No More Learning

A mostly harmless but thus precisely very clear represen- tative case of this kind is bureaucracy. The nature of the bureau, a formal organization for executing a more extensive administration, forms a pattern in itself that very often collides with the variable needs of practical social life, and indeed, on the one hand, because the spe- cialized work of the bureau is not equipped for very individual and complicated cases that nevertheless must be dealt with within it, and on the other hand, because the only speed at which the bureaucratic machinery can work often stands in screaming contradiction with the urgency of the individual case. Now if a structure only functioning with such unbeneficial consequences forgets its role as a mere auxiliary organ and makes itself the goal of its existence, so must the difference between its life form and that of the whole group sharpen to directly harm the former. The self-preservations of both are no longer compatible with one another. From this perspective one could compare the bureaucratic pattern with the logical one that relates to the recognition of the real-
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ity on the whole as the former does to public administration: a form and an instrument indispensable in the organic connection with the substance that it is called to shape, but in which its whole meaning and goal also lie. Meanwhile if logic opens up as an independent realization and presumes to construct for itself a self-contained knowledge without regard to the actual substance whose mere form it is, it constructs a world for itself that tends to stand in considerable opposition to the real world. The logical forms in their abstraction in relation to a par- ticular science are a mere organ of the complete knowledge of things; as soon as it strives for a complete self-sufficiency instead of this role and is taken as the conclusion rather than a means of knowledge, so it is for the preservation, hampering the development and the unity of the of knowledge, as it can occasionally become the bureaucratic pat- tern with regard to the totality of the group interests. Thus it is said of collegiality and the 'provincial system' that it would admittedly be less consistent, knowledgeable, and discreet than the bureaucratic depart- ment system, but milder and more thoughtful, and more inclined to allow the person of those affected to be respected and to allow for an exception to the unrelenting rule when that is called for. In these sys- tems the simply abstract state function has not yet become as objective and autocratic as in bureaucracy. Indeed even law does not always escape from this social configuration. From the outset it is nothing other than the very form of the mutual relationships of the group members that was presented as most necessary for the continuance of the group; it alone is not enough for guaranteeing this continuance or even prog- ress of society, but it is the minimum that must be protected as the basis of every group's existence. Here the formation of the apparatus is twofold: 'Law' differentiates itself out from the factually required and, most of all, actually practiced behaviors, as the abstracted form and norm of these behaviors, logically connected, and complements them so that it now stands as authoritative against the actual behavior. But this ideal apparatus, serving the self-preservation of the group, now still needs resistance from a concrete organ for its effectiveness; technical grounds cancel that original unity in which either the pater familias or the assembled group administered justice, and they require a special profession for securing the maintenance of those norms in the interac- tion of group members. Now both that abstraction from group relation- ships into a logically closed system of laws and the embodiment of their content in a judiciary is so useful and indispensable that both bring
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with them so inevitably the danger that precisely the firmness that is so necessary and the inner consistency of these formations may occa- sionally enter into opposition to the real progressive or individually complex circumstances and requirements of the group. Through the logical cohesion of its structure and the dignity of its administrative apparatus, law achieves not only an actual autonomy and, through its aim in a wide range, a necessary one, but it creates from itself--admit- tedly through a vicious circle--the right to an unconditional and unquestionable self-preservation. While the concrete situation of the group now occasionally requires other conditions for its self-preserva- tion, situations arise that are expressed by the words: fiat justitia, pereat mundus and summum jus summa injuria. 49 Admittedly one seeks to attain the flexibility and pliancy that law should have by virtue of its being a mere apparatus, through the latitude that the judge is allowed in the application and interpretation of the law. Those cases of the collision between the self-preservation of law and that of the group lie at the limits of this latitude, which should only serve here as an example of the fact that precisely the solidity and autonomy that the group must want to concede to its apparatus for its own preservation can obscure the very character of the apparatus, and of the fact that the autonomy and inflexibility of the apparatus that acts for the whole can turn into a danger to the whole group. This evolution of an organ into an auto- cratic totality through bureaucracy as well as through the formalism of the law is all the more dangerous in that it has the appearance and pretense of happening for the sake of the whole. That is a tragedy of every social development that is more advanced: the group must want for the sake of its own collectively egoistic purposes to equip the appa- ratus with the independence that often works against these purposes. Sometimes the position of the military can also bring about this socio- logical form, since, as an apparatus in the division of labor for the self-preservation of the group, it must on technical grounds be an organism itself as much as possible; the cultivating of its occupational qualities, especially its tight inner cohesion, requires a vigorous closure against the other strata--beginning with the idea of the special nobil- ity of the officer corps including the distinctiveness of its attire. As much as this independence of the military lies in a specific uniformity of life
49 Latin: "Let there be justice, the world be damned," and, "Highest law, highest injury"--ed.
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in the interests of the whole, it can nevertheless assume an absoluteness and rigidity that sets the military apart from the solidarity of the group as a state within the state and thus destroys the bond with the root from which alone its power and legitimacy can ultimately come to it. The modern citizen army seeks to confront this danger, and it represents a happy mean in the temporary duty of service of the whole people to bind the independence of the military to its organizational character.
Because for the sake of preserving the group, their organs, as inde- pendent to some degree, must confront it and must be set at a remove from the breadth of its immediate life, but this independence even for the sake of its own preservation needs very definite limits--this is obviously expressed in the problems of the term of office. 50 Even if the office is 'eternal' in principle as an expression and consequence of the eternal nature of the group with which it is bound as a vital organ, so is the independence of its real exercise still modified by how long the individual occupant administers it. The excursus on the inheritance of office shows the extreme in terms of longevity because heredity is as it were the continuation of the individual function beyond the lifespan of the individual. Admittedly at the same time an opposition emerges in the results: the inheritance of office at one time gave it its indepen- dence, with which it became like an autonomous force within the state, and at another time it allowed it to sink into insignificance and empty formality. Now the length of the personal term of office works in the very same dualism. The office of the sheriff was of great importance in the English Middle Ages; it lost that when Edward III in 1338 decreed that no sheriff should remain in office longer than one year. Conversely: the 'Sendgrafen' (legate counts) who were a very important apparatus of the central power under Charlemagne for the general control over the provinces, were normally nominated for only a year; meanwhile they
50 This relationship mentioned here and previously belongs for the most part to a future discussion of a remaining sphere of tasks: what role the purely temporary regulations play for the constituting and the life of social forms. How the change in relationships, from the most intimate to the most official, behave as a function of their duration without outside moments influencing them; how a relationship obtains a form and coloration beforehand through it being based on a limited or long dura- tion of time; how the effect of the limitation itself is modified completely according to whether the end of the relationship, of the institution, the employment etc. is set one point in time in advance or whether this is uncertain, and depends on 'notice,' on a waning of unifying impulses, or a change of external circumstances--all of which must be investigated in the individual case. There is a note about this in the chapter on space [Ch. 9--ed. ].
