No More Learning

This is a principal developmental, by all means also sociological, schema of the culture: that meaningful, deeply significant institutions and patterns of action are replaced by those that appear in and of themselves completely mechanical, external, soulless; only the higher purpose, lying beyond that earlier stage, gives its combined efforts or its subsequent result a cultural significance, which each individual ele- ment must itself do without; this character is carried by the modern soldier in contrast to the knight of the Middle Ages, machine work in contrast to handicrafts, the modern uniformity and leveling of so many
408 chapter six
? circumstances of life that were earlier left up to the free self-education of the individual; now the enterprise is on the one hand too large and too complex to express a, so to speak, complete concept in any one of its elements; each of these can instead have only a mechanical and, for its own part, meaningless character and contribute its part to the realization of a concept only as a member of a totality. On the other hand there is often operative a differentiation that releases the mental element of activity, so that the mechanical and the mental obtain a separate existence, as, e. g. , the worker at the embroidery machine exer- cises a much more mindless activity than the embroiderer has objecti- fied in it while the spirit of this activity, so to speak, was transferred to the machine. Thus social institutions, hierarchies, assemblages can become more mechanical and superficial and yet serve the advance of culture, the inner unity of a totality, when a higher social purpose arises, to which they have to subordinate themselves and which no longer allows them to preserve for themselves the spirit and meaning with which an earlier situation completed the teleological set; and thus that exchange of the tribal principle for the principle of social division by tens is explained, although this actually appears as an integration of the objectively heterogeneous in contrast to the natural homogeneity of the family.
CHAPTER SEVEN THE POOR PERSON
Insofar as the human individual is social in nature, to each person's duty there corresponds another's right. Perhaps even more profound is the view that there are only rights in the first instance, that every individual has claims--those of human beings in general and those arising from their special situations--which as such become duties for the other. But since everyone who is thus entitled is also somehow obli- gated, a network of rights and duties back and forth arises in which it is the right that is the primary, leading factor; duty is admittedly only its unavoidable correlate situated in the same activity. One can look at society in general as a reciprocity of moral, legal, and conventional relationships, and as a reality justified under many other categories; that this implies a duty for others is only, so to speak, a logical or technical consequence, and if the unthinkable were to happen, that satisfying every claim in a way other than in the form of fulfilling the obligation were to be sufficient, society would not require the category of duty. With a radicalism that admittedly does not correspond to psychological reality, in the sense that an ethical-ideal construction would be feasible, all of love and sympathy, magnanimity and religious impulse could be regarded as the rights of the one receiving them. Ethical rigorism has already made the assertion about those motivations, that at the most what a person could accomplish at all would be the fulfillment of a duty, and that this already demand of itself what appears from a lax or self-flattering attitude as meritorious beyond duty; and from here it is only a step behind every duty on the part of one who is obligated, to establish the right of the entitled person. Indeed, this actually appears as the ultimately attainable and rational basis upon which one's actions toward another are demanded.
Now here appears a basic contrast between the sociological and ethical categories. While all relational acts are derived from a right--in the broadest sense that includes legal right as a component--the rela- tionship of one person to another has penetrated the moral values of the individual completely and by itself determines their direction. But opposed to the unquestionable idealism of this standpoint stands the
410 chapter seven
? no less profound refusal of any inter-individual origin of duty: our duties would be duties toward ourselves, and there would be no others at all. They may have action directed toward the other as content, but their form and motivation could not come to us as a duty from that, but would arise as pure autonomy from the 'I' and from its sheer inte- rior, completely independent of anything outside itself. Only for right would the other be the terminus a quo of the motivation in our ethical behavior; in contrast, for morality as such the other is unconditionally the terminus ad quem. Ultimately, we are responsible for the morality of our actions only to ourselves, to the better 'I' in us, to the respect we have for ourselves, or as one may put the enigmatic point, what the soul finds within itself as its ultimate authority and from which it freely decides in what way the rights of the other are duties for it.
This principal dualism in the basic feeling for the sense of moral action has an example or empirical symbol in the different conceptions about providing assistance to the poor. The duty to provide it can appear as a mere correlate of the claims of the poor person. Especially in countries where begging is a regular business, the beggar believes, more or less naively, in a right to the alms, the refusal of which the beggar reprimands as the evasion of an obligatory tribute. The basis for the claim for support from the membership group has a completely differ- ent character--within the same type. A social perspective, according to which the individual is but the product of the social milieu, accords the beggar the right to demand a compensation for every emergency and loss. But even where no such extreme absence of self-responsibility exists, one could place emphasis, from a social perspective, on the right of the needy as the basis of all poor relief. Only when one assumes such a right, at least as a socio-legal fiction, the conduct of poor relief appears to be removed from what is arbitrary, from the dependence on chance financial conditions and other insecurities; the reliability of a function is increased everywhere if right constructs its methodological starting point in the correlation-pair of right and duty underlying it: for a person is on average more quickly prepared to claim a right than to fulfill a duty. Add to that the humanitarian motive, which makes the application and acceptance of support inwardly easy for the poor, since they are simply realizing their proper right; the dejection, the shame, and the degradation from charity are neutralized for the recipient to the extent that it is not granted out of mercy, a sense of duty, or expediency, but to the extent that it can be demanded. Since this right obviously has limits that are to be separately determined in every individual instance,
the poor person 411
? the right to support will not change these motivations toward others in a substantially quantitative sense. Their inner meaning is only established by it and rises out of a principal opinion about the relationship of the individual to other individuals and to the whole. The right to support belongs in the same category as the right to work and the right to one's existence. The obscurity of the quantitative limit that is suitable for this and other 'human rights' admittedly reaches its maximum especially with those where the support is with money, whose purely quantitative and relative character makes the objective demarcation of the claims much more difficult than, perhaps, the support in kind--as soon as it does not concern very complicated or individualized cases in which the poor person will use monetary help for greater purpose and productiv- ity than one could achieve with support in kind with its providential character. Toward whom the right of the poor is in fact aimed is also in no way clear, and the decision about that marks deep sociological differences. The poor person, whose situation seems to be an injustice of the world order and who demands a remedy from, so to speak, the whole of existence, will easily make every individual who is found better situated by chance answerable to this demand out of solidarity. This creates a range: from criminal proletarians who see enemies in all well-dressed people, representatives of the class that 'disinherited' them, and who therefore rob them with a good conscience, to the humble beggars who implore for offerings "for the sake of God," i. e. as though each individual were obligated to fill the gaps in an order actually willed but not completely realized by God. Here the demand of the poor is aimed at the individual, but not at a particular one but only by virtue of the solidarity of humanity in general. Beyond this correlation, which allows precisely the whole of being, in view of the demand directed against it, to crystallize around any given individual as a representative, there are the richly shaded particular collectivi- ties to whom the demand of the poor person turns. State, municipal community, parish, professional organization, friendship circles, and families may have as wholes exceedingly different relationships with their membership; still each of these relationships seems to contain an element that is actualized as a right for support in case an individual becomes pauperized. This is also common among such sociological relationships where they are perhaps otherwise very heterogeneous in nature. The claims of the poor springing from such bonds combine in unique ways in primitive settings, in which tribal customs and religious duties dominate the individual as an undifferentiated unity. Among the
412 chapter seven
? ancient Semites the claim of the poor for participation in meals did not have a correlate in personal generosity but in social membership and religious custom. Where care of the poor has a sufficient basis in an organic linkage among the members, the right of the poor gener- ally possesses a stronger emphasis--whether it derives religiously from metaphysical unity or from biologically based tribal or familial unity. We will see that where, on the contrary, the care for the poor depends teleologically on one reaching a goal through it instead of causally on an existing and real unity of the association of a group, the claim of the poor as a right is reduced to complete nothingness.
