Duality and Difference
You are (not) what you are.
Last time, I claimed that the belief in what I called “pure difference” is the seed that eventually grew into contemporary capitalism. However, I suspect that most people would take my characterization of pure difference—that different things are only different, that I am only me and you are only you—to be either so obvious as to not be worth mentioning or so obviously wrong as to be embarrassing to claim.
People who think that pure difference is obvious would claim that difference can only mean pure difference, that something less or other than pure difference would render the word “difference” meaningless, leaving us with no way to talk about the obvious multiplicity of particular things.
People who think that pure difference is obviously wrong would perhaps point to the ability of things to influence each other. They would claim that one person is not purely different from another because they can influence each other across the line that mutually defines them. But this is not actually a contradiction of pure difference because, contrary to the claims of both groups I just described, the defining trait of pure difference has less to do with the line and more to do with the fact that one’s self lies on only one side of it. Claiming to be able to influence someone across the line stops short of claiming one is on the other side of the line. In this sense, both groups I described actually believe in pure difference but neither understand that what’s at stake has less to do with the line and more to do with where the self is in relation to it.
What I actually mean by self-difference is indeed that self is on both sides of the line. This does not mean, as the former group might claim, that there is no line, and as such that there is no difference. Difference is maintained, but as self-difference. What this means in practice is the ability to look out at the world and say both of the following truly: “that is not me,” and “that is me.”
What I just described, two contradictory statements that are nevertheless both true, would seem to be a paradox. However, it is only actually a paradox, or only actually problematic, if one has already adopted the position of pure difference. In fact, this kind of paradox is just the result of defining things as necessarily only one thing or another. But what possible alternative might there be to understand the relationship between things without dissolving all difference?
My proposed alternative to pure difference is, of course, what I’ve been calling self-difference, but that’s a term that is maybe more easily relatable to the whole rather than the parts, the “self” rather than the “difference.” When considering the various things that pure difference claims are essentially different, it may be helpful to use a different term to explain the relationship between them: “mutual essence.” Mutual essence is the heart of, or perhaps even simply another term for, what we call “duality,” and what it means is that what one thing is, its essence, is intertwined with and cannot be separated from what something else is.
Let’s look at an obvious example of duality to see how pure difference and self-difference (i.e. mutual essence) seek to address it: light and darkness. A proponent of pure difference would have to say that light and darkness are essentially different from each other. They might defend this position by claiming that what we call light is “actually” (meaning “only”) particles called photons and that what we call “darkness” is nothing but the absence of those particles. In this sense, only light really is anything, and darkness is, at best, a subjective experience that has no independent meaning. This would be a far cry from the position mutual essence would have to take, which is that darkness must in some way be symmetrically essential to light.
However, there is a subtle conflation of terms the proponent of pure difference relies on in order to make this argument. Their claim is that light is photons, but that’s not exactly correct. Photons are photons, and light is the presence of photons, just as darkness is their absence. Now, this may seem like mere wordplay, but it reveals something absolutely essential to our understanding of our lives, our world, and the very nature of reality. Every duality, every distinction and difference, can be reduced to the duality between presence and absence. More than that, what every thing is is such a duality. Why? Because total presence or total absence, pure being or pure nothing, would make the existence of any particular thing impossible. Things are their differences: light can only be light when there is darkness, just as atoms can only be atoms when there is a void to give them definition. Green can only be green in the absence of not-green (which is part of what makes red and blue what they are, i.e. they share in what it means to be not-green). Thus everything is both what it is and what it is not, because it can’t be what it is without its other.
This is what I mean by self-difference. Light and dark, being and nothing, self and other: they arise together in their difference. Each of them is nothing more than the other of the other.
Who are you? The other of [the other of you]. And what are you without the other?
A reflection without a mirror.