Gratitude – invisibly webbing society together

The object of sociology, the forms of sociation and the relational nature of society

At the time in which Sociology was published, Simmel was already trying to move away from sociology and attempting to move back to philosophy, as he felt that he was not obtaining any recognition for his sociological work, and the professorship he had been waiting for had not arrived. ¹ Thus, he published this monograph knowing that it was far from being complete; yet, he wanted to finally wanted to set out clearly his vision for sociology and to turn his attention back to philosophy and aesthetics. For this reason, and despite giving Sociology a monographic format, the book is not a unitary, coherent work such as The Philosophy of Money (Simmel, 1989), but a highly interesting and inspiring patchwork, composed of bits and pieces that Simmel had written in the years immediately before, and which he had reworked in order to bring them all together and to make the point of his proposal for sociology more explicit. He illustrated it with specific and varied examples, sometimes even beautifully written short digressions. The short piece ‘Faithfulness and Gratitude’ is one of these digressions, and can be found in Chapter 8 of Sociology, which is devoted to ‘The Self-preservation of the Group’ (Simmel, 1992b: 652–670). ²

Simmel’s initial proposal of an object of analysis for the discipline of sociology had been published in an article named ‘The Problem of Sociology’ (1894) (Simmel, 1992a: 52–61). A modified version of this essay became the introductory chapter of Sociology. ³ Simmel felt that the valid point he had made in the 1894 essay had not received the attention it deserved, as no researchers had applied his proposed framework to empirical sociological analyses (Simmel 1992b: 892 [editorial report]) Thus, he sought to illustrate it himself by taking the analytical model and perspective he had created in ‘The Problem of Sociology’ and applying them to specific sociological questions. ⁴

In a bid to escape from individual–society dualism, Simmel argued that sociology should focus on the web of relations that people weave with each other daily, for it is the sum of these relations which constitutes society – what society actually is. ⁵ When a researcher adopts this perspective upon society, she is using sociology as a method, a perspective or a lens through which to look at society. However, if the researcher is to become a sociologist, she must take a step further into the analysis of these relationships that web society together by questioning what it is that is specifically social in these relationships; for these relationships simultaneously involve so many other aspects beyond the social (such as the psychological or the biological), and the sociologist must be able somehow to ‘filter’ what is social out of the mixed whole.

Indeed, Simmel argued that sociology as a discipline had to find a specific, recurrent and (albeit indirectly) observable object of analysis which, despite undergoing changes, had a certain continuity in time, appeared with a certain regularity and was strictly ‘social’.

Simmel suggested that the forms of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsformen or Formen der Vergesellschaftung) fulfil these objectives, and are indeed specifically social (Simmel, 1992b: 25–26). In a way, we can view these social forms as what makes individual motives, idiosyncrasies, and so on, socially shareable and understandable. Through the learning and understanding of the social forms of each time and place, individuals can orientate their behaviours, attitudes, expectations and actions towards each other. They can communicate with each other in a ‘social way’, and know what others are doing, and also know the ways in which they are expected (and socially allowed) to react, as well as what to anticipate if they fail to, or decide not to, satisfy expectations.

Thus, forms of sociation can be filled with many different contents, but remain relatively constant (although they do change with time). Among the paradigmatic forms which Simmel used as examples in his monograph are: competition, subordination, super-ordination, division of labour and coquetry (Simmel, 1992b: 25–39).

In order to exemplify possible ways of approaching the forms of sociation, as I have already mentioned, Simmel selected and rewrote some old texts, and composed some new ones concerning special forms of sociation (for example, the poor person or the aristocrat in relation to his or her society) formal relationships (for example, competition or subordination) and also socially significant objects and practices (for example, letters, money, exchange, gifts), since these objects and practices condensed so many relational threads that, by analysing them, a privileged insight could be gained into the ways in which society is webbed every day; a webbing in which the dynamics of this relational system named society and the individual characteristics of those people and objects involved coloured and moulded each other without ever becoming the same.

This idea of the daily webbing of the relational system (which is society) in which we, as individualsm, become possible, and the particular and unique way in which each of us fulfils a set of roles in it, leads us to focus on the apriorities of sociability, which Simmel elaborated upon in Sociology’s first digression: ‘How is Society Possible?’ (Simmel, 1992b: 42–61). Let us focus upon these apriorities for a moment, before we turn our attention to gratitude as a ‘special’ form of sociation.

