General question here:
Is contradiction necessary at some point to a realistic philosphy? Or is contradiction contradictory to the idea of a coherent philosophy?
Man, it would seem entirely on what audience you expose that philosophy to!
If a philosophy considers itself as a beginning to acquiring perspective, it will welcome contradiction that invites a higher perspective to reconcile it.
If the philosophy is considered as already expressing human perspective, then contradiction will be denied and rationalized in one way or another.
So I guess it is a personal question concerning either ones aim to either justify themselves and their understanding or to admit not understanding and inviting the experience of a higher perspective to reconcile contradiction
… Drift, I didn’t quite understand what you said…
Well depending on if i where to expose a thesis supporting the existence of god alone.It would apparently get no criticism if no one read it.
if i presented it to an Islamic person, the argument that god is real would probably not be challenged.
if i presented it too ILP it definitely would be.
If i presented it to the former USSR, it may be burned and me imprisoned?
All i’ve said is pretty obvious. But i’ll add:confidence and a philosophy go a long way together. if you expose your philosophical beliefs to the wrong audience,they may deride you and your belief(s) and may destroy your confidence in them. then it’s basically lost,no matter how true or right your belief(s) was(were).
anyways, to befair,if you expose your philosophy to the entire world,it will be contradicted more if it is NOT in harmony with current worldly events,or less if it goes along with the current bandwagon.
it would seem which way the wind was blowing.
of coarse (unbiased) rational critique is the word in deciding whether or not your philosophy was better or worse depending on what contradiction was used on it then.
prattling on further,i’m reminded of the one arguement no one could really support…
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=148089&highlight=hendonism
Contradictions = bad. Ideally, you want a theory with zero contradictions.
It’s become fashionable to say “contradictions are ok” or “contradictions are necessary” or “contradictions are human”, with the whole post-modernist movement. This is total shit. Contradictions are the essence of what the philosopher dislikes. Philosophy works on logic - logic says contradictions are bad.
The reason that we shouldn’t just run away screaming when we see a contradiction is that contradictions ARE human. They’re common, they’re natural. Every person that actually thinks will probably find a contradiction in their beliefs at least once in their lives, if not more. This doesn’t mean that contradictions are ok - it just means that when we encounter them, we say, “whoops!”, and try and decide the best way to fix it. But walking around saying “yep, I have contradictions, and that’s ok!” is philosophically unsound.
(Note: everyone should make sure to differentiate between contradictions and paradoxes. Contradictions are of the form A and notA. Paradoxes are things that seem like contradictions, but aren’t really. A contradiction is “god can create anything” together with “god can destroy anything”, where you put no restrictions on what “anything” can be. A paradox is “sometimes you have to kill in order to save lives” - it sounds like it’s a contradiction, but it can be perfectly true and consistent in some cases. Paradoxes are linguistically interesting, but philosophically just fine. Contradictions are philosophically undesirable.)
Drift, I mostly just meant the grammer part, but enlightening none the less…
I must disagree Twiffy; (it’s not necessarily some recent fashionable thing either; think back to Kirkegaard, if I’m spelling that right…)
To say Philosophers must run on pure logic I don’t beleive is true, (to scientists and Enlightenment thinkers, sure, but not necessarily by the full range of philosophers) at least beyond certain levels. As you said, contradictions are human, considering all the layers of conciousness that make up the mind, I’d even say inherently so. To totally dismiss contradiction is to banish any singularly human (subjective) view in favor of a purely scientific (objective) view, in the process losing out on a load of self-understanding. Besides, as Nick said, once you accept a contradiction, you can move beyond the opposing forces to a greater understanding of a whole, (I know semi-Eastern philosophy isn’t well liked by some on the board, but stick with me…) Granted that not all seeming contradictions are actually so, as Twiff said, but in my own view, acceptance of the idea of logical contradictions is nessary to a balanced view of the forces at work.
TheQuestion,
We seem to be talking about slightly different things, and I agree with some of what you have to say.
When I say philosophers must reject contradictions, I mean that it is the logical duty of a philosopher to not consciously believe A and notA. A philosopher cannot in good faith knowingly believe that something is both true and false.
Well, this is a little vague here - you’re actually talking about two different things. Yes, if someone wants to understand something, he should not allow contradictions in his explanatory system. If I want to understand black holes, I can’t use a theory that has contradictions in it, or else that theory will certainly be wrong, at least in some places. To totally dismiss contradiction IS to banish a human subjective view in favor of an objective view - and that’s an excellent thing. Understanding comes from eliminating bias.
