Early Culture
Theory: A Critique of the Enlightenment Project
Paper presented at the 15th Cheiron Europe Conference
1996
Theo Verheggen
The
theories of Wilhelm Wundt, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, Emile
Durkheim and Sigmund Freud have traditionally been studied from
perspectives true to the narratives of the Enlightenment. I argue
that it would be fruitful to instead balance this reception by
studying their ideas, concepts, style of reasoning and epistemology
from a framework of ideas that was very much "in the air" in their
time and that was highly critical of these Enlightenment narratives.
In doing so, I take the recent work of the American sociologist
Prof. Stjepan Mestrovic as my starting point. Especially, I will
address an aspect of his Durkheim interpretation and hope to demonstrate
its merits for contemporary social theory.
Let
me first clarify what I mean by "Enlightenment narratives". In
general -and I am aware that this is a gross abstraction- they can
be characterized by an overall faith in human rationality, that
is, by the idea that reason will eventually triumph over the uncivilized,
animalistic and "irrational" domains of human conduct. According
to the ideals of the Enlightenment man, society and even history
would reach its fulfillment if one would only be able to control -and
eventually overcome- man's passions and drives. At the time, faith
in human rationality was sky high, and the human mind was believed
to be able to establish the much desired triumph over phenomena
associated with the animal will and desires. Secondly, this focus
on mind and reason went hand in hand with a preoccupation withh
objective, scientific facts of human nature, cut loose from subjective
experience, tradition, habits, history, cults -in short "culture"
in the sense of romanticism and nationalism. The latter phenomena
were dismissed by the Enlightenment (as they were by positivism)
because they were perceived to be irrational forces, unreliable
in establishing any knowledge of truth.
These
Enlightenment narratives provided a framework of interpretation
for the work of Simmel, Wundt, Freud, Durkheim, Veblen -all founding
fathers of today's social and cultural sciences. But this framework,
I argue, did little justice to their original ideas. For instance,
it focused on the Enlightenment idea that culture in the sense
of civilization and progress is a force that will overcome tradition,
habits, cults and passions. As I hope to demonstrate, this interpretation
is a highly erroneous one when applied to for instance Durkheim.
However, the sociologist Mestrovic offers an alternative reading.
He claims that these founding fathers argued in the, what Mestrovic
calls -following Henry Ellenberger (1970)- fin de siècle tradition
that focused on habits, cults, passions and subjective experience,
instead of rejecting it. It is an era -and I quote Mestrovic (1991)- "that
Nietzsche described as one in which 'the whole great tendency
of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment', and in which
'the cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason
(Nietzsche 1968:84). Similarly, Durkheim commented in 1914 that
'in our time we are witnessing an attack on reason; actually it
is an all-out assault' (Durkheim [1913]1960:386)"- end quote. Wundt,
Simmel, Veblen, Sorokin, Durkheim: they insisted, all in their
own way, that human nature cannot be studied properly without
taking into account the social milieu. While recognizing that
the Enlightenment ideas did have their influence on the fin de
siècle intellectuals, Mestrovic balances their traditional reception
by emphasizing the non-Enlightenment narratives that he holds
to be much more important in understanding the founding fathers'
work.
One
of the most challenging aspects of Mestrovic's reading of the
fin de siècle proponents, is that he connects their body of thought
to a common source of inspiration, namely the philosophy of the
(one might say Enlightenment criticist) Arthur Schopenhauer. One
must notice that according to Ellenberger (1970) Janik & Toulmin
(1973) and Magee (1983) Schopenhauer was the philosophical superstar
in the intellectual circles of the scholars just mentioned. Tracing
back many of Freud's, Simmel's, or Wundt's inspiration to Schopenhauer
may be a move not all too surprising, since they all cite, or
refer to, the German philosopher. However, Schopenhauer's influence
on one of the founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim, is not at
all common knowledge. As far as I know, Mestrovic is the first
to argue for Schopenhauer's philosophy as a cardinal source of
inspiration for Durkheim. Maybe I must add here that it is not
necessary to demand that Durkheim actually read Schopenhauer or
that the German philosopher had a direct influence on Durkheim's
thought. But the philosophical climate in middle Europe around
the previous turn of the century was chock-full of Schopenhauerian
themes: for instance, the notion that will and representation,
body and mind, nature and culture, subject and object form a fundamental
unity, the idea that the heart (desires) is stronger than the
mind (reason). Schopenhauer was pessimistic -not optimistic- about
the powers of human rationality. He focused on compassion -not
on reason as the key element in society. In that light it must
have been virtually impossible for any intellectual to miss Schopenhauer's
(at least indirect) influence.
Having
said that, I would now like to focus your attention on a consequence
of rethinking the founding father's theories through the lens
of Schopenhauerian philosophy. Particularly I will do so with
respect to aspects of Durkheim's theory. I have been studying
this Schopenhauer-Durkheim connection the past year. As a matter
of fact, I think that there is similar work to be done with respect
to rethinking Simmel and Wundt, but I will focus on Durkheim here.
