No More Learning

Here the phenomenon of boundary-making between the whole and the part has propelled most unambiguously the objectificattion of the whole relation- ship as its correlate. It is interesting how occasionally a membership boundary is marked already in the Middle Ages. An aristocratic Anglo-Saxon guild of
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? the eleventh century decreed: if a comrade kills a person in self-defense or just revenge, the others are supposed to contribute to the wergild; but if it is done out of folly or wantonness, one's culpability is to be borne alone. Here the action of the individual becomes a matter of the collective only in so far as it is moral; in so far as it is an immoral act, the individual must deal with it alone. Other guilds of that time do not observe this boundary; they decree, e. g. , without any reservation that if any one of them has been guilty of an offense: "let all bear it, let all share the same lot;"4 a Danish guild considers explicitly even the case of murder and directs the guild members for their part to help their fellow member in escaping. In that first case, then, a boundary line exists between the whole and the individual, beyond which the latter is on one's own. The rationalistic character, which the boundary phenomena between these structures demonstrated, offers singly then a remarkable aspect when the contents by which the partnership is precisely circumscribed are opposed to such a quantitative division. This is quite likely the case to some extent for the Catholic institution that St. Francis established as the order of tertiaries: Laymen who want to be in brotherhood with a monastic order without themselves actually becoming monks pledge themselves to certain spiritual practices and contributions and thereby share in certain religious advantages of the main order, such as masses and indulgences, while remain- ing nevertheless entirely in their civil state. This careful balancing of being inside and outside seems to me, though, not to conform to the absoluteness of the religious nature. The communal life of the order exists for the sake of a goal whose inner structure rejects any more-or-less of it and, if participation in it occurs at all, turns the form of its boundary into an opposition vis-a`-vis its contents. In general, from an easily observable connection, content is of more decisive significance for boundary phenomena than for other sociological forms. While in general the quantitative limitation of an interest in a common content imposes on the interested a reciprocal limitation, this is not the case for certain contents the types of which are found in the most varied systems of values: at one end, for example, the community commons on which each can allow as many cattle graze as one owns, at the other end, the kingdom of God in which everyone can participate and can posses entirely without the possession of it by the other being thereby curtailed.
It is a matter here, then, essentially of the social interactions that arise between the inside and the outside of the boundary; so there is need of an example at least of those interactions that the boundary offers as a framework between the elements of the enclosed group itself. 5 The essential thing here is the narrowness or the breadth of the frame-
4 The phrase "let. . . lot" is without scare quotes but is in English in the original, so presumably then a quotation--ed. trans.
5 Here Simmel is resuming section 'B,' which began before the Excursus--ed.
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? work--although in no way the only essential thing; because even the form into which the spatial framework brings the group, its uniform or, depending on various locations, strongly varying cohesive energy, the question whether the frame in general is produced by the same structure (as in one respect with islands, in another, with states in the situation of San Marino or the Indian tribute states) or is composed from several adjacent elements--all this is for the inner structure of the group of undoubted significance, which, however, shall here only be mentioned. The narrowness or breadth of the framework does not at all always coincide with the small or large size of the group. Rather, it depends on the tensions that develop within the group; when these find sufficient latitude without their expansion bumping against the boundar- ies, the framework is then wide enough, even if relatively many people meet within it, as is often the case with the constellation of oriental kingdoms. On the other hand, the frame is narrow when it functions even for a small number of people as a constraint beyond which certain energies, unable to unfold within, continually exert outward pressure. The effect of this latter constellation on the social form has, e. g. , been unmistakably the experience of Venice: the narrow and immediately impervious boundedness of its territory is much more of an indication of the, so to speak, dynamic expansion among the relationships of the wider world than of a territorial expansion of power, which offers in such a situation only limited opportunities. Such a spatially far-sighted politics, reaching out beyond the nearest neighbors, makes, however, very emphatic intellectual demands, as cannot be realized on the greater part of the masses. Therefore, direct democracy for Venice was out of the question. It had to cultivate, in accord with its spatial life conditions, an aristocracy that, as has been claimed, governed the people much like the officers of a ship over the crew.
