No More Learning

Thus if a handicraft in somewhat earlier times, as there was not yet metal
59 Simmel places the statement in the singular and uses the Latin expression, quale, for kinds--ed.
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money, was sold for a cow or goat, which were wholly heterogeneous things but which were brought together and exchangeable through the economic, abstract-common value placed on both. In the modern money economy this heterogeneity has reached a high point. Since money is the common element, i. e. it expresses the exchange value in all exchangeable objects, it is incapable of expressing just what is individual among them; and hence a note of down- grading comes over the objects, insofar as they are presented as marketable, a note of reducing the individuals to what is common among them, what is common to this thing with all other marketable things, and above all what is common with money itself. Something of this basic heterogeneity occurs in the cases that I mentioned, where two people mutually offer one another different kinds of goods of their inner sensitivities, where gratitude for the gift is realized in an altogether different currency and thus something of the character of a sale enters into the exchange, which is here, a priori, inappropri- ate. One purchases love with what one gives from the soul. One purchases the attraction of a person that one wants to enjoy through superior suggest- ibility and willpower, which the person either wants to feel over oneself or wants to allow to be poured into oneself. The feeling of a certain inadequacy or unworthiness arises here only if the mutual offerings serve as detached objects that one exchanges, if the mutual gratitude involves only, so to speak, the good deed, only the exchanged content itself. However, especially in the circumstances in question here, the person is still not the merchant of the self. One's qualities, the powers and functions that flow out of one, exist not only for oneself as goods on the counter, but it happens that an individual, in order to feel oneself fully, even when giving only a single thing and offering only one aspect of one's personality, in this one aspect one's personality can be complete, one's personality in the form of this particular energy, of this particular attribute, can nevertheless give totally, as Spinoza would say. Any disproportion arises only where the differentiation within the relationship is so advanced that what one gives to the other is detached from the whole of the personality. Meanwhile, where this does not happen, a remarkable pure case of the otherwise not very frequent combination arises precisely here, that gratitude includes the reaction to the good deed and to the person who did it alike. In the seemingly objective response that only pertains to the gift and which consists of another gift, it is possible through that remarkable plasticity of the soul both to offer and to accept the entirety of the subjectivity of the one person as well as that of the other.
The most profound instance of this kind exists when the general inner disposition, which is attuned toward the other in the special way called grati- tude, is not only, as it were, a broadening of the actual response of gratitude copied onto the totality of the soul, but when what we experience of goods and generosity from another is only like an incidental motive by which a predetermined relationship to the other is only activated in the inner nature of the soul. Here what we call gratitude and what had given the name to this disposition, as it were, from only one single proof, very deep under the familiar, takes on the valid form of gratitude for the object. One can say that at the deepest level it does not consist in the gift being reciprocated, but that in the
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consciousness that one cannot repay, that here something exists that the soul of the recipient changes into a particular permanent disposition toward the other and brings to consciousness a presentiment of the inner endlessness of a relationship that cannot become completely exhausted or developed through a final demonstration or activity.
This coincides with another deep-lying incommensurability that is most essential for the relationship maintained under the category of gratitude. Where we have experienced from another something worthy of gratitude, where this was 'accomplished beforehand,' we can repay this completely with no return gift or reciprocity--although such may rightly and objectively outweigh the first gift--since voluntariness exists in the first giving, which is no longer existent in the equivalent return. Since we are already ethically bound to it, the pressure to give back is there, which is nevertheless a pressure, albeit not socio-legal but moral. The first manifestation arising from the complete spontaneity of the soul has a freedom that duty, even the duty of gratitude, lacks. Kant had decreed this character of duty with a bold stroke: The fulfillment of duty and freedom are identical. There he has confounded the negative side of freedom with the positive. Seemingly, we are free to fulfill or not to fulfill the duty that we feel as ideally above us. In reality, only the latter occurs in total freedom. Fulfilling it, however, results from a mental imperative, from the force that is the inner equivalent of the legal force of society. Complete freedom lies only on the side of what is allowed, not on that of the deed to which I am brought to the thought that it is a duty--just as I am brought to reciprocating a gift on the basis that I received it. We are free only when we are prepared, and that is the basis why in the case there lies a beauty not occasioned by the offer of gratitude, a spontaneous devotion, a sprouting up or blossoming toward another out of, as it were, the virgin soil of the soul that can be matched by no substantively overwhelming gift. Here remains a residue--with reference to the concrete content of the often seemingly unjustifiable evidence--that is expressed in the feeling that we cannot reciprocate a gift at all; for a freedom lives in it that the return gift, just because it is a return gift, cannot possess. Perhaps this is the basis why some people accept something reluctantly and if possible avoid being given a gift. If doing good and gratitude simply revolved around the object, that would be incomprehensible since one would then be making it all equivalent to revenge, which would be able to dissolve the inner bond completely. In reality, however, with everyone, perhaps, it simply works by instinct that the return gift cannot contain the decisive moment, the moment of the freedom of the first gift, and that with the acceptance of it one assumes an obligation that cannot be dissolved. 60 That as a rule people are so from a strong instinct of independence and individuality is reminiscent of the fact that the situation of gratitude is readily accompanied by a note of
60 Of course this is an extreme expression whose distance from reality, however, is unavoidable in analysis, which wishes to isolate and make visible for itself alone the causal elements of the mental reality that are mixed up a thousand times, always distracting, and that exist almost only in rudiments.
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an indissoluble bond, that it is of an indelible moral quality. Once we accept a deed, a sacrifice, or favor, that never completely extinguishable inner rela- tionship can originate from it since gratitude is perhaps the single existing feeling that can be morally required and satisfied under all circumstances. If our inner reality, from within itself or as a response to an outer reality, has made it impossible for us to love, admire, or esteem anymore--aesthetically, ethically, intellectually--we can still always be ever grateful to those who have once deserved our gratitude. The soul is absolutely adaptable to this challenge, or could be so, so that perhaps a judgment against a lack of no other feeling is so rendered without mitigating circumstances as against ingratitude. Even the inward fidelity does not have the same culpability. There are relationships that, so to speak, operate from the outset with only a definite capital of feel- ings and whose investment is unavoidably accompanied by it being used up, so that its discontinuation involves no actual perfidy. But admittedly, the fact that in their beginning stages they are often not too different from the others that--to stay with the analogy--they live off of the interest and in which all the ardor and unreservedness of the giving does not diminish the capital. Admit- tedly it belongs to the most frequent errors of people to treat what is capital as interest and to form a relationship around it so that its rupture turns into a case of faithlessness. But this, then, is not an error from out of the freedom of the soul but the logical development of a fate reckoned with erroneous factors from the outset. And infidelity does not appear to be avoidable where, not the self revealing deception of the consciousness but a real change in the individuals rearranges the presuppositions of their relationship. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of human relationships rises out of the mixture of the stable and the variable elements of our nature, which is not at all to be rationalized and which is continuously shifting. If we have committed ourselves with our whole being to a binding relationship, we remain perhaps with certain aspects in the same attitude and predisposition more oriented toward the outside but also with some purely toward the inside; but another develops toward a wholly new interest, goal, or ability that completely diverts our nature as a whole into a new direction. They thus divert us from that relationship--whereby of course only the pure inwardness is meant, not the outward fulfillment of duties--with a kind of faithlessness that is neither wholly innocent since some connection to that which now must be broken still exists, nor wholly guilty since we are no longer the same persons who entered into the relationship; the subject to whom one could impute the faithlessness has vanished. Here such exoneration from out of the inner essence such as this does not enter into our feeling when our sense of gratitude is extinguished. It seems to dwell in a place within us that cannot be changed, for which we require consistency with greater claims than with a more passionate and even deeper feeling. This peculiar indissolubility of gratitude, which even in the reciprocation with a similar or greater return gift leaves a residue, can also leave it on both sides of a relationship--perhaps reverting to that freedom of the gift that lacked only the morally necessary return gift--which allows gratitude to appear just as fine as it is a solid a bond between people. In every relationship that is permanent
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in some way a thousand occasions for thanks arise, of which even the most fleeting ones of their contribution to the reciprocal bond are not allowed to be lost. It arises from their summation, in the good cases, but sometimes also in those that are amply provided with counter instances--a general frame of mind of being quite obligated (one rightly claims to be 'bound' to the other for something worthy of gratitude), which is not able to be dissolved through any individual deeds; it belongs to the, as it were, microscopic but infinitely strong threads that tie one member of society to another and thereby, ultimately, all to a firmly formed common life.
