WWW.beBee

Welcome to Wednesday Word(s) of the Week at beBee: WWW.beBee

The exchanges taking place on beBee are dynamic and thought provoking. The writers are challenging the readers and in turn, the readers become the writers. Some words that have been coming across the various buzzes include; paradox, duality, singularity, complexity, opposites, process, and integration.

In my discussions, I have highlighted how these concepts reflect issues of identity. So, it was a pleasant discovery when I came across the word "dialectic". I saw it in the following quote:

"Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder." - Paul Ricoeur

The threads found in this quote; narrative, movement, order and disorder, wrap themselves around identity. This motivated me to explore the meaning of dialectic further. This is what I discovered.

"It [is] a transcendence of the opposites entailing a leap of the imagination to a higher level, which (1) provides justification for rejecting both alternatives as false and/or (2) helps elucidate a real but previously veiled integral relationship between apparent opposites that have been kept apart and regarded as distinct." 
Wikiperdia

Charles H. Elliott writes:

"Dialectics are one of the important unifying concepts that reflect how the mind fundamentally understands and perceives most core concepts and ideas. And the field of psychology contains an abundance of such concepts…Dialectics are based in part on the fact that we cannot fully understand any of these abstract concepts without appreciating that they consist of bipolar opposites with a higher level of integration somewhere in between them…The term "dialectical" means a synthesis or integration of opposites." 

In addition, this took me back to the following quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

I have communicated my bias that opposites do not exist; opposites are created.

In both our personal and professional lives, it is more manageable to work with ideas, strategies, plans, goals, relationships, feelings and so on, if we place them in an opposite:

Life/Death; Good/Evil; Right/Wrong; Pleasure/Pain; Love/Hate; Beautiful/Ugly; Rich/Poor; Success/Failure; to name just a few.

These states, however useful they are in organizing ourselves, do not exist; they have been created by us to help us make sense of who we are, in relation to others, and our environment.

I see this drive to compartmentalize, to create opposites, as a defense strategy gone wrong.

We have an innate drive towards homeostasis and balance. Somehow along the way, we associated this place of homeostasis as one in which we are comfortable. Therefore, anything that causes a sense of discomfort must be avoided or negated. This is man-made, not found in nature. The process of homeostasis is a dynamic one; only by experiencing a state of disequilibrium can we then make choices of where to go or what action to take in order to help us move towards equilibrium. In a way, we can say that we can’t achieve equilibrium without knowing how to tolerate and work with the disequilibrium. Because the two states coexist, we need to learn how to be in that tension of coexistence. I now think of the dynamic process of the dialectical as that tension; a tension that synthesizes.

Image credit: Pesticide Action Network

Invitation: I invite you all to contribute your words. Please send me a message with your word, its definition and what it means to you by Monday. Looking forward to next week.

Quiero pediros e invitaros a enviarme una palabra que tenga un significado especial para tí.