Unity of opposites
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[edit] Ancient Philosophy
Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, was the first to suggest this unity of opposites. Philosophers had for some time been contemplating the notion of opposites. Anaximander posited that every element was an opposite, or connected to an opposite (water is cold, fire is hot). Thus, the material world was composed by some indefinite, boundless apeiron from which arose the elements (earth, air, fire, water) and pairs of opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry). There was, according to Anaximander, a continual war of opposites. Anaximenes, a student and successor of Anaximander, replaced this indefinite, boundless arche with air, a known element with neutral properties. According to Anaximenes, there was not so much a war of opposites, as a continuum of change. Heraclitus, however, did not accept the milesian monism and replaced their underling material arche with a single, divine law of the universe, which he called logos. The universe of Heraclitus is in constant change, but also remaining the same. That is to say, an object moves from point A to point B, thus creating a change, but the underlying law remains the same. Thus, a unity of opposites is present in the universe as difference and sameness. This is a rather broad example though. For a more detailed example we may turn to an aphorism of Heraclitus:
"The road up and the road down are the same thing" (Hippolytus, Refutations 9.10.3)
This is an example of a compresent unity of opposites. For, at the same time, this slanted road has the opposite qualities of ascension and descention. According to Heraclitus, every object co-instantiates at least one pair of opposites (though not necessarily in simultaneously) and every pair of opposites is co-instantiated in at least one object. Heraclitus also uses the succession of opposites as a base for change:
"Cold things grow hot, a thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted."
As a single object persists through opposite properties, this object undergoes change.
[edit] Modern Philosophy
Unity of opposites is the central category of dialectics, and it is viewed sometimes as a metaphysical concept, a philosophical concept or a scientific concept. It defines a situation in which the existence or identity of a thing (or situation) depends on the co-existence of at least two conditions which are opposite to each other, yet dependent on each other and presupposing each other, within a field of tension.
In formal logic and mathematics, a unity or identity of opposites cannot exist (it would mean for example that 2 = -2), but dialecticians claim that it can exist in reality or in thought. If the opposites were completely balanced, the result would be stasis, but often it is implied that one of the pairs of opposites is larger, stronger or more powerful than the other, such that over time, one of the opposed conditions prevails over the other.
In his criticism of Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher Hegel who tried to systematise dialectical understandings thus wrote:
The principles of the metaphysical philosophy gave rise to the belief that, when cognition lapsed into contradictions, it was a mere accidental aberration, due to some subjective mistake in argument and inference. According to Kant, however, thought has a natural tendency to issue in contradictions or antinomies, whenever it seeks to apprehend the infinite. We have in the latter part of the above paragraph referred to the philosophical importance of the antinomies of reason, and shown how the recognition of their existence helped largely to get rid of the rigid dogmatism of the metaphysic of understanding, and to direct attention to the Dialectical movement of thought. But here too Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites. [1]
In his philosophy, Hegel ventured to describe quite a few cases of "unity of opposites", including the concepts of Finite and Infinite, Force and Matter, Identity and Difference, Positive and Negative, Form and Content, Chance and Necessity, Cause and Effect, Freedom and Necessity, Subjectivity and Objectivity, Means and Ends, Subject and Object, and Abstract and Concrete.
[edit] External links
- "Heraclitus on Change and Unity of Opposites" [2]
