Term(inal)s

The principle is that all dualities and opposites are not disjoined but polar; they do not encounter and confront one another from afar; they exfoliate from a common center. Ordinary thinking conceals polarity and relativity because it employs terms, the terminals or ends, the poles, neglecting what lies between them. The difference of front and back, to be and not to be, hides their unity and mutuality.

--Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

As usual, Alan Watts points out something in my everyday experience of language and logical thinking that I never noticed and which reveals to me the limitations of my usual way of experiencing the world--namely, the hidden meaning of "term." Much has been said about language's role in filtering and structuring Reality, and I will probably return to this topic.

Watts recognizes that our usual experience of language, for the sake of clarity and efficiency, ordinarily concerns itself with opposites (good and evil, life and death) and distinctions, and that it follows the structure of our logic--the law of the excluded middle. But, going back to an image I introduced here, this is a matter of observing the branches (a symbol of the diversity of life) but forgetting their source, the trunk.

But it goes even further than that--the terms not only share a source (good and evil both stem from the "trunk" of morality), but they are interdependent. Watts hammered in this point throughout his entire career--you cannot see a figure without its background, so it is more accurate to say that you are seeing a figure-background instead of simply a figure. You didn't just buy something--a buy-sell, a transaction, just occurred. And you can only recognize yourself because of everything else that is not-you. But just as you are not seeing a figure, but a figure-background, you are experiencing yourself as a you-not you.

There is also the notion of "spectrum." I won't elaborate here, but suffice it to say that a particular language's terms sometimes fail to capture aspects of experience that lie along the spectrum between such terms, in the cracks, as it were, of the ranges of experience language is capable of capturing.