{"id":2281,"date":"2013-02-26T07:41:19","date_gmt":"2013-02-26T12:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/thecc\/?p=2281"},"modified":"2013-02-26T07:41:19","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T12:41:19","slug":"durkheim-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/2013\/02\/26\/durkheim-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Durkheim- part three"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"durkheim2\"<\/a>At the end of my last blog I wrote that Durkheim believed that most epistemological problems resulted from individualism, a point I would like to develop further in relation to religion by referring, once again, to Anne Warfield Rawls\u2019 book Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim\u2019s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life<\/i> (Cambridge, 2004).\u00a0 Moreover, in doing so, it will be shown that Durkheim had great respect for archaic<\/span> religions \u2013 a position many of his contemporaries did not hold.<\/p>\n

Durkheim believed there was an inherent individualism in the philosophical and anthropological approaches to religion which obscured the essentially social nature of religious phenomena.\u00a0 Remember, one of Durkheim\u2019s central arguments is that religion caused reason or the categories of understanding through religion\u2019s social ritual practices (religious ideas are retrospective accounts of the ritual practices).\u00a0 Religion was not an aggregate of individual ideas because how could individual ideas cause the categories of understanding (reason) which are social.\u00a0 Religion understood as individual belief, therefore, would not support his empirical argument for the development of the categories of understanding in collective enacted practice.<\/i>\u00a0 Religion addresses an underlying social need for human intelligibility, that is, religions\u2019 ritual practices create common bonds and collective effervescence which then enable humans to reflect on and communicate to one another intelligibly because they arise out of a common experience.\u00a0 How could individual revelation, particular to any given individual, be intelligible to others or be communicated intelligibly to others.\u00a0 Only if the group had common experiences or shared practices<\/i> would they be able to communicate because these were shared in common and consequently all participants could have common ideas about what occurred \u2013 hence, the categories of understanding.\u00a0 Once again, ideas are retrospective accounts of what occurred in social ritual practices<\/i>.<\/p>\n

This is partly why Durkheim studied archaic religions, because archaic religions had NOT developed mountains of theological ideas, systematic theologies, doctrines that obscured religion\u2019s basic function of creating the categories of the understanding through its social ritual practices.\u00a0 Moreover, archaic religions, consequently, were not illogical or full of superstition and irrational.\u00a0 Indeed, just the opposite.\u00a0 As Rawls states it:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cDurkheim argues that the tendency to take an individualist approach, because it obscures the underlying social needs that religion addresses, makes archaic religions, which address those social needs in the simplest and most direct manner, appear to be illogical.\u00a0 In other words, if one treats archaic religions in terms of their belief systems, instead of in terms of the underlying needs which their practices<\/i> address, they seem absurd.\u00a0 Archaic religions are so pure in fulfilling only social functions, that beliefs are essentially irrelevant to understanding them.\u00a0 Durkheim argues that only an approach to explaining the origin of human reason that is based in social experience can reveal the meaning and coherence of archaic religions.\u00a0 In the body of The Elementary Forms<\/i>, he demonstrates at length, that popular arguments concerning the lack of validity, and the superstitious origins, of primitive religious ideas; arguments that tend to treat these religious belief systems as na\u00efve and even silly, are the result of the individualist assumptions made by empiricist and apriorist philosophers and anthropologists\u201d (p. 41-42).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Rawls continues:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cDurkheim consistently defends archaic religious practice from various detractors throughout the text.\u00a0 His argument that all social practices <\/i>that survive the test of time are equally true, because they fulfill the same purpose, is brought into play in this regard.\u00a0 This is interesting, because Durkheim\u2019s so-called \u2018functional\u2019 approach is generally referred to as \u2018conservative.\u2019\u00a0 Yet, here we find it as the basis for both his defense of the legitimacy of \u2018primitive\u2019 religious systems, and his insistence that an individualist approach, while it may be the accepted form of thought in western society, completely obscures the philosophical issues and social phenomena that the approach claims to clarify. . . .\u00a0 Both Durkheim\u2019s assertion of the legitimacy and cogency of primitive religions, and his assertion that philosophical individualism results in obscuring the essential nature of society and human knowledge, poses serious challenges to accepted religious, political, and philosophical views.\u00a0 This is not a conservative position<\/i>\u201d (p. 42).<\/p>\n

Rawls argues that Durkheim argued that religion, because of its ritual practices<\/i>, caused reason (the categories of understanding are social in nature).\u00a0 Religion, essentially, is not about ideas.\u00a0 Again, Anne Rawls: \u201cReligious beliefs or accounts arise as retrospective accounts for the practices<\/i>, which, in turn, develop in response to underlying social needs.\u00a0 These accounts do not provide access to the underlying reasons for the practices<\/i>.\u00a0 Durkheim argues that \u2018to know what the conceptions that we ourselves have not made are made of, it cannot be enough to consult our own consciousness.\u2019\u00a0 Analyzing either religion, or the conditions of knowledge in general, from an individual perspective, makes a nonsense of both religion and epistemology\u201d (p. 42-43).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of my last blog I wrote that Durkheim believed that most epistemological problems resulted from individualism, a point I would like to develop further in relation to religion by referring, once again, to Anne Warfield Rawls\u2019 book … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2281"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2311,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281\/revisions\/2311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}