Towards a Logic of Paradox
James Acken
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.
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"logic must be rewritten"
Even if i "get" some point, then i must "grok" that all points do not point toward Rome.Truly a paradox of history, that we see all roads ending up back there in Rome, we would be speaking of several levels of roads, metaphoricaly, literaly, and figuratively.Even if great roads are still pointing toward some great destination that is yet unknown, and some roads are falling into disrepair and others were built one on top of the other.Even if i can look up to the High road i must always swing my gaze back to the Low road.If i take my next thought from a Scottish song, even if i don't exactly get the context that that song was written from,(unless i study the times and the writer of the song) the "logic of paradox"seems to sing through some timeless true.
We then would see that Logic and Paradox, is like Being and Time, is like the point that we got somewhere along the line of reasoning that two contradictory statements cannot exist in the same space in time, we have arrived at the crossroads of Matter and Memory.That Paradox sounds like the word Paradise is no mere coincidence.That Logic in itself is nothing but a figment of Aristotle's mind, only serves to locate it in nonlocal flatlands whose meaning is a deliberate understatement after the fact.
Fact is, water is falling up toward the ocean in a thin line from the ocean itself through a horizon line that points in the other direction.Paradox or Logic? or a fluid perspective that balances on cosmos and creation.
You'll tak the high road and I'll tak the low ...
This song was written by one of two friends in London, both of whom were Scottish and one of whom was sentenced, I think as a Jacobite, to die. The High Road is the road above ground in this world that leads back to the Highlands, while the Low Road is the road of the underworld. The belief of the time held that the Scottish dead returned to their homeland at their death (the Gàidhlig song that runs "Chi mi na mòrbheanna" holds the same sentiment), so the one taking the High Road would get home after the dead who, taking the low road, returned faster than thought.
Tales inveniunt, quales colunt
wonderful
I was reading some about Scottish history, about scottish free masons, and the mention of Jacobite, brings up what little i recall, except that there were distinct differences between Scotland and England, struggles for thrones and religions.As far as the underworld and revolutionary struggles that bring up the underground, and the speed of transition that between this through and that thought.And those that "get it" home after the dead.And as i side note i have read a lot of philosophy, but my writing is influenced by that, though my thrust is through poetry.So that's why there are gaps and leaps of fire in my grasp of the concepts that serve to jar my imagination's applicability.Therefore the discription of the meaning of the high road low road song, was every bit as marvelous as i had hoped for and even more so.If we could grok that historical and mystical reference to the quickness of the dead.
oh and i did read Heidegger, as much as i could of Being and Time, but i liked his three books on Nietzsche better, as i was not a student of philosophy, all my readings were on my own, and between reading and writing poetry, and the poets i met, i recall an aquaintance i new that had read Being and Time several times, years ago, he could not talk about it as that i would wrap myself better around Dasein, he too became a kind of philosopher poet.I recall meeting a guy that had become a Buddhist also, and i spent weeks with him in a tent and in Big Sur working on a fire crew, and he had spent a year in a Thailand monastary, he attempted to educate me about Buddhist teachings, i was reading Saint John of the Cross.
i tried to look up...Tales inveniut, quales colunt
Tales inveniunt, quales colunt
Tales inveniunt, quales colunt
It's from Seneca and a marvelous Latin wordplay, but here's a very loose translation:
"People discover the kinds of things they cultivate or for which they search."
yes Seneca
i was just looking at his quotes, a few days ago, now i recall seeing the quote, it's funny but for some reason i was thinking he was a famous native American Indian Chief, now it returns that he was a Roman philosopher, ect. of course, when i was looking for the quote i got Latin, i saw something from St.Augustine, The City of God(against the pagans?), i guess that is what he was searching for.
not sure what he was trying to cultivate.I find it interesting that history is mostly what we don't know.Nietzsche said something about that.And Nassim Harmein whose blog is on RS, says something to the effect that 999999% is what we don't see .If i groked that.
and onto more marvelous Latin word play.Or pig Latin.Or any language will do, romantic is true.
Derrida takes us over the hump, to Buddhism
I read Being and Time in grad school in two different classes at once. It was Heidegger taking the Scientific, logic approach of Husserl and turning it to primary existential question. The first line of Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics" says it all...Why is there anything rather than nothing.
What they both missed was the deep and necessary lies their words contain, even as they are uttered, and even more so when they are typeset as text, and read over and over again by many different people in many different contexts, even in varieties of translations in many different languages.
To greatly overstate the simplicity, Derrida exposed the inherent Lie of Presence in reading text. We read anything in the context of who we are, the society we live in, and the implicit structures, categories, and mythologies of the day. We believe the author is in the words, when in fact it is the reader's own mind which gives life to the words, in the reader's own voice.
Both Husserl and Heigger were interested in a new foundation, Husserl for science, and Heidegger a foundation of what others called Existentialism, the experiential implicit structure of moment-by-moment existence.
While I don't know Derrida's specific opinion was of Buddhism, but it has always been my conclusion that when you take Derrida's critique of western civilization and apply it across the board, the many categories which divide millions of specific libraries of knowledge fall away. The historical events that led to schisms in fields of knowledge, like the split between science and spirituality which was dramatized in the trial of Galileo, while interesting, don't realy justify why we think we can really understand one without the other.
