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Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to continue our discussion of certain passages from Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive that we began in the last session. And I would just remind you that we talked about the way in which the concept of observation and therefore of what is factual gets played off in Comte against the realm of the imagination. I would also remind you that Comte believes that the neglect of the facts is encouraged by the untamed exercise of the imagination, a neglect that he identifies with a failed or inadequate adaptation to the actual given circumstances of society. In Comte, therefore, you already find, in rudimentary form, something like the theory of adaptation that later played such an important role in Spencer, and indeed has continued to dominate the field in American sociology to this day. I would add, in passing, that all this is not without interest in historical terms, for many of you will know that the theory of adaptation in the context of sociology is what has appropriately enough been dubbed ‘social Darwinism’; in other words, Darwin’s theory of adaptation, of the ‘survival of the fittest’, of the specimens that are best adapted to the actual conditions of life, is essentially transferred to sociology. But you find such theories, or at least this general idea, in Comte even before the development of Darwin’s theory of adaptation, which surely shows that the spirit of positivism in sociology unfolded in an immanent way and certainly has no need to be traced back to influences from biology. The fact that the concept of adaptation first makes its appearance in the context of sociology – although it now certainly enjoys a more secure scientific status in biology than it does in sociology – seems only to strengthen the possibility that the Darwinian conception itself was influenced by social ideas that actually derived from the competitive mechanisms of modern society, from the question of survival or otherwise in the specific context of economic struggle. (This possibility has already been suggested in various ways, and, in connection with our own concern with the relationship of philosophy and sociology, it clarifies the relationship between sociology and other concrete particular disciplines.) Thus I suggest that these ideas can ultimately be traced back to sociology and found their way into biology only later on,¹ and that this account is more plausible than the tired old story about Spencer that you get from the standard histories of science.²

Now the downgrading of imagination in comparison with observation – a direct consequence of the theoretical approach we have been considering – gives a distinctive twist to the concept of the subject, and this is actually what defines the relationship of philosophy and sociology. If you just recall for a moment, including those of you who have not specifically studied philosophy, what you know about the great idealist systems of the post-Kantian period, especially those of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, you will certainly be aware that a remarkably elevated and emphatic concept of subjectivity stands at the heart of all these philosophical doctrines. It is quite true that Hegel’s philosophy of objective idealism restricts the unrestricted validity of the concept of the subject as an utterly creative and spontaneous agency, a view that is particularly characteristic of Fichte; but in Hegel too the entire world can ultimately be regarded as the product of subjectivity, and the exemplary demand which this lays upon knowledge, upon philosophy as science, is precisely this: thought must exert itself to move beyond the mere facts, to penetrate the facts in a really thoughtful way, and, to express this task in traditional philosophical language, to bring out the very essence of the matter. Of course we cannot just talk about this tendency in a purely general and unqualified way. I need to say this because I feel obliged to present these things to you in a properly differentiated fashion. For there is a real danger that such general characterizations threaten to obscure or obliterate significant distinctions. And I believe that it is the duty of a lecture course such as this not to pass on any misleading ideas merely for the sake of offering you a straightforward orientation at the start. Now the concept of the subject, as you find it in philosophy, is itself ambiguous in many ways. Thus in Fichte, and to a certain sense already in Kant, the ‘subject’ is distinguished from the individual.³ The subject can be seen either as a social subject or as a purely intellectual entity, i.e. as an abstraction from the actually existing empirical subjects, or again as the ideal subject of scientific cognition, we might say, as the spirit of science as distinct from the individual human subjects who may embody it. Now this emphatic concept of the subject, which you can trace back to Kantian philosophy, of course also already implied for the German idealists some restriction of the meaning of actual empirical subjects. Thus even the most extreme speculative idealism would not have claimed that any individual, if I may put this rather crudely, could just think away wildly in their own way and simply construe a world of their own making. Rather, each thinking individual serves as a representative of this higher, universal, transcendental or objective subject, must try and live up to the full and undiminished significance of what can be found and observed, and thereby correct the limited and arbitrary aspects of a merely individual subjectivity. Hegel’s philosophy already follows this through to the very end when he calls, with a seemingly paradoxical expression, for freedom towards the object.