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lost their importance and the whole institution declined while later the nominations occurred for an indefinite term. The assumption is sug- gested that with respect to the longevity of an office the long term would then appropriately lead to its independence and thereby to a steady importance, if it includes an environment more regularly in a system- atic and continuous endeavor to filling functions and thereby requires a routine that the frequently changing incumbents cannot acquire. On the other hand where an office takes up always new and unanticipated tasks, where quick decision and agile adaptation occur in ever changing situations and demands, there a frequent, so to speak, infusion of new blood will be suitable because the new officials will always approach them with fresh interest and the danger of this becoming a routine for them will not come about. Developing a considerable independence in such offices here through frequent changes of incumbents will not cause any injury to the group as in many cases the frequent rotation of placements in very independent and irresponsive offices has served as a counterbalance and protection of the community against their selfish abuse of them. This motive in the filling of offices works in a unique way in the United States, indeed by virtue of the democratic ethos that would like to hold the leading positions as close as possible to the primary group life, the sum of individual subjects. While the offices are filled with the supporters of the particular president, in general a large number of candidates gradually come to hold offices. Secondly and more importantly, however, this prevents the formation of a closed bureaucracy that could become a mistress rather than a maidservant of the public. Long traditions of that, with their knowledge and practices, prevent anyone from being readily able to assume any position, and this is contrary not only to the democratic spirit that allows the Americans to really believe in their suitability for every function but it encour- ages what is wholly unbearable for him: that the officials would seem to be of a higher nature, that their life is lifted above the great masses through an otherwise unattainable dedication. This group believed--at least until recently--they were only able to obtain this special form if their apparatus remained permanently weak, in continual exchanges with the masses, avoiding the independence of the office as much as possible. But now it is peculiar that this socially-oriented condition has precisely an extreme egoism of the officials for a basis. The winning party shares in the offices under the slogan: "To the victor go the spoils! " It considers the office a property, a personal advantage, and it does not
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even conceal at all through the pretense of having sought it for the sake of the matter itself or of service to the society. And it is precisely that that should uphold the officers as servants of the public and prevent the formation of an autonomous bureaucracy. The service of the cause or of the enduring and objective interest of the collectivity requires a governing position above the individuals of the group because with it the apparatus outgrows the supra-personal unity of the collectivity. The principled democrat, however, does not want to be governed, even at the price of being served by that; the democrat does not acknowledge that the saying, "I am their leader, so I must serve them"--can just as well be reversed: "I want to serve them, so I must lead them. " The pure objectivity of its meaning and leadership, which causes a certain height and culmination, is hindered by that egoistic subjectivism of the attitude about the exercise of office, but it includes, however, the danger of a bureaucratic, arrogant severing of the apparatus from the immediate liveliness of the group. And depending on how threatening the danger for the structure of the group is, it will hinder or favor the expansion of the offices into the character of being its own purpose.
Second: The possibility of an antagonism between the whole and the part, the group and its apparatus, should not only hold the indepen- dence of the latter within a certain limit, but it is also useful so that the differentiated function could revert back to the collectivity if necessary. The development of society has the peculiarity that its self-preserva- tion can require the temporary dismantling of an already differentiated apparatus. This is not to make a close analogy with the atrophy of those animal organs that appears from the change of life environments, for example like the seeing-apparatus of animals that live continuously in dark caves becoming a mere rudiment. Since the function itself becomes superfluous in these cases and this is the reason for which the organs serving that function gradually wither away, in contrast, with social developments the function is indispensable and therefore must, where an inadequacy of the apparatus appears, revert back to the interactions among the primary members of the group, as the apparatus originated in the first place as the bearer of their division of labor. The structure of the group from the outset is in some cases based on such an alter- nation between the immediate function and that mediated through an apparatus. As with publicly-held corporations whose technical direction is admittedly the responsibility of the management while the general assembly is nevertheless empowered to remove the management or set
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certain guidelines for it, the general assembly has neither disposition nor the competence for this. Here belongs, above all, the power of the parliament over the governing apparatus in lands governed in a purely parliamentary manner. The English government draws its power again and again from the grassroots of the people, which is distilled, as it were, in the parliament. The government naturally has this competence in various shadowy ways for the continuous self-preservation of the group since the purely objective and consistent treatment of businesses is endangered by the interventions of the parliament and especially by its review of them. In England this is moderated by the general conservatism and by a fine differentiation between the officials and administrative branches that are subject to the immediate competence of the parliament and those that require a relative independence and continuity. Smaller associations that allow their business to be conducted through a board or executive committee tend to be organized in such a way that these apparatus return their authority to the whole group, willingly or unwillingly, as soon as they are no longer up to the burden or responsibility of their functions. Every revolution, in which a political group dethrones its government and binds legislation and administra- tion back to the immediate initiative of its members, belongs to this kind of sociological formation. Admittedly it readily happens now that such a restructuring of the apparatus is not possible in all groups. In very large groups or groups living in very complicated situations the assumption of administration by the group itself is simply impossible. The formation of organs became irrevocable and their malleability, their vital association with the members, can appear most of all in the members replacing the persons who comprise the apparatus in a given moment with more suitable persons. At any rate, the diverting back of group power from the apparatus to its original source, even if only as a transitional stage to a renewed constructing of an apparatus, still comes about in cases of a rather higher social formation. The Epis- copal Church in North America suffered greatly up to the end of the eighteenth century from having no bishop because the English mother church that alone could have consecrated one refused to do that for political reasons. Therefore, the communities decided to help them- selves in their greatest need and in the face of a danger of complete disintegration. In 1784 they sent delegations--lay and clergy--who assembled and constituted themselves as the supreme church unity, as the central apparatus, and for the provision of the church management. A historical specialist on this era portrays it this way:
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Never had so strange a sight been seen before in Christendom, as this necessity of various members knitting themselves together into one. In all other cases the unity of the common episcopate had held such limbs together: every member had visibly belonged to the community of which the presiding bishop was the head. 51
The inner solidarity of the faithful--which up to then lay in the appa- ratus of the episcopacy and became, as it were, a substance lying out- side them--now appeared again in its original nature. Now the power was returned to the immediate interaction of the members which was projecting that power from within themselves and which had worked on them from outside. This case is therefore particularly interesting because the function of keeping the church members together came to the bishop through consecration, i. e. from a source from above, one seemingly independent of the sociological function--and now was nevertheless replaced purely sociologically, through which the source of that power was unequivocally made visible. The fact that the communi- ties knew how, after so long lasting and so effective a differentiation of their sociological forces on an apparatus, to replace it again with the immediacy of the community, was an indication of the extraordinary health of its socio-religious life. Very many communities of a most dif- ferent kind have gone under when the relationship between the social powers of their members and the apparatus that arose from it was no longer malleable enough to be able to return to the members the functions that are necessary for their social self-preservation, in cases of omission or inefficiency on the part of the apparatus.
The evolution of differentiated organs is, so to speak, a substantial remedy for social self-preservation; with that the structure of society grows a new limb. Wholly different from that is the matter of treat- ing how the instinct for self-preservation affects the life of the group from a functional perspective. The question whether it happens in an undifferentiated unity or with separate organs is secondary for that; rather that is a matter of the entire general form or the rate at which the life processes of the group play out. Here we encounter two prin- cipal possibilities: The group can be maintained 1) by preserving its
51 Here Simmel uses the original English. The same quotation appears in Julia C. Emery, A Century of Endeavor 1821-1921 (Chicago: Hammond Press, 1921), appendix, attributing it to Samuel Wilberforce, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (London, J. Burns, 1844; New York: Stanford & Swords, 1949), though Emery does not give the title accurately--ed.
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form as much as possible through a stability and rigidity in it so that it counters mounting dangers with substantial resistance and protects the relationship of its members throughout all changes in the external circumstances; 2) by the greatest possible variability of its form, in that it responds to change in the external conditions with such a change within itself and maintains itself in the flux so that it can accommodate every demand of the circumstances. These two possibilities apparently go back to a very general behavior of things since it finds an analogy in all possible spheres, even the physical. A body is protected from destruction through pressure and shock either through rigidity and unalterable solidarity of its elements so that the attacking force makes no dent at all, or through flexibility and elasticity, which admittedly yield to every attack but immediately restores the previous form to the body after it is over. The self-preservation of the group also holds together either through stability or through flexibility whereby the unity of an entity is documented in both ways: we recognize its unity either as a result of its always seeming the same in the face of different stimuli and situations, or its behaving differently in the face of each circumstance, in a special way exactly matching it--like a calculation with two fac- tors always having to yield the same result with one changing and the other changing accordingly. Thus we say a person has got it all together when one, for example, manifests the aesthetic consideration and sensitivity toward all possible matters of life, but no less the one who behaves aesthetically where the object justifies it, but who has another kind of reaction where that is required by the object. Indeed this is perhaps the deeper consistency because manifold trials, whose manifold nature corresponds to the object, indicate an integrity of the subject that is all the more unshakable. So a person will appear to be consistent if a life situation of servitude has developed in that person a submissive behavior that one also manifests in all other activities not related to servitude; but it is no less 'consistent' if one, on the contrary, takes advantage of the underlings through brutality because of one's forced submission to superiors. And finally preservation and variation as sociological tendencies are only subtypes of something more generally human. And as such, these can, as pure forms of behavior, contain a meaning that binds together the most divergent content--as Augustus himself once praised Cato for the reason that everyone who did not want to have the existing condition of the state changed would be a good person and citizen. Now it is a matter of the closer determinations of these two methods of social self-preservation.
