Towards a Logic of Paradox

Since before Socrates first entered into one of his famous dialogues, logic and reason have acted as our primary means of making sense of the world. The word “reason,” derived from the Latin ratio, suggests a system of interrelated and cooperating parts that form a completed whole, while logic has acted as a structured process of verification, employing reason, ever since Aristotle coined the term “syllogism.” Nevertheless, both reason and logic are necessarily functions of our spatially determined experience of the world.

As a result, our habitual patterns of thinking demand all things, whether spiritual, mental or physical, to operate as if they shared in the states, phases and quantities of the world we currently perceive as being beyond our inner selves, even though our thoughts and ideas – the very things through which we experience ourselves – are in no way spatial. Thought has neither mass, breadth, depth or even location. We speak about having thoughts, following thoughts, sharing thoughts and expressing (literally “pushing out”) thoughts, but – so far as we can tell – any number of people may share a single thought or idea at one time.

As far as material reality is concerned, thought possesses only effect and duration. Nevertheless, our reasoning has dictated that veracity cannot exist when two contradictory statements suggest simultaneous and contradictory epistemes – that is, two differing rational systems. This understanding of how language and truth relate to each other is predicated on our spatial awareness, dictating that two differing ideas or ways of perceiving cannot occupy the same epistemic space. One must be true and the other false, or we are lost to paradox. The labors of reason from Aristotle through the Enlightenment thus seemed to succeed because we have experienced ourselves as occupants of a realm of finite dimension first experienced through the distinction of self and other. From that first distinction, all other distinctions arose.

If, however, our very sense of inner and outer is itself illusory – a simplistic mode of perception necessary for our ongoing development, but nonetheless as far removed from the truth as the assumption that the world is flat – then the boundaries, divisions and qualities defined by reason only bear on reality by way of conveniences. We have no trouble admitting that a cushion, leg and back are all constituent elements of a chair, but we (at least some of us) still balk at the idea of being ourselves, individually constituent of a planetary and universal being. At some point we will have to admit that two contradictory ideas can coexist with equal veracity, acting as the mental equivalent of two objects occupying the same space at the same time.

To put it another way, so long as we "understand" ideas, implying that we look up at them from below; "comprehend" concepts, implying that our mind somehow absorbs them; or "get" someone's "point", implying that we again obtain a spatially present projection of some thing "within" another person's mind, we will be chained to a limited awareness that does not allow for all the possibilities inherent to our true nature as individual emergent consciousnesses. Logic must be rewritten. Our very assumptions concerning the operation of mind and spirit must be unraveled and manifested anew, abandoning the urge to produce the endless paradigms of our epistemic youth, the false models of our pseudo-scientific adolescence.

If this seems too stringent or extreme, as though disrespecting the immense and often costly efforts of intellectual giants like Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant and Hegel, it should be added that our ability to form any given paradigm – any kind of epistemological model – in any given context has been the great blessing of our current mode of awareness. Each of our philosophical movements will doubtless serve us in ways we can hardly imagine at present. It is not the paradigms or even the ability to produce them that we must abandon, but the urge to continually do so.

Neither should terms like truth and falsity seem to lose their weight. We cannot help but live in truth. It is ever present to us, even if we choose to allow our reason to build a system of living that cocoons us from it, locking us into hours spent within metal boxes carrying us daily to workplaces that might as well be underground or producing an ecologically destructive and economically determined social organism (whether socialist or capitalist). Truth and falsity are ranges of meaning to which all ideas, even all actions, are party in manner and degree. Our determinants of truth and falsity must transcend the dictates of our spatialized habits of knowing to reflect our immediate, absolute experience and our manifesting perception.

Image by FlickrJunkie, courtesy of Creative Commons license.