In fact while right and duty only appear in the cases referred to as two sides of an absolute relational unity, wholly new changes come about as soon as the duty of the giver, instead of the right of the recipient, forms the point of departure. In the extreme case, the poor person vanishes completely as a deserving subject and point of interest; the motive for giving lies exclusively in the importance of the giving for the giver. As Jesus said to the rich young man: give your possession to the poor--obviously his concern was not at all for the poor but rather for the soul of the young man, for whose salvation the renunciation was a mere means or symbol of salvation. The later Christian alms-giving is of the same nature: it is nothing but a form of asceticism or 'good work' that improves the otherworldly fate of the giver. The excesses of begging in the Middle Ages, the meaninglessness in the use of offer- ings, the demoralization of the proletariat by indiscriminate offerings, the contributions that worked against all cultural activity--this is the revenge, as it were, of almsgiving for a motive that is purely subjectivistic and one that takes into consideration only the giver of the offering, but not the recipient. From such a restriction on the person that gives, the motivation goes away--without being devoted to the recipient--as soon as the welfare of the social whole necessitates the care of the poor. That happens, willingly or required by law, in order to not allow the poor person to become an active, dangerous enemy of society, in order to make the diminished power of the poor person once again productive for it, and in order to prevent the degeneration of the poor person's descendents. Therefore the poor person as a person, the reflection of the situation of the poor in the person's feelings, is just as indifferent as it is for those who give alms for the sake of the salvation of their own soul; the subjective egoism of the latter is indeed overcome, but not for the sake of the poor but for that of society: the poor person receiving the offering is not the goal but a mere means, as in the former
the poor person 413
? case. The dominance of the social point of view of alms is proven by the fact that, from that perspective, it can just as well be refused--and indeed often personal pity or the unpleasant situation of saying "No" would directly move us to give.
Thus the care for the poor as a public arrangement now points to a very unique sociological constellation. It is thoroughly personal in content; it does not do anything other than relieve individual difficul- ties. It thereby differs from all other arrangements of public welfare and protection. For these would benefit all citizens--the military and police, school and roads, court and church, parliament and research. In principle these are not directed toward people as distinct individuals but rather to their totality itself; the union of many or all is the object of these institutions. The care of the poor, in contrast, in its concrete effects is entirely concerned with individuals and their condition. And precisely this individual becomes the destination of the modern abstract form of welfare, but not completely its ultimate purpose, which rather lies in the protection and support of the community. Indeed, one can- not designate the poor as a means to this--which would still improve the person's position--since the social action does not serve them but only a certain objective means of a material and administrative kind in order to eliminate the dangers threatened by them and to do away with the detractions from the achievable public interest. For sure this formal constellation apparently holds simply not only for the general whole but also for smaller circles: there is even unlimited help within the family not only for the sake of the person who is supported but thereby it would be no disgrace for the family and the family would not lose its reputation through the mere fact of a member's poverty. The support granted by the English labor unions to their members during unemployment was meant not so much to bring about an alleviation of individual want as to prevent the unemployed from working too cheaply out of need and thus depress the wage rate of the whole work force. From this meaning of welfare it becomes clear that, while it takes from the prosperous and gives to the poor, it still in no way approaches an equalization of these individual positions and that its idea will not at all overcome the tendency for the differentiation of society into rich and poor. Rather, the structure of society, as it simply exists, relies basically on the sharpest difference from any socialist and communist efforts that would have overcome this very structure. Its intent is precisely to mitigate some of the extreme manifestations of social division enough so that every structure can rely on it further. If it depended on the interest
414 chapter seven
? in the individual poor person, there would in principle be no suitable limit where the provision of goods would have to stop, before it would achieve equality. But since it occurs instead of that, in the interest of the whole society--of political, familial, and any other socially defined circles--it has no basis for being sufficient in kind or quantity for the individual, since the preservation of the concerned totality in its status quo requires it.
Where this purely social, centralist teleology exists, the care of the poor offers perhaps the widest sociological tension between the imme- diate and remote end of an action. Emotionally, the alleviation of the subjective need is so categorical an end in itself that to dethrone it from its position of last resort and to make it a mere technique for the supra-subjective ends of a social unity, is a most extreme triumph of the social, a distancing of society from the individual that, with all its external inconspicuousness, is more fundamental and radical in its coolness and abstract character than the sacrifices of the individual for the whole, whereby means and end tend to be bound together in one emotional line.
