We think in terms of opposing forces and opposites. Duality flows from the boundaries created as we separate from the whole of existence—initially physically at birth, and then psychically in infancy. This schism has been expressed in many ways, often as contrasting forces: good and evil, life and death, aggressive and erotic, Me and Not-Me, extrovert and introvert. I believe the true significance of duality lies in our response to it. There is a fundamental difference in outcome between choosing between opposites and integrating them.
Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein conceived of opposing Life and Death instincts. However, a “Death” instinct seems incompatible with evolution; what purpose does it serve? More natural is Donald Winnicott’s expression of an aggressive component, born of opposition, and an erotic component, born of complementarity—both arising as an infant realizes the distinction between Me and Not-Me. Carl Jung also focused on the struggle to integrate opposing forces. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality typing that evolved from Jung’s work, with its four dimensions: Extrovert/Introvert, Thinking/Feeling, Sensing/Intuition, and Judging/Perceiving. From the dawn of our species, we have observed the difference between light and dark, describing our very nature as good or evil. Martin Buber gives us the profound duality of the I-Thou way of being, contrasted against I-It.
“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between man’s attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connection with objects… These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constitutes the world of THOU and the latter the world of IT.” — Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of Ich und Du
It appears, then, that duality—expressed as an opposition of forces—is fundamental to our reaction to existence, woven into the very fabric of our thinking and being.
What, then, is our response? Is it passive, involving choice or balance, or is it active, requiring process and integration? Admitting polarity in all things, what should our reaction be? Do we simply choose between good and evil? Should we seek balance between different drives, aiming for a kind of dynamic equilibrium—for instance, striving to find the center point between extroversion and introversion? Is reality, in fact, a process budding eternally at the very boundary created by duality—life within Winnicott’s Transitional Space or Whitehead’s point of prehension? Or is there a further truth behind this duality, found in what arises from the unification of opposites? To paraphrase Beethoven: there cannot be loud without soft; it is from contrast that music arises.
Perhaps it is a matter of personal taste. If so, then—at least for me—the integration of duality is our purpose. It is an unceasing process because there is always a countervailing force of differentiation. There is a flow of existence driven by splitting and unification, birth and death. Duality is dynamic, not static, and the fundamental creative contrast is actually that between differentiation and integration, replacing Freud’s Life and Death instincts with forces of Integration and Differentiation. This isn’t an original thought, nor is it mine alone. It is inherent in the worldview of Eastern traditions (such as Yin and Yang) and likely our Western ancestors as well (as explored in Brian Bates’s The Wisdom of the Wyrd). It was also one of Jung’s foundational insights: “Much of Carl Jung’s writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity” (Anthony Storr, Jung: Selected Writings).
If we conceive of a schism-powered flow, what is its destination, and what is its fundamental motive impulse? Here we find Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the ultimate duality between the spiritual and the material—the inner and the outer. For him, the force underlying existence is Love, which powers evolution. He envisioned evolution as a process of complexification moving through the physical, chemical, and biological spheres into the realm of ideas, culminating in our consciousness of a God that is Love, encompassing all. As described by his interpreters, “There is a duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the ‘without’ and ‘within.’ He traces the development of the ‘within,’ an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas.”
In Teilhard de Chardin’s words:
“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form… Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”