Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures

Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures: A Contextual Interpretation
Author(s): Neil Gross

Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jul., 1997), pp. 126-149
Published by: American Sociological Association
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Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures:
A Contextual Interpretation*
NEIL GROSS
University of Wisconsin
This article attempts to understand E'mile Durkheim s 1913-14 lectures on pragmatism
and sociology by situating them in the socio-intellectual context of the time. An analysis
of books and journal articles from the period reveals that the ideas of the Anglo-
American pragmatic philosophers Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and
F.C.S. Schiller were very popular in pre-World War I France. The French term le prag-
matisme, however, was used to refer not only to the thought of these philosophers, but
also to the work of French thinkers, such as Henri Bergson and the Catholic Modern-
ists Maurice Blondel and Edouard Le Roy, who wrote extensively about human action.
Pragmatism, because of its associations with Bergsonian spiritualism and the theology
of the Modernists, came to have religious connotations for many French intellectuals.
Durkheim had a similar understanding of pragmatism and his critique of the pragma-
tists caznnot be fully grasped unless these religious connotations are considered. The
article concludes by discussing several implications of this interpretation for sociolog-
ical theory.
In the 1913-14 academic year, Emile Durkheim gave a twenty-lecture course at the Sor-
bonne on the topic of pragmatism and sociology. Declaring that the problem posed by
pragmatism was "of national importance" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:1),' Durkheim offered
an exegesis and critique of the thought of the Anglo-American pragmatic philosophers
Charles Peirce, William James, F.C.S. Schiller, and John Dewey. Although this course was
later described by Mauss (1925:10) as "the crowning philosophical achievement of the
work of Durkheim," the lectures remain largely unknown outside the circles of Durkhe-
imian scholarship (Joas 1993; Lukes 1972). This is especially surprising today given a
resurgence of interest in Durkheim (Schmaus 1996; Pickering and Martins 1994) and the
renaissance of American pragmatism in social theory and philosophy (Joas 1996, 1993;
Putnam 1995; Langsdorf and Smith 1995; Saatkamp 1995; Wiley 1994; Shalin 1992;
Rochberg-Halton 1986; Habermas 1983; Rorty 1982).
The few scholars who have examined Durkheim's lectures have offered divergent inter-
pretations of the text. To assess the historical validity of these interpretations, I employ the
methodology advocated by Skinner (1988), Jones (1994, 1977), and Camic (1987), and
situate the lectures in the socio-intellectual context of the time. I argue that existing inter-
pretations pay insufficient attention to the peculiar manner in which pragmatism was received
in France and to the way in which this reception colored the meaning of the lectures for
Durkheim.
* Address correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 1180 Observatory
Drive, Madison WI 53706. I thank the following people for their helpful comments on various drafts of this
paper: Deborah Bardwick, Kelly Besecke, Jorge Cadena-Roa, Charles Camic, Mitchell Duneier, Nina Eliasoph,
Herb Gross, Warren Hagstrom, Black Hawk Hancock, Hans Joas, Jean de Lannoy, and Warren Schmaus.
J Dates in brackets are original dates of publication. All quotations from Durkheim are from existing English
translations. Other quotations originally written in French are my own translation.
Sociological Theory 15:2 August 1997
? Almerican Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
DURKHEIM'S PRAGMATISM LECTURES 127
CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PRAGMATISM LECTURES
An Epistemological Interpretation
A review of the sparse scholarship on Durkheim's pragmatism lectures reveals several
competing interpretative perspectives. According to one group of scholars, Durkheim's
attack on pragmatism was primarily epistemological. De Gaudemar (1969:82), for exam-
ple, claims that Durkheim viewed pragmatism as a threat to rationalism and to "theoretical
thought in general." Two assumptions underlie this claim. The first is that Durkheim was
a rationalist. Durkheim ([1895] 1938)2 had in fact described his sociological method as
rationalistic. Like Descartes, Durkheim believed that all aspects of reality could ultimately
be understood through scientific reasoning. Durkheim also believed that no mental oper-
ation other than the employment of reason could guarantee the certainty of scientific find-
ings. In addition, he adhered to the correspondence theory of truth, according to which the
truth of an idea depends on the degree to which that idea corresponds with the reality it
seeks to describe. This theory of truth is an important element of Cartesian rationalism
(Curley 1978) and was consistently upheld by Durkheim in his discussion of pragmatism
(Schmaus 1994).3
The second assumption is that Durkheim saw pragmatism as denying aspects of ratio-
nalism to which he clung tenaciously. Cuvillier ([1955] 1983:xviii), for example, inter-
prets the lectures as reflecting the epistemological opposition between Durkheim, who
held that "collective experience should be the object of rational thought," and pragma-
tism, which, seen as a version of logical utilitarianism, would deny that experience must
prostrate itself before the altar of reason. A similar view is advanced by Cladis (1991),
who describes Durkheim's main criticism as being that pragmatism shows a lack of con-
cern with the social world as it is found by individuals or by a rationalist science,
emphasizing instead the "worldmaking" potential of individuals. Rawls (1996), Lukes
(1972), and Bellah (1959) also characterize Durkheim's principal critique of pragmatism
as epistemological.
A Moral and Political Interpretation
According to a second group of scholars, Durkheim's moral and political disagreements
with pragmatism are primary. Kaufman-Osborn ( 1991 ), for example, represents Durkheim' s
rationalism as fused to an unwavering belief in the political philosophy of liberalism. In a
rationalist framework, a moral aura comes to surround truth and its pursuit. If individuals
feel the power of this aura as it applies to questions of social order, they will recognize the
need to place restraints on their claims to liberty and in so doing they will strengthen and
stabilize the democratic polity. According to Kaufman-Osborn, Durkheim saw pragma-
tism's defining feature to be the belief that the truth of an idea depends on its practical
benefit. This belief undermined what Durkheim called the "necessitating" power of truth
and hence aggravated the crisis of liberalism that the sociologist saw besetting France in
the first decade and a half of the century. Similarly, Allcock (1992, 1983) argues that the
pragmatism lectures must be understood in the context of Durkheim's efforts to inject the
findings of a science of morality into the French educational system:
2 For more nuanced accounts of Durkheim's relation to rationalism, see Schmaus (1994), Jones (1994), S.G.
Jones (1995), and Mestrovi6 (1993).
3 In the pragmatism lectures, Durkheim ([1955] 1983:84) does not say that the only defining feature of truth is
that it involves a correspondence between ideas and reality, but he says that by truth social agents mean such a
correspondence: "A representation is considered to be a true one when it is thought to express reality .... Let us
simply say that when we believe an idea to be true, it is because we see it as adequately conveying reality."
128 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
What is the substance of Durkheim's critique of pragmatism? In a nutshell, his attack
is based upon the premise that the weakness of pragmatism is a moral weakness.
What he finds in pragmatism is no less than intellectual anomie, in that there is
insufficient regulation of that which passes for truth in society. This point is the
fulcrum of his entire discussion of pragmatism .... (Allcock 1983:xxxvi-xxxvii)
Mestrovic (1993) echoes this view, but adds that Durkheim believed that pragmatism's
conception of truth tended to unleash the social equivalent of the Schopenhauerian will,
which would ultimately result in anomic forms of social solidarity.
An Anti-Sorel Interpretation
A third perspective on the lectures sees them as an attack on the French syndicalist Georges
Sorel. For example, Joas (1993:56), citing the German scholar Rene K6nig, questions
whether the lectures could be read "as a hidden polemic against. . . Sorel, and as an act of
resistance against the syndrome of decisionism, violence, and the immoralism of deca-
dence."4 Although Sorel's book, De l'Utilite du pragmatisme, was not published until
1921, there is evidence that he had been branded a pragmatist within the French intellec-
tual community many years earlier. For Sorel ([1908] 1950), the value of myth, especially
the myth of the general strike, lay in its ability to incite action, an idea that bears a passing
resemblance to James's argument for the value of belief in matters of faith (Thayer 1968).
Durkheim did not identify Sorel as one of the pragmatists he intended to target. However,
in developing a general criticism of pragmatism, and in keeping with his strategic reluc-
tance to discuss competing schools of French social thought (Karady 1983), Durkheim
may have intended to address Sorel, about whom he had written on only a few occasions.
An Anti-Bergson Interpretation
According to another interpretation, the true target of the pragmatism lectures was the
immensely popular philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson's ([1907] 1911) stress on the
cultivation of intuition as a way to grasp the reality of mental life led him to distrust what
he saw as mechanistic explanations of social and psychic reality (Antliff 1993; Schwartz
1992; Hughes 1958). His philosophy was thus radically opposed to Durkheim's, whose
scientific method required the very forms of explanation Bergson denounced (Vialatoux
1939). Soon after his appointment in 1900 to the College de France, Bergson came to be
closely associated with Anglo-American pragmatism (Allcock 1983, 1992). Considering
this association, Grogin (1988) suggests that Durkheim's pragmatism lectures could be
understood as a critique of Bergson.
A Scholarly Differentiation Interpretation
One other view of the lectures also merits attention. While not denying that Durkheim's
general epistemology was opposed to that of the pragmatists, several scholars nevertheless
have asserted that the actual distance between Durkheim and the pragmatists on many
specific issues was considerably less than Durkheim admitted. Jones (1995), for example,
notes that Durkheim's refusal to regard religion as an error, even after having shown it to
spring from social causes, reflects the direct influence of James. Cladis (1991:152) describes
4 Joas (1993:56) also warns that "the actual substance of Durkheim's line of argumentation is all too easily
ignored if this view is taken."
Durkheim as a "mild-mannered pragmatist" because the sociologist was willing to "hold
... on to what is valuable" from several different philosophical approaches in order to
produce coherent accounts of the social world. Joas makes two different arguments to the
same effect. Joas (1995) suggests that Durkheim and James were among the first scholars
to use religious experience as the basis for general theories about religious phenomena.
More significant, both Durkheim and the pragmatists were opposed to certain aspects of
empiricism and apriorism; they "attempt to take the deduction of... [the a priori condi-
tions for experience] beyond the domain of transcendental philosophy by inquiring how
