introduction, by donald levine (ix-lxiii)
(x): re: his noncomformity, contrast between Simmel and Durkheim "could scarcely be more conspicuous"
(xii): "he believed that the ultimate justification for scholarship lies in the materials it provides for the cultivation of educated individuals."
(xiii): "simmel's creativity was continuously exercised along three discernible lines"
- origins, essences, and destinies of cultural forms.
- "origins and structural properties of diverse social forms."
- "the formal properties of fulfilled personality."
- early 1890s, influenced by social darwinism
- neo-Kantian position for analysis of social and cultural forms
- in his last years, concerned with "developing a philosophy of life"
(xv): starting point is distinction between form and content
(xvi-xvii): key--"forms emerge to shape contents when the undifferentiated unity of immediate experience is ruptured by some sort of stress. the experiencing self divides into a self-conscious subject and a confronted object..." [a la Heidegger, at this level of generality]. this is the first level of cultural development, when culture is still 'pegged' to practical, structural interests. but, the more successful of these forms can take on a life of their own, and become 'objects of cultivation' themselves. [of course, there is a clear question raised by this question of success]. past this second level of cultural development, we come to a third--where "worlds" [of experience] can be formed.
(xviii): on individuality--"...individual persons are only limited realizations of their ideal selves--ideal not in the sense of a projection of the actual tendencies and syntheses manifested in each individual's own existence. the attainment of individuality is thus not a matter of arbitrary subjectivity, but rather a movement toward the realization of a determinat objective form."
(xix-xx): "objective culture" ("the complex of ideal and actualized [cultural] products") vs. "subjective culture" ("the extent to which individuals assimilate and make use of these products...")
(xx-xxi): 'it is our task not to complain or to condone but only to understand...'
(xxi): philosophy, for simmel, "operates at such a level of abstraction... that it does not matter if the general propositions it asserts are contradicted by data obtained form a position much nearer to things."
(xxii): important--anti-positivist understanding of history, insofar as history is not simply an accumulation of events that have actually occured (i.e., as content), but is a form-giving science--it is "a special way of constructing reality... history is that way of ordering the world that selects certain contents..." [at the same time, levine is arguing, he takes it so far that it is insulated from all other sciences, and becomes radically subjectivist in its implications--unlike weber]
(xxiii): important--roots of sociology, for simmel, lie in class conflict--it is the appearence of the analytical importance of the social environment that followed, which has set the stage for sociology as a science of social structures. within sociology, the form/content binary resurfaces--"'contents' take on a special meaning here: they are the needs, drives, and purposes which lead individuals to enter into continuing association with one another. 'forms' are the synthesizing processes by which individuals combine into supraindividual unities... the task of sociology properly understood is studying the forms of human sociality." [he is trying to delimit its scope at the same time agree that this is important, it seems...]
(xxv-xxvii): important--from (1) protoformal level (elementary social action), to (2) the level of institutionalized structures (in which "objectification of social forms that remains closely tied to praxis"), to (3) autonomous 'play' forms, to (4) the generic form of society itself.
(xxvii): important--"society," in simmel--"the concept of society is analogous... not to the concept of culture in general but to one of the world-forming cultural categories like religion, art... society exists as one of the ways in which all experience can potentially be organized. a given number of individuals therefore, can be society to a greater or lesser degree, just as agiven number of sounds can be music to a greater or lesser degree. society as a form presents the ideality of a world awaiting actualization. "
(xxix): "it is the nature of both history and sociology that they deal with contents which have already been given form. both of them study the already formed contents of human experience..."
(xxxi): important, Simmel's method--"His method is to select some bounded, finite phenomenon from the world of flux; to examine the multiplicity of elements which compose it; and to ascertain the cause of their coherence by disclosing its form. secondarily, he investigates the origins of this form and its structural implications."
(xxxii): "[his method[ does not force all phenomena together into a general scheme nor does it molest them with arbitrary or rigid categories; at the same time it avoids mindless empiricsim by providing a context of meanings for sets of observations. it enhances discovery."
(xxxii-xxxvii): four basic presuppositions
- form--"the world consists of innumerable contents which are given determinate identity.. through the imposition of forms which man has created in the course of his experience..." [exist as methodological tools or as lived realities or as both?]
