Life is a series of Dichotomies

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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You can’t escape it. Even the denial of Dichotomies is a Dichotomy in and of itself, Dichotomy vs Bichotomy. I’m not saying all things can be rigidly divided into two opposing categories, a and b. To be conscious is to discriminate. If everything is exactly the same, there would be nothing to be conscious of. Unless you die, or you lower your consciousness to that of a worm, or elevate your consciousness to that of a God, you will think in terms of dichotomies. I’m not saying this and that are completely unrelated (absolutism). How could there be tall without short, fine without coarse, pleasure without pain, etc. In other words, this has to be different from that in order for us to differentiate and distinguish things. Even if everything is really everthing, it is at least a persistent illusion that this appears to be this and that that. My coffee cup is not my computer, my computer is not my coffee cup. Of course, this can become that and that can become this. If we rearrange the particles of my computer, we may be able to construct a coffee cup and vice versa, but at least for the moment, they are two very different objects with very different properties.

Yes, life is a series of things and dichotomies. Notice there always seems to be two, not three or four. Good and evil, black and white, red and violet, beautiful and ugly. Is the world of opposites and things just a mental construct. Are our brains designed to decode a monistic, bichotomic (it should be a word) world into a pluralistic, dichotomic hallucination?

Some dichotomies and things seem to be more complex and broad than others. For example, galaxies are made up of trillions of individual things and some dichotomies appear more fundamental than others. More being vs less being is perhaps more fundamental than tall and short, big and small, wide and narrow.

Life is a series of dichotomies and we must inevatably choose which opposite is more real/good than the other. Scientists have made their choice. The vast majority of them believe consciousness is a byproduct of chemistry and not the other way around. They believe the creation is real and the creator (god) is a projection. They believe that empirical (experience before thought) methods are superior to rational (thought before experience) methods. They believe the whole is the sum of it’s parts and wholes are made up of parts and not the other way around (reductionism). Those who believe the opposite are just as Dichotomistic as scientists (idealists, theists, rationalists, wholists, etc).

Perhaps both sides of the dichotomy are equally real/good and dependant on each other for their continued existence, and this endless choosing between this and that is tantamount to insanity, perhaps not. Could matter exists without someone to be conscious of it? Conversely, could consciousness exist without something to be conscious of (objects, other subjects)? Like I said earlier, the ultimate dichotomy is dichotomy vs bichotomy, or is that just an illusion too (albeit a rather persistent one). Maybe dichotomies couldn’t exist without bichotomies and vice versa. Both dichotomies and bichotomies may exist.

So what stance do you take on this? As philosophers, it is our job to remove ourselves from the particulars of life (telephones, bridges, apples) and focus on the universals. It is our job to focus on the broadest, most fundamental dichotomies, and not get too wrapped up in the narrow, trivial dichtomies of everday life (should i smoke a joint, or not, should i take my dog for a walk, or not). Love vs hate, life vs dead, similar vs different, which one is more true/good, or are they mutually dependant on each other for their continued existence. We must decide for ouselves, which side of the debate we’re on, but one thing is for certain, the debate will go on. Right or wrong, This or that. To philosophize is to discriminate. Hmmm, this would be a good place to end this post… but I have more to say.

All things may have the potential to become their opposite. Animate objects become inanimate objects. Soil becomes plants and animals. Day gives way to night. Joy gives way to sorrow. Are we kidding ourselves? Is all this endless cycling between opposites an illusion, a snake chasing it’s tail (ouroboros)? In the long run, everything may be everything and division may be an illusion. How absurd is that? Am I an orange? Am I a table cloth? If so, what is the point of this existence?

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Probably. There’s a thread here
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=172669
going over very similar ground :slight_smile:

I’d disagree with this. As an admittedly third-rate philosopher, true. A philosophy removed from everyday life is hot air.

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Thanks, I checked out that link and posted a response to one of your assertions.

True, I think we should climb down from our ivory towers and get out more often.

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Very interesting OP.

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Thank you Bearded Lady, I put a lot of thought into it.

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When there’s no division, those questions don’t exist.

That question would not be there either.

The movement of thought is always between pairs of opposites. You cannot conceive a state of being where these pairs of opposites do not exist at all. You have never questioned that, because, if you begin to question, your existence is at stake. You are that. You are not different from this movement of thought.

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It might be as simple as thinking in terms of a curve instead of a straight line, and a moving river as opposed to fixed ground. Thus we get Boethius’ circular river of time, the nunc fluens that underlies or informs all of existence and takes us out of opposites and divisions, hopefully, and into something like the way James Joyce decided to make his language stream like a river in Finnegan’s Wake. Perhaps that was the result of a kind of mystical realization that pauses and punctuations do not tell the real story of humans in time and space. And that river, whether the real Liffey or the metaphorical one of Boethius, Heraclitus, or Meister Eckhart, can flow as slow or fast as our consciousness will allow.

Eckhart’s idea was that God is a great underground river, and many wells draw from this river. We need to go down to the depths, where we experience things in common.

According to Black Elk, nature is circular and, by implication, living in a square would be unnatural. His words resonate for us who seem to be living in a most insane, square-box world these days.

Perhaps the problem of human versus nature can be solved by squaring the circle or circling the square and then turning it into a river. Surely many answers lie in mysterious paradoxes.

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This is the truth. When you are in a state of pure awareness that does not attach itself to mind or any other object, none of these “problems” exist. The mind can only discriminate, divide, compare, and contrast. That’s just how it functions. But we are not our mind. Our mind is an object that, like every other object, exists to serve the whole. But in this insane world we try and exist to serve our mind, and as a result we become enslaved to it.

There really are no “problems” to existence. The universe functions infallibly. We create problem with our mind.