The Irish poet and former Catholic priest, John O’Donohue said, “I always think that contradiction is what makes a person interesting.” This was a bit like Nietzsche, another brilliant philosopher, who said that if you want to make a person interested in you at a party, you should blush or get embarrassed. Now that is interesting. Perfection is dull. As a person who has always been quick to get red, much to my dismay, I can appreciate the wisdom of these words, though in my case it is likely just wishful thinking. Perhaps it was the same with Nietzsche, but I really doubt that.
O’Donohue also said, “In the world of the soul, contradiction is the presence which makes the complexity of the person visible in some way.”
O’Donohue says “one of the problems with our western thought patterns and models is that we have been very unfair to contradiction. We constantly want to reduce the complexity of contradiction to one of its sides or dimensions.” This is what polarization is all about in modern society. Polarization banishes complexity.
This is where O’Donohue drags us back to the problems of polarization, without mentioning that nasty word. He says complexity is a good. A fundamental good. Concentrating on only one side, like left or right, good or bad, life or death, is to suck the blood out of life. I have always thought it sucked the blood out of truth, but now I must consider does it also do that to life?
O’Donoghue pointed this out, “In a certain sense what western thought has dreamed of, and its rationalism has tried to create, is a kind of one-dimensional kind of painting.” That of course is a pretty thin life, or art. Picasso was the first person to really drive this idea home. It was the basis of his Cubism. He wanted life as a cube not a square. He actively sought the complex and was repelled by the simple. That of course is a difficult thing to achieve on a canvas with paint, but he manfully worked at it.
O’Donohue went on:
“If we agree that in our personalities and in our presence, the shoreline of a great immensity, we are just the stencil line, the external visage of an incredible eternal interiority, then naturally there will be many dimensions of us coming awake at the same time. And if we decide that contradiction is undesirable and has to be either hammered out or rooted out or flattened then we will do immense damage to the mystery of our own inner landscape.”
I know this is a bit hard to grasp, but I think the effort it worth it.
Aristotle was not the only Greek philosopher who considered the idea of contradiction. Parmenides also has things to say about contradiction. He said that “something cannot be and not be.” No doubt this comes from Aristotle too. In saying this he had an inner kind of criterion of truth, according to O’Donoghue. Something that has inner contradictions then cannot actually be. This of course is what Aristotle said. He said A is A and not A is not A. sounds simple. But is it? Ayn Rand the American author and ultra-right-wing provocateur, long before the time of the neo-liberals made this the theoretical basis of her philosophy. But she like things to be simple. A is A.
In the world of A is A, complexity is banished. And with it goes a lot of truth. And beauty too.
