No More Learning

If instead ? and ? would be just as positively commanded, as ? is forbidden--and cor- respondingly in B and C--a unity would hardly appear because then what is directly proscribed on the one hand would then always be directly commanded on the other. Thus the following example: Since antiquity the enjoyment of a particular kind of animal--the exact one that was sacred for the individual's locality--was denied to every Egyptian. The doctrine that holiness requires abstention from all meat then arose as the result of the political amalgamation of a number of local cults into a national religion, on top of which a priest- hood stood reigning in unison. This unification could come about only through the synthesis or universalizing of all these prohibitions. Since the enjoyment of all animals allowed in every locality (thus also able to be omitted! ) would
becomes the responsibility of the multitude in the motivation by which one explained the forbearance and indolence of the North Americans, who are otherwise so energetic, about public nuisances. One might resort to public opinion to bring everything about. Fatalism arises from that: "Making each individual feel his insignificance, disposes him to leave to the multitude the task of setting right what is every one else's business just as much as his own. " (Quoted in English--ed. )
? 428 chapter seven
? have been somewhat positively commanded, obviously there would have been hardly any possibility of collecting the particular rules about animals into one higher totality.
The more general a norm is, the larger the circle to which it applies, the less is its observance characteristic and significant for the individual, while violating it tends to be especially serious and fraught with consequences. First of all, one should be very clear on the intellectual domain. The theoretical understanding, without which there would be generally no human society, rests on a small number of widely accepted--although of course not consciously in the abstract--norms that we describe as logical. They form the minimum of what must be acknowledged by all who wish to interact with one another at all. The most fleeting coming together in agreement by individuals most foreign to one another, as well as the daily common life of those closest to one another, rests on this basis. Obedience of the imagination to these very simple norms, without which it would never be in harmony with experienced reality, is the most unrelinquishable and general condition of all social life; for amidst any difference between the inner and outer worldview, logic creates a certain common ground, the abandonment of which would have to cancel any intellectual commonality in the widest sense of the term. But now logic, understood narrowly, implies or provides no positive property at all; it is only a norm not to be violated; without that, its observance would provide some distinction, a specific good or quality. All attempts to obtain knowledge of something particular with the help of pure logic are frustrated, and its socio- logical importance is therefore one that is as negative as that of the criminal code: only the violation of it creates a particular and noticeable situation, but persistence in these norms creates theoretically, i. e. practically, nothing else for individuals than the possibility of remaining in the general group. Certainly even the intellectual connection of a thousand substantive divergences can fail with logic strictly adhered to; but with faulty logic it must fail--precisely as, admittedly, the moral and social solidarity can collapse even with a strict avoidance of all that is criminally forbidden, but with the breaking of these norms it must. It is no different with social forms in the narrower sense, inso- far as they are really universal in a circle. They are suspended for nobody, but their violation is at the highest level when only what is most general in a circle will not be violated while the special norms that hold the smaller group together lend the individual a positive quality and difference to the extent that they are special. Also, on these conditions rests the practical uses of the social forms of civility that are so completely lacking in substance. Based on the positive presence of respect and devotion, of which they assure us, we may not exclude their least absence; yet the least violation of them convinces most unmistakably that those feelings do not exist. The greeting on the street does not give evidence of respect whatsoever; its omission, however, very strongly indicates the opposite. These forms completely withhold service as symbols of a positive inner disposition. But they express the negative most suitably, because quite a light omission can determine the relationship toward someone radically and definitely--and in fact, both to the degree to which the form
the poor person 429 of civility is wholly general and conventional, it is of the very essence of the
relatively large circle.
Thus it is that the action of the whole as a whole toward the poor person is limited to a minimum, thoroughly appropriate for the typical nature of the activity of whole societies. Along with the rationale that such action has as its content only what is clearly presupposed for everyone, the second rationale of this activity also has its source in the objective character of the care of the poor being limited to this minimum. What pertains to protecting someone from physical deterioration can be fixed objectively with approximate certitude. Every grant of more than this, every improvement toward a positive increase requires much less unam- biguous criteria and is left to more subjective estimates in quantity and kind. I mentioned above that the cases of not very special neediness and thus ones requiring no subjective judgment--such as neediness through sickness and bodily defect especially--are most suitable for governmental welfare while the individually formed cases better fall to the share of the smaller local community. Even such objective ascertainability of the need that lends itself to the intervention of the largest community exists as soon as the support is limited to the minimum. The old epis- temological correlation between generality and objectivity appears here again; in the field of knowledge the actual generality is the acknowl- edgment of a proposition through the--admittedly not historically real but ideal--universality of the spirit or an expression of its objectivity on one hand, while on the other it may be certainly irrefutable for one or many individuals and may possess the full meaning of the truth, but it still lacks the particular quality that we call objectivity. Thus in practice an action of the community can in principle be claimed only on a plainly objective basis. Where the reason is able to be evaluated only subjectively and lacks the potential for being established purely factually, though the claim may be no less urgent and its fulfillment no less valuable, it is nevertheless directed only to individuals, and their relationship corresponds to purely individual circumstances, and their fulfillment is simply through individuals.
