Rethinking The Dualism of Human Nature

Review by William Watts Miller

Emile Durkheim, Il dualismo della natura umana e le sue condizione

sociali, a cura di Giovanni Paoletti, Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2009, 85 pp.
[with introduction, notes and a critical edition, on parallel pages, of the
original French text]

Durkheim wrote his essay in order to bring out and clarify what he
regarded as one of the main themes of The Elemental Forms. Yet like the
Lorelei of the Rhine his dualism isnt all that it seems but has had a
power to seduce and lure the innocent into its snares. Nor were matters
helped by the fault-ridden English translation published in the 1960s, and
relied on by generations of Anglophone commentators. For example, it ends
with the much quoted sentence:

To the contrary, all evidence compels us to expect our effort in the struggle
between the two beings within us to increase with the growth of civilization.
([1914a] 1960: 339)

This is an inexcusably puffed up rendering of the original text, which in-

stead says:

Everything indicates, on the contrary, that the place of effort will always go on
increasing with civilization. ([1914a] 2005: 45)

Giovanni Paolettis new critical edition of the French text, together with a
parallel Italian translation, is very much to be welcomed. At the same time
it comes with an introduction that is as incisive as it is illuminating, and
that demands translation into English for the benefit of a wider audience.
The edition is part of a series of classic modern texts with parallel trans-
lations. It began with Diderots Platos Cave, immediately followed with
Durkheims The Dualism of Human Nature. Presumably this wasnt an
accident but comes with a message about a basic underlying linkage. In
any case, the publishers are to be congratulated for embarking on a project
that makes texts accessible in the original language and in translation. A
similar project is very much needed in the Anglophone world.

Durkheimian Studies, Volume 16, 2010: 137144, Durkheim Press

doi:10.3167/ds.2010.160111 ISSN 1362-024X
William Watts Miller

Paoletti provides helpful notes that do not swamp the text but are a
model of a judicious balance between the too short and the too long. A fea-
ture of particular interest is that he has gone carefully through Durkheims
earlier paper, Le problme religieux et la dualit de la nature humaine
([1913b] 1975), to track similarities and differences with the essay of 1914.
These are indicated in the essays text, so that readers can notice them as
they go along. But there is a strange omission, both in the notes to the text
and in the introduction. There is little or no attention to the essays main
source, the account of the soul in Book 2, Chapter 8 of The Elemental
Forms. Indeed, a general feature of almost all commentaries on the essay is
their failure to trace its roots, in The Elemental Forms, in the account of
god and the soul as a religious symbolism of the relation between soci-
ety, the individual and the person. Even so, Paolettis introduction stands
out from other commentaries. Its exercise in analysis is clear, concise, sane
and scholarly. In my view, it is the best that is now available.
One of the first things he tackles is Durkheims actual use of the terms,
dualit and dualisme. It isnt an entirely consistent usage. But he suggests
that dualit tends to refer to some sort of fact, while dualisme tends to
refer to ideas, representations and beliefs to do with this fact. At the same
time he suggests that it is possible to adopt a somewhat different analytical
distinction between dualit and dualismo. But he requires a third, neutral
term to describe it, and I assume there is an element of the playful and
ironic in his choice of duplicit, which might be roughly translated as the
two-faced. In any case, he emphasizes the need to distinguish between an
essentialist dualism to do with two beings, things or substances and a
relational duality, concerned with the two sides of an interlinkage in a whole
(910). It is then, in a series of analytical moves in a dialectically unfolding
overall argument, to work towards an interpretation of the essay, not as a
vulgar essentialist dualism, but above all as an affair of a relational duality.
As he concludes, it is above all an affair of a relational duality concerned
with an immanent transcendence (28).
It seems to me somewhat forced and artificial to highlight, at this point,
the philosophy of Husserl (2829). It isnt really necessary to go to Husserl,
or indeed to any other particular individual philosopher. In the account of
god and the soul in The Elemental Forms, there is repeated talk of a si-
multaneous relation of transcendence-immanence. But also, given the milieu
of the works author and readership, the obvious basic collective reference
is to the whole tradition of western theology and its whole concern with the
issue of a transcendent-immanent God, at once somehow both going over
and beyond us and an active inner presence within our lives.
At the same time the work claims to be a detailed, ethnographically based
study of Australia. Indeed, The Elemental Forms could never have been born
out of the barren soil of abstract social theory and philosophy, whether in