In contrast to the stability and substantial solidity that some groups form as a condition of their self-preservation, others need precisely the greatest flexibility and interchangeability of social forms; for example the one that either only tolerates its existence within a larger one or just manages only per nefas. 61 Only with the most thorough elasticity can such a society combine a firmness of its interconnections with the continual defense and offense. It must, so to speak, slip into each hole, expand according to the circumstances, and be able to coordinate, as a body in an aggregate fluid condition must assume every form that is offered to it. Thus criminal and conspiratorial gangs must acquire the ability to split up immediately and act in separate groups; sometimes they must act without conditions, sometimes be subordinate to the leader; sometimes in direct contact, sometimes in indirect contact, but always protect the same common spirit; immediately after each dispersing to immediately reorganize anew exactly in any form possible, etc. They thereby achieve self-preservation, for which reason the Romani (Gypsies) are in the habit of saying about themselves that it would be pointless to hang them since they would never die. The same has been said of the Jews. The strength of their social solidarity, in practice the very effective feeling of solidarity among them, the peculiar, if also often relaxed, closure against all non-Jews--this sociological bond probably has lost its confessional character since emancipation, only to be exchanged for that against capitalists. 62 Thus 'the invisible orga- nization' of the Jews would be just insurmountable because as soon as
61 Latin: through wickedness--ed.
62 This and what follows seem to be rationales presented by Simmel, himself of Jewish origin, of what was commonly said of social minorities such as Romani and Jews in Germany in the early twentieth century, along with the assumption that Jews became socialists in great numbers--ed.
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the power of the press first and then that of the capital is freed from the hate against the Jews, their equivalent justification would rise up in the end; if Jewish social organization would not go into a decline but would only be deprived of its sociopolitical organization, it would still gain strength again in its original confessional form of association. This sociopolitical game has been already repeated locally and could also repeat everywhere.
Indeed, one could find the variability of the individual Jew, their wondrous ability in the most manifold tasks, and their nature to adapt to the most changed conditions life--one could describe this as a mir- roring of the social group form in the form of the individual. Quite immediately the flexibility of the Jews in socio-economic relationships has been described exactly as a vehicle for their resistance. The bet- ter English worker is not at all driven away from the wage that seems necessary to him for his standard: he goes on strike or does rather substandard work or seeks some credit of a different kind rather than accept a wage for his craft below the standards that have been set. How- ever the Jew rather accepts the lowest wage, as if not working at all, and thus is not acquainted with the quiet satisfaction with an achieved standard, but strives tirelessly beyond it: no minimum is too low, no maximum enough. This range of variation, which obviously extends from the individual life into that of the group, is as much the means of self-preservation of the Jew as the inflexibility and immovability simply are in the example of the English worker. Now whether the first sug- gested claim about the history of Judaism is substantively true or not, its presupposition is instructive for us: that the self-preservation of a social entity could occur directly through the change of its apparent form or its material basis, and that its continuation rests precisely on its changeability.
These two manners of social self-preservation enter into peculiarly characteristic contradictions through their relationship with wider sociological conceptions. If then the preservation of the group is very closely bound up with the maintenance of a certain stratum in its existence and uniqueness--the highest, the widest, the middle--the first two cases need more inflexibility in the form of social life, the last more flexibility. As I have already emphasized, aristocracies in general tend to be conservative. For if they really are what the word, aristocracy, means--the reign of the best--they are the most adequate expression of the real dissimilarity among people. In this case--about which I am not examining whether it is not almost always realized only very
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partially--the spur for revolutionary movements is missing: the lack of fit between the inner qualification of persons and their social place, the exit point for the greatest human achievements and bravery as well as for the most absurd human undertakings. Once supposing this favorable case of aristocracy, a strict adherence of its total existence to forms and contents is necessary for its overall preservation since every experimental change threatens that delicate and rare proportionality between qualification and position either in reality or for the feeling of the person concerned, and thus would provide the stimulus for a principled transformation. In an aristocracy, the essential cause of that, however, will still be that absolute justice hardly ever exists in the governing relationships, that, rather, the reign of the few over the many tends to be raised on a wholly different foundation from that of an ideal suitability in that relationship. Under these circumstances the rulers will have the greatest interest in giving no cause for restless and innovative movements since every such movement would stimulate the just or only alleged claims of those being ruled. There would be the danger--and this is decisive for our line of thought--that not only would there be an exchange of persons but the whole constitution would be changed. As soon as structures for self-preservation are considered cautiously and they can only operate through a latent or real defense, they avoid progressive development. For during periods of development, a being expends its energy inwardly and has none free for defense. For every development, its success is something problematic, according to its inner as well as its outer chances, and therefore also a being for which how it exists does not matter so much as the fact that it exists will cultivate no impulse for development. Thus it is that in a fundamental relationship that age normally has the leading place in aristocracies, as does youth in democracies. But age has a physiologically grounded tendency toward conservatism; it can still only 'conserve' itself and can still allow itself to take a chance with the dangers of ever advancing development only in cases of an exceptional reserve of forces. And yet on the other hand, where age in practice enjoys prestige and posi- tion of power, conservatism will prevail: the young, at whose cost age now has its privilege--e. g. , the frequently higher age limit for holding office in aristocracies--can only hope to enter into office only under similarly existing conditions. In such a context the aristocratic form of constitution preserves its status for itself best with the greatest immobil- ity possible; and this in no way holds only for political groups but for ecclesiastical ones, interest groups, for informal and social groupings,
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that lend themselves to aristocratic formation. As soon as this has hap- pened, everywhere a strict conservatism becomes favorable not only for the temporary personal existence of a reign but also for its formal, principled preservation. Precisely the history of the reform movements in aristocratic constitutions makes this clear enough. The adaptation to newly existing social forces or ideals, as occurs through a mitigation of exploitation or subjugation, the legal establishment of privileges instead of arbitrary interpretations, and the lifting of the law and a good por- tion of the lower classes--this adaptation, insofar as it is conceded voluntarily, serves its goal not in what would thereby be changed but on the contrary in what would be thereby conserved. The lessening of aristocratic prerogatives is the conditio sine qua non63 for rescuing the aristocratic regime at all. But if one had allowed the movement to proceed in the first place, these concessions are mostly no longer suf- ficient. Every reform tends to reveal new things that need reform, and the movement that was introduced for the preservation of the existing order leads down a slippery slope either towards its overthrow or, if the revived claims cannot succeed, to a radical reaction that reverses the changes that had already been put in place. This danger, which exists in every modification and flexibility of an aristocratic constitution--that the concession granted for its preservation leads under its own weight to a total revolution--allows the conservatism a` outrance64 and the existing form of defense in unconditional rigidity and inflexibility to appear as the good one for the social form of aristocracy.