If the objective perspective goes hand in hand with the tendency to nationalize all welfare--which admittedly until now nowhere exceeds the stage of that tendency completely--the extent to which the content is standardized, the logical application of which simply means objectivity,
? ? 430 chapter seven
? derives not only out of the interests of the poor person but also out of those of the state. Here an essentially sociological form of the relationship of individual and community shows its advantage. Where grants or interventions pass over from being fulfilled by individuals to being fulfilled by the community, regulation by the community tends to use either too much or too little individual action. With statutory education the individual is forced not to learn too little; it leaves to the individuals whether they desire to learn more or 'too much. ' With the statutory workday, it makes the employers not to want to expect too much from the workers, as it also leaves to them how much less to expect. And thus this regulation stands everywhere only on one side of the action, while the other side is given over to the freedom of the individual. This is the pattern in which our socially controlled activi- ties appear to us: They are restricted as it were to one end alone; the society sets a boundary that is much for them or little for them, while more or less of the limitlessness of subjective discretion belongs to the others. Now, however, this pattern also deceives us in many cases where the social regulation actually occurs on both sides and only the practical interest steers attention only to the one side and allows the other to be overlooked. Where for example the private punishment of injustice shifts to the society and objective criminal law, in the law one has in view thereby only a greater assurance of expiation and a really sufficient measure and certainty of punishment being achieved. But in reality, it is not a matter of only being punished enough but also not being punished too much. Society not only protects perhaps the possibly harmed, but it also protects the criminal against excessive subjective reaction, i. e. it sets that level of punishment as the objective that corresponds not to the wish or purpose of the victim but to its social interest. And this is so not only in statutorily established relation- ships. Not every social stratum attaches much importance to each of its members achieving a certain minimum expenditure for clothing; it fixes a limit of the 'decent' suit, and one who remains below that no longer belongs to it. But admittedly it nevertheless also sets a limit in the other direction, not with the same clarity and with as conscious an emphasis: a certain level of luxury and elegance, indeed sometimes even of modernity, does not conform to one or the other group; whoever exceeds this upper threshold is sometimes treated as not completely belonging. Thus the group still does not also allow the freedom of the individual to be expanded fully on both sides but sets an objective limit to subjective discretion, i. e. one that the conditions of supra-individual
the poor person 431
? life in it require. This basic form is now replicated in the taking over of the care of the poor by the society. While at first it seems to have only an interest in boundaries: the poor person too receiving a proper share, not too little; the other, practically less effective, nevertheless also exists: that they do not receive too much. The inadequacy of private welfare lies not only in being too little but also in being too much, which leads the poor person to idleness, expends existing resources in economically unproductive ways, and capriciously benefits one at the expense of the other. The subjective impulse to be charitable errs on both sides, and although the danger of excess is not as great as that of too little, the objective norm still stands above it, which subtracts an interest in the individual from the interest of the community to no noticeable degree.
However, this transcending of the subjective point of view is valid both for the giver and the receiver of charity. While English public welfare begins only at total impoverishment, which was set objectively-- specifically, that the workhouse offered a stay so little agreeable that no one chooses it but in really extreme need--it completely dispensed with the proof of personal worthiness. Private charity, which is for the clearly worthy individual, can often be much more individually selec- tive, and since the state already provides for the most urgently needy, is thus its supplement. It has the task of making the poor person, who is already protected from starvation, capable of earning a living again, of curing the need for which the state has an only temporary relief. What is decisive is not need as such, although it is the terminus a quo, but the ideal of creating independent and economically valuable indi- viduals; the state proceeds with a causal intent, private charity with a teleological one. Or put differently: The state comes to help poverty; private charity comes to help the poor person. Here lies a sociological difference of the first order. The abstract ideas by which some individual elements crystallize out from individually complicated reality countless times achieve a liveliness and effectiveness for action that seems in real- ity only to benefit the concrete total phenomenon. This begins with quite intimate relationships. The meaning of many erotic relationships is not to be expressed any way other than at least one of the parties not seeking the beloved but love, only that one is generally met with a feeling of remarkable indifference toward the individuality of the lover. In religious circumstances it sometimes appears that the only essential thing is there being a certain kind and degree of religiosity while the bearers of it are irrelevant; the action of the priest or the relationship
432 chapter seven
? of the believer to the community is determined only by this general- ity, without regard to the particular motive that produces and colors this mood in the individual, and without any particular interest in the individual, who comes into consideration--or more correctly, does not come into consideration--only as the bearer of this impersonal activity. From the perspective of social ethics, a rationalism requires that the interaction of people be simply founded on subjective honesty. Truth, as an objective quality of a statement, must require from everyone to whom it would be addressed complete indifference toward the special characteristics and circumstances of the case; one so determined could not produce an individually differentiated right to truth. The truth, and not the speaking or hearing in individualization, would be the presupposition of the content or value of group interaction. Trends in criminology divide over the same question of whether punishment is for the crime or the criminal. An abstract objectivism demands punishment, once the crime occurs, as a restoration of the real or ideal disturbed order; based on the logic of ethics, it demands it as a consequence of the impersonal fact of the crime. From the other point of view only the guilty subject should be affected; the penal reaction comes in not because the crime occurred as something objective but because of a subject of the sin appearing in it that needs educating and being made harmless. Thus all individual circumstances of the case are exactly addressed by the amount of punishment as well as the general fact that there was a crime at all. This two-fold attitude also applies to poverty. One can proceed from poverty as from a specific factual phenomenon and seek to eliminate it with such questions as: to whom, from which individual cause, with which individual consequences do they always appear, does it require remedy and compensation for this social deficiency? On the other hand, interest is directed toward the poor individual--admittedly, of course, since the person is poor, but one does not wish to eliminate proportionately poverty in general with supportive action but to help this particular poor person. The person's poverty here serves only as an individual and singular qualification for it; it is so to speak only the present reason of being occupied with that person; the individual should generally be brought into a situation in which the poverty vanishes by itself. Thus this social service is directed more to the fact, more to the cause of poverty. Incidentally, it is socio- logically important to note about this formulation that the naturally suited distribution of both public and private welfare be modified as soon as one pursues the causal chain a step further. The state meets
the poor person 433
? the superficially apparent need--especially so in England--and private charity addresses the individual reasons for it. But the fundamental eco- nomic and cultural conditions on which those personal circumstances arise as a basis--these again must form the matter for the community, and in fact they are so formed that they give as little chance as pos- sible to individual weakness or unfavorable prejudice, ineptitude or mischance to produce poverty. Here, as in many other respects, the community, its conditions, interests, and actions encompass as it were individual determinations: on the one hand it represents an immediate surface on which the members perceive their appearance, the results of their own lives; on the other hand it is the broad underground where it develops--but in a way that, from its unity, the differences of indi- vidual arrangements and circumstances give that surface of the whole a conspicuous colorfulness of individual phenomena. 7
The French principle of poverty is the direct opposite of the English one that gave occasion to this generalization. Here the care for the poor is regarded as the domain of private associations and persons from the outset, and the state intervenes only where this is not enough. This reversal does not mean of course that the private entities care for the most urgent cases, as the English state does, but the state provides care, as the English private entities do, going beyond what is individu- ally desirable. The French principle makes it rather unmistakable that substantively the help cannot be so sharply and fundamentally separated
7 Perhaps it is worthwhile noting here outside the immediate factual context that this inclusion of the individual formation by the social, where it reaches the root as well as the fruit, is allowed to be exactly reversed in the same form. As the individual appears there as a kind of universal structure for the social essence, so can the latter function as a mere intermediary stage of individual development. This begins with the basic substance of the personality that life brings with it, which we cannot imagine in its purity apart from its being formed through the historical milieu, but only sense as the enduring material of our personal existence and the never completely totaled sum of its possibilities. On the other hand we offer, as it were at the other end of our existence, an appearance or complex of appearances where it brings existence as the ultimate, most important, most formed one to which existence brings it for the individualistic standpoint. Between the two lie the social influences that we receive, the conditions by which the society shapes us in every phenomenon we ultimately present, the whole complex of general demands and inhibitions through which we have to go. Considered in that way, society thus offers with its actions and presentations exactly the stage beyond and before which the individual structure stands; it is the vehicle of the forces through which one of its stages passes into another of its stages, and these forces embrace the society in the way that, from the other standpoint, the social con- ditions and events embrace the individual who mediates between their general bases and their respective manifestations.