The reality of the spatial frame of the group, as a form-sociological one, is in no way limited to the political boundary. Its narrowness or breadth exercises its forming effects with corresponding modifications wherever a quantity of people congregate spatially. The frequently emphasized assembled aggregate: its impulsivity, its enthusiasm, its mob mentality--depends in part also on its being either out in the open or minimally--in contrast to other residential spaces--in a very large locality. The great open air gives people a feeling of freedom of movement, of being able to reach out into the indeterminate, of the as-yet undefined erecting of greater goals--just as in a narrow room it is felt as decisively impeded. That even those enormous spaces,
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? however, are frequently too small, i. e. , overcrowded, can only increase this agitating effect, the growth of individual ardor beyond its normal boundaries: then it must increase that collective feeling that melds the individual into a solidarity beyond one's individuality, a solidarity that sweeps over a person like a storm flood beyond one's own personal directives and responsibilities. The stimulating suggestive effects of a large mass and its collective psychological phenomena, in whose form the individual no longer recognizes one's contribution, increases to the extent of its cohesive pressure, and all the more so the greater the space it fills. A locality offering, besides a cohesive crowd, a large atmosphere for individuals not accustomed to it, necessarily favors that feeling of expansion and an unfolding of power going into an indeterminate direction, to which large aggregative masses are so easily directed, and which is grasped, as a glance of clarity into the narrow framework of a conventional room, only occasionally by exceptional individuals. This ambiguity of the spatial framework, which supports so vitally the typical excitements of the collective, however unclear and wide the borders overall, functions not only in the spatial sense, excitingly seductively to degrade clarity of consciousness--precisely this makes even unlawful assemblies in the dark so dangerous that the police of the medieval city sought to prevent them by locking up the back streets in the evening with chains, etc. Darkness gives the assembly actually a rather peculiar framework that brings together the significance of the narrow and the wide into one of characteristic unity. While one of course views only the closest environment, and behind this an impenetrably black wall rises, one feels pressed together closely with those nearest; differentiation from the space, beyond that of the most visible periphery, has reached its extreme case: this space appears to have disappeared altogether. On the other hand this also lets even the truly existing boundaries disap- pear; the imagination augments the darkness with overly exaggerated possibilities; one feels oneself surrounded by a fantastically indefinite and unlimited space. While now the fearfulness and insecurity of this darkness is here removed by that tight cohesiveness and mutual orien- tation of the many to one another, that feared excitement and incal- culability of moving together in the dark arises as an entirely unique increase and combination of the enclosing and inherently expanding spatial boundary.
C. The third significance of space for social formations lies in the settling that it makes possible for its contents. Whether a group or specific individual elements of it or essential objects of its interest are fully fixed
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? or spatially indefinable obviously has to influence its structure, and, however much the conditions of nomadic and firmly settled groups are determined hereby through their differences is frequently enough real- ized to require here only an indication thereof. It is in no way a matter merely of a schematic extension of the principle of settling: that, appli- cable in the realm of the spatial, it would now be revealed in the mate- rial life contents as a stabilization and fixed order. This is because this immediately intelligible connection does not hold absolutely; precisely in very consolidated circumstances, freed from the possibility of external eradication, one will be able to dispense with some regulations and legal controls that are urgently required with general uncertainty and troubled relationships more easily prone to fragmentation. Whether and how, though, the group locks in its members with legal determina- tion, that yields a manifest continuum of many members that ranges from the completely local bond to complete freedom. The bond has presumably the main forms that leaving home is either absolutely for- bidden or that one is indeed at liberty to do so, but threatened with the loss of group membership entirely or more likely with its communal rights. Of many examples I would mention only the city ordinance from Harlem that stipulated in 1245, there are to be no expatriates: every citizen is duty-bound to live in the city, which one was permitted to leave only for planting and for harvesting up to 40 days for each. This is not exactly the question of freedom of movement that refers to the various districts within a larger political whole. Here rather is the issue whether one can leave the political unit entirely and yet still remain its citizen. The other type of bond is exemplified when in the eastern provinces of Prussia until 1891 the municipal suffrage is only for residents until the provincial reform of that year accorded it to all federal taxpayers. The more primitive the mental disposition is, the less can membership exist for it without residence and the more are the actual relationships accordingly also based on this personal presence of group members; with greater suppleness and range of mind, matters are organized in such a way that the essential determinants of member- ship can be preserved even in spatial absence, so that ultimately with a thoroughgoing money economy and division of labor an ever more extensive 'representation' of unmediated powers makes the presence of the individuals to a great extent dispensable.
