Metaphysics

Primitive perceptual opposites interact in complex ways throughout the history of metaphysical thought.

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.

— Heraclitus (see Campbell 2008)

Aesthetic phenomena are among the most complex phenomena within the domain of psychology, and this is often used as an excuse by psychologists for being able to say so little about them.

— Daniel Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (1971)

Dualities between primitive perceptual opposites appear in a suspiciously wide variety of contexts, frequently with qualities from one end of each duality, such as brightness, disorder and fluidity, or those at the other such as darkness, order and solidness, being grouped together as if they’re connected in the mind by default. Cultural, social, philosophical, mythological and religious dualities from around the world, such as those listed below, have almost the same structure as those that delineate primitive sensory systems, particularly with respect to dualities that are also physical opposites in nature.

Cultural dualities: Yin versus Yang in China, Marduk (order) versus Tiamat (chaos) in Mesopotamia, Maat (order) versus Isfet (chaos) in Egypt, Ahura Mazda versus Angra Mainyu or asha (truth and order) versus druj (deceit and chaos) in Iran, Indra (order) versus Vritra (chaos) and Vishnu (order) versus Shiva (chaos) in India, Buddha (calm) versus Mara (chaos), the Buddhist Middle Way between dualistic extremes, the angel of righteousness versus the angel of evil in the Shepherd of Hermas, Heraclitus’ unity of opposites, the cosmic cycle between order and chaos of Empedocles in Greek philosophy, Aroe (form, stasis, order) versus Bope (flux, dynamism, disorder) in the social structure of the Bororo of Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1889), the “cyclical oscillation of polar yet complementary opposites” (Maffie 2024) of teotl in Aztec (Mexica) philosophy, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theory of binary contrast or binary opposition, separation of opposites from Apeiron in the cosmogony of Anaximander, the interaction of “love” and “strife” in the cosmic cycle of Empedocles, the interaction between Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1995).

The Indian concept of Yoga proposes that what we perceive generates a reproduction of itself in the matter of the brain, made possible by the fact that its substance can easily be altered with respect to certain physical qualities. In The Masks of God, Volume 2: Oriental Mythology, Joseph Campbell (2014) translates the definition of the art of Yoga from Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra, line 1.2, as “the (intentional) stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff,” implying the brain is in constant motion. Bongiovanni (2018), with “Union” being the meaning of the word “Yoga,” translates the same line a little differently: “Union is restraining the thought-streams of the mind,” as if the motion in the brain is like a fluid. Campbell adds volatility, ripples, brokenness, speed and outwardness to the dynamism and fluidity used to describe the unstoppable motion of the mind:

The archaic psychological theory implied in the definition holds that within the gross matter of the brain and body there is an extremely volatile subtle substance, continually active, which assumes the forms of everything presented to it by the senses, and that by virtue of the transformations of this subtle matter we become aware of the forms, sounds, tastes, odors, and pressures of the outer world. Furthermore, the mind is in a continuous ripple of transformation — and with such force that if one should try without yogic training to hold it to a single image or idea for as long, say, as a minute, almost immediately it would be seen to have already broken from the point and run off into associated, even remote, streams of thought and feeling. The first aim of yoga, therefore, is to gain control of this spontaneous flow, slow it down, and bring it to a stop.

That there’s something subtle and volatile about the brain is undeniable, with this usually being thought to emerge from its complex chemistry, electricity, and/or its numbers of cells and connections, but the contents of language and the analogies we use to describe our minds are usually physical, involving fluidity, motion, disorder, solidness, stillness and geometric shapes, as in the following mind analogy used to explain Yoga, from Campbell (2014):

The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by a wind. The images reflected on such a surface are broken, fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if the wind should cease and the surface become still — nirvāṇa: “beyond or without (nir) the wind (vāṇa)” — we should behold, not broken images, but the perfectly formed reflection of the whole sky, the trees along the shore, the quiet depths of the pond itself, its lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. We should then see that all the broken images, formerly only fleetingly perceived, were actually but fragments of these true and steady forms, now clearly and steadily beheld. And we should have at our command thereafter both the possibility of stilling the pond, to enjoy the fundamental form, and that of letting the winds blow and waters ripple, for the enjoyment of the play (līlā) of the transformations.

To the extent that something fleeting, disordered, fragmented or flickering is more exciting than something steady, clear, perfectly formed and quiet, the analogy is a mixture of more and less exciting things. Campbell suggests the qualities of the excited pond are more fun than those of the still pond, and adds that the ability to experience both is ideal.

Complex interaction of opposites in philosophy is perhaps most famously illustrated by Yin versus Yang, the “constant, interactive balance” in the “coherent fabric of nature and mind” (Wang 2023) between qualities such as dark versus bright, cold versus hot, stillness versus action and order versus chaos. Aristotle says in Metaphysics (1908) that a certain school of “the so-called Pythagoreans” believed the world was composed of ten pairs of opposites, strangely similar to those that differentiate Yin from Yang:

Other members of this same school say there are ten principles, which they arrange in two columns of cognates — limit and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong. In this way Alcmaeon of Croton seems also to have conceived the matter, and either he got this view from them or they got it from him; for he expressed himself similarly to them. For he says most human affairs go in pairs, meaning not definite contrarieties such as the Pythagoreans speak of, but any chance contrarieties, e.g. white and black, sweet and bitter, good and bad, great and small. He threw out indefinite suggestions about the other contrarieties, but the Pythagoreans declared both how many and which their contrarieties are.

Alcmaeon is credited with the discovery that the mind resides in the brain, rather than the heart or somewhere else, and the partially true observation that our eyes are filled with fire and water (Huffman 2021). He proposed that “the majority of human things come in pairs” and created an early version of humorism theory: “the equality (isonomia) of the powers (wet, dry, cold, hot, bitter, sweet, etc.) maintains health” while “monarchy among them produces disease.”

The idea isn’t just that too much heat, coldness, wetness or dryness is unhealthy. It’s also that they need to be present in moderate amounts and intricately mixed together to sustain life. Much of what Alcmaeon said happens to be true as a statement about life’s special physical situation, or how we survive by avoiding both freezing into a solid and melting into a fluid. This is in accordance with the present definition of complexity, and with the thesis to the extent that the idea has aesthetic value and hot and wet are more exciting than cold and dry.

In the Pythagorean duality system, pairs of opposites are said to be arranged with qualities in the same group being associated psychologically, all of those on one side being “good,” for instance, compared to those on the other, all of which are relatively “bad.” The Pythagorean categories in Greek philosophy are notable because, like Yin versus Yang, they include the duality disorder~order (Huffman 2019):

Opposites played a large role in most Presocratic philosophical systems. The Pythagoreans who posited the table of opposites differed from other early Greek philosophers not only in the normative view of the opposites but also by including strikingly abstract pairs such as straight and crooked and odd and even, in contrast to the more concrete opposites such as hot and cold, which are typical elsewhere in early Greek philosophy.

Straightness, squareness, limitation, stillness, lack of change, singularity, light and right are aligned on the good side for the Pythagoreans, while crookedness, length, freedom, motion, multiplicity, darkness and the left side are supposedly bad or evil.

In the practical world, bad things are almost always unwelcome, and we favor the good. Aesthetically, though, bad things are accepted and indispensable; they happen all the time in the interest of providing a contrast to the occurrence of good things. Eliminating them would leave us with a lack of interesting narratives for stories, myths, folklore, literature, plays, movies and so on. Without evil characters, heroes would have no one to kill. Without an element of disorder art and decoration would be boring, jokes wouldn’t be funny, and music and dance would be almost impossible. In an aesthetic context, neither quality in a pair of opposites is dominant, or necessarily superior. Both are valuable, and almost equally so. One quality, however, such as evil, fluidity or chaos, is always more exciting than its respective opposite: good, solid or order.

Many other things we normally try to avoid nevertheless play an essential role in aesthetic phenomena. Death and confinement, for example, appear in popular stories at high rates even though in reality we prefer almost exclusively to be alive and free. In these cases we favor qualities on the more exciting side, in contrast to our negative feelings about chaos and evil. Thus, aesthetically, neither higher nor lower excitement is universally “better.” In traditional psychological terms, having a positive valence, or degree of attractiveness, is not consistently the same as being arousing or unarousing, and negative valence isn’t equivalent to high or low arousal either.

The mind being in the brain raises the question of what makes a brain such a suitable substrate for consciousness. Most likely, its condition of extreme physical softness in comparison to other organs and tissues, and other matter, has something to do with how it works. If the complexity of a material is measured by how intimately it mixes fluidity with solidness, the brain is the most complex organ in the body and the most complex object in the known universe.

There are probably direct connections between this softness and a brain’s ability to sense stimuli, process information and make decisions. It matters a lot for other body parts to be in a particular physical phase. Blood, bones and teeth didn’t evolve to be liquid and crystalline for no reason. Hearts and other muscles wouldn’t be capable of alternating between relatively relaxed and tense conditions if not for their intermediate and adjustable consistency. Thus, the physical state of the brain is unlikely to be an inconsequential side effect that plays no role in how it functions. It would be more reasonable to imagine brain softness itself having side effects, perhaps in the form of certain otherwise inexplicable, widespread predilections.

