What's the meaning of 'opposing' in the following sentence:
"We have long been accustomed to opposing x to y."
Edit: I deliberately eschewed the context and original reference, because its language is "strictly philosophical", in order to avoid the ambiguity. But anyway here it is:
Whatever has its essence in arrival and departure we would like to call becoming and perishing, which is to say, transience, and therefore not what has being (das Seiende); for we have long been accustomed to opposing being (Sein) to becoming, as if becoming were a nothingness and did not even belong to being, which one habitually understands only as sheer perdurance. If, though, becoming is, then we must think being so essentially that it not only comprises becoming in some empty concept, but that, rather, being ontologically (seinsmäßig) supports and characterizes becoming (genesis—phthora) in its essence.
The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics by David Bentley Hart