⁴ This refers to the capacity on the part of the subject to abandon oneself to the object, to immerse oneself as thinking subject in the matter itself, instead of simply spinning this out of oneself, turning it into a mere product of oneself, as it were. Nonetheless, the thought of the thinking subject as a spontaneous and productive subject is crucial for German Idealism, and indeed for the entire philosophical tradition. It is no accident if, in contrast to the passage I have already cited, where Comte speaks of the excess of imagination over observation, we find something very different even in Kant, a thinker who was notoriously cautious and reserved in his attitude to speculative thought. For Kant accords a central place to the concept of the imagination, and specifically to the original and productive power of the imagination which gives unity to the things of experience. In other words, what you find in sociology, to put this rather crudely here, is a kind of anti-subjective tendency: on this view the subject is not supposed to inform or shape reality in any way through its own intellectual processes or through its own activity, but simply keep to what reality provides. And in the course of time this has produced a requirement that anyone who is engaged with empirical sociology today can readily experience for themselves;⁵ and this, if I may exaggerate somewhat just so you understand what I am talking about here, is the requirement for the self-liquidation of the thinking subject. I believe that what distinguishes the positivistic spirit from the spirit of philosophy is this notion that the subject must effectively eliminate itself in order to attain the truth, whereas philosophy holds that the object only reveals itself at all through its exposure to the power and freedom of the subject. This is one of the most crucial distinctions here. Thus when the sociologists among you are learning how to prepare interviews these days, you will be told that it is imperative in all cases to suppress any thoughts of your own, that you ignore your own views when drawing any conclusions about the people before you, that you keep entirely to the relevant data; in short, if this suppression of your imagination, this restriction of your own freedom, appears to you here as the natural requirement of scientific research, this is ultimately connected with the attitude that early sociology already adopted in relation to the spirit of philosophy. I just want to present you with this idea here, and simply help you to see that these demands, which you will of course encounter not only in sociology but in every field of scientific research and investigation, are not nearly as self-evident as they may initially seem to be, for such demands actually already imply a very specific conception of scientific or objective knowledge, and one that is anti-philosophical in character. And it will be our task here to reflect expressly upon the question whether this ascetic approach which science constantly expects of us actually represents a freedom towards the object, whether it gives us more of the object, or whether under certain circumstances it even gives us less of the object, or whether perhaps this question can ultimately be decided simply in these terms.

In any case, this Comtean demand at the expense of the free subject has a certain implication for sociological thought which I would like to draw to your attention even at this preliminary stage, and that is the way this demand essentially directs the process of thinking. By encouraging you to avoid speculation and orient yourselves to the given, you find your thought is already referred to the categorial forms and the givens that you happen to encounter as they are. This tacitly presupposes the existing order, the particular arrangement of things that you find before you, although this presupposition is never actually made explicit, and the existing order is not only turned into the criterion of truth but is thereby elevated to the norm that is supposed to govern thinking as such. And this specific concept of adaptation has had these two sides to it right from the start: in the first place, we must unreservedly register the facts as faithfully as possible, while taking care to deduct all costs incurred by the process of subjectivity, so that the remainder, what you are finally left with, is the truth; in the second place, there is already something normative or prescriptive about this adaptation or accommodation on the part of knowledge to what is currently the case; thus knowledge itself is supposed to take its measure from the existing order of things as they are, though it may perhaps improve things in a gradual way. In other words, the conception of sociology which we have started with already contained the demand for the kind of immanently systematized thought that has been proclaimed as an explicit programme in a recently published book by René König, a work to which we shall return in due course.⁶ It is the kind of thinking that requires a guarantee of its own utility, that sets itself up as its own criterion by asking: ‘What am I good for? How can you best use me in the world as it is?’