Where the form of the group is not set by the prominence of a numerically small stratum but by the widest stratum and its autonomy, its self-preservation will likewise benefit from stability and motionless steadfastness. Thus it comes about that the broad masses, insofar as they serve as a permanent vehicle of a social unity, have a very rigid and immobile disposition. They diverge most sharply from the actu- ally currently assembled multitude that in its mood and decisions is extremely labile and changes with the most fleeting impulses from one extreme of behavior to another. Where the multitude is not directly sensually stimulated and joins a nervous fluctuation through mutually exercised stimulation and suggestion, an uprooting of firm control
63 Latin: indispensable condition--ed.
64 French: in the extreme--ed.
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which exposes the multitude to every current impulse, where rather its deeper and more enduring character becomes effective, there it follows, as it were, the law of inertia: it does not alter its condition of rest or movement by itself but only under the influence of new positive forces. Therefore movements that are borne by great masses and left on their own consequently go to their extreme, while on the other hand an equilibrium of conditions, once attained, is not easily set aside, as far as the masses are concerned. It corresponds to the practical instinct of the mass and meets the change of circumstances and stimulations of itself by means of a substantial firmness and intransigence in form, instead of protection through flexible adaptation and quickly instituted changes in its behavior. It becomes essential for political constitutions that the basis for their social form rest on the broadest and similarly qualified stratum, mostly among agricultural peoples--the ancient Roman peasantry and the ancient German communities of freemen. Here the behavior of their forms is prejudged by the content of the social interests. The farmer is conservative a priori; his business requires long time frames, durable equipment, persistent management, and tenacious steadfastness. The unpredictability of favorable weather, on which he depends, inclines him toward a certain fatalism that is manifested with respect to the external forces more by endurance than by avoidance; his technology cannot at all respond to market changes by such quick qualitative modifications as industry and business are accustomed to do. Added to that, the farmer above all wishes to have peace in his state and--what politicians of different times have known and exploited--it matters little to him, in contrast, what form this state takes. Thus here the technical conditions also create groups, the preservation of whose form coincides with that of the broadest agricultural stratum and with the disposition to achieve this preservation through firmness and tenac- ity, but not through instability in their life processes.
It is quite different where the middle class assumed control and the social form of the group rises and falls with its preservation. The middle class, however, has an upper and lower limit, and indeed of a kind that continuously picks up individuals both from the upper and from the lower classes and loses individuals to both. Thus it is stamped with a fluctuating, and the suitability of its behavior will thus be largely a suitability of adaptations, variations, and accommodations by which the once unavoidable movement of the totality is at least so directed or so encountered that the essential form and force remain preserved
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amidst all changes of circumstances. One can describe the sociological form of a group, which is characterized by the breadth and prevalence of a middle class, as that of continuity; such a one subsists neither in a really continuous, thus unranked equality of individuals nor in the constitution of the group out of an upper stratum and a lower stratum that is abruptly cut off from the upper. The middle class actually brings to these two a wholly new sociological element; it is not only a third added to the existing two, which would so behave toward each of these two approximately and only in quantitative shadings as these two would toward each other. Rather the new emphasis is that the middle stratum has an upper and a lower limit, that it exists with this continuous exchange with both other strata, and a blurring of limits and continu- ous transitions are generated by this uninterrupted fluctuation. For an actual continuity of social life does not come about through individuals being placed in positions with so little distance from one another--this would still always produce a discontinuous structure--but only by circulating separate individuals through higher and lower positions: Only thus will the distance between the strata be bridged by a real continuity. The upper and lower condition must be able to meet in the fate of the individual, so that an actual interchange between upper and lower would reveal the sociological picture. And this, not just a simple in-between condition, brings the middle class to reality. It takes a little consideration to realize that this gradualness across gradations must also hold for the degrees within the middle class itself. The continuity of positions in relation to prestige, property, activity, education etc. , lies not only in the minuteness of the differences that they, arranged on some objectively set scale, demonstrate, but in the frequency of the change that leads one and the same person through a multiplicity of such positions and thus brings about, as it were, continuous and vary- ing personal encounters of objectively different situations. Under these circumstances the general social picture will take on the character of something elastic: the dominant middle class lends it an easy mobility of members, so that the self-preservation of the group is carried out through the change of outer or inner circumstances and attacks not so much through firmness and inflexibility in the cohesion of its members as through ready adaptability and quick transformation. The shear fact of the diversity within a society gives its individuals a greater freedom of movement without its social self-preservation being thereby threat- ened. The intolerant conservatism of the Athenian majority, to which Socrates fell victim, was justified by the idea that the homogeneity of the
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population would make any disruption especially dangerous. With a larger number of manifold dominant and subordinated strata, a prob- lematic, indeed even a subversive, idea may be somewhat propagated in many minds--there are so many inhibiting forces; diverse tendencies lie between such a movement and the decision of the whole or of the influential factors that the disruption does not seize the whole so quickly. But where neither such immediate variety nor an officialdom based on a division of labor exists, an incipient disruption somewhere easily takes root in the whole. Thus the instinct of self-preservation will recommend to the whole the suppression of movements and agitations on the part of individuals that hold the chance of social dangers. On the other hand, a development within early Christianity manifested a formally similar context. The first communities protected the spirit of their com- munity with an extraordinary rigor and purity that knew no compro- mise with moral shortcomings or lapses when under persecution; a completely uniform composition of members in moral and religious matters corresponded to this stability in the life of the whole. But in the end the multiple lapses in the era of persecution forced the church finally to relax the absoluteness of its demands and grant membership to a whole spectrum of personalities who were more or less perfect. However, the inner differentiation meant at the same time a growing elasticity and accommodation on the part of the church as a whole; this new technique of its self-preservation, by which it learned finally to be satisfied with the changeable relationships with all manner of life forces, was associated with the break-up of its inner homogeneity and with the tolerance with which it allows its members to take on an unlimited variety of value-levels. It is interesting that the timelessness of the church principle is realized as much by a technique of unwaver- ing rigidity as unlimited flexibility. The self-preservation of the church stands, as it were, at so abstract a level that it can be served indis- criminately by one or the other means. It can be shown quite generally that a group with very many positions built on one another, on a nar- row scale, must have the character of a distinct changeability and variability if the worst state of health and breakdown should not result. In a great variety of possible situations it is much more unlikely from the start that everyone is placed at the right place right away than in a situation that places each person in a large group that embraces many sorts of games. Where a group includes only a few, sharply distinct life circumstances, the individuals are as a rule cultivated for their sphere from the outset. Such constitutions can create a correspondence between
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dispositions and places of individuals whereby the individual spheres are relatively large and their demands and opportunities are broad enough to provide them a generally suitable place through inheritance, upbringing, or through the example of specific individuals. The con- stitution of the social order thus manifests, as it were, a harmony, pre-stabilized or set by cultivation, between the qualities or dispositions of the individual and the individual's place in the social totality. But where the sharply bounded strata have separated from each other in a great number of gradations of circumstances, thanks to the existence of a broad middle class, the mentioned forces cannot clearly predispose the individuals to the position where they belong; thus the order also into which the individual correctly and harmoniously entered must be, as it were, empirically achieved a posteriori: the individual must have the possibility of transferring from an unsuitable position to a suitable one. So in this case the self-preservation of the group form requires an ability to leave the group readily, a continuing correction, an ability to change positions, but also a malleability of the latter, so that particular individuals can also find particular positions. Thus, in order to preserve itself, one group with a dominant middle class requires a fully different behavior from a group with an aristocratic leadership or a group with- out a formation of gradations altogether. Admittedly, the changeability that the dominance of the middle manifestations lends a group can also rise up to a destructive character. Thus the form type--the simul- taneous nearness and distance--which the middle or mixed elements possess compared to the more polar ones, incites opposition and is apparently effective because the children from mixed marriages are often the most dangerous opponents of aristocracy. The observation is handed down from antiquity that tyrants who overthrow aristocratic governments were mainly of mixed-rank parenthood. Thus in South America uprisings are fomented incomparably less often by Blacks and Indians than by mestizos and mulattos; and so are the children of Jewish-Christian marriages often especially sharp critics as much of the Jewish as of the German ways of life. But there is more. What the changeability and variability is in the group-forms in succession, the division of labor is in their juxtaposition. If among them it is a matter of the group as a whole adapting itself to the different life conditions appearing successively by means of corresponding changes in its form, in the division of labor it is a matter of developing it for the various, simultaneously existing requirements that correspond to the differences
