No More Learning

There are only specific types, with whose emergence society simply is, and which are neither the cause nor consequence of it; rather they them- selves are it instantly. Only the boundless profusion and diversity that are operative at every moment have given the general concept society an apparently independent historical reality. Perhaps the reason for the characteristic vagueness and uncertainty that adhere to the concept and former treatments of general sociology lies in this hypostasizing of a pure abstraction--just as the concept of life did not progress well so long as science regarded it as a unitary phenomenon of actual reality. Only inasmuch as the discrete processes inside organisms, whose sum- mation or interweaving life is, were analyzed, only inasmuch as it was recognized that life exists only in these specific activities and between organs and cells, did the life sciences acquire a firm foundation.
It is first necessary to find out in society what 'society' actually is, just as geometry determines in spatial things what spatiality actually is. Sociology, as the science of human social existence, which can still be the object of scientific study in countless other respects, thus stands in relation to the specialized disciplines as geometry stands in relation to the physical-chemical sciences of matter. Geometry considers the form through which matter becomes empirical bodies at all--form, which of course exists as such only in the abstract, just as do the forms of social interaction. Both geometry and sociology leave to other disciplines the study of the contents that are present in their forms; even the study of the totality of phenomena, whose pure form are their concern, is left to the others. It is hardly necessary to mention that this analogy with geometry does not apply more broadly than its purpose here of attempting to clarify the fundamental problems of sociology. Above all geometry has the advantage of finding in its field extremely simple pat- terns to which complicated figures can be reduced; hence it constructs the whole range of possible formations from a relatively few postulates. In contrast, even a mere approximate reduction into simple elements is not to be expected for the forms of social interaction in the foreseeable
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? future. The result is that sociological forms, even if tolerably accurate, are valid for only a relatively small range of phenomena. Thus if one says, for example, that domination and subordination are a formation found in almost every human social interaction, little is gained by this general acknowledgement. It is necessary, rather, to focus inquiry on the individual types of superior-subordinate relations, on the specific forms of their realization, which now, with some certainty, lose their accuracy at the periphery of their validity.
These alternatives are proposed for any science: either it is to lead to the discovery of timelessly valid laws or to the representation and conceptualization of time-specific historically real developments. In any case, though, one does not exclude the countless cases in empirical scientific undertakings that stand between these two types; so the prob- lematic identified here of a necessity to decide between them is not dealt with at the outset. The object abstracted out from reality allows these empirical manifestations to be observed on the one hand in the law-like regularities that, located entirely within the factual structure of elements, apply irrespective of their temporal-spatial realization; they are effective precisely in that they enable historical developments to operate one time or a thousand. On the other hand, however, those same forms of social interaction can be observed, with their now and then occurrences as well as with their historical development in definite groups in mind. In the latter instances their identification would basically be historical narrative for its own sake, and in the former instances induction material for the discovery of timeless law-like regularities. We learn about competition, for example, from countless instances telling us about it in very differ- ent domains--politics, political economy, history of religions, art. It is now a matter of establishing from these facts what competition as a pure form of human relationships means, under what circumstances it arises, how it develops, what modifications it undergoes with differ- ent kinds of objects of competition, by what concurrent formal and material regulations of a society it is inspired or reduced, how compe- tition between individuals differs from that between groups--in short, what it is as a form of interaction among humankind that can absorb all possible contents, but by the uniformity of its appearance, despite great differences in content, shows that it belongs to a well-ordered and abstractly justified field following its own laws. The uniform is lifted from the complex manifestations like a cross-section; the dissimilar in them--here, that is, the substantive interests--is set in their competitive opposition. It is also suitable to deal with all the great relationships and
the problem of sociology 29
? interactions that form societies: factionalism; imitation; the formation of classes, circles, and secondary divisions; the embodiment of social interaction in separate structures of a factual, personal, and ideational kind; the growth and role of hierarchy; delegated representation; and the importance of a common opponent for the inner cohesion of a group. Then such chief problems are joined to the same specific form of groups manifesting on the one hand features peculiar to the form and on the other hand complicated features--these, for example: the meaning of the "impartial," the "poor" as organic members of societies, the numerical determination of group processes, the primus inter pares, and the tertius gaudens. To mention even more complex processes: the intersection of various circles in individual personalities; the distinct importance of the "secret" in the formation of circles; the modification of group characteristics, incorporating detached individuals, whether through locally coalescing factors or factors not attributable to them; and countless others.
I leave open, as indicated above, the question of whether absolutely identical forms with diverse contents appear. The near similarity that they manifest under multitudinous material--likewise with the contrary--suffices to regard this as possible in principle. That it is not entirely realized simply shows the difference of the historical-mental event, with its never fully rationalizable fluctuations and complexities, from the capacity of geometry to free its concept of compliant shapes with absolute clarity from their realization in matter. One also keeps in mind that this uniformity in the nature of interaction, with the arbitrary distinction between human and material things, is first of all only a means to carry out and legitimate for all individual phenomena the scientific distinction between form and content. Methodologically, this would be required even if the actual constellations do not lend them- selves to that inductive practice that allows the same to be crystallized out of the difference, in the same way as the geometrical abstraction of the spatial form of a body is also justified, even if this body were to be formed this way in the world only one time. That there is a dif- ficulty in practice here is obvious. There is, for example, the fact that towards the end of the Middle Ages certain craft masters, because of the expansion of business networks for the supply of materials, were pressed to abandon journeymen and to use new means to attract customers, all of which was inconsistent with the old craft principles whereby each master was supposed to receive the same 'nutrition' as the others, and for that reason sought to place themselves outside earlier
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? narrow associations. Concerning the pure sociological form abstracted from a specific content, it is important to consider that the widening of the circle to which an individual's action binds him goes hand in hand with a stronger accentuation of personal distinctiveness, greater freedom, and the mutual differentiation of individuals. But as far as I can tell, there is no sure effective method to extract this sociological meaning from that complex content-determined fact. Which sheer socio- logical configuration, which particular interrelationship of individuals is included in the historical event when abstracting from individuals with all their interests and impulses and from the conditions of purely factual behavior--well, it is possible to interpret the historical facts in a variety of ways, and one can refer to the historical facts that occupy the reality of definite sociological forms only in their material totality, and devoid of the means, by hook or crook render teachable its break- down from the material and form-sociological point of view. This is the case with the proof of a geometrical theorem by the unavoidably haphazard and crudely sketched figure. The mathematician, however, can still recognize that the concept of the ideal geometrical figure is known and effective and is viewed now wholly internally as essentially the meaning of the chalk or ink lines. However in sociology the com- parable assumption should not be made; we cannot logically force a solution for the problem of what, out of the whole complex phenom- enon, is pure interaction.
Here one must accept the odium of speaking of intuitive prac- tice--though well apart from speculative-metaphysical intuition--about a specific angle of vision with which that distinction is realized and by which we can be guided, albeit only by demonstration with examples, until some later time when we will have conceptualized fully expressive and reliably guiding methods. And that raises the difficulty that not only is there no indubitable handle for the implementation of this sociologi- cally foundational idea, but also that even where it functions tolerably well, in many instances the aligning of events under it or under the perception of certainty with regard to contents still often remains arbi- trary. Inasmuch, for example, that the phenomenon of the 'poor' is a sociological type, a result of relational forms within a group, occasioned by general currents and movements, it is necessarily generated when people congregate. Or poverty can be viewed as the material outcome of certain idiosyncratic human characteristics, or exclusively from the viewpoint of substantive economic interests. Opposite opinions about it will be possible. On the whole one can view historical phenomena from
the problem of sociology 31
? three principal perspectives: that of individual beings, who are the real carriers of situations; that of the technical forms of interaction, which are executed certainly only by individual beings but are not considered just from the standpoint of individuals but of their togetherness, their with-one-another and for-one-another; and that of the conceptually definable content of situations and events, in which case one does not inquire about their bearers or their relationships but their purely factual meaning, the economy and technology, art and science, legal norms and products of the emotional life. These three perspectives continuously intertwine with one another. The methodological necessity to keep them apart is always confronted by the difficulty of arranging each one in a track independent of the others, and by the desire for a single view of reality encompassing all standpoints. And however deeply one leads back into the other, grounding and being grounded, it will never be able to get a fix on all cases, and for that reason, in spite of all the methodological clarity and crispness of the principal formulation, the ambiguity is hardly avoidable that the treatment of an individual problem seems to belong now to one, now to the other category and is itself never clearly within one or the other way of treating it. In the end, I hope that the methodology of the sociology proposed here will emerge more definitely and even perhaps more clearly through the exposition of its individual problems than through this abstract outline. It is certainly not altogether uncommon in intel- lectual matters--indeed, in the broadest and deepest problem areas, rather widespread--that anything we must refer to with the unavoid- able metaphor foundation is not as fixed as the superstructure erected upon it. So the practice of science, especially in fields yet undeveloped, will not be able to do without a certain measure of instinctive activity, the motives and norms of which will only later acquire a fully clear awareness and conceptual development. And yet so little is it permitted for scientific practice to ever give itself over to those vague instinctual methods of procedure, intuitively applied only in the single inquiry, that it is still in order to condemn them to unfruitfulness if one should wish to make still early steps into a completely formulated method for treating new problems. 1
1 We are considering in only a rough way the endless complexity of social life that gives rise to ideas and methods for mastering it intellectually. So it would be mega- lomania right now to hope and want to reach for fundamental clarity of questions and certitude of answers. It seems to me worthy to admit this right up front since in
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? Within the problem area that is constructed by selecting out the forms of social interaction from the whole manifestation of society, portions of research offered here yet remain that are, so to speak, quantitatively beyond the tasks that are recognized as sociological. That is to say one inquires at first into the back-and-forth influences among individuals, the sum of which produces society's cohesion, so that a progression is revealed at once, indeed a world, as it were, of such forms of relationship that were either not included at all in previous social science or without insight into their primary and vital meaning. On the whole sociology has been limited in fact to social phenomena in which the interactive forces are already crystallized out from their immediate bearers, at least as idea-units. States, manufacturers' associations, clergy, forms of family, economic conditions, military affairs, corporations, brotherhoods, depic- tions of class, and division of industrial labor--these and similar large agencies and systems appear to comprise society and fill in the sphere of its science. It is obvious that the larger, more important, and more dominant a province of social interest with its course of action is, the sooner will an objective expression, an abstract existence beyond the individual and primary process, emerge from immediate inter-individual life-and-work. But now one to two further important points need to be added. In addition to its comprehensive and outwardly important imposing phenomena, visible at a distance, it is made up of innumer- able apparently small forms of relationship and types of interaction among people (negligible in the single case), but which are presented to an inestimable degree by these single cases, and insofar as they are
this way at least a resolute beginning can be made instead of making a claim to a finality, the meaning of which would be doubtful in any case in this sort of venture. So the chapters of this book are thought of as examples with regard to method, as fragments with regard to contents, which I must consider for the science of society. In both respects it seemed in order to choose the most heterogeneous themes possible, mixing the general and specialized. The less the present offering here is rounded off to a systematic coherence, the further will the parts lie from one another around such an apparently all-encompassing circle, in which a future perfection of sociology will unite its isolated and unanchored points. Since I am myself thus emphasizing the wholly fragmentary and incomplete character of this book, I will not defend myself against criticisms of that with a preventative apologia. So if for certain the selection of a single problem and exemplification will appear to fall short of the ideal of an objective thoroughness, this would only show that I have not made the basic ideas understood clearly enough. Such clarity will only be possible after setting out and turning down a very long road, and every systematically concluded completeness would be minimally a self-deception. Integrity can be attained here by someone only in the subjective sense that one shares everything one manages to see.
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? in motion among the comprehensive and, so to speak, official social forms, they bring about indeed nothing less than society as we know it. Limiting sociology to the official social formations resembles the earlier science of the interior of human bodies, which fixed upon describing the large organs--heart, liver, lung, stomach, etc. , but missed and neglected the uncounted, the not popularly known, or those whose purposes were unknown. Without them, the more obvious organs would never produce a living body. The actually experienced existing life of society cannot be pieced together from the structures of the aforementioned type, those that make up the conventional objects of social science. Without the effects of the countless interworkings in individual small widespread syntheses, to which these inquires should be for the most part devoted, it would be fragmented into a multiplicity of discontinuous systems. What the scientific establishment of such unapparent social forms also makes difficult is that which makes it infinitely important for the deeper understanding of society: that they have generally not yet hardened into fixed supra-individual images; rather society appears to be in a state, as it were, of being born--of course not actually in its primal historically inscrutable beginning but in everything that takes place every day every hour; social interaction among people continuously making connections and breaking them off and making them again, a perpetual flowing and pulsing that unites individuals, even when it does not amount to actual organization. Here it is, so to speak, a mat- ter of the microscopic-molecular processes inside human material that are, however, the actual activity that links together or hypostasizes those macroscopic fixed entities and systems. That humans look at one other and that they are jealous of each other, that they exchange letters or eat lunch together, that beyond all tangible interests they elicit sympathy in one another, that the gratitude of altruistic service consistently has an unbreakable bonding effect, that one asks directions from another, and that they dress and adorn themselves for one another--all the thousands of person-to-person performances, momentary or enduring, conscious or not, fleeting or momentous relationships, from which these examples are selected entirely arbitrarily, continuously tie us together. Such threads are woven at every moment, allowed to fall, are taken up again, substituted for others, and interwoven with others. Here dwell the interworkings among the atoms of society, accessible only to the psychological microscope, the interworkings that sustain the thor- oughgoing tenacity and elasticity, the entire variety and uniformity of this so meaningful and so enigmatic life of society. It is a matter of
34 chapter one
? applying the principle of infinitely many and infinitely small effects, juxtaposed on society, as in the sciences of juxtaposition--of geology, of the tenets of biological evolution, history as effectively proven. The immeasurably small steps produce the coherence of historical unity; likewise the not-so-apparent person-to-person interactions produce the coherence of historical unity. What goes on perpetually in physical and mental contact, in reciprocal excitation of desire and suffering, in conversations and silences, in common and antagonistic interests--that is really what determines the wonderful untearableness of society, the fluctuation of its life, with which its elements constantly achieve, lose, and shift their equilibrium. Perhaps what the advent of microscopic research meant for the science of organic life will be what the advent of this knowledge will achieve for social science. Inquiry till then was limited to the large, separate, distinct bodily organs, the form and functional variety of which were a matter of course; now then life process appeared in relation to its smallest carriers, the cells, and in its identity with the countless and continuous interactions among them. As they attach to or destroy one another, assimilate or chemically influ- ence one another--this finally allows us to understand gradually how body generates its form, maintains it, or changes it. The large organs, in which these fundamental bearers of life and their interactions have combined in visible macroscopic specialized structures and activities, would never have made the network of life comprehensible if those countless activities taking place among the smallest elements, now as it were tied together by the macroscopic, had not revealed themselves as basic and fundamental to life. Wholly apart from any sociological or metaphysical analogy between the realities of society and organisms, it is now a matter here of the analogy of methodological deliberation and its development; of the exposure of the delicate threads, the irreduc- ible relations among human beings, by whose continual performance all these large structures, now objective and possessing an actual his- tory, are founded and borne. These entirely primary processes, which construct society out of the immediate, individual material, are thus, alongside the higher and more complicated activities and structures, to undergo formal examination. The specific interactions that from a theoretical view do not lend themselves to this undertaking to quite the usual extent, are to be examined as society-constructing forms, as parts of social interaction in general. Indeed, the more an exhaustive examination is purposefully devoted to these apparently insignificant varieties of relations, the better sociology gets at seeing them clearly.
