#34 Durkheim on Society’s need for Impersonal Concepts
The science of impersonal rituals as a collective rationality
Émile Durkheim wrote:
We have seen that this reality — which is the objective, universal, and eternal cause of those sui generis sensations of which religious experience is made — is society. I have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens that feeling of support, safety, and protective guidance which binds the man of faith to his cult. It is this reality that makes him rise above himself. Indeed, this is the reality that makes him, for what makes man is that set of intellectual goods which is civilization, and civilization is the work of society. In this way is explained the preeminent role of the cult in all religions, whatever they are. This is so because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is in action only if the individuals who comprise it are assembled and acting in common. It is through common action that society becomes conscious of and affirms itself; society is above all an active cooperation. As I have shown, even collective ideas and feelings are possible only through the overt movements that symbolize them. Thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source…
… I have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and thus science itself, have religious origins. The same has been shown to be true of magic, and thus of the various techniques derived from magic. Besides, it has long been known that, until a relatively advanced moment in evolution, the rules of morality and law were not distinct from ritual prescriptions. In short, then, we can say that nearly all the great social institutions were born in religion. For the principal features of collective life to have begun as none other than various features of religious life, it is evident that religious life must necessarily have been the eminent form and, as it were, the epitome of collective life. If religion gave birth to all that is essential in society, that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Thus religious forces are human forces, moral forces. Probably because collective feelings become conscious of themselves only by settling upon external objects, those very forces could not organize themselves without taking some of their traits from things. In this way, they took on a kind of physical nature; they came to mingle as such with the life of the physical world, and through them it was thought possible to explain events in that world. But when they are considered only from this standpoint and in this role, we see only what is most superficial about them. In reality, the essential elements out of which they are made are borrowed from consciousness. Ordinarily, they do not seem to have a human character except when they are thought of in human form, but even the most impersonal and most anonymous are nothing other than objectified feelings…
… The basic material of logical thought is concepts. To try to discover 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. If we see the concept only as a general idea, as is most usually the case, the problem seems insoluble. By his own means, the individual can indeed compare his perceptions or images and sift out what they have in common; in other words, he can generalize. So it is not easy to see why generalization should be possible only in and through society. But, first of all, it is inadmissible that logical thought should be characterized exclusively by the wider scope of the representations that constitute it. If there is nothing logical about the particular ideas, why would the general ones be any different? The general exists only in the particular; it is the particular, simplified and stripped down. The general, then, cannot have virtues and privileges that the particular does not have. Inversely, if conceptual thought can be applied to genus, species, and variety, however small, why could it not extend to the individual, that is, to the limit toward which the idea tends in proportion as its scope narrows? As a matter of fact, there are a good many concepts that have individual objects. In every kind of religion, the gods are individualities distinct from one another; they are nevertheless conceived, not perceived. Each people imagines its historical or legendary heroes in a certain fashion, which is historically variable, and these representations are conceptual. Finally, each of us has a certain notion of the individuals with whom he is in contact — their character, their appearance, and the distinctive traits of their physical and moral temperaments. Such notions are true concepts. No doubt, they are in general rather crudely formed; but even among scientific concepts, are there many that are perfectly adequate to their objects? In this regard, our own concepts and those of science differ only in degree.
Therefore, the concept must be defined by other traits. The following properties distinguish it from tangible representations of any sort — sensations, perceptions, or images. Sense representations are in perpetual flux; they come and go like the ripples of a stream, not staying the same even as long as they last. Each is linked with the exact moment in which it occurs. We are never assured of retrieving a perception in the same way we felt it the first time; for even if the thing perceived is unchanged, we ourselves are no longer the same. The concept, on the other hand, is somehow outside time and change; it is shielded from all such disturbance; one might say that it is in a different region of the mind, a region that is calmer and more serene. The concept does not move on its own by an internal, spontaneous development; quite the contrary, it resists change. It is a way of thinking that at any given moment in time is fixed and crystallized. To the extent that it is what it has to be, it is unchangeable. If it does change, change does not come about because of its nature but because we have discovered some imperfection in it, because it needs to be rectified. The system of concepts with which we think in everyday life is the one the vocabulary of our mother tongue expresses, for each word translates a concept. Language is fixed; it changes but slowly, and, hence, the same is true of the conceptual organization it translates. The scientist finds himself in the same position vis-à-vis the special terminology used by the science to which he is committed, and consequently vis-à-vis the special system of concepts to which that terminology corresponds. He may innovate, of course, but his innovations always do a certain violence to established ways of thinking.
At the same time as being relatively unchangeable, a concept is universal, or at least universalizable. A concept is not my concept; it is common to me and other men or at least can be communicated to them. It is impossible for me to make a sensation pass from my consciousness into someone else's; it is closely dependent on my body and personality and cannot be detached from them. All I can do is invite another person to set himself before the same object as I and open himself to its influence. By contrast, conversation and intellectual dealings among men consist in an exchange of concepts. The concept is, in essence, an impersonal representation. By means of it, human intelligences communicate.
