Living with paradoxes

by

William Edelen

Levi Strauss by Pablo Secca

     One of the giant scholars of our time died last month at 100 years of age. Claude Levi-Strauss: brilliant Anthropologist, Philosopher, Free Thinker and Humanist. His obituary in the New York Times, as well as the Los Angeles Times, covered one full page. One paragraph in the obituary inspired me to write this column. Levi-Strauss wrote: “Every culture’s mythology is built around opposites … raw and cooked … human and animal … hot and cold … and it is through these opposing concepts, these paradoxes, that humanity makes sense of the world.”

     I thought that being conscious of the fact that we live in paradoxes can keep us grounded and stable and free us from the psychotic obsession for absolutes. To make an absolute out of any one system of thought is to imprison the human spirit. Whether a philosophical system … or theological system … or economic … or mora l… or political or whatever the system, it can become a mental concentration camp when made into an absolute. Truth is always beyond any one sided system. Every system is only a fragment, a minute particle, a pebble on the cosmic beach of truth. We mutilate truth when we try to make every idea and every part of life fit into our little system. No matter how much we have to bend it … twist it … pervert it … force it. We so often mutilate facts and history and scholarship in an effort to make them fit into our little system of values and ideas. Systems delude us and deceive us and imprison us. Why? Why??

     Because life is paradox. Human beings are a paradox. Life demands that we hold together, in creative tension – that we balance what seem to be contradictions. We must continually balance the complimentary opposites, the Yin and Yang. Life and death: life is only a brief interlude between two great mysteries, which are yet one. We must balance daily the paradoxes: judgment and mercy, the personal and social, humility and confidence, weakness and strength, the contemporary and the timeless, the old and the new, mind and heart, foolishness and wisdom, faith and doubt, love and indifference, prudence and carelessness, logic and the failures of logic, tension and peace, despair and hope, rest and action…the paradoxes provide the balance. A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Mercy, for instance, if not checked by justice, becomes a gushy, mushy sentimental thing. Humility, for instance, if not balanced by a strong firm ego and confident personality can become a mealy-mouth thing that nobody can respect.

     Life and truth go far beyond systems and absolutes. Voltaire said it well: “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one”.

Every human being is living with paradoxes surging within that one brain and body. Every biography of Thomas Jefferson that I have read has brought out the fact that he was such a complex personality filled with contradictions, that it would be impossible to find a key to his life … and yet from keeping his tensions in balance, the creativity that flowed from that mind has seldom been equaled in the history of civilization. I have found the same to be true in my readings of other highly creative giants, from Churchill to Carl Jung to John Adams, Albert Schweitzer and countless others.

     “The human mind”, wrote Levi-Strauss, “tends to organize thought around paradoxical opposites in an effort to resolve the tension.”

     I resolve my tension from looking at a world with good and evil, existing as an obvious paradox, by realizing that I cannot explain either side of the paradox. There is violence and cruelty, torture and terrorism, murder, spouse and child abuse, animal abuse … and war and killing and on and on and I cannot explain it at all. But what keeps me in balance is that I cannot explain either, all of the good and noble and beautiful that is in human beings and life. When Helen Keller was given an honorary degree at the University of Glasgow, she said: “This is a sign that darkness and silence need not bar the progress of the immortal spirit.”

     I think of all of the beauty in human life … all of the music that becomes a cathedral of the human spirit, all of the art, poetry, literature … all of the hospitals and schools that have been given through charitable gifts. I think of all of the beauty of human lives that have reached out and inspired others to walk the same true path, and what keeps me in balance is that I cannot explain this side of the paradox either, but it is, and it is a part of our existence on this small planet that we share.

     Life and truth go far, far beyond any system or any so called “absolutes.” You and I are living daily in paradoxes because life is. I will be teaching in paradoxes, I will be thinking in paradoxes, I will be writing in paradoxes, I will be acting in paradoxes, living out the paradoxes that are within me, because life is. We can live the paradoxes in a meaningful, constructive and creative tension if we remember the truth that neither side of the paradox has all the truth.

     A life lived in harmony with the paradoxes is a life of balance and inner peace.

December 6, 2009 by Bill