No More Learning

As today custom functions as a supple- ment to both of these orders, so was it at one time the sole rule for life when those differentiated forms of normativeness did not at all yet exist or only embryonically. The sociological location of custom is indicated thusly: it lies between the largest circle, each member of which is subordinate as an individual to law, and absolute individuality, which is the sole bearer of free morality. Thus it belongs to the smaller circles--the middle structures between them. Almost every custom is a status- or class-custom; its manners of expression in external behavior, in fashion, and in honor always govern only a subsection of the largest circle, which is shared with law, and have there again different content in neighboring sections. 6 To violations of beneficial customs only those of the smaller circle who are thereby somehow affected or are witnesses to them react, whereas a violation of the legal order calls for a reaction of the whole. Since custom has for its executive authority only public opinion and certain directly consequential reactions of individuals to it, it is out of the question that a large circle as such would govern it. The know-how requiring no design--that which commercial custom as such would offer or require compared to that of the aristocracy, that of a religious circle compared to that of a literary one, etc. --suggests that, for guaranteeing the same content of custom made up from specific conditions that a smaller circle required, neither the coercion of state law nor entirely dependable autonomous moral impulses are available. What is common to these and the primitive groups with which our social history begins is nothing other than being numerically incon- sequential. The forms of life that at that time sufficed entirely for the solidarity of the circle withdrew upon its enlargement to its subsections. Because now these contain those possibilities of personal relationship that approximate equality of levels of membership, those common interests, and ideals, one can leave to them the social regulation of one of the more precarious and elastic types of normative regulation, such as custom. With an increasing number of elements and thus their inevitable increase of independence, these conditions cease to exist for the circle. The characteristic binding power of custom becomes too
6 Compare here the discussion of the sociological form of honor in the chapter on the self-preservation of the group and the intersection of circles.
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little for the state and too much for the individual, its content however too much for the state and too little for the individual. The former requires greater guarantees, the latter greater freedom, and only in those respects in which every element still belongs to mid-sized circles is it socially ruled by custom.
That the large circle requires and allows for stringent and objec- tive normative regulation, crystallized as law, coincides with greater freedom, flexibility, and individuality on the part of its elements. If, therefore, on the one hand the socially necessary repressions must be fixed more precisely and guarded more rigorously, then this is, on the other hand, more tolerable for individuals because they have a greater latitude for freedom outside of these relentless pressures. So if on the one hand the socially necessary inhibitions must be set more narrowly and guarded more rigorously, still on the other this is more tolerable for individuals since they have so much greater latitude for freedom outside of these highly precise strictures. This is all the clearer the more the law or norm emerging from it is proscription or prohibition. Among the indigenous Brazilians it is generally forbidden to marry one's own sister or the daughter of one's brother. This applies all the more strongly the larger the tribe is, while in smaller more isolated hordes brother and sister often live together. The prohibitive char- acter of the norm--which is more suited to law than to custom--is indicated more in the larger circle since it offers the individual ampler positive compensation than the smaller. In that the expansion of the group favors the transformation of its norms into the form of law, it becomes apparent, on the other hand, that many a unification of small structures into one larger occurred at first or continually only for the sake of legal administration, and their unity stands only in the sign of uniformly enforced law. Thus the county of the New England states was originally only "an aggregation of towns for judicial purposes. " There are obvious exceptions to this connection linking the difference between the social form of custom and that of law to the quantitative difference of the circle. The original folk units of the Germanic tribes, over which the great Frankish, English, and Swedish empires arose, were often able to save their jurisdiction for a long time; frequently these particularly were nationalized relatively late. And, on the other hand, in modern international relations multiple customs that are not yet set in law prevail; inside the individual states some behavior is fixed as law that in the relationships towards the outside, thus inside the largest circle of
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all, must be left to the more relaxed form of custom. The solution to the contradiction is simple. The size of the group naturally calls for the legal form only to the degree in which the multiplicity of its elements is integrated into a unity. Where, instead of a definite centralization, only rather loose commonalities allow the circle to be identified as one at all, this identification reveals very obviously its generally relative character. Social unity is an incremental concept, and if a form of regulation is required by a specific quantity of the circle, then it can be the same with a different quantity and a different one with the same quantity, if the degree of unity that it bears and by which it is borne is a different one. The significance of the numerical relationships is thus not at all discernible if a large circle on account of its specific tasks can or must do just as well without the legal form of its norms, as is otherwise possible only to a small one. The very disconnected state structures of early Germanic times simply did not yet possess the cohesion of the elements that is as much the cause as the effect of legal constitutions among contemporary large groups; and certain norms in the pure form of custom are produced in collective relationships between modern states just as in individual ones because here there is lacking the unity over the parties that is the carrier of a legal order, and is replaced in a small as well as in a less formal group by the more direct interactions from element to element; however, custom directly corresponds to them as a form of regulation. Thus even the apparent exceptions confirm the correlation that obtains between custom and law on the one hand and measurements of the group on the other.
Now it is obvious that the concepts, large and small circle, are of extraordinary scientific coarseness, quite vague and obscuring and actually only useful generally for suggesting the dependence of the sociological character of the form of a group on its quantitative cir- cumstances--not, however, for indicating any more exactly the actual proportion that exists between the former and the latter. Nevertheless ascertaining this proportion more exactly is perhaps not ruled out in all cases. To be sure, to insert exact numerical values into the formations and relationships considered up to now would obviously be a completely fanciful venture in the foreseeable progression of our knowledge; but for the moment let us within more modest boundaries indicate character- istics of those social interactions that occur between a limited number of persons and are characterized by this limitation. As transitions from the fully numerical uncertainty to the fully numerical certainty I am
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noting several cases in which the latter in principle already has its own sociological significance, but without a determination of the same hav- ing occurred in the individual.
1. Number functions as the group's principle of classification, i. e. , it will treat similar parts, produced through enumeration, as relative unities. Later I will discuss the particular meanings of the individual numbers for this, and highlight here only the principle. That a whole group, which somehow feels itself as one, generally divides itself, and indeed not only from top to bottom by the criterion of the ruling and the ruled, but even among its coordinated members--that is one of the greatest advances of humanity; it is the anatomical structure by which the higher organic-social processes are established. Now the classification can proceed from ancestry or voluntary associations or the similarity of occupations or grouping by districts; the numerical principle is linked to those; it divides the quantities of existing people or families into a certain number and so acquires quantitatively corresponding subdivi- sions, to each of which the whole relates roughly as their individuals are related to them. Now this principle is surely so schematic that it must in practice be fashioned into something more concrete: the numerically similar subdivisions, somehow closely associated with one another--relatives, friends, neighbors--were comprised of components that are complementary either by being similar or dissimilar. However it is crucial that the numerical similarity constitutes the formative principle of the categorizing--although it is never decisive by itself but only plays a role that varies from the greatest to the smallest. Nomadic tribes, for example, often in the absence of the more stable life pursuits, generally have hardly any other possibility to organize themselves than according to the principle of number; its significance for such a group on the march is still evident today determining the structure of the military. It continues naturally enough that with the dividing up of a conquered land or the colonization of a newly discovered one--where for the time being there is as yet no organization by some objective scale--the principle of incorporating in equally-proportioned shares prevails; for example, the oldest constitution of Iceland is ordered in that way. In a rather pure manner the Cleisthenes reform,7 with this
7 Cleisthenes (6th century B. C. E. Athenian) replaced an oligarchical government with a more democratic division of power, based on equal proportions of inhabitants organized into new "tribes"--ed.
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principle, brought about one of the greatest social-historical revolutions. When he established a council of five hundred members, fifty from each of the ten phyles, each demos received a corresponding number of council seats according to its headcount. 8 The rational idea, to create a representative body from the whole group purely by the principle of number, exceeds the typical "centuria" (about which more is to be said hereafter) as a higher state of development, and for the first time uses the method of purely numerical division to enable governmental entity to function as the symbol of the people.