the individual intellect has to be equipped in order for any form of cognition to take place"
(Joas 1993:57). Despite these similarities, "what emerges clearly ... is Durkheim's rhe-
torical strategy of not accentuating the similarities but rather the differences between prag-
matism and his own program of sociology" (Joas 1993:59). Stone and Farberman ([1967]
1990) also allege that, late in his career, Durkheim began to move toward pragmatism and
the theory that would eventually be called symbolic interactionism.5 Accepting these char-
acterizations, the lectures could be read as Durkheim's attempt to distinguish himself from
the pragmatists, whose ideas in some ways resembled his own.
Each of these perspectives expresses some truth about the pragmatism lectures, yet each
ignores a key aspect of Durkheim's critique-that his attack relied heavily on arguments
originally developed in the context of his sociology of religion. That religious topics fig-
ured prominently in the lectures becomes apparent only when certain aspects of the socio-
intellectual context in which the lectures were delivered are "recovered."
THE RECEPTION OF PRAGMATISM IN FRANCE
Pragmatism was an exceptionally popular philosophy in pre-World War I France. The
philosopher Edouard Le Roy (1908:271) exclaimed at a conference in 1908 that "the word
pragmatism refers today to a vast movement of thought, which, under diverse forms,
without doubt, and with many varied nuances, but also with a common core, manifests
itself a little everywhere: in America, in England, in France, in Germany, in Italy." Jean
Bourdeau (1909:39) wrote of pragmatism that it "seems to have gone beyond the fashion
of the moment." The Belgian philosopher Rend Berthelot (1911:3) opened his three-
volume study of pragmatism with the claim that "pragmatism is today perhaps the princi-
pal adversary that rational idealism confronts among philosophers." Albert Schinz (1909:111)
referred to pragmatism's "astonishing success." And an article in the popular journal La
Revue de Paris described pragmatism as one of "the projects of religious philosophy most
characteristic of the present time" (Archambault 1914:291). Durkheim ([1955] 1983:1,9)
said of pragmatism that it was "almost the only current theory of truth" and pointed out
that pragmatic ideas, born in private discussions between Peirce, James, and others in and
around Cambridge, Massachusetts, "were not long in crossing the Atlantic."
One measure of pragmatism's success in France is the rapidity with which the writings
of the Anglo-American pragmatists were translated during the 25 or so years following
1890 (Allcock 1983; Thayer 1968; Leroux 1922; Simon 1918; Boutroux 1912). Several
works each by Peirce, Dewey, and Schiller were published in translation between 1878 and
the time of Durkheim's first lecture on pragmatism in 1913, and many of James's books
were translated.
5 Mead, of course, was an important pragmatist in his own right. I devote little attention to Mead's ideas
because Durkheim was completely unfamiliar with his work. It is because of this unfamiliarity that Jones (1977)
cites the Stone and Farberman ([1967] 1990) article as an example of "presentist" historiography. Given Durkheim's
ignorance of Mead and given that the term "symbolic interactionism" was not coined until well after Durkheim's
death, the statement that Durkheim was "moving toward symbolic interactionism" lacks historical meaning.
In addition, pragmatism was discussed at several conferences attended or attended to by
prominent French intellectuals. For example, the American philosopher Josiah Royce gave
a presentation on pragmatism and the problem of truth at the third annual meeting of the
Congr&s de Philosophie held in Heidelberg in 1908. The journal Revue de metaphysique et
de morale reported extensively on these proceedings, noting that "from the first day, prag-
matism became for the Congress a central preoccupation and the object of the most ardent
discussions" (Anonymous 1908:930). Pragmatism was also the topic at a seance, or meet-
ing, of the Societe Francaise de Philosophie held in May 1908.
More important, a substantial secondary literature on pragmatism sprang up in France
in the years 1906-1914. Among the most important books were Abel Rey's La Philoso-
phie moderne (1908), Marcel Hebert's Le Pragmatisme (1908), Emile Boutroux's Science
and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy ([1908] 1911) as well as his William James
(1912), Schinz's Anti-Pragmatism (1909), Bourdeau's Pragmatisme et modernisme (1909),
and Berthelot's Un Romantisme utilitaire (1911). Nearly 70 articles or reviews relating to
pragmatism were published in the Revue philosophique between 1906 and 1912 (Claviere
1913). Leroux (1922) lists some 30 original articles on pragmatism by French thinkers
between 1905 and 1914, and Simon's (1918) dissertation6 cites many more.
When French writers of the day used the term le pragmatisme, they did not refer exclu-
sively to the work of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller. Instead, le pragmatisme was
thought of as a vague and amorphous philosophical movement in which the Anglo-
American pragmatic philosophers played only a part. For example, in his presentation to
the Soci6te Francaise de Philosophie, Parodi (1908b) commented that pragmatism was an
exceptionally difficult doctrine to define, in large part because of its inherent ambiguities.
Berthelot (1911) compared pragmatism to the cloud seen by Hamlet-both were cease-
lessly changing shape. Schinz (1909:77) expressed his frustration with pragmatism: "you
can't get a grip on pragmatism; when you try to seize it, it slips through your fingers." And
Fouillee (1911:275) echoed this view: "It is impossible to rigorously define pragmatism. It
is ... a curious amalgam of very different doctrines." Durkheim ([1955] 1983:10) also
alluded to the "elusive" character of pragmatic thought.
That French authors complained about pragmatism's vagueness speaks less to the lack
of clarity in the writing of the Anglo-American pragmatists than to the fact that the French
word pragmatisme was frequently used to describe several diverse currents of thought.
Thus H6bert (1908:101) implored readers, when using the word pragmatism, "to explain
with precision in what sense, with what limits. It has become an equivocal term; it is, alas,
hardly the only one in philosophy."
H6bert was one of many authors to write about and attempt to classify the different
types of "pragmatic" philosophies floating about the philosophical scene. In a clear but
unacknowledged reference to an essay by Arthur Lovejoy, Berthelot (1911:3) pointed out
that "an American writer was able, in 1908, to count up to thirteen different pragmatisms."
Berthelot went on to distinguish the integral pragmatism of James, Dewey, and Schiller
from the partial pragmatism of Bergson, Poincare, and the Catholic Modernists Loisy, Le
Roy, and Blondel. Similarly, Bourdeau (1909) noted that in France, far from there being
only one school of pragmatism, there were instead pragmatists of various sorts, each dis-
playing differing affinities with their Anglo-American brethren.
Many of these authors focused their attention on James, Dewey, and Schiller, whom
Durkheim ([1955] 1983:9) called the "chief protagonists of pragmatism." But the philos-
ophy of pragmatism was not reducible to the ideas of these core figures. Instead, le prag-
' Simon's (1918) dissertation appears to be the only book-length study devoted to the reception of pragmatism
in France.
matisme was thought of as a modern philosophical tendency, a general viewpoint on
knowledge and truth shared by many thinkers, French and Anglo-American. Thus, Parodi
(1908b) proposed to look to the "Anglo-Saxon" milieu in order to understand pragmatism
because, in the thought of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller, the pragmatic tendency of
contemporary thought had crystallized into a distinct and identifiable doctrine.
One way to gauge French understandings of pragmatism at the turn of the century is to
examine the connections French texts drew between pragmatism and antecedent philo-
sophical traditions. James ([1907] 1987) subtitled his book Pragmatism "A New Name for
Some Old Ways of Thinking" and counted Socrates and Aristotle, Locke and Berkeley,
Mill and Hume among those philosophers who had employed something like the prag-
matic method under different guises in past epochs. While Peirce regarded pragmatism as
most heavily indebted to Kant, French commentators tended to view pragmatism's intel-
lectual ancestry differently, stressing its connections with utilitarianism and its dissimilar-
ities from idealism and rationalism. Parodi (1908a), for example, traced pragmatism back
to the English empiricists, but also to the utilitarianism of Bentham and the evolutionism
of Spencer. Bourdeau (1909) noted pragmatism's striking similarities to the philosophies
espoused by Bentham, Kant, and Goethe, while Fouillee (1911) maintained that insofar as
the pragmatists held that to appreciate a belief it was necessary to consider its conse-
quences for the race, group, or individual, pragmatism spoke the same language as Dar-
win, Mach, and Nietzsche.
Others characterized pragmatism as principally a departure from idealism. For exam-
ple, Lalande (1906) noted that Peirce and James shared a profound distaste for "philosoph-
ical dilettantism"; for abstract speculation bearing no relation to the actual issues that
humanity calls on philosophy to help it confront. In this sense, Lalande argued, pragma-
tism was diametrically opposed to the abstract systematizing of idealism. Hebert (1908)
came to much the same conclusion, alluding to the differences between pragmatism and
neo-Hegelianism.
That pragmatism's ancestry was often traced back to the utilitarian tradition and seen
as opposed to idealism is hardly surprising, given the fact that French thinkers generally
regarded pragmatism as a form of utilitarianism. Lalande (1906:135) approvingly cited
Schiller's definition of pragmatism as "the doctrine that truths are logical values and the
method that systematically tests assertions according to this principle." Robet (1912:595)
observed that inquiry, in the pragmatist scheme, always begins with a problem or doubt,
in response to which an idea, and an action, are generated; this idea is true "if the satis-
faction sought is obtained." And Dessoulavy (quoted in Lalande 1906:142) insisted that
for the pragmatists, "the true is what is useful; it is in this affirmation that pragmatism
consists." Whereas traditional utilitarianism used utility-maximization as a standard for
assessing moral value, the pragmatists were seen as using the same standard to assess
truth claims.
Moreover, pragmatism was frequently criticized on the grounds that it was essentially
utilitarian. Fouillee (1911:298) argued that truth could not be a source of satisfaction if it
were known that truth meant no more than satisfaction-"in the domain of intelligence,
evidence and the harmony of ideas are indeed a cause of satisfaction, but the first of the
needs of intelligence that must be satisfied is precisely that there exists a reality, and real
relationships, independent of our satisfaction." Similarly, Schinz (1909), who suspected
that pragmatism tended toward intellectualism more than it acknowledged, maintained
that James explained how an idea could be true pragmatically only if the idea were already
true rationally. Rationally true ideas, in other words, could be more or less useful, but the
usefulness of an idea is not a sufficient guarantee of its truth. And Le Roy (1908), defend-
ing pragmatism, identified two widespread "abusive" interpretations of it: first, that prag-
matism denied the role of intelligence in human action, and second, that pragmatism,
because of its implicit utilitarianism, allowed agents to hold any belief as true.
Anglo-American pragmatism was also described in the French literature as a form of