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France or anywhere else. It is totally inconceivable without the input of

anthropology: specifically, Anglophone anthropology, and even more spe-
cifically, the pioneering ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen, The Native
Tribes of Central Australia (1899) and The Northern Tribes of Central Aus-
tralia (1904).
So while I very much tend to agree with Paolettis conclusion about a
relational duality of transcendence-immanence, my reservation is that he
reaches it through an essentially philosophical route as if the only context
that counts is the French intellectual world inhabited by a Sorbonne profes-
sor. It is also important to ask what happens in exploring an alternative,
more ethnographic route, through Australia as reported by Spencer and
Gillen and re-imagined in The Elemental Forms.
In brief, the works overall centrepiece is constituted by a group of three
chapters: Book 2, Chapters 6, 7 and 8. Chapter 6 reveals the operation in
Durkheims Australia of a vast immanent-transcendent one-and-manifold
force, which he compares with mana and which he calls the totemic prin-
ciple, even the totemic god. Only, as he says:

It is an impersonal god, without name, without history, immanent in the world,

diffused in a numberless multitude of things. (1912a: 269)

Chapter 7 constitutes the very core of the centrepiece, and comes packed
with still further revelations. These are to do with how god symbolizes
society; two times rather than merely two worlds of the sacred and profane;
the creativity of collective effervescence; the key role of the concrete mate-
rial symbol in communion-communication between individuals and the
birth of the realm of logical and conceptual thought. Here, however, there
are two special points to note. One is how effervescence involves a total
physical and mental high (surexcitation de toute la vie physique et men-
tale, 310). The other is how it requires the extraordinary effervescent ener-
gies of total bodily mental highs to create shared meanings between
individuals through symbols as material intermediaries (intermdiares
matriels, 330). A radical implication of this sociology of the symbol is that
there are no such things as purely abstract philosophical ideas, concepts or
categories. But in any case, it is why social life, in all its aspects and in all
moments of its history, is possible only thanks to a vast symbolism (331).
It also prepares the way for Chapter 8s revelations about the soul in
Australia. Durkheim begins with a warning against any simplistic soul-
body dualism: on the contrary, the soul is united with the body through
the closest ties (347). He then proceeds to develop an account of what is
at bottom a duality within the soul itself. As we might put it, an impersonal
soul-stuff is part of each and every different individual soul. As he himself
puts it, the soul is none other than the totemic principle, incarnated in

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each individual (357). Or in another formula, the soul is a spark of the

divinity (375). Or again, the soul is mana individualized (378).
So far, so good. The only trouble is that none of this has any direct basis
whatever in the ethnographic evidence of Spencer and Gillens Australia,
overwhelmingly his main ethnographic source. They never talk about the
soul. They never mention mana. And they never provide any report of
anything remotely resembling a belief in a vast elemental impersonal force
in the form of a totemic principle or a totemic god. Accordingly, is
Durkheims Elemental Forms a work, not so much of science, as of science-
fiction?
In terms of detail, it is necessary to check through all his impressive
looking references to Spencer and Gillens material. What then emerges is
that many are accurate enough, many are just erroneous, many are in var-
ious ways misleading, and many things are left out despite their relevance
to his argument. In terms of the bigger picture, it is necessary to identify
and evaluate the inferences not always explicit, but unspoken and implicit
that he draws from their material in an effort to put together a whole the-
ory. What might then be seen as emerging is a story of his creative re-imag-
ination of Spencer and Gillens Australia, or, in a word, its transfiguration.
A key figure in the story is Robert Marett. He had stirred up something
of a sensation with a paper arguing that religion originates in a notion of an
elemental, essentially impersonal force or energy (Marett [1900] 1909). At
the same time he had suggested borrowing from a Greek word for power to
call this form of belief teratism. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the term never
caught on. Instead, and following his suggestion in an influential paper at
an international conference in Oxford, what eventually took hold was the
generalized use of mana as an anthropological term for a whole widespread
type of belief (Marett [1908] 1909). No doubt one of the reasons for the
papers success is that it crystallized tendencies already taking place in
anthropology, as in the work of Mauss. In any case, the background to
Durkheims own particular search for mana in Australia is this wider move-
ment in anthropology, which Marett had helped to get going in 1900. But
apart from Durkheims conviction, shared with others, that there must be
something like mana in Australia, it is possible to identify two main infer-
ences he makes to support this view.
One is to do with his account of scenes of collective effervescence,
which is on the whole quite faithful to Spencer and Gillens description of
scenes of the wildest excitement. But he goes far beyond anything they
describe in going on to argue that scenes like these give birth to the reli-
gious idea (1912a: 313). Accordingly, his general inference seems to be that
it is impossible that explosions of all this energy can take place in Australia
or anywhere else without also generating a concept or notion of the
energy itself.

