No More Learning

Our sense impres- sions of a person allows the emotional value, on the one hand, the usefulness for an instinctive or sought-after knowledge of that person, on the other, to become jointly effective and for all practical purposes actually inextricable in the foundation of our relationship to the person. To a very different extent, of course, the construction being done by both, the sound of the voice and the content of what is said, the appearance and its psychological interpretation, the attraction or repulsion of the environment and the instinctive sizing-up of the other based on that person's mental coloration and sometimes also on the other's level of culture--in very different measures and mixes both of these developments of sense impression construct our relationship to the other.
Among the individual sense organs, the eye is applied to a fully unique socio- logical accomplishment: to the bonds and patterns of interaction of individuals who are looking at each other. Perhaps this is the most immediate and purest interactive relationship. Where otherwise sociological threads are spun, they tend to possess an objective content, to produce an objective form. Even the word spoken and heard still has an objective interpretation that would yet be transmissible perhaps in another manner. The most vital interactivity, however, in which the eye-to-eye look intertwines human beings, does not crystallize in any kind of objective formation; the unity that it establishes between them remains dissolved directly in the event, in the function. And so strong and sensitive is this bond that it is borne only by the shortest, the straight line between the eyes, and that the least diversion from this, the slightest glance to the side, fully destroys the singularity of this bond. There remains for sure no objective trace, as indeed, directly or indirectly, from all other types of relationships between people, even from exchanged words; the interactivity dies in the moment in which the immediacy of the function is abandoned; but the entire interaction of human beings, their mutual understanding and mutual rejection, their intimacy and their coolness, would in some way be incalculably changed if the eye-to-eye view did not exist--which, in contrast with the simple seeing or observing of the other, means a completely new and unparalleled relationship between them.
The closeness of this relationship is borne by the remarkable fact that the perceptive glance directed at the other is itself full of expression, and in fact precisely by the way one looks at the other. In the look that takes in the other one reveals oneself; with the same act, in which the subject seeks to know its object, it surrenders itself to the object. One cannot take with the eye without at the same time giving. The eye unveils to the other the soul that seeks to unveil the other. While this occurs obviously only in immediate eye-to-eye contact, it is here that the most complete mutuality in the whole realm of human relations is produced.
Hence it becomes really quite understandable why shame leads us to look to the ground to avoid the gaze of the other. Certainly not only for the purpose of keeping us spared of being perceptibly detected from observation by the
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? other in such a painful and confusing situation; but the deeper reason is that lowering my gaze deprives the other somehow of the possibility of detecting me. The look into the eye of the other serves not only for me to know the other but also for the other to know me; one's personality, one's mood, one's impulse towards the other is carried forth in the line that binds both our eyes. The 'ostrich-like attitude' in this physically immediate sociological relationship has a very real purpose: whoever does not look at the other actually eludes being seen to some degree. The person is not entirely quite there for the other should the other notice one, unless the first should also return the look of the other.
The sociological significance of the eye depends in the first instance, however, on the expressive significance of countenance, which, between one person and another, is offered as the first object in sight. We seldom clarify the extent to which even the practicality of our relationships depends on reciprocal recogni- tion--not only in the sense of all the externalities or the momentary intentions and mood of the other, but what we consciously or instinctively recognize from the other's being, from the other's inner foundation, from the immutability of that person's essence; this unavoidably colors our immediate as well as our long-term relationship to that person. The face is indeed the geometrical location of all these recognitions; it is the symbol of all that accompanies the individual as the prior condition of one's life, all that is stored up in a person, what from the past has descended to the foundation of one's life and become one's enduring traits. While we make use of the face for such meaning, which thus serves greatly the purposes of praxis, a supra-practical element takes place in the exchange: the face causes the person to be understood not initially from one's action but from one's appearance. The face, viewed as an organ of expression, is, so to speak, of an entirely theoretical nature; it does not act like the hand, like the foot, like the whole body; it does not convey the internal or practical activity of the person, but it certainly speaks of it. The particular, sociologically consequentially rich type of 'knowledge' that the eye mediates is determined by the countenance being the essential object of inter-individual seeing. This knowing (kennen) is something other than recognition (erkennen). In some kind of admittedly fluctuating measure we know with the first glance at people whether we are going to have anything to do with them. That we are for the most part not conscious of this fact and of its fundamental significance for us lies in the fact that we direct our attention beyond this obvious basis directly at the recognizability of particular traits, of singular contents that decide our practical behavior towards the person in particular. Should one, however, press forward to the consciousness of this self-evident reality, it is then astounding how much we know of a person upon the first glance. Noth- ing expressible with concepts, divisible into individual properties; we cannot say absolutely perhaps whether the person seems smart or dumb, pleasant or vicious, high-spirited or sleepy to us. All this recognizability in the usual sense includes universal characteristics that the person shares with countless others. What, however, that first look imparts to us is not to be analyzed and interpreted into the conceptual and expressible--although it remains forever the tone of all later recognitions of that person--but it is the immediate grasp
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? of someone's individuality, just as that person's appearance, above all the face, betrays it to our look; wherefore it is basically insignificant that with this there also occur sufficient errors and corrections.
While the face then offers to the glance the apparently most complete symbol of the persistent inwardness and all of what our experiences have allowed to sink into our enduring basic nature, there is nevertheless at the same time the interactively rich situations of the moment. Emerging here is something completely unique in the realm of the human: that the universal, supra-singular nature of the individual presents itself always in the particular coloring of a momentary disposition, fulfillment, impulsiveness; that the uni- tary stability and the fluid multiplicity of our souls is, as it were, visible as an absolute concurrence, the one always in the form of the other. It is the utmost sociological contrast between the eye and the ear: that the former offers us then the revelation of the person bound in temporal form; the latter, however, what is permanent in one's nature, the sediment of one's past in the substantial form of one's traits so that before us we see, so to speak, the successions of a person's life in one concurrence. Then the indicated tone of the moment, as indeed the face documents it too, is removed by us so essentially from that which is spoken that in the actual effect of the perception of the face, the permanent character of the person recognized through it, prevails.
For that reason the sociological tone of the blind is altogether different than that of the deaf. For the blind the other is present actually only in the succession, in the sequence of that person's utterances. The restless, disturbing concurrence of characteristic traits, of the traces from all of one's past, as it lies outspread in the face of a person, escapes the blind, and that might be the reason for the peaceful and calm, uniformly friendly disposition toward the surroundings that is so often observed among the blind. Precisely the variega- tion in that concurrence, which the face can reveal, often renders it enigmatic; in general what we see of a person is interpreted through what we hear from that person, while the reverse is much less frequent. Therefore, the person who sees without hearing is much more confused, more at a loss, more disquieted than the person who hears without seeing. Herein necessarily lies a significant factor for the sociology of the metropolis. Going about in it, compared with the small city, manifests an immeasurable predominance of seeing over the hearing of others; and certainly not only because the chance meetings on the street in the small city concern a relatively large quota of acquaintances with whom one exchanges a word or whose sight reproduces for us the entire personality rather than just the visible--but above all through the means of public transportation. Before the development of buses, trains, and streetcars in the nineteenth century, people were not at all in a position to be able or to have to view one other for minutes or hours at a time without speaking to one another. Modern traffic, which involves by far the overwhelming portion of all perceptible relations between person and person, leaves people to an ever greater extent with the mere perception of the face and must thereby leave universal sociological feelings to fully altered presuppositions. On account of the mentioned shift, the just mentioned greater incomprehensibility of people
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? being only seen over that of people being heard contributes to the problematic of the modern feel of life, to the feeling of disorientation in collective living, of the isolation, and that one is surrounded on all sides by closed doors.