The unique complication of duty and right that is found in modern government welfare is explained in this basic sociological conceptual- ization. In more than one instance, the principle confronts us that the duty to support the poor would exist on the part of the state, but no right on the part of the poor to be supported would correspond to it. As is expressly emphasized in England, for example, they have no cause for complaint or claim for damages for unlawfully denied support. In some ways the entire relationship of duties and rights transcends them. The right that corresponds to every duty of the state is not theirs but that of every individual citizen for the taxes levied for the poor to be raised to such a high level and be used in such a way that the public purposes of caring for the poor are actually served as well. Thus the poor would not have a legal cause for action if the care for the poor were neglected, but only the other members indirectly injured by this neglect. Thus if one could prove, for example, that a thief would have refrained from a robbery if the legally proper and requested poor relief had been granted him, in principle the person robbed could prosecute the welfare agency for damages. Support for the poor occupies the same place in legal teleology as the protection of animals. No one among us is punished for simply tormenting an animal, but only for having done it "publicly or in a way that causes scandal. " Thus not the abused ani- mal but the consideration for the witnesses of the abuse motivates the
the poor person 415
? punishment. This exclusion of the poor, which grants them no ultimate position in the teleological chain--indeed as we saw, not even really the status of being a means--is also revealed in the fact that in the modern relatively democratic states almost only here the persons having an essential interest in the administration are absolutely uninvolved in the administration of it. For a conception thusly noted, the care for the poor is just an expenditure of public resources for public purposes; and since its entire teleology thus lies outside of the poor themselves--which correspondingly is not the case with the interests of other administra- tive matters--it is only logical for the principle of self-administration otherwise acknowledged to some degree not to apply to the poor and the care of them. If the state is somehow obliged by a law to divert a torrent of water and thus manage to irrigate a certain district, the brook is somewhat in the situation of the support of the poor by the state: they are admittedly the objects of duty, but not the bearers of a right corresponding to it, which is what the lands adjacent to the brook are. But if the exclusively centralizing interest prevails at first, so can the right-duty relationship also be shifted in view of utilitarian considerations. The draft of the Prussian poor law of 1842 emphasized that the state must undertake the care of the poor in the interest of the public's common good. To that end it would order under public law that their agencies be bound to the support of needy individuals; it would not be about the latter themselves, who would possess no legal claim. This is indicated more pointedly where the state law imposes a duty on the better situated relatives to feed the poor. Here at first glance the poor person actually seems to have a claim on the prosperous relative, a claim that the state endeavors to secure and enforce. The inner sense is different, however. The political community provides for the poor for practical reasons, and in turn it creates on its part the backing for support on the relatives since the costs would otherwise be prohibitive to it or at least believed to be so. The immediate claim of one person on another that is in play, to an extent, between the poor and the rich brother and which is only a moral one, does not apply to the law at all; the law has exclusively the interests of the whole to look after and perceives it from both sides: the poor who are supported and the cost it exacts from their relatives. Such proceedings as the following show that this is the sociological structure of the sustenance law and that they would in no way give the force of law to what is only a moral duty: Certainly the moral responsibility for support among siblings is a most highly stringent one. However, as it was meant to be legally
416 chapter seven
? established in the first draft of the civil code, the motives recognized the extraordinary hardness of it without further comment, and the introduction thereby gave the justification that the public burden of the poor would otherwise be increased too much. The very same thing is proven by the fact that the legal obligation to support sometimes extends to deciding the amount that would be required from the indi- vidual-moral standpoint. The high court has decided against an old man in needy circumstances, ruling that he had to provide his only property, a few hundred marks, for the support of an unemployable son, even though he explained credibly that he would soon himself be unemployable and that the money was his only reserve. It is extremely doubtful whether one can still speak in this case of a moral right of the son; but the general society does not question this either but only about whether under general current norms it can be held harmless for its duty toward the poor person. Moreover, this inner meaning of the obligation to provide sustenance is rightly symbolized by the practical course: at first the poor person is supported adequately upon making a plea and then only is inquiry made into a son or father who eventu- ally, according to his financial status, will be sentenced to reimburse not the whole cost of the care, but perhaps a half or a third. The exclusively social meaning of the regulation is also discernible in that, according to the code of civil law, the obligation to support only has to enter in when it would not 'endanger' the 'living standard' of the person obligated. Whether support short of such endangerment would even be morally required in certain cases is at least doubtful. But the public cannot do without it in every instance since the descent of an individual in social standing does harm to the stability of society as a whole, which still seems to outweigh in social importance the material advantage to the individual gained by the extortion. Thus the duty to support does not contain a right of the poor to make a claim on their prosperous relatives; it is nothing other than the support duty obliging the state, which it passed on to the relatives and which required no corresponding claim at all on the part of the poor.
Now the above mentioned metaphor of the flowing stream was inex- act to the extent that the poor individual is not only a poor person but also a citizen. To the extent that the poor, admittedly, have their share in the entitlement that the law accords all citizens as a correlate of the duty of the state to support the poor, to maintain the parallel with the brook and the adjacent lands, they are both the brook and lands adjacent to it in the sense in which the richest citizen is too. Even though the state
the poor person 417
? services, formally standing at the same admittedly ideal distance over all citizens, gain a much different substantive importance for individual situations themselves, and if the poor person is therefore not involved in the welfare system as a goal-setting subject but only as a member of the encompassing teleological state organization, still the poor person's role, so to speak, in this state function is a different one from that of the prosperous person. Hence we have the sociological insight that the entire materially caused uniqueness in the situation of the supported poor that on the one hand makes an individual's well-being the end goal of assistance, and on the other places one in opposition to the general intention of the state as an object without rights and a material to be molded--that this does not quite prevent someone's belonging as a member of the body politic. Despite those two definitions by which welfare seems to place one outside the body politic, or more correctly, makes someone organically a part of the whole, the poor person belongs to the historical reality of the society that lives in him and above him, ever as much a form-sociological member as the official, the taxpayer, the teacher, or the mediator of some transaction. The poor person, who admittedly stands materially, so to speak, outside the group in which he or she dwells, behaves somewhat as a stranger to the group; but a whole structure simply exists that encompasses both the stranger and the indigenous parts of the group whose particular interactions with the stranger create a group in a wider sense and characterize the actual historically existing circle. Thus the poor person is admittedly put in a sense outside the group, but this being outside is only a particular kind of interaction with it that weaves one into a union with the whole in this widest sense.
The sociological antinomy of the poor, in which the social-ethical difficulties of caring for the poor are mirrored, is resolved by this conceptualization. The solipsistic tendency of the medieval type of alms, which I mentioned, went past the poor internally, so to speak, for whom the action pertains externally; it was the complete neglect of the principle: never treat the other person as a mere means but always as an end at the same time. If in principle now the recipient is also a donor, a causal ray returns from him the donor, and this just turns the gift into a reciprocal action, into a social occurrence. But as in any case, if the recipients are completely excluded from the intended process of giving, and they play no other role than that of a box into which a donation for a mass for the dead is placed, so is the interaction cut off, and the action of giving is not a social event but a purely individual
418 chapter seven
? one. Now, however, it seems the modern handling of welfare does not treat the poor person as an end; but it still remains to be said that the poor person, standing in this teleological line that reaches beyond, still belongs organically to the whole and on that given basis is an element woven into its purposive process. Admittedly, a person's response to the donation that was given concerns each individual here as little as in the medieval form; but it thereby makes someone's economic activity possible again; it preserves someone's physical strength from decay, and someone's impulses are diverted from violent enrichment; the totality of their social circle on its part actually experiences a reaction to what it had done about the poor person. A purely individual relationship will only have ethical sufficiency and sociological perfection if every person is really the reciprocal goal of every other person--of course not only a goal; however, this does not apply to the actions of a supra-personal collective entity. Such an action with its teleology may quietly reach way over the individual and without being, so to speak, stopped by the individual, come back on itself: while every individual belongs to this totality, each thereby also, from the outset, stands at the endpoint of action; one is not, as in the other case, left outside, but in the same immediate denial of one's nature as being one's own end, one has, as a member of the whole, a part in its quality of being an intrinsic end.
