A friend of mine and I, in our early 20s, were obsessed with the idea of the paradox. Reading this recently from Kierkegaard makes me think we were indeed on to something:

Kierkegaard, The Absolute Paradox: “However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. … The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking.”

A lovely apophatic musing by Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

A lovely apophatic rumination from Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

A wonderfully succinct quote from The Destiny Of Man by Nikolai Berdyaev:

“This is the tragedy of knowledge… existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.”*

I love this reply to the problem of objectification, and subject/object split, which is so fundamental to Western thinking. Berdyaev mentions Kant and critical philosophy, but really he is reaching all the way back to Descartes.

From Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man

“Knowledge for [German epistemologists] is objectification. The knowing subject is not an existent; he is an epistemological and not an ontological entity; he is the bearer of ideal logical forms which are not human at all and whose connection with man is incomprehensible. Concrete reality disappears and is replaced the ‘subject and object’. The knower is not a self, not a concrete particular person, but an epistemological subject which is not human and does not exist but is outside existence and stands over against it. And that which he knows is not an existent either, but an object correlative to him and specially constructed for knowledge. Existence slips away both from the subject and the object. The very opposition of the two does away with existence. Objectification destroys life and being. If knowledge is objectified it can never reach its goal. This is the tragedy of knowledge which many philosophers have clearly recognized and formulated as follows: existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.* The object proves to be utterly alien to the subject and opposed to it. They are logically correlative and cannot be separated one from the other, and yet they are forever opposed to each other.”

This is a nice summary of a great work by Michel Foucault, something very close to my own thinking.

from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“The History of Madness… much of the work is concerned with the birth of medical psychiatry, which Foucault associates with extraordinary changes in the treatment of the mad in modernity, meaning first their systematic exclusion from society in early modernity, followed by their pathologization
in late modernity.. with Foucault ultimately finding that madness is negatively constitutive of Enlightenment reason via its exclusion. The exclusion of unreason itself, concomitant with the physical exclusion of the mad, is effectively the dark side of the valorization of reason in modernity… Foucault argues in effect for the recuperation of madness, via a valorization of philosophers and artists deemed mad, such as Nietzsche, a recuperation which Foucault thinks the works of such men already portend.”

This is from Holmes Rolston III’s essay “Science, Religion, And The Future.”

“…evolutionary and molecular biology seem to be discovering that the history of life is a random walk with much struggle and chance, although they have also found that, on this seemingly random walk, over millennia, order is built up a negentropic slope, attaining in Earth’s natural history the most complex and highly ordered phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and- most of all-the human mind.”

I have always, instinctively, rejected the idea that order has somehow come about randomly, and the more I learn about the history and philosophy of science the more I think randomness is something science falls back on when it can’t understand something; moreover, it seems science must believe in randomness, as if there is something driving the development of the universe, it would be outside of science’s purview. We have really been under the heel of positivism too long; it is time we start thinking more imaginatively, more comprehensively.

At a time when nearly everyone’s view of the world has become political, partisan and reified, perhaps we should look to the “anti-philosophers” such as Lev Shestov, who understood that all points of view are not only false but harmful to the human spirit and the pursuit of wisdom.

From Lev Shestov’s All Things Are Possible

“A point of view.- “Every writer, thinker- even every educated person thinks it necessary to have a permanent point of view. They climb up some elevation and never climbs down again all their days. Whatever they see from this point of view, they believe to be reality, truth, justice, good- and what they do not see they exclude from existence. People are not much to blame for this. Surely there is no very great joy in moving from point of view to point to view, shifting one’s camp from peak to peak. We have no wings, and ‘a winged thought’ is only a nice metaphor- unless, of course, it refers to logical thinking. There to be sure great volatility is usual, a lightness which comes from perfect naivete, if not ignorance. Anyone who really wished to know something, and not merely to have a philosophy, does not rely on logic and is not allured by reason. They must clamor from summit to summit, and, if necessary, hibernate in the dales. For a wide horizon leads to illusions, and in order to familiarize oneself with any object, it is essential to go close up to it, touch it, feel it, examine it from top to bottom and on every side. One must be ready, should this be impossible otherwise, to sacrifice the customary position of the body; to wiggle, to lie flat, to stand on one’s head, in a word, to assume the most unnatural of attitudes. Can there be any question of a permanent point of view? The more mobility and elasticity a person has, the less they value the ordinary equilibrium of their body; the oftener they change their outlook, the more they will take in. If, on the other hand, they imagine that from this or the other pinnacle they have the most comfortable survey of the world and life, leave them alone; they will never know anything. Nay, they do not want to know, they care more about their personal convenience than about the quality of their work. No doubt they will attain to fame and success, and thus brilliantly justify their ‘point of view.’”