‘Fusing Morals and Aesthetics’. The Aesthetic Foundations of the Cosmopolitan Social Bond in Durkheim’s Vision of Ritual and Religious Life

The essay aims to show how, in the cosmopolitan vision of social reality that runs through Durkheim’s work, a properly aesthetic dimension, together with a moral dimension, finds space. The aesthetic dimension emerges from the understanding of ritual that Durkheim elaborates in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and, in particular, from the analysis of those intertribal ritual practices that the author places at the foundation of religious internationalism, typical of Australian Aboriginal societies. What I will try to show is that, from the representation that Durkheim offers of ritual and religious life, it is possible to draw a principle at the basis of the formation of cosmopolitan bonds, that is, forms of ‘extended solidarity’ beyond the narrow confines of a social group: the more the social bond becomes cosmopolitan, the more it requires a fusion between morality and aesthetics.