Long before the clarification of this centralist viewpoint about the nature of welfare, its organic role in community life was indicated by substantial symbols. In earliest England the care for the poor began with the monasteries and church societies, and in fact, as will be explicitly emphasized, this came about because only property under mortmain possessed the reliable duration which is necessary for the care for the poor. The many secular donations from booty and penances did not serve the purpose since they did not yet find any foothold in the state administrative apparatus and were consumed without any continuing effect. The care for the poor was thus linked tightly to the only really substantially fixed point in the social warp and woof, and this linkage is shown in a negative way in the indignation about the clergy sent to England by Rome: because they would neglect the care for the poor. The foreign cleric simply did not feel internally linked to the com- munity life, and his not providing for the poor appears as the surest sign of this lack of solidarity. The exact same linkage of the care for the poor with the most fixed substrate of social existence will become clear in the later link of the English poor taxes with land ownership: this was both the cause and the effect of the poor being considered
the poor person 419
? one organic component belonging to the land as such. The very same is asserted legally in 1861 as a part of the responsibility for the poor was transferred from the parish to the society for the poor. The costs of the care would no longer be borne by the parish alone but by a fund to which the parishes made contributions proportionate to the value of their lands. The proposal that the distribution would still take into account the population size was rejected expressly and often. With that the individualistic factor was rejected completely; the sum of persons no longer appears as the bearer of the care for the poor but rather the supra-personal entity that finds its substrate in the objectivity of earth and land. And the care of the poor stands so much in the center of the social group that in local administration to this focal point was gradually appended first the school and highway administration, health and registration services. Also besides, the welfare agency immediately turned into a vehicle--since it worked well--of governmental unity. The North German Federation decided that no one in need of help in the whole federal territory should remain without help and that no North German poor in one part of the federal territory should receive differ- ent treatment than in another part. If external technical reasons led to the linkage of the care of the poor to land ownership in England, this does not therefore alter its deeper sociological meaning when, on the other hand, the joining of the other administrative branches to it, as was mentioned, points directly to great technical disadvantages arising from the crossing of counties by the welfare organizations. The contrast of their technical implications allows the unity of their sociological implications for this matter to become really evident.
It is therefore a completely one-sided view when the care of the poor was described as "an organization of the propertied classes for the satisfaction of the feelings of moral obligation associated with owner- ship. " Rather it is a part of the organization of the whole to which both the poor and the propertied classes belong. Just as the technical and material conditions of the social position of the poor make them out to be a mere object or transition point of a collective life looming over them, this is ultimately the role of every individual, concrete member of society. From the standpoint assumed for the moment, according to which what Spinoza said of God and the individual entity holds here: we can, of course, love God, but it would be contradictory for him, the unity including us, to love us back. Rather, what we devote to him would be a part of the unending love with which God loves himself. The particular exclusion that the poor experience on the part of the
420 chapter seven
? community supporting them is the indicator for the role that they play within society, especially as a member; while one is technically a mere object of society, one is in a further sociological sense a subject who on the one hand forms, like all others, its reality, and on the other hand, as all others, stands beyond its supra-personal abstract unity.
Thus the general structure of the group also determines the answer to the question: Where does the poor person belong? If still engaging in any economic activity, a person belongs in as much a piece of the general economy that one deals with directly; in as much as someone is a member of a church, one belongs in it with no limitation differ- ing from that of the coinciding district; in as much as one is a family member, one belongs in the personally and spatially established group of relatives; but where does someone belong insofar as one is poor? A society that is held together or organized by ethnic consciousness assigns the poor to their ethnic group; in a different one whose ethical responsibilities are essentially arranged through the church, the church or pious associations are the places of the social response to the real- ity of the poor. The 'whereas' clauses in the 1871 German law on place of residence for support answer this question in this way: the poor would belong to that community--i. e. the community would be responsible for their support--which would have benefited from their economic power before their impoverishment. Within the latter prin- ciple lies a trace of the social structure in which, before the complete breakthrough of modern public policy theory, every local community was the place that enjoyed the economic accomplishments of those who are at present impoverished. Modern flexibility, the inter-regional exchange of all efforts, has lifted this restriction, so that only the entire body politic is considered the terminus a quo and ad quem of all activity. If state law now allows everyone to take up residence in any community whatever, the latter no longer has the correlate of its growing together with its inhabitants--namely the right to ward off the settlement of unsuitable persons; so the solidary bond with the individual can no more be expected from it in taking and giving. Only for practical reasons and only as organs of the state--as the cited 'whereas' clauses in the law emphasize--did the communities undertake the burden of the poor. This is thus the ultimate stage that the formal position of the poor achieved, revealing its dependence on the general stage of social development: it pertains to the largest practically possible social circle, not a part of the whole to the extent that it forms a unity at all, but the whole is the place or the power where the poor person, insofar as
the poor person 421
? being poor, belongs. Finally, for this circle, because it is the largest and it does not have anywhere where it could shift the responsibility outside of itself, the difficulty that the welfare workers in the small communities emphasize does not exist: the small communities thus frequently espe- cially struggled with supporting the poor since they feared they would be saddled with them forever if they once dealt with them at all. Here, however, a most effective feature of human interaction appears, which one can call moral induction: where a good deed of any kind, even the most spontaneous, most singular, in no way an obligatory duty, is performed, an obligation to continue with the good deed comes about that really lives on not only as a claim of the receiver but also in a feeling on the part of the giver. It is a quite ordinary experience that beggars, to whom one regularly gave, right away consider it their rightful claim and the donor's duty, the breaking off of which they reprimand as the misappropriation of an obligatory contribution owed them, so that they consequently feel more bitter about it than toward hardly anyone who would have completely and always denied them the donation. More- over, whoever maintained a needy person in higher circumstances for a long time after fixing precisely the period of support ahead of time, will nevertheless at the expiration of the period break off his offering with a painful feeling as if he were thereby encountering the violation of some obligation. With full consciousness a Talmudic law from the Jore Dea? h ritual code proclaims: Whoever has supported a poor person three times with equal amounts tacitly takes on a duty toward that person, even if one did not have the intent of continuing: it assumes the character of a vow that can be annulled only on special grounds (e. g. , one's own impoverishment). This case is much more complicated than that of a related one that forms the equivalent to odisse quem laeseris:1 one loves the person to whom one has done good. Then it is understandable that one projects the satisfaction about a good deed onto the person who provided the opportunity for it; in the love for the one whom one brought an offering, one in essence is loving oneself, just as in hatred for someone whom one has treated unjustly one hates oneself. With so simple a psychology the feeling of obligation that the good deed leaves to the doer is not to be interpreted as the only form of noblesse oblige. I believe that here, however, an a priori assumption is at work: that any activity of this kind--despite its apparently absolute
1 Latin: hating the person you have injured--ed.
? 422 chapter seven
? voluntariness, its apparent character as an opus supererogationis2--would derive from an obligation, that under any such deed a deeply situated obligation becomes subconscious, which to a certain extent becomes apparent and tangible through the deed. It runs analogous to a theoreti- cal induction that nevertheless assumes the equivalence of a past and a future course not simply because the former was conditioned so and so but because a law was derived from this that determines it just like it must determine each future one. A moral instinct for that must lie under that one, so that the first good deed already also corresponded to a duty from which the second now is demanded no less than the first. This obviously touches upon the motives that this chapter raised. If, generally, all devotion, all doing good and selflessness is even in the most extreme case no more than simple duty and obligation, this principle in the form of a particular case may be so represented that every act of charity in its deepest sense--if one will, in its metaphysi- cal sense of morality--is the fulfillment of a duty manifested therein, which now of course is not completed by the isolated act. Rather it extends as far as the cause of the action still continues to exist. Any support shown to anyone would be the ratio cognoscendi3 whereby one of the ideal lines of obligation from one person to another runs here that shows its timelessness in the continued effect of the bond that was once realized.
