Lecture 10 Social Forms: Conflict, Hierarchy ... amazonaws com
Lecture 10 Social Forms: Conflict, Hierarchy, Sociability Social Types: The Stranger Freedom + the Individual Group Expansion Intersection of Social Circles Conflict and integration Conflict is a major topic of sociology. It’s clear why. There’s obviously a difference between groups who have more conflicts than another. You want to understand typically why one has conflict. What are the consequences? Simmel takes a step back and talks about conflict in an interesting way. He doesn’t start with the assumption that conflict is necessarily, speaking generically, something that will break apart a group. It might lead to defragmentation or disintegration. He has an interesting approach. Disassociation or associating function, brings people together. Being in conflict with someone is a way of being in a relationship with someone. If you are in conflict, you might care about the other person more than anything. Levels of countries; US vs. Soviet Union, they weren’t tightly connected before the war. But now they are. The main point is that conflict is neither good or bad. Any group always have conflictual elements and this thing that pushes it apart; a push-pull tension. Simmel believes that every social unit has conflictual and harmonious elements. Why is that? Often the conflicts and competitions are what holds the groups together, gives it an energy or vibrancy. For example, sports teams; you’re in position with everyone else. If you showed up and there was none of that, the team would not be as tightly held together or as fun. Another example; marriage; when you notice people’s weddings, we have an image of no conflict as an ideal. Simmel says no way. You are basically deciding who you’ll have the most fights with for the rest of your life. Fighting is part of a healthy marriage, you connect with them in new ways through fighting. Workplace environment; the best workplace, no fighting, etc. A lot of people, the whole reason for showing up at work is because of feuds with everyone else there. This gives a kind of drama and excitement to the workplace. Two Levels of Unity If you only thing of conflict alone, you might think that that is negative, it actually has a positive affect towards a group. Unity (peacefulness) vs. Conflict; there’s a higher unity and incorporates both unity and conflict – that is the most unified group. Simmel uses this example; you could also think about life in this way. Life in one sense, the other side is death. There is a deeper meaning of life that includes both life and death and the process of that. These are sort of general, metaphysical ideas in Simmel’s conception of how unity correlates with the group. Conflict for itself
The whole purpose of a group is to create opportunities to fight with people. Example; UFC; boxing; Simmel wrote in our chapter, you can see, martial arts/boxing; it’s an important phenomenon in sociology. You are excluding everything else. In a pure form, you get people together just for the pleasure of fighting somebody. Durkheim or integration; or Comte; integration seems to be the obvious good. The idea that people get into fights is nonsense. Temporal Dimensions The key thing about forms of association, it occurs in various arenas; church, work, school; that’s a formal property. Many conflicts have a temporal features, an order. 1) People who start out in a conflict, that could relate to the deepest love in the end. That sequencing is important in determining the nature of your relationship 2) The opposite way; you start out in a close loving relationship, and then you get into a conflict; the outcome can be the most hateful relationship; divorced people. They were once in love with each other. But now they are hateful towards each other. Now that you have a fight it’s the end of the world. When people have love and solidarity before hand, it will make the relationships a lot worse. These are formal features not based on ordering that we are interested in. Hierarchy We can call it domination if we want to. 1) Superordinates People on the top 2) Subordinates People on the bottom Hierarchy is really a form of relationship. You can think of a one way street, the guy on the top tells the slave what to do. Simmel says no really. When you get to that point, it stops to be a relationship, you need a two-way street. One person forcing another to do something, there’s always a choice. If someone says do this or I’ll shoot you, you can say shoot me. You are defined by what that person tells you to do. You have hierarchies in different arenas. The number of people who are in the superordinate position; you can have a single ruler, a single person on top, a committee, a group of people who are in charge, or you can have an idea like the rule of law. 1) Under a single individual You have one person in charge, and he says a lot of interesting things that typically when you have one person in charge, the group will have a sense of togetherness and unity. Generally when you are ruled under a single individual, it’ll be more unified a. Internal That can be basically where the ruler, like God, or the King, or the professor, somehow provides a single point of reference of expressing what the group is all about. That can