- reciprocity--"no thing or event has a fixed, intrinsic meaning; its meaning only emerges through interaction with other things or events" [proto-structuralism?]
- distance--"the properties of forms and the meanings of things are a function of the relative distances between individuals and other individuals or things." (forms arise, remember, when the unity of experience is "disrupted and a distance is interposed between subject and object.")
- dualism--"the world can best be understood in terms of conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories." [a kind of primitive dialectic?]
(xxxix): this sounds marxist, almost--"once created, forms are rigid. they are incapable of adapting to the continuous oscillations of subjective need. the conflict between established forms and vital needs produces a perpetual tension, a tension which is nevertheless the source of the dialectical development or replacement of social structures and cultural forms throughout history."
(xl-xlii): important, the twin 'tragedies'--(1) "Simmel sees the existence of individuality attacked and threatened by the very forms which individual creativity has produced--objective culture and sociality... the conflict between the forms of individuality and sociality is self-generated and inescapable; it constitutes the 'sociological tragedy.'" (2) "modern facilities and organization have made possible an unparalleled development of autonomous objective culture. this has greatly magnified the distance between subject and object.... man stands to become alienated from the most advanced products of his creative spirit..." [the 'cultural tragedy'--formally alienation, clearly]
(xlviii): "it is clear that Simmel's ideas enjoyed a privileged position in German sociology, until sociology in general and Simmel's books in particular were suppressed by the Nazis."
(liii): Park's appropriation of Simmel included a shift in definition of sociology which wasn't inconsequential--"by relegating competition and conflict to the sphere of the presocial, or subsocial, it led to an identification of sociality with consensus, rather than a conception of all social facts as inherently based on fundamental dualisms."
(lvi): lewis wirth identifying simmel's essay as 'the most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint..'
(lvi): important angle into chicago school--"all these extension of simmel's ideas by Park's students... deal with social relationships, not sith social process."
(lxi): a kind of in sum: "Simmel's image of society may provide a continuing challenge to conceptions of social facts and social order which lay primary emphasis on systemic requirements and normative constraints, offering the counterparadigm of a luctuating field of self-regulating transactions--an alternative which stresses the phenomenology of individual experience and the dimension of distance in social relations..."
(lxiii-lxv): chapter summaries
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
chapter one, "how is history possible?" [1905] (3-6)
(3): a critique of postivist history -- of "historical realism," which provides a mirror image of the past 'as it really was'
(3-4): possible, then, in the way that Kant's understanding of 'nature' is possible--the triumph of the 'ego': "inasmuch as the ego produces nature as its conception, and the general laws constitutive of nature are nothing other than the forms of our mind, natural existence has been subordinated to the sovereign ego."
(4): important--"man, as something known, is made by nature and history; but man, as knower, makes nature and history."
(5): in sum, the argument of this essay: "that form in which all psychic reality comes to consciousness, which emerges as the history of every ego, is itself a product of the creative ego. mind becomes aware of itself in the stream of becoming, but mind has already marked out the banks and currents of that stream and thereby made it into 'history.' the investigations which follow serve the general objective of preserving the freedom of the human spirit --that is, form-giving creativity--over against historicism in the same way that Kant did with respect to naturalism."
chapter two, how is society possible? [1908] (6-22)
(7): important: taking the nature-society comparison further--"the unity of nature emerges in the observing subject exclusively; ... by contrast, the unity of society needs no observer. it is directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units." [in other words, there is a distinction between where the form-giving function resides, in the two accounts]
(8): "the question of how society is possible... is answered by the conditions which reside a priori in the elements themselves, through which they combine... into the synthesis, society."
(9): two functions of the "sociological apriorities": (1) "more or less completely determine the actual process of sociation..."; (2) they are the ideational, logical presuppositions for the perfect society [is this a methodological / normative list? ]
(9-10): a necessary incompleteness in our perception of the Other (the necessity of classifying him not in terms of his singularity alone, but also "in terms of a general category" which cannot cover him fully).
(10): "all of us are fragments, not only of general man, but also of ourselves..."
