The Duality of Human Beings: A dilemma confronting
us all the time
All the psychologists are quite conversant with the technical term "Jekyll and Hyde",coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next. However,the origin of the term is derived from a classic novella by a famous Scottish authorRobert Louis Stevenson Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is about a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson, a "large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty", occasionally feels he is battling between the good and evil within himself, thus leading to the struggle between his dual personalities of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He has spent a great part of his life trying to repress evil urges that were not fitting for a man of his stature. The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called "split personality", referred to in psychiatry asdissociative identity disorder , where within the same body there exists more than one distinct personality. In this case, there are two personalities within Dr Jekyll, one apparently good and the other evil; completely opposite levels of morality.
However, the question it raised on duality of human beings alongside the term "Jekyll and Hyde" did trigger profound thoughts of people: Are the morality of human beings absolute black and white or they could navigate their lives with both goodness and evil? This question conjured up my memory of a classic movie "Fight Club".
The movie tells a story of Jack, a office clerk, who fails to fall a sleep at night, and weirdly wakes up in different strange places each time. He get to know another person Tyler in one journey, who becomes his close friend later and they cooperate to start a special group named "Fight Club", serving for people who hide their true personality in day time and let the true self out at night. Gradually, the activities of the club goes out of control. They tent to engage themself into dangerous deeds or even seriously criminal activities. Sensibility comes back to Jack's mind, and he wants to stop the acts of lunacy until realizing the strange tracts of Tyler as well as their eccentric connection. In the end of the movie it turns out that Tyler is another Jack of evil side.
From my perspective, the narrator as an "everyman" the character is identified in the script as "Jack", but left nameless in the film. The author outlined the narrator's background: "He's tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing he isn't." The narrator cannot find happiness, so he travels on a path to enlightenment in which he must "kill" his one side which is connected to the society, to material world, to who he loved, even to his life. As tyler says that "No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide. data-layout="right" ". So for most part of the
film, it is talking about the process of "stripping". And Tyler attempts to strip everything attached to Jack away layer by layer to achieve the so-called "completely freedom". If we assume Jack reflects the good side of human beings, well-behaved, law-biding, and always putting "what they should do" ahead of "what they want to do", then we could regard Tyler as the evil side, who tends to deprive each burden and enjoys the true freedom. The process of "stripping" is the one that transfer "goodness" to "evil". So in order to answer the question raised above "Are the morality of human beings absolute black and white or they could navigate their lives with both goodness and evil? " we should pay close attention to the turning process of the two dual personalities in the movie, and for the next part of this paper, we are going to deliberate at the process of transformation between goodness and evil.
For the first layer of Jack's goodness to be stripped, it is the material world, his possession, along with relationship with others. Jack is described as "a person who offers no resistance" at very beginning of the film as he is too kind to turn his boss down for any trifle business. After starting and joining "fight club", he begins to focus more on night activities, or should we say, evil side. Then a series of changes take places one by one, first tossing his tie, the symptom of social connection, then being less polite to his boss, and finally declaring his departure from social life as he totally break up with his boss. For the second layer, he discards the hope to be loved. The classic lines by Tyler while Jack marks he hands with caustic soda could perfectly demonstrate the point, "You have to consider the possibility that god does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don’t need him. Fuck damnation,man. Fuck redemption. We are god’s unwanted children? So be it!" Pathetic as Jack was, he still believed in God and lusted for love as everyone did for ages , while at that time he completely gives up the hope and falls deeper to the evil side. On the third layer, Tyler tries to convince him that life does not important if we want to live qualified. There is a interesting segment in the movie that Tyler points a gun to the head of a shop keeper who wants to be a veterinary, then sets him free and makes him realize the fact that one day he is going to die. Therefore, he has every reason to enjoy his moment. "First you have to give up. First you have to know, not fear, know that someday you’re gonna die. It’s only after we’ve lost every ting that we’re free to do any ting." When they fling in the heavy rain taking the risk of losing lives, Tyler shows his philosophy of "let go" again, "You need to forget about what you know. That’s your problem. Forget about what you think you know about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me." For the last layer, also the one where Jack finally wakes up, Tyler tries to strip Marla, the one he loves, away from Jack, since love is also a burden, an obstruction to hinder our freedom.
In the end of the film, Jack "kills" the evil side of him and the story comes to a happy ending. However, it is not hard for us to find that technical expressions are used in the end to provide the audience the illusion of happy ending. Jack could never possibly stands alive after shooting at his mouth. In other words, if Tyler
died, Jack goes with him, Otherwise they proceed the transition of character. The above analysis could answer our question from two terms. Firstly, if a person wants to discard his goodness and turns to the evil side completely, he has to strip everything away, from material things, social connections to his life or his beloved ones. In the process of stripping, it is much possible for us to wake up and turn back as Jack does, because every one is born with goodness and no one could live without social connection or love from others. Secondly, the goodness and evil side of human beings can and only can coexist together. we live with both of them or we kill ourselves, as Jack does not succeed to eliminate his evil side until commits suicide.
However, there are questions the movie does not answer. the duality of human beings severely violates our demand for "consistency" (a term used in psychology to describe a harmonious uniformity or agreement among things or parts), to put it in a simpler way, it is hard for people to live with total opposite code of ethics, or outlook on life. In both the novel "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and the movie "Fight Club", the narrators fail to figure out how to deal with the problem and they end the contradiction by the destruction of lives.
Dilemma as it is, while stepping out of cinemas and putting down books, we are still one of the ordinary beings proceeding our normal lives, preoccupied with daily stuff and too engaged to worry about the duality of human beings. This ultimate problem of human is frequently mentioned in the creative works of artists. Somehow after stating the dilemma in various artistic form, those woks seldom present us the solution. Nevertheless, when resorting to religious thoughts, it seems that the duality of human beings is the priority of almost every religion. When people feel harassed by the endless transforms between goodness and evil and the forever lack of consistency, those devout men and women turn to God for help and restrain their evil sides by believing in goodness from the depths of their hearts. Although not every one of us is religious, I content it is okay to resort to religion at the mention of the topic so as to talk about the solution of the problem. According to Catechism of the Catholic Church, every one commits sins ever since born. The very first thing we should do against our sins is to confess. Jack in Fight Club would never try to kill his evil side if he is not ready to face it. That reminds me of another famous novel the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A women named Hester Prinne taken in Adultery and has to wear a scarlet letter A in her bosom for all her life. While her mysterious lover, Arthur Demmsdale never confess to the public until his death although both of them are tortured by deep guilty in heart. In the end, Hester Prinne, the one who confess the sin to God and to the public at very begining survived the publishment her guilty and gain the strength again to start a new life, while Mr Arthur Demmsdale get reduced by the sin day by day and only feel a light of God after his confession. The story told us whenever feel guilty for sinful deeds, confess it and start again with hope for goodness, because people are born with evil side.
To draw a conclusion, for the question inspired by the novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, "Are the morality of human beings absolute black and white or they could navigate their lives with both goodness and evil?", my answer is that every one of us live among the struggle and transition process of goodness and evil, and we can't simply "kill" another side of us while both of them are parts of human nature. And whenever our evil side make it's appearance, we are not supposed to be fearful or feel inimical to admit it. We should face them and confess our sin, then go on our lives with the desire for goodness, just like in the end of the movie, Jack finally wakes up to find that he has just gone through "a very strange time" of his life.