Brain Food #849: The dualities in us
There is nothing good or bad
Thoughts of the day
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote:
“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”
Polarised thinking, or the tendency to think in absolutes, makes itself present when we are faced with a challenge; the challenge of facing the unknown —otherwise known as the other— or something true yet unpleasant. Some trace this tendency back to the origins of humankind, the birth of our fight or flight mode, and how indispensable it has been to our survival.
Black or white thinking, what is referred to as ‘splitting’ by psychologists, means we might be tempted to pigeonhole events or people in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories. How good or bad one is at doing something; how good or bad one is as a person; how good or bad a year has been (not even considering that between today and next March there is also a year, and a new beginning can start at any moment in time).
This manner of thinking gives rise to all forms of divisions: social, relational, psychological. If something is not good for us, or to us, then it must be bad, and so we have to flee it or destroy it.
Perfectionism is polarisation’s closest friend, for if something is not perfect, then it must inherently be bad, or a failure. All of us are capable of making mistakes, but that does not necessarily make us bad at what we do, or bad at being human. In fact, it probably makes us very good at it. How negative a failure or setback is in the overall progress of a project or task should not determine the outcome of the task itself.
Being human comes with a range of experiences and characteristics. Part of being human is not just accepting them, both in ourselves and in others, but also in learning to see them differently.
As Hamlet famously proclaimed, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
The more we distance ourselves from extreme interpretations, the more we move towards a territory that feels more steady and navigable. And this extends beyond the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ labels, but to all forms of contraries. According to Aristotle’s Golden Mean, all virtues fall somewhere between two polar opposites: excess and deficiency, cowardice and recklessness, self-deprecation and arrogance.
If something is not black, it does not mean it is white. There is a world of colour to be discovered in between.
The swan is a recurring symbol in Hilma af Klint’s art, another reminder that perhaps we are all vessels of the same message, trying to communicate it in infinite ways during the short, finite time we are given.
“In alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of what is known as the philosopher's stone, a substance believed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Here, af Klint's black-and-white palette underscores the dualities of light and dark, male and female, life and death.”
(from the Guggenheim)
After all, in folklore, the swan is the ugly duckling until it turns into the most beautiful of creatures. Both the ugly and the beautiful were part of the same entity. The dualities are in us.