The argument also applies to life as a whole, which is indisputably liquid crystalline, and accordingly complicated, with adaptive consequences but also side effects such as the need for thermoregulation, liquid water and probably death, as well as apparently nonadaptive consequences such as universal biases in sensory systems for perceptual juxtapositions of the properties of liquids with those of crystals (fluid~solid, disorder~order, dynamic~static).

While everything else in the local universe can only change physically in one direction or the other, either into a fluid or a solid, depending on its temperature, life can do both. Robert Frost highlights this in his poem “Fire and Ice,” where he also connects fire to hate and desire, as though it obviously represents these emotions, and the coldness of ice their opposites. He calls death by ice “destruction,” even though burning would be a more destructive way to die than freezing, resulting in an interesting contradiction, an aesthetic effect with the specific structure destruction~ice and the general structure disorder~cold/solid. Overall, the poem expresses in aesthetic form the same idea that Alcmaeon implied we should consider philosophically, that we can either freeze or melt:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

In the Americas, despite being separated from Greek and Eastern philosophy by thousands of years and living on the far side of the planet, the Aztecs (Mexica) also saw the world in terms of fundamental, interactive opposites. They believed in what James Maffie (2023) describes as a “single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power, energy or force,” which they called “teotl”:

Teotl’s process presents itself in multiple aspects, preeminent among which is duality. This duality takes the form of the endless opposition of contrary yet mutually interdependent and mutually complementary polarities which divide, alternately dominate, and explain the diversity, movement, and momentary arrangement of the universe. These include: being and not-being, order and disorder, life and death, light and darkness, masculine and feminine, dry and wet, hot and cold, and active and passive. Life and death, for example, are mutually arising, interdependent, and complementary aspects of one and the same process. Life contains the seed of death; death, the fertile, energizing seed of life. The artists of Tlatilco and Oaxaca, for example, presented this duality artistically by fashioning a split-faced mask, one-half alive, one-half skull-like (see Markman and Markman 1989:90). The masks are intentionally ambiguous. Skulls simultaneously symbolize death and life, since life springs from the bones of the dead. Flesh simultaneously symbolizes life and death, since death arises from the flesh of the living. The faces are thus neither-alive-nor-dead-yet-both-alive-and-dead all at once.

Life versus the nonliving, in contrast to the ambiguity in teotl, and regardless of a human desire to think otherwise, doesn’t particularly defy metaphysical classification. Being alive is pretty clearly delineated from being dead. The former doesn’t, very much, “spring from the bones” of the later, and live flesh isn’t exactly an unquestionable symbol of death.

We don’t have to like that living versus nonliving is a proper duality, or to respect it as such in art and myth. Nothing stops us from creating amusing exceptions like the “neither-alive-nor-dead-yet-both-alive-and-dead all at once” masks of the Aztecs, artificially creating what Maffie calls “dialectical polar monisms.” The similarly ambiguous arrangement between Yin and Yang qualities has been called “dualistic monism.” Here, the phenomenon is simply called a “mixture,” assuming, of course, that one of the participating opposites is, on average, more exciting to the brain and mind than the other.

Ghosts, zombies, vampires, and the rest of the undead are further examples of how the duality of living versus nonliving can be partially broken so that dualistic monism applies. So are immortal beings who die, or have a small, mortalizing defect like the heal of Achilles, or Baldr only being susceptible to a sprig of mistletoe, and the countless gods and characters who die and then come back to life, including Innana in her trip to the ancient Mesopotamian underworld, Odin when he sacrifices himself in the world tree Yggdrasil, and Christ in the crucifixion and resurrection.

Hel, ruler of Hel and daughter of Loki in Norse mythology, is said to be half flesh-colored and half blue (bright~dark), and therefore was probably thought of as both dead and alive at the same time (Crawford 2015, 2018), just like the Aztec masks. It’s a simple detail that makes her more complicated and interesting than she would be otherwise. Dante’s Satan, like Hel, is only half alive in that his lower body is frozen. The circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno overall are reminiscent of Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” with punishments ranging from burning in the fiery molten river Phlegethon to being forever trapped in ice. Either way, a person needs to remain alive in some sense, although they’ve supposedly died, in order to experience any kind of hell or other afterlife.