the problem of sociology 35
? Just with this turn, however, the research projected here appears to become nothing other than a chapter of psychology, at best social psychology. Now there is for sure no doubt that all social processes and instincts have their seat in psyches, that social interaction is a psycho- logical phenomenon, and it is fundamental to its reality that a major- ity of elements becomes a unity. There is no single analogy in the world of physical bodies; there an insurmountable spatial impenetrability remains a given. Whatever external events we might also identify as social, it would be like a marionette play, not any more conceivable and meaningful than the interpenetration of clouds or the interweaving development of tree branches, if we were not to recognize fully as a matter of course psychological motivations, feelings, thoughts, and needs, not only as bearers of those events but as their essential vitality and us really as only interested parties. The causal understanding of any social event would have thus been attained in fact if psychological assessments and their development according to 'psychological laws'-- so problematic a concept for us--had permitted the complete deduction of these events. There is also no doubt that the conceptions of historical- social existence available to us are nothing other than psychological chains that we reproduce with either an intuitive or methodologically systematic psychology and, with internal plausibility, get to the feeling of a psychological necessity of the developments in question. Conse- quently each history, each portrayal of a social situation, is an exercise of psychological knowledge. However, it is of utmost methodological importance and downright crucial for the principles of the human sciences generally that the scientific treatment of psychological facts not employ psychology in any way; also where we continuously make use of psychological laws and knowledge, where the explanation of every single fact is possible only in psychological terms--as is the case inside of sociology--the aim and intention of this practice need not proceed throughout by way of psychology; that is, not some law of mental processes that can deal with a specific content, but rather according to the contents and their configuration themselves. There is here a bit of a contrast to the sciences of external nature, which as facts of the intellectual life also play out after all only inside the mind. The discovery of each astronomical or chemical truth, as well as the contemplation of every one of them, is an occurrence in consciousness that a fully developed psychology could deduce entirely from purely mental conditions and developments. But these sciences arise insofar as they turn the contents and correlates of mental processes into objects,
36 chapter one
? in the same way as we construe a painting in terms of its aesthetic and art-historical meaning and not from the physical wave lengths that its colors emit and that of course produce and sustain the whole real existence of the painting. It is forever a reality we cannot grasp scien- tifically in its actuality and totality, but must take up from a series of separate standpoints and thereby organize them into a variety of sci- entific optics that are independent of one another. This is now needed also for all mental occurrences, the contents of which are not themselves included in an autonomous realm and do not intuitively resist objectify- ing their own mental reality. The forms and rules of a language, for example, though certainly built up only from mental capacities for mental purposes, still come to be treated by a linguistic science that completely avoids any single given reification of its object. It is therefore portrayed, analyzed, and constructed purely in accord with its subject matter and the formations present only in its contents. The situation is the same with the facts of social interaction. That people influence one another, that the one does something or suffers something, manifests being or becoming, because others are present and they express, act, or emote--of course this is all a matter of mental phenomena, and the historical occurrence of every single case of it is to be understood only through psychologically pertinent concepts, through the plausibil- ity of psychological progressions, through the interpretation of the outwardly visible by means of psychological categories. However, now a unique scientific perspective can disregard these mental events as something else altogether and place their contents in relationships, as it organizes, tracks, analyzes them for itself under the concept of social interaction. Thus it would be established, for example, that the relation- ship of the more powerful to the weaker in the form of primus inter pares typically gravitates toward becoming an absolute domination by one and gradually rules out moments of equality. Although this is, in the reality of history, a psychological event, it interests us now only from the sociological standpoint: how the various stages here of higher and lower ranks string together, to what extent a higher rank in a certain kind of relationship is compatible with an order of equality in other relationships, and at what point the superiority of power destroys equal- ity in them; whether the issue of association, the possibility of coop- eration, is greater in the earlier or in the later stages of such processes, and so on. Or it becomes established that enmities are the most bitter when they arise on the basis of an earlier or still somehow felt com- monality and unity, in the same way that the most fervent hatred has
the problem of sociology 37
? been identified as that among blood relatives. Some will view this and even be able to characterize it as only psychologically comprehensible. But considered as a sociological formation, it is not of interest in itself as concurrent mental sequences in each of two individuals; rather of interest is the synopsis of both under the categories of unification and division: how fully the relationship between two individuals or parties can include opposition and solidarity--allowing the former or the lat- ter to color the whole; which types of solidarity offer the means for crueler, profoundly hurtful damage, as memory or irrepressible instinct, than is possible at the outset from prior unfamiliarity. In short, as that study represents the realization of relational forms of people, which also represents them as a specific combination of sociological categories-- that is what matters, even though the singular or typical description of the activity itself can also be psychological. Taking up an earlier sug- gestion, despite all the differences one can compare this with the geo- metrical deduction drawn from a figure sketched on a blackboard. What can be presented and seen here are only physically laid out chalk marks; however, what we mean with the geometrical considerations is not the chalk marks themselves, but rather their meaning for the geo- metrical concept, which is altogether different from that physical figure as a storehouse of chalk particles--while on the other hand it can also be followed as this material thing under scientific categories, and its physical materialization or its chemical composition or its optic impres- sion can be, more or less, objects of specific investigations. Sociological data are similarly mental processes the immediate reality of which is presented in the first instance in psychological categories; however these, though indispensable for the depiction of facts, remain outside the purpose of sociological consideration, which is in fact borne only by the mental activities and only able to portray the factuality of social inter- action through them--somewhat like a drama, which from beginning to end contains only psychological events, can only be understood psychologically and yet has its intention not in psychological knowledge but in the syntheses that shape the contents of the mental events under the point of view of the tragic, the art form, the symbols of life. 2
2 The introduction of a new way of thinking about facts must support the vari- ous aspects of its method through analogies with recognized fields; but not until the perhaps endless process in which the principle specifies its realizations within concrete research and in which these realizations legitimate the principle as fruitful, can such analogies with them clarify wherein the difference of materials at first obscures the
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? While the theory of social interaction as such, isolated from all the social sciences that are defined by some other content of social life, appears as the only science that is entitled to the name social science in the strict sense, the designation is not of course the important thing but the discovery of that new complex of specialized problematics. The argument over what sociology really means seems to me as something completely unimportant, so long as it turns only on conferring this title on an already existing and worked-over circle of activity. If, however, the title sociology is singled out for this set of problems with the preten- sion of covering the concept of sociology fully and solely, this must still be justified over and against one other problem-group that undeniably seeks no less to attain, beyond the contents of the specialized social sciences, propositions about society as such and as a whole.
As with every exact science intended for the direct understanding of facts, the social is also delimited from two philosophical domains. One encompasses the conditions, foundational concepts, and presuppositions of specialized research, which can find no completion in it themselves because they rather are already the basis for it; in the other, this spe- cialized research is led to completions and coherence and is set up with questions and concepts related to them, that have no place inside experience and directly objective knowledge. The former is epistemol- ogy, that is, the metaphysics of the specialized fields under discussion. The latter refers actually to two problems that remain, however, justifi- ably unseparated in the actual thought process: Dissatisfaction with the fragmentary character of specialized knowledge that leads to premature closure at fact checking and accumulation of evidence by supplementing the incompleteness with speculation; and this same practice even serves the parallel need to encompass the compatible and incompatible pieces in an overall unified picture. Next to this metaphysical function focused on the degree of knowledge, another one is directed towards a different dimension of existence, wherein lies the metaphysical meaning of its contents: we express it as meaning or purpose, as absolute substance under the relative appearances, also as value or religious meaning. With regard to society, these spiritual attitudes generate questions as these: Is society the end of human existence or a means for the individual? Is it perhaps not even a means for the individual but, on the contrary, an
now-crucial similarity in form; this process surely risks misunderstanding only to the degree at which it is no longer necessary.