Here, ladies and gentlemen, I am touching on a problem that I realize is extremely important to many of you, and it may be best to say a few words about it towards the beginning of the lecture course. For the question you come up against here – the idea that thought must be licensed by its utility – is a very serious one. It is not something that can just summarily be decided with an expression of academic arrogance: ‘For God’s sake, all we are talking about is applied knowledge, and that has nothing to do with truly autonomous and binding knowledge.’ What we have here is a genuine contradiction, and I think it is best for you to recognize this contradiction precisely as a theoretical and philosophical contradiction. If you really do recognize it and comprehend its necessity, this may help you to avoid the idea that this contradiction can simply be removed or abolished by science itself. If you are seriously committed to your studies, I believe you will see that the idea that the specific discipline with which you are engaged is capable of eliminating for you the contradictions which actually give it life and spirit is an illusion or daydream that you must be prepared to renounce; as is the idea that the realm of science or research could offer you any existence, or even any consciousness, that would be free of contradiction. For that would in fact assume that the world can be captured without remainder in terms of consciousness itself or any features of consciousness. It would be to ignore or forget something essential – that our consciousness is ultimately only a rather inadequate and tentative way of dealing with reality itself and that nothing simply guarantees or assures us that reality is not itself contradictory. What I am trying to say is this: you yourselves as knowing subjects, all of us as knowing subjects, always already oriented in some way towards the whole, the absolute, the truth – in other words, every thought,⁷ however unassuming it may be, simply by presenting itself as a claim, even an unassuming claim, to be right already harbours a kind of internal dynamic, already bears something like a concept of objective truth or objective rightness within itself. And thought feels itself somehow stalled or cheated if its claim is not honoured – in other words, if it is not actually given what it believes it may rightly expect from reality. On the other hand, the way the world is arranged means that we actually risk ruin if we fail to adapt sufficiently to it. Hence the pertinent saying: ‘Primum vivere, deinde philsophari’.⁸ In other words, we must first earn a living for ourselves before we can start thinking at all, and the idea of free, disinterested and emphatic truth already presupposes the kind of life we can secure only through a certain kind of accommodation to realistic ends and interests. Thus we can actually live and then perhaps think in an emphatic sense only if we perform what is often described as ‘socially productive labour’. All intellectual labour, and thus all academic and scientific labour, is also part of this socially productive labour.

As individuals engaged in scientific or scholarly disciplines, and specifically as sociologists who have to deal with a particularly sensitive and contested field, we are compelled to do certain things that allow us to earn a living, in other words, to function within the existing order; and this remains the case even if we do not restrict our thinking to the immanent demands of the system in which we find ourselves but reflect critically upon that system as philosophy enjoins us to do. On the other hand, we thereby find that our soul is deprived of ‘its God-given right’, as Hölderlin puts it,⁹ that the innermost dynamic of thought is somehow stifled or cut off. Now it often happens that students, and perhaps many of you here, especially if you have been thinking long and hard about these things, feel like coming up and reproaching us, your academic teachers, as follows: ‘Well, what on earth are we supposed to do then? On the one hand, as sociologists, we must try and find some role or function to perform within the whole existing set-up; at the same time we must not only entertain a distinctively critical attitude to this set-up but also know that these roles and functions we are meant to take up actually run counter to a range of insights that we have specifically acquired by understanding the mechanisms of society – and it is you pernicious sociologists who are responsible for this! – look what the Lorelei has done with her singing.¹⁰ You have tempted us with the prospect of some kind of free and undiminished truth; and now we find we cannot actually live with this truth, and when we go out and earn a living, we cannot fail to have a bad conscience about it, although in the world as it is in today you can hardly expect us to go hungry!’ Now this objection does indeed capture the predicament in which social thought inevitably finds itself today, although I think it is rather unjust to reproach sociology itself with this, or even to claim, as I have occasionally heard it said, that you have merely been drawn into a kind of sociological schizophrenia. It is unjust because the contradiction that I pointed out for you is not one that is produced by thinking, by the discipline of sociology, but is actually the contradiction inherent in society – a society whose understanding of reason, of ratio, has been shaped by the concept of a binding and comprehensive idea of truth, but one where reason is also always tied and limited in a particularistic way to merely instrumental rationality. When you find yourselves in this situation, the gravity of which I certainly do not underestimate, and then complain to us, your teachers, who must pursue knowledge, you are acting as if someone who tries to diagnose a difficult situation must actually be held responsible for the fact that the situation in question exists – and this is a kind of psychological mechanism that is indeed extraordinarily common. In this connection I like to cite the remark of Helvétius that the truth never hurt anyone except the one who told it.