(11): "the practice of life urges us to make the picture of a man only from the real pieces that we empirically know of him, but it is precisely the practice of life which is based on these modifications and supplementations, on the transformation of the given fragments into the generality of a type and into the completeness of the ideal personality... every member of a group... sees every other member not just empirically, but on the basis of an aprioric principle which the group imposes on every one of its participants..." [practice demands, in a sense, that we organize experience in this way--but again it's a practice that is independent of us. important to distinguish from the Kantian account of nature, as he said]
(11-12): "The civilian who meets an officer cannot free himself from his knowledge of the fact that this individual is an officer..."
(12): important--the question of reality: "in all these cases, reality is veiled by social generalization, which in a highly differentiated society, makes discovering it altogether impossible... but the very alterations and new formations which preclude this knowledge of him are, actgually, the conditions which make possible the sort of relations we call social. the phenomenon recalls Kant's conception of the categories: they form immediate data into new objects, but they alone make the given world into a knowable world."
(13): "for the social environment does not surround all of the individual. we know of the bureaucrat that he is not only a bureaucrat... this extrasocial nature--a man's temperament, fate, interests, worth as a personality--gives a certain nuance to the picture formed by all who meet him." [qua personality, counterposed to individual in society]
(13-14): "actually, individuals, as well as occupations and social situation, are differentiated according to how much of the non-social element they possess or allow along with their social content" [couple in love vs. catholic priest--but look to the text for explanation of this, because it's not what you'd think. or example of market exchange, later, wherein "the individual, inasmuch as he produces, buys, sells, and in general performs anything, approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity..."]
(14-15): important--"a society is, therefore, a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time... the individual can never stay within a unit which he does not at the same time stay out of..." [e.g., "to be one with God is conditioned in its very significance by being other than God." he applies, this, too the phenomenon of being both determined by nature, and free from its constraints]
(16): "on the one hand, we see ourselves as products of society... on the other hand, we see ourselves as members of society..."
(17-18): important--"the two--social and individual--are only two different categories under which the same content is subsumed." and man, of course, exists only as the synthesis of these two form--man is a "synthetic category." [the dual position--"the individual is contained in sociation, and, at the same time, finds himself confronted by it." to what extent, though, is this important as an analytical, rather than simply descriptive claim? i mean, it's clear he understand it as epistemologically terribly important, but--to an extent--it sidesteps the problem, no? or have we resigned ourselves to sidestepping the problem?]
(18): silly, standard reflections on equality
(21): reflections on the notion of "vocation"
(22): hmm... -- "the nexus by which each social element (each individual) is interwoven with the life and activities of every other, and by which the external framework of society is produced, is a causal nexus. but it is transformed into a teleological nexus as soon as it is considered from the perspective of the elements that carry and produce it--individuals... it is the dual nexus which supplies the individual consciousness with a fundamental category and thus transforms it into a social element."
chapter three, the problem of sociology [1908] (22-35)
(23): important, society is constituted by reciprocity--"the whole world could not be called one if each of its parts did not somehow influence every other part..."
(24): "in any given social phenomenon, content and societal form constitute one reality. a social form severed from all content can no more attain existence than a spatial form can exist without a material whose form it is."
(25): critical, spelling out his understanding of the science of society--"to separate, by scientific abstraction, these two factors of form and content which are in reality inseparably united; to detach by analysis the forms of interaction or sociation from their contents...; and to bring them together systematically under a consistent scientific viewpoint--this seems to me the basis for the only, as well as the entire, possibility of a special science of society as such."
(26): methodologically (or epistemologically?), there are two provisions which make this science possible, which are "undeniable facts": (1): the forms should be observable in diverse contents; (2) the content should manifest itself in diverse forms.
(27): "this conception of society implies a further proposition: a given number of individuals may be society to a greater or smaller degree."
(28): like the ideal-type, or not? -- "sociological forms, if they are to be even approximately definite, can apply only to a limited range of phenomena... what is needed is the study of specific kinds of superordination and subordination, and of the specific forms in which they are realized. through such a study, of course, these forms would losein applicability what they would gain in definiteness."
(28-29): need to mediate, too, between the abstract ("the object abstracted from reality may be examined in regard to laws entirely inhering in the objective nature of the elements") and the concrete ("the forms of sociation may be examined... in regard to their occurence at specific places and at specific times...")
(30-31): important--there is only ever an 'approximate' match between form and content [this clearly marks out his antipositivist orientation, even if it was already evident]... as he writes later, "there is no means of teaching, and, under certain conditions, even of performing the analysis of form and content into sociological elements."
(33): "there is always one reality and we cannot grasp it scientifically in its immediacy and wholeness but must consider it from a number of different viewpoints and thereby make it into a plurality of mutually independent scientific subject matters."
(33-36): important--distinction between sociological and psychological categories [corresponds to social/individual?]: "in this sense, then, the givens of sociology are psychological processes whose immediate reality presents itself first of all under psychological categories. but these psychological categories, although indispensable for the description of the facts, remains outside the purpose of sociological investigation. it is to this end that we direct our study to the objective reality of sociation, a reality which, to be sure, is embodied in psychic processes and can often be described only by means of them."
chapter five, exchange [1907] (43-70)
(43): exchange, at the highest level of generality, seems to stand in for the notion of necessary reciprocity outlined earlier.
(44): distinction between economic and other forms of exchange; "of all kinds of exchange, the exchange of economic values is the least free of some tinge of sacrifice."
(46): "considered with reference to its immediate content, exchange is nothing more than the causally connected repetition of the fact that an actor now has something which he previously did not have, and for that has lost something which he previously did have."
(46): weak rejoinder to the marxist theory of exploitation, here
(46): he wants to look at exchange subjectively--"it is extremely important to carry through this reduction of the economic process to that which takes place in actuality, that is, within the psyche of every economic actor... to the process of balancing two subjective events within an individual."
(47): subjectively, then, "exchange is just as productive... as is so-called production." [this is where weber et. al. were ripping out their hair, i'm sure]
(48-49): sacrifice/value? "...sacrifice is the condition of all value; not only the price to be paid for individual values that are already established, but that through which alone values can come into being."
(49): effectively, a 'non-labor' theory of value (what we give up)
(50): relativity of value--much like a line cannot be 'long' in and of itself, but only in relation to other lines.
(52): a theory, in effect, of non-exploitation--"the value which an actor surrenders for another value can never be greater, for the subject himself under the actual circumstances of that moment, than that for which it is given."
(53): is he using the orgasm as a heuristic?
(54): important--again, relativity of value: "economic value as such does not inhere in an object in its isolated self-existence, but comes to an object only through the expenditure of another object which is given to it."
(55): not simply subjective, desire is not enough--"[it is] certain that desire in and of itself could not establish any value if it did not encounter obstacles..."
(56-57): key, in sum--"the possibility of economy is at the same time the possibility of the objects of economy. the very transaction between two possessors of objects... which brings them into the so-called economic reation, namely, reciprocal sacrifice, at the same time elevates each of these objects into the category of value. the logical difficulty raised by the argument that values must first exist, and exist as values... is now removed. it is removed thanks to the significance we have perceived in that psychic relationsihp we designated as the distance between us and things... economic values thus emerge through the same reciprocity and relativity in which the economic condition of values consists."
(57): "there is no need to invoke a prior process of valuation... what is required for this valuation takes place in the very act of exchange itself."
(58): using 'primitives' and children to establish, again, the importance of subjective desire in the notion of value.
(59): again, he is stretching the subjective explanation to breaking point ("starvation wages" preferable to not working--thus, work 'valued' as equivalent to "starvation wages") [after all, how do you stop the subjective explanation from becoming a total non-explanation? it's not clear if you can, in fact]
(60): there is value formed from the traditions of society, and value formed from the individual. but we make a mistake thinking that the former is explicable by objective rules. they are both subjective, just have unfolded at different scales [this is my interpretation, at least]
(61): important--we can speak of standards of value (here about labor-power, socially necessary labor time), but he is really making clear that he is after the metaphysics of value, which has to be rooted in some kind of relation to subjective assessments of 'sacrifice/gain.'
(61-62): not a bit tautological?--essentially, what it means for things to exchange is for them to be valued equally. but what is the evidence that they've been valued equally? well that they exchange, of course!
(62): arguing that absolute value can be understood in these terms, as well: "exchange is, indeed, nothing other than the interindividual attempt to improve an unfavorable situation arising out of a shortage of goods; that is, to reduce as much as possible the amount of subjective abstinence by the mode of distributing the available supply."
(65): using Italy and the Orient to show the origins of exchange-value: "this shows clearly how the set price emerges out of the counterposition of subjects--the whole thing represents an intrusion of precommercial relations into a going exchange economy, but one that has not yet been consistently realized."
