From the Notebooks

I may have been hungover while writing this entry in 2004. Good luck:

If you hear a purported absolute truth and it doesn't involve a paradox, you can assume you hear heresy.

The tradition of Western philosophy to find an absolute source of knowledge–Descartes' I think therefore I am, Kanti's a priori knowledge,Bentham's Utilitarianism, Comte's positivism–eventually crashed in the twentieth century with Husserl and the rise of phenomenology and existentialism. Those philosophies tend to be evasive, skating between objectivism and subjectivism, favoring terms like "intersubjectivity" and "tactile," terms that give play to the full field of human experience: terms that therefore respect the paradox of existence. The phenomenological tradition doesn't flinch to say that the mind understands because of the body, or that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, or fiction reveals fact [for this latter, see Modern Movements in Euro. Philo, 21-22]

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Holmes, I think. And he's right, of course. Consistent application of paradoxes means inconsistency.

What doesn't strike me as immoral at one moment, may strike me as immoral the next. The objective norms involved don't change and as far as I can discern, my thinking (the subjective element) on the matter hasn't changed, either. So what has changed? Could be my spiritual state, my disposition: am I feeling more holy or profane? I'm not sure there's a paradox here, but at least a mystery: I may not want to be too objective when dealing with objective morality.

There is objective morality. Some might say, "Such an assertion doesn't involve a paradox and therefore, by your own number one rule, it cannot be true." But the unraveling of the statement does involve a paradox. My inability to deal objectively with objective morality, for instance, is a paradox.