be pretty much anything. The ruler can express a commonality, like common faith. So for instance, if you all elected king of socb43, you’ll look up to me like a God, that’ll create a stronger unity. b. External that is where a group can be unified based on being against that all same thing. We all hate the prof, I hate that guy, now you have that common point of reference which therefore creates a unity. You can organize around that commonality. 2) Under a plurality This is where you have a committee of some kind. Like Sparta two kings, Rome, two emperors, smaller groups, like classes with two teachers, how does that change the structure and the dynamics of the groups? a. Objectivity By contrast they will downplay personal favours or relationships or personal considerations of subordinates unique problems or situations. If you go to one person who is in charge, this is the situation, can u make a special exception for me? They won’t be bound by that, I’ll make this personal decision right now. If it is a committee you have to explain and have them agree. b. Less forgiving/more violent If you’ve experienced this before, you have some problem, you go to one person in charge, you have a better chance, okay I’ll let this go. Committees are very difficult, they don’t let you off easy. In a way no single member of the committee needs to take responsibility of the decision. It’s much easier to pass off the responsibility in a committee which allows you to take much harsher and violent decisions. Simmel backs it up with Rome, committees and groups; treated people more violent and harsh. c. Under a principle We say that the president or the pm is actually a subordinate beneath the law, they serve the law just like anyone else does. How does that change things? It’s a somewhat familiar idea in Tocqueville last term. The main is that it makes the relationship much more impersonal; reduces the personal connection between subordinate and superordinate. One example is Batman, Bruce Wayne vs. Alfred, whatever BW says Alfred does it, they have a special relationship. It’s the law, for these two hours you clean the house, you only do that and nothing else, I don’t need to build no bat cave. So this one does open space for freedom and individuality. Sociability What is it in general? Basically it’s like the conflict for itself idea but to a higher level. You have a way of relating with people where you just enjoy the relationship. You’re having the pleasure of going back and forth just for the sake of it. A party for instance; parties are amazingly important phenomena, we don’t have a class called sociology parties, how much of social life going back to history deals with parties? Why do we spend so much time doing that? One of the main features, you can talk about anything. Content doesn’t matter, it’s all about the talking, you’re doing it in this fun back and forth fashion. In
that feature, it’s something that’s unique and important. It’s sort of like that conflict but deeper in an important way. It turns the basic characteristic on itself and makes that the main topic. For simmel it’s about interaction, sometimes it can be interaction about interaction. When the interaction is defined minimally by making money, making friends, having power, it’s in acting the very basic bond of social life itself. Simmel says that sociability it distills the pure essence of association. At a party we can see a pure form of association, it’s just society with no adjectives. If you open up the newspaper, and you go to the society pages, what you see, parties! Play form of association just for the fun of it; 1) Autonomous The genuinely sociable interaction is independent from any extraneous goals or purposes other than just relating or interacting with people. It’s got a life of its own. A party may have all different reasons, like dating, getting a job; but when the party is just going for the sake of it, you’re just going back and forth. That means that there are certain rules of the game that aren’t determined by your motives. 2) Artifice Artificiality; at a party there are always high level of artificialities like masks and makeup; dark rooms, at night, you can see anyone else. For the party to work it has to be autonomous, you have to leave behind everything else in life. You just bring everyone in to interact with one another. Anything else about anybody else left behind; (132) “sociability creates an ideal sociological world, always contingent about the joy of others”; the sociable person would incorporate people who are in the corners, the point is to bring everyone in and set aside all these inequalities, setting aside the real world and do all sorts of stuff you wouldn’t normally do. Masking and make up is not deceptive. It’s not to say that people can trick people and get something out of them because otherwise you’ll be abusing the parties for your own purposes 3) Playful it doesn’t really matter what you talk about, what you care about is the reciprocal interaction, you have to find something to talk about, how does that work? What is the subject matter? You take the important things in life (things you leave behind) to games and fun. “Sociability transfers the serious often tragic character of life’s problems into the shadowy realm.” The serious business of life doesn’t become serious anymore but fun. For example; battleship; that’s about war and killing people, you take seriousness and turn it into fun. Monopoly; bankrupting other people, you take real estate, buying, selling and turn it into something you can play with. a. Coquetry serious business in life; that you’re going to end up having kids with, it’s not about that. It’s a party you turn serious business in life and make it into a game. You know you’re playing with serious stuff, that’s why it’s fun. If it is too serious, then that ruins the party. Why do we do all this? Why wear these masks? Why flirt? 