Chapter 78
Opposites and contraries; conflict, contradiction and the tension of opposing things.
155 passages · 43 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Opposition covers a family of relations: things that are contrary, contradictory, or merely contrasted, together with the conflict and tension that arise wherever opposing things meet. It is a great idea for these books because it runs through nearly every kind of inquiry they contain. The philosopher asks whether contraries generate or exclude one another. The physicist finds two kinds of electricity. The aesthetician sets the sublime against the beautiful, the theologian holds together truths that seem to contradict, and the historian watches patricians and plebeians tear a city apart. Whether opposition is the ruin of order or its very condition is the question beneath them all.
The earliest systematic treatment in these volumes is Plato’s. In the *Phaedo*, Socrates argues that whatever has an opposite comes to be out of that opposite: the greater from the less, the just from the unjust1. Between every pair there are intermediate processes, such as increase and diminution2, and the passage must run both ways, as sleeping yields to waking and waking to sleep3. Even pleasure and pain, he observes, grow from a single stem, as if a god had fastened their heads together4. Sir Thomas Browne, writing two millennia later, keeps the thought but gives it a Christian frame. Generation rests on contrarieties, yet nothing is truly contrary to God5, and contraries destroy one another while being each other’s life6.
Plato then draws a crucial distinction. Opposites as they occur in concrete things pass into one another, but essential opposites never admit their contrary; they withdraw or perish at its approach7. Snow will not endure the advance of heat, nor fire the cold8. More than this, things that merely bring an opposite with them also refuse its contrary: three refuses the even9. On this ground the soul, which brings life, never receives death10. The same dialogue supplies a logic of opposites. Simmias can be called both great and small without contradiction, because the predicates are relative to different things11. Extremes of great and small or fair and foul are rare, and most things lie in the mean12. Among the moderns, Hume reduces contrast to a mixture of causation and resemblance rather than an ultimate relation of ideas13. Emerson suggests that a new statement only seems to contradict the old, when in truth it limits it, though the old hates the new nonetheless14.
Contrast also does imaginative work. Aeschylus likens the victor’s shout and the captive’s moan to vinegar and oil in one cup, mingled yet unreconciled15. Cervantes makes comedy of the gap between Don Quixote’s visions and plain fact: a slain giant turns out to be spilled wine16, and a castle turns out to be a paltry inn17. Goethe sets Faust’s spring-like joy against Mephistopheles’ wintry coldness18. Hugo portrays Cromwell as a compound of contraries, austere yet jesting, tyrant yet plaything of his family19. Carlyle presents Schlegel’s spiritualism and Hope’s materialism as irreconcilable20, so that not every contrast promises a synthesis.
The modern natural philosophers give opposition a physical content. Faraday shows electrical force appearing in two opposed kinds, attracting and repelling21. The two powers cancel when the bodies are together and reappear when they are parted22. A magnet has two poles with a dual power that is absent at its middle23,24. Emerson generalizes this into a cosmic law. Polarity, action and reaction, light and dark, male and female pervade nature, and each thing is a half that suggests its opposite25. Everything is bipolar, spirit and fact, north and south26. In politics the centripetal and centrifugal forces each develop the other27. For Emerson this dualism becomes a moral law of compensation: every excess causes a defect and every evil has its good28, and all things answer tit for tat, measure for measure29. Augustine had noticed a gentler rhythm of the same kind, in which things ebb and flow and joy is ushered in by pain30.
Others see the opposition in nature as strife rather than balance. Cicero reports the Empedoclean view that whatever is unchangeable holds together by friendship and whatever changes does so through discord31. Augustine confronts the Manichean notion of an opposing mass set over against God and finds it incoherent32. He argues that contrary wills within us are not evidence of two separate natures, one good and one bad33. Goethe gives the dualist position its most vivid voice in Mephistopheles. He is the spirit that denies, holding that all that exists deserves destruction34, and he sees light and night contending for space and rank, destruction opposing creation35. Milton imagines a realm of Chaos and Night encroached upon by Heaven and Hell, which Satan proposes to restore out of shared enmity to God36. Darwin removes the mythology but keeps the contest. In the struggle for life new forms meet old competitors37, and the war of nature drives the less improved to extinction38.
