Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Emile DurkheimRead
The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the pitfalls of becoming overly introspective and detached from reality, suggesting that excessive inner meditation can lead to unproductive thought and isolation.
In this quote, Emile Durkheim critiques the tendency to focus all one's energy on inner meditation and contemplation. He argues that a person who is solely absorbed in their inner thoughts becomes disconnected from their environment, their emotional responses turn into mere illusions, and their imaginative efforts yield no tangible outcomes. Durkheim warns that this detachment can lead to a lack of real-world engagement and the inability to produce meaningful results outside of one's mind.
Themes
MeditationIntrospectionDetachmentImaginationReality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about the balance between self-reflection and real-world action in a philosophy class.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes →Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
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If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
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A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
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The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Emile DurkheimRead
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Emile DurkheimRead
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