? 434 chapter seven
? between the two steps as in England. Here and there in practice the situation will thus often take shape for the poor person in the same way. It is obvious, however, that a difference of the first order in sociological principles thereby results: It is a special case of the larger process by which the immediate interaction of group members changes into the action of the supra-individually unified whole and by which, as soon as this at all occurs one time, between both ways of social function- ing, continual compromises, displacements, and changes in rank take place. Whether the social tension or disharmony that appears as indi- vidual poverty is brought to resolution directly between the members of society or through the mediation of the unity that is aroused from all the members, this is obviously a decision that is required by a for- mal equality in the whole social field, albeit only rarely as purely and clearly as this. Obvious as it is, this only needs mention in order to not be overlooked how very much 'private' care for the poor is also a social event, a sociological form that assigns the poor person a no less definite position--only not overly clear from a superficial view--as an organic member in group life. This fact is clearly illuminated precisely by the transition in form between the two: by the poor taxes on the one hand, the legal duty to provide for poor relatives on the other. As long as a special poor tax exists, the relationship between the com- munity and the poor person had not attained the abstract clarity that sets one into an immediate bond with the community as an undivided unit; the state is rather only the intermediary that provides a regulation for the individuals absent any more voluntary contributions. As soon as the poor taxes are at all included in the tax liability and welfare follows from the general state or local revenues, that bond is realized; the support-relationship with the poor person becomes a function of the community as such, no longer the sum of individuals as in the case of the poor tax. The general interest is minted, so to speak, into a still more specialized form where the law requires supporting the needy relatives. Private support, which also embraces every other case of the structure and the teleology of group life, comes to a conscious intensification here by which it is dominated as well.
Once again I want to explain from the viewpoint just explicated what was emphasized above: that the relationship of the community to its poor is just as formal a society-constructing function as is that to the offi- cial or taxpayer. There I compared the poor person to the stranger, who similarly stands opposite to the group--but this being opposite implies a very specific relationship that pulls one into group life as a member.
the poor person 435
? So the poor person stands admittedly outside the group while being a mere object for undertakings by the community toward the individual, but this being on the outside is--put briefly--only a particular form of being inside. All this occurs in the society as, according to the Kantian expression, what is spatially outside of each other occurs in conscious- ness: admittedly in space everything would be outside of each other, and the subject too, graphically, would be external to the other things, but in a wider sense the space itself would be 'in me,' in the subject. But considered more closely, the double position of the poor person as characterized--as with the stranger--can only be established with gradual modifications to all members of the group. Individuals may adhere to group life with positive accomplishments so very much, may very much allow the personal content of their life to get woven into or to get out of this cycle, yet at the same time they stand facing this totality, giving and receiving, dealt with by it well or poorly, committed to it internally or only externally, in short facing the social circle as partner or as object, as to an opposite subject to which they neverthe- less belong through the very same actions and circumstances on which the relationship of member, of being part of the subject, is based. This duality of the position, seeming logically difficult to reconcile, is a quite elementary sociological reality. An earlier association already manifested this in so simple a structure as marriage; in some situations, each of the spouses sees the marriage as a, so to speak, independent structure before them, creating duties, representations, goodness and evil--with- out this deriving from the other spouse as a person but from the whole that makes each of its parts an object to itself, however much it itself consists immediately only of these parts. This relationship of being simultaneously inside and outside becomes more complex and evident at the same time in the degree to which the membership of the group grows. This is not only because the whole thereby gives individuals an overwhelming independence, but above all because the more particular differentiations among the individuals dispose them to a whole range of nuances of that double relationship. With respect to the prince and the banker, the woman of the world and the priest, the artist and the official, the group has a special tendency on the one hand to make the person an object, to deal with them, to subjugate them, or to recognize them as power against power, and on the other hand for it to draw the person into itself as a direct participant in its life, just as a part of the whole that faces up to other participants anew. This is perhaps
436 chapter seven
? a wholly uniform attitude of the social entity as such that is divided into the two sides or appears so different from two separate points of view--somewhat like the way the individual idea stands in opposition to the mind, really so distant as to be totally removed from it that the mind can be influenced by the mood of the whole: colored, suspended or suppressed, formed or eliminated--even while it is at the same time an integral part of this whole, an element of the mind that exists only apart from the togetherness and interpenetration of such elements. The poor person occupies a clearly distinct position on that scale. The support to which the community is obligated in its own interest but which the person has no right to demand in by far the majority of cases, turns one into an object of group action, sets one at a distance from the community, which often lets one live as an unworthy body at the mercy of the community and for this reason allows one to become a bitter enemy of it. The state expresses this when it withdraws certain civic rights from the recipient of public assistance. But this being on the outside still does not mean an absolute separation but just a wholly different relationship with the whole that, without this member, would just be different from what it is. And with the whole thus produced, that treatment of the individual as an object enters in with respect to the poor in a construction that includes their totality.
