Scribe on 'the one and the other'

One common defence for the 'Goodness of God' in the face of worldly evils is that is takes pain and evil to give sense to happiness and goodness. It takes one thing to understand its opposite. Arguably, some things can not be understood without knowing their opposite, or at least contrasts. Whether you subscribe to this or not, it makes good sense, in theory at least.

Jason Mraz, singer-songwriter, sums it up adeptly for the less philosophically-inclined;

It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction

…

It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to make you yawn, brother
And it takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other


In fact, in one sense, the relationship between two extremes is in fact a close one. To draw a clumsy comparison by way of example, in one sense Nazism and Stalinism are poles apart on the ‘political line’, yet very much neighbours in another.

Personally, I enjoy cold weather. Yet this is, for the most part, only because it enables me to enjoy it by looking out from the window of a warm lounge, sipping a cup of tea. Similarly, people say they appreciate home more when returning from a holiday. We usually only want iced drinks when enjoying the heat; thus contrasts are inescapable yet often overlooked.

WARNING; pointless philosophical/pretentious bit:

Night time follows day; it’s an inescapable cycle. Indeed, regular cycles bring organization and routine to all forms of life. We can’t appreciate the night if we don’t understand that apart from having its own nature (say, the property of n), it is also intrinsically lacking the nature of day (-d). Are the two mutually defining? I’d go so far as to say yes, but theoretically I could be wrong. For all practical purposes (n) always = (-d) and vice versa. Yet I suppose this is a matter of opinion; a sort of optimism and pessimism, but to do with how one sees contrasts. That is to say, one person may be more mentally aware of night (they may, for example, exclusively work night-shifts), thus their default awareness is of (n) and (n=-d). Likewise, another person may base their entire work and personal life around day-time, and seeing as the night time (in their mind, the absence of day) provides them with the contrast to the default, they think in terms of (d) and (n=-d). The first person to mention dusk and dawn gets a slap.

These differences may seem trivial, but we some things can only be understood in terms of contrast or comparison. If we didn’t have an awareness of contrast and comparison, many properties/attributes (and adjectives, linguistically speaking) would be meaningless; ‘big’, ‘tall’, ‘old’, ‘beautiful’, ‘rich’, ‘cold’ and ‘heavy’ for example.



Aside from these theoretical distinctions, there are many examples in mundane life. As per the above lyrics, the satisfaction of finding something can only come if that thing has been lost. Pleasure can only be appreciated by contrast to a lack of it, although in this case, the latter state doesn’t necessarily mean discomfort.

These observations are, however, not very practical. Informing the mother of a dying child in Africa that her infant’s death is helping some people to understand the dichotomy of good and evil, or slyly pointing out to the winners of a football match that all they are doing is providing a context for the other side to be losers is of no practical value, no matter how theoretically correct.

Sometimes we feel so relieved to sit down in a comfy chair and have five minutes peace, because we’ve been busy, feeling down, or out of our comfort zone. But it takes the bad to know the good, the dark to know the light. Not that that’s much consolation, at times. But it’s nice to know.