The apriorities of social life

By defining society as the sum of the relationships that people establish with each other and with (and through) their social and natural environment, the link between individual and society immediately becomes less clear than it would be if we thought society to be their sum. Because if society does not emerge by adding individuals together, how do individuals engage in the social relations that will become society and will make them social in the first place?

That is the question which Simmel intended to answer in ‘How is Society Possible?’ He did this exercise by paralleling Kant’s questioning of the possibility of apprehending nature, and established three apriorities for the very possibility of apprehending society, and thus engagement in social relationships. There were significant differences, however, between Simmel’s approach to the apriorities and Kant’s. In the first place, Simmel did not consider his three apriorities to be exhaustive. Rather, he claimed that they explained a great deal of our sociability. And, furthermore and more importantly, he believed these apriorities to be not prior to all human experience, but rather dispositions (using Bourdieu’s term) that developed (that is, had to develop in order to become socialized/social) within the process of the socialization of each human being, and were thus potentially liable to changing through time.

Each of the three apriorities concentrated on a necessary condition for sociability: (1) the very possibility of apprehending others and oneself as a whole; (2) the compatibility of being a social(ized) and an individual being at the same time; and (3) the very possibility of apprehending oneself as part of society, of having a place in it that is to a certain extent durable.

The first apriority thus concentrated on the fact that we can – even through fleeting acquaintances – gain an impression, a whole picture, of the individuals we have just, or only briefly, met. Of course, the ‘real’ individual behind this impression never quite matches the picture we have drawn of him or her, but this picture allows us to relate to this person, and thus makes interaction possible (regarding what we expect from the specific person we are relating to, as well as what we anticipate this person to be expecting from us). The quality of the thus-drawn picture improves as the relationship grows closer and closer, but even the picture that we have of ourselves attains a level of completeness which the actual experience of ourselves can never match. In this context, Simmel said that we are ‘fragments of ourselves’, in the sense that we are never as complete and coherent as we see ourselves, as we imagine and present ourselves to be (Simmel, 1992b: 49). And if this is the case for ourselves, it is even more so for the ‘others’. And the less we have experienced these ‘others’, the larger this generalization and ad hoc completion of the empty spaces becomes.

The second apriority concentrates on the relationship between our being social and being purely individual and thus not ‘expressible’ in social terms. Simmel argued that these two sides of human experience and action are not like the two sides of the moon which can never be viewed together, but rather colour each other, and thus, even when people play the most stereotyped role (police officer, mother, bureaucrat), they are never all alike, for each person colours and moulds the role she plays with her own irreducible individuality, and this is, in fact, the only way humans have to act socially – by bringing their individuality into the roles they play and thus making them unique in a socially inexpressible way.

The third apriority concentrates on the fact that individuals have to believe in the existence of a place in society specifically for them in order for them to feel as if they belong to this society. And this is not a momentary need, but a lasting state. Socialized people have to think that there is (was and will be) a place in (their) society for them. This belief allows individuals to develop a bond with their society and with their similarly socialized fellows, to develop a feeling of belonging to a place, to a ‘lasting place’, and thus subtly introducing time into their understanding of society and, consequently, into the social relationships in which they may engage.

On second-order forms

This brief sketch of the apriorities of social life connects us directly with Simmel’s conceptualization of gratitude as a ‘special’ form of sociation. Forms of sociation, which we interiorize in our process of socialization, are our key to sociability. They allow us to communicate, understand and be understood in society. Special forms of sociation, furthermore, allow us to combine our individuality with our social interactions, and to think beyond the present moment.

Simmel concentrated on different types of special forms: some are special (for example, the ‘poor’ – poverty – or the ‘stranger’ – foreignness) owing to the peculiar relation between distance and proximity on which these social positions build their ‘place’ in society; others, like gratitude or faithfulness, are special forms of sociation because they are forms of second order. Let us see what he meant by that by focusing a little closer upon the concept of forms of sociation, their relation to their contents, and their relations to the necessary relative durability of social bonds.

Simmel claimed that, of course, forms of sociation and their contents did not appear as autonomous entities in our daily lives, in our social relationships. Forms and contents melted together in our experiences and perceptions, and sometimes it even depended on the perspective taken by the researcher as to whether a particular phenomenon could be viewed as a form or as its content. However, using Weberian terminology, Simmel conceived forms of sociation and contents as ‘ideal types’, analytical abstractions which could not be found in their pure state in reality, but which allowed more accurate scientific work to be done on it. ⁶

Thus, forms of sociation had to be analytically (artificially) separated from their contents in order to reach the strictly social within social relationships. Forms had to be distilled by filtering constant (and only more or less slowly changing) patterns of relation that could be filled with the most diverse specific contents.

