August 4, 2003

• I love a mystery.
  It gives me something to think about.

  
  

  I’ve been thinking and thinking and consulting reference books and family members, and yet this remains a mystery–several mysteries, really, such as how it came to be and what it means.  The most likely solution I can come up with for how it came to be is chemical impairment, although an afflicted Mercury comes to mind as another possibility.  As for what it means, I’ll take my examination of that question paragraph by paragraph.

  
  

  Quoted below is a comment left by PotFeet on my “Dualism versus Monism” blog from yesterday.  The single “[sic]” in there was supplied by the author.  Just as in the quote from John J. Coughlin in yesterday’s blog, I have opted not to put a “[sic]” after each of her errors in grammar, spelling or syntax.  I think her prose is sick enough as it is.

  
  

  
  

  to me, the outstanding binary of western [sic, but give me better] thought is not good/evil, but rather praise/blame.  we elevate or condemn by words, and the value structure follows from our actions.

  
  

  I’d try to supply a “better” alternate for whatever she’s asking for, if only I knew what that is.  Her “[sic]” follows just after “western” (Why not just say, “dualistic”, since that, and not geography, was my topic?), so perhaps that’s the term of which she was unsure, but “binary” presents some problems for me… and “the outstanding” in this context is a bit questionable, too. 

  
  

  If we were only discussing binaries, not dualistic opposites, it would relieve some of the problematic issues, but we are, in fact, discussing opposites.  A binary is simply a set of two and can be a dyad, two of a kind, as well as a pair of opposites.  That semantic quibble is completely aside from the question of whether values follow from actions or if it is actually actions that proceed from values.  Who knows what she meant?  Perhaps she is implying that society’s “value structure” is a result of the actions of a few who speak out in praise or blame of whatever.  That I find questionable.  I think people are more likely to act upon their values than they are to form values based upon their actions.

  
  

  
  

  i guess that although monism as you quote/describe it does remove the absolutism prescribed by JCI tradition, it does not touch the inherent ‘purity’ of the binary, or why the notion of opposite is required so much by thinking.

  
  

  I don’t see how monism would remove anything.  What it does is, by contrast, point up and make obvious the absolutistic nature of dualism.  Whichever binary is “the” binary to PotFeet, I don’t see where “purity” is inherent in “binary” as a concept per se, nor even in those binaries that happen to be opposed pairs since much has already been said by many humans for a long time about the gray areas between the black and the white.  Alternatively if this is what she meant: that binaries are necessarily pure, I say that is nonsense.  What could be more purely absolutistic than purity, and what word in the English language is a less pure expression of dualistic extremism than, “binary”?

  
  

  Anyone who followed my links yesterday to those entries where I have addressed this issue previously, knows my take on the question of why we think dualistically.  We tend to think in dualistic terms because we are a bisexual species with bilateral symmetry, which has evolved on a planet that rotates in respect to a light source so that we spend about half our time in darkness and half in the light.  Add to that our single satellite at a distance that makes it appear to be about the same size as the daystar appears, and you have quite adequate bases for much myth and copious dualistic speculation.

  
  

  The notion that “opposite”, that dualism, is “required… by thinking,” is nonsense.  I suppose there could be many people who have never thought outside that particular box.  Speaking as one who not only thinks outside that box but lives and works in a monistic universe, I know the nonsensical nature of that statement.  True, our language, and some but not all other languages, are mired in dualism.  Many people (mostly men, I’m afraid) do tend to think only in words, numbers and symbols.  Our schools generally teach only linguistic thinking.  I think in pictures, diagrams, holistic ideas… and then sometimes try to put them into words.  Due to the limitations of language not all of my thoughts fit into words.

  
  

  
  

  a game is played were if anything is named, you must name the opposite.  charity, greed.  America, Russia.  walk, run.  it is a rhetorical device, strong in that it makes the audience hear if you use opposites: “i am not telling you tall tales as i am a very short man”.

  
  

  It degenerates as it goes along, that comment.  The dictionary search box in the left module of my main page goes to an indexed collection of 950 dictionaries, some of which include a thesaurus.  I searched not all of them, but all the main ones.  Nowhere did I find “charity” as the opposite of “greed”.  And that was the one out of her three examples of “opposites” that to my mind seemed nearest to fitting. 

  
  

  Joe McCarthy might have viewed Russia as the opposite of America.  If I were looking for an opposite to something such as a nation, which truly does not have either an equivalent or an opposite, I would probably choose a geographical opposition.  For America, the pair of continents, (this nation here is the United States, not “America”), I would pick a continent in the Eastern Hemisphere–say Asia or Africa.

  
  

  Walking and running are a dyadic pair, not opposites.  To either of those ideas, immobility or vehicular travel would be nearer to opposition than the other one is.  A school child conditioned to hearing the hallway monitor shout, “Walk, don’t run,” might see them as opposites.  If one is going to play a game, let’s give that game some rules that make some sense.

  
  

  Her, “rhetorical device, strong in that it makes the audience hear if you use opposites,” just leaves me asking, “Huh?”  Is she saying the game is a rhetorical device, as implied by her syntax?  Does she mean that the usage of opposites in rhetoric would strongly draw the attention of an audience?  Whatever she means here, I think her argument is weak. 

  
  

  
  

  so, if anything can be taken with the self-obsessed movement that is postmodernism, be it the questioning of all opposite and binary pairs.  the purest form of opposite is the spartial, everything else is metaphoric.

  
  

  After a while, I just had to give up on this final paragraph.  It uses words that are not words, for one thing, and the first part of it, which I hesitate to dignify by the label, “sentence”, might make some sense if one substitutes “by” in place of “with”.  Out of OneLook’s 950 dictionaries, only nine even recognized “metaphoric” as a word fragment and they did so with reservations, as in OneLook’s quick definition:
  adjective:   expressing one thing in terms normally denoting another (Example: “A metaphorical expression”)

  
  

  “Spartial”, on the other hand, is not one of the 5,906,621 words indexed in OneLook’s 950 dictionaries.  Maybe it is too new to have made it into a dictionary and we are all just ‘way behind PotFeet.  Maybe she meant “spatial”, which would make a sort of sense, if one ignores that, “everything else is metaphor….” quip.  What she wanted to say, and why she felt the need to say it, remains somewhat a mystery to me.  If I had to bet, I’d lay money on the chemical impairment.  It was the weekend, after all.

  
  

  

  • 4:48 pm
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