4) Provides distance from life Having a dinner party, having a party, dance club, you can have an outsider outlook on life, school, family, that can be so absorbing where you’ll never get outside and analyze. In these moments of sociability, you can set it all aside and enter into a different sphere. But that sounds like escapism. Simmel says that sociability can take you to the secret of life. You can feel the
basic forces of life, love, ambition, war, monopoly, battleship, flirting; in flirting you go thru romantic seduction and are not subjected to the consequences, you learn about how seduction and love works, you have a song about life, two people going thru their romance, the secrets of love, but you don’t need to go thru that in the same way, it’ll turn your life into a work of art. That’s why they have such important features in society. It’s why people keep coming back. Why should you go to a dark room to have parties, that’s why. Social Types: the stranger It’s about the types of people or characters to be in position of specific social forms. Maybe a single ruler in a hierarchy has specific traits, those are social types. Simmel thinks in a geometric way. He talks about the stranger to illustrate the idea of a social type. What does he mean by the stranger. Being a stranger doesn’t mean that you have an unusual quality like ethnic background or values, it’s not again about the content of who you are. He tries to define stranger formally – someone who has a special or unique position in a group or set of interactions; somebody who is close and distant; insider and outsider at the same time. Historically these people are being strangers thru commercial and trading, merchants wandering around trading different gods and stay at towns even for generations, merchants living in the town who is never really fully accepted as part of the town but knows everybody that’s there. What characteristics does that type of person have? Side note: in Europe the ethnic and religious groups were Jews, traders, merchants, they would be the ones that travel but never fully be accepted integral to the community. The symbols of Jews were dangerous in Germany. This is again part of a general approach, we might think a harsh generation, ones who are in it, and others who are distant and alienated. His view, there are certain people in the group but not in the group at the same time. (143) “the stranger is fixed within a spatial circle, his position is fundamentally not……” Insider, outsider, outsider, insider; he notices this social type that people haven’t given enough credit to. Three main qualities strangers have that give function prominence 1) Objectivity A stranger is one who people often believe to be objective in a conflict; be an objective third party to say who is right or wrong, you want someone you can trust. Who are you going to trust? You need to someone who is an outsider to be objective. It can’t just be anybody. A stranger is inside and close enough and outside enough to separate themselves to be outside out that conflict. 2) Emotional confidents The general idea is that you’re way more likely to share deeply things personal about yourself that you may never say to anyone else, but to the stranger. You’re not going to tell mom and sister these deep dark personal things. If it’s a stranger, that you don’t care about their outlook, you’re more than likely to have these barriers to the people in the stranger position than otherwise. Train rides for instance, or hotel lobbies, you tell those people because it is in the structure of the relationship. 3) Abstractness When you interact with the stranger you feel half commonality and therefore you end up talking about general abstract kind of things like weather or sports. Without that strong basis of being a