¹¹ I would advise you, therefore, to respond in a different way before you throw in the towel – in other words, before you just say: ‘Ah well, what’s the point of all this sociological reflection? I’ll just learn the required skills and techniques and get a decent job at the end of it. This damn sociological theory can only lead me astray – to the devil with it!’ So before you go down this road you would be better off, I believe, if you at least try and understand this contradiction, under which you and I can assure you all of us suffer, as an objectively grounded contradiction, and reflect upon it as such. My own view, if I may introduce this here, is that you will actually get further in your knowledge of facts, of the relations and connections involved in society, if you take on board these uncomfortable theoretical reflections than you will by just focusing relentlessly on the functional connections of society. For it is a rather remarkable paradox that when we simply try and perform our functional roles within society, when we reduce our own knowledge to this merely functional level, we generally find we actually no longer know or understand anything at all, or that our knowledge is extraordinarily impoverished as a result. In other words, to put this in logical terms, if you completely reduce the practice of thought to the mechanisms of social adaptation, if you allow thought no other possibility beyond that of unreserved accommodation, then thought ends up as nothing but tautology. It ends up with what empirical research likes to call ‘the preparation of the facts’, where you basically have no more than what you have already. Any judgements you come up with are all really nothing more than ‘analytical judgements’, mere repetitions or classifications of what is already there anyway. Yet I would suggest that the spirit of science, if we are still using the word ‘science’ in all seriousness and are not merely referring to various techniques and procedures, surely consists precisely in bringing us further, in giving us more, allowing us to see or understand more, than the orderly and efficient repetition of what we already hold in our hands.

Now the objection against imagination in favour of observation, which I talked about earlier, naturally has a certain plausibility. There is no doubt that the notion that mysterious forces are at work in society, things beyond the world of observable fact, can easily lead to all kinds of wild speculations and mythological explanations. If you consider Plato’s doctrine of the state from this perspective today, for example, and try and picture the essential character of a human society that is supposed to follow from assuming the reality of pure forms or essences or supposing that the soul essentially consists of a rational, a spirited and a desirous element,¹² what you will find is an extremely arbitrary and highly stylized expression of the actual society of the time. On the other hand, it has to be said that it is only the imagination, only the element in sociology which goes beyond the recording and collation of connections, that is able to bring such facts into any meaningful connection with one another – and this is a central problem which I hope these lectures will specifically encourage you to think about. Comte’s line of argument – and here Comte can really stand in for the positivist position in its entirety – supposes and essentially starts from the idea that all connections between social facts are fictive in character, or, as we might put this today in slightly more polite, friendly and elegant terms, are simply scientific models, while the only thing that is true, by comparison, are the facts themselves. The problem that I am trying to draw to your attention here is this: this assumption, in which you are unreflectively raised as sociologists, already downplays the possibility that social relations and connections precede and pre-form the individual data. I am talking about the kind of approach that says: ‘But something like a system of society doesn’t really exist at all, it’s just something that exists in the heads of philosophers!’ – and here that means: in the heads of certain backward sociologists who are not scientifically respectable in the first place. The objector might continue: ‘Something like a social system is not actually present, and it is highly questionable whether we can even speak of social systems at all; the only real thing here are the facts which can be observed and collected on the basis of our questionnaires and controlled experiments, the facts which can be captured in our protocol sentences, the facts we can take home with us.’ Here is the reason, to state it very simply, why I believe we should hold on to a philosophical concept of society in the context of modern sociology – a discipline which is now even proud to be a ‘sociology without society’, as René König puts it.¹³ To state the matter simply once again: it is surely impossible to avoid recognizing that we actually live in an all-encompassing social system, that the facts we find and the things we encounter within this system are already significantly pre-formed through this system. All the individual social acts that we perform as social beings are interrelated, and not in some merely arbitrary way but in accordance with certain rules within a quite specifically organized context. Even in our immediate experience we find that we encounter individual social facts within the context of a system that cannot be pinned down as readily as facts themselves may be, and this is the justification for continuing to hold on to the idea of society, of critical reflection, of an interconnected whole, of a predetermining structure, of a system, in short, for continuing to hold on to the social categories which sociology originally took over from philosophy. Here, of course, we encounter an objection which is frequently raised by the philosophy of science and by contemporary empirical sociology – the objection which Helmut Schelsky specifically