Episode 34 - Paradox

Transcript

David: 0:07

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:09

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

The podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. I think we generally take it for granted that it's good to be able to consider different perspectives, right. But being able to consider different perspectives at the same time and hold them in one's mind is somewhat different. And I've recently heard, David, that researchers call this the paradox mindset, starting with the Harvard psychiatrist Albert Rothenburg in the 1990s.

David: 0:53

And so is the idea that those people who are able to think about paradoxes or recognize the paradoxical nature of different things are somehow smarter or more advanced. I'm imagining that meme with like the little light in the head and then the bigger light and then illumination complete.

Ellie: 1:15

Oh, my gosh. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. More creative, smarter, happier. No, I don't think they went that far. More likely to win a Nobel prize.

David: 1:23

Oh, my God. I'm going to win a bunch of Nobel's.

Ellie: 1:27

You love paradox.

David: 1:29

I am a paradox. No, actually that's so pompous to say.

Ellie: 1:32

I actually think we're all paradoxes, which maybe we'll have a chance to come back to.

David: 1:36

We're all Nobel winners inside.

Ellie: 1:40

Yeah, I wouldn't go that far. But the basic idea is that those people who are able to hold seemingly contradictory opinions in their mind at the same time are likely to see the deeper truth than the one that kind of basic or cursory logic would suggest. So, as an example, we might think about Albert Einstein. Einstein famously observed that an object could be both at rest and moving at the same time. That seems like a total contradiction, but in fact, it's a paradox. It just depends on the position of the observer. And there's also the example of Eugene O'Neill the famous playwright who contemplated the possibility that a husband could both want his wife to be faithful to him and want her to be unfaithful at the same time, this sort of weird psychological paradox. And that's what led to his masterpiece, the play, The Iceman Cometh.

David: 2:37

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think psychoanalytic theory is filled with examples of ways in which our mind is able to navigate seemingly dissonant or contradictory beliefs at once, some of which we are entirely conscious of, but some of which we are not conscious of and yet we somehow can be said to hold. I wonder what the role of the unconscious would be in Rothenberg's paradox mindsets. You know, what, if you hold contradictory beliefs, but without being aware of that. I dunno, he probably talk about that.

Ellie: 3:07

Or you hold seemingly contradictory beliefs, right? Because a contradiction is not necessarily a paradox. A paradox is a seemingly contradictory belief that actually in a certain sense is not contradictory. And don't worry we'll tell you the difference between the two in a minute, um, but as we're thinking about this paradox mindset, there've been a number of studies done recently by organizational psychologists about paradoxical cognition as helping even those of us who are not Einsteins or Eugene O'Neills-

David: 3:38

Speak for yourself.

Ellie: 3:40

to solve everyday problems.

David: 3:42

Yeah, that's super interesting because there is research in the psychology of education that shows that, for example, in the classroom, when you ask students a question, like, do you believe A or B, where A and B seem to be a disjunction where you have to choose between them, typically students are very quick to choose A or B, and then they dig their heels in the sand and they will defend A or B at all costs against any arguments that might be thrown at them. But psychological research does show that if you tell students, do you choose A or B, don't answer yet, think about it for a minute, then students start sort of thinking about the pros and the cons of their own choice. And they land somewhere in the middle, in that gray area where they're able to appreciate the tension between A and B. And of course, this doesn't quite rise to the level of the paradox mindset perhaps, but I think it alludes to that, that being able to see a problem or a disjunction in a new way does open up new cognitive vistas from which you can appreciate the complexity of the problem in front of you.

Ellie: 4:51

Yeah. I love that image that you brought up David of the gray area, where we're holding things, intention, because I think that really gets at the heart of what's going on with the paradox mindset, this ability to hold that space of unknowing or even to hold black and white at the same time, right. And to be in this gray area where black is black and white is white, and those can co-exist and black is white and white is black.

David: 5:16

Well-

Ellie: 5:17

This sounds like a terrible, like, cancel-worthy Dr. Seuss story but in any case.

