No More Learning

At least this is the alternative for all deeper and more sensitive natures; where a relationship, after it has experienced a radical break, comes to life again afterwards in exactly the same manner as if nothing had hap- pened, one can in general presume either a more frivolous or more coarsely grained attitude. The case mentioned as a pair is the least complicated: that an estrangement once it has happened may never be quite overcome, even not through the most earnest will of the parties, is readily understandable; where no remnant of the issue of conflict as such remained, no irreconcilability at all need be existent, but the mere fact that in general a break was once there is decisive. Often playing a part in this outcome in close relationships, which have at some time come to the point of a more extreme estrangement, is this: one has seen that one can in general get on without the other, that life, albeit not very happy, nevertheless simply goes on. This does not merely diminish the value of the relationship, but after the unity is again re-established the individuals are easily reproached by a kind of betrayal and infidelity that is not in any way to be made good and that interweaves into the re-developing relationship a dispiritedness and a mistrust of its individuals towards their own feelings.
Of course, self-deception often occurs here. The surprising relative ease with which one sometimes bears the breakup of a close relation- ship stems from the rage that we still possess from the catastrophe. It stirred up all manner of forces in us, the momentum of which still carries us for a time and keeps us going. But just as the death of a loved one also does not unfold in all its terrible severity in the first hour, since only the further passage of time provides all the situations in which the deceased was normally an element, we now have situa- tions to live through as though with a limb ripped from us and which no initial moment could comprehensively anticipate--thus a valuable relationship does not, so to speak, dissolve in the first moment of a separation in which rather the reasons for its dissolution dominate our consciousness; but we feel the bereavement every single hour, time and again, and so our emotions will often not be set aright for a long time, though in the first moment they seemed to bear it with a certain composure. For this reason the reconciliation of some relationships is
conflict 303
? also to an extent deeper and more passionate when the break existed a longer time. Likewise for the same reason, however, it is in general conceivable that the tempo of the reconciliation, of the 'forgive and forget,' is of greater significance for the further structural development of the relationship, and that those conclusions of strife do not really neutralize it unless the latent energies found some kind of actualization beforehand: only in the more open or at least more conscious situation are they actually imbued with the inclination for reconciliation. Just as one may not learn fast enough, if what is learned is to remain with us, so one may also not forget fast enough, if the forgetting is to develop its sociological significance fully.
That, in contrast, the measure of intensity of the reconciled rela- tionship exceeds that of the unbroken has various causes. Mainly a background is thereby created, from which all values and survivals of the union stand out more consciously and clearly. To this is brought the discretion with which one deals with every reference to past events, a new sensitivity, indeed, a new unexpressed togetherness in the rela- tionship. For in all respects the common avoidance of an all-too-sensi- tive point can mean likewise a great intimacy and self-understanding, as well as the lack of inhibition that transforms every object of the individuals' inner lives into an object of affirming togetherness; and finally: the intensity of the desire to protect the revived relationship before every shadow comes not only from the suffering experienced in the rupture, but above all from the consciousness that a second break might no longer be able to be healed in the manner the first was. For, in countless cases and at least among sensitive people, this would turn the whole relationship into a caricature. It can presumably, even in the most deeply grounded relationship, come to a tragic break and to a reconciliation; but this then belongs to the events that can occur only once and whose repetition robs them of all worth and seriousness. Because once the first repetition has occurred, then nothing speaks against a second and third, which would trivialize all the emotional shocks of the process and reduce it to a frivolous game. Perhaps this feeling that another rupture would be the definitive one--a feeling to which there is hardly an analogy with the first one--is for finer natures the strongest bond by which the reconciled relationship is distinguished from one that was never broken.
Precisely because of the deeper significance that the degree of recon- ciliation after the strife, on a par with the suffering inflicted on the one or the other side, has for the development of the relationship between
304 chapter four
? the persons, its negative extreme, irreconcilability, plays a part in this significance. It can also be, as can reconcilability, a formal attitude of the soul that indeed requires an external situation for its actualization but then comes in entirely spontaneously and not only as a consequence of different, intervening emotions. Both tendencies belong to the polar foundational elements whose blending constitutes all relationships between people. One hears it said occasionally, "Whoever could not forget, could also not forgive," that is to say, not fully reconcile. This would mean evidently the most terrible irreconcilability, for it makes the reconciliation dependent on the disappearance from consciousness of every cause for its opposite; as with all processes based on forgetting, it would also be in constant danger of being recalled. If the whole argument is to make sense, then, it runs in the opposite direction: where the reconcilability exists as a primary fact, it will be the reason that the discord and the suffering that the other caused one no longer arises in consciousness. Accordingly the actual irreconcilability also in no way consists in the consciousness now not being able to get over the past conflicts; this is in fact just a consequence. Irreconcilability means that through the conflict the soul has suffered a modification of its being that is no longer to be undone, comparable not so much to a wound that cannot be healed as to a limb that has been lost. This is the most tragic irreconcilability: neither an anger nor a reservation or secret defiance needs to remain in the soul and lay a definite barrier between the one and the other; it is simply that through the brawl of the conflict something in the soul has been killed that is not to be brought to life again, not even through characteristically passionate effort for it; here lies a point at which the powerlessness of the will over against the actual being of a human is glaringly obvious--in the strongest psychological contrast to the previously discussed type of for- giveness. While this is the form of irreconcilability of highly integrated and not just easily agitated natures, there exists one other, internally strongly differentiated: the image and the after-effect of the conflict and everything pertaining to it that one had thrown at the other remain in existence in consciousness and cannot be gotten over. However, around this though there now grows the undiminished love and devotion in which those memories and resignations function not as shortcomings but, like organic components, are fitted into the picture of the other, whom we love, as it were, inclusive of this liability in the balance of our whole relationship to that person--just as we nevertheless love a person even with all that person's faults, which we wish away perhaps,
conflict 305
? but cannot think away. The bitterness of the conflict, the points whereby the personality of the other has disappointed that bring an ongoing renunciation or an ever renewed irritation into the relationship--all this is unforgotten and actually unreconciled. However it is, as it were, localized, as a factor taken up into the whole relationship under whose central intensity it is not necessary to suffer.