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of their individual members. The whole multiplicity and gradation of occupations and positions that we highlighted above is evidently pos- sible only with a division of labor; and corresponding to this as its counterpart is the variability in forms of social life that is a character- istic of the middle class and its predominance. Neither the aristocracy nor the free peasantry tends toward a greater division of labor. The aristocracy does not because every division of labor brings with it gra- dations in rank that are inconsistent with status consciousness and the unity of the stratum; the peasantry does not because its technology hardly requires or allows for it. But now what is peculiar is that the quality of variability and division of labor that links them together objectively and within those who bear them sometimes work directly against one another with respect to the self-preservation of the group. This arises on the one hand, already from the previously mentioned fact that a multiplicity and long-term gradation of positions--which emerges precisely from the division of labor--leads to all kinds of dif- ficulties and doubts, since an easy maneuverability and flexibility within the social elements do not come about readily. This works against the dangers that arise from the thoroughgoing division of labor: the frag- mentation, the one-sidedness, the discrepancy between the abilities and position of the individual. On the other hand, the complementing circumstances of the division of labor and variation in relation to the preservation of groups are thus presented. There will be many cases in which the changeability of the middle class produces insecurity, uncertainty, and rootlessness. This is now paralyzed by the division of labor since it links the elements of the groups extraordinarily close to one another. Small groups of primitive peoples, however centrally they may be organized, nevertheless easily split asunder because ultimately any segment of them is equally capable of survival; each can do by itself what the other can, and thus, because of the their difficulties in eking out an existence, they depend on external relationship. However, this is not thus a special diminution of this unity; they can be joined together again completely at will. In contrast, the solidarity of a large cultural group rests on its division of labor. Out of necessity one is in need of another; the disintegration of the group would leave each individual wholly helpless. Thus, the division of labor, with its linking together of individuals with each other, works against variability when it becomes harmful to the preservation of the group. That will already be noticeable in smaller circles. A group of settlers will in general be
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very flexible and diverse; one time it will become centralized, another time formed very freely, depending on its being rather pressured from outside or having some leeway. It will often leave the leadership to changing persons as interests change; one time it will link up with another group, at another time it must seek its welfare in the greatest possible isolation and with the greatest possible autonomy. Admittedly these variations in its sociological form will always support its self- preservation in individual cases; but on the whole they occasion conflict, insecurity, and fission. But in contrast, a developed division of labor arises strongly among them since on the one hand it makes the indi- vidual dependent on the group, and on the other hand it gives the group a heightened interest to hold on to the individual.
The readily changeable nature of group life, its propensity toward changes of a formal and personal kind, was in all the cases consid- ered so far an adaptation to what was necessary for life: a bending in order not to break, necessary as long as the substantial firmness, off of which each destructive force generally rebounds, is not at hand. With its variability, the group responds to the change in circumstances and compensates for it so that the result is its own continued existence. But now it can be asked whether such variability, such continuity through such changing and often contrasting conditions actually serves the preservation of the group only as a reaction to the change of external conditions, or whether its innermost principle of existence does not also to some extent present the same requirement. Completely apart from what variations in its behavior the outer or inner causes elicit, is not the strength and health of its life processes, as a development of purely inner energies, perhaps bound up with a certain change in its activity, a shift in its interests, a more frequent reorganization of its form? We know about individuals that they need changing stimuli for their survival, that they maintain vigor and unity in their existence not by being always the same mechanically in their outer and inner condi- tion and activity, but that they are designed from within, as it were, to prove their unity in the change not only of action and experience but also in the change within each of these. Thus it is not impossible that the consolidating bond of the group needs alternating stimuli in order to remain alert and strong. An indication of such an activity of the thing lies from the outset in certain phenomena that present a close fusion between a social entity as such and a certain content or its formation. Such a fusion conceivably appears when a substantive or otherwise particular condition exists unchanged for very long, and
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there is a danger that, as the social entity is nevertheless finally trans- formed by some external event, it draws the social entity itself into its own destruction--exactly in the manner that religious ideas often grow together with moral sentiments by being interrelated over a long time, and by virtue of this association, if the religious ideas are eliminated through enlightenment, the moral norms can be uprooted with it too. Thus a formerly wealthy family often disintegrates if it is impoverished, but so do many poor if they suddenly become wealthy. And the worst internal factionalism and inner turmoil always exist in a formerly free state if it loses its freedom (I am reminded of Athens after the Mace- donian era), but this also happens in a formerly despotically governed one as soon as it suddenly becomes free, which the history of revolu- tions proves often enough. It appears as though a certain changeability in the composition or formation of groups protects them against their inner unity being bound up with them, as it were, rigidly; the latter happens as the deepest vital nerve of the unified social entity is threat- ened immediately along with a still impending change. In contrast to this, every frequent change appears to serve as a kind of inoculation, the bonds between the most essential and the less vital characteristics remain looser, and the disruption of the less vital is generally a lesser danger for the preservation of the group unity.
We are readily inclined to view peace, harmony of interests, and concord to be the essence of social self-preservation, but every opposition as a disturbance of the unity, whose conservation is at issue, and as the unfruitful exhaustion of powers that could be directed to the positive construction of the organization of the group. Still the other opinions seem to be correct, which explain a certain rhythm between peace and conflict as more preservative of the life-form and in fact, as it were, according to two dimensions of that: thus the conflict of the group as a whole against external enemies in alternation with peaceful epochs, similar to the conflict of competitors, of parties, of opposing tendencies of every kind next to the realities of mutuality and harmony; the former alternates between harmonious and contradictory phenomena one after another, the latter placed one next to the other. The motive for both in the final analysis is one and the same, but realized in different ways. The struggle against a power that exists outside the group brings its unity and indispensability into consciousness most forcefully to preserve it undisturbed. It is a fact of the greatest sociological importance, one of the few that holds almost without exception for group formations of every kind, that the shared opposition unifying against a third party
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works under all circumstances, and does so in fact with much greater certainty than does the shared friendly relationship with a third party. Probably there is hardly a group--familial, ecclesiastical, economic, political, or of whatever kind--that could go completely without this cement. It seems as though for us humans, whose whole mental nature is constructed on a sensitivity toward difference, a feeling of separa- tion must always exist next to that of unity in order to make the latter perceptible and effective. But now this process, as mentioned, can also take place within the group itself. Aversions and antagonisms among the elements of a group toward one another can nevertheless bring the existent unity of the totality to the sharpest effectiveness; while they cut short, as it were, the threads of the social bonds, they simply stretch them and thereby make them visible. Admittedly, this is also the way toward allowing them to tear apart; but short of that, those contrary movements, which are indeed possible only on the basis of an underlying solidarity and close relations, will bring that basis to a stronger function- ing, regardless of whether it is also accompanied by such a heightened consciousness of it. Thus attacks and assaults among the members of a community lead to the mandate of the law that should restrain them and, although they rise only on the basis of the hostile egoism of an individual, nevertheless brings to the totality its togetherness, solidarity, and common interest to consciousness and expression. Thus economic competition is an extremely close interrelation that brings the com- petitors and the buyers closer to one another and makes them more dependent on them and also on one another than if competition were excluded from the start. So the wish to avoid hostility and mitigate its consequences leads above all to a unification (e. g. industrial and political cartels) to all kinds of practices of economic and other trade that, though it arises only on the basis of a real or possible antagonism, still brings positive support to the cohesion of the whole. A special chapter of this book is devoted to discussing the sociology of conflict, whose power for the self-preservation of the society was, therefore, indicated here only in its general reality. Opposition and conflict in their importance for the self-preservation of the group are a characteristic example of the value that the variability of the group life and the change in its forms of activity possess for this purpose.
