Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim 3031261135, 9783031261138

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SpringerBriefs in Sociology Carlos Belvedere

Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim

SpringerBriefs in Sociology

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Carlos Belvedere

Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim

Carlos Belvedere CONICET – Universidad de Buenos Aires Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani Buenos Aires, Argentina Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento Los Polvorines Buenos Aires, Argentina

ISSN 2212-6368 ISSN 2212-6376 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Sociology ISBN 978-3-031-26116-9 ISBN 978-3-031-26114-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Roberto Di Giano ({ 2022).

Foreword

The reader holds in hand a book devoted to the phenomenology of Émile Durkheim. This might come up as a surprise since for many he expresses quite the opposite to the phenomenological perspective. His stance is supposed to be “objectivistic”, while phenomenology ought to be “subjectivistic”. He is seen as a scientist, while phenomenologists are deemed to be philosophers. And so on. Or maybe what is on the reader’s mind is not surprise but hope—hope that a new Durkheim will come to light and challenge the dominant view on his work. If this is the case, my hope is not to disappoint her or him. However, this expected “new Durkheim” is quite old, since the stereotypes that conceal him were already faced by Durkheim himself. Notwithstanding, it is the author’s best wish that this brief and humble contribution will help see Durkheim in a different, if not a new, light. I recommend the reader to go through this little book one chapter a day. This will give her or him the time to engage in an in-depth reading and, notwithstanding, to finish the book in just a week. I wish to make a special mention of Professor Emilio de Ípola, who started in me the passion for reading Durkheim when I was a simple assistant in his chair of Systematic Sociology at Universidad de Buenos Aires. I would like to praise the hallmark work of Edward Tiryakian, whose contributions I have been reading over the years in what, otherwise, would have been too lonely a journey. Durkheim’s work will be quoted from the French edition. However, for long citations I will prefer the established English translation. In such cases, the reference from the French edition will also be provided next to the English reference.

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CONICET – Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Buenos Aires, Argentina Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Los Polvorines, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Foreword

Carlos Belvedere

Contents

1

Looking for Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Durkheim in a Contemporary Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Durkheim in the Phenomenological Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Losing Track of Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1 1 2 5

2

Durkheim as a Phenomenologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Cartesian Spiritualism and the Context of Durkheim’s Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Almost a Neo-Cartesianism: Methodological Convergences . . . . . . . 2.3 Durkheim’s Practice of Static Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Quest for Origins as a Practice of Genetic Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Durkheim and the Phenomenological Approach to Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Durkheim and the Philosophy of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Consciousness, a Central Concept Cast in Oblivion . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Representations and Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Representation and the Philosophy of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Durkheim’s Sociology as “an Extension of Kantianism” . . . . . . . . 3.5 Representations as a Clue for Intentional Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

19 19 21 22 24 25

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An Objectivity Sui Generis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 A Brief Note on Intentional Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Back to Social Things Themselves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Social Facts Are Things! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 A Few Words on the Phenomenology of Ideal Objects . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Social Things as Ideal Objectivities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Sacred Things and the Ontological Regions of the Social . . . . . . . . 4.7 New Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Durkheim and the Transcendental . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Intentional Analysis and Phenomenological Sociology . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Agreements and Disagreements About the Subject of Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Durkheim’s Way Out of the Empiricism and Apriorism Dilema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Sociological Theory Versus Transcendental Philosophy . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Unmasking the Monster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Durkheim’s Forgotten Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Collective Consciousness as the Ensemble of Social Similarities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Sociology and Formal Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Two Consciousness, One Single Substratum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 The Life of the Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Durkheim’s Argument, Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Finding Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Husserl and Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Husserl on Collective Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Schutz on Social Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 One Durkheim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Lost and Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.6 Durkheim Makes Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Chapter 1

Looking for Durkheim

This book is a desperate search for Durkheim. How come he is missing? Not in a literal, trivial way. Of course, he is omnipresent in the sociological tradition. However, is that the real Durkheim? Or is it just a name that conceals an unfathomed author? My point will be that Durkheim is misunderstood when the phenomenological background of his work remains unattended. The “true Durkheim” is lost when his readers disregard core concepts such as consciousness and representations. Regrettably, the prevailing consensus in our days has often neglected, or even discarded, this set of ideas, promoting a stereotyped image of Durkheim. In this chapter, I will propose the reader the detective work of looking for the real Durkheim.

1.1

Durkheim in a Contemporary Context

In contemporary social theory, Durkheim is deemed to be an objectivistic who opposed allegedly subjectivistic approaches such as phenomenology. From this perspective, there cannot be any serious convergences between Durkheim and phenomenology since they hold different ways of conceiving the social. (See Bourdieu, 1979: 562 f., and Bourdieu, 1980, p. 58, 74) This is also the prevailing consensus among Durkheimian scholars, where the idea that phenomenology has nothing to do with his work is dominant. Most likely, that is the reason why there are no references to Husserl or Schutz in the most important books on Durkheim in the last 25 years, while other phenomenologists are rarely named.1 Likewise, there is not a single article on Durkheim and 1

For instance, Alexander and Smith include a few mentions to Heidegger (Alexander & Smith, 2005, p. 246, 362) and Merleau-Ponty (Alexander & Smith, 2005, p. 211), all of them incidental or trivial. Pickering (2000a, p. 104) quotes Berger and Luckmann’s definition of reality as “a quality appertaining to phenomena which we recognize as having a being independent of volition” only to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_1

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Looking for Durkheim

Phenomenology in Durkheimian Studies (the scholarly journal of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies), and phenomenologists are only mentioned for allegedly seeing Durkheim as someone who ignores “the nature of social action as intrinsically meaningful.” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 14) Something similar happens with books and dissertations published in the new century, where phenomenologists are depicted as confronting Durkheim.2 However, classical phenomenology has appreciated many of Durkheim’s insights. Some even claim that there is an “implicitly phenomenological approach” (Tiryakian, 1965, p. 681) in his oeuvre, which is manifested not only in his latest writings but throughout his work from his early years on. (Tiryakian, 1978, pp. 26–27) Accordingly, our first task will be to display the phenomenological reception of Durkheim.

1.2

Durkheim in the Phenomenological Tradition

Unlike Durkheimian scholars, the most prominent phenomenologists have appreciated the deep insights of Durkheim, particularly in the twentieth century. Mainly it was French philosophers who recognized this phenomenological air in his work, although some sociologists out of the ordinary have also been perceptive to the implicitly phenomenological approach of the founding father of French sociology. The phenomenological reading of Durkheim can be traced back to Monnerot (1946), who overtly engages in discussion with him from a phenomenologicalexistential perspective inspired by Sartre and Husserl. In Monnerot’s opinion, the alleged “social facts” are not ‘things” but “situations lived,” and identified pursuant to a particular “human condition.” Hence, it would not be possible to address social facts as things because the way they exist is not that proper of things. Therefore, “Durkheim’s dogmatic sociology” would make the mistake of using the same word to designate two types of phenomena that are substantially heterogeneous. Against Durkheim, Monnerot argues that social facts, while phenomena, are ambiguous and can only exist if they gain meaning from a human situation in a specific place and time. Therefore, sociology should refer to “states lived,” not to “things.” These states should be comprehended rather than explained rationally as required by the “nonwritten rule” of Durkheim’s sociological method; namely, that

argue that “Durkheim frequently used the word reality in this sense.” Berger and Luckmann are also mentioned in Schmaus (2004, p. 7), an author to whom their “purely phenomenological analysis” lapses into “causal talk.” 2 For instance, Hamilton (2002, p. 94) thinks that phenomenologists “are critical of Durkheim” and Richman (2002, p. 102) refers to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as part of the generation that rejected his “Third Republic ideology.” Morin (2003), instead, does not mention phenomenology at all, and Toews (2001, p. 24) refers to Durkheim in a vague, insubstantial way by saying that “his strategy is to take the social as a phenomenon.”

1.2

Durkheim in the Phenomenological Tradition

3

for sociology to be deemed scientifically, it should establish explanatory relations with grounds on statistical covariations. As opposed to the controversial frame of mind of Monnerot, Merleau-Ponty refers to Durkheim in a friendly manner. He displays an attachment to the Durkheimian way of understanding social facts upon stating that, for as regards the social, the question lies in understanding “how it can constitute a ‘thing’ to be known without preconceptions and, at the same time, a ‘meaning’ that is only given an opportunity to become evident by the societies from which we gain knowledge.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 104) Then, he recalls the rule of treating social facts as things and other Durkheimian ideas such as collective representations, collective consciousness, and essential forms of social life (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 124)— clear references that are directed to a reading of Lévy-Brühl and his notion of “primitive mentality” and to Mauss’s theory of gift. (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 125f) If you agree to consider Ortega y Gasset as a philosopher somehow related to phenomenology,3 then you might find interesting that, when claiming that society is not a mere creation of individuals but an “authentic reality,” (Ortega y Gasset, 1981, p. 12) he mentions the concept of social facts. Therefore, even if Ortega y Gasset (1981, p. 16f.) denied that something like “a collective soul” would exist—which obviously makes him skeptical as regards the existence of a collective consciousness—he considered Durkheim as who got closest to an appropriate intuition of social facts. (Ortega y Gasset, 1981, p. 16) A similar stance is held by Schutz, who admitted that there is a collective consciousness at work, even if he remained critical of the hypostatized, mystified conceptions of collectivity, mass, and society. However, his interest in Durkheim has changed over the years. In his early work, Schutz does not even mention Durkheim. He refers to him for the first time in 1940, when claiming that Parsons’ discussion of normative values in Durkheim can be interpreted “as systems of in-order-to or because motives, to the extent that the subjective point of view of all these phenomena is retained” (Schutz, 2011, p. 25), implicitly admitting some convergences between Durkheim’s sociology (at least as interpreted by Parsons) and his own perspective. However, affinities are limited. Just 1 year later, in a letter to Parsons, he observed a problem in Durkheim’s thought that he called “the group mind difficulty,” arising “because of Durkheim’s attempt to use a conceptual scheme which had been formulated in terms of what I [Schutz] call the concrete level as a basis of generalization about the determination of a total system of action.” (Schutz, 2011, p. 47) Then in 1944, Schutz referred to Durkheim, this time to endorse his idea that “war is the archetype” of the state of anomie. (Schutz, 1964, p. 117)

3

At least this seems to have been Schutz’s view in his review of Man and people, where he mentions specific agreements with Ortega y Gasset. For instance, he matches his concept of “anonymity” with Ortega’s notion of “people” as a dehumanized form of relation. (Schutz, 1962, p. 144)

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Looking for Durkheim

Nevertheless, Schutz’s best comments on Durkheim are expressed in the early 1950s. In two passages written in 1953, he criticizes and praises different aspects of Durkheim’s sociology. On the one hand, he objects to his “organic” conception of social life and expresses his preference for the way in which Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Max Scheler reduced “social collectivities to the social interaction of individuals.” (Schutz, 1966, pp. 38–9) On the other hand, he presents one of Simmel’s best ideas (namely, that we only take part in a We-relation with a part of our personality, which appears as a partial self) as a solution to the dilemma between individual and collective consciousness, so clearly seen by Durkheim. (Schutz, 1962, p. 18) In short, Schutz does not accept yet Durkheim’s solutions, but he considers some of the problems he posed to be valid. Nevertheless, 5 years later, Schutz starts to approach Durkheim in a more positive way. At this point, he conceives of language as a “group phenomenon” in line with Durkheim, “whose study of language presupposes that there is something like a ‘social consciousness’ at work in the human world.” (Schutz, 2010, p. 61) Therefore, now the mind group is not a difficulty, and the relationship of the individual and the group is no longer a dilemma. In contrast, Schutz accepts the reading of Durkheim and Saussure by Georges Gusdorf (Schutz, 2010, p. 101), according to whom “speaking is the product of a ‘collective consciousness’; more particular, it is the affirmation of the person within the collective consciousness constituting the given sociality in which a person lives.” (Schutz, 2010, p. 67) Then, in the manuscripts for The Structures of the Life-World, he projects to address on his own the notion of collective consciousness. Schutz insists on the idea of a partial self, which, again, he attributed to Simmel and considered compatible with Durkheim’s collective consciousness. Schutz even contextualizes these ideas in the framework of his own perspective on typifications. In other words, he includes the notion of collective consciousness in the list of his own theoretical interests, as well as the concept of “social coercion” (i.e., “constraint” in Durkheim’s sense). (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, pp. 212–213, 265) In a less ambivalent way, Levinas embraces some of Durkheim’s claims and engages in an early study thereof at the University of Strasbourg, where he attended Halbwachs’ classes. (Hayat, 1995, p. 41) He manages to capture from a Durkheimian perspective a drafting of the “essential social categories” on the basis of the main idea that the social “is not limited to a mere addition of individual psychologies”; however, he believes those ideas only become entirely meaningful when recovered under a Husserlian and Heideggerian approach. (Levinas, 1982, pp. 17–21) Accordingly, Levinas portrays Durkheim as a “metaphysician” of the social world, who successfully proved that society is structured as a totality with its own reality and is superior to the individuals who are a part of it. (Levinas, 1961, p. 203) This, in turn, entails appraising the idea of social totality (Levinas, 1991, p. 40), understood not as merely factual coexistence but as what gives individuals the chance to elevate themselves to morality. (Hayat, 1995, p. 42) Probably the most radical reading is that of Henry (2007), who considers that Durkheim conceives of society as a specific reality whose laws rule individual life even though they are, as laws, mere abstractions. From his perspective, it would be

1.3

Losing Track of Durkheim

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nonsense to think that abstract social laws rule individual life. Thus, the words “social life” would not refer to any kind of reality. Indeed, for Henry, reality is strictly individual, and the social is nothing other than mere abstractions (i.e., irrealites). For instance, neither politics nor economics find their reality in themselves but in the subjective praxis of the individuals who produce and sustain them. From this angle, there is no reality in society other than real living individuals. Consequently, from a Hernian point of view, Durkheim’s idea of society as a reality sui generis whose laws are different from the ones that rule individual phenomena would be nonsense. Consequently, the conception of the supremacy of society on individuals and the belief that it can act on them according to objective rules would be an “illusion” because “the laws of society cannot be different from the laws of the living subjectivities.” (Paredes-Martín, 2011, p. 105) Finally, it was Tiryakian who drafted the most emphatic phenomenological argument in support of Durkheim. His claim is that Durkheim’s dictum that social facts must be treated as if they were things could serve to establish a profound affinity with Husserl, who attempted to go back to things themselves. Furthermore, both authors would share the methodological procedure that consists of suspending the naïve stance, setting aside the prejudices inherent to our natural attitude, in order to operate some sort of reduction. It is in this regard that Tiryakian refers to Durkheim’s implicitly phenomenological approach. (Tiryakian, 1965, p. 383) Even if Tiryakian’s view has been challenged by Heap and Roth alleging that he uses the concepts of phenomenology metaphorically as regards the intentionality of consciousness, the reduction, the concept of phenomenon, and the concept of essence (Heap & Roth, 1973, p. 355), and regardless of their objection that this would lead to a distorted, if not perverted, idea of both phenomenology and sociology (Heap & Roth, 1973, p. 359), in my opinion, Tiryakian’s intuition that there is an implicit phenomenology in Durkheim is sound. As the reader will determine in the next chapters, much of this book is based on the idea that, even if more accurate arguments could be provided, Tyriakian is basically right in stating that there is a programmatic rapprochement between Durkheim and Husserl, disguised through odd positivism and even lost after the illusions such positivism cherishes.

