I start with a joke. There are 10 sorts of people in the world. Those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.
In our culture, we are encouraged to think that we can divide the world up using binary oppositions. We are either x or we are y. In politics we are on the left or on the right; in personality we are extrovert or introvert; for our intellectual training we choose between the sciences or the arts; we are routinely asked, by organisations gathering data on diversity, whether we are male or female, homo- or hetero-, abled or disabled, black or white; in London, you either live north of the river or you don’t really live in London at all, which illustrates a significant problem about the use of dichotomies: they set people in opposition one with another.
I recently came across a remark by Bertrand Russell, who said of the development of his philosophical temperament that he had leapt from the Hegelian view that the world was a bowl of treacle to the atomist view that the world was a bowl of lead shot. In other words, he had abandoned the view that we cannot understand anything until we understand everything, since as Hegel claimed the true is the whole, and instead had adopted the view that the only way to understand anything is to break it down into its component parts and try to understand each of them in turn and then figure out how they connect. Atomists, of whom Russell is a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is analysis, that is, the systematic separation of each part or element of a phenomenon, so that it can be studied in isolation; by contract, treaclists, of whom John Dewey might be a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is synthesis, that is, the examination of the interconnectedness of phenomena, so that their reciprocal influence upon each other can be understood. I was taught philosophy in the atomist tradition, but during my training I leapt in the opposite direction to Bertrand Russell, and I am now a confirmed treaclist. I try to resist attempts to divide up the world, believing that we understand best when we consider the whole and the fulness of its variety. There are many more than 10 sorts of people in my world.
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