No More Learning

helle
? ----. 1894. Das Problem der Soziologie. Jahrbuch fu? r Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volk- swirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 18:272-77, 1301-07.
----. 1895. The Problem of Sociology. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 6(3):412-23.
----. 1907. Philosophie des Geldes. 2nd edition (1st edition 1900). Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. [ET: The Philosophy of Money, 3rd enlarged edition, ed. David Frisby, tr. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London and New York: Routledge, 2004]
----. 1908. Soziologie. Untersuchungen u? ber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Sociology. Inquiries into the forms of socialization). Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
----. 1931. Soziologische Vorlesungen von Georg Simmel--Gehalten an der Universita? t Berlin im Wintersemester 1899 (Nachschrift von Robert E. Park). Chicago: Society for Social Research, University of Chicago 1931, 1, 1, 53 pages.
----. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, tr. , ed. Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press. ----. 1955. Conflict--The Web of Group-Affiliations, tr. Kurt H. Wolff--tr. Reinhard
Bendix. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press.
----1983a [1892]. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. (Introduction to Moral Science).
Vol. I. Aalen: Scientia.
----. 1983b [1892]. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. (Introduction to Moral Science).
Vol. II Aalen: Scientia.
----. 1989. Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot. ----. 1997. Essays on Religion, ed. , tr. Horst J. Helle and Ludwig Nieder. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press.
Tenbruck Friedrich. 1958. Georg Simmel 1858-1918. Ko? lner Zeitschrift fu? r Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie 10:587-614.
Thomas, William I. 1923. The Unadjusted Girl--with cases and standpoint for behavior analysis.
Boston: Little Brown & Company.
CHAPTER ONE
THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY
If it is correct that human knowledge developed from practical necessity and that knowing how to keep safe is a weapon in the struggle for exis- tence against nature and in the competition of people with each other, it is no longer tied up with this origin. From being a mere means to a goal of action it has become an ultimate goal in itself. Yet knowledge, even under the self-governing form of science, has not broken off the relationship with practical interests altogether, even though it no longer appears entirely as an outcome of the latter but as interactions of the two, each with its own autonomous claims. Because scientific knowledge offers, in technology, not only the realization of extrinsic purposes but is also directed to the theoretical need for insight into the practical purposes, sometimes new directions of thought turn up that nevertheless touch upon problematics and forms of intellectuality, out of interests in a new sensitivity and desire only for their purely abstract character. So these are the claims that the science of sociology is concerned to raise: the theoretical pursuit and reflection on the practical power that the masses have acquired in the nineteenth century against the interests of individuals. However, the import and concern that the lower classes have caused the higher is scarcely conveyed in the concept, "society. " It is still true that the social distance between the classes does not allow their members to be seen as individuals but as a unified mass, and that this distance does not leave the two bound together in any other fun- damental way than that together they comprise "a society. " While the significance of classes lies not in their ostensive separate importance but in their comprising a "society," theoretical consciousness--as a result of the practical balance of power--at once took up as true the idea that every individual phenomenon is mainly determined through immea- surably immense influences from its social environment. And this idea obtained, so to speak, a retrospective power: next to the present society the past appeared as the substance that shaped individual existence, like waves in the sea. Here ground was gained in that the specific forms of these forces alone shaping individuals became explainable to them. This line of thought lent support to modern relativism, the tendency
20 chapter one
? to dissolve the distinct and essential into interworkings; the individual became only the location where social threads link, the personality only the particular way in which this occurs. Since we have been brought to the conscious awareness that every human act takes place inside society and nothing can evade its influence, so everything that was not the science of external nature must be the science of society. It appears as the all encompassing domain in which ethics as well as cultural his- tory, political economy as well as religious studies, aesthetics as well as demography, politics as well as ethnology are gathered together because the objects of these sciences take form in the compass of society. So the science of humanity would be the science of society. Contributing to this picture of sociology as the science of everything human was that it was a new science and consequently going into every possible problem not otherwise firmly fixed--just as a newly developing field typically becomes the El Dorado of homeless and itinerant beings; the inevitably vague and indefensible boundaries at the beginning grant everyone the right to accommodations. On closer inspection, throwing together all these former areas of study produces nothing new. It means only that the historical, psychological, and normative sciences are thrown into a large pot and the label 'sociology' tacked on. With that, only a new name would have been obtained, while everything that it treats is already fixed in its contents and relations, or produced inside the former domains of research. The fact that human thought and action occur in and are shaped by society makes sociology no more the all encompassing science of it than one can make chemistry, botany and astronomy the contents of psychology, because their topics are in the end only in human consciousness and subject to its requirements.
To be sure a misunderstood but in itself very significant fact underlies that error. The insight that the human being may be defined in all its essence and manifestations as living in interaction with other human beings simply must lead to a new manner of consideration in all the so called cultural sciences. It is no longer possible to explain historical facts in the widest sense of the word, the content of culture, the varieties of knowledge, and the norms of morality in terms of the individual, indi- vidual intellect, and individual interest, or where this does not work, to seize immediately upon metaphysical or magical accounts. With regard to language, for example, one no longer stands before the alternatives that it was invented by an individual genius or given by God; no longer need one split it up, to use religious images, between the invention of the clever priest and direct revelation and so forth. Rather, we now
the problem of sociology 21
? believe that we understand historical phenomena from the interaction and the cooperation of individuals, from the accumulation and sub- limation of countless individual contributions, from the embodiment of social energies in structures that stand and develop outside of the individual. Sociology therefore, in its relationship to the older sciences, is a new method, an aid in research for grappling with phenomena from all those fields in a new way. However, it does not operate essentially differently than induction at present; and induction has penetrated into all possible sciences as a new research principle, acclimatized, as it were, in each one of them, and introducing new solutions to longstanding problems. At the same time, though, sociology is no more a unique or all-embracing science than induction. Insofar as it depends on having to understand humans as social beings and society as the vehicle of historical events, it embraces no object that is not already dealt with in one of the previously existing sciences. Rather it is only a new avenue for all of them, a method of science that, due to its applicability to almost all problems, is not a separate science that stands by itself.
