The Sociology of Knowledge

Toward a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas

Werner Stark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351302746
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This volume serves as both an introduction to the field of the sociology of knowledge and an interpretation of the thought of the major figures associated with its development More than a compendium of ideas, Stark seeks here to put order into what he regarded as a diffuse tradition of diverse bodies of thought, in particular the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the study of the political element in thought identified here with Karl Mannheim and the investigation of the social element in thinking associated with the work of Max Scheler.

The sociology of knowledge is primarily directed toward the study of the precise ways that human experience, through the mediation of knowledge, takes on a conscious and communicable shape. While both schools dealt with by Stark assume that the pursuit of truth is not purposeful apart from socially and historically determined structures of meaning, the tradition extending from Marx to Mannheim seeks to expose hidden factors that turn us away from the truth while that of Weber and Scheler attempts to identify social forces that impart a definite direction to our search for it

In order to reconcile opposing theoretical positions, Stark seeks to lay the foundations for a theory of the social determination of thought by directing his inquiry to the philosophical problem of truth in a manner compatible with cultural sociology. Stark's theoretical legacy to the sociology of knowledge is that social influences operate everywhere through a group's ethos. From this, many systems of ideas and social categories emanate, revealing partial glimpses of a synthetic whole.

The outcome of Stark's work is a general theory of social determination remarkably consistent with contemporary interests in the broad range of cultural studies, whose focus is best described as the use of philosophical, literary, and historical approaches to study the social construction of meaning. The Sociology of Knowledge will be of great interest to social scientists, philosophers, and intellectual historians.

PART ONE
THE PROVINCE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER ONE

PRELIMINARY ORIENTATION

(a) INTRODUCTION

THERE can be few to whom it has not happened at one time or another to attend a concert, the programme of which included, first a symphony of the eighteenth century, perhaps Haydn’s ‘Military’ or Mozart’s ‘Haffner’, and then a symphony of the nineteenth century, say, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ or Bruckner’s ‘Romantic’. Conductors love contrasts of this kind, and rightly so, for nothing serves better to bring out the specific excellences of a work of art than its juxtaposition with another work of art comparable in stature but different in content and in style. Now, anyone who has become aware of the great dissimilarity between the music of a Haydn or a Mozart on the one hand, and the music of a Beethoven or a Bruckner on the other, and who begins to speculate about the nature and the implications of this dissimilarity, will soon discover that it is nowhere more immediately manifest than in the third movements of the respective symphonies. Both the older and the younger composers follow the traditional andante, the slow and serious music, with light relief, to bring back a more smiling and contented mood: but whereas an eighteenth-century audience expected, and was served with, a sprightly minuet, the minuet has given place, a few decades later, to the scherzo, a movement similar in aim and inspiration, but different in form. This disappearance of the minuet which took place around the year 1800 —one might almost be tempted to say, around the year 1789—points beyond the confines of musical creation and musical thought to the wider sphere of social life and social strife. The minuet was, as everyone knows, an expression of ancien régime society and sociability; it could not survive the social order of which it was part, parcel and product; it had to vanish as soon as its historical basis dissolved and disappeared. And thus it is that a social and political revolution draws after it certain kindred developments in the realm of culture, and even in so apparently remote and independent a province of this realm as music, the most abstract of all arts, the art furthest removed from the hurly-burly of everyday events.

But the replacement of the minuet by the scherzo is only a comparatively superficial difference between the eighteenth-century symphony and its nineteenth-century successor. The dissimilarity goes a good deal deeper than that. It concerns not only pure form, but, what is much more important, the relation of form and content as well. When we call Haydn and Mozart representatives of classicism, what we mean is that with them form is throughout in control of content, passion is firmly contained by the spirit. Certainly, deep forces are sometimes stirring in the music of a Mozart, for instance in his symphony in G minor (number 40): they struggle upward and outward, as it were, and clamour for freer expression. ‘But however poignant these expressions may become at this or that point ... they are still presented with an incomparable classical poise and restraint; nor does the composer find it necessary to lay stress on distress by committing drastic breaches of form anywhere.’¹ With Beethoven, things are different. Not that he ever allows the content to burst the form or passion to escape control altogether. But what a contest between the two, what a struggle! Furious forces beat against the barriers that hem them in, as a raging sea may foam against the rocks along the shore-line. ‘The main difference between Beethoven’s conception and his predecessors’ is not the actual form but, so to speak, the voltage, the degree of tension between the component musical characters or ideas.... What in Haydn’s sonata had been a spirited conversation, and in Mozart’s a picturesque adventure, becomes with him a dramatic scene of terrific tension.’² Let us concede at once that a great deal of this must be attributed to personal characteristics: it is simply a fact that Beethoven was a much more choleric individual than either the more placid Haydn or the more sanguine Mozart. But is it not also clear and undeniable that something of contemporary social reality is mirrored and expressed, not only in the settled formality of the eighteenth-century symphony, but also in the passionate and painful attempt to realize a greater freedom in art as in life which is characteristic of a Beethoven and a Berlioz? Can we imagine an ‘Eroica’ or a ‘Fantastique’ written in 1780 and performed in the salle des glaces at Versailles? We cannot. It was only the cataclysm of the French Revolution which released and unleashed the forces, at once destructive and creative, demoniacal and angelic, which inform the music of a Ludwig van Beethoven.