member of the community, it isn’t that specific but it is general. Simmel talks about those strangers have abstract qualities attributed to them. Jews are very rational, use reason in a way that’s disconnected with others. It doesn’t have to do with Jews per se, it has to do with anyone in these positions, and they will be dealt with abstractly. Strangers aren’t from here, they are everywhere. Abstract attributes therefore apply to strangers. The main point is that the insider and outsider position you can derive all those qualities to strangers, the position of their interaction. Freedom + the individual Individuality as a cultural value in modern society; individuality wasn’t a good thing back in the day. Individuals are absorbed in the group and defined by the groups you are in, defined by the family you are from, the background you are in. Part of the breakthrough of modernity was changing that. Simmel describes three stages in this process in the cultural rise of the individual. 1) Conspicuous individualism Renaissance, 1500s-1600s; you have people who are wealthy, new banks emerging at the time; conspicuous; showing it off, and this kind of individuality, what you care about is showing how grand you are, how powerful you are, how beautiful you are, I am better, prettier than everyone else. Who has the biggest and beautiful house? This is the cultivation of something new according to Simmel, but it couldn’t spread more generally because it took place in the backdrop of inequality, in the 1500s still, who you can talk with, who was allowed to go to school, what you learn, etiquette, so it was only a few people who can develop this type of individuality. The great movements after that tried to extend this individuality to more and more people and reduce all those constraints on education, interaction, etc. 2) Egalitarianism this is the kind of individual based on the desire to remove all the world’s obstacles stopping people from developing their own unique self, inability to travel, etc. This ambition to tear down all the artificial barriers to preventing development of him or herself, it is an ideal of a. Pure freedom This would consist of throwing off all those restrictions. The free part of you that is left is when all those barriers are wiped away somehow. Class you’re born in, religion; that divides people up into artificial categories. Therefore being free is to wipe away all that. b. Natural Equality This is what we all share, usually thought as reason. This became a deep cultural movement. It was very much at the same time where science was rising at the time. Natural science is emerging, especially in the sense of Newton, the same laws apply to all things everywhere. The same law of gravity applies to a rock, this part of earth, and this part of the universe. Before, people thought that there were different laws in the context of different situations. One law that applies to all of humanity regardless of nationality or religion and whatever. What that means is that equality and freedom and individuality are all interconnected. All those superficial lines we draw across on
ourselves of nationality and class, all that is not me, it's not really me. Whatever divides me from all other human beings is not really me. So becoming really me means somehow throwing out all those constraints and only exercising those abilities that make me equal to all other people. There's a weird alignment between individuality and universal equality. You exercise your individuality by making yourself different from all the arbitrary things in the world. In doing that you also find what you share with all other people. This is the kind of egalitarian individualism. So the idea is again the road to the authentic true self is what is it in you that you share with all other human beings. The way Simmel puts this is that all men are equal beyond the model of the social bonds. Now this is a noble ideal, a noble tradition but also generates tension. And the major tension they create is one between equality and freedom because if you throw off all the social constraints, and you give everyone freedom to discover their true self, it's nice to believe equality will emerge and libertarian economic philosophy assumes all that. Get rid of all the constraints, get the government out of your business, let everybody do their own thing. But what typically happen is that the strong will dominate the weak. There's a tension between equality and freedom. c. Qualitative individualism The idea here is that actually you become your true self not by trying to look at something inside you that is the same as everybody else but you find out something inside you that is different from what's in everybody else. Here's a quote from Simmel: "What matters now is no longer that one individual is free as such, so that one is a particular irreplaceable individual." The quest is for myself, I want to find my true self but what you're trying to do is found out something unique, different than everyone else. Let's say we're trying discover what we all share and what our true selves are. You date a bunch of different people because you learn more about yourself. You travel to different countries because you discover different aspect of yourself on the way. In general other people are there when you discover what in you is irreplaceable and unique. In this period, new kinds of philosophy is starting to emerge. We articulate in a philosophical way. The deep structure in this kind of thinking where the self is the ultimate meaning of life. You see it in poetry where great poets - aristocracy of dandies social thinker emerged in Paris, sort of like a hipster nowadays, second hand clothes, you have a unique style and how you can set yourself apart from the rest. So these now are what you are left with, the two great forces of society: the tendency of equality and the tendency towards uniqueness and individuality and they have all sorts of implications of which one people give priority to.