(66-67): in sum, the same point--"in this sense which holds true of all cultural development, then, exchange is originally a matter of social arrangements, until individuals become sufficiently acquainted with objects.. there may be doubt that these socially legislated rates... could only have resulted from numerous previous transactions which initially took place in irregular and unfixed form among individuals. this objection holds for exchange, however, no more than it does for language, custom, law... for all the fundamental forms of life... for a long time these forms, too, could only be explained as the inventions of individuals, whereas they surely arose from the very beginning as interindividual formations, as the product of interaction between individual and collectivity, so that no individual is to be credited with their origin."
(68): "by no means does it follow logically from those... properties of things which we call utility and scarcity... the meaning that an object has for an individual always rests soley in it desirability. for whatever an object is to accomplish for us, its qualitative desire is decisive."
(68-69): in an unintended way, he is making an important point about the always-social nature of scarcity, here
(69): in sum--"the difficulty of attainment, that is, the magnitude of the sacrifice involved in exchange is, thus the element that peculiarly constitues value."
(69): in sum--"we may examine an object ever so closely with respect to its self-sufficient properties, but we shall not find its economic value. for this consists exclusively in the reciprocal relationship which comes into being among several objects on the basis of these properties..."
chapter six, conflict [1908] (70-95)
(70): conflict, of course, is a form of sociation
(70-71): "conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties..." it is not purely negative, a la indifference--it contains something positive.
the sociological relevance of conflict (71-72)
(72): where you have unity, you also have discord--"an absolutely centripetal and harmonious groupd, a pure 'unification', not only is empirically unreal, it could show no real life process." [yin-yang sociology, i feel--but would be instructive to properly tease out distinction with dialectics]
unity and discord (73-74)
(73): there is an analytical mistake insofar as "what is eventually left standing is [seen] as the result of the subtraction of the two (while in reality it must rather be designated as the reslut of their addition.)"
conflict as an integrative force in the group (74-76)
(74): using this approach to 'understand' marriage and caste
(75): important--again, groups are characterized as much by their cooperation as they are by their mutual replusion--"the disappearence... of repulsive energeis does by no means always result in a richer and fuller social life... but in a different and unrealizable a phenomenon as if the group were deprived of the forces of cooperation." (see 76)
(76): and the 'urban'--"without such aversion, we could not imagine what form modern urban life, which every day brings everybody in contact with innumerable others, might possibly take. the whole inner organization of urban interaction is based on an extremely complex hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of both the most short-lived and the most enduring kind."
homogeneity and heterogeneity in social relations (77-80)
(77): important--"relations of conflict do not by themselves produce a social structure, but only in cooperation with unifying forces."
(79): it is also possible that we are unable to grasp the underlying consistency--"the structure may be sui generis, it smotivation and form being wholly self-consistent, and only in order to be able to describe and understand it, do we put it together, post factum, out of two tendencies, one monistic, the other antagonistic." (example given is nobility working for the king & being compelled to defend their interests against the king)
antagonism as an element in sociation (80-83)
(80): "while antagonism by itself does not produce sociation, it is a sociological element almost never absent in it."
(81): sociology vs. ethics
(81): interesting--"if... there is any consideration, any limit to violence, there already exists a socializing factor, even though only as the qualification of violence."
(82-83): only a fight for its own sake, it seems, is "wholly free from the admixture of other forms of relation."
antagonistic games (83-84)
(83): the single case where the fascination of the fight is the exclusive motivation--yet, even here: "one unites in order to fight, and one fights under the mutually recognized control of norms and rules. to repeat, these unifications do not enter into the motivation of the undertaking, even though it is through them that it takes shape." [this is actually a place where we can interrogate the methodological/analytical/normative question]
legal conflict (84-86)
(85): legal petifoggery!
(85): important--"legal conflict rests on a broad basis of unities and agreements between the enemies. the reason is that both parties are equally subordinated to the law..." [but again, there needs to be a distinction between this as consent, and this as coerced subordination--in what way are people freely subject to the law, after all? this is a distinction that his framework seems incapable of making.]
conflicts over causes (86-90)
(87-88): interesting, in particular, because here he is speaking about Marx and Marxism: "ever since marx, the social struggle has developed into this form [of wholly decisive victories, and where peace is treason], despite infinite differences in other respects." [there is a question, too, about how one mediates between objective and subjective--do you see the entrepreneur as a person or in his social role?]