However, self-understanding is another thing altogether. In the process of understanding yourself, you still don’t want to have contradictions in your perceptions. You don’t want to perceive that you are both intelligent and not intelligent, because both of those can’t be true, and if you’re trying to understand yourself, you only want to believe what is ACTUALLY true about yourself. However, in understanding yourself, you will need to accept that you DO probably believe in a contradiction, since most people do.
In other words, you never want contradictions in your THEORY that explains and predicts a system. But you have to accept that there may be contradictions in that particular system if that system is a person.
A and notA have no place in the beliefs of a philosopher. But a philosopher must recognize and accept that they are common components of average people’s beliefs.
I totally agree. It’s the distinction between believing IN contradictions (which is bad), and believing that there ARE contradictions, at least in other people’s beliefs (which is simply true).
I don’t believe that God can create anything and that he can destroy anything - that’s a contradiction. But I recognize that some people do believe that.
Nicely put, Twiff, but I must disagree again.
I don’t believe you can totally eliminate subjectivity in objective observations (and vice-versa for that matter) and that completely objective observations are impossible, (especially once you get into metaphysics and essential natures and all that shit,) but only once you get past a certain level of observation.
The other thing, the self-understanding thing, I must disagree there too, but only because I come from the Jungian school and that’s a whole other thing…
Again, I feel like we might be talking about different things.
I’m not sure what you mean by “certain level of observation”, but discounting that, I entirely agree with what you say. I’m unsure about how it applies to our discussion, though.
The Question,
I’m going to allign my subjective tenet to that of Twiffy’s, in discerning the role of contradictions within context. Given a certain set of axioms and guidelines, you will concede that human reason tends to expand and enlargen its knowledge about the world with the purpose of constructing an architectonical edifice of worldly dimensions. Philosophical knowledge, which you may understand it as advancement through concepts, needs to constantly look back upon its device so that it may spot inconsistencies - otherwise, the grand architectonical edifice will crumble to the earth with the first earthquake.
Moving up, or down, or away (as you like it) to an existential dialectic, one may observe opposing statements with a more clement eye. Here, every element of existence becomes part of a Brownian movement of forces and tensions that shape one’s destiny. The audacity of admitting to contradictions is not even unaesthetical any more, as most conflicts of ideas are regarded as false dichotomies. The intrepid demarche of constructing a tower to reach the skies and offer visibility becomes a personal journey into the thicket of external influences. This is when everybody begins talking a different language and the tower is named Babel.
Twiff, the levels of observation I’m talking about deal basically with how you’re willing to look at something. There’s simple subjective (like “I feel sad”) and simple objective (like “That ball is red”) and those can extend pretty far (to the length even of analyzing the darkest depths of the subconcious or describing the paths of electrons.) But once you venture into things like the nature of observation itself, whether or not a quality like beauty is inherent in an object, the validity of something as an object or just a mass of atoms, basically questions in which the relationship between subjective and objective becomes so intertwined, it’s not so easy to make clearly objective observations, in my view, impossible. Such questions can not be shoved aside as something completely seperate from reality; the best we can do is turn a blind eye to them for the sake of convenience.
Mucius, I must take issue with your view of human knowledge as single towering ediface, much less one that must constantly look to pure reason as a blueprint. Rather, if I am to have to pick my own opposing metaphor, I’d say it’s like an organism, constantly evolving, constantly changing, often almost dying completely only to have a mutated strain live on through the cataclysm. Is it to be something so rigid as a single, towering building? If the whole human race is contributing to this ediface, whose knowledge is to be deemed unworthy or untrue, as so many of these held “known” things are contradictory? Who holds the blueprint?
Your multitude of “Babel Towers” on the other hand sounds lovely. Let each man construct his own residence! Of course, he will use the basic idea of what a house looks like (i.e. agreed upon objective ideas), let him use the newest building techniques, but from there, bulid it to his own imagination. The materials, the things needed to construct our knowledge, have been the same all along; the universe and its laws have not changed and the human self has not changed in many, many thousands of years, but what has changed is our view of them, our understanding of what we can do with them. Let us not bulid a single ediface, but a metropolis. All your building would need to collapse would be for a single brick near the bottom to be removed, one idea you thought to be fundemental, and it’s gone.