Although so little of the antagonism generally ever dies out completely and everywhere, nevertheless, there is so much in its nature always to form a spatially and temporally based segment within the scope of the forces that band together and
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uniformly harmonize. By its own nature, the antagonism represents one of the stimuli for change by which the principle of the unity of society evidently desires from its innermost necessities of life; perhaps, it desires because here as everywhere what remains can only become apparent in relation to what is changing and thereby to come into conscious force. Social unity is the form or the continuity-factor, as it might be called, that proves itself to be the fortress amidst all changes in its own particular development, its content, and its relationships to the material interests and experiences, and it proves all the more, the livelier the change is even in the latter. The deepening, solidity, and unity of, for example, the marital bond is certainly, ceteris paribus, a function of the variety and variability of the destinies, the experience of which derives from the formal permanence of the marital community of interest. It is the nature of things human that the life situation of its individual moments is the existence of their opposite. The variety of formations and the change of content are essential for the self-preservation of the group not only in the degree to which perceptions differ essentially, which allow the unity of it that contrasts the variations coming at them, but above all because this unity always comes back the same, while the formations, interests, and destinies, from which our consciousness separates them, are different each time. It thereby gains, against all disruptions, the same prospect of firmness and effectiveness that truth possesses against error. So little does truth possess in and of itself, in individual cases, an advantage or mystical power of self-assertion over error, so little is its ultimate victory consequently still probable, that it is only one while errors over the same matter are countless. Thus it is to be assumed from the outset that it comes back amidst the wavering of opinions more frequently, indeed not more frequently than error in general, but nevertheless as every particular error. Thus the unity of the social group has the chance of deepening and strengthening itself against all disrup- tions and vicissitudes, because the latter are always of a different kind, but the former in every occurrence of it, always comes back the same as before. By virtue of this situation of the matter, the favorable results of social variability for the preservation of the group mentioned above can remain in existence, without which the fact of change at all would have to change the principle of unity into a serious competition.
CHAPTER NINE
SPACE AND THE SPATIAL ORDERING OF SOCIETY
Among the most frequent degenerations of the human causal impulse is the cessation of the formal conditions without which particular events cannot occur for maintaining their positive, productive motives. The typical example is the power of time--an idiom that forever defrauds us of researching the actual grounds for the mitigation or the cooling off of sentiment, grounds for processes of mental healing or firmly established habits. With the significance of space it is frequently no different. When an aesthetic theory declares it the essential task of the plastic arts to make space perceptible for us, it misunderstands that our interest holds only for the particular shapes of things, but not space in general or spatiality, which constitutes only their conditio sine qua non, and neither its special essence nor its generating factor. If an interpre- tation of history presents the spatial factor in the foreground to such an extent that it would understand the greatness or the smallness of the realm, the crowdedness or dispersion of populations, the mobility or stability of the masses etc. as the, as it were, motives radiating out from space to the whole of historical life, then here too the essential spatial preoccupation of all these constellations runs into danger of being confused with their positive functional causes. Indeed kingdoms cannot have just any size whatever; indeed people cannot be near to or far from one another without space lending its form to it, any more than those processes that one attributes to time can occur outside of time. 1 But the contents of these forms still take on the distinctive feature of their fates only through other contents; space remains always the form, in itself ineffectual, in whose modifications the real energies
1 When Simmel was writing, most Western countries were still kingdoms, often significantly so. Constitutional monarchies, of varying levels of democratic practice, in 1908 included Denmark, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria-Hungary, and Belgium. True monarchies included Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Many large nations outside Europe were "dominions" of monarchies: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, and Indonesia. Only the United States and by this time also France were fully outside the realm of monarchical government--ed.
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? are indeed revealed, but only in the way language expresses thought processes that proceed certainly in words but not through words. A geo- graphical expanse of so and so many square miles does not make a great kingdom, but what does is the psychological powers that hold the inhabitants of such a realm together politically from a governing center. The form of spatial nearness or distance does not generate the peculiar phenomena of neighborliness or alienation, however inevitably it may seem. Rather even these are facts generated purely by psychological contents, the course of which stands in relationship to its spatial form in principle no differently than a battle or a telephone conversation to that of theirs--thus doubtlessly these processes too can be realized then only under quite specific spatial conditions. Not space, but the psycho- logically consequential organization and concentration of its parts have social significance. This synthesis of the role of space is a specifically psychological function that is certainly individually modified with every apparently 'natural' reality, but the categories from which it originates of course comply, more or less vividly, with the immediacy of space. For the social formation in the medieval cities of Flanders three such bases were cited: the 'natural commons,' i. e. the union of habitations under the common protection of rampart and ditch; the city magistracy, by which the community became a legal person; the church association of inhabitants in parishes. These are three wholly different themes that proceed to a combination of one and the same collection of persons within one and the same piece of terrain. That all three occupy the same district in such undisturbed togetherness, just as light and sound waves flow through the same space, effects its collective composition as of a piece, without the outward clarity of the function of 'rampart and ditch' giving preference basically to this theme over the others. That space is in general only an activity of the psyche, only the human way of binding unbounded sensory affections into integrated outlooks, is specifically reflected in the need of psychological functions for the individual historical forms of space.
In spite of these facts the emphasis on the spatial importance of things and processes is not unjustified. This is so because these often actually take their course in such a way that the formal, positive or negative con- dition of the spatiality comes up especially for consideration and we possess the clearest documentation of real forces in it. If in the end a chemical process or a game of chess is likewise bound to relativities of space, just as the course of war or just as the sales of agricultural products, then indeed the line of vision that pursues the interest of knowledge with
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? regard to the one or the other case differentiates so methodically that the question regarding the conditions and determinants of space and place falls at one time quite outside of them, at another time is quite definitely included. Social interaction among human beings is--apart from everything else it is--also experienced as a realization space. If a number of persons inside certain spatial boundaries live isolated from one another, then each of them simply fills their own immediate space with their substance and their activity, and between this space and the space right next to them is unfilled space; practically stated: nothing. In the moment in which two of these enter into social interaction, the space between them appears filled and enlivened. Of course this only rests on the double meaning of betweenness: that a relationship between two elements, which though only one, is in the one and in the other immanently an occurring movement or modification between them, in the sense of spatial intervention. Whatever errors this ambiguity might otherwise lead to, it is nevertheless of deep significance in this sociologi- cal matter. The betweenness as a merely functional reciprocity, whose content continues in each of its personal bearers, is also actually realized here as a claim of the space existing between these two; it always takes place actually between both points of space, with regard to which one and the other has a place of theirs designated for it, filled by each alone. Kant defines space simply as "the possibility of being together"--this then is sociological; interaction makes the formerly empty and null into something for us; it fills it, in that it makes it possible. Association, in the various types of interaction among individuals, brought about different possibilities of being together--in the psychological sense; some of them, however, are realized in such a way that the form of space, in which this typically occurs for all of them, justifies a particular emphasis for the purposes of our inquiry. So in the interest of penetrating the forms of association, we pursue the meaning that the spatial circumstances of an association possess for their particular determination and develop- ments in a sociological sense.