A sociologically extremely functional compensation for that difference in performance of the senses lies in the very much stronger memory capacity for the heard over that for the seen--in spite of that, what a person has spoken is, as such, irretrievable, while one is a relatively stable object before the eye. Indeed, for that reason one can much more readily deceive the ear of a person than the eye, and it is quite obvious that from this structure of our senses and their objects, in so far as a neighbor displays such, the whole class of human traffic is carried: if the words heard would not immediately vanish from the ear, albeit still grasped in memory, if the the contents of the face, which lack this strong reproductiveness, would not offer themselves up to visual percep- tion--our inter-individual life would then stand on an absolutely different basis. It would be useless speculation to think about this as being otherwise, but considering its possibility in principle frees us from the dogma that human association, as we know it, is entirely obvious and, so to speak, beyond discus- sion, a reality for which there are no particular causes. With regard to the singly large social forms, historical research removed this dogma; we know that the constitution of our families as well as our form of economy, our law as well as our traditions are the outcomes of conditions that were different elsewhere and that therefore had other outcomes, that with these realities we in no way stand on the deepest foundation on which the given is even the absolutely necessary; it can no longer be conceived as a special formation from special causes. With regard to the entirely universal sociological functions playing out between one person and another, however, this question has not yet been posed. The pri- mary, direct relationships that determine then all higher structures appear so solidary with the nature of society overall as to allow it to be overlooked that they are solidary only with the nature of humanity; it is from the particular conditions of this nature then that they require their explanation.
The just indicated contrast between an eye and an ear in their sociological significance is obviously a further extension of the double role to which indeed the eye appeared designated for itself alone. Just as all sense of reality always breaks up into the categories of being and becoming, so they dominate as well that which a person can and wants to notice of other people in general. We want to know: what sort of being is this person? What is the enduring substance of this person's nature? And: What is this person like in this moment? desiring? thinking? saying? This establishes for all practical purposes the division of labor between the senses. Apart from many modifications, what we see in a person is what is lasting in that individual, what is drawn on the face, as in a cross-section of geological layers, the history of a person's life and what lies at the founda- tion of that person's nature as a timeless dowry. The vicissitudes of historical expression do not approximate the variety of the differentiation that we detect through the ear. What we hear is what is momentary about someone, the flow of someone's nature. First, all sorts of secondary perceptions and conclusions reveal to us, even in someone's features, the mood of the moment and what is invariant in that person in a person's words. Otherwise in the whole of nature,
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? as it is offered to immediate sense impression, the lasting and the fleeting are allocated much more unevenly than among people. The permanent rock and the flowing stream are polar symbols of this unevenness. Only human beings are simultaneously something that always persists and flows before our senses; both the fleeting and the lasting have reached a height within them by which one is always measured against the other and is expressed in the other. The formation of this duality stands in an interaction with that of eye and ear; for if neither of the two completely ignores both kinds of perception, they are still, in general, dependent on mutual complementariness, on ascertaining the permanently plastic nature of human beings through the eye, and on their surfacing and submerging expressions through the ear.
In a sociological perspective, the ear is still separated from the eye through the absence of that reciprocity that sight produces between eye and eye. By its nature, the eye cannot receive something without giving at the same time, while the ear is the quintessentially egoistic organ that only takes but does not give; its outer shape almost seems to symbolize this in that it serves somewhat as a passive appendage of the human phenomenon, the most unmovable of all the organs on the head. It atones for this egoism by not being able to turn away or close like the eye, but since it only takes, it is also condemned to take all that comes near it--the sociological consequences of which is yet to be shown. Only together with the mouth, with speech, does the ear generate the internally unified act of taking and giving--but it also generates this in the alternation of the fact that one is not able to speak correctly when one hears and not hear correctly when one speaks, while the eye blends both in the miracle of the 'look. ' On the other hand the unique relationship of the ear with the objects of private possession stands in contrast to its formal ego- ism. In general one can only 'possess' something visible while that which can only be heard is already in the past along with the moment of its present and no 'property' is preserved. It was an extraordinary exception when in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the great families strove to possess works of music that were only written for them and that were not allowed to be published. A number of Bach concertos originated from a prince's order for them. It pertained to the prominence of a house to possess works of music that were withheld from every other house. For our sensibility there is something perverse in this, since hearing is supra-individualistic in its nature: all those who are in a room must hear what transpires in it, and the fact that one picks it up does not take it away from another. Thus also arises the special mental emphasis that something spoken has if it is nevertheless intended exclusively for one individual. Innumerable others would be able to hear physically what one says to another only if they were there. If the content of something that is said excludes this formally physical possibility, this lends such a communica- tion an incomparable sociological coloration. There is almost no secret that could be conveyed only through the eyes. Communication through the ear, however, actually includes a contradiction. It forces a form, that in and of itself and physically is turned toward an unlimited number of participants, to serve a content that totally excludes them all. This is the remarkable point of the orally shared secret, the conversation under four eyes; it expressly negates
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? the sensory character of speaking out loud, which involves the physical pos- sibility of innumerably more hearers. Under normal circumstances generally not too many people can have one and the same facial expression at all, but by contrast extraordinarily many can have the same impression from hear- ing. One may compare a museum audience with a concert audience; for the determination of the hearing impression to communicate itself uniformly and in the same way to a crowd of people--a determination by no means simply external-quantitative but bound up deeply with its innermost nature--socio- logically brings together a concert audience in an incomparably closer union and collective feeling than occurs with the visitors to a museum. Where, as an exception, even the eye yields such sameness of impression for a large number of people, the communalizing social effect also makes its appearance. When everyone can see the sky and the sun, I believe, that is the essential moment of coming together that every religion signifies. Because everyone somehow turns toward the sky or the sun, according to the origin or cultivation of each, everyone has some sort of relationship to that which is all-embracing and controlling the world. The fact that a sense that is so exclusive in the exercise of living as the eye, which even somehow modifies what is seen through the difference of viewpoint at the same time for each, nevertheless has a content that is not absolutely exclusive, but offers uniformly to each the sky, the sun, the stars--that must suggest, on the one hand, that transcending of the nar- rowness and distinctiveness of the subject that every religion contains, and bears or encourages, and on the other hand, that moment of the unification of believers that every religion alike possesses.
The different relationships of eye and ear to their objects, highlighted above, sociologically establish very different relationships between the individuals, whose associations depend on one or the other. The workers in a factory hall, the students in an auditorium, and the soldiers of a unit somehow think of themselves as one. And if this unity also springs forth from supersensible elements, it is still influenced in its character by the eye being the sense that is essentially effective for it, by the individuals being indeed able to see themselves during the processes that join them together, but not being able to speak. In this case the consciousness of unity will have a much more abstract character than if the being together is at the same time also an oral interaction. The eye shows, in addition to what is individual in the human being who is involved in the appearance, what is also the same in all to a greater degree than the ear does. The ear communicates the fullness of the divergent moods of the individual, the course and the momentary climax of thought and impulse, the whole polarity of subjective as well as objective life. From people whom we only see, we form a general concept infinitely more readily than if we could speak with each one. The usual incompleteness of seeing favors this difference. Very few people can say with certainty what the eye color of their friends is, or can vividly represent in their imagination the shape of the mouth of the people next to them. Actually, they have hardly seen them; one evidently sees in a person in a much higher degree what that person has in common with another than one hears this commonality in that person. The immediate pro- duction of very abstract, unspecific social structure is thus favored the most,
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? to the extent that the technique of the senses works by the proximity of sight, in the absence of the proximity of conversation. This situation has advanced very much, in accord with what was mentioned above, the formation of the modern idea of the 'worker. ' This strange, effective concept, the idea that unites the generality of all wage laborers, regardless of what they do, was not found in previous centuries, when associations of fellow workers were often much narrower and more intimate, since they often depended essentially on personal interaction by word of mouth, which the factory hall and the mass rally lack. Here, where one saw countless things without seeing them, that high level abstraction was first made of all that is common to them, and it is often hindered in their development by all the individual, concrete, variable things as the ear transmits them to us.
