The Source:
Emile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, originally published in French as Pragmatisme et Sociologie (1955), English translation Cambridge University Press 1983
… lectures which Durkheim gave in the academic year 1913-14 [d. 1917] …
FIRST LECTURE
The origins of pragmatism
… It would be … accurate to see William James as the true father of pragmatism. In 1896, he published The Will to Believe, which appeared in a new edition in 1911. In that book, he makes a distinction between purely theoretical questions which are connected with science alone — a field in which, although we do not yet see with perfect clarity, we can ultimately expect illumination, for science will one day be able to provide us with the elements necessary for our beliefs — and those practical questions which engage our life. When we are dealing with the latter, we cannot wait, but must choose and commit ourselves, even if we are uncertain: and by so doing, we obey personal factors, extra-logical motivators such as temperament, surroundings and so on. We yield to our urges; one hypothesis seems more alive to us than others; we concretize it and convert it into actions.
Here, James is thinking in particular of religious belief, of which moral belief is in his view only an aspect. This is Pascal's ‘wager’; although truth cannot be demonstrated in this area, nor clearly perceived, it is necessary to commit oneself and act appropriately. It is here that we find the major starting-point for pragmatism. This kind of preoccupation with religion is to be found in the work of all the pragmatists, and it was in this form that pragmatism first appeared in James. The consequence is that, for James, truth has a personal character and truth and life are inseparable. Another great pragmatist, F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford, even if he does not go as far as James and say that it is necessary to have an attitude towards religious questions, does maintain that truth must not be 'depersonalized' or 'dehumanized', and calls his pragmatism humanism. …
TENTH LECTURE
Constructing reality and constructing truth
FROM INDIVIDUAL TO IMPERSONAL TRUTH
[A] question arises. If the personal and affective [mood/feeling/attitude] factor plays such a major role [in seeking for truth], should we not conclude that truth is essentially individual and consequently incommunicable and untranslatable, since translating it means expressing it in concepts and thus impersonally? Moreover, if judgements are affected by this weighting of subjectivity [feeling/mood/opinion], the result is that they are of unequal value. Some are preferable to others.
We are told that a quite spontaneous choice is established, and that as a result of experience those of least worth are eliminated, whilst the others emerge, come closer to each other and come to form the common treasure of humanity. One might, however, ask for whom the value of these judgements is unequal. There are judgements which for me are good and therefore true, but bad and therefore untrue for others.
‘Satisfaction’, for different people, depends on different things. Amongst all these, which will constitute such a ‘treasure of humanity’? Pragmatists tell us that they are those which are worth most for the general run of men and correspond to the similarities between them. ‘Truth’ thus appears to be a residue of particular beliefs.
Does a truth of this kind deserve to be called impersonal? Pragmatists tell us that we could no doubt have an idea of an objective, impersonal and, in this sense, absolute truth, containing no differences or changes. But it would, they say, only be possible to see it as an ideal towards which we would be moving, closely linked to the progress of human knowledge, and only indicating an orientation of thought. Here the danger of error would be to take this tendency for an already established reality. However that may be, we can see here how it would be possible to explain from the pragmatist point of view that truth, although individual in origin, never remains rigorously so.
But what will bring about and strengthen mental agreement more than anything else is the action of society. Once this ‘consensus of opinion’ has been established, once this ‘great stage of equilibrium in the human mind’s development' which James calls ‘the stage of common sense’ has been reached, society exerts pressure towards imposing a certain intellectual conformism.
There is a yardstick for measuring truth which gradually takes shape, and which society tends to sanction and guarantee; for if truths remained individual, they would clash with each other and be ineffective. We can thus see that in order to explain that there is an impersonal truth pragmatism is obliged to propose interpretations of a sociological nature.