anti-intellectualism or irrationalism. The psychologist Alfred Binet (1908:216), for exam-
ple, reporting the results of his survey of French teachers of philosophy, conflated prag-
matism and irrationalism when he noted that among lycee students, "irrationalism, as
much as pragmatism, is foreign to them." Boutroux (1912), equating intellectualism with
the correspondence theory of truth, suggested that James and the pragmatists departed
significantly from intellectualism insofar as they maintained that the object of a true idea
is reality as it is received by the mind through experience and not through a simple process
of conformity or copying. Bourdeau (1909) described pragmatism as a doctrine opposed to
all forms of purely speculative or intellectualistic philosophy. Finally, Fouill6e (1911)
concerned himself with pragmatism precisely because he saw it as one of several promi-
nent anti-intellectual doctrines.
Pragmatism was considered to be anti-intellectual for at least two reasons. First, to eval-
uate ideas, pragmatism turned to experience rather than to an abstract conception of reason.
Second, and considerably more important in the French context, pragmatism was under-
stood as claiming there were realms of being and experience-such as those of God, spirit,
and soul-that the intellect could not penetrate in any satisfactory way. Pragmatism, in other
words, was seen in France as a philosophy with clear religious or spiritual connotations.
Two arguments from James's religious writings impressed French commentators. The
first was James's claim that religious belief can produce its own verification. In his 1896
address "The Will to Believe," James ([1896] 1948:99) argued that in certain situations,
for example, when a decision must be made whether to believe in God, "the intellect, even
with the truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be
truth or no." When situations like these arise, decisions must be made only on the basis of
faith. But faith is an appropriate guide to decision-making when it comes to religious
matters, for in the realm of religion, "faith in a fact can help create the fact" (James [1896]
1948:105). Acting faithfully in the world, James claimed, is one condition for salvation.
The world and the Absolute display no stultifying monism, but rather have an unfinished,
pluralistic character. It is humanity's responsibility to mold that world, that Absolute,
insofar as possible, into a satisfactory condition. James ([1907] 1987:618) later wrote, "on
pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of
the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it
certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it so that it will
combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths." To believe in God is to live one's
life believing in God, and to live in that fashion, James claimed, is to do no less than to
help bring about God.
James was also known among French intellectuals for his argument that religious expe-
riences lose something of their vital qualities when they are understood only in intellectual
or scientific terms. James ([1902] 1987:50) argued that religion's distinctive feature is that
religious feeling constitutes "an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life." He held
that it was impossible to define religion per se, but insisted that a class of experience exists
that is distinctively religious, a class that consists of states of consciousness directed toward
a supernatural end. Religious experience is always accompanied by an intuition of the
supernatural or some greater power in the universe, a power with which humanity seeks to
enter into a harmonious relationship. The problem, according to James, is that rationalism
and modern philosophy have no room for mystics or those with intuitions of the divine.
However, even the rationalists should recognize two aspects of human experience-an
objective aspect and a subjective aspect. "The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever
DURKHEIM'S PRAGMATISM LECTURES
133
at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the
thinking comes to pass" (James [1902] 1987:446). Science and rationalism have authority
over objective experience, but they cannot speak about subjective experience without trans-
lating it into objective terms. But both types of experience, according to James, must be
taken into account if the human condition is to be understood or lived-in its fullness.
"That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as
he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may
be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete
actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such feeling, or its analogue, would
be a piece of reality only half made up" (James [1902] 1987:447).
French authors commented extensively on James's religious writings (Lalande 1906;
Sorel 1909; Schinz 1909; Parodi 1908a; Bourdeau 1912; Robet 1912). Schinz (1909:162)
pointed to the alliance between theology and pragmatism in England and "upon the Euro-
pean continent, too, for that matter." Parodi (1908a) noted that a key feature of James's
philosophy was his inclination toward a concrete, pluralistic, and melioristic religion, a
religion that believed in the power of human action. And Bourdeau (1912) observed that
James's pluralism represented God as a particular form or aspect of life.
The philosopher Emile Boutroux was by far the most important popularizer of James's
religious thought. In Science iand Religion il Contempoiranr Philosophy, Boutroux ([ 19081
1911:306) described James as a proponent of a method of religious thought "especially
constituted so as to agree with living reality." Boutroux began with a discussion of James's
conception of religious experience, rehearsing James's claim that religious consciousness
is distinctive because it is permeated by a sense of the divine. This experienced sense of
divinity leads individuals to behave in saintly, moral ways. Thus, for James, "religion is
useful, and, in certain cases, irreplaceable: what more do we need in order to call it true?
If truth is, in the last analysis, that which is, that which continues, and that which engen-
ders, religion is quite as true as our belief in natural beings and forces" (Boutroux [1908]
1911:316-17).
As for the conflict between religion and science, Boutroux argued that according to
James, nature is multifaceted enough that it could be "handled" and "modified" in many
ways. Science is one way, but what evidence suggests that religion is not another? More-
over, while religion is for James "the fullest possible realisation of the human self," sci-
ence is merely "the selection and the classification of all that which, at any time and for
any mind, can be the object of clear and distinct knowledge" (Boutroux [1908] 1911:328).
The objective and impersonal kinds of experience that science deals with can never satisfy
the insatiable human demand for concepts and ideas that are "constantly revivified through
contact with reality, i.e., with the subjective" (Boutroux 11908] 191 1:329). Insofar as we
desire a philosophical system capable of satisfying the demand for "revivified" concepts,
we must find a way to incorporate science and religion into that system. Boutroux main-
tained that for James science and religion are opposed only if religion is understood to
consist of a system of dogmas and beliefs. But "if religion is essentially an experience-
something felt and lived-it need not, a priori, be contrary to a science which, itself, only
leads up to a certain interpretation of experience" (Boutroux [1908] 1911:330). Boutroux
([19081 1911:333) concluded-and this is crucial to understanding Durkheim-that James's
views "actually eliminate from the essence of religion all that is chiefly objective, intel-
lectual, or practical in the material sense ... for instance, dogmas, rites, traditions. They
put in the foreground the emotional and volitional element, which is embedded in person-
ality and cannot be separated from it." According to Boutroux, religion, for the pragma-
tists, is no strictly theoretical or intellectual affair, but instead is the stuff of subjective
experience.
Why did pragmatism's religious dimensions receive so much attention in the French
literature of the period? Perhaps because Anglo-American pragmatism was seen as con-
fluent with several emerging lines of thought in French philosophy that were either overtly
theological or sympathetic to spiritual concerns.
PRAGMATISM, BERGSONISM, AND CATHOLIC MODERNISM
Despite the best efforts of the anticlerical government, the state could not wean the French
populace from its taste for things religious during the Third Republic. The state's distrust
of organized religion originated in the secular ideology of the Revolution and received
repeated experiential validation over the course of the nineteenth century as conspiracies
between the French Catholic Church and various royalist factions were exposed. Ferry's
laicization of education in the 1880s was in many ways a continuation of the demand
voiced in 1789 that the privileged institution of the Church, with its ties to the pre-
Revolutionary aristocracy, be weakened and its influence over the youth of France mini-
mized. The polarization of the polity during the Dreyfus years-when the republican
Dreyfusards, convinced that the Jewish army officer had been unjustly convicted, were
pitted against the royalist, Catholic, and anti-Semitic traditionalists-created a situation in
which the associations between republicanism and anticlericalism and between royalism
and Catholicism were solidified in the public consciousness (Arnal 1985). Bury (1950)
describes a sharp rise in anticlerical sentiment in the late 1890s. A coalition of Radicals
and Socialists took advantage of this situation and was swept into power in the elections of
1899, advancing a vigorously anticlerical platform. Waldeck-Rousseau, the premier who
headed the coalition, passed legislation mandating that all religious orders apply for state
certification. And under the tenure of Combes, Waldeck-Rousseau's successor, the gov-
ernment "insisted on a literal and punitive administration of the law" (Arnal 1985:34). The
conflict between Church and state worsened in 1905 when the Republic passed a separa-
tion law that ended state support for all forms of religious worship.
As the first decade of the century wore on, however, increasingly large segments of the
urban public tired of the Republic's hostility to religion. Weber (1968) and Arnal (1985) note
a revival of interest in Catholicism after the turn of the century. Support for the Church had
remained relatively strong in rural France despite the anticlerical crusades of Combes and
others, but increasingly, Parisians who had once given their minds to science and their hearts
to the Republic found themselves drawn toward traditional dogmas. Fiction from the period
also reflected a resurgence of interest in religion. Jean Barois, for example, the title character
in a novel set in the Third Republic, is raised a devout Catholic. As an adult, he becomes an
atheist and a Dreyfusard, but at the end of his life, he returns to the faith of his childhood. As
the elderly Barois explains to a colleague: "today I tell you this. Though dogmas may have
had their day, the religious emotion will persist .... You've only got to look around you and
you'll see that all the attacks of rationalism have failed to eradicate it. On the contrary, reli-
gious sentiment is permeating ourcivic life more and more" (Martin du Gard [ 1913] 1949:306).
The revival of interest in Catholicism coincided with a general resurgence of interest in
spiritual and religious matters. This resurgence was a reaction against what Grogin (1988)
calls the "mechanism" of the Third Republic, which had naively attempted to stamp out re-
ligious sentiment by besieging the Church and substituting the manifold discourses of ratio-