The sociological importance of the lower senses diminishes before that of sight and sound, although that of smell not so much as the particular dull- ness and lack of potential for the development of its impressions leads one to assume. There is no doubt that the surrounding layer of air scents every person in a characteristic way, and in fact it is essential to the olfactory impression existing that way so that, of the two developments of the sensory experi- ence--toward the subject, as liking or disliking it, and towards the object, as recognizing it--one allows the first to prevail by far. Smell does not form an object from within itself, as sight or sound does, but remains, so to speak, self-conscious within the subject; what is symbolized by it is that there are no independent, objective descriptive expressions for its differences. If we say: it smells sour, that means only that it smells like something smells that tastes sour. To a completely different degree from the sensations of those senses, those of smell escape description with words; they are not to be projected onto the level of abstraction. Instinctive antipathies and sympathies that are attached to the olfactory sphere surrounding people and those, for example, that often become important for the social relationship of two races living on the same territory, find all the less resistance of thought and volition. The reception of Africans into the higher levels of society in North America seems impossible from the outset because of their bodily atmosphere, and the aversion of Jews and Germans toward each other is often attributed to this same cause. The personal contact between cultivated people and workers, so often enthusiastically advocated for the social development of the present, which is also recognized by the cultivated as the ethical ideal of closing the gap between two worlds "of which one does not know how the other lives," simply fails before the insurmountable nature of the olfactory sense impres- sions. Certainly, many members of the upper strata, if it were necessary in the interest of social morality, would make considerable sacrifices of personal comfort and do without various preferences and enjoyments in favor of the disinherited, and the fact that this has not yet happened to a greater degree is clearly because the forms that are quite suitable for them have not been found yet. But one would have taken on all such sacrifices and dedication a thousand times more readily than the physical contact with the people onto whom "the venerable perspiration of work" clings. The social question is not only an ethical one, but also a nasal question. But admittedly this also works
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? on the positive side: no sight of the plight of the proletarian, even less the most realistic report about it, viewed from the most striking cases of all, will overpower us so sensually and immediately as the atmosphere, when we step into a basement apartment or a bar.
It is of significance, still insufficiently noticed, for the social culture that the actual perceptive acuity of all senses clearly declines but, in contrast, the emphasis on sense pleasure or lack of sense pleasure increases with the refinement of civilization. And I really believe that the heightened sensibility in this respect in general brings with it much more suffering and repulsion than joy and attraction. Modern people are choked by countless things, unendur- ably countless things appear to them through the senses, which a more undif- ferentiated and more robust manner of sensing accepts without any reaction of this kind. The individualizing tendency of modern people and the greater personality and the freedom of choice in their commitments must be consistent with that. With their partly immediately sensory and partly aesthetic manner of response, they can no longer retreat easily into traditional associations and close bonds in which they are not asked about their personal taste and their personal sensitivity. And inevitably this brings with it a greater isolation, a sharper delimitation of the personal sphere. Perhaps this development in the sense of smell is the most remarkable: Contemporary efforts at hygiene and cleanliness are no less results as causes of it. In general, the effectiveness of the senses at a distance becomes weaker with the heightening of culture, their effectiveness stronger within close range, and we become not only near-sighted but altogether near-sensed; however, we become all the more sensitive at these shorter distances. Now the sense of smell is already from the start a sense positioned more for the proximate, in contrast to sight and sound, and if we can perceive no more as objectively with it as can some primitive peoples, we react subjectively all the more intensely toward its impressions. The direction in which this happens is also the same as that mentioned previously, but also at a higher degree than with the other senses: A person with an especially fine nose certainly experiences very much more discomfort than joy by virtue of this refinement. Reinforcing that isolating repulsion that we owe to the refine- ment of the senses, here is more: When we smell something, we draw this impression or this radiating object so deeply into ourselves, into our center, we assimilate it, so to speak, through the vital process of respiration as close to us as is possible through no other sense in relation to an object, it would be then that we eat it. That we smell the atmosphere of somebody is a most intimate perception of that person; that person penetrates, so to speak, in the form of air, into our most inner senses, and it is obvious that this must lead to a choosing and a distancing with a heightened sensitivity toward olfactory impressions altogether, which to some extent forms one of the sensory bases for the social reserve of the modern individual. It is noteworthy that someone of such a fanatically exclusive individualism as Nietzsche often said openly of the type of person most hateful to him, "they do not smell good. " If the other senses build a thousand bridges among people, if they can soothe over with attractions the repulsions that they repeatedly cause, if weaving together the positive and negative values of their feelings gives the total concrete relation-
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? ships among people their coloration, one can note, by way of contrast, that the sense of smell is the dissociating sense. Not only because it communicates many more repulsions than attractions, not only because its judgments have something of the radical and unappealing that lets it be overcome only with difficulty by the judgments of the other senses or minds, but also precisely because the bringing together of the many never grants it any such attractions as that situation can unfold them for the other senses, at least under certain conditions: indeed, in general such interferences of the sense of smell will increase in a direct quantitative relation of the mass in whose midst they affect us. Cultural refinement, as already mentioned, points to an individualizing isolation through this arrangement, at least in the colder countries, while in southern lands chance influenced the coming together essentially in the open air, thus without having to manage that inconvenience.
Finally, artificial perfume plays a social role in that it effects a unique syn- thesis of individual egoistical and social purposes in the field of the sense of smell. Perfume accomplishes through the medium of the nose the same thing as jewelry does through the medium of the eye. Jewelry adds something com- pletely impersonal to the personality, drawn in from outside, but nevertheless suits the person so well that it seems to emanate from the person. It enhances the person's sphere as the sparkle of gold and diamond; one situated near it basks in it and is thus, to some extent, caught in the sphere of the personal- ity. Like clothing, it covers the personality with something that should still work at the same time as its own radiance. Insofar as it is a typical stylistic phenomenon, a blending of the personality into a generality that nevertheless brings the personality to a more impressive and more fashioned expression than its immediate reality could. Perfume covers the personal atmosphere; it replaces it with an objective one and yet makes it stand out at the same time. With the perfume that creates this fictive atmosphere, one presupposes that it will be agreeable to the other and that it would be a social value. As with jewelry, it must be pleasing independently of the person whose environment must please subjectively; and it must still at the same time be credited to the bearer as a person.