Besides setting this milestone of formal sociology in his 1908 monograph, Simmel introduced the concept of forms of second order. He did so in the digression ‘Gratitude and Faithfulness’. The concept of forms of second order complicates and complements the original dualism of social form–content.

Simmel claimed that both gratitude and faithfulness are ‘second-order’ forms because he saw them, in a way, as ‘forms of forms’; and defined them as ‘instruments of relations which already exist and endure’, thus relating to ‘first-order’ forms as the latter relate to the ‘material contents and motives of social life’ (Simmel, 1964: 379, my emphasis)

The special nature of these second-order forms is expressed by the way in which they help to link first-order forms of sociation to the duration/durability of society; a condition which is crucial for its very existence, as the third apriority of social life emphasizes (and thus explaining how an apriority at the individual level becomes possible at the social level, at the level of Wechselwirkung, of reciprocal actions and effects). ⁷

Forms of second order play this special and fundamental role for the existence of society by extending the duration of the relations they contain towards the future as well as towards the past (thereby guaranteeing the continuity of a momentary fact towards a past in the making – that which has just happened, that momentary fact, immediately becomes the past and gains the condition of being a ‘memory’, and at the same time connects future actions and reactions to come with this set of memories). Thus, while shaping memories, while marking and reinterpreting that which is ‘memorable’ (also in its most quotidian sense), second-order forms also link us to actions, attitudes, emotions and plans that we will have and develop in the future.

Second-order forms confer an extension in time to momentary social bonds, to reciprocal actions and effects, and thus allow society to exist beyond the immediate moment, by structurally coupling social and psychic systems, creating a mechanism of inertia that sustains and extends in time those forms of social relation that exist at a certain moment: ‘Without this inertia of existing sociations, society as a whole would constantly collapse, or change in an unimaginable fashion. The preservation of social units is psychologically sustained by many factors, intellectual and practical, positive and negative’ (Simmel, 1964: 381).

This special link/structural coupling between psychic and social systems which, on the social side, I have just described as being the inertia which second-order forms confer to momentary social bonds can be viewed as emotions on the individual side. Indeed, the coupling with second-order forms is attained through the affective/emotional dimension (Simmel, 1964: 380–381). ⁸

Faithfulness and gratitude are both affective states, emotional states assuring that the individuals will endure in their attachment to the momentary emotional and social bond. Thus, when an individual experiences gratitude, and has the feeling of gratitude ⁹ towards another person and this person’s deeds, his or her relationship to this person becomes extended in time through the repeated remembering of that initial deed, and thereby the repeated remembering of the experienced thankfulness, which in some way comes to life again whenever that moment, situation and deed are recalled.

In this way, gratefulness is at the same time a form of second order and an emotion, and it represents a powerful cement for social relations (between two people, between a person and a group, among groups of people, between a person and an institution, a person and an animal, and a person and his or her society as a whole). In spite of whichever form of distance separates the fact that arouses the emotion and bond of gratefulness in the first place, this emotion for those human beings who have been socialized is kept alive, albeit perhaps dormant, and can be ‘reactivated’. Gratitude thereby becomes the ‘memory’ of the surprise, pleasure, joy, astonishment, experienced at the moment of the perhaps unexpected gift.

Faithfulness, similarly, extends in time whatever feeling may have bonded two or more people together at a particular moment. A paradigmatic example of faithfulness is the form of faithfulness that extends in time the feeling of being in love, thus keeping it alive beyond the scope of the time period in which this feeling is so overwhelming that no reminders of the feeling are needed to stop people looking around for other potential partners. At the point when the feeling of being in love diminishes in intensity, the affective state, the form of forms (the form that contains the memory of having been so in love), is activated, so that the initial bond and emotional state can be remembered even when they have been ‘forgotten’ at the level of immediate experience.

Of course, the feeling of faithfulness and the emotional and social bond that attains a durable dimension is not limited to romantic love relationships. One can be faithful to one’s parents, friends, partner, children, commitments, obligations, feelings, institutions, objects to which one’s personal (or collective) memories are attached, pets, and so on. The feeling of faithfulness is a form of forms in the sense that it keeps alive whatever emotional and social bond existed, in the sense of a living memory that attaches us with emotion to what we felt, even if we do not feel it in the same way anymore.

