No More Learning

The circle of potential spouses has widened extraordinarily through the mixing of strata, the elimination of religious barriers, the reduction of parental authority, freer movement in both the local and social senses, etc. But in turn the individual selection is a much more restricted one; the reality and direction of the wholly personal inclina- tion, the consciousness that among all persons these two are meant for one another and only for one another--this became a shocking devel- opment even for the business class of the eighteenth century. A deeper meaning of freedom arises here: Individual freedom means freedom that is limited by individuality. A uniqueness of a being corresponding to the individual arises out of the uniqueness of that individual's nature, which can fulfill and free the individual. The correlate of the clarity of the individual's needs is that there would be a largest possible circle of possible objects of choice; because the more individual are the wishes and inner necessities, the more unlikely it is that they will find their satisfaction in one narrowly bounded area. In the earlier situation, in contrast, there was much less limitation from the fixed nature of per- sonalities: The individual was much freer from himself concerning what choice one wished to make, since instead of a decisive differentiation there was a rough equivalence of all the choices under consideration; so the circle of these potential choices did not need to be considerably great. Thus admittedly the relatively undeveloped situation socially hemmed in the individual, but with this was joined the negative free- dom of non-differentiation, that liberum arbitrium4 given by the shear equivalency of the possible selections; under more advanced conditions; on the contrary, the social possibilities are much expanded, but they are limited by the positive meaning of freedom, in which every selection is, or at least ideally should be, the clearly determined expression of a unique kind of personality. And now in the general societal meaning of freedom: Feudalism produced nothing but narrow circles that bound one individual to another and limited the one with the duty toward the other. Therefore under the feudal system there was room neither for national enthusiasm or public spirit nor for individual entrepreneur- ialism or private industriousness; the same relationships that did not allow at the highest level the formation of a cultural unity of a social kind hindered the exercise of individual freedom at the lower level.
4 Latin: free choice The term was used historically in theological arguments about the human ability to do good, but commonly translated rather inaccurately as free will.
? the expansion of the group 637
But precisely because of that it remains thoroughly relevant and deeply delineated in concept if the 'free' person in the feudal era is one who stands under the law of the land, i. e. under the law of the widest circle; one who is bound, unfree, belongs to a feudal body, i. e. one's right derives from this narrower circle and in exclusion of the wider one. Now if freedom swings also to the extreme and if, as I indicated above, the largest group allows for an extreme education or miseducation of individualism, misanthropic isolation, grotesque and moody forms of life, it creates greater room for the crassly selfish way of life; this is still only the consequence of the wider group making fewer claims on us, being less concerned about the individual, and thus hinders less the outgrowth of the most perverse instincts than the smaller circle does. Here the size of the circle carries some blame, and it is a matter more of developments, so to speak, outside than inside the group; the larger group gives the members greater potential for these developments than does the smaller one.
In general, the meaning of individuality diverges in two directions; one is the one laid out above, the freedom and responsibility for one- self that suits the person in broad and turbulent social environments, while the smaller group is a 'narrow' one in a double sense--not only in its reach but in the restriction that it places on the individual, the control that it exercises over one, the small range of opportunities and changes that it allows one. The other meaning of individuality, however, is the qualitative: that each individual is separated from others, that one's being and activity with regard to form or content or both suits only that person and that this being different has a positive meaning and value for one's life. The formulations that the principle or ideal of individualism has undergone in modern times differ according to the emphasis placed on its first and second meanings. In general, the eighteenth century strove for individuality under the form of freedom, the emancipation of personal abilities from impositions of any kind, communal or ecclesiastical, political or economic. But nevertheless the assumption was valid that individuals freed from all socio-historical bonds would seem essentially the same, that 'the human as such,' with all the qualities and perfections of human nature, would be contained in every person and would need to be freed from every bond that deforms and misleads. The fact that people, as soon as they gain free- dom, use it in order to differentiate themselves, to dominate or to be enslaved, to be better or worse than others, in short to develop every difference of individual potential--this escaped that individualism for
638 chapter ten
which 'freedom and equality' were two peacefully compatible, indeed mutually necessary values. But it is obvious how the breakup of all nar- row and constraining unions was related to this--partially as its actual historical effect and at least partly as a desire and requirement for it. In the French Revolution, however, even the workers were forbidden to join associations aimed at securing better working conditions because such an association would limit the freedom of the individual member! Therefore this individualism is thoroughly correlated to a 'cosmopolitan' attitude; even national solidarity recoiled before the idea of 'Human- ity'; in place of the particular regulations of the strata and circles, the rights of the individual, which were characterized as 'human rights,' stood prominently, hence that which derived from membership in the widest thinkable circle of all. The nineteenth century cultivated the other meaning of individuality, the opposite of the above-mentioned, that the eighteenth century had not generally seen, most prominently in romanticism from a theoretical viewpoint and practically in the prevalence of the division of labor. That the individual occupies and should occupy a place that this individual and no other can fill, that this place in the organization of the whole waits, so to speak, for one and that one should seek it until finding it, that both the personal and the social, the psychological and the metaphysical meaning of human existence would be fulfilled by this indispensability of one's being and by this sharpened differentiation--that is an ideal construct of individualism that obviously has little to do with the idea of the 'the human as such,' with the uniform human nature that exists in everyone, which would only need freedom for its emergence; it has nothing to do with such an idea; indeed it basically contradicts that: in the first sense lies the value emphasis on what is common to human beings; in the second, on what makes them distinct. However, they coincide precisely with reference to the correlation that I am now trying to prove. The expansion of the circle to which the first concept of individuality corresponded also favors the emergence of the second. Although the second does not look upon the whole of humanity, although it rather allows the individu- als to complement one another and need one another through their specialization in the division of labor instead of allowing the atomizing of society into identical and simply only 'free' individuals; although historically it favors nationalism and a certain illiberalism rather than free cosmopolitanism, it is nevertheless bound to a relatively consider- able size of the group in which it can arise and exist. How immedi- ately the shear expansion of the economic circle, the increase of the
the expansion of the group 639
population, and the spatial limitlessness of competition has driven the specialization of activity needs only be mentioned. It is no different, and in fact especially so, with mental differentiation, since that tends to arise through the encounter of latent mental aptitudes with objectively existent mental products. The immediate interaction of subjectivities or the purely internal energy of a human seldom brings forth all that that one possesses by way of mental distinctiveness; rather a certain portion of what is called the 'objective spirit' appears to belong to traditions and the experiences of the genre in a thousand patterns, the art and knowledge that exist in perceptible forms, all the content of cultivation that the historical group possesses as something supra-subjective and yet as something in principle accessible to each person. It is characteristic of what is generally offered in objective structures of crystallized spirit that it provides precisely the material and stimulation for constructing the peculiarly personal form of mind: It is the essence of 'cultivation' that our purely personal potentiality is developed sometimes as a form of the content of the objective-spiritual given, sometimes as the content of the form of the objective-spiritual given; our mental life achieves its full uniqueness and personhood only in this synthesis, only in that it concretely incorporates its irreplaceability and complete individuality. This is the context that attaches spiritual differentiation to the size of the circle out of which the objective spirit comes to us; this circle can be the real-social one, or it may be of a more abstract, literary, historical kind--in correlation with its range, the chance will always grow to develop its performance, the uniqueness, the singularity, the being-for-self of our inner life and its intellectual, aesthetic, and practical creativity, as objective and general as these may be. The individualism of equivalency,5 which is not from the outset a contradictio in adjecto6 only if under 'individualism' one understands independence and freedom not limited by any narrow social bond, and the individualism of inequality, which draws the consequence of that freedom on the basis of the infinite variety of human capabilities and thus makes them incompatible with equivalency--both of these forms of individualism are found in their basic opposition together at one point: that each one finds the possibil- ity of its development in the measure in which the circle around the
5 Gleichheit, which can also mean equality--ed.
6 Latin: a direct contradiction--ed.
? 640 chapter ten
individual provides it the stimulus and material through its quantitative expansion of the room for that purpose.