2. While so far it is a matter of separate divisions of the same size, number can also be used to distinguish from a total group a unique and indeed leading circle of persons. Thus one often called the guild leader according to its number: in Frankfurt with the wool weavers they were called the Six, with the bakers the Eight; in medieval Barcelona the senate was the One Hundred, etc. It is most peculiar how, in itself least revealing, even the most prominent personalities are identified by number regardless of any other qualification. It seems to me that the presupposition behind this is that by a number such as six is meant not 6 individual elements existing in isolation from one another but a synthesis of them; six is not 1 and 1 and 1 etc. , but a new concept that results from the combination of these elements and is not realized pro rata in each of them for itself. In this book I identify the living functional interaction of elements often as their unity, which would rise above their mere sum and in sociological contrast to it. Here, however, by the identification of a directorship, a committee and so forth with the mere sum is meant in reality that functional combination, and as designation it is then even possible that the number signifies also even a unity from unities. In the case alluded to, the Six are not simply scattered about in a homogeneous group, but they stand for a specific and fixed structure of the group, by which six persons from it are given prominence and forged together into a leading entity. The character- less impersonality of naming with a number is here even exceedingly characteristic; for it indicates more definitely than could any less formal idea, that no individuals are hereby as persons meant, but that it is purely a social structure: the structure of the group requires a certain contingent of itself as leadership. In that purely numerical idea lies the pure objectivity of the formation, which is indifferent toward everything
8 Greek: phyle, tribe; demos, people--ed.
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personal on the part of the members and only requires that one simply be one of the Six. There is perhaps scarcely any more effective expres- sion with which to indicate at one and the same time the elevation of individuals and the complete irrelevance of what they are as persons apart from this function.
The formation of group unity that is revealed in the assembling of members in a greater number is emphasized especially strongly with an ostensive exception. The Senate of Barcelona, which is called the One Hundred, eventually had in reality more members, up to two hundred, without for that reason changing its name. The same phenomenon arises when the number functions not as a principle of emphasis but as a principle of classification. Wherever hereafter the handling of classification of the population consisted of groups of a hundred, this membership of the division was almost nowhere strictly adhered to. This is expressly reported by the ancient Germanic groups of hundred. There the number becomes a direct synonym for the social sector that at first included or was supposed to include such a circle of individuals. This inconspicuous fact shows the enormous importance of numeri- cal determination for the structure of the group. The number even becomes independent of its arithmetical content; it shows only that the relationship of the member to the whole is a numerical one, or the firmly established number stands for this relationship. Only the idea of classification by a hundred elements remains, while the empirical relationships realize this only more or less exactly. When it was said of the Germanic groups of hundred that they would express only an indeterminately large quantity between the individual and the whole cohort--then this indicates precisely the sociologically identified type: the life of the group requires a middle-level entity between the one and the all, a vehicle for certain functions that neither the one nor the other can accomplish, and the structure designated for these tasks is labeled simply according to its numerical determination. The functions do not supply the name because they are multiple and changing; what remains the same is only the bringing together of some part of the totality into a unit. How large this part is at any given time may be uncertain; the enduring numerical designation indicates that the general numerical relationship was felt to be the essential thing. There emerges thereby an occurrence in the social realm whose psychological form also shows up elsewhere. The Russian coin denominations are supposed to be derived from an old system of weights in such a way that every higher denomination contains ten times the one below it. Actually, however,
the quantitative conditioning of the group 71
not only the absolute, but also the relative metal content of the coins changed frequently, whereupon, though, their relative value, once they were brought into the numerical order, remained the same. Whereas the actual values of the metal change relatively, the role that they have to play in exchange is assigned by the constancy of these face-value rela- tions so that their historically first weight-relations permanently provide the name and symbol for these relations. Also the number comes to be the representative of the thing that it enumerates, and then the essence is thereby designated so that it is a matter of a relation between the whole and a part, in that the numerical meaning of the earliest rela- tions covers all later variations. The metal extraction tax in sixteenth century Spain was called the Quinto because it amounted to a fifth of the value; and it would retain this name later, albeit with entirely differ- ent proportions. Thus the word tithe came, already among the ancient Israelites and in variety of ways, to simply mean levy--as the group of hundred came to mean simply a section. That the quantitative rela- tion, which is the essence of the tax as well as the social classification, became psychologically dominant over its particular content proves most conclusively that the original numerical moniker crystalizes into a designation for modifications in the relationship.
3. The numerical determination as organizational form occupies a position inside the development of society. Specifically, quantitative classification emerges historically as a substitute for the principle of the clan. Apparently in many places the groups had at first been composed of kin-affiliated subgroups, each of which formed an entity economically, penally, politically, and in other respects; that this internally very well established organization was replaced by the forging together of ten or a hundred persons directly even into those solidifying capacities--can appear at first as a strange trivialization, a schematic completely devoid of inner life. One would also search in vain among the inherently cohe- sive principles of this group for a justification of that organic root being replaced by this mechanical formulaic principle. Rather the basis for this can only reside in the whole that is made up of such classifications and makes demands that are independent of the life principles of its parts. To the extent that the whole as unity becomes more encompassing and powerful, the parts lose their particular meaning--at least at first and before the highest stages of development; they yield to the whole the meaning that they possessed in and for themselves, and are then the more functional the less any self-sufficient idea lives in each of them and the more they, as parts lacking their own character, receive in return
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a position and importance only from their contribution to the whole. 9 This does not apply to certain of the most complete types of develop- ment: there are social structures, especially of the most formidable size and most complete organization, that can allow the individual element the greatest freedom to live according to its peculiar norms and in its most idiosyncratic forms; on the other hand there are such that attain the strength of the whole only on the condition of their elements hav- ing their own most enhanced and differentiated life. The transition from clan to Hundred, however, seems to indicate that middle stage in which the inner meaningless and characterless nature of the members means progress for the whole; then only so were they easily managed under the given circumstances, directed by simple norms and without that resistance to the central authority that emerges all too easily with any subgroup of a stronger internal solidarity.
Where the composition or action of the group is quantitatively determined--from the ancient group of hundred to the modern rule of the majority--a suppression of individuality is present; it is a point at which the profound internal discrepancy between actual democratic and liberal-individualist social thought very clearly appears. That one produces an "approximate total" from personalities, and goes on like this without any consideration of the distinctiveness of the individuals involved; that one counts the votes and does not weigh them; that institutions, prescriptions and proscriptions, achievements and capaci- ties are from the outset firmly fixed at a particular number--that is either despotic or democratic, but in any case it is a reduction of the actual and total substance of the individual personality to the formal fact that it is simply one; in that it takes a position in an organization only by virtue of a number, one's character as a member of the group has become the complete master over one's distinctive character as an individual. The classification into numerically equal subgroups may thus be continuously modified as roughly and practically as in the groups of hundred of the Germans, the Peruvians, and the Chinese, or purpose- fully and exactly refined as in a modern army--here it always indicates most clearly and most mercilessly the legal form of the group existing for itself, there as a new emergent tendency, still in a position of constant struggle and compromise with others, in full development. The supra- individuality of the grouping, the fully developing independence of its
9 See the introduction to the chapter in this volume on the intersection of circles.
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form vis-a`-vis any reality of individual existence, lives nowhere more absolutely and more emphatically than in the reduction of the principles of organization to purely mathematical relationships; and the extent to which this occurs, as it very often appears in the most varied groups, is at the same time the extent to which the idea of being a group in its most abstract form has absorbed the individuality of its factors.
4. Finally, important sociological consequences are linked to quan- titative determination--although the effective number of elements can be entirely different depending on the circumstances--of a kind that 'society' exemplifies now and again in the modern sense of sociability. How many persons must one invite for it to be a 'society'? 10 Evidently the qualitative relationships between host and guests does not decide the matter; and the invitation of two or three persons who stand in relation to us fully formally and not subjectively still does not bring about 'society'--whereas this does occur if we gather together fifteen close friends. The number always remains decisive, although its size in individual cases naturally depends on the quality and closeness of the relationships among the members. The three circumstances--the relationships of the host to each of the guests by itself, the guests to one another, the way each participant subjectively experiences all these relationships--form the basis on which the number of participants then decides whether a society or a mere being together (of the nature of friendship or matter-of-fact in purpose) exists. There is here thus gener- ated with every numerical modification a very definitely experienced change into an entirely different sociological category--thus little of the extent of this modification is to be grasped with our psychological resources. But at least the qualitative sociological results of the quan- titative cause can be described to some extent.
