Is accepting contradiction as actual possible. It is not obvious. It sounds wrong, by definition. How could so much history pass with so much being missed? Wouldn't differences between the real nature of life and the way we commonly conceive of it expose themselves eventually?
As we've stated before, one really cannot get around contradiction, as is made plain by paradoxes such as the Liar. “I am lying.” If that sentence is true, then it is a lie, which would imply it is not true, which itself implies that it is not a lie and therefore true—and we know what
that then implies! Some will say such sentences aren't truly contradictory, but merely senseless. Such an analysis allows us to go about our lives under the common conception of consistent, non-contradictory reasoning. In fact, on top of such resolutions of paradox further contradictions can be created. “This sentence is not true and is senseless.” So if it is senseless then it is also not true (it is neither true nor false). But concluding it is not true and senseless makes the sentence true, which is contradictory again. No doubt a skeptic of contradiction will find a further resolution, and a lover of contradiction can create another on top of that. We will leave this battle between paradox and resolution aside and take situation to be ambiguous. Let's look how the two beliefs can coexist without our having noticed it.
When we are contradicted, some one or thing has indicated that an item we have taken to be true is, to the contrary, false. If this item is something we hold dear, this can be damaging to us to the same degree to which it was dear. Suppose, however, that by being contradicted we aren't being shown false, but rather having ambiguity introduced. Suppose we are still correct, but now also see a sense in which we aren't. Certainly if this latter perspective is the more accurate than the former we would have noticed it sooner or later. But in fact, isn't introducing an ambiguity nearly as damaging as flat out contradiction? Perhaps sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less, but it is close enough we certainly might eschew use of the latter perspective due to the convenience of using the closer-by former understanding. That it is near enough that we might miss or purposely pass by this perspective can be seen easily, using the same idea we used in resolving the paradox above. That is, once contradicted, even if all we've discovered is that our item is not categorically, unambiguously, universally true, it still prevents us from treating it as categorically, unambiguously, universally true. And, in fact, unambiguously true is what we really seek, it is what truly relieves us from labor of thought, frees us up to explore consequences with out reexamining our premises upon each new conclusion. So, in the end, we are still contradicted, to some degree, in the old sense, and that is enough to prevent us from exploring further.
But, having let this more subtle perspective languish due to its lack of utility in the majority of cases, we may have neglected a valuable resource for a minority, perhaps important minority, of cases. This perspective hasn't been entirely neglected. Versions of it appear in many recent and ancient writings. People employ the possibility of contradicting reality on a frequent basis even today. It is infrequently recognized as such because recognizing it removes the leverage in it. Ultimately, taking a truth to be a falsehood appears as a lie. So when we recognize that we are fooling ourselves, we're no longer fooling ourselves. Of course, in the case of fooling oneself, the leverage is arguably not used to a good end. But recognizing the wider view of a spectrum of truths, a distinction of a multiplicity, we are no longer lying to ourselves and have given up a questionable leverage for a valuable clarifying tool.
The thesis in this series has been that we have benefited from this latter perspective, it being a view on our very existence. So in a sense we've used it without being aware of it. The embrace of contradiction and reality as born from our own acts of distinction has been observed many times, notably in the Dao De Jing via its exploration of acting without action and naming as source of the many things of reality. This conception isn't advocated, but its analogy is visible even in Genesis where God names the things created, night and day, separating the waters to name the resultant space sky, and bringing the creatures to Adam to be named. It has been used without explanation at times, sometimes deceptively. We frequently deride a practice as slippery, implying no fixed truth. The awareness of the technique of using ambiguity without our knowledge, again arguably necessarily without our knowlege (our recognition), can be seen certainly as early as Plato in his allegory of the cave, where the extra degree of freedom of those in the light allowed them to create arbitrary realities for those fixed in the cave. What is two different cardboard cutouts to those in the light can appear, when overlapped, as one and then two to those in the cave.
So, in a sense, we've been using this perspective all along. And isn't it something of a relief that all these contradictions haunting our daily lives aren't so intractable after all? Perhaps life is no clearer under this more accepting conception, but possibly that is what is called for by many modern problems.
tags: contradiction distinction inexhaustibility meaning naming