How to Be Multiple and Twinkind

From The Wall Street Journal:

Twins have long sparked fascination, awe, fear and superstition. They appear in literature both high and low—from Shakespeare and Charles Dickens to the Bobbsey Twins and the Sweet Valley High young-adult books. In mythology, their stories are linked to the origins of nations (Romulus and Remus; Esau and Jacob) and the power of the gods (Castor and Pollux; Apollo and Artemis). Venerated in some cultures and feared in others, twins have served as emblems of affinity and rivalry and, for scientists and philosophers, as case studies in the search to understand the power of nature over nurture.

Today twins remain relatively rare—only 1 in 60 people is a twin in the U.S. and Europe—although the rate of twin births has risen precipitously since the 1980s, thanks mostly to in-vitro fertilization. The relative rarity of twins invites speculation about how their experience is distinct from that of singletons—and what that distinctiveness can teach us about personhood.

In “How to Be Multiple,” Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College and herself an identical twin, draws on her own experience as a way to explore mind-body boundaries and the nature of individualism and autonomy. “What makes a person themself rather than someone else?” she asks. “Can one person be spread across two bodies? Might two people be contained in one?”

This approach works some of the time. It is true that the resemblances between twins—both physical and psychological—can seem uncanny, as if they are a single identity. Twins can express similar or identical tastes in food, living situations and even sexual preferences, as Ms. de Bres notes, suggesting bonds far stronger than those that exist among ordinary siblings.

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Ms. de Bres also argues that twins offer evidence of the so-called extended-mind thesis, which posits that, given our reliance on tools and close interaction with the physical world, some cognition can be understood as entwined with our material surroundings—extended. As an identical twin, Ms. de Bres describes in fascinating detail the ways in which her twin’s thoughts and her own—and their physical experiences—seem to merge. She notes the “experience of merger I sometimes have with [her twin] Julia: the sense that I’m thinking via her mind.” She describes the twin contemporary artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, who work together on pieces of art and sign only their last name, since, as Tim puts it, “it’s our painting, not Greg’s or mine.”

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More interesting is her claim that twins prompt a kind of unacknowledged existential dread in singletons because people “raised in Western cultures” are “deeply attached to being discrete individuals with sharply distinct physical, mental, and emotional barriers between ourselves and other humans.” Thus twinhood offers an alternative to the radical individualism ascendant in Western culture. Twins “and other freaks” encourage “social interdependence” and “model more communal ways of living.”

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Ms. de Bres notes that “much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinship itself but the response of non-twins to it.” As a mother of fraternal twin boys, I know too well that the parents of twins have pet peeves about how their children are treated by the world. I wince whenever someone refers to my sons as “the twins,” as if they always act in concert like the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Wonder Twins rather than as the very different individuals they are. In “Twinkind,” William Viney captures the full range of nontwin response, among much else, aiming to explore what he calls “the singular significance of twins.” His book is a visual feast, replete with reproductions of twins in paintings, sculptures, medical drawings and advertisements. Like Ms. de Bres, Mr. Viney is a twin, but his focus is less on his personal experience than on how people in different cultures and eras have understood twinhood.

“Transfigured as gods and monsters, spirits and animal familiars, and viewed as phantoms, freaks and clones,” Mr. Viney writes, “twins pass through a hall of unpredictable mirrors.” He describes, for instance, twins as symbols of both power and mystery in Egyptian, Greek, Aztec and Indo-European mythology, as well as the ways in which cultures change their views of twins over time. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Oyo Yorubans (in present-day Nigeria) saw twins as dangerous—a “supernatural curse”—but by the early 20th century began to see them as markers of good fortune and “treated them with care and reverence as a deity in miniature.”

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Mr. Viney acknowledges the dangers of reading too much into twinhood. “One reason that a twin history is difficult to portray in one image or a few hundred . . . is that each twin is what US anthropologist Roy Wagner might have called a ‘fractal person’—neither singular nor plural.” Perhaps our fascination with twins is the result of that enduring, mysterious fact: As singletons, we can never really understand what it means to be multiple.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Of course, The Princeton University Press can’t be bothered with a free preview of Twinkind the way everyone else does on Amazon because, ebooks and previews are for proles.

You can see a sort of queer preview of Twinkind by clicking Here, then cursoring down instead of clicking on each page the way Amazon and all non-troglodytes do.