First of all, 'society' requires a rather specific external set-up. Who- ever invites one or two from a circle of, say, thirty acquaintances desires 'nothing formal. ' But if someone invites all thirty at the same time, there immediately arises entirely new demands for food, drink, attire, etiquette, an extraordinarily increased expenditure for aspects
10 In this numbered section Simmel has numerous instances of 'Gesellschaft' in quotation marks and seems to want to indicate thereby an undetermined number of participants at which a social gathering or occasion takes on a level of objectivity transcending the inter-subjective reality of intimates. Where in this section he puts Gesellschaft in quotation marks, we've translated it 'society'; and where he has used Gesellschaft without quotation marks, we've translated it as 'social gathering' or 'social occasion'--ed.
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of sensual attractions and enjoyments. This is a very clear example of how the mere increase in size reduces the intensity of personalities. In a considerably smaller gathering a kind of reciprocal accommodation is possible; the common ground that makes up the contents of their sociability can include such all-embracing or highly suitable portions of their individualities that the gathering takes on the character of intel- lectuality, of differentiated and most highly developed psychic energy. However, the more persons who congregate, the lower the possibility that they will coincide in those more valuable and intimately essential aspects, the more deeply must that point be sought that is common to their motives and interests. 11
To the extent, however, that the number of members provides no place for the more highly personal and intellectual pursuits, one must seek to compensate for the shortage of these charms through an increase in the superficial and sensory. The shear joy of being together has always had a particularly close connection to the number of festively gathered persons and the extravagance; at the end of the middle ages, for example, the extravagance at weddings went so far with the retinue escorting the bridal couples that the authorities sometimes prescribed through their sumptuary laws exactly how many persons the entou- rage would be allowed to have. If food and drink has always been the medium for the association of a wider circle, for which an integrative mood and interest in another direction would be difficult to achieve, so a 'society,' then, purely on account of a quantitative composition that rules out the commonality and social interaction of the subtle and intellectual moods, will have to accentuate all the more strongly and certainly these sensual pleasures common to all.
A further characteristic of 'society' on the basis of its numerical dif- ference, in contrast to the gathering of a few, is found in that a full uniformity of mood cannot in general, as with the latter, be achieved and
11 Consequently the complaint about the banality of interaction in large social gatherings manifests complete sociological misunderstanding. The relatively low level of intensity on which a larger grouping gathers is not in principle remediable. Since all the higher and finer attainments are of a more individual kind and are thus not suited for commonality of content, they can in any case have a socializing effect, should a unity be acquired through a division of labor--which, however, is apparently pos- sible only inside a 'society' of a small size, and at higher quantities would negate its very nature. It is therefore a thoroughly correct sociological instinct when one senses the more notable emergence of personal individuality in a 'society' often as a bit of tactlessness--even one in itself meaningful and enjoyable.
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furthermore should not; rather, on the contrary, in a further contrast, the formation of subgroups is indicated. The life principle of a social gathering of a few personal friends is very much opposed to dividing, say, into two separate moods, indeed even only separate conversations; 'society' is present in that moment, when instead of its necessarily one center, a duality emerges: on the one hand an inclusive but still rather informal centrality that is essentially found only outwardly and physi- cally--which is why social gatherings of the same social level, the larger they are, the more they resemble one another as wholes, just as their personal exchanges are also more diverse; on the other hand the special small centers of shared conversation, mood, interest, which, however, continuously exchange participants. Consequently there is the continual alternating between engaging and breaking off in the large social gather- ing, which will be experienced, depending on the temperament of the subject, one moment as the most unbearable superficiality, the next as an effortless rhythm of high aesthetic charm. This technical sociologi- cal type is demonstrated in a particularly pure example by the ball with the modern style of dance: a momentary relationship always of a couple of actually fanciful closeness develops into an entirely new form through the constant exchange between couples; that physical closeness between each other of complete strangers makes it possible here for all the guests to be one host who, however casual the relationship to this host may be, permits a certain reciprocal assurance and legitimation, there again by way of the impersonal, quasi anonymous character of the relationships that the size of the social gathering and its formalistically bound behavior offers. Obviously these traits of the large social occa- sion, which the ball presents, as it were, by sublimating, perhaps even caricaturing them, are tied to a certain minimum of participants; and one can sometimes make the interesting observation that an intimate group of fewer persons takes on the character of 'society' through the arrival of one single additional person.
In one case, which certainly concerns a far less complicated human matter, the size that produces a particular sociological institutional struc- ture appears to be set somewhat more firmly. The patriarchal family household in the most diverse settings and even under wholly different economic conditions always numbers twenty to thirty people, so that those conditions cannot be the cause or at least not the exclusive cause of the similarity in size. It is rather likely that the internal interactions that constitute the particular structure of the household generate the necessary proportions of narrowness and width for precisely within
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that boundary. The patriarchal family was everywhere characterized by a great intimacy and solidarity, which had its center in the pater familias, the paternalism of which he exercised over the affairs of every individual in the interest of the whole as well as in his own egoistic interest. Hence arose the upper limit: this kind of cohesion and control appears to be able to include no greater quantity of members for the corresponding psychological level of development. On the other hand the lower limit follows from the fact that such a self-reliant group must cultivate for its self-sufficiency and its self-preservation certain collective psychological realities that tend to materialize only above a certain numerical threshold: resoluteness for the offensive and defensive, con- fidence on the part of each one always to find the necessary support and reinforcement, above all: the religious spirit whose elevation and inspiration arises, at first from the mixture of many contributing factors, in mutual elimination of their peculiarly individual character, above the individuals--or: lifts the individuals above themselves. The number mentioned specified perhaps empirically the approximate range over which and under which the group could not go if it would cultivate the character traits of the patriarchal household. It appears as though with growing individualization, beyond this level of civilization, those intimacies were possible only among an ever decreasing number of persons; on the other hand the phenomena relevant to the size of the family required precisely an ever growing circle. The needs that were realized above and below this numerical complement differentiated; one part requires a smaller complement, the other a larger one, so that later on one finds no structure anymore that can suffice for them in the same consistent manner as the patriarchal family had.