Besides the two forms of the right-duty relationship--the poor person has a right to support and there exists a duty to support, which is not arranged as an entitlement of the poor person directed at the society, the self-preservation of which requires from everyone of its organs and from certain circles--besides these there exists a third that typically rules the moral consciousness; a duty to support the poor exists on the part of the public and on the part of the prosperous, which finds an adequate purpose for it in the improved circumstance of the poor person; to this corresponds the claim of the latter as the other side of the purely moral relationship between the needy and the well-placed. If I am not mistaken, the emphasis within this relationship was some- thing displaced since the eighteenth century. Most clearly in England the ideal of humanity and human rights have thrust aside the centralist point of view of the poor laws of Elizabeth--work had to be created
2 Latin: a work performed in addition to what one is obligated to do--ed.
3 Latin: basis for recognizing--ed.
? the poor person 423
? for the poor person in the interest of the whole. Every poor person is to be entitled to a minimum existence just as much whether able and willing to work or not. In contrast, modern charity allows the correlation between moral duty (of the donor) and moral right (of the recipient) to be realized more by the former. Obviously this form is essentially realized by private charity, in contrast to public, and its sociological meaning is now the question for us.
First of all, to state the already mentioned tendency: treating the care of the poor more as a concern of the widest governmental circles after it was originally based everywhere on the community of the locality. At first the care for the poor person was the result of the communal bond that enveloped the community; before the supra-individual structure that the individuals saw around and above them was transformed from a community into the state, and before the freedom of movement com- pleted this process, factually and psychologically, it was natural for the local community to support the needy. This is of the utmost importance for the whole sociology of the poor person: of all the non-individualistic social claims based on a purely general quality, those of the poor are materially the most impressive. Disregarding such acute excitations as those from misfortune or sexual provocation, there are none that would be so completely impersonal, so indifferent toward the other qualities of their object and at the same time making claims so effectively and immediately as those from need and misery. This has always lent a spe- cifically local character to the duty toward the poor person, instead of centralizing it in so great a circle, instead of functioning through imme- diate perception only through the general concept of poverty--which is one of the longest roads sociological forms have had to cover between perception and abstraction. Since this change in the care for the poor person into an abstract state responsibility occurred--in England from 1834, in Germany somewhat after the middle of the century--its nature was modified in tandem with this centralizing form. Above all, the state admittedly kept the community obligated for the substantial part of the care, but now the community is only its agent. The local organiz- ing is turned into a mere technique by which the objectively greatest capacity for action could be achieved. The community is no longer the starting point but the passageway for welfare.
Thus poor associations are constituted everywhere according to the consideration of their suit- ability, e. g. in England so that they can maintain one workhouse each and--which is a conscious tendency--remain free of the bias of local influences. The increasing use of salaried welfare officials has the same
424 chapter seven
? intent. Such an official stands in relation to the poor person much more as a representative of the collectivity on which the official depends for a salary than does the unpaid one, who functions so to speak more as a person and will be allowed to hold sooner the human, person-to- person point of view rather than the purely objective one. Finally a most highly sociologically indicative division of tasks appears. The fact that furthermore welfare is also delegated essentially to the community is thus very useful since every case must be dealt with individually, and this is possible only from nearby, and with accurate knowledge of, the milieu; but if the community has to approve the assistance, it must also raise the means since it would readily manage the public funds all too generously. On the other hand there are cases of need for which the danger of pre-schematizing that is avoided in this way does not exist since this and the needed acts of care are established according to wholly objective criteria: illness, blindness, deaf-muteness, insanity, chronic illness. Here welfare is a more technical matter and thus the state or the large unit is more efficient; its greater means and central- ized administration, where personal matters and local circumstances are less decisive, point to its overwhelming advantages. And in addition to this qualitative determination of direct public activity, the quantita- tive appears, which especially distinguishes it from private charity; the state or the public in general only provides for the most urgent and immediate need. Everywhere, and most clearly in England, the care for the poor has the completely fixed principle that one could give to the poor person from the taxpayers' pockets only the absolutely necessary minimum of the cost of maintaining life.
Fundamentally this is related to the spiritual character of community action in general. The community, which encompasses the energies or interests of many individuals, can make room for their particularity only when it is a question of the whole structure of the division of labor whose members perform different functions. If, however, instead of this a uniform procedure is needed, whether directly or through a representative organ, its content can simply contain only the rela- tive minimum of the personality sphere on a par with that of every other. At first this results in no larger expenditure being allowed in the name of a community than what is expected also of its stingiest member. A collectivity that is currently found together may come to an agreement on an upsurge of extravagant generosity; but where the will of every individual is not proven so directly but must be presup-
the poor person 425
? posed on the part of representatives, the assumption can only be that each person wants to spend as little as possible. Admittedly this is not a logically unavoidable necessity--for which the opposite would not also be a logical contradiction--but it corresponds to a psychological dogma that has acquired the practical value of logical proof through the overwhelming magnitude of its empirical confirmation. Out of its necessity the quantification has to embrace in effect the lowest level of the intellectual, economic, cultural, aesthetic, etc. scale: the character of a minimum: the right valid for all is described as the ethical minimum; the logic valid for all is the intellectual minimum; the 'right to work' claimed for all can only be extended to the person who represents a minimum for its value character; membership in a party requires in principle only that one acknowledge the minimum of the party's prin- ciples without which it could not exist. This type of social minimum is expressed most completely even in the directly negative character of quantification and level of interest.
Excursus on the Negativity of Collective Behavior
The unity of the just mentioned phenomena comes about in many aspects only through negation, and in fact such phenomena often develop the char- acteristic of negativity in the degree of its numerical scope. In mass actions the motives of the individuals are often so divergent that their union is all the more possible the more their content is purely negative, indeed destructive. The dissatisfaction that leads to large-scale revolutions always feeds off so many and often so directly opposed sources that their unification around a positive goal would hardly be carried out. The formation of unity, then, tends to be the responsibility of smaller circles, and the dispersed energies of individuals have worked to put in order as well as to destroy the countless private undertakings intended to unify the masses. In view of this, one of the most knowledgeable historians asserted that the crowd would always be ungrateful since, although the whole would be brought to a flourishing condition, individuals would above all feel what they lack personally. The divergence of individual deci- sions that leaves to the collectivity only negation (which obviously is regarded only cum grano salis4 and beyond everything by which society overcomes this fate of its forces) is very evident, for example, in the late Russian revolution. 5 The unsafe spatial expansion, the personal differences in formation, the
4 Latin: with a grain of salt--ed.
5 Simmel appears to be referring to the 1905 failed revolution in Russia--ed.
? 426 chapter seven
? variety of objectives that prevail in this movement actually made the idea of nihilism, the complete denial of what exists, into the applicable expression of the community for all its members.