Against this picture of strife stands the conviction that contraries serve the whole. Epictetus holds that vice and virtue alike contribute to universal harmony39. Marcus Aurelius calls human life an orderly combination of contraries40, and he says the ruling mind turns opposition into material, as a strong fire consumes whatever is heaped upon it41. Pascal states the formal principle: uniformity without diversity is useless, and diversity without uniformity is ruinous42. Burke transfers the cosmic idea to the state, where conflicting interests produce harmony as discordant powers do in the universe43. Emerson finds the English character a fusion of antagonistic elements44 and England itself a nation that subsists by antagonisms, a museum of anomalies45.
Schiller makes this position the core of a theory of culture. The antagonism of forces is, he says, the great instrument of culture, because man’s manifold aptitudes develop only when they are set against one another46. Man’s mixed nature makes two opposite demands, one for absolute reality and one for absolute formality47. These take the form of a sensuous impulsion toward change and a formal impulsion toward immutability, which seem utterly opposed yet together exhaust humanity48. Schiller’s decisive claim is that they contradict each other only when they transgress their spheres49. They are correlative, and encroachment by either destroys personality or reality50. Each limits the other, and each reaches its height because the other is active51. The reconciling term is the play instinct52. Beauty arises from the antagonism of the two impulsions53, and man departs from it by two opposite roads, tension and relaxation54. Matter and form must first be kept rigorously distinct and then united in a third state55. In that aesthetic state sensibility and reason cancel each other’s determining power like balanced scales56, and two opposed impulses dwell in one mind without breaking its unity57. Against reason’s moral unity and nature’s manifoldness, Schiller seeks a balance that avoids both uniformity and confusion58, which comes close to Pascal’s formula.
Burke’s aesthetics proceeds differently. He sets the qualities of the beautiful in opposition to those of the sublime59. The sublime is vast, rugged and dark and is founded on pain; the beautiful is small, smooth and light and is founded on pleasure60. The two may be united in one object, but they remain distinct, like black and white blended, and their union does not prove them identical61. Burke even finds opposite extremes of light and darkness concurring to produce the sublime, which abhors mediocrity62. Where Plato preferred the mean, Burke’s sublime lives in extremes. Coleridge holds that life and beauty require strife or victory between opposing forces63. Hugo makes the harmony of contraries the definition of true poetry, which renders the daily struggle of opposing principles in life64. The sublime gains from its contrast with the grotesque, as hell beneath Eden heightens Paradise65. Drama joins the two, tragedy beneath comedy, each sharpening the other66, and these contrasts meet in the poets themselves67. Burke wished to keep his opposites distinct even when combined; Hugo wants them fused into a single living art.
In practical affairs the argument becomes a defense of opposition itself. Mill holds that truth in such matters reconciles opposites. Order and progress, democracy and aristocracy, liberty and discipline each need the other’s opposition to stay sound68. His own education was sharpened in debates that pitted philosophic Radicals, Tory lawyers and Coleridgians against one another69. Burke, though no friend to Mill’s principles, agrees that government requires tempering liberty and restraint in one consistent work70.
Opposition also runs through the human soul. Plato’s Socrates notes the soul resisting the body’s thirst71. Browne describes reason rebelling against faith and passion against reason, a triumvirate that distracts the soul’s peace72; man is a frame of antipathies with conscience set against all73. Pascal finds man credulous and incredulous, timid and rash74, divided by reason and passion75, with two contrary instincts blended confusedly in the soul76. Carlyle calls our being a dualism of light and darkness in perpetual contradiction77, and he makes continual conflict with the spirit of contradiction, without and within, the human condition78.
