is permitted to an ox is not permitted to Jove--ed.
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nobility in ancient Rome or in the Norman Empire, among the Indians or in the ancien re? gime possesses a correspondence of social traits within all the uniqueness of their life contents; and these also appear in a more rudimentary, unsettled, and passing form in any smaller groupings in which a fraction is gathered and set off as 'the aristocracy,' be it in large family groups, among workers, or within the clergy. For the nobility in the narrower sense, this com- monality is illustrated with the observation that "Nobles become acquainted better in an evening than commoners do in a month. " That obviously depends on the common conditions of existence being extended here very widely in personal conditions and the natural presupposition of relationships that are brought with them. In interests, world view, personal awareness, feeling for the position where they stand within the social order--in all that, the aristocrats obviously agree so much, and the fact that they agree in them is so known and obvious to them that they can come to personal matters much more quickly than others who must first assure themselves what basis they have in com- mon. In order to "become acquainted with one another," i. e. , to reveal their individualities to one another, the nobles do not need so many preliminaries as those who have to first look for the a priori from which the particulars of thinking, interests, or natures can be presented.
This homogeneity of the sociological form appears to be important in a series of historical phenomena. The strange fact has been noted that many of the families of the high nobility in the separate countries of Europe are of foreign birth. In England the Fitzgerald family and the Herzogs of Leicester originate from Florence, the Herzogs of Portland from Holland; in France the Broglie family from Piedmont, the Herzogs of Des Car from Perugia, the Luynes from Arezzo; in Austria the Clary from Florence; in Prussia the Lynar from Faenza; in Poland the Poniatowski family from Bologna; in Italy the Rocca from Croatia, the Ruspoli from Scotland, the Torlonia from France, etc. Precisely because of its bond to the ownership of land and because of its traditional nationalism, with which its conservative world view tends to be bound up, the nobility seems to be especially little suited for such transplantations. The factors making them alike must be all the more effective, which suggest such a glimmering of the sort within it, which has been called the international republic of the nobles. This is enhanced through particular associations of the national nobility. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, the German nobility had very little connections with one another. Most nobles cared for their interests within the narrower circles of their places of residence or else their narrowest homelands. 11 But as the German nobles of the different regions met together during the war against Napoleon, for example, a contact among them produced what led to the quite unique structure, as it was called the Adelskette (Nobility Chain). The Adelskette was a half-secret association that probably came to be at the time of the Congress of Vienna. The nobility
11 Simmel appears to have in mind the small countries that at the beginning of the nineteenth century had not yet formed a united Germany--ed.
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felt that since the French Revolution its role was in decline in Germany too, particularly through the emancipation of the peasants, and so sought some- how to create a common structure in order to restore its lost importance by taking advantage of the solidarity that existed among the whole nobility. This Adelskette expressly emphasized in its charter that everything political should remain foreign to it. If this might have contained a certain deception or self- deception, it nevertheless brings to expression here the essential thing, i. e. , the nobility have in common what is common to all, purely because they are the nobility, as opposed to the sameness of their political and geographical boundaries. The similarity of purely material interests would not have been big enough to bring about this inter-German association of the nobility if the deeper bond in the form of nobility as such--the interpretation of which is still to be made--had not been effective. Finally a last example: The great importance of the nobility in Austria and the considerable prerogatives people have always granted it there goes back to the fact that, in the extraordinarily heterogeneous and divergent components of the Austrian monarchy, the nobil- ity was still a continually uniform and qualitatively common element, and thus greatly served the unity of the whole. The similar formal position of the nobility in the very different parts of this assemblage of countries enabled it to be a collective Austrian aristocracy even if there is no collective Austrian nation. The unity that it had by virtue of its every similar social position enabled it to serve as the glue for uniting the whole.
However, everything considered up to now is a more or less superficial phe- nomenon that is based on the inner social structure of the nobility, but it still does not identify it. The sociological analysis of the nobility now centers around the general social content of the life of this particular group that possesses a wholly unique relationship to the individual being of its members. Here the individual is not only included in a union of individuals existing before him, contemporaneous with him, and after him, who are bound together following a formula in effect nowhere else; but what characterizes it is that the best and most valuable of this whole rank benefits every single member. It was often emphasized in this inquiry that the collective level of a group, the worth of all that which is really common, lies very close to the level of the one standing lowest in it; for as a rule someone with a high standing can sink to that of the lower, but the lower one cannot rise to that of the higher. Thus what should be common to them will be on the whole what the lower ones possess--as, for example, if a hundred people would march at the same pace, the pace that is kept is that of the person whose ability to march is the most limited. Now with the nobility the assumption is the reverse. Every personage in a noble group (be it in the narrow sense, the noble family, or in the wider sense of the noble of a land or epoch) has a share according to his worth in the fame that precisely the most outstanding members of this group have earned; such a personage joins the heritage of the stratum, as it were, sub beneficio inventarii;12
12 Latin: under the generosity of the inventory--ed.
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the positive values directly accumulated here in merits, precedence, and honors stream down on the individual in a direct way other than happens in any other group. This is the prejudice that the other strata allows to benefit the nobility that it cultivates among its own, which is ultimately the presupposition of the self-awareness, so to speak, for each individual member and forms as strong an individual foundation for it as a social one for the totality of the social stratum. The nobility has a unique tenacity situated in its social structure in the conserving of its 'objective spirit,' which the productivity of individuals crystallized in tradition, fixed form, work outcomes, etc. Thus in individual families what comprises their merit, glory, and value is what streams together, so to speak, into the general position of the 'nobility,' which is to be nevertheless distinguished in this respect from its purely external power and property. This even appears in an actual inverse formation. It was said of the organization of ancient nations that very frequently a nobility came into existence by the leader of the gens always being selected in the traditional manner from the same lineage. This lineage was thus not the one favored from the outset, but it would become favored only by its being expected that it would always bring forth a person qualified for the position of leader. Consequently while the whole family turns into a nobility, it discounted the service and merit that any one member of it might acquire sometime and which, reflected back, as it were, from the future, might procure the ennobling substance for the whole lineage. It is an informative metaphor when one speaks of the 'noble metals,' of the 'nobility' of gold and silver. This aristocracy of the metal exists, so it seems to me, first in its relative indestructibility: It is preserved forever because of its value, and it only changes the shape in its being continually recast, while its capital value is relatively unchangeable. A similar idea is the basis for the feeling of nobility and for the nobility: as if its individual members were only, so to speak, nothing but different castings, nothing but different forms of an enduring substance of value that is preserved through the whole series of being inherited. Hence the relationship that these individuals have to the historical group leading up to them gains a completely special accent. It is, so to speak, an immortality of the value that the nobility claims for itself and seeks to realize its sociological conditions. The reason for the fact that no aristocracy formed as a closed social stratum in Russia, up to Czar Theodore II,13 the predecessor of Peter the Great is this: The honors and dignities of each person depended exclusively on the 'service,' the official activity, from which a classification for the family derived. The unique principle prevailed, that nobody should serve under a superior who had himself, in his turn, served under the father of the candidate; in order to establish the possible rights and positions of each person according to this principle, special registers were consulted. Continual conflicts over facts and rights among the families coming into consideration were the result of this, open and hidden competitions and rivalries. Therefore
13 Czar Theodore II reigned from 1676 to 1682. The immediate predecessor to Peter the Great was Czar Ivan V, 1682-1689--ed.