The same trait appears in the outcome of large popular referenda, which is so often and almost incomprehensibly purely negative. Thus in Switzerland in 1900, for example, a law about confederate health and accident insurance would be flatly rejected by a referendum after it was accepted unanimously by both representatives of the people--the Nationalrat and the Sta? nderat; and this was just generally the fate of most statutory proposals that were subjected to referendum. Negation is just the simplest act, and thus large masses, whose members cannot agree upon a positive goal, just find themselves united in that. The standpoints of particular groups, by whom every law was rejected, were extremely different: particularistic and ultramontane, agrarian and capi- talist, technical and partisan--and thus could have nothing but negation in common. Of course, conversely also, therefore, where they agree at least in negative stands, negation can suggest or prepare for the unity of many small groups. Thus it is striking that admittedly the Greeks would have shown great cultural differences among one another, but if one even compared the Arca- dians and the Athenians with the contemporary Carthaginians or Egyptians, Persians, or Thracians, various negative characteristics would still have been held in common. Nowhere in historical Greece were there human sacrifices or deliberate mutilation; nowhere polygamy or the sale of children into slavery; nowhere the wholly unlimited obedience to an individual person. Amidst all the positive differences, the commonality of the purely negative still had to bring the solidarity to the consciousness of a cultural circle transcending the individual state.
The negative character of the bond that brings the large circle together into a unity appears above all in its norms. This is prepared by the phenom- enon of binding arrangements of any kind having to be all the simpler and fewer the larger the compass of their applicability would be, all things being equal--beginning approximately with the rules of international etiquette that are very much fewer than would be observed in every smaller group, up to the fact that the individual states of the German Reich tend to have all the less encompassing constitutions the larger they are. Expressed in principle: with a widening scope of the circle, the commonalities that bind every one in the social unity to every one else always become less extensive. Therefore what at first could appear paradoxical: generally, it is possible to hold a large circle together with a small minimal number of norms than a small one. Now, in a qualitative sense, the patterns of behavior that a group must demand of its members in order to be able to exist as a group tend to be all the more purely prohibitive and restrictive in nature, the more extensive it is: the posi- tive associations that give group life its unique substance member by member, must ultimately be left to the individual;6 the variety of persons, interests, and
6 Thus an English adage says: "The business of everybody is the business of nobody. " This unique becoming-negative on the part of an action also appears as soon as it
? the poor person 427
? processes becomes too great for it to be regulated from a center. The prohib- iting function nevertheless remains only for the establishment of what must not be done under any circumstances, the limitation of freedom instead of steering it--by which is meant, of course, only the steering of a development continually thwarted and deflected by other tendencies. Thus it is so where a greater number of diverging circles of religious feeling or interest would be united into a unity. Allah emerged from the decline of Arab polytheism as the general conceptualization, so to speak, of God. Polytheism necessarily generates a religious splintering of faith circles since its components will turn to the different deities in unequal ways according to the difference in their inner and practical tendencies. Allah's abstract and unifying character is thus a negative one at first; it is his original nature "to keep off evil," but not to urge the doing of good; he is only the "one who restrains. " The Hebrew God, who brought about or expressed a union of socio-religious combination unheard in antiquity--compared to every diverging polytheism and every unsocial monism, as in India--gives its most strongly emphasized norms of conduct in the form: Thou shalt not. In the German Empire, positive relationships in life, which are subject to civil law, first found their standard form in the civil code about thirty years after the founding of the Empire; in contrast, the criminal code with its prohibitive stipulations was already uniformly codified in the Empire from 1872. Exactly what makes prohibition especially suitable for generalizing smaller circles into a larger one is the circumstance that the counterpart of forbidden things is in no way always what is commanded but often is only what is permitted. Thus if no ? could occur in the circle of A but probably ? and ? , no ? in the circle of B but probably ? and ? , no ? in C but ? and ? etc. --in this way the unified structure can be established in A, B, and C on the prohibition of ? , ? , and ? . Unity is only possible if ? and ? were not commanded in A but only permitted so that it can also be omitted. If instead ? and ? would be just as positively commanded, as ? is forbidden--and cor- respondingly in B and C--a unity would hardly appear because then what is directly proscribed on the one hand would then always be directly commanded on the other. Thus the following example: Since antiquity the enjoyment of a particular kind of animal--the exact one that was sacred for the individual's locality--was denied to every Egyptian. The doctrine that holiness requires abstention from all meat then arose as the result of the political amalgamation of a number of local cults into a national religion, on top of which a priest- hood stood reigning in unison. This unification could come about only through the synthesis or universalizing of all these prohibitions. Since the enjoyment of all animals allowed in every locality (thus also able to be omitted! ) would
becomes the responsibility of the multitude in the motivation by which one explained the forbearance and indolence of the North Americans, who are otherwise so energetic, about public nuisances. One might resort to public opinion to bring everything about. Fatalism arises from that: "Making each individual feel his insignificance, disposes him to leave to the multitude the task of setting right what is every one else's business just as much as his own. " (Quoted in English--ed. )
? 428 chapter seven
? have been somewhat positively commanded, obviously there would have been hardly any possibility of collecting the particular rules about animals into one higher totality.
The more general a norm is, the larger the circle to which it applies, the less is its observance characteristic and significant for the individual, while violating it tends to be especially serious and fraught with consequences. First of all, one should be very clear on the intellectual domain. The theoretical understanding, without which there would be generally no human society, rests on a small number of widely accepted--although of course not consciously in the abstract--norms that we describe as logical. They form the minimum of what must be acknowledged by all who wish to interact with one another at all. The most fleeting coming together in agreement by individuals most foreign to one another, as well as the daily common life of those closest to one another, rests on this basis. Obedience of the imagination to these very simple norms, without which it would never be in harmony with experienced reality, is the most unrelinquishable and general condition of all social life; for amidst any difference between the inner and outer worldview, logic creates a certain common ground, the abandonment of which would have to cancel any intellectual commonality in the widest sense of the term. But now logic, understood narrowly, implies or provides no positive property at all; it is only a norm not to be violated; without that, its observance would provide some distinction, a specific good or quality. All attempts to obtain knowledge of something particular with the help of pure logic are frustrated, and its socio- logical importance is therefore one that is as negative as that of the criminal code: only the violation of it creates a particular and noticeable situation, but persistence in these norms creates theoretically, i. e. practically, nothing else for individuals than the possibility of remaining in the general group. Certainly even the intellectual connection of a thousand substantive divergences can fail with logic strictly adhered to; but with faulty logic it must fail--precisely as, admittedly, the moral and social solidarity can collapse even with a strict avoidance of all that is criminally forbidden, but with the breaking of these norms it must. It is no different with social forms in the narrower sense, inso- far as they are really universal in a circle. They are suspended for nobody, but their violation is at the highest level when only what is most general in a circle will not be violated while the special norms that hold the smaller group together lend the individual a positive quality and difference to the extent that they are special. Also, on these conditions rests the practical uses of the social forms of civility that are so completely lacking in substance. Based on the positive presence of respect and devotion, of which they assure us, we may not exclude their least absence; yet the least violation of them convinces most unmistakably that those feelings do not exist. The greeting on the street does not give evidence of respect whatsoever; its omission, however, very strongly indicates the opposite. These forms completely withhold service as symbols of a positive inner disposition. But they express the negative most suitably, because quite a light omission can determine the relationship toward someone radically and definitely--and in fact, both to the degree to which the form
the poor person 429 of civility is wholly general and conventional, it is of the very essence of the
relatively large circle.