David: 5:21

Or it also sounds like an entire research program in neuroscience where you show people different visual stimuli to different eyes. And the brain starts sort of switching back and forth between them and sometimes lends somewhere in the middle where both eyes are competing for cognitive dominance. And so you end up appreciating the overlap or that gray area between the two things that you're perceiving in different ways. So there's an entire research program in cognitive neuroscience that turns on appreciating that back and forth of holding two things at the same time that cannot really co-exist together.

Ellie: 6:04

Vision is a paradox.

David: 6:06

And paradox is a vision. That actually doesn't work super well.

Ellie: 6:13

Wow. It's like an Instagram poet line. It's just like so meme-able, David.

David: 6:19

I take that as an insult. Today, we are talking about paradox.

Ellie: 6:26

What are paradoxes? And how do they differ from contradictions?

David: 6:32

And what role does paradoxical thinking play in areas such as religious space?

Ellie: 6:38

What is the philosophical value of paradoxes? And how can it open up new ways of living?

David: 6:56

Ellie, all of us are familiar with what a contradiction is. But paradoxes are a little trickier and a little bit different. Contradictions typically are defined as two statements that conflict with one another in a fundamental way. It comes from the term contra diction, against that which is said, so one statement against another. And it means that with a contradiction, you basically can't have it both ways. You can't have A and B, because the two of them cancel each other out.

Ellie: 7:27

Yeah, a classic case of contradiction would be, "I'm pregnant and I'm not pregnant." You really can't have it both ways. And by the way, I'm not telling you that I'm pregnant with this one, just an example.

David: 7:39

Or not not pregnant or whatever the opposite of that would be. And you also think about the phrase you can't have your cake and eat it too, which by the way, caused a lot of problem for me as an ESL subject who didn't speak English when I was in my teens. What do you mean you can't have your cake and eat it too, but essentially the phrase tell us that it would be a contradiction to have your cake and eat it too, in the sense that you either have your cake, you know, it's beautifully decorated, you made it in your oven, following your mother's recipe, it's on display at the party that you're hosting for me, Ellie. Or you eat it, but you cannot have it after you eat it. You can't have both of those things.

Ellie: 8:20

Oh, my God, David, I cannot believe that you chose this contradiction because there's actually a whole discussion in the classic Mary-Kate and Ashley movie Holiday in the Sun, a childhood favorite of mine about precisely this, where the Olsen twins debate whether having your cake and eating it too is a contradiction or a paradox. And this movie just- I want to shout out to my other millennials. This is a classic.

David: 8:43

Maybe we should find that clip and discuss that because I'm interested in which twin takes which position.

Ellie: 8:49

Yeah. $14 and 99 cents later on iTunes, I have to say this movie holds up so well. And can you even believe what a perfect instantiation of Socratic dialogue, yes.

David: 10:06

I have no words to describe the level of intellectual rigor displayed by 12 year old Ashley and Mary Kate.

Ellie: 10:15

Well, I have to say one of my favorite moments is when one of them, and I'm not gonna remember which one it is says, Oh, wow. I think you might be right. And then a moment later is like, But... because you see that all the time in Plato.

David: 10:29

Oh, yes. That's such a Socratic move, where he'll let you believe that you've won and then he'll be like, Except... and then his interlocutors will be like, Well, Socrates, unless it's on your blouse.

Ellie: 10:44

Okay. So the second twin ,who is not named Alex, we know the first twins named now Alex, I used to know all of their names because Ashley would be named Alex cause it started with an a and then Mary Kate- oh, I think it's Melanie in this movie. I think it's Melanie and Alex.

David: 10:59

Oh, wow. That's that's some great memory. Kudos to you.

Ellie: 11:03

Oh, yeah. I mean, I was a huge- I would go to Blockbuster often and get Mary Kate and growing up. They also went to my elementary school in fact, but they only came to school like one week out of every

David: 11:11

month. Is that because they were famous and like touring to make movies.

Ellie: 11:15

Oh yeah. They were filming.

David: 11:16

So they were homeschooled.

Ellie: 11:17

they were already famous. No, they were just like on-set filming. Anyway, they were a few years older than me, but what we see is that the second twin is saying No, actually, having your cake and eating it too is not a contradiction. It is a paradox. It's something that seems to be contradictory, but upon further investigation is not. And what this twin, Mary Kate, points to is precisely the fact that having your cake and eating it too makes sense when you think about the fact that you can first have your cake and then eat it.