But what could its unique and new object be? What inquiry makes sociology an independent and demarcated science? It is obvious that its discovery as a new science does not depend for its legitimacy on objects unknown till now. Everything that we simply call an object is a complex of determinants and relationships, each of which reveals multiple facets, any of which can become an object of a special sci- ence. Every science is based on an abstraction for comprehending the entirety of something, an entirety we cannot grasp with a science lim- ited to just one aspect of its perspective or one of its concepts. Every science develops through splitting up the totality of things or its matter of inquiry into individual qualities and functions, after which an idea is found that allows the latter to blend in and as they occur allows the selected qualities and functions to be fixed to real things with method- ological coherence. So, for example, the linguistic facts, which are now connected as the material of comparative linguistics, had long existed among scientifically treated phenomena; however, that special science originated with the discovery of the concept under which what were formerly disconnected as separate speech complexes were grouped and subjected to specific laws. Similarly sociology as a specialized science can find its unique object, insofar as it simply draws a new line through facts which are well known as such but for which a concept would not be ready until now. It makes the cluster of facts that fall on that line into a common and cognitively patterned methodological-scientific unit.
22 chapter one
? Over against the most complicated, disorganized, and not scientifically ordered facts of historical society, the concepts of politics, the economy, culture, etc. produce that kind of organized knowledge, whether by linking certain portions of those facts, some more valuable than others, to unique historical developments or by identifying groups of elements that necessarily bring together both the historically unique and the timeless. Now there shall be a sociology as a distinctive science whose job it is to subject the concept of society as such--beyond the superficial collection of facts, to the social-historical results of a new abstraction and ordering, in such a way that certain determinants, formerly noted only in other varied connections, are seen as cohering and therefore as objects of one science.
This perspective comes to light by way of an analysis of the concept of society that one can describe as differentiating between the form and content of society, while emphasizing that this is really only an analogy for purposes of making a contrast between distinct neighbor- ing elements. This distinction will have to be understood in its unique meaning without prejudging the specific meaning of this preliminary label. I start, then, with the broadest image of society to avoid the fight over definitions: That is, a society exists where several individuals enter into interaction. This interaction always originates from specific impulses within or for the sake of specific purposes. Erotic, religious, or purely social impulses, purposes of defense from attack, the play of commerce, the need for assistance from instruction, and countless other purposes bring it about that human beings enter into fellowship--cor- relating their affairs with one another in activity for one another, with one another, against one another, activity that both affects them and feels the effects of them. These interactions indicate precisely that the individuals bearing these motivating drives and purposes become a unity, indeed a 'society. ' Then unity in an empirical sense is nothing other than the interaction of elements; an organic body is a unity because its organs are in a closer interchange of their energies than with any outside entity. A state is one, because the corresponding relationship of mutual interworkings exists among its citizens; indeed we could not call the world one if every part did not somehow influence every other, if anywhere the always actively mediating reciprocity of interworkings were severed. That unity or social interaction can have very different degrees, depending on the kind and closeness of the interaction--from the casual meeting, to a walk to visit the family, from all 'terminated' associations to membership in a state, from the transient society of hotel
the problem of sociology 23
? guests to the intimate bond of a medieval guild. I am describing now everything that exists in individuals, the immediate concrete locus of every historical reality--such as impulse, interest, purpose, predisposi- tion, psychological state, and incitement in such a way as to say that on account of them people affect one another and are in turn affected. I call them the content, the stuff, so to speak, of social interaction. In and of itself this stuff, of which life is full, the motives that drive it, are not quite social. Neither hunger nor love, neither work nor religiosity, neither technology nor the functions and products of intelligence yet mean social interaction in the simple and pure sense given to the term; rather they only shape it, in that they structure the isolated individuals in proximity into definite forms of association and mutuality that belong under the general idea of interaction. Social interaction is also the process, materialized in countless separate forms, in which individuals for these reasons--sentient or ideal, momentary or lasting, conscious or unconscious, causally driven or propelled teleologically--come together as a unity in which these interests are realized.
In every existing social phenomenon, content and social form con- struct a united reality; a social form can no more exist disconnected from content as can a spatial form exist without some material, the form of which it is. Rather, these are in reality inseparable elements of each social being and process: an interest, goal, motive, and a form or kind of interaction among individuals, through which or in which a Gestalt of the content attains social reality.
Now what 'society,' in every currently valid sense of the word, plainly makes into society, are manifestly the above-mentioned kinds of interac- tion. Some number of people would not be a society, simply on account of each harboring some factually determined or individually motivating life content; but if the vitality of this content attains the form of mutual influence, when one person affects another--directly or through an intervening third party--only then has the purely spatial proximity or even temporal succession of people become a society. Should there thus be a science, whose object is society and nothing else, it would inquire only into these interworkings, these kinds and forms of social interac- tion. Thus anything else that is also found under 'society,' anything realized through it and in its context, is not society as such. It would only be some content that accompanies this form or which this form of coexistence engenders along with that structure we call 'society' in the wider and usual sense. That both of these, inseparable in reality, are separated in scientific abstraction, that the forms of interchange
24 chapter one
? or social interaction, conceptually stripped of the contents by which exclusively they become social, are combined and subordinated to a methodologically standardized scientific perspective--this seems to me the singular and complete possibility for justifying a specific science of society as such. With this the facts that we point to as the socio-his- torical reality would first be actually sketched out at the level of the purely social.
Now such abstractions alone might manage to make a science out of the complexity as well as unity of reality, indeed may even be demanded by the internal requirements of cognition. Some legitimation for it must lie in the structure of objectivity itself, because only in some functional connection to factuality can there be protection against unfruitful ques- tions, against haphazard scientific conceptualization. It is an error for a nai? ve naturalism to allow mere data to comprise analytical or synthetic formations through which they become the content of science, so that there are analyses it actually has more or less conformed to those for- mations (something like a portrait fundamentally altering the natural human appearance and therefore having a greater chance than another for an entirely alien image); whereof then the better or worse warrant for those scientific problems and methods can be gauged. So now the rule that will apply an analysis by forms and contents to socio-historical phenomena and bring those phenomena to a synthesis rests upon two stipulations that can only be verified factually: It must be found on the one hand that the same form of social interaction occurs with wholly different contents for altogether different ends, and conversely that the same substantive interest is clothed in wholly different forms of social interaction as its vehicle or types of fulfillment--just as the same geo- metrical forms are found in different materials and the same material takes on different spatial forms, or just like the corresponding fit between the forms of logic and the contents of cognition.