I should add a comment about sexual feeling in its relationship to space, although 'sensuality' here has a different meaning: not that of pure passivity, as when impressions of the sense of warmth or the sense of sight is being spo- ken of; but here desires and activities are placed on the receptive impressions with a greater immediacy than indicated in speech usage as sensibility. Now in this area of sensation spatial proximity seems to me to be of the greatest, perhaps of the decisive importance for an important social norm: The prohi- bition of marrying close relatives. I enter all the less into the controversy over the reason for this prohibition, as the problem of it seems to be incorrectly posed. Here, as opposed to all broader and significant social phenomena, one cannot generally inquire about 'the reason' but only about the reasons. Humanity is too diverse, too replete with forms and motives, for one to be able to contend with a single source or a single origin for the phenomena that occur in very different points on the earth and as results of long-term and obviously very different developments. As the debate over whether humans
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? 'by nature' are monogamous or not is clearly incorrect, since even from the beginning as well as up to later times there have been monogamous and polygamous, celibate and mixtures of all these trends; thus all the motives cited for the prohibition appear to me to have actually been in effect, but none of them can claim to be the essential motive. Friendship and relationship of alliances with foreign lineages as well as hostile relationships that led to most of the robbery of women, the instinct of racial advancement as well as the husband's wish to separate his wife as much as possible from her family and its support for her--all this will have contributed to these marriage prohibi- tions in varying combinations. However, what is most essential may be this: the maintenance of discipline and order within the same house requires the complete exclusion of sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters, parents and children, and all the pairs of relatives who formed a spatially closed unit in earlier times. The spatial proximity in which the house holds its male and female members would allow the sexual impulse to degenerate into limitless debauchery if the most terrible penalties were not set on them, if an instinct were not cultivated through the most unrestricted sternness of social prohibi- tions, which from the outset excludes any mixing within the household group. It would speak against this rationale for the prohibition if it really held, as is claimed, originally only within the 'matrilocal family,' i. e. where at marriage the husband goes over to the family of the wife; moreover, if it were true, this matrilocal family would in no way coincide with the complex of people living together. But the period of youth before marriage, in which the male lives in his maternal household in any event, seems long enough to me to bring about all the dangers for household order that the prohibition seeks to counter; and if then this holds further for the divorced, this may be a further effect of the time that has become permanent in which he was not only a family associate but also an associate of his own household. The fact that in many places the clan regulations strongly prohibit marriage within the same clan, is in favor of this opinion, although real blood relatives are allowed without further consideration as soon as they are found by some happenstance in different clans. It is reported of the Pomtschas in Bogota that the men and women of one and the same settlement are considered brothers and sisters and thus do not enter into marriage with one another; but if the actual sister was born by chance in a different place from the brother, they were allowed to marry each other. In Rome, as long as the rigor of the household lineage stood at its height, all persons who stood under the same paternal authority, i. e. rela- tives up to the sixth degree, were prohibited from marrying one another. To the extent that the close cohesion and strict unity of the house was loosened, this rule was also softened, to the point where during the time Caesar even marriage between uncle and niece became legitimate. The prophylaxis was no longer needed as soon as the closeness of living together was loosened. This precautionary tendency appears everywhere, which is intended to obviate the temptation resulting from close physical contact, because giving into it would cause an especially violent disturbance of the family order--often of course with the radical lack of differentiation that can even otherwise only enforce a kind of partial norm upon the primitive stages of mind, so that it controls the
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? total and general range of its content, way beyond its boundary. Among the Braknas on the Fiji Islands and elsewhere brother and sister, male and female cousins, and brother-in-law and sister-in-law must neither speak nor eat with one another. In Ceylon11 father and daughter, and mother and son cannot observe one another. Prohibitions corresponding to these exist among the indigenous Americans as well in the South Seas, among the Mongolians, and in Africa and India, against any interaction between mother-in-law and son- in-law, and between father-in-law and daughter-in-law. Among the Kyrgyz the young woman must not appear at all before any male member of her husband's family. Among many peoples, for example the Alfuren of Buru, the Dajaks, some Malayans, and the Serbs, among others, bride and bridegroom cannot interact with each other at all, and the Africans hold it especially honorable if a man marries a girl whom he has never seen before. And, again, under apparently contrasting circumstances, the same precaution appears, but made another step more subtle, when Islamic law prohibits a man from seeing the face of another woman whom he cannot marry.
Under these psychological conditions the norm exists that persons of the opposite sex who must not cultivate any sexual communion, shall not come spatially close together at all. However an exactly different norm corresponds to the contexts of sensuality that justify this: For persons of the opposite sex who unavoidably simply share the same space, marriage must be absolutely forbidden and made outwardly and inwardly impossible--as long as one wishes to avoid promiscuity in sexual behavior that drowns out any regula- tion. Thus many of these prohibitions affect not just blood relatives, but also foster brothers and sisters, and clan and group associates generally who live in a close local relationship. The Jameos of the Amazon River, some tribes in Australia and on Sumatra allow no marriage within the same village. The larger the households are, the stricter--e. g. among the Hindus, South Slaves, in the Nanusa Archipelago, and among the Nairs of Kerala--are the mar- riage prohibitions within one and the same group. Apparently it is much more difficult to protect propriety and order in a very large house than in a small one; thus the prohibition of marriage of close relatives was not sufficient, but extensive laws had to be introduced among those peoples that placed the whole house under the prohibition of marriage. As long as individual families lived apart, even blood relationships prevented marriage among them only to a limited degree. Among the Thanea Indians of Brazil, among whom marriages between relatives distant by two degrees are very frequent, every family lives in its own house, and this holds for the Bushmen and the Singhalese as well; also the fact that among the Jews marriage between brothers and sisters was strictly taboo, but between first cousins was allowed, is explained by the lat- ter not living together in a household. By and large, prohibitions of marriage among primitive peoples are more extensive and stricter than among the more advanced ones; in the course of development, they were limited more and more to the really narrower family circle, apparently because the closeness of living
11 Today's Sri Lanka--ed.
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? together only increasingly included more of the latter. The more extensive and diverse the social totality is that surrounds us, the smaller the familial subdivi- sions become that feel as belonging to one homogenous whole, the fewer the people who refer to the dangers of living close to one another, against which the prohibition of marriage formed a preventative rule.
Completely contrary to this motif, people have admittedly claimed that living together, as housemates do, would directly blunt sensual attraction; one would not desire with passion what one would have in view from earliest childhood daily and hourly; being accustomed to living together dampens fantasy and desire, which would only be stimulated rather by the distant and novel. On this psychological basis, it would not be the members of one's own family but always strangers toward whom the desire for marriage would be turned. However the psychological correctness of this theory is only conditional. The intimate living together not only produces apathy, but in many cases stimu- lation; otherwise the ancient wisdom, that love often arises in the course of a marriage where it might be absent upon entering into it, would not hold; otherwise the first intimate acquaintance with a person of the other sex would not be so dangerous during certain years. It is also possible that during the very primitive stages of development, when the prohibition in question comes into existence, that finer sense for individuality is lacking, because of which not the woman as such is charming, but her personality that is different from all others.
This understanding, however, is the condition under which desire turns from the beings whom one already knows well, and who do not have a new individual attraction to offer, to strangers of a yet unknown individual- ity. As long as desire in its original unrefined condition dominates the man, any woman is like any other woman for him insofar as she is not too old or is ugly in his judgment; and that higher psychological need for change could have had no strength to overcome the natural inertia that referred him at first to the nearest female. An anonymous writing from the year 1740, Bescheidene doch gru? ndliche Gegenvorstellung von der Zula? ssigkeit der Ehe mit des verstorbenen Weibes Schwester,12 also rejects marriage with a deceased husband's brother, and in fact precisely from the point of view emphasized here, which makes a strange impression in this case, whereby the husband should still not abuse his right to eventually marry the woman in her lifetime after the death of the spouse, for which the frequent familial gatherings would give special opportunity. And already the Jewish philosopher Maimonides cited as a basis for that prohibi- tion the danger of the immorality that lay all too near in living together in one house. Because of the prohibition of marriage, however, every husband would know that he should not direct his inclinations and thoughts in this direction at all.
