Antinomy

Hyponymy, antinomy and synonymy are all lexical terms.

The Antinomians: These Gospell-truths, these sweet Sermons of Free-grace, that setting up of naked Christ on his Throne, which hath seduced so many thousands of well-meaning souls, do now appear in their own colours, and to any common eye may be seen to be nothing but the grosse Antinomy of the old Libertines.

There is, notwithstanding, a sort of Manicheism in genius, as there is the antinomy in science, as there are light and shade in art, as there are opposite and similarly appearing movements in life, as there are diverse and simultaneous springs in the human conscience, as there are attraction and repulsion in the sidereal worlds, as there are multiferous and heterogeneous forces that resolve themselves into astonishing antithetic duality .

Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other.

But in fact the antinomy of exceptionalism and assimilationism has been there all along, and otherwise puzzling decisions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become readily understandable when seen as moments when assimilationism was ascendant.

This introduces the antinomy that has followed us through the whole study. The solution of this antinomy is found in making the Not-me, which interrupts self-consciousness, really reflect self-consciousness, by manifesting the nature of the I—in other words, by making it conform to the ideal of the soul.

Of the work that has been done on the liar antinomy, possibly the most profound and certainly the most influential has been that of Tarski