Now these descriptions do not appear to be valid for the poor in general but only to a certain portion of them: those who receive sup- port, since there are still enough poor who are not assisted. The latter fact points out the relativistic nature of the concept of poverty. Anyone whose means do not match goals is a poor person. This purely individu- alistic concept is narrowed in its practical application in such a way that certain ends of arbitrary and purely personal discretion are exempted from it. First, those needs that are physically imposed on people: food, clothing, shelter. But no level of these needs is fixed with certainty that would be in effect in all circumstances and generally and below which poverty in the absolute sense would thus have existed. Rather every general milieu and every particular social stratum has needs peculiar to it, which being unable to satisfy means poverty. Hence the fact, banal in all developed cultures, that people who are poor within their class might be so in no deeper way since their means would be enough for the ends typical for them. The poorest in an absolute sense may thereby not suffer from the discrepancy of their means to their class-specific needs, so that hardly any poverty would exist in a psychological sense; or the richest may set goals for themselves that exceed those presumed class-
the poor person 437
? specific wishes and their own means, so that they feel psychologically that they are poor. Thus individual poverty--the non-attainment of the means to personal ends--can be absent where the social concept of it is found, and it can exist where there is no mention of it in the indi- vidual sense. Its relativism does not mean the relationship of individual means to really individual ends--which is something absolute according to the inherent meaning unaffected by anything that lies beyond the individual--but to the stratum-specific ends of the individual, to his or her social a apriori, which changes from one social stratum to the other. What level of need each group fixes, as it were, the zero point below which poverty begins and above which wealth begins, is by the way a very socio-historically notable variable. In somewhat developed circumstances it has always a latitude, often considerable, for fixing this. How the location of this point is related to the actual majority, whether one must already belong to the assisted minority in order not to be considered simply poor, whether on the contrary a class avoiding being overwhelmed by the feeling of poverty out of an instinctive expediency sets the scale very low below which poverty first begins, whether any one phenomenon is capable of moving this scale (as easily happens for example by the entry of a prosperous personality into a small city or into a some other small circle) or whether the group continues to hold onto what it has set once and for all--obviously these are fundamental sociological variables.
Because poverty appears in every social stratum that has formed a typical standard of needs pre-established for every individual, it also happens without further ado that in many cases a support for the poor person does not at all come into question. Nevertheless the principle of support is extended further than what its, as it were, official manifestations indicate. If in an extended family, for example, poorer and richer members exchange presents, one gives to the latter gifts according to good manners; to the former gifts not only more in value than that received from them, but precisely the quality of the gifts reveals the supportive character: one gives the poorer relatives useful things, i. e. those that help them maintain the accustomed class standard of living; thus in this sociological constellation the gifts prove to be completely different in the different strata. The sociology of the gift partially overlaps with that of poverty. An extremely rich scale of reciprocal relationships of people is shown in the gift, as well as in its content, the attitude and kind of giving, and also in the attitude and kind of receiving. Gift, theft, and exchange are the external forms of
438 chapter seven
? interaction that are immediately linked to the question of property and by which each receives an inestimable richness of psychological prop- erties defining a process social in itself. They correspond to the three motives of action: altruism, egoism, and objective standardization. Then it is the essence of exchange that objectively equal values are involved, the subjective motives of kindness or greed remain outside the process; to the extent that the exchange clearly reflects its idea in the process, the value of the objects is not measured according to the desires of the individual but according to the value of the other objects. Of the three, the gift manifests the greatest wealth of social constellations since the sentiment and condition of the giving and receiving are combined in it in the most various ways with all their particular nuances. Under the many categories that make a, so to speak, systematic ordering of these phenomena possible, this seems to be the most important for the problem of poverty: whether the particular meaning and goal of the gift resides in the end state attained with it, wherein the recipient should just have a particular object of value, or in the action itself, in which the giving as the expression of a sentiment of the giver, a love that must sacrifice, or an expansion of the Ego which more or less indiscriminately radiates itself in the gift. In this latter case, in which the process of the giving is, so to speak, its only purpose, the question of wealth or poverty obviously plays hardly any role; it would then be for the sake of the practical possibilities. But where it is given to the poor person, the emphasis is not on the process but on its result; the poor should have something. Obviously, countless mixtures of each kind exist between these two extreme kinds of gift. The more purely the latter kind prevails, the more impossible it often is to contribute to the poor person what is lacking in the form of gifts since the other social relationships among the persons are not carried out with gifts. One can always give where there is very great social distance or where there is greater personal closeness; however, it tends to be difficult to the extent that the social distance diminishes and the personal distance increases. In the higher strata the tragic situation often comes about that the needy would like to receive support and the wealthy would like to grant it, but the former can neither ask for it nor the latter offer it. The higher a class is, so much the more does it have an economic a priori limit below which what is poverty for it begins, set in a way so that this poverty seldom occurs, and is indeed in principle actually impossible. Accepting support thus moves the supported ones away from the prerequisites for status; it brings the evidence to light that one is
the poor person 439
? formally downgraded. Until this happens, the class prejudice is strong enough to make poverty, so to speak, invisible, so long as it remains an individual problem and does not have any social effect. The entire presuppositions of upper class life entails someone being poor in an individual sense, i. e. someone can stay within one's means below the needs of the class without having to reach for support. Thus one is poor in a social sense only if receiving support. And probably this would be generally valid: viewed sociologically, poverty does not occur first and then support follows--rather this is only its destiny also according to one's personal form--but the one who enjoys support should also enjoy it according to one's sociological constellation, which is called poverty--even if by chance this does not happen.
It is entirely in this sense, when it had been emphasized by the Social Democrats, that the modern proletarian would admittedly be poor, but not any poorer. The poor person does not come about as a social type through a certain level of want and deprivation but through receiving support or should be receiving it according to social norms. Thus to this way of thinking, poverty in itself and for itself is not to be defined as a fixed quantitative condition but only in terms of a social reaction that appears after a certain condition, just as crime, which immediately is a very difficult concept to define, has been defined as "an action associated with a public penalty. "8 So now some no longer define the essence of ethics from the inner constitution of the subject but from the results of what the subject does: its subjective intent counts as valu- able only to the extent that it normally occasions a particular socially useful result. Thus the concept of personality is often not viewed as a characterization of one's being from within, which would qualify one for a specific social role, but on the contrary, the members of society who play a certain role in it are called personalities. The individual condition, as it is constituted from within itself, no more determines the idea in the first instance; rather the social teleology does this. The individual is established by the type, as the environing whole behaves around and toward the individual. Where this happens it is a continu- ation of a kind of modern idealism that does not seek to define a thing any more by its inherent nature but from the reaction that is given off
8 Simmel seems to have E? mile Durkheim's treatment of crime in mind; see Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, tr. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), Ch. 2-- ed.
