[lit-ideas] Negative Polarity
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 22:30:36 EDT
Thanks to M. Chase for the reference.
>fragment 53 Diels-Kranz (=3D fr. 83 in the excellent study by Charles=20
>Kahn, Art and thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge 1979, p. 207ff)=A0: War =
>is=20
>father of all and king of all. As Kahn writes (p. 209) ...it would be=20
>tedious to attempt a catalogue of all examples of polar contrsat or=20
>opposition [sc. in Heraclitus]: there is scarcely a text of Heraclitus=20=
>that would not have to be included....the doctrine of opposites, like=20
>the thesis of unity which is its counterpart, is coextensive with=20
>Heraclitus' thought as a whole".
----
Incidentally, I'm sorry my previous ref. to Liddell-Scott got all those
cumbersome link references. I just copied the entry for 'antithesis' -- with
the
Plato one quote -- from the online version and I was unable to turn it into
plain text (but then it was Greek).
While I agree with Kahn that it would be tedious to... etc. -- that depends
on what you mean by 'tedious' (as Geary et al. will agree).
Surely one can 'catalogue' the examples of polar contrsat (sic) and still
find it amusing -- especially is, as Chase, you do it in Greek. The idea is
that
perhaps Heraclitus was wrong in some of the examples (notably 'war is the
father of all...' etc).
The idea: some items are not necessarily polar (I don't think 'war' is. In
any case, the polar contrsat (sic) of 'war' is 'non-war', and not, as
Heraclitus thought, 'peace' (eirene). Ditto, the polar contrsat of 'peace' is
non-peace, and not, as some think, war.
Linguists refer to this (et al) as _negative_ polarity (as in Josephine
Baker's Parisian success at "The Red Mill", in Montmartre: "Yes, we have no
bananas", "Mai oui, nous n'avons pas _des_ banana's" -- in C major) -- to
contrsat
(sic) it with _positive_ polarity (cf. "I didn't sleep a wink" vs. the odd
"positive" polar expression, "I did sleep a wink"). What's a polar negative
item varies from language to language, and possibly from dialect to dialect (or
ideolect, as Geary likes to spell it).
Are there polar bears in Antarctica?
Cheers,
JL
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