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Another, more specific inference is to do with the notion of an imper-

sonal soul-stuff, which again goes far beyond anything reported by Spencer
and Gillen. On the contrary, their Australia is permeated by a worldview
that centres round the individual ancestral beings of a mythic time of the
alchera rather than abstract impersonal forces such as mana. To some
extent this is recognized by Durkheim himself, as in his remark that these
ancestral beings are thought to be the source of all religious power (398).
Yet, as in the remark, he still assumes there is such a thing as a notion of
an elemental force. In effect, instead of just accepting an Australian reli-
gious cosmology anchored in an ancestral past, he mana-izes the alchera.
This involves an inference drawn from how the worldview of the alchera
is about a sense of identity in which individuals feel connected with one
another as members of a same human community that stretches across
past, present and future generations, to link the dead, the living and the not
yet born. More specifically, it is a sense of a continuing identity constructed
through ideas of kinship and descent. But it isnt a merely biological, phys-
ical kinship. It is a spiritual kinship, through souls that stem from the an-
cestral beings of the alchera and that are re-embodied in the individuals of
each new generation. Thus it is the cosmology itself that entails a notion of
some sort of impersonal soul-stuff, common to all souls and linking the
souls of past, present and future individuals. Or as he himself says, it en-
tails a mystical form of germinative plasma, transmitted from one gener-
ation to another, and creating the clans spiritual unity across time (385).
It might well be thought quite plausible, in going through the material,
to draw both of these inferences. Yet they remain nothing more. An irritat-
ing feature of Durkheims Elemental Forms is how he tends to present his
detective-works inferences as if established ethnographic facts, complete
with spurious and misleading references as if they are actually reported as
such in his main ethnographic source. Even so, they help to set up an alto-
gether crucial argument, at the core of what is at stake in his dualism of
human nature.
It is his argument about a simultaneous process of internalization-indi-
vidualization. In Australia, the totemic principle is immanent in each of
the members of the clan, but, in penetrating inside individuals, it is inevi-
table that it is itself individualized (356). More generally:
The impersonal forces that arise from the collectivity cannot take form without
becoming embodied in individual consciousnesses, where they are themselves
individualized. Nor, in reality, is it in two different processes, but in two differ-
ent aspects of one and the same process. (382)

This generates the entire vast issue of why he still maintains the collective
is prior to the individual, when he himself accepts it is not prior in time. In
a brief passing remark opening a whole can of worms he suggests the

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William Watts Miller

collective is prior in a logical sense (ibid.) But it also generates other

issues, to do with individuality itself, and leading straight on to another can
of worms, in the form of his dualism of human nature.
What he wants to explain is why it is always the case even in the extra-
ordinarily intense collective energies of effervescence that when individ-
uals internalize collective currents of thought they inevitably understand
them in their own particular ways. As he puts it: there must be a factor of
individuation. As he at once answers: it is the body that plays this role
(386).
Despite his own earlier warning against any simplistic body-soul dual-
ism, he now proceeds to embark on a sweeping general argument in which
the body is the driving force of individuation. There are many ways to ques-
tion such a picture of things, but not least through Durkheims own sociol-
ogy. On the one hand, the body is an essential factor of collective life. On
the other, society is a major source of individuality.
It is as if he sweeps aside his own account of effervescence and sociol-
ogy of the symbol. The physical, sensate individual experiences the uplift
of total bodily mental highs. The physical, sensate individual at the same
time helps to make social life possible, thanks to a vast symbolism that acts
as a material intermediary between the world of sense-data and the realm
of conceptual thought. So it is not the case that, in The Elemental Forms,
the embodied individual is always a force getting in the way of society. At
the heart of the work, embodiedness is an artery of collective life.
But also, and turning things round the other way, it is sociologically in-
coherent to rely on embodiedness to explain individuation. Or at least this
is the message of Durkheim himself in his thesis on the division of labour,
where he recognizes embodiedness as a first, permanent, inalienable basis
of individuality, which is precisely why it is impossible to invoke something
so fixed as the main or only way to explain changes leading to increasing
variation. The author of the chapter on the soul comes to his sociological
senses when, at the end, he refers to his thesis in order to bring back in
how society itself is an important source of individual differentiation (390,
n.1).
In sum, and given that its official basic rationale is to correlate embod-
iedness and individuality, the dualism of human nature is so self-contra-
dictory that it can appear completely beyond rescue. So apart from just
giving up on it as hopeless, there are two main alternative strategies that
might be adopted. One is to treat it as a confused way to express an under-
lying Durkheimian pre-occupation, and to suggest what this might be. The
other is to try to rethink and reformulate it as something more coherent.
In the case of the first strategy, a candidate for an underlying preoccupa-
tion is his long-running worry over anomie and belief in rules to discipline
and constrain individual desires. So perhaps his dualisms basic message is