? 440 chapter seven
? from it in the subject. The membership function that the poor person serves within the existing society is not already given by one's being poor; only when the society--the whole or the individual members of it--responds with support to the person, does the latter play a specific social role.
This social meaning of the 'poor,' as opposed to the individual one, first allows the poor to unite into a kind of status group or unified layer within society. As was said, one does not belong to a socially defined category by simply being poor. One is just a poor merchant, artist, worker etc. and remains such through the kind of one's activity or standing of one's particular rank.
One may take up a gradually changed position within the society because of poverty, but the individuals who find themselves in the different statuses and occupations at this stage are in no way united into a special social unit outside the boundaries of their home stratum. The moment they are assisted--many times already if the whole constellation normally requires this, even without it actually happening--they enter into a circle characterized by pov- erty. Admittedly this group is not held together by interaction among its members but by the collective attitude that society as a whole takes up toward it. Still there has not also always been a lack of that direct creation by society; in the fourteenth century, for example, there was a guild of poor people in Norwich, a Poorman's Gild, in Germany the so called Elendengilden (guilds of the wretched)--just as some time later in the Italian cities one encounters a party of the wealthy people, the Optimates, as they called themselves, that found the basis of their unity only in the fact of the wealth of each member. Certainly such a union of the poor soon became impossible because, with the increasing dif- ferentiation of society, the individual differences of the members in suitable education and attitude, interests and backgrounds became too many and too strong for still allowing the strength for the society- creation of one community.
Only where poverty brings with it a positive content that is common to many poor does an association of the poor as such come about. Thus the most extreme phenomenon of poverty--the lack of shelter--allows the persons affected by it to stream together in certain shelters in the large cities. When the first haystacks are erected in the vicinity of Berlin, the homeless, the Penner (bums), find one for themselves to make a suitable night lodging in the hay. A beginning of organization, nevertheless, exists under this, since the Penner of the one territory have a kind of leader, the
the poor person 441
? Oberpenner, who assigns the places in the night quarters to the members of the guild and settles disputes among them. The Penner see to it that no criminal sneaks in among them, and if this does happen they do him in, i. e. betray him to the police, for whom they generally perform occasional good services. The Oberpenner are well known personages whom the authorities always know how to find if they need information about the personal details of someone with a shady existence. Such specification of poverty, which they experience through its progression up to the point of homelessness, is necessary nowadays to win for them an associative momentum. By the way it is notable that the increased general well-being, the closer police supervision, above all the social consciousness that strangely mixes good and bad sensitivities, 'cannot bear' the sight of poverty--all this imposes on poverty the tendency to hide itself ever more. And this conceivably holds the poor further apart, allows them to feel much less like a coherent stratum than could be the case in the Middle Ages. The class of the poor, especially in modern society, is a most unique social synthesis. It has its importance and place- ment in the social body because of a great homogeneity that, however, as indicated, is absent from it in terms of the individual characteristics of its members. It is the common endpoint of destinies of the most different kinds; persons from the whole range of social variation flow into it. No change, development, intensification, or depression of social life passes by it without depositing a residue in the stratum of poverty as if in a reservoir. That is what is dreadful in this poverty--as distinct from merely being poor, which everyone has to sort out for themselves and which is only a coloration of an otherwise individually qualified situation--that there are people who are only poor in terms of their social position and nothing more. Incidentally this becomes especially certain and clear by virtue of an expansive and indiscriminate almsgiv- ing, as in the Christian Middle Ages and under the rule of the Koran. But precisely to the extent that one was content with an official and unalterable fact, it did not have the bitterness and actual opposition with which a class influences the developmental and turbulent tendency of modern times that establishes its unity on a purely passive element, i. e. on that basis on which the society behaves toward the class in a certain way and treats it in a certain way. If political rights are taken away from the recipients of alms, this is the adequate expression of their not being anything socially, except being poor. This absence of a positive qualification for oneself causes what was indicated above--the stratum
442 chapter seven
? of the poor developing no socially unifying force from outside or within itself despite the similarity of their situation. Poverty thus presents the wholly unique social constellation of a number of individuals taking up a very specific organic membership inside the whole by means of a purely individual fate. But this position is still not determined by one's own fate and condition but by others--individuals, associations, whole societies--seeking just to correct this condition, so that, according to the sociological concept, it is not the personal deficiency that makes people poor but the people supported for the sake of the deficiency are primarily the poor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SELF-PRESERVATION OF THE GROUP1
The conflictual character that immediate experience manifests in the life of the individual--the need for conquest given at every moment, for defense against attacks, for firmness against temptations, for regaining a continuously losing balance--persists, as it were, above and below the psychological existence of the individual. The physiological processes within our bodies offer the same picture of an unceasing struggle. The self-preservation of the physical life is also never a static persistence, but an exercise in overcoming resistance, a construction of antitoxins against the poisons generated in the body itself, a response to attacks that would immediately become destructive without resistance offered against it. And such are the general forms in which the supra-individual structures also lead their lives. Even if they 'preserve themselves'--and, in fact, not only against external attacks that threaten their entire exis- tence with one stroke as it were--we combine innumerable uninter- rupted processes that are made manifest inside these structures as punch and counterpunch, peril and prevention, repulsion and reengagement among the members. For many reasons it is understandable that we see the simple stasis, the continuity of undisturbed tranquility, much more than the adjustments in play back and forth, formations of ever new means against ever new dangers in the preservation of the state and guild, church and interest group, family and school. First because the individual experiences all the frailty of life, the endlessness of offense and defense only within the self, while the corresponding processes of the collective structures are divided up among many individuals and over many points quite separated by space, content and interests, and are, therefore, not readily present in the consciousness of the individual in their entirety, though probably in their result: the persistence of the whole. Furthermore, these processes frequently occur in substrata of major dimensions and thus more slowly and ponderously over such long periods of time, so that the transitions of their individual stages
