Overcoming the Overcoming of Metaphysics

Durkheim, on John Milbank’s reading (Theology and Social Theory, 63-4), attempted to socialize Kant. Comte had already argued that Kant anticipated relativism, since he knew that knowledge had to do with “one’s environmental setting” and that “this principle made transcendent metaphysics impossible.” Biology and sociology were to make this assault on metaphysics even stronger. By stressing the social situatedness of knowledge, Durkheim was able to pull out the last props.

The move, Milbank argues, is “fraudulent,” and was already recognized as such by JG Hamann: “if . . . one advances against Kant a ‘metacritique,’ according to which the categories of knowledge are linguistically and historically determined (which is in part what Comte does also), then the very grounds of a clear distinction between ‘necessary’ finite knowledge and a superfluous and pretended transcendent knowledge are undermined. This distinction depended on our being able to ‘round upon finitude,’ to list once and for all the general a priori categories, both conceptual and sensory, into which the finite is organized. Yet if this cannot be done, if local and particular experiences always enter into our general conception of epistemological categories, making them endlessly revisable, and justifiable neither de facto and a posteriori, nor de jure and a priori, then these culturally particular categories can only justify themselves as a kind of ‘conjecture’ about the transcendent, and the relation of this transcendence to finitude.” 

Comte and Durkheim appear to finitize and humanize religion but “only because they endow the social and linguistic source of categorization with a transcendental colouring. They suppose, wrongly, that one can ‘round upon’ society as a finite object, and give an exhaustive inventory, valid for all time, of the essential categorical determinants for human social existence.”

Sociologists appear to relativize knowledge only because they don’t take their own categories as relative to particular historical and social circumstances. Durkheim thinks he can decode religion as the worship of society; he argues that the sacred/profane distinction is the essence of all religion. But these categories are not, in his usage, contingent. Religions get relativized with respect to Durkheimian transcendentals. And so he hasn’t really eluded transcendence at all, and hasn’t really escaped metaphysics. Rather, his “relativizing” theory depends on a metaphysics.