1.3

Losing Track of Durkheim

Regrettably, the conviction prevailing in classical phenomenology that discussing Durkheim is a productive task and that something inspiring could come out of it has been abandoned in the current debates involving fundamental social issues. His work has not gained enough attention from those devoted to the most Durkheimian subject: collective consciousness. Take, for instance, the collective intentionality approach, where Durkheim is confined to the past. In the few papers and books that mention him, he is assigned the role of a predecessor. His view is deemed “to be the direct historical root” of this

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field and a historical source, but—if I may say—in a bad way, since the conviction prevails that his “remarks on the role of collective consciousness suggest a view of the collective ‘taking over control’ and bypassing individual intentional psychology in the explanation of action.” (Schweikard & Schmid, 2021) In this perspective, the notion of collective consciousness seems to be “problematic,” (Olen & Turner, 2015, p. 20) and terms such as “fact” are “a little odd” to “a contemporary ear.” (Epstein, 2018, p. 267) An excellent example of this kind of attitude is Szanto’s statement that Durkheim endorsed “collectivism,” namely, the “claim that individuals’ intentional psychology, behavior, personhood, or moral status” are “compromised,” “outflanked,” or “overridden” by their “membership in collectives, their shared affective life, intentional regularities governing group agency, or sociocultural laws or norms.” (Szanto, 2020, pp. 294–295) A few things must be noted here. First, it is a stereotyping of Durkheim’s thought; one that Durkheim himself fought when, in the “Preface to the second edition” to The Rules of Sociological Method, he made it clear, against his critics, that collective consciousness is not a substance but an ensemble of phenomena, and posed the following complaint: “While we had expressly said and repeated in every way that social life was entirely made up of representations, we were accused of eliminating the mental element of sociology.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XI) He then contradicted another misunderstanding, the idea “that presents social phenomena as external to individuals,” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XV) while all he had said is that collective consciousness opposes individual consciousness and not the individuals as such, since society is made of them. Second, Szanto’s description of collectivism is quite light, which makes him a strong anti-collectivist. I could understand if he fought strong collectivist positions that strangle individual life, but—as seen in the previous paragraph—Durkheim is far from that. In addition, none of the elements that Szanto considers as characteristics of the phenomenological perspective are missing in Durkheim. See, for instance, Szsanto’s gloss of one of his favorite classical phenomenologists: “Scheler rejects [. . .] Durkheimian social determinism. Instead, he advocates a codetermination between mind, knowledge, and society.” (Szanto, 2020, p. 296) As just seen, Durkheim admitted the mental element in sociology. Additionally, he devoted painstaking efforts to the study of knowledge in society. Therefore, the description provided by Szanto that better fits Durkheim’s aim is not that of collectivism but that of Scheler’s phenomenology. Third, even if Szanto (2020, p. 295) thinks that “there is hardly any phenomenologist who subscribes to such collectivism,” I could name quite a few who do. Of course, I would admit that no one would endorse a strong collectivism in the terms outlined in the previous paragraph, but probably most of them would adhere to the light version exposed therein. If collectivism claims that individuals are “compromised” or “outflanked” by their “membership in collectives,” that is exactly what Schutz said. In his latest years, Schutz came to understand that the We is primordial with regards to the I. (Schutz, 2010, 74) Social coercion has also become an important concept, and Schutz mentions that it can take different forms. (Schutz, 2011, p. 94;

1.3

Losing Track of Durkheim

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Schutz, 2010, p. 65, 94, 99; Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 202) All these subjects are related to what, for Schutz, is the “central concept” (Schutz, 1996, p. 76) and the “fundamental problem of sociology”: the problem of relevance. (Schutz, 1996, p. 3) Interestingly, Szanto (2020, p. 298) mentions “relevance.” I just wonder why he did not draw all the conclusions that it has regarding “collectivism.” Schutz, instead, was not so reluctant. It might worth the effort to dedicate a few lines to his view on the concept of relevance. Relevance is a “basic phenomenon” related to the mind’s selective activity (Schutz, 2011, p. 99) that establishes merely a correlation between two terms having reciprocal import as regards one another. (Schutz, 2011, p. 120) It has to do with the structuration of the field of consciousness “into a thematic kernel which stands out over against a surrounding horizon and is given at any ‘now’ of inner duration.” (Schutz, 2011, p. 95) Relevances can be either “intrinsic” or “imposed,” as we may or may not voluntarily structure our field of consciousness. Consequently—and this is Schutz’s claim—all relevance systems are socially determined. (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 290) Social determination is an imposition of the social world upon the individual, who finds himself always “in the midst” of a social environment that is a coconstitutive element of his biographical situation and is therefore “experienced as inescapably belonging to it.” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 278) It determines every “interest and the relevance systems of all sorts.” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 278) A stronger position can be found in Embree. Borrowing Schutz’s idea that groups are fundamental with regard to individuals, he goes one step further to claim that the former are concrete, whereas the latter are abstract: “while the social world as a structure of individuals emphasized by Schutz is based on an abstraction, one in which a member’s group memberships are abstracted from, the structure of groups in collective life is concrete and thus fundamental.” (Embree, 2015, p. 129) In his view, some groups can serve as collective subjects and even relate to groups of others in the same capacity. (Embree, 2015, p. 124) If we grant this, it follows that the concrete subject of the social world is the collective life of groups. For that reason, the social world is in the first place a structure of groups that hold their peculiar collective standpoint and (metaphorically speaking) lead their lives in mutual understanding and interaction. Groups are concrete collective subjects, integrated by individuals or by other groups that can hold subjective and objective meanings and can act upon one another and influence each other. The conclusion follows that Durkheim’s stance is not confronted with, nor is it impossible to assimilate to, that of phenomenology. Not only the perspectives of Schutz and Embree allow us to think so but also the numerous comments made by phenomenologists over the years on Durkheim’s work. Accordingly, the aim of this book stands in opposition to the current consensus in the fields of social ontology and collective intentionality. In the following chapters, it will be argued that Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness has not yet been fully appreciated and that there is more to it than what the pleiad of its readers have found thus far.

Chapter 2

Durkheim as a Phenomenologist

In Chap. 1, I have bare the longstanding interest of classical phenomenologists in the work of Durkheim. However, a mere descriptive argument is not convincing enough. The sole constatation that they have found in Durkheim valuable insights does not suffice. We must take our considerations to another level, reflecting not only on the fact that there is something phenomenologically challenging in Durkheim’s work but also considering the reasons why this is so. With that aim, I will attempt to prove a rapprochement between Durkheim and phenomenology. Of course, in times of Durkheim, phenomenology could only mean Husserl’s phenomenology since they were contemporaries. As Tiryakian notes, they. were born a year apart (Durkheim in 1858, Husserl in 1859), which means that for about six decades they shared a common European history; they also shared in their formative years, though not at the same time, the same teacher, Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology (although both Durkheim and Husserl came to reject ‘psychologism’ as an accounting of the phenomenal world). (Tiryakian, 1978, p. 25)

Accordingly, I will focus on some meaningful affinities between Durkheim and Husserl, mostly of a methodological and practical kind. Then, methodology and its practice are the two axes that will structure this chapter.

2.1

Cartesian Spiritualism and the Context of Durkheim’s Sociology

A number of studies have remarked on the importance of Cartesianism for understanding Durkheim’s sociology. They call attention to the importance of this perspective as one of the main contexts of French academic discussions of that time. Nevertheless, the way these studies relate Cartesianism to Durkheim is, as I will try to prove, insufficient because they can only see in it a collection of misunderstandings and confrontations. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_2

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Regarding Cartesianism as a misunderstanding, Stedman Jones recalls that “for Kant, Descartes is the main exponent of problematic idealism.” (2000a, p. 46) Fields, in turn, considers that when Durkheim refers to the soul as something real but without extension, he tacitly quotes Descartes’ res extensa (Fields, 2005, p. 175) in a way that Descartes might not accept. (Fields, 2005, p. 178) Schmaus refers to Descartes as a skeptical, invoking his “evil genius” (Schmaus, 2004, p. 139)—a perspective that might be contested by many Cartesian scholars. Regarding the idea that Durkheim confronts Descartes, it is possible to find a variety of motives why this is so. One, historical, is because Renouvier, who influenced Durkheim, “dismissed the spiritualists’ Cartesian introspection of the soul” (Schmaus, 1998, p. 178) and opposed “the egocentric approach of Cartesian idealism.” (Stedman Jones, 2000a, p. 47) This confrontation is also extended to some of Durkheim’s predecessors and contemporaries, such as Cousin, Mendelssohn, Kant, Maine de Biran, Guyer, and Rabier. (Schmaus, 2004, p. 20, 60ff, 50–52, 164n9) Another motive—probably the most claimed—is that Durkheim’s sociology surpasses Cartesian philosophy not only because—in some respects—he is superior to Descartes but also because sociology solves some philosophical antinomies. For instance, according to Schmaus (2004, p. 1), Durkheim offered “a superior explanation” of the universality and necessity of the categories than that provided by Cartesian introspection. Richman sees this relation in a similar way when stating that Durkheim and “the French invention of sociology arose as a reaction to” Cartesianism (Richman, 2002, p. 75), whose “global effects [. . .] on French thought and culture” he reproved. (Richman, 2002, p. 79) In this view, nothing good seems to come out of Cartesianism. I agree that Durkheim’s relation with Cartesianism is complex, sometimes conflicting, and even mistaken. Nevertheless, a more accurate and specific relation with Descartes can be found in The Rules of Sociological Method, which might let us think that most of what Durkheim confronted had to do with the Cartesian spiritualism of his contemporaries rather than with Descartes himself. I must admit that Durkheim challenged many of Descartes’ ideas, particularly that the spirit is the easiest thing to know because the ego accesses it from the inside. Nevertheless, I will focus on one special issue that, in my opinion, makes Durkheim a Cartesian and, therefore, a phenomenologist in Husserl’s sense. This is easiest seen through a comparison between Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method. The influence of Meditations. . . on Rules. . . can be ascertained through minor and anecdotal references, such as considering heat as an example of subjective impressions for being confusing, i.e., not being “clear and distinct notions.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XIII) Additionally, true is that, based on the same case and the same criterion, Durkheim reaches a conclusion opposite to that made by Descartes: it is not about the certainty of sentiment (it is absolutely true that I feel hot, irrespective of the outside temperature) but about the doubtful nature of our impressions (considered, under Hume’s rather than Descartes’ approach, as fallible representations or copies of the outside). Nevertheless, at this particular point, I only intend to prove

2.2

Almost a Neo-Cartesianism: Methodological Convergences

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that a highly significant paratext of The Rules of Sociological Method is, indeed, Meditations on First Philosophy. Nevertheless, the deepest convergence should not be traced to incidental quotes but to the programmatic aspects of both authors, which will disclose a Durkheim who is not as positivist as expected by prevailing consensus in the academic arena. Indeed, such positivism—the main hurdle to the comparison suggested herein, as previously noted by Tyriakian—is embraced by Durkheim for being a legitimate science model for its time rather than for philosophical convictions. Furthermore, the author of Rules. . . considers himself as a rationalist rather than a positivist; positivism being a consequence of his rationalism and not the other way around. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 13) That is, the positive method is not appraised by Durkheim in terms of its intrinsic features but upon consideration of the fact that it would guarantee adherence to rational science. Therefore, The Rules. . . is a “‘rationalist’ manifest, as Durkheim himself invites us to think.” (Chazel, 2011, p. 27) In this context, the most direct and significant influence of Descartes on Durkheim is—once again, despite his positivism—of a methodological nature. It is precisely the rule whereby social facts should be treated as things that Durkheim presents as a “state of mind” that must be reached by sociologists, not so different from the phenomenological epoché (as will be seen in the next section). Therefore, the Durkheimian method is a Cartesian method—just as Husserl’s, when he claimed that phenomenology is almost a “neo-Cartesianism.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 1) This is sufficiently evidenced in the title of The Rules of Sociological Method, where Durkheim, in a Cartesian spirit, proposes “rules concerned with the observation of social facts” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 15) so that the leanings of the “spirit” do not make him fall into preconceptions. Now, the first of these rules—“systematically discard all prenotions”—is associated with Descartes’ methodic doubt as if it provided an example for application. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 31) Durkheim also commits himself to respecting the rules of synthesis and analysis (Durkheim, 1999, p. 137), which, as is well known, are two of the rules stated by Descartes in Discourse of Method. That is, despite any speculation or conclusion we may reach, Durkheim himself explains that the sociological method departs from the very same principle as the Cartesian method.

2.2

Almost a Neo-Cartesianism: Methodological Convergences

The aforementioned methodological convergences allow us to consider Durkheim as a phenomenologist like Husserl, who also finds inspiration in Descartes for the first step of his method consisting of bracketing all our theories and preconceptions. However, neither the meaning of Durkheim’s work nor the meaning of phenomenology can be based on mere facts. It is not just the fact that Durkheim and Husserl quoted Descartes that makes them phenomenologists.

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Durkheim as a Phenomenologist

Two motives in Durkheim’s work make him a phenomenologist. First, the context of his Cartesianism is similar, in many respects, to the context in which Husserl interpreted Descartes’ findings. Seccond, Durkheim’s Cartesianism leads to a practice of phenomenology that shares not only the first step of the Husserlian method, namely, the epoché (or the phenomenological reduction) but also the second step (i.e., the eidetic reduction). In this section, I will explore both levels of Durkheim’s implicit phenomenological perspective. It would not be difficult to establish deeply in the wording of The Rules of Sociological Method the presence of various phenomenological topics. One could find there some of the key slogans of Husserlian phenomenology, such as the explicit rejection of any metaphysical approach or speculation to focus entirely on “things themselves.” Furthermore, this idea is rooted in “a higher positivism”, which sets itself up as the heir of rationalism and not a mystification of empirical dogma. Similarly, we could detect some of the fundamental problems of The Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl, 1970), such as a criticism of psychologism—a doctrine Durkheim considers “dangerous”—in concomitance with a criticism of objectivism (here, of a materialistic kind) to which he declares an “opponent.” Moreover, we could focus on this sort of “heroism of Reason” (as Husserls puts it), while Durkheim invites all those who take part in the “faith in the future of reason” as a way out of these “times of resurgent mysticism.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. IX) The foregoing are Husserlian themes mentioned in Durkheim’s work; but we would err if remained at this level because we would only have general and thematic rapprochements to offer. We would fail to reach the accuracy and thoroughness sought herein by trying to contribute to a foundation stricter than that offered by previous interpretations. Hence, we should move forward in the quest for further methodological convergences between Durkheim and phenomenology. In the following, I will argue that Durkheim’s interpretation of the Cartesian method directs him toward the practice of phenomenology. I do not mean that he was fully aware of that, nor that he took some ideas from Husserl. However, if we agree that “phenomenology is not the interpretation of texts, but rather the reflective observation, analysis, and eidetic description of phenomena, which is to say mental or intensive processes and things-as-intended-to or encountered in them” (Embree, 2012, p. 3), then we could find in Durkheim a practice of phenomenology that comes from a switch in mental attitude that (influenced by Descartes) he adopted toward social things, which, indeed, is the first step of the phenomenological reduction.

2.3

Durkheim’s Practice of Static Phenomenology

According to Reeder, the phenomenological reduction—of which Descartes’ Meditations. . . is an example (Reeder, 2010, p. 73)—can be “characterized in terms of two stages or steps, the first of which is called bracketing, epoché or simply reduction, and the second of which is called eidetic reduction.” (Reeder, 2010, p. 71) The first step or epoché, which makes part of Husserl’s “Cartesian way,” (Kern,

2.3

Durkheim’s Practice of Static Phenomenology

13

2005, p. 127ff.) “is a method of adopting a certain attitude towards experience in selfcritical reflection” (Reeder, 2010, p. 71), which. doesn’t change or remove the experience to be described, but only alters our focus upon it: instead of living in the natural attitude of everyday naïve realism, one views one’s experience solely as transcendental correlates of one’s own subjectivity. (‘Transcendental’ means for Husserl lived experience, self-given in intentional, phenomenologically reduced experience). While under bracketing, one remains focused upon the intentionality of all acts of consciousness [. . .]. Only the naïve metaphysical beliefs [. . .] are put out of play, and one examines ‘the given’ without either positing or rejecting its reality. (Reeder, 2010, p. 71f.)

