ABSTRACT
To a degree, the philosophical language of ‘contradiction’ is unavoidable in our dialogue-
and many have dismissed dialectics because of the seeming obfuscatory nature of this
concept (most recently Fisher, 2010). The same, perhaps, is true of Daoism’s ‘complementarity
in opposites’. And so we must be sensitive to the coming together of Western and Eastern phi-
losophical categories, languages, and cultural histories in our exchange. Here, expression is
crucial and so to clarify from the outset, in many respects, Cheng’s misinterpretation of contra-
diction stems directly from the many misconceptions of Hegelian dialectics, the most prominent
of which concerns the status of the dialectical triad: ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis’. For even
Hegel himself condemned this as a ‘lifeless schema,’ implying determinism and mechanism and,
therefore, a conceptualization grossly inadequate for helping us understand the complexity and
dynamism of social relations in world politics (see Mueller, 1958, pp. 411-414).