Religious doctrine meets this division with paradox. Paul describes the apostles as sorrowful yet rejoicing, having nothing yet possessing all79. Luther reconciles contradictory statements about the Christian by distinguishing the inner man from the outer80. Pascal makes the principle explicit: each truth must be joined with its opposite truth81. The righteous are sinners and the dead are living82, and the Sacrament involves two seemingly opposed truths83. Heresy arises from excluding one of the pair, as the Arians accepted Christ’s manhood and denied his divinity84. Scripture abounds in such contradictions, an eternal law changed and an eternal covenant made new85,86, and their source is a God humiliated who triumphs by death87. Stoic greatness and skeptic weakness cannot be joined or stand alone, and only the Gospel reconciles them88. Pascal also laments that Church and world, once irreconcilable enemies, are now confounded89, so for him some oppositions must be preserved.
The Eastern texts take another path. The Bhagavad-Gita counsels the renouncer to stand proof against joy and sorrow, heat and cold90, since the “pairs of opposites” bind creatures and only those freed from them cleave to the Lord91. A Buddhist text argues from paired contraries that existence implies a non-existence to be sought92. Emerson’s “Brahma” declares slayer and slain, shadow and sunlight, one93. Pascal would hold both truths together, while these texts would rise above both.
In society, opposition becomes a contest of wills and interests. Machiavelli finds contrary humours in every city: the people wish not to be oppressed, and the nobles wish to oppress94. Smith sets workmen against masters over wages95 and shows dealers’ interests running opposite to the public’s96. Burke sees real warfare between the landed and moneyed interests97, and Johnson finds the same pairing in the characters of Addison’s club98. Carlyle pictures Wealth and Poverty as uncommunicating poles99, borrowing Faraday’s image for a social fact. Rousseau notes that chiefs sow distrust among the orders to strengthen their own power100 and that opposition of interests prevails among men101.
Faction is the political form of this conflict. Plutarch’s Rome splits into warring parties over tribunes and corn102, and the city is divided by the plebeians’ joy and the patricians’ sorrow103. In Athens the rivalry of two leaders deepened a hidden seam into open division104. Luke’s saying that a house divided falls105 stands behind many later laments. Burns sets Whig against Tory, each claiming the right106, and Tennyson hears New and Old shock like armed foes while Faction bays107. Religious sects contend as well108,109. Browne softens his own case: the Reformers separated from Rome rather than against it110. Defoe’s ironic High-Churchman refuses union against a common enemy until domestic faction is crushed111.
Personal quarrels repeat the pattern on a smaller scale. Menelaus and Agamemnon divide the host with hard words112. Aristides opposes Themistocles to check his growing power113, and Johnson recounts how Addison and Steele, long friends, parted in acrimonious controversy114. Bacon warns that controversies kindled by mere contradiction are not worth the strife115, and observes that many a man’s strength lies only in opposition116. Wordsworth holds that excellence is doomed to meet opposition and to triumph over it117.
Opposition also ends in reconciliation. Edwardes holds that strife is natural to all creatures, that reconciliation follows it118, and that friendship is made real only through quarrel119. Jonson’s quarrelling partners find the knot stronger for the breach120, and Skinner bids Whig and Tory drop their quarrels and dance121. Common enmity unites foes: Claudius and Laertes against Hamlet122, and Puritan and Cavalier against Cromwell123. Such alliances may prove brittle, as Plutarch’s confederates show when their dispute over command ends in slaughter124.
The questions remain open. Do contraries pass into one another, as in Plato’s first argument, or exclude one another, as in his last? Is opposition a war to be won, a balance to be kept, a paradox to be held, or an illusion to be transcended? The ancients sought the order beneath strife. Moderns like Schiller, Hugo and Mill made strife itself the engine of culture, art and truth, while Darwin and Goethe’s Mephistopheles kept alive the darker possibility that conflict is simply destruction.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Physics 4b
See also: Man 3b · Liberty 1d
See also: The Sublime 1c