“Opposition of opposites
It follows from all that we have just seen that when we say, "Life is life, and death is death," we are affirming that there is nothing in common between life and death. We set them apart from each other by seeing life and death each for itself, without seeing the relationships that can exist between them. Under these conditions, a man who has just lost his life must be considered dead, because it is impossible for him to be both alive and dead at the same time, since life and death are mutually exclusive.
By considering things as isolated, definitely different from each other, we manage to set them against each other.
This is the fourth character of the metaphysical method, which opposes opposites to one another and affirms that two opposites cannot exist at the same time.
Indeed, in this example of life and death, there can be no third possibility. It is absolutely necessary for us to choose one or the other of the possibilities that we have distinguished. We consider that a third possibility would be a contradiction, that this contradiction is an absurdity and, therefore, an impossibility.
The fourth character of the metaphysical method is therefore the horror of contradiction.
The practical consequences of this reasoning is that, when we talk about democracy and dictatorship, for example, well! the metaphysical point of view demands that a society choose between the two: because democracy is democracy, and dictatorship is dictatorship. Democracy is not dictatorship; and dictatorship is not democracy. We have to choose, otherwise we are faced with a contradiction, an absurdity, an impossibility.
The Marxist attitude is quite different.
We think, on the contrary, that the dictatorship of the proletariat, for example, is at the same time the dictatorship of the mass and democracy for the mass of the exploited.
We think that life, the life of living beings, is only possible because there is a perpetual struggle between cells and that, continually, some die to be replaced by others. Thus, life contains within it death. We think that death is not as total and separate from life as metaphysics thinks, because on a corpse all life has not completely disappeared, since certain cells continue to live for a certain time and from this corpse other lives will be born.
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