ANTIPERISTASIS

The following is the abstraction of a  topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman 

            “All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream.”   Diogenes

Isaac Newton 1642-1727

                Modern science is marked by an enormously rapid and ever-accelerating progress. It is a movement from multiplicity to unity, from the purely mechanistic understanding of the Newtonian universe to an ideal composite space of four dimensions and the essentially virtual ideas of geometrical form in which light moves along a geodesic. In fact, it is useless to try to understand the meaning of the universe except in terms of measurements which, once made and recorded, become facts, and which looked upon as facts, reproduce as nearly as possible an objective empirical reality.

Friedrich Schelling
1775-1854 

            There is, of course, another instigator of reality: Antiperistasis, or the development of an idea by its opposite. Indeed, Friedrich Schelling’s reconciliation of ‘contrarieties’ in nature or Hegel’s dialectical ascription of synthesis to the perennial process of thesis versus antithesis bear an uncanny resemblance to the quantitative, mechanical physics of attraction and repulsion. For it is this polarity rather than the ‘uncertainty’ scenario which most aptly characterizes the nineteenth-century physics of electricity and magnetism. And accordingly, one might illustrate the empirical nature of objective reality by a simple, specific example: 

            It is known for instance that the density of gold is 19:32, a statement which does not profess to deal with anything but arbitrary magnitudes. In fact, for as long as no corresponding assertion  has been made about, say, the

Friedrich Hegel
1771 - 1834

density of a liquid such as water, it is impossible to quantify the degree of compactness of any piece of gold which is usually determined by the ratio of its weight to that of a volume of water of equal size: 19:32. Each thus serves to explain the other and questions of arbitrary magnitudes determine nothing about the specific weight to be set, until we add to the idea of quantity that of ratio. In the same way, electromagnetic energy consists only of relations. Which means that we can only measure the energy of one state relative to another. One could not, moreover, imagine a positron unless one had first been apprised of the electrical properties of the electron. An electron consists solely of negative electricity, which tells us nothing about the essential nature of negativity until we are confronted with its opposite. With no other distinction to be drawn, one is almost exactly the equal of the other while neither can be understood on its own.

            Thus, one might say that the Origin of Discourse began with a paradox. Or that reality is the product of its literal antithesis. That it functions by reflecting on itself. If consciousness is choice, conception is, in fact, effected by contrast. Reality, therefore, is informed by a sense of what it is not. Nothing can be explained by itself. It must always be compared with its opposite, or with what its opposite necessarily forgoes. The good cannot be explained without the bad. 

No entity can be simultaneously hot and cold - unless by comparison to another - nor high or low. Light and darkness cannot co-exist. Even the Devil must have his due. Divine worship includes the belief in the devil as a logical necessity. On this issue I am on the side of Satan. Evil is the natural and inescapable corollary of good. And the ancient enmity between God and the Devil reflects nothing but the opposition between elementary archetypes. In fact two very potent sources of attraction and repulsion are at play here. The matter and antimatter of unnerving coexistence. Each being the defining begetter of the other, rather like two ends of the same stick, neither is possible without the other. 

            Essentially therefore, theirs is a battle of wits, a textbook case for psychologists. In fact, what better proof could there be that the depths of hell are found in the human soul.  And let no one imagine that  the powers of light and darkness, of eschatological beings, holy lambs and horned beasts, can be really comprehended without reference to each other. Both worlds have their legends, their champions, their metaphysics.

Indeed, no mitigation, no amount of reasoning, not even a clear understanding of themechanism of this arrangement, avails to deactivate the dynamic power of these dualistic creations. Wisdom, will, damnation and redemption depend on their association, so that all knowledge is a battleground, from the creation of the world to the eve of Armageddon. That story has been told elsewhere, but  given  the evidence for the essential unanimity of God and the Devil there is only one conclusion one can draw: none requires any other cause than having been begotten by the other.  Two very different yet equivalent psychological engines for the moral mechanics of good and evil; and two very different interpretations, indeed, of the fundamental polarity of the human mind or the elementary symbols it employs in the respective archetypal categories.