? the problem of sociology 39
? inhibition? Does its value reside in its functional life or in the genera- tion of an objective mind or in the ethical qualities that it evokes in individuals? Is a cosmic analogy revealed in the typical developmental stages of society, so that the social relationships of people would fit into a universal foundation-laying form or rhythm, not obvious to them but manifest in all phenomena and also governing the root forces of material reality? Can there at all be a metaphysical-religious meaning of the whole, or is this reserved for individual souls?
These and numerous similar questions by themselves do not appear to me to possess the categorical independence, the unique relationship between object and method that would justify establishing sociology as a new science that would rank it with the existing ones. Since all these are strictly philosophical questions, and they have taken society as their object, it amounts to only an extension of a structure in the manner of a previously given kind of knowledge to a wider field. Whether we recognize philosophy as actually a science or not, social philosophy has no fundamental reason whatsoever to avoid the advantages or disad- vantages of its connection to philosophy generally by its constitution as a special science of sociology.
Not as in the past,3 nothing else remains of the kind of philosophical problem that society has as a presupposition, but to inquire into the presuppositions of society itself--not in the historical sense, by which one is supposed to describe the actual occurrence of any particular society or the physical and anthropological conditions that can arise on the basis of that society. It is also not a matter here of the particular drives that draw subjects, while encountering other subjects, into social interactions, the types of which sociology describes. But rather: if such subjects exist--what are the presuppositions for conscious beings to be a sociological entity? It is not in these parts, however, in and for themselves, that society is found; it is certainly real in the forms of interaction. What then are the inner and principal conditions, on the basis of which subjects generally generate society out of the individu- als equipped with such drives, the a priori that the empirical structure of individuals, insofar as they are socially capable, makes possible and forms? How are the empirically emerging particular forms possible,
3 Simmel's phraseology that follows is reminiscent of Luther's "Here I stand; I can do no other"--ed.
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which fall under the general idea of society, and how can society gener-
ally be an objective form of subjective souls?
Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible?
Kant could ask and answer the fundamental question in his philosophy: How is nature possible? --only because for him nature was nothing else but the representation of nature. This does not merely mean that 'the world is my representation,' that we can speak of nature only insofar as it is a content of our consciousness, but what we call nature is a distinct manner in which our intellect collects, arranges, and forms sense impressions. These 'given' sensations of colors and tastes, tones and temperatures, resistances and scents, which extend throughout our consciousness in the chance sequences of subjective experience, are not 'nature' by themselves, but they become it through the activity of the mind that put them together as objects and series of objects, substances and properties, causal connections. As the elements of the world are immediately given over to us, according to Kant, there exists no particular connectedness among them, however, that makes them the intel- ligible law-abiding unity of nature, or more correctly: simply being nature in itself signifies incoherent and lawless flashing fragments of the world. So the Kantian depiction of the world creates the singular dilemma that our sense impressions are, for him, purely subjective, since they depend on the physical- psychic organization that could be different for different beings, and on the fortuitousness of their stimulations; but they become 'objects' when they are picked up by the forms in our intellects, through which firm regularities and a coherent picture of 'nature' are formed; but on the other hand those sensations are still real data unalterably adding content to the world and a guarantee for a reality independent of us, so that now those intellectual formations of them into objects, relationships, and regularities appear as subjective, things brought about by us in contrast to what we receive from existence, as though the functions of the intellect itself, themselves unchanging, had constructed another nature in regards to content out of other sense material. Nature for Kant is a particular kind of experience, an image developing through and in our knowledge-categories. Hence the question, How is nature possible? I. e. , what are the conditions that must be present for there to be nature--freeing it through the search for forms that make up the essence of our intellect and thereby bring about nature as such a priori.
It would be advisable to deal with the question of the conditions by which society is possible in an analogous manner. For here too there are individual elements that continue to exist apart from one another in certain sense, operate as sensations and undergo a synthesis into the unity of society only through a process of consciousness that places the individual being of the one ele- ment in relation to that of the other in definite forms according to definite rules. The decisive difference between the unity of a society and the unity of nature, however, is this: that the latter--for the Kantian standpoint presup-
? the problem of sociology 41
? posed here--comes about exclusively in the observing subjects, is produced exclusively by them in and from those disconnected elements of sensation; whereas the societal unity is realized only by its own elements, nothing else, since they are conscious and actively synthesize, and needs no spectator. That proposition of Kant--that connection might never lie in things because it is brought about only by subjects--does not hold for societal connection, which, in contrast, is in fact directly fulfilled in the 'things,' which in this case are individual minds. Even as a synthesis it naturally remains something purely mental and without parallels among spatial constructs and their interactions. However, the unifying in this case needs none of the factors outside its ele- ments, since each of them serves the function of exercizing the psychological power of the observer vis-a`-vis external reality: the consciousness constituting a unity with others is in this case actually the entire existing unity in question. Naturally this does not mean on the one hand the abstract consciousness of the concept of unity but the innumerable individual relationships, the feeling and knowledge of this defining and being defined vis-a`-vis the other, and on the other hand rules out even so much as an observant third party crafting anything, let alone a well-founded subjective synthesis of the relations between persons, as between spatial elements. Whatever realm of outwardly evident being is to be combined into an entity, it does not ensue from its immediate and simply objective contents but is determined by the categories of the sub- ject and by the subject's knowledge interests. Society, however, is the objective entity that does not need an observer not included within it.
Things in nature on the one hand are more separate from one another than are minds; the unity of one person with another, lying in the understanding, in love, in shared work--there is simply no analogy to it in the spatial world, where every being occupies its own space, sharing it with no other. But on the other hand the fragments of spatial being comprise an entity in the con- sciousness of the observer, which is then not attained by the togetherness of individuals. Because the objects of the synthesis are in this case autonomous beings, centers of consciousness, personal entities, they resist, in the mind of another subject, that absolute coherence that the 'selflessness' of inanimate things must obey. So a quantity of people is in reality a much greater unity, though less so as a concept, than table, chairs, sofa, rug and mirror depict 'a furnished room' or river, meadow, trees, house are 'a landscape' or 'an image' in a painting. In an altogether different sense than the outer world, society is 'my representation,' i. e. situated in the activity of the consciousness. For the other mind itself has as much of a reality for me as I do myself, a reality that is distinguished from that of material things. If Kant yet assures us that spatial objects would have exactly the same certainty as my own existence, only the specific contents of my subjective life can be meant by the latter; for the general basis of representation, the feeling of being an 'I,' has an uncon- ditionality and imperturbability that is obtained by no single representation of a material exterior. Indeed even this certainty has for us, warranted or not, the facticity of the 'you'; and whether as source or effect of this certainty, we feel the 'you' as something independent of our representation of it, something
42 chapter one
? precisely for itself, as our own existence. That the for-itself of others still does not prevent us from representing them to ourselves, so that something, never entirely captured by our representation, becomes nevertheless the contents and thus the product of this re-presentation--this is the deepest psychological- epistemological schema4 and problem of social interaction. Inside one's own consciousness we distinguish very precisely between the foundational nature of the 'I,' the presupposition of every representation that does not participate in the ever incomplete problematic of sorting out its contents--and these contents, which are collectively presented with their coming and going, their doubtfulness and modifiability, in general as simple products of that absolute and ultimate power and existence of our spiritual being. To the other minds, however, although we are still conceptualizing them as well, we must neverthe- less transfer just these conditions or, rather, unconditionality of one's own 'I,' which has for us that utmost measure of reality that our self possesses with regard to its contents and from which we are certain that it holds also for those other minds with regard to their contents. Under these circumstances the question--How is society possible? --has a completely different methodological significance from that of, How is nature possible? For the latter is answered by forms of cognition by which the subject effects the synthesis of the factual elements of 'nature,' whereas the former is answered by the a priori conditions found in the elements themselves, through which they actually combine to form the synthesis, 'society. ' In a certain sense the entire contents of this book, as developed on the basis of the principles presented above, is the initial attempt at an answer to this question. For it seeks the processes, ultimately occurring in individuals, that give rise to their being a society--not as transient prior causes of this result but as processes sharing in the synthesis, the whole of which we call society. However, the question is to be understood in a more fundamental sense.
