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The Field of Opposites
Recent discussions on some friend's LJ's have me ruminating on Joseph Campbell's writings on the Field of Opposites - the polarized reality in which we live - with its day/night, hot/cold, male/female, good/evil etc pairs of opposing forces.
Rich/poor, black/white, law/chaos, up/down, liberal/conservative,gay/str8, North/South, East/West, left /right...the list goes on and on. Of course you *can* divide up the zillions of physical and mental phenomena into other arrangements but doesn't it seem that the biggest movements and forces in society tend to fall back on this pole /opposite pole axiom at least as abstract ideals if not concrete manifestations?
Seems like the most powerful and often the most violent conflicts are about thing / anti-thing. Us/them, communist / capitalist, Jew/Arab, insider /outsider, Democrat / Republican, commoner /royal, nurture /nature, socialist /individualist...
Obviously some of those are not objective opposites and there are spectrums of grey between the blacks and whites but the blacks and whites are there, if only as conceptual paragons that spur and motivate people's actions.
Doesn't it seem it always comes down to this sort of thing? Even macrocosms like "Four Elements" and "16 Temperaments" are essentially subdivisions of two. Even the Trinity concept of Christianity still boils down to God / Devil in everyday usage.
I wonder if this is because we have left and right brains...dual-sided symmetry in our biology?
Rich/poor, black/white, law/chaos, up/down, liberal/conservative,gay/str8, North/South, East/West, left /right...the list goes on and on. Of course you *can* divide up the zillions of physical and mental phenomena into other arrangements but doesn't it seem that the biggest movements and forces in society tend to fall back on this pole /opposite pole axiom at least as abstract ideals if not concrete manifestations?
Seems like the most powerful and often the most violent conflicts are about thing / anti-thing. Us/them, communist / capitalist, Jew/Arab, insider /outsider, Democrat / Republican, commoner /royal, nurture /nature, socialist /individualist...
Obviously some of those are not objective opposites and there are spectrums of grey between the blacks and whites but the blacks and whites are there, if only as conceptual paragons that spur and motivate people's actions.
Doesn't it seem it always comes down to this sort of thing? Even macrocosms like "Four Elements" and "16 Temperaments" are essentially subdivisions of two. Even the Trinity concept of Christianity still boils down to God / Devil in everyday usage.
I wonder if this is because we have left and right brains...dual-sided symmetry in our biology?
no subject
But your points are well taken - however I think I should clarify just in case I was coming across too deterministic - I don't think we MUST choose in terms of duality, only that we have a tendency to boil concepts down into dualities - many of which are some of the most fundamental and powerful concepts that drive us as a species.
I think its no coincidence that we seem to like base-10 numbering so much when we have 10 fingers and 10 toes - especially the fingers - our primal primary tools are base 10 by default (barring accident or deformity) so I don't think its much of a stretch for us to tend to look for dualities.
I think the either/or simplification you mention might be a good example of that sort of thing at work. Not that one choice is left and one choice is right brained - but that these types of fundamental divisions in conceptualizaition being dual due to the architecture of that which is doing the thinking.