Epistemology in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Epistemology in Durkheim's ElementaryForms ofReligiousLife TERRY F. GODLOVE, JR. WHERE DO CATEGORIESsuch as space, time, quantity, quality, and relation purchase their peculiar necessity and universality? For Kant, the answer lies with the realization that objects of experience must conform to those conditions under which experience is possible. Thus, we explain the necessity and universality of our fundamental categories of experience not by a causal account of their origin, but by showing that we cannot help but presuppose them in all our empirical knowledge. I shall return to Kant's solution at the end of this paper, but until then I want to examine l~mile Durkheim's answer in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)? With Kant, Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that we cannot explain this peculiar necessity and universality so long as we view it as an effect caused by something in the spatio-temporal world. But against Kant, and based on this rejection of "empiricism," he went on to trace the modal structure of the categories to an ideal object outside .the world, to an ideal object he called "society." Durkheim's sociological idealism has never been well received, most critics offering empirical patches and apologies. Though I have no interest in defending Durkheirn, I hope to show that his error lies at a deeper level than his critics allege. For he righdy saw that no empirical investigation can explain how it is that certain of our concepts are able to constrain any empirical investigation whatever. After some brief historical remarks, I shall argue that the idea of society as an ideal entity emerges, for Durkheim, from epistemological considerations which are not easily put off. ' I havegenerallyfollowedthe translation byJoseph Ward Swain(NewYork:GeorgeAllen &Unwin, Ltd., 1915),but haveoccasionallymodified it from the French (LesFormesklkmenl,aires de la vie religiegse,le systkmetotkraiqueen Australie,6th ed. [Paris:PressesUniversitairesde France, x979]). Referencesto the ElementaryForms(EF) willhenceforth appear in the text. [~85] 386 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4:3 JULY 1986 As an English critic has recently noted, "a rounded assessment of Durkheim 's epistemology has yet to be undertaken."' Since epistemological considerations occupied Durkheim throughout his career, a rounded assessment would have to take up at least The Rules of SociologicalMethod (x895), Sociology and Philosophy (1898-191i), Primitive ClassOication (19o3) (with Marcel Mauss), and Pragmatism and Sociology(19t4). s But though the present essay considers only a small part of Durkheim's epistemological writing, it treats, I think, his most sustained, mature, and philosophically significant statement. My aim is to throw Durkheim's theory into relief by holding it up against the Kantian approach to epistemology it was meant to supersede. 1. Between x879 and t88~, Durkheim studied at the i~cole Normale Sup6rieure , where he was influenced by, among others, Comte, and two neoKantian teachers, Charles Bernard Renouvier and l~mile Boutroux. Comte's influence was crucial; a recent biographer notes that, of all Comte's teaching , "its most important element was precisely the extension of the scientific attitude to the study of society.TM More specifically, Durkheim placed himself in the Comtean methodological tradition through his lifelong allegiance to a hypothetico-deductive method. From Renouvier, Durkheim absorbed a particular view of the Kantian categories. The categories, rather than given a priori---independent of all experience---are subject to practical forces of both an individual and societal nature; that is, they could be other than they are. From Boutroux came the idea that societal facts are irreducible to psychological facts, a hallmark of Durkheim's sociology,s However , Durkheim soon rejected Boutroux's teleological mode of reasoning, ' John B. Allcock, "Editorial Introduction" to Durkheim's Pragmatism and Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), xl. 3 References for these works are as follows. LesR~glesde la n~thode sociologiq~e(Paris: Alcan, 1895); translated by S. A. Soiovay and J. H. Mueller (New York: The Free Press, 1964). Sociologie et philosophic (Paris: Alcan, 195a); translated by D. F. Pocock (New York: Free Press, 1974). "De quelques formes primitives de classification: contribution ~,l'etude des representations collectives," Annie sodolog/que6 (Paris 19ot-o2): 1-7a; translated with an introduction by Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).P...