THIRTEENTH LECTURE
General criticism of pragmatism
… Actually, pragmatism has not been concerned with picturing a particular ideal for us. Its dominant trait is the need to ‘soften the truth’, to make it 'less rigid', as James says — to free it, in short, from the discipline of logical thought. This appears very clearly in James's ‘The Will to Believe’. …
… [In] rationalism truth is conceived of as a simple thing, a thing quasi-divine, that draws its whole value from itself. Since it is seen as sufficient unto itself, it is necessarily placed above human life. It cannot conform to the demands of circumstances and differing temperaments. It is valid by itself and is good with an absolute goodness. It does not exist for our sake, but for its own. Its role is to let itself be contemplated. It is so to speak deified; it becomes the object of a real cult. This is still Plato's conception. It extends to the faculty by means of which we attain truth, that is, reason. Reason serves to explain things to us, but, in this conception, itself remains unexplained; it is placed outside scientific analysis.
'To soften' the truth is to take from it this absolute and as it were sacrosanct character. It is to tear it away from this state of immobility that removes it from all becoming, from all change and, consequently, from all explanation. Imagine that instead of being thus confined in a separate world, it is itself part of reality and life, not by a kind of fall or degradation that would disfigure and corrupt it, but because it is naturally part of reality and life. It is placed in the series of facts, at the very heart of things having antecedents and consequences. It poses problems: we are authorized to ask ourselves where it comes from, what good it is and so on. It becomes itself an object of knowledge. Herein lies the interest of the pragmatist enterprise: we can see it as an effort to understand truth and reason themselves, to restore to them their human interest, to make of them human things that derive from temporal causes and give rise to temporal consequences. To 'soften' truth is to make it into something that can be analysed and explained.
It is here that we can establish a PARALLEL BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND SOCIOLOGY. By applying the historical point of view to the order of things human, sociology is led to set itself the same problem. Man is a product of history and hence of becoming; there is nothing in him that is either given or defined in advance. History begins nowhere and it ends nowhere. Everything in man has been made by mankind in the course of time. Consequently, if truth is human, it too is a human product. Sociology applies the same conception to reason. All that constitutes reason, its principles and categories, has been made in the course of history.
Everything is a product of certain causes. Phenomena must not be represented in closed series: things have a 'circular' character, and analysis can be prolonged to infinity. This is why I can accept neither the statement of the idealists, that in the beginning there is thought, nor that of the pragmatists, that in the beginning there is action.
But if sociology poses the problem in the same way as does pragmatism, it is in a better position to solve it. The latter, in fact, claims to explain truth psychologically and subjectively. However, the nature of the individual is too limited to explain alone all things human. Therefore, if we envisage individual elements alone, we are led to diminish unduly the amplitude of the effects that we have to account for. How could reason, in particular, have arisen in the course of the experiences undergone by a single individual? Sociology provides us with broader explanations. For it, truth, reason and morality are the results of a becoming that includes the entire unfolding of human history.
Thus we see the advantage of the sociological over the pragmatist point of view. For the pragmatist philosophers, as we have already said several times, experience can take place on one level only. Reason is placed on the same plane as sensitivity; truth, on the same plane as sensations and instincts. But men have always recognized in truth something that in certain respects imposes itself on us, something that is independent of the facts of sensitivity and individual impulse. Such a universally held conception of truth must correspond to something real.
It is one thing to cast doubt on the correspondence between symbols and reality; but it is quite another to reject the thing symbolized along with the symbol. This pressure that truth is seen as exercising on minds is itself a symbol that must be interpreted, even if we refuse to make of truth something absolute and extra-human.
Pragmatism … deprives itself of the means of making this interpretation by failing to recognize the duality that exists between the mentality which results from individual experiences and that which results from collective experiences. Sociology, however, reminds us that what is social always possesses a higher dignity than what is individual.
It can be assumed that truth, like reason and morality, will always retain this character of being a higher value. This in no way prevents us from trying to explain it. The sociological point of view has the advantage of enabling us to analyse even that august thing, truth.