Apart from such singular cases, all those questions pertinent to the numerical requirement for a 'society' have a sophistic tone: how many soldiers make up an army, how many participants are necessary for a political party, how many joiners make a crowd. They seem to repeat the classical questions: how many grains of wheat make up a heap? Since, then, one, two, three, four grains do not do it at all, but a thousand certainly, there would have to be a boundary between these numbers at which the addition of a single grain to the previous ones would make a 'heap'; however, should someone make this attempt at continuous counting, it becomes evident that no one is able to identify this boundary. The logical basis of these difficulties lies in there being a numerical series that appears continuously, ceaselessly increasing due to the relative insignificance of each individual element, and that this
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at some point is to allow for the application of a qualitatively new idea, abruptly replacing altogether one previously applied. This is obviously a contradictory requirement: the continuous, conceptually, simply cannot justify purely from itself a sudden break and transition. The sociological difficulty, however, has another complication that lies beyond that of the ancient sophists. Because by a 'heap' of grain one understands either an accumulation, and then one is logically justified in calling it that as soon as only one layer simply appears over the spot underneath; or should it thereby be designated simply by an amount, then it is unjustifiably required from a concept such as heap, which by its very nature is rather variable and indeterminate, that it should acquiesce in its application now to entirely determinate unambiguously delimited realities. In the sociological cases, however, characteristically wholly new phenomena appear with an increasing quantity that appear not even proportion- ately at the lower existing quantity: a political party has a qualitatively different significance from a small clique; several curious spectators standing together manifest different characteristics than a 'crowd,' etc. The uncertainty coming from the impossibility of numerically grasping these concepts by the corresponding quantities might be resolved in the following way. That vacillation concerns apparently only certain middling sizes; some lower numbers do not yet reliably comprise the collectivities in question; some rather high ones comprise them entirely without question. Now there are indeed those qualities sociologically signifying a numerically more negligible formation: the gathering that falls short of 'society,' the troop of soldiers that does not yet make up an army, the collaborating miscreants who are not quite a 'gang. ' While these qualities stand in contrast to others arguably characteristic of the large community, the character of the numerically in-between can be interpreted to comprise both, so that each of the two is made rudimentarily perceptible in individual features, now emerging, now disappearing, or becoming latent. Thus while such structures situated in the numerically middle zone also objectively participate partially or alternately in the definitive character of that situated above it or below it, the subjective uncertainty in deciding which of the two they belong to is to be explained. It is thus not that in a formation without sociological qualities suddenly, like the crystal in the mother liquid, a quite definite sociological constellation is supposed to start, without one, though, knowing the distinct moment of this transformation; but rather it is that two different kinds of formations, each consisting of a number of features and variously qualitatively nuanced, converge under
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certain quantitative conditions in a social structure and share the lat- ter between themselves in a variety of ways; so that the question, to which of the two the structure belongs, does not at all suffer from the difficulty of recognizing a continuous series but is instead one posed in an objectively false manner. 12
These convergences then would affect social formations that indeed depend on the number of interacting elements, but without this depen- dence being sufficiently formulated for us to be conscious of them for purposes of drawing their sociological consequences from individual specific quantities. However, this latter is not out of the question if we are satisfied with just adequate elementary forms. If we begin with the lower limit of the quantitative range, mathematically determined sizes appear as unambiguous preconditions for characteristically sociologi- cal structures.
The numerically simplest formations that can still be characterized as social interaction at all seem to arise, of course, between two elements. However, there is, viewed from the outside, an as yet simpler structure that belongs among sociological categories; namely--as paradoxically and actually contradictory as it seems--the isolated individual person.
12 More exactly, however, the situation is probably this. To every definite number of elements, there corresponds, depending on the purpose and meaning of its association, a sociological form, an arranging, cohesiveness, relationship of the parts to the whole, etc. --that with each and every arriving and departing member, a modification, however immeasurably small and imperceptible, is experienced. But since we do not have a specific expression for each of these endlessly many sociological situations, even when for us perceptible in its nature, often nothing else remains but to think of it as made up from two situations--one more, as it were, relevant, the other less. In any event it is thereby not so much a matter of a composite as it is, say, the so-called emotional blend of friendship and love, or hate and contempt, or pleasure and pain. Here there is in most cases an integrative emotional state--which will occupy us later on--for which we have no immediate concept and which we therefore through synthesis and mutual qualification of two others paraphrase more than describe; here as elsewhere the actual unity of being is not available to us, but we must break it up into a duality of elements, neither of which covers it completely, in order to have it emerge from the interweaving of the two. This is, however, only a conceptual analysis possible after the fact that does not trace the actual process of becoming the distinct being of those entities. So where the concepts coined for social units--meeting and society, troop and army, clique and party, pair and gang, personal following and school, assembly and crowd--find no certain application, because the human material for the one seems to be too little and for the other too much, there remains nevertheless as precise a standard sociological formation of as precise a correspondence specifically to the numerical qualification as in those more definitive cases. It is only that the lack of a specific concept for these countless nuances forces us to describe their qualities as a mixture of the forms that correspond to numerically smaller and numerically higher structures.
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As a matter of fact, though, the processes that shape the duality of elements are often simpler than those necessary for the sociological characterization of the singular. For the latter it is a matter principally of two pertinent phenomena: solitariness and freedom. The shear fact that an individual is not at all in any kind of interaction with other individuals is of course not a sociological one, but still it also does not satisfy the full concept of the solitary. This, in fact, so far as it is emphasized and internally meaningful, does not in any way mean simply the absence of any society, but rather its existence somehow imagined and only then negated. Solitude receives its unambiguously positive meaning as a distant effect of society--be it as echoes of past or anticipation of future relationships, be it as yearning or as voluntary seclusion. The solitary person is not thus characterized as though from time immemorial the sole inhabitant of the earth; rather even such a person's situation is determined by social interaction, albeit negatively denoted. All the joy as well as all the bitterness of solitude are indeed only different kinds of reaction to socially experienced influences; it is an interaction from which the one member is actually separate after exercising certain influences and yet lives on and functions yet in the imagination of the other subject. Rather characteristic of this is the well-known psychological fact that the feeling of being alone seldom appears so decidedly and hauntingly in an actual physical isolation as when one is conscious of oneself as alien and disconnected among many physically quite present people--at a social gathering, in the train car, in the crush of the crowded urban street. It is necessarily essentially a matter of the configuration of a group whether it fosters or in general enables such manufactured feelings of loneliness in its midst. Close and intimate communities do not often allow such an, as it were, intercellular vacuum in their structure. As one speaks, however, of a social deficit that is produced in certain amounts according to the social conditions: the antisocial phenomena of the disenfranchised, criminals, prostitutes, suicides--so a given quantity and quality of social life produces a certain number of occasional or chronically lonely existences that the statistics by themselves certainly cannot grasp numerically. In another manner solitude becomes sociologically meaningful as soon as it no longer consists of a relationship occurring in an individual between the individual and a specific group or the group life in general but rather emerges as pause or periodical differentiation inside of one and the same relationship. This becomes important for those relationships that are concerned, based on their foundational concepts, precisely with
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the ongoing negation of solitude, such as, above all, the monogamous marriage. In so far as the finest internal nuances find expression in its constitution, it makes a fundamental difference whether husband and wife have indeed still preserved the joy of solitude for themselves or whether their relationship is never to be interrupted by indulgence in this--be it because their habitual togetherness has deprived them of the attractiveness of it, be it because a lack of inner security of love leads them to fear those kinds of interruptions as betrayals or, worse, as a threat to fidelity. Thus solitude, a phenomenon apparently limited to the individual subject, consisting in the negation of sociality, is nev- ertheless of highly positive sociological significance: not only from the perspective of the subject, in whom it exhibits as conscious perception an entirely given relationship to society, but also through the definitive characteristic that offers up encompassing groups as well as the most intimate relationships, as cause as well as effect, for its occurrence.
Among its many sociological implications, freedom also has an aspect pertinent to this. It too appears at first as the simple negation of social connection, because every connection is a relationship. Free persons simply do not form unities together with others, but are ones for themselves. Now there may be a freedom that exists in this sheer unrelatedness, in the sheer absence of any limitation by other beings: a Christian or Hindu hermit, a solitary settler in a German or Ameri- can forest may enjoy a freedom in the sense that one's existence is filled throughout with other than social contents--likewise perhaps a collectivity, a household, or a political entity that exists completely insulated, without neighbors, and without relationships to other entities. However, for an entity that exists in connection to others, freedom has a much more positive meaning. It is a specific kind of relationship to the environment, a co-relational phenomenon that loses its meaning if there is no counterpart. It has in this regard two extremely important meanings for the deep structure of society.
1. For social people, freedom is neither a self-evident condition given at the outset nor a possession of more-or-less substantial durability acquired for all time. For sure not just because every single hypothetical demand that engages the strength of the individual generally towards a particular course actually has the tendency to proceed without lim- its; almost all relationships--governmental, party, family, friendship, erotic--though voluntary, go overboard and spin their demands, if left to their own resources, out over everybody; emotionally they become often uncannily surrounded by an imaginary sphere from which one
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then must emphatically mark out for oneself a reserve of strengths, commitments, interests.