David: 11:49

Yes. And this highlights one of the most important features of paradoxes, especially in contradistinction to contradictions, which is that paradoxes, typically, when you appreciate their depth and their complexity, they lead you to see the thing from a slightly different perspective than from where you began.

Ellie: 12:08

Yeah, and we might be cheating a little bit to say that, Oh, well, you can resolve the paradox by saying you first have your cake and then you eat it, like a true, true paradox would be actually something that is both A and B at the same time. But I still think this is a really wonderful example of a dialogue and of why having your cake and eating it too may or may not be a contradiction.

David: 12:33

Well, and the reason that I mentioned that before you took us in the direction of the twins is because when it is expressed in its traditional form, which one of the twin says, people get it wrong, I have to side with her. People get it wrong. So when I first heard this idiomatic expression, You can have your cake and eat it as well. In fact, you always have your cake right before you eat it. So I must side with the twin that highlights the problem with the temporality of the traditional expression.

Ellie: 13:03

Good old Mary Kate.

David: 13:04

Yes. So I'm boy Mary Kate. Team Mary Kate.

Ellie: 13:08

She was the sporty one, that checks out for you David. I was definitely an Ashley girl, but I will say this is not the only scene in the movie where they discuss this. I won't make our listeners listen to a second clip.

David: 13:21

Well, and when thinking about a paradox, one of the things that does differentiate it from a contradiction is precisely that, that most paradoxes are not solvable. You do not choose one side or the other. And so you don't quite appreciate that in this particular case, but it's something that I want to highlight. And that's the reason why, for example, the Scholastics, during the medieval period in the 11th to the 13th century, talked a lot about paradoxes, especially religious paradoxes having to do with scripture. And they called them insolubilia, meaning that which cannot be solved, that which you cannot reduce to a true or a false statement on the side of A or B.

Ellie: 14:02

Yeah, I think that's a great thing to bring in the mix here, because when you're faced with a contradiction, you have to choose one of the ideas if you want to be rational, but with a paradox, you have a pair of statements that seems like an either/or, but it's actually a both/and. So paradox has expressed a fundamental truth rather than a logical mistake. The word paradox comes from the ancient Greek para, which means contrary or against, and doxa, which means opinion. And on the one hand, you might think about that in basically the same way that you described the etymology of contradiction, David: what goes against an opinion or a saying. Paradox has a Greek origin and contradiction has a Latin origin, but I think there is nonetheless a distinction between these two terms, even though their etymology is basically the same, but just in different languages, because in the ancient world, paradox doesn't just mean that which goes against logic or reason, but also can mean what is contrary to popular opinion, something that is unexpected or strange.

David: 15:05

Yeah, a lot of definitions that I saw include the adjective surprising. A paradox surprises you, because it reveals an aspect of the phenomenon in question that you hadn't quite considered before, precisely because it forces you to hold attention that you hadn't held before.

Ellie: 15:23

And the history of philosophy is filled with paradoxes. So perhaps the most famous philosopher of paradox is the ancient Greek thinker, Zeno.

David: 15:31

Oh my God, Zeno.

Ellie: 15:32

Good old Zeno. Zeno was the student of the famous Greek philosopher Parmenides, who was best known for the idea that nothing in the universe ever moves or changes. Everything is eternally unified and changeless. And Zeno, at least according to some reports, was not only Parmenides' student, but also Parmenides' lover, intrigue in the ancient world.

David: 15:56

Did not know that.

Ellie: 15:58

Socrates talks about it. And Zeno created a number of paradoxes to basically show that his teacher slash lover Parmenides was right about the fact that there's no motion in the universe, so a lot of these paradoxes have to do with motion and infinity and they've puzzled scientists and mathematicians for millennia. Although I do have to say that some have been more recently solved by quantum physics. In fact, Einstein's Nobel prize could be construed as his resolving one of Zeno's paradoxes.

David: 16:28

Yeah. And Zeno's most memorable paradox is arguably the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox because who does not love a paradox that pairs are really hot warrior, Achilles, and then like a really cute animal, a tortoise. By the way, I think tortoises are adorable, even though people don't tend to agree with me.