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the formation of a centripetal social stratum, the consolidation of individual forces and preferences into that common unified and persisting capital, around which the whole social structure of the nobility grows, was stifled.
This structure, as already described so far, lets one recognize without fur- ther ado why the nobility must attach importance to equality. It was already claimed about the ancient clan government that the nobles of different clans belonged to a single stratum, and that while the clan as such is exogamous as a rule (thus it permits no marriage among its members), that stratum always had the inclination to be endogamous, i. e. marrying only within itself. If the nobility presupposes, as it were, a strong foundation, with which each member in it is equipped and which must be passed on to later generations undiminished, each member must also emerge from only this circle; no circle in which privileges are not hereditary, which created that foundation, should be blended into it. Only thus can one be sure by and large that every member would also actually share in the power, attitude, and importance of the whole and that the particular relationship would be realized in which the value of the whole extends through each individual. This self-amplification from within supports the unique solidarity and self-sufficiency of this stratum that, so to speak, cannot need and must not need what lies outside itself. Thus it is like, so to speak, an island in the world comparable to artwork in which every part receives its meaning from the whole and testifies with its frame that the world can do nothing within and that the work is absolutely self-sufficient. This form creates a large part of the aesthetic appeal of the nobility that it exercised throughout time; for it holds not only for the individual, who thus attaches to and depends on good breeding and on the members of the nobility having cared for and cultivated their body and their social form over long generations better than is the case in other social strata, but that kind of appeal hovers in the image of the whole of the nobility, an attraction clearly dependent on the aesthetically satisfying form of the being-for-itself and solidarity-in-itself, the unity of the parts--all of which is analogous to artwork. This amplification of the being of the individual with a psychologically and historically inherited content can admittedly lead directly to a decadent emptiness. It appears as though traditional social contents and significance only become actual life values when they are balanced by the formative strength rising to a certain extent out of the individual. Consequently a self confidence of personal existence, a feeling of equally strong independence, but also a responsibility on the part of the individual, appear in the more excellent manifestations of the nobility. This is the result of the unique narrowness under the social forma- tions with which a dependable essence, extended along the three dimensions of the past, present, and future, merged with the individual existence and has been converted into the consciousness on the part of the individual of a higher life value. But where the individual factor is too weak for the personal form to create the supra-personal essence, decadent phenomena appear, as noted: Then that essence inevitably becomes form; there is no importance to that life but the preservation of the specific honor of the social stratum and 'keeping one's composure'--somewhat as ultimately emerged in the nobility of the ancient re? gime.
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The importance of the 'family tree' for this relationship of the family--as well as for the noble group generally--to the individual is of a deeper symbol- ism: The essential matter that forms the individual must have gone through the single trunk of the whole, just as the matter of the branch and fruit is what also formed the trunk. Perhaps this social constitution explains the aversion to work that the aristocracy manifested through the whole of social history up to the most recent era in which the economy hastened the creation of change through democratization. In real 'work' the subject is devoted to the object every moment, and however much the yield of work returns back to the subject again, the action as such still remains directed to an impersonal structure and finds its fullness in a formation of just this--be it a matter of the construc- tion and reconstruction of ideas in the work of discovery, of the pedagogical formation of a student, or of working on physical materials. However, this is counter to the basic life feeling of the aristocracy as such, since what finds its center in the being of that subject is absolutely personal and emerges in the value of aristocracy alone and in what emerges from that, while work in the most meaningful sense is activity directed onto an exterior determined by the terminus ad quem. Thus Schiller distinguishes the noble natures, who pay with what they are, from the common natures, who pay with what they do. The nobles busy themselves, but they do not work (all such definitions, of course, change a thousand ways in every empirical case and appear misdirected). War and hunting, the historically typical preoccupation of the nobility, are still not 'work' in the real sense, despite all the toil attached to them. The subjective factor has a decidedly greater emphasis over the objective in these activities; the result does not manifest, as in work, an object set apart from the person that absorbed the person's energy into itself, but the emphasis lies in testing the strength of the subject itself. At most, artistic work offers some analogy with the aristocrat's kind of activity; it indeed does not really work on the object; rather, the forming of it is only important for it as the radiating out of a purely subjective movement from within. Only the activity of the artist and its value flow exclusively from the enigmatically unique point of its indi- viduality, beyond which no further authority can be found that would have supported it or that would have been acting in it, while the specific action and consciousness of the aristocrat flows from the traditional essence of the family and the social stratum that found in him only an individual form, one now admittedly self confident and at rest.
A unique exception to this characteristic of the nobility comes about through the accumulation or ideal crystallization of dignities and offices, fortunes and honors, duties and rights that are gained within the family and social stratum and in which every member shared--not pro rata as with a share but as an indivisible property that is, as it were, the a priori of every personal being and act. In China, the rule prevails that the hereditary nobility gradually decreases. What would remain continuously in the family and thus what would make an accumulation of its importance possible is never granted quintessentially to the nobility, but there is an infinitely finely gradated series of honors; we have no expressions corresponding to these levels. And the son always stands on a level, a step lower than the father, so that after a particular succession
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of generations the nobility ends altogether. If I am correctly informed, as the highest noble, the stratum of prince is conferred for twenty-six generations, so that after their course--and this also holds for the descendents of princes of the royal house not coming to power--the family returns again to the com- moner status. This anomaly, which can only happen in an official or paper nobility, amounts to a normal progression with, so to speak, a negative sign. For this, though perhaps also deriving from an original grant, has its meaning in that gradual accumulation of values that were handed down; meanwhile the substance, as it were, is given for a time and is gradually used up. On the other hand a pattern proper to Tahiti manifests the normal form in a very instructive manner. There, if a son is born to a noble, the father abdicates his social position in favor of that of the son and, in fact "because the son has more nobility than the father. " In a satirical poem of Glassbrenner from the middle of the nineteenth century the hollow dignity and inflated paltriness of a noble is depicted with the concluding verse, that he would still rightly have one point of pride:
If on some day he must blessed die As an ancestor yet he will lie.
This is the same basic feeling as in the case in Tahiti, and on the sociological basis that the nobility once secured with the greatest historical success, it can appear in no way as meaningless as certain types of decline and general social circumstances in which that basis can no longer exist.
