Opposition

Non-being is not the negation of being but the mark of difference, and opposition among the great kinds is what makes discourse possible.

Opposites divide into four irreducible kinds: correlatives, contraries, privation and possession, and affirmation and negation.

Evil is not a positive opposite of good but its privation, a lack in what ought to be present.

All real opposition is mechanical: contrary motions in matter, and contrary appetites in human beings driven by self-preservation.

Not all possible things can coexist: opposition appears as the logical incompatibility among perfections that constrains God's choice of the best world.

Reason, left unchecked, generates antinomies: pairs of opposed demonstrations on transcendent questions that expose the limits of metaphysics.

Opposition is the engine of thought and reality: every determination generates its negation, and the two are reconciled in a higher unity.

Opposition is a tool of logic and empirical method: contraries and contradictories organize inductive reasoning, with no need for dialectical drama.

Opposition is class struggle: the material contradictions within a mode of production drive history forward through revolutionary transformation.