Ellie: 16:48

Wow, okay.

David: 16:50

The paradox basically suggests that you have this person, Achilles, who is the fastest person in the ancient world, but he actually cannot beat the slowest animal in the kingdom because of the nature of motion and movement. So in it's typical-

Ellie: 17:07

If the tortoise got a headstart.

David: 17:09

Yes. So if the tortoise gets a headstart, so in its typical

formulation, the paradox goes like: 17:15

Achilles runs 10 times faster than the tortoise. Let's just say that. And Achilles starts a race against the tortoise, but gives the tortoise at 10 meter headstart. By the time that Achilles runs the first 10 meters and catches up to where the tortoise was, the tortoise will have ran one 10th of that. So the tortoise will be one meter ahead. Now by the time Achilles catches up to that meter, the tortoise will have advanced one 10th of that. So it will be one meter and 10 centimeters ahead of its previous location and so on and so forth ad infinitum. And so basically the idea is the distance between Achilles and the tortoise will start getting shorter and shorter and shorter for all infinity, but Achilles will never actually surpass the tortoise, which means that he will never win the race, which is paradoxical since he runs 10 times faster than the tortoise.

Ellie: 18:18

Yeah. You know, I've always found this paradox to be a little silly, to be honest. Um, Well just cause I'm like, obviously Achilles is going to outpace the tortoise. It's- would rarely just appeal to brute common sense as a philosopher, but this is one of those moments where I'm just inclined to do that. And I actually heard that supposedly folks did this in the ancient world too. They would be like Zeno, you really think Achilles wouldn't outrun the tortoise. I'm going to show you by doing a race with my friend where they run slow and I run fast and I give them a headstart. And look, I have disproven your paradox.

David: 18:51

Well, there's a story about Diogenes entering into a dialogue with Zeno and then disproving his thesis about the impossibility of motion by getting up and walking. That was his performative reputation.

Ellie: 19:04

That is classic Diogenes, also just a shout out to episode nine, our speaking truth to power episode, where we talk about other wild that Diogenes did in the square.

David: 19:15

Oh yeah. I like the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, primarily because I really am a fan of Achilles.

Ellie: 19:28

Especially if you've seen Brad Pitt playing Achilles is in the terrible movie, Troy.

David: 19:33

He's my Achilles heel. But another paradox that I prefer, in fact, from Zeno is the Paradox of the Arrow. And in fact, I've written an article about that.

Ellie: 19:44

Oh my God. I had no idea I was sitting here with a casual Zeno scholar.

David: 19:48

You cannot see this, but I'm making a little wink. Well, I am sure that I am not an expert on Zeno. I have written a section of one article about him, but the paradox about the arrow is interesting because it's specifically about the metaphysics of time. And Zeno invites us to envision an arrow. A lot of philosophers in antiquity used arrows and shooting arrows as metaphors for all kinds of philosophical points.

Ellie: 20:14

Welcome to this military industrial complex. Achilles was a warrior too.

David: 20:18

And he said, so imagine that somebody shoots an arrow into the air. Now we all agree that it's moving because that's our common belief. That's the doxa. But, at any one point in time, if you take a snapshot of the arrow, if you think about the arrow at any one moment in time, the arrow must be occupying a particular point in space. And then if you think about where that arrow is, let's say a second later, it is at another specific point in space. And that means that the trajectory of the arrow is really a series of points that the arrow occupies and at each of those points, the arrow must be stable, right. Because if it's just an instant of time, like the tiniest, tiniest slice of time that you could conceive, the arrow is there without moving. And that means that what we perceive as motion is in fact just an illusion. The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, about whom I wrote this article, makes the argument that the problem with Zenos paradoxes is precisely that, that Zeno envisions time as a series of points in a geometrical line.

Ellie: 21:35

Although Aristotle actually also critiqued this view of time in his metaphysics. He was really critical of Zeno in general and Parmenides by extension, but particularly this idea that time is just a series of points. Like that's not actually the way time works. When we imagine time as a series of points, we're actually thinking about time as space, rather than thinking time on its own terms. And a lot of 20th century physics has been precisely trying to take time on its own terms rather than reducing it to geometric space.

