A universal duality! By Roberto Sironi
T
he nature or condition of that which is composed of two elements or principles is called duality! Man is the most fitting example of this, certainly not the only one, but he is the most appropriate and relevant! The duality in man as he is made up of soul and body! This mind-body dualism can be conceived as a perfect machine, an exceptional and exemplary apparatus that moves like an instrument that is self-sufficient in all its parts, a mechanism that on the one hand works philosophically, and on the other uses physics as dominant and essential energy! In the conception of this concept that has always intrigued human beings, one finds, in fact, the presence of two fundamental principles conspiring towards a goal or contrasting with each other! Duality is a symptom of harmony and its opposite! Plato, Kant, and Descartes, especially the latter are the ones who introduced dualism into modern philosophy, and other philosophers have tried, each in their own way, to define this principle, and all, without distinction, have supported it with intelligence and culture, this indispensable concept! I would like to address this topic not with order, but with a mental disorder that however gives meaning to this journey, even metaphorical, to the metaphysical
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Summer 2024 - The Duality issue
world, that world which on the one hand is immaterial, supernatural, transcendental, and on the other is sensitive, empirical, material and immanent! White and black! I am a painter, and as such, dualism in the world of colors would be almost impossible instead, even in this colorful universe, metaphysics seen as an absolute value through an image is very important! Black and white are the absolute masters of color in general! Both defend and fight the worlds they interpret and represent! They are two material entities with a very authoritative presence and their incisiveness and their essential and indisputable necessity mean that both become inevitable and mandatory for the creation of a work! Black and white in their very ancient duality, probably already existing at the dawn of life, of any type of life, even that which would seem to have no life, determine everything that then becomes for us humans and not only through visual effect or induction everything that can be considered color: the color of the known and unknown universe! In this disorder with which I am tackling this topic, the man-woman relationship, the man-man relationship, or the woman-woman relationship cannot be missing! Duality here exhibits itself as a true science of thought, therefore as an idea that shapes, even in the smallest and most infinitesimal details, our human race! Accustomed as we are, by culture, religion, tradition, and
custom to distinguishing men from women, perhaps we have forgotten the best part of this useless distinction, namely duality! The masculine part and the feminine part are the most important polarities that coexist in each of us and it is a duality that Jung defined as Animus and Anima, the two primary archetypes of the unconscious mind with an anthropomorphic rather than animal aspect! According to Jung, the Animus, the woman, represents the unconscious psychic counterpart, while for the man the Anima is nothing other than the true center of the individual!” Man, woman, black and white! Images reflected in the same mirror which, despite changing their “existential illustration”, maintain their metaphysical dimension by mixing into each other, amalgamating and blending into billions of possible and impossible visions! If the synonyms of dualism, of this contrast of opposing forces which over time have become the pillars of good and evil, are antagonism, contrast, disagreement, opposition, dichotomy, or rivalry, they’re opposite, assuming that opposite exists, lies in the fact that there can be a singularity, an exceptionality, an “unequal ability”, therefore a uniqueness! Could be? Would it even be possible in the philosophical sense? Could the idea of the whole be founded as the synthesis of the unique?