*Homo duplex (How am I not myself?)

How Am I Not Myself? from Ryan Robles on Vimeo.
*this is a clip from 'I heart Huckabees' if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (one of my favorites).

Homo duplex is a thesis by Durkheim to discuss the duality of being a person:

On the one hand there is our individuality, and, more especially, our body that is its foundations; on the other, everything that, within us, expresses something other than ourselves.

--Emile Durkheim 2005: 37

Born into a set of conditions beyond our control...  

the specific form 'society [to which individuals have given the social element of their being] acquires its own agents and organs, which confronts the individual like an alien body with demands and obligations.

--Georg Simmel 1997: 182

Traversing across a particular space-time continuum, 

my experience of life within the floating time structure of past, present, and future cannot be experienced by anyone else.

-- Anton C. Zijderveld 1970: 13

And yet, we are

...a member of a species, a social being who plays predefined social roles which urge [us] to think and act and feel according to the rules and patterns of [our] society. That means [our] unique experience of life is simultaneously a learned experience of a social life within the traditional structures of the 'objective' time of clock and calendar.

 --Ibid.

Within this

...mixture of enforcement and personal freedom ... there is a latent potential for conflict [in that society is represented both in and by the individual as it were]. Man has the capacity to split himself into different parts and feel that one such portion is his real self, although this one part clashes with other parts and competes for the determination of his actions. This capacity often puts man - insofar as he is and feels himself to be a social being - in a conflicting relationship with impulses and interests of his self which are not related to society.

--Simmel 1997: 182-3

i.e. Freedom and obligation as a form of conflict.

--Ibid.: 185; in the 'morality of law' this is discussed in terms of 'aspiration' and 'duty'
 

The Homo duplex theorem above not only depicts the parameters of an existential/ontological question but it also points to the question about

 "the ways in which from society to society [people] know how to use their bodies."

--Marcel Mauss 1973

Some call it socialization, some call it embodiment, the psychology of learning, or the sociology of knowledge. However, the approach to investigating "Homo duplex" differs. While the psychology of learning begins with the individual and the biology of perception. During its early years, the discipline was shaped by classical and operant conditioning paradigms of learning which led to Skinner's 'Behaviourism' only to be disproven later on...

… the approach of the sociology of knowledge intentionally does not start with the single individual and his thinking ... Rather, the sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only very gradually emerges. Thus, it is not men in general who think, or even isolated individuals who do the thinking, but men in certain groups who have developed a particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to certain typical situations characterizing their common position.

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further the inherited modes of response or to substitute others for them in order to deal more adequately with the new challenges which have arisen out of the shifts and changes in his situation. Every individual is therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a society: on one hand he finds a ready-made situation and on the other he finds in that situation preformed patterns of thought and of conduct.

--Karl Mannheim 1936: 3

In this sense, the sociology of knowledge represents a "one-sided determinism" with  
most of the empirical studies in the area give evidence in support of this view. The principal trend in the sociology of knowledge, especially within American sociology, however, has been toward emphasizing the functional relationship between the individual mind and the environment.

--Curtis & Petras 1970: 4

 

Although sociology is defined as the science of society, in reality it cannot deal with human groups, which are the immediate concern of its research, without in the end tackling the individual, the ultimate element of which these groups are composed. For society cannot constitute itself unless it penetrates individual consciousnesses and fashions them 'in its image and likeness'.

--Emile Durkheim (Curtis & Petras 1970: 35)

...in one sense it is very true that every psychological phenomenon is a sociological phenomenon, the mental element being identified with the social one. But, in another sense, everything is reversed. The proof as to what is social can only be a mental one; in other words, we can never be sure we have fathomed the meaning and function of an institution if we are not capable of reliving its impact upon the individual consciousness. As such an impact is an integral part of institutions, any interpretation must aim to match the objectivity of the historical or comparative analysis with the subjectivity of the experience as it has been lived.

--Claude Lévi-Strauss (Moscovici 1993: 14; Cf. Lévi-Strauss 1960; Bloch (2012) has echoed this overlap and stressed the necessary relationship between anthropology and psychology)

In this regard, the subject of the sociology of knowledge or the psychology of learning - "socially informed body" - or the paradigm of embodiment must include 'cognition' as well as the various expressions of how "people learn how to use their bodies." Another term for Durkheim's Homo duplex theorem is the concept of habitus, which, according to Sam Whimster, was described by Max Weber as "the disposition to behave and view the world in a particular and distinctive manner."

--Max Weber (Swedberg 2005: 109)

Put another way, Pierre Bourdieu - in typical French fashion - described habitus as the

... systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring practices and representations which can be objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.

--Pierre Bourdieu 1977: 72 emphasis original

For me, investigating habitus can be done by investigating belief as a learned disposition (if you want to pull Rodney Needham back from his grave, I ain't scurred - I got him covered in chapter 2). More specifically, I argue that beliefs are the units of embodiment and cultural history (among a few other things). In other words, the beliefs that we have are the products of the particular cultural histories presented to us. The nuances between individuals are not just social/cultural but also biological in terms of our inherited genetic dispositions that are covered in the Big 5 (I understand that this is not the only model for discussing personality but it is one of the models that have generated a significant amount of evidence for the relationship between personality and genes; *genetic variation does not entail a different species! I know this is obvious to some but you'd be surprised). Moreover, there have been studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised in very different environments - the similarities between them are quite striking (see Minnesota twin study). I use the phrase "valence of affinity" to capture this sense of individuality and direction of aesthetic, taste, style, etc. etc. I arrive at these points by discussing some of the critiques of 'belief' from the anthropology of religion, epistemology, and the theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology. In addition, I cover the literature on 'crisis' and 'religious conversion' to be more specific in the ways we can look into the study of 'belief' that constitute the "structuring structures" of our being and becoming.  

*the above was part of a preliminary 'introduction' that I eventually discarded.