Now I will return to the association mentioned above: between a stronger cultivation and evaluation of individuality and cosmopolitan- ism, the next social milieu of the individual, which is, so to speak, one of a mindset that leaps over--and I am immediately reminded of the teaching of the Stoics. While the socio-political context in which the individual remains still forms the wellspring of ethical rules for Aristotle, the Stoic interest, which involves practical activity, was actually fixed only on the individual person, and the shaping of the individual toward the ideal that the system prescribes becomes so ultimate under the aegis of stoic praxis that the association of individuals to one another appeared only as a means to that ideal individualistic goal. But admittedly this was determined by the content of the ideal of a general reason that is at work in every individual, and every human has a share in this reason, whose realization in the individual comprises the Stoic ideal; reason threw a bond of equality and brotherhood around all that humanity signifies, beyond all limitations of nationality and social bar- riers. And so the individualism of the stoics thus has cosmopolitanism as its complement; the breakup of the narrower social group, favored no less in that epoch by the political relationships than by a theoretical consideration, shifted the central focus of ethical interest on the one hand to the individual and on the other hand to the widest circle to which each belongs as a human individual. Historical reality has fol- lowed this pattern in countless variations. When the medieval knight with his life orientation to the whole individual linked an emphatically cosmopolitan trait to testing and proving the person, when his self-deter- mination gave room to the forms that created a European knighthood over all national boundaries, the directions were also signaled by this formula, which held sway in the entire Holy Roman Empire that in the end dissolved them. Thus it was destroyed on the one hand by the particularism of its components and on the other hand by the binding relationships to the remaining components of the European politics as a whole, through tightening and extending, which split up the national intermediary structures. That particularism was already evoked in and of itself by the same constellation, though extended in another dimen- sion. Where elements that are already differentiated or on the way to being differentiated are forged into a comprehensive unity, there an increased intolerance, a stronger mutual repulsion, is often the result. The large common context that nevertheless requires differentiation
the expansion of the group 641
on the one hand in order to be able to exist as such, causes on the other hand a mutual friction of elements, a validation of oppositions, that would not have come about without their being forced into the union. The unification within a large commonality means that, albeit a passing one, it becomes a means for individualization and becoming aware. Exactly thus the medieval empire's politics of world domination first unleashed the particularism of peoples, strata, and princes, indeed called it into life; the intended and partially completed unification into a large whole first created, expanded, and made conscious that which was admittedly destined to cause its break up: the individuality of the parts. The culture of the Italian Renaissance followed this norm in a vivid fashion. It cultivated full individuality on the one hand and the attitude and cultured behavior extending far beyond the limits of the narrower social environment on the other. This was expressed directly, for example in the words of Dante that--with all his ardent love for the city of Florence--for him and people like him the world would be one's native land, as the sea is for fish; indirectly, and as it were a posteriori, it is thus shown that the life forms that the Italian Renaissance created were taken from the whole civilized world, and in fact precisely therefore, they gave previously undreamed of room for individuality, whatever kind of individuality it might be. As a symptom of this development, I mention here the contempt for the nobility during this epoch. The nobility is only of real importance so long as it signifies a social circle to which they tightly belong that stands out all the more vigorously from the mass of all others and indeed from below and above; denying it worth means infringing upon both markers; it means on the one hand the recognition of the value of the person, whatever hereditary group one belongs to, and on the other hand a leveling in relation to those over whom one has otherwise been elevated. Both find unconditional expression in Renaissance literature.
Excursus on the Nobility
With the nobility, social development created one of the intermediary struc- tures around which turns the correlation that has been claimed here. And in fact it is 'intermediary' in the double meaning that the beginning of this inquiry into the concept of society has shown: The nobility is on the one hand a supra-personal social form of a unity of individuals that is inserted between these elements as individual beings and a large circle encompassing the nobility itself, like the guild and sect, the family and the political party; on
642 chapter ten
the other hand it is a concrete conglomerate of people that forms a middle member between the ruling power and the broad mass of the body politic. 7 This two-fold configuration rests on, thusly nuanced, and above the actual subject matter of this chapter, going so far beyond the determinations that have been laid out, that a separate presentation seems advisable for it.
The above-mentioned position of the nobility, which is between the most highly placed and the lower elements of the group, is also a formally different one from what we observed earlier as the 'middle class. ' For the latter has its sociological distinctiveness in its being open to both of its boundaries, but the nobility in its being closed to both of them--though with many qualifications. The middle class can expand upward or downward, but the nobility repulses both. Even if the nobility tends to move its boundaries upward more readily than downward, for obvious reasons there are enough historical examples where it nevertheless also has positioned itself in opposition to the ruler as quite self-sufficient, enclosed, and centered on its own interests. It has thus brought about a position independent from both sides in a twofold sense: It derived itself like a wedge between the ruler and a large portion of the population, paralyzed the action of the former for the interests of the latter (as often at the time of the peasants' hereditary subservience and frequently during the feudal governments), but also has exercised a unifying effect, a mediating representation of the one to the other (especially so in England). In monar- chical countries where the setting of the two boundaries is not clear-cut, the formation of a nobility also remains rudimentary. Thus a real nobility never developed in Turkey. This is due on the one hand to the Islamic perspective that allows the whole people to feel like an aristocracy, as something select compared to the unbelievers; on the other hand, because the absolute grandeur of the Sultan that was not to be mediated through anything did not allow to come into existence an authority that would stand closer to him in principle and in its own right than any other one. The fact that in Russia there is no aristocracy as a cohesive stratum but only isolated aristocrats who occasionally form groups--to be discussed later in more detail--results similarly from the absolutist position of the czar, but also because of the fact that the subject population forms no such practically united stratum as to provoke an asso- ciation that would position itself above it. Conversely, the two-fold boundary of the nobility--which is still also a two-fold relationship--will nevertheless become diverse in lands having a developed stratum and richer relationships of strata, mixed in various ways in syntheses and antitheses--which must push the nobility from its actual position, though a new significance may develop for them. The life motives that Napoleon I imputed to the group that he created as his new nobility shows this to the point of caricature. Of this intermediary caste8 he is reported to have said to the democrats, it is thoroughly demo-
7 Of course, the second form applies only to the nobility in monarchical states; but in the context of this chapter, I am discussing only that, not the nobility of a govern- ing aristocracy as such.
8 Simmel uses the French: caste intrme? diaire--ed.
? the expansion of the group 643
cratic because it is open at any time to anyone without hereditary prejudice; to the great lords: it will support the throne; to the moderate monarchists: it will counter any absolute regime because it will become a power in the state itself; to the Jacobins: the old nobility will actually be completely destroyed by it for the first time; to the old nobility: once it is decorated thus with new dignities, your old ones will be revived in them. So here the double position of the nobility was inflated into an ambiguity, which reveals precisely the specific duality as right and essential for it alone.
