There was a well known ancient philosopher who said something along the lines of the world being made up of opposites, and in order to experience good you must also experience bad, like being rich and poor.
Does anyone know which philosopher believed that?
2007-11-27 07:37:27 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Philosophy
Heraclitis saw the world as opposites tending to pass into each other, consciousness and unconsciousness, day and night, winter and summer, good and evil.
Socrates famously uses this to agrue that the soul is immortal, because life passes into death, death must also pass into life.
2007-11-27 07:47:48 · answer #1 · answered by aaron.brake 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Sounds like Heraclitus' theory regarding the strife of opposites.
2007-11-27 08:07:32 · answer #2 · answered by iconoclast12 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Anaximander is one who was "pre-Taoist"/"pre-Heraclitan" in the sense of noting opposites in physis.
The Tao as Oneness process is a bit more subtle than Heraclitus' "change" among opposites.
Aristotle's categorization of "pre-Socratics" imports the lack of Psyche, daimonic awareness of higher power, among the physicalist Greeks. Ari took a middle way between Plato's Gnosis of the Real above appearance and physis, and the mere physicalism of the pre-Socratics.
Anaximenes, Anaximander's main well-known student, proposed a physicialist fix for opposites' procession: "air." Heraclitus conceptualized a principle, change or the "word" ("logos") qua measure, that Word which in Saint Paul "frames the universe."
Plato realized the Mind of Logos, which Plotinus realized as One Mind Soul-individuation, complete with energy-veiling, e-veiling, eviling, as distortional distance from Logos, One Mind Soul Principle.
You might enjoy "A Philosophy of Universality," O. M. Aivanhov, as contemporary lectures for the general public, and "Climb the Highest Mountain," Mark Prophet, for its references to e.g. Bergson.
"Expecting Adam," Martha Beck, is a profound explication of such thinking, as she uncovers and lives many of these ideas in her time carrying Adam, while in a Harvard Ph.D. program.
cordially,
j.
2007-11-27 07:57:24 · answer #3 · answered by j153e 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
It wasn't a philosopher it was scientist who said that for every reaction there's an equal and opposite reaction...His name was Isaac Newton.
2007-11-27 07:42:33 · answer #4 · answered by thebigm57 7 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Yeah, I'll give Heraclitus a second vote.
Life is the interaction of opposing forces.
Everything is fire.
2007-11-27 07:54:38 · answer #5 · answered by Phoenix Quill 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