The second step, or eidetic reduction, consists of “the free variation in phantasy upon some object presented in bracketed, retentional presence”, and it is used to find its general evidential structures. (Reeder, 2010, p. 77) To that aim, “the phenomenology focuses upon some feature in imagination, to see whether this aspect of the object is essential to the presence of such an object.” (Reeder, 2010, p. 75). Now, if we consider Durkheim as a phenomenologist, we can see that he practices both steps of the phenomenological reduction. As seen before, he claims to be doing an epoché (even though he does not used the word) inspired in Descartes’ rule of bracketing all our previous notions and, from there on, he proceeds to an eidetic reduction in order to figure out what is the essence of social facts. I will argue this to some extent as follows. We can find in the first rule of the sociological method an epoché since Durkheim intends nothing but to suspend the representation of social things we have made through our life, trying to overcome the resistance posed by the natural ways of thinking about the scientific study of social phenomena and definitely relieving the science of social facts from preconceptions. Once this spontaneous phenomenological epoché is made effective, Durkheim engages in an eidetic reduction inquiring, in chapter one of Rules. . ., what is it a social fact. It is now time to search for the essence of social phenomena, whose understanding was obstructed by dogma and theoretical speculation. Hence, only after bracketing our preconceptions is it possible to “see the apparently most arbitrary facts to then display, to a more thorough observation, features of regularity and persistence that constitute the symptoms of its objectivity.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 28) That is, only then are we in a position to ask: “What is a social fact?” According to Durkheim, social phenomena are “external to the individuals”, i.e., “the facts of individual life and those of collective life are, at a certain point, heterogeneous.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XV) Another aspect of the “intrinsic feature of these facts” is that “they are endowed with a constraining and imperative power, by means of which they are imposed” upon the individual (Durkheim, 1999, p. 4) so that they “consist in manners of acting, thinking, feeling, external to the individual, endowed with a certain power of constraint.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 5) Briefly, “A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 14) Far from being an early intuition abandoned in his latest years, the idea that social facts are things in their own right is reassumed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Certainly, Durkheim maintains this first intuition in his latest work, even by

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openly quoting his earlier books. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 33n) Therefore, I will agree with Boudon when, against Jeffry Alexander, he calls to insist on the unity of Durkheim’s work. (Boudon, 2006, p. 140) I will also make my own Affergan’s opinion that there is not a clear-cut “conversion” from Rules. . . to The Elementary Forms. . . “but rather a continuity with its curves, its inflections and fissures,” not a “rupture.” (Affergan, 2008, p. 147) From this angle, it will not be difficult to appreciate some methodological continuities, particularly as regards the epoché and the eidetic variation. Just as he did in Rules. . ., in The Elementary Forms. . . Durkheim engages in a practical epoché. It is his advice that to let the things themselves appear, we “begin by freeing our minds of all preconceived ideas” that, as ordinary men, we had to create for existential reasons. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 32) This is Durkheim’s instruction: Well before the science of religions instituted its methodical comparisons, men had to create their own idea of what religion is. The necessities of existence require all of us, believers and unbelievers, to conceive in some fashion those things in the midst of which we live, about which we continually make judgments, and of which our conduct must take account. But since these notions are formed unmethodically, in the comings and goings of life, they cannot be relied on and must be rigorously kept to one side in the examination that follows. It is not our preconceptions, passions, or habits that must be consulted for the elements of the definition we need; definition is to be sought from reality itself. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 21–22; Durkheim, 2005b, p. 32)

Once the epoché is completed, Durkheim performs an eidetic reduction of the various religious forms to what they are “comparable” in the understanding that, since they all belong to the same kind, the essential elements are the same everywhere. These “permanent elements”—according to Durkheim—constitute that which is “eternal and human in religion” and form “all the objective contents of the idea which is expressed when one speaks of religion in general.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 6) Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish “the essential from the accessory” to successfully discover the ever-present causes upon which the most essential forms of religious thought and practice depend (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 7). To that effect, “inferior religions” (Durkheim’s wording) are particularly “instructive for they can be viewed as convenient experiences where facts and relationships “are easier to determine.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 11) Hence, in as much the same manner as a physicist simplifies the phenomena that he studies “and gets rid of their secondary features” in order to discover its laws, as regards institutions, nature makes a “spontaneous” simplification of that kind, from which Durkheim wishes an advantage to be gained, since only this method will allow to find the “elemental facts.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 11f.) Following those procedures, Durkheim finds that in “inferior societies,” “everything is common to all,” “unified” and “simple” because what is accessory or secondary has not yet come to hide the principal elements. All is reduced to that which is indispensable, to that without which there could be no religion. “However, that which is indispensable is also that which is essential,”, i.e., that which we must know before all else. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 8) In other words, “given that for these

2.4

The Quest for Origins as a Practice of Genetic Phenomenology

15

very simple beings life is reduced to its essential traits,” they would hardly stay unknown; therefore, as facts were simpler in primitive religions, the relations among them were also more evident. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 9) Put differently, it is in those elementary forms that what is essential to religious phenomena becomes evident.

2.4

The Quest for Origins as a Practice of Genetic Phenomenology

Thus far, I have argued that Durkheim practices a kind of static phenomenology,1 which, according to Husserl, is focused on types arranged in their “systematic order” (Husserl, 1982, p. 76) and addresses “finished” apperceptions, i.e., apperceptions that “emerge and are awakened as finished, having a ‘history’ that reaches way back.” (Husserl, 1998a, p. 142) We must still deal with “the problems of phenomenological genesis,” (Husserl, 1970, p. 69) which is the object of genetic phenomenology—a perspective that necessarily completes static analysis,2 particularly as regards phenomena which are “essentially temporal.” (Larrabee, 1976, p. 170). Genetic phenomenology “follows the history, the necessary history of this objectivation and thereby the history of the object itself as the object of a possible knowledge.” (Husserl, 1998a, p. 142) It then “shows how consciousness arises out of consciousness, how constitutive accomplishments are also continually carried out here in the process of becoming, thus the relation of conditionality obtaining between the motivating and the motivated or to the necessary transition from impression into retention, in which is constituted the consciousness precisely of this becoming, and correlatively of the alteration of the Now into a Now that is just past.” (Husserl, 1998b, p. 150) Another way to put it is by saying that “genetic phenomenology follows the histories of the constitution of objects that are there for the concrete monad as well as traces the genetic ‘history’ of the monad itself.” (Steinbock, 1998, p. 133) In this perspective, it could be said that Durkheim practices—to some extent—genetic 1

As Larrabee recalls, the method of static phenomenology can be summarized in two principles: “(1) Guide the analysis by the use of a ‘transcendental clue’ in the form of an object which is pregiven and therefore is a finished unity embodying a certain sense (Sinn); and (2) Carry out a series of correlation analyses which trace on the side of the object its various levels and on the side of consciousness the corresponding levels of conscious acts.” (Larrabee, 1976, p. 164). 2 Husserl’s “radical approach”—which expresses his most elaborated position on this matter—“would restructure the elements of static and genetic methods into a single method; the latter would integrate into genetic method those elements from static method which have both methodological and phenomenological validity and do not involve essential distortion. [. . .] We shall call this new analysis ‘static/genetic’ analysis to signify the integration of the viable elements of static phenomenology into genetic phenomenology. This new static/genetic method is the only feasible solution to the difficulties inherent in the complete distinction of the static and genetic phenomenology of perception and related phenomena.” (Larrabee, 1976, p. 171).

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phenomenology because not only he accounts for idealities from a static perspective but also, when inquiring into the “origin” of ideal objectivities, for the histories of its consecutive constitution.3 Indeed, Durkheim asks how it happened that men constituted certain ideas and how is it that they organized their worlds based on them. Appealing to “reasons of method,” he states that we can only understand the recently constituted regions pursuing throughout history the way in which they have been progressively developed. Through history, we can deconstruct institutions in their “constitutive elements” and perceive them as growing in time, one after the other, and grounded one upon the other.4 To perform the analysis described above, Durkheim introduces the following principle as one of the main “reasons of method”: We cannot hope to succeed in understanding the most recent religions unless we follow the way in which they have been progressively constituted in the course of history. “History is indeed the only method of explanatory analysis which can possibly be applied to them.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 4) It alone enables us to deconstruct an institution into its constituent elements since history displays them to us, one after the other as they are born in time. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 4) Therefore, only by placing each of the constituent elements in the set of circumstances in which they were born and at a given moment in time will we be able to describe human things. To that effect, it is also necessary to go back to “its most primitive and simple form.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 4) This means that human questions can only be fully understood upon a genealogical retrospectiveness based on its original elements, describing the genetic-historical process of its naissance. This entails not only recognizing phenomena where they can be found without confusing them with others (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 32), as Durkheim does in his static phenomenology, but also describing them from a genetic perspective based on the elemental phenomena they derive from. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 49) For that reason, Durkheim engages in the study of the most simple and primitive religion: because it does not contain any elements inherited from previous religions, it is easier to accurately and truthfully describe “the religious nature of man” as “an essential and permanent aspect of humanity” and to base on it a genealogical description of the specific historical processes of the constitution of positive religions. Hence, it is 3

Although a distinction must be made here. Durkheim practices genetic phenomenology in a limited way since he does not trace the genetic history of the monad itself nor does he carry his “investigations into the ultimate levels of consciousness, those of inner time-consciousness, the ‘obscure depths’ which were omitted in the static analysis” in order to account for “all characteristics of conscious experience.” (Larrabee, 1976, p. 164). 4 I am indebted to Nisashi Nasu, who made me notice that, in genetic perspective, the historical must be distinguished from the eidetic. Both layers coexist in Durkheim. On the one side, he sketches out a brief history of religions, by describing how different kinds of cults followed one after the other. On the other side, this history is structured in strict order from the complex to the simple, elemental. One may say that history has its logic. Therefore, in Durkheim, the eidetic and the historic are articulated, just like in Husserl’s Crisis. . . (1970) when he accounts for history not as it has occurred but as it would have occurred.

2.5

Durkheim and the Phenomenological Approach to Consciousness

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necessary to trace back current religious phenomena to the original, essential, and elemental forms they derive from, even though it might seem “strange” and “paradoxical” that, to get to know the current humanity, it is necessary to start by turning away from it. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 2) By tracing back religions to their primitive forms—i.e., its “original state,” where they are more clearly exposed—we can go back to the “first impressions from which they originated” without getting stuck in an extensive system of distorting interpretations (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 10) because, in primitive religions, the religious fact still bears the visible mark of its origins. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 10) Based on these considerations, Durkheim intends to take up the old problem of the origin of religions from a different angle. This fresh perspective on the origins consists of a retrospective method: “to discover the truly original form of the religious life,” it is necessary to “descend by analysis beyond these observable religions, to resolve them into their common and fundamental elements,” and then seek, among these, one from which the others are derived. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 67) In short, it consists of the phenomenological method of establishing relations of foundation among the studied phenomena.

2.5

Durkheim and the Phenomenological Approach to Consciousness

None of the meaningful convergences noted here among Durkheim and phenomenology would be possible without a phenomenological conception of consciousness. To address things-as-encountered is assuming that things appear to consciousness. To constitute those things and cast them into genus and species means referring to the work of consciousness. Therefore, there must be a phenomenological conception of consciousness in the work of Durkheim. That is precisely the topic of our next chapter.

Chapter 3

Durkheim and the Philosophy of Consciousness

I have argued thus far that Durkheim must be considered a phenomenologist. I will next advocate the idea that Durkheim’s sociology is driven by the “philosophy of consciousness.” I will take this expression in two different although related meanings. First, I will show that Durkheim conceived of consciousness as intentional in Husserl’s sense. Second, I will argue that Henry’s critique of the philosophy of consciousness as a philosophy of representation fittingly describes the Durkheimian approach, as it describes classical phenomenology.

3.1

Consciousness, a Central Concept Cast in Oblivion

What surprises me the most about the reception of Durkheim’s work is that, despite its ubiquity, the concept of consciousness has been constantly overlooked. Conscience is probably the most repeated word in his writings and the most neglected concept. Not that it is difficult to understand. It just is disturbing. Nobody wants to deal with it. However, we must, since our goal is to understand the deep phenomenological meaning of his oeuvre. One happy exception to this general attitude is Stedman Jones (Stedman Jones, 2007, p. 98), whose opinion I share that, despite its centrality, the concept of consciousness is “the most neglected theoretical term in Durkheim’s thought.” By “centrality”, she means that it is “closely tied” in with Durkheim’s fundamental concepts, “primarily amongst which is solidarity.” (Stedman Jones, 2007, p. 95) Indeed, it is the similarity of consciences that gives birth to legal rules and that constitutes traditional mechanical solidarity. Thus conscience is central to the whole issue of solidarity. In the traditional mechanical case, social cohesion results from a ‘conformity of all particular consciences to a common type, which is nothing but the psychic type of society’. [. . . And] the concept of conscience is also present in the concept of a modern organic solidarity. [. . .] Organic solidarity is about differentiation, and this entails a sphere of action, within © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_3

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conscience, which is free from the conscience commune and which is where ‘special functions develop’.” (Stedman Jones, 2007, p. 95)

For being related to Durkheim’s main ideas, to clarify his concept of consciousness is a condition sine qua non for understanding the deepest meaning of his sociology, no matter if some scholars forget or choose to ignore that Durkheim is insistently talking about it. However, the oblivion of consciousness is not absolute. Somehow, obliquely, it has appeared under a different name. Many of Durkheim’s readers who have been reluctant to deal with the idea of consciousness have, nevertheless, been receptive to the concept of representation, which, in a way, has been taken as a proxy of consciousness. Representation is a key concept in Durkheim. For instance, nothing less than the collective is made of representations, and it “entirely” consists of representations. (Stedman Jones, 2000b, p. 70) Regrettably, despite its relevance, not all scholars have noticed the centrality of representations for the sociology of Durkheim. In this regard, three different stances have been taken. Some (probably the most) have overlooked the importance of representations in Durkheim. Others, such as Lukes, (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 14), upheld that “representation is a post-1895 concept.” A few (and I would like to include myself in this group) consider that “representation” is a core concept for Durkheim since his early writings and a fundamental reference in order to truly understand his oeuvre (Stedman Jones, 2003, pp. 16–18). That is why, for instance, Paoletti (2002, p. 456) refuses to oppose an alleged “first,” positivist Durkheim to a “second,” idealist one and refers to “the continuity” of his recherche, which was always focused on the issue of representations. I am not saying that Durkheim often mentioned the word “representation.” It is not the word but its meaning that can be found in his writings. My claim is that Durkheim’s longstanding idea that social facts are objective and external to individuals only makes sense if related to the idea of representation conceived, in Kantian terms, as the opposition between internal and external reality. Maybe this is one reason why the neglect of representations in Durkheim often goes along with the oblivion of the ubiquitous notion of consciousness, since “it is the functions of conscience which make representation possible.” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 18). However, not for being central concept Durkheim’s concept of representation has been properly understood. This should not come as a surprise since Durkheim’s sociology has been misunderstood from the outset, as one can see in his complaints about the way The Rules of Sociological Method was read in his time. In the Preface to the second edition, Durkheim complained that his critics did not realize how important representations are for understanding social life even though he had “expressly said and repeated in every way that social life was entirely made up of representations.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XI) Another mistaken idea, as controversial as the preceding, concerns the exteriority of social facts, which has been confused with the idea—which Durkheim explicitly rejects—of the exteriority of social phenomena as regards the individuals. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XV) The third

3.2

Representations and Intentionality

21

misinterpretation is related to the notion of objectivity, which Durkheim called his “fundamental principle.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XXIII). All three misunderstandings are parts of one and the same confusion, which requires an integrated approach. Specifically, the first misunderstanding is at the base of the other two since disregarding the role of representations steers to a misleading conception of the exteriority and objectivity of social facts. A deeper comprehension of what Durkheim meant by “representation” is then needed to grasp what he had in mind while claiming that social facts are external to the individuals and that they have an objectivity of their own. To fully understand Durkheim’s notion of representations, we must consider that they are a product of the activity of our consciousness. Maybe a reason why “Durkheim is one of the best known and one of the least understood major social thinkers” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 3) is precisely that not many of his readers have realized the importance of the concept of representation and the consequences it has for some main issues of his sociology. In what concerns us, many of Durkheim’s critics neglect the fact that representations—as Stedman Jones (2007, p. 99) keenly observes—are a function of consciousness, which endows consciousness with a “centrality” as regards representations. (Stedman Jones, 2003, pp. 16–17) This—I would like to add—for very good reasons, since Durkheim finds in representations the main features of consciousness. I will show later, when dealing with Henry’s critique of consciousness, that this connotation is meaningful and consistent. In the meantime, I will depict Durkheim’s position on representations as an expression of the philosophy of consciousness, starting with intentionality.