Now the definition of this basis is allowed to be carried out according to the broadest categories of life. Each person appears as some combination of pre- determination and happenstance, of given material and a unique life-formation, of social inheritance and an individual management of it. In each person we see the prejudices of one's race, social stratum, tradition, family--in short, of what makes one the bearer of pre-existent contents and norms; we see these combined with unpredictability and personality, the free being-for-self--the former, as it were, the a priori, the latter the singular reality that together with the former generates the empirical phenomenon. Now the two are mixed in various ways in the large social type-formations and actually in the nobil- ity in a quite individual way, the scientific establishing of which in abstract concepts, of course, is independent of the complications of reality that allow clouding, distracting, and particularizing forces to have effects in these pure relationships. Here those manifold prejudgments are merged together as in a riverbed: While the collected life contents, upbringing and marriage, occupation and political standpoint, aesthetic inclinations and economic expenditure are 'appropriate for the social stratum,' all become conformances that hand down to the individual the material of life as a byproduct, as it were, led through a single channel. There were certainly binding prejudgments of the same or greater strength everywhere in the guild and priesthoods, in the hereditary occupations and in the constraint of the caste and class entities. But now what is different about the nobility is that at the same time the other element of life--personality, freedom, stability--assumed a form changing into a higher value and meaning than occurs in the other forms since the substance handed
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down in one was not something objective, as it were, transcending the indi- vidual; but the particular form and power of the individual makes this whole traditional material alive in the first place. Although the individual may often experience enough constraint from it, the meaning of the whole configuration is still that this valuable material that the social stratum and the family had accumulated would benefit the autonomous individually directed essence of the individual and would thus undergo no diminution but an enhancement. The self-sufficient, self-responsible, and satisfying existence is not a departure from the general well-being and common property, as in many other structures proper to the society, but their development, protection, and enlargement. This particular synthesis of the nobility stands between the extremes of the individual being engulfed by the group and it facing the individual with an oppositional independence. Through the stricture of the form of life proper to the social stratum it has that which created a very wide meeting ground among its members. Through the insistence on the same level of birth that brings about a physiological guarantee of the qualitative and historical solidarity of the stratum, through the stratagem of its tradition that allows the values and acquisitions of the family and social stratum to flow without loss as into a reservoir--through these social means the nobility, to an otherwise unattainable extent, melted its individuals down into the collectivity. However, the structure so impersonal in origin now has more decidedly than any other its goal and meaning in the existence of the individual, in the power and importance of the individual, and in the freedom and self-sufficiency of the individual's life. While the nobility, in its purest historical manifestation, unites the life values of the individual with unique strength in its collectivity, and while on the other hand its development aims with unconditional unanimity at the formation, growth, and independence of the individual, the nobility provided a histori- cally unique solution to the balance between the whole and the individual, the predetermined realities and the personal arrangements of life.
Finally, the emergence of the money economy provides the greatest example in world history of the correlation between social expansion and the individual emphasis of life in content and form. The natu- ral economy produces small economic circles relatively closed in on themselves; first the difficulty of transportation limits their scope and, accordingly, the technology of the natural economy does not allow much of a differentiation and individualization of activities to come about. The money economy alters this situation in two ways. The general acceptance of money as well as its easy transportability, and finally its transformation into finance and mail-order commerce allow its effects to spread to unlimited distances and ultimately create a single economic circle with interrelated interests, complementary production, and uni- form practices in the general cultural world. On the other hand, money causes an immense individualization of economically active people: The
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form of the money wage makes the worker infinitely more independent than any natural-economic payment; possessing money gives the person a previously unheard of freedom of movement, and the liberal norms that are regularly linked to the money economy place the individual in open competition against every other individual; finally this competition as well as that extension of the economic circle force a specialization of activity otherwise out of the question, at the height of its driven one-sidedness. These are only possible with the closing of transactions in the framework of a rather large circle. Money is the bond within the economy that sets the maximum expansion of the economic group into a relationship with the maximum differentiation of its members on the side of freedom and self-responsibility as well as on that of the qualitative division-of-labor differentiation; or more correctly, money develops the smaller, more closed, more homogeneous groups of the natural economy into a different one whose uniform character divides into the two aspects of expansion and individualization.
Political developments bring this pattern about in a great number of individual areas, admittedly under a manifold variation of the basic relationship. Somewhat in the way that no simultaneous progression occurs from the smaller, narrowly socialized circle to the large group and to the differentiation of the personality but a choice and alter- nation, the accent of the more developed situation falls either on the establishment of a broad general public and growing importance of the central organs or on the individual members becoming independent. Or, the expansion of the circle is not on a par with the development of the personality, even in the context of the circle's members, but with the idea of a highest personage to whom, as it were, the individual's will is submissive. I will cite some examples from the different realms of politics. In the agrarian case, the dissolution of the rural com- mons since the end of the Middle Ages occurred in these forms. The developing centralist states confiscated the commons, the common march, as a public good inside the state property and handed it over to the administrative organs of the whole state; on the other hand, to the extent that this did not happen, it parceled it among those with legitimate rights to it as private property. And in this latter action the two tendencies toward the individual and the most general are again simultaneously notable: For this parceling out was directed on the one hand by Roman legal concepts with their enthronement of individual interest and on the other hand by the idea that the parceling out of the commons would be to the advantage of the best cultivation of the
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land, as well as of the widest community. Under very different mate- rial and collective conditions a phase of the history of the Allmend, the common property in the Swiss communities, still manifested the same form in the nineteenth century. Insofar as the Allmenden are transformed into the property of portions of communities, territorial and village corporations, they are handled in some cantons (Zurich, St. Gallen, among others) by the legislation with the tendency to parcel them out either to the individual neighbors or to allow them to be handed over to the larger territorial communities, because the smallest associations possessed too small a personal and territorial basis for allowing their property to be productive for the public entity.