The two-front position of the nobility, which rests precisely on its self-con- fidence and being for itself (to be treated later in more detail), is mirrored again in its distinctive, more inwardly directed duality. It originates from the personages who always, for whatever reasons, are better off than others; but once it exists, personages who are already better off thus have it retroactively, as it were, because they belong to it. There is no need for examples of the 'prerogatives' of the nobility. But there probably is, for the other side of its position, its limitations and disadvantages. Around the year 1300 there was an extensive democratic movement in Florence, in the course of which quite specific, clear restrictions and burdens were imposed on the nobles, so that at the time one could be made a noble as a penalty. The original precedence of the nobility was extended, as it were, with a negative sign: The exceptional position of the nobility would remain as already existing, just that instead of the special advantages that it otherwise owed to this position, it found the content of that position in a very particular sacrifice and restriction. Something similar is found in a regulation in the eighteenth century in the very democratic Thurgau Canton in Switzerland. It was a matter at the time of eliminating all stratum-specific prerogatives, and the rule was subsequently accepted in the constitution that whoever wished to occupy a public office had to first renounce any nobility. The penalty, so to speak, thus weighed on the nobility, not to be able to hold public office. That was the limitation that was imposed on it, the counterbalance against the social prerogative. Such disadvantages of the nobles are expressed most characteristically if their criminal exemptions were turned into the reverse. While countless times the crime of the noble was punished more lightly than that of the common person, we nevertheless also encounter phenomena as the following. In medieval Dortmund, there was an extraordinarily distinguished guild, called the Reinoldsgilde, which was always called the Major Gilda. If any of its members committed a crime against the body and life of any other member, he had to pay an extra fine to the council in addition to the usual fine that anyone generally faced for that offense. An ordinance of the city law of Valenciennes from the twelfth century goes even further. It sets a certain fixed penalty for a theft committed by a page, apprentice, or citizen. But if a knight steals, the matter is quite different. A noble does not actually steal, but he robs; stealing does not fall within his competence, so to speak. If he appropriates something by injustice, it is pre- sumed that it occurred by force, as robbery--and because it becomes robbery under that law, it is punished more severely than theft! The noble position of the knight thus prevents him from suffering the milder penalty. He stands on a height from the outset, where one can only sin more fundamentally, where
644 chapter ten
one cannot so much as commit so petty a sin such as theft that is settled with a lower penalty. Rights and burdens exist for the Brahmanic priestly aristocracy in a subtler way, but perhaps with the most radical tension. Perhaps there was never a hierarchy that dominated as unconditionally and possessed such fantastic prerogatives as these. But then one examines the life of the Brahman who was provided with this unheard of power and against whose word there was no appeal at all, who appeared as the only authoritative person in the whole population so that even the king was nothing but the subject of the priest--it was a so unbearably hard existence, of one enlaced in forms and formula, self-chastisements and limitations, that there would probably have been remarkably few Europeans who would have wanted to obtain the unheard of rights of the Brahman priest at this price. He was the most powerful but also the least free person in India. But maybe--as according to Giordano Bruno, necessity is of inferior value to God, and freedom of inferior value to a human being--even freedom seemed contemptible to him since it would have meant that every element of life would be something of equal value. It may be of equal value, whether the rabble did this or that; for a person of the highest nobility every moment must be arranged by a law because every moment is completely important. The phenomena of this type are summarized in noblesse oblige. All such difficulties or subtractions from the advantages of the position of the nobility in reality only fully signify its prominence and exclusivity. Only in allowing the masses of the many to do what is forbidden to the nobility is there the deepest contempt and indifference toward the masses. It lies in the fact that they are permitted many things that the nobility is forbidden to do: The masses are not considered to be worthy of the more stringent regulations. The non-noble may, if desired, make the same renunciations, but that does not belong to their social position; it is an irrelevant private matter. But for the noble it is a social duty, or more correctly: It is the prerogative of one's social stratum not to be allowed to do many things--perhaps the prohibition against commerce of is of that type, which runs through the whole history of the nobility from the ancient Egyptians onward. If the nobility has emphasized that Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi,9 in its principle there is still also the reverse, Quod licet bovi non licet Jovi. 10 If the sociological form of the nobility is built at first on its clear group demarcation, which involves the whole being of person- hood--so that all individual differences are only the symbol of an absolutely self-sufficient and closed kind of being--so this differentiation from the entire non-nobility will specify fully that the nobility may do what others may not, and what it may not do the others may.
Obviously the collective life of a group generated the nobility's particular structure from the inner conditions of its interaction, which reveals its formal character through the similarity of essential traits among endless differences of these groups in their otherwise formal and material characteristics. The
9 Latin: What is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox--ed.
10 Latin: What is permitted to an ox is not permitted to Jove--ed.
? the expansion of the group 645
nobility in ancient Rome or in the Norman Empire, among the Indians or in the ancien re? gime possesses a correspondence of social traits within all the uniqueness of their life contents; and these also appear in a more rudimentary, unsettled, and passing form in any smaller groupings in which a fraction is gathered and set off as 'the aristocracy,' be it in large family groups, among workers, or within the clergy. For the nobility in the narrower sense, this com- monality is illustrated with the observation that "Nobles become acquainted better in an evening than commoners do in a month. " That obviously depends on the common conditions of existence being extended here very widely in personal conditions and the natural presupposition of relationships that are brought with them. In interests, world view, personal awareness, feeling for the position where they stand within the social order--in all that, the aristocrats obviously agree so much, and the fact that they agree in them is so known and obvious to them that they can come to personal matters much more quickly than others who must first assure themselves what basis they have in com- mon. In order to "become acquainted with one another," i. e. , to reveal their individualities to one another, the nobles do not need so many preliminaries as those who have to first look for the a priori from which the particulars of thinking, interests, or natures can be presented.
This homogeneity of the sociological form appears to be important in a series of historical phenomena. The strange fact has been noted that many of the families of the high nobility in the separate countries of Europe are of foreign birth. In England the Fitzgerald family and the Herzogs of Leicester originate from Florence, the Herzogs of Portland from Holland; in France the Broglie family from Piedmont, the Herzogs of Des Car from Perugia, the Luynes from Arezzo; in Austria the Clary from Florence; in Prussia the Lynar from Faenza; in Poland the Poniatowski family from Bologna; in Italy the Rocca from Croatia, the Ruspoli from Scotland, the Torlonia from France, etc. Precisely because of its bond to the ownership of land and because of its traditional nationalism, with which its conservative world view tends to be bound up, the nobility seems to be especially little suited for such transplantations. The factors making them alike must be all the more effective, which suggest such a glimmering of the sort within it, which has been called the international republic of the nobles. This is enhanced through particular associations of the national nobility. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, the German nobility had very little connections with one another. Most nobles cared for their interests within the narrower circles of their places of residence or else their narrowest homelands. 11 But as the German nobles of the different regions met together during the war against Napoleon, for example, a contact among them produced what led to the quite unique structure, as it was called the Adelskette (Nobility Chain). The Adelskette was a half-secret association that probably came to be at the time of the Congress of Vienna. The nobility
11 Simmel appears to have in mind the small countries that at the beginning of the nineteenth century had not yet formed a united Germany--ed.
? 646 chapter ten
felt that since the French Revolution its role was in decline in Germany too, particularly through the emancipation of the peasants, and so sought some- how to create a common structure in order to restore its lost importance by taking advantage of the solidarity that existed among the whole nobility. This Adelskette expressly emphasized in its charter that everything political should remain foreign to it. If this might have contained a certain deception or self- deception, it nevertheless brings to expression here the essential thing, i. e. , the nobility have in common what is common to all, purely because they are the nobility, as opposed to the sameness of their political and geographical boundaries. The similarity of purely material interests would not have been big enough to bring about this inter-German association of the nobility if the deeper bond in the form of nobility as such--the interpretation of which is still to be made--had not been effective. Finally a last example: The great importance of the nobility in Austria and the considerable prerogatives people have always granted it there goes back to the fact that, in the extraordinarily heterogeneous and divergent components of the Austrian monarchy, the nobil- ity was still a continually uniform and qualitatively common element, and thus greatly served the unity of the whole. The similar formal position of the nobility in the very different parts of this assemblage of countries enabled it to be a collective Austrian aristocracy even if there is no collective Austrian nation. The unity that it had by virtue of its every similar social position enabled it to serve as the glue for uniting the whole.