Both, however, are undeniable as fact. We therefore find in social groups, with the most varied purposes and significance conceivable, the same formal patterns of behavior among individuals. Domination and subordination, competition, imitation, division of labor, factional- ism, representation, the reciprocal nature of inclusion and exclusion, and countless others are found in a political organization as well as a religious community, in a conspiratorial band as well as a business, in an art school as well as a family. As multiple as are the interests for which these social interactions come about, the forms by which they are achieved can still be the same. And conversely, substantively similar
the problem of sociology 25
? interests can exhibit very differently formed social interactions, e. g. eco- nomic interests are realized as much through competition as through the systematic organization of manufacturers, as readily through agreements against other economic classes as through agreements with them. The contents of religious life, with invariably identical contents, require at one time a free form of community and at another time a centralized one. The interests on which the relationships between the sexes is based are satisfied in a hardly comprehensible multiplicity of family forms. Pedagogical interests lead now to a liberal, now to a despotic relational form between the teacher and the single student, now to more collec- tivistic ones between the former and the entire population of students. Just as there can be identical forms in which are found the most diverse contents, so can the matter persist while the association of individu- als sustaining it moves inside a diversity of forms. Thus while in their reality facts make matter and form an indissoluble unity of social life, they still lend a legitimation to sociological problems that require the identification, systematic organization, psychological grounding, and historical development of pure forms of social interaction.
This problem directly contradicts the method that the previous indi- vidual social sciences had created because their division of labor was determined entirely by the diversity of contents. Political economy, the typology of church organizations, the history of educational systems, ethics, politics, theories of sexual life etc. have divided up the field of social phenomena among themselves, so that a sociology--that wanted to comprehend, with its construct of form and content, the totality of these phenomena--could result in nothing other than a combination of those areas of study. As long as the lines we draw through historical reality to separate it into distinct fields of research join only those points that highlight content interests, no area is conceded to a particular sociology. Rather a line is needed that cuts through everything previ- ously drawn and constitutes as a specific field the pure facts of social interaction, according to their multiple configurations and detaching them from their connection with various contents. In that way it will have become specialized science in the same sense that epistemology became one--with all the obvious differences of methods and results--in that it abstracted categories or functions of cognition from the mul- tiple perceptions of individual things. Sociology belongs to that type of science whose special character is not that its object clusters with others under a broader concept (in the manner of classical and Ger- man philology, or optics and acoustics), but rather places a whole field
26 chapter one
? of objects under a particular perspective. Not its object but its way of looking, especially by carrying out its abstraction, distinguishes it from the customary historical-social sciences.
The idea of society, for purposes of scientific treatment, covers two strictly differentiated meanings. It is first the complex of interacting individuals, the socially formed human matter, as that constitutes the entire historical reality. Then, however, 'society' is also the sum of indi- vidual forms of relationship by which individuals are able to become a society in the first sense. So one might at first call a distinctly formed material a 'sphere,' but the pure Gestalt or form in a mathematical sense enables such mere material to become a sphere in a first sense. When one speaks of social sciences according to that earlier meaning, their object is everything that occurs in and with society. Social science in a second sense has forces, relationships, and forms as its subject matter, through which people socialize, things that, viewed separately, constitute 'society' in the strict sense--which obviously is not altered by circumstance, so that the content of social interaction, the specific modifications of its substantive purpose and interest, is distinguished often or always from its particular form. Here the objection would be wholly false that all these forms--hierarchies, corporations, competi- tions, forms of marriage, friendships, social customs, rule by one, and rule by many--would only be constellation-like incidents in existing societies: were a society not already present, the prerequisites and the opportunity for allowing such forms to come about would be lacking. The suggestion thus arises that in every society known to us a great number of such associations are at work--i. e. , forms of social inter- action. If then one form ceases to exist, 'society' would still be there so that certainly it can appear in every particular one; the form would arise in a society already preparing or producing such a phenomenon. However, were one to remove all of them, no society would remain. Not until such interrelations are generated on account of certain motives and interests does society emerge. So then it remains that the concern of social science in the widest sense is the history and laws of such a developing comprehensive picture. Because this is broken up among the individual social sciences, left to sociology is the specific task of considering the abstracted forms that do not so much generate social interaction but rather are social interaction. Society in a sense that sociology can use is, then, either the overall abstract concept for these forms, the genus of which they are species, or the actual momentary summation of the same. Further, it follows from this idea that a given
the problem of sociology 27
? quantity of individuals can be a society in greater or lesser degrees. With every new awakening of emergent formations, every construction of factions, every coalescence in a mutual work or shared feeling and thought, every sharper division of serving and ruling, every shared meal time, and every adorning oneself for others, even the same group becomes more 'society' than it was before. There is simply never a society of the type that forms on the basis of any single associative paradigm because there is no such thing as interaction per se. There are only specific types, with whose emergence society simply is, and which are neither the cause nor consequence of it; rather they them- selves are it instantly. Only the boundless profusion and diversity that are operative at every moment have given the general concept society an apparently independent historical reality. Perhaps the reason for the characteristic vagueness and uncertainty that adhere to the concept and former treatments of general sociology lies in this hypostasizing of a pure abstraction--just as the concept of life did not progress well so long as science regarded it as a unitary phenomenon of actual reality. Only inasmuch as the discrete processes inside organisms, whose sum- mation or interweaving life is, were analyzed, only inasmuch as it was recognized that life exists only in these specific activities and between organs and cells, did the life sciences acquire a firm foundation.
It is first necessary to find out in society what 'society' actually is, just as geometry determines in spatial things what spatiality actually is. Sociology, as the science of human social existence, which can still be the object of scientific study in countless other respects, thus stands in relation to the specialized disciplines as geometry stands in relation to the physical-chemical sciences of matter.