The form of agrarian political measures highlighted above is gener- ally more widespread in post-medieval development in Germany in the realm of internal politics. The authorities treated the particular circles of the unions set off against each other and against the whole with differentiated tendencies: on the one hand making them purely private legal structures that were a personal matter of the individual share holders, on the other hand elevating them to the status of state institutions. These corporations, which had dominated medieval society, had gradually solidified and narrowed in such a way that public life threatened to disintegrate into an incoherent sum of egoistic factions. Then with the beginning of the modern era, the thought of the all- inclusive universality, in contrast to these and dissolving them, was set by and admittedly in the form of the absolutism of the prince. Accordingly from this came the principle: 'the same law for all,' i. e. , the freeing of the individual on the one hand from the inhibiting of practical activity by the privileges of corporations, and on the other hand the loss by the individual of prerogatives enjoyed as a member of them, but which forced the individual into an often unnatural association with associ- ates. Thus it is quite basically a matter of destroying, so to speak, the narrow, homogeneous, and so to speak middle level associations, the prevalence of which had characterized the earlier situation, in order to lead the development upwards to the state and downwards to the unprecedented freedom of the individual. The fact that on the other hand this state in practice found its effectiveness in the form of the highest personality, the unlimited sovereign, is so little a counter level of authority against the basic pattern that the latter is rather directly realized in an extraordinarily large number of cases, one after the other as well as simultaneously. This is the often emphasized link between republicanism and tyranny, between despotism and leveling, that history
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makes manifest. Any form of government that borrows its character from the aristocracy or business class, that, in short, gives a greater part of social and political consciousness to narrower juxtaposed circles, as soon as it aims beyond itself at all, presses on the one hand toward consolidating in a personal leading authority and on the other hand toward socialism painted over with anarchism, which seeks to produce the absolute right of the free person by erasing all differences. The break up of the narrowly delimited groups within an otherwise unified whole has such a strict relationship with the accentuation of individuality that both the unity of a ruling personage and the individual freedom of all group members are interchangeable, merely as two variations on the same theme. It has been observed of political aristocracies, which are always constructed in the social pattern of closed and strictly restricted circles, that they seldom have great military success in broader contexts; and this may go back to their aversion toward those two authoritative levels, which are set upon replacing them in succession or at the same time: They are afraid on the one hand of rousing the whole population to an uprising and united action; on the other hand they are distrustful of individual generals with broad authority and great successes. Thus the correlation between the volonte? ge? ne? rale and autocracy is so decided that it is used often enough as an official cover for intentions that aim ultimately at the suppression of the former. As the Earl of Leicester was appointed to the general governorship of the Netherlands in 1586, he strove for an unlimited reign far over the heads of the narrower authority of the estates general and the provincial social strata, up to then the governing bodies; and he did so in fact under the pretense of the absolutely democratic principle that the will of the people should be the absolute sovereign, and it had appointed Leicester. But it was thereby expressly emphasized that merchants and attorneys, farmers and crafts persons were not to interfere at all in governance but were to simply obey. Thus the ostensibly leveling democratization was driven so far that both the higher and the lower social strata were disenfranchised and only the ideal unity of the abstract 'people in general' remained; and opponents declared very soon that this newly discovered idea of the 'people' only sought to transfer this unconditional sovereignty to one person.
Our basic relationship gains yet further elaboration in local politics.
The relationship is already evident in the Middle Ages in the English cities, with the larger ones being dominated by individual corporations or major nobles while in the smaller ones the people as a whole had
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ruled. A homogeneity of members who uphold the evenness of their share of the governance simply corresponds to the smaller circles, but in the larger ones the shear mass of private individuals was pushed out and left to one side, and the individual ruling personages to the other. In a certain rudimentary form the administration of the North American cities shows the same pattern. As long as the cities are small, their offices being headed by a number of persons would emerge as the most suitable mode; but if they grow into metropolises, it would be more practical to entrust the office to only one person. Large-scale conditions need the individual, a fully responsible person, for their rep- resentation and management; the smaller circle could administer itself in a more undifferentiated way while a greater number of its members were always immediately at the rudder. Thus this social difference cor- responds completely with the development by which the general political tendency of the several states of the union substantiate the basic pattern at issue here: It should begin with a weakening of parliamentarianism in the later decades and replace it in two ways: in one instance with direct plebiscite and in another instance with monarchical institutions, through a transfer of power to individual persons or person.
Finally, church politics provides examples that already find their analogy in purely religious developments. The polytheism of antiquity had many of the traits that I have collected here under the concept of the 'narrower group. ' The cults set themselves apart by sharp inner, though local, boundaries; the groups of adherents were centripetal, often indifferent toward one another, often hostile. Even the deities were often ordered aristocratically, with complex dominations, subor- dinations, and separate spheres of influence. At the beginning of our calendar in classical culture, this situation led to monotheism, to the enthronement of a single and personal God who united in himself the spheres of influence of each singular and separate deity; and this means--insofar as our correlation appears as an almost logical necessity at this point--that the boundaries fell between the circles of adherents, that there would be a shepherd and a flock, that a 'greater circle' existed among the religions, the members of which existed entirely at one level in an 'equality before God. ' The linkage of the religious community to the political one--characteristic of the pre-Christian religiosity--the centering of the religious group around the particular deity proper to it alone, which willingly gave room for many others beside itself, broke off. At the same time there was also the politically homogeneous solidarity of this group, religion as a socio-political
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duty, every member being answerable to their deity for the errors of the whole collectivity. The religious individual with an unconditional self-responsibility emerged, the religiosity of the 'Ka? mmerlein' (cell), the independence from any bond to the world and people other than the one there was in the undivided immediate relationship of the individual soul to its God--the God who was thus no less, indeed precisely thereby 'one's own,' because this was equally the God of all. Within the vast leveled universality, as it arose from the dissolution and amalgamation of all earlier particular groups, individuality was the counterpart of the absolute and unitary personhood of God, who emerged from the same analysis and synthesis of all earlier particular gods. And this form of development, which Christianity manifested in its original purity, was repeated once again in the politics of the Catholic Church. Within her the tendency toward the construction of separate groups, of a sharp demarcation of ranks and interests, also raised up anew an aristocracy of the clergy for the church over the stratum of the laity. But Pope Gregory VII14 already united a decided demagogy with the absoluteness of his individual struggle for power, which brought the sharpest contrasts together and passed over the head of the exclusive aristocratic bishops. Afterwards celibacy reinforced this effort--since the married priest had a backing in a smaller group and thus very quickly generated a united opposition within the church, while in his individual isolation he thus fell prey unconditionally to the unrestricted universal--and Jesuitism took it up with the greatest success. For everywhere it countered the status-inclination of the clergy, emphasized the universal character of the priest, which allows him to feel as one with the faithful of all social strata; and in contrast to every aristocratic system it had as a purpose a uniform leveling of all the faithful on the one hand and a papal absolutism on the other.
Maybe one could express the whole relationship that is meant here and takes shape in the most diverse kinds of simultaneity, sequence,
14 Pope Gregory VII (the monk Hildebrand), reigned 1073-1085. Simmel's is a particularly unsympathetic interpretation of this medieval pope. The secular authori- ties, i. e. nobility, had been controlling ecclesiastical appointments up to 1049, when Emperor Henry III (1039-1056) appointed Pope Leo IX. Leo issued a decree chang- ing the way his successors would be selected--election by the cardinal clergy of the suburbs of Rome, a method that bypassed the Roman nobility and the Emperor. Gregory VII was the first pope elected under the new method. His effort to have the papacy control the appointment of bishops was part of a larger reform project known as the Cluniac Reform--ed.