A second sociological significance of spatial definition can be indi- cated by the symbolic expression of the 'pivot': the spatial situation of an object of interest generates specific forms of relationship that
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? group around it. Now every fixed thing of value--around which activi- ties, economic transactions of any type are taking place--is actually such a stable pivot for unsettled relationships and social interactions. However, the spatial immobility of the object, at least today, does not determine those relationships in a particularly characteristic sociological manner. This is observed in a not uninteresting modification in that relationship of economic individuals that is realized with the mort- gage. Fundamentally, with the mortgage this relationship gets directly linked almost exclusively to fixed property, the fixedness of which is combined with its indestructibility, which can count as the correlate of the previously treated exclusivity: it achieves the permanence for the singularity with which every part of our space is, so to speak, limited, by virtue of which real estate is so especially suited to the mortgage commitment. This is because only in this way is it possible that the mortgaged object remains in the hands of the debtor and is yet fully secured for the creditor; it can be neither carried off nor exchanged with another. But now the principle of insurance has made precisely those objects, the fixed nature in space of which is lacking altogether, still accessible to mortgage, namely ships. This is because what is espe- cially important for the spatial fixedness of the mortgage--suitability for public registration--is what otherwise is readily attainable for ships. Thereupon, as in many other cases, the substantial definiteness revealed itself as a functional equivalent. The fixedness, which as a quality of property favors the mortgage, acquires this in reality at least in part through public record-making, to which it is disposed, which can also be established, though, by other means with the same result. So the pivot of economic interactions then is here certainly rather dominantly a spatially fixed value, but not actually because of its immobility, but rather because of specific functions connected to it. It was otherwise, however, in the Middle Ages, which required in general an altogether different mix of stability and mobility of life contents. We find countless 'relationships' in the social traffic of the Middle Ages that entirely elude our understanding of economic and private legal action, but still made into objects of such a kind. Governing power over territories as well as jurisdiction within them, church patronage as well as tax privileges, roads as well as coin minting privileges--all this is sold or loaned, pro- vided as collateral or given away. To turn such labile objects, already in themselves existing in the basic interactions between people, into the object of nevertheless economic transactions would have to lead to still
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? more fluctuating and precarious circumstances if all these rights and conditions had not had the property of being immovably fixed at the place of their practice. This was the moment of stability that gave their purely dynamic and relativistic nature enough stability that further economic transactions could themselves then be grouped around them. Its local stabilization was not like that of a material object, which one would always find in the same place, but like the actually ideal one of a pivot that maintains a system of elements at a particular distance, in a social interaction, in mutual dependence.
The importance of a sociological relationship as pivot attaches to the fixed locality especially where the contact or assembly can occur only at a particular place for elements otherwise independent of one another. I will treat several examples of this phenomenon, which actually represents an interaction of the internally sociologically determined and the spatially. For churches in a situation of diaspora it is an extremely wise policy, especially where only the smallest number of adherents lives in a district, to immediately erect a chapel and permanent station of pastoral care. This establishment of a space comes to be a pivotal point for the relationships and the solidarity of the faithful, so that not only the strengths of the religious community develop in a location of pure isolation, but the strengths that radiate from such an apparent center also reawaken the consciousness of belonging to the confession in its adherents, whose religious desires in their isolation long lay asleep. The Catholic Church is far superior in this to the Evangelical. 6 She does not simply wait in the diaspora for a formal community of persons to constitute it spatially but starts it around the smallest core of persons, and this localization has countless times become the point of crystallization for an internally and numerically growing vital community. Everywhere cities function as the pivotal point of commerce for their narrower and wider surroundings; i. e. each one generates in itself countless ongoing and changing pivotal points of commercial interactivity. Commerce needs cities all the more decisively the more brisk it is, thereby revealing the complete difference of its vitality in contrast to the restless nomadic movement of ancient groups. It is the typical contrast of social activities: whether they involve simply a striving outwards from the spatially and
6 Presumably Simmel is referring here to Germany or even to continental Europe. Evangelical in this instance means Protestants--trans.
