The notion of "objectivity" in the "subjectivist Durkheim": A reading of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

CARLOS BELVEDERE

Rochester

Conferencia; 2012 SPHS Conference; 2012

Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences

I will undertake a phenomenological reading of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life focused on the notion of objectivity. I will establish that Durkheim confers to social facts the same features as Husserl does to ideal objectivities, since they are perceived as not thought just by me or others given that they have a constant manner of being, a nature that does not depend on individual arbitrariness and which results in necessary relations. Furthermore, I will show that Durkheim expressly refers to the idea of ?region? to draft what can be considered as an ontology of the social world, with its laws and facts. In order to ?address the social realm? he proposes a regional analysis that is not so different from Husserl?s, in the awareness that it is always possible to find the most general structure of a phenomenon of a specified type. Therefore, based on a grouping and designation of groups of similar phenomena, Durkheim proposes a stratification into different ontological regions within the more general region of the modes of being.