Defined in that way, the nature of the concept bespeaks its origins. It is common to all because it is the work of the community. It does not bear the imprint of any individual intellect, since it is fashioned by a single intellect in which all the others meet, and to which they come, as it were, for nourishment. If it has greater stability than sensations or images, that is so because collective representations are more stable than individual ones; for while the individual is sensitive to even slight changes in his internal or external environment, only quite weighty events can succeed in changing the mental equilibrium of society. Whenever we are in the presence of a type of thought or action that presses uniformly on individual intellects or wills, that pressure on the individual reveals the intervention of the collectivity. Further, I said before that the concepts with which we routinely think are those deposited in the vocabulary. It is beyond doubt that speech, and hence the system of concepts it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole conceives the objects of experience … [as] collective representations…
… We can now begin to see society's share in the origin of logical thought. Logical thought is possible only when man has managed to go beyond the fleeting representations he owes to sense experience and in the end to conceive a whole world of stable ideals, the common ground of intelligences. To think logically, in fact, is always, in some measure, to think impersonally; it is also to think sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity]. Impersonality and stability: Such are the two characteristics of truth. Logical life obviously presupposes that man knows, at least confusedly, that there is a truth distinct from sense appearances. But how could he have arrived at any such idea? People proceed most often as though logical life must have appeared spontaneously, as soon as man opened his eyes upon the world. But there is nothing in direct experience to suggest it; indeed, everything opposes it. Thus, children and animals have not even a clue of it. History shows, furthermore, that it took centuries to emerge and take shape. In our Western world, only with the great thinkers of Greece did logical life for the first time become clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences it implies. And when the discovery came, it provoked wonderment, which Plato expressed in magnificent language. But even if it was only then that the idea was expressed in philosophical formulas, it necessarily existed before then as a vague awareness. Philosophers sought to clarify this awareness; they did not create it. To have been able to reflect upon and analyze it, they must have been given it, and the question is where this awareness came from, that is, on what experience it was based. The answer is collective experience. It is in the form of collective thought that impersonal thought revealed itself to humanity for the first time, and by what other route that revelation could have come about is hard to see…
… We can now take up a final question, which was set out in the Introduction and has remained more or less implicit throughout this book. We have seen that at least certain of the categories are social things. The question is where they got this trait. No doubt, since they are themselves concepts, we easily understand that they are the work of the collectivity. Indeed, no concepts display the distinguishing marks of a collective representation to the same degree. Indeed, their stability and impersonality are such that they have often been taken to be absolutely universal and immutable. Besides, since they express the fundamental conditions of understanding between minds, it seems obvious that they could only have been fashioned by society…
… [The] space I know through my senses, where I am at the center and where everything is arranged in relation to me, could not be the space as a whole, which contains all the individual spaces and in which, moreover, those individual spaces are coordinated in relation to impersonal reference points common to all individuals. Similarly, the concrete duration that I feel passing within and with me could never give me the idea of time as a whole. The first expresses only the rhythm of my individual life; the second must correspond to the rhythm of a life that is not that of any particular individual, but one in which all participate…
… For a long time, the world's history was only a different aspect of society's history. The one begins with the other; the periods of the world are determined by the periods of the society. Measuring that impersonal and global duration and setting reference points in relation to which it is divided and organized are society's movements of concentration or dispersal — or, more generally, the periodic need for collective renewal. If those critical moments are most often attached to some physical phenomenon, such as the regular reappearance of a certain star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs are needed to make that essentially social organization tangible for all. Similarly, the causal relation becomes independent of any individual consciousness from the moment it is collectively established by the group; it hovers above all the minds and all the individual events. It is a law having impersonal validity. I have shown that the law of causality seems to have been born in just this way…
… If society is something universal as compared to the individual, it is still an individuality, having its own form and idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and, consequently, one that particularizes what it thinks of. So even collective representations contain subjective elements, and if they are to become closer to things, they must be gradually refined. But crude as these representations might have been at first, it remains true that with them came the seed of a new mode of thinking, one to which the individual could never have lifted himself on his own. The way was open to stable, impersonal, ordered thought, which had only to develop its own special nature from then on…
… [As] international life broadens, so does the collective horizon; society no longer appears as the whole, par excellence, and becomes part of a whole that is more vast, with frontiers that are indefinite and capable of rolling back indefinitely. As a result, things can no longer fit within the social frames where they were originally classified; they must be organized with principles of their own; logical organization thus differentiates itself from social organization and becomes autonomous. This, it seems, is how the bond that at first joined thought to defined collective entities becomes more and more detached and how, consequently, it becomes ever more impersonal and universalizes. Thought that is truly and peculiarly human is not a primitive given, therefore, but a product of history; it is an ideal limit to which we come ever closer but in all probability will never attain…
… [via Kant] To think rationally is to think according to the laws that are self-evident to all reasonable beings; to act morally is to act according to maxims that can be extended without contradiction to all wills. In other words, both science and morality imply that the individual is capable of lifting himself above his own point of view and participating in an impersonal life. And, indeed, herein we undoubtedly have a trait that is common to all the higher forms of thought and action. But what Kantianism does not explain is where the sort of contradiction that man thus embodies comes from. Why must he do violence to himself in order to transcend his individual nature; and inversely, why must impersonal law weaken as it becomes incarnate in individuals? Will it be said that there are two antagonistic worlds in which we participate equally: the world of matter and sense, on the one hand, and on the other, that of pure and impersonal reason? …
… [The] mystery dissolves once we have acknowledged that impersonal reason is but collective thought by another name. 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; the reasons they participate and the reasons they collaborate are the same. In short, there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in us, and since social life embraces both representations and practices, that impersonality extends quite naturally to ideas as well as to actions. Some will be astonished, perhaps, to see me connecting the highest forms of the human mind with society. The cause seems quite humble as compared to the value we attribute to the effect.
The Source:
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated and with an Introduction by Karen E. Fields, The Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 1995 [the concluding chapter: pp. 420-422, 434-435, 437-438, 440-441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447]