Metaphysics on the fly

The Taoist Dragon

I saw this image recently and liked it quite a bit. I was reading about the development of dualistic thinking. In the western tradition the idea of dualisms is thought to have been first developed by Herclitus. He is our “…you can’t step in the same stream twice…” friend, who noted that variation is the common thread of existence.The two concepts are closely allied.Dualisms are pairs of opposites (and sometimes called that). For example, hot and cold.At what point does being hot stop and becoming cold begin? Does that idea even have meaning? Can there even be such a thing as hot if there is not such a thing as cold? In other words, can they even be considered as different things or are they not simply two sides of the same coin?If they are two sides of the same coin, then what differentiates hot and cold is variation.All things are different along this dimension (temperature), some hotter and colder. Thus, we can say with assurance that there will be variation among things with regard to their temperature. They cannot be all the same. Such is the ubiquity of variation.Up and down, happy and sad, light and dark, are more of these types of examples and, once you begin to think about it, you see that our world is filled with these  pairs of opposites. Can we have good days without bad days? It wouldn’t seem so. We would only have days; neither good nor bad. Even more fundamentally, if the days are indistinguishable, is there any meaning in the label of day?I used to tell my kids when they said that they were having a bad day that they should be grateful. It is those really bad days that make the good days so good. They would just roll their eyes.In the East this is dualist way of thinking is an accepted truth and symbolized frequently by the Yin and Yang symbol we see in the dragon.It is not that some things are Yin and some Yang, a misunderstanding sometimes made by westerners. It is that all things are always both, but in different combinations.