The following is an actual conversation I had this morning. The screen names have been changed to avoid IM spam.
(11:14:26) firesetterninja: I miss my dichotomy studies.
(11:15:07) firesetterninja: there's still a big huge comm geek inside me just waiting for the opportunity break out at a moment
(11:15:47) elvee: At what point did "dichotomy" become a real word? Seriously, this was not a term invented by hunter-gatherer society.
(11:16:29) firesetterninja: how about when we moved beyond the hunter gatherer society? :-) Burke argues that the use of the negative was the point when this all changed.
(11:16:39) firesetterninja: because the negative does not exist in nature.
(11:16:52) firesetterninja: it was at that point that we began to think in the abstract
(11:17:37) elvee: There was a point in human history when the brain evolved to think in abstract concepts.
(11:17:44) firesetterninja: I dont know if that was the answer you wanted.
(11:18:01) firesetterninja: exactly. the closest we can pinpoint is to the understanding of the "not"
(11:18:16) firesetterninja: which stood as the basis for dichotomy and metaphor
(11:18:27) elvee: That makes sense, actually.
(11:18:30) firesetterninja: and where would we be in abstraction without that?
(11:18:52) firesetterninja: yes! I RULE! I just explained burke to an animator. :-)
(11:19:06) elvee: I'd say that we wouldn't have abstraction, but that would be a negative, so I fear my brain is tied in knots.
(11:19:14) elvee: Good job. You get a cookie.
(11:19:14) firesetterninja: now, this all ties in with perspective by incongruity....but that's a whole other lecture. :-)
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It's more obvious in some myths than in others, but that's the moment that a lot of creation myths seem to be about. I remember reading about some I think Native American story that before time, everything was just a big dance party, but then a participant got trampled and thus was born the living-dead dichotomy, and all the other dichotomies started being. I've been spending the semester hearing a lot about Ovid's Metamorphoses, because my classes are that specific, so I can also relate that. When he describes the creation of the world, it's not a sudden being from nothing, but a sorting of what was there (by a deliberately unnamed god). It's not just a mess of nature, but now here's land and here's water. You can see it here, if you like. If you go to the next page (line 89), you can see how many negatives are used to describe the Golden Age, which is comparable to the Garden of Eden.
Pretending to be as academic as grad students,
Michael
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