Of the principle of self-approbation and of self-disapprobation

1 In the two foregoing parts of this discourse, I have chiefly considered the origin and foundation of our judgments concerning the sentiments and conduct of others. I come now to consider more particularly the origin of those concerning our own.

2 The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we exercise the like judgments concerning the conduct of other people. We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves, we either can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives which directed it. And, in the same manner, we either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, according as we feel that, when we place ourselves in the situation of another man, and view it, as it were, with his eyes and from his station, we either can or cannot entirely enter into and sympathize with the sentiments and motives which influenced it. We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.

Even a hundred years ago Tönnies's friend, Friedrich Paulsen, complained of his ‘horrible sentences’, while to many modern Germans he is ‘the Great Unreadable’ because his constructions require a command of German grammar that has largely fallen into disuse. Tönnies's style favours the traditional periodic German sentence, long, convoluted, with many subordinate clauses branching off one another. This is possible in German because the language has genders and inflections, so that it is clear to which word a relative pronoun is referring. This feature of his writing we have not attempted to retain, and the long sentences have been broken up in accordance with English usage. Another of Tönnies's preferences was for constructions which balance two halves of an argument, e.g. both … and; not only … but also; on the one hand … on the other hand; x stands to a as y stands to b; and so on. In many cases this feature has had to be greatly simplified in order to avoid confusion in English.

Tönnies used many archaic words and grammatical structures, influenced no doubt by older authors from his wide reading and by his own Schleswigian background. Although the 1887 edition was published in Roman print, the 1912 edition was printed in the old Gothic style, as were all subsequent editions before that of 1979. Similarly, many Latinate spellings of German words employed in 1887 were ‘Germanised’ in the 1912 edition.

The human self or the ‘subject’ of human natural will is, like the system of natural will itself, a unity. That is to say it is a unit within a larger unit, as well as containing other lesser units within itself. Like an organism and its component parts, however, it is a unity because of its inner self-sufficiency, unum per se, and because its parts are all related to it as a living entity. It maintains itself by changing these parts, discarding old parts (robbing them of their life and their particular unity), and creating new parts or assimilating them from inorganic matter. Thus nothing is a unified system that is merely a ‘part’, and everything that is a ‘whole’ forms some kind of unified system. As a whole it is not just part of another whole and dependent upon it, but is also a representative of its kind or species, or of its ‘ideal type’, since all organic entities are ultimately included within the general conception of organic life. This latter can then itself be seen as simply a facet of the ‘infinite energy’ or ‘universal will’, from which it has managed to develop under certain given conditions.

For it is a fact that advanced scientific research has shown that all organic beings are also aggregations of more basic organisms, known as cells, which are determined both by inheritance and by the way in which they relate to each other.

A concentrated mass of natural, essential will may be compared to a concentated mass of arbitrary, calculative, rational will, in the same way as the organic structure and individual organs of an animal body may be compared to a piece of apparatus or a purpose-built machine. It is easier to study the phenomena being compared if we think of them as visible objects, and an understanding of the contrast between the psychological concepts presented here can be gained from seeing them in this way. Mechanical equipment and biological organs have in common the fact that they contain and represent an accumulation of horse-power or energy which both embodies and increases the total energy of the systems to which they belong. In both cases they possess their own specific strength only in relation to this overall energy and their dependence on it.

They differ, however, in their origins and qualities. An organ is self-generating; additional and more specialised powers are developed to a greater or lesser degree by repeated straining after a particular activity – either of the entire organism or of one of its constituent parts – which the organ in its fully developed state has to achieve. A piece of equipment is made by human hand, which makes use of extraneous material and is given a specific structure and form.

The ancient philosophy of law was concerned with the problem of whether law was a product of nature (physei) or of artifice (thesei or nomô). The response of modern theory is that everything originating from the human mind or formed by it is both natural and artificial. But in the course of development the artificial overtakes the natural, and the more specifically human – particularly the mental power of will – gains in scope and importance, until in the end it attains at least relative autonomy from its natural base and may even come into conflict with it.

Thus all community-type law is to be understood as a creation of the reflective human spirit. It is a system of thoughts, rules and maxims, comparable to an ‘organon’ or a productive process, which originated in a mass of inter-related activity and practice, and adapts previously undifferentiated material by means of development from the general to the particular. Hence Gemeinschaft law is an end in itself, although it necessarily relates to that social whole to which it belongs, from which it originates, and of which it is in itself a special manifestation. It takes for granted a certain solidarity among human beings as a natural and necessary mode of existence; indeed, it assumes that a protoplasm of law is a spontaneous and inevitable product of collective life and thought.

The conflict between the historical and the rationalistic point of view has in the course of the nineteenth century penetrated into every area of social or cultural studies. It coincides from the outset with the attack of empiricism and critical philosophy on the established system of rationalism as it was exemplified in Germany by the Wolffian school of thought. Coming to terms with these two methods is thus of major significance for my attempt at a new analysis of the fundamental problems of social life.