nalism for more spiritually satisfying systems of belief. Increasingly after the turn of the century,
however, spiritual concerns, although not specifically Catholic concerns, occupied intellec-
tuals on the fringes of the academy. As Weber (1986:32) writes: "the reaction against scien-
tific materialism and rational explanations . . . encouraged interest in mystery and the
supernatural, appreciation of faith for the sake of faith." Expressionist, Futurist, and neoprim-
135
itivist painting celebrated the spiritual and the irrational, while symbolist writers in the tra-
dition of Arthur Rimbaud tried to capture in poetry and prose their "flights from reason" (Grogin
1988). Men and women of respectable social standing discussed-not dismissively-such
occult practices as hypnosis, communication with the dead, levitation, telekinesis, and the
like. Although the number of people actually engaged in these practices was small, the par-
ticipants were only the most explicit manifestation of a more general "trend away from ra-
tionalism and moderation, to action, to activism, to vitalism" (Weber 1986:237).
Bergsonian philosophy fit in with this trend. Reacting against mechanistic attempts to
explain human life using concepts derived from the physical sciences, Bergson argued that
states of mind bear no ontological relation to material objects (Schwartz 1992). Conscious-
ness existed only in quality, not in quantity, and hence was mathematically unmeasurable.
The inner time of consciousness in which states of mind flutter in and out of being and
interpenetrate one another was, for Bergson ([1907] 1911:299), a succession without dis-
tinction, a "dlure reelle" that could only be grasped through intuition, a method of appre-
hension in every way contrary to intellectual analysis. Bergson did not oppose intellectual
apprehension per se, but claimed it could only grasp objects materially; that is, by concep-
tualizing them as distinct, fragmented entities situated in time and space (Gunter 1966).
That was fine for apprehending inert matter, but if used to apprehend states of conscious-
ness, spirit, life, God, and other realities that "exhibit liberty, indetermination, and creativ-
ity" (Morkovsky 1972:44), a distorted picture would inevitably result. Bergson explored
these ideas in such popular works as Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory
(1896), and Creative Evolution (1907).
Bergson had participated in more than one seance and was regarded by some in the
occult movement as a prophet, but he was regarded by others as the expositor of a philos-
ophy that could be put to many uses. Bergson's insistence on the irreducibility of life and
spirit to any sort of mechanical process was consistent with the efforts of those who
wished to undermine the dominant ideology of rationalism and the legitimacy of the Repub-
lic that it supported. Many in the syndicalist movement, for example, were sympathetic to
Bergsonism. Although the philosopher was not concerned with issues of class and labor,
his stress on conceptual fluidity and the vital power of ideas appealed to those who wished
to exploit the emotive energy of violence to bring about revolutionary social change (Gro-
gin 1988). Because Bergson was a professor at the College de France, his work was also
embraced by critics of the New Sorbonne like Henri Massis as an example of all that could
be accomplished if rationalism and empiricism were decentered from their positions of
dominance (Stock 1966; Bompaire-Evesque 1988).
For a variety of reasons, Bergsonian anti-intellectualism became identified with Anglo-
American pragmatism. Whereas the pragmatists maintained that reality was neither com-
plete nor ready-made, Bergson argued that objects always appear to the mind as objects of
action on which the dissecting, spatializing intellect inevitably goes to work (Jacoby 1912).
James sought a framework in which to argue that intellectual and conceptual knowledge
was relative to human action, and Bergson provided such a framework, claiming that
objects of consciousness are continuous and indistinct and that their representation by
discontinuous, fixed concepts was an act of representation, and often an act of misrepre-
sentation (Boutroux 1912). Grogin (1988) enumerates four similarities between James and
Bergson: Both displayed a contempt for mechanistic conceptions of life; they treated the
human personality as a functioning whole; they wrote on mysticism and religion; and both
were interested in psychic phenomena. James and Bergson were also friends and frequent
correspondents and James regarded Bergson's thinking as complementary to his own.
After James's death in 1910, Bergson authored the introduction to the French translation
of Pragnmlltisn. Following the book's publication in 1911, "Jamesian pragmatism ...
[became] closely associated with the thought of [Bergson], this highly influential and
popular figure" (Allcock 1983:xxviii). In fact, Bergsonism was often confused with prag-
matism. For example, a respondent in Binet's (1908) survey claimed there were enough
varieties of pragmatism floating about in academic circles for him to find one with which
he could align himself, and the variety of le pragmatisine he said he felt the most sympathy
for was that developed by Bergson. Similarly, Berthelot's (1911) text contains a substan-
tial treatment of Bergsonism and discusses its relationship to and fundamental overlap
with pragmatism.
Pragmatism was also frequently associated with Catholic Modernism. The Modernists,
a small but influential group of theologians and philosophers active from the 1880s until
their condemnation by the Holy See in 1907, addressed what they saw as a conflict between
science and Catholicism (Kurtz 1986). A key figure in the Modernist movement was Mau-
rice Blondel, a Catholic philosopher who had studied under Durkheim's teacher, the neo-
Kantian Boutroux. Blondel argued that science, or at least the philosophies on which
science was grounded, "could demonstrate man's need ('exigence') for the supernatural"
(Daly 1980:29). He argued that Kant had erred in separating pure and practical reason. For
Blondel, action, and not thought or belief or pure reason, was the "point on which the
powers of Nature, the light of intelligence, the strength of the will, and even the benefits of
grace, converge" (Blondel, quoted in Ranchetti 1969:40). Blondel showed that a careful
analysis of human action would always reveal something of the Absolute, and that the
presence of God can be revealed by taking the correct attitude toward action (Thayer
1968). Opening space for such a revelation was significant, for Blondel suggested that the
entire edifice of modern philosophy rested on the notion of immanence, the idea that
"nothing can enter into man which does not emerge from him and correspond in some way
to a developmental need" (Blondel, quoted in Ranchetti 1969:39) But the idea of imma-
nence conflicts with the insistence of the Catholic Church on the supernaturalness of the
Divine; by definition, the supernatural cannot emerge from the human mind. If it were
possible, by developing a method of immanence in which the distinction between the
supernatural and the transcendent was recognized, to find the Absolute, the transcendent,
emerging from the human mind, then modern philosophy could be reconciled with the
teachings of the Church. It was in action that Blondel sought signs of transcendence, for all
of humanity's action was "a journey toward the absolute which ... is, objectively consid-
ered, nothing less than the supernatural revelation given in Christ and made available to us
in Christian tradition" (Daly 1980:40).
The mathematician and philosopher Edouard Le Roy took a different approach to Cath-
olic apologetics. Le Roy (1907:4) believed that traditional demonstrations of the validity
of Christian doctrines were no longer persuasive given the state of modern science and
philosophy: "Catholic thought is, at this time, without notable influence on the diverse
intellectual movements that are developing around us." To remedy this situation. Le Roy
published in 1905 a controversial essay entitled "Qu'est-ce qu'un dogme?" and a book in
1907 entitled Dognme et critique. There are, Le Roy argued, at least four standard philo-
sophical objections to dogmas: (1) Dogmas are neither provable nor proven; (2) dogmas
often rely on indirect proofs, while science rests on and accepts only direct proofs; (3)
dogmas are often based on long-abandoned philosophies; (4) because dogmas and their
proofs are not on the same ideational plane as the axioms and demonstrations of positive
science, accepting dogmas requires a break in the unity of thought. Le Roy granted that
these are valid objections, but claimed they misconceive the nature of Catholic dogmas
and thus do not apply to them.
Le Roy (1907:25) denied that dogmas are intellectual propositions, arguing that "reli-
gion is less an intellectual adhesion to a system of speculative propositions than a real-life
[vecue] participation in mysterious realities." Dogmas have to do with action: "It [a dogma]
expresses above all a prescription of a practical kind. It is, more than anything else, the
formula of a rule of practical conduct" (1907:25). He did not mean that actions were to be
deduced firom dogmas, but that its action component was what was essential about a dogma.
Dogmas, moreover, have only negative meaning. For example, the dogma "God is per-
sonal" is not an intellectual statement about the nature of God, but an indication that God
is not to be treated as a formal category or an abstract concept. As negative prescriptions
for action, Le Roy (1907:91 ) argued, dogmas have absolute authority: "A dogma is a truth
of a vital order, it presents us its object under the rubric of action commanded of us by
Him, and the obligation to adhere which accompanies it concerns properly its practical
meaning, its value for life." Le Roy acknowledged that each dogma may encounter certain
theoretical, scientific, or philosophical problems. And he made clear that dogmas have no
special authority to address scientific or philosophical questions. But while the theoretical
problems posed by dogmas and the degree to which they seem acceptable given the state
of science change throughout the ages, Catholics have always had and always will have
"the same practical attitude concerning Jesus" (Le Roy 1907:34). Religion and dogmatic
authority are of the realm of action, while science and philosophy are of the realm of the
theoretical. Each has supreme authority within its realm, and only when one tries to over-
step the boundaries of its authority does a conflict between religion and science occur.
Blondel and Le Roy, because of their discussions of the relation between religion and
action, were often referred to in France as pragmatists. For example, Hebert (1908:75)
claimed that "the pragmatic tendency seems to me to have manifested itself, in our coun-
try, under forms belonging more or less to one of these three modes of expression of
religious experience: moralism, fideism, symbolism." He noted that Blondel continued to
describe his philosophy as a form of pragmatism as late as 1902, after which, in order to
distance himself from James, he abandoned the depiction. As Thayer (1968:315) explains,
Blondel thought of ideas "as ways of furthering life, and the truth of an idea depends upon
its so functioning." For this reason Blondel called his theory le pragmatisme, despite the
fact that his work had little in common with the thought of Peirce or James. Hebert went on
to ask: Should Blondel and Bergson, who both speak frequently about action, be described
as pragmatists? "Yes," responded Hebert (1908:72), "if one goes by etymology alone, but
that would be to introduce a new equivocation into philosophical language." Bourdeau
(1909:vii), less concerned with equivocation, described modernism as "an application of