Until now there has been no particularly urgent need to choose between the points of view of sociology and pragmatism. In contrast to rationalism, pragmatism sees clearly that error does not lie on one side and truth on the other, but that in reality truths and errors are mixed, the latter having often been moments in the evolution of truth. In the history of creations, there are unforeseeable novelties. How, then, could truth be conceived of as something fixed and definitive?
But the reasons that pragmatism adduces to support this idea are susceptible to a great many objections. Moreover, the fact that things change does not necessarily mean that truth changes at the same time. Truth, one could say, is enriched; but it does not really change. It has certainly been enlarged and increased in the course of the development of history; but saying that truth grows is quite different from saying that it varies in its very nature.
FOURTEENTH LECTURE
The variations of truth
Let us return to the reasons that pragmatism gives in order to prove that truth is subject to change. There are really two: (1) truth cannot be immutable because reality itself is not immutable; hence truth changes in time. (2) Truth cannot be one because this oneness would be incompatible with the diversity of minds; hence truth changes in space.
1. In order to be able to say that truth has varied in time, one would have to show that a proposition can legitimately be considered true at a given moment and in particular circumstances, and that this same proposition at another moment and in other circumstances cannot be held to be true, even though it relates to the same object. This has not been shown. Pragmatism alleges that reality has changed; but does this mean that old truths become false?
Reality can evolve without truth thereby ceasing to be truth. The laws of the physical world, for example, have remained what they were when life first appeared, and as the biological world has taken form.
2. The pragmatists base their case on the diversity of individual minds. But does progress perhaps not consist precisely in the removal of individual differences? Will the pragmatist then maintain that truth belongs only to the individual? This is a paradox that pragmatism itself has not dared to attempt to resolve.
Nor do the pragmatists explain what relationship there is between the diversity of minds and the diversity of truth. From the fact that in penetrating individual minds, truth takes on diverse forms, it does not follow that truth in itself is multiple. In short, pragmatism offers no proof of the thesis that it advances, the thesis that truth is amorphous [without clearly defined shape or form].
Yet this thesis is not without some foundation, for it rests on certain facts. However, these facts, which the pragmatists sense only vaguely, must be restored to their true meaning.
Let us see what explanation of them is offered by sociology. Sociology introduces a relativism that rests on the relation between the physical environment on the one hand and man on the other.
The physical environment presents a relative fixity. It undergoes evolution, of course; but reality never ceases to be what it was in order to give way to a reality of a new kind, or to one consisting of new elements. The original world survives under successive additions that enrich it. New realities were, in a sense, already present in the old ones. The organic world does not abolish the physical world and the social world has not been formed in contradistinction to the organic world, but together with it.
The laws that ruled the movements of the primitive nebulae are conserved in the stabilized universe of today. It seems that in the organic world the era of great transformations closed with the appearance of the human species. Can this be true of man and the social milieux in which he lives? Social milieux are the products of different elements, combined and fused together. Our present-day French society is made up of Gallic, Germanic, Roman and other elements; but these elements can no longer be discerned in an isolated state in our present civilization, which is something new and original, a synthesis which is the product of a true creation.
Social environments are thus different from each other, since each of them presents something new. Therefore, the institutions of which they are composed must also be different. Nevertheless, these institutions fulfil the same functions as those that preceded them. Thus it is that the family has evolved in the course of history, but it has always remained the family and has continued to fulfil the same functions. Each of the various forms has been adapted to these functions. …
… Why should things not be the same in the theoretical order, in thought itself? If the value of a particular act has changed, it means that speculative thought has changed, and if speculative thought has changed, why should the content of truth not change too?
Action cannot be separated from thought. It is impossible for us to say that the generations which preceded us were capable of living in total error, in complete aberration. For false thoughts produce erroneous acts. Thus if men had been completely mistaken about the nature of things, their actions would not have been the right ones; and their failures would have produced suffering which would have led them to seek something else.