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? objectively given, or the cycle of herding peoples alternating between pasture lands--or whether they rotate around fixed points. In the latter case, only as they are actually formed do they crystallize as the jumping- off point for permanent values, even if these only exist in the unaltered form of relationships and movements. This contrast in their forms of movement so often altogether dominates the outer and inner life that its spatial realization appears as merely a special case. Whether mental and social relationships have a firm center, around which interests and discourse circulate, or whether they simply follow the linear form of time, whether two political parties possess a fixed point between them (be it a steady similarity of stance or a steady opposition), or whether their relationship develops without prejudice on a case-by-case basis, whether in the individual person a strong singularly colored feeling for life prevails (perhaps of an aesthetic type) that links all of one's diverse interests (religious as well as theoretical, social as well as erotic), shades them into one another, sets them firmly in a sphere or whether one's interests unfold only according to their own relational strengths without such a lasting connection and ordering criterion--this leads evidently to the greatest difference of life schemata and defines the actual course of our existence through perpetual conflicts and mixtures of both. All of these, however, are simply individual developments of the same general antithesis inherent in the spatiality of the sociological pivot. When com- merce shapes the city into such an antithesis, only then does the real meaning of commerce emerge; for this is indeed--in contrast to the simple venture into the realm of the unlimited in which the movement encounters a second equivalent power, without this encounter being nec- essarily hostile--which is always prior to a developed commerce. It now no longer means mutual elimination but a complementarity and thereby increase of strengths that needs the spatial base of support and therefore generates it. I am reminded, moreover, of the rendezvous, a specifically sociological form whose spatial specificity is characterized linguistically by the double meaning of the word: it indicates the encounter itself as well as the place for it. 7 The sociological nature of the rendezvous lies
7 The more decidedly a concept is purely of a sociological type, i. e. indicating absolutely nothing substantial or individual but a pure form of relationship, the more likely it will be defined linguistically by its own contents or its bearer. Thus 'sovereignty' [Herrschaft] is nothing other than the functional relationship or relational form between those who command and those who obey; but in our language Herrschaft is then also the expression for the first party itself, but at the same time for the territory on which its governing occurs. What characteristically has the purest sociological word there
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? in the tension between the punctuality and the hastiness of the event on the one hand and its spatial-temporal fixednesss on the other. The rendezvous--and by no means only the erotic or illegitimate--stands out psychologically from the usual form of existence by the trait of temporal singularity, urgency, coming exclusively by way of the specific opportunity; and because it breaks away from the ongoing course of life's contents in an island-like manner, it wins immediately with its formal moments of time and place a particular hold on consciousness. For memory, the place, because it is perceptibly more graphic, usually develops a stronger associative power than the time, so that for memory, especially where it is a matter of a single and strongly emotional social interaction, the interaction tends to bind insolubly immediately with place, and thus, since this occurs reciprocally, the place thereafter remains the pivot around which memory then spins the individuals into an increasingly idealized correlation.
This sociological meaning of the point fixed in space is certainly similar to another that could be identified as the individualization of location. It appears an inconsequentially superficial fact that the urban houses in the Middle Ages quite universally and frequently up until into the 19th century were identified by proper names; the inhabit- ants of the Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris until just about 60 years ago are supposed to have regularly identified the houses with the proper names (Au roi de Siam, E? toile d'or, etc. ) in spite of the numbering already in existence. For all that, in the distinction between the individual names and the mere number of the house a difference in the relationship of the owner as well as of the occupants to it--and likewise to that of its neighborhood--is expressed. The determinate and the indeterminate in identification are mixed here to quite a unique extent. The house designated with the proper name must give those persons a sense of spatial individuality, relationship to a qualitatively established spot in space; through the name, which was associated with the conception of the house, there is formed much more an inherent being of individually colored existence; it contains intuitively a higher type of individuality than does the identification by numbers that are repeated similarly in every street and constitute only quantitative differences between them.
is: relationship [das Verha? ltnis]--to which popular linguistic usage has added to the fullest extent possible an erotic relationship to its meaning. Lovers 'have' a relation- ship [Verha? ltnis]; they are as a sociological entity 'a relationshp'; and finally he is 'her relationship' and she 'his relationship. '
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? Over against the ebb and flow of the social, especially the urban, traf- fic, that sort of naming testifies to a distinctiveness and personality of being according to its spatial aspect, which, compared to the situation now, however, is indeed paid for with an indistinctness and a lack of objective fixedness and must therefore disappear over a certain expanse and rapidity of traffic. The named house is not readily found; one cannot objectively construe its location, as now with geographical identifica- tion. The numbers signify, with all their indifference and abstractness as merely ordinal numbers, still a definite place in space, which the proper name of a locality does not do. The ultimate step, then, is on the one hand the reference to hotel guests by their room number and on the other that even the streets are no longer named but numbered consecutively as it is in part in New York. This antithesis in kinds of naming reveals in the sphere of the spatial a fully antithetical sociological position for the individual. The individualistic person with a qualita- tive fixedness and unchangeability of life contents thereby eludes the arrangement in an order that holds for all, in which one would have a definitely calculable location according to a constant principle. Where conversely the organization of the whole regulates the activities of the individual in accord with a goal not within the self, one's place must be fixed in accord with a system external to the self; not an inner or ideal norm but the relationship to the whole determines one's place, which is therefore established most suitably by a numerical-like arrangement. The automatic readiness of the waiter or coachman, whose unindi- viduality is distinguished precisely in that it is in its content ultimately not so mechanically uniform as that of the machinist, is therefore most highly appropriately emphasized through one's numbering instead of any kind of personal identification. This sociological difference is that which those different ways of identifying houses represent in the rela- tionships of urban sectors projected into space. The numerability of city houses means in general an advance initially in the spatial fixing of individuals, in that these are now traceable by a mechanical method. This traceability is obviously of quite another nature than that of the medieval designating of particular quarters and streets for particular social strata and occupations or of the separation of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters in oriental cities. 8 In contrast to this that system
8 This immeasurably important sociological motif, that the qualitative relation is even spatially correlated, has found also, so to speak, an absolute expression: the common abode of departed souls.
