I may well be missing something, but this seems like an esthetic version of the anthropic principle—that we observe the universe that we observe because it's the kind of universe in which it is possible for our kind of life to evolve and observe it.Jnyusa wrote: ... a truth which an omnipotent, transcendent god need not have utilized in his forming his creation. No?
I'm not sure.
The alternative would presumably be to have the joy without the accompanying potential for suffering?
Let me come at the question of duality from a different angle.
I had a sort of revelation about twenty-two ago, while out walking my first daughter in her stroller. It was not a revelation about pain but about beauty. And it turns out that this idea was pretty old hat, but I know next to nothing about Aesthetics so to me it felt like a revelation.
I was standing, looking at a cluster of wind-bent cedar trees in our neighborhood, and thinking how hard it would be to find a person who did not consider them surpassingly beautiful, and bemoaning by extension the overdevelopment that robs us of so many natural beauties ...
... when it suddenly occurred to me that there was something miraculous in the fact that what we consider to be beautiful is actually the world as it was created.
How fortunate that the attributes if this world in which we were placed (originally) coincide with our aethetic sense and give us joy rather than dismay.
Why should it be so? I mean, thinking about it within the scientific paradigm, the aesthetic sense is probably as difficult to explain as our experience of spirituality. That satisfaction and joy we feel when something is harmonious - whether a piece of music or an elegant equation - the transcendence we feel in the middle of a cathedral forest ... heck, the joy of a dog allowed to stick his head out the window of a moving car! These seem to me pointless from an evolutionary perspective ...and yet they are very real and confluent and near-universally shared. The fact that we (and other animals) have this capacity for pointless joy ....this seems to me a tiny miracle, a little bonus that contains, possibly, a larger truth about our existence.
It's not precisely duality, but rather conjunction of two different attributes that had no necessity of being conjoined.
So I ask myself whether duality might not be conjunction seen in a different light.
It's hard to think how suffering might be cast as a symptom of conjunction if we are limited to the perspective of one linear lifetime, but I am not sure what other ... realities ... we might be participating in. I suspect that there could be perspectives from which everything is unifying in some way, rather than breaking down and separating.
Jn
Or the fact that the wavelength of light the human eye perceives most easily (a kind of yellow-green) coincides exactly with the sun's wavelength maximum—the wavelength at which it puts out the most light.
We evolved to fit this world. If joy has an evolutionary purpose, then it isn't surprising that we evolved to take joy in the world in which we find ourselves.