Nothing authorizes us to think that the [mood/feeling/attitude] affective capacities of men of former times were radically different from our own.
Speculative and theoretical thought vary as practice varies. Aesthetic speculation itself shows variations, each people has its own aesthetic [a notion of beauty from which a pleasure is derived]. Hence we tend to believe that speculation and its value are variable and that consequently, truth, too, is variable.
These variations occur not only in time but also in space, that is to say, not only from one type of historical society to another but also among the individuals of the same society. In fact, an excess of homogeneity within a society would be its death. No social group can live or — more particularly — progress in absolute homogeneity. Both intellectual and practical life, both thought and action, need diversity, which is, consequently, a condition of truth. We have moved beyond the intellectual excommunication of all those who do not think as we do. We respect the truths of others. We ‘tolerate’ them, and this tolerance is no longer the sort that preceded the development of our modern civilization. It is not the kind of tolerance that has its source in weariness (as happened at the end of the wars of religion), nor is it the kind that is born of a feeling of charity. Rather it is the tolerance of the intellectual, of the scientist, who knows that truth is a complex thing and understands that it is very likely that no one of us will see the whole of all its aspects. Such tolerance mistrusts all orthodoxy, but it does not prevent the investigator from expressing the truth as he feels it.
It is in this way that the thesis enunciated by pragmatism is justified from the sociological point of view. Considerations of an abstract or metaphysical order cannot provide us with a satisfactory explanation. It is provided instead by its heightened sense of human reality, the feeling for the extreme variability of everything human. We can no longer accept a single, invariable system of categories or intellectual frameworks. The frameworks that had a reason to exist in past civilisations do not have it today. It goes without saying that this removes none of the value that they had for their own eras. Variability in time and variability in space are, moreover, closely connected. If the conditions of life in society are complex, it is naturally to be expected that this complexity and with it many variations are to be found in the individuals who make up the social groups. …
FIFTEENTH LECTURE
Truth and utility
[Let us look] at the characteristics of truth. We see at once that it is linked to:
1. a moral obligation. Truth cannot be separated from a certain moral character. In every age, men have felt that they were obliged to seek truth. In truth, there is something which commands respect, and a moral power to which the mind feels properly bound to assent;
2. a de facto necessitating power. There is a more or less physical impossibility of not admitting the truth. When our mind perceives a true representation, we feel that we cannot not accept it as true. The true idea imposes itself on us. It is this character that is expressed in the old theory of the evident nature of truth; there emanates from truth an irresistible light. …
… when pragmatists speak of truth as something good, desirable and attractive, one wonders whether a whole aspect of it has not escaped them. Truth is often painful, and may well disorganize thought and trouble the serenity of the mind. When man perceives it, he is sometimes obliged to change his whole way of thinking. This can cause a crisis which leaves him disconcerted and disabled. If, for example, when he is an adult, he suddenly realizes that all his religious beliefs have no solid basis, he experiences a moral collapse and his intellectual and affective life is in a sense paralyzed. This [is a] sense of confusion … the truth is not always attractive and appealing. Very often it resists us, is opposed to our desires and has a certain quality of hardness.
3. Truth has a third character, and one which is undeniable: impersonality. The pragmatists themselves have indicated this. … But here a problem arises. If truth … has a personal character, how can impersonal truth be possible? Pragmatists see it as the ideal final stage towards which all individual opinions would ultimately converge …
… Above all these dialectics, there is one fact. If, as pragmatism maintains, the ‘common’ truth was the product of the gradual convergence of individual judgements, one would have to be able to observe an ever-greater divergence between the ways of thinking of individuals as one went further and further back through history.
However, what happens is exactly the opposite. It is in the very earliest ages that men, in every social group, all think in the same way. It is then that uniformity of thought can be found. The great differences only begin to appear with the very first Greek philosophers. The Middle Ages once again achieved the very type of the intellectual consensus. Then came the Reformation, and with it came heresies and schisms which were to continue to multiply until we eventually came to realize that everyone has the right to think as he wishes.
