Beyond Yin-Yang: The Relational Reality of Darkness and Light

Last essay for 2025….

For some, the Yin-Yang symbol is a cool pendant. A tidy depiction of binary opposites: darkness and light. But hang on, pilgrim. Is it?

People say we should chase away the darkness with light.
But what is darkness?
Often, the explanation arrives quickly and reductively: darkness is the absence of light.
My standard reply is simple: I’m with you. Now explain darkness without referencing light in any way.
That is usually where the fumbling begins. Next comes scientific jargon.
Darkness is described as low photon density. An absence of electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Yet darkness is not only a lack of energy. It is also a perception. And that is where things become difficult. What do we actually see? What do we experience?

Perception chucks out the idea of clean opposites. Instead of enemies, they begin to look like prerequisites. Darkness and light stop behaving as rivals and start functioning as conditions for meaning.

The Yin-Yang symbol collapses when one side is removed. With only one half, the symbol loses coherence. The remaining half becomes unintelligible. Even our scientific attempts to define darkness remain relational.
We describe it by what it lacks rather than what it is.
Darkness may be less a physical condition and more a phenomenological state.
A blind person’s darkness is presumably different from a sighted person’s darkness in a sealed room. And this also differs again from the imagined darkness between stars, something we can visualize but never directly experience.

Humans define meaning relationally. We use difference and contrast. Asking someone to define darkness without light is similar to asking them to define “up” without any reference to space or orientation. This suggests that the Yin-Yang framing is not symbolic decoration. It may reflect how meaning itself functions.

On a practical level, this loops back to something I have written about before: We inevitably compare ourselves with others, consciously or subconsciously. You might as well stop feeling guilty about it. To hell with the idea that we should only compare ourselves to our past selves. A relational existence is essential for survival. You cannot search for food, safety, or fulfillment without comparing those states to their perceived absence.

When language fails to describe what we feel, we return again to absence as explanation. ‘Empty’ becomes the reference point for understanding ‘full.’  Much of my thoughts these past weeks have circled understanding itself.It became a sobering exercise. If we struggle to explain something as seemingly simple as darkness without invoking its opposite, we are forced to confront the very guts of meaning and how it operates.

The Yin-Yang offers a practical method for better understanding stuff: stop trying to isolate concepts.
Examine the relationships that give them meaning.
Instead of asking what something is in isolation, ask what conditions allow it to be experienced, recognized, or valued at all. Understanding strengthens when we look at relationships instead of pure definitions.
Meaning does not live in objects or ideas alone. It emerges at the boundary, those spaces where one thing is revealed through another.
The work, then, is not choosing sides, but learning to read the space between them.

Just for fun, I created an interactive HTML revolving Yin-Yang symbol. As unpredictable as communication can be, I can almost read your mind where the little app is concerned, knowing you will max out the speed of the thing instantly. But yeah, do it!