Most students of philosophy do not appreciate just how brilliant -- Anaxamander -- the second oldest known philosopher in both Greek and Western Civilization, and his dialectic conception of the cosmic world, was -- and still is. Anaxamander was the king of the Pre-Socratic philosophers....In fact, I will be very bold and go one step further. Anaxamander's cosmic philosophy -- as primitive, archaic, and symbolic as it may have been -- is a more important conception of the cosmic world -- and the psychology of man -- than every part of Platonic philosophy except that part which indirectly builds from the multi-dialectic, multi-bi-polar philosophy that Anaxamander laid down before him. Is that bold enough? Let me support my case.
We hear the words 'bi-polar this' and 'bi-polar that' these days...as in 'bi-polar, manic-depression' which used to be simply 'manic-depression' before psychiatrists and other mental health workers started to add the 'bi-polar personality' tag to it...
We hear this 'bi-polar personality' tag as a type of 'mental health pathology' and yet most of us -- including many if not most mental health workers do not properly understand....Man is full of 'multi-bi-polarities' and this is a normal part of healthy mental and physical and physiological and bio-chemical and organic and cosmic, natural processes...Protons (positive charges) and electrons (negative charges) coming together, and/or splitting apart, according to different positive or negative or neutral electrical charges...
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Atom
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For other uses, see Atom (disambiguation).
The atom is a basic unit of matter that consists of a dense, central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. The atomic nucleus contains a mix of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons (except in the case of hydrogen-1, which is the only stable nuclide with no neutrons). The electrons of an atom are bound to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force. Likewise, a group of atoms can remain bound to each other, forming a molecule. An atom containing an equal number of protons and electrons is electrically neutral, otherwise it has a positive or negative charge and is an ion. An atom is classified according to the number of protons and neutrons in its nucleus: the number of protons determines the chemical element, and the number of neutrons determines the isotope of the element.[1]
The name atom comes from the Greek "ἄτομος"—átomos (from α-, "un-" + τέμνω - temno, "to cut"[2]), which means uncuttable, or indivisible, something that cannot be divided further.[3] The concept of an atom as an indivisible component of matter was first proposed by early Indian and Greek philosophers. In the 17th and 18th centuries, chemists provided a physical basis for this idea by showing that certain substances could not be further broken down by chemical methods. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists discovered subatomic components and structure inside the atom, thereby demonstrating that the 'atom' was divisible. The principles of quantum mechanics were used to successfully model the atom.[4][5]
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Medical conditions like high and low blood pressure, high and low blood sugar levels, hyper and hypothyroidism, acidic and alkaline blood levels...indicate that any and all body functions are based on the floating, ranging principle of a 'homeostatic, bi-polarity spectrum' where 'health' is usually found in 'the balanced middle'...
The same 'homeostatic priniciple' can easily be extended and applied to any and all life functions whether they be cognitive-mental-psychological functions on the inside looking out, or extending outwards into the respective and overlapping realms of the philosophical, the economic, the legal, the political and/or the aforementioned medical...Everything in the universe is based on the principle of 'bi-polarity'...In the realm of language, a word would not mean anything unless we could partly define it by contrasting it with its opposite word and concept...
The word and concept of 'light' would have no meaning if we did not understand, having directly experienced, the meaning of the concept of and the word 'dark'...
In summary, the world we live in is a world of 'multiple bi-polarities'...
In this regard, Anaxamander was the first Western philosopher to describe the world as a world of multiple bi-polarities competing against, and essentially trying to overpower each other...one dominating and the other sliding back into the Shadow, the undifferentiated Chaos of the 'Apeiron'...until the 'suppressed' polarity becomes 're-charged' and comes out of The Shadow to 're-compete' against the 'dominant-in-the-limelight' polarity that bring the two opposites together...Heraclitus, an indirect student of Anaxamander, would later add that 'opposites attract as well as repel each other'...
This dialectic cosmic philosophy of Anaxamander's was very, very modern -- and still is -- just as ancient Eastern philosophy would build from the twin dialectic or bi-polar concepts of 'yin' and 'yang' which would become one of the central features, if not the central feature, of much Eastern philosophy today -- particularly Taoism/Daoism. Again, the central feature here was one of 'homeostatic balance' between the 'masculine' characteristic of 'yang' and the 'feminine' concept of 'yin'....applied even to Eastern Medicine...which would become the central feature of the current North American 'Natural Health' industry...
Can you start to see how brilliant a concept -- or conceptuology or cosmology or cosmic philosophy -- that Anaxamander had latched onto and started to describe...some 2550 years ago!!!
It was so brilliant a cosmic philosophy that it contained the seeds of the brilliant philosophies and psychologies of Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, W.B. Cannon, Perls, Berne, Foucault, and Derrida hundreds and even thousands of years later...And that is just quickly off the top of my head...
The conceptuology and cosmic mythology-philosophy is so brilliant that it has been perculating in the depths of my subconscious for a number of years now and is about to become the focus of my mythological-philosophical model of the the human psyche...
Call this conceptuology 'Anaxamander's Multi-Bi-Polar (or Multi-Dialectic) Power-Drama' played out both inside and outside the human psyche...
-- dgb, November 22nd, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain
