Clarification of Yin and Yang

[T'ai Chi]

Newbies: Huh? What is it? See my avatar. Do a Google search. Watch the sun rise.

Oldies: Does the principles of Yin and Yang mean that...

1. everything has a (real and/or logical) complementary opposite
(hot? cold! up? down! dog? no dog! bad? good!)

2. every object/thing simultaneously possesses complementary opposite attributes
(water? It is soft, yet it can crash violently! cat? It can be very quick, yet also extremely lazy! a new job? Can be a blessing, or be the worst experience ever!)

3. both 1. and 2.

4. nonsense, superstition, pseudo-stuff, quackery, religion, philosophy, BS, "sniff test", creation myth

5. proto-science, an early and fairly sensible way for ancient people to look at the world

6. other (yeah, you better explain yourself then! )

 

[MRC_Hans]

I voted nonsense. That is not to say that most things do not have opposites, and that there are no interesting philosophical aspects in that, but to use it as a mainstay for anything is ..... nonsense.

Hans

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

T'ai Chi,

I voted 5, given that before the formalization of the scientific method, and the discovery of much of the scientific knowledge we currently have, the Yin/Yang approach was probably a useful one, if not really logically valid.


A few comments about your options:

1. everything has a (real and/or logical) complementary opposite
(hot? cold! up? down! dog? no dog! bad? good!)

Pretty trivial to show that this one is false. Just look at your examples. Each one uses a (technically) different definition of "opposite".

2. every object/thing simultaneously possesses complementary opposite attributes
(water? It is soft, yet it can crash violently! cat? It can be very quick, yet also extremely lazy! a new job? Can be a blessing, or be the worst experience ever!)

Same problem as (1).

3. both 1. and 2.

Ditto.

4. nonsense, superstition, pseudo-stuff, quackery, religion, philosophy, BS, "sniff test", creation myth

I didn't choose this option, because I could not tell whether you meant "one of the above", "all of the above", or "all of the above are equivalent".

I don't think it is nonsense, just not true. It is only superstition if you make it such, for example by claiming that some sort of supernatural forces enforce the principle. I don't know what "pseudo-stuff" means. Quackery does not seem to apply in any meaningful way. It could be a component of a religion, but does not seem to qualify as one itself. Ditto for philosophy. I suppose you could say it is BS in the sense that it is not true. I have no idea what "creation myth" is doing in that list.

5. proto-science, an early and fairly sensible way for ancient people to look at the world

See above.


Dr. Stupid

 

[Some Friggin Guy]

I voted other and it is based on my personal view of the yin-yang, which may or may not have anything to do with any kind of traditional belief.

My view is that the design is a simplistic representation of human nature, insofar as each human has the potential of being "good" or "evil" depending on their choices. The design furter illustrates that there is no such thing as a purely "good" or purely "evil" choice (this is shown by the fact that the white field still has som black in it and vice versa.)

Again, this is my personal view and is not intended to be anything remotely resembling rationality.

 

[Wudang]

I voted other, it's a metaphor. Remember the yin/yang isn't static. It's a metaphor for balance, change and other stuff.

 

[shemp]

Aren't they a pair of Chinese acrobats? I think I saw them at the circus.

 

[El Greco]

Nice background for amazing stories. Pretty harmless, unless it finds applications in ayuverdic mumbo-jumbo.

Reminds me of myself and a whole other bunch of idiots trying to sense chi in a karate class for years and years...

 

[sorgoth]

I voted proto-science, not because I don't think it's a load of bull, but because, for the time it was made, it was fairly sensible. Much better than a lot of other things going on in the same time period. However, for the modern world, it is pretty much useless.

 

[metacristi]

According with Tao Te King and other taoist writings 'it is because we single out something and treat it as distinct from other things that we get the idea of its opposite. Beauty, for example, once distinguished,suggests its opposite, ugliness. . . .All distinctions naturally appear as opposites.

Every positive factor involves its negative or opposing factor. . .

Yang is not superior to yin, nor is yin superior to yang...

The dialectics of Yin and Yang are the double manifestation of the one and only eternal, non divisible,and transcendent principle: Tao ("the Way")'

My interpretation of all these is that the simple assignation of certain attributes to entities creates the idea of their opposites,though these opposites are not assigned with necessity to the same entity.In a stronger form no matter if the qualities we assign to an entity are primary or secondary the act of treating them as totally independent inevitably lead us to consider the opposite attributes,assigned to the same entity-the attributes are intersubjectively observed,as being also independent [the most often these opposite attributes assigned to the same entity are not the exact opposites,varying from person to person].The same is valid when we consider observed entities themselves as being totally independent.

The concepts of yin and yang imply an important degree of subjectivism [not related with the 'emergent' secondary qualities-that can still be 'probed' intersubjectively after all] for not all people will assign the same opposite to a certain attribute and even for the same person it might vary with time.This is valid even when we talk of attributes that can be considered as being primary,intrinsic to the observed entity.Additionally there is the problem of deciding what is 'yang' and what is 'yin' [edit to add]and even considering positive attributes as being 'yang' and negative attributes as being 'yin' the same attribute can be 'yang' for some and 'yin' for others [/edit].Different persons (or the same person at different times) might choose differently,for example one could say that pizza has a 'great' taste whilst others will label it 'bad'.

Tao Te King seems to suggest that we should consider such opposite attributes,assigned to the same entity,as inseparable+not dependent of an immutable system of reference,depicting though the same ultimate reality,with yin and yang being inexorably linked as facets of a single 'whole'.Taken to the extreme 'everything that exist' is the manifestation of a single thing at the 'ultimate level' of reality:'Tao' [a concept that corresponds more or less with the 'Sunyata' of buddhists excepting the intrinsic monism of taoism].

With the subjectivist assumption accepted Number 2. seems the closest to my interpretation of Tao Te King quotes.

Practical applications?Well appart from the problem to establish if a glass is half full or half empty the 'yin and yang' approach is very useful when applied at the problems of morality and 'good vs evil'.Unfortunately it is irrelevant in the scientific problems: even if a sort of monism is true at the level of the 'ultimate reality' the taoist approach is no more than a mere philosophy.

 

[Yahweh]

I voted "nonsense, superstition, pseudo-stuff, quackery, religion, philosophy, BS, "sniff test", creation myth".

Yin and Yang is a Philosophy (not necessarily a science... especially when you cant describe abstract properties like "good" and "bad" absolutely across the whole of humanity).

 

[gnome]

I picked "other" also, I see it as some did here as a visual metaphor with no other significance than that which you care to perceive in it.

That said, it is a metaphor I am fond of.