During my stay in Texas in 1995, where I studied with Mestrovic,
I tried to unravel Schopenhauerian elements in Durkheim's specific
epistemology. There are certainly clear parallels between, for
instance, Durkheim's and Schopenhauer's stand in the subject-object
debate. Both thinkers deny any schism between the subject and
the object. Instead, they focus on the "bridge" that intertwines
them. In Schopenhauer's work, this bridge is called the Vorstellung -in
English awkwardly translated as representation. Durkheim's equivalent
is what he labeled the représentation (I mean thee French word
here) whose original connotation is actually much closer to the
German term Vorstellung (as Schopenhauer uses it) than to the
English word representation. The crux is that both the German
Vorstellung and the French représentation are ambiguous terms
in that they refer to presenting and re-presenting at the same
time. The German word Vorstellung for instance can mean "representation"
or "idea" in the sense of mentally mirroring something already
present in the outer world.. However it also means "presenting"
in the sense of performing, acting out, or creating. Something
similar is true for the French word représentation, but this very
connotation is lost in the English translation. Payne writes in
his introduction to Schopenhauer's main work The World as Will
and Representation ([1818]1969) that the German philosopher deliberately
choose an ambiguous term to refer to his philosophical concept.
I believe that Durkheim did just the same. His représentation
is to be understood as the German Vorstellung . In a recent article
(Verheggen, 1996), I argue that the concept of représentation
or Vorstellung is one of the keys to the non-Enlightenment theorizing
of Schopenhauer and Durkheim. To be sure, Kant and Hegel used
the concept of representations extensively, but I believe that
the use of it by Schopenhauer and Durkheim (as well as by for
instance Simmel and Freud) was fundamentally different. For the
latter always studied the representation in relation to its counterpart
which they explicitly acknowledged: the passions, drives, body,
or other refractions of the Schopenhauerian will. The Enlightenment,
on the other hand, basically wanted to get rid of anything associated
with the will. So, for Schopenhauer, the fundamental dualism of
will and representation constitutes the "antagonistic unity" [this
oximoron is actually the best term I could think of at the moment
to describe this complicated principle] of human existence. On
the one hand there is the higher pole -the representation; associated
as I said with mind, reason reflection, and civilization. On the
other hand there is the lowere pole- the will; associated with
passions, the body, the irrational and theh animal will. Adherents
of the Enlightenment had predicted that the representation (that
is, the "mind") would eventually overcome the barbaric will, in
the form of a total triumph of human rationality over animal drives
and passions -in short "irrationality". In the view point of Schopenhauer,
though, representation and will, mind and body, are inextricably
bound and one cannot deny either one of them. In that context,
this "Enlightenment" rationality could never overcome the striving
"lower pole" of human nature. Consequently, the nature of Schopenhauer's
"representation" concept is significantly different from its Enlightenment
counterpart. His philosophy is in this point a clear-cut critique
to the narratives of the Enlightenment.
Schopenhauer's
idea of this "antagonistic unity", including it consequent war
between the two poles, can be found in a similar form in Durkheim's
work. I argue that it is in the Schopenhauerian light that one
must understand Durkheim's famous concept of the "dualism of human
nature". In his 1914 article (The dualism of human nature and
its social conditions), Durkheim puts forward the notion that
human nature is fundamentally torn between individual representations,
pertaining to the own organism, and collective representations,
pertaining to society. Traditionally, this dualism has been conceived
to be a schism between nature and culture, and it has been interpreted
in such a way that society / culture would triumph over the individual
/ nature. This is the notorious view of Durkheim as an extreme
sociologist whose mere aim it was to overrule the autonomy of
the individual for the sake of society. Essentially, we find here
an Enlightenment claim: the higher pole will overcome the lower
one; reason / society will triumph over will / individual / body.
A schopenhauerian or fin de siècle interpretation as presented
by Mestrovic completely changes the reception of Durkheim's concept.
What is crucial now is that the dualisms of human nature cannot
be resolved: the tension between both poles is essential. As I
demonstrated in my article, it makes much more sense tot view
Durkheim as a scholar who always sought balance between opposing
phenomena; he sought tension instead of one-sided triumph. In
short, he acknowledged both will and idea. Form his early writings
on the relation between collective and individual representations
as in The Division of Labor ([1893]1933) up to his last work on
the sacred and the profane in The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life ([1912]1965) balance, tension and duality are the key words.
But this was completely missed by the interpreters, arguing according
to the Enlightenment narratives.
Rereading
Durkheim in a Schopenhauerian, fin de siècle manner, necessarily
changes ones outlook on Durkheim's epistemology, his sociology
of knowledge, and his symbol theory. The Enlightenment and positivist
version of Durkheim had destroyed the dynamics of his duality
concept. Mestrovic's counterbalances the traditional reception
of Durkheim as an extreme sociologist As early as 1939, Harry
Alpert protested against such a distortion of Durkheim's aims
and of those of the Durkheimians including Marcel Mauss and Robert
Hertz. However, Alpert's argument was hardly acknowledged, until
Mestrovic picked it up in the 1980's and added a comprehensive
framework for a more "Durkheimian" reading of Durkheim, in which
the individual and society form an antagonistic but balanced unity.
This sheds a new light on the relationship between the two within
Durkheim's thought. That is no longer one of absolute societal
dominance over the individual, because "one pole will never vanish
or overcome the other".
References
Alpert, H. ([1939]1993). Émile Durkheim and his sociology.
Brookfield: Gregg Revivals.
Durkheim, É. ([1893]1933). The division of labor in society.
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Durkheim, É. ([1912]1965). The elementary forms of the religious
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Durkheim, É. ([1913]1960). Pragmatism and sociology. In K.H. Wolff
(Ed.), Émile Durkheim 1858-1917: A collection of essays with
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