YOLANDE JANSENheteronomy means that ‘‘the moral rule is the product of a collectivity, we receive it much
more than that we make it.’’^27 What precedes the subject for Durkheim is not pure reason
but collectivity, and with this argument, he makes the Kantian concept of morality, oxy-
moronically, ‘‘sociologically transcendental.’’
For Durkheim, it is important that Kantianism, like Protestantism, supposes the
translation of the heritage of religious, transcendent morality into moral principles:
With Protestantism, the autonomy of morality becomes even more apparent, because
the strictly cultic element diminishes. The moral functions of the divine become the
only reason for its existence; this is the only argument invoked to prove it.... We
must look, at the very heart of religious conceptions, for moral realities that here are
as if lost and dissimulated; we must free them to find how they are consistent, to
determine their proper nature, and to express them in a rational language. We must,
in a word, discover the rational substitutes for these religious notions, which, for so
long, have served as carriers of the most essential moral ideas.... We must discover
these moral forces, which man, up to the present, has not learned to represent to
himself except in the form of religious allegories.^28Durkheim considers the heritage of the religious past to be an indispensable reservoir of
moral forces. Autonomy does not mean that we reject the religious heritage or that we
rise above it in order to evaluate it critically from an Archimedan point of view. What we
need, rather, is a translation of the concretely developed, historical moral forces that
religions have carried with them.
A preliminary examination oflaı ̈cite ́through its history reminds us that its moral-
philosophical basis is much more complex than is suggested by contemporary claims
concerning the ways in which public schools embody its ideals. I would propose that the
prohibition of religious signs in public schools is at least partly the result of a wish to
reaffirm the laı ̈cist foundations of public schooling in the struggle with a religion, Islam,
that is perceived to be as threatening as clerical Catholicism once was. In that sense, the
prohibition is not only an answer to the violence perpetrated against girls in their struggle
against their ‘‘duty to belong,’’ but more fundamental. By this affirmation of the laı ̈cist
foundations of public schools, it is not this violence but religion in general that is once
again brought into competition with a modernist conception of subjectivity.
In fact, even before the philosophical problematic Durkheim formulated, Kant him-
self already problematizes this conception of subjectivity. Ironically, the great philosopher
of autonomy refers to veiling in order to make clear how ‘‘transcendental’’ the sources of
our moral sense are: ‘‘The veiled goddess before whom we of both parties bend our knees
is the moral law in us, in its inviolable majesty. We do indeed perceive her voice and also
understand very well her command. But when we are listening, we are in doubt whether
it comes from man, from the perfected power of his own reason, or whether it comes
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