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and either/or in a way that the smaller group forms, so to speak, a middle proportionality between the expanded group and individuality, so that, closed in on itself and needing no other input, it produces the same result for life chances that emerges from the combination of the latter two. Now I will select some examples from jurisprudence, in fact from fields that are absolutely different in their historical substance. So, for instance, the total power of the Roman concept of the state had as its correlate that next to the ius publcum there was a ius privatum. 15 The legal restraint on the universal whole that was manifest in itself required a corresponding one for individuals inside that whole. There was the community in the broadest sense on the one hand and the individual person on the other; the most ancient Roman law knew no corpora- tions, and in general this spirit remained with it. In contrast, there were no different legal principles for the community and for the individual; however, these publics are not the all-inclusive ones of the Roman state but smaller ones, occasioned by the changing and manifold needs of the individual. In smaller communities that disconnection of public law from private is not necessary since the individual is bound more deeply to the whole. This correlation appears as a unifying development in the right of blood revenge, for example in Arabia. Its essence rests entirely on the solidarity of sharply bounded tribal groups and on their autonomy: It held for the whole tribe or the family of the murderer and was carried out by the whole tribe or the family of the murder victim. Concerning it Mohammed's preference was clearly bound up with the explanation argued above. A national or state universality should transcend the particular groups and be leveling them through the common religion; a legal verdict would come from that universality, which replaced the particular legal interest with a supreme universally recognized authority. And accordingly, the verdict should affect the guilty individual alone and the collective responsibility of the particular group should discontinue: The widest universality and the individually circumscribed person now exist as results, albeit opposite ones, of the differentiation of the intermediary structures. With equal clarity, though with completely different contents, this form type appears in ancient Rome as the resultant stage of a continuous series, as development there broke up the patriarchal family grouping. If civil law and duties in war and peace pertained now to the sons as well as to the father, if
15 Ius publicum . . . ius privatum, Latin: public law . . . private law--ed.
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they could acquire personal importance, influence, booty etc. , a tear thus rent the patria potestas,16 which had to split the patriarchal relation- ship even more, and in fact in favor of the widened state functionality, in favor of the law of the greater whole over that of its members, but also in favor of the person; for the person could gain an importance from the relationship to this whole that the patriarchal relationship had curbed to an incomparable extent. Finally the formally similar process occurs in a particularly mixed phenomenon in which it is ascertained only with a tight grip on the basic idea. Up to the Norman era in England, a community was assigned to the individual sheriff and the royal judge for a long time, so that the jurisdiction had a certain local quality or constraint in which the interest of the community and that of the state were merged. However, the two separated after the middle of the twelfth century: Royal jurisdiction was now exercised by judicial commissions that traveled around great areas and thus apparently in a much more general and locally uninhibited way, while community interests were looked after through the growing importance of the local jury. In its purely internal interests the community represented the role of the individual here in our correlation; it was a social individual that had earlier lived its legal life in an undifferentiated unity with the universal state but now acquired a purer being-for-itself and with that stood next to the now just as clearly developed law of the large universality, or even in opposition to it.
It is only a consequence of the thought of such a relationship between the individual and the social if we say: The more the person comes to the foreground of interest as an individual rather than as a member of society, and therefore as that characteristic that pertains to someone purely as a human, the closer must the bond be that leads someone above the head of one's social group, as it were, toward all that is human in general, and makes the thought of an ideal unity of the human world obvious to a person. It is necessary not to make a discon- nection in this tendency in the comprehension of the latter idea, which is actually required logically, even if it were hindered by all kinds of historical limitations. So we find in Plato on the one hand an interest in the purely individual, in the perfection of the individual person, an interest that is broadened into an ideal of friendship, and on the other hand one in the purely political, with a total neglect of the intervening
16 Latin: fatherland power--ed.
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associations and the interests borne by them. The way in which he emphasized the formation and activity of the individual person and the value of one's soul as an independent separate structure should also have consequently broken down the last barrier, that of the Greek form of the state, as also occurred with other philosophers of the time. It is only the coincidence of his political tendencies and national Greek attitude that kept him from drawing the real conclusion from his ideal construct for the individual: that beyond the individual there need be only the whole of humanity as a collectivity. It is the same if in Chris- tianity the absolute concentration of all values on the soul and its salvation was singled out and thus that bond is still not recognized that is thereby made between Christianity and the whole of human existence, this process of unifying and equalizing (as the equality would also be by degrees, extending out onto the whole of humanity) finds its firm barrier rather in the membership in the church--somewhat as Zwingli explained that all orders, sects, separate associations, etc. must fall away, since all Christians should be brothers--but just only Christians. In a wholly consistent manner, on the other hand, extreme individualism frequently enters into an alliance with the doctrine of the equality of all persons. It is psychologically obvious enough that the terrible inequal- ity into which the individual was born in some epochs of social history unleashed a reaction in two ways: both toward the right of individual- ity and that of general equality, since both tend to come up short for the larger masses to the same degree. A manifestation such as Rousseau is to be understood only from this two-fold relationship. The increasing development of general education shows the same tendency: It seeks to eliminate the sharp differences in mental levels and give each person the possibility, denied earlier, of asserting the individual talent of each precisely by producing a certain equality. I have already spoken above about the form that our correlation has in the concept of 'human rights. ' The individualism of the eighteenth century sought only freedom, only the canceling out of those 'middle' circles and interstitial authorities that separated people from humanity, i. e. of those that hindered the development of that pure humanity that would form the value and core of personal existence in each individual, but covered and made one-sided by historical group separations and separate affiliations. As soon as one is really reliant on the self, on what is ultimate and essen- tial within one, that individual stands on the same basis as any other, and freedom makes equality evident; the individuality that really is just that and not curbed by social repression represents the absolute unity
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of the human race and blends into that unity. It is not necessary to explain how this theoretical-ethical conviction of the eighteenth century was elaborated in thoroughly practical and real conditions and simply acquired an enormous impact on them. That later meaning of indi- vidualism--that the actuality of human nature would entail being different in quality and value with respect to each person, and that the development and growth of this being different would be a moral imperative--this meaning is admittedly the immediate negation of any equality. For it seems altogether inadmissible to me to construct an equality precisely by each being so good as to be someone special and incomparable to any other. For someone to be so is indeed not a positive quality at all for oneself, but originates precisely in the com- parison alone with others who are different only in the judgment of the subject that does not find in one what it has found in others. This is most immediately clear in the comparison of only two objects: The black object and the white object obviously do not have a common quality between them, that one is not white and the other is not black. Thus if there is only a sophistical misuse of words with reference to the equivalence of the human race to a qualitative singularity of the individual, the ideal of the unity of the human race is in no way irrec- oncilable with this assumption. For one can understand the difference of the individuals as a kind of division of labor, even if it means not at all an economic production nor an immediate cooperation of all. Admittedly this changes into the speculations of social metaphysics. The more unique someone is, the more one occupies a place that can be filled only by that person according to one's being, action, and fate and the more that place is reserved for that person alone in the order of the whole, the more is this whole to be grasped as a unity, a meta- physical organism in which every soul is a member, unable to be exchanged with any other, but presupposing all others and their work- ing together for one's own life. Where the need exists to experience the totality of mental existence in the world as a unity, every person will need each other in this individual differentiation where the indi- vidual entities are necessarily complementary; each fills the place that all others allow for--it is more readily sufficient for this need for unity and hence for the grasp of the totality of existence through this than through the equality of natures, by which basically anyone would be able to replace anyone and the individual thus actually appears super- fluous and without a real link with the whole. Meanwhile the ideal of equality, which in a wholly different sense united the utmost individu-
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alization with the utmost expansion of the circle of beings belonging together, has never been furthered more than by the Christian doctrine of the immortality and infinitely valuable soul. The soul in its meta- physical individuality, placed on itself alone before its God, the single absolute value of existence, is like any other in that which alone matters in the end; for in the infinite and in the absolute there are no differ- ences: The empirical differences of people do not come into consider- ation before the eternal and transcendent, in which all are the same. Individuals simply are not only the sums of the qualities whereby they were naturally as different as those qualities are, but apart from those, each one is an absolute entity by virtue of personhood, freedom, and immortality. The sociology of Christianity thus offers the historically greatest and at the same time metaphysical example for the correlation in question here: The soul free from all bonds, from all historical rela- tionships constructed for any purposes whatever, aimed in the absolute being-for-itself only at those powers that are the same for all, comprises with all others a homogeneous being inclusive of all life; the uncondi- tioned personality and the unconditioned expansion of the circle of what is like it are only two expressions for the unity of this religious conviction. And as much as this is at all a metaphysics or one inter- pretation of life, it is still unmistakable in the broad scope as an a priori attitude and feeling that it has influenced the historical relation- ships of people to one another and the attitude with which they encounter one another.