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Self-preservation through conservative activity seems to be indicated where the collectivity consists of very disparate elements with latent or manifest oppositions, so that generally every initiative, of whatever kind, becomes dangerous and the very measures of preservation and positive usefulness must be avoided as soon as they bring a movement with them. Thus a very complex and enduring state, such as the Austro- Hungarian Empire, needing to be held in a delicate balance, would generally be highly conservative since every movement could produce an irreparable disturbance of the balance. Generally this consequence is wholly associated with the form of heterogeneity of the constituent elements of a larger group, as soon as this difference does not lead to a harmonious mutual engagement and cooperation. Here the threat to the preservation of the social status quo resides in the fact that every initiative must elicit extremely different forms of response in the different social strata that are laden with completely opposing energies. The less the inner solidarity among the members of the group, the more prob- able it is that the oppositions will cause new incitements, new awaken- ings of consciousness, new occasions for decisions and developments to diverge further from one another. Then there are always countless ways in which people can become distant from one another, but often only a single way in which they can come close to one another. Change may still be useful in itself--its effect on the members will bring their whole heterogeneity into expression, indeed, to a heightened expres- sion in the same sense in which the mere prolongation of divergent lines allows their divergence to appear more clearly. 52 The avoidance of every innovation, every departure from the previous way, will thus be shown to be a strict and rigid conservatism in order to hold the group in its existing form.
52 The precise fact that the disruptions of a foreign war often serve to unite the diver- gent and threatened elements of the state together again in its balance, is an obviously real exception but one that confirms the rule. For war appeals to those energies that are nevertheless common to the opposed elements of the community and raises those that are vital and fundamental in nature so strongly into consciousness that the disturbance here annuls the presupposition for their harmfulness--the divergence of the elements. On the other hand, where it is not strong enough to overcome the oppositions existing in the group, war has the above-claimed effect: as often as it has given the last blow to the internally shattered statehood, it has let even the nonpolitical groups, split by inner oppositions, to stand before the alternative: either to forget their disputes against the other during the conflict or on the contrary to let them degenerate incurably.
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In addition, for this behavior to be purposeful only a very broad but not necessarily hostile divergence among the group members is necessary. Where social differences are very great and do not begin to intermesh in intermediate stages, each swift movement and disruption of the structure of the collectivity must become much more dangerous than where mediating layers exist; since evolution always first takes hold of only a part of the group exclusively or especially firmly at first, there will be a gradualism in its progress or widening in the latter case, while in the former the movement will suddenly be very much more forcefully taking hold of both the ones not disposed to that and those far away from it. The middle classes will serve as buffers or shock absorbers that take in, soften, and diffuse the unavoidable disruptions of the structure of the whole in rapid development. Hence, societies that have clearly developed middle classes show a liberal character. And on the contrary it is most necessary that social peace, stability, and a conservative character of group life be preserved at all costs were it is a matter of the preservation of a discontinuous structure characterized by sharp internal differences. Therefore we also actually observe that with immense and irreconcilable class contrasts, peace and a persistence of forms of social life prevail sooner than with existing convergence, exchange, and mixing between the extremes of the social ladder. In the latter case the continuation of the collectvity in the status quo ante joins much sooner with fragile circumstances, abrupt developments, and progressive tendencies. Aristocratic constitutions are thus the authentic seats of conservatism; what is of interest here about this connection of motives, which will be treated later, is this: aristocracies form the strongest social divides on the one hand--more than monarchy does in a principled manner, which often ends up precisely as a leveling down, and only where it joins with the aristocratic principle, which however has no inner necessity and often has no outer necessity at all, does it create sharp class distinctions; on the other hand those constitutions are intended from within for a quiet, form-maintaining effect, since they have to be prepared neither for the unpredictability of a change on the throne nor for the moods of a mass of people.
This linkage between stability of the social character and the width of the degree of social distance is made evident also in the reverse direction. Where the self-preservation of the group through stability is forced from without, there strong social differences sometimes form as a result. The development of rural serfdom in Russia shows this to some extent. There was always a strong nomadic impulse in Russia that
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the expansive nature of the country gladly accommodated. In order to secure the orderly development of the land it was thus necessary to deprive the farmers of their liberty; this happened under Theodore I in 1593. But now once the farmer was tied to the soil, he gradually lost the freedoms possessed until then. Here the forced immobility of the farmer became, as also many times in the rest of Europe, the means by which the landlord oppressed him more and more deeply. What was originally only a provisional rule finally made him a mere appendage of the property. Thus the group's instinct of self-preservation did not only create a tendency toward stability of the form of life with sharply existing oppositions; but where it directly evoked the latter it added growing social differences to it, proving that connection in principle.
Another case in which the self-preservation of the group will press toward the greatest possible stability and rigidity exists in outlived struc- tures that no longer have any inner reason to exist and whose members actually belong to other relationships and forms of social life. Since the end of the Middle Ages, the German leagues of communities were weakened in their rights by the strengthening of central powers, and instead of the vital cohesion that they had derived from the importance of their previous social roles, only the mask and its externality remained for them--since then the last remaining means for their self-preserva- tion was an extremely strict closure, the unconditional prohibition of the entry of additional communities. Every quantitative expansion of a group requires certain qualitative modifications and adaptations that an outdated structure can no longer undergo without breaking apart. An earlier chapter showed the social form in its narrow relationships of dependency on the numerical determination of its elements: the structure of the society that is the right one for a certain number of members is no longer the right one for an enlarged number. But the process of transforming it into a new structure requires the assimila- tion and working up of new members; it consumes energy. Structures that have lost their inner meaning no longer possess this energy for the task, but use all that they still have in order to protect the once exist- ing form against internal and external dangers. That strict exclusion of additional members--such as also later characterized the antiquated guild constitutions--thus immediately meant not only a stabilization of the group, which it tied to the existing members and their descendents, but it also meant the avoidance of the structural transformations that were necessary for every quantitative expansion of the group, and for which a structure that had become unsuitable no longer had the
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capability. The instinct of self-preservation will therefore lead such a group to measures of a rigid conservatism. Generally, structures inca- pable of competition will be inclined to this means of self-preservation. For to the extent that its form is fragile, passes through various stages, carries out new adaptations, the competitor is given an opportunity for dangerous attacks. The most vulnerable stage for societies, as for individuals, is that between two periods of adaptation. Whoever is in motion cannot be shielded on all sides at every moment, as can some- one who is in a motionless, stable position. A group that feels wary of its competitor will thus, for the sake of its self-preservation, avoid any instability and evolution in its form and live by the principle, quieta non movere. 53 This rigid self-insulation will be especially useful where competition does not yet exist in reality, but it is a matter of prevent- ing competition since one does not feel up to it. Here rigorous exclu- sionary rules alone will be able to maintain the state of affairs,54 since the existence of new relationships, the presentation of new points of connection to the outside of the group would attract a larger circle, in which a group would encounter a superior competitor. This social rule may be effective in a very subtle way in the following context: A paper currency that is not redeemable, in contrast to the one covered (by precious metals), has the characteristic of being valid only within the region of the government that issues it and is not exportable. This is claimed as its greatest advantage: it remains in the land, is always there ready for all undertakings, and it does not enter into the balance of precious metals with another nation, which causes an importation of foreign goods and outflow of money in a relative surplus of money and thereby an immediately subsequent increase in prices. Thus there is an inner bond of the circulation of money limited to its land of ori- gin and a self-preservation of its social form, while sealing it off from the wider competition of the world market. An economically strong land and one equal to that competition would not need this means, but it would certainly be clear that it would achieve a strengthening of its essential form of life precisely amidst instability, the vicissitudes, and development of an interdependence with all others. It should not be claimed, for example, that relatively small groups generally seek their preservation in the form of stability, and large ones in variability.