But we can go even further. The music of the pre- and the post-revolutionary periods are different, not only because they are different in form, and not only because they show differences in the relationship of form and content: they are different even in content itself, quite apart from any formalistic aspect of the matter different in thought and feeling and experience. If the contrast between Beethoven and Haydn in the underlying philosophy is not greater than we actually find it, the reason is merely that the spiritual revolution of Europe had taken place much earlier than the political—in the middle of the eighteenth century rather than at the end. When Rousseau uttered his soul-stirring cry: Retournons à la nature, he expressed a mood which was felt by musicians as much as it was by political pamphleteers. It was people like Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach who, in the forties of the century, broke away from the severe contrapuntal style of their elders and, in Dr. Gal’s graphic phrase, worked ‘for the emancipation of melody from its tight constrictive bodice’.¹ The intellectual revolution was already over when Haydn appeared on the scene. He certainly preserved the traditional forms of musical composition; these were only discarded after the whirlwind of 1789 had swept the boards clean; but he poured new wine into the old bottles. ‘A certain type of minuet in his symphonies, sturdy and stamping like a peasant at a dance, is definitely the earliest appearance of low-class music, shaped and idealized by a great master.’² Thus Haydn, like Beethoven, belongs already to what might loosely be called the bourgeois age.³

But that does not mean that a comparison of the thought-content of their music does not yield interesting and enlightening results, for the two composers represent successive and contrasting phases in the development of the bourgeois mind. Haydn shows it in the ascendant, in its optimistic stage, when all is confidence, expectation and anticipation. ‘There is no profounder expression of the philosophical ideals of eighteenth-century rationalism than the perfect logical order of a string quartet or a symphony of Haydn’s. Our world, created by God on a prestabilized harmony, is the best of all possible worlds. This, the quintessence of Leibniz’s philosophy, is not only the clearly stated main idea of Haydn’s greatest work, The Creation. It stands, an unwritten motto, on every page of his music, a creed based on the sublime confidence that if only Reason would prevail, universal happiness would be round the next corner.’ Rightly does Dr. Gal in this passage⁴ link Haydn and Leibniz: their spiritual kinship must be obvious to all who know them. But Leibniz was also the philosopher of François Quesnay and Adam Smith,⁵ of economists and politicians and world-reformers in general: he was the philosopher who assured the world that the ordre positif of Europe, the traditional feudal order, could and should be wiped away, because underneath it there is the much better ordre naturel preordained by the all-wise and all-loving deity whose work men can easily mar but never mend—the philosopher, in a word, who gave the revolutionary forces that supreme self-confidence which they needed in order to accomplish their task.

In a sense, even Beethoven’s mind still has its roots in this world-view —but how dark a shadow has been cast over it, how deeply has it been tinged with doubt, how painfully has it been touched by despair! In the second, fourth and eighth symphonies it still asserts itself, but how different is the mood of the third and fifth! And the ninth, does it not read like a creed of defiance, an assertion of optimism in the face of a world that is going from bad to worse?¹ Shattered is the facile belief of the eighteenth century that a society of liberty and equality (the twin principles in which Beethoven passionately believed) will also be a society of fraternity and bliss. ‘In “Egmont”, in “Coriolanus”, in the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and even the eighth symphony you find Beethoven at the very moments of his most delirious, most ecstatic exultation in his triumphant strength suddenly interrupting himself with a question.’² The French Revolution is over: the magic formula has been tried, but the experiment has miscarried. Certainly, it would be foolish to deny the purely personal element in Beethoven’s music; it would be foolish even to belittle it and play it down. Certainly, he is all the time talking about his own fate: but he is also talking, and talking quite consciously, of the fate of his age, of the fate of his kind. ‘Beethoven’s “favourite theme”, we are told, was politics’, writes one who knows him intimately. ‘It was not the politics of the politician intriguing for party, place and power to aggrandize self and friends; it was “politics” as the art of creating society, a society that will express a richer and fuller life.’³ The developments of the Napoleonic age made it increasingly clear that the sufferings of the revolutionary era had not been the birth-pangs of a better world; that what had come into being was a monstrosity as evil and repulsive as the feudalism which it had driven out. The bitter realization of this fact filled Beethoven’s mind and personality to its remotest nook and cranny. A purely individualistic reading of his artistic work will never reveal all the meaning of his music. He never thought of himself as an isolated man or mind, however much others may have done so. He belonged to his period and was its mouthpiece, voicing the anxieties of a class and generation which had seen its ideals tested and found wanting. We must see, not only the ‘Eroica’, but all his art against the backcloth of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and only if we do so shall we be able to enter into its depths. In this way even the content of music is vitally connected with its subsoil in contemporary social reality and understandable in terms of it.