I said that the function of effecting synthetic unity that, vis-a`-vis nature, lies in the observing subject would, vis-a`-vis society, pass over to the elements of society itself. The conscious construction of society is, to be sure, not present in the individual in abstracto, but for all that everybody knows the others as bound up with them; so much is this knowledge about others as social actors, this awareness of the whole complex as a society--so much is this knowledge and awareness given over only to achieving this with single concrete contents. But perhaps this is nothing other than the 'unity of awareness,' according to which we proceed, to be sure, in consciousness processes assigning a concrete content to the other, without however having a separate consciousness of the unity itself as something other than rare and after-the-fact abstractions. Now there is the question, What wholly universal and a priori ground is there? Which must actually be the presuppositons whereby individual concrete events would be actual socialization processes in
4 Here Simmel appears to be adopting a usage of Kant, where Schema appears in apposition to representation; Kant also speaks of Schemata of the individual cat- egory--ed.
? the problem of sociology 43
? individual consciousness? Which elements are contained in them that make it possible for their enactment, which is the production of a social unity out of individuals, to say it abstractly? The sociological a priori conditions will have the same double meaning as the those that 'render nature possible. ' They will on the one hand determine completely or incompletely the actual social interaction processes as functions or forces of mental developments; on the other hand they are the ideal logical presuppositions for the complete society, although society is possibly never perfectly realized in this completion. In the same way the law of causality on the one hand dwells and works in the actual cognitive processes; on the other hand it constructs the form of truth as the ideal system of completed knowledge, independent of the process, whether or not this is realized through that transient relatively random mental dynamic, and independently of the true reality, more or less consciously and effectively approximating the ideal.
It is a non-issue whether the research into these conditions of the social process should be epistemologically significant or not, because in fact the pic- ture arising from them and standardized by their forms is not knowledge but practical processes and states of being. However what I mean here and what should be examined as the general idea of social interaction in its conditions is something knowledge-like: consciousness of socializing or being associated. Perhaps it would be better to call it an awareness rather than a knowledge. Since in this case the subject does not stand over against an object from which it would gradually extract a conceptual construct, but the consciousness of social interaction is instantly a consciousness of its carriers or its inner meaning. It is a matter of the processes of interaction that, for the individual, mean the reality of being associated--not abstractly of course, but certainly capable of abstract expression. Which forms must remain as the basis, or which specific categories a person must, as it were, bring along while this consciousness develops, and which are thus the forms that must carry the resulting consciousness society as a reality of knowledge, this we can undoubtedly call the epistemology of society. I try in the following to sketch several of these a priori conditions or forms of social interaction--for sure not identifiable as, in a word, the Kantian categories--as an example of such research.
I.
The image of others that a person acquires from personal contact is occasioned
by real fluctuations that are not simple illusions in incomplete experience, faulty focus, and sympathetic or hostile biases, but important alterations in the character of real objects. And indeed these principally follow two dimensions. We see others generalized to some extent, perhaps because it is not given to us to be able to represent one fully to ourselves with our varying individuality. Every reproduction of a soul is shaped by the resemblance to it, and although this is by no means the only condition for mental knowledge--since on the one hand a simultaneous dissimilarity seems necessary for achieving distance and objectivity, and on the other hand there is an intellectual capacity to view oneself beyond the similarity or difference of being--so complete knowledge would still presuppose a complete similarity. It appears as though each person
44 chapter one
? has a mark of individuality deep down within, that can be copied internally by no one else, for whom this mark is always qualitatively different. And that this contention is still not logically compatible with that distance and objective judgment on which moreover the representation of others rests only plainly proves that the complete knowledge of the individuality of others is denied us; and all relationships among people are limited by the varying degree of this lacuna. Whatever its cause might be, its result is in any case a generalization of the mental picture of others, a blurring of the contours that a relationship to others superimposes on the uniqueness of this picture. We represent all people, with a particular consequence for our practical activity toward them, as the type 'human,' to which their individuality allows them to belong; we think of them, aside all their singularity, under a general category that certainly does not encompass them fully and that they do not completely match--with that condition the relationship between the general idea and the individuality proper to them is discerned. In order to take cognizance of people, we view them not according to their pure individuality but framed, highlighted, or even reduced by means of a general type by which we recognize them. Even when this distortion is so imperceptible that we are not aware of it more readily, even then when all the characterological general ideas common among people fail--moral or immoral, independent or dependent, master or slave, etc. --we still categorize people intrinsically after a wordless type with which their pure being-for-itself does not coincide.
And this leads to a further step. We form a picture directly from the total uniqueness of a personality that is not identical with its reality, but also still not a general type; rather the picture we get is what it would display if it were, so to speak, entirely itself, if it were to realize the ideal potential that is, for better or for worse, in every person. We are all fragments, not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgamations not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality and uniqueness--no longer distinguishable in principle--which envelops our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines. However, the view of the other broadens these frag- ments into what we never actually are purely and wholly. The fragments that are actually there can scarcely not be seen only juxtaposed, but as we fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, completely unconsciously of course, we construct the fullness of its individuality from these fragments. The praxis of life pressures us to shape the picture of a person only from the bits of reality empirically known; but even that rests on these changes and amplifications, on the transformation of the actual fragments into the generality of a type and into the completion of the hypothetical personality.
This basic procedure, though seldom actually brought to completion, func- tions inside the already existing society as the a priori for further interactions arising among individuals. Within any given circle based, say, on a common vocation or mutual interest, every member sees every other member not purely empirically but through an a priori that the circle imposes on each participating consciousness. In the circle of officers, the church faithful, civil servants, the
the problem of sociology 45
? learned, family members, each sees the other under the obvious assumption that this is a member of my circle. Arising from the shared life-basis are cer- tain suppositions through which people view one another as through a veil. To be sure this does not simply cloak the uniqueness of the personality but while fusing its quite real individual existence with that of a unified construct, it gives it a new form. We see the other not merely as an individual but as a colleague or fellow worker or a fellow member of a political faction, in short as a fellow inhabitant of the same specific world, and this unavoidable presup- position, operating entirely automatically, is one of the means by which the other's personality and reality is brought to the proper level and form in the minds of others necessary for sociability.
This obviously also holds for the relationship of members of various circles to one another. The civilian who meets an officer cannot free himself at all from the reality that this individual is an officer. And, although being an officer may be pertinent to this personality, his image still prejudices toward the schematic type comparable to it in the representation of the other. This also holds for the Protestant in regard to the Catholic, the shopkeeper in regard to the civil servant, the layperson in regard to the priest, etc. The concealment of the lines of reality is present everywhere through social generalization, which essentially rules out its discovery inside a socially separated differentiated main society. Because the generalization is always at the same time more or less than the personality, the human being finds alterations, deletions, and extrapolations from all these a priori operating categories: from one's type as person, from the conception of a whole unique person, from the general public to which one belongs. Hovering above all this as a heuristic principle of knowledge is the idea of a person's real, absolutely individual indubitability; but while it appears at first as though the achievement of this would provide one with the completely correct foundational sense of self, those alterations and distortions are in fact what obstruct this ideal knowledge of the self even while being precisely the conditions by which the relationships that we know alone as social become possible--somewhat similar to the Kantian categories of understanding that form the immediately given data into wholly new objects, while alone making the given world knowable.