However, it is not only the extensiveness of demands by which the social egoism of any social involvement endan- gers the freedom of its participants but indeed the relentlessness with which the entirely one-sided and narrow demand of already existing bonds likewise emerges. Each one of this sort tends to assert its rights with complete lack of mercy and indifference toward other interests and duties--whether they are compatible with it or fully incompatible--and limits the freedom of the individual by this nature of its manner no less than by its quantitative extent. Over against this form of our relation- ships freedom manifests itself as an ongoing process of liberation, as a struggle not only for the independence of the 'I' but also for the right even to remain in the interdependence each moment with free will--as a struggle that must be renewed after each victory. Detachment as nega- tive social behavior is thus in reality almost never a dormant property but a ceaseless loosening from bonds that continually either actually restrict the being-for-self of the individual or strive to do so in principle; freedom is not a solipsistic existence but a sociological event, not a situ- ation confined to the singularity of the subject but a relationship, albeit definitely viewed from the standpoint of the one subject.
2. Considered functionally as well as substantively, freedom is some- thing completely other than the repudiation of relationships, than the untouchability of the individual spheres by those located nearby. It follows from that very simple idea that a person is not only free but indeed also wants to use that freedom for something. This use, however, is for the most part nothing other than the domination and exploitation of other people. For the social individual (i. e. , one living in permanent interrelationships with others) freedom would in countless instances be entirely without content and purpose if it did not make possible or constitute the extension of one's will to those others. Quite correctly our language identifies certain insults and violations as 'having taken liberties with someone,' and likewise many languages have used their word for freedom in the sense of right or privilege. The purely nega- tive character of freedom as a relationship of the subject to one's self complements a very positive one in two ways: freedom exists for the most part in a process of liberation, it rises above and against a bond, and remains then as a reaction against this meaning, consciousness, and value; and it consists no less of a power relationship to others, of the possibility of acquiring advantage inside of a relationship, of the obligation or subjugation of the other, in which freedom only then
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finds its value and its realization. The inherent meaning of freedom for the subject is thus only as the watershed between both of its social relevancies: that the subject is bound by others and binds others. It shrivels up to nothing, so to speak, thereby revealing the actual mean- ing of freedom, even when visualized as a quality of the individual, as indeed this twofold social relationship.
Since now there are such frequent multi-faceted and indirect connec- tions consisting of determinants such as solitude and freedom, but still though as sociological forms of relationship--nevertheless the methodologi- cally most simple sociological formation simply remains effectively that between two participants. It provides the prototype, the germ, and the material for countless complex cases, although its sociological impor- tance in no way rests only on its expansion and diversification. Rather it is itself indeed a social interaction with which not only many forms of such are generally very purely and characteristically realized, but the reduction to the duality of elements is even the condition under which alone a variety of forms of relation emerge. The typical sociological entity reveals itself then, in that not only does the greatest diversity of individuality and the attendant motives not alter the identity of these formations, but that even these occasionally arise as much between two groups--families, states, associations of different kinds--as between two individual persons.
The specific characterization of a relationship through the duality of participants fully represents everyday experiences: a common share, an undertaking, an agreement, a shared secret binds participants into twos in a way quite different than when only three participate in it. Perhaps this is most characteristic of the secret, wherein the general experience seems to show that this minimum, with which the secret crosses the boundary of the being-for-itself, is at the same time the maximum with which its preservation is reasonably secured. A secret ecclesiastic-political society that was organized in France and Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century had separate grades, whereby the actual governing secrets were known only to the higher of these grades; permitted to be discussed, however, only between two members each of those high grades. The limit of two is thus felt to be so decisive that, where it can no longer be maintained with respect to knowledge, it is still observed with respect to speech! Now in general the difference between the bond of two and that of more members is thereby set, in that that relationship, as a unity of two individuals, stands to each of the participants as greater-numbered formations stand to it. Much as
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it may appear, say, to a third party as an independent entity above the individual, that is as a rule not the case for its participants, but each sees oneself in relation to the other, and not as one in an overarching collectivity. The social structure rests directly on the one and on the other. The departure of any individual would destroy the whole, so it does not attain the same supra-personal life that one feels as indepen- dent of oneself; whereas already even with a social formation of three a group can yet continue to exist even after the departure of one.
This dependence of the dyad on the pure individuality of the single member lets the idea of its existence be accompanied by that of its end in a way more nearly and perceptibly than is the case with other unions, which all members know can survive their individual departures or deaths. Just as the life of the individual is shaded in some way by the idea of one's death, so is the life of associations. By 'idea' is here understood not only the theoretical, conscious thought but a portion or modification of our being. Death stands before us not as a fate that will at any moment intrude, previously only as an idea or prophecy, as a present fear or hope, without interfering in the reality of this life until it occurs. Rather, that we will die is from the very beginning of life an intrinsic quality; in all of our living reality something is, which later as our death simply finds its last phase or revelation: we are, from our birth on, something that will die. Admittedly we vary in this; not only does it vary in the way that we subjectively imagine this quality and its final effect and react to it, but the way in which this element of our being interweaves with its other elements is of most extreme diversity. And so it is with groups. Every multimember group can be immortal in its idea, and this gives each of its members as such a completely unique sociological feeling, however one wishes to face death personally. 13 That, however, a union of two, certainly not with regard to its life but with regard to its death, depends on each of its elements for its very being--because two are required for its life, not however for its death--the entire inner attitude of the individual must contribute to it, albeit not always consciously and not always equa- bly. For the feeling of bonding, there has to be a tone of peril and of indispensability which makes it on the one hand an actual place of a
13 Compare the more detailed examination of this in the chapter on the self- preservation of the group.
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genuine sociological tragedy, on the other hand a sentimentality and mournful problematic.
This tone is generally pervasive where the end of the union is organi- cally grafted into its positive structure. From a northern French city recently there was a report of a strange 'Union of the Broken Dish. ' For years there, some industrialists are supposed to have joined in a meal. Once when a dish fell to the ground and broke, someone remarked by chance that the number of pieces was exactly the same as the number of people present--an omen for them to join together in a union of friendship in which each should owe the others good turns and assis- tance. Each of the gentlemen took a piece of the dish. Whenever one of them dies, his porcelain fragment is delivered back to the chairman, who glues the pieces handed back to him together. The last survivor is then supposed to glue the last piece, and the thusly repaired dish must be quickly buried. With that the 'Union of the Broken Dish' is finally liquidated and vanishes. Undoubtedly, the emotional tone inside this fellowship and in relationship to it would be a completely changed one if new members had been admitted and its life thereby perpetuated indefinitely. Its being designed from the very beginning to die gives it a certain cachet--which dyadic affiliations possess at the outset by virtue of the numerical limitation of their structure.
From the same structural foundation also only relationships of two are actually exposed to the characteristic coloration or decoloration that we identify as triviality. Because only where the claim to an individuality is productive of its appearance or achievement, the feeling of triviality produces its absence. It is still hardly adequately observed how rela- tionships, with fully unchanged content, are colored by the pervading imagination, however frequently or rarely similarly constituted. It is not only erotic relationships that receive through imagination (that there has never yet been such an experience) a special and meaningful timbre quite apart from their otherwise ostensible content and worth. Perhaps since there is hardly any externally objective property whose value--not only its economic value--would not from the infrequency or frequency contribute to the consciousness or unconsciousness of such, so perhaps also no relationship in its inner meaning for its carriers is independent of the factor of its amount of recurrence; this rate of occurrence can also mean thereby the repetitions of the same contents, situations, excitements inside the relationship itself. With the feeling of triviality we associate a certain level of frequency, of consciousness of the repetition of life content, the value of which is contingent directly upon a level
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of infrequency. Now it seems as though the life of a supra-individual social entity or the relationship of the individual to it has generally not faced this question, as though here, where the substantive meaning of the relationship transcends the individuality, even its individuality in the sense of the uniqueness or infrequency played no role and its absence thus operated as triviality. For the dyadic relationships of love, of mar- riage, of friendship--or even such higher numbered relationships that produce no higher structure often than the social gathering--the tone of triviality leading to despair or ruin proves the sociological character of the dual formations: to commit to the immediacy of the interaction and to deprive each of the elements of the supra-individual unity facing them, while they simultaneously partake of it.
