Dualisms

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Here I want to deal with two sets of dualisms

  1. Yin And Yang - Yin is the principle of interiority Yang is the principle of exteriority
  2. I will use a philosophical shorthand and call these two principles Philia and Neikos - Love and Strife after Empedocles. Love serves to collect things, to unify Things. Strife acts to disperse things, to break things apart.

Is yin equivalent to Love? Is Yang equivalent to Strife. I personally don’t think so, but I can’t quite put my finger on the difference(s)

What think you?

2

if love could be the opposite of strife, then yes they could be placed as yin and yang I suppose… but I do not think strife is the opposite of love

3

Strife doesn’t mean strife. Love doesn’t mean love. Empedocles is using them as metaphors. the meanings of those metaphors, as best as I understand them, were provided in my intro post

h3m

4

I think that any pair of opposites could be substituted in the yin and yang positions…

-Imp

5

Regardless the definitions, the importance is that one cannot exist without the other and that they represent equilibrium of all that is.

JT

6

Hermes, can you elaborate on interiority and exteriority please. I’m not sure what they mean apart from love and strife.

7

yin and yang are just patterns of life and the universe. I see them as being polar. Neither are good or bad, only represnetations of good and bad. Just as a bad person may see himself as good, and a good person may see himself as bad. So any opposites fit in the yin and yang, taoists from what I understand emphasize that feminine and masculine are the traits of the pair. However, the pair are the same and cannot exist without one another. This is an accurate representation of the sexes it seems because men and women, as different as they are from one another, are both people, and cannot exist without one another. Taoism is fascinating. I need to do more studying in that area.

8

At one point in time Yin stood for the shady side of the river. Yang stood for the sunny side of the river. So Yin is passive, cool, and damp. Yang is active, warm and dry. Yin is also feminine to the masculine Yang.

These two seem like opposite, but they are two parts of a greater wholeness. One cannot exist with the other. Yin cannot conquer Yang, nor can Yang conquer Yin. It is Yin and Yang always together.

Love and Strife are not part of a greater wholeness. Love does motivate the process of drawing together. Strife is one of the methods by which things break apart. What motivates things to break apart? Apathy separates.

Love is the most intense form of sympathy, sharing feelings together. Apathy is the absence of all sympathy. Feeling nothing of what the other feels. Apathy is the opposite of love on this spectrum.

Order seems more like the opposite of strife. Order and strife go through the continuing cycle of becoming one another. Order ends in new strife and strife ends in new order.

9

Although I agree that yin and yang, love and strife are not the same their are some strange similarities once one familiarizes oneself with the context that Empedocles used them in, and the definition that he ascribed to them.

Here is a quote from a book titled “The First Philosophers” published by Oxford World Classics, and translated by Robin Waterfield.

“The action of love and strife on things is not just local. Empedocles saw the whole universe as subject to an endlessly repeating cosmic cycle, like a vast cosmic inbreath, and outbreath. At one extreme love is totally dominant, with strife banished to the outermost reaches of the universe; at the opposite extreme, strife has become dominant, and has moved inwards to push love to the centre of the universe. Under the rule of love everything is unified into a mass with none of the 4 elements distinct.; under the rule of strife the 4 elements are completely unmixed, and occupy 4 distinct layers or concentric spheres (from the outside: fire, air, water, earth).”

Further down at the end of the next paragraph. “this could also mean that there are four equal time periods–the rule of love, the period of increasing strife, the rule of strife, and the period of increasing love.”

That last sentence is particularly interesting to me , because it is extremely similiar to the function of the yin yang triptychs(sp?) in the I-Ching. Old yin giving way to young yang, and old yang giving way to young yin.

On to my comment: Yin is not love and niether is strife, conversely the same goes for yang. Yin and yang together form the concept of harmony where as love seems to be Empedocles idea of the harmoniuos whole.
They are two very different dualisms, but They do seem to coincide in certain areas.

Hermes what do you think about another coincidence between eastern thought and Empedocles which is his creation of the four element theory, and the eastern idea of the five elements of water, fire, earth, metal, and wood. If nothing else it is kind of strange.