II.
Another category under which subjects see themselves and one another, so formed that they are able to produce empirical society, may be formulated with the seemingly trivial statement that every member of a group is not only a part of society but also something else besides. To the extent that the part of the individual not facing society or not absorbed in it is not simply disconnected from its socially significant part, i. e. entirely external to society, this functions as a social a priori to accommodate that external part, willingly or unwillingly; however, the fact that the individual is in certain respects not a member of society creates the positive condition for it being just such a member in other respects. What kind a person's socialized being is, is determined or co-deter- mined by the kind of one's unsocialized being. The following investigations will yield several kinds whose sociological significance is even established in
46 chapter one
? their core and essence, precisely because they are somehow excluded from the society for which their existence is important--as with the stranger, the enemy, the felon, even the poor. However this holds not only for such general characters but, with countless modifications, for every individual phenomenon. That every moment finds us enveloped by relationships with people and its content directly or indirectly determined by them does not at all suggest the contrary, but the social envelope as such pertains even to beings that are not fully enclosed in it. We know that the civil servant is not only a civil servant, the merchant is not only a merchant, the officer is not only an officer; and this extra-social being--its temperament and its fated outcome, its interests and the merit of its personality--may alter very little the essential operations of the civil servant, the merchant, the soldier, and yet it gives opposing aspects to every one of them, always a particular nuance and a social persona perme- ated by extra-social imponderables. All the social intercourse of people within social categories would be different if they confronted one another merely as categories, as bearers of the social roles falling to them just at that moment. Indeed individuals differentiate one another just as much by occupation as by social situation, according to whatever degree of that 'additive' they possess or permit, given its social content. At one pole of this continuum the person comes to be perhaps in love or in friendship; in this case what the individual keeps in reserve, beyond the developments and activities directed toward the other, can approach a threshold of nothing, quantitatively; there is only a single life that can be viewed or lived from two angles, at one time from the inside, from the terminus a quo of the subject, then however, while nothing has changed, from the perspective of the beloved, from the category of the subject's terminus ad quem, which absorbs it completely. In an entirely different direction, the Catholic priest demonstrates formally the same phenomenon, in that his ecclesiastical function completely envelopes and engulfs his individual being-for-himself. In the first of these extreme cases the 'additive' of social activity vanishes because its content is wholly absorbed in the turn toward the other; in the second, because the corresponding type is in principle absorbed by the content. The appearance of the modern culture, economically driven by money, now manifests the antithesis, wherein the person approximates the ideal of absolute objectivity as one producing, buying or selling, gener- ally doing anything. Leaving out of account high positions of leadership, the individual life, the tone of the whole personality, is absorbed in striving; people become only the bearers of settlements of performance and non-performance as determined by objective norms, and everything that does not pertain to this pure matter-of-factness is in fact likewise absorbed into it. The personal- ity with its special coloration, its irrationality, its inner life, has absorbed the 'additive' fully into itself, and only relinguished to those social activities the specific energies in pure detachment.
Social individuals always move between these extremes so that the energies and determinations directed toward the inner center manifest some meaning for the activities and convictions that are important to the other. Since, in the borderline case, even the consciousness of what the person is and signifies--this social activity or predisposition supposedly set apart from the other person
the problem of sociology 47
? and not even entering into a sociological relationship with the other--this very consciousness exerts a completely positive influence on the attitude that the subject assumes toward the other and the other toward the subject. The a priori for empirical social life is that life is not entirely social. We form our interrelations under the negative restraint that a part of our personality is not to enter into them, and yet this part has an effect on the social processes in the mind through general psychological connections overall, but furthermore just the formal fact that it stands outside the social processes determines what kind of influence. In addition, that societies are essentially patterns existing simultaneously inside and outside of society underlies one of the most impor- tant sociological formations: namely that between a society and its individuals a relationship can exist as between two parties, indeed perhaps always exists, actually or potentially. Thus society engenders perhaps the most conscious, at least the most universal form foundational for life itself: that the individual person can never stand within a union without also standing outside it, that one is inserted into no arrangement without also being found opposite it. This holds for the transcendent and most comprehensive associations as well as for the most singular and incidental. The religious person feels fully embraced by the divine essence, as though one were nothing more than a pulse beat of divine life; one's own substance is unconditionally abandoned to mystical undifferentiation in that of the absolute. And yet, for this absorption to have any meaning, one must preserve some sense of a self, a kind of personal counterpart, a distinct I, for which this dissolving into the divine All-Being is an eternal challenge, a process that would neither be metaphysically possible nor religiously sensible if it did not originate with a being-for-itself of the subject: the meaning of oneness-with-God is dependent on the otherness-of- God. Beyond this culmination in the transcendent the relationship with nature as a whole that the human spirit claims for itself throughout its entire history manifests the same form. On the one hand we know ourselves incorporated in nature as one of its products that stands next to the others, like among likes, a point through which its substance and energies come and go just as they circle through flowing water and blooming flowers. And yet the soul, apart from all these interweavings and incorporations, has the feeling of an independent being-for-itself, which we identify with the logically precarious idea of freedom. All this movement, whose element we ourselves indeed are, countering and parlaying, culminates in the radical statement that nature is only a representation in the human mind. However as nature at this point with all its inherent undeniable lawfulness and firm reality is included in the I, so, on the other hand, this I, with all its freedom and being-for-itself, its opposition to mere nature, is yet a member of it; it is precisely the overarching coherence of nature opposite it, that it encompasse, this independent, indeed frequently even hostile essence, so that what, in accord with its deepest sense of being alive, stands outside of nature must nevertheless be an element of it. Now this formulation holds no less for the relationship between the particular circles of the relational milieu and individuals, or, if one combines this with the concept or feeling of being associated in general, for the relationship among individuals absolutely. We know ourselves on the one hand as products
48 chapter one
? of society: the physiological succession of ancestors, their adaptations and establishments, the traditions of their work, their knowledge and faith, the entire spirit of the past crystallized in objective forms--these determine the arrangements and content of our life so that the question could arise whether the individual is therefore simply anything other than a receptacle into which previously existing elements mix in various amounts; for if these elements are also ultimately produced by individuals, with the contribution of each one being an increasingly faint amount and the factors being produced only through their species-like and social convergence, in the synthesis of which the vaunted individuality would then again consist. On the other hand we know ourselves as a member of society, with our life-process and its meaning and purpose just as interdependently woven in a proximity in society as in a progression in it. We have, as natural character, so little being-for-ourselves because the circulation of natural elements goes through us as through com- pletely selfless creatures, and the similarity to natural laws renders our whole existence a pure exemplar of their inevitability--so little do we dwell as social entities around an autonomous center, but moment by moment we are pieced together from interrelationships with others and are thus comparable to the organic substance that exists for us as though a sum of many sense impres- sions but not as an existence of a being-for-itself. Now, however, we feel that this social diffusion does not completely usurp our personality; it is not only a matter of the reserves already mentioned, of unique contents whose meaning and development at the outset lie only in the individual psyche and generally find no place in the social context; not only a matter of the formation of social contents, whose unity as an individual psyche, again, is not itself social essence any more than an artistic pattern, composed of patches of color on a canvass, is derived from the chemical constitution of the colors themselves. But above all, the entire content of life, as completely as it may be able to be explained by social antecedents and interrelationships, is still to be regarded concurrently under the category of individual life, as the experience of the individual and completely oriented to the individual. Both are only separate categories under which the same content appears, just as plants can be considered one time in terms of the conditions of their biological origin, another time in terms of their practical uses, a third time in terms of their aesthetic meaning. The standpoint from which the existence of the individual is ordered and concep- tualized can be taken from inside as well as outside it; the totality of life, with all its socially derivable contents, is to be grasped as the centripetal tendency of its carrier, just as it can, with all its parts reserved for the individual, still count as a product and element of social life.
