Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 June 16

= June 16 =

Not-quite-dualism -- is there a word for it?
OK, so dualism is when there are two different things which are polar opposites in every way and are mutually antagonistic (e.g. good and evil, life and death, love and hate, heat and cold, fire and water, etc.) -- but is there a word for when two different things are radically different (to the extent of being opposites in some ways, but not in every way), but coexist in a mutually complementary relationship? 69.181.91.208 (talk) 10:01, 16 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Symbiosis? Commonly used as a metaphor in realms beyond biology. Card Zero  (talk) 10:54, 16 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Can you give some examples of pairs that stand in that relationship? Husband & wife? Lock & key? Crime & punishment? --Lambiam 14:06, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Marriage often qualifies, for sure. --<-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 21:50, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, husband and wife is very much along the lines of what I was thinking of -- as a matter of fact, I was thinking of such mutually complementary relationships in the context of romantic love (which, besides involving a man and a woman, also always has both a physical and an emotional component, an active and a passive component, a dominant and a submissive component, a giving and a taking, etc. -- so at least five pairs of such "partial opposites" required to make it complete (and required to be in good balance to make it work long-term), and these are just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!) 69.181.91.208 (talk) 11:45, 18 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Complementarity, duality, symmetry, dialectic, synthesis, compatibilism, syncretism, perennialism, pluralism, Anekantavada? Supervenience? --Amble (talk) 20:49, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Yin_and_yang? Iapetus (talk) 08:44, 17 June 2022 (UTC)


 * The classic "square of opposition" distinguishes between "contradictions" and "contraries" (and sometimes subcontrary, subalternation, and superalternation). AnonMoos (talk) 10:37, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
 * How about "orthogonal", as in x- and y-axes: totally independent, but necessarily linked. -- Verbarson talkedits 09:06, 20 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks for all the input, everyone -- these are good answers, but the problem is, all of them are either only tangentially related to what I was trying to describe, or they're too narrowly specific. What I was asking about is a general philosophical term for the situation I described -- so I think out of the answers listed above, "dialectic" is the closest to the target (or perhaps "monism" is a better fit?) 2601:646:8A81:6070:F5AD:972D:6C45:ADB3 (talk) 22:38, 21 June 2022 (UTC)