barefootwisdom ([personal profile] barefootwisdom) wrote in [personal profile] sdi 2021-11-18 02:49 am (UTC)

It may be that opposites attract, in a sense, but not in the same way that similarities congregate...

I think "opposites" may be a bit of a red herring here, since strictly speaking, a given term/property/etc. can only have a single proper opposite. Black is unlike all the other colors, but only opposite of white.

It seems to me that an important part of the contrast between likeness and unlikeness is that there is (plausibly) only a single way for a pair of things to be alike, while there are indefinitely many ways of being unlike. So in the Pythagorean Table of Opposites, likeness would belong in the first column, and unlikeness in the second. And its axiomatic (to a Pythagorean) that the things in the first column are preferable to the things in the second.

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