The whole purpose of a group is to create opportunities to fight with people. Example; UFC; boxing; Simmel wrote in our chapter, you can see, martial arts/boxing; it’s an important phenomenon in sociology. You are excluding everything else. In a pure form, you get people together just for the pleasure of fighting somebody. Durkheim or integration; or Comte; integration seems to be the obvious good. The idea that people get into fights is nonsense. Temporal Dimensions The key thing about forms of association, it occurs in various arenas; church, work, school; that’s a formal property. Many conflicts have a temporal features, an order. 1) People who start out in a conflict, that could relate to the deepest love in the end. That sequencing is important in determining the nature of your relationship 2) The opposite way; you start out in a close loving relationship, and then you get into a conflict; the outcome can be the most hateful relationship; divorced people. They were once in love with each other. But now they are hateful towards each other. Now that you have a fight it’s the end of the world. When people have love and solidarity before hand, it will make the relationships a lot worse. These are formal features not based on ordering that we are interested in. Hierarchy We can call it domination if we want to. 1) Superordinates People on the top 2) Subordinates People on the bottom Hierarchy is really a form of relationship. You can think of a one way street, the guy on the top tells the slave what to do. Simmel says no really. When you get to that point, it stops to be a relationship, you need a two-way street. One person forcing another to do something, there’s always a choice. If someone says do this or I’ll shoot you, you can say shoot me. You are defined by what that person tells you to do. You have hierarchies in different arenas. The number of people who are in the superordinate position; you can have a single ruler, a single person on top, a committee, a group of people who are in charge, or you can have an idea like the rule of law. 1) Under a single individual You have one person in charge, and he says a lot of interesting things that typically when you have one person in charge, the group will have a sense of togetherness and unity. Generally when you are ruled under a single individual, it’ll be more unified a. Internal That can be basically where the ruler, like God, or the King, or the professor, somehow provides a single point of reference of expressing what the group is all about. That can
be pretty much anything. The ruler can express a commonality, like common faith. So for instance, if you all elected king of socb43, you’ll look up to me like a God, that’ll create a stronger unity. b. External that is where a group can be unified based on being against that all same thing. We all hate the prof, I hate that guy, now you have that common point of reference which therefore creates a unity. You can organize around that commonality. 2) Under a plurality This is where you have a committee of some kind. Like Sparta two kings, Rome, two emperors, smaller groups, like classes with two teachers, how does that change the structure and the dynamics of the groups? a. Objectivity By contrast they will downplay personal favours or relationships or personal considerations of subordinates unique problems or situations. If you go to one person who is in charge, this is the situation, can u make a special exception for me? They won’t be bound by that, I’ll make this personal decision right now. If it is a committee you have to explain and have them agree. b. Less forgiving/more violent If you’ve experienced this before, you have some problem, you go to one person in charge, you have a better chance, okay I’ll let this go. Committees are very difficult, they don’t let you off easy. In a way no single member of the committee needs to take responsibility of the decision. It’s much easier to pass off the responsibility in a committee which allows you to take much harsher and violent decisions. Simmel backs it up with Rome, committees and groups; treated people more violent and harsh. c. Under a principle We say that the president or the pm is actually a subordinate beneath the law, they serve the law just like anyone else does. How does that change things? It’s a somewhat familiar idea in Tocqueville last term. The main is that it makes the relationship much more impersonal; reduces the personal connection between subordinate and superordinate. One example is Batman, Bruce Wayne vs. Alfred, whatever BW says Alfred does it, they have a special relationship. It’s the law, for these two hours you clean the house, you only do that and nothing else, I don’t need to build no bat cave. So this one does open space for freedom and individuality. Sociability What is it in general? Basically it’s like the conflict for itself idea but to a higher level. You have a way of relating with people where you just enjoy the relationship. You’re having the pleasure of going back and forth just for the sake of it. A party for instance; parties are amazingly important phenomena, we don’t have a class called sociology parties, how much of social life going back to history deals with parties? Why do we spend so much time doing that? One of the main features, you can talk about anything. Content doesn’t matter, it’s all about the talking, you’re doing it in this fun back and forth fashion. In