I. First are several foundational qualities of spatial form with which forms of social life must reckon.
A. To this belongs that which one can call the exclusivity of space. Just as there is only one single universal space, of which all individual spaces are portions, so each portion of space has a kind of uniqueness for which there is hardly an analogy. To think of a specifically located portion of space in the plural is complete nonsense, and yet this makes it possible for a plurality of fully identical exemplars to be constituted
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? simultaneously from different objects; because then by each occupying a different portion of space from which one cannot at any time coin- cide with another, there is indeed variety, although their properties are absolutely indistinguishable. This uniqueness of space imparts itself then to the objects, in so far as they are presented as merely space-filling, and this becomes for praxis important for them to the highest degree, from which we tend precisely to emphasize and exploit the importance of space. Thus at the most basic level the three-dimensional nature of space for our purposes is the condition for filling it and making it pro- ductive. To the degree in which a social structure is blended or, so to speak, in solidarity with a certain expanse of ground, it has a character of uniqueness or exclusivity that is likewise not attainable in any other way. Certain types of bond can be realized in their complete sociological form only in such a way that inside the spatial realm, which is filled by one of its exemplars, there is no room for a second. Of others, on the other hand, any number whatever--sociologically similarly consti- tuted--can fill the same sphere, in that they are more-or-less mutually permeable; because they have no intrinsic relationship to space, they cannot also result in spatial collisions. For the former, the single fully sufficient example is the state. Of it, it has been said, it would not be one association among many but the association dominating all, thus the only one of its kind. This conception, whose correctness for the whole essence of the state is beyond debate, holds in every case with regard to the spatial character of the state. The type of bond between the individuals whom the state constitutes or who constitute the state is bound up with the territory to such an extent that a second state contemporaneous with it, even of the same kind, is fully unthinkable. To a certain extent the municipality has the same character: within the boundaries of a city there can be only that city, and if by chance a second nevertheless arises inside the same boundaries, there are not two cities on the same ground and soil but on two territories, formerly united but now separate. However, this exclusivity is not as absolute as that of the state. The significant and functional area of a city--inside a state--ends though not at its geographical boundary, but, more or less noticeably, it extends out ripple-like over the whole land with cultural, economic, political currents, while the general administration of the state allows the strengths and interests of every part to coalesce with those of the whole. From this perspective the community loses its exclusive character and expands functionally over the whole state in such a way that this is the common sphere of influence for the, so to speak, ideal
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? extension of all individual communities. In that each reaches out over its immediate boundaries, it meets with all the others effective in the same total area, so that no one is the only one in it, and each one maintained a wider sphere, in which it is not alone, around the exclusivity of its narrower one. Also within the individual city this local form of group life can recur. If episcopal sees developed from the core of German communities, then the free community was never in possession of the whole city boundary; rather there existed next to it a bishop who had a comprehensive dominion of independent people behind him, ruled by their own laws. Further, there still existed in most cities a lord's court of the king with a separately administered court community, finally yet independent monasteries and Jewish communities that lived under their own laws. There was then in ancient times communities in the cities, but no genuine municipalities. Unavoidably, however, there developed from spatial proximity amalgamative and incorporative effects that, before all these divisions merged into the essence of a city, first pro- duced an expression in the collectively shared peace of the city. With that, all the inhabitants were given a common law protective of their specifically personal rights; i. e. the legal sphere of each district would reach out beyond its demarcation (inside of which each community was the only one of its kind), extend in a manner equally for all to a total area including all, and lose local exclusivity with this expansion of its operative nature. This pattern constitutes the transition to the further stage of the spatial relationship of groups, where, because they are not bound to a definite expanse, they do not possess even the claim to uniqueness inside any one of them. So there could exist side by side on the territory of a city any number of sociologically quite similarly produced guilds. Each was indeed the guild of the entire city; they did not divide the given expanse quantitatively, but functionally; they did not collide spatially because they were not, as sociological formations, spatial, even though determined by locality. By their contents they had the exclusivity of the accomplishments of spatial expansion, inasmuch as for every particular craft there was just one guild in the city and no room for a second. By their form, however, countless structures of this type could, without opposition, occupy the same space. The most extreme pole of this continuum is exemplified by the church, at least when it, as does the Catholic Church, lays claim to unlimited exten- sion as well as freedom from any limitation to locality. Nevertheless, several religions of this type could find themselves, e. g. , in the same city. The Catholic church would be no less 'the city's Catholic church'--i. e.
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? standing in a particular organizationally local relationship to the city as a unity--than correspondingly that of any other religion. The principle of the church is non-spatial and therefore, although reaching out over every area, not precluded by any similarly formed structure. There is within the spatial a counterpart to the temporal opposition of the eternal and the timeless: the latter by its nature is not affected by the question of the now or earlier or later and is therefore indeed at every moment in time accessible or current; the former is precisely a tempo- ral concept, namely of endless and unbroken time. The corresponding difference in the spatial, for which we have no similarly simple expres- sions, is formed on the one hand by the supra-spatial structures that have, by their own nature, no relationship to space, but then simply an equable relationship to all individual points of it; on the other hand those who enjoy their equable relationship to all spatial points not as equable indifference, but actually as bare possibility, as generically real and essential solidarity with the space. The purest type of the former is obviously the church, and of the latter, the state: between the two move intermediate phenomena, some of which I have alluded to; a particular light may fall on the formal nature of many kinds of social structures, therefore, from their level on the scale that leads from the completely territorially fixed and the exclusiveness following from that, to the completely supra-spatial and the possibility following from that of a co-dominium of many similar ones over the same section of space. Thus the proximity or distance, the exclusivity or multiplicity, which the relationship of the group to its land exhibits, is often the root and symbol of its structure.