Let us also go back in the series of propositions of pragmatist doctrine. We see that if pragmatism defines the true as the useful, it is because it has proposed the principle that truth is simply an instrument of action. For pragmatism, truth has no speculative function: all that concerns it is its practical utility. For pragmatists, this speculative function is present only in play and dreams. But for centuries, humanity has lived on non-practical truths, beliefs which were something quite other than ‘instruments of action’.
Myths have no essentially practical character. In primitive civilizations they are accepted for themselves, and are objects of belief. They are not merely poetic forms. They are groupings of representations aimed at explaining the world, systems of ideas whose function is essentially speculative. For a long time, myths were the means of expression of the intellectual life of human societies. If men found a speculative interest in them, it is because this need corresponded to a reality.
SIXTEENTH LECTURE
Speculation and practice
… According to pragmatism, knowledge is essentially a plan of action, and proposes practical ends to be attained. Yet the mythological beliefs encountered in primitive societies are cosmologies, and are directed not towards the future but towards the past and the present.
What lies at the root of myths is not a practical need: it is the intellectual need to understand. Basically, therefore, a rationalist mind is present there, perhaps in an unsophisticated form, but nevertheless enough to prove that the need to understand is universal and essentially human.
After mythology came philosophy, born from mythology, and it too satisfies purely intellectual needs. The belief in the existence of speculative truths has neither been a hallucination nor a view more purely appropriate to Plato. It predates him by a long time, and is affirmed in all the philosophers. It is true that from a very early age philosophy set itself practical problems, both moral and political. But even if it tried to engage in practical action (of a very general nature, be it noted) with regard to human problems, it has never claimed to have any effect with regard to action or things.
Morality has never been more than the handmaiden of philosophy. In the Middle Ages, it was a secondary concern; and scholastic philosophy often paid no attention to it. The same is true of the seventeenth century. A practical concern does not therefore represent a permanent current of philosophical thought.
The same is also true of science. Speculation and practice were of course intermingled in the very early stages. Alchemy, for example, was less concerned with finding the real nature of bodies than with a method of producing gold. In this sense, it could be said that in origin the sciences are pragmatic. But as history progresses, the more scientific research loses the mixed character that it originally possessed. Science has increasingly less to do with purely technical concerns. The scientist contemplates reality, and becomes less concerned with the practical consequences of his discoveries. In all research there is no doubt a point of departure, an optimistic act of faith in the utility of research; but that is a transitory stage. …
… History too is no less of an embarrassment for pragmatists … historical facts are facts from the past. How could there be any question of acting on this? … Fustel de Coulanges said that history serves no purpose, and that that was its greatness. That aphorism is perhaps rather too absolute; but we must admit that the practical benefits of history are singularly slim. Times change, circumstances change, and the events of history cannot recur in precisely the same way, because the conditions are different.
There is of course one science which is close to history and which can extract practical consequences from historical facts. This science is sociology. It is however a recent one, and still in its very early stages. Even if it were more advanced than it actually is, it would still be separate from history. …
… Thus, the search for truth for truth's sake is neither an isolated case, nor a pathological fact, nor a deflection of thought. Indeed, even if we suppose that it is an aberration, and that men were driven by illusion to seek for a truth which could not be grasped, we should still have to explain that illusion. …
SEVENTEENTH LECTURE
The role of truth
… A representation is considered to be a true one when it is thought to express reality. I am not concerned here with whether that is a correct view. We may hold it erroneously. It may be that ideas are held to be true for other reasons. That is of little consequence for the moment. Let us simply say that when we believe an idea to be true, it is because we see it as adequately conveying reality.
The problem is not to know by what right we can say that a given proposition is true or false. What is accepted as true today may quite well be held to be false tomorrow. What is important is to know what has made men believe that a representation conforms to reality. …
… Generally nowadays, when we speak of 'truth', we have in mind particularly scientific truth. But truth existed before science; and to answer the question properly, we must also consider pre-scientific and non-scientific truths such as mythologies.
What were mythologies? They were bodies of truths which were considered to express reality (the universe), and which imposed themselves on men with an obligatory character which was just as marked and as powerful as moral truths.
What, then, caused men to consider these mythological propositions or beliefs as true? Was it because they had tested them against a given reality, against spirits, for example, or against divinities of which they had had real experience? Not at all. The world of mythical beings is not a real world, and yet men believed in it. Mythological ideas were not considered as true because they were based on an objective reality. The very opposite is the case: it is our ideas and beliefs which give the objects of thought their vitality. Thus, an idea is true, not because it conforms to reality, but by virtue of its creative power.
COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS
These ideas, however, do not originate with individuals. They are collective representations, made up of all the mental states of a people or a social group which thinks together. In these collectivities, of course, there are individuals who do have some role to play; but this very role is only possible as a result of the action of the collectivity.
In the life of the human race, it is the collectivity which maintains ideas and representations, and all collective representations are by virtue of their origin invested with a prestige which means that they have the power to impose themselves. They have a greater psychological energy than representations emanating from the individual. This is why they settle with such force in our consciousness. That is where the very strength of truth lies.
Thus, we come back to the double thesis of pragmatism, but this time transposed onto a different level: (1) the model and the copy are one; (2) we are the co-authors of reality. However, one can now see the differences. Pragmatism said that we make reality. But in this case, 'we' means the individual. But individuals are different beings who cannot all make the world in the same way; and the pragmatists have had great difficulty in solving the problem of knowing how several different minds can know the same world at once.
If, however, one admits that representation is a collective achievement, it recovers a unity which pragmatism denies to it. This is what explains the impression of resistance, the sense of something greater than the individual, which we experience in the presence of truth, and which provides the indispensable basis of objectivity.
In the last analysis, it is thought which creates reality; and the major role of the collective representations is to 'make' that higher reality which is society itself. This is perhaps an unexpected role for truth, but one which indicates it does not exist simply in order to direct practical affairs.
EIGHTEENTH LECTURE
The different types of truths
In the history of human thought there are two kinds of mutually contrasting truths, namely, mythological and scientific truths.
MYTHOLOGICAL TRUTHS
In the first type, all truth is a body of propositions which are accepted without verification, as against scientific truths, which are always subjected to testing or demonstration. If they are unproven, from where do they acquire the character of truth attributed to them? It is representations which create the character of objectivity which mythologies have, and it is their collective character which confers on them the creative power that enables them to impose themselves on the mind. Collective representations carry with them their objects, and entail their existence. Mythological truths have been, for those societies that have believed in them, the conditions necessary for their existence. Communal life in fact presupposes common ideas and intellectual unanimity. By the very fact that the collectivity accepts them, mythological ideas are no longer subject to individual contingencies. Hence their objective and necessitating character.
But are peoples completely free to create truth as they will? Can society transform reality just as it wishes? … Ideas and representations cannot become collective if they do not correspond to something real. Nor can they remain divorced from the conduct of individuals; for experiencing failure, disappointment and suffering tells us that our action corresponds to an inadequate representation, and we immediately detach ourselves from both of these. Indeed, it is untrue to say, as the pragmatists do, that an idea which brings us ‘satisfaction’ is a true one by the very fact that it does so. But, although it is false to think that any idea which satisfies us is a true one, the reciprocal idea that an idea cannot be true without bringing us some satisfaction is not false.
It is the same with truth as with moral rules. Moral rules are not made with the purpose of being useful to the individual. However, we could not do what we ought to do if duty contained no attraction for individuals or if they found nothing satisfying in it. Truth is similar to moral rules, in having an impersonal and a necessitating character; but if that were the sum of its characteristics we should constantly tend to reject or ignore it. In order to become really a part of ourselves, it must serve us and be useful to us.
At the practical level, any collective representation must serve individuals, in the sense that it must give rise to acts which are adjusted to things, to the realities to which the representation corresponds. Hence, if it is to be able to give rise to such acts, the representation itself must be adapted to these realities.
Mythological creations therefore have some connection with reality. There must be a reality of which these representations are the expression. That reality is none other than society. The forces that religions and myths believe that they recognize in mythological creations are not mere illusions, but forces which are collective in origin. What religion expresses in its representations, its beliefs and myths, is social realities and the way in which they act upon individuals. …
… Society cannot become aware of itself in the absence of any relationship with things. Social life demands agreement between individual consciousnesses. In order to notice it, each one must express what it experiences. It can only do so, however, by means of things taken as symbols. It is because society expresses itself through things that it has managed to transform and transfigure reality. That is why, in representations in the form of a myth, plants, for example, become beings capable of expressing human feelings. Such representations are false with respect to things, but true with respect to the subjects who think them.
It is for this reason that truth has varied historically. We have seen that the pragmatists have been well aware of that idea; but they express it by talking of the truth as neither fixed nor definite, as being constantly formed. This formulation is not satisfactory; for although there are new truths, that does not mean that old ones change or are abolished. All the cosmologies immanent in mythological systems are different from each other, but can nevertheless be said to be equally true, because they have fulfilled the same function for all the peoples who have believed in them, and because they performed the same social role.
SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS
Nowadays we see scientific truths as being the very type of truth. At first glance, scientific representations seem very different from mythological ones. The latter express ideas which society has about itself, the former express the world as it is.
The social sciences, in particular, express what society is in itself, and not what it is subjectively to the person thinking about it. Nevertheless, scientific representations are also collective representations.
It will be objected that scientific representations are impersonal; but perhaps so too are collective representations? We can answer in the affirmative, for they express something which is outside and above individuals.
Scientific ideas have all the characteristics necessary to become collective representations. Scientific truth helps to strengthen social consciousness, as does mythological thought, though by different means.
One might ask how individual minds can communicate. In two possible ways: either by uniting to form a single collective mind, or by communicating in one object which is the same for all, with each however retaining his own personality; like Leibnitz's monads, each expressing the entirety of the universe while keeping its individuality. The first way is that of mythological thought, the second that of scientific thought.
Nor has science taken on this task fortuitously or, as it were, unconsciously, for it is its very raison d'etre. When pragmatists wonder why science exists, and what its function is, they should turn to history for a reply. History shows us that it came into existence in Greece, and nowhere else, to meet certain needs. For both Plato and Socrates, the role of science is to unify individual judgements. The proof is that the method used to construct it is 'dialectics', or the art of comparing contradictory human judgements with a view to finding those in which there is agreement. If dialectics is the first among scientific methods, and its aim is to eliminate contradictions, it is because the role of science is to turn minds towards impersonal truths and to eliminate contradictions and particularisms.
NINETEENTH LECTURE
Science and the collective consciousness
… IMPERSONAL TRUTH AND INDIVIDUAL DIVERSITIES
We are now faced with a further problem. So far we have seen truth as characterized by its impersonal nature. But should we not keep a place within it for individual diversity? As long as mythological truth holds sway, conformity is the rule. Once scientific thought becomes paramount, however, intellectual individualism appears.
Indeed, it is this very individualism which has made scientific truth necessary, since social unanimity can no longer centre on mythological beliefs. The impersonal truth developed by science can leave room for everyone's individuality. The fact is that the diversity of objects found in the world encourages the differentiation of minds; for individual minds are not all equally suited to studying the same things, and thus tend to parcel out amongst themselves the questions to be investigated.
But this is not all, and not even the real question, which is whether, with a given problem, there is room for a plurality of mental attitudes all of which in a sense are justified. …
… This means that for every object of knowledge there are differing but equally justified ways of examining it. These are probably partial truths, but all these partial truths come together in the collective consciousness and find their limits and their necessary complements.
