I was particularly interested in our talk about the passage on page 321. Society lifts us up above ourselves and does violence to our natural appetites. I did not realize that this was a call to the dual nature of man. This point solidified in my mind when we discussed how man jumps between the worlds of the sacred and the profane during office-hours. Rituals allow the man to become sacred, and the rest of the time man is profane during everyday tasks. For Durkheim, the sacred, or social, part of the man lifts him from what he could normally do alone. The social part of the man sees the benefits of society and prevents the profane nature of the man to break societal norms. This prevention is the very violence to the profane man’s natural appetites. The social and sacred man then seems to contain all of the morality within the man. The social man is the authority of society.
I was also interested in our discussion of the weight of words. Words themselves have different levels of the weight they carry. An example of this are the words “small” and “minute”. “Small” is slightly ambiguous but is commonly known as less than average. “Minute” has more weight to it. It is something even smaller than small. There are other things that cannot even be expressed by words. I believe the use of totems was designed as a way to fix this. It gave tangible meaning and understanding to things unable to be explained by words.