It is a psychological reservoir, as it were, an over-all or unitary mould for the most varied interests, affects, and motives of reciprocal bonds. In spite of all variety of origin, the original psychic states attain, in the form of faithfulness, a certain similarity, which understandably promotes the permanence of faithfulness itself ….

Simmel emphasized the crucial nature of these forms of second order for society’s very existence, and the importance of their emotional reflection on the individual side. In fact, he also wrote of them as being apriorities of social life. He did not list them among the three apriorities that have been presented above, and I would venture to say that they are included in them; especially in the third apriority, in the sense that they anchor the individual to the society she feels that she belongs to. Having the feeling of (having to feel) gratefulness or faithfulness links people strongly to their society, and confers a strong sense of belonging: if I am grateful and faithful to a person, to an imagined nation, to an institution, to a memory, I will normally not feel, at the same time, as if I have no place in that relationship, and no role to play in its future, either.

… what I mean is that faithfulness itself is a specific psychic state, which is directed toward the continuance of the relation as such, independently of any particular affective or volitional elements that sustain the content of this relation. This psychic state of the individual is one of the a priori conditions of society which alone make society possible (at least as we know it), in spite of the extraordinary differences of degree in which this psychic state exists. It can probably never reach zero: the absolutely unfaithful person, the person for whom it is impossible to transform feelings that engender relationships into the feeling designed to preserve the relationship, is not a thinkable phenomenon.

We could thus interpret Simmel as arguing that a socialized and fully unfaithful and ungrateful person is not possible; in the sense that being able to develop emotional bonds that are also social bonds that are kept alive over time through forms of second order such as gratitude and faithfulness belongs to the most crucial and basic processes of sociation (to becoming a social being – thus fulfilling the a priori conditions for perceiving society as such, and being able to act, feel and relate in a social way). Thus, second-order forms of sociation have to be learned and incorporated (in the most physical sense as well) for a human being to become a fully socialized individual. ¹⁰

In this way, furthermore, Simmel pointed to the emotional dimension as being the dimension in which the social and individual psychical systems meet, thus creating the possibilities for fulfilling (at the individual level) the necessary conditions by which society becomes possible to apprehend, possible to become the framework within which an individual relates to others, him- or herself and the environment (and thus fulfilling the apriorities of social life).

As far as it concerns us here, faithfulness or loyalty is the emotional reflection of the autonomous life of the relation, unperturbed by the possible disappearance of the motives which originally engendered the relation.

The expression of ‘emotional reflection’ calls our attention precisely towards this point: the ‘autonomous life of the relation’, the relational, social nature of the bond, acquires its extension in time through the arousing of emotions in each individual, who, therefore, carries in his or her consciousness in a more or less latent way the memory of the original bond, sustained by the emotion, which is still alive, and reignited by the mechanisms of collective memory, which call to mind and reawaken the original bond by conferring meaning and importance upon it. Thus, perhaps the bond and feeling of faithfulness would be less strong if it were only relegated to the individual emotional life, but it grows stronger and more important as this feeling is called to mind every time that we are asked (directly or indirectly) in our daily life whether we have a partner, children, and so forth.

According to Simmel, not all emotions possess the same strong social nature. There are emotions that are more and less ‘social’, gratitude and faithfulness being the most ‘social’ of these, ¹¹ since they can only emerge and exist after the social relationship has been established, and thus they ‘serve’ to preserve the relationship that thus emerged out of a specific feeling. Therefore love would be a momentary feeling that leads to the establishing of a love relationship; faithfulness would then come as a second-order form of relation, as a feeling of a certain kind of obligation towards the beloved person, which stabilizes the relationship that emerged from the first emotional impulse of experiencing love. This leads to a tension between the initial feeling of being in love and the feeling of being (that is, of having to be) faithful; between the forms of sociation of seduction, coquetry and the establishing of a love relationship and the second-order form of faithfulness. This tension is in a way similar to the one that Simmel presented between life and forms in his later philosophical and sociological works: while the initial emotions and initial relationship may change, the second-order form tends to crystallize and stabilize that which would not remain in that form, and thus eventually generates conflicts. This again does not apply only to the example of love relationships. Staying with the example of love, we can see that the love people feel for their parents, for instance, may change throughout the years as they become adults, but the feelings of faithfulness and, above all, of gratitude give that filial love a strong framework (second-order form) within which to remain healthy and alive.

However, this tension is never like the one between life and forms because, as I have claimed, the forms of second order on the social side are emotions on the individual side, and thus these forms are mediated and channelled through emotions that touch the innermost sensibility of socialized individuals. And although emotional tensions may (and do) arise, the nuances are manifold and cannot be reduced to the fight between two poles, one moving and one fixed and stable.