1 We are indebted to Lutz Kaelber for his many suggestions for rendering Simmel's prose in this chapter--ed.
? 444 chapter eight
are barely noticeable. Finally, the most difficult but perhaps the most effective factor: all those collective structures affect us not only as indi- vidual historical realities whose temporal life process carries its entire significance, but they possess something of the timelessness of the general concept, the universal law, the general form, whose meaning and validity are not identical with the single appearing and disappear- ing example or occurrence. Admittedly the concept of the individual is also independent of the forces of reality generating or destroying one or the other individual; nevertheless we feel that the individual state or church seemingly absorbed more from the general concept of the state or church, and that here the historical structure somehow shares in the supra-particular, in the timelessness of the universal or form drawn from all the vicissitudes of life. The basis of this feeling should be that such collective structures admittedly possess an eternity relative to their individual participants and that they are indifferent toward their distinctiveness and survive their coming and going (which will be spoken about below). They proceed from there into the category of law, which is valid independently of its individual applications, and form, whose ideal meaning remains unaffected by all the variety in its material fulfillments. But these structures achieve this affinity with general timelessness only from the standpoint of the individual from whose fluctuating and transient existence they face as something persisting and ever surviving. Viewed from this comparison, they are themselves involved in the coming into and passing out of existence; if it happens in what one must call a life process, in another tempo and rhythm than that of the members, the self-preservation over a span of time, which is not a rigid unquestionability and inner immobility but a sum of internal processes, they are the defense against an enduring threat, the re-establishment of an often lost balance, the conscious or unconscious preparation of means to an end never realized by self, in order to experience the next moment.
These three kinds of self-preservation are independent of one another to a relatively great extent: Physiological self-preservation often occurs with a success or failure that is wholly opposed to the simultaneous psychological results; and this again has the same random relationship to that of the social group. The individual's instinct for self-preservation requires wholly different actions and employs wholly different powers than the self-preservation of one's group, so that the self-preservation of individuals can sometimes exist thoroughly intact and successful while that of the group becomes weak and the group splinters. Conversely
the self-preservation of the group 445
the latter can appear in full strength although that of the individual members is in decay. Above all, this phenomenon has led to the uni- fied group being considered as a structure with an independent reality, leading a life according to its own laws and its own powers, independent of all its individual bearers--in a close analogy to the construction of a 'life spirit' or a special personal 'life force' in the physiological indi- vidual. A substantial unity, as it were, that was maintained in itself seemed to be created by the existence of the subject, in which delayed knowledge blocks the persistence of life, and replaced the thousand-fold intermeshing interaction processes among the factors. Our task in this essay is the social parallel. When we see that the most diverse social interactions visibly manifest particularly effective powers for self-preser- vation, into what more primary processes is this manifestation allowed to be decomposed? Nevertheless the persistence of the group--once it has come about--seems to portend a particular vitality, as it were, a permanence stemming from a unitary source, but which is thus only the apparent result or, more accurately, the complex of a number of individual and varying processes of social nature. Thus we ask, what particular kinds of direct or indirect interaction are there, if one speaks of the self-preservation of a social group?
The most general case in which the self-preservation of the group becomes a problem is found in the fact that it maintains its identity during the departure and change of its members. We say that it would be the same state, the same organization, the same army existing now as the one that existed for one or another number of decades or cen- turies, even though not a single one of the members of this association is 'the same' any more as in the earlier point in time. Here one of the cases is offered in which the temporal order of the phenomenon manifests a decided analogy with its spatial one. As the social union is still formed out of the individuals existing next to one another--i. e. , still outside one another--as the unavoidable separation that creates space between people is nevertheless overcome through the psychological bonds among them so that the image of a united 'one' arises in one another, so also the temporal separation of individuals and generations does not hinder their forming in our thinking a solid and continuing whole. With the spatially separated entities, this unity is borne by the interaction among them that takes place through space: among com- plex entities unity means nothing but a cohesion of the members that is represented by mutually exercised forces. With temporally separated entities, their unity cannot occur in this way since the interaction is
446 chapter eight
absent: an earlier one can probably affect a later one, but not the other way around. Therefore, precisely by the turnover of individuals, the maintenance of the social unity constitutes a special problem that is not yet solved at the same time with the coming into being of its unity at a given instant, as was explained.
The first and most immediate temporal element that confers this continuity on the unity of the group is the persistence of the locality, the soil and earth on which it lives. The state, still more the city, but also numerous other associations, have their unity first in the terri- tory that forms the enduring substrate under all the changes in its content. In classical Greece it was above all the maintenance of the landownership to which the continuity of the family group was linked. This was carried in two opposite directions: its reduction by sale was typically regarded as an offense not only against the children but also the ancestors, since that broke the thread of the family's existence lead- ing up from them; and its increase was only possible with difficulty, depending on circumstances. Thus Greece experienced landownership from above and below, as it were, to be suited to leading the family through all the vicissitudes of its individual existence as, in principle, something indestructible. Most remarkable, but also conceivable, is this importance of landownership for the continuation of the family in view of the fact that territory and land nevertheless did not possess its later importance for the Greek concept of state. As one always spoke of foreign state 'territories' as only the sum of their inhabitants--? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 2--so for the Greeks the affiliation to one's state is never predicated on the land but only on the community of citizens. Where banished citizens are gathered in sufficient numbers elsewhere, they continue there without the state entity being further disturbed by the enemy; their continuity of life is thus manifest in the persons of the participants, but it does not seem to be bound to the land. In contrast, during the feudal and patrimonial era, the model principle by which the bond mediated by territory becomes effective in a definitely different manner. The inhabitants of the land are subject to the state government only as entities that come within its territory. Here the state as a specific formation of human materials actually has its conti- nuity only in the permanence of the soil. While acquisition and loss of the domicile in the land means acquisition and loss of citizenship, the
2 Greek: 'the Egyptians, the Persians'--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 447
specific ground and soil is the genuine object of rule, continuation of which carries the state through all the changes of its material. To the extent that the idea of the state in its ideal unity and indestructibility rose above the idea of the privately governed kind, the indivisibility of its territory also becomes a principle; its territory is no longer an indivisible thing, but a conceptual unity that is the correlate of state unity in general. While this crosses over from the abstract sphere into that of feeling, it constructs in the latter an emotion of patriotism that is infinitely important for political self-preservation. Consequently, as the modern person feels it, the persistence of the emotional sphere is wholly indispensable for it; the fatherland is very much a part of its effectiveness for holding the political group together. In the same way it is the sociological characteristics of the circumstances, which would be somewhat similar in every other respect, that considerably differ in their actual manifestation by their varying duration. One does not tend to clarify how much every factor of a human relationship that seems completely and exclusively distinct from its factual content, from its idea and feeling, what is actually present and is effective in it, and what appears definite, although at the same time, it depends on the conscious and unconscious thoughts over the duration of these factual contents; how every relationship is inevitably influenced by one esti- mating one's survival for a longer or shorter time, by one foreseeing one's end or seeing it as unlimited, by limitness appearing only as an actual non-ending or the impossibility of an end in principle. Examples of the last mentioned cases are marriage, the relationship to God, and that to the fatherland. These temporal determinants need not change the immediate and individual content of the relationships; they are a formal, though for their course an extremely influential coloration of themselves. Thus patriotism is not at all only a feeling and an ethical bond of individuals to their political group, but it needs the collabora- tive notion that the relationship to them is not dissolvable, and in fact is not dissolvable at all despite the freedom of movement of modern people. The clarity of the patriotic basis and ground as the unalter- able and irreducible reason for that relationship becomes a vehicle of patriotism and a symbol of its limitlessness in time, and with this formal emphasis also gives its first individual moment the full solidifying force of the whole.