Indeed, the sociological understanding that has the general world view as both cause and effect within the correlation proposed here is evident even if the question of the narrowness or breadth of the world depiction does not even stop at the human world but includes objectivity altogether, the forms of which are so often formed by us as analogous to socially accustomed ones. It can probably be said that antiquity lacked the deepest and precise idea of subjectivity as much as the broadest and clearest idea of objectivity. The idea of natural law as a quintessentially objective and universally impartial control over being, in contrast to all 'values,' was no less foreign to it than the authentic idea of the 'I' with its productivity and freedom, its ambiguity, and its values outweighing the world; the soul neither went so far outside itself nor so far into itself as later occurred through the synthesis, or even antithesis, of the Christian life awareness through natural science and cultural science. This cannot be without an inner and at least indirect connection with the socio-political structure of the Greek world. The
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enormous internal prerogative of the narrower state circle by and large captivated the individual inside a certain middling view of the world and life between the most universal and the most personal, and the whole form of existence produced by this limitation had to subside in order to create room for development on the two more extreme sides.
More directly than in its importance for the cosmic-metaphysical, our correlation becomes clear in the area of ethics. The Cynics already broke up the bond to the narrower social structure, otherwise typical for the Greek world, insofar as they embraced a basically cosmopolitan attitude on the one hand and on the other an individualist or egoistic one and excluded the middle link of patriotism. The expansion of the circle that the view and interest of the individual fills may perhaps annul the particular form of egoism that generates the real and ideal limitation of the social sphere and may favor a broadmindedness and enthusiastic broadening sweep of the soul that does not allow an approach to combining personal life with a narrow circle of interest of fellows in solidarity; but, significantly enough, where circumstances or the character hinder this result, precisely the extreme opposite will readily appear. To the greatest extent, as I have already mentioned, the money economy and the liberal tendencies associated with it loos- ened and dissolved the narrower affiliations on the one hand from the guild level ones to the national, and inaugurated the world economy, and on the other hand thoughtlessness favored egoism at all levels. The less producers know their consumers because of the enlargement of the economic circle, the more their interest is directed exclusively toward the level of the price that they can get from them; the more impersonally and less qualitatively their public face them, all the more is there a correspondingly exclusive orientation toward the non-quali- tative result of work, toward money. Apart from those highest areas where the energy of the work arises from abstract idealism, workers will invest their person and ethical interests in work as much as their circle of buyers is also personally known to them and stand as close as has a place only in smaller relationships. As the size of the group for which the work grows, as the indifference with which they are able to face it increases, various factors decline that would limit economic egoism. Human nature and human relationships are so positioned in many respects that they turn back on themselves all the more if the individual's relationships exceed a certain perimeter size. Thus it is a matter not only of the purely quantitative extension of the circle that already has to lessen the intrinsic personal interest in each of its points
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down to a minimum, but also of the qualitative variety within it, which prevents the interest from being set at a single point with unambiguous decisiveness and which thus leaves egoism, so to speak, as the logical result of the mutual paralysis of unbearable demands. From this formal theme one has it that, for example, one of the factors contributing to the color and inner heterogeneity of the Hapsburg possessions is that in their politics the Hapsburgs had in view only the interests of their house. Finally, it is the spatial extension of the market--not necessarily coinciding with its actual enlargement--that allows the subject to face at least its narrower circle egoistically. Up to the reigns of Henry III and Edward I, the English social strata were separated by the fact that many times their interests stretched out beyond the homeland: An English noble had a greater interest in a foreign war led by the nobility than in the domestic struggles over the law. A city dweller was more often interested in the situation of Dutch business conditions than in that of the English cities if it was not directly a matter of one's own business. The major church officials felt more like members of an international ecclesiastical entity than they showed specifically English sympathies. Only since the era of the above-mentioned kings did the classes begin to really merge into a united nation, and an end came to the mutual isolation, the egoistic character of which had been thoroughly associ- ated with that expansion of cosmopolitan interests.
Beyond the importance that the expansion of groups has for the dif- ferential setting of wills, there is that for the development of the feeling of the personal 'I. ' Admittedly nobody will fail to recognize that, because of its mass character, its rapid pluralism, its all-boundary transcending evening out of countless previously conserved characteristics, the style of modern life led directly to an unheard of leveling precisely of the personality-form of life. But just as little should the counter tenden- cies to this be unrecognized, as much as they may be deflected and paralyzed in the whole manifest effect. The fact that life in a wider circle and the interaction with it develops a greater consciousness of personhood in and for itself than grows in a narrow circle lies above all in the personality documenting itself directly through the exchange of individual feelings, thoughts, and actions. The more continuously and steadily life progresses, and the less the extremes of the emotional life are remote from their average level, the less starkly the feeling of personhood enters in; but the wider they extend, and the more ener- getically they sprout, the more powerfully do persons sense themselves as personalities. As persistence is only ascertained anywhere in what
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changes, as only change in accidents allows permanence in substance to appear, so then is the 'I' especially experienced apparently as that which remains in all the change of psychological content, even if the latter gives it an especially rich opportunity. The personality is not sim- ply the individual current condition, not the individual quality or the individual, though still such a unique destiny, but something that we feel apart from the details, something matured in consciousness from their experienced reality--if this, as it were, subsequently existing personality is also only the symptom, the ratio cognoscendi17 of an underlying unified individuality that serves as the determining basis of this multiplicity but which cannot become conscious somewhat immediately but only as the gradual result of those multiple contents and eventualities of life. As long as psychological stimulations, especially feelings, occur only in a low number, the 'I' is merged with them and remains latently planted in them; it rises above them only to the extent that it becomes clear in our consciousness through the fullness of the generic differences that the 'I' itself is still common to all this, just as the higher idea of individual phenomena does not arise for us, then, if we know only one or a few of their formations, but only through knowledge of very many of them, and all the more highly and purely, the more clearly the difference in kind correlatively emerges in them. This change of the contents of the 'I,' however, which is actually only present to consciousness as the stationary pole in the transience of psychological phenomena, will be much more extraordinarily vivid within a large circle than in life within a smaller group. Stimulations of the feeling on which it is especially dependent for the subjective consciousness of the 'I' occur precisely where the very differentiated individual stands amidst other very differentiated individuals, and then comparisons, frictions, special- ized relationships precipitate a plethora of reactions that remain latent in the narrower undifferentiated group, but here provoke the feeling of the 'I' as what is quintessentially proper to the self through precisely its fullness and generic difference.