(88): "an interesting example of this correlation is the workers' boycott of the berlin breweries in 1894. this was one of the most violent local fights in recent decades, carried out wit the utmost foce by both sides, but without any personal hatred of the brewers by the leaders of the boycott... it thus appears that conflict can exclude all subjective factors... at the same time we see that this common basis increases, rather than decreases, the intensity, irreconcilability, and stubborn consistency of the fight" [this framing, though, is of course highly dubious--in what way do the respective parties share a 'common basis'? this could be his own political intervention.]
common qualities vs. common membershp in larger social structures as basis of conflict (90-92)
(90-91): "two kinds of commonality may be the bases of particularly intense antagonisms: common qualities, and common membership in a larger social structure."
(91): too true--"people who have many common features often do one another worse or 'wronger' wrong than complete strangers do... we confront the stranger, with whom we share neither characteristics nor broader interests, objectively; we hold our personalities in resrve; and thus a particular difference does not involve us in our totalities... the more we have in common with another as whole persons, however, the more easily will our totality be involved in every single relation to him..."
conflict in intimate relations (92-95)
(92-94): odd relationship science, here
(95): hmm, maybe need to re-read the class conflict section in light of this point--"the degeneration of a difference in convictions into hatred and fight ordinarily occurs only when there were essential, original similarities between the parties. the (sociologically very significant) 'respect for the enemy' is usually absent where the hostility has arisen on the basis of previous solidarity."
chapter 18, group expansion and the development of individuality [1908] (251-293)
(251-252): "rather than pursuing a single abstracted form in the phenomena where it happens to appear, ... this chapter presents a particular correlation, an interactionally determined pattern of development among forms of association."
(252): "individuality in being and action generally increases to the degree that the social circle encompassing the individual expands."
(253): abstract solidarities between groups--socialist internationals and aristocratic cabals, both
(254): the fall of the guilds, rise of capital/labor divide
(255): division of labor, internal differentiation--" as soon as the boundaries of the group are ruptured and it enters into trade in special products with another group, internal differentiation develops between those who produce for export and those who produce for domestic consumption--two wholly opposed inner modes of being."
(255): account of dissolving of feudalism traces this process through the emancipation of the serfs (i.e., the process whereby they're divested of the means of production)
(256): thus, "differentiation and individualization loosen the bond of the individual with those who are most near in order to weave in its place a new one... with those who are more distant..."
(256): this is quite painful, these apologetics for the current order
(256-257): important--"these examples hint at a relation that will be found everywhere in the course of this inquiry. the nonindividuation of elements in the narrower circle and their differentiation in the wider one are phenomena that are found, synchornically, among coexistent groups and group elements, just as they appear, diachronicaly, in the sequence of stages through which a single group develops."
(257): basic thesis, it seems--"the narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we possess; however, this narrower circle is itself something individual... correspondingly, if the circle in which we are active... enlarges, there is more room in it for the development of our individuality; but as parts of this whole, we have less uniqueness: hte larger whole is less individual as a social group. thus, the leveling of individual differences correpsnds not only to the relative smallness... of the collectivity, but also... to its own individualistic coloring." [i.e., infuriating, nested dualisms abound. also, note that he is advocating we use this as a kind of ideal type.]
(258): quakers; north vs. south
(259): crux--"we lead... a halved existence. we live as an individual within a social circle, with tangible separation from its other members, but also as a member of this circle, with separation from everything that does not belong to it." this gives rise to a contradictory impulse--the more we want to distinguish ourselves from others in our group, the more we undercut the unity of the group (from which we also find satisfaction, don't forget)
(259-260): employing this as a heuristic--again, a very loose claim on what is actually happening (this gets us back to the normative/methodological questions)
(262): the family
(263): expanding to the animal kingdom -- in other words, the contingency of his argument is a non-issue, in his opinion
(263): family, con't--it's sociological duality: "on the one hand, it is an extension of one's own personality... on the other hand, the family also constitutes a complex within which the individual distinguishes himself from all others..."
