Tetralemmic Polarity

Tetralemmic Polarity

Scott Roberts

I have found that, once one gets past belief in independent material existence, many of the remaining metaphysical questions can be dealt with through what Coleridge called 'polarity'. Coleridge borrowed the term from magnetism, with its feature that the north and south poles of a magnet existed in mutual dependence and mutual opposition. The metaphysical issues are more restrictive, however. While in magnetism one could just switch the labels "north" and "south" with nothing changing, one cannot do that with the polarities of interest here. The main example I will be discussing is the polarity of formlessness with form, though I think that other polarities like unity/multiplicity or permanence/change are in a sense equivalent to formlessness/form. One might call such polarities 'tetralemmic' in that one establishes the reality of such a polarity by going through the four horns of what is called the 'tetralemma'. The horns are, given the possibilities X and not-X: to affirm X alone as fundamental, to affirm not-X alone, to affirm both X and not-X, and to affirm neither X nor not-X. It is by running through the tetralemma that one recognizes such a polarity as being, on the one hand, not categorizable in any ordinary way (like "is" or "isn't"), while on the other hand, one finds it is necessary to make sense of our experience.

One gets a tetralemmic polarity when one of the poles is not an object. By "object" I mean whatever can be observed or thought about. So a tree, a hallucination, a concept, a process are all objects. All objects have form. A form is a set of distinctions that allows one to identify an object as a particular object, distinct from all other objects. However, this raises the question of whether an object is a form, or is it that it has a form, and its form is not all there is to it. If the latter, then that "extra" must be formless. I will argue that formlessness is indeed a reality in all objects, and that formlessness and form are a tetralemmic polarity.

Let us go through the tetralemma, considering the possibilities:
1) There is ultimately only formlessness (and form is somehow derived from formlessness).
2) There is ultimately only form (and formlessness is just vacuous word-mongering).
3) There is ultimately both form and formlessness.
4) The ultimate is neither form nor formlessness.

Time

Scott Roberts

...Thus awareness of change can only be thought through as a tetralemmic polarity. Is it mumorphic? Yes, in that that which is unchanging is formless, and hence non-objectifiable, while change is (dynamic) form. But, as mentioned in the tetralemmic polarity essay, there is a curious aspect to it, which we can note best in considering the awareness of change that occurs when we think. It is that the unchanging pole of the mumorphism is that which drives change (produces new thoughts), while the changing part resists change (it takes effort to get past old thoughts). This, as I see it, further drives home the point of the identity of the poles, that is, further refuting the third horn.

What we have, then, is that the present "moment" is the mumorphic identity of change and that which does not change. I put "moment" in scare quotes, since it is an ambiguous term in this context. Is a "moment" a point, or is it extended? In this case, that is, in considering awareness of change, it must be extended. If it were a point (as in the physicist's model of time) then there is no way for there to be awareness through a change. Yet whenever we see a fly buzz by, we are perceiving change through some period of time -- we can even specify that the "present moment" lasts somewhere around a quarter of a second to a second or two. (Note: The phrase "present moments" may have undesirable connotations, as it suggests discrete events, while the experiential reality is that of a continual flow. A simile I find helpful is that it is like the contact that a tire on a moving car makes with the road. It is, first of all, extended: an area, not a point. But it is also continually being added to on one end as the other end drops off. Thus, one can't truly speak of one present moment following another as if one stops and another begins.}

Unfortunately, this does not settle everything, as we have only considered time within the present moment. What of the past and future...