It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war.
What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified totality of any binary properties we find that there is no such thing as an inverse property by and through which any thing is defined or definable in opposition or through negation to another.
What this really means is that the opposite of a unified whole in distinction and definition by which we might seek to ground that unity in language or cognition requires a curious species of ontological trickery. For this reason – and through such nuanced manoeuvring – the presence of absence as the unifying anchor of holistic, gestalt systems analysis appears as necessary as it does counter-intuitive.
Of course, building systems of numbers around the seed of an empty set makes about as much sense as asserting that infinity is only definable (and intelligible) as inversion of nothing, an everything and a nothing being here quite sensibly and referentially contrapuntal. So, it is to the complete absence of anything at all – a void – that we must turn to disentangle the chaos and confusion of a shared experience, memory and history of endlessly-oscillating war and peace.
Daedelus Kite 