Anomie’s Eastern origins

Abstract

Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ ( soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thirst’ ( unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha’s argument that ‘ceaselessly recurring thirst’ ( tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and reveals that the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie are rooted, through Schopenhauer, whose thought influenced many thinkers during the Neo-Romantic fin de siècle period, including Durkheim, in the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – a doctrine made available to Schopenhauer in European translations of Buddhist texts during the previous turn of the century’s ‘Oriental Renaissance’. By achieving a more thorough understanding of the ambiguous concept of anomie through its Eastern intellectual origins, this project shows that the common conceptualization of anomie as ‘normlessness’ is inconsequential without presupposing that humans thirst and unconstrained thirst causes pain.