3.2

Representations and Intentionality

According to Husserl, the word “intentionality” refers to “this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be consciousness of something; as a cogito, to bear within itself its cogitatum.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 33) Inasmuch Durkheim is dealing with the correlation of subjective and objective meaning—for instance, with the distinction of individual and collective representations (Durkheim, 2004b, pp. 1–48)—it can be said that he takes intentionality for granted. Indeed, Durkheim’s concept of representations involves “both the mode of thinking and that which is thought,” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 18) and that is exactly what Husserl called intentionality: the correlation of the cogito and the cogitatum. As Paoletti (2002, p. 444) puts it, “each representation has, for Durkheim, an intentional character—that is to say, it is a representation of ‘something’.” Even if Durkheim didn’t get this from Husserl but from Renouvier—who upheld an idealistic, antirealistic, reinterpretation of Kant1 that rejected the “thing-in-itself” and reduced it to

In this regard, Paoletti (2002, p. 441) notes that “Renouvier ended up defending the anti-realist position according to which there would be no reality independent of our representations. [...] With

1

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the phenomenon (see, for instance, Renouvier, 1901, pp. 53–54)—he conceived of representations in line with Husserl’s conception of intentionality. Within Renouvier’s “logic of representation” (which influenced Durkheim), there were only two poles: “the ‘representative’ (représentatif) is that which represents and the ‘represented’ (representé) is what is represented or is referred to [. . .]. Conscience covers the totality of these functions which do the referring and ‘thing’ is that which is referred to. (The association of thing and the represented for Durkheim is clear).” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 18; see Renouvier, 1854, pp. 24–25, Renouvier, 1901, pp. 236–237) Therefore, representations are for Durkheim not just a subjective or merely cultural kind of thoughts—as Alexander seems to imply when claiming that there is a “cultural turn” in The Elementary Forms of eligious Life2—. In contrast, representations are twofold realities, objective as well as subjective, which refer to one another.

3.3

Representation and the Philosophy of Consciousness

From the perspective of material phenomenology, the structure of consciousness consists of the opposition of the subject and the object. In the words of its founding father, “Consciousness resides precisely in the relationship of subject and object, it is this relationship as such.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 83; Henry’s emphasis) Therefore, “The relationship is the concrete term; on the other hand, the terms between which this relationship is established are abstract.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 84; Henry’s emphasis) Since Durkheim conceived of representations as having a subjective as well as an objective aspect, his sociology must be considered an expression of the philosophy of consciousness. In the following, I will discuss Henry’s critique of representation as an expression of “ontological monism” (the philosophical perspective that takes representation as the only way of being, thus falling into oblivion of life) and his claim that Kant was its champion. Henry argues that representation is what presents things to us. It “designates a mode of presence. To represent means to make present. Representation is always representation of something, it implies a thing-represented, which representation has as its mission to make present.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 80)

the distinction between the receptivity of the forms of sensible intuition (space and time) and the spontaneity of the categories of understanding, the difference between what is knowable—the object of experience, the phenomenon according to Kant—and what is not knowable, but only thinkable as existing—the ‘noumenon’—is also cancelled.” See Kant, “The Transcendental Aesthetic. First Section. On space” and “Conclusions from the above concepts.” (1998, p. 160, 162, 177) 2 Boudon’s critique (2006, pp. 138–139) is addressed to Alexander (2005). See also Affergan (2008, p. 147), who argues that there is not a “conversion” between The Rules. . . and The elementary forms. . .”

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Representation and the Philosophy of Consciousness

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Representation is not a particular mode of the life of consciousness: “it is the essence of consciousness which must be understood in its own eidetic and specifically universal structure in the light of the concept of ‘representation’.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 81) Representation refers “to the essence of the presence as such,” taken as “a presence of the thing represented, namely, the presence of something which is encountered ‘in-front-of’ in a milieu of exteriority whose opening it is, insofar as it is an essence common to consciousness and representation.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 81) Consequently, the concept of representation entails an ontological monism, as the opposition of the subject and the object conceives of both as having “one and the same essence.” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 86) According to one of Henry’s closest disciples (Lipsitz, 2014, p. 2), the highest moment in ontological monism is the philosophy of Kant. (see also Henry, 1973, § 11, pp. 91–93) He “dominates all philosophy of consciousness and finds its illustration as well as its most general formulation in the understanding of the essence of consciousness as ‘representation’.” (Henry, 1973, § 11: 80) At this point, speaking of the “splitting of representation which is consciousness” (Henry, 1973, § 11, p. 80, n12), Henry quotes Renouvier (1912, p. 286), who—as seen thus far—strongly influenced Durkheim. Being a monist, Kant takes representativeness as the condition for everything that there is and as the essence of being. All that exists has as its condition that we may represent it. Therefore, “Kantianism is a metaphysics of representivity because ekstasis is the essence of representation, making possible all coming into being as a coming into phenomena, a coming into the condition of Object.” (Henry, 1993, p. 106) In this view, Kantian metaphysics is a metaphysics of representivity—representivity as the precondition of everything that is, and therefore as the essence of being. How can anything be for us? By being represented by us. We know only phenomena, Kant says, and critical thought takes its legitimation from that phenomenological presupposition. However, ‘knowledge’ and ‘phenomenon’ mean nothing but ‘coming to the condition of being-represented,’ ‘being-therebefore,’ and thus ‘self-showing’ or simply ‘being’ [. . .]. Knowledge and object, however, are identical—if to be an object is to be represented and if to be represented is to be known. Representivity is the essence common to knowledge and object as the essence common to phenomena and being. (Henry, 1993, p. 103; Henry’s emphasis)

Consequently, for Kant, to be known and to be a phenomenon means to become represented. Additionally, to be known and to be an object is just the same since to be an object is to be represented and to be represented is to be known as an object. Accordingly, representativeness is the essence common to knowledge and objectivity. Thus, Kant’s metaphysics of representation claims that to become a phenomenon, any being must be represented as an object. In addition, for being an ontology of our experience of objects, Kant’s metaphysics of representation is a philosophy of consciousness since it conceives of experience “as the general rapport between subject and object.” (Henry, 1993, p. 3) Hence, what this philosophy brings to light is the oppositional structure of consciousness— i.e., the opposition of the object facing the subject—.

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3.4

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Durkheim’s Sociology as “an Extension of Kantianism”

It would not be difficult to attest Kant’s decisive influence on Durkheim, even though some scholars choose to focus on his ambivalent relation to the philosopher from Konigsberg (Vera, 2002, p. 112; Murguía Lores, 2012, p. 89, 91) or even in his criticism. (Morales Zúñiga, 2009, p. 158, 151; Giner, 2008, pp. 12–13) Notwithstanding, Durkheim echoes Kantian language when opposing sensations and sensibility to concepts. For instance, while referring to les civilisations primitives, he claims: “we must look for the determining causes in sensations and movements of the sensibility, not in concepts.” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 275) Then, when advocating for the human personality, he even mentions Kant: “according to the Kantian formula, we must respect the human personality wherever it is found, that is to say in ourselves as in our fellow men.” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 395) However, it will not be necessary to insist on this since I am not the first to notice the influence of Kantism on Durkheim. Major social theorists such as Giddens (1979, p. 22) have referred to “Durkheim’s sociological Kantism,” and allusions to this topic are ubiquitous in the state of the art. For instance, LaCapra (2001, p. 6) considers Durkheim’s “passion for dualistic antinomies” as a neo-Kantian influence, along with the “philosophy of finitude” and the understanding of morality as a matter of practical reason. Additionally, Stedman Jones (2003, p. 17) observes the influence of neo-Kantism on Durkheim, this time, attributed to Renouvier, who “was the first French philosopher to point to the scientific importance of Kant’s Copernican revolution.” Boudon (2006, p. 140) goes further yet by arguing that Durkheim erected his sociology as “an extension of Kantianism.” Nevertheless, I will not address such a large issue as “Durkheim and Kantism.” I will focus on one aspect of Kantism that is essential to understanding what Durkheim had in mind when speaking of consciousness. This particular aspect is the idea of representation. I will focus not on Kant himself but on the way his ideas were received by Durkheim, on how Renouvier influenced him, and on how they antedated phenomenology since they involve the idea of consciousness as intentionality (in a Husserlian sense) and as the opposition of the object and the subject (in Herny’s view). Durkheim thought that representations are inner determinations of the subject, but he also pursued the collective aspect of representations “through the logic of ‘external’ relations.” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 17) As Stedman Jones notes, Durkheim appreciated that Kant had shown “that representation is not a private subjective (or merely ‘inner’) experience but has an objective reality that is general.” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 17) Indeed, in the “Preface” to Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1998, p. 122) argued that “for an experience in general to be possible, the reality of outer sense is necessarily bound up with that of inner sense, i.e., I am just as certainly conscious that there are things outside me to which my sensibility relates, as I am conscious that I myself exist determined in time.” However, these Kantian ideas came to Durkheim through the perspective of Renouvier, who—in a peculiar,

3.5

Representations as a Clue for Intentional Analysis

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personal way—continued Kant’s distinction between the inner and the outer as a way of accounting for all aspects of experience within the logic of representation. For Renouvier (1901, p. 7), the self logically belongs to the inner aspect of representation; nature and material things or all external relations belong to the outer aspect—or external relation. According to him, any quality constitutive of any subject is subjective, and any representation given to a consciousness as its external or internal object is objective. In accordance, external sensation is at a time objective, as representative, and subjective, as a property of a subject endowed with sensibility. In this, Renouvier is actually following Kant closely when, in “The Transcendental Aesthetic. First Section. On space,” he states: By means of outer sense (a property of our mind) we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all as in space. [. . .] Inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself, or its inner state, gives, to be sure, no intuition of the soul itself, as an object, yet it is still a determinate form, under which the intuition of its inner state is alone possible, so that everything that belongs to the inner determinations is represented in relations of time. Time can no more be intuited externally than space can be intuited as something in us. (Kant, 1998, p. 157)

Once the context of Durkheim’s perspective on exteriority is retrieved, it becomes clear that society consists of the relations that surround the person and that are thus logically external. This helps to explain Durkheim’s use of the outside (le dehors) in relation to social facts. (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 18) It also elucidates the way he conceived of collective consciousness as opposite to individual consciousness inasmuch as the exterior opposes the interior. In his view, exteriority is immediately given, while interiority is harder to reach. Durkheim’s sociology starts “from the outside” only because “it alone is immediately given,” but it does that in order “to reach the inside.” (Durkheim, 2005a, p. 356n1) The opposition between internal and external reality and the idea that the social is objective can be clearly appreciated, for instance, in the large issue of the origin and nature of categories, which increasingly interested Durkheim over the years. Durkheim conceives of categories as being both objective and external. In accordance with Kant, he considers them as ruled by objective laws of representations constituted in the sphere of the outer. (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 17) By doing this, he was answering the French spiritualists, who “had developed a tradition of deriving the categories from internal reflection.” (Schmaus, 2004, p. 100) Durkheim, instead, considered that even inner experiences that generate in part some fundamental categories (such as the category of causality) are inner experiences of outer social forces “generated in us by collective representations.” (Schmaus, 2004, p. 100)

3.5

Representations as a Clue for Intentional Analysis

In this chapter, I have shown that the current state of the art mostly agrees that, in Durkheim’s work, representativeness is the condition for everything that exists as a social fact. I have quoted different scholars who claimed that the concept of

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representation is one of Durkheim’s main ideas and a persistent interest throughout his oeuvre. I have also shown a consensus as regards the idea that, for Durkheim, representations are associated with objective experience. In regard to social representations, their mere existence indicates the existence of an objective social fact. Thus, collective representations are inextricably related to objectivity. In addition, I have depicted how representations and consciousness are closely tied in Durkheim since social, objective representations are opposed to individual, subjective representations—a demarcation drawn upon Renouvier’s interpretation of the Kantian distinction of inner and outer experience. Finally, I suggested that Renouvier’s distinction of inner sense and outer sense informed, at least in part, the way Durkheim conceived of individual and social representations. This is enlightening because it could lead to a nonobjectivistic understanding of Durkheim’s sociology if the distinction of individual and collective representations is not to be found in a hypostasized collective consciousness existing on its own but in two different functions of our consciousness, one that we use to make our own representations of the objects of our thought and another that we use to represent objects external to us to ourselves. Over the years, Durkheim dwelt in different ways with the issues and misunderstandings discussed thus far. This is one of the reasons why, as I said, his notion of representation is the most neglected theoretical term in his work. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note how, regardless of any other differences, the various stances on this topic remained faithful to this one idea: that representations have to do with the oppositional structure of consciousness. In this view, Durkheim’s conception of representation must be interpreted in the frame of the philosophy of consciousness depicted by Henry as a perspective for which all that exists has as its condition that we may represent it, i.e., that it is meant to be known as an object. My point is that the main features of the metaphysics of representation—namely, objectivity, exteriority and the oppositional structure of consciousness—can be found in Durkheim’s work. One can even conjecture that Henry might accept this since he implicitly assumes that there is a collective consciousness when he claims that the Christian concept of Truth determines “the collective consciousness of society.” (Henry, 1996, p. 36) Accordingly, Durkheim shall be seen as a postKantian who antedated phenomenology for good and for worse, i.e., as an early sketch of what Husserl called “intentionality” and as an instance of the “ontological monism” contested by Henry. In the next two chapters, I will explore Durkheim’s philosophy of consciousness, starting with his account of the represented object (in Chap. 4) and continuing with the representing subject (in Chap. 5) from the perspective of intentional analysis. In other words, I will explore the intentional arch of consciousness starting with the object given in straight intuition and then following its back reference along the intentional thread of consciousness.

Chapter 4

An Objectivity Sui Generis

In the previous two chapters, I have argued that Durkheim conceived of collective consciousness as intentional; in the next two, I will address it from the perspective of intentional analysis as conceived by Husserl in the second Cartesian Meditation. To that end, a few introductory words on this perspective might help.