It goes without saying that both of these phenomena of irreconcil- ability, which are obviously differentiated from what is usually called that, nevertheless include the whole scale even of the latter: the one allows the consequence of the conflict, fully released from its individual contents, to sink right into the center of the soul; it reshapes the per- sonality, in so far as it pertains to the other, at its deepest level. On the other hand, the psychological legacy of the discord is, as it were, isolated in the other, remaining a single element that can be taken up into the picture of the other, then to be embraced along with the whole personality. Between that worst and this lightest case of irreconcilability obviously there lies the whole manifold of degrees to which irreconcil- ability places peace even in the shadows of conflict.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SECRET AND THE SECRET SOCIETY
All relationships of human beings obviously rest on their knowing something about one another. People in business know that their com- petitors want to buy as cheaply as possible and sell as high as possible; teachers know that they can expect a certain quality and quantity of educational content from the students; within any social class indi- viduals know roughly what level of education they have to presuppose on the part of one another--and obviously without such knowledge the actions between person and person touched on here would not be able to occur at all. In all relationships of a personally differenti- ated kind--as one can say with readily evident reservations--there develops an intensity and coloring to the degree to which every part reveals itself to the other through word and deed. How much error and mere prejudice may be hidden in all this knowledge is uncertain. Just as we gain, however, over against our perception of the external nature, alongside its deceptions and deficiencies, enough truth as is required for life and progress of our kind, so each knows the other with whom one has anything to do, in large part or as a whole cor- rectly enough that communication and relationship are possible. That one knows with whom one has something to do is the first condition for having something to do with someone at all; the usual reciprocal mental image in some long ongoing conversation or in the encounter on the same social level is, appearing so very much as an empty form, an apt symbol of that mutual knowledge that is an a priori of any rela- tionship. This is frequently concealed from consciousness because for an extraordinarily large number of relationships we need only know the rather typical tendencies and qualities mutually available, which, in their necessity, are usually only noticed when they are lacking at some point. It would merit a specialized investigation, which type and degree of mutual knowledge is required for the various relationships among people; how general psychological presuppositions, with which each approaches any other, interweave with the specific experiences about the individual before us; how in some realms mutual knowledge need not or is not permitted to be the same for both parties; how existing
308 chapter five
? relationships are determined in their development only by the increas- ing knowledge about the other on the part of both or just one; finally, contrariwise: how our objectively psychological image of the other is influenced by the real relationships of praxis and of disposition. The latter is by no means meant in the sense of misrepresentation. But in a fully legitimate way the theoretical idea of a particular individual is a different one, according to the standpoint from which it is grasped and which is given by the whole relationship of the knowing to the known. Because one can never know another absolutely--which would mean the knowledge of every individual thought and every attitude--because one forms for oneself in fact a personal unity of the other from the fragments in which the other is solely available to us, then the latter depends on that part of the other that our standpoint vis-a`-vis the other allows us to see. These differences, however, originate in no way only through such a reality as the quantity of knowledge. No psychological knowledge is a poor imitation of its object, but each is, just as those of the external character, dependent on the forms that the knowing mind brings with it and by which it appropriates the data. These forms, however, are highly individually differentiated where it is a matter of the knowledge of an individual about an individual; they do not lend themselves to scientific generalization and supra-subjective strength of conviction that is attainable regarding external nature and only typical mental processes. When A has a different idea of M than B possesses, then this need not in the least signify incompleteness or delusion, but as A is simply situated in relation to M according to A's essence and the general circumstances, this image of M is truth for A, likewise as for B with a substantially different one. It is by no means an issue of the objectively correct knowledge of M beyond both of them, by which they would be legitimated according to the degree of their agreement with it. The ideal of truth rather, which indeed the image of M in the conceptualization by A always only approaches asymptotically, is also as ideal different from that by B; it contains, as an integrating, shaping pre-condition, the mental characteristic of A and the particular rela- tionship in which A and M fall into with one another through their characters and their destinies. Every relationship between persons has a picture of the one arising in the other, and this operates obviously in interaction with the real relationship: while it creates the premises on which one's idea of the other serves as a catalyst for one thing or another and possesses a truth legitimized for this case, the real interac- tion of the individuals is based, on the other hand, on the image that
the secret and the secret society 309
? they acquire from one another. There is here one of the deeply based cycles of mental life, in which one element presupposes a second, now this one but now that one. While in narrower realms this is a fallacy that invalidates the whole, it is more generally and fundamentally the unavoidable expression of the unity to which both of the elements attend, and which cannot be expressed in our thought forms other than by the construction of the first on the second and simultaneously of the second on the first. Thus our relationships develop on the basis of a simultaneous knowledge of one another, and this knowledge on the basis of the actual relationships, both meshing together indissolubly and, through its alternation within the sociological interaction, dem- onstrating this as one point at which the being and the concept make their mysterious unity empirically evident.
Our knowledge of the whole being on which our actions are grounded is marked by characteristic limitations and diversions. That 'only in error is life, in knowledge is death' can in principle not be valid of course because a being enmeshed in ongoing errors would act progressively pointlessly and thus would definitely perish. 1 Nevertheless, in view of our random and deficient adaptations to our life circumstances, there is no doubt that we preserve only so much truth but also so much ignorance and acquire so much error as is useful for our practical action--going from the great, the cognitions transforming the life of humanity that nevertheless fail to materialize or remain disregarded unless the whole cultural situation makes these changes possible and useful, to the 'life story' of the individual, who so often has need of illusion about one's ability, indeed, about one's feelings of superstition with regard to the gods as well as people in order to preserve oneself in one's being and one's potential. 2 In this psychological sense error is coordinated with truth: the usefulness of the outer as well as the inner life ensures that we, from the one as well as from the other, have precisely that which forms the basis of activity necessary for us--naturally only in general and on the whole and with a wide latitude for fluctuation and imper- fect adaptation.
1 The statement 'only in error is life, in knowledge is death' translates nur der Irrtum das Leben, das Wissen der Tod ist, based on Friedrich Schiller's poem "Kassandra," which has the lines: Nur der Irrtum ist das Leben,/Und das Wissen ist der Tod--ed.
2 "Life story" translates Lebenslu? ge, literally 'life lies,' meaning basically a life of deception; it seems to be used here in the sense of the lies that make life bearable, but it could also be translated colloquially as 'life story,' thus making an ironic play on words--ed.
? 310 chapter five
? Now, however, there is inside the sphere of the objects for truth and illusion a certain portion in which both can take on a character that occurs nowhere else: the interior of the person before us, who can either intentionally reveal to us the truth about oneself or deceive us with a lie or concealment about it. No other object can explain itself to us or hide from us in this way as a person can, because no other modifies its behavior through consideration of its becoming known. This modifica- tion does not occur, of course, without exception: frequently the other person is to us basically just like another piece of nature that to our knowledge remains, as it were, silent. As far as expressions of the other are thus possible, and even such that are modified by no thought given to this use of them but are fully unguarded and immediate disclosures--a principal factor in the characterization of the individual through the individual's context becomes important. It has been declared a prob- lem, and the broadest conclusions then drawn from it, that our mental process, which proceeds purely naturally, would, however, in its content as well as always concurrently be in conformity with logical norms; it is in fact most remarkable that a mere event brought forth by natural causes goes on as though it were governed by the ideal laws of logic; for it is no different than as if a tree branch, bound with a telegraph apparatus so that its movements in the wind activate it, gave rise thereby to signals that produce for us an intelligible meaning. In view of this unique problem, which as a whole is not under discussion here, the one thing to be noted though is: our actual psychological processes are logi- cally regulated to a much lesser extent than it seems by its expressions. If one pays close attention to the concepts as they proceed in the course of time continually through our consciousness, then their flickering, their zigzag movements, the confusing whirl of objectively unintegrated images and ideas, their, as it were, merely tentative combinations not at all logically justifiable--all this is extremely remote from any kind of rational pattern; only, we are not frequently conscious of it because our pronounced interests lie in the 'as needed' part of our mental life, for we tend quickly to pass over and ignore its leaps, its irrationalities, and its chaos, in spite of the psychological reality of it all, in prefer- ence for the more-or-less logical or the otherwise valuable. So now all that which we share with another in words or perhaps in some other way, even the most subjective, the most impulsive, the most intimate, is a selection from the actual mental totality whose absolutely accurate disclosure in terms of content and sequence would bring any person--if a paradoxical expression is permitted--into the insane asylum. There
the secret and the secret society 311
? are fragments of our actual inner life, not only with regard to quantity, that we ourselves reveal to the nearest person alone; but these, too, are not a selection that represents that reality, as it were, pro rata, but a viewpoint of judgment, of value, of the relationship to the hearer, of regard for the other's understanding from encounters. We also like to say something that goes beyond the interjection and the minimal communication: we never thereby present directly and faithfully what is actually going on in us right then, but a teleologically directed, excluding, and recomposing conversion of the inner reality. With an instinct that automatically excludes the opposite, we show nobody the purely causally real course of our mental processes, wholly incoherent and irrational from the standpoint of logic, factuality, and meaningfulness, but always only an extract from them stylized by selection and arrangement; and there is no other interaction and no other society at all thinkable than that resting on this teleologically determined ignorance of one for the other. From this self-evident, a priori, as it were, absolute presupposition the relative differences are grasped that we know as sincere self-revela- tion and deceptive self-concealment.