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? is eminently unhistorically diagramatic; it is, as in the manner of any rationalism, on the one hand much more individual, on the other hand much more indifferent towards the individual as a person. Accordingly the intra-societal nature of urban life is expressed in the language of space. The purer this becomes, the more rationalistic it reveals itself to be--above all in the displacement of the individual, the accidental, the twisted, the bent in the layout of streets by the deadly straight, estab- lished by geometrical norms, universal rules. When, at the time of the sophists and of Socrates, the clear and consciously intentional rational triumphed over the intuitively traditional character of ancient Greece, Hippodamus of Miletus was recommending the principle of perfectly straight streets! 9 The straightening of crooked streets, the installation of new diagonal roads, the whole modern system of right-angled symmetry and systematics is certainly immediately space-saving for the traffic but above all time-saving, as is required by the rationalization of life. With these traffic principles of traceability, on the one hand mechanical, on the other hand as fast as possible, the nature of the city in general, in contrast to the rural, is brought to the greatest purity, just as had been demonstrated indeed from the very beginning in the parallelism of the two aspects of streets--a perceptible rationalism, to which the structure of rural life possesses no analogy at all. In the essence of the city, following its whole possibility of existence, there lies a certain 'constructability,' in deep contrast to the more organic, intuitive, in the psychological sense, tribal principle. In conceptual connection with this, such, as it were, a posteriori constructed empires as that of Alexander and the Alexandrians, on the one hand, the Roman, on the other hand, were built absolutely on the principle of urban communities, not on that of the tribal entities: these empires were to be composed from citizenries settled inside the ringed wall. And this contrast of the rationally laid out urban settlement against the more natural-like tribal idea is echoed yet again among the Arabs: as long as they, in their earlier epochs, led a nomadic life without fixed settlements, genealogy was the only means of 'traceability,' of designating a person; later Omar I10 complains that
9 Hippodamus of Miletus was a fifth-century BCE architect who favored straight streets intersecting at right angels and geometrical forms; he planned Piraeus, the port of Athens, for Pericles, the city of Rhodes, and the Italian town of Thurii--ed.
10 Omar I: associate of Mohammed and early caliph--ed.
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? the farmers no longer used their tribe but their village for identifying a person!
Were the individuality of the spatial elements now not to be united with the relationship to a wide and manifold circle in the one symbol of those proper names of individual houses, one can nevertheless per- haps by this measure, rather formally understood, set up a sociological scale. That is: the individuality, more-or-less the character of a personal uniqueness, which the location of certain persons or groups possesses, hinders or favors it, in the most varied mixtures, so that wide ranging relationships are linked by it to a variety of other elements. The most complete union of both determinants has been achieved by the Catholic Church with its seat in Rome. On the one hand, Rome is simply the unique location, the most incomparable historical geographical forma- tion, established as though by a system of countless coordinates, hence "All roads lead to Rome"; on the other hand, however, through the immense scope and content of its past, it has appeared as a geometrical location for all the changes and contrasts of history whose meaning and traces have merged spiritually as though visibly in it or for it--thereby it lost entirely the limitation of being located at one spot. The church has, in that it possesses Rome, certainly a continuous local homeland with all the advantages of being always easily located, of perceptibly visual continuity, of a definite centralization of its functions and its own institutions; however, it need not pay for this with all the other difficul- ties and narrow-mindedness of the localization of power at one single individual point because Rome is, so to speak, not a single location at all. It reaches out in its social-psychological effect by the scope of the destinies and importance invested in it, far beyond its fixed location, while it offers the church, however, precisely also the definitiveness of such a localizability. It possesses, in order to support the purposes of the church in its governing relationship to the faithful, the utmost individuality and distinctiveness that any particular location would possess, and at the same time the elevation beyond all limitation and happenstance of an individually fixed existence. Large organizations as such require a spatial middle point because they cannot manage without domination and subordination, and the commander must as a rule occupy a fixed location in order, on the one hand, to have one's subordinates at hand and thereby, on the other hand, for them to know where at any given time they can find the chief. However, where the wonderful union of locality and supra-locality as in Rome does not occur, this can be acquired, then, always only with certain sacrifices.