It is a paradox to say that empiricism, even though it may have carried the day, is also the formal consummation of rationalism. Yet this is nowhere more obvious than in the epistemology of Kant which, while claiming to synthesise the opposing positions, in fact contains equal amounts of modified empiricism and modified rationalism. This admixture had already been evident in the pure empiricism of Hume; for even he does not investigate whether there can in fact be any such thing as universal and necessary knowledge with regard to facts and causality. Instead he deduces the impossibility of such knowledge conceptually, in the same way as Kant later imagined that he could deduce its reality and thus its possibility. Both are proceeding in a rationalistic manner to achieve opposite results.

The theory of Gesellschaft takes as its starting point a group of people who, as in Gemeinschaft, live peacefully alongside one another, but in this case without being essentially united – indeed, on the contrary, they are here essentially detached. In Gemeinschaft they stay together in spite of everything that separates them; in Gesellschaft they remain separate in spite of everything that unites them. As a result, there are no activities taking place which are derived from an a priori and pre-determined unity and which therefore express the will and spirit of this unity through any individual who performs them. Nothing happens in Gesellschaft that is more important for the individual's wider group than it is for himself. On the contrary, everyone is out for himself alone and living in a state of tension against everyone else. The various spheres of power and activity are sharply demarcated, so that everyone resists contact with others and excludes them from his own spheres, regarding any such overtures as hostile. Such a negative attitude is the normal and basic way in which these power-conscious people relate to one another, and it is characteristic of Gesellschaft at any given moment in time. Nobody wants to do anything for anyone else, nobody wants to yield or give anything unless he gets something in return that he regards as at least an equal trade-off.

We have on offer two contrasting systems of collective social order. One is based essentially on concord, on the fundamental harmony of wills, and is developed and cultivated by religion and custom. The other is based on convention, on a convergence or pooling of rational desires; it is guaranteed and protected by political legislation, while its policies and their ratification are derived from public opinion.

Furthermore, there are two contrasting legal systems. The first is a mutually binding system of positive law, of enforceable norms regulating the relationships of individuals one with another. It has its roots in family life and its concrete embodiment in the ownership of land. Its forms are basically determined by custom, which religion consecrates and transfigures, if not as divine will then as the will of wise rulers who interpret the divine will in trying to adapt and improve those forms. The second system is also a system of positive law which is devoted to upholding the separate identities of rational individuals in the midst of all their combinations and entanglements. It has its natural basis in the formal regulation of trade and similar business but attains superior validity and binding force only through the sovereign will and power of the state.

The wills of human beings interact in many different ways. Every such relationship is reciprocal – on the one side active or assertive, on the other passive or acquiescent. These interactions are of such a kind that they tend either to support the mental and physical well-being of the other party or to destroy them – they are either positive or negative. My theory will concentrate on investigating only relationships that are based on positive mutual affirmation. Every relationship of this kind involves some kind of balance between unity and diversity. This consists of mutual encouragement and the sharing of burdens and achievements, which can be seen as expressions of people's energies and wills. The social group brought into existence by this positive relationship, envisaged as functioning both inwardly and outwardly as a unified living entity, is known by some collective term such as a union, fraternity or association. The relationship itself, and the social bond that stems from it, may be conceived either as having real organic life, and that is the essence of Community [Gemeinschaft]; or else as a purely mechanical construction, existing in the mind, and that is what we think of as Society [Gesellschaft]. If we look at the ways in which these two terms are applied we shall see that they are conventionally used in German as synonyms.

The whole thrust of this treatise demands a correct grasp of the concept of human will, which is to be understood in a twofold sense. All intellectual activity may be characterised as ‘human’ by the fact that it involves thinking; but I shall distinguish between ‘will’ that includes some element of thought, and ‘will’ that is merely a part of the thought process. Each represents a coherent whole which integrates many different kinds of feelings, instincts and desires. In the first case the integration must be seen as natural and spontaneous, whereas in the second it is abstract and artificial. The first sort of human will is what I shall call Wesenwille [i.e. ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ or ‘essential’ will]; the second I shall call Kürwille [i.e. will that involves calculation, arbitrary freedom and rational choice].

Natural or essential will is the psychological equivalent of the human body; it is the unifying principle of life, conceived of as the pattern of material reality to which thinking itself belongs (quatenus sub attributo cogitationis concipitur). It involves ‘thinking’ in the sense that the organism contains certain cells in the forebrain which, when stimulated, cause the psychological activities that we interpret as thought (of which the speech faculty is undoubtedly a part).

If we try to classify recognisable human qualities in these terms, a superficial glance suggests the following points. The first thing that strikes us, in broad outlines, is the psychological contrast between the sexes. It is a stale cliché, but all the more important because it is dredged up out of general experience, that women are mostly led by their feelings, while men follow their reason. Men are more ‘prudent’. They alone have the capacity for calculation, cool (abstract) thought, deliberation, strategic thinking and logic. As a rule, women are not much good at these things. They are thus lacking in the basic prerequisite of calculative will. It is not true that people can only succeed in being really active, independent of nature and with some degree of mastery over it, by means of abstract thought and rational calculation. But it is true that such activity begets and develops rational calculation and is [in turn] infinitely increased with its aid. Now the role of the male is more active not only among human beings, but certainly among other mammals, and in all cases where the female has to devote a large part of her time and attention to her brood. The male is then responsible for providing food and for fighting, especially when he has to attack and plunder or even kill his rivals in order to acquire a mate.