However, everything considered up to now is a more or less superficial phe- nomenon that is based on the inner social structure of the nobility, but it still does not identify it. The sociological analysis of the nobility now centers around the general social content of the life of this particular group that possesses a wholly unique relationship to the individual being of its members. Here the individual is not only included in a union of individuals existing before him, contemporaneous with him, and after him, who are bound together following a formula in effect nowhere else; but what characterizes it is that the best and most valuable of this whole rank benefits every single member. It was often emphasized in this inquiry that the collective level of a group, the worth of all that which is really common, lies very close to the level of the one standing lowest in it; for as a rule someone with a high standing can sink to that of the lower, but the lower one cannot rise to that of the higher. Thus what should be common to them will be on the whole what the lower ones possess--as, for example, if a hundred people would march at the same pace, the pace that is kept is that of the person whose ability to march is the most limited. Now with the nobility the assumption is the reverse. Every personage in a noble group (be it in the narrow sense, the noble family, or in the wider sense of the noble of a land or epoch) has a share according to his worth in the fame that precisely the most outstanding members of this group have earned; such a personage joins the heritage of the stratum, as it were, sub beneficio inventarii;12
12 Latin: under the generosity of the inventory--ed.
? the expansion of the group 647
the positive values directly accumulated here in merits, precedence, and honors stream down on the individual in a direct way other than happens in any other group. This is the prejudice that the other strata allows to benefit the nobility that it cultivates among its own, which is ultimately the presupposition of the self-awareness, so to speak, for each individual member and forms as strong an individual foundation for it as a social one for the totality of the social stratum. The nobility has a unique tenacity situated in its social structure in the conserving of its 'objective spirit,' which the productivity of individuals crystallized in tradition, fixed form, work outcomes, etc. Thus in individual families what comprises their merit, glory, and value is what streams together, so to speak, into the general position of the 'nobility,' which is to be nevertheless distinguished in this respect from its purely external power and property. This even appears in an actual inverse formation. It was said of the organization of ancient nations that very frequently a nobility came into existence by the leader of the gens always being selected in the traditional manner from the same lineage. This lineage was thus not the one favored from the outset, but it would become favored only by its being expected that it would always bring forth a person qualified for the position of leader. Consequently while the whole family turns into a nobility, it discounted the service and merit that any one member of it might acquire sometime and which, reflected back, as it were, from the future, might procure the ennobling substance for the whole lineage. It is an informative metaphor when one speaks of the 'noble metals,' of the 'nobility' of gold and silver. This aristocracy of the metal exists, so it seems to me, first in its relative indestructibility: It is preserved forever because of its value, and it only changes the shape in its being continually recast, while its capital value is relatively unchangeable. A similar idea is the basis for the feeling of nobility and for the nobility: as if its individual members were only, so to speak, nothing but different castings, nothing but different forms of an enduring substance of value that is preserved through the whole series of being inherited. Hence the relationship that these individuals have to the historical group leading up to them gains a completely special accent. It is, so to speak, an immortality of the value that the nobility claims for itself and seeks to realize its sociological conditions. The reason for the fact that no aristocracy formed as a closed social stratum in Russia, up to Czar Theodore II,13 the predecessor of Peter the Great is this: The honors and dignities of each person depended exclusively on the 'service,' the official activity, from which a classification for the family derived. The unique principle prevailed, that nobody should serve under a superior who had himself, in his turn, served under the father of the candidate; in order to establish the possible rights and positions of each person according to this principle, special registers were consulted. Continual conflicts over facts and rights among the families coming into consideration were the result of this, open and hidden competitions and rivalries. Therefore
13 Czar Theodore II reigned from 1676 to 1682. The immediate predecessor to Peter the Great was Czar Ivan V, 1682-1689--ed.
? 648 chapter ten
the formation of a centripetal social stratum, the consolidation of individual forces and preferences into that common unified and persisting capital, around which the whole social structure of the nobility grows, was stifled.
This structure, as already described so far, lets one recognize without fur- ther ado why the nobility must attach importance to equality. It was already claimed about the ancient clan government that the nobles of different clans belonged to a single stratum, and that while the clan as such is exogamous as a rule (thus it permits no marriage among its members), that stratum always had the inclination to be endogamous, i. e. marrying only within itself. If the nobility presupposes, as it were, a strong foundation, with which each member in it is equipped and which must be passed on to later generations undiminished, each member must also emerge from only this circle; no circle in which privileges are not hereditary, which created that foundation, should be blended into it. Only thus can one be sure by and large that every member would also actually share in the power, attitude, and importance of the whole and that the particular relationship would be realized in which the value of the whole extends through each individual. This self-amplification from within supports the unique solidarity and self-sufficiency of this stratum that, so to speak, cannot need and must not need what lies outside itself. Thus it is like, so to speak, an island in the world comparable to artwork in which every part receives its meaning from the whole and testifies with its frame that the world can do nothing within and that the work is absolutely self-sufficient. This form creates a large part of the aesthetic appeal of the nobility that it exercised throughout time; for it holds not only for the individual, who thus attaches to and depends on good breeding and on the members of the nobility having cared for and cultivated their body and their social form over long generations better than is the case in other social strata, but that kind of appeal hovers in the image of the whole of the nobility, an attraction clearly dependent on the aesthetically satisfying form of the being-for-itself and solidarity-in-itself, the unity of the parts--all of which is analogous to artwork. This amplification of the being of the individual with a psychologically and historically inherited content can admittedly lead directly to a decadent emptiness. It appears as though traditional social contents and significance only become actual life values when they are balanced by the formative strength rising to a certain extent out of the individual. Consequently a self confidence of personal existence, a feeling of equally strong independence, but also a responsibility on the part of the individual, appear in the more excellent manifestations of the nobility. This is the result of the unique narrowness under the social forma- tions with which a dependable essence, extended along the three dimensions of the past, present, and future, merged with the individual existence and has been converted into the consciousness on the part of the individual of a higher life value. But where the individual factor is too weak for the personal form to create the supra-personal essence, decadent phenomena appear, as noted: Then that essence inevitably becomes form; there is no importance to that life but the preservation of the specific honor of the social stratum and 'keeping one's composure'--somewhat as ultimately emerged in the nobility of the ancient re? gime.
the expansion of the group 649
The importance of the 'family tree' for this relationship of the family--as well as for the noble group generally--to the individual is of a deeper symbol- ism: The essential matter that forms the individual must have gone through the single trunk of the whole, just as the matter of the branch and fruit is what also formed the trunk. Perhaps this social constitution explains the aversion to work that the aristocracy manifested through the whole of social history up to the most recent era in which the economy hastened the creation of change through democratization. In real 'work' the subject is devoted to the object every moment, and however much the yield of work returns back to the subject again, the action as such still remains directed to an impersonal structure and finds its fullness in a formation of just this--be it a matter of the construc- tion and reconstruction of ideas in the work of discovery, of the pedagogical formation of a student, or of working on physical materials. However, this is counter to the basic life feeling of the aristocracy as such, since what finds its center in the being of that subject is absolutely personal and emerges in the value of aristocracy alone and in what emerges from that, while work in the most meaningful sense is activity directed onto an exterior determined by the terminus ad quem. Thus Schiller distinguishes the noble natures, who pay with what they are, from the common natures, who pay with what they do. The nobles busy themselves, but they do not work (all such definitions, of course, change a thousand ways in every empirical case and appear misdirected). War and hunting, the historically typical preoccupation of the nobility, are still not 'work' in the real sense, despite all the toil attached to them. The subjective factor has a decidedly greater emphasis over the objective in these activities; the result does not manifest, as in work, an object set apart from the person that absorbed the person's energy into itself, but the emphasis lies in testing the strength of the subject itself. At most, artistic work offers some analogy with the aristocrat's kind of activity; it indeed does not really work on the object; rather, the forming of it is only important for it as the radiating out of a purely subjective movement from within. Only the activity of the artist and its value flow exclusively from the enigmatically unique point of its indi- viduality, beyond which no further authority can be found that would have supported it or that would have been acting in it, while the specific action and consciousness of the aristocrat flows from the traditional essence of the family and the social stratum that found in him only an individual form, one now admittedly self confident and at rest.
A unique exception to this characteristic of the nobility comes about through the accumulation or ideal crystallization of dignities and offices, fortunes and honors, duties and rights that are gained within the family and social stratum and in which every member shared--not pro rata as with a share but as an indivisible property that is, as it were, the a priori of every personal being and act. In China, the rule prevails that the hereditary nobility gradually decreases. What would remain continuously in the family and thus what would make an accumulation of its importance possible is never granted quintessentially to the nobility, but there is an infinitely finely gradated series of honors; we have no expressions corresponding to these levels. And the son always stands on a level, a step lower than the father, so that after a particular succession
650 chapter ten
of generations the nobility ends altogether. If I am correctly informed, as the highest noble, the stratum of prince is conferred for twenty-six generations, so that after their course--and this also holds for the descendents of princes of the royal house not coming to power--the family returns again to the com- moner status. This anomaly, which can only happen in an official or paper nobility, amounts to a normal progression with, so to speak, a negative sign. For this, though perhaps also deriving from an original grant, has its meaning in that gradual accumulation of values that were handed down; meanwhile the substance, as it were, is given for a time and is gradually used up. On the other hand a pattern proper to Tahiti manifests the normal form in a very instructive manner. There, if a son is born to a noble, the father abdicates his social position in favor of that of the son and, in fact "because the son has more nobility than the father. " In a satirical poem of Glassbrenner from the middle of the nineteenth century the hollow dignity and inflated paltriness of a noble is depicted with the concluding verse, that he would still rightly have one point of pride:
If on some day he must blessed die As an ancestor yet he will lie.