With that, then, the reality of social interaction brings the individual into the position of duality with which I began: that the individual is engaged in it and at the same time stands over against it, is a member of its organism and at the same time itself a complete organic whole, a being for it and a being for itself. However the essential nature and the meaning of the peculiar sociological a priori grounded in it, is this: that the interior and the exterior between individual and society are not two agents existing side by side--although they can develop incidentally in that way, even to the extent of a hostile antagonism--but that
the problem of sociology 49
? they identify the entirely integral position of the living social being. One's existence is not only, in a partition of its substance, partially social and par- tially individual; rather, it falls under the basic, formative, irreducible category of a unity that we can express only through the synthesis or the simultaneity of both determining positions, logically contrary to one another, as member and as being-for-oneself--as being produced by and occupied by society and as life from out of one's own center and for the sake of one's own center. Society does not exist as only previously emerged from beings that are in part not socialized, but from such beings as feel on the one hand like fully social entities and on the other, while retaining the same content, as fully personal ones. And these are not two unrelated juxtaposed standpoints, as when one examines the same body at one time in terms of its weight and at another in terms of its color, but both form the union that we call social existence, the synthetic category--as the concept of causality is an a priori union even though it includes both substantively altogether different elements of cause and effect. That this formation is available to us, this capacity of beings--every one of which can experience the self as the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of its developments, destinies, and qualities--to create precisely the operational concept of society and to know this then as the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of those vitalities and determinations of existence--this is an a priori of the empirical society that makes its form as we know it possible.
III.
Society is a construct of unlike parts. Since even where democratic or socialist tendencies anticipate or partially achieve an 'equality,' it is always a matter only of a similar evaluation of persons, achievements, and positions, whereas the issue of an equality of persons with regard to their natures, life-contents, and destinies cannot even be entertained. And whereas on the other hand an enslaved population makes up only a mass, as in the great oriental despotisms, this equality affects everyone always only with respect to certain facets of exis- tence, perhaps the political or economic, never however the entire selves, whose innate qualities, personal associations, and lived destinies will unavoidably have a kind of uniqueness and unmistakableness, not only for the interiority of life but also for its social interactions with other beings. Let us imagine society as a purely objective schema, so that it appears as an arrangement of contents and accomplishments--all related to one another in space, time, concepts, and values--and next to which one can in this respect disregard the personality, the I-form, that carries its dynamics. If that dissimilarity of elements now allows each accomplishment or quality inside this arrangement to appear as one characterized individually, unambiguously fixed in its place, society then looks like a cosmos whose multiplicity in being and movement is, to be sure, incalculable, but in which every point can be composed and developed only in that given manner if the structure of the whole is not to be changed. What has been generally said of the structure of the earth--that not a grain of sand could be shaped differently and placed elsewhere than it currently is without this presupposing and resulting in a change of all existence--is repeated in the structure of society, viewed as an interconnection of qualitatively distinct
50 chapter one
? phenomena. An analogous image of society in general, but in miniature, rather simplified in words, is found in a snapshot of the civil service, which as such is composed of a definite organization of 'positions' with a predetermined set of skill requirements that exist detached from their respective office hold- ers, offering up an idealized association. Inside of such an organization new entrants find unambiguously specific posts, just as though these positions were waiting for them and to which their energies must harmoniously conform. What here is a conscious, systematic arrangement of work roles is naturally a tangled confusing play of functions in the whole of society; the positions in society are not produced by a purposeful design but, understandably, just by the actual creative activity and experience of individuals. And in spite of this enormous difference, in spite of every irrationality and imperfection, however reprehensible from a standpoint of merit, that the historical society demonstrates, its phenomenological structure--the sum and relationship of the kind of existence and accomplishments offered objectively socially by every element--remains an arrangement of elements, of which each person takes an individually defined position, a coordination of objectively and, in its social significance, meaningfully, although not always valuable, functions and functional centers; in the process of this the purely personal, the inwardly productive, the impulses and reflexes of the real 'I' remain entirely outside consideration. Or expressed differently, the life of society proceeds--viewed not psychologically but phenomenologically purely in terms of its social contents--as though every element were predetermined for its place in the totality; with all this discrepancy from the ideal claims, it simply continues as if every one of its members were fully relationally integrated, each one dependent on all others and all others on the one, just because each one is individually a part of it.
At this point conspicuously obvious is the a priori which we need to discuss now and which offers the 'possibility' of belonging to society. That every indi- vidual is directed according to one's own rank in a definite position inside of one's social milieu: that this appropriate position is hypothetically available to one, actually throughout the social whole for that matter--that is the presump- tion under which the individual lives out a social life and which one can point to as the universal value of individuality. Whether it is elaborated into clear conceptual consciousness is independent of whether it also finds its realiza- tion in the actual course of life--just as the a priori status of causal laws as a formative presupposition of knowledge is independent of whether conscious- ness formulates it in separate concepts and whether or not the psychological reality always proceeds in accord with it. Our knowledge of life rests on the presumption of a pre-established harmony between our mental energies, albeit individual ones, and external objective existence; thus this always remains the expression of the immediate phenomenon, whether or not one were to attribute it metaphysically or psychologically to the production of existence through the intellect alone. If social life as such depends on the presupposition of a fundamental harmony between the individual an d the social whole, it does little to hinder the sharp clash of the ethical with the pleasurable life.
the problem of sociology 51
? Had social reality been shaped by this principal presumption without restraint and without fail, we would have the perfect society--again not in the ethical sense or eudaemonistic perfection but conceptually: i. e. , not the perfect society but the perfect society. As this a priori of one's social existence goes, so goes the individual: the thoroughgoing correlation of individual beings with their environing circles, the necessity for the life of the whole integrating them by way of the particularity of their subjectivity--in so far as the whole does not realize this a priori or find it realized, it is simply not socialized and society is not the unbroken interconnected reality that the concept of it suggests.
With the category of vocation, this attitude is sharply intensified. Certainly antiquity did not know of this concept in the sense of a personal distinctive- ness and a society structured by a division of labor. But what is fundamental to it--that socially functional activity is consistently the expression of inner capacity, that the wholeness and durability of subjectivity practically objectivizes itself by way of its function in society--that also existed in antiquity. Insofar as this connection was effected on a more generally uniform content, its principle appears in the Aristotelian saying, that some people were meant by their nature ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (to serve), others ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (to rule). With a further development of the idea it indicates the peculiar structure: that on the one hand society produces and provides a 'position' in itself that is indeed distinct from others in content and outline, but in principle it can be fulfilled by many and is so to speak somewhat anonymous; and that now, despite its general character, this position is then taken up by the individual on the basis of an inner 'call' a qualification felt as wholly personal. For there to be a 'calling' at all, there must exist a harmony, however derived, between the structure and life process of society on the one hand and the individual make up and predispositions on the other. On that harmony as a prevalent assumption ultimately rests the idea that there exists a position-and-performance in society for each person, to which one is 'called,' and an imperative to search for it until one finds it.
