Day
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Night
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“I often think that the night is more alive...
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...and more richly colored than the day.� Vincent Van Gogh
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Dr. Jekyll
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Mr. Hyde
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“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man.”
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“If I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.” Robert Louis Stevenson
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“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.� Oscar Wilde
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Light
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Darkness
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“Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingles opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating.”
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“We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.” Louis Aragon
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“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night� Galileo Galilei
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24 | Light & Darkness
The Unity of Opposites Heraclitus
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Heraclitus' flux doctrine is a special case of the unity of opposites, pointing to ways things are both the same and not the same over time. He depicts two key opposites that are interconnected, but not identical. Heraclitus sometimes explains how things have opposite qualities: “Sea is the purest and most polluted water: for fish drinkable and healthy, for men undrinkable and harmful.�
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Barnes thinks Heraclitus gets his doctrine of the universal coinstantiation of contraries through fallaciously dropping qualifiers. But below shows he is perfectly aware of them, and we might rather say that he understands them tacitly even when he does not utter them. When he says: “Collections are: wholes and not wholes;
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brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things.” Hercalitus does not contradict himself. There are perfectly good contexts in which everything he says is true. “One can divide a collection into its parts or join the parts into a unified whole.”
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26 | Light & Darkness
Most tellingly, Heraclitus explains here just how contraries are connected: “As the same thing in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.” Contrary qualities are found in us “as the same thing.” But they are the same by virtue
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of one thing changing around to another. “We are asleep and we wake up; we are awake and we go to sleep. Thus sleep and waking are both found in us, but not at the same time or in the same respect. Indeed, if sleeping and waking were identical, there would be no change as required by the second sentence.”
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Contraries are the same by virtue of constituting a system of connections: alive-dead, waking sleeping, young-old. Subjects do not possess incompatible properties at the same time, but at different times. In general, what we see in Heraclitus is not a conflation of opposites into a certain identity,
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but a series of subtle analyses revealing the interconnectedness of contrary states in life and in the world. There is no need to impute to him a logical fallacy. Opposites are a reality, and their interconnections are real, but the correlative opposites are not identical to each other.
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Philosopher
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Fool
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“Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike.”
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“It is not possible to find some differences which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.” Gottfried Leibniz
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34 | Philosopher & Fool
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.� William Shakespeare
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Saint
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Sinner
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“Every saint has a past.”
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“Every sinner has a future.” Oscar Wilde
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42 | Sinner & Saint
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one; Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in the hungers and ambitions;
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In their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too in a net of good and evil... there is no other story.� John Steinbeck
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Life
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Death
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“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast...
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...nothing exists in itself.� Herman Melville
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48 | Life & Death
Metaphysics of Yin & Yang Heraclitus
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The idea of opposites (Yin Yang, the union and harmony of opposites) has existed in both Eastern and Western philosophy since ancient times. Of the Ancient Greek Philosophers, Heraclitus and Parmenides both understood that the Universe was One and Dynamic. As Bertrand Russell writes on Heraclitus; For Heraclitus the unity of things was to be found in their essential structure or arrangement rather than their material.
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This common structure or Logos, which was not superficially apparent, was chiefly embodied in a Single kinetic material, Fire. It was responsible both for the regularity of natural changes and for the essential connexion of opposites - Heraclitus adopted this traditional analysis of differentiation through balanced interaction.
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The important regularity underlying change was a very significant thing (Bertrand Russell on Heraclitus, The History of Western Philosophy) It is also very interesting to read the original fragments of Heraclitus' own writing; “Listening to the Logos rather than to me, it is wise to agree that all things are in reality one thing and one thing only.�
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Empty
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Full
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“Collections: wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart;
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Sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things.� Heraclitus
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“I have a simple philosophy; Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth
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Silence
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Noise
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“For every action...
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...there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Issac Newton
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66 | Silence & Noise
“Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.� William Powell
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Is
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Isn’t
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“If you are aware of a state which you call is, this implies another state called isn’t.”
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“You can’t know one without the other.” Unknown
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