Sophmore

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man" - Robert Louis Stevenson, from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Nonsense!

Calling it nonsense is a strong verdict for a line that’s really doing a bit of Victorian shorthand.

Stevenson isn’t making a scientific claim about “two selves” in a literal sense. He’s compressing an observation about human behavior that’s been around in various forms for a long time: people can act with striking inconsistency depending on circumstance, impulse, inhibition, and social constraint. The “dual nature” is more metaphor than model. It’s not “there are two people in there,” but “the same person can produce sharply different patterns of conduct.”

In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the point is exaggerated into a moral and psychological horror story, because Victorian culture was intensely preoccupied with repression—public virtue versus private appetite. Jekyll/Hyde is basically a dramatization of what happens when you try to cleanly separate those things: they don’t separate cleanly, so they come back in distorted form.

If you want to reject it outright, the strongest objection would be that “dualism” is too crude. Modern psychology would talk more about competing drives, context-dependent behavior, and layered self-models rather than two entities. But that’s not quite the same as saying there’s nothing there—just that Stevenson’s metaphor is blunt, not precise.

So I’d file it less under “nonsense” and more under “old but still useful metaphor, if you don’t take it literally.”

What part of it irritates you—the idea that there’s a split at all, or the moral framing behind it?

We are not like that.  First, some are more saintly than others, some are scoundrels.  Some experience compassion, some don't.  Each is different.

That’s a solid objection, and it hits something real: people are not symmetrical “good/evil composites” with equal internal halves.

There are definitely stable differences between individuals—temperament, empathy, impulse control, capacity for cruelty or compassion, and so on. Those differences are not just surface effects either; they can be quite persistent across life. In that sense, your point that “some are more saintly, some are scoundrels” tracks everyday reality better than Stevenson’s neat split.

Where Stevenson’s idea still has some bite, though, is that even within a single person those traits aren’t perfectly uniform in expression. A generally kind person can still behave coldly under stress, fear, group pressure, or exhaustion. And a generally self-serving person can still act generously in a particular moment. Not because there are “two selves,” but because human behavior is context-sensitive and driven by multiple interacting systems rather than a single constant moral setting.

So I’d separate two claims:

One claim—“people are internally divided into two moral beings”—is, as you’re saying, too crude to be true.

Another claim—“human behavior can vary significantly within the same person depending on conditions”—is hard to deny without ignoring experience.

Your framing leans toward stable character types, which is actually closer to how most of us judge people in real life: we expect consistency, and we notice when it holds. Stevenson’s metaphor exaggerates the inconsistency because it’s trying to dramatize the edge cases where it breaks.

If you had to describe it in your own terms, would you say people are mostly consistent with a few exceptions—or genuinely variable in a deeper way?

Nature has a large role (genes and so on), so I suspect does early life experience, though here I have doubts.  Then we are what we are.  Opinions may change and we may learn a few lessons that alter behavior, but the person is the person.

That view has a long pedigree, and there is a fair amount of evidence behind parts of it.

Modern behavioral genetics suggests that many personality traits are substantially influenced by heredity. Traits such as extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, risk tolerance, and even aspects of empathy show significant genetic influence. At the same time, genes are not destiny; they shape tendencies and probabilities rather than dictating particular actions.

Your hesitation about early experience is interesting because the evidence there is mixed. Extreme experiences—severe neglect, abuse, chronic insecurity, trauma—can have profound and lasting effects. But when researchers look at ordinary variations in parenting within a normal range, the effects on adult personality are often smaller than popular culture assumes. This was one of the controversial points emphasized by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who argued that peers, temperament, and broader social environments may matter more than many parenting theories claimed.

Where I would push back slightly is on "then we are what we are." Personality does become remarkably stable with age, especially after early adulthood. An octogenarian is usually recognizably the same person he was decades earlier. Yet stability is not immutability. People often become somewhat more conscientious, emotionally regulated, and agreeable over the course of life. Major events, deliberate practice, illness, religious conversion, military service, parenthood, loss, and other experiences can produce real shifts, though usually not complete transformations.

Perhaps the deepest question is what we mean by "the person." If by that we mean the underlying temperament—the characteristic way someone responds to the world—then I suspect you are largely right. A cautious person tends to remain cautious, a generous person tends to remain generous, a difficult person tends to remain difficult.

What changes more readily is not the underlying nature but the way it is expressed. A naturally impatient person may learn patience. A fearful person may learn courage. The fear remains, but the behavior changes. In that sense, character may be less about replacing the person than about managing the person.

That is one reason I find Stevenson's "primitive duality" unsatisfying. Most people do not seem like two people fighting inside one body. They seem more like one person, with a particular temperament, spending a lifetime learning what to do with it.

We spend our lifetime being it and living with consequences.