All in all it seems to me that the spatial proximity is so effective for arous- ing the sense of sex that where cultivation and custom are upheld at all, and an inconceivable chaos in all legal and moral relationships should not
12 Translation: Humble Though Thorough Refutation of the Admissibility of Marriage to a Deceased Wife's Sister--ed.
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? arise, the strictest rules of separation must be established precisely between spatially proximate persons. If only the prohibitions of propriety and reserve that separated the members of a family are also valid for people who are far from each other, they would not be proven as powerless as they actually are often enough, but even more powerless in view of the special situation of those who live in a closer external unity. Thus a barrier had to be erected between them that does not exist for non-relatives. Neither are the ruinous effects of inbreeding on the race absolutely certain, nor is such knowledge among the primitive peoples likely to be sufficient to make marriage among relatives an unconditionally shocking horror for them. On the contrary, maintaining a sexual order is almost everywhere a closely observed requirement, and for that matter the incest taboo seems to me to be essentially introduced and given an instinctive obviousness as a prophylaxis against the allurements that must have resulted here from no other general circumstance as overwhelming as from local contact.
Of course in addition to these psychological (in the narrower sense) consequences of proximity or distance for social interactions stand those of a more logical or at least intellectual nature, which do not pertain to sensory-irrational immediacy. For example, the vicissitudes that a relationship undergoes through the transition of its elements from distance into spatial proximity in no way exist only in a growing intensity of the bond but also very much in attenuation, reservation, and repulsion. In addition to that direct antipathy that may issue from sensory proximity, principally at work here is an absence or denial of the idealization with which one more or less clothes the abstractly represented partners. If outer distance is lacking, it brings about the needed emphasis on inner distance, on the limit setting of the personal sphere, on the defense against inappropriate intimacy, and, in brief, against such dangers that do not come into question where there is spatial distance; it brings about certain caution and detour that inter- action must produce directly through personal immediacy because greater objectivity, a moderation of personal angularities, and a smaller likelihood of too much hastiness and fervor often tend to be peculiar to the indirect and often interrupted distant interaction. It belongs to the finest social task of the art of life to preserve in a close relationship the values and sensitivities that develop between persons in a certain distance relative to the rarity of togetherness. One will spontaneously decide that the warmth and sensitivity of the relationship must increase with the level of personal closeness. One anticipates at the beginning, in the tone and intensity of interaction, what could indeed develop
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? in the most favorable case, admittedly in order to then feel that one expected too much of the mere form of the spatial relationship; we reach deeply into the void because the suddenness of the physical or permanent closeness has misled us about the slowness with which the mental closeness increases it again. Thus set-backs and cooling-off occur that not only undo these illusory excesses but also sweep away the previously attained values of love, friendship, common interest, or mental understanding. This situation does not belong to rare confu- sions among people, which could probably be avoided at the outset with instinctive tact; but once they occur, as a rule they no longer can be set right with tact alone, but only with the assistance of conscious assessments and deliberations. Physical closeness is still not always the adequate result of internal intimacy, but occurs where the latter remains in the status quo, often for entirely external reasons. And, therefore, corresponding to the physical occurrence the following happens: if one were to cause those changes in a body that warmth brings about in it, through another mechanical means, it cools off!
I take up a second example of relationships that are far distant from the intimacy that we mentioned, in order to dwell on the sociological distinctiveness of spatial distance in its more calculable consequences. Where a minority that is held together by the same interests is found in a larger group, it is very different for the relationship to the whole whether it lives spatially close together or scattered in small sections throughout the whole group. Which of the two forms is the more favor- able for such a minority's position of power under otherwise similar conditions is not generally ascertainable. If the subgroup in question is found in a defensive posture vis-a`-vis the majority, the level of its power decides that question. If the group is very small, so that no genuine resistance, but only an escape--making themselves invisible--and avoidance of devastating attacks remain in question, it is immediately obvious that the maximum possible dispersion is advisable. On the contrary, with considerably more strength, especially larger numbers of people for whom the chance already exists to withstand an attack, the most possible concentration will promote preservation. In the way that streams of herring are protected from danger by their tight concentration, in that they thus offer a narrower target and less space in between for enemies to penetrate, so living closer together provides the exposed minorities the greater probability of successful resistance, mutual support, and more effective consciousness of solidarity. The
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? mode of spatial dispersion of the Jews made both ways usable for them. While their diasporas distributed them throughout the cultural world, no persecution could encounter all of their segments, and there was always for those for whom life at one place was made impossible still a link, protection, and support at another; on the other hand, since they lived mostly as close neighbors in individual places either in the ghetto or elsewhere, they also enjoyed the advantages and powers that the compact togetherness without a vacuum develops for defense. Now if the energies have reached the threshold from which they also can advance to attacks, to win advantages and power, the relationship is reversed: at this stage, a concentrated minority cannot accomplish so much as one that cooperates from many points. Thus while at that stage, by virtue of the smaller and thus essential powers needed for defense, the ghetto was decisive for the Jews as advantageous and empowering, with growing certainty and energy it appeared as injurious to Judaism and their distribution throughout the total population raised their collective power most effectively. This is one of the not too infrequent instances in which the absolute growth of a quantity directly reverses the relations within it. Now if one does not look at the minority as the variable ele- ment in the sense of its structure, but inquires into the constitution of the environing totality in a given spatial dispersal or compactness of it, the following tendency necessarily results. A smaller special structure within an encompassing group that holds the central authority together will favor, with its spatial compactness, an individualizing form of gov- ernance granting autonomy to the parts. Since where such a part does not provide for its interests by itself, its life cannot be led according to its own norms; it has no technical possibility at all of being protected from the oppression by the whole. For example, a parliamentary regime that always subjects the very life of the parts to a mere majority decision will simply outvote such a minority. But if it lives dispersed so that there cannot be any talk about an independent development of immediate power or of their institutions for them, the autonomy of local sectors of the whole will be of no value for them since they still do not gain a majority. It will be rather centralist minded since the consideration by which it can still hope for something from the splitting of its energies is still the most to be expected from a unified, indeed perhaps absolut- ist central authority; it will attain a positive influence on so diffuse a structure only through individually outstanding personalities whom it produces, and the greatest chance for this form of power will also exist
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? precisely in view of a sovereignty as powerful and personal as possible. The local distance of the members makes it dependent on a central authority and its compactness leads it away from that.
The result of this spatial situation is an entirely different one when it is not a matter of a sector but a whole group. A community, all of whose elements live dispersed, if other causes are not strongly affect- ing it, will not have centralist inclinations as readily. As the Swiss rural regional communities in the Middle Ages were structured as collective state entities, they thereby essentially duplicated the basic characteristics of city constitutions. However the farmers' cooperative did not arise as did the urban one, almost completely in the agencies set up by it, but the early assembly of people remained the most important organ itself for the administration of justice and control over all public mat- ters. Here, on the one hand, a certain mistrust is effective because the permanent control of the central organs from afar is impracticable, and on the other, the lesser vitality of the social interactions in the country is compared to that of the compact urban population. Objec- tive structures are necessary for them as solid points in the storms and frictions that urban life generates as much through on-going contacts as through the strong but continuously gradated social differentiation of its members. These results of local conditions will also bring about a certain tenseness of centralization upon the democratic foundation of the urban population.
