On Dualities

I’ve been finding the word duality useful quite a bit recently. I find it very useful for describing situations where there are two very valuable perspectives (or lens) through which we can look at a situation and any attempt to answer the question needs to grapple with and account for both of these. The way I use the word, I’m not claiming that two logically contradictory viewpoints are simultaneously true, but rather that aspects of both can be synthesised together to reach the truth. Here’s a few examples. Maybe you agree or disagree with these specific examples, but I think they should suffice for illustrative purposes:

• Some people are born with major disadvantages and we need to be sympathetic to them. At the same time, people can act in a way which makes their decisions better or worse and we need to encourage personal responsibility. If we’re too harsh, we don’t give them the help that they need, if we’re too sympathetic, we simply enable people to ruin their own lives. We need to find a balance between the two

• On one hand, tolerance is important for enabling us to get along with people who are different from us. On the other hand, too much tolerance means that there are no standards of behaviour. We need find a way to merge these two considerations without simply tolerating that which we approve and refusing to tolerate that which we dislike (it is possible to synthesise a worst of both worlds approach)

• On one hand, a person can be acting in a way that is horrific from a moral standpoint, on the other hand, it may be hard to blame them given the circumstances. This sets up a tough conflict between the demands of justice and the desire to be merciful and it can be hard to figure out how to navigate these systems Dualities allow you to avoid a particular dysfunctional pattern of thought. Most people will have one side of the duality stick out for them more than the other. Since both sides contradict (or seem to contradict), they conclude that they must reject the other side of the duality. This resolves the contradiction, but it doesn’t give them the truth. Finding the truth would require considering both sides, but now that they’ve settled for consistency instead, they’ve prevented themselves from making further progress. There is value in having a part of the truth-finding process where you can identify ideas as containing a lot of truth without having to worry about whether they contradict, at least temporarily. Thinking in terms of dualities encourages this. I really value consistency and I encourage others to value it too, but perhaps I should value it a bit less as overvaluing consistency seems to be what leads to these kinds of mistakes. If your model of the world contains an unsynthesised duality, then this won’t allow you act consistently, but it may still give you a more accurate model of the world than picking one side or the other. Of course, attempting to eventually synthesise these dualities should be the eventual goal, but we should also recognise that this may simply be beyond our own personal abilities and that we may never be able to completely remove the duality. It is also very useful for explaining ideas that you haven’t completely worked out in your head. Quite often you are aware that there are two main sides of the issue, both of which make good points and you want to establish that you will be drawing on both sides. Once you’ve set that up, you can then move towards synthesise. Even if you’ve already figure out a synthesis, there can be value in taking the listener on the same intellectual journey so that they can understand your conclusions. Also, undoubtedly there are times when you want to synthesise more than two ideas. I don’t have a word for this, but it is much less common. Why use the word "duality"? The word duality communicates this concept well and if you want to be understood, you need to use language that people understand. Undoubtedly, many people don’t want to use this word as it is usually associated with forms of mysticism and the belief that something can be two things that logically contradict at the same time. This is not a viewpoint that I embrace at all, but I’m not convinced that using the word "duality" encourages this to the extent where I would want to stop. After all, while it may encourage more people to use the word duality and some of these uses may be incoherent, using it properly may also led some people to replace incoherent uses with coherent uses. So I see the overall effect as something of a wash. I would actually prefer the word dialectic, as it connotes the idea of two opposites which can then be synthesised together, but I don’t feel it’s meaning is known well-enough.