B. A further quality of space that vitally affects patterns of social interaction is found in space dividing up for our practical use into por- tions that operate as units and--as cause as well as effect therefrom--are surrounded by boundaries. Now the configurations of the surfaces of the earth may appear to us to mark the boundaries where we are enrolled in the limitlessness of space, or purely ideal lines may divide similarly constituted portions of the land as a watershed, on which this side of and the other side of each little portion is gravitating to a different center: in all cases we comprehend the space, which a social group in some sense fills, as a unit that the unity of the group likewise expresses and bears, just as it is carried by it. The frame, the self-contained bound- ary of a structure, has a very similar meaning for the social group as for an artwork. Regarding this, the frame exercises the two functions that are actually only the two sides of a single one: separating the work
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? of art from and associating it with the surrounding world; the frame announces that inside of it there is a world subject to its own norms, a world that is not drawn into the determinants and dynamics of the surrounding world; while it symbolizes the self-sufficiency of the artwork, at the same time by its very nature it highlights the reality and imprint of the surroundings. So a society, in that its existential space is encom- passed by keenly conscious borders, is thereby characterized as one also internally cohesive; and conversely: the interacting unity, the functional relationship of each element to each acquires its spatial expression in the framing boundary. There is probably nothing that demonstrates the power particularly of the cohesiveness of the state than that this socio- logical centripetalism, which however is in the end only a psychological coherence of personalities, grows up into a meaningfully experienced structure of a firmly circumscribing boundary line. It is rarely made clear how wondrously now the extensity of space accommodates the intensity of the sociological relationships, how the continuity of space, precisely because it contains subjectively no absolute boundary of any kind, simply allows then such a subjectivity to prevail throughout. As far as nature is concerned, every boundary placement is arbitrary, even in the case of an insular situation, because indeed in principle even the sea can be 'taken possession of. ' Precisely on account of this lack of spatial prejudice in nature, the sharpness, in spite of its prevailing unconditionality, of the physical boundary once it is fixed makes the power of social association and its necessity, originating internally, espe- cially vivid. For that reason the consciousness of being inside borders is also perhaps not the strongest with regard to the so-called natural boundaries (mountains, rivers, seas, deserts), but rather precisely solely with political borders, which lie simply on a geometrical line between neighbors. And in fact precisely because here dislocations, expansions, migrations, mergers are more obvious, because the structure at its edge hits upon vital, psychologically functional borders from which not only passive oppositions but very active repulsions come. Every such border signifies defense and offense; or more correctly perhaps: it is the spa- tial expression of a standard relationship between two neighbors, for which we have no entirely standard expression and which we perhaps can identify as the condition of neutrality for a defense and offense, as a condition of tension in which both lie latent, be it then developing or not.
And with that it is obviously not denied that the psychological border placement in every case would be facilitated and emphasized at those
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? natural territorial enclosures; indeed space often acquires, through the arrangement of its ground surfaces, divisions that color in a unique manner the relationships of the inhabitants among themselves and with those on the outside. The best known example is formed by the mountain dwellers with their characteristic merging into one of a sense of freedom and conservatism, of reserved behavior towards one another and passionate attachment to the land, which creates an extraordinarily strong bond between them. 2 The conservatism in the mountain valleys is explained very simply by the impediment of interaction with the outside world and the resulting lack of incentives for making changes; where the mountain context does not exercise this prohibitive effect, as in several regions of Greece, the conservative tendency does not in any way prevail. It has then only negative inducements, in contrast perhaps to other geographical determinants with the same result: the Nile offers the inhabitants along its banks, on the one hand, an extraordinary regularity, which they can count on, and the activity, which is necessary for the utilization of it. On the other hand, the fertility of its valley is so great that the population, once settled there, has no inducement to unsettled movements. These very positive elements stamp the region with a uniformity of ever-repeated life contents, bind them as if to the regularity of a machine, and have for centuries frequently forced upon the Nile Valley a conservative rigidity, in a way that was not at all achiev- able on the coasts of the Aegean, surely for geographical reasons.
The concept of boundary is in all human affairs of the utmost impor- tance among them, although its meaning is not always a sociological one; because it indicates often enough only that the sphere of a personality has found a limit to power or intelligence, to the capacity to suffer or enjoy--but without then the sphere of another having settled at this limit and with its own boundary having determined more noticeably that of the first. This latter, the sociological boundary, implies an entirely
2 This passion for the homeland, which is straightforwardly manifest among the mountain dwellers as a typical 'homesickness' and is immediately a purely individual affect, goes back perhaps to the conspicuous differentiating of the land that has to fasten consciousness strongly to it and to the uniqueness of its shape, often precisely to that small patch of earth that belongs to the individual or that one has inhabited. There is no intrinsic reason why mountain dwellers should love their homeland more than lowland dwellers. However, emotional life everywhere blends with the distinctively incomparable as a singularly felt formation in an especially close and effective way, therefore more with an old, angular, irregular city than with the pole-straight modern, more with the mountains in which each portion of the land manifests an entirely individual, unrec- ognizable shape than with the plains whose sections are all the same.
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? unique interaction. Each of the two elements affects the other, in that one sets the boundary for the other, but the content of this influence is simply the qualification beyond this boundary, thus still not in general meant to or able to affect the other. When this general concept of mutual limitation is drawn from the spatial boundary, this latter is still, understood more deeply, only the crystallization or removal of the real psychological boundary-establishing processes alone. It is not the lands, not the properties, not the city district and the rural district that set one another's boundaries, but the residents or owners performing the reciprocal action that I just indicated. From the sphere of two person- alities or personality complexes each acquires an inner consistency for itself, a referring-to-one-another of its elements, a dynamic relationship to its center; and between both there is then produced that which is symbolized in the spatial boundary, the completion of the positive mea- sure of power and right of its own sphere by way of the consciousness that does not extend power and right then into the other sphere. The boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological reality that is formed spatially. The idealistic principle that space is our conception--more precisely, that it is realized through our synthesizing activity by which we shape sense material--is specified here in such a way that the spatial formation that we call a boundary is a sociological function. If indeed at first it had become a spatial-sensual formation that we write into nature independent of its sociological-practical sense, then it has strong repercussions for the consciousness of the relationship of parties. While this line marks only the differentiation of relationship between the elements of a sphere among one another and between them and the elements of another, it becomes then, nevertheless, a living energy that drives them towards one another and does not leave them out of its unity and moves, as a physical force that radiates repulsions from both perspectives, between both.
Excursus on Social Boundary
Perhaps in most relationships between individuals as well as between groups the concept of the boundary becomes important in some way. Overall, where the interests of two elements concern the same property, their co-existence depends on a boundary line separating their spheres within the property--be this then the end of the dispute as a legal boundary or its beginning as a boundary perhaps of power. I am reminded then of a case, immeasurably meaningful for all human social existence, which the chapter on secrecy dealt with in
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? detail from a different standpoint. Every close association thoroughly rests on each one knowing more of the others through psychological hypotheses than is exhibited directly and with conscious intent. For if we were dependent only on that which is revealed, we would have before us, instead of a united people whom we understand and with whom we can deal, only numerous accidental and disconnected fragments of a soul. We must then through inferences, inter- pretations, and interpolations supplement the given fragments until as whole a person emerges as we need, internally and for life's praxis. Over against this unquestioned social right of fathoming others, whether or not intentional, stands however one's private possession of one's mental being, one's right to discretion--also to that which refrains from the pondering and deductions by which someone could penetrate against the will of the other into one's intimacies and reserve. Where, however, does the boundary lie between the allowed, indeed essential construction of another's soul and this psychological indiscretion? And this precarious, objective boundary means, however, only the boundary between both personality spheres; it means that the consciousness of the one may cover the sphere of another only up to a certain point and that it is here that the inviolable sphere of this other begins, the revelation of which only that person though has disposal. It is quite obvious that the eter- nally varied management of this demarcation stands in the closest interaction with the entire structure of social life: in indigenous-undifferentiated eras the right to enlargements of this psychological boundary becomes greater; the interest in it, however, is perhaps less than in eras of individualized persons and complicated relationships; with commercial transactions this boundary lies elsewhere than in the relationship between parents and children, among diplomats elsewhere than among comrades-in-arms. I have here touched again on this matter, rather far from the issue of space, in order to clarify in it the incomparable solidity and lucidity that the processes of social boundary-mak- ing obtain through their spatialization. Every boundary is a mental, more exactly, a sociological occurrence; however, by its investment in a border in space the mutual relationship acquires, from its positive and negative sides, a clarity and security--indeed also often a rigidity--that tends to remain denied to it as long as the encountering and partitioning of powers and rights is not yet projected into a physical form, and thus always persists, so to speak, in the status nascens. 3
Another sociological boundary-making problem of the first rank lies in the different degrees to which single members of collective structures partici- pate in them. That there is a difference between the full compatriot and the one-half or one-quarter compatriot signifies a boundary between these latter two and the totality to which one belongs nevertheless; or also a boundary inside the collective that marks the points, their center determined by radiat- ing lines of rights and duties that indicate the boundary of participation for several elements, for others, however, not so, and also within the individual, who will experience especially sharply, in the lack of total acceptance into the