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? The Franciscans were originally fully homeless beings; this demanded their individualistic liberation from all earthly ties, their poverty, their preaching mission. Only as the widely dispersed order then required 'ministers,' these needed, for the reasons mentioned, a permanent resi- dence and therefore the brothers could not manage henceforth without the establishing of cloisters. This was of so much service technically to their power, though, that it reduced that incomparable peacefulness, that inner certainty of the first brothers, of whom one would say they certainly had nothing, but possessed everything; while they now shared with the rest of humanity ties of residence, their form of life became trivialized; their freedom was still very great but no longer infinite, because now they were bound to one point at least.
Entirely differently from Rome, the localization of the Jewish cult, otherwise comparable in some aspects, was ultimately effective in Jerusalem. As long as the Temple endured in Jerusalem, there ran from it, as it were, an invisible thread to every Jew dispersed in count- less locations with their various state affiliations, interests, languages, indeed nuances of faith; it was the meeting point that mediated the partly substantial, partly spiritual connections for all of Jewry. But it had a regulation by which the local individualization was more strictly spun than the Roman and which enveloped them: sacrifices could be made only here; Yahweh had no other proper places of sacrifice. The destruction of the Temple, therefore, had to sever that bond; the spe- cific strength and coloring that had come to the Yahweh cult through the rather singular specialization now made room for a more colorless deism. Thereby the displacement by Christianity happened more readily and with more energy; the place of the central site in Jerusalem was taken by the autonomous synagogue; the effective bond among the Jews withdrew ever more from the religious factor to the racial. That was the result of that loss of locality that the sociological tie had formulated so rigidly: here or nowhere.
D. A fourth type of outward relationship that is transformed in the vitality of sociological patterns of interaction is offered by space through the perceptible nearness or distance between persons who stand in some kind of relationship to one another. The first glance convinces that two associations, held together by the principle of common interests, strengths, attitudes, will differ in their character, depending on whether their participants are spatially in touch or separated from one another. And in fact not only in the obvious sense of a difference of total rela- tionships--insofar as developing through physical proximity is added
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? to the relationship still internally independent of it, but in a way that spatially grounded patterns of interaction nevertheless essentially modify the former, possibly even at a distance. An economic cartelization as well as a friendship, an association of stamp collectors as well as a religious community can go without personal contact continuously or intermittently; but immediately manifest is the possibility of countless quantitative and qualitative transformations of binding ties when it does not have to overcome any distance. Before going into these, let the principle be noticed that the difference of both kinds of bond is more relative than the logical abruptness of the contrast of being together and being separate leads one to presume. The psychological effect of the former can be actually very largely replaced by means of indirect interaction and still more by that of the imagination. It is precisely for the opposite poles of human linkages in the psychological sense, i. e. , for the purely objectively impersonal and for that placed entirely on the intensity of feeling--that this result succeeds most readily; for the one, perhaps certain economic or scientific transactions because their contents are expressible in logical forms and so therefore completely in written form; for the other, such as religious and some unions of the heart, because the force of imagination and the submission of feeling often enough overcome the conditions of time and space in a mystically appearing manner. To the extent that these extremes lose their purity, spatial proximity becomes more necessary: when those objectively grounded relationships manifest gaps that are to be filled by simply logically incomprehensible imponderables, or when the purely internal ones cannot escape the mixture of externally perceptible needs. Perhaps the totality of social interactive patterns produces a gradient from this standpoint: which measure of spatial proximity or spatial distance a combination of given forms and content either requires or endures. The manner in which one could combine the criteria of such a scale should be exemplified further in the following.