Now the continuation of the locality by itself admittedly does not mean the continuation of the social unit since if almost the whole population of a state is expelled or enslaved by a conquering group,
448 chapter eight
we still speak of the displaced national group despite the continuation of the territory. The unity whose continuation is at issue is in addition a psychological one, which in turn makes the territorial basis a unify- ing basis: this inner meaning of place for consciousness can completely replace the outer one. But one, though anecdotal case, reveals in an interesting way how even this kind of unity remains linked to its par- ticular land by spiritual threads by a complete internalization of the social unity in its continuity. During the Spanish-American War in the summer of 1898 as the Spanish fleet seemed to threaten the American east coast, a Bostonian away from home was asked what he would think about his city possibly being bombarded.
"Bombard Boston! " was the response. "You talk as though Boston were a locality. Boston is not a place; Boston is a state of mind. You can no more shoot it with a gun than you could shoot wisdom, or justice, or magnanimity. "3
But once a territory has now taken on the mental bond and is des- ignated as belonging to it, this, again, on the other hand is thus an essential vehicle for the further existence of the latter. Admittedly only one vehicle, since there are enough group formations that do not need a local basis: on the one hand all small groups such as the family that can stay exactly the same during changes of residence, on the other hand all large ones--such as the ideal community of 'the republic of scholars' or the other international cultural communities of literary and artistic interests, or the global trading groups--whose essence exists precisely in the denial and superseding of every linkage to a particular locality.
In contrast to this more formal condition, the physiological con- nection of the generations, the whole network of relationships among relatives, is of incomparably greater importance for the preservation of the group. Admittedly, affinity to the tribe alone is not always enough to guarantee the unity of the connections over a long time; rather in many cases it must involve local unity. The social unity of the Jews loosened seriously despite their anthropological and confes- sional unity since their diaspora; it closed more tightly again where a group of them lived on the same territory for a long time, and the efforts of modern Zionism to re-establish their comprehensive group
3 Here Simmel quotes the man in English--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 449
unity linked them to their settling in the same location again. But on the other hand, where other connections fail, the physiological is the ultimate refuge on which the self-preservation of the group falls back. The more the German guild system ossified and withered internally and the weaker the actual strength of its cohesion became, the more vigorously each guild sealed itself off physiologically, i. e. , made family and marriage the requirement for admission. The history of the guild system is characterized by preference being shown the masters' sons. The guild was, in the main and with certain interruptions, an associa- tion handed down to the children. Nevertheless not only were material advantage and family egoism always clearly the motives here, but also the objective social ideal of the permanence and continuity of the guild structure as such. The thought that the self-isolation of the guild intro- duces--that one master should have 'the same food' as another--is no purely individualistic one, but guarantees an inner homogeneity that would keep the unity of the group from fragmenting. But of course a numerical limitation corresponded to this exclusion of the competi- tion, for which the favoring of the master's son, i. e. the exclusion of one not physiologically belonging to the group, was the most obvious technique. Everywhere the tightness of a privileged social stratum, the strict distancing of the 'parvenu,' is the expression or means of main- taining its continuity; and this tight unity--admittedly not exclusively but most simply and plausibly--is borne on the tradition of privileges in the physiological line; it blocks at the earliest the fragmentation of the structure in a multiplicity of directions, interest-based associations, and characteristics. Augustus, who placed the greatest value on the continual preservation of the senatorial stratum as such, provided for its close unity by prohibiting its members from marrying emancipated persons, actors, and the children of these. For that stratum, however, he favored in every way the inheritance of dignity by senators' sons. Blood-relationship seemed to him as the cement that alone could hold the ordo senatorius4 together: its unity, as it were, its contraction within the latitudinal dimension, was thus bound to its expansion in the lon- gitudinal dimension of time. And in modern family life--as it presents itself as loosened, atomized, broken into a thousand ways by inner alienations and antagonistic autonomies--what still characterizes the family as one in the replacement of generations is actually the unique
4 Latin: senatorial order--ed.
? 450 chapter eight
physiological connection and perhaps the succession by inheritance that is bound very closely with it. Out of all the bonds that earlier bore, the continuity of the family solidarity--occupational, religious, traditional, social standing mediated by reverence--one after the other, becomes less able to support the supra-individual unity of the family. Only the bond of the physiological, and what directly depends on it, still seems to succeed to some extent.