Empirical society becomes 'possible' only through this a priori, climaxing in the concept of vocation, which is indeed to be identified not as heretofore with a simple slogan, as the Kantian categories would have it. The processes of consciousness in which socialization takes place--the unity out of many, the reciprocal recognition of individuals, the changing significance of individuals for the totality of others and of this totality for individuals--all this proceeds, in principle, completely outside abstract conscious but self-revealing in the reality of praxis, under this assumption: that the individuality of the person finds a place in the structure of the collective, indeed that this structure is positioned beforehand to a certain extent, despite its unpredictability, for the individual and its activity. The causal connection that involves every social element in the being and action of every other one and thus brings the external network of society into existence is transformed into a teleological one as soon as one considers from the perspective of the individual carriers, from its creators, who experience themselves each as an 'I' and whose activity develops on the basis of a being-for-itself, self-determining personality. That this phenomenal totality should align itself with that person's goal, as though personalities came
52 chapter one
? from outside, and offers it from its internally regulated life process the place where its unique nature will be that of playing a necessary part in the life of the whole--this gives, as a fundamental category, the consciousness of the individual the form that characterizes it as a social element.
It is a fairly idle question whether the inquiries into the epistemology of society that are supposed to be exemplified in these sketches belong in social philosophy or perhaps sociology after all. There may be a bound- ary zone for both methods--the soundness of the sociological problem, as heretofore delineated, and the demarcation from philosophical issues suffer as little from it as the clarity of the ideas of day and night suffer on account of the existence of twilight, or the ideas of human and animal because perhaps intermediate stages are found sometimes that unify the characteristics of both in a way not conceptually separable for us. While the sociological question arises in the abstraction from the complex phenomenon that we call social life, which is actually only society, i. e. social interaction; while it eliminates in the purity of the concept everything that will be realized at all only historically within society but which does not constitute society as such as a unique and autonomous form of existence--a completely unambiguous core of tasks is created. It may be that the periphery of the problem area pro- visionally or permanently adjoins other areas that become definitions of doubtful boundaries. The center remains no less fixed in its place on that account.
I move on to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this central idea and problem in specific inquiries. Far from claiming to offer the number of forms of interaction that make up society or to do them justice at a distance, they only show the way that could lead to the scientific analysis of the full perimeter of 'society' from the totality of life--they mean to show this, in that they themselves are the first steps toward it.
? CHAPTER TWO
THE QUANTITATIVE CONDITIONING OF THE GROUP
A series of forms of collective life, of alliances and reciprocal influences of individuals, shall be examined first in terms of the importance that the shear number of individuals interacting in these forms has for them. One will grant from the beginning and from everyday experiences that a group of a certain magnitude must take measures for its maintenance and development, and design forms and organs that it did not previ- ously need; and that on the other hand smaller groups exhibit qualities and patterns of interaction that they inevitably lose with an enlarge- ment of their size. Quantitative determination has a double importance: the negative, in that certain formations, which are necessary or possible from the content or other conditions of life, can materialize on this side or that side of a numerical border of participants; the positive, in that other formations are required directly by specific purely quantita- tive modifications of the group. Obviously they do not appear in every case but depend for their part on other determinants of the group; however, it is decisive that the formations under investigation stand out from the other factors only under the condition of a definitive numer- ical expansion. So let it be noted, for example, that completely or approximate socialistic arrangements until now were feasible only in rather small groups, but are ever frustrated in large ones. The inherent tendency to share fairly in burdens and pleasures can be readily real- ized in a small group and, what is clearly just as important, be reviewed and monitored by individuals. What each would endure for the whole and how the whole compensates each are implicit in one another, so that agreements and settlements are readily produced. In a large group, especially, the inevitable differentiation within it of persons, their func- tions and their demands hinders this. A very large number of people can form a unity only by a definitive division of labor; not only by virtue of the economic technology at hand but principally because it generates the interlocking and interdependence that connects everyone throughout with each other through countless third persons, and with- out that a widely scattered group would break apart at every opportu- nity. An ever tighter unity of the group is required; therefore, the
54 chapter two
specialization of the individuals must be all the more definite, all the more unconditional, thus relating the individuals to the whole and the whole to the individuals. The socialism of a large group would thus require the sharpest differentiation of personalities, which naturally would have to extend over their work to their feelings and desires. However, this complicates to the extreme the comparison among them of achievements, of remunerations, the adjustments among both, on which for small and therefore undifferentiated groups the possibility of an approximation of socialism rests. What logically limits such groups of advanced culture, as they are called, to numerical insignificance is their dependence on goods that generally cannot be offered under their own group's conditions of production. To my knowledge there is in contemporary Europe only one case approaching a socialist form of organization:1 the Familistere de Guise, a large ironworks factory that was founded in 1880 by a follower of Fourier2 on the principle of complete sustenance for each worker and his family, guaranteeing a minimum subsistence, care and education of children at no cost, and collective provision of the necessities for life. The cooperative employed about 2,000 people in the 1890s and seemed viable. This reveals, how- ever, that it can cover, from among the totality of all the existing living conditions around it, only the satisfaction of needs unavoidably remain- ing in under its own control. Because human needs are not likewise to
1 The historical material, by which this research is assisted, is in its content-reliability limited by two factors: the service to be performed here must be selected on the one hand from so many and various fields of historical-social life that the limited labor power of an individual is left essentially with secondary sources for its compilation, and these could be verified only seldom through one's own fact-checking. On the other hand the extension of this collection through a long stretch of years will make it conceivable that not every fact can be confronted right before publication of the book with the latest state of the research. The communication of any particular social fact, which is only an incidental goal of this book, would not be allowed because of the latitude indicated here for unproven and mistaken things. However, with this attempt to obtain the possibility of a new scientific abstraction for social reality, the essential endeavor can simply be to complete this abstraction with some kind of examples and to prove it to be meaningful. If I am permitted, for the sake of methodological clarity, to exaggerate something, it will simply depend on the possibility that the examples are real rather than the actuality that they are. Because their truth is not supposed to--or only in a few cases--prove the truth of a general claim, but even where the expres- sion could allow it to appear so, they are still only for analysis of objects, irrelevant in themselves, and the correct and fruitful kind, as this is done, not the truth about the reality of its object, is that which is here either achieved or missed. In principle the investigation is to have led also to object lessons and deferred their significant reality to the relative factual knowledge of the reader.
2 Charles Fourier, nineteenth century French utopian socialist--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 55
be rationalized as production would, they often appear to have a chance and unpredictability that allows coverage only for a price that borders the incalculably irrational and inappropriate. A group that avoids this and is set for full systematizing and uninterrupted practicality in its operations will always only be able to be a small one, because it can procure only by a large inclusive one what would be required for the satisfaction of possibilities of life in any higher culture. Further there is a kind of collective church formation whose sociological structure does not allow for large memberships: hence the Waldensian, Men- nonite, and Moravian sects. Wherever the dogma in them forbids oaths, military service, and uniforms; where wholly personal matters belong to the community, such as employment, organization of the day, even marriage; where a special attire distinguishes the faithful from all oth- ers and identifies them as members; where the subjective experience of an immediate relationship to Jesus holds the community together-- from all this it is obvious that an expansion into a large group would rupture the bond that holds the group together, a bond that depends in important respects on its exceptionality and opposition to a larger group. At least in this sociological perspective the claim of these sects to represent the original Christianity is not unwarranted. Since, in exhibiting an undifferentiated unity of dogma and lifestyle, they were possible only in those small communities within larger surrounding ones that served them precisely as an external complement necessary for their vitality, a contrast by which they became conscious of their own uniqueness. Thus the expansion of Christianity to the whole state must have altered its sociological character no less fully than its spiritual contents. What's more, in that an aristocratic corporate entity can have only a relatively small area is contained in its very concept.