However, really direct democracy needs the spatially close limitation of its sphere, as the classic Federalist Papers proclaims: "The natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point which will but just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand. "13 And in Greek antiquity it had to be experienced as a banishment if one lived so far from the place of the political assembly that one could not participate in it regularly. Democracy and aristocracy meet in this interest in immediate autonomy if their spatial conditions are the same. The Spartan history shows this limitation in a very interesting combination. There one knew very well that the dis- persed settlement on the flat terrain favored aristocracy; because even democracies under this local condition assume a type of aristocratic character because of their self-sufficiency and their independence from
13 In English in Simmel's text. The quotation is from The Federalist, number 14, written by James Madison--ed.
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? dominant central powers, as the history of the German tribes frequently reveals. Thus as the Spartans wanted to overthrow the democracy in Mantinea, they dissolved the city into a number of boroughs. But in the conflict between the agrarian character of their state, in which the spatial separation always remains tangible--and indeed to the extent it was also suitable to its aristocracy and to the vigorous centralization that their militarism required--they found an outlet to let their agrar- ian economy of serfs thrive while they themselves remained fairly close together in Sparta. In some way superficially similar to that, during the ancient re? gime the fate of the French noble took the same course. He had been autonomous to a great extend in his largely agrarian way of life until the government, which became ever more centralized with a clear culmination in the court life of Louis XIV, on the one hand undermined the legal and administrative independence of the noble and, on the other hand, drew him continuously to Paris. The correla- tion is thus in contrast to that of the opposition minority: Centralist tendencies correspond to the spatial concentration of the group and, conversely, autonomy to spatial dispersion. And since this relationship appears in complete contrast to the social tendencies of life, both demo- cratic and aristocratic, it follows that the spatial factor of proximity or distance determines the sociological form of the group decisively or at least decisively in part.
E. All the sociological formations considered up to now described what lies next to one another spatially: boundary and distance, perma- nence and neighborhood are like continuations of the spatial configura- tion within the structure of humanity, which is distributed in space. The latter fact attaches wholly new consequences to the possibility that people move from place to place. The spatial constraints on their existence are thereby put in flux, and as humanity achieves the existence that we know only through its mobility, from wandering, countless further con- sequences for their interactions result from the change of place in the strict sense; we wish to sketch some of these consequences here. The basic division of these phenomena from the sociological point of view is: Which forms of social interaction are established in a wandering group, as opposed to a spatially fixed one? And: Which forms emerge for the group itself and for wandering persons if in fact no one group wanders as a whole but certain members of it do?
1. The principal formations of the first type are nomadism and those movements that are called migrations of people; for nomads
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? the wandering pertains to the substance of life that is best noted for its endlessness, for the circularity of constantly returning to the same places; but as for the migrations of people, the wandering is experi- enced more like an in-between condition between two different ways of life--be it that of being settled, or be it the earlier of the two, which is the nomadic. Insofar as the sociological consideration only inquires into the effect of the wandering as such, it need not distinguish between the two kinds. For the effect on the form of society is typically the same in both cases: Suppression or abolition of the inner differentiation of the group, hence an absence of a genuine political organization is often thoroughly compatible with despotic governance. The latter configura- tion is above all reminiscent of the relationship of patriarchal bonds within nomadism. Where the necessity arises for hunting peoples to scatter and wander, the husband takes his wife away from the neigh- borhood of her family, thereby thus deprives her of its support, and places her more decisively under his power, so that among the North American Indians the wandering of the family is made directly respon- sible for the transition from the female to the male kin organization. Then it happens that among authentic nomads stock-farming replaced hunting and that stock-farming as well as hunting are the business of males everywhere. Male despotism develops among nomads through this male responsibility over the most important or exclusive means of acquiring food. Family and state despotism, however, stand not only in a broad relationship of mutual production, but nomadism still has to favor the latter all the more decisively as the individual then has no support from the land. The same circumstance that makes nomads everywhere into subjects as well as objects of robbery--the mobility of property--makes life in general become something so unstable and root- less that the resistance against powerful, unifying personages is certainly not so strong as where the existence of each individual is consolidated on the land--especially since there is no question here of the chance of escaping, which was such a characteristic weapon for the wandering craft workers against state centralizing tendencies, as is to be similarly emphasized later. It still happens that those despotic collectives are created mostly for military purposes, to which the venturous and wild nomads will always be more disposed than will the farmers. As has been stated, nomadic groups, as a rule, lack the strict and solid organization, which otherwise cultivates the methods of military formations. There is hardly any disposition for that because of the wide dispersal and mutual
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? independence of the individual nomadic families, since a more sophisti- cated and more extensive organization presupposes a division of labor; the latter presupposes a spatially tight or dynamic contact among the elements. However, the despotic organization among those wandering masses of nomadic peoples, which ran through European history no less than that of China, Persia, and India, was obviously no organized synthesis, but its force rested precisely on the mechanical aggregation of wholly undifferentiated elements that poured forth with the steady and uninterrupted pressure of a mud flow. The lowlands and steppes that on the one hand encourage nomadic life, are on the other hand the headwaters of the migrations of the large tribes. Eastern Europe, Northern and Inner Asia, the American lowlands thus manifest culti- vated racial types the least, and this ethnographic situation must be no less the result than the cause of a sociological leveling down. A deeply grounded relationship exists between the movement in space and the differentiation of social and personal contents of existence. Both only form different satisfactions of one side of opposite mental tendencies, the other side of which comes from silence, regularity, and a substantial uniformity of the feeling and picture of life: conflicts and compromises, mixtures and changing predominance of both lend themselves to be used as patterns in order to bring in all the content of human history. The extraordinary increase in the differences of needs among modern people simultaneously affects both forms--change of place and differ- entiation--but in other cases the two can substitute for each other so that societies that are spatially stable strongly differentiate internally; and wandering societies, in contrast, which have veiled their necessary feeling of differentiation from the outset, require a social leveling for the constitution of their nerves and for the simultaneous tendency of life in the opposite condition.
The stratagem of wandering is made the vehicle of this principal relationship. The members of a wandering band are especially closely dependent on one another; the common interests, in contrast to the settled groups, have more the form of the momentary and therefore obscure, with the peculiar energy of the present that so often triumphs over the objectively more essential, individual differences, in the double sense of the word: as qualitative or social variety and as strife and divi- sion among individuals. Impulses for spatial expansion and contraction stand in sharp contrast among nomadic tribes; conditions for nourish- ment lead the individuals as far apart from one another as possible (and
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? the spatial separation must also work towards a qualitative mental sepa- ration), while the need for protection nevertheless drives them together again and restrains differentiation. 14 Livingstone says of the divisions of African clans, which otherwise do not feel very connected, that they hold whole tribes very much together during wanderings and mutually support one another. From the Middle Ages, it is often reported that merchants who travel together had introduced a strongly communistic order among themselves, of which it is only a continuation that the merchant guilds or Hanses often established abroad, and that indeed characteristically right from the beginning of their development, they agree to a completely common life. Along the leveling moment of the travels, of course, there was no lack of the despotic in such cases. At least it is emphasized about the traits of the traveling merchants who traveled through the Roman Empire from Palmyra in the Euphrates region, that their leaders would have been the most noble men of quite old aristocracy, for whom the caravan participants would then often set up honorary pillars. It is thus assumed that their authority during the trip was a discrete one, under a relationship very analogous to that that of a ship captain during a voyage. Precisely because wandering individualizes and isolates in and of itself, because it places people on their own, it drives them to a close unity beyond the differences that exist otherwise. While it removes the support of the homeland from individuals, and at the same time removes the fixed levels among them, it directly brings to consciousness the travelers' fates, isolation, and rootlessness--to complement and augment a more than individual entity through the greatest possible commitment.
This essential sociological characteristic of wandering reveals itself as one that is in form always the same in phenomena that are in essence completely without any connection to what has been touched on until now. The travel acquaintance, as long as one is really only that and does not assume a character independent from that kind of association, often develops an intimacy and candor for which no genuine inner basis is to be found. Three causes appear to me to work in concert here: the liberation from the accustomed milieu, the mutuality of the momentary impressions and encounters, and the consciousness of the imminent and
14 The unbalanced proximity of these two necessities, which find a harmony, organi- zation, and complementary form in no higher viewpoint, both dominating, is perhaps the basis for the low and difficult development of the tribe at the stage of nomadism.