Thus intellectual individualism, far from making for anarchy, as would be the case during the period of the domination of mythological truth, becomes a necessary factor in the establishment of scientific truth, so that the diversity of intellectual temperaments can serve the cause of impersonal truth. …
… Thus, on the one hand, scientific truth is not incompatible with the diversity of minds; and on the other, as social groups become increasingly complex, it is impossible that society should have a single sense of itself. Hence there are various social currents. …
… A further consequence of this transformation is that tolerance must henceforth be based on this idea of the complexity and richness of reality, and then on the diversity of opinions, which is both necessary and effective. Everyone must be able to admit that someone else has perceived an aspect of reality, which he himself had not grasped, but which is … real and as true …
We can also see at the same time that the task of speculative truth is to provide nourishment for the collective consciousness. … [The resulting] world is the human and social one. Truth is the means by which a new order of things becomes possible, and that new order is nothing less than civilization.
TWENTIETH LECTURE
Are thought and reality heterogeneous?
… When [Herbert] Spencer says that the universe moves from “the homogeneous to the heterogeneous”, the expression is inexact. What exists originally is also heterogeneous in nature; but it is the heterogeneity entailed by a state of confusion. The initial state is a multiplicity of germs, of ways and means, and of different activities which are not only intermingled, but, as it were, lost in each other, so that it is extremely difficult to separate them. They are indistinct from each other. Thus, in the cell of monocellular organisms, all the vital functions are so to speak included. …
[MH: On homogeneity evolving to heterogeneity as explained by Herbert Spencer see exhibits from a year ago: Spencer 1 and Spencer 2.]
… In social life, that primitive undivided state is even more striking. Religious life, for example, contains a rich abundance of forms of thought and activities of all kinds. In the field of thought, these include myths and religious, beliefs, and embryonic science, and a certain poetry. In the sphere of action, we find rites, a morality, and a form of law and arts (aesthetic elements, songs and music in particular). All these elements are gathered up into a whole and it seems extremely difficult to separate them. Science and art, myth and poetry, morality, law and religion are all confused or, rather, fused.
The same observations could be made about the early family, which is at one and the same time, for example, a social, religious, political and legal unit.
Thus the primitive form of any reality is a concentration of all kinds of energies, undivided in the sense that they are only various aspects of one and the same thing.
Evolution consists of a gradual separation of all these various functions which were originally indistinct. Secular and scientific thought has moved away from religious thought; art has moved away from religious ceremonies; morality and law have moved away from ritual. The social group has been divided into the family group, the political group, the economic group and so on.
We are thus brought round to the view that what we are told is the major form of reality, that is, the non-separation and interpenetration of all its elements, is really its most rudimentary form. Confusion is the original state. …
… In the beginning, all forms of activity and all functions [of life] were gathered together, and were, in a manner of speaking, each other's prisoners. Consequently they were obstacles for each other, each preventing the other from achieving its nature fully. That is why, if science is to come into being, it must differentiate itself from religion and myths. If the link which originally united them slackens and weakens, it is not a fall or a collapse, but progress. …
… The fact is that nothing changes except to achieve a result. … Movement and change can surely be seen as means of achieving results. If becoming were a kind of frantic, incessant and restless flight, with never a fixed point, it would simply be sound and fury. … When thought is applied to change, it always contains… the idea of a state thought about in rudimentary terms because it still does not exist …
… The expression of reality … does have a truly useful function, for it is what makes societies, although it could equally well be said that it also derives from them. …
… But although truth is a social thing, it is also a human one at the same time, and thus comes closer to us, rather than moves away and disappears in the distant realms of an intelligible world or a divine understanding. It is no doubt still superior to individual consciousness; but even the collective element in it exists only through the consciousness of individuals, and truth is only ever achieved by individuals. …
[Close to the END of the final chapter]
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