No More Learning

The supra- individuality of the grouping, the fully developing independence of its
9 See the introduction to the chapter in this volume on the intersection of circles.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 73
form vis-a`-vis any reality of individual existence, lives nowhere more absolutely and more emphatically than in the reduction of the principles of organization to purely mathematical relationships; and the extent to which this occurs, as it very often appears in the most varied groups, is at the same time the extent to which the idea of being a group in its most abstract form has absorbed the individuality of its factors.
4. Finally, important sociological consequences are linked to quan- titative determination--although the effective number of elements can be entirely different depending on the circumstances--of a kind that 'society' exemplifies now and again in the modern sense of sociability. How many persons must one invite for it to be a 'society'? 10 Evidently the qualitative relationships between host and guests does not decide the matter; and the invitation of two or three persons who stand in relation to us fully formally and not subjectively still does not bring about 'society'--whereas this does occur if we gather together fifteen close friends. The number always remains decisive, although its size in individual cases naturally depends on the quality and closeness of the relationships among the members. The three circumstances--the relationships of the host to each of the guests by itself, the guests to one another, the way each participant subjectively experiences all these relationships--form the basis on which the number of participants then decides whether a society or a mere being together (of the nature of friendship or matter-of-fact in purpose) exists. There is here thus gener- ated with every numerical modification a very definitely experienced change into an entirely different sociological category--thus little of the extent of this modification is to be grasped with our psychological resources. But at least the qualitative sociological results of the quan- titative cause can be described to some extent.
First of all, 'society' requires a rather specific external set-up. Who- ever invites one or two from a circle of, say, thirty acquaintances desires 'nothing formal. ' But if someone invites all thirty at the same time, there immediately arises entirely new demands for food, drink, attire, etiquette, an extraordinarily increased expenditure for aspects
10 In this numbered section Simmel has numerous instances of 'Gesellschaft' in quotation marks and seems to want to indicate thereby an undetermined number of participants at which a social gathering or occasion takes on a level of objectivity transcending the inter-subjective reality of intimates. Where in this section he puts Gesellschaft in quotation marks, we've translated it 'society'; and where he has used Gesellschaft without quotation marks, we've translated it as 'social gathering' or 'social occasion'--ed.
? 74 chapter two
of sensual attractions and enjoyments. This is a very clear example of how the mere increase in size reduces the intensity of personalities. In a considerably smaller gathering a kind of reciprocal accommodation is possible; the common ground that makes up the contents of their sociability can include such all-embracing or highly suitable portions of their individualities that the gathering takes on the character of intel- lectuality, of differentiated and most highly developed psychic energy. However, the more persons who congregate, the lower the possibility that they will coincide in those more valuable and intimately essential aspects, the more deeply must that point be sought that is common to their motives and interests. 11
To the extent, however, that the number of members provides no place for the more highly personal and intellectual pursuits, one must seek to compensate for the shortage of these charms through an increase in the superficial and sensory. The shear joy of being together has always had a particularly close connection to the number of festively gathered persons and the extravagance; at the end of the middle ages, for example, the extravagance at weddings went so far with the retinue escorting the bridal couples that the authorities sometimes prescribed through their sumptuary laws exactly how many persons the entou- rage would be allowed to have. If food and drink has always been the medium for the association of a wider circle, for which an integrative mood and interest in another direction would be difficult to achieve, so a 'society,' then, purely on account of a quantitative composition that rules out the commonality and social interaction of the subtle and intellectual moods, will have to accentuate all the more strongly and certainly these sensual pleasures common to all.
A further characteristic of 'society' on the basis of its numerical dif- ference, in contrast to the gathering of a few, is found in that a full uniformity of mood cannot in general, as with the latter, be achieved and
11 Consequently the complaint about the banality of interaction in large social gatherings manifests complete sociological misunderstanding. The relatively low level of intensity on which a larger grouping gathers is not in principle remediable. Since all the higher and finer attainments are of a more individual kind and are thus not suited for commonality of content, they can in any case have a socializing effect, should a unity be acquired through a division of labor--which, however, is apparently pos- sible only inside a 'society' of a small size, and at higher quantities would negate its very nature. It is therefore a thoroughly correct sociological instinct when one senses the more notable emergence of personal individuality in a 'society' often as a bit of tactlessness--even one in itself meaningful and enjoyable.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 75
furthermore should not; rather, on the contrary, in a further contrast, the formation of subgroups is indicated. The life principle of a social gathering of a few personal friends is very much opposed to dividing, say, into two separate moods, indeed even only separate conversations; 'society' is present in that moment, when instead of its necessarily one center, a duality emerges: on the one hand an inclusive but still rather informal centrality that is essentially found only outwardly and physi- cally--which is why social gatherings of the same social level, the larger they are, the more they resemble one another as wholes, just as their personal exchanges are also more diverse; on the other hand the special small centers of shared conversation, mood, interest, which, however, continuously exchange participants. Consequently there is the continual alternating between engaging and breaking off in the large social gather- ing, which will be experienced, depending on the temperament of the subject, one moment as the most unbearable superficiality, the next as an effortless rhythm of high aesthetic charm. This technical sociologi- cal type is demonstrated in a particularly pure example by the ball with the modern style of dance: a momentary relationship always of a couple of actually fanciful closeness develops into an entirely new form through the constant exchange between couples; that physical closeness between each other of complete strangers makes it possible here for all the guests to be one host who, however casual the relationship to this host may be, permits a certain reciprocal assurance and legitimation, there again by way of the impersonal, quasi anonymous character of the relationships that the size of the social gathering and its formalistically bound behavior offers. Obviously these traits of the large social occa- sion, which the ball presents, as it were, by sublimating, perhaps even caricaturing them, are tied to a certain minimum of participants; and one can sometimes make the interesting observation that an intimate group of fewer persons takes on the character of 'society' through the arrival of one single additional person.
In one case, which certainly concerns a far less complicated human matter, the size that produces a particular sociological institutional struc- ture appears to be set somewhat more firmly. The patriarchal family household in the most diverse settings and even under wholly different economic conditions always numbers twenty to thirty people, so that those conditions cannot be the cause or at least not the exclusive cause of the similarity in size. It is rather likely that the internal interactions that constitute the particular structure of the household generate the necessary proportions of narrowness and width for precisely within
76 chapter two
that boundary. The patriarchal family was everywhere characterized by a great intimacy and solidarity, which had its center in the pater familias, the paternalism of which he exercised over the affairs of every individual in the interest of the whole as well as in his own egoistic interest. Hence arose the upper limit: this kind of cohesion and control appears to be able to include no greater quantity of members for the corresponding psychological level of development. On the other hand the lower limit follows from the fact that such a self-reliant group must cultivate for its self-sufficiency and its self-preservation certain collective psychological realities that tend to materialize only above a certain numerical threshold: resoluteness for the offensive and defensive, con- fidence on the part of each one always to find the necessary support and reinforcement, above all: the religious spirit whose elevation and inspiration arises, at first from the mixture of many contributing factors, in mutual elimination of their peculiarly individual character, above the individuals--or: lifts the individuals above themselves. The number mentioned specified perhaps empirically the approximate range over which and under which the group could not go if it would cultivate the character traits of the patriarchal household. It appears as though with growing individualization, beyond this level of civilization, those intimacies were possible only among an ever decreasing number of persons; on the other hand the phenomena relevant to the size of the family required precisely an ever growing circle. The needs that were realized above and below this numerical complement differentiated; one part requires a smaller complement, the other a larger one, so that later on one finds no structure anymore that can suffice for them in the same consistent manner as the patriarchal family had.
