Transcending the Fallacy of the Binary Through Ambivalence
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document in English
humanities/philosophy
term papers
published 24/04/2007
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level : Advanced
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Summary
A thought process that appears to be common to all humans is that of setting up binaries. It is a tendency that exists across cultures and since “the beginning of time.” This may be because it is easier to define what something is not than what it actually is. The opposition of a binary also contains the fundamental fear of the Other, the unknown, which ultimately is a fear of death. Plato famously addresses this unknowability of death in the Phaedo and attempts to use the Argument from Opposites to show that life comes from death and death comes from life, a step in his argument for the immortality of the soul, or a transcendence of life and death. Ultimately, however, he only succeeds in reproducing a binary of body and soul in which he attempts to suppress the bodily half. Also in Greek thought, and later taken up by Nietzsche, is the divide between Apollonian and Dionysian drives. Indeed this clash between order and chaos can be seen as one of the fundamental characteristics of modernity, or rather the accepted Western paradigm of modernity which stemmed from the Enlightenment desire to define, categorize and clearly delineate or illuminate, with the scientific method as its exemplar and ideal toward which to strive. However, the order/chaos split is itself a description of the binary system.
Table of Contents
- A thought process that appears to be common to all humans is that of setting up binaries
- Bauman claims that 'the gift of God was, so to speak, the knowledge of ambivalence and the skill of living in this knowledge?.
- Paul equates the flesh of humanity with sin
- The Divine and the anti-Divine
- The poetic language of the entire Confessions
- In Totem and Taboo
- Oppressed by the obsessive rationality of Western culture
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