pragmatism to religious beliefs." Insofar as pragmatism celebrated the utility of individual
religious experience, it was a form of thought opposed to ecclesiastical institutions, and
thus "Rome justly condemned [pragmatism] under the name of modernism" (Bourdeau
1909:82). "The pragmatic state of mind," Bourdeau (1909:153) wrote, "is that of M. Edouard
Le Roy." Later, Bourdeau (1912:3) averred that "Catholic Modernism was inspired by
pragmatism." He argued that Le Roy's modernism was merely an outgrowth of the phi-
losophy of Bergson: "M. Le Roy builds modernism on Bergsonian philosophy" (Bourdeau
1912:60). Fouillee (1911:320-21) described modernism's relation to pragmatism as one
of appropriation: "The apologists of the different religions are always on the track of all
that could serve the grand cause; they clothe their apologetic according to the fashion of
the day; they adapt it to the theories in style. Pragmatism has furnished the apologists a
unique occasion to rejuvenate worn arguments."
A CONTEXTUAL INTERPRETATION OF DURKHEIM'S PRAGMATISM LECTURES
Clearly, pragmatism's reception in France was conditioned by the religious, theological,
and spiritual concerns of the intellectual field of the day. This point has been overlooked in
much of the existing commentary on the French reception of pragmatism. Two questions
arise from this finding: (1) Is there textual evidence to support the claim that Durkheim,
too, gave substantial attention to the religious dimensions of pragmatism?; and (2) does
this textual evidence alter the interpretation of Durkheim's lectures?
Pragmatism as Logical Utilitarianism
A noncontextual reading of the 1913-14 lectures leaves the impression that religious issues
were not at the forefront of Durkheim's critique. Distinguishing pragmatism as a method
from pragmatism as a theory of truth, Durkheim ([1955] 1983) made clear early in the
lectures that he would focus on the latter. Durkheim explained that pragmatism rallies
against the "dogmatic" conception of truth subscribed to in one form or another by Plato,
Mill, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel that holds that a true idea is a copy or mental representation
of reality.
According to Durkheim, the pragmatists offered five objections to the dogmatic theory
of truth. (1) If truth were merely a copy of reality, it would have no intrinsic purpose or
value; God would have no reason to create the concept of truth and humanity would have
no reason to seek truth as an end in itself. (2) For the reality known by truth to be external
to the mind and yet graspable by the mind, ideas and experience would have to exist on the
same plane of reality. But by many accounts, ideas and experience are separated by an
epistemological "abyss" or "chasm" that the mind should have difficulty crossing. (3)
Truth could not impose itself on minds as an end to be sought if truth were not wholly a
human concept. But as conceived in the dogmatic theory of truth, "truth is impersonal, it is
foreign to man, it is extra-human. How, then, can it act on the human mind, attracting and
fascinating it?" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:16). (4) That which is true in the dogmatic con-
ception of truth is true for everybody and remains true for all times. But most truths do not
have this character-what is regarded as true changes radically over the ages and varies
considerably even among peoples of the same epoch. "What a difference there is between
the ideal, immutable truth of dogmatism and the real, concrete truths that we experience!"
(Durkheim [1955] 1983:19). (5) The dogmatic theory of truth permits no diversity of
opinion and is morally objectionable because it promotes intolerance.
In place of the dogmatic conception of truth, pragmatism posits that "the true and the
good are simply two different aspects of the useful, the advantageous" (Durkheim [1955]
1983:44). Overcoming the Cartesian separation of mind and body, ideas and actions, the
pragmatists maintain that ideas have truth only in relation to action-"thought and reality
are part of one and the same process" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:38). Thought, in apprehend-
ing reality, does not efface itself to engage in copying, but rather actively creates that
which it apprehends. Reality is always in the process of being created-it is fluid, dynamic,
pluralistic-and thought participates in this constant remaking, especially when belief
helps provide its own verification. For the pragmatists, "since reality is not something
completed, truth cannot be something immutable. Truth is not a ready-made system: it is
formed, de-formed and re-formed in a thousand ways; it varies and evolves like all things
human" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:24).
Thus, Durkheim ([1955] 1983:72) characterized pragmatism as a form of logical utili-
tarianism: "We shall see that the proposition that the useful is the true is a formula that
brings us back to utilitarianism. The pragmatist theory of truth is a logical utilitarianism."
He acknowledged that the satisfaction produced through the interaction of ideas and real-
ity was a criterion of truth for James only when satisfaction was understood in a circum-
scribed way. Still, Durkheim objected to the idea that truth should be defined in relation to
satisfaction or utility of any kind. He argued instead that truth has two essential properties:
a moral obligation attaches to truth, such that "in truth, there is something which com-
mands respect, and a moral power to which the mind feels properly bound to assent"
(Durkheim [1955] 1983:73), and truth is almost impossible for us to resist. These two
properties of truth, Durkheim argued, are consistent only with a rationalist theory of truth
and therefore are incompatible with pragmatism. By placing truth in the realm of the
useful, the pragmatists transformed the moral obligation to seek truth into a mere desire to
seek utility. Moreover, truth, far from always producing utility, sometimes causes the truth-
seeker displeasure or pain. That humans should feel compelled to accept the authority of
that which is true, even when truth is painful, was, for Durkheim, the hallmark of truth. In
short, Durkheim denied that the truth of an idea depends upon its ability to provide satis-
faction; instead, a true idea corresponds to the aspect of reality it seeks to express.
Pragmatism and Speculative Religious Thought
It is clear that Durkheim characterized pragmatism in terms of the Jamesian theory of truth
and set out to discredit the pragmatic project by invoking the tropes of rationalism.7 How-
ever, Durkheim also viewed pragmatism much as his French contemporaries did-as a
general philosophical movement that, in its religious moments, denied that what was essen-
tial about religious or spiritual experience had anything to do with ideas or the intellect. It
was in this context that Durkheim offered his most original, and most genuinely sociolog-
ical, argument against pragmatism.
As Grogin (1988) points out, Durkheim saw pragmatism as closely related to Berg-
sonism. While Durkheim ([1955] 1983:9) claimed in the second lecture that "the pragma-
tists are a little too apt to claim some thinkers who are far from accepting all their theses.
In this way James recruits Henri Poincare, and also Henri Bergson," his references to the
work of Bergson indicated the applicability of his critique to Bergson's philosophy. For
example, Durkheim ([1955] 1983:32) averred in the fifth lecture that "to a very great
extent, James's whole argument closely follows developments in Bergson. The positive
conclusions at which the two men arrive are not identical, but their attitude toward classic
rationalism is the same." Similarly, in the eighth lecture, which included an extended
discussion of James's argument that concepts need not be thought of as copies of objects,
Durkheim ([1955] 1983:47) noted that James's view "is reminiscent of Bergson's schema
dynamique." And the twentieth lecture, which examines the heterogeneity that pragmatism
alleges exists in the relation between thought and reality, is as much a discussion of the
Bergsonian elan vital as it is a critique of James.
Durkheim also saw a connection between pragmatism and religious modernism. Inter-
preting James's argument for the right to believe in God as akin to Pascal's wager,8 Durkheim
([1955] 1983:7) wrote that "preoccupation with religion is to be found in the work of all
the pragmatists." He later noted that "the only question to which the pragmatist method
has been consistently applied is that of religion" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:60). Durkheim
([1955] 1983:9) also made this highly significant statement: "In France, pragmatism appears
chiefly in the neo-religious movement described as 'modernist.' Edouard Le Roy claims to
base his religious apologetics on principles borrowed from pragmatism."
These points alone, of course, do not establish that Durkheim's lectures were centrally
concerned with the pragmatic treatment of religion. Durkheim had gone on record on
7 In the lectures, Durkheim remained faithful to an argument he had made throughout his career; namely, that
rationalism, while essentially sound, needed reform because it placed reason outside the realm of that which
could be analyzed by science.
8 For a lucid discussion of James's religious philosophy, see Vanden Burgt (1981). James was less interested
in the benefits that religious devotion might bring in the hereafter than he was in the this-worldly moral strenu-
ousness that faith could inculcate.
previous occasions as opposing pragmatism's view of religion, and it is conceivable that
he was doing no more in the pragmatism lectures-by noting the religious or spiritualistic
dimensions to pragmatism-than reiterating objections he had made elsewhere.9
But Durkheim's arguments against the pragmatists in the lectures went far beyond the
largely methodological criticisms he had voiced contra James, for example, in The Ele-
menta,r Forms. After his lengthy summary of the thought of the pragmatists, Durkheim
identified what he saw as the hallmark of pragmatic thinking: Pragmatism denies the value
of purely speculative thought. At the end of the twelfth lecture, Durkheim ([1955] 1983:64)
noted that pragmatism's "preoccupation with action, which has been seen as the defining
characteristic of pragmatism, is not, in my view, its major feature"; pragmatism is "much
less of an undertaking to encourage action than an attack on pure speculation and theoret-
ical thought." Durkheim ([1955] 1983:76-77) ended the fifteenth lecture with the claim
that "for pragmatism, truth has no speculative function: all that concerns it is its practical
utility," and in the following lecture stated that "the pragmatist philosophers, and Schiller
in particular, deny that thought has a speculative value."
Without knowing something about pragmatism's reception in France, it would be dif-
ficult to know how to understand Durkheim's argument. In point of fact, the pragmatists
did not deny that some speculative thought has value. James, for example, was not averse
to engaging in metaphysical speculation as long as he was convinced that his speculative
statements could pass the pragmatic test of meaning."' To say, as the pragmatists did, that
all meaningful thought is bound up with action, is not to say there is only one type of action
that can be connected with thought. For the pragmatists, meaningful speculative thought
could consist of those ideas that are phases of actions that are not immediately perceptible
as actions but which, on examination, turn out to be actions nonetheless. James's views
about the "pluralistic" character of the universe were certainly speculative, but they had
meaning inasmuch as they were tied to certain practical attitudes toward the world.
However, by portraying pragmatism as denying the speculative value of thought,