Geometry considers the form through which matter becomes empirical bodies at all--form, which of course exists as such only in the abstract, just as do the forms of social interaction. Both geometry and sociology leave to other disciplines the study of the contents that are present in their forms; even the study of the totality of phenomena, whose pure form are their concern, is left to the others. It is hardly necessary to mention that this analogy with geometry does not apply more broadly than its purpose here of attempting to clarify the fundamental problems of sociology. Above all geometry has the advantage of finding in its field extremely simple pat- terns to which complicated figures can be reduced; hence it constructs the whole range of possible formations from a relatively few postulates. In contrast, even a mere approximate reduction into simple elements is not to be expected for the forms of social interaction in the foreseeable
28 chapter one
? future. The result is that sociological forms, even if tolerably accurate, are valid for only a relatively small range of phenomena. Thus if one says, for example, that domination and subordination are a formation found in almost every human social interaction, little is gained by this general acknowledgement. It is necessary, rather, to focus inquiry on the individual types of superior-subordinate relations, on the specific forms of their realization, which now, with some certainty, lose their accuracy at the periphery of their validity.
These alternatives are proposed for any science: either it is to lead to the discovery of timelessly valid laws or to the representation and conceptualization of time-specific historically real developments. In any case, though, one does not exclude the countless cases in empirical scientific undertakings that stand between these two types; so the prob- lematic identified here of a necessity to decide between them is not dealt with at the outset. The object abstracted out from reality allows these empirical manifestations to be observed on the one hand in the law-like regularities that, located entirely within the factual structure of elements, apply irrespective of their temporal-spatial realization; they are effective precisely in that they enable historical developments to operate one time or a thousand. On the other hand, however, those same forms of social interaction can be observed, with their now and then occurrences as well as with their historical development in definite groups in mind. In the latter instances their identification would basically be historical narrative for its own sake, and in the former instances induction material for the discovery of timeless law-like regularities. We learn about competition, for example, from countless instances telling us about it in very differ- ent domains--politics, political economy, history of religions, art. It is now a matter of establishing from these facts what competition as a pure form of human relationships means, under what circumstances it arises, how it develops, what modifications it undergoes with differ- ent kinds of objects of competition, by what concurrent formal and material regulations of a society it is inspired or reduced, how compe- tition between individuals differs from that between groups--in short, what it is as a form of interaction among humankind that can absorb all possible contents, but by the uniformity of its appearance, despite great differences in content, shows that it belongs to a well-ordered and abstractly justified field following its own laws. The uniform is lifted from the complex manifestations like a cross-section; the dissimilar in them--here, that is, the substantive interests--is set in their competitive opposition. It is also suitable to deal with all the great relationships and
the problem of sociology 29
? interactions that form societies: factionalism; imitation; the formation of classes, circles, and secondary divisions; the embodiment of social interaction in separate structures of a factual, personal, and ideational kind; the growth and role of hierarchy; delegated representation; and the importance of a common opponent for the inner cohesion of a group. Then such chief problems are joined to the same specific form of groups manifesting on the one hand features peculiar to the form and on the other hand complicated features--these, for example: the meaning of the "impartial," the "poor" as organic members of societies, the numerical determination of group processes, the primus inter pares, and the tertius gaudens. To mention even more complex processes: the intersection of various circles in individual personalities; the distinct importance of the "secret" in the formation of circles; the modification of group characteristics, incorporating detached individuals, whether through locally coalescing factors or factors not attributable to them; and countless others.
I leave open, as indicated above, the question of whether absolutely identical forms with diverse contents appear. The near similarity that they manifest under multitudinous material--likewise with the contrary--suffices to regard this as possible in principle. That it is not entirely realized simply shows the difference of the historical-mental event, with its never fully rationalizable fluctuations and complexities, from the capacity of geometry to free its concept of compliant shapes with absolute clarity from their realization in matter. One also keeps in mind that this uniformity in the nature of interaction, with the arbitrary distinction between human and material things, is first of all only a means to carry out and legitimate for all individual phenomena the scientific distinction between form and content. Methodologically, this would be required even if the actual constellations do not lend them- selves to that inductive practice that allows the same to be crystallized out of the difference, in the same way as the geometrical abstraction of the spatial form of a body is also justified, even if this body were to be formed this way in the world only one time. That there is a dif- ficulty in practice here is obvious. There is, for example, the fact that towards the end of the Middle Ages certain craft masters, because of the expansion of business networks for the supply of materials, were pressed to abandon journeymen and to use new means to attract customers, all of which was inconsistent with the old craft principles whereby each master was supposed to receive the same 'nutrition' as the others, and for that reason sought to place themselves outside earlier
30 chapter one
? narrow associations. Concerning the pure sociological form abstracted from a specific content, it is important to consider that the widening of the circle to which an individual's action binds him goes hand in hand with a stronger accentuation of personal distinctiveness, greater freedom, and the mutual differentiation of individuals. But as far as I can tell, there is no sure effective method to extract this sociological meaning from that complex content-determined fact. Which sheer socio- logical configuration, which particular interrelationship of individuals is included in the historical event when abstracting from individuals with all their interests and impulses and from the conditions of purely factual behavior--well, it is possible to interpret the historical facts in a variety of ways, and one can refer to the historical facts that occupy the reality of definite sociological forms only in their material totality, and devoid of the means, by hook or crook render teachable its break- down from the material and form-sociological point of view. This is the case with the proof of a geometrical theorem by the unavoidably haphazard and crudely sketched figure. The mathematician, however, can still recognize that the concept of the ideal geometrical figure is known and effective and is viewed now wholly internally as essentially the meaning of the chalk or ink lines. However in sociology the com- parable assumption should not be made; we cannot logically force a solution for the problem of what, out of the whole complex phenom- enon, is pure interaction.
