Binarius

Description

Jeremy Naydler:

"Something in us seeks unequivocal answers. It underpins our modern sense of truth. That "something" is the Binarius. You can catch sight of it at work within you whenever you look for an unequivocal answer: a Yes or a No, and whenever you deny the validity of an intermediate between them.

By such means is our certainty guaranteed. And yet we know that this binary principle shuts us out of Paradise, as Nicholas of Cusa pointed out, because it confines us to the hard-edged world of Yes or No. For Nicholas of Cusa, the gate of Paradise "is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and unless it is overpowered, the way will not lie open."(c) The guardian of the gate demands of the human soul that it declares its loyalty to the Binarius, and in this way the guardian ensures we are all strangers to Paradise. Indeed, the guardian of the gate of Paradise could be said to be none other than the Binarius itself. For it is precisely within the domain of the "excluded third," the *tertium non datur*, to which the Binarius seeks to bar our access, that we discover the realm of the gods and spirits, poetry, myth, and the world of the symbolic imagination. Precisely there is *the world of archetypes*, where paradox, ambivalence, and multiple levels of meaning are all vital.

If we identify the Binarius with the "highest spirit of reason," then its role is to try to keep us on the outside of Paradise. The Binarius would appear, therefore, not to be so much an archetype as an anti-archetype! And yet the role of "guardian of the gate" is in itself inescapably archetypal. Just as we encountered the paradox of the Binarius archetype being harboured within the conscious mind in the latter's default mode of functioning rationality, so too is the Binarius entangled in the paradoxical nature of the archetypal realm, in virtue of its anti-archetypal role. For it cannot escape this role of being the *archetype of the "anti-archetype"*. This seeming contradiction it terms actually enables us to see the true archetypal status of the Binarius more clearly, and through raising it to consciousness we can begin to loosen the hold it has on us."

(https://alvinchevskiy.substack.com/p/the-archetype-of-the-binarius)