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? definitive separation that will happen again. The second of these factors is immediately clear in its effects on uniting and on a kind of spiritual communism, so long as even the identity of the experience lasts and the consciousness prevails; the other two, however, are only accessible to a more difficult sociological consideration. On the occasion of the first factor one must clarify how few people know from within, and through sure instincts, where the unalterable boundary of their private mental possession lies, and which reserves their individual being requires in order to keep themselves from being injured. Only through initiatives and reversals, through disappointments and adaptations do we gradu- ally tend to discover what we must reveal about ourselves to others without allowing feelings of tactlessness against ourselves and direct damages to develop from embarrassing situations. The fact that the mental sphere of one individual is not at all as clearly set off from that of others at the outset as is the body, the fact that this boundary, after it also overcame the vicissitudes of its first formation, never absolutely overcomes its relativity--this readily appears when we leave behind us the accustomed relationships in which we marked out a fairly solid space for ourselves with gradually increasing rights and responsibilities, by understanding and being understood by others, by testing our pow- ers and our emotional reactions, so that we certainly know here what we have to say and what to withhold and by what measure of both we create and sustain the accurate picture of our personality in others. Now since this relative measure of expression, set by the relationship to our environment, hardens for many people into an absolute in its own right, in an entirely new environment, one before entirely strange people, it generally loses any standard for self-revelation. On the one hand they are revealed under suggestions that they cannot resist in their actual state of being uprooted, and on the other hand in an inner uncertainty in which they can no more hold in check an intimacy or confession once they are prompted, but allow them to roll to the end as though they fell on a slanted plane. Now the third factor comes into play: we allow our accustomed reserve to drop so easily before those with whom we have nothing to do after this unique, mutual or one-sided revelation. All social interactions are influenced in the character of their form and content most decidedly by the idea of the duration for which one believes it is determined. This pertains to the sociological cognitions, the truth of which is admittedly unmistakably obvious for the grossest cases; for the finer ones, however, they are all the more frequently overlooked. That
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? the qualitative character of a bond between a man and a woman in a lifelong marriage is different from that in a fleeting relationship, that the professional soldier has a different relationship to the army than that of a one or two year service is admittedly self-evident for anyone; but the conclusion that these macroscopic effects of the quantity of time also must appear with a lesser proportionate starkness and, as it were, microscopically, seems to be applied nowhere. Whether a contract is completed in one or ten years, whether a get-together of colleagues is planned for a few hours in the evening or as something at a country outing for a whole day, or whether one gets together at the set dinner of a hotel that changes the guests every day or that of a pension that is intended for a longer stay, that is quite essential for the coloration of the process in otherwise wholly similar material, meaning, and personal character of the being together. Whichever way it works, the quantity of time is admittedly not looked at in itself but depends on the totality of the circumstances: the greater length of time will sometimes lead to something overlooked,15 as it were to a lingering trace of the gathered group, since one is certain of it and does not yet find it necessary to strengthen the still irrevocable bond with new efforts; sometimes, again the consciousness of this simple indissolubility will move us toward a mutual adaptation and a more or less resigned flexibility in order to make the pressure, once it is taken on, at least as bearable as possible. Shortness of time will occasionally lead to the same intensity of the utilization of the relationship as its length, among other characteristics that can admittedly endure only a superficial or 'half ' relationship over a short time but not over the long term. This reference to the effect that thought exerts on the duration of a relationship at any individual moment should show here only the sociological essence of the brief encounter belonging to a wider and principled context. The traveling acquaintance--from the feeling of being obligated to nothing, and of being really anonymous in relation to a person from whom one will be separated for ever in a few hours--often entices one to quite remarkable confidences, giving in unreservedly to the impulse to speak what only experience has taught, through their consequences, to control. Thus people have also attributed the erotic opportunities of the military to its not possessing the stationariness that most other sectors of society possess, to the relationship with the soldier possessing the coloration
15 einer ne? gligeance--ed.
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? of a fleeting dream on the part of the woman, a dream that not only involves no commitment but precisely by its brevity seduces one to the most superficial intensity in the exploitation of her and the devotion to him. Thus one has also explained the success of the mendicant friars by the fact that one often confessed with less embarrassment to those who had the right to hear confession anywhere and came today and left tomorrow, than to one's own pastor who had the penitent in sight for a long time. Here as often as the extremes appear to possess a certain uniform importance that is opposed to the middle sphere: one reveals oneself to the closest and the strangest persons while the layers that stand in between comprise the place of genuine reserve. Thus the following is also recognizable in these wide-ranging phenomena within the basic context: Peoples' peculiar lack of attachment as wanderers and toward wanderers, even by what I indicated above as an approach to spiritual communism, is a surrender beyond the other barriers of individualism; this sociological theme is alive in countless, difficult to recognize transformations, which promotes at a certain level a deper- sonalizing unity within the wandering group.
2. Totally apart from this is the consideration of how the wandering of a section affects the form of the whole, otherwise sedentary group. I mention here only two of the many relevant phenomena, of which one would continue to have an effect on the side of the unification of the group, and the other precisely on the side of its duality. In order to dynamically hold elements together that are distant from one another in a spatially spread out group, highly developed epochs develop a system of various means, above all everything that is customary to the objective culture, which is accompanied by the consciousness that it would be just the same here as it is at every point in the same group: the sameness of speech, law, general way of life, the style of buildings and tools; moreover, the functional units: the centralized administration of state and church that extends itself everywhere at the same time, the more selective associations of entrepreneurs that nevertheless reach out across all local separations, such as industrial workers, commercial associations of wholesalers and retailers, the more ideal but still very effective association of scholars, military association, school teachers, university professors, collectivities of all sorts--in short, a tangle of threads with an absolute or partial center that holds together all parts of a highly cultivated state, admittedly with very differently distributed energy, since the substantive culture according to quantity and kind is neither sufficiently uniform, nor do the functional connections turn all
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? elements with the same interest and same force toward their center. At any rate, insofar as these unifications are effective, they require only the movement of peoples through large stretches of space in trifling segments and, as it were, accidentally; modern life succeeds in bring- ing about the consciousness of social unity, on the one hand through those factual regularities and the knowledge of the common points of contact, and on the other hand through the institutions that are fixed once and for all, and finally and thirdly, through written communica- tion. But as long as there is an absence of this objective organization and technology, it has another overriding significance as the secondary means of unification later: the wandering that, admittedly, because of its purely personal character, can never cover the breadth of the spatial territory as do those means and can never centralize the same circuit from the point of view of content. The merchant and the scholar, offi- cial and craftsperson, monk and artist, the highly prominent as well as the most depraved members of society were in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era much more mobile than now. What we gain in consciousness of solidarity through letters and books, checking account and warehouses, mechanical reproduction of the same model and photography had to be done at that time through travel by persons, which was as lacking in success as it was wasteful in imple- mentation; for where it is a matter of merely factual communication, traveling is the most unhelpful and unspecialized means for a person since one must drag along, as heavy baggage, all that is external and internal to one's personality that has nothing directly to do with the business at hand. And if the byproduct of many personal and infor- mal relationships were also thereby gained, that still does not exactly serve the purpose now in question, i. e. , making the unity of the group perceptible and effective. Pertinent relationships that leave the personal completely aside--and thus can lead from any element to many other ones without limitation--succeed more thoroughly to make conscious a unity that transcends individuals; precisely, the informal relationship not only excludes all others in substantial matters, but it exhausts itself in its immediate narrowness so that its benefit for the consciousness of the unity of the group, to which both belong, is minimal. It is indicative of this subjective nature of the linkages and at the same time also of their importance that in the Middle Ages the maintenance of highways and bridges was regarded as a religious duty. That so many of today's objectively mediated relationships came about in earlier times only
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? through the wandering of personalities seems to me to be a basis for the relative weakness of the consciousness of unity in the extended groups of antiquity.