Here one must accept the odium of speaking of intuitive prac- tice--though well apart from speculative-metaphysical intuition--about a specific angle of vision with which that distinction is realized and by which we can be guided, albeit only by demonstration with examples, until some later time when we will have conceptualized fully expressive and reliably guiding methods. And that raises the difficulty that not only is there no indubitable handle for the implementation of this sociologi- cally foundational idea, but also that even where it functions tolerably well, in many instances the aligning of events under it or under the perception of certainty with regard to contents still often remains arbi- trary. Inasmuch, for example, that the phenomenon of the 'poor' is a sociological type, a result of relational forms within a group, occasioned by general currents and movements, it is necessarily generated when people congregate. Or poverty can be viewed as the material outcome of certain idiosyncratic human characteristics, or exclusively from the viewpoint of substantive economic interests. Opposite opinions about it will be possible. On the whole one can view historical phenomena from
the problem of sociology 31
? three principal perspectives: that of individual beings, who are the real carriers of situations; that of the technical forms of interaction, which are executed certainly only by individual beings but are not considered just from the standpoint of individuals but of their togetherness, their with-one-another and for-one-another; and that of the conceptually definable content of situations and events, in which case one does not inquire about their bearers or their relationships but their purely factual meaning, the economy and technology, art and science, legal norms and products of the emotional life. These three perspectives continuously intertwine with one another. The methodological necessity to keep them apart is always confronted by the difficulty of arranging each one in a track independent of the others, and by the desire for a single view of reality encompassing all standpoints. And however deeply one leads back into the other, grounding and being grounded, it will never be able to get a fix on all cases, and for that reason, in spite of all the methodological clarity and crispness of the principal formulation, the ambiguity is hardly avoidable that the treatment of an individual problem seems to belong now to one, now to the other category and is itself never clearly within one or the other way of treating it. In the end, I hope that the methodology of the sociology proposed here will emerge more definitely and even perhaps more clearly through the exposition of its individual problems than through this abstract outline. It is certainly not altogether uncommon in intel- lectual matters--indeed, in the broadest and deepest problem areas, rather widespread--that anything we must refer to with the unavoid- able metaphor foundation is not as fixed as the superstructure erected upon it. So the practice of science, especially in fields yet undeveloped, will not be able to do without a certain measure of instinctive activity, the motives and norms of which will only later acquire a fully clear awareness and conceptual development. And yet so little is it permitted for scientific practice to ever give itself over to those vague instinctual methods of procedure, intuitively applied only in the single inquiry, that it is still in order to condemn them to unfruitfulness if one should wish to make still early steps into a completely formulated method for treating new problems. 1
1 We are considering in only a rough way the endless complexity of social life that gives rise to ideas and methods for mastering it intellectually. So it would be mega- lomania right now to hope and want to reach for fundamental clarity of questions and certitude of answers. It seems to me worthy to admit this right up front since in
? 32 chapter one
? Within the problem area that is constructed by selecting out the forms of social interaction from the whole manifestation of society, portions of research offered here yet remain that are, so to speak, quantitatively beyond the tasks that are recognized as sociological. That is to say one inquires at first into the back-and-forth influences among individuals, the sum of which produces society's cohesion, so that a progression is revealed at once, indeed a world, as it were, of such forms of relationship that were either not included at all in previous social science or without insight into their primary and vital meaning. On the whole sociology has been limited in fact to social phenomena in which the interactive forces are already crystallized out from their immediate bearers, at least as idea-units. States, manufacturers' associations, clergy, forms of family, economic conditions, military affairs, corporations, brotherhoods, depic- tions of class, and division of industrial labor--these and similar large agencies and systems appear to comprise society and fill in the sphere of its science. It is obvious that the larger, more important, and more dominant a province of social interest with its course of action is, the sooner will an objective expression, an abstract existence beyond the individual and primary process, emerge from immediate inter-individual life-and-work. But now one to two further important points need to be added. In addition to its comprehensive and outwardly important imposing phenomena, visible at a distance, it is made up of innumer- able apparently small forms of relationship and types of interaction among people (negligible in the single case), but which are presented to an inestimable degree by these single cases, and insofar as they are
this way at least a resolute beginning can be made instead of making a claim to a finality, the meaning of which would be doubtful in any case in this sort of venture. So the chapters of this book are thought of as examples with regard to method, as fragments with regard to contents, which I must consider for the science of society. In both respects it seemed in order to choose the most heterogeneous themes possible, mixing the general and specialized. The less the present offering here is rounded off to a systematic coherence, the further will the parts lie from one another around such an apparently all-encompassing circle, in which a future perfection of sociology will unite its isolated and unanchored points. Since I am myself thus emphasizing the wholly fragmentary and incomplete character of this book, I will not defend myself against criticisms of that with a preventative apologia. So if for certain the selection of a single problem and exemplification will appear to fall short of the ideal of an objective thoroughness, this would only show that I have not made the basic ideas understood clearly enough. Such clarity will only be possible after setting out and turning down a very long road, and every systematically concluded completeness would be minimally a self-deception. Integrity can be attained here by someone only in the subjective sense that one shares everything one manages to see.
? the problem of sociology 33
? in motion among the comprehensive and, so to speak, official social forms, they bring about indeed nothing less than society as we know it. Limiting sociology to the official social formations resembles the earlier science of the interior of human bodies, which fixed upon describing the large organs--heart, liver, lung, stomach, etc. , but missed and neglected the uncounted, the not popularly known, or those whose purposes were unknown. Without them, the more obvious organs would never produce a living body. The actually experienced existing life of society cannot be pieced together from the structures of the aforementioned type, those that make up the conventional objects of social science. Without the effects of the countless interworkings in individual small widespread syntheses, to which these inquires should be for the most part devoted, it would be fragmented into a multiplicity of discontinuous systems. What the scientific establishment of such unapparent social forms also makes difficult is that which makes it infinitely important for the deeper understanding of society: that they have generally not yet hardened into fixed supra-individual images; rather society appears to be in a state, as it were, of being born--of course not actually in its primal historically inscrutable beginning but in everything that takes place every day every hour; social interaction among people continuously making connections and breaking them off and making them again, a perpetual flowing and pulsing that unites individuals, even when it does not amount to actual organization. Here it is, so to speak, a mat- ter of the microscopic-molecular processes inside human material that are, however, the actual activity that links together or hypostasizes those macroscopic fixed entities and systems. That humans look at one other and that they are jealous of each other, that they exchange letters or eat lunch together, that beyond all tangible interests they elicit sympathy in one another, that the gratitude of altruistic service consistently has an unbreakable bonding effect, that one asks directions from another, and that they dress and adorn themselves for one another--all the thousands of person-to-person performances, momentary or enduring, conscious or not, fleeting or momentous relationships, from which these examples are selected entirely arbitrarily, continuously tie us together. Such threads are woven at every moment, allowed to fall, are taken up again, substituted for others, and interwoven with others. Here dwell the interworkings among the atoms of society, accessible only to the psychological microscope, the interworkings that sustain the thor- oughgoing tenacity and elasticity, the entire variety and uniformity of this so meaningful and so enigmatic life of society. It is a matter of
34 chapter one
? applying the principle of infinitely many and infinitely small effects, juxtaposed on society, as in the sciences of juxtaposition--of geology, of the tenets of biological evolution, history as effectively proven. The immeasurably small steps produce the coherence of historical unity; likewise the not-so-apparent person-to-person interactions produce the coherence of historical unity. What goes on perpetually in physical and mental contact, in reciprocal excitation of desire and suffering, in conversations and silences, in common and antagonistic interests--that is really what determines the wonderful untearableness of society, the fluctuation of its life, with which its elements constantly achieve, lose, and shift their equilibrium. Perhaps what the advent of microscopic research meant for the science of organic life will be what the advent of this knowledge will achieve for social science. Inquiry till then was limited to the large, separate, distinct bodily organs, the form and functional variety of which were a matter of course; now then life process appeared in relation to its smallest carriers, the cells, and in its identity with the countless and continuous interactions among them. As they attach to or destroy one another, assimilate or chemically influ- ence one another--this finally allows us to understand gradually how body generates its form, maintains it, or changes it. The large organs, in which these fundamental bearers of life and their interactions have combined in visible macroscopic specialized structures and activities, would never have made the network of life comprehensible if those countless activities taking place among the smallest elements, now as it were tied together by the macroscopic, had not revealed themselves as basic and fundamental to life. Wholly apart from any sociological or metaphysical analogy between the realities of society and organisms, it is now a matter here of the analogy of methodological deliberation and its development; of the exposure of the delicate threads, the irreduc- ible relations among human beings, by whose continual performance all these large structures, now objective and possessing an actual his- tory, are founded and borne. These entirely primary processes, which construct society out of the immediate, individual material, are thus, alongside the higher and more complicated activities and structures, to undergo formal examination. The specific interactions that from a theoretical view do not lend themselves to this undertaking to quite the usual extent, are to be examined as society-constructing forms, as parts of social interaction in general. Indeed, the more an exhaustive examination is purposefully devoted to these apparently insignificant varieties of relations, the better sociology gets at seeing them clearly.
