The Socratic Durkheim

8 The Socratic Durkheim Teaching Durkheim on Moral Obligation Stephen P. Turner and Carlos Bertha

"Are you attempting to tell me my duties, Sir?" "No, but I'm having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are." -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep The concept of duty, as Max Weber once said of the notion of a calling, "prowls about in our lives like the ghosts of dead religious beliefs."1 The term "duty," which looms so large in Kant and also in nineteenth-century ethics and social and political thought, was once obviously true as a description of commonplace moral situations and intelligible without academic instruction; today it is arcane and puzzling. When we teach the meaning of texts about duty and obligation, we are typically forced to explain them in terms of concepts that still survive as part of daily life, such as promises, which lack the original force and significance of "duty." As a consequence, learning ethics as an academic subject is very often a matter of mastering this archaic language and "applying" it where it no longer naturally fits, and puzzling over its failure to fit. Yet these concepts are so pervasively bound up with our philosophical understanding of ordinary normative concepts that we can neither ignore them nor do without them. And what holds for teach· ing ethics holds also for political and social thought. To understand such notions as "political obligation," for example, requires that one understand the notion of obligation in the first place, and consequently many of the same problems of pedagogy that arise for ethics arise for social philosophy, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. So teaching ethics or political theory in a way that makes sense of

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the notion of obligation is correspondingly more difficult than it would have been either at the time of Kant or a century ago.

Using The Elementary Forms in Class In this chapter we will discuss some pedagogical uses of Durkheim that serve to make sense of obligation by enabling students to see how these and related moral concepts are based on, and express, actual moral feelings and bear on actual moral experience. We collaborated in the teaching of a course that was directed at a multidisciplinary audience, including students interested in political philosophy, sociological theory, and political theory. The course itself was defined as a mass section, and for most of the time it was taught was presented through the internal television course delivery system of the university, which transmitted the course to branch campuses. Total enrollments were typically over one hundred. The course was team taught, and there were sections on four major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and a fourth figure, usually a pragmatist; different individuals were included as the fourth thinker at various times in which the course was offered. This discussion will relate exclusively to a four-week section of the course devoted to Durkheim, which focused on readings from Pickering's Sociology of Religion.. The course readings also included substantial material from selections in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life. A second class, to be discussed later, is a class in military ethics, originally taught primarily to Reserve Officer Training Corps students as a philosophy class. The first of these classes consisted oflectures and discussion, but a major feature of the class was a take-home exam, which was designed to compel students to reflect on their own moral experiences in Durkheimian terms. The key feature of this exercise was that it enabled students to identify, through the use of Durkheimian strategies, both ritual structures and social forms that embodied and signified obligations for them, and to see how these forms (and the enactment of the rituals they required) produced feelings of obligation. The approach was "Socratic" in the sense that it made no attempt to instruct students about their obligations, or to derive them from ethical maxims about obligations that they might have rationally acquiesced to, or to treat obligation in any respect as the product or consequence of a theory. Like Chandler's celebrated detective Philip Marlowe, we asked what our duties are. But our questioning was disciplined by basic Durkheimian reasoning, together with a consideration of the kinds of facts the Durkheimian account of obligation points to. The method could only succeed if students already in some way felt obligations of the kind we considered and also could be made to recognize moral feelings as the product of ritualized social interaction and participation in something "higher" than and distinct from the individual will.