53 Latin: Be still, no moving! --ed.
54 Simmel uses the Latin, status--ed.
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There are generally not such simple and definitive relations between such broad structures and patterns of activity, since each one of them includes an abundance of different factors that enter into multitudinous combinations with one another. Precisely very large groups, of course, need stability for their institutions that smaller ones can replace with swift wholesale adaptations. A conscious effort of the English labor federations to shift the site of its headquarters from time to time from one affiliate union to another has made room at a later time to settling its administration in one specific place and with particular persons. The large group can tolerate this stability of its institutions because it still always provides room through its size for sufficient changes, variations, as well as for local and temporal adaptations. Indeed, one can say: the large group increases both in itself as it increases generalization and individualization in itself, while the smaller group either represents one or the other or both in an incomplete state of development.
The essentially individual-psychological motive that supports the preservation of a relationship under the form of stability is termed 'fidel- ity. ' The sociological importance of this encloses the specific matter of this chapter in so wide a circumference, and the immediate relevance here is so closely fused with the transition to what comes later, that I will move the discussion of it into a separate excursus, in which I also deal with the importance of gratitude for social structure, or rather as a sociological form in itself. Since, in an admittedly more particular type than fidelity, gratitude prevents the breaking off of a once intact relationship and works as an energy with which a relationship preserves its status quo in the face of unavoidable disturbances of a positive or negative kind.
Excursus on Fidelity and Gratitude
Fidelity belongs to those most universal patterns of action that can become significant for all interactions among people, which are most diverse not only materially but also sociologically. In domination and subordination as well as in equality, within a joint opposition against a third as well as within a shared friendship, in families as well as with respect to the state, in love as well as in relationship to an occupational group--in all these structures, seen purely in terms of their sociological configuration, fidelity and its opposite become important, as it were, as a sociological form of a second order, as the bearer of the existing and self-preserving kinds of relationship among members; in its universality it relates, as it were, to the sociological forms attained by it, as these behave toward the material contents and motives of social existence.
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Without the phenomenon that we call 'fidelity,' society would not be able to exist in the factually given manner for any time at all. The factors that support the preservation of society--individual interests of the members, suggestion, force, idealism, mechanical habit, sense of duty, love, inertia--would not be able to protect it from breaking up if all of them were not complemented by the factor of fidelity. Admittedly the quantity and importance of these fac- tors are not determinable in the individual case since fidelity, in its practical effect, always substitutes for another feeling, any trace of which whatever will hardly be wasted. That which is to be attributed to fidelity is intertwined with a collective result that resists quantitative analysis.
Because of the complementary character that befits fidelity (Treue), an expression 'faithful love' (treue Liebe), for example, is somewhat misleading. If love persists in a relationship between people, what need is there for fidelity? If the individuals are not bound together by fidelity at the very beginning but rather by the primary genuine disposition of the soul, why would fidelity still have to arrive after ten years as the guardian of the relationship, since, presumably, that is nevertheless just the same love even after ten years and must prove its binding strength entirely on its own, as in the first moment? If word usage would simply call enduring love 'faithful love' (treue Liebe), one need not, of course, object to that, since it is not a matter of words, but probably upon there being a mental--and social--condition that preserves the dura- tion of a relationship beyond its first occurrence and which outlives these forces with the same synthesizing effect, as it had on it, and which we can only call 'fidelity,' although this word still includes a totally different sort of meaning, i. e. , the perseverance of these forces. One could describe fidelity as the ability of the soul to persevere, which keeps it keeps to a course that has been taken, after the stimulus that led it to that course in the first instance has passed. It is to be understood from this that I am always speaking here only about fidelity of a purely psychological kind, about a disposition that stems from within, not about a purely external relation, as, for example, within the marriage the legal concept of fidelity means nothing positive at all but only the non-occurrence of infidelity.
It is a fact of the highest sociological importance that countless relation- ships remain unchanged in their social structure, even though the feeling or practical occasion that allowed them to originate in the first instance have disappeared. The otherwise indubitable truth--that it is easier to destroy than to build--does not simply hold for certain human relationships. Admit- tedly the coming into existence of a relationship requires a certain amount of conditions, positive and negative, the absence of any one of which hinders its coming about from the beginning. But once it has begun, it is still in no way always destroyed by the subsequent loss of that condition without which it would not have arisen in the first place. An erotic relationship, for example, originating on the basis of physical beauty, can very well survive the latter's diminishing and turning into ugliness. What has been said about states--that they can only be maintained by the same means by which they are estab- lished--is only a very partial truth and no less than a general principle of social relations. Rather, the sociological connection from which it always arises
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forms a self-preservation, a special stability of its form, independently of the original motives behind the connections. Without this ability of maintaining the social structure that was once constituted, society as a whole would collapse at every moment or be changed in an unimaginable way. The preservation of the form of unity is born psychologically by various forces--intellectual and practical, positive and negative. Fidelity is the underlying sentimental factor, or also the same thing in the form of feeling, its projection on the level of feeling. The feeling in question here--whose quality should be established only in its psychic reality, as much whether one accepts it as an adequate definition of the concept of fidelity or not--thus remains as defined. To those relationships that develop between individuals correspond a specific feeling, an interest, and an impulse that are relationship-oriented. Now, if the relationship continues further, there arises, in interaction with this ongoing stability, a special feeling or also this: those originally grounded mental conditions--many times, if not always--metamorphose themselves into a unique form that we call fidelity, into, as it were, a psychological reservoir or a form of collectvity or uniformity for the most diverse interests, emotions, and bonding motives; and over all the difference in their origin, they assume a certain similarity in the form of fidelity, which conceivably favors the lasting character of this feeling. Thus what is called true love, true devotion, etc. is not what is meant, nor that which means a certain modality or temporal quantity of an otherwise already identified feeling; but I mean that fidelity is a unique condition of the soul, directed toward the continuation of the relationship as such and independent of the specific emotional or volitional vehicle of its content. This mental con- stitution of the individual, manifest here in such different degrees, belongs to the a priori conditions of society that are first made possible, at least in their existence that is known to us, although it appears at extremely different levels that, meanwhile, can probably never drop to zero: the person with absolutely no fidelity, for whom the transformation of a relations-forming affect into a particular one and for whom the preservation of the feeling oriented toward relationship would be simply impossible, is not an unthinkable phenomenon. Thus, one could describe fidelity as an inductive conclusion of the feeling. A relationship comes into existence at such a moment. The feeling--in a formal similarity to a theoretical induction--derives a further conclusion from it: thus it also exists at a later moment; and as in intellectual induction one no longer needs to establish the later case as fact, since induction simply means that it remains spared for it, thus in very many cases of that later moment the reality of the feeling and interests is hardly to be found any more, but it replaces these with that inductively originated condition that is termed 'fidelity. ' One must (and this pertains to the sociological foundation) think that, among very many relationships and associations of people with one another the mere habituation of being together and simply the factually longer existence of the relationship bring with it this inductive conclusion of the feeling. And this broadens the concept of fidelity and adds a very important factor to it: the externally given sociological situation, the togetherness, co-opts to some degree the feeling that really corresponds to it, although they were not present in the beginning and in relation to the grounding of the relationship. Here, the process of fidelity
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becomes somewhat retrogressive. The psychological motives that create a relationship make room for the ones linked to it and for the specific feeling of fidelity, or change into it. If such came about now from any such external reasons, or at least mental ones, that do not correspond to the meaning of the association, then a fidelity toward it arises, and this allows the deeper emotional conditions, ones that are adequate for the alliance, to develop, which is legiti- mated as it were per subsequens matrimonium animarum.