Now, this connection between the mental and the extra-mental, between thought and society, is traceable not only in the higher reaches of creative art, but also in the higher reaches of philosophical speculation. It is a well-known fact that, throughout the ages, British philosophy has been predominantly realistic, sober and down-to-earth, whereas German philosophy has been predominantly, not to say exclusively, metaphysical and divorced from everyday reality. We need only group together some eminent contemporaries to see this: Leibniz and Locke, Kant and Bentham, Hegel and John Stuart Mill. The German academic philosopher has always been a little like Carlyle’s Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, living high above the city in his lonely garret, locked up with his profound thoughts, and appearing to the common multitude as a true but impenetrable sage. It cannot be taken for granted that there can really be an ‘explanation’ of the contrasting character of these two dissimilar national traditions in philosophy, but if something like an explanation is sought, one direction which must obviously be explored is the great difference of socio-political development in the two countries. Britain achieved a working democracy early in her history: however, imperfect that democracy may have been prior to 1832, the political arena stood open to the intellectual and could be entered freely and without fear. There were opportunities even for the petty bourgeois, and men like Hobbes, Locke, Bentham and John Stuart Mill grasped at them in their different ways. Germany, on the other hand, was and has remained almost to the present day, a country of authoritarianism. To talk about politics was dangerous, to write about it more or less impossible; so that to think about practical affairs, about problems of the day, was a rather thankless and useless task. Understandably, the greatest minds turned away from reality and towards the ideal, towards the realm of the ‘pure spirit’ in which the intellect could freely spread its wings and soar up to the heights.¹ Candidly did Hegel declare in his inaugural lecture at Heidelberg that philosophy should avoid political entanglements, and few of his tribe have thought otherwise in the matter.² Who will explore an avenue that leads only to a dead end, to complete frustration, and perhaps even to loss of livelihood and freedom? Thus political circumstances imparted opposite directions to philosophical speculation in Britain and in Germany, and though there may also be other factors in the situation, one feature in the complex of causes which have made German and British philosophy what they are must be seen in the extra-philosophical, extra-mental, social constellation under which philosophers lived and worked on the Thames and on the Spree. ‘The German philosophy of modem times’, Max Scheler has written, ‘was in the first place an achievement of the educated protestant middle class, above all of the manse, a fact which explains not only many aspects of form, style, terminology (the latter in contrast to current usage and often gruesome), and its strong tendency to become enclosed in rigid schools which hardly manage to understand each other, but also various material characteristics, as for example its relatively tenuous connection with mathematics and the exact sciences, its unpolitical, contemplative animus, its comparative lack of radicalism (which becomes particularly obvious in a comparison between the German and Western philosophies of enlightenment), its almost complete mental aloofness¹ from the “spirit” of industry and technology ... These important facts have created in Germany entirely different fronts in the struggle of philosophical opinions from those that exist in the Romance countries.’ In Germany, Scheler concludes, ‘the philosopher is mostly quite divorced from practical life’²—a statement which is very true of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but which nobody will be inclined to make of the leading English philosophers, a Hobbes, a Locke, a Bentham or a John Stuart Mill.

Perhaps it will be objected to this interpretation that the real reason why British philosophy always remained close to reality is after all a purely intellectual one, namely the fact that both the English and the Scots embraced Calvinism, whereas that creed left no deeper traces on the German mind. Calvinism, with its doctrine of man’s total perversion, maintained that metaphysical speculation can never be more than a sad waste of time since the truth must for ever be hidden from us poor fallen creatures—a waste of time, or, even worse, an insolent and rebellious grasping at a forbidden fruit which the Lord has manifestly reserved unto Himself. Was it not this belief which turned the British away from metaphysics, rather than the openness and attractiveness of the political arena? Far be it from the present writer to impugn the truth contained in this argument. But if it is taken to imply that intellectual developments can only be explained by other intellectual developments, then it must be declared insufficient to prove the contention. For the question at once arises: why did the British embrace Calvinism in the first place? And if an answer is sought to this query, we shall soon find ourselves at and beyond the confines of the intellectual field. Calvinism was carried to power by certain social, political and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Part One The Province of the Sociology of Knowledge
• Part Two The Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge
• Index