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that society might help to free the individual from passions that enslave
(ibid. 389), but it comes at the cost of individual pain and suffering.
Indeed, in his essay, it does violence to some of our most tyrannical incli-
nations ([1914a] 2005: 44). Yet, like passions that enslave, this seems a
clear reference to Kantian talk of the tyranny of desire. So another candi-
date is that the dualism is a vehicle of Durkheims well-known rage against
particular currents of individualism, while covering over and obscuring his
support for others. Moreover, this fits in with his account of god and the
soul as a religious symbolism of the relation between society, the individ-
ual and the person.
In the case of Durkheimian Australia, the clans impersonal soul-stuff is
not just about continuing collective identity across time but is also to do
with a spiritual principle that is the same in everyone, in and through
which consciousnesses commune (1912a: 386). In the case of the modern
secular world, the impersonal soul-stuff that links us all is revealed as none
other than reason and the whole collectively created realm of logical and
conceptual thought. It is this that endows each and every individual with
the status and sacredness of a person. And he goes on to write about a his-
torically developing autonomy in a move towards a society of persons, in
which we are all the more a person, the more we are capable of thinking
and acting through concepts (389). Indeed, after the sweeping general
argument about a dualism of human nature, it turns out that the basic mes-
sage he himself wants to emphasize is just that it is a mistake to equate the
individual with the person, since, instead, the person is about what we
have in common (ibid.).
In a way this marks a return to the duality within the soul itself, through
the figure of the individual personality. At the same time it is a key to the
strategy of rethinking the dualism of human nature in more coherent
terms. It seems to me this is the strategy adopted by Paoletti, in rethinking
it as a relational duality of immanent transcendence. It also seems to me
that he is entirely right, given Durkheims own most fundamental preoccu-
pations and concerns, to formulate it as a duality of an immanent transcen-
dence, rather than as a transcendent immanence. In other words, again
given Durkheims own well-known concerns, it is a relational duality that
nonetheless prioritizes the aspect of the transcendent-impersonal-collec-
tive over the aspect of the immanent-particular-individual. But isnt there a
need to make at least some distinction between the concerns of an author
and the actual arguments of a work? In the case of The Elemental Forms as
well as of the subsequent essay, it is difficult to see how it is possible to pri-
oritize either aspect of the relation, thanks to the argument that the forma-
tion of the collective, internalization and individualization are all part of a
single simultaneous process. In other words, and whatever the authors
intentions, the work itself comes up with a non-prioritizing relational dual-

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ity. It clearly doesnt privilege the individual and immanent, but is also
unable to privilege the collective and transcendent.
This is a somewhat radical suggestion, which might disturb diehard Durk-
heimians. Nor did it surface and crystallize in my own reading of the texts,
until thinking about Paolettis succinct and illuminating account of Durk-
heims dualism of human nature, which nonetheless remains, in many
ways, like the Lorelei of the Rhine.

References
Durkheim, Emile. 1912a. Les formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse: le systme
totmique en Australie, Paris: Alcan.
____ [1913b] 1975. Le problme religieux et la dualit de la nature humaine, in
V. Karady (ed.), Textes, vol. II, Paris: Minuit, 2359.
____ [1914a] 1960. The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions, in
K. Wolff (ed.), Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, New York: Harper, 325
340.
____ [1914a] 2005. The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions,
Durkheimian Studies/Etudes durkheimiennes, n.s. 11: 3345.
Marett, Robert. [1900] 1909. Pre-animistic Religion, in 1909: 132.
____ [1908] 1909. The Conception of Mana, in 1909: 115141.
____ 1909. The Threshold of Religion, London: Methuen
Spencer, Baldwin and F. J. Gillen. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia,
London: MacMillan.
____ 1904. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, London: MacMillan.

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