55 The banal adage that is often heard regarding conventional or purely external reasons for marriages to occur--love would still certainly come in the marriage--is actually not always in error. If at first the continuation of the relationship had once found its psychological correlate in fidelity, its emotions, interests of the heart, inner associations, which become apparent now rather as their end result instead of their logical position at the beginning of the relationship, follow them in them finally--a development that admittedly does not come about without the intervening factor of fidelity, of the affect oriented toward the preservation of the relationship as such. Corresponding to the psychological association that, once the idea B is first linked to the idea A, now also works in the reverse direction and calls A into consciousness if B appears in it--the sociological form leads, in the way that was just indicated, to the inner condition corre- sponding to it, while otherwise the latter leads to the former. In France the 'secours temporaire'56 was introduced from the middle of the nineteenth century, in order to limit child abandonment and the transfer of the children to the foundling homes as much as possible, which was a fairly generous support for unwed mothers if they kept their children in their own care; and the authors of this measure on the basis of very extensive observations cited in its favor that in the overwhelming majority of cases, if it only succeeded at all in keeping the child with the mother for a time, then there would be no more danger of her parting with it. While the natural emotional bond of the mother to the child should actually lead to her keeping it with herself, this apparently does not always happen. But if it succeeds in moving the mother to keep the child with herself even if for only a short time in order to secure the benefit of this secours temporaires out of extraneous reasons, this external relationship gradually allows its emotional basis to grow between them.
These psychological configurations take on a particular emphasis in the phenomenon of the renegade, in whom one has noticed a fidelity typically toward a new political, religious, or some other party, a fidelity that, ceteris paribus, exceeds in consciousness and commitment that of the members belonging to the party. This goes so far that many times in Turkey the Turks born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not generally occupy the high positions of the state, but only Janissaries were accepted for that purpose, i. e. born Christians who were either converted of their own free will or Christian children who were robbed from their parents and reared as
55 Latin: by the subsequent marriage of souls--ed.
56 French: temporary aid--ed.
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Turks. They were the most loyal and the most energetic subjects. This special fidelity of the renegade seems to me to be based on the circumstances under which one has entered the new relationship, affects one longer and more permanently than if one were, so to speak, nai? ve and reared without break in another relationship. If fidelity, as far as it concerns us here, is one's own life of relationship reflected in feeling, amidst indifference toward the eventual disappearance of the motive that originally established it, it will be effective all the more energetically and certainly the longer those motives still remain alive in the relationship and the lighter the burden of proof that is expected of the strength of the pure form of the relationship as such; and this will be most especially the case with the renegade, acutely aware of not being able to go back--thereupon, for the renegade the other relationship, from which one is irrevocably detached, always forms the background of the currently existing relationship, as in a form of sensitivity to difference. One is always, as it were, repelled anew from it and driven into the new relationship. The renegade's loyalty is particularly strong because it still contains in itself what fidelity as fidelity can spare: the conscious living out of the motive for the relationship that merges with the formal power of this simply enduring relationship, as in the cases where this opposed past and this exclusion of the possibility of going back or doing differently begins.
This already shows the purely conceptual structure of fidelity to be a socio- logical or, if one wishes, sociologically oriented affect. Other feelings, as much as they may bind people together, are still somewhat more solipsistic. Even love, friendship, patriotism, and sense of social duty have of course their nature first in an affect that occurs within the subject itself and remains imminent in the subject, as revealed perhaps most strongly in the words of Philene, "If I love you, what matters that to you? "57 Here the emotions remain conditions of the subject first, despite their unending sociological importance. They are admittedly only created through the influence of other individuals or groups, but they also act before this influence is transformed into mutual influence; they need at least, if they are also directed toward another being, not to have the relationship with them for their real presupposition or content. This is simply the exact meaning of 'fidelity' (at least what is of concern here, although it also has still other meanings in common speech); it is the word for the particular feeling that is not oriented to possessing others, as to an eudaemonistic good of the one who feels it, also not to the well-being of others, as to an objective value standing before the subject, but to the preservation of the relationship with others; it does not establish this relationship and consequently cannot be, as with all the emotions, pre-sociological, but courses through what is estab- lished, holding onto one of the participants in the relationship as the inside of its self-preservation. Perhaps this specifically sociological character of fidelity is related to the fact that--more than our other feelings, which come upon us like rain and sunshine and without our will having control over their coming
57 Evidently, from Dialogue de Philene by Jean de Mairet (1604-1686)--ed.
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and going--it is amenable to our moral endeavors, so that its denial would be a stronger reproach to us than if love or social feeling--beyond their purely obligatory exercises--were lacking.
This special sociological importance of fidelity, however, still allows it to play a unifying role in a wholly fundamental duality affecting the principal form of all social processes. It is this: a relationship that is a fluctuating, con- tinuously developing life process obtains a relatively stable external form. The social forms of people associating with one another, of the representation to the outside of the changes within their interior, i. e. , the process within each individual relating to the other, do not generally follow in close alliance; both levels have a different tempo of development, or it is also often the nature of the external form, that they do not actually develop at all. The strongest external crystallization amidst variable circumstances is evidently juridical: the form of marriage, which faces the changes in the personal relations with inflexibility, and the contract between two partners that divides the business between them despite it soon turning out that one does all the work and the other none; membership in a state or religious community that becomes completely alien or hostile to the individual. But also beyond such ostensive cases, it is noticeable step by step how the relationships developing between individuals--and also between groups--incline toward a crystallization of their form and how then they form a more or less fixed prejudice in favor of a further development in the relationship and, in turn, how they are hardly capable of a vibrant vitality to be able to adapt to the softer or stronger changes in concrete interactions. Besides, this contradicts only the discrepancies within the individual. The inner life, which we experience as a steaming, unstop- pable up and down of thoughts and moods, thereby crystallizes for us even into formulae and fixed directions, often those that we fix in words. If it can also thereby be too concrete, perceptible inadequacies do not often appear in individuals; if in fortunate cases the fixed outer form can represent the point of emphasis or point of indifference around which life oscillates equally toward one and the other side, still the principal, formal contrast between the flow- ing, the essential agitation of the subjective mental life, and the ability of its forms remain, which somehow do not express and shape an ideal, a contrast with its reality, but directly this life itself. Since in individual life and in social life the external forms do not flow as the inner development itself, but always remain fixed for some time, the pattern is this: the external forms soon rush right ahead of the inner reality and quickly stand right behind it. Precisely when the superseded forms are shattered by the life pulsating behind them, it swings, so to speak, to an opposite extreme and creates forms that rush ahead of that real life and by which it is not yet completely filled--beginning with wholly personal relationships, where for example, the use of German Sie [formal 'you'] among those who have been friends for a long time is often found to be an unsuitable stiffness in the warmth of the relationship, but the Du [informal 'you'] just as often, at least at first, is a bit excessive as an anticipation of a total intimacy not yet achieved. Until changes in the political constitution, to replace forms that have become outdated and an unbearable force, through being liberal and broader, without the reality of the political
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and economic forces ever being ripe for this yet, would be setting too wide a provisional framework in place of too narrow a one. Now fidelity, in the sense analyzed here has the implication for this pattern of social life that once the personal, fluctuating inwardness actually assumes the character of the fixed stable form of relationship, this sociological life, beyond the immediate one, and the stability that preserves its subjective rhythm, has here really become the content of the subjective, emotionally determined life. Viewed from the countless modifications, twists, and turns of the concrete destiny, fidelity is the bridge over and reconciliation for that deep and essential dualism that divides the life form of individual interiority from that of the social process that is certainly supported by the former. Fidelity is the disposition of the soul agitated and living itself out in a continual stream, with which it now nevertheless internally adopts the stability of the supra-individual form of relationship and adopts a content whose form must contradict the rhythm or lack of rhythm of the really lived life--although it created it itself. It takes up its meaning and value into this life.