4.1

A Brief Note on Intentional Analysis

According to Husserl, when regard is directed to certain themes, intentional analysis brings about, on the noematic side, an “unfolding” and a “clearing” of the objective sense and, correlatively, an explication of the potential intentional processes themselves. “Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant.” (Husserl, 1982, § 20, p. 46) With his reflective regard, the phenomenologist also penetrates the anonymous ‘cogitative’ life, he uncovers the definite synthetic courses of the manifold modes of consciousness and, further back, the modes of Ego-comportment, which make understandable the objective affair’s simple meantness for the Ego, its intuitive or non-intuitive meantness. Or, stated more precisely, they make it understandable how, in itself and by virtue of its current intentional structure, consciousness makes possible and necessary the fact that such an ‘existing’ and ‘thus determined’ Object is intended in it, occurs in it as such a sense. (Husserl, 1982, § 20, p. 47; Husserl’s emphasis)

However, intentional analysis qua intentional “reaches out beyond the isolated subjective processes that are to be analyzed. By explicating their correlative horizons, it brings the highly diverse anonymous processes into the field comprising those that function ‘constitutively’ in relation to the objective sense of the cogitatum in question.” (Husserl, 1982, § 20, p. 48) The most universal type within which everything particular is formally included is indicated by Husserl’s (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 50) “first universal scheme: ego — cogito — cogitatum.” The most universal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_4

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descriptions, which Husserl has attempted “in a rough fashion concerning intentionality, concerning its peculiar synthesis, and so forth, relate to that type.” (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 50) However, in its particular description, the intentional object plays “the role of ‘transcendental clue’ to the typical infinite multiplicities of possible cogitationes that, in a possible synthesis, bear the intentional object within them (in the manner peculiar to consciousness) as the same meant object.” (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 50) In accordance, the necessary. point of departure is the object given ‘straightforwardly’ at the particular time. From it reflection goes back to the mode of consciousness at that time and to the potential modes of consciousness included horizontally in that mode, then to those in which the object might be otherwise intended as the same, within the unity (ultimately) of a possible conscious life, all the possibilities of which are included in the ‘ego.’ (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 50)

Once done that, the phenomenologist must ask to each type brought out by a transcendental clue about its noetic-noematic structure, which must be “systematically explicated and established in respect of those modes of intentional flux that pertain to it, and in respect of their horizons and the intentional processes implicit in their horizons, and so forth. (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 51) In the following, I will explore the transcendental clue provided by Durkheim’s definition of social facts, going back and forth through its noetic-noematic structure. I will do so abiding by Husserl’s claim that social communities and cultural objects give rise to “transcendental theories of constitution.” (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 52) With that aim, I will address the objective, nomeatic aspect of this structure in the present chapter and its noetic, subjective aspect in the next chapter.

4.2

Back to Social Things Themselves

As seen in Chap. 1, Durkheim suspends all preconceived notions to go back to things themselves and to ground on them a renewed sociology. To that end, he performs the phenomenological reduction and the eidetic variation, convinced that we should not resort to prejudice to consult for the elements of the definition we need; definition must be sought from “reality itself.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 32) We should “face that reality”, “setting aside any conception” as to the phenomenon to be studied, which should be considered based on this specific reality. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 32) In other words, Durkheim (2005b, p. 55) advocates the return to the things themselves in much the same manner as Husserl did. As is well known, in The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim defined social facts as things. Social facts are objective ways of acting, thinking and feeling. What makes them objective is the property of existing outside the individuals’ consciousness. Therefore, exteriority is one aspect of objectivity. However, that social facts are objective does not mean that they are not subjective but that they have been defined by others and have been handed down to the individual through education.

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Social Facts Are Things!

29

Another aspect of objectivity is coercion. Social facts are endued with compelling and coercive power by virtue of which they impose themselves upon the individual. Thus, social facts are identifiable through the power of external coercion they are capable of exerting upon individuals. Precisely, being constraining is one of the reasons why we must consider social facts as things: because they are independent from the individual’s will. However, that social facts are things is one of Durkheim’s best known and least understood mottos. He did not conceive of them as ordinary things but as phenomena. Indeed, having rejected the idea of the “thing-in-itself” (Pickering, 2000b, p. 109), Durkheim addressed representations “as phenomenal reality.” (Pickering, 2000b, p. 111) This made him a phenomenologist since he was not differentiating “reality from appearance” but taking appearances as “real phenomena.” (Pickering, 2000b, p. 106) Indeed, Durkheim “referred to the subject matter of sociology as social phenomena, and [. . .] asserted that such phenomena are ‘immaterial,’ but ‘nevertheless real things’.” (Pickering, 2000b, p. 108)

4.3

Social Facts Are Things!

For Durkheim, a thing is an object of knowledge that is presented to the spirit in a manner that it is understood from its outside toward its deeper—though less visible—aspect, which can only be understood by detaching from it. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XIII, 18–19) Then, social facts are things in a very peculiar way. They are not “tangible things,” even though they are things in as much the same way as them. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XII) They are social, intangible things. (Durkheim, 1999, pp. 142–143) Additionally, for Renouvier (a major influence in Durkheim’s work), representations are what Husserl called “the things themselves.” In his view, things are representations, representations are things, and both are ultimately phenomena. Indeed, Renouvier (1901, p. 7) conceives “things as representations” and calls them “facts or phenomena.” In accordance, he defines “the thing by the representation after having defined the representation by the thing; and this circle is inevitable; and the two words representation and thing, first distinguished, merge into a third: phenomenon.” (Renouvier, 1901, p. 7) Now, if social facts are phenomena, then Tyriakian’s assumption that there is an implicit phenomenology in Durkheim’s sociology—which was discussed in Chap. 1—is accurate, and Monnerot’s thesis that social facts are experiences rather than things must be reconsidered. Social facts being experiences is an assertion that cannot be challenged—I agree with Monnerot on that—. The question lies in the misperception that they cannot be things—that is, in the idea that their nature as experiences deprives social facts from any objectivity. Monnerot sustains that if social facts are to be treated as if they were things, that is precisely because they are not things at all. In contrast, I will explain that it is necessary to treat them that way

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because they actually are things of a particular kind. Once again, I have to agree with Tiryakian. [When Durkheim] said the sociological attitude must treat these phenomena as ‘things,’ he clearly meant not that social phenomena are to be treated as if they were in the same domain as physical ‘entities’ but that they must be approached free from the prejudices of the natural attitude which makes naive assumptions as to how social phenomena are constituted. Hence his injunction ‘all preconceptions must be eradicated’ is of the same methodological import as Husserl’s dictum, ‘to the things themselves;’ in both, there is an emphasis on the bracketing of the natural attitude if we are to go behind appearances to the ground of reality. (Tiryakian, 1978, p. 42)

Grounded in reality, Durkheim’s sociology provides a phenomenological account of social things. I will argue that he conceived of social facts as ideal objectivities in line with Husserl, who considered them as “objects of higher levels” in comparison to “sensous or real objects,” which are “objects of the lowest level of possible intuition.” (Husserl, 2001b, Investigation Six, Chap. 6, § 46, p. 282)

4.4

A Few Words on the Phenomenology of Ideal Objects

Ideal objects are the product of a “synthetic identification” (Husserl, 1982, § 55, p. 126) by virtue of which, in my own subjective processes, something acquires for me the sense and status of something existing as the “same” object. As Husserl says, in repeated presentations, I go back to it and do so with the evidence: ‘I can always do so again.’ But these repeated presentations are evidently themselves a temporal sequence; and each is separate from the others. In spite of that, however, an identifying synthesis connects them in the evident consciousness of ‘the Same’ which implies the same, never repeated temporal form, filled with the same content. Here, as everywhere else, ‘the Same’ signifies therefore an identical intentional object of separate conscious processes. (Husserl, 1982, § 55, pp. 126–127; Husserl’s emphasis)

When I constitute an ideal object in “a living, many-membered thinking action I produce a structure” (for instance, “a theorem or a numerical structure”). Subsequently I repeat the producing, while recollecting my earlier producing. At once, and by essential necessity, an identifying synthesis takes place; furthermore a new identifying synthesis occurs with each additional repetition (a repetition performed with a consciousness that the producing can be repeated again at will) [. . .]. Therefore in this case, through the medium of recollective presentations, the synthesis extends within my stream of subjective processes (which always is already constituted) from my living present into my currently relevant separate pasts and thus makes a connexion between my present and these pasts. (Husserl, 1982, § 55, p. 127)

In this view, there exists a kind of “supertemporality” of ideal objects since they are constituted in the temporal flux of consciousness as being identically the same. However—observes Husserl—this alleged supertemporality “turns out to be omnitemporality, as a correlate of free produceability and reproduceability at all

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times. After constitution of the Objective world with its Objective time and its Objective men as possible thinking subjects, that obviously carries over to ideal structures, as themselves Objectivated, and to their Objective omnitemporality.” (Husserl, 1982, § 55, p. 127) Husserl illustrates the constitution of ideal objects with the following example: In a living, many-membered thinking action I produce a structure: a theorem or a numerical structure. Subsequently I repeat the producing, while recollecting my earlier producing. At once, and by essential necessity, an identifying synthesis takes place; furthermore a new identifying synthesis occurs with each additional repetition (a repetition performed with a consciousness that the producing can be repeated again at will). (Husserl, 1982, § 55, p. 127)

However, that I constitute the same object in my consciousness does not mean that it has a mere “psychic existence” for me since “it does not exist as something personal within the personal sphere of consciousness; it is the existence of what is objectively there for ‘everyone’.” (Husserl, 1970, “The Origin of Geometry”, Appendix VI, p. 356) An ideal objectivity has, “from its primal establishment, an existence” whose particular form is “accessible to all men” as are also “all forms newly produced by someone on the basis of pregiven forms immediately” as they “take on the same objectivity.” (Husserl, 1970, “The Origin of Geometry”, Appendix VI, p. 356) Additionally, it is proper to ideal objectivities, in as much as they pertain to “a whole class of spiritual products of the cultural world,” to exist “only once”: Works of this class do not, like tools (hammers, pliers) or like architectural and other such products, have a repeatability in many like exemplars. The Pythagorean theorem, [indeed] all of geometry, exists only once, no matter how often or even in what language it may be expressed. It is identically the same in the ‘original language’ of Euclid and in all ‘translations’; and within each language it is again the same, no matter how many times it has been sensibly uttered, from the original expression and writing-down to the innumerable oral utterances or written and other documentations. The sensible utterances have spatiotemporal individuation in the world like all corporeal occurrences, like everything embodied in bodies as such; but this is not true of the spiritual form itself, which is called an ‘ideal object’ [ideale Gegenständlichkeit].”(Husserl, 1970, “The Origin of Geometry”, Appendix VI, p. 357)

In that regard, it could be argued that Durkheim’s social things are ideal objectivities since he depicts them in a similar way as Husserl describes ideal objectivities, in opposition to sensuous representations.

4.5

Social Things as Ideal Objectivities

The traits of ideal objectivities presented in the previous section can be clearly found in Durkheim’s characterization of social facts, which are perceived as not thought just by me or others given that they have a constant manner of being, a nature that does not depend on individual arbitrariness, which results in necessary relations. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XVIII) Indeed, he “always stressed that collective representations should be conceived independently from the subjects who have them” because they are not thoughts of individuals. (Némedi, 2000, p. 92) In other words, they are

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considered external to individual psychism and necessary and nonapprehensible to introspection. More specifically, Durkheim (2005b, p. 617) distinguishes the individual’s sensuous representations (such as sensations, perceptions, and images), which are given one after another in a perpetual flux “like the waves of a river,” from concepts, which are “out of time and becoming” and resist change, and which consist in an “immutable” mode of thinking, “fixed and crystallized.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 618) Sensuous perceptions are strictly individual. They cannot be transmitted from my consciousness to another’s. Instead, concepts—for instance, logical ones, which for Durkheim (2005b, p. 623) are thought sub specie aeternitatis—are not mine: they can be shared because they are essentially impersonal representations that make human communication possible. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 619) Interestingly, even if anecdotic, is that Durkheim was also sensitive to the peculiar nature of mathematical entities, which he somehow related to social things. See, for instance, the Conclusions to The Elementary Forms. . ., where he claims: “The matter of logical thought is made of concepts. To try to find how society could have played a role in the genesis of logical thought therefore amounts to asking how it can have taken part in the formation of concepts.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 617) Then, he equates, up to a point, the concept of totality with those of society and divinity. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 630-631n2) Additionally, Durkheim (2005b, p. 6) was after the necessary, fundamental, and “eternal” elements common to a particular ontological region—in this case, the region of religious experience—that “have the same objective meaning everywhere and everywhere fulfill the same functions. It is these constant elements that constitute what is eternal and human in religion.” This is pretty much what Husserl thought of ideal objectivities in general. Therefore, he intuitively discovers, in the vast region of realities, the superior ontological region of social things considered to be ideal but as real as that of tangible things. Consequently, ideal objectivity is one of the most remarkable phenomenological aspects of Durkheim’s social facts. This makes them facts of a certain kind, that is, facts that belong to a specific ontological region, as will be seen next.

4.6

Sacred Things and the Ontological Regions of the Social

Durkheim provides a material or regional ontology of the social, which—as such— presents “a closed unity and form the particular principles” of positive sciences (Kern, 2005, p. 136). He expressly refers to the idea of “region” to draft what can be considered an ontology of the social, with its laws and facts. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XXV) Thus, to “address the social realm,” Durkheim (1999, p. 46) proposes a regional analysis that is not so different from Husserl’s (Husserl, 1983, § 17–45) in the awareness that it is always possible to find the most general structure of a phenomenon of a specified type. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 56) Therefore, based on a grouping and designation of groups of similar phenomena, he proposes a

4.6

Sacred Things and the Ontological Regions of the Social

33

stratification into different ontological regions within the more general region of the modes of being. To produce this ontology, Durkheim starts with the clarification of religious phenomena as a form of ideation that can be ordered in increasing degrees of generality, composing categories that can be ranked in terms of genus and species that constitute the “realms of reality.” Indeed, Durkheim considers that “religious phenomena are naturally structured into two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites,” which are distinguished by the same differences “that separate thinking from movement.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 50) Hence, there are two categories of religious phenomena that are clearly differentiated from each other based on their essential features. Of these phenomena, we are more concerned with beliefs since, given their status as forms of thinking, they will give us access to ideal objectivities. Religious beliefs imply a classification of things into two contrasting genres, “the profane and the sacred,” which result in a division of the world into two domains” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 50) and hold a relation of subordination between them, in addition to relations of distinction. Consequently, the “circles” of “profane things” and “sacred things” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 51) are differentiated not only due to their heterogeneity but also based on their rank, as the former is subordinated to later. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 53) Regarding their heterogeneity, Durkheim indicates that such an aspect “is absolute” since “in all the history of human thought, there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated, so radically opposed to one another [. . .] the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as separate genres, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common.” (Durkheim, 2005b,p. 53; Durkheim’s emphasis) Hence, even though the form of such opposition can vary, opposition itself is universal. The manner of thinking about the objects that fall within each of these classes is also universal, including more general categories such as time—that is objectively conceived by all men of the same civilization (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 14)—or symbols—understood as ideas that have “objective value.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 26) Now, ideal objectivities are not only divided into categories that organize the world and establish hierarchies, but they are also grouped into regions understood as specific realities with their differentiated emotional values (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 16) and their own ways of manifestation, governed by immanent laws that lead us to think about realms of reality, (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 26) and are considered by Durkheim as “an empire within an empire.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 25) The domain of this type of ideal legality applies not only to each of the genera described above (the sacred and the profane) but also to the wider ontological region of the social. Thus, as alleged by Durkheim, societies are subject to laws of necessity and form a “natural kingdom” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 37) that may be well reflected in the religious phenomenon as its more elemental expression, whose main characteristic is that it always entails “a bipartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable into two genres which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 56) For instance, “sacred things are those which

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the interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 56) In turn, “religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of the sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 56) Therefore, the most relevant aspect of the religious for Durkheim is that it conceives the world as divided into “two heterogeneous and incomparable worlds, although nothing in sensible experience” suggests “the idea of so radical a duality.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 58) In other words, its specificity consists of establishing an ideal, rather than an empirical, distinction.