Irrespective of the innumerable modifications, deflections, intermixtures of specific destinies, faithfulness bridges and reconciles that deep and essential dualism which splits off the life-form of individual internality [Innerlichkeit] from the life-form of sociation that is nevertheless borne by it. Faithfulness is that constitution of the soul (which is constantly moved and lives in a continuous flux), by means of which it fully incorporates into itself the stability of the super-individual form of relation and by means of which it admits to life, as the meaning and value of life, a content which, though created by the soul itself, is, in its form, nevertheless bound to contradict the rhythm or un-rhythm of life as actually lived.

In spite of both being second-order forms, gratitude possesses for Simmel a stronger nature, and a stronger emotional nature (bond), than faithfulness. He defined gratitude as the ‘moral memory of mankind’ (thereby touching on the topic of collective memory that I presented above). Gratitude establishes a bridge between people, an invisible thread that binds them together in a durable manner. ¹² This, for instance, differentiates gratitude or faithfulness from shame – which, being also deeply social, ¹³ does not guarantee the durability of the thus-established bonds between specific people.

Although it is a purely personal affect, or (if one will) a lyrical affect, its thousandfold ramifications throughout society make it one of the most powerful means of social cohesion. It is a fertile emotional soil which grows specific actions among particular individuals. But much more: although we are often unaware of its fundamentally important existence, and although it is interwoven with innumerable other motivations, nevertheless, it gives human actions a unique modification or intensity: it connects them with what has gone before, it enriches them with the element of personality, it gives them the continuity of interactional life. If every grateful action, which lingers on from good turns received in the past, were suddenly eliminated, society (at least as we know it) would break apart.

However, shame, through the incorporation into our habitus of what is embarrassing, what is not appropriate, also establishes a dimension of duration attached to our emotion to the norms and rules of the society in which we live, and which has set the frame of our socialization. Even so, it introduces a lesser dimension of durability into fluctuant relationships that would not endure without the reciprocity to which the gift and the subsequent gratitude give rise. ¹⁴

… his irredeemable nature of gratitude shows it as a bond between men which is as subtle as it is firm. Every human relationship of any duration produces a thousand occasions for it, and even the most ephemeral ones do not allow their increment to the reciprocal obligation to be lost. In fortunate cases, but sometimes even in cases abundantly provided with counter-instances, the sum of these increments produces an atmosphere of generalized obligation (the saying that one is “obliged” [“verbunden”] to somebody who has earned our thanks is quite apt), which can be redeemed by no accomplishments whatever. This atmosphere of obligation belongs among those "microscopic," but infinitely tough, threads which tie one element of society to another, and thus eventually all of them together in a stable collective life.

Concluding remarks

In this paper I have attempted to trace a line between Simmel’s formal sociology, his little-reviewed concept of ‘forms of second order’, his apriorities for social life and his incipient sociology of emotions. Thus I have brought together and linked elements of Simmel’s sociology which are all present in his 1908 monograph (and many also in his Fundamental Questions of Sociology, published in late 1917 [Simmel, 1999]), but which were not connected to each other in the way that they have been interconnected here. For me this is the most interesting, fruitful and exciting way of working with Simmel’s works and Simmel’s sociology. Beyond the nevertheless interesting and exciting exercise of revisiting classical works from the perspective of a history of sociology, it is captivating to think further from the point at which their authors left their works, to continue developing bits and pieces of sociological theory, and sociological work, on the shoulders of magnificent giants such as Georg Simmel. David Frisby was one of the professors who taught me to work this way, and to enjoy doing it; and he was also one of the kindest, noblest academics I have ever met. A walk with him through Leipzig could become an unexpected key lecture in the history of architecture and sociology of the flâneur, a lesson in humanity, and the possibility to talk about one’s deepest worries. These gifts, and the many unexpected gifts he gave to me, have marked my path towards the writing of this text. Each of its words bears my gratitude towards him, his help, patience, support and wholeheartedness.

… Isn’t it proof of the strength of this ‘moral memory of mankind’, David? This memory we cannot grasp or see, so different from the trace we leave upon the cities we build and inhabit. Isn’t it a paradigmatic example of the invisible threads that bind us all together in a durable manner? Indeed, in reciprocal actions and effects, these threads do bind us together, and through forms of second order and the emotions they arouse in us, they bind us throughout our lives and, as you see, even beyond. Thank you, David.