I came across this quote by Barry Lopez, whilst looking for quotes for topic discussion at one of the meetings we hold on campus. The topic was on 'Ethics'.
I found this to be incredibly valid, perhaps more so for me, on a very personal note and it took me a few moments to reflect on this.
" How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual's life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such a paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
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9 comments:
Hmmm...A nice quote
But, analysing it, what exactly does it mean, to "live in the middle of contradiction"?
Is it really a contradiction that there is that darkness within us, but that we try to lead our lives without that darkness dominating us?
I'm thinking of a contradiction more as a set of mutually incompatible ethical imperatives.
Just to come up with a hypothetical possibility, if there were a world where the only edible source of food for humans was dogs (the dogs all safely eat a wild berry poisonous to humans), an ethic which said
a) Don't kill dogs
and which ALSO said
b) Preserve human life
would be said to either
I) produce a contradiction
or
II) Be imprecise or perhaps indifferent as to whether the dog or the human is to live.
The idea in general though about the increasing ease with which we accept contradictions as we mature seems to be very true to me too
Interesting that this eventual acceptance of contradiction is portrayed as a human responsibility, suggesting that there is a cost to the individual and possibly to society where there is constant thinking and/or squabbling over contradictions, real or imagined.
I think this again relates to the death of the idealist...the idealist being intolerant of anything but absence of contradiction (the phenomenon of the teenager who thinks absolutely everyone is a "total hypocrite" because everybody, at times, contradicts things that they've said before etc). I can see how this relates to fundamentalism in general too.
Where I disagree is that any of the above implies that there are no answers to "some of the great pressing questions". Forgetting momentarily about already-solved scientific questions of immense importance (I'm assuming the quote refers to more existential 'questions'), such an attitude seems at best lazy and perhaps defeatist if it says that, just because in practise we usually struggle enormously to grapple with such questions (or fail in our attempts to discover truths), that no answers to them exist, or that there are no objective truths to be found.
"to live in the middle of contradiction", i think is to understand that many things will be in conflict and overlap, there will always this pervasive sense of irony. I guess, it is a little contradictory, if one were so aware of the darkness within us. I guess it could be said that the most knowledgeable, are the least innocent, more 'corrupted' and 'tainted'. That loss of innocence makes it difficult to lead life away from the darkness?
In regards to your disagreement with 'at best, seems lazy' and perhaps 'defeatist'. I understand your sentiments on this. And yes, there has been much found, realised, and answered. But there are questions that perhaps for the moment, we lack the capacity, understanding, knowledge, tools, technology to answer just yet, ie: is there really 'God', is there simply ONE theory, truth, that is an absolute and cannot be refuted on in any instance? I highly doubt there is.
uhm. lecture. time.
more later. :)
Its like in drug trials, or evidence based medicine or methods of treatment. If 'drug,thing,treatment,idea' cannot be proven to be bad, then thus can be used, since it cannot be bad. It can only be good then, if not, then nothing at all in worst scenario.
Or following the previous example in post, can God be proven to NOT exist? If this cannot be done, then God perhaps then can exist? This is i think what he meant, there are sometimes no answers, well, no definite or absolute ones for certain questions (for the time being anyways).
The existence of God could never be disproven. No amount of searching and not finding would constitute proof that God does not exist...
The problem is, that this by itself should not make the individual take the possibility that God exists any more seriously. After all, no amount of searching could disprove that, SOMEWHERE or in some capacity, a huge, talking frog (or flying spaghetti monster) exists.
In fact, the inability to disprove such an hypothesis (that God exists) is exactly what makes it a poor hypothesis in the first place - hypothesis should be at least theoretically testable (scientific tradition / logical positivism)
Also, mankind witnessing a seeming 'violation' of the ordinary laws of physics would not constitute such proof either, for there could always be some naturalistic explanation for such an event.
melissa2715well. if following your line thought, that in scientific tradition/logical positivism...should hold true, then what if it is simply that we lack the tools and the present knowledge to scientifically test, prove or disprove the existence of God, the sphagetti monster, the talking frog and the abominable snowman (while we're at it?).
Going back to the living in the middle of contradiction discussion, that seems to be the sad conclusion of Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Youthful idealism dies when the characters prove unable to surmount their inner darkness, in a dark world, and suicide becomes the only way to end the torment.
God, by necessity, is constructed as something which cannot be discovered by scientific methods...Theologians more or less eloquently regurgitate the argument that God moves in "mysterious ways", which are simply unknowable to humans.
If God could be detected using scientific methods or even studied within the traditions of logical positivism, God would cease to mean anything.
It's not only the fact that few would pray to a finite, being bound entirely by the laws of physics and subject to logical constraints.
It's not just that we can't detect God now, because of technological limitations. God is in principle undetectable, because there is no logical way to observe the laws of physics being broken; such an apparent observation merely suggests revisions need to be made to our understanding of the world.
Anyway, "God" doesn't mean a hell of a lot, when you think about it.
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