the problem of sociology 35
? Just with this turn, however, the research projected here appears to become nothing other than a chapter of psychology, at best social psychology. Now there is for sure no doubt that all social processes and instincts have their seat in psyches, that social interaction is a psycho- logical phenomenon, and it is fundamental to its reality that a major- ity of elements becomes a unity. There is no single analogy in the world of physical bodies; there an insurmountable spatial impenetrability remains a given. Whatever external events we might also identify as social, it would be like a marionette play, not any more conceivable and meaningful than the interpenetration of clouds or the interweaving development of tree branches, if we were not to recognize fully as a matter of course psychological motivations, feelings, thoughts, and needs, not only as bearers of those events but as their essential vitality and us really as only interested parties. The causal understanding of any social event would have thus been attained in fact if psychological assessments and their development according to 'psychological laws'-- so problematic a concept for us--had permitted the complete deduction of these events. There is also no doubt that the conceptions of historical- social existence available to us are nothing other than psychological chains that we reproduce with either an intuitive or methodologically systematic psychology and, with internal plausibility, get to the feeling of a psychological necessity of the developments in question. Conse- quently each history, each portrayal of a social situation, is an exercise of psychological knowledge. However, it is of utmost methodological importance and downright crucial for the principles of the human sciences generally that the scientific treatment of psychological facts not employ psychology in any way; also where we continuously make use of psychological laws and knowledge, where the explanation of every single fact is possible only in psychological terms--as is the case inside of sociology--the aim and intention of this practice need not proceed throughout by way of psychology; that is, not some law of mental processes that can deal with a specific content, but rather according to the contents and their configuration themselves. There is here a bit of a contrast to the sciences of external nature, which as facts of the intellectual life also play out after all only inside the mind. The discovery of each astronomical or chemical truth, as well as the contemplation of every one of them, is an occurrence in consciousness that a fully developed psychology could deduce entirely from purely mental conditions and developments. But these sciences arise insofar as they turn the contents and correlates of mental processes into objects,
36 chapter one
? in the same way as we construe a painting in terms of its aesthetic and art-historical meaning and not from the physical wave lengths that its colors emit and that of course produce and sustain the whole real existence of the painting. It is forever a reality we cannot grasp scien- tifically in its actuality and totality, but must take up from a series of separate standpoints and thereby organize them into a variety of sci- entific optics that are independent of one another. This is now needed also for all mental occurrences, the contents of which are not themselves included in an autonomous realm and do not intuitively resist objectify- ing their own mental reality. The forms and rules of a language, for example, though certainly built up only from mental capacities for mental purposes, still come to be treated by a linguistic science that completely avoids any single given reification of its object. It is therefore portrayed, analyzed, and constructed purely in accord with its subject matter and the formations present only in its contents. The situation is the same with the facts of social interaction. That people influence one another, that the one does something or suffers something, manifests being or becoming, because others are present and they express, act, or emote--of course this is all a matter of mental phenomena, and the historical occurrence of every single case of it is to be understood only through psychologically pertinent concepts, through the plausibil- ity of psychological progressions, through the interpretation of the outwardly visible by means of psychological categories. However, now a unique scientific perspective can disregard these mental events as something else altogether and place their contents in relationships, as it organizes, tracks, analyzes them for itself under the concept of social interaction. Thus it would be established, for example, that the relation- ship of the more powerful to the weaker in the form of primus inter pares typically gravitates toward becoming an absolute domination by one and gradually rules out moments of equality. Although this is, in the reality of history, a psychological event, it interests us now only from the sociological standpoint: how the various stages here of higher and lower ranks string together, to what extent a higher rank in a certain kind of relationship is compatible with an order of equality in other relationships, and at what point the superiority of power destroys equal- ity in them; whether the issue of association, the possibility of coop- eration, is greater in the earlier or in the later stages of such processes, and so on. Or it becomes established that enmities are the most bitter when they arise on the basis of an earlier or still somehow felt com- monality and unity, in the same way that the most fervent hatred has
the problem of sociology 37
? been identified as that among blood relatives. Some will view this and even be able to characterize it as only psychologically comprehensible. But considered as a sociological formation, it is not of interest in itself as concurrent mental sequences in each of two individuals; rather of interest is the synopsis of both under the categories of unification and division: how fully the relationship between two individuals or parties can include opposition and solidarity--allowing the former or the lat- ter to color the whole; which types of solidarity offer the means for crueler, profoundly hurtful damage, as memory or irrepressible instinct, than is possible at the outset from prior unfamiliarity. In short, as that study represents the realization of relational forms of people, which also represents them as a specific combination of sociological categories-- that is what matters, even though the singular or typical description of the activity itself can also be psychological. Taking up an earlier sug- gestion, despite all the differences one can compare this with the geo- metrical deduction drawn from a figure sketched on a blackboard. What can be presented and seen here are only physically laid out chalk marks; however, what we mean with the geometrical considerations is not the chalk marks themselves, but rather their meaning for the geo- metrical concept, which is altogether different from that physical figure as a storehouse of chalk particles--while on the other hand it can also be followed as this material thing under scientific categories, and its physical materialization or its chemical composition or its optic impres- sion can be, more or less, objects of specific investigations. Sociological data are similarly mental processes the immediate reality of which is presented in the first instance in psychological categories; however these, though indispensable for the depiction of facts, remain outside the purpose of sociological consideration, which is in fact borne only by the mental activities and only able to portray the factuality of social inter- action through them--somewhat like a drama, which from beginning to end contains only psychological events, can only be understood psychologically and yet has its intention not in psychological knowledge but in the syntheses that shape the contents of the mental events under the point of view of the tragic, the art form, the symbols of life. 2
2 The introduction of a new way of thinking about facts must support the vari- ous aspects of its method through analogies with recognized fields; but not until the perhaps endless process in which the principle specifies its realizations within concrete research and in which these realizations legitimate the principle as fruitful, can such analogies with them clarify wherein the difference of materials at first obscures the
? 38 chapter one
? While the theory of social interaction as such, isolated from all the social sciences that are defined by some other content of social life, appears as the only science that is entitled to the name social science in the strict sense, the designation is not of course the important thing but the discovery of that new complex of specialized problematics. The argument over what sociology really means seems to me as something completely unimportant, so long as it turns only on conferring this title on an already existing and worked-over circle of activity. If, however, the title sociology is singled out for this set of problems with the preten- sion of covering the concept of sociology fully and solely, this must still be justified over and against one other problem-group that undeniably seeks no less to attain, beyond the contents of the specialized social sciences, propositions about society as such and as a whole.
As with every exact science intended for the direct understanding of facts, the social is also delimited from two philosophical domains. One encompasses the conditions, foundational concepts, and presuppositions of specialized research, which can find no completion in it themselves because they rather are already the basis for it; in the other, this spe- cialized research is led to completions and coherence and is set up with questions and concepts related to them, that have no place inside experience and directly objective knowledge. The former is epistemol- ogy, that is, the metaphysics of the specialized fields under discussion. The latter refers actually to two problems that remain, however, justifi- ably unseparated in the actual thought process: Dissatisfaction with the fragmentary character of specialized knowledge that leads to premature closure at fact checking and accumulation of evidence by supplementing the incompleteness with speculation; and this same practice even serves the parallel need to encompass the compatible and incompatible pieces in an overall unified picture. Next to this metaphysical function focused on the degree of knowledge, another one is directed towards a different dimension of existence, wherein lies the metaphysical meaning of its contents: we express it as meaning or purpose, as absolute substance under the relative appearances, also as value or religious meaning. With regard to society, these spiritual attitudes generate questions as these: Is society the end of human existence or a means for the individual? Is it perhaps not even a means for the individual but, on the contrary, an
now-crucial similarity in form; this process surely risks misunderstanding only to the degree at which it is no longer necessary.
? the problem of sociology 39
? inhibition? Does its value reside in its functional life or in the genera- tion of an objective mind or in the ethical qualities that it evokes in individuals? Is a cosmic analogy revealed in the typical developmental stages of society, so that the social relationships of people would fit into a universal foundation-laying form or rhythm, not obvious to them but manifest in all phenomena and also governing the root forces of material reality? Can there at all be a metaphysical-religious meaning of the whole, or is this reserved for individual souls?
These and numerous similar questions by themselves do not appear to me to possess the categorical independence, the unique relationship between object and method that would justify establishing sociology as a new science that would rank it with the existing ones. Since all these are strictly philosophical questions, and they have taken society as their object, it amounts to only an extension of a structure in the manner of a previously given kind of knowledge to a wider field. Whether we recognize philosophy as actually a science or not, social philosophy has no fundamental reason whatsoever to avoid the advantages or disad- vantages of its connection to philosophy generally by its constitution as a special science of sociology.
Not as in the past,3 nothing else remains of the kind of philosophical problem that society has as a presupposition, but to inquire into the presuppositions of society itself--not in the historical sense, by which one is supposed to describe the actual occurrence of any particular society or the physical and anthropological conditions that can arise on the basis of that society. It is also not a matter here of the particular drives that draw subjects, while encountering other subjects, into social interactions, the types of which sociology describes. But rather: if such subjects exist--what are the presuppositions for conscious beings to be a sociological entity? It is not in these parts, however, in and for themselves, that society is found; it is certainly real in the forms of interaction. What then are the inner and principal conditions, on the basis of which subjects generally generate society out of the individu- als equipped with such drives, the a priori that the empirical structure of individuals, insofar as they are socially capable, makes possible and forms? How are the empirically emerging particular forms possible,
3 Simmel's phraseology that follows is reminiscent of Luther's "Here I stand; I can do no other"--ed.
? 40 chapter one
which fall under the general idea of society, and how can society gener-
ally be an objective form of subjective souls?
Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible?
Kant could ask and answer the fundamental question in his philosophy: How is nature possible? --only because for him nature was nothing else but the representation of nature. This does not merely mean that 'the world is my representation,' that we can speak of nature only insofar as it is a content of our consciousness, but what we call nature is a distinct manner in which our intellect collects, arranges, and forms sense impressions. These 'given' sensations of colors and tastes, tones and temperatures, resistances and scents, which extend throughout our consciousness in the chance sequences of subjective experience, are not 'nature' by themselves, but they become it through the activity of the mind that put them together as objects and series of objects, substances and properties, causal connections. As the elements of the world are immediately given over to us, according to Kant, there exists no particular connectedness among them, however, that makes them the intel- ligible law-abiding unity of nature, or more correctly: simply being nature in itself signifies incoherent and lawless flashing fragments of the world. So the Kantian depiction of the world creates the singular dilemma that our sense impressions are, for him, purely subjective, since they depend on the physical- psychic organization that could be different for different beings, and on the fortuitousness of their stimulations; but they become 'objects' when they are picked up by the forms in our intellects, through which firm regularities and a coherent picture of 'nature' are formed; but on the other hand those sensations are still real data unalterably adding content to the world and a guarantee for a reality independent of us, so that now those intellectual formations of them into objects, relationships, and regularities appear as subjective, things brought about by us in contrast to what we receive from existence, as though the functions of the intellect itself, themselves unchanging, had constructed another nature in regards to content out of other sense material. Nature for Kant is a particular kind of experience, an image developing through and in our knowledge-categories. Hence the question, How is nature possible? I. e. , what are the conditions that must be present for there to be nature--freeing it through the search for forms that make up the essence of our intellect and thereby bring about nature as such a priori.
