Throughout history, many writers and philosophers have talked about the intricate relationship between life's seemingly opposing forces. In addition to concluding that the perennial presence of oppositions and contradictions is not necessarily a bad thing, many of them have found that what actually lies underneath oppositions is a higher-order synthesis. If we were to think about oppositions in a different way, we would come to realise that there really is no opposition in the first place. From the tension and struggle that ensues between each pair of contradictions comes a new unity—a newer and richer understanding of the world and of ourselves.
I'd like to share some quotes that I find interesting:
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.—Louis Aragon (1897–1982), French poet. "Preface to a Modern Mythology," Paris Peasant (1926).
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, vol. 10.
The kind of negation is...determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular nature of the process...Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such a manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea.—Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Anti-Duhring (1954), Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 25.
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature’s workings. Otherwise there would be no impulse to satisfy the needs which ensure the body’s and the species’ survival. And survival—for reasons we do not know—is inwritten, inscribed as nature’s only goal. Gratification, or its anticipation, acts as a goad. Pain or the fear of pain acts as a warning. Both are essential. The difference between them, considered as opposites, is that pleasure has a constant tendency to exceed its functional purpose, to not know its place.—John Berger (b. 1926), British author, critic. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984), pt. 2, Random House.
Good fortune lieth within bad, and bad fortune within good.—Lao-Tzu (fl. 6th century BC), Chinese Taoist philosopher.
...The condition for the knowledge of all the processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites.—Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Soviet leader. "On the Question of Dialectics," Philosophical Notebooks (1915), Collected Works, vol.38.
I’ve always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall—Judith Jamison (b. 1943), African American dancer. Dancing Spirit (1993), ch. 1.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (1954), Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 1.
Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both the creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.
Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self- satisfied private property.
The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.—Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). The Holy Family (1844), Collected Works, vol. 4.
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.—Audre Lorde (1934–1992), African American poet, autobiographer, and lesbian feminist. Sister Outsider (1984), ch. 11.
If you want to be whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself become empty. If you want to be reborn, Let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.—Tao Te Ching (Cannon of the Virtue (Power) of Tao) (c. 300 BC).
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986), ch. 8.
In psychology, we must take seriously the notion of an object, that is, the human mind, which maintains its identity and coherence in spite of being subject to apparently contrary descriptions. This, by the way, is what clinicians frequently ask of their patients in psychotherapy. Patients are, in effect, asked to expand their notions of themselves so that they can tolerate feeling love and hate toward the same person, so that they can acknowledge being conditioned by their past but at the same time feel free to decide their future, so that they can tolerate a relationship (or a life) that simultaneously feels untrustworthy and secure, and so they can accept within themselves certain characteristics that they normally regard as reprehensible, and so on.—Sanford L. Drob, Director of Psychological Assessment, Bellevue Medical Center. "Fragmentation in Contemporary Psychology" (2003), Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4.
Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros (love) there was an instinct of death. . .
And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct toward destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.—Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis. Civilization and its Discontents (1930).
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music.—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), U.S. philosopher. Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), aph. 108.
Any development, whatever its substance may be, can be represented as a series of different stages of development that are connected in such a way that one forms the negation of the other...In no sphere can one undergo a development without negating one's previous mode of existence."—Karl Marx (1818-1883). Moralizing Criticism & Critical Morality (1847), Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 6.
I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962).
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.—Octavio Paz (b. 1914-1998), Mexican poet. Times, London, 8 June 1989.
The masculinity of the woman and the femininity of the man are inferior, and it is regrettable that the full value of their personalities should be contaminated by something that is less valuable. On the other hand, the shadow belongs to the wholeness of the personality: the strong man must somewhere be weak, somewhere the clever man must be stupid, otherwise he is too good to be true and falls back on pose and bluff. Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness?—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, vol. 10 (check reference).
Blow and you can extinguish a fire. Blow and you can make a fire.—Zen koan.
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955), Spanish essayist, philosopher. "In Search of Goethe from Within," Partisan Review (Dec. 1949). Repr. in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays (1968).
. . . the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Collected Works, vol. 9.
What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do and crosswise to our purposes? For love to bridge these opposites through joy it must not eliminate or deny them.—Even self-love presupposes an irreconcilable duality (or multiplicity) in a single person.—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher. Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879), aph. 75, "Love and Duality". Reprinted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (1980), eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 2.
[When] pressed to their logical conclusions the very concepts that underlie diverse paradigms in psychology actually imply contrary ideas that support paradigms that the original concepts were meant to exclude...[By] maintaining the truth of both notions in certain pairs of presumably contrasting ideas about the mind will we be able to attain a coherent and comprehensive account of our subject matter.—Sanford L. Drob, Director of Psychological Assessment, Bellevue Medical Center. "Fragmentation in Contemporary Psychology" (2003), Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4.
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Recalled on his death 6 Jun 1961.
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. The Transcendent Function (1916).
[Talking about the kind of change that clients experience in psychotherapy]: For one client this may mean: "I have thought I must feel only love for my parents, but I find that I experience both love and bitter resentment. Perhaps I can be that person who freely experiences both love and resentment." For another client the learning may be: "I have thought I was only bad and worthless. Now I experience myself at times as one of much worth; at other times as one of little worth or usefulness. Perhaps I can be a person who experiences varying degrees of worth.". . .For still another: "I have been brought up to feel that I must not appreciate myself—but I do. I can cry for myself, but I can enjoy myself, too. Perhaps I am a richly varied person whom I can enjoy and for whom I can feel sorry."—Carl Rogers (1902-1987), American psychologist. On Becoming a Person (1961).
Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites.—Richard Garriott (aka Lord British), creator of the Ultima computer game series.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.—Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (1938), Collected Works, vol. 9.
American psychologist, Fritz Perls, recognised the intense conflict that people can experience when they are torn between two opposing courses of action. One of the most painful experiences is being unable to decide whether to do something because two different voices inside your head give you very different directives. Perls noted that many of the people who come to psychotherapy are often deeply conflicted for this very reason. According to him, one of aims in therapy is help a client come to realise that the opposing voices inside her head are actually not all that opposing after all—that they actually speak with one voice because both aim for the same thing: what is best for the client. For instance, a person may have trouble deciding whether to continue a romantic relationship with his girlfriend. One voice inside his head tells him that his girlfriend is such a unique and special person that he would be nuts to leave her. Another voice tells him something very different: "You had better stay away from this because she has a history of hurting you." In both cases, the voices want what's best for this person. The first voice wants to encourage him to have a good, solid relationship with a special person. The other voice wants the same thing, but does not want him to get hurt in the process. If we think in terms of synthesis, what is the synthesis between these two opposing forces? Well, the synthesis is that this person deserves to have a solid, meaningful relationship with a special person. The two opposing forces both want to ensure that this particular person is able to have this kind of relationship.