Enantiosis (e-nan-ti-o’-sis): Using opposing or contrary descriptions together, typically in a somewhat paradoxical manner.
I was freezing. I had just waded through three feet of snow to bring my grandma’s mail from the post office one mile away. I sat on my grandma’s glowing pot-bellied stove to warm my ass. Instead, my pants caught on fire and I ran outside to do snow angels and put out my pants. My butt was cold and hot at the same time. It had broken the rule of contradiction that has governed scientific reasoning and other things for at least 1,000 years.
It started with Plato’s toga catching on fire at a symposium when he was making goat fondue for his date. He jumped in the river that had become recently famous by Heraclitus when he realized he couldn’t dip the same foot in a different river twice. He was ridiculed for his pronouncement. He subsequently revised it to shut up the critics: You can’t put your foot in the same river twice. Critics said this was probably a function of having your foot bitten off by a crocodile. Heraclitus was perplexed and went back to Athens mumbling and distraught.
Anyway, Plato successfully extinguished his toga’s fire. The singularity of the blaze’s consumption of his garment made him realize it wasn’t cold at the same time. Here, the principle of contradiction was born, and eventually become Aristotle’s Primary Axiom: “A or Not A.” I was stunned that it did not apply to my burning ass. I felt betrayed by Plato and all his lying fellow travelers. He had duped Western Civilization into believing that the binding of contradictories was a “mere” figure of speech: oxymoron—the yoking of contradictories. “Jumbo shrimp” became the flagship oxymoron, making people laugh, never realizing that “jumbo shrimp” is a singular entity—wholly jumbo, wholly shrimp—literally!
Grandma loaned me one of grandpa’s red union suits. I could leave the rear flap open and sit in the snow to soothe my butt’s pain. But first, I stood by the stove trying to figure out how my liberation from contradiction would affect my life. “Either/Or” would be excised from map of decision making. Free from philosophy-induced illusion, I looked forward to eating jumbo shrimp in the deafening silence of my dining room. It will be awfully good. This is my unbiased opinion.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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