3 Latin: state of being born--ed.
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? community, the boundary between the part of the personality that belongs in it and the part that remains outside the whole relationship. Occasionally a tragedy can result from this formation, when of course the group limits the degree in which it includes an individual, but subjectively no corresponding limitation takes place in the individual whose self-experiences, nevertheless, is that of entirely belonging to it, where in reality only a partial membership has been conceded. It is noteworthy and appropriate that the rights and duties of partial members of the group tend to be set more narrowly than those of full members. Since, however, this individual shares entirely in the contents and entirely in the destiny of the association, that which comes to one in terms of requirements, pains, and pleasures as a result of the participation is not determined, as it were, from the very beginning; one can only wait and see what happens with the whole and what the consequences will be according to one's place in the totality. In contrast, there is a tendency for there to be unique, assignable, objectively determined aspects of the association to which the half-compatriot is related; it is as a rule not a weaker relationship to the totality and unity of the group, so no difference in the intensity, but in the extensiveness: an exact determination of what one must accomplish and what one can demand, in relative independence of the fate of the whole group as well as one's own--while with the full compatriots that kind of demarca- tion of the share of the whole and of the part does not occur. The deeper sociological significance of the limitation or lack of limitation of belonging, however, is found in that the more exact determination of the relationship in a case of the latter gives it a more objective character than is possessed in a case of the former. I am reminded, for example, from a very singular realm, the difference in the status of the maid as opposed to the 'cleaning lady. ' The relationship of the domestic servant to the 'household,' however uncoupled it may be from patriarchal circumstances, has nevertheless the nature of an organic membership; one's tasks follow the fluctuation in domestic activities, and one tends, albeit to a lesser degree, to participate in the mood and the fortunes of the household--because inside one's overall prescribed function there exists no precise limit thereof. The cleaning lady, on the other hand, is hired for duties that are precisely defined according to content and number of hours; consequently her relationship to the household has a thoroughly exact character, fully beyond the life process of the house, and she does not have, not even in proportion to the duties, the subjectively personal engage- ment of the domestic servant for the household, but only a purely objective relationship to it existing from a pre-determined sum of rights and duties. The greatest example, characterized elsewhere in this book, is the change from the medieval agreement that claimed the whole person and was thus in turn in solidarity with that person--to the modern one that, even where it is not purely an intentional association, returns typically only a limited amount of a participant's contribution with a limited amount of reciprocal contribution. Here the phenomenon of boundary-making between the whole and the part has propelled most unambiguously the objectificattion of the whole relation- ship as its correlate. It is interesting how occasionally a membership boundary is marked already in the Middle Ages. An aristocratic Anglo-Saxon guild of
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? the eleventh century decreed: if a comrade kills a person in self-defense or just revenge, the others are supposed to contribute to the wergild; but if it is done out of folly or wantonness, one's culpability is to be borne alone. Here the action of the individual becomes a matter of the collective only in so far as it is moral; in so far as it is an immoral act, the individual must deal with it alone. Other guilds of that time do not observe this boundary; they decree, e. g. , without any reservation that if any one of them has been guilty of an offense: "let all bear it, let all share the same lot;"4 a Danish guild considers explicitly even the case of murder and directs the guild members for their part to help their fellow member in escaping. In that first case, then, a boundary line exists between the whole and the individual, beyond which the latter is on one's own. The rationalistic character, which the boundary phenomena between these structures demonstrated, offers singly then a remarkable aspect when the contents by which the partnership is precisely circumscribed are opposed to such a quantitative division. This is quite likely the case to some extent for the Catholic institution that St. Francis established as the order of tertiaries: Laymen who want to be in brotherhood with a monastic order without themselves actually becoming monks pledge themselves to certain spiritual practices and contributions and thereby share in certain religious advantages of the main order, such as masses and indulgences, while remain- ing nevertheless entirely in their civil state. This careful balancing of being inside and outside seems to me, though, not to conform to the absoluteness of the religious nature. The communal life of the order exists for the sake of a goal whose inner structure rejects any more-or-less of it and, if participation in it occurs at all, turns the form of its boundary into an opposition vis-a`-vis its contents. In general, from an easily observable connection, content is of more decisive significance for boundary phenomena than for other sociological forms. While in general the quantitative limitation of an interest in a common content imposes on the interested a reciprocal limitation, this is not the case for certain contents the types of which are found in the most varied systems of values: at one end, for example, the community commons on which each can allow as many cattle graze as one owns, at the other end, the kingdom of God in which everyone can participate and can posses entirely without the possession of it by the other being thereby curtailed.
It is a matter here, then, essentially of the social interactions that arise between the inside and the outside of the boundary; so there is need of an example at least of those interactions that the boundary offers as a framework between the elements of the enclosed group itself. 5 The essential thing here is the narrowness or the breadth of the frame-
4 The phrase "let. . . lot" is without scare quotes but is in English in the original, so presumably then a quotation--ed. trans.
5 Here Simmel is resuming section 'B,' which began before the Excursus--ed.
? ? space and the spatial ordering of society 555
? work--although in no way the only essential thing; because even the form into which the spatial framework brings the group, its uniform or, depending on various locations, strongly varying cohesive energy, the question whether the frame in general is produced by the same structure (as in one respect with islands, in another, with states in the situation of San Marino or the Indian tribute states) or is composed from several adjacent elements--all this is for the inner structure of the group of undoubted significance, which, however, shall here only be mentioned. The narrowness or breadth of the framework does not at all always coincide with the small or large size of the group. Rather, it depends on the tensions that develop within the group; when these find sufficient latitude without their expansion bumping against the boundar- ies, the framework is then wide enough, even if relatively many people meet within it, as is often the case with the constellation of oriental kingdoms. On the other hand, the frame is narrow when it functions even for a small number of people as a constraint beyond which certain energies, unable to unfold within, continually exert outward pressure. The effect of this latter constellation on the social form has, e. g. , been unmistakably the experience of Venice: the narrow and immediately impervious boundedness of its territory is much more of an indication of the, so to speak, dynamic expansion among the relationships of the wider world than of a territorial expansion of power, which offers in such a situation only limited opportunities. Such a spatially far-sighted politics, reaching out beyond the nearest neighbors, makes, however, very emphatic intellectual demands, as cannot be realized on the greater part of the masses. Therefore, direct democracy for Venice was out of the question. It had to cultivate, in accord with its spatial life conditions, an aristocracy that, as has been claimed, governed the people much like the officers of a ship over the crew.
The reality of the spatial frame of the group, as a form-sociological one, is in no way limited to the political boundary. Its narrowness or breadth exercises its forming effects with corresponding modifications wherever a quantity of people congregate spatially. The frequently emphasized assembled aggregate: its impulsivity, its enthusiasm, its mob mentality--depends in part also on its being either out in the open or minimally--in contrast to other residential spaces--in a very large locality. The great open air gives people a feeling of freedom of movement, of being able to reach out into the indeterminate, of the as-yet undefined erecting of greater goals--just as in a narrow room it is felt as decisively impeded.