4.7

New Directions

Thus far, from a static perspective, I have shown that the social is thought by Durkheim as an ontological region formed by two subregions (the sacred and the profane) that, in turn, are mutually differentiated and establish relations of subordination between them (the latter being subordinated to the former) that govern the relations to be established with the ideal objectivities that each of them comprises (representations, values, etc.). In the context of intentional analysis, this means that only the objective aspect of the noetic-noematic correlation has been explored. We still must go backward, following the intentional thread of consciousness, to the encounter of the subjective processes involved in the constitution of social facts. This will be our concern in the following chapter. We will turn our glimpse from the constituted objectivity to the constituting subjectivity, which will require that we discuss Durkheim’s view on the origin of the categories and some fundamental constitutional processes that exceed the activity of the individuals’ consciousness.

Chapter 5

Durkheim and the Transcendental

We have seen thus far how Durkheim, practicing static phenomenology, described the constituted object of sociology and included it in a region peculiar to what Husserl calls “the spiritual world,” namely, the realm of ideal objectivities. However, constitution is the work of transcendental subjectivity. In Husserl’s view, that would mean that we are still supposed to pursue constitutional analysis, pulling backward on the intentional thread of consciousness, stepping back from the constituted objectivities to the constitutional acts that provide them for us, so exploring in full the intentional arch. However, Durkheim takes a different direction. Not that he overlooks the work of constitution; he assigns it to society, not to transcendental consciousness. Nevertheless, he does go beyond the individual’s ego (what, for Husserl, would be the empirical ego) in search of an impersonal, transcendent work of constitution. This is what we must explore in the following pages.

5.1

Intentional Analysis and Phenomenological Sociology

In Husserl’s visionary work, intentional analysis allows the phenomenologist to make understandable to himself how, within the immanency of conscious life and in thus and so determined modes of consciousness belonging to this incessant flux, anything like fixed and abiding objective unities can become intended and, in particular, how this marvelous work of ‘constituting’ identical objects is done in the case of each category of objects – that is to say: how, in the case of each category, the constitutive conscious life looks, and must look, in respect of the correlative noetic and noematic variants pertaining to the same object. (Husserl, 1982, § 20, pp. 48–49; Husserl’s emphasis)

From this angle, intentional analysis must explore the “horizon structure belonging to every intentionality [. . ., which] prescribes for phenomenological analysis and description methods of a totally new kind” from the moment consciousness and object, intending and sense, “present themselves as names for transcendental

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_5

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problems, to be taken in hand as genuine problems concerning ‘subjective origins’.” (Husserl, 1982, § 20, pp. 48–49; Husserl’s emphasis) Interestingly, Husserl mentions that these methods for addressing problems concerning the subjective origin of objective sense are valid, mutatis mutandis, not only in philosophy but also in purely intentional psychology: “the same is manifestly true in the case of a pure ‘internal psychology’ or a ‘purely intentional’ psychology (within the realm of natural positivity), which we have alluded to as the parallel to constitutional transcendental phenomenology.” (Husserl, 1982, § 20, p. 49) This perspective opens new possibilities for phenomenological sociology since intentional psychology belongs to the constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, which Schutz prefers to call “General Sociology, since it must always be referred back to mundane intersubjectivity.” (Schutz, 1962, p. 137) Based on Husserl’s writings, Schutz claims that an apriori and pure intentional psychology, understood as an eidetic science, “would have to execute the interpretation of the phenomena of intentional constitution in the natural conception of the world” that should also involve a social science which, “while limited to the social sphere, is of an eidetic character.” (Schutz, 1996, p. 164) Its task would consist in “the intentional analysis of those manifold forms of higher-level social acts and social formations which are founded on the - already executed - constitution of the alter ego. This can be achieved in static and genetic analyses, and such an interpretation would accordingly have to demonstrate the aprioristic structures of the social sciences.” (Schutz, 1996, p. 164)

5.2

Agreements and Disagreements About the Subject of Categories

The issue of categories is an important aspect of intentional analysis. Husserl himself assigned it a special place when stating a “radical difference between objectivities that are real (in a broad sense) and categorial objectivities [. . .] The latter point back to an origin from ‘operations,’ from a step-by-step generative-constructive activity of the ego: the former, to an origin as effects of a merely passive (in any case, not an < actively > generative) synthesis.” (Husserl, 1982, § 21, p. 50; Husserl’s emphasis) Durkheim also assigned it a significant status, agreeing with Husserl on that. As Tiryakian (1978, p. 37) keenly notes, “Husserl’s and Durkheim’s last work are both explorations of origins and both go from the exteriority of the world to its interiority in transcendental consciousness.” Indeed, it can be found in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life a congruent conception of ideal objectivities at large and of categorial objectivities in particular, convergent with Husserl’s view. As seen in Chap. 4, both Husserl and Durkheim conceive of categories as ideal objects that are not subjective but objective, which means that they are accessible to anyone and that their validity does not lie in the individual subject who conceived it but in its intrinsic features. They also agree that real and ideal objects are given in

5.2

Agreements and Disagreements About the Subject of Categories

37

different ways: Husserl distinguishes between sensuous intuition and categorial intuition; Durkheim, in a similar way, differentiates sensation from concept, sense experience from the “higher intellectuality” of concept formation. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 624) He even admits that—as the apriorists claim—knowledge is formed from two superimposed, irreducible layers, empirical knowledge and categories. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 21–22) However, similarities are limited. Husserl conceives of categorial acts as founded in sensuous intuition; Durkheim, instead, seems to imply that they are quite autonomous with regard to sense perceptions and are founded on the objectivity of the object. As will be seen, this has significant consequences. In Husserl’s view, an object of simple perception is directly present, immediately given, present ‘in one blow.’ Objects of sense perceptions are ‘there’ for us in one step of constitution in which they are intended and also given. By contrast, categorial objects can be intended and given only in a complex series of distinct founding acts which are grasped together by a comprehensive act which itself has a new, different intention. In this founded act there is a new object intended and also given which could not be intended or given in the founding acts. (Lohmar, 2002, p. 125)

Brief, for Husserl, “categorial intuition is founded.” (Lohmar, 2002, p. 129) As a consequence, it. does not refer to its object in simple, one-rayed acts but always in jointed, higher order acts which rest on founding acts. The objects of founding acts are synthetically placed into a categorial relation within the founded categorial act. Thus in categorial acts new objects are intended, i.e., categorial objects which can only be intended (and given) in such founded acts. (Lohmar, 2002, p. 129)

Within this view, “objects of simple perception only become objects of cognition in the founded act of categorial intuition which placed them within a synthetic relation.”1 (Lohmar, 2002, p. 130) In Husserl’s words (2001b, Investigation Six, Chap. 6, § 46, p. 306), “everything categorial ultimately rests upon sensuous intuition,” which, “without any foundation of sense, is a piece of nonsense.” Regardless of the affinities noted thus far, Durkheim’s approach to ideal objects presents some meaningful differences from Husserl’s. Even if he considers that “to think by concepts [. . .] is to project onto sensation a light which illuminates it,” this phenomenological idea is still expressed in a rather Kantian language that conceives this illumination as the work of a “faculty” and opposes sensibility and understanding. This, indeed, would be a problem for Husserl, who was convinced that “The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a muchneeded clarity through a distinction between straightforward or sensuous, and

This happens in the simplest instances. As Lohmar (2002, p. 133) notes, “sense perception can contribute to the fulfilment of categorial intentions at least in the most simple cases. But there are many objects of categorial intuition which have only a very loose connection with sense perception, for example the propositions of pure mathematics and algebra, where there is hardly any contribution of sensibility.” In my view, these cases are closer to Durkheim’s perspective. No wonder mathematical entities have for him a peculiar proximity with social objects. 1

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founded or categorial intuition.” (Husserl, 2001b, Investigation Six, Introduction, p. 186) Durkheim also intends to go beyond Kant but following a different direction. This is evident in sect. II of the introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where—in a dialog with Hamelin (1907) and mimicking Kant’s (Kant, 1998, p. 127ff) discussion with empiricism and rationalism—he confronts both “classical empiricism” and “apriorism” as one-sided perspectives, aiming at a new direction. However, as said, Durkheim keeps the Kantian names “sensibility” and “understanding” in his argumentation. He did not ignore that this kind of language is problematic; he simply tried a different way out it, as will be seen next.

5.3

Durkheim’s Way Out of the Empiricism and Apriorism Dilema

In Durkheim’s (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 18) opinion, up to his days, there only existed two doctrines regarding the nature and origin of the categories, empiricism—the thesis that conceives them as individuals’ constructions—and apriorism—the thesis according to which they cannot be derivated from experience. In his view, both doctrines are wrong. Empiricism denies the specific qualities of categories—namely, their universality and necessity—because empirical data have diametrically opposed characteristics to them. Categories are the most general concepts that exist; thus, they are not attached to a particular object and rest independent of any individual subject, while sensations are always linked to a definite object or objects and express momentary states of an individual consciousness. Empiricism, then, falls into irrationalism because it reduces reason to experience, which means reducing its universality and necessity to mere appearances, to illusions that do not correspond to nothing at all and deny the objective reality of categories. Therefore, empiricism should be called irrationalism. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 19–20) Apriorism, on the contrary, is rationalism because it acknowledges the specific character of categories. It claims that the world has a logical aspect that is grasped by reason. Ironically, as regards our matter, apriorists are more attentive to facts than empiricists. They ascribe to intellect a power to transcend experience. However, they do not provide any explanation or proof of such a unique power. Then, apriorism is shielded from all experimental controls. Thus, it does not fulfill the conditions for being considered a scientific hypothesis. In addition, the categories of human thought are never fixed: they change and vary according to time and place, while reason as conceived by this hypothesis is immutable. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 20–21) These conceptions have existed for centuries and engaged in endless discussions. Both leave unattended significant features of the categories. Therefore, Durkheim (2005b, p. 26) offers a fresh formulation, which he terms “theory of knowledge” and aims at profiting from the advantages of these rival theories. To that end, it looks to

5.4

Sociological Theory Versus Transcendental Philosophy

39

preserve the essential principles of apriorism and to seek inspiration in the positive turn proclaimed by empiricism. It acknowledges the specific power of reason but also provides tangible proof. It affirms the duality of our intellectual life but explains it with natural causes. Durkheim’s theory of knowledge brings in new procedures. To know what the categories are made of it does not suffice to question our own consciousness; we must look outside ourselves, observe history, and institute a whole new science undertaken as a collective labor. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 27–28) A new perspective is mandatory because, for being objective and external, categories cannot be accessed in introspection. Durkheim considered them as ruled by objective laws of representations constituted in the sphere of the outer. (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 17) However, categories are not only objective and external but—as mentioned—they are the work of the collectivity. What intimate link does Durkheim find among these features?

5.4

Sociological Theory Versus Transcendental Philosophy

As seen thus far, Durkheim did not conceive of ideal objects as necessarily founded on sensuous objects (neither on other ideal objects) but on objectivity and the work of society. Because it is a controversial issue, this will require further discussion. Durkheim (2005b, p. 26) explicitly states that categories are founded in “the nature of things.” In his view, categorial intuition is founded on the objectivity of the object, in line with the Kant-informed philosophy of consciousness described in Chap. 3, which in turn is consequent with his concept of representation. The primacy of the object can be appreciated in the Conclusions to The elementary forms. . ., part III, where Durkheim (2005b, p. 625) claims that objectivity is the warrant of collective representations. It is for fitting the nature of things that they have such an ascendency on human thought, this accordance being repeatedly and indefinitely verified through common experience. However, it must not be forgotten that in regard to categories, the things addressed are social things in their specifics. Furthermore, it is the particulars of social objects that impose themselves on understanding and not the other way around. In other words, it is not because we are endowed with a specific faculty that we conceived of social things as being objective and external, but we constitute in ourselves the specific region of rational objects because they impact our inner capabilities in that way. It must be remembered that as social objects, categories are the work of the collectivity. They not only come from society but also express society to a higher degree. In addition to being instituted by society, they conform to different features of the social being. (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 637) Therefore, it is not social things on their own but society, through them, that impacts our so-called “faculties.” This, in turn, involves a significant change in the Husserlian approach to the theory of knowledge.

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As seen thus far, Husserl and Durkheim conduct intentional analysis in a direction that intends to surpass the account of merely individual states of consciousness. Husserl’s criticism of psychologism and his transcendental turn (see Husserl, 1983) are well known, and—this is my claim—an analogous turn can be found in Durkheim, just not directed at the transcendental field but at society. This turn is brilliantly described in Tyriakian, with whom I have to agree once more. His claim is that, despite “the rapprochement between Husserl’s phenomenology and Durkheim’s sociology,” an area of disagreement deserves to be acknowledged as regards their approach to consciousness. No matter how radical Husserl’s philosophy is, he still thinks of subjectivity, in the last analysis, as grounded in the individual cogito, while for Durkheim, consciousness has two irreducible constitutive modes, those of the individual and those of the collectivity; for Durkheim, our knowledge of the world, our representations of reality, in terms of which we experience the world is a dual product of individual and collective consciousness, without one being more fundamental than the other. Man qua social human being is homo duplex. Consequently, although The Crisis shows an increasing awareness of intersubjectivity and of community, Husserl’s transcendental grounds of worldhood remains an I-pole at its core, whereas Durkheim’s transcendental grounds of worldhood emphasizes its We-pole. (Tiryakian, 1978, pp. 37–38)

As said, I cannot but agree with Tiryakian on this. In addition, I do not even think it is just a hunch. One can see Durkheim insistently and obviously trying to prove that there is more to representations than individual thinking, particularly in the case of the categories, which are “the skeleton of understanding.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 13) Up to this point, Durkheim seems to go the same way as Husserl, moving away from the individual, empirical ego, which cannot access the universal layers of experience. However—and still following Tiryakian—this must be considered the limit of their affinities. From the start, and particularly in Chap. 2, I have been arguing that there is in Durkheim an implicit phenomenological approach, which has one of its closest parallels with Husserl in their methodological aspects. I have disclosed in Durkheim’s writings the practice of phenomenological and eidetic reduction; however, nothing I have found related to transcendental reduction. The previous steps are remarkably similar, but nothing like a transcendental turn can be found in Durkheim as a continuing, in-depthening, pathway toward a transcendental ego. Instead, he abandons what we might call an egology sui generis toward a self-proclaimed sociological theory of knowledge. It is not a deeper stratum of egoic experience but a social construction of meaning that constitutes the ultimate layers of our experience. Durkheim expresses this in one of his least understood and most rejected ideas: the concept of a kind of synthesis operated outside the individual’s consciousness.

