dualism - (noun) the division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided
There are times when I feel divided, composed of two opposing forces. One force wants to do good, the other just wants to get what he wants. I associate this half with bad, not necessarily evil, but not necessarily good either. I am sure I'm not alone in this feeling. I believe this dualism of good and bad resides in most people. The truly good who walk among us can ignore and suppress the darkness, they may not even have enough of it to call it darkness, and then there are others that succumb to anger, fear, agression (which lead to the dark side as we all know), and greed. I've been called a nice guy more times than I care to recount, because I was the one who either acted as if I had no male genitalia around women or because I appeared altruistic. I say appeared because deep down I'm not convinced that I am that altruistic. That dark half has his ulterior motives which he politely weaves into the actions of the lighter half. This causes me to have issue with the reliability of who I think I am.
Let's break this down into physics shall we? Dust off those old text books and refresh yourself with the concept of dualism in physics in terms of light. Light acts as both matter and a wave, seemingly opposing concepts. Matter is thought to be tangible where as waves are not. Okay, that's not entirely true since we can see waves in the water, but those are merely physical manifestations of waves being carried through matter and I'm getting off point. When we're first learning this concept it's confusing. "How can something be matter and not? How can something be considered matter when it doesn't have mass?" I'm sure I grappled with this myself back when the idea was first introduced to me, but now it's second nature. People are kind of the same way. You may have a best friend, someone you trust beyond the shadow of a doubt, but they might do something that seems completely out of character. You think, "this can't be my friend," yet it is. That's an incredible simplification of the idea, but hopefully that will paint a picture.
How do we deal with this? This two-faced nature of reality, of ourselves. Some people accept it. They accept that they have the capacity for good and evil, and they consciously make choices based on the predisposition that they can choose which to be. Others aim to control it. They force one or the other, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Newton's third law. Good usually begets bad in some way. I myself would continually force myself to be good, to do good, good, good, good, good. In many ways I'm still that person, I've just grown to be able to forgive myself for straying outside of that constraint and coloring outside the lines. To want things and not feel greedy or selfish because of that fact, but only in small amounts. My moral sponsor reminds me I still have a long ways to go in that regard. It's a bitch to have a mindset that feels counterproductive to your own happiness, but at the same time, to see smiles on others' faces because of something you did that wasn't for yourself, can definitely be gratifying.
Again, I've strayed from the topic a bit. I should really be a geometry teacher with all of these tangents I talk about. Where was I? Oh right, dualism. The ultimate piece of dualism that I feel I run across on a daily basis, besides light and good and evil, is happiness. There is a dualism to happiness that I've yet to grasp. Some say you shouldn't need other people to make you happy, because for the same reason that they can make you happy they can also make you unhappy. Others say that we do need other people to be happy since we aren't made to be alone as human beings. That we can only truly be happy when we've found love. This confuses me. I feel like both ideas are right, but they don't really make sense together, unlike chocolate and peanut butter. You need to be able to make yourself happy, but you also need to be open to the fact that someone else can make you happy, and that you may come to realize that this person was part of something that was missing from your equation. Maybe that's not right. Our lives aren't really a single equation with one single result, they're more like a system of equations. We are the variables in those equations and many times we seek to understand what the constants are in those equations. Those constants can be other people, they can be places, they can be memories, they can be things that make us happy, and maybe this analogy is falling apart.
This study in duality was brought to my attention when I was reading through an [IGN] article about director Duncan Jones as he talks about his newest film Source Code, and he mentions how it relates to his directorial debut Moon. Jones states that both films share the theme of duality, of having "issue with the reliability of who people think they are." In Source Code, Jake Gyllenhaal's character relives the last 8 minutes of the life of a man on a train before it explodes. In Moon, Sam Rockwell's character struggles to grasp on his own reality as he's trapped in a mining facility on the Moon, where he thinks he's alone. Both characters end up having to deal with not being who they think they are, in different ways yes, but it's fundamentally a similar idea. Who am I? This may sound like something that all teenagers deal with in high school, but I know for a fact that I don't really know who I am yet. But I aim to figure it out. Maybe this is just me [thinking] too much, but I feel that's where philosophy comes from, lots of thinking while searching for answers.
So what are your thoughts on the subject?
-A Mindless Philosopher
[END TRANSMISSION]
Let's break this down into physics shall we? Dust off those old text books and refresh yourself with the concept of dualism in physics in terms of light. Light acts as both matter and a wave, seemingly opposing concepts. Matter is thought to be tangible where as waves are not. Okay, that's not entirely true since we can see waves in the water, but those are merely physical manifestations of waves being carried through matter and I'm getting off point. When we're first learning this concept it's confusing. "How can something be matter and not? How can something be considered matter when it doesn't have mass?" I'm sure I grappled with this myself back when the idea was first introduced to me, but now it's second nature. People are kind of the same way. You may have a best friend, someone you trust beyond the shadow of a doubt, but they might do something that seems completely out of character. You think, "this can't be my friend," yet it is. That's an incredible simplification of the idea, but hopefully that will paint a picture.
