Emile Durkheim is seen as the father of modern sociology. Sociology was, in his own definition, about social structuring and structural determinism. Consistent with this approach is a social consciousness of which individual consciousnesses are, at least in part, only an emanation. How many ideas or sentiments do people have completely on their own? According to Durkheim, there are very few. Each person speaks a language which he or she has not created: people find it ready-made. The dichotomy of society and individual is fundamental to Durkheim's thinking. This paper will discuss Durkheim's dualistic theory of human nature, especially in relation to the sacred and to the profane. It will then explore the validity of the dualistic argument as applied to today's world.
In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (1933) declares that people have a dual nature:
There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a
social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation. This duality of our nature has as its consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility of reason to individual experience (p. 279).
Durkheim's view of human nature follows rigorously and clearly from his conception of the nature of society. Society may have distinct characteristics in relation to place and time, but society is not external to people; indeed it is inseparable from them and their minds, character and role. People and society are fused.
In Durkheim's eyes, it was manifestly not the case, contrary to the confident assertion of Herbert Spencer and utilitarian philosophy, that social solidarity was produced automatically by each individual pursuing his ot...