This is the same basic feeling as in the case in Tahiti, and on the sociological basis that the nobility once secured with the greatest historical success, it can appear in no way as meaningless as certain types of decline and general social circumstances in which that basis can no longer exist.
Now the definition of this basis is allowed to be carried out according to the broadest categories of life. Each person appears as some combination of pre- determination and happenstance, of given material and a unique life-formation, of social inheritance and an individual management of it. In each person we see the prejudices of one's race, social stratum, tradition, family--in short, of what makes one the bearer of pre-existent contents and norms; we see these combined with unpredictability and personality, the free being-for-self--the former, as it were, the a priori, the latter the singular reality that together with the former generates the empirical phenomenon. Now the two are mixed in various ways in the large social type-formations and actually in the nobil- ity in a quite individual way, the scientific establishing of which in abstract concepts, of course, is independent of the complications of reality that allow clouding, distracting, and particularizing forces to have effects in these pure relationships. Here those manifold prejudgments are merged together as in a riverbed: While the collected life contents, upbringing and marriage, occupation and political standpoint, aesthetic inclinations and economic expenditure are 'appropriate for the social stratum,' all become conformances that hand down to the individual the material of life as a byproduct, as it were, led through a single channel. There were certainly binding prejudgments of the same or greater strength everywhere in the guild and priesthoods, in the hereditary occupations and in the constraint of the caste and class entities. But now what is different about the nobility is that at the same time the other element of life--personality, freedom, stability--assumed a form changing into a higher value and meaning than occurs in the other forms since the substance handed
the expansion of the group 651
down in one was not something objective, as it were, transcending the indi- vidual; but the particular form and power of the individual makes this whole traditional material alive in the first place. Although the individual may often experience enough constraint from it, the meaning of the whole configuration is still that this valuable material that the social stratum and the family had accumulated would benefit the autonomous individually directed essence of the individual and would thus undergo no diminution but an enhancement. The self-sufficient, self-responsible, and satisfying existence is not a departure from the general well-being and common property, as in many other structures proper to the society, but their development, protection, and enlargement. This particular synthesis of the nobility stands between the extremes of the individual being engulfed by the group and it facing the individual with an oppositional independence. Through the stricture of the form of life proper to the social stratum it has that which created a very wide meeting ground among its members. Through the insistence on the same level of birth that brings about a physiological guarantee of the qualitative and historical solidarity of the stratum, through the stratagem of its tradition that allows the values and acquisitions of the family and social stratum to flow without loss as into a reservoir--through these social means the nobility, to an otherwise unattainable extent, melted its individuals down into the collectivity. However, the structure so impersonal in origin now has more decidedly than any other its goal and meaning in the existence of the individual, in the power and importance of the individual, and in the freedom and self-sufficiency of the individual's life. While the nobility, in its purest historical manifestation, unites the life values of the individual with unique strength in its collectivity, and while on the other hand its development aims with unconditional unanimity at the formation, growth, and independence of the individual, the nobility provided a histori- cally unique solution to the balance between the whole and the individual, the predetermined realities and the personal arrangements of life.
Finally, the emergence of the money economy provides the greatest example in world history of the correlation between social expansion and the individual emphasis of life in content and form. The natu- ral economy produces small economic circles relatively closed in on themselves; first the difficulty of transportation limits their scope and, accordingly, the technology of the natural economy does not allow much of a differentiation and individualization of activities to come about. The money economy alters this situation in two ways. The general acceptance of money as well as its easy transportability, and finally its transformation into finance and mail-order commerce allow its effects to spread to unlimited distances and ultimately create a single economic circle with interrelated interests, complementary production, and uni- form practices in the general cultural world. On the other hand, money causes an immense individualization of economically active people: The
? 652 chapter ten
form of the money wage makes the worker infinitely more independent than any natural-economic payment; possessing money gives the person a previously unheard of freedom of movement, and the liberal norms that are regularly linked to the money economy place the individual in open competition against every other individual; finally this competition as well as that extension of the economic circle force a specialization of activity otherwise out of the question, at the height of its driven one-sidedness. These are only possible with the closing of transactions in the framework of a rather large circle. Money is the bond within the economy that sets the maximum expansion of the economic group into a relationship with the maximum differentiation of its members on the side of freedom and self-responsibility as well as on that of the qualitative division-of-labor differentiation; or more correctly, money develops the smaller, more closed, more homogeneous groups of the natural economy into a different one whose uniform character divides into the two aspects of expansion and individualization.
Political developments bring this pattern about in a great number of individual areas, admittedly under a manifold variation of the basic relationship. Somewhat in the way that no simultaneous progression occurs from the smaller, narrowly socialized circle to the large group and to the differentiation of the personality but a choice and alter- nation, the accent of the more developed situation falls either on the establishment of a broad general public and growing importance of the central organs or on the individual members becoming independent. Or, the expansion of the circle is not on a par with the development of the personality, even in the context of the circle's members, but with the idea of a highest personage to whom, as it were, the individual's will is submissive. I will cite some examples from the different realms of politics. In the agrarian case, the dissolution of the rural com- mons since the end of the Middle Ages occurred in these forms. The developing centralist states confiscated the commons, the common march, as a public good inside the state property and handed it over to the administrative organs of the whole state; on the other hand, to the extent that this did not happen, it parceled it among those with legitimate rights to it as private property. And in this latter action the two tendencies toward the individual and the most general are again simultaneously notable: For this parceling out was directed on the one hand by Roman legal concepts with their enthronement of individual interest and on the other hand by the idea that the parceling out of the commons would be to the advantage of the best cultivation of the
the expansion of the group 653
land, as well as of the widest community. Under very different mate- rial and collective conditions a phase of the history of the Allmend, the common property in the Swiss communities, still manifested the same form in the nineteenth century. Insofar as the Allmenden are transformed into the property of portions of communities, territorial and village corporations, they are handled in some cantons (Zurich, St. Gallen, among others) by the legislation with the tendency to parcel them out either to the individual neighbors or to allow them to be handed over to the larger territorial communities, because the smallest associations possessed too small a personal and territorial basis for allowing their property to be productive for the public entity.