Apart from such singular cases, all those questions pertinent to the numerical requirement for a 'society' have a sophistic tone: how many soldiers make up an army, how many participants are necessary for a political party, how many joiners make a crowd. They seem to repeat the classical questions: how many grains of wheat make up a heap? Since, then, one, two, three, four grains do not do it at all, but a thousand certainly, there would have to be a boundary between these numbers at which the addition of a single grain to the previous ones would make a 'heap'; however, should someone make this attempt at continuous counting, it becomes evident that no one is able to identify this boundary. The logical basis of these difficulties lies in there being a numerical series that appears continuously, ceaselessly increasing due to the relative insignificance of each individual element, and that this
the quantitative conditioning of the group 77
at some point is to allow for the application of a qualitatively new idea, abruptly replacing altogether one previously applied. This is obviously a contradictory requirement: the continuous, conceptually, simply cannot justify purely from itself a sudden break and transition. The sociological difficulty, however, has another complication that lies beyond that of the ancient sophists. Because by a 'heap' of grain one understands either an accumulation, and then one is logically justified in calling it that as soon as only one layer simply appears over the spot underneath; or should it thereby be designated simply by an amount, then it is unjustifiably required from a concept such as heap, which by its very nature is rather variable and indeterminate, that it should acquiesce in its application now to entirely determinate unambiguously delimited realities. In the sociological cases, however, characteristically wholly new phenomena appear with an increasing quantity that appear not even proportion- ately at the lower existing quantity: a political party has a qualitatively different significance from a small clique; several curious spectators standing together manifest different characteristics than a 'crowd,' etc. The uncertainty coming from the impossibility of numerically grasping these concepts by the corresponding quantities might be resolved in the following way. That vacillation concerns apparently only certain middling sizes; some lower numbers do not yet reliably comprise the collectivities in question; some rather high ones comprise them entirely without question. Now there are indeed those qualities sociologically signifying a numerically more negligible formation: the gathering that falls short of 'society,' the troop of soldiers that does not yet make up an army, the collaborating miscreants who are not quite a 'gang. ' While these qualities stand in contrast to others arguably characteristic of the large community, the character of the numerically in-between can be interpreted to comprise both, so that each of the two is made rudimentarily perceptible in individual features, now emerging, now disappearing, or becoming latent. Thus while such structures situated in the numerically middle zone also objectively participate partially or alternately in the definitive character of that situated above it or below it, the subjective uncertainty in deciding which of the two they belong to is to be explained. It is thus not that in a formation without sociological qualities suddenly, like the crystal in the mother liquid, a quite definite sociological constellation is supposed to start, without one, though, knowing the distinct moment of this transformation; but rather it is that two different kinds of formations, each consisting of a number of features and variously qualitatively nuanced, converge under
78 chapter two
certain quantitative conditions in a social structure and share the lat- ter between themselves in a variety of ways; so that the question, to which of the two the structure belongs, does not at all suffer from the difficulty of recognizing a continuous series but is instead one posed in an objectively false manner. 12
These convergences then would affect social formations that indeed depend on the number of interacting elements, but without this depen- dence being sufficiently formulated for us to be conscious of them for purposes of drawing their sociological consequences from individual specific quantities. However, this latter is not out of the question if we are satisfied with just adequate elementary forms. If we begin with the lower limit of the quantitative range, mathematically determined sizes appear as unambiguous preconditions for characteristically sociologi- cal structures.
The numerically simplest formations that can still be characterized as social interaction at all seem to arise, of course, between two elements. However, there is, viewed from the outside, an as yet simpler structure that belongs among sociological categories; namely--as paradoxically and actually contradictory as it seems--the isolated individual person.
12 More exactly, however, the situation is probably this. To every definite number of elements, there corresponds, depending on the purpose and meaning of its association, a sociological form, an arranging, cohesiveness, relationship of the parts to the whole, etc. --that with each and every arriving and departing member, a modification, however immeasurably small and imperceptible, is experienced. But since we do not have a specific expression for each of these endlessly many sociological situations, even when for us perceptible in its nature, often nothing else remains but to think of it as made up from two situations--one more, as it were, relevant, the other less. In any event it is thereby not so much a matter of a composite as it is, say, the so-called emotional blend of friendship and love, or hate and contempt, or pleasure and pain. Here there is in most cases an integrative emotional state--which will occupy us later on--for which we have no immediate concept and which we therefore through synthesis and mutual qualification of two others paraphrase more than describe; here as elsewhere the actual unity of being is not available to us, but we must break it up into a duality of elements, neither of which covers it completely, in order to have it emerge from the interweaving of the two. This is, however, only a conceptual analysis possible after the fact that does not trace the actual process of becoming the distinct being of those entities. So where the concepts coined for social units--meeting and society, troop and army, clique and party, pair and gang, personal following and school, assembly and crowd--find no certain application, because the human material for the one seems to be too little and for the other too much, there remains nevertheless as precise a standard sociological formation of as precise a correspondence specifically to the numerical qualification as in those more definitive cases. It is only that the lack of a specific concept for these countless nuances forces us to describe their qualities as a mixture of the forms that correspond to numerically smaller and numerically higher structures.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 79
As a matter of fact, though, the processes that shape the duality of elements are often simpler than those necessary for the sociological characterization of the singular. For the latter it is a matter principally of two pertinent phenomena: solitariness and freedom. The shear fact that an individual is not at all in any kind of interaction with other individuals is of course not a sociological one, but still it also does not satisfy the full concept of the solitary. This, in fact, so far as it is emphasized and internally meaningful, does not in any way mean simply the absence of any society, but rather its existence somehow imagined and only then negated. Solitude receives its unambiguously positive meaning as a distant effect of society--be it as echoes of past or anticipation of future relationships, be it as yearning or as voluntary seclusion. The solitary person is not thus characterized as though from time immemorial the sole inhabitant of the earth; rather even such a person's situation is determined by social interaction, albeit negatively denoted. All the joy as well as all the bitterness of solitude are indeed only different kinds of reaction to socially experienced influences; it is an interaction from which the one member is actually separate after exercising certain influences and yet lives on and functions yet in the imagination of the other subject. Rather characteristic of this is the well-known psychological fact that the feeling of being alone seldom appears so decidedly and hauntingly in an actual physical isolation as when one is conscious of oneself as alien and disconnected among many physically quite present people--at a social gathering, in the train car, in the crush of the crowded urban street. It is necessarily essentially a matter of the configuration of a group whether it fosters or in general enables such manufactured feelings of loneliness in its midst. Close and intimate communities do not often allow such an, as it were, intercellular vacuum in their structure. As one speaks, however, of a social deficit that is produced in certain amounts according to the social conditions: the antisocial phenomena of the disenfranchised, criminals, prostitutes, suicides--so a given quantity and quality of social life produces a certain number of occasional or chronically lonely existences that the statistics by themselves certainly cannot grasp numerically. In another manner solitude becomes sociologically meaningful as soon as it no longer consists of a relationship occurring in an individual between the individual and a specific group or the group life in general but rather emerges as pause or periodical differentiation inside of one and the same relationship. This becomes important for those relationships that are concerned, based on their foundational concepts, precisely with
80 chapter two
the ongoing negation of solitude, such as, above all, the monogamous marriage. In so far as the finest internal nuances find expression in its constitution, it makes a fundamental difference whether husband and wife have indeed still preserved the joy of solitude for themselves or whether their relationship is never to be interrupted by indulgence in this--be it because their habitual togetherness has deprived them of the attractiveness of it, be it because a lack of inner security of love leads them to fear those kinds of interruptions as betrayals or, worse, as a threat to fidelity. Thus solitude, a phenomenon apparently limited to the individual subject, consisting in the negation of sociality, is nev- ertheless of highly positive sociological significance: not only from the perspective of the subject, in whom it exhibits as conscious perception an entirely given relationship to society, but also through the definitive characteristic that offers up encompassing groups as well as the most intimate relationships, as cause as well as effect, for its occurrence.
Among its many sociological implications, freedom also has an aspect pertinent to this. It too appears at first as the simple negation of social connection, because every connection is a relationship. Free persons simply do not form unities together with others, but are ones for themselves. Now there may be a freedom that exists in this sheer unrelatedness, in the sheer absence of any limitation by other beings: a Christian or Hindu hermit, a solitary settler in a German or Ameri- can forest may enjoy a freedom in the sense that one's existence is filled throughout with other than social contents--likewise perhaps a collectivity, a household, or a political entity that exists completely insulated, without neighbors, and without relationships to other entities. However, for an entity that exists in connection to others, freedom has a much more positive meaning. It is a specific kind of relationship to the environment, a co-relational phenomenon that loses its meaning if there is no counterpart. It has in this regard two extremely important meanings for the deep structure of society.