that feature, it’s something that’s unique and important. It’s sort of like that conflict but deeper in an important way. It turns the basic characteristic on itself and makes that the main topic. For simmel it’s about interaction, sometimes it can be interaction about interaction. When the interaction is defined minimally by making money, making friends, having power, it’s in acting the very basic bond of social life itself. Simmel says that sociability it distills the pure essence of association. At a party we can see a pure form of association, it’s just society with no adjectives. If you open up the newspaper, and you go to the society pages, what you see, parties! Play form of association just for the fun of it; 1) Autonomous The genuinely sociable interaction is independent from any extraneous goals or purposes other than just relating or interacting with people. It’s got a life of its own. A party may have all different reasons, like dating, getting a job; but when the party is just going for the sake of it, you’re just going back and forth. That means that there are certain rules of the game that aren’t determined by your motives. 2) Artifice Artificiality; at a party there are always high level of artificialities like masks and makeup; dark rooms, at night, you can see anyone else. For the party to work it has to be autonomous, you have to leave behind everything else in life. You just bring everyone in to interact with one another. Anything else about anybody else left behind; (132) “sociability creates an ideal sociological world, always contingent about the joy of others”; the sociable person would incorporate people who are in the corners, the point is to bring everyone in and set aside all these inequalities, setting aside the real world and do all sorts of stuff you wouldn’t normally do. Masking and make up is not deceptive. It’s not to say that people can trick people and get something out of them because otherwise you’ll be abusing the parties for your own purposes 3) Playful it doesn’t really matter what you talk about, what you care about is the reciprocal interaction, you have to find something to talk about, how does that work? What is the subject matter? You take the important things in life (things you leave behind) to games and fun. “Sociability transfers the serious often tragic character of life’s problems into the shadowy realm.” The serious business of life doesn’t become serious anymore but fun. For example; battleship; that’s about war and killing people, you take seriousness and turn it into fun. Monopoly; bankrupting other people, you take real estate, buying, selling and turn it into something you can play with. a. Coquetry serious business in life; that you’re going to end up having kids with, it’s not about that. It’s a party you turn serious business in life and make it into a game. You know you’re playing with serious stuff, that’s why it’s fun. If it is too serious, then that ruins the party. Why do we do all this? Why wear these masks? Why flirt? 4) Provides distance from life Having a dinner party, having a party, dance club, you can have an outsider outlook on life, school, family, that can be so absorbing where you’ll never get outside and analyze. In these moments of sociability, you can set it all aside and enter into a different sphere. But that sounds like escapism. Simmel says that sociability can take you to the secret of life. You can feel the
basic forces of life, love, ambition, war, monopoly, battleship, flirting; in flirting you go thru romantic seduction and are not subjected to the consequences, you learn about how seduction and love works, you have a song about life, two people going thru their romance, the secrets of love, but you don’t need to go thru that in the same way, it’ll turn your life into a work of art. That’s why they have such important features in society. It’s why people keep coming back. Why should you go to a dark room to have parties, that’s why. Social Types: the stranger It’s about the types of people or characters to be in position of specific social forms. Maybe a single ruler in a hierarchy has specific traits, those are social types. Simmel thinks in a geometric way. He talks about the stranger to illustrate the idea of a social type. What does he mean by the stranger. Being a stranger doesn’t mean that you have an unusual quality like ethnic background or values, it’s not again about the content of who you are. He tries to define stranger formally – someone who has a special or unique position in a group or set of interactions; somebody who is close and distant; insider and outsider at the same time. Historically these people are being strangers thru commercial and trading, merchants wandering around trading different gods and stay at towns even for generations, merchants living in the town who is never really fully accepted as part of the town but knows everybody that’s there. What characteristics does that type of person have? Side note: in Europe the ethnic and religious groups were Jews, traders, merchants, they would be the ones that travel but never fully be accepted integral to the community. The symbols of Jews were dangerous in Germany. This is again part of a general approach, we might think a harsh generation, ones who are in it, and others who are distant and alienated. His view, there are certain people in the group but not in the group at the same time. (143) “the stranger is fixed within a spatial circle, his position is fundamentally not……” Insider, outsider, outsider, insider; he notices this social type that people haven’t given enough credit to. Three main qualities strangers have that give function prominence 1) Objectivity A stranger is one who people often believe to be objective in a conflict; be an objective third party to say who is right or wrong, you want someone you can trust. Who are you going to trust? You need to someone who is an outsider to be objective. It can’t just be anybody. A stranger is inside and close enough and outside enough to separate themselves to be outside out that conflict. 2) Emotional confidents The general idea is that you’re way more likely to share deeply things personal about yourself that you may never say to anyone else, but to the stranger. You’re not going to tell mom and sister these deep dark personal things. If it’s a stranger, that you don’t care about their outlook, you’re more than likely to have these barriers to the people in the stranger position than otherwise. Train rides for instance, or hotel lobbies, you tell those people because it is in the structure of the relationship. 3) Abstractness When you interact with the stranger you feel half commonality and therefore you end up talking about general abstract kind of things like weather or sports. Without that strong basis of being a
