What of Light and Dark: A Quick Trip into the Dialectic

Throughout human history, no element has been more pervasive than mistakes. Mistakes vary greatly in form, magnitude, and their impact on the world. Some appear as benign, such as the accidental discovery of cosmic background radiation, which provided the initial evidence for the Big Bang. Others are far more severe, such as the submarine incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where a Soviet commander mistook the approach of an American submarine as a sign of all-out war, nearly firing a nuclear missile in "retaliation" and triggering World War III.

Because of these examples, one could argue both for and against the necessity of mistakes. Biologist Lewis Thomas once claimed, "[if] we are not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done." On the other hand, one might argue that mistakes, as accidents, should be avoided at all costs: if the Soviet submarine crew had fired their nuclear missile, the world would have ended. Doesn’t this suggest that the cost of making mistakes is far too high, even if they occasionally lead to progress? I, however, will argue that mistakes are not only necessary but also logically inevitable and unavoidable if we are to exist.

Socratic and Aristotelian thought posits that opposites, such as light and darkness, are intelligible only in relation to each other—a perspective echoed in many cultures. This entails a logical necessity: for something to be understood, there must be something of an opposite nature to distinguish it. After all, how can the concept of "light" make sense if we don’t have "darkness" for comparison? The same logic applies to mistakes and their opposite, correctness: without mistakes, the concept of correctness would lose its meaning.

However, this line of reasoning only establishes the necessity of knowing mistakes, not the necessity of their existence. One might argue that we only conceptualize mistakes, but they don’t truly exist. For instance, in the case of the Soviet submarine, was it genuinely a mistake, or is it only labeled as such in hindsight? Is there even such a thing as a "true" mistake, or is it just a construct of our minds? If mistakes are purely conceptual, why should we accept their existence as necessary? Could we not simply reframe them—seeing them as opportunities for growth rather than errors? In other words, the necessity of contrasting concepts for cognition does not necessarily entail that the opposite must exist in reality; it might all remain in the realm of ideas.

A potential refutation of this argument comes from Hegel's dialectics. Earlier, it was assumed that these concepts exist as true opposites, but what if that assumption is flawed? Instead, let’s define darkness as the absence of light and mistake as the absence of correctness. From this perspective, one could argue that recognizing a concept inherently requires positing the existence of its absence. For example, to affirm that "A is A" (a simple assertion of identity) implicitly requires that "A is not B" (a differentiation from everything else). Similarly, for correctness to exist, there must be an absence of it—a "not-correctness," which we define as "mistake." The converse is also true: for mistakes to exist, there must be a "not-mistake," which is correctness. Thus, the two are interdependent; the existence of one necessitates the existence of the other.

At first glance, "the opposite of mistake" and "not-mistake" may appear identical, both referring to correctness. However, they are conceptually distinct because opposites are not universally interchangeable with absences. Consider the concept of a student. What is the opposite of a student? Is it a teacher? A dysfunctional learner? Something entirely unrelated? The absence of a student, however, is clear: it refers to anything that is not a student, encompassing teachers, dysfunctional learners, or something else entirely. Opposites and absences differ conceptually.

Regardless of their value, mistakes are a necessary part of human existence. Their necessity arises from the logical interdependence of concepts: the assertion of any idea inherently entails the concept of its absence. For mistakes, this means that correctness requires the potential for error, just as error requires the potential for correctness. Together, they form the framework through which we understand and navigate the world.