Thus it is that the action of the whole as a whole toward the poor person is limited to a minimum, thoroughly appropriate for the typical nature of the activity of whole societies. Along with the rationale that such action has as its content only what is clearly presupposed for everyone, the second rationale of this activity also has its source in the objective character of the care of the poor being limited to this minimum. What pertains to protecting someone from physical deterioration can be fixed objectively with approximate certitude. Every grant of more than this, every improvement toward a positive increase requires much less unam- biguous criteria and is left to more subjective estimates in quantity and kind. I mentioned above that the cases of not very special neediness and thus ones requiring no subjective judgment--such as neediness through sickness and bodily defect especially--are most suitable for governmental welfare while the individually formed cases better fall to the share of the smaller local community. Even such objective ascertainability of the need that lends itself to the intervention of the largest community exists as soon as the support is limited to the minimum. The old epis- temological correlation between generality and objectivity appears here again; in the field of knowledge the actual generality is the acknowl- edgment of a proposition through the--admittedly not historically real but ideal--universality of the spirit or an expression of its objectivity on one hand, while on the other it may be certainly irrefutable for one or many individuals and may possess the full meaning of the truth, but it still lacks the particular quality that we call objectivity. Thus in practice an action of the community can in principle be claimed only on a plainly objective basis. Where the reason is able to be evaluated only subjectively and lacks the potential for being established purely factually, though the claim may be no less urgent and its fulfillment no less valuable, it is nevertheless directed only to individuals, and their relationship corresponds to purely individual circumstances, and their fulfillment is simply through individuals.
If the objective perspective goes hand in hand with the tendency to nationalize all welfare--which admittedly until now nowhere exceeds the stage of that tendency completely--the extent to which the content is standardized, the logical application of which simply means objectivity,
? ? 430 chapter seven
? derives not only out of the interests of the poor person but also out of those of the state. Here an essentially sociological form of the relationship of individual and community shows its advantage. Where grants or interventions pass over from being fulfilled by individuals to being fulfilled by the community, regulation by the community tends to use either too much or too little individual action. With statutory education the individual is forced not to learn too little; it leaves to the individuals whether they desire to learn more or 'too much. ' With the statutory workday, it makes the employers not to want to expect too much from the workers, as it also leaves to them how much less to expect. And thus this regulation stands everywhere only on one side of the action, while the other side is given over to the freedom of the individual. This is the pattern in which our socially controlled activi- ties appear to us: They are restricted as it were to one end alone; the society sets a boundary that is much for them or little for them, while more or less of the limitlessness of subjective discretion belongs to the others. Now, however, this pattern also deceives us in many cases where the social regulation actually occurs on both sides and only the practical interest steers attention only to the one side and allows the other to be overlooked. Where for example the private punishment of injustice shifts to the society and objective criminal law, in the law one has in view thereby only a greater assurance of expiation and a really sufficient measure and certainty of punishment being achieved. But in reality, it is not a matter of only being punished enough but also not being punished too much. Society not only protects perhaps the possibly harmed, but it also protects the criminal against excessive subjective reaction, i. e. it sets that level of punishment as the objective that corresponds not to the wish or purpose of the victim but to its social interest. And this is so not only in statutorily established relation- ships. Not every social stratum attaches much importance to each of its members achieving a certain minimum expenditure for clothing; it fixes a limit of the 'decent' suit, and one who remains below that no longer belongs to it. But admittedly it nevertheless also sets a limit in the other direction, not with the same clarity and with as conscious an emphasis: a certain level of luxury and elegance, indeed sometimes even of modernity, does not conform to one or the other group; whoever exceeds this upper threshold is sometimes treated as not completely belonging. Thus the group still does not also allow the freedom of the individual to be expanded fully on both sides but sets an objective limit to subjective discretion, i. e. one that the conditions of supra-individual
the poor person 431
? life in it require. This basic form is now replicated in the taking over of the care of the poor by the society. While at first it seems to have only an interest in boundaries: the poor person too receiving a proper share, not too little; the other, practically less effective, nevertheless also exists: that they do not receive too much. The inadequacy of private welfare lies not only in being too little but also in being too much, which leads the poor person to idleness, expends existing resources in economically unproductive ways, and capriciously benefits one at the expense of the other. The subjective impulse to be charitable errs on both sides, and although the danger of excess is not as great as that of too little, the objective norm still stands above it, which subtracts an interest in the individual from the interest of the community to no noticeable degree.