That the sociological event remains thus within the personal apart- and-dependent existence, without the elements progressing to the formation of an overarching whole--as it exists in principle even with groups of two--is, moreover, the basis of 'intimacy. ' This characteristic of a relationship seems to me to return to the initially individual dis- position: in that the person gladly differentiates oneself from the other, the qualitatively individual is regarded as the core, value, and sine qua non of one's existence--a presumption in no way always justified since for many it is quite typically the contrary, the essence and substantial value of their personality shared with others. Now this repeats itself with aggregations. For them, too, it is manifest that the quite unique contents their participants share with one another but with no one outside this community have become the center and the real gratifica- tion of this community. This is the form of intimacy. To be sure, in every relationship some components, which its carriers contribute only to this relationship and no other, blend with others that are not exactly unique to this relationship but which the individual also shares in the same or similar way with other persons. Now as soon as that first, the internal aspect of the relationship, is experienced as its essence, as soon as it establishes its affective structure on that which each one gives or shows exclusively only to their own and to no one else--then the characteristic coloration is given that one calls intimacy. It is not the content of the relationship on which this rests. Two relationships, with regard to the mix of individual-exclusive contents as well as those radiating out in other directions, may be quite similar: only that one is intimate in which the former appears as the vehicle or axis of the relationship. When on the contrary certain people on the outside or people whose disposition is relatively alien to us initiate expressions and
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confessions like those that are otherwise reserved only for those closest to us, in such a case we nevertheless feel that this 'intimate' relational content does not yet make it intimate; because our entire relationship even to these people rests in its substance and its meaning still only on its general, non-individual components, and the former, certainly otherwise perhaps never revealed, nevertheless allows the relationship its own exclusive content because it does not become the basis of its form outside of intimacy. That this is the essence of intimacy makes it thus frequently a danger for closely bound dyads, perhaps most of all for marriage. In that the couple share the little 'intimacies' of the day, the kindnesses or unkindnesses of the hour, the faults carefully hidden from all others--it stands to reason that to transfer the accent and the substance of the relationship directly into the definitely fully individualistic, yet still objectively entirely irrelevant, and to view it as though actually lying outside the marriage, as something which one also shares with others, and which is perhaps the most important of the personality, the spiritual, the gracious, the general interests, is to gradually remove it from marriage.
Now there is the matter of how much the intimate character of the dyadic bond is connected to its sociological specificity, forming from it no higher unity over its individual elements. For this unity, its concrete carriers being thus so very much only those two, would be indeed effectively a third that can somehow come between them. The more extensive a community is, the easier it is, on the one hand, for an objective unity to form over the individuals, and, on the other, the less intimate it becomes; both of these characteristics are internally connected. That one is merely faced with others in a relationship and does not at the same time feel an objective supra-individual structure as existing and real--that is yet seldom actually fully clear in triadic relationships, but is nevertheless the condition of intimacy. That a third thus added to the two persons of a group interrupts the most intimate feeling, is significant for the more delicate structure of the groupings of two; and it is valid in principle that even marriage, as soon as it has led to a child, is sometimes undermined. It is worthwhile substantiat- ing this with a few words in order to characterize the affiliation of two members.
Just as duality, which tends to shape the form of our life content, presses toward reconciliations, whose successes as much as their failures make that duality all the more visible--so the masculine and the femi- nine, as the first example or prototype of this, press towards another,
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for unification, which becomes possible precisely only by way of the contrasting character of both, and which stands directly before the most impassioned desire for one another, in one another as something in the deepest unattainable ground. That it remains denied to the 'I' to grasp the 'Not I' actually and absolutely becomes nowhere more deeply felt than here where opposites nevertheless appear created for completion and fusion. Passion seeks to tear down the boundaries of the 'I' and merge with the other; however, they do not become an entity, but rather a new entity results: the child. And the characteristically dualistic condition of its becoming: a closeness that must nevertheless remain a remoteness, and its ultimate, which the soul desires, can never be reached, and a remoteness that presses endlessly to become one--with this, what has become stands also between its progenitors, and these varying sentiments associated with them allow now one, now the other to take effect. So it is that cold, internally estranged marriages desire no child because it binds: its uniting function highlights the foundation of that dominant estrangement all the more effectively, but also all the more undesired. Sometimes however very passionate and fervent mar- riages also want no child--because it divides. The metaphysical oneness, into which both sought to fuse only with one another, has now slipped through their fingers and stands over against them as a third physical presence that intrudes between them. But even a go-between must appear as a separation, to those who desire unmediated unity, in the same way that a bridge connects two banks, but nevertheless forms a measurable gap between them; and where a go-between is superfluous, it is worse than superfluous.
For all that the monogamous marriage seems here to be of the essential completion of the sociological character of dyadic group- ings--which is given through the absence of a supra-personal entity--an exception has to be made. The not-at-all unusual fact that there are decidedly poor marriages between admirable personalities and very good ones between quite deficient personalities indicates first of all that this structure, however dependent it is on each one of the participants, nevertheless can have a character that coincides with no member. If by chance each of the spouses suffers confusion, difficulties, inadequacies, but understands these to be as it were limited to oneself, while one contributes only one's best and purest in the marital relationship, this keeps it free from all personal inadequacies--so this may certainly hold first of all only for the spouse as a person, but nevertheless the feeling still arises that the marriage is something supra-personal, something
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in itself valuable and holy that is beyond the mundanity of each of its partners. While inside a relationship the one turns a sympathetic side only to that of the other, behaves only with respect for the other, these attributes, although certainly always one's duty, nevertheless obtain an entirely different color, mood, and meaning from when, in relation to one's own 'I,' they interweave only in the whole complex of this relationship. Consequently, for the consciousness of each of the two, the relationship can crystallize into an essence outside of it that is more and better--under some circumstances, also worse--than the individual self, an essence towards which one has obligations, and from which goods and fortune come to one as from an objective being. With regard to marriage this exemption of group unity from its being built on the basic 'I' and 'Thou' is facilitated by two kinds of factors. First by its incomparable closeness. That two so fundamentally differ- ent essences as man and wife form that kind of close bond, that the Egoism of the individual is so fundamentally overridden not only in favor of the other but in favor of the relationship as a whole, which includes family interests, family honor, the children above all--this is actually a wonder that is no longer rationally explainable beyond even this foundational seat of the conscious 'I. ' And the same is expressed in the separation of this union from its singular elements: the fact that each one of them experiences the relationship as something that takes on its own life with its own powers is only a formulation of its incom- mensurability with what we tend to imagine as the personal and rooted in the comprehensible 'I. ' This is furthermore especially required by the supra-individuality of the marital forms for the meaning of their social regulation and historical transmission. So immeasurably varied are the character and value of marriages--no one can dare decide whether they are more or less varied than single individuals--nevertheless no couple, after all, forged the form of marriage, but rather it is viewed as a relatively set form inside each cultural circle, removed from choice, not affected by individual hues and fortunes in its formal essence. In the history of marriage it is striking how large--and certainly always traditional--a role third persons, often not even relatives, play in the courtship, the arrangements over the dowry, the wedding customs--up to the officiating priest. This non-individual initiation of the relation- ship symbolizes very tangibly the sociologically unique structure of marriage: that the most personal of all relationships both with regard for substantive interests as well as formal configuration is appropri-
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ated and directed by plainly supra-personal, socio-historical entities. This insertion of traditional elements into the marital relationship, which places it significantly in contrast to the individual freedom in the arrangement, say, of the relationship of friendship, and in essence permits only acceptance or rejection but no modification, obviously promotes the sense of an objective formation and supra-personal unity in the marriage; although each of the two participants is in relation only to the single other, each feels nevertheless at least partially as though in relation only to a collectivity: as the mere bearer of a supra-individual structure that is in its essence and norms, however, independent of each one who is yet an organic member of it.
