Durkheim on Religion Revisited: Another Look at The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life - 213

 

I                               ... epistemology and the sociology of knowledge gratuitously “dragged in” …

II                             It is here that the famous distinction between the sacred and the profane enters in. …

III                            … there is a persistently recurring note, namely, the emphasis on separateness …

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SINCE MORE THAN thirty years ago I wrote a long chapter (1937:640-96) on Durkbeim's analysis of religion based mainly on the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1910), and I had only sporadically gone back to this focal book of Durkheim since then, it seemed that full rereading of the Elementary Forms was the best way to prepare myself to write a chapter in the frame of reference of the present book, namely: how do Durkheim's contributions in the field of religion look at the present time? 

It should be kept in mind that from the very beginning of his published work, Durkheim was deeply concerned with normative order as a fundamental constituent in the nature and structure of society.  It was this emphasis on which I initially focused attention in my own first serious study of Durkheim's work. 

It seemed to me, and I think rightly at the time, that the Elementary Forms constituted the culmination for its author of a long and complex process of the deepening and clarification of his understanding of this very central problem area.  Along the road, building on his analysis in the Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim arrived at the full statement of the conception of internalization of moral norms in the personality of individuals and of the seminal conception of anomie, and I think very importantly of what I have called institutionalized individualism.  Conspicuously, this last began with his analysis of the reasons why Protestants had higher suicide rates than Catholics.

 

From Beyond the Classics?: Essays in the Scientific Study of Religion, Charles Y. Glock and Phillip E. Hammond, eds. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 156-180.  Copyright ® 1973 by Charles Y. Gloek and Phillip E. Hammond.  Reprinted by permission of the Publisher.

 

214 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

           

            Looking back, I think I was somewhat ambivalent about two features of the Elementary Forms.  The first was Durkheim's concentration on studying the religion of a single primitive society, indeed the most primitive about which he could find what he considered to be adequate evidence.  The second was the stress he laid in the book on problems in the difficult boundary areas of epistemology and of the sociology of knowledge, which I had a certain feeling were being somewhat gratuitously "dragged in" to a study which I interpreted to be focused mainly in the sociology of religion. 

 

            As the background of a great deal that has happened to me intellectually in the long intervening period, I can say that I have come out of the rereading with a substantially altered perspective, an alteration which definitely enhances my appreciation of the greatness of the book.  In the first place, stimulated along the way by Robert Bellah's (1959) significant paper, "Durkheim and History."  I think I hhave come fully to understand the sense in which Durkheim had, by the time he wrote the Elementary Forms, come to be committed to a theory of evolution not merely of human societies in the analytical sense, but of the human condition generally.  The choice of empirical material for the book and its main pattern of organization were clearly to a major degree determined by this commitment. 

 

            Second, I have come to see that the book is not primarily a study in the sociology of religion, but rather of the place of religion in human action generally.  In the terms that I have used in recent years, it is couched primarily at the level of what I have called the general system of action, which includes the theory of the social system but also of cultural systems, personality systems, and of behavioral organisms.  In a very important sense the last of these four references proved to be unexpectedly important in interpreting what Durkheim was doing.  Above all, it makes much more intelligible the grounds for his concern with problems that I have called those of epistemology and the sociology of knowledge.  Many of his formulations about the societal origins of the categories of the understanding, of space and time and the idea of force and, hence, causality that were unacceptable to me in earlier years are still unacceptable as adequate general statements, in the sense that I think the basic insights that he had can be reformulated in more acceptable terms.  A very central shift of his, however, from the inherited traditions of the theory of knowledge was his placing of culture, including, of course, empirical knowledge, in a perspective which was only partly epistemological. 

 

            What I take to be his basic theorem is that human society and the cultural framework of the human condition, including knowledge, have evolved concomitantly from a common basis and, in relatively advanced stages of sociocultural development, have come to be differentiated from each other.  This conception of common origin is very different indeed from a one-way conception of determinism, namely, that of society as an independently existing entity, determining the nature of the organization of knowledge.  This, of course, has been the common sense of what might be called the vulgar sociology of knowledge, of which Durkheim most definitely was not a proponent.

 

Durkheim on Religion Revisited   215

 

            Durkheim's position in epistemology was definitely Kantian, emphasizing the strong duality of the problems of sense data and their sources on the one hand, and the categorical structure of knowledge on the other hand.  Indeed, in his conclusion Durkheim cites Kant's sound conviction that the grounding of cognitive knowledge and that of moral judgment should be treated as linked through the fact that they both concern universality of reference, as distinguished on the one hand from the data of the senses, and on the other from what he called the appetites.  This is indeed the fundamental conceptual scheme of Durkheim's analysis: the duality on the one hand of the universal and the particular, on the other hand, the cross-cutting duality of the cognitive and moral references. 

 

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