1. For social people, freedom is neither a self-evident condition given at the outset nor a possession of more-or-less substantial durability acquired for all time. For sure not just because every single hypothetical demand that engages the strength of the individual generally towards a particular course actually has the tendency to proceed without lim- its; almost all relationships--governmental, party, family, friendship, erotic--though voluntary, go overboard and spin their demands, if left to their own resources, out over everybody; emotionally they become often uncannily surrounded by an imaginary sphere from which one
the quantitative conditioning of the group 81
then must emphatically mark out for oneself a reserve of strengths, commitments, interests. However, it is not only the extensiveness of demands by which the social egoism of any social involvement endan- gers the freedom of its participants but indeed the relentlessness with which the entirely one-sided and narrow demand of already existing bonds likewise emerges. Each one of this sort tends to assert its rights with complete lack of mercy and indifference toward other interests and duties--whether they are compatible with it or fully incompatible--and limits the freedom of the individual by this nature of its manner no less than by its quantitative extent. Over against this form of our relation- ships freedom manifests itself as an ongoing process of liberation, as a struggle not only for the independence of the 'I' but also for the right even to remain in the interdependence each moment with free will--as a struggle that must be renewed after each victory. Detachment as nega- tive social behavior is thus in reality almost never a dormant property but a ceaseless loosening from bonds that continually either actually restrict the being-for-self of the individual or strive to do so in principle; freedom is not a solipsistic existence but a sociological event, not a situ- ation confined to the singularity of the subject but a relationship, albeit definitely viewed from the standpoint of the one subject.
2. Considered functionally as well as substantively, freedom is some- thing completely other than the repudiation of relationships, than the untouchability of the individual spheres by those located nearby. It follows from that very simple idea that a person is not only free but indeed also wants to use that freedom for something. This use, however, is for the most part nothing other than the domination and exploitation of other people. For the social individual (i. e. , one living in permanent interrelationships with others) freedom would in countless instances be entirely without content and purpose if it did not make possible or constitute the extension of one's will to those others. Quite correctly our language identifies certain insults and violations as 'having taken liberties with someone,' and likewise many languages have used their word for freedom in the sense of right or privilege. The purely nega- tive character of freedom as a relationship of the subject to one's self complements a very positive one in two ways: freedom exists for the most part in a process of liberation, it rises above and against a bond, and remains then as a reaction against this meaning, consciousness, and value; and it consists no less of a power relationship to others, of the possibility of acquiring advantage inside of a relationship, of the obligation or subjugation of the other, in which freedom only then
82 chapter two
finds its value and its realization. The inherent meaning of freedom for the subject is thus only as the watershed between both of its social relevancies: that the subject is bound by others and binds others. It shrivels up to nothing, so to speak, thereby revealing the actual mean- ing of freedom, even when visualized as a quality of the individual, as indeed this twofold social relationship.
Since now there are such frequent multi-faceted and indirect connec- tions consisting of determinants such as solitude and freedom, but still though as sociological forms of relationship--nevertheless the methodologi- cally most simple sociological formation simply remains effectively that between two participants. It provides the prototype, the germ, and the material for countless complex cases, although its sociological impor- tance in no way rests only on its expansion and diversification. Rather it is itself indeed a social interaction with which not only many forms of such are generally very purely and characteristically realized, but the reduction to the duality of elements is even the condition under which alone a variety of forms of relation emerge. The typical sociological entity reveals itself then, in that not only does the greatest diversity of individuality and the attendant motives not alter the identity of these formations, but that even these occasionally arise as much between two groups--families, states, associations of different kinds--as between two individual persons.
The specific characterization of a relationship through the duality of participants fully represents everyday experiences: a common share, an undertaking, an agreement, a shared secret binds participants into twos in a way quite different than when only three participate in it. Perhaps this is most characteristic of the secret, wherein the general experience seems to show that this minimum, with which the secret crosses the boundary of the being-for-itself, is at the same time the maximum with which its preservation is reasonably secured. A secret ecclesiastic-political society that was organized in France and Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century had separate grades, whereby the actual governing secrets were known only to the higher of these grades; permitted to be discussed, however, only between two members each of those high grades. The limit of two is thus felt to be so decisive that, where it can no longer be maintained with respect to knowledge, it is still observed with respect to speech! Now in general the difference between the bond of two and that of more members is thereby set, in that that relationship, as a unity of two individuals, stands to each of the participants as greater-numbered formations stand to it. Much as
the quantitative conditioning of the group 83
it may appear, say, to a third party as an independent entity above the individual, that is as a rule not the case for its participants, but each sees oneself in relation to the other, and not as one in an overarching collectivity. The social structure rests directly on the one and on the other. The departure of any individual would destroy the whole, so it does not attain the same supra-personal life that one feels as indepen- dent of oneself; whereas already even with a social formation of three a group can yet continue to exist even after the departure of one.
This dependence of the dyad on the pure individuality of the single member lets the idea of its existence be accompanied by that of its end in a way more nearly and perceptibly than is the case with other unions, which all members know can survive their individual departures or deaths. Just as the life of the individual is shaded in some way by the idea of one's death, so is the life of associations. By 'idea' is here understood not only the theoretical, conscious thought but a portion or modification of our being. Death stands before us not as a fate that will at any moment intrude, previously only as an idea or prophecy, as a present fear or hope, without interfering in the reality of this life until it occurs. Rather, that we will die is from the very beginning of life an intrinsic quality; in all of our living reality something is, which later as our death simply finds its last phase or revelation: we are, from our birth on, something that will die. Admittedly we vary in this; not only does it vary in the way that we subjectively imagine this quality and its final effect and react to it, but the way in which this element of our being interweaves with its other elements is of most extreme diversity. And so it is with groups. Every multimember group can be immortal in its idea, and this gives each of its members as such a completely unique sociological feeling, however one wishes to face death personally. 13 That, however, a union of two, certainly not with regard to its life but with regard to its death, depends on each of its elements for its very being--because two are required for its life, not however for its death--the entire inner attitude of the individual must contribute to it, albeit not always consciously and not always equa- bly. For the feeling of bonding, there has to be a tone of peril and of indispensability which makes it on the one hand an actual place of a
13 Compare the more detailed examination of this in the chapter on the self- preservation of the group.
? 84 chapter two
genuine sociological tragedy, on the other hand a sentimentality and mournful problematic.
This tone is generally pervasive where the end of the union is organi- cally grafted into its positive structure. From a northern French city recently there was a report of a strange 'Union of the Broken Dish. ' For years there, some industrialists are supposed to have joined in a meal. Once when a dish fell to the ground and broke, someone remarked by chance that the number of pieces was exactly the same as the number of people present--an omen for them to join together in a union of friendship in which each should owe the others good turns and assis- tance. Each of the gentlemen took a piece of the dish. Whenever one of them dies, his porcelain fragment is delivered back to the chairman, who glues the pieces handed back to him together. The last survivor is then supposed to glue the last piece, and the thusly repaired dish must be quickly buried. With that the 'Union of the Broken Dish' is finally liquidated and vanishes. Undoubtedly, the emotional tone inside this fellowship and in relationship to it would be a completely changed one if new members had been admitted and its life thereby perpetuated indefinitely. Its being designed from the very beginning to die gives it a certain cachet--which dyadic affiliations possess at the outset by virtue of the numerical limitation of their structure.
From the same structural foundation also only relationships of two are actually exposed to the characteristic coloration or decoloration that we identify as triviality. Because only where the claim to an individuality is productive of its appearance or achievement, the feeling of triviality produces its absence. It is still hardly adequately observed how rela- tionships, with fully unchanged content, are colored by the pervading imagination, however frequently or rarely similarly constituted. It is not only erotic relationships that receive through imagination (that there has never yet been such an experience) a special and meaningful timbre quite apart from their otherwise ostensible content and worth. Perhaps since there is hardly any externally objective property whose value--not only its economic value--would not from the infrequency or frequency contribute to the consciousness or unconsciousness of such, so perhaps also no relationship in its inner meaning for its carriers is independent of the factor of its amount of recurrence; this rate of occurrence can also mean thereby the repetitions of the same contents, situations, excitements inside the relationship itself. With the feeling of triviality we associate a certain level of frequency, of consciousness of the repetition of life content, the value of which is contingent directly upon a level
the quantitative conditioning of the group 85
of infrequency. Now it seems as though the life of a supra-individual social entity or the relationship of the individual to it has generally not faced this question, as though here, where the substantive meaning of the relationship transcends the individuality, even its individuality in the sense of the uniqueness or infrequency played no role and its absence thus operated as triviality. For the dyadic relationships of love, of mar- riage, of friendship--or even such higher numbered relationships that produce no higher structure often than the social gathering--the tone of triviality leading to despair or ruin proves the sociological character of the dual formations: to commit to the immediacy of the interaction and to deprive each of the elements of the supra-individual unity facing them, while they simultaneously partake of it.