It seems as though modern culture, while it increasingly individualizes the character of the individual marriage, still leaves the supra-individu- ality that forms the core of the sociological form of marriage wholly untouched, indeed increases it in some respects. The variety of forms of marriage--whether based on the choice of contracting parties or determined by their particular social position--as it occurs in partly cultured and higher past cultures, appears at first as an individual form that especially lends itself to the differentiation in single cases. In reality it is quite the contrary: each of these separate kinds is still something thoroughly unindividual, socially preformed, and throughout the begin- ning of its differentiation is much more narrow and brutal than a wholly general and thoroughgoing fixed form of marriage, whose more abstract essence must necessarily allow greater room for personal differentiation. This is a thoroughgoing sociological formation: there is a much greater freedom for individual behavior and design when the social fixation con- cerns the whole public, when a thoroughgoing form is socially imposed on all relevant relationships--such as when, with apparent respon- siveness to individual circumstances and needs, social arrangements specialize themselves into all kinds of particular forms. The actually individual is in the latter case much more predetermined, the freedom for differentiation is greater if the unfreedom pertains quite overall to persistent traits. 14 Thus the unity of the modern form of marriage clearly offers wider latitude for further elaboration than does a majority of socially predetermined forms--while through its invariable univer- sality, however, it extraordinarily increases the cachet of objectivity,
14 These correlations are dealt with extensively in the last chapter.
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of the independent standing vis-a`-vis all individual modifications, which matter to us now. 15
Something sociologically similar could yet be seen in the duality of the partners of a business. Although its foundation and perhaps opera- tion rely exclusively on the cooperation of both of these persons, the matter of this cooperation, the business or firm, is still an objective structure about which each of the partners has constituent rights and duties--often not unlike those toward a third partner. Nevertheless, this has a different sociological meaning from that in the case of mar- riage; since the 'business' from the outset is something separate from the person of the proprietor due to the objectivity of the economy, and indeed in a duality the proprietor is no different from a sole or joint proprietorship. The interacting relationship of the partners with one another has its objective outside itself, while that in marriage has it
15 The actual intertwining of the subjective and objective characters, of the personal and the general supra-personal that marriage offers, is indeed found in the fundamental process, the physiological coupling, that alone is common to all historically known forms of marriage, while perhaps no single additional purpose is invariably found for all of them. This process on the one hand is felt as the most intimate and personal, but on the other hand as the absolutely general that allows the personality to immerse itself directly in the service to the genus, in the universal organic demand of nature. Its psychological secret is found in this double character of the act as that of the completely personal and the completely supra-personal, and from this it becomes understandable how this act could become the immediate basis of the marital relationship, which repeats this duality now on a higher sociological level. Now however there immediately emerges with the relationship of marriage to sexual activity a most peculiar formal complica- tion. While an exact definition of marriage may be quite impossible in light of the historical heterogeneity of its forms, it can nevertheless be determined what relation between man and woman marriage in any case is not: the purely sexual. Whatever else marriage may be, it is always and everywhere more than sexual intercourse; however divergent may be the directions towards which marriage goes, it transcends them--that it transcends sexual intercourse is primarily what makes marriage marriage. This is an almost unique sociological formation: that the one point that alone is common to all forms of marriage is at the same time the very one that it must transcend to result in a marriage. Only entirely remote analogies to this appear to occur in other realms: so artists, as they pursue even heterogeneous stylistic or imaginary-like tendencies, must equally know most exactly the naturalistic phenomena, not in order to remain with them, but in order to fulfill in that transcendence over them their specifically artistic task; in the way that all the historical and individual variations of gastronomic culture have still had to satisfy the same thing, the physiological needs of their field, but not in order to remain stationary there but precisely to step beyond this satisfaction of shear general need with the most diverse allurements. Within the sociological forma- tions, however, marriage appears to be the only or at least the purest of this type: all cases of a conceptual social form really involving only one unique element common to all, but for that very reason do not become realizations of this concept unless they add to that commonality something further, something unavoidably individual, something different in different cases.
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within itself; in the former the relationship is the means toward obtaining some objective result, in the latter any objective actually appears only as a means for the subjective relationship. It is all the more notable that in marriage, nevertheless, the objectivity of the groups of two and the independence of the group structure grow further away from the immediate psychological subjectivity.
One constellation however of utmost sociological importance is lacking in that group of two, while it is in principle open to every plurality: the shifting from duties and responsibilities to the impersonal structure-- which so frequently characterizes social life, and not to its advantage. And, to be sure, from two angles: Every whole that is more than a mere pair of given individuals has an uncertainty in its boundaries and its power, which easily tempts one to expect all kinds of benefits from it that in fact obligate the individual member; one shifts them onto society, in the way one often in the same psychological tendency shifts them into one's own future, whose vague possibilities give room for everything or will secure through one's own growing powers everything that one would not readily want to take on at the moment. Over against the power of the individual, transparent in the relationships just considered but therefore also just as clearly limited, stands the always somewhat mystical power of the totality, from which one therefore easily expects not only what the individual can achieve but also what one would not like to achieve; and indeed with the sense of this shift of responsibil- ity being fully legitimate. One of the best North American experts shifts a large part of the deficiencies and constraints under which the governmental apparatus works onto the belief in the power of public opinion. The individual is supposed to rely on the totality inherently recognizing and doing right, and so easily loses the individual initiative for the public interest. This intensifies conceptually into the positive phenomenon that this selfsame author thusly describes:
The longer public opinion has ruled, the more absolute is the authority of the majority likely to become, the less likely are energetic minorities to arise, the more are politicians likely to occupy themselves, not in forming opinion, but in discovering it and hastening to obey it. 16
16 Quotation is from James Bryce in The American Commonwealth, vol. II, first pub- lished in London in 1888; see James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (1888), The Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc. , 2005 <http://oll. libertyfund . org/Home3/Book. php? recordID=0004. 02> [accessed 26 November 2006].
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Likewise dangerous for the individual is membership in a whole, just as much with regard to inaction as action. Here it is a matter not only of the increase of impulsiveness and elimination of moral restraint, as these emerge in the individual in a crowd of people and lead to crimi- nal mob action in which even the legal responsibility of the member is controversial, but also that the true or the alleged interest of a com- munity entitles or obliges the individual to actions for which one as an individual would not like to bear responsibility. Economic enterprises make demands of such shameless egoism, office colleagues confess to such howling abuses, fraternities of a political as well as of a scientific type exercise such outrageous suppression of individual rights--as would not at all be possible for an individual or would at least make one blush if one were to answer for it as a person. As a member of a collective, however, one does all this with the clearest conscience because, as such, one is anonymous and shielded by the whole, indeed feels, as it were, concealed and intends at least formally to represent its interests. There are few cases in which the distance of the societal entity from the elements that form it gets so strongly, indeed almost in caricature, tangibly and effectively out of hand.
