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03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 117 Book Reviews Neil Gross and Robert Alun Jones (eds., trans.). Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883-1884, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. 2004. pp. 339. Thanks to the enterprise and hard work of the editors, a transcription of the original French manuscript has been available for some while on the web. Thanks also to their determination, an English version has now been pub- lished. But as the introduction to this makes clear, the manuscript is a set of notes taken by the young André Lalande, discovered among his papers by the librarians of the Sorbonne in 1995, and entitled, ‘E. Durkheim—lectures on philosophy given at the lycée of Sens in 1883-84’. The introduction considers the evidence for them as notes of a course given in fact by Durkheim. And it now seems the consensus of scholarly opinion that they are, with no special reason to conclude otherwise. Yet there is still a need for caution. Did Durkheim really subscribe to the proof of the existence of God at the end of the course? Was he completely free to express his own views, given the constraints of teaching an official philosophy programme? How reliable are student notes as a record of lectures? Indeed, it is because they are student notes that the editors have gone for a readable, free and easy translation, rather than a scrupulously literal rendition, as if of a ‘sacred text’ by Durkheim himself. And they succeed very well in what, in the circumstances, seems to me the correct translation strategy. The manuscript might not have immediate, obvious importance as a key to Durkheim’s sociology. But the book they have produced is a highly acces- sible guide to French philosophy of the time. True, it is the link with Durkheim that is the selling point. And this is no bad thing, if it encourages a wider and more informed interest in the French philosophical context in which he developed his sociology. The trouble with so many readings of Durkheim is that they either de-philoso- phize his sociology, or they parachute into it with a de-contextualized idea of philosophy itself. The publication of the Sens lecture-course is a wel- come antidote to all this. But it is invaluable in another way. If we try to understand French philosophy in Durkheim’s time, and indeed want to construct a sociology of this, it isn’t enough just to go to contemporary philosophy books, reviews, articles, etc. For it is evident that it was a sig- nificantly oral culture, transmitted as well as transformed through personal Durkheimian Studies, Volume 11, 2005: 117-140 © Durkheim Press ISSN 1362-024X 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 118 Book Reviews contact, unwritten codes, discussions and debates, but also and not least the institution of the lecture. The Sens manuscript helps to give us a glimpse of this vie philosophique. Thus it is not hard to see why Lalande and his fellow lycée students felt inspired by Durkheim, and rated him so highly. If we consult standard philosophy textbooks of the period—for example, Jacques, Simon and Saisset, Manuel de philosophie (1863); Janet, Traité élémentaire de philosophie (1873); Rabier, Leçons de Philosophie (1884)—they aren’t exactly a lively, exciting read. It requires a truly Durkheimian ‘effort’—assisted by many cups of coffee and the threat of impending examinations—to stay awake while wading through them. In contrast, the Sens lectures are almost exhil- arating, in their brisk opening discussion of different takes on philosophy, their swift tour of Psychology, Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics, their new look at old issues such as freedom versus determinism, their always-to-the- point crispness. And coming across in the notes, there is the presence of the lecturer himself, the young man hotfoot from Paris, brimming with confi- dence, and well versed in how to attract and sustain attention. A general pattern is to set up a problem, then fill it out with clear statements of opposing positions plus handy references to their main supporters. But it is also to proceed, with a flourish, to how to solve the problem, so that knowledge of long-running issues and classic positions and references com- bines with a feeling of uplift, as students and lecturer together advance towards a new, modern, better understanding of things. Neil Gross’s introduction does a good job in setting out to identify main themes and lines and patterns of argument that run through the lectures. On the other hand, one of the patterns of argument is in fact to incorporate references to key figures who represent a particular position or a whole general approach. And so it can also be helpful to ask about the lecture-course’s references. Who tops its list of ‘Great Philosophers’, and why? Who is margin- alized, or left out altogether, and why? Thus it is Kant who is by far the most frequently cited and discussed philosopher of all. In contrast, there is no mention whatsoever of Hume, and indeed there is no other evidence that his work was ever read by Durkheim. It is instead John Stuart Mill who is picked out as the arch-representative of the radical philosophical empiricism attacked again and again in the lectures. And, after Kant, the most cited and discussed author is Mill—though closely followed by Spencer, seen as the lat- est lesson to us all of the errors of empiricism. Indeed, in a rough and ready but neat statistic, the references to Kant are equalled by the combined references to the arch-empiricist twins, Mill-and-Spencer. Moreover, this symbolic as well as statistical battle of references—Kant versus Mill-and-Spencer— leads on to perhaps the best strategy for tackling the lecture-course, which is to try to identify its basic underlying problematic. The prize, then, is if the Sens philosophy course contains a first version of the same basic problematic that underlies and shapes the whole career of Durkheim’s sociology itself. A place to start is where the lectures start, and his whole concern with philosophy as a concern with ‘the inner man’ and a study of ‘states of 118 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 119 Book Reviews consciousness and their conditions’ (35). For it seems to me this is more than a main theme, but a foundation of the entire problematic at work in his sociology. Thus it is fundamental that the lectures extend consciousness beyond the faculty of cognition, so that it includes not only thought but sensation and action—or, as in The Rules, ways of thinking, feeling and act- ing. And it is fundamental because it sets up a problematic in which there is one same single world of human ‘consciousness’, but involving both a radical epistemological break between this world’s different realms, and, somehow, an interlinkage between them. Indeed, we could almost be reading ‘The Dualism of Human Nature’ when we read, in the lectures, that ‘the self remains one, the point around which all the faculties converge’ (59). And as in ‘The Dualism’, so in the lectures, what is at bottom wrong with empiricism is its monistic reduction of everything to sensory experience, utility, self-interest. In contrast, the trouble with Kant’s efforts to escape this is an escape from the world altogether, as in appeal to the a priori or imagination of the noumenal, and as in his attempt to reconcile freedom and determinism. Thus we could almost be reading Moral Education’s discussion of autonomy when we read, in the lectures, that Kant leaves the will imprisoned in the noumenal, so that the freedom he offers us isn’t a real freedom at all, but ‘metaphysical, virtual, sterile’ (163-164). Before going further, however, it is worth making some particular points. There is a more or less uniform hostility in the references to Mill, Spencer and other empiricists, who include Adam Smith and his ‘morality of sentiment’ (237). Yet there is not the same hostility in the references to Kant. Thus sweeping comments on Durkheim’s ‘anti-Kantianism’ are superficial and misleading. In fact, in the lectures as elsewhere, Durkheim is often highly appreciative of Kant, and this is not least an appreciation of Kant’s onslaught on empiricism. Thus the lectures on freedom work their way up to Kant, for, in his battle against empiricists, it was Kant who came up with ‘perhaps the strongest response’ to the doctrine of determinism (163). Sim- ilarly, after the lecture laying into Mill, Spencer, Smith and the empiricist ‘Morality of Sentiment’, we move on to higher ground in the lecture on ‘The Morality of Kant’. For here we read that Kant’s ethics, in their determination to draw us away from the world of the senses, constitute ‘one of the greatest efforts ever made to push humanity towards the ideal’ (242). True enough, it runs into difficulties and indeed is doomed to failure. But it is a ‘beautiful’ failure. In sum so far, the lecture-course’s problematic gets articulated in a consistent rejection of empiricism and its reduction of the world of consciousness to the substratum of the senses. But it is together with a more ambivalent attitude towards Kant, involving an appreciation of his argu- ments against empiricism as well as an indebtedness to these, yet also a consistent rejection of an escape from the world in which he takes flight into the a priori and the noumenal.

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