That the sociological event remains thus within the personal apart- and-dependent existence, without the elements progressing to the formation of an overarching whole--as it exists in principle even with groups of two--is, moreover, the basis of 'intimacy. ' This characteristic of a relationship seems to me to return to the initially individual dis- position: in that the person gladly differentiates oneself from the other, the qualitatively individual is regarded as the core, value, and sine qua non of one's existence--a presumption in no way always justified since for many it is quite typically the contrary, the essence and substantial value of their personality shared with others. Now this repeats itself with aggregations. For them, too, it is manifest that the quite unique contents their participants share with one another but with no one outside this community have become the center and the real gratifica- tion of this community. This is the form of intimacy. To be sure, in every relationship some components, which its carriers contribute only to this relationship and no other, blend with others that are not exactly unique to this relationship but which the individual also shares in the same or similar way with other persons. Now as soon as that first, the internal aspect of the relationship, is experienced as its essence, as soon as it establishes its affective structure on that which each one gives or shows exclusively only to their own and to no one else--then the characteristic coloration is given that one calls intimacy. It is not the content of the relationship on which this rests. Two relationships, with regard to the mix of individual-exclusive contents as well as those radiating out in other directions, may be quite similar: only that one is intimate in which the former appears as the vehicle or axis of the relationship. When on the contrary certain people on the outside or people whose disposition is relatively alien to us initiate expressions and
86 chapter two
confessions like those that are otherwise reserved only for those closest to us, in such a case we nevertheless feel that this 'intimate' relational content does not yet make it intimate; because our entire relationship even to these people rests in its substance and its meaning still only on its general, non-individual components, and the former, certainly otherwise perhaps never revealed, nevertheless allows the relationship its own exclusive content because it does not become the basis of its form outside of intimacy. That this is the essence of intimacy makes it thus frequently a danger for closely bound dyads, perhaps most of all for marriage. In that the couple share the little 'intimacies' of the day, the kindnesses or unkindnesses of the hour, the faults carefully hidden from all others--it stands to reason that to transfer the accent and the substance of the relationship directly into the definitely fully individualistic, yet still objectively entirely irrelevant, and to view it as though actually lying outside the marriage, as something which one also shares with others, and which is perhaps the most important of the personality, the spiritual, the gracious, the general interests, is to gradually remove it from marriage.
Now there is the matter of how much the intimate character of the dyadic bond is connected to its sociological specificity, forming from it no higher unity over its individual elements. For this unity, its concrete carriers being thus so very much only those two, would be indeed effectively a third that can somehow come between them. The more extensive a community is, the easier it is, on the one hand, for an objective unity to form over the individuals, and, on the other, the less intimate it becomes; both of these characteristics are internally connected. That one is merely faced with others in a relationship and does not at the same time feel an objective supra-individual structure as existing and real--that is yet seldom actually fully clear in triadic relationships, but is nevertheless the condition of intimacy. That a third thus added to the two persons of a group interrupts the most intimate feeling, is significant for the more delicate structure of the groupings of two; and it is valid in principle that even marriage, as soon as it has led to a child, is sometimes undermined. It is worthwhile substantiat- ing this with a few words in order to characterize the affiliation of two members.
Just as duality, which tends to shape the form of our life content, presses toward reconciliations, whose successes as much as their failures make that duality all the more visible--so the masculine and the femi- nine, as the first example or prototype of this, press towards another,
the quantitative conditioning of the group 87
for unification, which becomes possible precisely only by way of the contrasting character of both, and which stands directly before the most impassioned desire for one another, in one another as something in the deepest unattainable ground. That it remains denied to the 'I' to grasp the 'Not I' actually and absolutely becomes nowhere more deeply felt than here where opposites nevertheless appear created for completion and fusion. Passion seeks to tear down the boundaries of the 'I' and merge with the other; however, they do not become an entity, but rather a new entity results: the child. And the characteristically dualistic condition of its becoming: a closeness that must nevertheless remain a remoteness, and its ultimate, which the soul desires, can never be reached, and a remoteness that presses endlessly to become one--with this, what has become stands also between its progenitors, and these varying sentiments associated with them allow now one, now the other to take effect. So it is that cold, internally estranged marriages desire no child because it binds: its uniting function highlights the foundation of that dominant estrangement all the more effectively, but also all the more undesired. Sometimes however very passionate and fervent mar- riages also want no child--because it divides. The metaphysical oneness, into which both sought to fuse only with one another, has now slipped through their fingers and stands over against them as a third physical presence that intrudes between them. But even a go-between must appear as a separation, to those who desire unmediated unity, in the same way that a bridge connects two banks, but nevertheless forms a measurable gap between them; and where a go-between is superfluous, it is worse than superfluous.
For all that the monogamous marriage seems here to be of the essential completion of the sociological character of dyadic group- ings--which is given through the absence of a supra-personal entity--an exception has to be made. The not-at-all unusual fact that there are decidedly poor marriages between admirable personalities and very good ones between quite deficient personalities indicates first of all that this structure, however dependent it is on each one of the participants, nevertheless can have a character that coincides with no member. If by chance each of the spouses suffers confusion, difficulties, inadequacies, but understands these to be as it were limited to oneself, while one contributes only one's best and purest in the marital relationship, this keeps it free from all personal inadequacies--so this may certainly hold first of all only for the spouse as a person, but nevertheless the feeling still arises that the marriage is something supra-personal, something
88 chapter two
in itself valuable and holy that is beyond the mundanity of each of its partners. While inside a relationship the one turns a sympathetic side only to that of the other, behaves only with respect for the other, these attributes, although certainly always one's duty, nevertheless obtain an entirely different color, mood, and meaning from when, in relation to one's own 'I,' they interweave only in the whole complex of this relationship. Consequently, for the consciousness of each of the two, the relationship can crystallize into an essence outside of it that is more and better--under some circumstances, also worse--than the individual self, an essence towards which one has obligations, and from which goods and fortune come to one as from an objective being. With regard to marriage this exemption of group unity from its being built on the basic 'I' and 'Thou' is facilitated by two kinds of factors. First by its incomparable closeness. That two so fundamentally differ- ent essences as man and wife form that kind of close bond, that the Egoism of the individual is so fundamentally overridden not only in favor of the other but in favor of the relationship as a whole, which includes family interests, family honor, the children above all--this is actually a wonder that is no longer rationally explainable beyond even this foundational seat of the conscious 'I. ' And the same is expressed in the separation of this union from its singular elements: the fact that each one of them experiences the relationship as something that takes on its own life with its own powers is only a formulation of its incom- mensurability with what we tend to imagine as the personal and rooted in the comprehensible 'I. ' This is furthermore especially required by the supra-individuality of the marital forms for the meaning of their social regulation and historical transmission. So immeasurably varied are the character and value of marriages--no one can dare decide whether they are more or less varied than single individuals--nevertheless no couple, after all, forged the form of marriage, but rather it is viewed as a relatively set form inside each cultural circle, removed from choice, not affected by individual hues and fortunes in its formal essence. In the history of marriage it is striking how large--and certainly always traditional--a role third persons, often not even relatives, play in the courtship, the arrangements over the dowry, the wedding customs--up to the officiating priest. This non-individual initiation of the relation- ship symbolizes very tangibly the sociologically unique structure of marriage: that the most personal of all relationships both with regard for substantive interests as well as formal configuration is appropri-
the quantitative conditioning of the group 89
ated and directed by plainly supra-personal, socio-historical entities. This insertion of traditional elements into the marital relationship, which places it significantly in contrast to the individual freedom in the arrangement, say, of the relationship of friendship, and in essence permits only acceptance or rejection but no modification, obviously promotes the sense of an objective formation and supra-personal unity in the marriage; although each of the two participants is in relation only to the single other, each feels nevertheless at least partially as though in relation only to a collectivity: as the mere bearer of a supra-individual structure that is in its essence and norms, however, independent of each one who is yet an organic member of it.
It seems as though modern culture, while it increasingly individualizes the character of the individual marriage, still leaves the supra-individu- ality that forms the core of the sociological form of marriage wholly untouched, indeed increases it in some respects. The variety of forms of marriage--whether based on the choice of contracting parties or determined by their particular social position--as it occurs in partly cultured and higher past cultures, appears at first as an individual form that especially lends itself to the differentiation in single cases. In reality it is quite the contrary: each of these separate kinds is still something thoroughly unindividual, socially preformed, and throughout the begin- ning of its differentiation is much more narrow and brutal than a wholly general and thoroughgoing fixed form of marriage, whose more abstract essence must necessarily allow greater room for personal differentiation. This is a thoroughgoing sociological formation: there is a much greater freedom for individual behavior and design when the social fixation con- cerns the whole public, when a thoroughgoing form is socially imposed on all relevant relationships--such as when, with apparent respon- siveness to individual circumstances and needs, social arrangements specialize themselves into all kinds of particular forms. The actually individual is in the latter case much more predetermined, the freedom for differentiation is greater if the unfreedom pertains quite overall to persistent traits. 14 Thus the unity of the modern form of marriage clearly offers wider latitude for further elaboration than does a majority of socially predetermined forms--while through its invariable univer- sality, however, it extraordinarily increases the cachet of objectivity,
14 These correlations are dealt with extensively in the last chapter.
?