The capacity for managing spatial tension in an association under common conditions of feeling and interests is dependent on the amount of available potential for abstraction. The more primitive the consciousness is, the less it is able to imagine the solidarity of the spa- tially separated or the lack of solidarity of the spatially near. At that point the manner of socially associative strengths reverts immediately to the ultimate foundations of mental life: namely to that where the nai? ve consistency of undeveloped imagination does not yet generally distinguish well between the 'I' and its environment. On the one hand
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? the 'I' merges, without further individualistic emphasis, into the images of other people and things, just as the lack of the 'I' is manifest with the child and the communistic semi-undifferentiation of earlier social circumstances; on the other hand no being-for-itself is acknowledged for the objects on this level; the nai? ve egoism of the child and of the natural person wants to acquire every desired thing immediately for oneself--and desires nearly everything that approaches perceptibly near--and thus the sphere of the 'I' reaches out for all practical pur- poses even over things, as occurs theoretically through the subjectivism of thought and the unawareness of objective legalities. For that reason, it becomes obvious how decisive for this mental constitution perceptible proximity must be for the consciousness of belonging-to-one-another. Because this proximity comes into play indeed not as an objective spatial fact but as the mental superstructure over it, it can thus, as mentioned already, be replaced at times even on this level by other psychological constellations, e. g. by membership in the same totemic band, which among the Australian aborigines brings individuals from entirely separate groups into close relationship so that they avoid enter- ing into a group conflict with one another. As a whole, however, with primitive consciousness, then, the external contacts are the bearers of the internal--however varied these may be in their character; the undifferentiated imagination does not know rightly how to keep the two apart from one another; just as even today still in the backward- ness of small-town relations the relationship to the next-door neighbor and the interest in that person plays an entirely different role than in the large city, in which one becomes accustomed, by the complication and confusion of the outward image of life, to perpetual abstractions, to indifference towards spatial intimacy as well as the close relation- ship to someone far away.
In epochs in which spatially transcending abstraction is needed by objective circumstances but is hindered by the lack of psychological development, sociological stresses of considerable consequence arise for the form of relationship. E. g. , the patronage of the Anglo-Saxon king over the Church was justified legally based on the distance of the See of Rome. Personal presence was felt at that time still very much as a condition for the exercise of authority, so that one would have to voluntarily relinquish this to an authority that far away. By the way, I would also like to take a historical digression in this context. Where the mental superiority of one part or the force of circumstances makes inevitable relationships at a distance for which the consciousness is actually not yet matured, then this would have to
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? contribute greatly to the formation of abstraction, as it were an elasticity of mind; sociological necessity would require the cultivation of its own ear for individual psychology. So probably the relationship of medieval Europe to Rome, where it was not breaking down on account of spatial distance, became indeed, precisely because of it, a school for the capac- ity for abstraction, for the ability to be consciously aware beyond what is perceptibly nearest, for the triumph of powers effective then by their content over those which were based on spatial presence. There seems to be a 'threshold' for overcoming distance for each of the relevant sociological relationships in such a way that the spatial distance, up to one of a certain size, increases the capacity for abstraction by which it is overcome; beyond this level, though, it is immediately weakened. Spatial distances with their flowing transitions and their different mental meanings manifest in general multiple threshold phenomena, especially in combination with temporal distances. This is most noteworthy with emotional relationships: a spatial separation may bring the mutual feeling to its highest attainable intensity for a while, but from a certain moment on it consumes the strength of the feeling, so to speak, and leads to its cooling and to an indifference. A close spatial distance will often modify the sensation only a little according to its tenor; a very great distance will allow it to flare up in desperate ardor; on the other hand, then, precisely that separation, spatially then insignificant, when it is nevertheless insurmountable, often leads to the most tragic situa- tion because the divisive forces are felt more sharply in their substantial strength as though the space, in itself indifferent, stepped in between: the purely physical obstacle does not embitter as much as the moral; it does not function so very much as a fate tapered to the personality but more as the generally nonhuman.
If relationships at a far distance presuppose in the first place a certain intellectual development, conversely the more perceptible character of local proximity is manifest in them, so that one tends to stand on a friendly or, short of a decidedly positive one, hostile footing with close neighbors, and mutual indifference tends to be excluded to the extent of spatial closeness. The dominating intellectuality always means a reduction of emotional extremes. In accord with its objectivity as well as mental function, it is placed beyond the contrasts between which feeling and will swing; it is the principle of impartiality, so that neither individuals nor historical epochs of essentially intellectual color tend to be marked by one-sidedness or the intensity of love and hate. This correlation also holds for the individual relationships of people. Intel-
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? lectuality, as much as it offers a ground for general understanding, nev- ertheless places precisely thereby a distance between people: because it enables understanding and agreement between the most distant people, it establishes a cool and an often estranging objectivity between the clos- est. If spatially far distant relationships tend to manifest a certain calm, formality, disaffectedness, this appears to those thinking naively likewise as a direct consequence of distance, in the same way that the decrease of a throwing motion, according to the measure of the space traversed, looks like merely the result of spatial breadth. In reality the importance of spatial interval lies then in that it excludes the incitements, tensions, attractions, and repulsions that physical proximity calls forth, and thus produces in the complexity of socially interactive mental processes the dominant mode for those thinking intellectually. Towards the spatially near, with whom one is reciprocally involved in the most varied situations and moods without the possibility of foresight and choice, there tends to be then definite feelings so that this proximity can be the foundation of the most exuberant joy as well as the most unbearable coercion. It is an exceedingly old experience for residents of the same house to stand on friendly or hostile footing. Wherever there exists close relationships that would not be enhanced any further in their essentials by incessantly immediate nearness, such nearness is thereby best avoided because it brings with it all kinds of chances for contrasting coloration and thus offers too little to gain, but much to lose; it is good to have one's neigh- bors as friends, but it is dangerous to have one's friends as neighbors. There are probably only very few friendship relationships that do not involve some kind of distance in their closeness; spatial remoteness takes the place of the often embarrassing and irritating rules by which it is necessary to maintain that inner distance with continuous contact. The exceptions to that rule of emotional polarity with greater nearness confirm its basis: on the one hand with a very high educational level, on the other hand in the modern large city, complete indifference and exclusion of any mutual emotional reaction can occur among the clos- est of neighbors along the hall. In the first case, because the dominat- ing intellectuality reduces the impulsive reactions to the, so to speak, attraction of contact; in the second, because incessant contact with countless people produces the very same effect through indifference; here indifference toward those proximally close is simply a protective device, without which a person in the metropolis would be mentally torn and scattered. Where this mitigating effect of life in the metropolis is counteracted by the particularly lively temperaments, other protective
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? devices have been occasionally pursued: in the Alexandria of the Roman Empire two of the five city quarters were inhabited principally by Jews, so that neighborly conflicts might be prevented as much as possible through mutually held customs. If, then, the mediator seeks first of all to separate colliding parties spatially, in contrast to this absolute move, the same mediator takes the trouble to bring them directly together when they are far from one another. Because with some natures the effective imagination at a distance unleashes an uninhibited exaggera- tion of feelings, over against which the consequent stimuli of physical proximity, however great they may be, seem nevertheless at the same time as somehow limited and finite.
Besides the practical effects of immediate spatial proximity and for consciousness, most important sociologically, to have such effects at least in that moment at hand, even if one does not actually make use of them--next to these the consequence of proximity for the form of association lies in the importance of the individual perceptions by which the individuals perceive one another.
Excursus on the Sociology of Sense Impression
The fact that we notice people physically near us at all develops in two respects whose joint effect is of fundamental sociological significance. Acting on the subject, the sense impression of a person brings about feelings in us of desire and aversion, of one's own enhancement and diminishment, of excitement or calm by the other's appearance or the tone of that person's voice, by the mere physical presence in the same space. All this is not of use for getting to know or defining the other; it is simply fine for me or just the opposite if someone is there whom I would see and hear. That person's self is left, so to speak, outside by this reaction of feeling to one's physical appearance. In the direction of the opposed dimension the development of the sense impression proceeds as soon as it becomes the means of knowledge of the other: what I see, hear, feel of the other is simply the bridge over which I would get to where that person is an object to me. The speech-sound and its meaning forms perhaps the clearest example. Just as the organ of a person has a fully immediately engaging or repulsive effect on us, irrespective of what that person says, so on the other hand what that person says helps us to the knowledge not only of the other's immediate thoughts but also to that person's mental being--thus is it probably with all sense impressions; they usher into the subject as that person's voice and feeling, and out to the object as knowledge of that one. Vis-a`-vis non- human objects, both of these tend to lie far apart. To the physical presence of non-human objects, we emphasize either their emotional value: the aroma of the rose, the charm of a sound, the attraction of the branches that bend in the wind--we experience these things as a happiness in the interior of the
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? soul itself. Or we want to identify the rose or the sound or the tree--thus we apply fully different energies for that, often with conscious avoidance of feel- ing. What are here rather disparately alternating with one another are for the most part interwoven into a unity vis-a`-vis human beings. 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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