To a much lesser extent than with fidelity, a sociological character appears immediately in the emotion of gratitude. Meanwhile the sociological importance of gratitude is hardly to be overestimated; only the external insignificance of its individual act--in contrast to which stands the immense expanse of its effectiveness--appears to have been almost fully deceptive about how the life and cohesion of society would be immeasurably different without the reality of gratitude.
First what gratitude brings about is a complement to the legal order. All human commerce is based on the pattern of devotedness and equivalency. Now, the equivalency of innumerable duties and performances can be enforced. In all economic exchanges that occur in legal form, in all fixed promises to perform something, in all obligations stemming from a legally regulated relationship, the legal constitution forces the receiving and giving of work and reciprocal work and provides for this interaction without which there is no social balance and cohesion. Now, however, there are numerous relationships for which no legal form exists, in which there can be no talk about a forcing of equivalents for devotedness. Gratitude appears here as something gratuitous, the bond of interaction, of engendering, receiving and giving of work and reciprocal work, where no external force guarantees it. Gratitude is thus in that sense a complement of the legal form, in the same sense as I showed honor to be.
In order to place this connection in its correct category, it must first be made clear that the personal, even in cases of person to person action involving things, somewhat as in robbery or gift, lies in the primitive form of the exchange of property, and it evolves into commerce in the objective meaning of the word. The exchange is the objectification of the interaction between people. While one gives something and the other gives something in turn that has the same value, the pure sensitivity of the relationship between the persons is externalized in objects, and this objectification of the relationship, its growing into things that come and go, becomes so complete that the personal interac- tion in the developed economy withdraws altogether and the products have achieved a life of their own; the relationships between them, the equivalency
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of value between them, takes place automatically, purely mathematically, and the people only appear as the executors of the tendencies toward shifting and balancing, grounded in the products themselves. Objectively the same is given for objectively the same, and the persons themselves, though they obviously carry out the process for the sake of their interests, are actually indifferent. The relationship of people has become the relationship of objects. Now, gratitude originates likewise from and in the interaction among people, and turns inside, as every relationship of things springs from it and turns outward. It is the subjective residue of the act of receiving or also of giving. As the interaction emerges with the exchange of things from the immediate action of the interrelation, so with gratitude this action declines in its consequences, in its subjective importance, and in its mental echo down in the soul. It is, as it were, the moral memory of humanity, distinguished here from fidelity so that it is more practical, more impulsive in nature, so that although it can of course also remain purely within, by stimulating action the potential for new action is still an ideal bridge that the soul, so to speak, finds ever again, in order to construct a new bridge that would otherwise perhaps not be sufficient for reaching over to the other person. All social interaction beyond its first origin is based on the further effect of the relationship beyond the moment of its origin. If love or greed, obedience or hate, the sociability instinct or a thirst for power may allow an action of one person to another to emerge from itself, the creative mood does not serve to exhaust itself in the action, but somehow to live on in the sociological situation created by it. Gratitude is such a continuing existence in a most particular sense, an ideal survival of a relationship, even after it was somewhat broken off for a long time and the act of giving and receiving has been long completed. Although gratitude is a purely personal or, if one will, lyric emotion, it turns into one of the strongest bonds through its thousand-fold intermeshing within the society; it is the fertile emotional foundation from which not only are individual actions stimulated toward each other, but through its fundamental existence, even though often unconscious and interwoven with countless other motives, it adds a particular modification or intensity to actions, a linkage to them, a giving of continuity into the personality amidst the vicissitudes of life. If every thankful response to an earlier action still remaining in the hearts were to be wiped out with one blow, society, at least as we know it, would disintegrate. 58 If one can see
58 Giving is, overall, one of the strongest sociological functions. Without the existence of continuous giving and receiving--also beyond commerce--no society would come into existence at all. For giving is in no way only a simple effect of one person on another but is exactly what is required by the sociological function: it is interaction. Insofar as the other either accepts or rejects, a certain repercussion is exercised on the one giving. The way one accepts, gratefully or ungratefully, as one already expected or is surprised, so that one is satisfied by the gift or remains dissatisfied, so that one feels elevated by the gift or humiliated--all this has a very specific repercussion on the giver, although, of course, not expressible in a particular concept and quantity, and thus each giving is an interaction between the giver and the recipient.
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through all the outside/inside binding motives between individuals from the way they carry on exchange, how much they support commerce, which builds up society for the most part and does not only hold the structure together, gratitude will be seen simply as the motive that causes the repetition of the good deed from within, where one does not speak of external necessity. And the good deed is not only an actual giving from person to person, but we thank the artist and the poet who do not know us, and this fact creates innumerable ideal and concrete, looser and firmer bonds between them that such gratitude toward the same giver brings about; indeed we thank the giver not only for whatever somebody does, but one can describe the feeling only with the same idea with which we often react to the shear existence of personalities: we are thankful to them purely because they are there, because we experience them. And the finest and the most solid relationships are often associated with what offers exactly our whole personality to the other as from a duty to be thankful, independently of the feeling of all individual receptions, since it also applies to the whole of one's personality.
Now, the concrete content of gratitude, i. e. the responses to which it leads us, creates room for changes in the interaction, the delicacy of which does not lessen its importance for the structure of our relationships. The interior of this structure experiences an extraordinary richness of nuance since a gift accepted according to the psychological situation can only be responded to with another gift of the same kind given to the other. Thus perhaps one gives to the other what is termed a spirit, intellectual values, and the other shows gratitude by returning something of mental value; or one offers the other something aesthetic or some other appeal of one's personality, which is of a stronger nature and, as it were, infuses it with a will and equips one with firmness and power of decision. Now there is probably no interaction in which the to and fro, the giving and receiving, involve completely identical kinds. 59 But the cases that I have mentioned here are the ultimate increments of this unavoidable difference between gift and return gift in human relations, and where they appear very definite and with a heightened consciousness of the difference; they form an ethically as well as theoretically difficult problem of the same proportion of what one can call 'inner sociology. ' That is, it often has the tone of a faint inner inappropriateness for one person to offer the other intellectual treasurers without considerably engaging in the relationship something of the spirit, while the other does not know anything to give for it as love; all such cases have something fatal at the level of feeling, since they somehow smack of a purchase. It is the difference between exchange in general and purchasing that is emphasized in the idea of the sale, that the actually on-going exchange involves two wholly heterogeneous things that are brought together and become comparable only through a common monetary value. Thus if a handicraft in somewhat earlier times, as there was not yet metal
59 Simmel places the statement in the singular and uses the Latin expression, quale, for kinds--ed.
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money, was sold for a cow or goat, which were wholly heterogeneous things but which were brought together and exchangeable through the economic, abstract-common value placed on both. In the modern money economy this heterogeneity has reached a high point. Since money is the common element, i. e. it expresses the exchange value in all exchangeable objects, it is incapable of expressing just what is individual among them; and hence a note of down- grading comes over the objects, insofar as they are presented as marketable, a note of reducing the individuals to what is common among them, what is common to this thing with all other marketable things, and above all what is common with money itself. Something of this basic heterogeneity occurs in the cases that I mentioned, where two people mutually offer one another different kinds of goods of their inner sensitivities, where gratitude for the gift is realized in an altogether different currency and thus something of the character of a sale enters into the exchange, which is here, a priori, inappropri- ate. One purchases love with what one gives from the soul. One purchases the attraction of a person that one wants to enjoy through superior suggest- ibility and willpower, which the person either wants to feel over oneself or wants to allow to be poured into oneself. The feeling of a certain inadequacy or unworthiness arises here only if the mutual offerings serve as detached objects that one exchanges, if the mutual gratitude involves only, so to speak, the good deed, only the exchanged content itself. However, especially in the circumstances in question here, the person is still not the merchant of the self. One's qualities, the powers and functions that flow out of one, exist not only for oneself as goods on the counter, but it happens that an individual, in order to feel oneself fully, even when giving only a single thing and offering only one aspect of one's personality, in this one aspect one's personality can be complete, one's personality in the form of this particular energy, of this particular attribute, can nevertheless give totally, as Spinoza would say. Any disproportion arises only where the differentiation within the relationship is so advanced that what one gives to the other is detached from the whole of the personality. Meanwhile, where this does not happen, a remarkable pure case of the otherwise not very frequent combination arises precisely here, that gratitude includes the reaction to the good deed and to the person who did it alike. In the seemingly objective response that only pertains to the gift and which consists of another gift, it is possible through that remarkable plasticity of the soul both to offer and to accept the entirety of the subjectivity of the one person as well as that of the other.