5.5

Unmasking the Monster

5.5

41

Unmasking the Monster

That social facts are exterior to individuals is one of Durkheim’s most horrifying ideas. Many sociologists panic when they hear that kind of thing. Nevertheless, social facts are not the product of whatever mystified entity: they are just the work of the collectivity—and I know this is another spine-chilling word... Thus, our last section will be devoted to unmasking this alleged monstrous Durkheim. The truth is that when talking about the work of the collectivity, Durkheim (2005b, p. 619, 621, 624, 633) does not mention any mystic creature but quite tangible things such as the community, groups, language, social classes, and the like. See the following example: When I perform my duties as a brother, a husband or a citizen and carry out the commitments I have entered into, I fulfil obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions. Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, it does not cease to be objective; for I have not made them but received them through education. (Durkheim, 1999, pp. 3–4)

Durkheim (1999, p. 4) adds, if these obligations existed before me, then they existed outside me. That social facts are exterior just means that they have been defined by others and have been handed down to me through education. Is it not so hard to understand, at least if you are a parent, a teacher, or a human being. . . Another aspect of exteriority is coercion. Social facts not only are external to the individual; they are endued with an imperative, coercive power by virtue of which they impose themselves upon the individual. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 4) Even if he struggles free from rules and successfully breaks them, “it is never without being forced to fight against them.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 5) Thus, social facts are identifiable through the power of external coercion that they exert or are capable of exerting upon individuals—a power whose presence is in turn recognizable because of the existence of some predetermined sanction. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 11) Again, this is no hidden mystery for those who live in society. However, many sociologists have trouble accepting it. Therefore, let us again pose the question: Where does this coercive power come from? No matter how frequently misunderstood Durkheim’s ideas on this subject were, his words are clear like clear water: Coercive power comes from the group. In this way, a social fact can be defined by its propagation within the group. (Durkheim, 1999, p. 11) That the group imposes itself upon the individuals becomes “evident in those beliefs and practices which are handed down to us ready fashioned by previous generations; we accept and adopt them because, since they are the work of the collectivity and one that is centuries old, they are invested with a special authority that education has taught us to recognize and respect.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 11) Whoever believed in something, or at least went to school, would agree with Durkheim on this. Most likely, she or he would even admit that “education consists of a continual effort to impose upon the child ways of seeing, feeling and acting which he himself would not have arrived at spontaneously.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. 7)

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At least, it happened to me. However, if a few readers are still reticent, let me offer them, as a final argument, a brief specification taken from the ethnomethodological reception of Durkheim. Respecifying Durkheim’s aphorism that “the objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental phenomenon,” Garfinkel (2002, pp. 65–66) claims that social facts are “the Things of social order—the distinctive order phenomena of ordinary society.” In this view, “Contrary to the commonly accepted interpretations of Durkheim’s work,” ethnomethodology understands that “the objective reality of social facts was Durkheim’s descriptive proxy” for empirical phenomena of social order. (Garfinkel, 2002, pp. 67–68, see also, pp. 93–94) That is, from an ethnomethodological perspective, Durkheimian things are embodiedly enacted, endogenously produced, accountable sociological phenomena of social order. (Garfinkel, 2002, pp. 75–76) After all, “the macrosociological phenomena which Durkheim sees in the collective life [. . .] consist of active practices which have their only existence in the local life of the people,” no matter if he failed “to present a concrete picture of social sentiments in the mundane life.” (Liberman, 1985, p. 109). If you agree to this, there is no need for worries. Collective life, which expresses itself through social facts, is but a set of embodied practices; nothing that an attentive, faithful description of (social) things themselves would not reach. However, I know this answer might still be considered slightly abstract, in line with the “generic theorizing” so many times criticized—even parodied—by Garfinkel. I agree. For that reason, in the next chapter, I will provide a more detailed, particularized description of how collective consciousness arises and works. Even if that description might remain theoretical for the ethnomethodological taste, I hope at least it is specific and detailed enough for the average reader. In addition, it will be Durkheim’s. Sure, it is too late for him to visit Australia and provide a firsthand, in vivo, account; but it might calm the waters to determine that he did not hide behind general theorizing thinking but provided with particulars about how collective consciousness is constituted. It might worth the effort to take a closer look at one of Durkheim’s forgotten arguments.

Chapter 6

Durkheim’s Forgotten Argument

In the previous chapter, I took up on Garfinkel’s concern for Durkheim’s neglected aphorism that social facts constitute the fundamental phenomenon in sociology. It is time to go one step further and retrieve Durkheim’s forgotten argument about how those facts are constituted. I use the word “constitution” on purpose because Durkheim is trying to tell us that social facts are lived experiences given to a consciousness sui generis. How does this happen? That is precisely what this argument is about. Why do I call it a “forgotten argument”? Although Durkheim insistently mentions it from his early up to his later works, it has not yet received enough attention. A token of such an oversight is what I mentioned in Chap. 1 regarding the reception of Durkheim in the current debate on collective consciousness. Therefore, it is about time to go throughout Durkheim’s work once again and put to an end this centennial oblivion.

6.1

Collective Consciousness as the Ensemble of Social Similarities

Among the many things Durkheim said, let aside the different nuances and possible switches of emphasis over the years, a strong, simple argument remains throughout his work: that collective consciousness comes from the association and similitude of individual consciousnesses and does not have an entity of its own apart from the biological individuals. In this view, the expression “collective consciousness” designates no other thing than “the ensemble of all social similarities.” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 47) An early version of the argument can be found in The Division of Labor in Society: Just as opposing states of consciousness are mutually enfeebling to one another, identical states of consciousness, intermingling one another, the latter add something. If someone

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_6

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expresses to us an idea that was already itself upon it, intermingles with it, and transmits to it its own vitality. From this act of fusion burgeons a new idea that absorbs the former ones and which in consequence is more filled with vitality than each idea taken separately. This is why in large gatherings produced in each individual consciousness echoes in every consciousness. (Durkheim, 2018, p. 145; Durkheim, 2004a, p. 67)

A similar argument can also be found in Durkheim’s latest work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Collective thought is possible only through the coming together of individuals; hence it presupposes the individuals, and they in turn presuppose it, because they cannot sustain themselves except by coming together. The realm of impersonal aims and truths cannot be realized except through the collaboration of individual wills and sensibilities; if the reasons they participate and the reasons they collaborate are the same. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 447; Durkheim, 2005b, p. 636)

One can also find this line of argument in Sociologie et philosophie, where Durkheim claims that collective consciousness emerges from a synthesis originating in the relations among individual consciousnesses. It rises as a social world produced by the reification of individual life outside itself. In this way, collective consciousness emerges from the intensification of interactions between individual consciousnesses. See, for instance, the following paragraph. When individual consciousnesses, instead of remaining separated from each other, come into close contact, act actively on each other, there emerges from their synthesis a psychic life of a new kind. It is distinguished first from that led by the solitary individual by its particular intensity. The feelings that are born and develop within groups have an energy that purely individual feelings do not reach. The man who experiences them has the impression that he is dominated by forces that he does not recognize as his own, which lead him, of which he is not the master, and the whole environment in which he is immersed seems crisscrossed by forces of the same kind. He feels as if transported to a different world from that in which his private life passes. (Durkheim, 2004b, p. 133)

As seen, Durkheim understands the synthesis from which the states of collective consciousness emerge as elaborated from the relationship between individual states of consciousness. Commenting on this, Watier (2008, p. 110) stresses that it is by penetrating, merging, mingling with each other that consciences create a new entity, a collective consciousness. (See also Vera, 2002, p. 107) In this view, a synthesis that brings together a multiplicity of individual states generates a new type of psychic life that, as such, is a feeling but a feeling distinct from the mere sum of individual feelings and that constitutes a new force arising from intersubjective effervescence. It is the emergent character of this new order—new or different in relation to individual experience—that produces the feeling of exteriority and transcendence that awakens in us the social. In this line of argument, Stedman Jones (2003, p. 16) claims that, for Durkheim, “the irreducibility of collective representations to individual representations” is based on “the combination of ‘associated individuals’ which establishes the diverse relations from which the collective representations develop.” Accordingly, the alleged “synthesis at the level of the whole” (Stedman Jones, 2003, pp. 16–17) might be thought of as nothing other than a combination sui generis of individual

6.2

Sociology and Formal Psychology

45

consciousnesses, i.e., as a “communion” (Stedman Jones, 2007, p. 97) or “meeting of consciousnesses.” (Weiss, 2012, p. 90) Once again, this kind of idea seems to come from the Kantian philosopher Renouvier, who “argued that for representation to be possible, there must be more than one person who represents: representation is general and objective and as such is the condition of truth relations.” (Stedman Jones, 2003, p. 17) However, it has a historical precedent, namely, Hume’s laws of association of ideas, whose influence on Durkheim is clearly appreciated in The Rules of Sociological Method.

6.2

Sociology and Formal Psychology

Durkheim’s idea that “just as opposing sentiments repel each other, simmilar sentiments attract, and [that] this occurs the more strongly the more intense they are,” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 70) is Humean in spirit. This filiation is explicitly established in The Rules of Sociological Method, where Durkheim (1999, p. XVIII) takes as valid for the realm of individual psychology the laws of the association of ideas since they provide well-known explanations of “the manner in which individual ideas combine together.” Moreover, Durkheim claims that “the laws of the collective ideation” should be addressed in line with the laws of individual ideation. How social representations are attracted to or exclude each other, amalgamate with or are distinguishable from each other, etc., and, at the same time, how these two kinds of laws differentiate one from each other should be investigated. Eventually, it will be established “that each category of mental states has its own formal laws which are peculiar to it” and, in accordance, that the corresponding laws of social thinking are specific, as is social thinking itself. (Durkheim, 1999, p. XIX) However, once the difference in nature between these two kinds of laws is acknowledged, “one may ask whether individual representations and collective representations do not nevertheless resemble each other in that they both are equally representations; and whether, as a consequence of these similarities, certain abstract laws might not be common to the two domains.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XVIII) In this view, “collective thinking in its entirety, in form as in substance, must be studied in itself, for itself, with a feeling for what is special to it, and one must leave to the future the task of discovering to what extent it resembles the thought of individuals.” (Durkheim, 1999, pp. XIX–XX) However, despite their specificities, individual and collective representations are, both, representations and may well be addressed as such. Durkheim admits that there is something psychical about social life, which is essentially made up of representations, even if “collective representations are of quite another character from those of the individual.” (Durkheim, 2005a, p. 352) This gives rise to a new science, which Durkheim (1999, p. XVIII) conceives as a formal psychology, whose subject matter would be the manner in which representations attract or repel, join together or separate, independently of their specific content, by virtue of “their general quality of being representations.” Here,

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Durkheim (1999, p. XVIII) glimpses “the possibility of an entirely formal psychology which might form a kind of common ground to individual psychology and sociology.” Up to a point, although not all the way through, what Durkheim called “formal psychology” could be thought of as an instantiation of Husserl’s regional ontologies, as presented in Ideas I, §§ 2, 9 &16. A region is delimited by the “highest eidetic universalities.” (Husserl, 1983, p. 8; Husserl’s emphasis) It is the highest genus to which the objects of a particular kind belong (Husserl, 1983, p. 18). In other words: A region is nothing other than the total highest generic unity belonging to a conretum, i.e., the essentially unitary nexus of the summa genera pertaining to the infimae species within the concretum. The eidetic extension of the region comprises the ideal totality of concretely unified complexes of infimae species belonging to these genera; the individual extension comprises the ideal totality of possible individua having such concrete essences. [. . .] Each regional essence determines ‘synthetical’ eidetic truths, that is to say, truths that are grounded in it as this generic essence, but that are not mere particularizations of truths included in formal ontology. (Husserl, 1983, p. 31, Husserl’s emphasis)

Inasmuch as Durkheim is differentiating two species of representations, each of them ruled by their own laws and both subjected to the universal laws of formal psychology, a similar framework to Husserl’s regional ontologies might be appreciated. However, only one of those species of representations is truly compatible with Husserl’s description of ontology, which is the realm of collective representations. Only them are formal, universal representations. Indeed, in collective representations, “reason has gained the power to go beyond the range of empirical cognition.” Social being represents within us “the highest reality” in the intellectual realm, whose consequence is “the irreducibility of reason to individual experience.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 23) In accordance, “collective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 633): Being outside and above individual and local contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in their permanent and fundamental aspect, which it crystallizes in ideas that can be communicated. At the same time as it sees from above, it sees far ahead; at every moment, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the intellect with frameworks that are applicable to the totality of beings and that enable us to build concepts about them. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 445; Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 633–634)

6.3

Two Consciousness, One Single Substratum

Durkheim’s distinction between collective and individual consciousness must not be taken as substantial. As seen in Chap. 3, he conceives of consciousness as representations, not as an entity existing on its own. Durkheim makes this explicit: Two consciousnesses exist within us: the one comprises only states that are personal to each one of us, characteristic of us as individuals, whilst the other comprises states that are common to the whole of society. The former represents only our individual personality, which it constitutes; the later represents the collective type and consequently the society without which it would not exist. When it is an element of the latter determining our

6.3

Two Consciousness, One Single Substratum

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behavior, we do not act with an eye to our own personal interest, but are pursuing collective ends. Now, although distinct, these two consciousnesses are linked to each other, since in the end they constitute only one entity, for both var one and the same organic basis. (Durkheim, 2018, p. 151; Durkheim, 2004a, p. 74)

Hence, even if there is a radical heterogeneity between personal and social consciousness, even if they fulfill different functions (one constitutes our social personality and the other represents the collective type), they both constitute a single entity with one single organic substrate. In the end, society “has no other substrata than individual consciousnesses.” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 339) That is, the collective consciousness is not an entity apart. It is exterior as regards their individual personality, not their biological organism. Our two consciousnesses are then distinguished as two states of mind and not as two substances: they are distinct states of a single consciousness, structured into regions that have one single organic substratum. Therefore, the social is a state of consciousness that constitutes a specific ontological region and not a self-subsisting entity that oppresses individuals as a selfsufficient collective substance capable of operating on its own. The social exists in us. It is us, not in what we have of singular and incomparable but in what we have in common, in what we resemble, it is what moves in us a feeling of belonging that could not drag us like a whirlwind outside we (using Durkheim’s metaphor) if it did not move us from within; that is, if it were not immanent to us. Collective representations are not the product of any mysterious, impersonal force but of the cooperation of different minds that have associated and combined their ideas and feelings across generations. (Durkheim, 2005b, pp. 22–23) In this light, society is constituted by a synthesis sui generis that “brings out new phenomena, different from those which occur in solitary consciousnesses.” (Durkheim, 1999, pp. xvi–xvii) They are specific facts that reside in the very society that produces them, not in its parts, that is, not inside the individual’s consciousness. (Durkheim, 1999, p. xvii) However, society has no other active forces than individuals; but individuals by combining form a psychical existence of a new species, which consequently has its own manner of thinking and feeling. Of course the elementary qualities of which the social fact consists are present in germ in individual minds. But the social fact emerges from them only when they have been transformed by association since it is only then that it appears. Association itself is also an active factor productive of special effects. In itself it is therefore something new. When the consciousness of individuals, instead of remaining isolated, becomes grouped and combined, something in the world has been altered. Naturally this change produces others, this novelty engenders other novelties, phenomena appear whose characteristic qualities are not found in the elements composing them. (Durkheim, 2005c, pp. 274–275; Durkheim, 2005a, p. 350)

Accordingly, society has a psychical, not an ontic, existence that emerges from the combination of individuals’ psychic experiences once they associate one another. Society emerges from the grouping of individual minds that, combined, engender a novelty. That is why, when claiming that social facts are external to the individuals, Durkheim is not advocating for any mystified entity but simply distinguishing two regions of our experience, one that encompasses our individual experiences, another

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that contains those states of mind that, for being shared with others, have been reinforced. Even if they have two different phenomenological substrata, both kinds of experiences rely on the same ontological substratum. As Durkheim puts it: We refuse to accept that these phenomena [social phenomena] have as a substratum the conscience of the individual, we assign them another; that formed by all the individual consciences in union and combination. There is nothing substantival or ontological about this substratum, since it is merely a whole composed of parts. But it is just as real, nevertheless, as the elements that make it up; for they are constituted in this very way. They are compounds, too. [. . .] Nothing is more reasonable, then, than this proposition [. . .:] that a belief or social practice may exist independently of its individual expressions. We clearly did not imply by this that society can exist without individuals, an obvious absurdity we might have been spared having attributed to us. But we did mean: 1. that the group formed by associated individuals has a reality of a different sort from each individual considered singly; 2. that collective states exist in the group from whose nature they spring, before they affect the individual as such and establish in him in a new form a purely inner existence. (Durkheim, 2005c, p. 284; Durkheim, 2005a, pp. 361–362)

Interestingly, for Durkheim, a whole composed of parts is nothing substantial or ontological. This sole statement should suffice to fade away the ghosts of collectivism. In his view, collective consciousness is just a gathering of individuals’ minds. All Durkheim is trying to say, or to shout out loud, is that the reality behind collective consciousness (the monster we talked about in Chap. 5) is just a group of people. Collective life is no other than the life of the group.