A less direct way in which the relatively large group attains a special freedom within the person and a being-for-self for its members runs through the formation of organs that--as was examined above--lets the original immediate interactions of individuals crystallize in them and transfer to particular persons and structures. The more purely
17 Latin: basis for knowing--ed.
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and more completely this division of labor occurs--obviously with the extent of the enlargement of the group--the more will the individual be freed from the interactions and fusions replaced by it and abandon its centripetal concerns and tendencies. Forming organs is the means of uniting the solidarity of the group to the greatest freedom of the individuals. Admittedly, the organs bind every member to the group itself and thus to each other; but the decisive thing is that the immediate interactions preceding this arrangement drew the totality of the person into specialized activity in a way that brought about a disproportionate expenditure of energy. Whoever is not a judge for a whole life but only when the community is called together is not only hindered in actual practice but is burdened with extraneous concepts and interests in the exercise of the judicial office in an entirely different way from the profes- sional judge. On the other hand once one is concerned with the court in the advanced circumstance, it is only then that one's whole interest is also really engaged in it. So long as every father of the household is a priest, he must function as such whether or not he is the right person for it; if there is a church with a professional priest, he enters into it because he really feels compelled by it and thus is completely into the activity. As long as no division of production exists, the individual must use what is produced just once with perhaps wholly different needs and wishes awakened in the meantime; as soon as there are special products for each need, everyone can choose what is desired so that one need not consume with mixed feelings. Thus the differentiating out of social organs does not mean that the individual would be detached from the bond with the whole but rather direct only the objectively justified portion of the personality to the bond. The point at which one is particularly affected by the whole or the arrangement of the totality now no longer draws the irrelevant portions of one's person into the relationship. With the organ, with the result and characteristics of the growth of the group, the interconnections are dissolved by which one must join in and deal with members in their situations and activities that do not belong to what one is interested in.
Finally, in the area of intellectuality, the interrelationships of our theoretical ideas often develop in the exact same form-type that we have observed here in the interrelationships of individuals with each other and thereby, perhaps more than individual social examples could, confirm this deeper sense stretching out over all details; one would call it its objective meaning which is only realized historically in all empiri- cal cases and only with an approximate purity.
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Excursus on the Analogy of the Individual Psychological and the
Sociological Relationships
This analogy is in and of itself not of a sociological but a social philosophical nature in that its content is not knowledge of society but that of a general interconnection that is only found to be an example of it in social form. That individuals within a society frequently act toward one another in the same forms as the mental elements within an individual intellect is a very old obser- vation. It could be thought psychologically in a general combinatorial analy- sis in regularly repeating forms of relationships among such elements. As the text will also still show for the individual psychological and theoretical devel- opments, so, for example, a relatively narrow homogeneous cluster of elements, of whatever kind, will only find its expansion under the condition that every single element finds greater independence and qualitative difference from every other one. Thus the independence of each element would become incompat- ible with the limitation on its space for existence and activity by others, and a mutual repression thereby appears, some kind of struggle for existence among the individuals. Thus it would thereby directly occur that an individual ele- ment forms a diversity within itself that can turn it as a whole into a counter- part of the surrounding totality; a tendency toward well-roundedness and completeness can appear there that is not compatible with the role of part and member of a whole, and it must come into a conflict between the special or partial character of an element respectively of a province of a whole and its possible or actual character as a unified entity in itself, etc. In short, one may think psychologically of general types of relationship that encompass both the sociological forms as a special case--that is the elements form such in the socialized individual--and encompass even the individual groups of concrete processes of social interaction. Thus, a deeper foundation would be achieved, for example, for one being able to call the state a 'person writ large. ' But the immediate relationships between society and the individual would not be sought apart from this formulation as they bring the mutual similarities about. The question will be posed from two points of view. First, if there is an indi- vidual mind, what effects go out from it to the whole so that they evoke in it the forms of their own conditions of stability and change? Second, if there is a whole, which influences that it exerts on the individual mind generate the relations in it that are parallel to its own ones? Thus, for example, there is the phenomenon of the 'faction. ' The interests within the individual are in conflict countless times, as are the individuals. Others who increase the weight of any one idea thus gather around the ruling ideas, as the party supporters are grouped around the leading personality. Complexes of feelings and thoughts that have nothing really to do with the content of inner conflict are neverthe- less drawn in, are brought in from their previous equilibrium, are colored by one or the other of the incompatible interests, exactly like party conflict, which splits essential parts of a group, and ultimately the entirety parcels out within itself, whether individuals or groups, what are actually strangers to them. All phases of a conflict--the balance of power that at times brings a conflict to a stalemate, the apparent victory of a party that gives the other one only an
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opportunity for reassembling its forces, the influence of the mere hint of the outcome of the actual decision, direction and indirection in the application of forces--all this is the form of the course of both inner and outer conflicts alike. Now at least in order to give an example for both lines of inquiry with respect to this analogy: As the inner experiences of the subject probably form a pat- tern that serves as an a priori for its external experiences, and as the form in which material data are received and in accordance with which the data are interpreted. What 'conflict' is, is an altogether purely inner experience. From outside one sees certain actions of beings, each of which is, so to speak, not to be forced out from its space, by virtue of the impenetrability of the material on which the other cannot in the strict sense encroach. That the particular movements of always two such beings are a 'conflict' is a psychological inter- pretation; the 'intermeshing,' the unity being carried out in counter movements that we call conflict cannot be actually defined and its essence cannot be looked at from outside, but it can only be experienced internally. Therefore, a two-fold context arises: The real one, with which the mental experiences that we describe as the 'against one another' and the 'with one another,' the fusion and dissipation of the imagination, provide the schemata for our exter- nal behavior; the ideal one, with which we interpret, order, and name the externally perceived patterns of behavior of the individual at hand. We can hardly make any decision, achieve any conviction, without an always rudi- mentary, hardly conscious, and quickly sorted out conflict of motives and stimuli leading the way: Our entire mental life is saturated with that; it there- fore suggests the assumption that the inter-individual processes that take place still always borrow a certain portion, both of their form and their meaning, on the basis of individual processes. And now in the other direction: The real conflict that we experience as a participant or as a spectator will provide the schema and meaning for inner processes. This will take place especially where the individual is not exclusively tied to one of the parties entering into a rela- tionship but places some interest in each of them; then will 'two souls in one heart' sympathize and imitate the relationships of conflict and reconciliation, separation and unity, domination and subservience that occur between the targets of interest. The conflict that we see carried out outside ourselves first becomes accessible to us, so to speak, through the relations of our imaginings representing it inside us; the imagining of conflict is often a conflict of imag- inings. And as occurs with the factional relationships briefly sketched here, so with those of the reconciliation and the exclusion, domination and equality, imitation and organization, and many others. The outside is formed and understood through the inside and in turn the inside, through the outside, but also, of course, simultaneously. The relationship between the immanent- subjective and the forms of social interaction stands in the same way as it stands between the former and the spatial-material. It has long been observed that the expressions for the movements of imagination--their rise and fall, fusion and separation, inhibition and recurrence, dejection and grandeur, and many others--take their names like all these from the movements of the outer world, and that we would have no inner insight and no names for such experiences without this symbolism. But if we look more closely, this symbol- izing is no less effective the other way around. All that is really a process, a