The form of agrarian political measures highlighted above is gener- ally more widespread in post-medieval development in Germany in the realm of internal politics. The authorities treated the particular circles of the unions set off against each other and against the whole with differentiated tendencies: on the one hand making them purely private legal structures that were a personal matter of the individual share holders, on the other hand elevating them to the status of state institutions. These corporations, which had dominated medieval society, had gradually solidified and narrowed in such a way that public life threatened to disintegrate into an incoherent sum of egoistic factions. Then with the beginning of the modern era, the thought of the all- inclusive universality, in contrast to these and dissolving them, was set by and admittedly in the form of the absolutism of the prince. Accordingly from this came the principle: 'the same law for all,' i. e. , the freeing of the individual on the one hand from the inhibiting of practical activity by the privileges of corporations, and on the other hand the loss by the individual of prerogatives enjoyed as a member of them, but which forced the individual into an often unnatural association with associ- ates. Thus it is quite basically a matter of destroying, so to speak, the narrow, homogeneous, and so to speak middle level associations, the prevalence of which had characterized the earlier situation, in order to lead the development upwards to the state and downwards to the unprecedented freedom of the individual. The fact that on the other hand this state in practice found its effectiveness in the form of the highest personality, the unlimited sovereign, is so little a counter level of authority against the basic pattern that the latter is rather directly realized in an extraordinarily large number of cases, one after the other as well as simultaneously. This is the often emphasized link between republicanism and tyranny, between despotism and leveling, that history
654 chapter ten
makes manifest. Any form of government that borrows its character from the aristocracy or business class, that, in short, gives a greater part of social and political consciousness to narrower juxtaposed circles, as soon as it aims beyond itself at all, presses on the one hand toward consolidating in a personal leading authority and on the other hand toward socialism painted over with anarchism, which seeks to produce the absolute right of the free person by erasing all differences. The break up of the narrowly delimited groups within an otherwise unified whole has such a strict relationship with the accentuation of individuality that both the unity of a ruling personage and the individual freedom of all group members are interchangeable, merely as two variations on the same theme. It has been observed of political aristocracies, which are always constructed in the social pattern of closed and strictly restricted circles, that they seldom have great military success in broader contexts; and this may go back to their aversion toward those two authoritative levels, which are set upon replacing them in succession or at the same time: They are afraid on the one hand of rousing the whole population to an uprising and united action; on the other hand they are distrustful of individual generals with broad authority and great successes. Thus the correlation between the volonte? ge? ne? rale and autocracy is so decided that it is used often enough as an official cover for intentions that aim ultimately at the suppression of the former. As the Earl of Leicester was appointed to the general governorship of the Netherlands in 1586, he strove for an unlimited reign far over the heads of the narrower authority of the estates general and the provincial social strata, up to then the governing bodies; and he did so in fact under the pretense of the absolutely democratic principle that the will of the people should be the absolute sovereign, and it had appointed Leicester. But it was thereby expressly emphasized that merchants and attorneys, farmers and crafts persons were not to interfere at all in governance but were to simply obey. Thus the ostensibly leveling democratization was driven so far that both the higher and the lower social strata were disenfranchised and only the ideal unity of the abstract 'people in general' remained; and opponents declared very soon that this newly discovered idea of the 'people' only sought to transfer this unconditional sovereignty to one person.
Our basic relationship gains yet further elaboration in local politics. The relationship is already evident in the Middle Ages in the English cities, with the larger ones being dominated by individual corporations or major nobles while in the smaller ones the people as a whole had
the expansion of the group 655
ruled. A homogeneity of members who uphold the evenness of their share of the governance simply corresponds to the smaller circles, but in the larger ones the shear mass of private individuals was pushed out and left to one side, and the individual ruling personages to the other. In a certain rudimentary form the administration of the North American cities shows the same pattern. As long as the cities are small, their offices being headed by a number of persons would emerge as the most suitable mode; but if they grow into metropolises, it would be more practical to entrust the office to only one person. Large-scale conditions need the individual, a fully responsible person, for their rep- resentation and management; the smaller circle could administer itself in a more undifferentiated way while a greater number of its members were always immediately at the rudder. Thus this social difference cor- responds completely with the development by which the general political tendency of the several states of the union substantiate the basic pattern at issue here: It should begin with a weakening of parliamentarianism in the later decades and replace it in two ways: in one instance with direct plebiscite and in another instance with monarchical institutions, through a transfer of power to individual persons or person.
Finally, church politics provides examples that already find their analogy in purely religious developments. The polytheism of antiquity had many of the traits that I have collected here under the concept of the 'narrower group. ' The cults set themselves apart by sharp inner, though local, boundaries; the groups of adherents were centripetal, often indifferent toward one another, often hostile. Even the deities were often ordered aristocratically, with complex dominations, subor- dinations, and separate spheres of influence. At the beginning of our calendar in classical culture, this situation led to monotheism, to the enthronement of a single and personal God who united in himself the spheres of influence of each singular and separate deity; and this means--insofar as our correlation appears as an almost logical necessity at this point--that the boundaries fell between the circles of adherents, that there would be a shepherd and a flock, that a 'greater circle' existed among the religions, the members of which existed entirely at one level in an 'equality before God. ' The linkage of the religious community to the political one--characteristic of the pre-Christian religiosity--the centering of the religious group around the particular deity proper to it alone, which willingly gave room for many others beside itself, broke off. At the same time there was also the politically homogeneous solidarity of this group, religion as a socio-political
656 chapter ten
duty, every member being answerable to their deity for the errors of the whole collectivity. The religious individual with an unconditional self-responsibility emerged, the religiosity of the 'Ka? mmerlein' (cell), the independence from any bond to the world and people other than the one there was in the undivided immediate relationship of the individual soul to its God--the God who was thus no less, indeed precisely thereby 'one's own,' because this was equally the God of all. Within the vast leveled universality, as it arose from the dissolution and amalgamation of all earlier particular groups, individuality was the counterpart of the absolute and unitary personhood of God, who emerged from the same analysis and synthesis of all earlier particular gods. And this form of development, which Christianity manifested in its original purity, was repeated once again in the politics of the Catholic Church. Within her the tendency toward the construction of separate groups, of a sharp demarcation of ranks and interests, also raised up anew an aristocracy of the clergy for the church over the stratum of the laity. But Pope Gregory VII14 already united a decided demagogy with the absoluteness of his individual struggle for power, which brought the sharpest contrasts together and passed over the head of the exclusive aristocratic bishops. Afterwards celibacy reinforced this effort--since the married priest had a backing in a smaller group and thus very quickly generated a united opposition within the church, while in his individual isolation he thus fell prey unconditionally to the unrestricted universal--and Jesuitism took it up with the greatest success. For everywhere it countered the status-inclination of the clergy, emphasized the universal character of the priest, which allows him to feel as one with the faithful of all social strata; and in contrast to every aristocratic system it had as a purpose a uniform leveling of all the faithful on the one hand and a papal absolutism on the other.
Maybe one could express the whole relationship that is meant here and takes shape in the most diverse kinds of simultaneity, sequence,
14 Pope Gregory VII (the monk Hildebrand), reigned 1073-1085. Simmel's is a particularly unsympathetic interpretation of this medieval pope. The secular authori- ties, i. e. nobility, had been controlling ecclesiastical appointments up to 1049, when Emperor Henry III (1039-1056) appointed Pope Leo IX. Leo issued a decree chang- ing the way his successors would be selected--election by the cardinal clergy of the suburbs of Rome, a method that bypassed the Roman nobility and the Emperor. Gregory VII was the first pope elected under the new method. His effort to have the papacy control the appointment of bishops was part of a larger reform project known as the Cluniac Reform--ed.
? the expansion of the group 657
and either/or in a way that the smaller group forms, so to speak, a middle proportionality between the expanded group and individuality, so that, closed in on itself and needing no other input, it produces the same result for life chances that emerges from the combination of the latter two. Now I will select some examples from jurisprudence, in fact from fields that are absolutely different in their historical substance. So, for instance, the total power of the Roman concept of the state had as its correlate that next to the ius publcum there was a ius privatum. 15 The legal restraint on the universal whole that was manifest in itself required a corresponding one for individuals inside that whole. There was the community in the broadest sense on the one hand and the individual person on the other; the most ancient Roman law knew no corpora- tions, and in general this spirit remained with it. In contrast, there were no different legal principles for the community and for the individual; however, these publics are not the all-inclusive ones of the Roman state but smaller ones, occasioned by the changing and manifold needs of the individual. In smaller communities that disconnection of public law from private is not necessary since the individual is bound more deeply to the whole. This correlation appears as a unifying development in the right of blood revenge, for example in Arabia. Its essence rests entirely on the solidarity of sharply bounded tribal groups and on their autonomy: It held for the whole tribe or the family of the murderer and was carried out by the whole tribe or the family of the murder victim. Concerning it Mohammed's preference was clearly bound up with the explanation argued above. A national or state universality should transcend the particular groups and be leveling them through the common religion; a legal verdict would come from that universality, which replaced the particular legal interest with a supreme universally recognized authority. And accordingly, the verdict should affect the guilty individual alone and the collective responsibility of the particular group should discontinue: The widest universality and the individually circumscribed person now exist as results, albeit opposite ones, of the differentiation of the intermediary structures. With equal clarity, though with completely different contents, this form type appears in ancient Rome as the resultant stage of a continuous series, as development there broke up the patriarchal family grouping. If civil law and duties in war and peace pertained now to the sons as well as to the father, if
15 Ius publicum . . . ius privatum, Latin: public law . . . private law--ed.
? 658 chapter ten
they could acquire personal importance, influence, booty etc. , a tear thus rent the patria potestas,16 which had to split the patriarchal relation- ship even more, and in fact in favor of the widened state functionality, in favor of the law of the greater whole over that of its members, but also in favor of the person; for the person could gain an importance from the relationship to this whole that the patriarchal relationship had curbed to an incomparable extent. Finally the formally similar process occurs in a particularly mixed phenomenon in which it is ascertained only with a tight grip on the basic idea. Up to the Norman era in England, a community was assigned to the individual sheriff and the royal judge for a long time, so that the jurisdiction had a certain local quality or constraint in which the interest of the community and that of the state were merged. However, the two separated after the middle of the twelfth century: Royal jurisdiction was now exercised by judicial commissions that traveled around great areas and thus apparently in a much more general and locally uninhibited way, while community interests were looked after through the growing importance of the local jury. In its purely internal interests the community represented the role of the individual here in our correlation; it was a social individual that had earlier lived its legal life in an undifferentiated unity with the universal state but now acquired a purer being-for-itself and with that stood next to the now just as clearly developed law of the large universality, or even in opposition to it.