raised against me quite recently, something about which I shall have a lot more to say later on in these lectures¹⁴ – runs like this: ‘You all talk about a social system that somehow goes beyond the individual facts; you say there is an exchange society in which equivalent elements are exchanged for one another, in which we encounter real things that at the same time are not real things;¹⁵ you make all kinds of clever remarks in this connection, but where, after all, is the system you talk about, the system that allegedly stands behind the facts, if you don’t also have the facts themselves? Are you just relying on some special intuition? That would surely be a very curious or indeed laughable situation for someone who appeals to self-conscious reason as emphatically as you do. Or are you just trying to play off your own so-called simple pre-scientific or pre-reflective experience against the demands of science? You certainly won’t get far with that, for if you want to be rigorously scientific in your approach this kind of pre-scientific experience can only be regarded as basically dogmatic, as something that is not ultimately binding at all! You have to start by bracketing out such experience and subjecting it to the scrutiny and control of science if it is to serve as a reliable source of truth!’ Now I do not wish to go into this question fully at this point. But it strikes me like this: the idea that the system which we ourselves experience as an extreme form of compulsion itself requires theoretical justification in terms of individual facts already implies a kind of reversal of the order of knowing, of the process of experience, a reversal that is already framed in terms of the basic rules of the established sciences.¹⁶

But I think I may venture to say, even at this point in today’s lecture, that we experience the social pre-formation in question whenever in our own social behaviour we try to act in a way other than that which the pre-existing social system essentially requires of us. This is a fact which was accorded an undeniably central place even by empirical sociology in relatively recent times – and I would say …;¹⁷ I am referring to Durkheim, whom we shall soon have more to say about in a different context, and to his concept of ‘contrainte sociale’ or social compulsion.¹⁸ Durkheim effectively put it like this: ‘If you want to know what society is, just ask where it hurts; it’s where you come up against something that is so much stronger than your own action and your own behaviour that you cannot really do anything about it or even resist it without provoking the most tangible and specific consequences.’ I think you have only to perform the thought experiment of imagining what would happen to any one of you if you no longer consistently observed the rules of exchange, if you no longer subjected your labour to the law of equivalent exchange, if you no longer arranged your private life in such a way that you also get something back for what you give, if you were no longer prepared to put your life on anything unless you expected to receive the equivalent in return. You cannot just discover this ubiquitous principle of exchange, this omnipresent principle, as another fact precisely because it expresses a structural totality which is never simply or exhaustively given in any finite or particular case. But this fundamental aspect of social compulsion – in other words, the way you have to conform to the regular norms of the organized already existing whole – is something you can directly experience for yourselves from the resistance you meet as soon as you try to act otherwise. This force of the social, which finds its most powerful expression in the so-called folkways,¹⁹ in the established mores and practices of a specific culture, had such a tremendous impact on Durkheim’s sociology that he even employed the concept of ‘chose’, or thing, to capture it.²⁰ He not only made this ‘contrainte sociale’, this alien compulsion that is opaque to us and to every individual, into the social as such but also regarded it as the ultimate fact: the fact that appears largely independent of ourselves precisely because we do not experience it as our own. Instead we experience it as something alien and opposed to us, almost like a brick wall we must bang our head against. With a positivistically inclined sociologist such as Emile Durkheim – and perhaps he is the last sociologist of whom this may be said – you find that a central question of philosophy – the conceptual entwinement of social facts through the system that goes beyond these individual social facts – is transformed into the ultimate social given. This immediately leads to a considerable problem, since Durkheim, who was particularly hostile to any tendency to hypostasize concepts, here goes down the same road precisely by hypostasizing something that is itself mediated and conceptual in character and turning it into an ultimate criterion. This is not something purely immediate in character: it is a nexus of facts rather some particular fact in the sense in which we use the word in the context of experimental observation, for example. I just wanted to point this out here to show you how the simple exercise of reason, even in what you might call a pre-philosophical sense, already reveals how we can go beyond the concept of particular observable facts without thereby falling into fanciful speculation.

Let me just close for today by saying that philosophical concepts, if they are worth anything at all, are not concepts that dwell in some other separate world, in ill-famed higher spheres that lie far beyond the particular sciences or disciplines. On the contrary, philosophy is ultimately nothing but rigorous self-conscious reflection upon the actual world, upon what you encounter in the experience of your own field of research or investigation. This should already suggest that, while we have indeed begun by exploring the difference between the spheres of philosophy and sociology, these disciplines are not merely antithetical but also constitute a functional or dynamic unity.