Durkheim could apply his sociology to the basic premises of pragmatism. In the lectures,
Durkheim argued that pragmatism's ideas about the nature of thought should be under-
stood as empirical claims, and then argued that these claims were empirically untrue.
Durkheim could make this argument only because he and his audience understood prag-
matism to be of a piece with Bergsonism and Catholic Modernism and therefore as deny-
ing that the intellectual or ideational aspects of religion were essential to religious experience.
Durkheim took this to mean that the pragmatists denied that religious ideas and beliefs
stem from an intellectual desire on the part of agents to understand their worlds, especially
their social worlds. Yet Durkheim's work on the sociology of religion provided proof that
religious ideas and myths are indeed speculative and intellectual in nature. If so, and if
religious ideas were the evolutionary precursors of the ideas of modern science and phi-
losophy, then the validity of the pragmatic understanding of thought could be called into
question.
Thus, Durkheim's characterization of pragmatism as an attack on speculative thought
was bound up with his understanding of French pragmatism-the pragmatism of Bergson
and the Modernists. In Creative Evolution, Bergson ([ 1907] 1911 ) tried to show that thought
9 Durkheim took issue with pragmatism's analysis of religion at a 1908 meeting of the French society of
philosophy (see Jones 1995), as well as in The Elementary Forms. He repeated many of these criticisms in the
twelfth lecture on pragmatism.
)0 For example, James ([19091 1943:249-50) wrote: "I am quite willing to part company with Professor
Bergson, and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect, provided you on your part then agree to
discriminate 'theoretic' or scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired to by most
philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from
living or sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of reality."
is never purely speculative in that it is never completely divorced from action. Bergson
argued that a distinctive feature of human intelligence is its ability to fabricate tools or
instruments out of "unorganized matter," matter that in its natural state is not an obvious
instrument for practical use. It does not matter that the objects apprehended by intelligence
are sometimes ideas rather than physical objects-intelligence sees ideas, too, as unorga-
nized matter that can be organized in some coherent, instrumental way. Even when intel-
ligence engages in speculative thinking, then, it is transforming the objects of its perception
and engaging in action, and the ideas and concepts it employs are in no sense "pictures" or
"copies" of those objects.
The Catholic Modernists also downplayed the importance of purely speculative thought,
at least within the realm of religion. At the 1908 seance on pragmatism, Le Roy (1908:280-
81) said of its theory of religious knowledge: "What pragmatism affirms is that the point is
to try and perceive moral realities, and, for this, moral conditions are required; further, that
religious truths are in the realm of givens and facts instead of theories, and thus that we
apprehend them first as moments of life instead of as materials of science." While prag-
matism asserted the superiority of practical reasoning, it did not exclude or subordinate
intelligence: "Does this mean that pragmatism condemns all uses of abstract, analytical,
discursive thought? Not at all, as this thought itself can be conceived of and practiced as a
moment of life. Only, it is up to experience to decide where, when, and in what degree it is
legitimate" (Le Roy 1907:274). For the Catholic Modernists and James (at least as the
latter was interpreted by Boutroux), dogmas and religious ideas have authority only when
they pertain to action, not when they speculate about the nature of the world. This was why
Blondel's "philosophy of action," as well as Le Roy's apologetics, were referred to as
varieties of pragmatism.
But Durkheim ([1955] 1983:77) insisted that the pragmatists' denial of the importance
of purely speculative thought within the realm of religion was empirically false: "How
valid is that opinion [that thought has no speculative value]? It is contradicted by the
facts." About "primitive" systems of classification, he elsewhere claimed that "these sys-
tems, like those of science, have a purely speculative purpose. Their object is not to facil-
itate action, but to advance understanding, to make intelligible the relations which exist
between things" (Durkheim and Mauss [1903] 1963:81). Durkheim's ([1912] 1915:169)
well-known argument, which he developed in The Elementary Forms, was that systems of
classification are "modeled upon the social organization, or rather that they have taken the
forms of society as their framework." "Primitive" taxonomies and mythologies provide
aboriginal peoples with ideational systems that explain the world around them, and these
systems are important components of religion: "Feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, are not
the whole religion. This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas
whose object is to explain the world; we have seen that even the humblest have their
cosmology" (Durkheim [1912] 1915:476).
While Durkheim was more interested in socially efficacious religious action, which lay
at the heart of collective effervescence, than in religious belief, he retained a strong inter-
est in what Pickering (1984) calls the "cognitive aspects" of religion. The pragmatists,
particularly the Catholic Modernists, either denied that religion had any such cognitive
component or downplayed the importance of the ideational aspects of religion for reli-
gious experience. But Durkheim often repeated in the pragmatism lectures that speculative
religious thought exists. Myths, he said, "are groupings of representations aimed at explain-
ing the world, systems of ideas whose function is essentially speculative . . . what lies at
the root of myths is not a practical need: it is the intellectual need to understand" (Durkheim
[1955] 1983:76-77). The twentieth lecture contained the assertion that "religious life ...
contains a rich abundance of forms of thought and activities of all kinds. In the field of
thought, these include myths and religious beliefs, an embryonic science, and a certain
poetry" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:94). Durkheim also distinguished mythological truths
from scientific truths: Both involve collective representations, shared understandings about
the realities they apprehend. "What religion expresses in its representations, its beliefs and
myths, is social realities and the way in which they act upon individuals ... [while science
expresses] the world as it is" (Durkheim [1955] 1983:87-88). Mythological thought and
scientific thought differ mostly in content; they are not radically different modes of appre-
hension. Having insisted that purely speculative mythological thought exists, Durkheim
could claim that speculative thought in general-that is, thought entirely removed from
the world of action-must exist as well, and can have intrinsic value.
Durkheim's argument lent empirical support to the correspondence theory of truth in
two ways. First, purely speculative thought was, by definition, thought that was not reflected
in action. Such thought could have no bearing on the practical problems of life and there-
fore could not be judged by any standard of utility. Second, purely speculative thought
could not produce its own verification. The only possible relations between purely spec-
ulative thought and reality were relations of correspondence or noncorrespondence and
these were consistent only with versions of the dogmatic theory of truth.
Interpretative Implications
Ample textual evidence indicates that Durkheim not only considered the religious dimen-
sions of pragmatism in the lectures, but made this consideration a cornerstone of his soci-
ological critique.
This implies, first, that Durkheim's attack on pragmatism was in part a defense of his
sociology of knowledge. Given the way pragmatism was received in France, Durkheim
may have viewed pragmatism's conception of religious experience as a threat to his own
attempts to explain the origin of certain types of knowledge by reference to sociological
data about the cognitive aspects of religion-aspects that, according to the pragmatists,
were not an essential part of religious experience.' I
Second, Durkheim's critique of the pragmatists should be understood within the con-
text of his religious politics. If, in expressing his objections to pragmatism, Durkheim was
opposing the diverse currents of religious and spiritualistic thought that Jamesian pragma-
tism, Bergsonism, and Catholic Modernism seemed to support, then his lectures can be
seen as a move in the ongoing rhetorical contest between supporters of the secular state
and traditionalistic proponents of religion. Durkheim, of course, was committed, for per-
sonal, sociological, and moral reasons, to a secular politics. As an assimilated Jew who had
carved out an identity for himself as a scientist and moralist for the French democracy
(Pickering 1994), Durkheim had a vested interest in the maintenance of a secular ideolog-
ical sphere that valued such an identity. Durkheim also favored, for sociological reasons, a
radical separation of Church and state and an eventual weakening of the moral role of the
Church. While Durkheim praised Christianity for its tolerance, its idealistic concern with
the interior moral life of the human being, and its emphasis on the need to discipline the
human passions (Pickering 1984), it is well known that he felt organized religion was
becoming outdated. Durkheim's moralistic vision for sociology, a vision that appealed to
administrators of the French Republic and thus provided an ideological basis for the insti-
tutionalization of the discipline, was that sociology would be offered to a populace whose
collective moral life had been threatened by the declining interest in religion (Grogin
1 l Further research is required to discover whether the pragmatists' ideas were actually used by Durkheim's
critics to challenge his sociology of knowledge. Such an historical finding would considerably bolster this inter-
pretation.
1988; Greenberg 1981; Clark 1973). Finally, despite his protestations that sociological
explanations of religious belief were not intended to undermine such belief, the scientific
vantage point from which Durkheim's sociology of religion was initiated was, at its core,
a secular one.
The revival of interest in religion after the turn of the century must have made Durkheim
uneasy. Tied to attacks on rationalism and empiricism, this revival threatened the Durkhe-
imian program. Because pragmatism was understood in France as providing philosophical
support for this revival, if only by defending the experiential validity of religious or spir-
itual belief against the objections of science, it is hardly surprising that Durkheim ([1955]
1983:1) challenged the pragmatists, declaring the threat posed by pragmatism to be "of
national importance." The complete history of Durkheim's response to the resurgence of
religious sentiment in the early twentieth century in France has not been written, but the
1913-14 pragmatism lectures will be an important part of the story.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
My analysis reveals a layer of critique in Durkheim's pragmatism lectures that has gone
largely unnoticed. While the lectures were an attack on the Jamesian theory of truth, they
were also a substantive defense of a crucial component of Durkheim's sociology of reli-
gion and, by extension, his sociology of knowledge. The lectures also were an attempt to
erode the support that various pragmatic philosophies were lending to the cause of reli-