Every lie, even if its object were of a factual nature, is by its inner essence a generation of error outside the lying subject, for it consists in the liar hiding from the other the true conception that is treated. That the one lied to has a false ideal about the matter does not exhaust the specific essence of the lie--it shares that with simple error--but rather what one will accept about the inner opinion of the lying person in a deception. Truthfulness and falsehood then are of the most far- ranging importance for the relationships of people with one another. Sociological structures differ most characteristically by the degree to which falsehood is at work in them. In the first place, falsehood is often more harmless for the existence of the group in very simple relationships than in complex ones. Primitive persons--living in small scale circles, meeting needs through their own production or direct cooperation, limiting intellectual interests to their own experiences or on-going tradi- tions--oversee and control the material of their existence more easily and more completely than people in a higher civilization. The innu- merable errors and superstitions in the life of the primitive person are admittedly destructive enough for that person, but not to the extent that their counterparts would be in advanced epochs because the praxis of one's life is established in the main on those few facts and relationships by which one's narrow face-to-face sphere allows one to acquire a correct point of view directly. With a richer and broader cultural life, on the
312 chapter five
? contrary, life stands on a thousand presuppositions the causes of which the individual cannot at all trace and verify, but which must be taken on faith. In a much wider range of things than one is in the habit of clarifying for oneself our modern existence--from the economy, which is becoming evermore an economy of credit, to scientific enterprise, in which the majority of researchers have to use the unlimited results of others they themselves cannot at all verify--rests on faith in the honesty of others. We erect our most important decisions on a complicated system of representations, most of which presuppose the confidence that we are not deceived. Thus the lie becomes in modern relations something much more devastating, putting the foundation of life into question much more than was the case in the past. If the lie were to appear to us today as so venial a sin as among the Greek gods, the Jewish patriarchs, or the South Sea Islanders, if the extreme sternness of the moral order were not acting as a deterrent of it, the structure of modern life, which is in a much broader than economic sense a 'credit economy,' would be absolutely impossible. This relationship of time is repeated in the distances of other dimensions. The further third persons stand from the center of our personality, the sooner we can come to terms with their untruthfulness practically but also inwardly: when the two persons closest to us lie, life becomes unbearable. This banality must nevertheless be emphasized sociologically since it shows that the measure of truthfulness and falsehood that are compatible with the existence of relationships form a scale on which the degrees of intensity of the relationships are to be read.
With that relative social approval of falsehood in primitive circum- stances, however, there comes a positive purposefulness for it. Where the initial organizing, ranking, centralizing of the group are the issue, it will occur through a subjection of the weak to physical and mental superiors. The lie that is accepted, i. e. , not seen through, is undoubt- edly a means to bring mental superiority into effect and to use for the direction and domination of the less clever. It is a mental law of the jungle, just as brutal but sometimes just as suitable as the physical, be it as a selection for the cultivation of intelligence, be it to create the leisure for the production of higher cultural goods for a certain few for whom others must work, be it to provide the leader for the forces of the group. The more these purposes are met by means of lesser undesired side-effects, the less need is there for falsehood and the more room there will be for an awareness of its ethical reprehensibility. This process is not yet in any way concluded. Small business proprietors still believe
the secret and the secret society 313
? today to not be able to dispense with certain deceptive promotions of wares and practice them then with a good conscience. Wholesale trade and retail business on a really large scale have overcome this phase and can proceed in the presentation of their wares with full candidness. As soon as the mode of enterprise even of the small and midlevel business operators has reached the same completed development, the exaggerations and blatant falsehoods in advertisements and promotions, for which they are not in general resented today, will experience the same ethical condemnation that is today already, for all practice pur- poses, in the position of being superfluous in big business. Commerce based on truthfulness will be generally all the more appropriate inside a group the more the well-being of the many rather than the few forms its norm. This is because the deceived--hence those harmed by the lie--will always be in the majority in relation to the liar who finds advantage through deception. Therefore, 'enlightenment,' which aims at the elimination of falsehood at work in social life, is thoroughly democratic in character.
Interaction among people normally rests on certain elements being common to their conceptual worlds, on objectively mental contents forming the material that is developed through its relationships to subjective life; the model and the essential vehicle for that, equally for all, is language. If one looks a bit closer, though, the basis hereby intended consists in no way only in what one and the other know or, as the case may be, what one knows as the mental content of the other, but it is interwoven with what one knows, but the other does not. And certainly the significance of this limitation will turn out to be still more positive than that which resulted earlier from the antithesis between the illogical-accidental reality of the course of ideas and that which we logi- cally select from them purposefully in order to reveal it to others. The dualistic essence of human nature, the expressions of which flow mostly from scattered sources, allows every measurement to be experienced as a large one and a small one at the same time, according to whether it is compared with something smaller or greater--this also leaves social relationships completely dualistically determined: concord, harmony, cooperation, which count as the plainly socializing strengths, must be penetrated by distance, competition, repulsion, in order to produce the real configuration of society; the durable organizing forms that seem to fashion society in one form or another must be continuously stirred up through individualistically irregular powers, put off balance, whittled away in order to achieve, yielding and resisting, the vitality of
314 chapter five
? their reaction and development; the relationships of an intimate nature, whose formal vehicle is physical-mental nearness, lose the attraction, indeed, the content of their intimacy as soon as the further relation- ship does not include, simultaneously and alternately, also distance and pauses; finally, it thus comes about that the knowledge about one another that positively affects relationships does so, though not really for itself alone--but once they exist they likewise presuppose a certain ignorance, an immeasurable changing degree of mutual concealment. The lie is only a very crude, ultimately often contradictory form in which this necessity comes to light. Though it may often destroy a relationship, as long as it existed it was still an integrating element of the nature of the relationship. One must take care not to be deceived by an ethical point of view, by the negative evaluation of the lie over the completely positive sociological significance that it exercises in the formation of certain concrete relationships. Furthermore, the lie, with regard to the elementary sociological reality now at issue, is the limiting of knowledge of the one by the other--only one of the possible means here, the positive and, as it were, aggressive method, whose purpose in general is achieved through shear secrecy and concealment. These more general and more negative forms are at issue in what follows.
Before the secret as a consciously desired concealment is taken up, it needs to be mentioned to what different extents different relation- ships allow the reciprocal knowledge of whole personalities outside their boundaries. Of the associations that still in general include direct interaction, the association for a purpose stands here at the top--and certainly that in which absolutely objective and definite duties are requisite from the beginning for belonging to the association--most undeniably, of course, in the form of pure money dues. Here the reality of interaction, the cohesiveness, the common specific aim is not at all based on one knowing the other psychologically. The individual, as a member of the group, is exclusively the bearer of a definite activity, and generally which individual motives drive one to it or which corporate personality supports one's activity is completely irrelevant here. The association formed for a purpose is the quintessentially discreet socio- logical formation; its participants are from a psychological viewpoint anonymous and need only, in order to form the association, know about one another that they form it. The increasing objectification of our culture, whose constructs arise more and more from impersonal energies and appropriate the subjective entirety of the individual less and less, as exemplified most simply in the contrast between handiwork
the secret and the secret society 315
? in the crafts and factory work--this objectification also affects social structures, so that associations in which the whole and individual person entered formerly and which consequently required a mutual knowledge about the immediate substantive content of the relationship are now exclusively set up on this being clearly distinguished.
That prior or later form of knowledge about a person (the trust one places in the other--evidently one of the most important synthetic strengths inside society) thereby acquires a particular evolution. Trust, as the hypothesis for future behavior, which is certain enough thereby to ground practical action, is, as hypothesis, a middle position between knowledge and ignorance of others. Someone who knows all need not trust, someone who knows nothing cannot reasonably trust at all. 3 What degree of knowledge and ignorance must be blended to make possible the individual practical decision based on trust is what characterizes eras, realms of interest, individuals. That objectification of culture defini- tively distinguished the quantities of knowledge and lack of knowledge required for trust. The modern merchant who enters into business with another, the scholar who undertakes research together with another, the leader of a political party who comes to an agreement with the leader of another party over election issues or matters of legislation--all these know, apart from exceptions and imperfections, exactly what is necessary to know about their partner for forming the relationship. The traditions and institutions, the power of public opinion, and the shifting of opinion that inescapably prejudices individuals have become so firm and reliable that one needs to know only certain external traits about
3 Admittedly there is another type of trust that, since it stands beyond knowledge and ignorance, affects the present context only indirectly: that which one calls the faith of a person in another and which belongs to the category of religious faith. Just as one never believed in God on the basis of the 'proofs for the existence of God'--these proofs are in fact only the additional justification or intellectual reflection entirely of a disposition of the heart--so one 'believes' in a person without this belief being justified by proofs of the worthiness of the person, indeed, often in spite of proofs for the opposite of worthiness. This trust, this inner unconditionality vis-a`-vis a person is imparted neither by experiences nor by hypotheses but by a primary disposition of the soul with regard to the other. In completely pure form, detached from any empirical consideration, this condition of faith probably appears only inside religion; regarding people, it will likely always require a stimulus or a confirmation by the knowledge treated above or an expectation; while on the other hand certainly also in those social forms of trust, even as they appear exactly and intellectually justified, there may be a supplement of that intuitive, indeed, mystical 'faith' of person in person. Perhaps even that hereby identified is a basic category of human behavior, going back to the metaphysical meaning of our relationships and only empirically, randomly, fragmentarily actualized by the conscious, singular foundations of trust.
? 316 chapter five
? another in order to have the trust needed for acting in concert. The foundation of personal qualities by which a modification of the behavior inside the relationship could come about is in principle no longer of concern; the motivation and regulation of this behavior has been so objectified that trust no longer requires actual personal knowledge. In more primitive, less differentiated circumstances one knew very much more about one's partner--in a personal sense--and very much less with regard to purely factual reliability. Both belong together: in order to generate the necessary trust in light of the lack with regard to the latter, a much higher level of knowledge was needed in the former. That purely general knowledge of one, involving only the facts about the person, at the boundary of which what is personally unique can remain private, must be supplemented emphatically then by the knowl- edge of the personal as soon as the association for a purpose possesses an essential significance for the total existence of the participants. The businessperson who sells grain or petroleum to another needs to know only whether that person is good for the amount; but as soon as one takes the other on as an associate, one must not only know the financial condition and certain rather general qualities of the person, but must know the latter extensively as a personality, that person's respectability, sociability, whether of a venturesome or cautious temperament; and on such knowledge--reciprocally--rests not only the establishment of the relationship but its whole continuation, the daily joint activities, the division of functions among the partners. The privacy of the personal- ity is now more socially limited; with the extent to which the common interest is now carried by personal qualities, the personality is no longer allowed such a wide-ranging being-for-itself.
Beyond the associations formed for a purpose, but also beyond the relationships rooted in the whole personality, there is the relationship socially most characteristic in the higher levels of culture that they refer to now as merely the 'acquaintance. ' That one 'knows' mutually does not at all mean in this sense that one knows mutually, i. e. that one had an insight into the actual individuality of the personality, but only that each, as it were, had taken notice of the existence of the other. Characteristically for the idea of acquaintance the 'introduction' by name is enough: the knowledge of the 'that,' not the 'what' of the per- sonality, defines 'acquaintance. ' When one declares oneself acquainted with a certain person, indeed even to be well acquainted, one is thus indicating very clearly the lack of an actually intimate relationship; one knows under this rubric only what of another is external: either in the
the secret and the secret society 317
? purely socially representative sense or in that we know just what the other shows us; the degree of knowledge that 'being well acquainted with another' includes, as it were, not the 'in-oneself ' of the other, not that which is in the inner layer, but only that which is essentially turned to the other and to the world. Therefore, the circle of acquaintances in this social sense is the actual location of 'discretion. ' This is because this circle certainly not only exists in the respect for the privacy of the other, for one's immediate desire to hide this or that from us, but for sure in that one steers clear of the knowledge of everything that the other does not positively reveal. Thus it is in principle not a matter here of something definite that one is not permitted to know, but of the entirely general reserve exercised toward the whole personality, and of a special form of the typical antithesis of imperatives: what is not forbidden is allowed, and what is not allowed is forbidden. So the relationships of people part ways at the question regarding the knowledge of each other: what is not hidden it is permitted to know, and what is not revealed it is also not permitted to know. The latter decision corresponds to the feeling, effective also elsewhere, that around every person there is an ideal sphere, in various directions and for various persons certainly largely unequal, which one cannot penetrate without destroying the value of the personality of the individual. Honor sets such a field in place around the person; linguistic usage speaks of an offense to honor very precisely as 'getting too close'; the radius of that sphere identifies, as it were, the distance whose violation by a personal stranger offends one's honor. Another sphere of the same form corresponds to what one refers to as the 'importance' of a personality. Before the 'important' person there exists an inner compulsion to maintain distance, which does not immediately disappear even in the intimate relationship with someone and which is not present only for those who have no feel for importance. For this reason that sphere of distance does not exist for the 'chamber servant' because there are no 'heroes' for such, which is due, however, not to the heroes but to the chamber servant. For that reason, too, all intrusiveness is bound up with a conspicuous lack of feeling for the differences of the importance of people; whoever is intrusive with respect to an important personage does not--as it could appear superficially--esteem that person highly or overly highly but, on the contrary, reveals thereby just the lack of actual respect. As the painter often emphatically renders the importance of a form in a multi-figured picture by arranging the others at a considerable distance around it, so also the sociological parallel of importance is the distance that keeps
318 chapter five
? others outside a personality's specific sphere filled with that person's power, purposes, greatness. For such a person, although a somewhat differently emphasized periphery surrounds the person, occupied with personal affairs and activities, penetrating it by paying attention amounts to an injury to that one's personality. Just as material property is more- or-less an extension of the Ego--property is simply what is subject to the will of the possessor just as, in only graduated differentiation, is the body, which is our first 'possession'--and just as therefore every intru- sion into vested property rights is felt as a violation of the personality, so there is a private property of the mind whose violation causes an injury of the Ego in the very center of the self. Discretion is nothing other than the sense of correctness with reference to the sphere of the contents of life not to be shared. Of course it is rather variously expanded in its circumstances according to various personalities, just as also that of marriage and of property each has a radius quite different for persons 'nearby' than for strangers and the indifferent. With the above mentioned more narrowly conceived social relationships, identi- fied most simply as 'acquaintances,' it is a matter first of all of a quite typical boundary, beyond which there are perhaps no guarded secrets, but about which the other conventionally goes into with discretion, not with questions or other invasions.
The question, where does this boundary lie, is even in principle not at all to be answered simply but leads down into the most subtle texture of social formation. The right to that realm of mental life cannot be affirmed precisely as private property in an absolute sense any more than that of the material realm. We know that inside higher culture the latter--with regard to the three essential aspects of acquisition, security, productiveness--rests never merely on the powers of the individual but requires as well the circumstances and powers of the social milieu, and that therefore its limitation--be it through the prohibitions concerning acquisition, be it through taxation--is from the start the right of the whole; but this right is still more deeply grounded than on the principle of achievement and anti-achievement between society and individual, namely rather on the much more elementary principle that the part must allow as much limitation of one's being- and having-for-oneself to fall to itself as the preservation and the purposes of the whole require. And this applies as well to the inner sphere of the person. This is because in the interest of exchange and of social solidarity, one must know certain things about the other, and this other does not have the right from the moral standpoint to offer resistance against it and to require discretion
the secret and the secret society 319
? from the former, i. e. an undisturbed possession of one's own being and consciousness as well, where the discretion would damage the social interests. The businessperson who contracts long-term obligations with another, the master who engages a domestic servant but also the latter before placing oneself into the relationship of service, the superior in promoting a subordinate, the housewife who accepts a new personality into her social circle--all these must be authorized to learn or deduce from the past and present of the person in question, everything about temperament and moral character on which the action or refusal to act concerning the person may be reasonably based. These are rather crude cases in which the duty of discretion, to abstain from know- ing about all that the other does not freely reveal to us, must retreat before practical realities. But in more refined and less clear forms, in fragmentary statements and things unexpressed, the whole interactive dynamic of human beings rests on each knowing something more of the other than the other willingly reveals, and frequently one would not wish the discovery of that by the other if the one knew of it. While this can be considered an indiscretion in an individual sense, in a social one, however, it is necessary as a condition for the closeness and vitality existing in social interaction--and it is extraordinarily difficult to point to the limit of the right to this breach of private mental property. In general, human beings grant themselves the right to know everything that they can fathom purely through psychological observation and reflection without turning to patently illegal means. Actually, though, the indiscretion exercised in this manner can be just as brutally and morally objectionable as listening at closed doors and glancing at other people's letters. To those who are especially psychologically sensitive, people betray their most secret thoughts and characteristics countless times, though not only but often precisely because they are anxiously straining to guard them. The greedy, spying gathering of every indiscreet word, the penetrating reflection--what this intonation probably would mean, what those expressions allow one to conclude, what the blushing at the mention of a certain name perhaps betrayed--all this does not overstep the boundary of outward discretion; it is entirely the work of one's own intellect and for that reason an apparently undisputed right of the subject; and this often occurs completely involuntarily, so much more than the misuse of psychological superiority--we cannot at all often put a stop to our interpretations of the other, to the construals of another's inner life. As much as the decent person will forbid to the self the pondering over the secrecy of another, that exploitation of the
320 chapter five
? other's imprudence and defenselessness, there takes place a process of knowledge of this realm often so automatically, its results standing before us often so suddenly and conspicuously, that good will can do nothing at all to counter it. Where the undoubtedly disallowed can be unavoidable, however, the demarcation between allowed and disallowed is all the more unclear. How far discretion has to abstain also from the mental encroachment 'of everything that is existing,' how far the interests of the human enterprise of communication, the relying-on-one-another of the members of the same group limit this duty of discretion--that is a question to whose answer neither moral tact nor the overview of the objective relationships and their demands alone suffice, since in fact both must operate completely together. The subtle and complicated nature of this question offers the individual to a much higher degree no general norm for prejudicing the decision than would be necessary for a question of private property in a material sense.
This pre-form or this supplement concerning the secret, in which not the behavior of the secret-holder but that of another is in question, in which with the blending of mutual knowledge or ignorance the accent lies more on the measure of knowledge than ignorance--over against this we come to a completely new turn: in those very relationships which center, not as those until now firmly circumscribed, and if even only by the fact of their pure 'superficiality,' around materially fixed interests but those, at least according to their conception, building on the whole breadth of the personality. Here the main types are friend- ship and marriage. Insofar as the ideal of friendship from antiquity has been appropriated and, in a curious way further developed precisely in the romantic sense, there is the by-product of absolute psychological intimacy, that material property is also supposed to be common among friends. This entry of the whole undivided 'I' into the relationship may thus be more plausible in friendship than in love, since it lacks the one- sided intensification based on one element that love experiences in its sensuality.
Indeed, it occurs thereby that in the whole scope of possible reasons for association one takes, as it were, the Te^te, a certain organizing of the same, as it is bestowed on a group through the leadership. 4 A very strong relational element often paves the way along which the others follow without this latent casualty; and undeniably with most people sexual love opens widest the gates of the whole personality; indeed,
4 Te^te, French for 'head'; in this case, probably 'lead'--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 321
? with not a few love is the only form in which they can give their whole 'I,' just as with artists the form of their respective art offers the only possibility to proffer their whole inner being. Especially frequently this is to be observed with women--certainly also 'Christian love,' intended entirely differently, is supposed to accomplish the same correspond- ingly--in that they not only, because they love, sacrifice their whole being without reservation, but that this whole being is, as it were, dis- solved chemically in the love and flows only and entirely in its coloring, form, temperature onto the other. On the other hand, however, where the feeling of love is not expansive enough, the remaining contents of the soul not adaptive enough, the predominance of the erotic bonds that remain can, as I indicated, suppress practical-moral as well as the spiritual connections, the self-exposure of the reservoirs of the person- ality lying beyond the erotic. Friendship, which lacks this intensity but also this frequent disproportionate dedication, may more readily bind the whole person with the whole person, may more readily loosen the reserve of the soul, to be sure, not so passionately, but in wider scope and in the longer run. Such complete familiarity meanwhile would have to become more difficult with the ever increasing differentiation of people. Perhaps the modern person has too much to hide in order to have a friendship in the ancient sense; perhaps personalities are also, apart from very young years, too uniquely individualized in order to enable the complete mutuality of relationship, of the mere entry into relationship, to which indeed ever so much mental divination and pro- ductive fantasy belong on the part of the other. It seems that, therefore, modern sensitivity tends more towards differentiated friendships, i. e. to such that have their realm associated typically with only one pertinent aspect of the personalities and in which the rest plays no role. With that a wholly different kind of friendship emerges that is of greatest importance for our problem: the degree of intrusion or reserve inside the friendship relationship. These differentiated friendships that associ- ate us with one person by the aspect of disposition, with another by that of shared intellectual interest, with a third for the sake of religious impulses, with a fourth through common experiences--these represent a completely unique synthesis with regard to the issue of discretion, of self-revelation, and self-censorship; they do not require that the friends look into the realms of interest and feeling that are simply not a part of the relationship, and to refer to them would make the boundary of the mutual self-understanding emotionally painful. But the relationship, in this way limited and enveloped in discretion, can nevertheless come
322 chapter five
? from the center of the whole personality, saturated from its ultimate root sap, so much so that it pours forth into a section of its periphery; it leads, with its notion, into this same depth of feeling and to the same willing sacrifice as undifferentiated epochs and persons bind them simply with a commonality of the whole periphery of life, for which reserve and discretion are no problem.
Much more difficult is the degree of self-revelation and self-reserve in marriage, with their complements--intrusion and discretion. It pertains here to the wholly general problem area, most difficult for the sociology of the intimate relationship: whether the maximum of common values is thereby achieved in the personalities giving up their being-for-self entirely to one another or, on the contrary, by holding back--whether they do not somehow belong to one another qualitatively more when they belong to each other quantitatively less. This question of degree can of course be answered only along with the other: how then, inside the totality of the communicability of the person, is the boundary to be drawn at which the restraint and the respect for the other would possibly begin. The preference of modern marriage--which makes both questions of course answerable only on a case-by-case basis--is that this boundary is not set in place from the start, as is the case in other and earlier cultures. In the latter particularly, marriage is in principle generally not erotic but only a socio-economic institution; satisfaction of the desires of love is thereby tied to it only accidentally; it is contracted, with exceptions of course, not on the basis of individual attraction but for reasons of family alliances, of work relationships, of offspring. It was in this sense brought to its uttermost clear differentiation by the Greeks; according to Demosthenes: "We have hetaerae for pleasure and concubines for daily needs, wives, however, for providing us legitimate children and for tending to the interior of the household. "5 Obviously with such a mechanical relationship, functioning outside the psychologi- cal center--as is shown, by the way, with certain qualifications, in the history and observation of marriage at every step--on the one hand, neither the need nor the possibility of intimate mutual self-revelation will exist; but on the other hand some reserves of sensitivity and purity will also fall away that are still precisely the flower of a completely spiri- tualized, entirely personal close relationship in spite of their apparent negativity. The same tendency to exclude certain aspects of life from
5 Attributed to him in an oration, Against Neaera--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 323
? the mutuality of marriage a priori and by supra-individual statute lies in the multiplicity of marital forms within a circle of people, among whom those concluding a marriage have to make a prior decision, and who distinguish the economic, religious, and familial interests in the marriage in manifold ways: thus it is with indigenous peoples, with the Hindus, and with the Romans. 6 Now nobody will fail to recognize that in modern life also marriage is probably entered into mainly from conventional or material motives. Nevertheless, as it is often realized, the social notion of the modern marriage is the common possession of all of life's contents insofar as they determine directly and through their effects the value and the destiny of the personality. And the precedence of this ideal claim is not at all without effect; it has provided room and stimulation often enough for developing an originally very incomplete commonality into an ever more encompassing one. But while the very indeterminacy of this process supports happiness and inner vitality for the relationship, its reversal tends to foster heavy disappointments: namely when absolute unity is anticipated from the start, desire as well as offering know no kind of restraint, even not that which yet remains for all finer and deeper natures ever in the dark recesses of the soul when it intends to pour itself out entirely in the presence of the other.
In marriage as well as in marital-like free relationships the temptation is manifest from the beginning to open oneself fully to each other, to send the last of the soul's reservations on to those of the corporeal, to lose oneself fully in one another without reserve. This will, however, more than anything else, considerably threaten the future of the rela- tionship. Without danger, only those people can give of themselves completely who in general cannot give of themselves completely because the abundance of their souls rests in continually developing further, which means that every devotion immediately nurtures new treasures that have an inexhaustibility of properties latent in the soul, and these can therefore be revealed and given away only so much in any given moment, like a tree with this year's harvest bearing that of next year's. It is otherwise, however, with those who, with the upsurge of feeling, the unconditionality of devotion, subtract the revelation of the life of their souls from, as it were, the capital, whereby the revelatory source of ever new spiritual attainment, not at all separable from the 'I,' is not
6 The expression 'indigenous peoples' translates Naturvo? lker, literally 'nature peo- ples'--ed.
? 324 chapter five
? at all lacking. Then the chance is near that one will some day stand before oneself with empty hands, that the Dionysian blessedness of giving leaves behind an impoverishment that yet retroactively--unjustly, but for that reason no less bitterly--gives the lie even to the savored indulgences and their joy. We are simply so equipped that we not only, as mentioned above, need a certain proportion of truth and error as a basis of our love, but also of clarity and ambiguity in the pattern of our life's elements. What we see clearly short of the latter foundation thus shows us just the limit of its attraction and prohibits the fantasy from weaving into it its possibilities, for the loss of which no reality can compensate us, because that is merely self-activity that cannot be replaced in the long run by obtaining and enjoying. The other person is supposed to give us not only an additional gift, but also the possibil- ity of giving it, with hopes and idealizations, with hidden beauties and even unconscious attractions. The site, however, at which we deposit all this production, produced by us but for the other, is the ambiguous horizon of the other's personality, the intermediate realm in which faith displaces knowledge. It is certainly to be emphasized that it is not in any way a matter only of illusions and optimistic or amorous self- deception but simply that a part of the person closest to us must be offered to us in the form of ambiguity and opacity for their attraction to remain elevated for us; thereby the majority of people make up for the attractiveness that the minority possesses with the inexhaustibility of their inner life and growth. The mere fact of absolute knowledge, of full psychological exploration, disillusions us even without prior intoxication, benumbs the vitality of relationships, and allows their continuation to appear as something actually pointless. This is the danger of complete and, in a more than superficial sense, shameless devotion, toward which unlimited possibilities of intimate relationships tempt one, which indeed are easily felt as a kind of duty--especially where no absolute security of one's own feeling exists and the concern over not giving the other enough leads to giving the other too much. In this absence of mutual discretion, in the sense of giving and taking, many marriages clearly go aground, i. e. , fall into a dull, banal habitu- ation, into a matter of course that no longer has room for surprises. The fertile depth of relationships, which in the end senses and honors behind each something revealed yet another final one that also stimulates someone assuredly obsessed to conquer anew daily, is simply the wage of that sensitivity and self-control that still respects the inner privacy
the secret and the secret society 325
? even in the closest all-consuming relationship, that allows the right to inquire to be restricted by the right to privacy.
All these combinations are sociologically significant in that the secret of one is recognized in some measure by the other, in that the inten- tionally or unintentionally hidden is intentionally or unintentionally respected. The intent to conceal, however, takes on a wholly different intensity as soon as it is faced with the intent to uncover. Then that ten- dentious hide-and-seek and masquerade arises, that aggressive defense, as it were, against the third person, which one now actually identifies as a secret. The secret in this sense, the concealment of realities carried out by negative or positive means, is one of the greatest achievements of humanity; contrary to the childish condition in which every idea is immediately spoken, every undertaking is open for all to see, an immense expansion of life is achieved with the secret because its various contents cannot make an appearance at all with complete publicity. The secret offers the possibility of a, so to speak, second world next to the appar- ent one, and this is influenced by the former most strongly. Whether and how much secrecy is in it characterizes every relationship between two people or between two groups; for even where the other does not notice its existence, for that reason the activity of those concealing, and thus the whole relationship, is in any case modified. 7 The historical development of society is in many respects marked by earlier manifest matters moving into the protection of secrecy, and conversely earlier secret matters being able to dispense with this protection and revealing themselves--comparable to that other evolution of the spirit: the initially conscious activity sinks into the unconscious-mechanical exercise, and on the other hand the earlier unconscious-instinctive climbs into the light of consciousness. How this disperses to the various formations of private as well as public life; how that evolution leads to ever more purposeful situations, while at first the secret is often, ineptly and undifferentiat- edly, extended far too widely, conversely, for the many the advantage of concealment not recognized until late; how the magnitude of the secret
7 This concealment has in many cases a sociological consequence of an especially ethically paradoxical quality. So destructive is it namely for a relationship between two people when the one has committed an offense against the other, of which both are conscious, it can thus be advantageous for the relationship if only the guilty party knows about it, because that person is moved thereby to circumspection, tenderness, secret desire to make it good again, to indulgence and selflessness that with a completely good conscience would be far from one's mind.
? 326 chapter five
? is modified in its consequences through the importance or indifference of its contents--all this as pure inquiry has allowed the meaning of the secret for the structure of human realities of interaction to shine forth. The multiply ethical negativity of secrecy need not mislead us about these things because the secret is a general sociological form that stands completely neutral over the value-relevance of its contents. It assimilates, on the one hand, the highest value: thus the keen shame of the noble soul that conceals precisely its best in order not to allow itself the reward of praise and gain; then after this one possesses, as it were, compensation but not the actual value itself. On the other hand, the secret is certainly not in league with the devil, but the devil is in a direct connection with the secret. This is because immorality is concealed for obvious reasons--even where its content meets with no social penalty, as with sexual indiscretions. The internally isolating effect of immorality as such, even apart from all primary social repulsions, is, next to the many ostensible linkages of the ethical and the social continua, a real and important effect; the secret is--among other things--also the social expression of moral wickedness; although the classical sentence, "No one would be so evil as to also desire to appear evil," contradicts the facts. 8 Since defiance and cynicism are not allowed to come to mask wickedness often enough, they can exploit it indeed for elevating the personality vis-a`-vis others, to the point that occasionally one becomes renowned for non-existing immoralities.
The use of the secret as a sociological technique--as a form of activ- ity without which certain goals are not at all achievable in light of our social surroundings--is readily seen. Not quite so obvious are the attrac- tions and values that it possesses beyond this significance as a means, the peculiar attraction of the formally secretive behavior, apart from its particular contents. First of all, the strongly emphasized exclusion of all outsiders bestows a correspondingly strongly emphasized feeling of ownership. For many natures, possession simply does not get its proper significance even by positively having, but requires the awareness that others have to do without it. It is evidently the susceptibility of our sense for difference that accounts for this. Moreover, since the reality of the exclusion of others from a possession will come especially when the value of the possession is great, psychologically the reverse suggests itself, that the many would have to be those denied something valuable. And
8 Quotation marks added--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 327
? thus the inner ownership of the most varied kind obtains a characteristic accent of value through the form of the secret, in which the substan- tive significance of the secreted facts often enough recedes entirely, in that others simply know nothing of it. Among children, a pride and self-pretension are often based on one being able to say to the other, "I know something you don't know"--in fact thus meant broadly that this is stated as a formal means of bragging and degrading of the other, even where it is completely untrue and no secret is held at all. From the least into the greatest relationships this jealousy of knowledge on account of facts hidden from others is manifest. English parliamentary negotiations were secret for a long time, and even under George III publicity in the press about them was subject to criminal prosecution, in fact expressly as an injury to parliamentary privileges. The secret gives the person an exceptional position; it functions as a purely social attraction, in principle independent of the content that it shelters, but of course to the degree that the latter increases, the exclusively possessed secret is meaningful and extensive. The converse also works, analogously to what was just mentioned. Every high-level personality and all high- level accomplishments hold something mysterious for average people. Certainly all human existence and action issue from undeciphered powers. However, inside an order of equality, qualitatively and with the same values, this does not yet make one a problem for the other, especially since a certain immediate understanding, not carried by the intellect, occurs in this equality. Essential dissimilarity, however, does not allow it to come to this, and the general mysteriousness becomes effective immediately in the form of the singular difference--somewhat like one, always living in the same landscape, may not come upon the problem of our being influenced by the milieu of the landscape, which intrudes, though, as soon as we change surroundings and the differ- ence in life-feeling makes us attentive to its provocative force. From the secret that overshadows all that is deep and important there develops the typical mistake: all secrecy is something essential and meaningful. The natural impulse to idealize and the natural timidity of people work to the same end concerning the unknown, to magnify it through fantasy and give it an emphasis that the revealed reality would not for the most part have acquired.