However, this transcending of the subjective point of view is valid both for the giver and the receiver of charity. While English public welfare begins only at total impoverishment, which was set objectively-- specifically, that the workhouse offered a stay so little agreeable that no one chooses it but in really extreme need--it completely dispensed with the proof of personal worthiness. Private charity, which is for the clearly worthy individual, can often be much more individually selec- tive, and since the state already provides for the most urgently needy, is thus its supplement. It has the task of making the poor person, who is already protected from starvation, capable of earning a living again, of curing the need for which the state has an only temporary relief. What is decisive is not need as such, although it is the terminus a quo, but the ideal of creating independent and economically valuable indi- viduals; the state proceeds with a causal intent, private charity with a teleological one. Or put differently: The state comes to help poverty; private charity comes to help the poor person. Here lies a sociological difference of the first order. The abstract ideas by which some individual elements crystallize out from individually complicated reality countless times achieve a liveliness and effectiveness for action that seems in real- ity only to benefit the concrete total phenomenon. This begins with quite intimate relationships. The meaning of many erotic relationships is not to be expressed any way other than at least one of the parties not seeking the beloved but love, only that one is generally met with a feeling of remarkable indifference toward the individuality of the lover. In religious circumstances it sometimes appears that the only essential thing is there being a certain kind and degree of religiosity while the bearers of it are irrelevant; the action of the priest or the relationship
432 chapter seven
? of the believer to the community is determined only by this general- ity, without regard to the particular motive that produces and colors this mood in the individual, and without any particular interest in the individual, who comes into consideration--or more correctly, does not come into consideration--only as the bearer of this impersonal activity. From the perspective of social ethics, a rationalism requires that the interaction of people be simply founded on subjective honesty. Truth, as an objective quality of a statement, must require from everyone to whom it would be addressed complete indifference toward the special characteristics and circumstances of the case; one so determined could not produce an individually differentiated right to truth. The truth, and not the speaking or hearing in individualization, would be the presupposition of the content or value of group interaction. Trends in criminology divide over the same question of whether punishment is for the crime or the criminal. An abstract objectivism demands punishment, once the crime occurs, as a restoration of the real or ideal disturbed order; based on the logic of ethics, it demands it as a consequence of the impersonal fact of the crime. From the other point of view only the guilty subject should be affected; the penal reaction comes in not because the crime occurred as something objective but because of a subject of the sin appearing in it that needs educating and being made harmless. Thus all individual circumstances of the case are exactly addressed by the amount of punishment as well as the general fact that there was a crime at all. This two-fold attitude also applies to poverty. One can proceed from poverty as from a specific factual phenomenon and seek to eliminate it with such questions as: to whom, from which individual cause, with which individual consequences do they always appear, does it require remedy and compensation for this social deficiency? On the other hand, interest is directed toward the poor individual--admittedly, of course, since the person is poor, but one does not wish to eliminate proportionately poverty in general with supportive action but to help this particular poor person. The person's poverty here serves only as an individual and singular qualification for it; it is so to speak only the present reason of being occupied with that person; the individual should generally be brought into a situation in which the poverty vanishes by itself. Thus this social service is directed more to the fact, more to the cause of poverty. Incidentally, it is socio- logically important to note about this formulation that the naturally suited distribution of both public and private welfare be modified as soon as one pursues the causal chain a step further. The state meets
the poor person 433
? the superficially apparent need--especially so in England--and private charity addresses the individual reasons for it. But the fundamental eco- nomic and cultural conditions on which those personal circumstances arise as a basis--these again must form the matter for the community, and in fact they are so formed that they give as little chance as pos- sible to individual weakness or unfavorable prejudice, ineptitude or mischance to produce poverty. Here, as in many other respects, the community, its conditions, interests, and actions encompass as it were individual determinations: on the one hand it represents an immediate surface on which the members perceive their appearance, the results of their own lives; on the other hand it is the broad underground where it develops--but in a way that, from its unity, the differences of indi- vidual arrangements and circumstances give that surface of the whole a conspicuous colorfulness of individual phenomena. 7
The French principle of poverty is the direct opposite of the English one that gave occasion to this generalization. Here the care for the poor is regarded as the domain of private associations and persons from the outset, and the state intervenes only where this is not enough. This reversal does not mean of course that the private entities care for the most urgent cases, as the English state does, but the state provides care, as the English private entities do, going beyond what is individu- ally desirable. The French principle makes it rather unmistakable that substantively the help cannot be so sharply and fundamentally separated
7 Perhaps it is worthwhile noting here outside the immediate factual context that this inclusion of the individual formation by the social, where it reaches the root as well as the fruit, is allowed to be exactly reversed in the same form. As the individual appears there as a kind of universal structure for the social essence, so can the latter function as a mere intermediary stage of individual development. This begins with the basic substance of the personality that life brings with it, which we cannot imagine in its purity apart from its being formed through the historical milieu, but only sense as the enduring material of our personal existence and the never completely totaled sum of its possibilities. On the other hand we offer, as it were at the other end of our existence, an appearance or complex of appearances where it brings existence as the ultimate, most important, most formed one to which existence brings it for the individualistic standpoint. Between the two lie the social influences that we receive, the conditions by which the society shapes us in every phenomenon we ultimately present, the whole complex of general demands and inhibitions through which we have to go. Considered in that way, society thus offers with its actions and presentations exactly the stage beyond and before which the individual structure stands; it is the vehicle of the forces through which one of its stages passes into another of its stages, and these forces embrace the society in the way that, from the other standpoint, the social con- ditions and events embrace the individual who mediates between their general bases and their respective manifestations.
? 434 chapter seven
? between the two steps as in England. Here and there in practice the situation will thus often take shape for the poor person in the same way. It is obvious, however, that a difference of the first order in sociological principles thereby results: It is a special case of the larger process by which the immediate interaction of group members changes into the action of the supra-individually unified whole and by which, as soon as this at all occurs one time, between both ways of social function- ing, continual compromises, displacements, and changes in rank take place. Whether the social tension or disharmony that appears as indi- vidual poverty is brought to resolution directly between the members of society or through the mediation of the unity that is aroused from all the members, this is obviously a decision that is required by a for- mal equality in the whole social field, albeit only rarely as purely and clearly as this. Obvious as it is, this only needs mention in order to not be overlooked how very much 'private' care for the poor is also a social event, a sociological form that assigns the poor person a no less definite position--only not overly clear from a superficial view--as an organic member in group life. This fact is clearly illuminated precisely by the transition in form between the two: by the poor taxes on the one hand, the legal duty to provide for poor relatives on the other. As long as a special poor tax exists, the relationship between the com- munity and the poor person had not attained the abstract clarity that sets one into an immediate bond with the community as an undivided unit; the state is rather only the intermediary that provides a regulation for the individuals absent any more voluntary contributions. As soon as the poor taxes are at all included in the tax liability and welfare follows from the general state or local revenues, that bond is realized; the support-relationship with the poor person becomes a function of the community as such, no longer the sum of individuals as in the case of the poor tax. The general interest is minted, so to speak, into a still more specialized form where the law requires supporting the needy relatives. Private support, which also embraces every other case of the structure and the teleology of group life, comes to a conscious intensification here by which it is dominated as well.
Once again I want to explain from the viewpoint just explicated what was emphasized above: that the relationship of the community to its poor is just as formal a society-constructing function as is that to the offi- cial or taxpayer. There I compared the poor person to the stranger, who similarly stands opposite to the group--but this being opposite implies a very specific relationship that pulls one into group life as a member.
the poor person 435
? So the poor person stands admittedly outside the group while being a mere object for undertakings by the community toward the individual, but this being on the outside is--put briefly--only a particular form of being inside. All this occurs in the society as, according to the Kantian expression, what is spatially outside of each other occurs in conscious- ness: admittedly in space everything would be outside of each other, and the subject too, graphically, would be external to the other things, but in a wider sense the space itself would be 'in me,' in the subject. But considered more closely, the double position of the poor person as characterized--as with the stranger--can only be established with gradual modifications to all members of the group. Individuals may adhere to group life with positive accomplishments so very much, may very much allow the personal content of their life to get woven into or to get out of this cycle, yet at the same time they stand facing this totality, giving and receiving, dealt with by it well or poorly, committed to it internally or only externally, in short facing the social circle as partner or as object, as to an opposite subject to which they neverthe- less belong through the very same actions and circumstances on which the relationship of member, of being part of the subject, is based.