gious apologetics. While my findings neither contradict nor confirm previous perspectives
on the lectures, they do suggest that interpretations that ignore Durkheim's treatment of
the religious dimensions of pragmatism are incomplete.
What are the implications of this conclusion for sociological theory? This depends on
what is meant by sociological theory. To the extent that Durkheim's pragmatism lectures
are regarded as part of the classical social-theoretical canon, an interpretation of the lec-
tures that provides historical evidence that they were intended to be understood differently
than they are currently understood is indeed of theoretical relevance. However, this does
not show that my interpretation of the lectures has implications for contemporary theoret-
ical efforts to understand the social world.
Nevertheless, there are at least two implications for contemporary sociological theory. First,
Durkheim's confrontation with the pragmatic understanding of religion was the occasion for
his lapsing into a highly unusual and highly revealing cognitive essentialism. Schmaus (I 1995),
Godlove (1986), and Lukes (1972) have observed that Durkheim frequently attempted to re-
solve philosophical disputes empirically by referring to sociological data. This is evident in
the pragmatism lectures vis-a-vis the use of data about the speculative aspects of myth and
religion. How successful was Durkheim's use of empirical evidence in the context of phil-
osophical argument? In fact, Durkheim did little more than assert the existence of purely spec-
ulative mythological thought. Certainly James, if he admitted that the mythologies of aboriginal
peoples fell under the rubric of religion, would have argued that mythological thought is tied
to action. To conceptualize the origin of the world in two different ways is to adopt two dif-
ferent practical attitudes toward the world. Durkheim would not have denied this, but would
have claimed that practical attitudes are analytically separable from the processes of thought.
Ultimately, however, Durkheim's recourse to empirical data served only to illustrate-not
resolve-the philosophical quarrel.
Perhaps anticipating criticism along these lines, Durkheim advanced several strictly
philosophical arguments about the relationship between thought and action. Dewey argued
that consciousness emerges when agents confront action-problematic situations, but
Durkheim ([1955] 1983:79) insisted that thought and action are antagonistic processes and
that sometimes "consciousness slows down, overloads or paralyzes action." He cited the
case of the pianist whose perfect playing is interrupted only when excessive conscious
attention is paid to the task. Thought, according to Durkheim ([1955] 1983:80), is "a
hyperconcentration of consciousness [whereas] action ... is a sudden release." Because
thought and action are opposed, action could not give rise to consciousness. What, then,
produces consciousness? Durkheim would answer that it is the human mind's essential
need for knowledge:
The role of consciousness is not to direct the behavior of a being with no need of
knowledge: it is to constitute a being who would not exist without it. ... Conscious-
ness is therefore not a function with the role of directing the movements of the body,
but the organism knowing itself.... Consciousness, far from having only the role of
directing the movements of beings, exists in order to produce beings.... Reducing
the conscious being to nothing but his actions means taking from him the very thing
which makes him what he is." ([1955] 1983:82-83)
In fact, Durkheim ([1955] 1983:77) defended his interpretation of the speculative char-
acter of myths in the following way: "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."
These arguments indicate that contemporary commentators may be misreading Durkheim
as subscribing to an entirely nonuniversalistic conception of reason. Durkheim's theoret-
ical work on the cultural construction of cognition, especially in Primitive Classification
and The Elementary Forms, has given rise to decades of anthropological fieldwork attempt-
ing to document cultural variability in the basic categories of human thought. In recent
years, Durkheim's underlying premises have come increasingly under attack from neo-
Kantians (Godlove 1986) and others (Gell 1992). According to his critics, when Durkheim
attempted to derive a metaphysics by looking out on the heterogeneity of the social world,
he abandoned the idea that there are certain categories of thought that all humans share by
virtue of their common status as thinking beings. While Durkheim recognized that all
social agents, across societies, have some categories and concepts in common, he never
satisfactorily answered the question of whether these common forms of thought resulted
from the universal functional requirements of social life or from the a priori necessities of
thought, whether these necessities are understood in Kantian terms or in terms of the
essential qualities of the human psyche (Schmaus 1994). Given this alleged lack of cog-
nitive universalism in Durkheim's work, the principal anti-Durkheimian argument has
been that while there is variability in the cultural understanding of the categories, there is
no variability in the categories themselves. For example, although agents in different soci-
eties may weave temporality into their religious rituals in different ways, this does not
demonstrate the variability across cultures of the nature of time itself (Gell 1992).
However, by positing a "need to understand" and the existence of at least an unsophis-
ticated "rationalist mind" as part of the make-up of all human beings, Durkheim, in the
pragmatism lectures, adumbrated a theoretical model in which the cultural variability of
reason is superimposed on a rudimentarily universal cognitive base. If, as Durkheim sug-
gests, there does exist a basic human need to understand the world-particularly the social
world-does this not imply that there must also exist certain inborn mental capacities that
could facilitate this understanding? What are these capacities? What is their relation to the
categories of thought whose origin Durkheim tried to explain sociologically? To what
extent was Durkheim's cognitive constructivism dependent on his essentialism? While
these questions cannot be answered in reference to the pragmatism lectures alone, one
clear implication of my interpretation of the lectures is that such questions should be
asked. The answers may bear on contemporary controversies in the sociology of knowl-
edge and culture and could support the claims by Schmaus and others that Durkheim was
in no final sense a relativist.
Second, the "religious" interpretation of Durkheim's lectures raises a problem with
contemporary sociological theory's efforts to utilize elements of both pragmatism and
Durkheimian sociology. Whether these efforts take the form of analytic theorizing about
interaction (Turner 1988), new undertakings in action theory (Alexander 1988 and else-
where), or sociological semiotics (Wiley 1994), they usually involve combining some
element of pragmatism's focus on the interactional self with the Durkheimian interest in
social solidarity and the socially integrative effects of shared cultural understandings. For
example, Wiley (1994:104, 132) attempts to demonstrate the existence of a complemen-
tarity between Durkheim's theory of solidarity and the pragmatic theory of the self; he
tries to "show what solidarity means in Durkheim's macro theory and then show how this
idea can be 'lowered,' not only to the level of interaction but also to that of the self" and
to establish that "reflexivity and solidarity can be formally integrated.... Durkheim's
solidarity has always been implicit in Mead's reflexivity."
Although Durkheim is not concerned with interaction in the pragmatism lectures, the
conceptual ground underlying Meadian interactionism had much in common with that
underlying the pragmatic theory of religion. Mead argues that, while meanings always
arise in a context of interaction in which the attitudes of sets of "generalized" others are
interiorized, the sociality of the self exists in a constant state of tension with the unique-
ness of personal experience. The self is constituted of ongoing internal conversations that
depend on available social signs and meanings and of the individual's unique chains of
experience. As Park ([1926] 1967) pointed out in his sociological rendering of pragma-
tism, this tension in the constitution of the self makes communication-involving the
coming together of experientially unique selves who interact only on the basis of what they
have in common-a precondition of moral order. Similarly, James's focus in the 1902
Gifford lectures on the personal aspects of religious experience stemmed in part from his
conviction that all such experience has a common character. By showing the convergence
of all religious experience compared with the divergent nature of different systems of
religious belief, James hoped to lay the theological groundwork for a religious pluralism or
moral order that would defend the right to believe in the existence of the Divine. Solidarity
was to be established not on the basis of collective symbols and ideas, but around the
irreducible commonality of a certain order of experience.
In both Meadian interactionism and the pragmatic theory of religion, then, personal
experience is opposed and yet inextricably tied to common or collective experience. A
different conception of the relationship between individual and collective experience under-
lies the Durkheimian theoretical project. For Durkheim, sociality does not arise from a
common experiential base, but from the ontological nature of the world. The sociality of
experience, in the Durkheimian scheme, largely reflects the extent of the individual's
participation-via collective representations and socially efficacious action-in the onto-
logical order of the social. Thus, experience provides the micro-foundation for the macro-
level variability of social solidarity. But it is unclear whether the pragmatists' conception
of the self, in which the self at any moment is not considered more or less social (though
experience can be more or less personal), is compatible with these Durkheimian micro-
foundations. It is hard to imagine selves, social through and through as pragmatism under-
stands them to be, experiencing anomie in the Durkheimian sense of an inadequate
introjection of the morally regulative aspects of society into the psyche of the individual.
It is therefore worth reconsidering whether pragmatism's theory of the self and Durkheim's
theories of anomie and solidarity can co-exist within the same theoretical frame.'2 I have
tried to show that one of Durkheim's objections to the pragmatic understanding of religion
involved a disagreement over the nature of religious experience, and that this disagreement
was central to Durkheim's pragmatism lectures. Analyses of the relation between the Durkhe-
imian and pragmatic conceptions of religious experience-analyses that could help assess
the theoretical compatibility of Durkheim's views on solidarity and the pragmatic under-
standing of the self-should therefore start with an examination of the lectures.
Advocates of the contextualist method contend that situating a text in its socio-
intellectual context can elucidate an author's intentions. Here the method has highlighted
a dimension of Durkheim's critique that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. While
many questions about Durkheim's relationship to the pragmatists remain unanswered, my
analysis should direct future research on the topic to Durkheim's treatment of Bergsonism,
Catholic Modernism, and other French intellectual discourses that offered experiential and
pragmatic defenses of religious faith.
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Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures: A Contextual Interpretation