(265): methodologically, then, we're dealing with nested circles, which makes analysis complex. he is arguing, though, that "it is always precisely the intermediate structure that exhibits the pattern in question."
(266): there is, of course, an intederminacy to how this individuality drive might emerge
(267): tracing the general pattern through a general model of three concentric circles: "one might sacrifice oneself for a single human being...; and then again, for an incomprehensible multitude; but for a hundred people, hardly anyone brings himself to martyrdom..." [this may sound neat, but it's all hogwash]
(269): key--"the larger circle encourages freedom, the smaller one restricts it."
(269): speaking about spouses and our ability to be picky--"a more profound meaning of freedom emerges here: individual freedom is freedom that is limited by individuality."
(270): in sum--"the relatively undeveloped condition certainly imposed a social constraint on the individual; however, this was linked to the negative freedom of nondifferentiation... in the more advanced state, on the other hand, social possibilities are much enhanced, but now they are restricted by the positive meaning of freedom in which every choice is... the unambiguously determined expression of an unalterable kind of personality."
(271-272): two meanings of individuality--(1--an 18t century variant) "individuality in the sense of the freedom and responsibility for oneself that comes from a broad and fluid social environment..."; freedom from external influence (2--a 19th century variant) "means that the single human being distinguishes himself from all others; that his being and conduct.. suit him alone..."; freedom in individual flowering
(272): french revolution, and unions
(273): 'the objective mind', which gives birth to 'tradition' and objective culture
(274): individualism of equality vs. individualism of inequality [?]
(274): individualism and cosmopolitanism
(275): differentiation/expansion as 'cause' of collapse of holy roman empire?!
(277-278): cash economy and differentiation/expansion: "money is the connection that relates maximal expansion of the economic group to maximal differentiation of its members, both in the dimension of freedom and a sense of responsibility for oneself, and in the dimension of a qualitative differentiation of labor."
(278): enclosures--ugh, what the fuck.
(279): e.g., absolutism and the end of the guild/corporation
(279): despotism and leveling, republicanism and tyranny: "the shattering of group constraints within a whole that somehow belongs together is so intimately related to the accentuation of individuality that both the cohesion of the ruling personality and the individual freedom of all group members center upon it like two variations on a single theme."
(280-281): tracing this dynamic through the question of representation (as you get larger, more differentiated, administration demands rule of a single man...)
(283): through law--smaller collectivities do not distinguish, unlike larger ones, between public authority and private life
(284-285): a corollary, which was mentioned earlier, too--"as man as individual... comes to replace man as social element..., the bond must tighten that pulls him... toward all that is human, suggesting to him the notion of an ideal unity of mankind."
(285-286): important--seemingly setting up an opposition between pursuit of individuality and pursuit of equality (but i think this is more complicated that we might think, at first glance)--example is increased education: "it seeks to eliminate glaring differences in mental level and, precisely via the creation of a certain equality, to secure for each person the previously denied chance of making good his individual capacities..." again, the two different understandings of individuality are key--the first, freedom from external constraint, he deems compatible with inequality; the second, however, is not at all compatible.
(287): a la durkheim, seeing society as an organism
(289-290): forshadowing the tragic?--"...when the individual's relations begin to exceed a certain extensiveness, he becomes all the more thrown back upon himself..."
(291): even if there has been a certain leveling of personality, he's arguing, "life in a wider circle and interaction with it develop, in and of themselves, more consciousness of personality than arises in a narrower circle." we become conscious of ourselves, as constant ego, the greater the variability of the world around us.
(292): again, a la durkheim--"the generation of functional organs is the means wehreby the cohesion of the group is united with the greatest freedom of individuals." the individual finds his niche. [my god i hate this hogwash]
chapter twenty, the metropolis and mental life [1903] (324-339)
(324): key--"the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society..." [prefiguring the tragedy]. in each movement for emancipation (from Nietzsche to the Socialists), Simmel sees "the same fundamental motive [at work], namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the socio-technological mechanism."
(325): important--the classic definition of the 'urban'/rural: "to the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions--with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life--it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatrues dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence."
(326): the metropolitan type that emerges is less emotional, more rational (as protection, it seems...). corresponds to emotional relationships vs. objective relationships.
(327): a kind of commodity fetishism-line, though not really: noting that now people are provided for and produce for producers/consumers that they don't know. "thereby, the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter-of-factness."
