Light Thoughts Over A Dark Matter

Most words that we use refer to some discernible object, phenomenon, event or process, but there are some which do not do so in a straightforward manner. Take the sentence, ‘I did not go to office’. The word ‘office’ refers to a building which I can indicate with my forefinger, but what does the word ‘not’ refer to? For another instance of how some words fail to pick out objects in an unproblematic manner, consider antonyms such as light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. It is clear that the first term in each pair stands for something ‘objective’, but what about the second term? If asked for the meaning of the word ‘light’, we may direct the interlocutor’s attention to the sun, a torch, a candle, and other sources of light; but in response to a request for the meaning of ‘darkness’, what do we point out?

This, in turn, raises another question: do we define darkness as the absence of light or do we explicate the meaning of light as the antonym of darkness? That is, should we hold that light is the primary or original ‘thing’, and darkness is whatever is lacking in it, or that darkness is the fundamental substance whose absence we call light? Now we can take our enquirer to a dark field under a pitch-black moonless sky, and say, ‘All of this is darkness’. But the disanalogy now becomes clearer: in the case of light, we can indicate an active source, but with darkness, we are compelled to talk in terms of an absence, a deficit, an inadequacy. To the question, ‘What is causing this light?’ we can respond, ‘the sun’; but the parallel question, ‘What is causing this darkness?’ does not elicit such a reply. We can at best say, ‘the lack of sunlight’.

Consider how we teach numbers to children in school. First, we introduce them to the so-called natural numbers 1, 2, 3 and so on. After some weeks or months, we tell them about negative numbers which are formed by adding a negative sign to the former. So from the series 1, 2, 3 … we form the mirror-opposite one of -1, -2, -3 … In other words, to put forward a tautology, negative numbers are called so precisely because they are negative, that is, they are placed in negation to the positive numbers. However, this is not the only way to go about doing things. We can very well imagine a pedagogic system which advocates the following pattern. Children will first be taught the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 … Only when they have understood this series will the natural (or ‘positive’) numbers be introduced to them. In this alternative system of learning numbers, children are taught that it is negative numbers that are primary for here the positive numbers are defined in terms of what the negative numbers lack (and not the other way round).

The same goes for the polarity of light and darkness. Light is usually regarded as a positive entity, and darkness is understood as the absence of light; but there is nothing illogical in starting with darkness as the positive entity, and defining light as what darkness is deficient in. If we find this state of affairs somewhat hard to conceive it could, to some extent, be an accident of our evolutionary history which has been guided, among other things, by copious amounts of sunlight. But consider a planet where the sun shines for only one hour in a day, so that the remaining twenty-three hours are steeped in blinding darkness. Life-forms have evolved on this planet to survive under such conditions which we earthlings would perceive as the nonexistence of light, but they as the presence of a positive entity called darkness. It should, therefore, not be very surprising if its inhabitants follow the convention of defining (and experiencing) darkness as the basic substance, and light as a deficiency of darkness.

However, let us not stray too far into the realms of sci-fi, and instead remain grounded on our planet. We note that the terms ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ are not merely descriptive but also evaluative. For instance, darkness is associated with death, corruption, disease and bestiality; in India at least nobody would turn up at a wedding, unless s/he wanted to offend the hosts, dressed in black. Children (and often grown-ups too!) are routinely admonished: ‘Don’t harbour such dark thoughts! Don’t give in to negative thinking’. In contrast, light/colour is the glue that holds together an entire constellation of images of beauty, life, vivacity and vitality. Therefore, given the traditional belief (or more precisely superstition, if you will) that widows are dead to the world, Indian widows were (and still are?) not allowed to wear colourful, or shall we say lightful, dresses. These polarized images are brought together, and their evaluative distinctions clearly marked out, in an ancient hymn in which the speaker prays that he be led away from darkness to light and away from death to immortality. This invocation clearly emphasizes what we might call the priority of being (symbolized by light) over non-being (symbolized by darkness).

Let us move a step further, but in a somewhat different direction. We have noted that ‘light’ is usually regarded as the fundamental stuff, and darkness as its negation, lack, denial or contrary. However, this is not to imply that darkness is nonexistent per se. Though it may not have the absolute degree of reality that we would like to impute to light, it still exists somehow, maybe in the shadowlines of life, in the peripheries of brightness, in the penumbras of existence. Think of a hole in your wallet (literally, not metaphorically). In a certain sense, this hole is not something positive, it simply marks an absence in the texture of the wallet. In another sense, however, this lack can have real effects, as for instance when your money falls out through it. Likewise, darkness, which seems to belong to an ambiguous zone of half-reality, has very real consequences, for there is a lot that happens and gets done, as we say, because of the cover that darkness provides us.