Emile Durkheim, following the positivist school of sociology defines the Social Fact as social phenomena having an existence independent of the individuals comprising the social group. As such, it has a coercive effect. A corollary is that the individuals comprising the group can change, while leaving the group behavior intact.
Positivism admits only the existence of facts, not consciousness, the material world, not the spiritual. Hence Durkheim cannot provide a theory of how the social fact came to be independent of any human beings; nor can he explain how the social fact controls the group, nor even how the group came to be constituted in the first place. How are we then to understand this from the metaphysical point of view?
First of all, to be an effective force, the social fact must be experienced as a thought in consciousness, though to be efficacious, it must not be reflective self-consciousness. That is, it is experienced in its immediacy and as unquestionable as any observation of the external world; in other words, no epistemological distinction is made between the social fact and an external fact. Julius Evola describes this type of consciousness:
the “I” still lives only as if in a dream: it is not yet a self-consciousness, nor an autonomous principle of action: immersed in an immediate, indistinct coalescence with nature and the world, we can say that it is not so much he who thinks, speaks, and asserts himself, as much as that various forces and impulses think, speak and assert themselves in him. He therefore is only a type of medium, a passive instrument that has his very life outside himself, and he experiences everything as grace, as spontaneity, as the immediate self-manifestation of something that transcends him. (From The Individual and the Becoming of the World.)
In the first edition of Pagan Imperialism intended for an Italian audience, Evola makes explicit reference to Durkheim and other similar sociologists by name. Although the names are removed in the subsequent German edition, the argument is the same. Durkheim used field studies of primitive societies to reach his conclusions, on the mistaken assumption that they represent earlier stages of evolution of more developed societies. Evola comments on the stage of consciousness of such societies, although he uses the word “totem” in much the same sense as social fact:
the totem is the mystical soul of the group, the clan, or the race: the individual members do not feel themselves, in their blood and in their life, as anything other than incarnations of this collective spiritual force, and possessing in themselves almost no trace of personality.
Given Evola’s thesis, then, such societies do not represent human societies at all, but something else entirely. In them, individuals are fungible, essentially indistinguishable from each other. Just a in a bale of hay, one piece of straw can be replaced with another without altering the characteristics of the bale, so in such societies the individual members may change without altering the group characteristics. Thus, they persist unchanged for centuries, unless disturbed by outside forces. Evola writes:
If the totemic force remains at this diffuse and faceless level, so to speak, and if, consequently, there are neither leaders nor subjects, and the individual members of the group are nothing other than “placed together” (com-posti) — then we find ourselves at the lowest level of human society, at the level which borders on the subhuman, that is, the animal kingdom: something confirmed by the fact that the totems—the mystical souls of the clan — are often regarded at the same time as the “spirits” of particular animal species. In addition, it is interesting that, even as the totems represent masculine figures, the composition of these societies reflects above all the telluric-matriarchal type
So, while Durkheim’s ideas may pertain to such societies, they are not valid for a Traditional civilisation, properly so called. Thus the claim of sociology to represent a universal knowledge of social groups is falsified. A true civilisation is compose of persons, not individuals. A person, as opposed to the individual, is a conscious agent. As such, he is not replaceable by any arbitrary individual, as he has a specific place and role. The aim of such a civilisation is not to keep its members in bondage to a lower animal-like form of life, but rather to further develop the personality. Evola explains:
A civilisation, in the true and higher sense — with reference both to individuals and peoples — arises only where the totemic level is surpassed, and where the race element, also understood mystically, is not the last resort; where, beyond blood, a force of higher, meta-biological, spiritual, and “solar” type manifests itself, which does not lead outside of life, but determines life, transforming it, refining it, giving it a form which it initially did not have, freeing it entirely from every mixture with animal life, and opening the various paths for the realisation of the various personality types.
This is not to say that Durkheim’s ideas fail to describe man as he is in a disordered untraditional “civilisation”. Stuck in a worldview of naturalism, materialism, and rationalism, modern man is no longer able to transcend the social fact. Seeing no sense in the idea of a “virile overcoming”, he is mired in sensuality. Unable to discern any connection with a higher world, he is satisfied with an animal existence. Intellectually incapable of understanding the sacred traditional sciences, he subjects himself to the limiting ideas of a scientific positivism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The modern techniques of mass manipulation — advertising, propaganda, media — have introduced new totems to occlude the personality of modern man. Evola explains:
Far from not exhausting itself in a naturalism — as today only the ignorance or the tendentious falsification of some people are able to present it — beyond knowing the ideals of virile overcoming and of absolute liberation, in the pagan conception, the world was a living body, suffused with secret, divine and demonic forces, with meanings and with symbols, as illustrated by that saying of Olympiodorus: “sensible expression of the invisible”. Man lived in an organic and essential connection with the forces of the world and of the supraworld, so that it could be said, with the hermetic expression, to be “a whole within the whole, composed of all the powers”: the sense which is revealed by the aristocratic doctrine of the Atman is no different. And that conception was the basis on which, as a whole in its perfect way, the corpus of the sacred traditional sciences developed.