Buddhism and Buddhist logic takes a different approach. It never denies the paradox, and in fact it all but deifies the paradox. Further, it is the structure of the paradox which is the essence of existence.
This primacy of the paradox is beautifully and succinctly described in the brilliant one page Heart Sutra.
http://www.unfetteredmind.com/translations/heart.php
Tem Noon
Phenomenologist, StreetBuddhist, Percussionist - Tabla, Djembe
http://TemNoon.com/
the only way we can
Ternary Logic to the rescue
An Ancient Game
Further study on this subject can be found at: http://www.synchromysticism.com/subnet/The%20Myth%20of%2050.htm
Pay attention! This stuff keeps one on one's toes.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another. - Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins
one quote.
By the end of your post you're smack back in the paradigm
Hi James,
Thanks for this post. I agree that it's time to not only leave the old paradigms and constructs behind but perhaps the paradigm OF the paradigm as well. We have to brave enough to jump into the philosophical darkness!
That said, when you start talking about truth at the end, it sounds like you're right back in the paradigm that is perhaps the hardest to shake--metaphysics. To go beyond metaphysics is to go beyond ideas of inherent value--of good and bad, true and false, signifier and siginfied. You write:
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.
I disagree with this and side with Heidegger--truth is not a value or a judgment--it's an ACT. Truth is the act of unveiling--of making that which was hidden come to light. It's not specifically what has come to light, but how it's come to light. For example the truth of a poem is the way it opens up the world and reveals it to us in a way we could not have imagined.
You're right to imply that we will most likely always have a need for truth as a value--I agree that this is how society needs to work. There have to be rights and wrongs in real life so that it's not a free-for-all--people need some degree of order and routine in life. The beautiful thing about philosophy, however, is that it doesn't have anything to do with real life or society. As Socrates taught it is that which goes on outside the city walls. To be a lover of wisdom means at times to be an outlaw--the one who stands apart--observing and creating concepts. Truth has nothing to do with it--it's about the sturdiness of what is constructed.
Thanks again for this post.
peace,
jp
http://twitter.com/true
I should read more Heidegger ...
Thank you very much for these kind words. I was trying to employ the truth-falsity paradigm without being held by it, but perhaps I was not overly successful. For myself, the great struggle - or perhaps the great work - is to let go of this constant experience of inner/outer and begin to percieve the total connectivity of all things, mental as well as physical and perceptual as well as factual. I consider truth and falsity, whether they are acts or accidences, to be tools of perception and as such should be under our complete control. Such tools, as products of our own ability to concieve ideas spatially, are as infinitely flexible and rarified as any model we construct. Thus there is no paradigm or concept that has any degree of sturdiness, only applicability.
Thanks again and I hope to hear more of what you have to say.
Tales inveniunt, quales colunt
The problem with Darwinian logic
Man's evolution is contrary to self-seeking. Self-seeking is tied to fear, envy, pride, derision, the whole lot. The basic lesson in life is that you are not in it for yourself.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and must of necessity die. There is no safety but collective safety, not for very long. Ayn Rand was an idiot.
Another glaring flaw in Darwinism...
In a very short span of geologic time, man has "evolved" the destruction of the biosphere. This very fact separates man from the animal kingdom, even from the whole earth. Some would shoulder man with the blame for this, but the vast majority are totally blameless. Those who consider earth their home, who cannot imagine another existence beyond this illusory one, are probably in for a rough few years.
so it comes down to reason
to ratio,the ratios of space and time.These once were laws of dimension and cubits.Now "reason" has taken a back seat to the reason itself.Reality was watching reason with something like slightly amused sideways glance.What could reason bring to the table of bird heads and meteor rocks? This upstart with visions of grandeur.What could some child of man's games of placing mankind in the center of the riddle, in the middle of the measurement.Yes this species has a faculty and a body that seems to become up right if only to deliver grand speeches in the great hall.But what is this frothing of units of sound and vibration, that waxes with arch and parabola, that creeks, groans, rattles, and proclaims the invention of Logic?
Have we then arrived at some colossal juncture in the meeting of what some call reason as the golden means by which all else would follow?Where these moments in the first order of thought, given by that which is beautiful in the eyes of great thinkers of the wonderful thoughts.This, seen in some quiescent transparent instant of reflection floating in the substratums of the question raised on the up stretched hands of the philosopher king.Oh, reason made a bargan with logic, then, as reality looked on with a slightly more cock to its asunder brow.What monsters would be hatched just as soon as the paradox was perceived and the quick deal was passed between the difference between two statements.Reality shook its zeroed out face of mountans, rivers and strange grotesque sculptures with archaic compartments and round shapes that bare witness to the mysterious birth of the universe.
Reality slides out of the domed arched quintessential structured meeting place , where the statuesque heads are now still and the night sky fills the empty eye holes stars a twinkle,blue essence water is dripping through a heaven ceiling onto the earth floor.A silver snake now in the mother letter shape distance between then and there, rewriting itself.
Maybe maybe or maybe not logic?