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 infi- nitely 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 econ- omy of its formulation. The problem it presents is a spe- cial 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 mem- ber 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 affirma- tion, the truth or falsity of which could be more or less accurately tested. Further, the Liar paradox makes a state- ment, 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 rhe- torical, logical, or epistemological, they comment on their own method and their own technique. The rhetorical para- dox criticizes the limitations and rigidity of argumenta- tion; 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.

To review the progress of a love affair is to recast Paul: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; and what I hate, that I do.” Paul’s emphasis upon the inward condition of all men demands the same intense scrutiny that love produces; Paul requires that all men continually examine themselves in their spiritual love, that they unceasingly note the contradictions in each hu- man nature: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

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