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relationship, a characteristic picture in these externals exist for us only as a subjective-mental object and movement that we sense in spatial vividness. The shear changes of place that those determinants of the sensual amount to would never serve as names for internal feelings if they were not already equipped by this with an emphasis and significance, with syntheses, that work below their surface. From the outset, emotional states and sensations of strength and feelings must enter into the events externally projected by us so that we might achieve through them demonstrations and expressions of internal facts. And similar to this mere externality, that third field also behaves toward the pure interiority of the individual subject: society, by means of which the individual mind indeed emerges from within itself, but not into the spatial world but rather into the supra-individuality of the interactions with other minds. Here too the inner behavior should supply the standardization and stimulation for the extra-subjective conditions that, however, return to it the service of giving form and meaning. And one can perhaps complete this with a wholly funda- mental thought. The fact that we reduce a mental event to an 'idea' and comprehend it as its movements and combinations is in no way given thus by the nature of the thing, so obvious and exact as we are accustomed to see it. Rather, it is a continuously flowing process reduced to sharply contrasting elements; the contents of this process, which are given to us exclusively in the form of our consciousness, to some extent become substantial beings that are provided with energy and that act on their own and are acted upon. Where we grasp the life of the mind as a movement of ideas, it is never the immedi- ate description of the data at hand, but is captured by the latter in a symbol and image and placed into categories that are not yet supplied by the data themselves. And, to me it is not improbable that the individual's image of every individual around us would directly prompt us to this objectification and illustration of the inner life. We experience our existence as it takes place among mere beings that move themselves, that come close and that go away, endowed with strengths and weaknesses; the people in our environment form our first world, one essentially interesting to us: It is obvious that we use the form of the transference, of independence, of mutual influence, in which their elements confront us with overpowering meaning that we use them for order- ing and illustrating the world inside ourselves, and that we categorize the movements felt within us; we think of the elements that exist in themselves as so constructed that we see them before ourselves in this outer but mentally defined world. As every person is 'a representation' for us--'one' at a higher level than the others, appearing more than as types, more in the connections of the collective existence of the objects involved--so is every representation for us, so to speak, a person, i. e. our representation appears to us as the play of essences that, as we see them in the people, assert themselves and give way, unite and divide, and put into play sufficient and insufficient forces. That which cannot be immediately grasped by us, the inexpressible unity of the individual and society, is revealed in such a way that the mind is the image of the society and society the image of the mind.
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Our concept formation takes the approach that a certain number of objects are at first gathered together into a category on the basis of very striking characteristics and sharply opposed to a different, although existing, concept. Now to the same degree that one next discovers in addition to those, other conspicuous and decisive qualities that distin- guish the objects contained under the previously conceived idea, the sharp conceptual boundaries must be overcome within it. The history of human culture is full of examples of this process, one of the most outstanding of which is the transformation of the old theory of species into the theory of evolution. The earlier view believed it saw such sharp boundaries between the kinds of organism, so little similarity in essence that it could believe in no common descent but only in separate acts of creation; it satisfied the two-fold need of our mind for combining on the one hand and distinguishing on the other in a way that it included a large sum of similar instances in a unitary concept, but set this concept off all the more sharply from all others and, as it is in accord with the starting point of the formula developed here, which balanced the meager observation of individuality within the group with the all the sharper individualization of them from the others and through an exclusion of a general similarity of large classes or of the whole world of organisms. The new discovery shunts this conduct toward both sides; it satisfies the instinct for combining with the thought of a general unity of all living things, which brings to the fore the abundance of phenomena as related by blood through an original seed. It thus encounters the inclination toward differentiation and speciation through the notion that each individual is as it were, a particular stage of that develop- mental process of all living things. Insofar as it makes the fixed species boundaries fluid, it destroys at the same time the imaginary essential difference between what is purely individual and what is characteristic of a species. Thus it comprehends the general more generally and the individual more individually than could the earlier theory. And this is just the relationship of complementarity that is also established in actual social developments.
Generally the psychological development of our recognition process also manifests this two-fold direction. An unsophisticated level of thought is incapable on the one hand of rising to the highest generalization and comprehending universally valid laws from the intersection of which the particular individual arises. And on the other hand it lacks the sharpness of concept and affectionate devotion by which individuality as such is understood or also only perceived. The higher a spirit stands, the more
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completely it differentiates in both respects; the world's phenomena leave it no rest until it reduces them to general laws, so that any uniqueness is completely missing and the combination of phenomena that are not very distant does not contradict the solution. But as accidental and fleeting as these combinations may be, they are now still there at one time, and whoever is capable of bringing to consciousness the universal and lasting elements of being must also sharply perceive the form of the individual in which they combine, because only the most exact insight into the individual phenomenon precisely allows for ascertaining the general laws and conditions that intersect in it. The blurring of thought counters both since the constituent elements of the phenomenon are neither clear enough to recognize the individual uniqueness nor the higher pattern that they have in common with others. Thus it is so in a deeper context that the anthropomorphism of the worldview retreats to the same degree that the knowledge of the similarity of people to all other beings according to the law of nature emerges for recognition; for when we recognize what is higher, to which we ourselves and every- thing else is subordinate, we thereby dispense with what we constitute to represent and judge the rest of the world's realities according to the particular norms of this accidental complication. The intrinsic impor- tance and legitimacy of the other phenomena and processes in nature get lost in the anthropocentric kind of perspective and are stained by the color of humanness. Only rising toward that which also stands above it, to the most general natural law perspective, creates the legitimacy and worldview that knows and recognizes everything in its being-for-itself and individuality. I am convinced that if all movements in the world were reduced to the all-controlling lawfulness of the mechanics of the atoms, we would recognize more clearly than ever before how every being differs from every other one.
This epistemological and psychological relationship widens, although retaining the same developmental form, as soon as it is a matter of metaphysical universalities instead of natural law.