Serenity and Dualism

Because it is easy to interpret an organism as naturally seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, Pleasure and Pain are often posited as the fundamental Psychological principles.  Accordingly, intelligence is often conceived as functioning primarily in the service of maximizing Pleasure and minimizing Pain.  However, as human invention demonstrates, the capacity to cause suffering increases in proportion to the capacity to end suffering and to produce pleasure.  So, a higher wisdom often begins with the insight that Pleasure and Pain are inextricably entwined in Nature, so freedom from Pain requires a purified Pleasure that transcends Nature, i. e. Serenity.  Popular versions of that super-natural realm are Heaven and Eden, and the prototypical Philosophical version is The One of Parmenides.  Now, Serenity entails transcendence of natural Pleasure and Pain, so these various hypostatizations of it entail a systematic Dualism, the second term of which for Parmenides is Motion/Multiplicity.  A more general characterization of the Duality is Incorporeality vs. Corporeality, one to which most successors of Parmenides have adopted.  So, these traditional Ontological or Epistemological Dualisms are usually Psychological in origin, and their ultimate aim, implicit or explicit, is to ground the cultivation of Serenity.