Today I'm honoring the birthday of philosopher-hero Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). He is known as the "father of the dialectic" for his study of the emergence/evolution of thought (and Being). Hegel interpreted all of history, all of science, all of life as the continual development of syntheses, from the natural interaction of a "thesis" with its opposing "antithesis." Every thesis is accompanied by, or triggers the emergence of, an antithesis, and "life" (and Being) proceeds through their opposition to develop a synthesis, which in turn becomes a new thesis . . . Some examples of these natural oppositions are wealth/poverty, reactants/product, war/peace, life/death, center/circumference, eggs/chickens, background/foreground . . .
My dual purple-stripe ties serve as a crude example of a dialectic. They exist in my collection as "opposites" because the stripes on one (a thesis) go "one direction" while the stripes on the other (an antithesis) go "the other direction." Yet their interaction creates a new pattern (a synthesis!), forming "arrows" pointing up to my chin - or even an alternate synthesis forming "arrows" pointing down to my waist.
Philosophy is fun.
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