Never Simply Black and White. It is always tempting to
see things in black and white or, shall we say, bright and dark, but,
unfortunately, things are rarely that simple. For a start, there are two axes,
one dominated by free soma in female fashion and the other led by free psyche
in male fashion, and therefore there are fundamentally two kinds of bright and
dark, or light and shade, even without class complications. Take metachemistry over antimetaphysics
at the northwest point of the intercardinal axial
compass. Free soma, the female ideal, is a brightness,
whilst its bound psychic counterpart is somewhat of a dark shadow, trailing
behind the leading string, as it were. Therefore a somatic brightness has to be
contrasted, in each gender case, antimetaphysical as well as metachemical, with
a psychic darkness. The same is true of chemistry over antiphysics
at the southwest point of the intercardinal axial
compass, free soma being bright and bound psyche dark. But on the sensible side
of the moral divide things are quite otherwise. There free psyche is bright and
bound soma dark, whether in terms of physics over antichemistry at the
southeast point of the intercardinal axial compass
or, up above, of metaphysics over antimetachemistry at its northeast point. The
bright side of a male hegemonic coupling, being free, is certainly psychic,
whilst its dark side, corresponding to the bound, is somatic. This has some
interesting, if quite unconventional, moral ramifications, but I don't wish to
enlarge upon that now. Suffice it to say that things are never simply black and
white, least of all in terms of evil being somehow
dark and good bright (the reverse is actually the case, bearing in mind the
distinction between free metachemical soma and bound antichemical soma on
primary state-hegemonic terms). To be sure, a distinction between the dark and
the bright most certainly exists, and at all points of the intercardinal
axial compass, but it is not simply in terms of soma being dark and psyche
bright, or vice versa. That is why, with both the female ideal of free soma and
the male ideal of free psyche corresponding to the bright side of things, one
has a moral incompatibility between them which is no mere black/white dichotomy
but a competition between alternative kinds of brightness that is likely to
lead, in axial differentiation, to different types of society, depending on
which kind of freedom is officially encouraged and regarded as alone right, and
to keep those who believe in the one kind quite separate from those who believe
in the other, both within and without their particular society. For mutually
incompatible, as free females and free males, they respectively remain.