Therefore the genealogical linkage of generations succeeding one another is of such incomparable importance for the preservation of the uniform self of larger groups, because the replacement of one generation by the next, the succession of the one to the position of the other, does not happen all at once. The continuity is thereby created that takes into the next moment the vast majority of individuals who live in a given moment; the changeover, the separation and new entry of persons, in two contiguous moments always affects only an extremely small num- ber in relation to the ones that endure. It is a fundamental factor that humans are not bound like animals to a specific mating season, but that children are born at any time. It can thus never be actually said within a group that a new generation begins at a given moment. The exit of the old and the entry of the new members takes place in it so gradually and continuously that it appears just like a united self, like an organic body in the change of its atoms. If the replacement of members happens all at once, with a sudden removal affecting the whole group, one would hardly be able to say that the group maintains its unified self despite the loss of members. The fact that at any time those who already belonged to the group in the earlier moment comprise the vast majority against the ones that follow saves the identity of the group despite the fact that moments that are spread out far from one another may not have a single member left in common. The gradualness of the change obviously has its importance not only in the function of saving the collective identity throughout the turnover of the individuals who maintain it, but also where the changeover affects other relevant circumstances. Moreover where the political forms, law, customs, the whole culture of a group changes, whereby after a certain time it actu- ally presents a completely different picture, still the right to call it the same identical one depends on the change not affecting the totality of the life forms of the group at the same time. If it did that, it would be doubtful whether one should still call the group actually the 'same' one that it was before the critical moment; only the circumstance that the change affects only a minority of the collective life of the group at any
the self-preservation of the group 451
given moment makes it possible for it to maintain its self completely. It can be expressed schematically this way: If the totality of the individuals or other life circumstances of the group could be described as a b c d e in one moment, but in a later moment as m n o p q, one will still speak of a preservation of its unified self, provided the development maintains the following course: a b c d e--m b c d e--m n c d e--m n o d e--m n o p e-- m n o p q, so that each step is only separated from the neighboring ones by one member and each moment shares the same main features with its neighboring moments.
This continuity amidst the change of the individuals who maintain the unity of the group is admittedly made most directly and drastically noticeable where it is based on reproduction. 5 But this could also occur in cases where this physical mediation is directly excluded, as within the Catholic clergy. Here the continuity is produced by having a sufficient number always remaining in office for instructing the new entrants. Celibacy showed here advantages over even physiological bonds for the strict uniform continuity of the group. It has been correctly noted that, given the great tendency in the Middle Ages toward the inheritance of occupations, without celibacy the clergy would have become a caste. Admittedly, this became the precise mechanism for the Russian secular clergy, which is obliged to marry, to achieve the maximum possible group continuity under this circumstance. Since the serfs could not become priests and the nobles did not want to, and since there was no actual middle class, the clergy had to replenish itself from within itself: the sons would also become priests, and they only married daughters of priests; exceptions required special permission. The Russian priesthood thereby became a caste limited to endogamy, whose lack of non-clerical family relationships conferred on them something of a freeman's sta- tus and inner continuity of the spirit of celibacy. It is remarkable that precisely this very sharp emphasis of physiological continuity in suc- cession bordered upon an equally sharp exclusiveness. Nevertheless the superiority of the other system is unmistakable. Especially in the vitality and inner diversity of West European life--in contrast to the earlier Russian--the physiologically mediated continuity would have subjected the church to a life process with all its fluctuations, rhythms, upswings and senescence, as manifest in the guilds. With heredity the clergy would
5 Simmel uses the expression, 'Proliferation. ' He may have in mind the term in plant biology, which refers to propagation by means of buds or offshoots--ed.
? 452 chapter eight
have been exposed to the happenstances befalling the individual much more than now, where inclusion follows objective norms that include and exclude individuals with unbiased rigor. Here there are no undutiful sons who nevertheless remain in the family and in the class environment which thereby slackens them. Here continuity was really linked to the objective spirit with its timeless validity, and with that the transience of an only organic structure was avoided. But inevitably this requires a repressing of the individual. Thus already in the fourth century one began to prevent priests from leaving their status and membership in it, once it was accepted, and eliminated individual freedom. Only insofar as the timelessness of the collective idea was revealed in the life- long and indestructible nature of the vocation was the danger that the change of the persons brought to that continuity minimized. However this was symbolized by nothing so aptly, and maintained so effectively, as by the ordination of priests. Here the 'spirit,' an ideal property of the church as a whole, is transferred from individual to individual, and none can attain it without this mediation. This is an ingenious means of leading the preservation of the group along an entirely unbroken line; here the sociological significance of physical propagation6 took on, through the transferal of the consecration from one to the other, a spiritual body, so to speak, that guarantees the temporal continuity of the whole structure in the purest and most undisturbed manner. This social form is duplicated in other ways too, without such crystallization to a consistent permanence of the metaphysical spirit. For example it also gives official hierarchies their permanence and allows the nature, the objective spirit itself, to be maintained throughout all the turnover of individuals (which was already also indicated then, analogous to the case of the priests, in the ancient Roman idea that the magistra- cies actually came from the gods and that the consecration to them could only be imparted to the successor by the incumbent): the mem- bers existing in a given moment are altogether eliminated only when they were united long enough with their successors in the group, i. e. , enough to fully assimilate the spirit, form, and tendency of the group. The immortality of the group depends on this change being slow and gradual enough.
The reality indicated by this expression is of the greatest impor- tance. The preservation of the consistent self of the group throughout
6 See note 5 above--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 453
a potentially unlimited time period gives it an importance that, ceteris paribus, is infinitely superior to that of any individual. The individual life is designed in accord with its destiny, its value, its power to end in a limited time, and, to a certain extent, every individual must start at the beginning. While the life of the group lacks such a time limit that is set a priori, and while its forms are actually designed as though it would live forever, it arrives at an accumulation of the achievements, strengths, and experiences through which it rises further above the repeatedly shattered courses of individual life. In England this was the source of the power of the urban corporations since the early Middle Ages. They always had the right "of perpetuating their existence by filling up vacancies as they occur. "7 Admittedly the ancient privileges read only, for the townspeople "and their heirs"; but this in fact came to be exercised as a right to take in new members, so that whatever fate the members and their physical descendents met, the corporation as such would always survive as a whole. Incumbents electing col- leagues8 is the immensely important principal form that here takes the place of the function of priestly ordination mentioned above. It keeps the character of the group thoroughly the same through an undefined period of time and forms a certain analogy with the life of an organism, which also takes on only the ingredients adequate for it and able to be assimilated by it. It represents a continuation of the longevity in that it still sets in place members selected for passing traits on as well as for the eventuality where a member may possibly withdraw later. Thus, historically, the right to elect suitable colleagues to vacant positions was often attached to representative bodies that obtained life-long tenure, e. g. , in the city councils of Basel, Freiburg, and Solothurn in the seven- teenth century.