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Needless to say, this sharply contrasts with much of current ethical teaching. The recent revival of interest in Kantian approaches in ethics has often been only very distantly linked to substantive senses of obligation. When pressed, a present-day Kantian in ethics, such as Thomas Nagel and Christine Korsgaard, will characteristically provide a highly generic and often very thin example that they claim can be unequivocally established through the resources of reason itself The focus is on what can unequivocally be said to be rational. An obligation not to torture other people, for example, is a characteristic example of these obligations. Whether this is a convincing strategy in ethics is a metaphilosophical ques tion that can be left to others. But it is evident that whatever agreement about philosophical methods might tie together Kantian ethical thinkers, there is a substantial problem about content that arises from these arguments, and this problem is well known to anyone who teaches Kant's ethics as a source of usable insight into actual ethical questions, as distinct from a formal exercise in ethical theory. People typically do not regard these ethical dictates of reason as relevant to them, and, specifically, they do not recognize them as motivating. There is a large gap between the sorts of things that do powerfully motivate people, such as family bonds, and the status of such bonds in ethical theory. Family feeling, indeed, is barely intelligible to ethics . It appears to be a matter ofirrationality and therefore a source of conflict with the "ethical."

Historical Background Difficulties with Kant's ethics akin to these contemporary pedagogical problems were of course well known to thinkers of the nineteenth century, and they focused on two particular problems with the Kantian analysis of obligation. First, the fact that Kant fails to provide a plausible motivation for acting in accordance with these obligations, was the point that concerned such figures as the legal philosopher Rudolph Ihering, who commented: "You might as well hope to move a loaded wagon from its place by means of a lecture on the theory of motion as the human will by means of the categorical imperative." 2 The second problem, equally serious, was the inadequacy of any universalistic account of obligation to make sense of the diversity of actual obligations in terms of which actual moral agents operated. It was evident in the nineteenth century that different cultures cultivated different senses of obligation, that different professions cultivated different kinds of obligations, and so forth. Durkheim was of course well aware of these discussions and in particular in his earliest writings commented on attempts to account for cultural diversity like those of Wundt, which provide a substantive moral psychology that does so, and the writings of various figures on the general topic of moral psychology, including Ihering. 3 Durkheim was also aware, especially through Spencer but

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probably also through Victor Cousin,' of the peculiar legacy of the dispute between intuitionism and utilitarianism of the middle part of the nineteenth century. The course provided a useful pretext for introducing this historical background. The arguments in this dispute are summarized in the first part of W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals, which defends intuitionism. The key to this defense is the notion of moral feeling, and the claim that intuitionism rests on an induction quite as severe as any that can be employed by their opponents. They examine, analyze, and classify their existing moral feelings, ascertain in what respects their feelings agree with or differ from others, trace them through their various phases, and only assign them to a special faculty when they think they have shown them to be . . .

generically different from all others. 5 The intuitionists' claim, which is similar to Durkheim's own famous emphasis on externality, was that if moralists approach the problem inductively, they will arrive at the core fact on which intuitionism rests: first by "perceiving in ourselves a will, and a crowd of intellectual and emotional phenomenon that seem wholly different from the properties of matter,"• and, second, from this perceived difference, inferring the existence of a power of perceiving the differences, and, third, by naming this power. From reasoning of this sort Bishop Butler took the next, explanatory step, arguing that "the sense of obligation that is involved in" moral judgments "separates them from all other sentiments" and therefore requires a separate perceptual apparatus, "a special faculty of supreme authority called conscience."' The reasoning, in short, was this: we perceive the difference between obligatory feeling and other feelings, and thus have an autonomous power, or faculty, that enables us to do this, which we may call conscience. Spencer respected this statement of the problem, particularly the basic idea that, as Lecky says, a theory of morals must explain not only what constitutes a duty, but also how we obtain the notion of there being such a thing as duty. It must tell us not merely what is the course of conduct we ought to pursue, but also what is the meaning of this word "ought," and from what source we derive the idea it expresses. 8 But Spencer came to different conclusions from Lecky. Spencer grasped that the fundamental problem with the intuitionist account of moral feeling was a problem that paralleled Kant's problem, namely, that moral feeling, to the extent that it is grounded in something-either intuition given by God or reason that is universal-can only with great difficulty, if at all, be reconciled with the diversity of moral feeling between cultures. Conscience is culturally diverse, and many societies operate in terms of shame. Spencer's solution to the prob-

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