90 chapter two
of the independent standing vis-a`-vis all individual modifications, which matter to us now. 15
Something sociologically similar could yet be seen in the duality of the partners of a business. Although its foundation and perhaps opera- tion rely exclusively on the cooperation of both of these persons, the matter of this cooperation, the business or firm, is still an objective structure about which each of the partners has constituent rights and duties--often not unlike those toward a third partner. Nevertheless, this has a different sociological meaning from that in the case of mar- riage; since the 'business' from the outset is something separate from the person of the proprietor due to the objectivity of the economy, and indeed in a duality the proprietor is no different from a sole or joint proprietorship. The interacting relationship of the partners with one another has its objective outside itself, while that in marriage has it
15 The actual intertwining of the subjective and objective characters, of the personal and the general supra-personal that marriage offers, is indeed found in the fundamental process, the physiological coupling, that alone is common to all historically known forms of marriage, while perhaps no single additional purpose is invariably found for all of them. This process on the one hand is felt as the most intimate and personal, but on the other hand as the absolutely general that allows the personality to immerse itself directly in the service to the genus, in the universal organic demand of nature. Its psychological secret is found in this double character of the act as that of the completely personal and the completely supra-personal, and from this it becomes understandable how this act could become the immediate basis of the marital relationship, which repeats this duality now on a higher sociological level. Now however there immediately emerges with the relationship of marriage to sexual activity a most peculiar formal complica- tion. While an exact definition of marriage may be quite impossible in light of the historical heterogeneity of its forms, it can nevertheless be determined what relation between man and woman marriage in any case is not: the purely sexual. Whatever else marriage may be, it is always and everywhere more than sexual intercourse; however divergent may be the directions towards which marriage goes, it transcends them--that it transcends sexual intercourse is primarily what makes marriage marriage. This is an almost unique sociological formation: that the one point that alone is common to all forms of marriage is at the same time the very one that it must transcend to result in a marriage. Only entirely remote analogies to this appear to occur in other realms: so artists, as they pursue even heterogeneous stylistic or imaginary-like tendencies, must equally know most exactly the naturalistic phenomena, not in order to remain with them, but in order to fulfill in that transcendence over them their specifically artistic task; in the way that all the historical and individual variations of gastronomic culture have still had to satisfy the same thing, the physiological needs of their field, but not in order to remain stationary there but precisely to step beyond this satisfaction of shear general need with the most diverse allurements. Within the sociological forma- tions, however, marriage appears to be the only or at least the purest of this type: all cases of a conceptual social form really involving only one unique element common to all, but for that very reason do not become realizations of this concept unless they add to that commonality something further, something unavoidably individual, something different in different cases.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 91
within itself; in the former the relationship is the means toward obtaining some objective result, in the latter any objective actually appears only as a means for the subjective relationship. It is all the more notable that in marriage, nevertheless, the objectivity of the groups of two and the independence of the group structure grow further away from the immediate psychological subjectivity.
One constellation however of utmost sociological importance is lacking in that group of two, while it is in principle open to every plurality: the shifting from duties and responsibilities to the impersonal structure-- which so frequently characterizes social life, and not to its advantage. And, to be sure, from two angles: Every whole that is more than a mere pair of given individuals has an uncertainty in its boundaries and its power, which easily tempts one to expect all kinds of benefits from it that in fact obligate the individual member; one shifts them onto society, in the way one often in the same psychological tendency shifts them into one's own future, whose vague possibilities give room for everything or will secure through one's own growing powers everything that one would not readily want to take on at the moment. Over against the power of the individual, transparent in the relationships just considered but therefore also just as clearly limited, stands the always somewhat mystical power of the totality, from which one therefore easily expects not only what the individual can achieve but also what one would not like to achieve; and indeed with the sense of this shift of responsibil- ity being fully legitimate. One of the best North American experts shifts a large part of the deficiencies and constraints under which the governmental apparatus works onto the belief in the power of public opinion. The individual is supposed to rely on the totality inherently recognizing and doing right, and so easily loses the individual initiative for the public interest. This intensifies conceptually into the positive phenomenon that this selfsame author thusly describes:
The longer public opinion has ruled, the more absolute is the authority of the majority likely to become, the less likely are energetic minorities to arise, the more are politicians likely to occupy themselves, not in forming opinion, but in discovering it and hastening to obey it. 16
16 Quotation is from James Bryce in The American Commonwealth, vol. II, first pub- lished in London in 1888; see James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (1888), The Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc. , 2005 <http://oll. libertyfund . org/Home3/Book. php? recordID=0004. 02> [accessed 26 November 2006].
? 92 chapter two
Likewise dangerous for the individual is membership in a whole, just as much with regard to inaction as action. Here it is a matter not only of the increase of impulsiveness and elimination of moral restraint, as these emerge in the individual in a crowd of people and lead to crimi- nal mob action in which even the legal responsibility of the member is controversial, but also that the true or the alleged interest of a com- munity entitles or obliges the individual to actions for which one as an individual would not like to bear responsibility. Economic enterprises make demands of such shameless egoism, office colleagues confess to such howling abuses, fraternities of a political as well as of a scientific type exercise such outrageous suppression of individual rights--as would not at all be possible for an individual or would at least make one blush if one were to answer for it as a person. As a member of a collective, however, one does all this with the clearest conscience because, as such, one is anonymous and shielded by the whole, indeed feels, as it were, concealed and intends at least formally to represent its interests. There are few cases in which the distance of the societal entity from the elements that form it gets so strongly, indeed almost in caricature, tangibly and effectively out of hand.
This reduction of the practical value of the personality, which the inclusion into a group often brings for the individual, must be indicated in order to characterize the dyad by its exemption. While here each member has only one other individual beside oneself, but not a greater number that would comprise a higher entity, the dependence of the whole on the member and thereby a share of responsibility for every collective action, is obvious. It can of course, as often enough happens, shift responsibilities to the companion, but the latter will be able to reject this much more immediately and definitely than can often be the case with an anonymous whole, for which the energy of personal interest or justifiable substitute for such cases is lacking. And likewise as little as one of two, on account of it, can hide what one does behind the group, so little can one, on account of it, depend on it for what one does not do. The strengths with which the group transcends the individual, to be sure very imprecisely and very partially, albeit still very noticeably, cannot compensate for individual inadequacy as in larger groupings; since in many cases two united individuals accomplish more than two isolated ones, so it is nevertheless characteristic in this case that each one must actually do something, and that, if one refuses this, only the other, and not the supra-individual power, is left--as is the case, indeed, even already by a combination of three. The importance
the quantitative conditioning of the group 93
of this provision, however, lies in no way only in the negative, in that which it excludes; from it stems rather also a narrow and specific tone of the combination of two. Precisely in that each one knows one could depend on the other alone and no one else, there is a special dedica- tion to the other--e. g. , marriage, friendship, but also the more external affiliations of two groups, including political ones--each element finds its social destiny in relationship to it and more highly dependent on it as an all or nothing affair than in more distant associations. This characteristic closeness is manifest most simply in the contrast to the combination of three. In that kind of grouping each individual element acts as a mediating authority for the other two and shows the two-fold function of such: both to bind together and to separate. Where three elements--A, B, and C--form a community, the direct relationship, for example, between A and B, is supplemented by an indirect one through their common relationship to C. This is a form-sociologi- cal enrichment, that each two elements, besides being bound by the direct and shortest line, is also yet bound by a refracted one; points at which they can find no immediate contact are created in interac- tion with the third member to whom each has a different perspective and unites each in the unity of the third personality; divisiveness that the participants cannot straighten out themselves are repaired by the third member or by its being dealt with in an encompassing whole. However, the direct binding is not only strengthened by the indirect but also disrupted. Still there is no such intimate relationship between three in which each individual would not be experienced occasionally as an intruder by the other two, and would also be only through the sharing of certain moods that their focus and modest tenderness can unfold at the undistracted glance of eye into eye; every attachment of two is thereby irritated that it has an onlooker. One can also note how extraordinarily difficult and seldom it is for three people to go, for instance, on a visit to a museum or before a landscape in an actually cohesive mood that develops relatively easily between two. A and B can emphasize and experience without interruption the ? they have in common because the ? that A does not share with B and the ? that B does not share with A are readily felt as individual reserve and as though on an altogether different floor. Now, however, C appears, who has ? in common with A and ? in common with B; thus is ended even with this the schema favorable for the unity of the whole as well as the assimilation of the mood in principle. While two can actually be a party relatively beyond any doubt, three tend to form immediately,
94 chapter two
in most emotionally subtle affiliations, three parties--by pairs--and thereby override the united relationship of, now one, now the other. The sociological structure of the bond of two is thereby characterized in that both lack the strengthened connection by the third, with respect to a social framework inclusive of the two, as well as the distraction and diversion of pure and immediate reciprocity. However, in many cases precisely that lack will make the relationship stronger and more intense, because in the feeling of being exclusively dependent on one another and on the cohesive powers that one is able to expect from nowhere in particular, not immediately evident in social interaction--some other- wise undeveloped powers of community, stemming as well from more remote psychic reservoirs, will come alive, and some disturbances and threats, to which one could be misled in the reliance on a third as well as on a collectivity, are more scrupulously avoided. This limitation, to which the relationship between two people is susceptible, is precisely the basis on which they construct the principal occasion of jealousy.
But one other expression of the same basic sociological constellation lies in the observation that relationships between two, formation of a whole from only two participants, presupposes a greater individualiza- tion of each of the two than, ceteris paribus, a whole made from many elements. Here, the essence is that in a union of two there is no majority that can outvote the individuals, an occasion immediately given by the addition of a third. Relationships, however, in which the oppression of the individual by a majority is possible, not only reduce individuality but generally, insofar as they are voluntary, they are not in general inclined to entertain very distinctive individualities. Whereupon indeed two commonly confused ideas are to be distinguished: the definitive and the strong individuality. There are personalities and collective entities that are of the most extreme individuality but do not have the power to protect this characteristic in the face of suppressions or leveling powers; whereas the strong personality tends to firm up its formation precisely in the face of opposition, in the struggle for its distinctiveness and over against all temptations to conform and blend in. The former, the merely qualitative individuality, will shun associations in which it finds itself opposite a possible majority; it is, however, as though it is predestined to multiple pairings because it is dependent by its distinctiveness as well as by its vulnerability on completion through another. The other type, the more intensive individuality, will, however, rather view itself in opposition to a majority against whose quantitative preponderance it can prove its dynamism. To be sure, technical reasons, as it were,
the quantitative conditioning of the group 95
will justify this preference: Napoleon's consulate-of-three was decid- edly more comfortable for him than a duality would have been, since then he needed to win over only the one colleague (what the strongest nature among the three will quite readily succeed in doing) in order to dominate the other, i. e. in fact both others, in the most legal man- ner. On the whole it can be said, however, that on the one hand the union of two, compared to larger numbers, favors a relatively greater individuality of the participants, on the one hand, and, on the other, presumes that the suppression of character by way of social incorpora- tion into an average level is absent here. Since it is for that reason true that women are the less individual gender, that the differentiation of individuals deviates less from the generic type than is the case on the average for men--so the very widespread opinion of them would be understandable, that they are in general less responsive to friendship than men. Because friendship is a relationship resting entirely and completely on the individualities of the members, perhaps even more than marriage, which, through its traditional forms, its social defini- tions, and its actual interests, includes the rather supra-individual, an independence from the distinctiveness of the personalities. The funda- mental differentiation, on which marriage rests, is in itself indeed still not an individual one but one of types; friendship, however, rests on one that is purely personal, and for that reason it is understandable that on the level of lower personality development in general actual and ongoing friendships are rare, and that on the other hand the modern highly sophisticated woman shows a conspicuously growing capability and inclination towards relationships of friendship and, to be sure, with men as well as with women. The entirely individual differentiation has here gained preponderance over that of types, and we therefore see the correlation produced between the sharpest individualization and a relationship that is limited absolutely at this stage to the relationship between two; naturally that does not exclude the same person being able to stand in different friendships at the same time.
That relationships between couples generally have such specific traits indicates not only the fact that the entry of a third changes them but also, what is often observed, that the further expansion to four or more in no way modifies the essence of the grouping correspondingly more. So, for example, a marriage with a child has a completely different char- acter from a childless one, while it does not differ so very significantly from a marriage with two or more children. Of course the difference in its inner being that the second child brings about is considerably
96 chapter two
greater again than what is being produced by a third. However, this still follows the mentioned norm, since a marriage with a child is in many respects a relationship with two members: the parents as a unit on the one hand, the child on the other. The second child is here actually not only a fourth but, sociologically viewed, simultaneously also a third member of a relationship that exercises the characteristic effects of such; because inside the family, as soon as the actual period of infancy is past, the parents much more commonly form a functioning unity than does the totality of children. Also in the realm of marital forms, the critical difference is whether monogamy generally prevails or the husband also has a second wife. If the latter is the case, the third or twentieth wife is relatively unimportant for the structure of the marriage. Inside the boundary drawn thereby, the step towards the second wife is here, of course, also at least from one perspective more consequential than that towards yet a greater number because just the duality of wives can generate in the life of the husband the sharpest conflicts and deepest disturbances, which do not in general increase with each additional one. Since with this, such a degradation and de-individualization of women is established, such a decisive reduction of the relationship to its sensual side (because every more mental relationship is also always more naturally individual)--it will not in general result in those deeper upheavals for the husband that can flow precisely and only from a relationship of two.
The same basic motif recurs in Voltaire's claim regarding the political usefulness of religious anarchy: two sects in rivalry inside a nation would unavoidably produce disturbances and difficulties that could never arise from two hundred. 17 The significance that the duality of the one element possesses in a multi-member combination is, of course, no less intrinsic and invasive, when it, instead of disruption, directly serves to safeguard the whole relationship. Thus it was asserted that the collegiality of the two Roman consuls may have counteracted monarchical appetites still more effectively than the system of nine top officials in Athens. It is the same tension of duality that simply functions, now destructively, now preserving, depending on the sundry circumstances of the whole association; what is essential here is that this latter one acquires an entirely different sociological character as soon as the activity in question
17 "If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace. " Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, translated and introduced by Ernest Dilworth (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961 [1733/34]), p. 26--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 97
is carried out either by an individual person or a number greater than two. By the same logic as the Roman consuls, leading colleagues are often paired together: the two kings of the Spartans, whose continuous disagreements were explicitly emphasized as a protection for the state; the two chief war leaders of the Iroquois tribes; the two city guardians of medieval Augsburg, where the attempt at a unitary mayor's office stood under a severe penalty. The characteristic irritations between the dualistic elements of a larger structure acquire the function by them- selves of maintaining the status quo, while in the cited examples the fusion for unity would have easily led to an individual higher lordship, the enlargement to plurality, however, to an oligarchic clique.
Now regarding the type that showed the duality of elements in general as so critical that any further increase does not significantly alter it, I mention yet two very singular facts, but nevertheless of the utmost importance as sociological types. The political standing of France in Europe was immediately changed most significantly when it entered into a close relationship with Russia. A third or fourth ally would not bring about any essential change, once the principal one has occurred. The contents of human life vary quite significantly depending on whether the first step is the most difficult and decisive, and all later ones have secondary importance for them--or whether it does not yet mean anything for it, and not until its developments and increases realize the changes which it only portends. The numerical relations of social interaction provide ample examples of both forms, as will be pointed out time and again below. For a state whose isola- tion stands in reciprocal relation with the loss of its political prestige, the reality of an alliance is generally the crucial thing, while perhaps certain economic or military advantages are obtained only when a circle of alliances is available from which even one is not allowed to go missing should success not be forthcoming. Between these two types then there is obviously that in which the specific character and success of the alliance appears in proportion to the number of elements, as is the rule with the association of large masses. The second type includes the experience that command- and assistance-relationships change their character in principle if instead of one domestic servant, assistant, or other kind of subordinate, two of them are allied. Housewives some- times prefer--wholly apart from the matter of cost--to manage with one servant because of the extra difficulties that a greater number of them brings with it. The single one will, because of the natural lack of self-assurance, strive to draw near and fit in to the personal sphere and circle of interest of the rule of the master; that very same person will
98 chapter two
be moved, with an eventual second party, to organize against the rule because now each of the two has the support of the other; the sense of rank with its latent or more conscious opposition to the domination of the master will then become effective for the two because it emerges as what they have in common. In short, the sociological situation between the dominant and the subordinate is absolutely altered as soon as the third element enters; instead of solidarity, now there is in fact party formation, instead of emphasis on what binds those who serve with those who rule, now in fact the disjunctive, because the commonalities on the part of the comrades are sought and naturally found, which constitutes the opposition of both against that shared by those who dominate. Furthermore, the transformation of the numerical difference into a qualitative one is no less fundamental when it shows up in the opposite consequence for the ruling element of the association: one is better able to hold two at a desirable distance than one, and possesses in their jealousy and competition a tool to hold each down and to keep them compliant, for which there is no equivalent over against one. An old saying says technically the same thing: "Who has one child is its slave; who has more is their lord. " In any event the grouping of three stands in contrast to the dyad as a fully new structure, the latter char- acteristically distinguished in such a way that the former is specifically distinguished backwards against it but, however, not forwards against increased groupings to four or more elements.
In the transition to the peculiar formations of the triad of elements, the diversity of the character of groups is to be emphasized, which their division into two or three main parties produces. Impassioned times tend to place the entire life of the public under the motto: Who is not for me is against me. The result must be a division of the elements into two parties. All interests, persuasions, impulses that generally place us in a positive or negative relationship to another are distinguished by the extent to which that principle holds for them, and they fall into a spectrum, beginning from the radical exclusion of all mediation and nonpartisanship to tolerance for the opposed standpoint as one likewise legitimate and to a whole spectrum of standpoints agreeing more or less with one's own positions. Every decision that has a relationship to the narrower and wider circle surrounding us, that determines our place in them, that involves an inner or outer cooperation, a benevolence or mere tolerance, self-promotion or threat--every such decision occupies a definite rung on that scale; each draws an ideal line around us that decisively either includes or excludes every other person, or has spaces where the question of inclusion or exclusion is not raised, or that is
the quantitative conditioning of the group 99
managed in such a way that it makes mere contact or merely partial inclusiveness and partial exclusivity possible. Whether and with what decisiveness the question of "for me or against me? " is raised is deter- mined in no way only by the logical stringency of its content, indeed not even the passion with which the soul insists on this content, but likewise by the relationship of those doing the asking to their social circles. The stricter and more solidary this is, the less the subject can co-exist with others as entirely equally disposed fellows, and the more an ideal demand embraces the totality of all the latter as a unity--the more intransigent will each one become in regard to the question of for or against. The radicalism with which Jesus formulated this ruling rests on an indefinitely strong feeling of the unified solidarity of all those to whom his message came. That there is over against this not only a simple acceptance or rejection but indeed even an acceptance or fight--that is the strongest expression for the indeterminate unity of those who belong and the indeterminate outsider status of those who do not belong: the fight, the being-against-me, is always still a distinc- tive relationship, proclaiming yet a stronger internal, albeit perversely developed, unity than the indifferently co-existing and the intermediate kingdom of half-and-half. This basic sociological sense will therefore force a division of the whole complex of elements into two parties. Where in contrast that passionate feeling of envelopment vis-a`-vis the whole is lacking, which forces each into a positive relationship--acceptance or resistance--with the emerging idea or demand; where every faction is satisfied in essence with its existence as a faction, without the earnest demand for inclusion in the totality--there the soil is prepared for a multiplicity of party formations, for tolerance, for moderate parties, for a scale of gradually tiered differences. That epochs wherein the great masses are put into movement manifest the dualism of parties and preclude indifference and the minimizing of the influence of moderate parties--becomes understandable from the radicalism that appeared to us a little while ago as the character of mass movements. The simplicity of the ideas by which these are guided forces a definite 'Yes' or 'No. '18
18 Throughout history the democratic tendencies, in so far as they lead the great mass movements, go in for simple regulations, laws, principles; the various standpoints taking antipathetic practices into account are all complicated for democracy by varied ongoing considerations, while the aristocracy on the other hand tends to abhor universal and compulsory law and to establish the particularity of the individual element--of the personal, local, objective type--in their law.
? 100 chapter two
This radical decisiveness in mass movements does not thoroughly prevent their total shift from one extreme to another; indeed, it is not difficult to conceive of this happening even to completely irrelevant trifles. Any one cause, X, which corresponds to mood A, may affect an assembled mass. In that mass is a number of individuals or even only a single one whose temperament and natural enthusiasm are predisposed to A. Such persons are highly excited by X; it is grist to their mill and understandably they assume the leadership in the mass already in some measure set out in this direction by X; the mass follows them through their spiritedness and drive into their exaggerated frame of mind, while the individuals who are by nature disposed to mentality B, the opposite of A, remain silent in the face of X. Now enter any one Y, which B warrants, then the former must keep silent, and the game repeats itself in the direction of B with the same exaggeration; it simply comes from the fact that in every mass individuals are available whose nature is disposed towards a more extreme development of the correspondingly excited frame of mind, and that these, as the momentarily strongest and most impressive, take the mass with them in the direction of their frame of mind, while the contrarily disposed remain passive during this movement that offers them and the whole no motivation towards their particular direction. Expressed wholly in principle, it is the inducement of the formal radicalism of the mass and its easily changing content that a resultant middle line arises, not from its elements disposed in various directions, and that a momentary preponderance of one direction tends at the same time to silence completely the representatives of the others, instead of their participating proportionally in the mass action, so that for any particular tendency getting a hearing there exists absolutely no inhibition to prevent it from going to an extreme. Over against the fundamental practical problems there are as a rule only two simple standpoints, while there may be countless complex and thus intervening ones. Likewise in general every vital movement inside a group--from the familial, through all interest groups, to the political--will be disposed to its own division into a pure dualism. The heightened tempo in the execution of interests in the course of developmental stages presses always towards more resolute decisions and divisions. All interventions require time and leisure; quiet and stagnating epochs, in which the life questions are not stirred up but remain covered over by the routine of everyday concerns, easily allow imperceptible changes to emerge and give way to an indifference on the part of personalities whom a more lively current would have to drag into the conflict of the major
the quantitative conditioning of the group 101
factions. The typical division of the sociological constellation remains then always that of two or of three main factions. In the function of the third, to mediate between two extremes, several divisions into graduated levels are possible; here there is, so to speak, only a broadening or even refinement in the technical design of the principle. This change, itself determining the configuration internally, is for sure always realized through the introduction of the third party.
The role played by the third party and the configurations that result among three social elements have hereby indeed been suggested for the most part. The two present, as the first synthesis and unification, thus also the first disunity and antithesis; the entry of the third means transformation, reconciliation, abandonment of absolute opposition--of course occasionally even the instigation of such. The triad as such seems to me to result in three kinds of typical group formations that on the one hand are not possible with just two elements, on the other hand are with a number greater than three either likewise excluded or expand only quantitatively without changing their type of form.
1. The nonpartisan and the mediator. It is a most effective sociological reality that the common relationship of isolated elements to one outside the reach of their power leads to an association between them--going from the confederation of states, which is concluded for the defense against a common enemy, to the invisible church, which incorporates all the faithful into a union by way of the identical relationship of everyone to the one God. This social constructing mediation of a third element is treated, however, in a later context. Because the third element has here such a distance from each of the others that actual sociological interactions, which would combine the three elements, are not occur- ring, but rather dyadic configurations: while either the relationship of the one or the other joining together is sociologically certain, it persists between them as a unity on the one hand and the center of interests confronting them on the other. Here, however, it is a matter of three elements standing so close to one another or in common movement that they form a permanent or temporary group.
In the most significant case of dyadic formations, that of the monoga- mous marriage, the child or children, as the case may be, often exercises the function of the third element that keeps the whole together. Among many primitive peoples, the marriage is first considered actually com- plete or even indissoluble when a child is born; and one of the motives from which emerging culture deeply and closely connects marriage is surely this, that the children become independent of it relatively late
102 chapter two
and thus need care for a longer time. The basis for the aforementioned fact naturally lies in the value that the child has for the husband and in his tendency, sanctioned by law and custom, to disown a childless wife. The real effect of this, however, is that precisely the third additional member actually first closes the circle, in that it binds the other two together. This can occur in two forms: either the existence of the third member immediately establishes or strengthens the bond between the two--as for example when the birth of a child increases the couple's love for one another or at least that of the husband for the wife--or the relationship of both individuals to the third results in a new and indirect bond between them--as the common concerns of a marital couple for a child generally mean a bond that simply must lead via this child and often consist of sympathies that could not operate at all without such an intermediate station. This occasion of internal socializing from three elements--whereas the two elements on their own would resist this--is the basis of the phenomenon mentioned above that some internally disharmonious marriages want no child: it is the instinct that the circle would thereby be closed, inside of which they would be held more closely together--and to be sure not only superficially but also in the deeper psychological levels--than they intended it to be.
Another variety of mediation occurs in the third functioning as an impartial element. Thus the third party will either bring about the unity of both conflicting parties while it seeks to disengage and simply continue to function, while it seeks to exclude itself and make the two disunited or divided parties unite without mediation; or the third will emerge as conciliator and bring their conflicting claims more or less into balance and thereby eliminate the divisiveness. The disputes between workers and employers have developed both forms of agreement, especially in England. We find bargaining councils in which the parties dispose of disputes through negotiations under the chairmanship of a mediator. Certainly the mediator will bring about the agreement in this form only if each party views the relationship as more advantageous in peace than the grounds for the hostility, in short if the actual situation war- rants it in and of itself. The enormous prospect for both parties being convinced by this faith, which is brought about by the mediation of the mediator--apart from the obvious elimination of misunderstandings, effective persuasion, etc. --is formed in the following manner. While the impartial member puts forth the claims and grounds of one party to the other, they lose the tone of subjective passion that tends to pro- voke the same from the other side. Here what is so often unfortunate
the quantitative conditioning of the group 103
becomes beneficial: that the feeling that accompanies a psychological content within its first bearer tends to be substantially moderated inside a second for whom this content is transient. Therefore, recommenda- tions and intercessions that must first pass through several mediating persons, are so often ineffective, even when their objective contents arrive entirely unchanged at the deciding authority; simply with the transmission there are emotional imponderables lost that complement not only insufficiently objective reasons, but also furnish sufficient rea- sons with just the incentives for practical realization. This fact, most highly important for the development of purely psychological influence, brings it about in the simple case of a third mediating social element, that the emotional accents accompanying the demands, because this is formulated by an impartial side and presented to the other, are abruptly separated from the substantive content, and thus that circle disastrous for any agreement is avoided--that in which the vehemence of the one calls out the same in the other, this latter reality, then, reactively raising the vehemence of the former, and so forth until there is no stopping it. On top of that each party not only hears more objectively but must express itself more objectively than with unmediated confrontation. For it must now matter to them that they also win over the mediator to their point of view, which is exactly where the third is not an arbitrator but only the manager of the initial compromise and must always stop short of the actual decision, whereas, however, an arbitrator in the end definitively takes a side--which can be expected precisely in this case only on the basis of the most objective grounds. Inside the social method there is nothing that would serve the unification of conflicting parties so effectively as its objectivity, that is, the attempt to let the purely factual content of grievances and demands speak--philosophi- cally stated: the objective spirit of the party's position--so that persons themselves appear only as irrelevant carriers of it. The personal form in which objective contents are subjectively alive must pay for its warmth, its colorfulness, its depth of feeling, with the acrimony of the antagonism that it generates in instances of conflict; the moderation of these personal tones is the condition under which understanding and unification of opponents is achievable, and indeed especially because only then each party is actually aware of what the other must demand. Expressed psychologically, it is a matter of a reduction of the obstinate form of antagonism to the intellectual: intellect is everywhere the prin- ciple of understanding on whose ground can be encountered what is rejected uncompromisingly on the grounds of feelings and their willful
104 chapter two
decisions. The merit of the mediator, then, is to bring about this reduc- tion, to present it in itself or even to form a kind of central station that, in whatever form the matter of controversy gets into from one side, dispenses it to the others and withholds everything beyond it that tends to stir up useless conflict conducted without mediation.
For the analysis of community life it is important to make it clear that the constellation heretofore identified in all groups that count more than two elements occurs continually even where the mediator is not specifically selected, is even not particularly known or identified as such. The group of three is here only a type and schema; all cases of mediation reduce in the end to its form. There is absolutely no com- munity of three, from the hour-long conversation to the life of a family, in which now these, now those two do not get into a disagreement of a harmless or pointed, momentary or long-lasting, theoretical or practical nature--and in which the third would not function mediatively. This happens countless times in quite rudimentary form, only hinted at, mixed with other actions and interactions from which the mediative function is never purely absent. Such mediations need not even take place in words: a gesture, a kind of listening, the mood that comes from a person, suffices for giving a misunderstanding between two others a direction toward unity, to make the essential commonality perceptible underneath a sharp difference of opinion, to put this in a form in which it is most easily discharged. It is not at all necessarily a matter of actual conflict or strife; rather there are a thousand entirely minor differences of opinion, the hint of an antagonism between personalities, the emergence of wholly momentarily opposed interests or feelings--which colors the fluctuating forms of every enduring collective life and is determined by the presence of a third continually and almost unavoidably performing the mediating function. This function rotates, so to speak, among the three elements, because the ebb and flow of shared life tends to realize that form in every possible combination of members.
The impartiality needed for mediating can have two kinds of pre- condition: the third is impartial because of either standing outside the contrasting interests and opinions, untouched by them, or because of sharing in both at the same time. The first case is the simplest, bringing with it the fewest complications. In disputes between English workers and employers, for example, a nonpartisan is often called in who can be neither a worker nor an employer. Noteworthy is the resoluteness with which the above emphasized division of the material from the personal moments of the conflict is here realized. The impartial member brings
the quantitative conditioning of the group 105
the presumption of absolute personal disinterestedness to the material concerns of the conflicting parties, viewing them as though from an entirely pure, impersonal intellect, untouched by any subjective residue. The mediator must, however, have a subjective interest in the persons or complex of persons whose issues of conflict are merely theoretical for the mediator because otherwise the mediator would not take on the function of mediation. Thus here a more-or-less purely objective mechanism of subjective warmth is put into operation; the personal distance from the objective meaning of the conflict and the simultane- ous subjective interest in functional combination characterize then the position of the impartial and render it all the more suitable, the more sharply each of these angles is developed in itself and the more unified at the same time both work together precisely in this differentiation.
There tends to be a more complicated formation in the situation for the nonpartisan who is obligated to play an equal role vis-a`-vis the conflicting interests, instead of being unaffected by them. A position of mediation on this basis will then frequently arise when personalities belong to another interest circle in respect to location rather than to actual role. So in earlier times the bishops could sometimes intervene between the secular powers of their parish and the pope; so, too, civil servants, who are close to the special interests of their district, will be the most suitable mediators when a collision occurs between these spe- cial interests and the general interests of the state, whose civil servants they are; thus will the degree of impartiality and simultaneous interest that is available for the mediation between two divided local groups often be found in the personalities who come from the one and live in the other. The difficulty of such positions for the mediators tends to originate then from the equality of interest in both parties, their inter- nal equanimity not being firmly secure and often enough distrusted by both parties. A more difficult and often tragic situation arises, however, when there are no such separate provinces of interest for the third party with which the third is bound to the one or the other party, but when the third's whole personality is close to both; this grows most extremely acute when the issue of conflict is in general not quite objectifiable and the objective meaning of the conflict is actually only a pretense or an opportunity for deeper personal incompatibilities. Then the third, who is tied to each of the two with equal sincerity through love or duty, through fate or custom, can be crushed by the conflict, much more than if taking one of the two sides; and all the more so than in those cases when the balance of the intermediary's interests allows no tilt to either
106 chapter two
side but tends nevertheless to lead to no successful mediation because the reduction to a merely objective opposition collapses. This is very often the pattern in family conflicts. While the intermediaries whose impartiality is a consequence of a similar distance from those in con- flict, capable then of pleasing both parties relatively easily, they will, because of their equal closeness to both, encounter great difficulty and get caught up personally in the most awkward emotional ambivalence. Consequently, when the mediator is chosen, one will prefer, in otherwise similar circumstances, the equally disinterested over the equally inter- ested; so, for example, the Italian cities in the middle ages would often obtain their judges from other cities to be sure of their impartiality with regard to the internal party feuds.
With this, there is the transition to the second form of reconciliation by the impartial: that of arbitration. As long as the third element func- tions as a genuine mediator, the cessation of the conflict still remains exclusively in the hands of the parties themselves. By the selection of an arbitrator, however, they have handed over the final decision; they have, if you will, outsourced their drive for reconciliation; it has come to be in the person of the arbitrator, whereby it gains particular clarity and power vis-a`-vis the antagonistic parties. The voluntary appeal to an arbitrator, to whom one submits a priori, presupposes a greater subjec- tive trust in the objectivity of the judgment than does any other form of adjudication. Since even before the state court only the action of the plaintiffs, in fact, arise from confidence in a fair-minded decision (because they view it in their case as beneficial for the just); the defendants must enter into the process, irrespective of whether or not they believe in the impartiality of judge.