Now strangely enough, together with these attractions of the secret is joined its logical opposite: those of betrayal--which are obviously no less sociological in nature. The secret involves a tension that is resolved in the instant of its being revealed. This forms the reversal in
328 chapter five
? the development of the secret, collecting and culminating in it once again all the attractions--as the moment of squandering lets one enjoy with the greatest intensity the value of the object: the feeling of power, provided with the possession of money, is concentrated for the soul of the squanderer most completely and with the greatest of relish where one parts with that power. The secret is also sustained by the consciousness that there is the capacity for betrayal, and thereby the power of changing destiny and of surprises, of joys and destructions, albeit perhaps only at hand for self-destruction. Therefore, a possibil- ity and temptation of betrayal swirls around the secret, and with the external danger of being discovered is intertwined the internal one of self-discovery that the powerful attraction of the abyss resembles. The secret places a barrier between people but at the same time also the seductive appeal to break through by divulging or confessing--which the mental life of the secret accompanies as an overtone. Therefore, the sociological significance of the secret finds its practical measure, the mode of its realization, first of all in the ability or inclination of the subject to keep it to oneself, or in its resistance or weakness of tempta- tion towards betrayal. Out of the interplay of these two interests, to conceal and to divulge, flow nuances and destinies throughout the whole realm of human interactive relationships. If according to our earlier determination every relationship between people has its characteriza- tion in how much secrecy there is in it or around it, then its further development is determined in this sense in accord with the degree of mixture of retentive and declining energies--the former borne by the practical interest and the formal attraction of the secret as such, the latter by the inability to tolerate any longer the strain of keeping the secret and by the superiority which, residing in the secret in latent form, as it were, is fully actualized emotionally in the moment of disclo- sure, on the other hand, however, also often in the desire for confession that can contain that feeling of power in a more negative and perverse form than self-abasement and contrition.
All these factors that determine the sociological role of the secret are of an individual nature; however, the degree to which the constructions and the complications of the personalities form secrets depends at the same time on the social structure on which its life stands. Now in this connection the deciding factor is that the secret is a factor of individu- alization of the first order, and certainly in the typical double role: that social relationships of more strongly personal differentiation permit and require it in great measure, and that conversely the secret carries and
the secret and the secret society 329
? increases such differentiation. In a small and narrowly enclosed circle the formation and preservation of secrets will indeed be technically difficult because everyone stands near the relationships of everyone else and because the frequency and intimacy of the contacts occasion too many temptations to disclosure. However, there is also no need for secrets to any substantial degree since this social formation tends to level its elements and work against those peculiarities of being, action, and possession whose preservation demands the form of the secret. That with the considerable expansion of the circle all this passes over into its opposite is obvious. Here as usual the relationships of the money economy reveal most clearly the specific characteristics of the large circle. Since the traffic in economic assets takes place continuously by means of money, an otherwise unachievable secrecy became possible with it. Three properties of the monetary form of assets become important here: its compressibility, which allows it to make someone into a rich person with a check that one lets slip unnoticed into that person's hand; its abstractness and featureless nature, by virtue of whose transactions, acquisition, and exchange of property can be hidden in a manner and made undetectable, as is impossible so long as assets can be possessed only as bulky unambiguously tangible objects; finally its long-range effect by means of which one can invest in the most remote and continuously changing assets and thereby keep it entirely from the eyes of the near- est associates. These possibilities for dissimulation, which are produced to the extent that monetary economic relationships expand and have to be exposed to dangers especially in economic activities with other people's money, have aroused the public for the fiscal management of corporations and states as a protective rule. This points to a closer regu- lation of the evolutionary formula touched on above: that all through the form of the secret an ongoing in- and outflow of content occurs, in that what was originally manifest becomes secret, originally hidden sheds its cover--so that one could come to the paradoxical idea that human affiliation would need a certain measure of secrecy under oth- erwise similar circumstances, that only its objects would change: while it would leave the one, it would grasp the other, and would acquire with this exchange an unchanged quantum. A somewhat more exact complement is detectable for this schema. It seems as though, with the increasing practicality of culture, the matters of generality have become ever more open, those of the individual ever more hidden. In less developed conditions the relationships of individual persons cannot, as already noted, be protected from mutual observation and meddling
330 chapter five
? to the degree that it can within the modern life-style, especially in the large city, which has produced an entirely new measure of reserve and discretion. In contrast, the bearers of the public interest in the politi- cal systems of earlier times took care to wrap themselves in a mystical authority, while in more seasoned and wider relationships there accrues to them, through the expansion of their area of domination, through the objectivity of their methods, through the distance from each indi- vidual person, the security and honor that allows them to tolerate the public exposure of their behavior. However, that secrecy in public matters manifests its inner contradiction in its immediately producing the counter-movements of betrayal on the one side and espionage on the other. Still in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the govern- ments were most fearfully concealing the magnitude of state debt, the tax rates, the military headcount--with the result that the diplomatic service in many cases had nothing better to do than to spy, intercept letters, bring persons who 'knew' something or other to the service personnel for a chat. 9 In the nineteenth century, however, publicity itself captures the affairs of state to such an extent that now governments officially publish the data, without the concealment of which until now no regime seemed possible. Thus politics, business administration, and courts lost their secrecy and inaccessibility to the same degree that the individual won the possibility of an ever more complete withdrawal, whereby modern life cultivated a method for the secluding of private affairs in the midst of a large urban collective density, just as earlier it was achievable only through spatial seclusion.
To what extent this development is to be viewed as an expedient one, however, depends on axioms of social values. Every democracy will view publicity as a condition desirable in itself, based on the fundamental notion that everyone should also know those events and circumstances that concern them--because this is the prerequisite they must have
9 This countermovement occurs also in the reverse direction. It was noticed in English court history that the actual court cabal, clandestine insinuations, the organizational intrigues do not yet come about with despotism, but first of all when the king has constitutional advisors, when the government is in this respect an openly accessible system. Only then would the king begin--and this would be especially noticeable after Edward II--to form, over against this somehow or other intrusive co-governing circle, an unofficial, more-or-less underground circle of advisors, which in itself could address the king and through its efforts would produce a chain of concealment and conspiracies.
? the secret and the secret society 331
? to make decisions together; and all common knowledge also inher- ently includes the psychological goad of wanting to act in concert. It remains uncertain whether that conclusion is entirely valid. If over the individualistic interests there emerges an objective sovereign structure, combining certain features from them, then it can by virtue of its for- mal autonomy very probably be justified in having a secret function, without thereby denying its 'public openness' in the sense of protecting the material interests of all. Thus a logical connection consequent upon the greater value of the condition of public openness does not exist. Perhaps, however, the general schema of cultural differentiation mani- fests itself here: what is public becomes ever more public, the private ever more private. And for sure this historical development brings to expression the deeper, objective significance: the public, according to its essence, according to all its initial contents, becomes even outwardly, according to its sociological form, ever more public; and that which has a being-for-itself according to its inner meaning, the centripetal matters of the individual, even in their sociological position, acquire an ever more private character, an ever more distinctive possibility of remaining a secret.
What I pointed out before, that the secret also works as an orna- mental property and asset of the personality, contains within itself the contradiction that precisely that which is withheld and concealed from the consciousness of others gains emphasis in their consciousness, and the subject is supposed to appear to be especially noteworthy exactly through that which is being concealed from them. It demonstrates that the need for social display does not make use just of the inner most contradictory means, but in that even those against which it is indeed actually opposed in that case, while paying the price of that superior- ity, enter the picture--with a mixture of willingness and reluctance certainly--however, in practice it achieves the desired recognition. It makes sense then to demonstrate an analogous structure right at the apparent sociologically opposite pole of the secret, that of adornment and its social significance. It is the essence and the meaning of adorn- ment to direct the eyes of others to the adorned, and to that extent it is the antagonist of the secret, which for its part, however, also does not elude the personally accenting function. Adornment similarly operates in a way that it blends superiority over others with a dependence on them, and on the other hand blends the other's good will and envy in a way that requires a special portrayal as a sociological form of interaction.
332 chapter five
Excursus on Jewelry and Adornment10
Interwoven with the desire of the person to please associates are the opposite tendencies in the interplay of which the relationship between individuals gener- ally takes place: a goodness is in it, a desire to be a joy to the other, but also the other desire: that this joy and 'favor' would flow back as recognition and esteem, our personality be reckoned as an asset. And this need increases so far that it entirely contradicts that initial selflessness of the desire to please: even by this kindness one wants to distinguish oneself before others, wants to be the object of an attention that will not fall to the lot of others--to the point of being envied. Here the kindness becomes a means of the will to power; there arises thereby in some souls the strange contradiction that, with regard to those people over whom they stand with their being and activity, they nev- ertheless find it necessary to build up their self-esteem in their consciousness precisely in order to keep them subordinate.