The most profound instance of this kind exists when the general inner disposition, which is attuned toward the other in the special way called grati- tude, is not only, as it were, a broadening of the actual response of gratitude copied onto the totality of the soul, but when what we experience of goods and generosity from another is only like an incidental motive by which a predetermined relationship to the other is only activated in the inner nature of the soul. Here what we call gratitude and what had given the name to this disposition, as it were, from only one single proof, very deep under the familiar, takes on the valid form of gratitude for the object. One can say that at the deepest level it does not consist in the gift being reciprocated, but that in the
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consciousness that one cannot repay, that here something exists that the soul of the recipient changes into a particular permanent disposition toward the other and brings to consciousness a presentiment of the inner endlessness of a relationship that cannot become completely exhausted or developed through a final demonstration or activity.
This coincides with another deep-lying incommensurability that is most essential for the relationship maintained under the category of gratitude. Where we have experienced from another something worthy of gratitude, where this was 'accomplished beforehand,' we can repay this completely with no return gift or reciprocity--although such may rightly and objectively outweigh the first gift--since voluntariness exists in the first giving, which is no longer existent in the equivalent return. Since we are already ethically bound to it, the pressure to give back is there, which is nevertheless a pressure, albeit not socio-legal but moral. The first manifestation arising from the complete spontaneity of the soul has a freedom that duty, even the duty of gratitude, lacks. Kant had decreed this character of duty with a bold stroke: The fulfillment of duty and freedom are identical. There he has confounded the negative side of freedom with the positive. Seemingly, we are free to fulfill or not to fulfill the duty that we feel as ideally above us. In reality, only the latter occurs in total freedom. Fulfilling it, however, results from a mental imperative, from the force that is the inner equivalent of the legal force of society. Complete freedom lies only on the side of what is allowed, not on that of the deed to which I am brought to the thought that it is a duty--just as I am brought to reciprocating a gift on the basis that I received it. We are free only when we are prepared, and that is the basis why in the case there lies a beauty not occasioned by the offer of gratitude, a spontaneous devotion, a sprouting up or blossoming toward another out of, as it were, the virgin soil of the soul that can be matched by no substantively overwhelming gift. Here remains a residue--with reference to the concrete content of the often seemingly unjustifiable evidence--that is expressed in the feeling that we cannot reciprocate a gift at all; for a freedom lives in it that the return gift, just because it is a return gift, cannot possess. Perhaps this is the basis why some people accept something reluctantly and if possible avoid being given a gift. If doing good and gratitude simply revolved around the object, that would be incomprehensible since one would then be making it all equivalent to revenge, which would be able to dissolve the inner bond completely. In reality, however, with everyone, perhaps, it simply works by instinct that the return gift cannot contain the decisive moment, the moment of the freedom of the first gift, and that with the acceptance of it one assumes an obligation that cannot be dissolved. 60 That as a rule people are so from a strong instinct of independence and individuality is reminiscent of the fact that the situation of gratitude is readily accompanied by a note of
60 Of course this is an extreme expression whose distance from reality, however, is unavoidable in analysis, which wishes to isolate and make visible for itself alone the causal elements of the mental reality that are mixed up a thousand times, always distracting, and that exist almost only in rudiments.
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an indissoluble bond, that it is of an indelible moral quality. Once we accept a deed, a sacrifice, or favor, that never completely extinguishable inner rela- tionship can originate from it since gratitude is perhaps the single existing feeling that can be morally required and satisfied under all circumstances. If our inner reality, from within itself or as a response to an outer reality, has made it impossible for us to love, admire, or esteem anymore--aesthetically, ethically, intellectually--we can still always be ever grateful to those who have once deserved our gratitude. The soul is absolutely adaptable to this challenge, or could be so, so that perhaps a judgment against a lack of no other feeling is so rendered without mitigating circumstances as against ingratitude. Even the inward fidelity does not have the same culpability. There are relationships that, so to speak, operate from the outset with only a definite capital of feel- ings and whose investment is unavoidably accompanied by it being used up, so that its discontinuation involves no actual perfidy. But admittedly, the fact that in their beginning stages they are often not too different from the others that--to stay with the analogy--they live off of the interest and in which all the ardor and unreservedness of the giving does not diminish the capital. Admit- tedly it belongs to the most frequent errors of people to treat what is capital as interest and to form a relationship around it so that its rupture turns into a case of faithlessness. But this, then, is not an error from out of the freedom of the soul but the logical development of a fate reckoned with erroneous factors from the outset. And infidelity does not appear to be avoidable where, not the self revealing deception of the consciousness but a real change in the individuals rearranges the presuppositions of their relationship. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of human relationships rises out of the mixture of the stable and the variable elements of our nature, which is not at all to be rationalized and which is continuously shifting. If we have committed ourselves with our whole being to a binding relationship, we remain perhaps with certain aspects in the same attitude and predisposition more oriented toward the outside but also with some purely toward the inside; but another develops toward a wholly new interest, goal, or ability that completely diverts our nature as a whole into a new direction. They thus divert us from that relationship--whereby of course only the pure inwardness is meant, not the outward fulfillment of duties--with a kind of faithlessness that is neither wholly innocent since some connection to that which now must be broken still exists, nor wholly guilty since we are no longer the same persons who entered into the relationship; the subject to whom one could impute the faithlessness has vanished. Here such exoneration from out of the inner essence such as this does not enter into our feeling when our sense of gratitude is extinguished. It seems to dwell in a place within us that cannot be changed, for which we require consistency with greater claims than with a more passionate and even deeper feeling. This peculiar indissolubility of gratitude, which even in the reciprocation with a similar or greater return gift leaves a residue, can also leave it on both sides of a relationship--perhaps reverting to that freedom of the gift that lacked only the morally necessary return gift--which allows gratitude to appear just as fine as it is a solid a bond between people. In every relationship that is permanent
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in some way a thousand occasions for thanks arise, of which even the most fleeting ones of their contribution to the reciprocal bond are not allowed to be lost. It arises from their summation, in the good cases, but sometimes also in those that are amply provided with counter instances--a general frame of mind of being quite obligated (one rightly claims to be 'bound' to the other for something worthy of gratitude), which is not able to be dissolved through any individual deeds; it belongs to the, as it were, microscopic but infinitely strong threads that tie one member of society to another and thereby, ultimately, all to a firmly formed common life.
In contrast to the stability and substantial solidity that some groups form as a condition of their self-preservation, others need precisely the greatest flexibility and interchangeability of social forms; for example the one that either only tolerates its existence within a larger one or just manages only per nefas. 61 Only with the most thorough elasticity can such a society combine a firmness of its interconnections with the continual defense and offense. It must, so to speak, slip into each hole, expand according to the circumstances, and be able to coordinate, as a body in an aggregate fluid condition must assume every form that is offered to it. Thus criminal and conspiratorial gangs must acquire the ability to split up immediately and act in separate groups; sometimes they must act without conditions, sometimes be subordinate to the leader; sometimes in direct contact, sometimes in indirect contact, but always protect the same common spirit; immediately after each dispersing to immediately reorganize anew exactly in any form possible, etc. They thereby achieve self-preservation, for which reason the Romani (Gypsies) are in the habit of saying about themselves that it would be pointless to hang them since they would never die. The same has been said of the Jews. The strength of their social solidarity, in practice the very effective feeling of solidarity among them, the peculiar, if also often relaxed, closure against all non-Jews--this sociological bond probably has lost its confessional character since emancipation, only to be exchanged for that against capitalists. 62 Thus 'the invisible orga- nization' of the Jews would be just insurmountable because as soon as
61 Latin: through wickedness--ed.
62 This and what follows seem to be rationales presented by Simmel, himself of Jewish origin, of what was commonly said of social minorities such as Romani and Jews in Germany in the early twentieth century, along with the assumption that Jews became socialists in great numbers--ed.
