Who deserves what? Do we have ‘free will’? Does history repeat itself? What is the nature of awareness? In delving into the heart of this often repeated questions I see the outlines of a few dualities. Much of the time, each pole of the duality is invisible. Below, I describe a couple of dualities I’m particularly interested in.
You could see this in the vein of Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology and Haidt’s moral foundations theory. What follows, though, isn’t really a theory so much as list of provocations.
I could write a chapter on each, but I want to share the rough outline in the spirit of working in public.
Human Dualities
Pure and impure: at the heart of the creation of society is the duality between purity and impurity. The profound and the profane. When a myth is strongly shared, it is pure. It does not happen to be shared because it is pure; rather, the collective worship enacts the purity. One might think of it as a psychotechnology that draws on a deep biological inheritance. At its root, we are repelled by the potentially noxious: excrement, urine, mold. This is harnessed and turned into a social scale whereby people can be weighed. See Maps of Meaning. Also: technology renders profane the functions underlying previously sacred objects.
Means and ends: One might say we have person-treating apparatuses, and tool-treating apparatuses/circuits. Means is the tool-oriented interface, ends are the person-relational interface. This is a continual tension in human relations. Pragmatically of course we relate in a way that is alternately as a way of using each other and as an end in and of itself. Something deep however is violated when we see a person being treated wholly as a tool. How this tension shows up; utilitarians see people as means or as containers of utility.
Mind and body; the cartesian notion of 'inner' and 'outer' stuff forms the foundation of western science. Division and doing away with the inner mind does violence to inner experience and results in confusions like the placebo effect. This is also essentially the question about software vs hardware. Consciousness etc is bound up in this. Marr's levels of cognition. Is consciousness at the software level etc. See Merleau Ponty, enactivism etc
Good and evil: this may be overdone, but it is so deeply central to how we orient. Pairwise better and worse seems a broad universal, but how many cultures take it to an infinity/conclusion? How different is the very traditional conception of good and bad in Chinese culture versus Western culture? See Beyond Good and Evil, on the Genealogy of Morals.
Self and other: deep psychological boundary. A process that is at the heart of all suffering, according to Siddhartha Gautama. Sense of self as repeated efforting, a clenching that identifies itself with the whole
Agent and arena, autonomy and determinism, freedom and oppression: very linked with ‘self and other’. Vervaeke points out that the process of niche construction is how the agent and the arena are causally coupled. We shape the environment to fit ourselves (e.g. by building houses), and also ourselves to fit the environment (e.g. by wearing clothes). The boundary however is of course nebulous.
Is and ought: closely linked with purity and impurity. ‘Is’ = reality, the way things are, ‘ought’ = normativity, how things ‘should’ be. In practice the division appears to be an entangled mess. Active inference implies that action and perception are inseparable: we perceive how we can act and we can only act through what we perceive. Our ‘ought’ is outlined by what we think perceive as our ‘is’
Abundance and scarcity, Explore and exploit, negative and positive sum games: Much of the evolution of life can be understood as balancing dynamically changing systems of scarcity and abundance. Fascinating how an attitude of abundance generates kind coordination across a large class of people
Linear time and circular time: where the Christians departed from the Ancient Greeks. The natural world has circular rhythms. Seasons. Days. Moon cycles. The invention of progress, of linear time, was truly radical. Science and technology is crucially predicated on a linear constructive time. Eliade’s The Myth of Eternal Return, Bury’s The Idea of Progress
Subjective - Objective: this falls out of self-vs other. ‘Objective’ as manifestation of the myth of third person bird-eye view of god. Reifying objectivity denies the fluid boundary between self and world and also the personal-social perceptual construction we are performing at all times to remain legible to ourselves and other people. Daston and Galison’s Objectivity, Richard Rorty.
I welcome other dualities in the comments.