It is only a consequence of the thought of such a relationship between the individual and the social if we say: The more the person comes to the foreground of interest as an individual rather than as a member of society, and therefore as that characteristic that pertains to someone purely as a human, the closer must the bond be that leads someone above the head of one's social group, as it were, toward all that is human in general, and makes the thought of an ideal unity of the human world obvious to a person. It is necessary not to make a discon- nection in this tendency in the comprehension of the latter idea, which is actually required logically, even if it were hindered by all kinds of historical limitations. So we find in Plato on the one hand an interest in the purely individual, in the perfection of the individual person, an interest that is broadened into an ideal of friendship, and on the other hand one in the purely political, with a total neglect of the intervening
16 Latin: fatherland power--ed.
? the expansion of the group 659
associations and the interests borne by them. The way in which he emphasized the formation and activity of the individual person and the value of one's soul as an independent separate structure should also have consequently broken down the last barrier, that of the Greek form of the state, as also occurred with other philosophers of the time. It is only the coincidence of his political tendencies and national Greek attitude that kept him from drawing the real conclusion from his ideal construct for the individual: that beyond the individual there need be only the whole of humanity as a collectivity. It is the same if in Chris- tianity the absolute concentration of all values on the soul and its salvation was singled out and thus that bond is still not recognized that is thereby made between Christianity and the whole of human existence, this process of unifying and equalizing (as the equality would also be by degrees, extending out onto the whole of humanity) finds its firm barrier rather in the membership in the church--somewhat as Zwingli explained that all orders, sects, separate associations, etc. must fall away, since all Christians should be brothers--but just only Christians. In a wholly consistent manner, on the other hand, extreme individualism frequently enters into an alliance with the doctrine of the equality of all persons. It is psychologically obvious enough that the terrible inequal- ity into which the individual was born in some epochs of social history unleashed a reaction in two ways: both toward the right of individual- ity and that of general equality, since both tend to come up short for the larger masses to the same degree. A manifestation such as Rousseau is to be understood only from this two-fold relationship. The increasing development of general education shows the same tendency: It seeks to eliminate the sharp differences in mental levels and give each person the possibility, denied earlier, of asserting the individual talent of each precisely by producing a certain equality. I have already spoken above about the form that our correlation has in the concept of 'human rights. ' The individualism of the eighteenth century sought only freedom, only the canceling out of those 'middle' circles and interstitial authorities that separated people from humanity, i. e. of those that hindered the development of that pure humanity that would form the value and core of personal existence in each individual, but covered and made one-sided by historical group separations and separate affiliations. As soon as one is really reliant on the self, on what is ultimate and essen- tial within one, that individual stands on the same basis as any other, and freedom makes equality evident; the individuality that really is just that and not curbed by social repression represents the absolute unity
660 chapter ten
of the human race and blends into that unity. It is not necessary to explain how this theoretical-ethical conviction of the eighteenth century was elaborated in thoroughly practical and real conditions and simply acquired an enormous impact on them. That later meaning of indi- vidualism--that the actuality of human nature would entail being different in quality and value with respect to each person, and that the development and growth of this being different would be a moral imperative--this meaning is admittedly the immediate negation of any equality. For it seems altogether inadmissible to me to construct an equality precisely by each being so good as to be someone special and incomparable to any other. For someone to be so is indeed not a positive quality at all for oneself, but originates precisely in the com- parison alone with others who are different only in the judgment of the subject that does not find in one what it has found in others. This is most immediately clear in the comparison of only two objects: The black object and the white object obviously do not have a common quality between them, that one is not white and the other is not black. Thus if there is only a sophistical misuse of words with reference to the equivalence of the human race to a qualitative singularity of the individual, the ideal of the unity of the human race is in no way irrec- oncilable with this assumption. For one can understand the difference of the individuals as a kind of division of labor, even if it means not at all an economic production nor an immediate cooperation of all. Admittedly this changes into the speculations of social metaphysics. The more unique someone is, the more one occupies a place that can be filled only by that person according to one's being, action, and fate and the more that place is reserved for that person alone in the order of the whole, the more is this whole to be grasped as a unity, a meta- physical organism in which every soul is a member, unable to be exchanged with any other, but presupposing all others and their work- ing together for one's own life. Where the need exists to experience the totality of mental existence in the world as a unity, every person will need each other in this individual differentiation where the indi- vidual entities are necessarily complementary; each fills the place that all others allow for--it is more readily sufficient for this need for unity and hence for the grasp of the totality of existence through this than through the equality of natures, by which basically anyone would be able to replace anyone and the individual thus actually appears super- fluous and without a real link with the whole. Meanwhile the ideal of equality, which in a wholly different sense united the utmost individu-
the expansion of the group 661
alization with the utmost expansion of the circle of beings belonging together, has never been furthered more than by the Christian doctrine of the immortality and infinitely valuable soul. The soul in its meta- physical individuality, placed on itself alone before its God, the single absolute value of existence, is like any other in that which alone matters in the end; for in the infinite and in the absolute there are no differ- ences: The empirical differences of people do not come into consider- ation before the eternal and transcendent, in which all are the same. Individuals simply are not only the sums of the qualities whereby they were naturally as different as those qualities are, but apart from those, each one is an absolute entity by virtue of personhood, freedom, and immortality. The sociology of Christianity thus offers the historically greatest and at the same time metaphysical example for the correlation in question here: The soul free from all bonds, from all historical rela- tionships constructed for any purposes whatever, aimed in the absolute being-for-itself only at those powers that are the same for all, comprises with all others a homogeneous being inclusive of all life; the uncondi- tioned personality and the unconditioned expansion of the circle of what is like it are only two expressions for the unity of this religious conviction. And as much as this is at all a metaphysics or one inter- pretation of life, it is still unmistakable in the broad scope as an a priori attitude and feeling that it has influenced the historical relation- ships of people to one another and the attitude with which they encounter one another.
Indeed, the sociological understanding that has the general world view as both cause and effect within the correlation proposed here is evident even if the question of the narrowness or breadth of the world depiction does not even stop at the human world but includes objectivity altogether, the forms of which are so often formed by us as analogous to socially accustomed ones. It can probably be said that antiquity lacked the deepest and precise idea of subjectivity as much as the broadest and clearest idea of objectivity. The idea of natural law as a quintessentially objective and universally impartial control over being, in contrast to all 'values,' was no less foreign to it than the authentic idea of the 'I' with its productivity and freedom, its ambiguity, and its values outweighing the world; the soul neither went so far outside itself nor so far into itself as later occurred through the synthesis, or even antithesis, of the Christian life awareness through natural science and cultural science. This cannot be without an inner and at least indirect connection with the socio-political structure of the Greek world. The
662 chapter ten
enormous internal prerogative of the narrower state circle by and large captivated the individual inside a certain middling view of the world and life between the most universal and the most personal, and the whole form of existence produced by this limitation had to subside in order to create room for development on the two more extreme sides.
