Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations by Georg Simmel

Author:Georg Simmel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press

MAN’S NEED FOR ACCENTUATION

WHEN A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT occurs in the form of a continuous rhythmical change between two recurring periods, each of them as important as the other and attaining its own meaning only through its relation and contrast with it, then the consistent image we form of such a process rarely reflects the objective regularity and the persistent level on which its elements alternate. Instead, we almost inevitably bestow on the change of these elements a teleological accent so that one of them is always the point of origin, which is objectively primary, while the other develops out of it; and the renewed transition of the second to the first appears to us as a kind of regression.

For instance, we represent the world-process as an eternal change between the qualitative homogeneity of fused masses of matter and their differentiated dispersion. We may well be convinced that always the one comes out of the other and then again the reverse takes place. Yet because of the way in which our conceptual categories happen to function, we think of the undifferentiated state as of the first. That is, our need for explanation requires us to derive variety from unity much more than vice versa. Even so, objectively it would perhaps be more correct to posit neither as first but to assume an infinite rhythm where we cannot stop at any stage we have calculated but where we must always derive that stage from an earlier, opposite one. It is similar in regard to the principles of rest and motion. The two follow each other endlessly—whether we look at the whole of being or at particular sequences of it. Nevertheless, we usually feel the state of rest to be the original, or definitive, state, which itself needs no derivation, as it were. Thus whenever we look at a pair of periods together, one of them always seems to be the explanatory and the other the derived one; it is only in such a rank ordering that we believe to grasp the meaning of their dynamic process. We are not satisfied with their mere alternation, as it actually shows itself, without designating one of its elements as primary and the other as secondary. Man is too much of a discriminating, valuing, purposive being not to articulate the uninterrupted flow of alternating periods by means of such accents; not to interpret them in analogy to domination and submission, or preparation and fulfillment, or transitory and definitive states.

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