(328): the city as a "firmly fixed framework" above and all subjective elements, possibly
(328): punctuality, calculability, exactness, condition the "exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impluses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of receiving it from without." this is why Nietzsche hated the city.
(329): the blase outlook, without which life in the metropolis would be impossible (see 331-332, also)
(330): money as the frightful leveler [that] "hollows out the core of things, their pecularities..."
(332): re: the blase outlook--"what appears here directly as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialization."
(333): same argument as last essay--the small town as panopticon
(334): "for here, as elsewhere, it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man reflect itself in his emotional life only as a pleasant experience."
(334): a 'geometric' model re: the "urban"--the ecological critique is very apt, here
(335): something like the "urban effect"--"...the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere."
(335-336): the city as site for most extensive division of labor
(336): "all this leads to the narrower type of intellectual individuation of mental qualities to which the city give rise in proportion to its size."
(337): important--again, an allusion to the modern tragedy (the creation of man as a "cog")--"the development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjetive; that is... there is embodied a sort of spirit, the daily growth of which is followed only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual." spirituality and value escape their subjective existence, and become objective reality. culture "has outgrown every personal element."
(338): "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis."
(339): summary passage, in which the metropolis is read as the site in which the two understandings of individuality (the 18th and 19th century-versions) meet, collide--"it is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and stimulus for the development of both."
chapter twenty-two, social forms and inner needs [1908] (351-352)
(351): "a basic dualism" afflicts all sociation--"a relation, which is a fluctuating, constantly developing life-process, nevertheless receives a relatively stable external form." [again, this passage provides ample opportunity to work out normative/methodological/analytical/epistemological]
(352): we give 'form' to our "inner life", yet these "forms... do not express or shape an ideal, a contrast with life's reality, but this life itself."
(352): forms can outrun content, just as content can outrun forms [example of a new political constitution]
chapter twenty-four, the conflict in modern culture [1918] (375-393)
(375): key--here, gesturing towards the tragic: "...these forms [cultural forms] encompass the flow of life and provide it with content and form, freedom and order. but although these forms arise out of the life process, because of their unique constellation they do not share the restless rhythm of life... these forms are frameworks for the creative life, which, however, soon transcends them... this new rifidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent."
(376): "each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life.... life constantly struggles against its own products..."
(376): fits the Marxist narrative into this larger framework
(377): "life is always in a latent opposition to the form" [here, again, clearly 'real', this form/content -- relevant for the normative/methodological question.]
(377): important, a unique conjuncture?--"... what is happening is not only a negative, passive dying out of traditional forms, but simultaneously a fully positive drive towards life which is actively repressing these forms."
(378): notion of the 'central idea' / 'secret being' of an epoch (378-379: history of this development, across epochs)
(380): "i will now illustrate... the uniqueness of the cultural situation we are undergoing..."
(381-382): in art, expressionism--"artist replaces his model with the impluse lying behind the model... according to the artist's intention, the form represents only a necessary evil."
(384): van gogh
(385): in philosophy, pragmatism--truth is that which sustains life; "there is no originally independent truth... the purest expression of life as a central idea is reached when it is viewed as the metaphysical basic fact, as the essence of all being..."
(388): a turn away form classicism, which "is the ideology of form."
(388): towards a new erotic life
(390): in religion--"tendency for forms of religious belief to dissolve into modes of religious life, into religiosity as a purely functional justification of of religion"
(392-393): important, a restatement of the fundamental contradiction of our age--"life must either produce forms or proceed through forms... life is inseparably charged with contradiction. it can enter reality only through the form of its antithesis, that is, only in the form of form.... the forms themselves, however, deny this contradiction: in their rigidly individual shapes, in the demands of their imprescriptible rights, they boldly present themselves as the true meaning and value of our existence... life wishes here to obtain something which it cannot reach. it desires to transcend all forms and appear in its naked immediacy. yet the processes of thinking, wishing and forming can only substitute one form for another. they can never replace the form as such by life which as such transcends the form..."
(393): hinting at a dialectic, rather than simple dualism, in a sense: "in short, the present is too full of contradictions to stand still. this itself is a more fundamental change than the reformations of times past..." [how to integrate this with the earlier reflections?]
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