The idea of a partially broken duality is perhaps most evident in the physics of life, where thermal opposites are caught up in the ultimate dualistic monism, dialectical polar monality, unity of opposites, liquid crystal or mixture of more and less exciting things. In answering the question of whether life is fluid or solid, for instance, it’s not that we’re failing to recognize bodies are actually one or the other, or that life is definitely neither and beyond such metaphysical classification. Life is best described as fluid, solid, both and neither all at once, and this is true of other thermal dualities as well: hot~cold, dynamic~static, disorder~order, all of which are also surprisingly prevalent in philosophical lists of opposites, and unexpectedly likely to be juxtaposed in aesthetic phenomena.

While an appreciation for mixtures of thermal opposites is reflected in the structure of any society, these are particularly clear in what Maybury-Lewis (1989) says about the Bororo of Brazil:

The Bororo… have an all-pervasive dual organization that is at once cosmic, symbolic, and social (see Crocker 1985). It is expressed through the two major classes of spirits that exist in Bororo cosmology: the Aroe and Bope. The Aroe are associated with essence and pure form, as opposed to the Bope who are associated with process and flux. The Aroe are thus static, where the Bope are dynamic. The Aroe are associated with order, the Bope with disorder. The Aroe are comparatively sterile, as compared to the Bope who are associated with both creativity and destruction. The Aroe are rather distant, whereas the Bope are immediate and their influence is both sought and felt.

Fluid qualities (flux, dynamism, disorder) are associated with each other in a mental category, those of the Bope spirits, and solid qualities (form, stasis, order) are grouped together in the concept of the Aroe. The creation of such categories implies associations between those qualities, and consequently a degree of opposition between qualities we don’t normally think of as being opposed, such as destruction versus stasis or motion versus form, as proposed in Aesthetic Mixtures.

Scientists would have to agree the spirit classes are a suspiciously good description of a liquid crystal, despite having been created by people with no direct knowledge of mesophases or small-scale physics. The same opposites are involved, and arranged appropriately with respect to how they vary thermally. To the extent that flux, dynamism and disorder are perceptually more exciting than form, stasis and order, the Bororo system is a mixture of more and less exciting things. It’s difficult to imagine such a system evolving in the absence of a universal reflex-like preference for a balance between the opposites they apply to the spirits.

Physically, fluid~solid is usually a definitive duality. Few opposites are as clearly demarcated in nature as fluidity versus solidness, or liquid versus crystalline, with the process by which something in one of these states changes into the other normally happening suddenly, at a very specific temperature, assuming invariable pressure. It follows, because matter in a fluid state is disordered and dynamic while that in a solid state is ordered and static, that disorder~order, dynamic~static and other thermal opposites are also definitively dualistic in nonliving matter.

At the same time, however, within living things, especially for brains, these are partly distinct and partly indistinguishable, making bodies and brains impossible to categorize in a dualistic or monistic framework. A brain has the same metaphysical ambiguity as the Aztec masks, being neither-fluid-nor-solid-yet-both-fluid-and-solid all at once, and the same structure as Bororo society, mixing the same qualities into monistic dualities as the Aroe and Bope spirits.

Aesthetic complexity has thus been recognized and valued for a long time from various otherwise diverse perspectives, by cultures all over the world, since the origins of philosophy, mythology and social structure, continuously so throughout history to the present day, likely because we find it intuitive and amusing, but also because it describes a basic biological reality.

More recently, parallels can be drawn between the present thesis and contemporary ideas in complexity theory used to model living systems like the “edge of chaos” (see Lewin 1999) and class four cellular automata. Wolfram (2002) categorizes one-dimensional cellular automata into four distinct classes. Class one, the simplest, tend to collapse rapidly into an infinite fixed state, or an orderly, repetitious pattern. Class two are less regular, developing a slightly more intricate pattern than class one and then repeating the pattern forever. Class three are very random, sometimes running more than a million time steps with no detectable structure, analogous to chaotic systems. The fourth class is special. They were described last, hence the name, but behaviorally they belong between classes two and three.

Class four automata show a mixture of order and randomness that often leads to great complexity, corresponding to the edge of chaos in dynamical systems. Christopher Langton has pointed out that class one and two automata can be taken to correspond to the physical solid state, class three to the fluid state and class four to a phase transition between them (Waldrop 1992).

Under certain sets of rules they yield attractive, complex patterns of order and chaos that resemble those on the surfaces of animals (Wolfram 2002). Recent research (Manukyan et al. 2017) on the “quasi-hexagonal lattice,” “green and black labyrinthine pattern of skin colour” in occelated lizards has shown that “cellular automata are not merely abstract computational systems, but can directly correspond to processes generated by biological evolution.”