This reduction of the practical value of the personality, which the inclusion into a group often brings for the individual, must be indicated in order to characterize the dyad by its exemption. While here each member has only one other individual beside oneself, but not a greater number that would comprise a higher entity, the dependence of the whole on the member and thereby a share of responsibility for every collective action, is obvious. It can of course, as often enough happens, shift responsibilities to the companion, but the latter will be able to reject this much more immediately and definitely than can often be the case with an anonymous whole, for which the energy of personal interest or justifiable substitute for such cases is lacking. And likewise as little as one of two, on account of it, can hide what one does behind the group, so little can one, on account of it, depend on it for what one does not do. The strengths with which the group transcends the individual, to be sure very imprecisely and very partially, albeit still very noticeably, cannot compensate for individual inadequacy as in larger groupings; since in many cases two united individuals accomplish more than two isolated ones, so it is nevertheless characteristic in this case that each one must actually do something, and that, if one refuses this, only the other, and not the supra-individual power, is left--as is the case, indeed, even already by a combination of three. The importance
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of this provision, however, lies in no way only in the negative, in that which it excludes; from it stems rather also a narrow and specific tone of the combination of two. Precisely in that each one knows one could depend on the other alone and no one else, there is a special dedica- tion to the other--e. g. , marriage, friendship, but also the more external affiliations of two groups, including political ones--each element finds its social destiny in relationship to it and more highly dependent on it as an all or nothing affair than in more distant associations. This characteristic closeness is manifest most simply in the contrast to the combination of three. In that kind of grouping each individual element acts as a mediating authority for the other two and shows the two-fold function of such: both to bind together and to separate. Where three elements--A, B, and C--form a community, the direct relationship, for example, between A and B, is supplemented by an indirect one through their common relationship to C. This is a form-sociologi- cal enrichment, that each two elements, besides being bound by the direct and shortest line, is also yet bound by a refracted one; points at which they can find no immediate contact are created in interac- tion with the third member to whom each has a different perspective and unites each in the unity of the third personality; divisiveness that the participants cannot straighten out themselves are repaired by the third member or by its being dealt with in an encompassing whole. However, the direct binding is not only strengthened by the indirect but also disrupted. Still there is no such intimate relationship between three in which each individual would not be experienced occasionally as an intruder by the other two, and would also be only through the sharing of certain moods that their focus and modest tenderness can unfold at the undistracted glance of eye into eye; every attachment of two is thereby irritated that it has an onlooker. One can also note how extraordinarily difficult and seldom it is for three people to go, for instance, on a visit to a museum or before a landscape in an actually cohesive mood that develops relatively easily between two. A and B can emphasize and experience without interruption the ? they have in common because the ? that A does not share with B and the ? that B does not share with A are readily felt as individual reserve and as though on an altogether different floor. Now, however, C appears, who has ? in common with A and ? in common with B; thus is ended even with this the schema favorable for the unity of the whole as well as the assimilation of the mood in principle. While two can actually be a party relatively beyond any doubt, three tend to form immediately,
94 chapter two
in most emotionally subtle affiliations, three parties--by pairs--and thereby override the united relationship of, now one, now the other. The sociological structure of the bond of two is thereby characterized in that both lack the strengthened connection by the third, with respect to a social framework inclusive of the two, as well as the distraction and diversion of pure and immediate reciprocity. However, in many cases precisely that lack will make the relationship stronger and more intense, because in the feeling of being exclusively dependent on one another and on the cohesive powers that one is able to expect from nowhere in particular, not immediately evident in social interaction--some other- wise undeveloped powers of community, stemming as well from more remote psychic reservoirs, will come alive, and some disturbances and threats, to which one could be misled in the reliance on a third as well as on a collectivity, are more scrupulously avoided. This limitation, to which the relationship between two people is susceptible, is precisely the basis on which they construct the principal occasion of jealousy.
But one other expression of the same basic sociological constellation lies in the observation that relationships between two, formation of a whole from only two participants, presupposes a greater individualiza- tion of each of the two than, ceteris paribus, a whole made from many elements. Here, the essence is that in a union of two there is no majority that can outvote the individuals, an occasion immediately given by the addition of a third. Relationships, however, in which the oppression of the individual by a majority is possible, not only reduce individuality but generally, insofar as they are voluntary, they are not in general inclined to entertain very distinctive individualities. Whereupon indeed two commonly confused ideas are to be distinguished: the definitive and the strong individuality. There are personalities and collective entities that are of the most extreme individuality but do not have the power to protect this characteristic in the face of suppressions or leveling powers; whereas the strong personality tends to firm up its formation precisely in the face of opposition, in the struggle for its distinctiveness and over against all temptations to conform and blend in. The former, the merely qualitative individuality, will shun associations in which it finds itself opposite a possible majority; it is, however, as though it is predestined to multiple pairings because it is dependent by its distinctiveness as well as by its vulnerability on completion through another. The other type, the more intensive individuality, will, however, rather view itself in opposition to a majority against whose quantitative preponderance it can prove its dynamism. To be sure, technical reasons, as it were,
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will justify this preference: Napoleon's consulate-of-three was decid- edly more comfortable for him than a duality would have been, since then he needed to win over only the one colleague (what the strongest nature among the three will quite readily succeed in doing) in order to dominate the other, i. e. in fact both others, in the most legal man- ner. On the whole it can be said, however, that on the one hand the union of two, compared to larger numbers, favors a relatively greater individuality of the participants, on the one hand, and, on the other, presumes that the suppression of character by way of social incorpora- tion into an average level is absent here. Since it is for that reason true that women are the less individual gender, that the differentiation of individuals deviates less from the generic type than is the case on the average for men--so the very widespread opinion of them would be understandable, that they are in general less responsive to friendship than men. Because friendship is a relationship resting entirely and completely on the individualities of the members, perhaps even more than marriage, which, through its traditional forms, its social defini- tions, and its actual interests, includes the rather supra-individual, an independence from the distinctiveness of the personalities. The funda- mental differentiation, on which marriage rests, is in itself indeed still not an individual one but one of types; friendship, however, rests on one that is purely personal, and for that reason it is understandable that on the level of lower personality development in general actual and ongoing friendships are rare, and that on the other hand the modern highly sophisticated woman shows a conspicuously growing capability and inclination towards relationships of friendship and, to be sure, with men as well as with women. The entirely individual differentiation has here gained preponderance over that of types, and we therefore see the correlation produced between the sharpest individualization and a relationship that is limited absolutely at this stage to the relationship between two; naturally that does not exclude the same person being able to stand in different friendships at the same time.
That relationships between couples generally have such specific traits indicates not only the fact that the entry of a third changes them but also, what is often observed, that the further expansion to four or more in no way modifies the essence of the grouping correspondingly more. So, for example, a marriage with a child has a completely different char- acter from a childless one, while it does not differ so very significantly from a marriage with two or more children. Of course the difference in its inner being that the second child brings about is considerably
96 chapter two
greater again than what is being produced by a third. However, this still follows the mentioned norm, since a marriage with a child is in many respects a relationship with two members: the parents as a unit on the one hand, the child on the other. The second child is here actually not only a fourth but, sociologically viewed, simultaneously also a third member of a relationship that exercises the characteristic effects of such; because inside the family, as soon as the actual period of infancy is past, the parents much more commonly form a functioning unity than does the totality of children. Also in the realm of marital forms, the critical difference is whether monogamy generally prevails or the husband also has a second wife. If the latter is the case, the third or twentieth wife is relatively unimportant for the structure of the marriage. Inside the boundary drawn thereby, the step towards the second wife is here, of course, also at least from one perspective more consequential than that towards yet a greater number because just the duality of wives can generate in the life of the husband the sharpest conflicts and deepest disturbances, which do not in general increase with each additional one. Since with this, such a degradation and de-individualization of women is established, such a decisive reduction of the relationship to its sensual side (because every more mental relationship is also always more naturally individual)--it will not in general result in those deeper upheavals for the husband that can flow precisely and only from a relationship of two.
The same basic motif recurs in Voltaire's claim regarding the political usefulness of religious anarchy: two sects in rivalry inside a nation would unavoidably produce disturbances and difficulties that could never arise from two hundred. 17 The significance that the duality of the one element possesses in a multi-member combination is, of course, no less intrinsic and invasive, when it, instead of disruption, directly serves to safeguard the whole relationship. Thus it was asserted that the collegiality of the two Roman consuls may have counteracted monarchical appetites still more effectively than the system of nine top officials in Athens. It is the same tension of duality that simply functions, now destructively, now preserving, depending on the sundry circumstances of the whole association; what is essential here is that this latter one acquires an entirely different sociological character as soon as the activity in question
17 "If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace. " Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, translated and introduced by Ernest Dilworth (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961 [1733/34]), p. 26--ed.
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is carried out either by an individual person or a number greater than two. By the same logic as the Roman consuls, leading colleagues are often paired together: the two kings of the Spartans, whose continuous disagreements were explicitly emphasized as a protection for the state; the two chief war leaders of the Iroquois tribes; the two city guardians of medieval Augsburg, where the attempt at a unitary mayor's office stood under a severe penalty.