member of the community, it isn’t that specific but it is general. Simmel talks about those strangers have abstract qualities attributed to them. Jews are very rational, use reason in a way that’s disconnected with others. It doesn’t have to do with Jews per se, it has to do with anyone in these positions, and they will be dealt with abstractly. Strangers aren’t from here, they are everywhere. Abstract attributes therefore apply to strangers. The main point is that the insider and outsider position you can derive all those qualities to strangers, the position of their interaction. Freedom + the individual Individuality as a cultural value in modern society; individuality wasn’t a good thing back in the day. Individuals are absorbed in the group and defined by the groups you are in, defined by the family you are from, the background you are in. Part of the breakthrough of modernity was changing that. Simmel describes three stages in this process in the cultural rise of the individual. 1) Conspicuous individualism Renaissance, 1500s-1600s; you have people who are wealthy, new banks emerging at the time; conspicuous; showing it off, and this kind of individuality, what you care about is showing how grand you are, how powerful you are, how beautiful you are, I am better, prettier than everyone else. Who has the biggest and beautiful house? This is the cultivation of something new according to Simmel, but it couldn’t spread more generally because it took place in the backdrop of inequality, in the 1500s still, who you can talk with, who was allowed to go to school, what you learn, etiquette, so it was only a few people who can develop this type of individuality. The great movements after that tried to extend this individuality to more and more people and reduce all those constraints on education, interaction, etc. 2) Egalitarianism this is the kind of individual based on the desire to remove all the world’s obstacles stopping people from developing their own unique self, inability to travel, etc. This ambition to tear down all the artificial barriers to preventing development of him or herself, it is an ideal of a. Pure freedom This would consist of throwing off all those restrictions. The free part of you that is left is when all those barriers are wiped away somehow. Class you’re born in, religion; that divides people up into artificial categories. Therefore being free is to wipe away all that. b. Natural Equality This is what we all share, usually thought as reason. This became a deep cultural movement. It was very much at the same time where science was rising at the time. Natural science is emerging, especially in the sense of Newton, the same laws apply to all things everywhere. The same law of gravity applies to a rock, this part of earth, and this part of the universe. Before, people thought that there were different laws in the context of different situations. One law that applies to all of humanity regardless of nationality or religion and whatever. What that means is that equality and freedom and individuality are all interconnected. All those superficial lines we draw across on
ourselves of nationality and class, all that is not me, it's not really me. Whatever divides me from all other human beings is not really me. So becoming really me means somehow throwing out all those constraints and only exercising those abilities that make me equal to all other people. There's a weird alignment between individuality and universal equality. You exercise your individuality by making yourself different from all the arbitrary things in the world. In doing that you also find what you share with all other people. This is the kind of egalitarian individualism. So the idea is again the road to the authentic true self is what is it in you that you share with all other human beings. The way Simmel puts this is that all men are equal beyond the model of the social bonds. Now this is a noble ideal, a noble tradition but also generates tension. And the major tension they create is one between equality and freedom because if you throw off all the social constraints, and you give everyone freedom to discover their true self, it's nice to believe equality will emerge and libertarian economic philosophy assumes all that. Get rid of all the constraints, get the government out of your business, let everybody do their own thing. But what typically happen is that the strong will dominate the weak. There's a tension between equality and freedom. c. Qualitative individualism The idea here is that actually you become your true self not by trying to look at something inside you that is the same as everybody else but you find out something inside you that is different from what's in everybody else. Here's a quote from Simmel: "What matters now is no longer that one individual is free as such, so that one is a particular irreplaceable individual." The quest is for myself, I want to find my true self but what you're trying to do is found out something unique, different than everyone else. Let's say we're trying discover what we all share and what our true selves are. You date a bunch of different people because you learn more about yourself. You travel to different countries because you discover different aspect of yourself on the way. In general other people are there when you discover what in you is irreplaceable and unique. In this period, new kinds of philosophy is starting to emerge. We articulate in a philosophical way. The deep structure in this kind of thinking where the self is the ultimate meaning of life. You see it in poetry where great poets - aristocracy of dandies social thinker emerged in Paris, sort of like a hipster nowadays, second hand clothes, you have a unique style and how you can set yourself apart from the rest. So these now are what you are left with, the two great forces of society: the tendency of equality and the tendency towards uniqueness and individuality and they have all sorts of implications of which one people give priority to.