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the power of the press first and then that of the capital is freed from the hate against the Jews, their equivalent justification would rise up in the end; if Jewish social organization would not go into a decline but would only be deprived of its sociopolitical organization, it would still gain strength again in its original confessional form of association. This sociopolitical game has been already repeated locally and could also repeat everywhere.
Indeed, one could find the variability of the individual Jew, their wondrous ability in the most manifold tasks, and their nature to adapt to the most changed conditions life--one could describe this as a mir- roring of the social group form in the form of the individual. Quite immediately the flexibility of the Jews in socio-economic relationships has been described exactly as a vehicle for their resistance. The bet- ter English worker is not at all driven away from the wage that seems necessary to him for his standard: he goes on strike or does rather substandard work or seeks some credit of a different kind rather than accept a wage for his craft below the standards that have been set. How- ever the Jew rather accepts the lowest wage, as if not working at all, and thus is not acquainted with the quiet satisfaction with an achieved standard, but strives tirelessly beyond it: no minimum is too low, no maximum enough. This range of variation, which obviously extends from the individual life into that of the group, is as much the means of self-preservation of the Jew as the inflexibility and immovability simply are in the example of the English worker. Now whether the first sug- gested claim about the history of Judaism is substantively true or not, its presupposition is instructive for us: that the self-preservation of a social entity could occur directly through the change of its apparent form or its material basis, and that its continuation rests precisely on its changeability.
These two manners of social self-preservation enter into peculiarly characteristic contradictions through their relationship with wider sociological conceptions. If then the preservation of the group is very closely bound up with the maintenance of a certain stratum in its existence and uniqueness--the highest, the widest, the middle--the first two cases need more inflexibility in the form of social life, the last more flexibility. As I have already emphasized, aristocracies in general tend to be conservative. For if they really are what the word, aristocracy, means--the reign of the best--they are the most adequate expression of the real dissimilarity among people. In this case--about which I am not examining whether it is not almost always realized only very
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partially--the spur for revolutionary movements is missing: the lack of fit between the inner qualification of persons and their social place, the exit point for the greatest human achievements and bravery as well as for the most absurd human undertakings. Once supposing this favorable case of aristocracy, a strict adherence of its total existence to forms and contents is necessary for its overall preservation since every experimental change threatens that delicate and rare proportionality between qualification and position either in reality or for the feeling of the person concerned, and thus would provide the stimulus for a principled transformation. In an aristocracy, the essential cause of that, however, will still be that absolute justice hardly ever exists in the governing relationships, that, rather, the reign of the few over the many tends to be raised on a wholly different foundation from that of an ideal suitability in that relationship. Under these circumstances the rulers will have the greatest interest in giving no cause for restless and innovative movements since every such movement would stimulate the just or only alleged claims of those being ruled. There would be the danger--and this is decisive for our line of thought--that not only would there be an exchange of persons but the whole constitution would be changed. As soon as structures for self-preservation are considered cautiously and they can only operate through a latent or real defense, they avoid progressive development. For during periods of development, a being expends its energy inwardly and has none free for defense. For every development, its success is something problematic, according to its inner as well as its outer chances, and therefore also a being for which how it exists does not matter so much as the fact that it exists will cultivate no impulse for development. Thus it is that in a fundamental relationship that age normally has the leading place in aristocracies, as does youth in democracies. But age has a physiologically grounded tendency toward conservatism; it can still only 'conserve' itself and can still allow itself to take a chance with the dangers of ever advancing development only in cases of an exceptional reserve of forces. And yet on the other hand, where age in practice enjoys prestige and posi- tion of power, conservatism will prevail: the young, at whose cost age now has its privilege--e. g. , the frequently higher age limit for holding office in aristocracies--can only hope to enter into office only under similarly existing conditions. In such a context the aristocratic form of constitution preserves its status for itself best with the greatest immobil- ity possible; and this in no way holds only for political groups but for ecclesiastical ones, interest groups, for informal and social groupings,
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that lend themselves to aristocratic formation. As soon as this has hap- pened, everywhere a strict conservatism becomes favorable not only for the temporary personal existence of a reign but also for its formal, principled preservation. Precisely the history of the reform movements in aristocratic constitutions makes this clear enough. The adaptation to newly existing social forces or ideals, as occurs through a mitigation of exploitation or subjugation, the legal establishment of privileges instead of arbitrary interpretations, and the lifting of the law and a good por- tion of the lower classes--this adaptation, insofar as it is conceded voluntarily, serves its goal not in what would thereby be changed but on the contrary in what would be thereby conserved. The lessening of aristocratic prerogatives is the conditio sine qua non63 for rescuing the aristocratic regime at all. But if one had allowed the movement to proceed in the first place, these concessions are mostly no longer suf- ficient. Every reform tends to reveal new things that need reform, and the movement that was introduced for the preservation of the existing order leads down a slippery slope either towards its overthrow or, if the revived claims cannot succeed, to a radical reaction that reverses the changes that had already been put in place. This danger, which exists in every modification and flexibility of an aristocratic constitution--that the concession granted for its preservation leads under its own weight to a total revolution--allows the conservatism a` outrance64 and the existing form of defense in unconditional rigidity and inflexibility to appear as the good one for the social form of aristocracy.
Where the form of the group is not set by the prominence of a numerically small stratum but by the widest stratum and its autonomy, its self-preservation will likewise benefit from stability and motionless steadfastness. Thus it comes about that the broad masses, insofar as they serve as a permanent vehicle of a social unity, have a very rigid and immobile disposition. They diverge most sharply from the actu- ally currently assembled multitude that in its mood and decisions is extremely labile and changes with the most fleeting impulses from one extreme of behavior to another. Where the multitude is not directly sensually stimulated and joins a nervous fluctuation through mutually exercised stimulation and suggestion, an uprooting of firm control
63 Latin: indispensable condition--ed.
64 French: in the extreme--ed.
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which exposes the multitude to every current impulse, where rather its deeper and more enduring character becomes effective, there it follows, as it were, the law of inertia: it does not alter its condition of rest or movement by itself but only under the influence of new positive forces. Therefore movements that are borne by great masses and left on their own consequently go to their extreme, while on the other hand an equilibrium of conditions, once attained, is not easily set aside, as far as the masses are concerned. It corresponds to the practical instinct of the mass and meets the change of circumstances and stimulations of itself by means of a substantial firmness and intransigence in form, instead of protection through flexible adaptation and quickly instituted changes in its behavior. It becomes essential for political constitutions that the basis for their social form rest on the broadest and similarly qualified stratum, mostly among agricultural peoples--the ancient Roman peasantry and the ancient German communities of freemen. Here the behavior of their forms is prejudged by the content of the social interests. The farmer is conservative a priori; his business requires long time frames, durable equipment, persistent management, and tenacious steadfastness. The unpredictability of favorable weather, on which he depends, inclines him toward a certain fatalism that is manifested with respect to the external forces more by endurance than by avoidance; his technology cannot at all respond to market changes by such quick qualitative modifications as industry and business are accustomed to do. Added to that, the farmer above all wishes to have peace in his state and--what politicians of different times have known and exploited--it matters little to him, in contrast, what form this state takes. Thus here the technical conditions also create groups, the preservation of whose form coincides with that of the broadest agricultural stratum and with the disposition to achieve this preservation through firmness and tenac- ity, but not through instability in their life processes.
It is quite different where the middle class assumed control and the social form of the group rises and falls with its preservation. The middle class, however, has an upper and lower limit, and indeed of a kind that continuously picks up individuals both from the upper and from the lower classes and loses individuals to both.