Characteristic formations of these motives, the outwardness and the inward- ness of their forms weaving into one another, convey the meaning of adorn- ment. Thus this meaning is to give prominence to the personality, to highlight it as in some way an excellent one, but not through a direct expression of power, through something that compels the other from the outside, but only through the kindness that is aroused in one and for that reason still contains some kind of voluntary element. One adorns oneself for oneself and can do that only while one adorns oneself for others. It is one of the oddest sociologi- cal deductions that an act that serves exclusively to place emphasis on and increase the importance of its bearer nevertheless achieves its goal exclusively through the pleasing view it offers others exclusively as a type of thankfulness to these others. This is because even the envy for adornment means simply the desire of the envious to win the same recognition and admiration for oneself, and one's envy proves just how very much these values are tied to adornment for that person. Adornment is something absolutely egoistic insofar as it makes its bearer stand out, sustains and increases one's self-esteem at the cost of others (because the common adornment of all would no longer set off the individual), and at the same time something altruistic because its enjoyment is simply meant for these others--whereas even the possessor can enjoy it only in the moment before the mirror--and only with the reflection of this presentation attains value for the adornment. Just as everywhere in the formation of the aesthetic, the trends of life that reality strangely juxtaposed with one another or counterposed antagonistically against one another, are revealed as intimately related--so in the sociological patterns of interaction this human arena of the struggle of the being-for-oneself and being-for-others, the aesthetic structure of adornment denotes a point at which both of these crosscurrents are dependent on one another as means and end.
10 Schmuck, which Simmel uses in this heading and in the previous paragraph, means both 'jewelry' and 'adornment. ' We use either or both of the English terms as the context requires--ed.
? ? the secret and the secret society 333
? Adornment increases or enhances the impression of the personality, while it functions as its, as it were, radiation. For that reason gleaming metals and the precious stones have always been its substance and are 'adornment'11 in the narrower sense, similar to clothing and coiffure, which indeed also 'adorn. ' One can speak of a radioactivity of the person; there is around everyone, as it were, a larger or smaller sphere of radiating significance from each, in which everybody else who has anything to do with that person immerses--a sphere where the physical and psychological elements inextricably blend: the sensually noticeable influences that radiate out from a person to one's surroundings are in some manner the carriers of spiritual lightning flashes; and they function as the symbols of such even where they are in fact only external, where no kind of power of suggestion or importance of the personality streams through it. The radiations of adornment, the sensual attention that it provokes, create such an enhancement for the personality or even an intensification of its sphere that it is, as it were, greater when it is adorned. While adornment tends to be at the same time some kind of significant object of value, it is as a synthesis of the having and the being of a subject whereby it goes from being merely a possession to a sensual and emphatic distinction of the personality itself. This is not the case with usual clothing because it enters consciousness as individu- ally distinctive neither from the perspective of having nor from that of being; only when decorated clothing and the highest of valuables have concentrated their value and radiating significance as in one smallest point does the having of the personality turn into a visible quality of its being. And all this not in spite of adornment being something 'superfluous' but precisely because it is. The immediately necessary is more closely bound to the person; it surrounds one's being with a thinner periphery. The superfluous 'overflows,' i. e. it flows out further from one's starting point; and while it is then still attached to this point, around the area of the merely necessary it lays another more encircl- ing periphery that is in principle limitless. The superfluous conceptually has no quantity in itself; the freedom and magnificence of our being increase to the degree of superfluity that associates us with our having, because no given structure imposes on it any kind of limiting norm, such as that which neces- sity as such indicates.
This accentuation of the personality is actualized, however, directly by means of an impersonal feature. Everything that in any way 'adorns' the person is ordered in a scale according to how closely bound it is to the physical per- sonality. For primitive peoples the absolutely joined adornment is typically the tattoo. The opposite extreme is metal and stone jewelry, which is absolutely not individualistic and can be worn by anyone. Between these two, stands cloth- ing--though not so un-interchangeable and personal as the tattoo, but also not so un-individual and detachable as jewelry. However, it is precisely in its impersonality that its elegance lies. This enduringly self-contained, thoroughly un-individually demonstrative, solid unmodifiability of stone and metal now
11 This clauses makes sense only remembering, as mentioned, that in German, Schmuck is used for both 'adornment' and 'jewelry'--ed.
? 334 chapter five
? nevertheless being forced to serve the personality--is precisely what gives jew- elry its most subtle appeal. The authentically elegant eludes the amplification of the peculiarly individual; it always sets a sphere of a more general, more stylized, as it were, abstract nature around the person--which obviously does not prevent the refinements with which this generality of the personality is combined. That new clothes function especially elegantly lies in the fact that they are still 'stiffer,' i. e. , do not yet accommodate all the modifications of the individual body as unconditionally as clothes worn a longer time, which are already stretched and squeezed from the special movements of the wearer and thereby betray that person's special style more completely. This 'newness,' this unmodifiability by individuality is to the greatest degree characteristic of metal jewelry: it is forever new; it stands coolly untouchable beyond the singularity and beyond the destiny of its wearer, which cannot in any way be said of clothing. A long-worn piece of clothing is closely bound up with the body; it has an intimacy that clashes altogether with the essence of elegance. This is because elegance is something for 'others'; it is a social concept that draws its value receiving general recognition.
If adornment then is supposed to augment the individual by way of some- thing supra-individual, which seeks to reach all and is received and esteemed by all, then it must, beyond its mere material effect, have style. Style is forever a universal that brings the contents of personal life and creativity into a form shared with many and made accessible to many. In the actual artwork its style interests us all that much less, the greater that personal uniqueness and subjec- tive life are expressed in it; since it thereby appeals to the personal aspect also of the observer, the latter is alone in the world, so to speak, with the artwork. In contrast, for all that we call arts and crafts, which on account of their usefulness appeal to a wide range of people, we require a more general, more typical creation; in them is supposed to be expressed not only a soul presented in its uniqueness but a widespread, historical or social sensitivity and attitude that makes its subsumption into the life systems of a great many individuals possible. It is the greatest of errors to think that adornment has to be an indi- vidual work of art because it is supposed to always adorn an individual. Quite the contrary: because it is supposed to serve the individual, it need not itself be of individual essence, just as little as the furniture on which we sit or the eating utensil with which we fiddle need be individual works of art. Rather, all that occupies the wider sphere of life around the person--in contrast to the work of art which is not incorporated in a different life at all but is a self- sufficient world--must envelop the individual as in ever widening, concentric spheres, leading to or going out from the person. This dissolution of focus on individuality, this generalizing beyond being unique that now, however, car- ries what is individual as a basis or as a radiating circle or takes it up as in a wide-flowing stream--this is the essence of stylization; out of the instinct for it, adornment has been formed continually into a relatively rigid genre.
Beyond the formal stylizing of adornment is the material means of its social purpose, that glitter of jewelry by which its wearer appears as the center point of a radiating circle in which everyone nearby, every beholding
the secret and the secret society 335
? eye, is included. While the ray of the gemstone seems to radiate out to the other, as the beam of the view that directs the eye towards it, it carries the social significance of adornment--the being-for-the-other that returns to it as an expansion of the subject's sphere of significance. The radii of this circle mark on the one hand the distance that adornment generates between people: I have something that you do not; on the other hand, however, they allow the other not only to participate, but they shine precisely for the other, they exist overall only for the sake of the other. Through its material, jewelry is a distancing and an indulgence in one act. For that reason it is thus especially serviceable to vanity, which needs others in order to be able to disdain them. Herein lies the deep difference between vanity and arrogant pride: the latter, whose self-consciousness actually only rests in itself, tends to spurn 'adornment' in every sense. Entering here with the same tendency is the significance of the 'right' material. The appeal of the 'genuine,' in every respect, consists in its being more than its immediate appearance, which it shares with the forgery. So it is not, like the latter, something in isolation, but it has roots in a ground beyond its mere appearance, while the imitation is only that which one sees in it momentarily.