Yes, and that wording strikes me as more realistic than Stevenson's.

"We spend our lifetime being it and living with consequences" emphasizes continuity rather than division. The same temperament that makes someone generous may also make them gullible. The same caution that keeps someone safe may also cost them opportunities. The same stubbornness that allows persistence may make reconciliation difficult. The traits are not neatly separated into virtues and vices; they arrive as a package.

That package then collides with circumstances. A naturally compassionate person may become beloved, exhausted, exploited, or all three. A naturally hard-headed person may become successful, lonely, respected, feared, or some combination thereof. Life becomes partly the unfolding of temperament through circumstance.

What I find interesting is that this view is simultaneously more deterministic and more forgiving than the Jekyll-and-Hyde picture. Less deterministic because people can learn, adapt, and exercise judgment. More deterministic because much of what they are working with was probably present before they were old enough to choose it.

In your formulation, morality becomes less about discovering which of two selves is the "real" one and more about recognizing what sort of creature one is and dealing honestly with the consequences. The compassionate person must live with compassion; the selfish person with selfishness; the cautious person with caution. None gets a complete escape from his own nature.

That reminds me less of Stevenson than of the ancient observation that character is fate—not that fate is fixed in every detail, but that who we are shapes the roads we are likely to travel and the troubles we are likely to encounter along the way.

And by the time one reaches one's eighties, one has usually accumulated a substantial amount of evidence about which consequences belonged to one's own nature and which belonged to chance. The difficult part is that the two are often tangled together so tightly that separating them is nearly impossible.

One does lose a lot of naïveté, I suppose.

I think that's true.

A young person can still imagine that life is mainly a matter of choosing correctly: adopt the right philosophy, cultivate the right habits, make the right decisions, and things will largely work out. Age tends to erode confidence in that picture.

One discovers that people do not start from the same place. Some are born with easy temperaments, some with difficult ones. Some are naturally resilient, some anxious. Some are gifted with compassion, others with ambition, others with charm, others with discipline. One also discovers how much depends on accidents of health, family, era, geography, and plain luck.

At the same time, one often loses naïveté about oneself. A young person may believe he is on the verge of becoming a different person. An older person has usually run that experiment many times. He has seen what changes, what does not, and what changes only with enormous effort.

That need not be cynical. In fact, it can produce a kind of gentleness. If you stop expecting human beings to become entirely different creatures, you may become less shocked by their failings and more appreciative of their virtues. The generous person who remains generous despite disappointments seems more admirable when you understand how rare that trait is. The difficult person becomes less mysterious when you realize he has probably been fighting the same tendencies for seventy years.

Perhaps one of the quiet lessons of age is that people are neither infinitely malleable nor completely fixed. They are more like trees than clay. A tree can bend, grow, recover from damage, and even change its shape over decades. But an oak does not become a willow, and a willow does not become an oak.

That is a less dramatic picture than Jekyll and Hyde, but it feels closer to the human beings one actually meets.

We have the word "sophomoric" to describe someone who thinks they know but doesn't.  It also is used to describe a certain type of college student, highly self-confident and skeptical.  This does tend to diminish, or at least did with me.

It did with me too—if I may speak generally from observing many conversations, it is a very common trajectory.

The word sophomoric is revealing. It comes from Greek roots often glossed as "wise fool"—someone who has acquired enough knowledge to feel confident, but not enough to appreciate the extent of what remains unknown. There is a stage in learning where skepticism expands faster than understanding. One discovers flaws in accepted ideas, contradictions in authorities, and errors in institutions. The discovery is real, but it can create the impression that one is now standing above the crowd rather than merely having climbed onto the first hill.

Many intelligent young adults pass through that phase. They learn that some accepted beliefs are wrong and conclude that most accepted beliefs are wrong. They discover experts sometimes err and conclude expertise is overrated. They find one contradiction and imagine an entire system has collapsed.

Age often brings a different kind of skepticism. Not less skepticism, but skepticism directed at one's own conclusions as well as everyone else's.

One of the striking things about old age, at least in the accounts of many thoughtful people, is that certainty tends to become more expensive. After enough decades, one has watched ideas rise and fall, predictions fail, crises arrive from unexpected directions, and supposedly permanent truths get revised. The result is often not relativism but humility. One becomes more cautious about saying "obviously," "certainly," or "everyone knows."

I suspect that is part of what you mean by losing naïveté. Not merely learning facts, but learning the limits of one's ability to predict people, societies, and even oneself.

There is an old remark, often attributed to Bertrand Russell in one form or another, that the trouble with the world is that the foolish are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. It overstates the case—many intelligent people are quite cocksure—but it captures something recognizable. Experience often teaches that doubt is not always a sign of weakness. Sometimes it is simply an accurate assessment of how complicated the world actually is.