Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox

The one meaning must always be taken with respect to the other so that the Liar paradox is, literally, speculative, its meanings infinitely mirrored, infinitely reflected, in each other. The Liar, in various forms, is one of the most persistent of logical paradoxes, ubiquitous partly because of the economy of its formulation. The problem it presents is a special case of all “speculative,” or self-referential operations -a special case, then, of what I call the epistemological paradox, in which the mind, by its own operation, attempts to say something about its operation. Statements by a member of a class about its own class tend to paradox, as does much self-reference-it must be a Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. If someone else were to formulate the statement, the paradox would dissolve into a simple affirmation, the truth or falsity of which could be more or less accurately tested. Further, the Liar paradox makes a statement, not only by a Cretan about the class to which he belongs, but also about itself as a statement, a fact which constitutes another degree of self-reference. Another way of describing this phenomenon is to say that paradoxes are profoundly self-critical: whether rhetorical, logical, or epistemological, they comment on their own method and their own technique. The rhetorical paradox criticizes the limitations and rigidity of argumentation; the logical paradox criticizes the limitations and rigidity of logic; the epistemological paradox calls into question the process of human thought, as well as the categories thought out (by human thought) to express human thought. Paradox deals with itself as subject and as object, and in this respect too may be seen as both tautological and paradoxical.

Operating at the limits of discourse, redirecting thoughtful attention to the faulty or limited structures of thought, paradoxes play back and forth across terminal and categorical boundaries -that is, they play with human understanding, that most serious of all human activities.

One element common to all these kinds of paradox is their exploitation of the fact of relative, or competing, value systems. The paradox is always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy, the paradox is an oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention.

The long debates in those dialogues deal with the problems arising from the conventional existence of two realms, one of experience and one of discourse; what is real in the second may not be real in the first, with all the intellectual and moral problems thereupon pendant.

Whatever else it is designed to do to incite its audience’s wonder, the paradox dazzles by its mental gymnastics, by its manipulation, even prestidigitation, of ideas, true or false. The rhetorical paradox is, further, paradoxical in its double aim of dazzling that is, of arresting thought altogether in the possessive experience of wonder-and of stimulating further questions, speculation, qualification, even contradiction on the part of that wondering audience.

Unavailable to human experience and to human speculation, the transcendent deity deals in impossibilia, is itself an impossibilium: the appropriate way to express transcendent deity is by tautology (e.g., God’s own self-referential comment to Moses, “I am that I am”) or by negative affirmations which are by definition paradoxical (e.g., God is incomprehensible, or infinite). That is, there are two ways of avoiding contamination of the divine essence by the implications carried in metaphors from human experience, the one, to use terms of totality about divinity (Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence); the other, to use negative or “ablative” terms (Infinity, Eternity, Immutability). Of the many practitioners of this sort of language, the two most significant for our purposes are Dionysius the Areopagite and Nicholas of Cusa. Both traveled the via negativa to its logical and rhetorical extremes. In Dionysius’ work the classic statements appear of the paradoxical “truth” achieved by speaking negatively of God:

Folly points her finger fearlessly “at things” because by so doing she also points “through” them to their ideal significance.

…in the Renaissance major emphasis within the trivium shifted from logic to rhetoric, to the arts of expression and persuasion. As far as humanists were concerned-Valla, Ficino, Pico, Erasmus, Montaigne earlier concentration on logic had resulted merely in the sterile barbarity of scholastic logical structures-expressed, furthermore, in a barbaric Latin lacking both the flexibility and grace of the classical language. For the humanists, rhetoric seemed to open anew the possibility of expressive integrity such as the ancients had enjoyed, in which style, form, and matter were inextricably conjoined.

Though paradoxes are in one sense entirely self-sufficient in their self-reference, in another (and paradoxical) sense, they are also unalterably dependent upon society, upon what E. H. Gombrich has called the “beholder’s share.”

A Berkeleian paradox is an impossibility: paradox demands an audience, and an audience desiring to be surprised.

Self-limited, they deny limitation.

For all lovers, love “makes one little room an everywhere”; all lovers know that Shee is all States, and all Princes, I. Nothing else is.

The word “passion” itself provides an example of the dialectic of love. Primarily “suffering,” or being acted upon, “passion” has come to mean something quite opposite-a drive or force, impelling a human being to the most intense activity, thus combining in its meanings the whole of love’s interchange, the acting and the being acted upon, the getting and the giving, and the getting and giving, furthermore, of both pleasure and pain, and both at once.

All the same, the major philosophers of Greece were chary of “nothing,” denying its validity as fact and as concept. Platonic plenism and Aristotelian horror vacui denied existence to “nothing”; Christian orthodoxy followed them in this respect, canonizing a single, divine creatio ex nihilo at which nihil was transformed, for good, by the blast of God’s mouth into omnis, the cosmos, the universe, total being. After the Genesis with which Scripture began, Lear’s dictum is self-evident, that “Nothing can come of nothing,” as is Donne’s hopeful view of his unhappy love: “Yet nothing can to nothing fall, / Nor any place be empty quite.”

“A Lecture upon the Shadow” is a lecture upon the visibility, the sharpness, the depth, and the transiency of love itself: the shadow, an impalpable accidental record of human presence, is made the image of the nothingness of both love and the living, breathing lovers.