It would be advisable to deal with the question of the conditions by which society is possible in an analogous manner. For here too there are individual elements that continue to exist apart from one another in certain sense, operate as sensations and undergo a synthesis into the unity of society only through a process of consciousness that places the individual being of the one ele- ment in relation to that of the other in definite forms according to definite rules. The decisive difference between the unity of a society and the unity of nature, however, is this: that the latter--for the Kantian standpoint presup-
? the problem of sociology 41
? posed here--comes about exclusively in the observing subjects, is produced exclusively by them in and from those disconnected elements of sensation; whereas the societal unity is realized only by its own elements, nothing else, since they are conscious and actively synthesize, and needs no spectator. That proposition of Kant--that connection might never lie in things because it is brought about only by subjects--does not hold for societal connection, which, in contrast, is in fact directly fulfilled in the 'things,' which in this case are individual minds. Even as a synthesis it naturally remains something purely mental and without parallels among spatial constructs and their interactions. However, the unifying in this case needs none of the factors outside its ele- ments, since each of them serves the function of exercizing the psychological power of the observer vis-a`-vis external reality: the consciousness constituting a unity with others is in this case actually the entire existing unity in question. Naturally this does not mean on the one hand the abstract consciousness of the concept of unity but the innumerable individual relationships, the feeling and knowledge of this defining and being defined vis-a`-vis the other, and on the other hand rules out even so much as an observant third party crafting anything, let alone a well-founded subjective synthesis of the relations between persons, as between spatial elements. Whatever realm of outwardly evident being is to be combined into an entity, it does not ensue from its immediate and simply objective contents but is determined by the categories of the sub- ject and by the subject's knowledge interests. Society, however, is the objective entity that does not need an observer not included within it.
Things in nature on the one hand are more separate from one another than are minds; the unity of one person with another, lying in the understanding, in love, in shared work--there is simply no analogy to it in the spatial world, where every being occupies its own space, sharing it with no other. But on the other hand the fragments of spatial being comprise an entity in the con- sciousness of the observer, which is then not attained by the togetherness of individuals. Because the objects of the synthesis are in this case autonomous beings, centers of consciousness, personal entities, they resist, in the mind of another subject, that absolute coherence that the 'selflessness' of inanimate things must obey. So a quantity of people is in reality a much greater unity, though less so as a concept, than table, chairs, sofa, rug and mirror depict 'a furnished room' or river, meadow, trees, house are 'a landscape' or 'an image' in a painting. In an altogether different sense than the outer world, society is 'my representation,' i. e. situated in the activity of the consciousness. For the other mind itself has as much of a reality for me as I do myself, a reality that is distinguished from that of material things. If Kant yet assures us that spatial objects would have exactly the same certainty as my own existence, only the specific contents of my subjective life can be meant by the latter; for the general basis of representation, the feeling of being an 'I,' has an uncon- ditionality and imperturbability that is obtained by no single representation of a material exterior. Indeed even this certainty has for us, warranted or not, the facticity of the 'you'; and whether as source or effect of this certainty, we feel the 'you' as something independent of our representation of it, something
42 chapter one
? precisely for itself, as our own existence. That the for-itself of others still does not prevent us from representing them to ourselves, so that something, never entirely captured by our representation, becomes nevertheless the contents and thus the product of this re-presentation--this is the deepest psychological- epistemological schema4 and problem of social interaction. Inside one's own consciousness we distinguish very precisely between the foundational nature of the 'I,' the presupposition of every representation that does not participate in the ever incomplete problematic of sorting out its contents--and these contents, which are collectively presented with their coming and going, their doubtfulness and modifiability, in general as simple products of that absolute and ultimate power and existence of our spiritual being. To the other minds, however, although we are still conceptualizing them as well, we must neverthe- less transfer just these conditions or, rather, unconditionality of one's own 'I,' which has for us that utmost measure of reality that our self possesses with regard to its contents and from which we are certain that it holds also for those other minds with regard to their contents. Under these circumstances the question--How is society possible? --has a completely different methodological significance from that of, How is nature possible? For the latter is answered by forms of cognition by which the subject effects the synthesis of the factual elements of 'nature,' whereas the former is answered by the a priori conditions found in the elements themselves, through which they actually combine to form the synthesis, 'society. ' In a certain sense the entire contents of this book, as developed on the basis of the principles presented above, is the initial attempt at an answer to this question. For it seeks the processes, ultimately occurring in individuals, that give rise to their being a society--not as transient prior causes of this result but as processes sharing in the synthesis, the whole of which we call society. However, the question is to be understood in a more fundamental sense. I said that the function of effecting synthetic unity that, vis-a`-vis nature, lies in the observing subject would, vis-a`-vis society, pass over to the elements of society itself. The conscious construction of society is, to be sure, not present in the individual in abstracto, but for all that everybody knows the others as bound up with them; so much is this knowledge about others as social actors, this awareness of the whole complex as a society--so much is this knowledge and awareness given over only to achieving this with single concrete contents. But perhaps this is nothing other than the 'unity of awareness,' according to which we proceed, to be sure, in consciousness processes assigning a concrete content to the other, without however having a separate consciousness of the unity itself as something other than rare and after-the-fact abstractions. Now there is the question, What wholly universal and a priori ground is there? Which must actually be the presuppositons whereby individual concrete events would be actual socialization processes in
4 Here Simmel appears to be adopting a usage of Kant, where Schema appears in apposition to representation; Kant also speaks of Schemata of the individual cat- egory--ed.
? the problem of sociology 43
?