How do we deal with this? This two-faced nature of reality, of ourselves. Some people accept it. They accept that they have the capacity for good and evil, and they consciously make choices based on the predisposition that they can choose which to be. Others aim to control it. They force one or the other, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Newton's third law. Good usually begets bad in some way. I myself would continually force myself to be good, to do good, good, good, good, good. In many ways I'm still that person, I've just grown to be able to forgive myself for straying outside of that constraint and coloring outside the lines. To want things and not feel greedy or selfish because of that fact, but only in small amounts. My moral sponsor reminds me I still have a long ways to go in that regard. It's a bitch to have a mindset that feels counterproductive to your own happiness, but at the same time, to see smiles on others' faces because of something you did that wasn't for yourself, can definitely be gratifying.
Again, I've strayed from the topic a bit. I should really be a geometry teacher with all of these tangents I talk about. Where was I? Oh right, dualism. The ultimate piece of dualism that I feel I run across on a daily basis, besides light and good and evil, is happiness. There is a dualism to happiness that I've yet to grasp. Some say you shouldn't need other people to make you happy, because for the same reason that they can make you happy they can also make you unhappy. Others say that we do need other people to be happy since we aren't made to be alone as human beings. That we can only truly be happy when we've found love. This confuses me. I feel like both ideas are right, but they don't really make sense together, unlike chocolate and peanut butter. You need to be able to make yourself happy, but you also need to be open to the fact that someone else can make you happy, and that you may come to realize that this person was part of something that was missing from your equation. Maybe that's not right. Our lives aren't really a single equation with one single result, they're more like a system of equations. We are the variables in those equations and many times we seek to understand what the constants are in those equations. Those constants can be other people, they can be places, they can be memories, they can be things that make us happy, and maybe this analogy is falling apart.
This study in duality was brought to my attention when I was reading through an [IGN] article about director Duncan Jones as he talks about his newest film Source Code, and he mentions how it relates to his directorial debut Moon. Jones states that both films share the theme of duality, of having "issue with the reliability of who people think they are." In Source Code, Jake Gyllenhaal's character relives the last 8 minutes of the life of a man on a train before it explodes. In Moon, Sam Rockwell's character struggles to grasp on his own reality as he's trapped in a mining facility on the Moon, where he thinks he's alone. Both characters end up having to deal with not being who they think they are, in different ways yes, but it's fundamentally a similar idea. Who am I? This may sound like something that all teenagers deal with in high school, but I know for a fact that I don't really know who I am yet. But I aim to figure it out. Maybe this is just me [thinking] too much, but I feel that's where philosophy comes from, lots of thinking while searching for answers.
So what are your thoughts on the subject?
-A Mindless Philosopher
[END TRANSMISSION]
Deep breath, okay.
ReplyDeleteOkay so back when I was a philosophy major, briefly, I learned that dualism is a cornerstone of western philosophy, and it is even important in certain threads of eastern philosophy (you have a picture of a yin yang here, there you go with the dualism) but in both cases dualism leads to a lot of pain and suffering. In eastern philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy, this is acknowledged as a truth, and it is something that you must overcome on your way to enlightenment.
Western philosophers, however, have tended to treat dualism as a good thing. Take Descartes. After floundering about in dialogue with himself, he finally concludes that his soul and his body are two different and necessarily opposed entities. Furthermore, he's convinced that animals don't have souls. This dualism sets up a hierarchy of life, where humans are more deserving of living than animals, which are little more than machines. It doesn't take much of a stretch to imagine how this philosophy may have informed terrible wars, holocausts, and the continued wholesale slaughter of people and animals.
I think that people tend to latch on to dualism because it's an easy concept that explains the way we act. Take gender. Most of us—present company excluded—like gender. But what's more, most people in modern western society can't grasp the concept that there could be more or less than two genders. That's too bad because there are more than two genders, but that's another conversation.
In terms of forces that influence personality and behavior, I think treating it as dualism is a gross oversimplification. Morality is far more complicated than good vs. evil, and the question of what the "right" thing to do in any given situation might be is usually terribly ambiguous.
Also, light is not a particle AND a wave. It's something else entirely, a wavicle. That's easier to get your head around, no?
I certainly agree with the notion posited by Dokami that dichotomizing the forces that influence personality and behavior is somewhat of a oversimplification. Additionally, while many consider Morality to a be a spectrum, ranging from Dark to Gray to Light, I tend to understand instead as a Collage. We are nothing more than the sum of our components and every experience we have, every second that we breathe becomes is incorporated into our identity. Some moments form a more distinct and less nebulous portion of the Collage; these are our most vivid memories, moments DESCRIBE us but moments that we cannot allow to DEFINE us. To continue with the physics allegories, we are (as Ke$ha would say) Who We R; that is, we are bodies with mass in a universe where every other body with mass is tugging on with varying degrees of force, but no one force can completely account for our velocity and direction.
ReplyDeleteI think this is another key point: The answer to the question "Who am I?" is answered simply in the form of the question "Who do I want to be?". This is where the gravity metaphor breaks down...Every second of every day, we are amassing new experiences and are shift slightly as a result. While the past and the future are beyond our limited reach of control, there are no bounds and no restrictions on the present. One has complete control over one´s own actions in any given situation, and thus has the agency to shape one´s own experiences. This power ultimately gives the brush, and allows us to paint our own collage, to be who we want to be.
Like Captain Planet said, the power is YOURS.
Thus, there is no good or evil, but rather just the sum product of nature and our nurture.