The philosophy behind 'opposites attract'

World-renowned American physicist Richard Feynman once claimed that the single most important concept in physics was the idea that everything, everywhere at any time is made up of a single thing. This is the constantly moving atoms that both attract and repel each other. While this assertion may seem overly simplistic, it is not a “reductio ad absurdum,” which is when the consequences of a proposition are shown to be absurd. In other words, what Feynman said made a lot of sense. But how can opposites, such as attraction and repulsion, explain everything about the world?

The notion of reductionism is fundamental to the scientific method, which looks for parsimony – i.e., simple explanations – when accounting for events in the natural world; in other words, uncomplicated stories are better than complicated ones.

This involves breaking something down into its most fundamental parts and observing its behavior. It is in this way that major advances in knowledge occur: first, reduce a phenomenon to its basic elements; then, observe it; and finally, develop a theory about it that can be tested based on hypotheses relating to cause and effect.

Feynman’s contention about the behavior of opposites in the natural sciences, was echoed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in the social sciences, when he claimed that the human mind works in fundamentally the same way across all cultures and civilizations, premised on the idea of binary opposition. According to Levi-Strauss, all social structures – like family trees, dietary habits and religious beliefs – are built around contradictions that the human mind must process and overcome.

Binary concepts represent simple ideas, such as male versus female; raw versus cooked; dead versus alive, and both modern and so-called “primitive” ways of thinking operate in the same way when trying to deal with these oppositions. They do this by attempting to reconcile the tension between these polar extremes that both complement (i.e., attract) and contrast (i.e., repel), allowing us to better understand the world. For example, many primitive societies have a myth explaining the creation of fire, which differentiates food that is raw from food that is cooked.

What is noteworthy is that the thoughts of these apparently disparate thinkers show a point of conjunction between the natural and social sciences. In its simplest form, knowing about the world means understanding how opposites work – they both attract and repel at the same time as they try to deal with the mental tension created by opposition.

While mythic expression seeks to explain contradictions in the social world, physical forces in nature are accounted for by the attraction of atoms that are close to each other, as well as repulsion when they get too close. Could such a simple idea explain so much complexity?  A more scientific approachtells us that the simpler the explanation the better, and what could be simpler than the idea that opposites explain everything.

Ron Messer holds six university degrees and teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, located in Vancouver, British Columbia. He does not think of himself as a writer, but rather as an interpreter of ‘big ideas’ and how they apply to our personal lives. He can be reached at ron.messer@kpu.ca

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: The philosophy behind 'opposites attract'