Deconstructing Durkheim by Jennifer M. Lehmann

Author:Jennifer M. Lehmann [Lehmann, Jennifer M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136164064
Google: VvJEAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-08T04:51:06+00:00

INDIVIDUAL, EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE AS IDEOLOGY/COLLECTIVE, RATIONAL KNOWLEDGE AS TRUTH

The object of truth: reality

Durkheim’s most important formulations about the nature of reality are interrelated, and lead directly to his epistemology. He views reality as essential and relational, rather than as existential and substantial.98 There are two levels of reality, and the deeper, more internal, less visible level is the most important, the determinative level. Because he poses this surface/depth, external/internal, appearance/essence, effect/cause, phenomenon/structure dichotomy, he believes that it is impossible to know reality empirically. The abstract is more real and true than the concrete. Concepts, categories, logic and reason must be invoked, to mirror or model the essences and relations which underlie, interconnect, and give meaning and order to, the manifest objects of the universe.

Concepts express reality because they express the essence of things. Conceiving something is, first, ‘learning its essential elements’, its ‘general and permanent qualities’.99 The ‘function’ of concepts is ‘to express the reality to which they adhere’. The conceptual idea is ‘a symbol of a thing and makes it an object of understanding’. It gives a ‘faithful analysis and representation of reality’ because it reflects the factual, the real object: it reflects ‘the inherent properties of the object … its nature’.100 Thus, at the level of individual objects, concepts create ‘harmony’ between human minds and ‘the nature of things’. The raison d’être of the concept is ‘being true’, rendering ‘things, thought of as adequately as possible’.101 Therefore, ‘the world expressed by the entire system of concepts’ is the universe; the real, true, essential universe.

More important than concepts, the categories of logic and reason serve to express universal reality, natural as well as social reality, because they express not individual things in essence, but the more essential relations among things. Conceiving something is, second, ‘locating it in its place’.102 The categories ‘represent the most general relations which exist between things’. ‘The fundamental relations that exist between things – just that which it is the function of the categories to express – cannot be essentially dissimilar in the different realms’. Thus, while the categories are a ‘work of art’, that is to say, socially constructed, it is ‘an art which imitates nature’.103 Irrationalism is false: the categorical thinking of logic and reason has ‘objective reality’, which is to say that it is based in reality, it accurately reflects reality, it derives from the nature of reality. The rational is the real, the real is rational. The ‘true laws of nature’, which comprise the ‘natural law’ of the social and physical worlds alike, are ‘the regulations according to which facts are really interconnected’.104 There is, in fact, and not merely in thought, a ‘natural order of things’. This means that ‘the phenomena of the universe are bound together by necessary relations, called laws’. These necessary relations indicate ‘the manner in which things are logically related’, and signify a ‘universal determinism’. Therefore, Durkheim asserts that: ‘what is natural in this sense of the word, is also rational’.105 Nature or reality, or the nature of reality, is rational, which is to say relational.

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