Duality - Again

Duality – Again

Ok.  So we all know I’ve got a beef with duality.

Well … I just learned something that made a lot of sense to me, and has made duality be less of a villain in my book:

There are two types of duality:

1)  Prescriptive Duality.  This is the duality that I’m familiar with.  It takes two things that are each other’s opposite and determines one to be “bad” and one to be “good”.  Or “dark” and “light” or whatever … it assigns each a value opposite the value of the other polarity.   In prescriptive duality, the value of one thing is relational to the value of its opposite – they’re both required in order to define each other. I think this is lame.  You know, the whole spectrum/vividly hued tapestry thing where I prefer an entire range of color to merely black and white …

2)  Descriptive Duality.  This is a way of using duality with which I have previously been unfamiliar.  With descriptive duality, there are still two items, but there is no value placed on them other than “different than that one”.  There is no hierarchy of right/wrong or better/worse.  It just says, “Hey look … there are two things here.  One looks like this and the other looks like this.”  I can see the value in this mode of duality application.  Because, often, there are two things that one may wish to contrast – not in value, but rather in features.  It provides nothing more than neutral information.

When I was finally presented with the concept of descriptive duality, I was so relieved.  It works just fine in any setting that prescriptive duality works in, and is able to empower one to recognize difference from a space of equality.  Kinda like the Human Rights Movement.