For the Greeks, Light caused all truths to emerge and make themselves seen so we could understand them. Before Light, there was Darkness, and we stumbled about like the Obama Administration from one crisis to the next, never remembering a thing from one day to the next. From the Tree of the Greeks of course grows nothing less than Christianity itself. The Light of the Word (Logos) illuminated (alethia) all frozen indecipherable meaning, making the ineffable comprehensible to our meager minds.
It follows that the essential truths emerge, whereby the truth is in the unity of the opposites, the black and white, hate and love, life and death, sadness and joy, masculine and feminine, coldness and warmth, cruelty and mercy, dominance and submission. Each one is stranded without the other, a wallflower at the singles bar destined to sulk home alone again. Merged with its opposite, the whole is created, the circle is squared and the world makes sense once again. The Yin and the Yang. They’re all swirling, all the opposites, all at the same time, merging into one another where we can’t tell one from the other.
The binary structure of thought crystallizes here:
- identity/difference
- truth/error
- totality/infinity
- one/many
- white/black
- intelligible/sensible
- light/darkness
- good/evil
- subject/object
- presence/absence
- heaven/hell
- salvation/damnation
- sky/earth
- self/other
- reason/emotion
- mind/body
- God/human
Nietzsche was on it:
For a philosopher to say ‘the good and the beautiful are one’ is infamy; if he goes on to add, ‘also the true,’ one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly.
- Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 820.
But of course. Falsehood can ring sublime. Truth can be ugly as mud, maggots and refuse. The ugly is at time glorious and the good on occasion is horrific, and the opposites of all of these are also true, all running at the same time, flowing together, merging and commingling to where we cannot tell one from the other.
This fusion is the basis of Hegel’s claim that dialectic makes the entirety of ideas thinkable.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic
Got it? The dialectic is the Light is the Word that illuminates the truth in unity of opposites in which the world is made readable to the blind.
And God said let there be light…
In the beginning was the Word…
The skies brighten in a new day of meaning.