After all, the wanderings were often the only vehicle, often at least one of the comparatively strongest ones, for centralization, especially in a political sense. On the one hand the king took the individual parts of the realm into his possession personally in the form of a circuit, as is reported of the ancient Franks and as did the earlier kings of Sweden; on the other hand, the king traveled around in the realm either periodi- cally or continuously. The earliest Russian sovereigns did it periodically by visiting all the cities annually, and the German emperors of the old empire did it continuously. The Russian custom was supposed to have served the solidarity of the Empire, the German, which followed from the lack of an imperial capital, was thereby admittedly just the symbol of a dubious decentralization, but under these circumstances still the best that one could do for the unification of the separate parts of the empire in the person of the king. Precisely one of the causes of this traveling around on the part of the German princes--the fact that the taxes paid in kind to them had to be consumed on the spot for lack of a means of transportation--precisely this established a kind of entirely personal relationship between each place and the king. In England the arrangement of the itinerant justices through Henry II served an analogous purpose. With the imperfections of the centralization and communication, the administration of the counties was vulnerable from the outset to considerable abuse by county constables. The circuit judges first brought the highest state authority everywhere; with the distance that they had as strangers to each part of the realm, and with the sub- stantial similarity of their judgments, they first pulled all parts of the kingdom beyond their scattered condition into a unity centralized under the king by law and administration. As long as there is a lack of the supra-local means, working at a distance, to bring the local settlement authorities also into this unity, the riding circuit of the officials gives the most effective possibility of centralizing the outlying regions into the ideal political unity. The physical impression of persons also works just the same way; one knows about them that they come from that center of the whole and return back to it. In this immediacy and clarity lies an advantage of this organization, borne by mobile members, held together before the more abstract means, who occasionally balance its fortuitousness and isolation. A half-socialist English organization, the
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? English Land-Restoration League, used a red coach ('red van') for its propaganda among the rural workers, in which its speaker lived and which, driving from place to place, formed the center stage at meet- ings and center of excitement. Such a wagon, with all its mobility, by virtue of its characteristics, a spectacle recognized everywhere, is still a psychologically stationary element; with its coming and going it brings the scattered party comrades their connectedness throughout the area to a stronger consciousness than would perhaps occur under otherwise similar circumstances of a fixed branch of the party, with the result that other parties would readily imitate this wagon-propaganda. In addition to state and party unity, travel can also serve religious unity. The English Christians only began founding parish churches late. At least well into the seventh century bishops moved around the diocese with their assistants to carry out church business; and thus certainly the religious unity of the individual community obtained an incomparable solidity and clarity through the church structure; thus the latter could more quickly work towards a particularistic isolation of the community while the unity of the whole diocese, indeed the Church in general, must have come more strongly into consciousness through the traveling of its bearer. Even now the Baptists in North America proceed with their recruitment of adherents in the more remote regions by means of special wagons, 'gospel cars,' that would be furnished as chapels. This mobility of worship services must be especially favorable for propaganda since it makes it clear to the scattered adherents that they are not in isolated lost outposts, but belong to a unified whole that is held together by continuously functioning connections. And finally it is still the moral conduct of the group toward its wandering members that it must occasionally come to the places of meeting and fellowship. Besides the indispensability that travel had for the whole economic and cultural activity in the Middle Ages, combined with its dangers and difficulties, the poor that were thus as much an object of general charities also wandered almost continuously--it would happen that the Church recommended travelers to the daily prayers of the devout in the same breath with the sick and the imprisoned. And similarly the Koran specifies: the fifth portion of the spoils belongs to God, His emissaries, the orphans, the beggars, and the wanderers. Then the immediate provision of welfare for the traveler was differentiated, in accordance with a general historical development, into the objective relief of the traveler on the road, assurances, institutions of different kinds, and into
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? the subjective ones allowing the individuals their independence and self-reliance. That general religious obligation toward the traveler was the ethical reflection of the continuous social interaction and functional unity that the traveler produced. As the traveler, even if not poor at all, can still be especially easily caught up in situations of need, and all the more so the less developed the outer culture is, it is in turn particularly suggested to the poor that they travel, since the individual fields of the harvest of alms is exhausted. The fact that poverty and wandering are so often presented as a completely unified phenomenon--the persisting type of the beggar, the 'roaming poor,' is probably only recently begin- ning to disappear completely in Germany--is the basis of one of the greatest difficulties of the care for the poor with reference to the sinking poor: that one has absolutely no sure means of distinguishing between the worker seeking employment who is caught in the course of that in undeserved difficulty, and the professional idler who moves from one place to another in order to live at the cost of other people.
In addition to the unifying effect of travel on the fixed group that strives to overcome functionally its spatial distancing from itself through coming and going, there is another one that serves precisely the antago- nistic forces of the group. This occurs if one part of a group is princi- pally settled, another characterized by its mobility, and this difference in formal spatial behavior then becomes the vehicle, instrument, and growth-factor of an otherwise already existing latent or open opposi- tion. Here the most distinctive type is the vagabond and the adventurer, whose continuous roving about projects unrest, the rubato quality of their inner rhythm of life, onto territory. The difference between one settled by natural inclination and the wandering nature in itself already gives the structure and development of society infinitely possible varia- tions. Each of these two temperaments senses in the other a natural and irreconcilable enemy. Since where, perhaps, it does not succeed in procuring the born vagabonds an employment adequate to their talent through a fine differentiation of professions--which very rarely succeeds where already the time toward regular employment for them is all too related to the fixedness in space--there they will exist as a parasite on the settled members of the society. However, they do not persecute the vagabonds only out of hate, but they hate them also because they must persecute them for their self preservation. And just the same, what drove the vagabonds into this exposed and weakened position, their instinct for a continuous change of place, their ability and desire to
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? 'make themselves invisible' is still at the same time a protection against that persecution and ostracism; it is simultaneously an offensive and their defensive weapon. As the vagabonds' relationship with space is the adequate expression of their subjective interiority and erraticism, so is it the same for the relationships to their social groups.
Here it is exclusively a matter of unique elements that are forced by their restlessness and mobility, but are also capable of actually sustain- ing a conflict with the entire society. At least very rarely, compared to the interweaving of the social whole into the nature of the vagabond, unions among them are such that it is thus a matter not of wandering communities, in a sociological difference from nomads, but of a com- munity of wanderers. The whole life principle of the adventurer resists that because an organization can hardly avoid some kind of permanence. There are, after all, beginnings of that, which one could call flowing social formations, which can however obviously always include within themselves and regulate only a small part of the inner and outer life of their members. One such homeless fellowship was the itinerant people of the Middle Ages; it needed the entire spirit of fellowship of the time so that these itinerant people would create a kind of inner order for themselves. While this fellowship rose even to the establishment of a 'Meisterschaft'16 and other dignities, at least the formal edge of their opposition against the rest of the society became moderate. Now this happened even more decidedly in a different type of special move- ment as a bearer of a social antagonism: namely, where two parts of a group are set into a more active opposition by it. Here the traveling skilled worker, especially in the Middle Ages, is the best example.