6.4

The Life of the Group

I am aware that this specification of Durkheim’s argument might not remove all the reader’s fears. Conspicuous individualists might still hold that groups are as unreal as collective consciousness itself. As a matter of fact, that is what most social phenomenologists currently believe, as seen in Chap. 1. Nonetheless, also as seen there, this perspective has been challenged with a Schutzian air by Embree, with whom I totally agree that individuals are abstracta, only groups are concreta. Also I share his view that “groups are concrete collective subjects, integrated by individuals or by other groups that can hold subjective and objective meanings and can act upon one another and influence each other.” (Belvedere, 2017, p. 84) In Durkheim’s words: Most of our states or consciousness [. . .] derive not from the psychological nature of man generally, but from the way in which men, once they associate together, exert a reciprocal effect upon one another [. . .]. State of consciousness are products of the life of the group, and it is the nature of the group alone that can explain these states. Naturally they would not be possible unless the individual constitution favored them. But such constitutions are only remote conditions and not determining causes. (Durkheim, 2018, p. 367; Durkheim, 2004a, pp. 341–342; emphasis mine)

Then, collective representations are the product of cooperation among individuals who have associated their minds and combined their ideas and feelings, whose

6.5

Durkheim’s Argument, Again

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experience and knowledge they have accumulated along generations, thus distilling “a very special intellectuality, infinitely richer and more complex than that of the individual.” (Durkheim, 2005b, p. 23) Therefore, they are the expression of “the way in which the group thinks of itself,” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XVII) and its authority is made up in large part of “the authority of tradition.” (Durkheim, 2004a, p. 277) Just as social constraint—if I may say—it stems “from the prestige with which certain representations are invested.” (Durkheim, 1999, p. XXI)

6.5

Durkheim’s Argument, Again

Thus far, Durkheim’s views on collective consciousness have been portrayed. As a last effort, it might be worth summarizing those views. With that aim, I will provide a six-step argument as a synthesis of what Durkheim’s conception of collective consciousness can offer to the phenomenological eye, at least in this humble phenomenologist’s perspective. 1. Collective consciousness is the outcome of the association of similar individual consciousnesses. It is the ensemble of all social similarities. 2. Collective consciousness emerges from a synthesis originating in the relations among individual consciousnesses ruled by the law of association of ideas at the level of the social, which states that opposing sentiments repel each other while like sentiments attract each other the more strongly the more intense they are. 3. The distinction between collective and individual consciousness must not be taken as substantial. They are to be distinguished as two states of mind, not as two entities. 4. Consequently, society has a psychical, not an ontic existence, which emerges from the combination of individuals’ psychic experiences once they associate one another. Even though they have two different phenomenological substrata, both kinds of experiences rely on one and the same ontological substratum, namely, the biological individual. 5. Society is an ontological region. Two regions organize our experience, one that encompasses our individual experiences and another that contains those states of mind that, for being shared with others, have been reinforced. The latter encompasses the ontological region called “society.” 6. Society emerges from the grouping of individual minds. Collective representations are the product of cooperation and express the way in which the group thinks of itself. In summary, collective consciousness is the outcome of the association of individual consciousnesses, which produces a peculiar synthesis between similar ideas and constitutes two differentiated ontological regions, that of individual representations and that of collective representations. They are not substantial states of affairs but two distinct states of mind. Even though they have different phenomenological substrata, they both rely on one and the same ontological substratum, namely, the

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biological individual. In this view, society is but an ontological region that emerges from the grouping of individuals throughout the work of cooperation. True, Durkheim said many other things about collective consciousness, and some of those things might not be so easy to take for many phenomenologists. However, he insisted on what I called “Durkheim’s forgotten argument.” That, I would say, is the core of his sociology. I have only one more reason to offer for convincing the reader or fail in my attempt. That will be the subject of our last chapter, where I will hold that the very concept of collective consciousness made sense for Husserl and that distinctive features of social facts were addressed by Schutz from a phenomenological perspective.

Chapter 7

Finding Durkheim

This book started with the claim that Durkheim is misunderstood when his phenomenological background remains unattended and that, regrettably, the prevailing consensus in our days has often neglected it. To amend things, I proposed “the detective work” of looking for Durkheim. I hope the work is done, since a phenomenological approach to consciousness has been unveiled in fundamental pages of Durkheim’s writings, thus elucidating the experiential meaning of some misunderstood ideas in his work. However, additional reasons would be provided if the phenomenological insights of Durkheim were also found in the work of the main figures of the phenomenological movement. This will be the task for our last chapter, not just to find Durkheim but also find him in Husserl and in Schutz.

7.1

Husserl and Durkheim

Up to this point, particularly in Chaps. 1 and 2, I intended to prove that there is in Durkheim a profound affinity with Husserl, while a Cartesian inspiration can be detected in his method and the results of its application to sociology lead to an ontology that could well be interpreted as consistent with Husserl’s proposal in his best-known writings on static and genetic phenomenology. Can this be a coincidence? I find it hard to believe that Durkheim and Husserl were not aware of each other’s existence. As mentioned in Chap. 2, they both shared a common European history and had a teacher in common. I would add that for being so interested in German thought, Durkheim could not ignore the importance of Husserl’s philosophy. Conversely, Husserl’s knowledge of French philosophy would make it hard for him to pass over such an outstanding, philosophy-informed work as Durkheim’s. Therefore, my guess would be that not all the similarities explored in this book are just coincidences. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Belvedere, Collective Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Émile Durkheim, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26114-5_7

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Finding Durkheim

However, a solid line of argument should not be based on a hunch. I hope to provide better evidence by demonstrating that Husserl refers to collective consciousness in a way consistent with Durkheim. To that end, I will quote some paragraphs where he expresses conceptions about collective consciousness, norms and social sanctions that do not significantly differ from the way they were thought by Durkheim. Furthermore, I will determine that he suggests analyzing social objectivities and the way they are grouped into genus and species (depending on its essential varieties, thus organizing societies) in as much the same manner as Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. For short, I will find in Husserl a way to access the social that is not so different from Durkheim’s.

7.2

Husserl on Collective Consciousness

In Husserliana XIII, Husserl (2001a, p. 213) refers to the social by using some of the most relevant terms inherent to Durkheim’s sociology, such as “moral consciousness,” “coercive rules,” and “sanction” as the “transgression atonement” of the law. (Husserl, 2001a, p. 214) In this framework, he proposes to analyze social objectivities “in a purely objective manner,” (Husserl, 2001a, p. 208) in line with what has been noted in Chap. 4. To that effect, we may “form different general concepts, concepts of genus and species, and so variously vary the idea of an objectivity of this kind, mostly build essential supreme concepts, and study them a priori by organizing them based on their essential varieties.” (Husserl, 2001a, p. 208) This procedure allows to build “the systems of these social ideas,” (Husserl, 2001a, p. 210) preparing—from a genetic phenomenological approach—a social ontology based on essential types arranged in relations of genus and species, differentiated, and founded among them. An approach to social objectivities not only requires a static description but also calls for a genetic description. Therefore—according to Husserl, and in line with Durkheim in The Elementary Forms. . .—it is necessary to study “the primitive forms of society, [and] the closest forms of relations and connections of these primitive configurations with the configurations of a higher order through which a ‘complexly organized society’ is purely and simply born.’” (Husserl, 2001a, p. 209) This means that it is necessary to genetically retrace the most complex forms of a society to its elementary forms, from which it arises. Husserl not only refers to social things as objective but also to a collective consciousness. For instance, in the Kaizo papers collected in Husserliana XXVII, Husserl (2002, p. 22) explicitly mentions collective consciousness as well as other related expressions, such as the consciousness of collectivity and the consciousness of the collective. (Husserl, 2002, p. 53, 57, 59) He also refers to “collective life,” (Husserl, 2002, p. 23, 61) “collective will,” (Husserl, 2002, pp. 47, 57–58) and similar expressions. Therefore, the idea of a collective consciousness seems to be implied in Husserl’s conception of social life and seems to have similar consequences for understanding the realm of social things as in Durkheim.

7.3

7.3

Schutz on Social Facts

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Schutz on Social Facts

Durkheim’s view on collective consciousness is also found in the work of the most influential phenomenologist in the history of sociology, Alfred Schutz. Although he hardly uses the expression “collective consciousness,” he does address social facts and conceives them in line with Durkheim. For Schutz, social facts are collective phenomena pertaining to the relative natural worldview of the group that the individual has to take into account to find his bearings in it. (Schutz, 2010, p. 74) As with any other phenomena, social facts have an objectivity of their own, which (in this context) means they are exterior to the individuals. This is clearly appreciated when, summarizing his own perspective on the role of symbols, Schutz quotes from The New Science of Politics, where Eric Voegelin admits that human society “has externality as one of its important components,” that it exists “as a whole,” and that “the symbols express the experience that man is fully man by virtue of his participation in a whole which transcends his particular existence.” (Schutz, 1962, p. 336–37) In Schutz, exteriority is an important feature of the stock of knowledge, which is consistent with Durkheim’s view that education and tradition are intrinsically related to social facts. His claim is that “only a small fraction” of our stock of knowledge at hand originates from the individual’s own experience, while “the greater portion is socially derived and has been handed down to him by parents and teachers as so-called social heritage.” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 288) Another aspect of Durkheimian objectivity is coercion. This is also an important concept for Schutz, as already seen in Chap. 1. Coercive life can take different forms. Schutz mentions, inter alia, socioeconomic determination, (Schutz, 2011, p. 94) political predominance and domination, social and class stratification. (Schutz, 2010, p. 65, 94, 99; Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 202) All these subjects are related to the problem of relevance, in particular “imposed relevances,” in which we may not voluntarily structure our field of consciousness. Consequently—and this is Schutz’s claim—all relevance systems are socially determined. (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 290) Imposed relevances are, to a large extent, an imposition of the natural worldview of the group upon the individual. They are the work of education, custom and law since such a worldview has been handed down by parents and teachers and has been imposed on the individual by the group’s folkways, the law, and the coercive power of the state. Folkways “constitute the social heritage which is handed down to children born into and growing up within the group.” (Schutz, 1964, p. 231) Additionally, since the individual must learn the different ways of behaving and the typical behavior, actions and motives one may expect from others according to their position, status, role and prestige, the “system of types under which any social group experiences itself has to be learned by a process of acculturation.” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1989, p. 290) After all, this is not so different from Durkheim’s claim that there is nothing in my individual consciousness that might give me the idea of social objects such as “a

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class, that is, a framework able to encompass the whole group of all possible objects that fulfill the same criterion. I would still need to have the idea of group beforehand, an idea that the mere unfolding of our inner life cannot be sufficient to arouse in us.” (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 441–442; Durkheim, 2005b, p. 629; Durkheim’s emphasis)

7.4

One Durkheim

From Chapters 1–6, I have exhibited a phenomenological strand in Durkheim’s work. Then, in the preceding sections, I have displayed the presence of important Durkheimian topics in Husserl and Schutz. It is about time to assess the significance of such affinities. The first and obvious conclusion is that there is no “anti-phenomenological Durkheim” at all. As noted in Chap. 1, it is usual in social theory to oppose phenomenological and Durkheimian sociologies as expressions of allegedly rival approaches such as subjectivism and objectivism. Nothing in our reading of Durkheim is even close to that. The second conclusion that comes to mind is that there are not “two Durkheims.” Some consider that a rapprochement to phenomenology can only be found in a particular set of writings (Mauss & Durkheim, 2017; Durkheim, 2002; Durkheim, 2005b). In this view, there would be a phenomenological Durkheim and a nonphenomenological Durkheim. In contrast, sufficient evidence has been provided that Durkheim’s phenomenology is present all over, from his early up to his late works. Luckily, I am not alone here. Once again, I feel close to Tiryakian (1978, p. 26), who refuses to consider the last work of Durkheim “as a ‘break’ or as a discontinuity with earlier writings” like those commentators who approach The Elementary Forms of Religious Life as “a discontinuity, if not a reversal, with his previous undertakings.” Tiryakian’s opinion is that, on the contrary, The Elementary Forms. . . has a fundamental continuity with the development of Durkheim’s thoughts; in fact, in some respects, it is the culmination of themes he had broached in his earliest essays. In particular, Durkheim had in 1886 outlined the profound interrelationship and interdependence of religion, morality, and social organization, and these themes are the contextual background of his ‘middle period’ [. . .]. The background comes to the fore in The Elementary Forms, which should be properly seen as much more than a study of the social structures of religion: it is an investigation into the essential structures of social consciousness. (Tiryakian, 1978, p. 27)

7.5

Lost and Found

If Durkheim’s phenomenological vein is not circumscribed to a particular period; if losing sight of this vein is missing an essential feature of his sociology; if the state of the art mostly agrees that phenomenology challenges the Durkheimian view on

7.6

Durkheim Makes Sense

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society; the conclusion follows that we, contemporary social thinkers, have lost Durkheim. We have replaced him with a set of stereotypes and prejudices that conceal the deep meaning of his sociology and turned him into a kind of monster, as we ironized in Chap. 5. Having lost Durkheim, we better try to find him back. That is exactly what I aimed at from the first pages of this book on. First, I exposed some methodological convergencies between him and Husserl concerning the practice of static and genetic phenomenology and the description of the oppositional structure of consciousness. Then, I disclosed in Husserl and Schutz some similarities with the Durkheimian concepts of collective consciousness and social facts. None of this suffices, however, to truly find back Durkheim’s phenomenological heritage, since the oblivion we are talking about is not produced by this author but by sociologists and social phenomenologists at large in the contemporary scene. Just writing or reading a book will not suffice to undo decades of denial. A wide reception of the ideas expressed in it is also needed, which, of course, is not up to this author. Not even Durkheim was capable of reverting some of the misreading we are still dealing with today! Thus, a dose of skepticism would not be out of place here... although we still hold to hope, even if groundless. Not the hope that this book on its own will put an end to this state of affairs but that further contributions will come to prove that there is more to Durkheim than what the current scholarly readings have noted thus far. Put otherwise, let us hope that additional studies will prove that the one we think to know is not the real Durkheim.

7.6

Durkheim Makes Sense

The most widespread image of Durkheim is that of a wholistic sociologist who mystifies society, turning it into a self-sufficient entity that imposes itself upon individuals, whose existence is called into question from the perspective of this alleged suprapersonal, collective being. If this view were correct, Durkheim’s sociology would be no more than a handful of absurdities and nonsenses. My claim is that Durkheim’s sociology only makes sense once you grasp it in its entirety, which involves—as already claimed—taking notice of his phenomenological insights. Put the other way around, it is not possible to truly understand Durkheim without noticing his phenomenological background. Whoever disregard his notion of phenomenon, his conception of consciousness, and the role intentional analysis plays in his oeuvre (to mention but a few issues) would hardly understand Durkheim. The very idea of a collective consciousness would seem meaningless. Therefore, we face a quandary here: either the work of Durkheim—the great French sociologist—is pure nonsense, or it makes sense within a phenomenological framework—the only one that proved to make intelligible the most contested claims of his sociology—. In this view, the aim of this book has been to demonstrate that Durkheim’s work makes sense; in particular, that his conception of collective consciousness is not an

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arbitrary or an empty expression but an accurate description of the lived experience of people, who do not lead their lives as isolated individuals but as persons belonging to different kinds of groups. I am aware that this perspective could still be contested. Not every reader will agree to it. I do not pretend to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about Durkheim. Other perspectives are also valid. All I hope is to have offered a plausible interpretation of some core aspects of Durkheim’s sociology that, in my opinion, have a deep phenomenological meaning. Only time will tell if it was worth the effort.

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