Attractive opposites

Every Polly in the country is up in arms about the ‘divisiveness’ of Mrs Thatcher. But for ancient Greeks, opposition, or polarity, was as inherent in the nature of things as it is in our adversarial political system.

The first Greek philosopher Thales said: ‘There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune: that I was born, first, human and not animal; second, man and not woman; and third, Greek and not barbarian.’ This is a very typical Greek sentiment. ‘Most human things’ go in pairs, said Alcmaeon, and Greeks regularly set up oppositions in order to think about the nature of the world: right and left, odd and even, one and many, limited and unlimited, straight and curved, light and darkness, white and black, sweet and bitter, good and bad, large and small, and so on. It was Heraclitus who saw that somehow these opposites were ‘the same thing’, i.e. that there was a point of connection between them all that made the world what it was. The great Greek tragedy Antigone was centred round some of the great polarities: young vs old, male vs female, man vs god, family vs state, living vs dead. There were no winners there.

Aristotle clarified this intellectual procedure. He agreed that making such divisions between opposites could be important for certain purposes, but insisted that the opposites so produced (e.g. male, not female) must be exhaustive. If there was an intermediate position (e.g. grey, between black and white), the system of opposition by definition collapsed.

This is what the Pollies cannot understand. All governments are ‘divisive’. Left- or right-wing, they want matching policies. Yet any Polly who demanded the middle ground, the grey between the black and the white, would betray her inherent Pollytheism.