More directly than in its importance for the cosmic-metaphysical, our correlation becomes clear in the area of ethics. The Cynics already broke up the bond to the narrower social structure, otherwise typical for the Greek world, insofar as they embraced a basically cosmopolitan attitude on the one hand and on the other an individualist or egoistic one and excluded the middle link of patriotism. The expansion of the circle that the view and interest of the individual fills may perhaps annul the particular form of egoism that generates the real and ideal limitation of the social sphere and may favor a broadmindedness and enthusiastic broadening sweep of the soul that does not allow an approach to combining personal life with a narrow circle of interest of fellows in solidarity; but, significantly enough, where circumstances or the character hinder this result, precisely the extreme opposite will readily appear. To the greatest extent, as I have already mentioned, the money economy and the liberal tendencies associated with it loos- ened and dissolved the narrower affiliations on the one hand from the guild level ones to the national, and inaugurated the world economy, and on the other hand thoughtlessness favored egoism at all levels. The less producers know their consumers because of the enlargement of the economic circle, the more their interest is directed exclusively toward the level of the price that they can get from them; the more impersonally and less qualitatively their public face them, all the more is there a correspondingly exclusive orientation toward the non-quali- tative result of work, toward money. Apart from those highest areas where the energy of the work arises from abstract idealism, workers will invest their person and ethical interests in work as much as their circle of buyers is also personally known to them and stand as close as has a place only in smaller relationships. As the size of the group for which the work grows, as the indifference with which they are able to face it increases, various factors decline that would limit economic egoism. Human nature and human relationships are so positioned in many respects that they turn back on themselves all the more if the individual's relationships exceed a certain perimeter size. Thus it is a matter not only of the purely quantitative extension of the circle that already has to lessen the intrinsic personal interest in each of its points
the expansion of the group 663
down to a minimum, but also of the qualitative variety within it, which prevents the interest from being set at a single point with unambiguous decisiveness and which thus leaves egoism, so to speak, as the logical result of the mutual paralysis of unbearable demands. From this formal theme one has it that, for example, one of the factors contributing to the color and inner heterogeneity of the Hapsburg possessions is that in their politics the Hapsburgs had in view only the interests of their house. Finally, it is the spatial extension of the market--not necessarily coinciding with its actual enlargement--that allows the subject to face at least its narrower circle egoistically. Up to the reigns of Henry III and Edward I, the English social strata were separated by the fact that many times their interests stretched out beyond the homeland: An English noble had a greater interest in a foreign war led by the nobility than in the domestic struggles over the law. A city dweller was more often interested in the situation of Dutch business conditions than in that of the English cities if it was not directly a matter of one's own business. The major church officials felt more like members of an international ecclesiastical entity than they showed specifically English sympathies. Only since the era of the above-mentioned kings did the classes begin to really merge into a united nation, and an end came to the mutual isolation, the egoistic character of which had been thoroughly associ- ated with that expansion of cosmopolitan interests.
Beyond the importance that the expansion of groups has for the dif- ferential setting of wills, there is that for the development of the feeling of the personal 'I. ' Admittedly nobody will fail to recognize that, because of its mass character, its rapid pluralism, its all-boundary transcending evening out of countless previously conserved characteristics, the style of modern life led directly to an unheard of leveling precisely of the personality-form of life. But just as little should the counter tenden- cies to this be unrecognized, as much as they may be deflected and paralyzed in the whole manifest effect. The fact that life in a wider circle and the interaction with it develops a greater consciousness of personhood in and for itself than grows in a narrow circle lies above all in the personality documenting itself directly through the exchange of individual feelings, thoughts, and actions. The more continuously and steadily life progresses, and the less the extremes of the emotional life are remote from their average level, the less starkly the feeling of personhood enters in; but the wider they extend, and the more ener- getically they sprout, the more powerfully do persons sense themselves as personalities. As persistence is only ascertained anywhere in what
664 chapter ten
changes, as only change in accidents allows permanence in substance to appear, so then is the 'I' especially experienced apparently as that which remains in all the change of psychological content, even if the latter gives it an especially rich opportunity. The personality is not sim- ply the individual current condition, not the individual quality or the individual, though still such a unique destiny, but something that we feel apart from the details, something matured in consciousness from their experienced reality--if this, as it were, subsequently existing personality is also only the symptom, the ratio cognoscendi17 of an underlying unified individuality that serves as the determining basis of this multiplicity but which cannot become conscious somewhat immediately but only as the gradual result of those multiple contents and eventualities of life. As long as psychological stimulations, especially feelings, occur only in a low number, the 'I' is merged with them and remains latently planted in them; it rises above them only to the extent that it becomes clear in our consciousness through the fullness of the generic differences that the 'I' itself is still common to all this, just as the higher idea of individual phenomena does not arise for us, then, if we know only one or a few of their formations, but only through knowledge of very many of them, and all the more highly and purely, the more clearly the difference in kind correlatively emerges in them. This change of the contents of the 'I,' however, which is actually only present to consciousness as the stationary pole in the transience of psychological phenomena, will be much more extraordinarily vivid within a large circle than in life within a smaller group. Stimulations of the feeling on which it is especially dependent for the subjective consciousness of the 'I' occur precisely where the very differentiated individual stands amidst other very differentiated individuals, and then comparisons, frictions, special- ized relationships precipitate a plethora of reactions that remain latent in the narrower undifferentiated group, but here provoke the feeling of the 'I' as what is quintessentially proper to the self through precisely its fullness and generic difference.
A less direct way in which the relatively large group attains a special freedom within the person and a being-for-self for its members runs through the formation of organs that--as was examined above--lets the original immediate interactions of individuals crystallize in them and transfer to particular persons and structures. The more purely
17 Latin: basis for knowing--ed.
? the expansion of the group 665
and more completely this division of labor occurs--obviously with the extent of the enlargement of the group--the more will the individual be freed from the interactions and fusions replaced by it and abandon its centripetal concerns and tendencies. Forming organs is the means of uniting the solidarity of the group to the greatest freedom of the individuals. Admittedly, the organs bind every member to the group itself and thus to each other; but the decisive thing is that the immediate interactions preceding this arrangement drew the totality of the person into specialized activity in a way that brought about a disproportionate expenditure of energy. Whoever is not a judge for a whole life but only when the community is called together is not only hindered in actual practice but is burdened with extraneous concepts and interests in the exercise of the judicial office in an entirely different way from the profes- sional judge. On the other hand once one is concerned with the court in the advanced circumstance, it is only then that one's whole interest is also really engaged in it. So long as every father of the household is a priest, he must function as such whether or not he is the right person for it; if there is a church with a professional priest, he enters into it because he really feels compelled by it and thus is completely into the activity. As long as no division of production exists, the individual must use what is produced just once with perhaps wholly different needs and wishes awakened in the meantime; as soon as there are special products for each need, everyone can choose what is desired so that one need not consume with mixed feelings. Thus the differentiating out of social organs does not mean that the individual would be detached from the bond with the whole but rather direct only the objectively justified portion of the personality to the bond. The point at which one is particularly affected by the whole or the arrangement of the totality now no longer draws the irrelevant portions of one's person into the relationship. With the organ, with the result and characteristics of the growth of the group, the interconnections are dissolved by which one must join in and deal with members in their situations and activities that do not belong to what one is interested in.
Finally, in the area of intellectuality, the interrelationships of our theoretical ideas often develop in the exact same form-type that we have observed here in the interrelationships of individuals with each other and thereby, perhaps more than individual social examples could, confirm this deeper sense stretching out over all details; one would call it its objective meaning which is only realized historically in all empiri- cal cases and only with an approximate purity.
666 chapter ten
Excursus on the Analogy of the Individual Psychological and the
Sociological Relationships
This analogy is in and of itself not of a sociological but a social philosophical nature in that its content is not knowledge of society but that of a general interconnection that is only found to be an example of it in social form. That individuals within a society frequently act toward one another in the same forms as the mental elements within an individual intellect is a very old obser- vation. It could be thought psychologically in a general combinatorial analy- sis in regularly repeating forms of relationships among such elements.