Author(s): Neil Gross

This article attempts to understand E'mile Durkheim s 1913-14 lectures on pragmatism

article concludes by discussing several implications of this interpretation for sociolog-

an exegesis and critique of the thought of the Anglo-American pragmatic philosophers

later described by Mauss (1925:10) as "the crowning philosophical achievement of the

Rochberg-Halton 1986; Habermas 1983; Rorty 1982).

translations. Other quotations originally written in French are my own translation.

Sociological Theory 15:2 August 1997

? Almerican Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PRAGMATISM LECTURES

A review of the sparse scholarship on Durkheim's pragmatism lectures reveals several

competing interpretative perspectives. According to one group of scholars, Durkheim's

attack on pragmatism was primarily epistemological. De Gaudemar (1969:82), for exam-

seeks to describe. This theory of truth is an important element of Cartesian rationalism

cern with the social world as it is found by individuals or by a rationalist science,

emphasizing instead the "worldmaking" potential of individuals. Rawls (1996), Lukes

A Moral and Political Interpretation

According to a second group of scholars, Durkheim's moral and political disagreements

rationalism as fused to an unwavering belief in the political philosophy of liberalism. In a

stabilize the democratic polity. According to Kaufman-Osborn, Durkheim saw pragma-

findings of a science of morality into the French educational system:

Jones (1995), and Mestrovi6 (1993).

What is the substance of Durkheim's critique of pragmatism? In a nutshell, his attack

What he finds in pragmatism is no less than intellectual anomie, in that there is

fulcrum of his entire discussion of pragmatism .... (Allcock 1983:xxxvi-xxxvii)

which would ultimately result in anomic forms of social solidarity.

closely associated with Anglo-American pragmatism (Allcock 1983, 1992). Considering

understood as a critique of Bergson.

A Scholarly Differentiation Interpretation

ignored if this view is taken."

Durkheim as a "mild-mannered pragmatist" because the sociologist was willing to "hold

... on to what is valuable" from several different philosophical approaches in order to

the pragmatists, whose ideas in some ways resembled his own.

intellectual context in which the lectures were delivered are "recovered."

THE RECEPTION OF PRAGMATISM IN FRANCE

Pragmatism was an exceptionally popular philosophy in pre-World War I France. The

itself a little everywhere: in America, in England, in France, in Germany, in Italy." Jean

referred to pragmatism's "astonishing success." And an article in the popular journal La

characteristic of the present time" (Archambault 1914:291). Durkheim ([1955] 1983:1,9)

around Cambridge, Massachusetts, "were not long in crossing the Atlantic."

of the Anglo-American pragmatists were translated during the 25 or so years following

In addition, pragmatism was discussed at several conferences attended or attended to by

Congr&s de Philosophie held in Heidelberg in 1908. The journal Revue de metaphysique et

ing, of the Societe Francaise de Philosophie held in May 1908.

More important, a substantial secondary literature on pragmatism sprang up in France

(1912), Schinz's Anti-Pragmatism (1909), Bourdeau's Pragmatisme et modernisme (1909),

and Berthelot's Un Romantisme utilitaire (1911). Nearly 70 articles or reviews relating to

thought of as a vague and amorphous philosophical movement in which the Anglo-

alluded to the "elusive" character of pragmatic thought.

hardly the only one in philosophy."

unacknowledged reference to an essay by Arthur Lovejoy, Berthelot (1911:3) pointed out

playing differing affinities with their Anglo-American brethren.

matisme was thought of as a modern philosophical tendency, a general viewpoint on

(1908b) proposed to look to the "Anglo-Saxon" milieu in order to understand pragmatism

contemporary thought had crystallized into a distinct and identifiable doctrine.

of Spencer. Bourdeau (1909) noted pragmatism's striking similarities to the philosophies

win, Mach, and Nietzsche.

Others characterized pragmatism as principally a departure from idealism. For exam-

regarded pragmatism as a form of utilitarianism. Lalande (1906:135) approvingly cited

consists." Whereas traditional utilitarianism used utility-maximization as a standard for

relationships, independent of our satisfaction." Similarly, Schinz (1909), who suspected

that pragmatism tended toward intellectualism more than it acknowledged, maintained

Anglo-American pragmatism was also described in the French literature as a form of

Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures

Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures