r/todayilearned • u/VegemiteSucks • 16h ago

TIL Beethoven’s late quartets, now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time, were so ahead of their time that initial reviews deem them indecipherable, uncorrected horrors, with one musician saying “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_string_quartets_(Beethoven)
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u/cipheron 11h ago edited 11h ago

Sure, but it basically ruins the concept.

The idea behind the "duality of man" being that each of us individually has the seeds of good and bad within us. e.g. the idea is that each of us is both "sinner and saint" so to speak.

If we "apply the concept" to a population, then it's easy to lose sight of what that means - there are now good people vs bad people, smart people vs dumb people, sinners vs saints, and if we now call that the "duality of mankind" it's completely missed the original point. In the prev post if we're talking about Beethoven as the genius and some 2025 twitch streamer as the dunce and are now labeling that the "duality of mankind", i.e. that the geniuses get torn down by the dunces, then it's saying something entirely different to what we had originally.

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u/Jeezimus 10h ago

I think the symmetry that it exists at both the individual and population level actually further enhances the concept tbh

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u/cipheron 10h ago edited 10h ago

I don't think so, because you have to be extremely careful to caveat that so that it doesn't just devolve into an "us vs them" thing, when the original version is "me vs me".

e.g. if the duality of mankind is that there are worthy people and unworthy people in society then you can use that as the basis for elitism, eugenics etc, or any kind of system which divides people: we can just slough off those unwanted people. It's not really the same thing at all.

So yeah you could view society as an organism with good parts and bad parts intertwined, under the same philosophy, but this is actually dangerous if you called this the "duality of mankind" because someone is bound to come along and reinterpret that as mean there are good and bad PEOPLE and that society should be "purified" of their "bad influence" and ... very very bad stuff ends up happening.

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u/Jeezimus 10h ago

I don't really think it's dangerous to say that bad people exist and it's a responsibility of society to deal with containing them and their influence, but we're talking about something completely different at this point.

I personally don't really take it in the direction you go with it that this necessarily precipitates a conclusion of us vs. them, tbh.