David: 22:06

Yeah, and this is exactly the point that Henri Bergson makes. He says the problem with Zeno is that he spacializes time. He thinks time on the model of space and little interesting trivia here: Bergson had this super public debate with Einstein in the early 20th century, precisely about the nature of time. And some people have argued that his debate with Einstein about this is the reason why Einstein became super famous and his fame sort of suffered, because then he became the guy who disagreed with Einstein, who was like the mind of a generation.

Ellie: 22:43

Oh, my God. I'm curious to hear more about that too, because Einstein certainly didn't think of time as a series of points, but maybe we should move on.

David: 22:51

Yeah, no, we can move on, but it also makes me think about the philosopher and essayist Jose Luis Borges, who wrote a number of short stories and poems as well, that are paradoxical in nature. I love Borgesian short stories, because there are always these fractal stories where things fold upon themselves, they are meta-fictional and he wrote two short essays about the Achilles and the Tortoise paradoxes from Zeno. One of them is entitled "The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Turtle," again perpetual because one never overtakes the other. And another one. Yeah, it's infinite. And another one is called "Avatars of the Tortoise." And one of the arguments that he makes is that Zenos paradoxes are ultimately paradoxes of infinite regression. That's really the problem at the heart of these paradoxes, right. Something folds upon itself like a fractal until infinity, and then we just don't know what to do with them. And he says, when you think about these paradoxes as problems of infinite regress, you realize that they've had a very, very long intellectual afterlife because there have been all these other avatars, that's the term that he uses, which I just love, after the Greek period where people make essentially the same argument, just using different illustrations.

Ellie: 24:11

And that's also just true of the history of human thought, right? Like so many people come up with different versions of the same idea, many times over and think they're new. One place where paradoxes have played a fundamental role is in theology, especially in monotheistic religions, such as Christianity. So Christianity involves a lot of paradoxes, especially the belief in an omniscient and omnipresent and an all loving God, who simultaneously loves everyone, but then wants to send some people to hell. Couple of examples of paradoxes in Christianity: how can Jesus be the son of God if he is also God? This is the paradox of the Trinity, where God is at once Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And is those three things, but is also only one thing. So that's a paradox, in fact, that God is three, but one. And related to that as a kind of sub paradox, there is the fact that God is both God's own father and God's own son. How does that happen?

Another one: 25:33

if God created the universe, then what created God? And a final one to throw in the mix is: can God conceive of something he can not create?

David: 25:43

Yeah, these are the kinds of paradoxes that when I was 13 years old, I was throwing in the face of my poor grandmother, way of explaining to her why I was refusing to go to church anymore, because I was under the assumption that if I could just highlight these apparently contradictory aspects of theology, I would have disproven Catholicism and liberated myself from it. But you know, another one that I-

Ellie: 26:07

budding philosopher.

David: 26:08

Oh my God. Yes. Um, to her benefit, she encouraged my weird, critical attitude about religion, even though she herself was highly, highly Catholic, but another one that I really like in terms of thinking about the paradoxes is the

paradox of the Virgin Mary: 26:19

how can Mary be both a mother and a virgin? So it's clear that these kinds of paradoxes are the bread and butter in many ways of Christianity. And again, when I was young, I had this belief that exposing a paradox was a silver bullet argument against that entire tradition, but my view about the role of religious paradoxes, especially in connection to Christianity really changed when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno. Hello, everybody in Reno, Nevada. And I read the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard, who was a 19th century philosopher, who makes the fascinating claim that one should be a Christian, not in spite of, but because of the paradoxical content of Christianity. So if you want to be a real Christian, you have to really lean into the paradoxical aspect of your faith rather than trying to shy away from it.

Ellie: 27:24

Yeah. And I mean, one thing I love about Kierkegaard too is that I think a lot of people are turned off to him at first if they're not Christian, because they're like, well, I don't believe that there's a Trinity, so why do I have to read this? But I always encourage students when I teach this in existentialism, for instance, to kind of rest with Kierkegaard, because there's so much to gain no matter what your religious views are. He also was just like a total weirdo who paradoxically fell in love with a woman who loved him back, but then decided to break off the engagement, wrote in a bunch of pseudonyms and contributed all sorts of trippy cool stuff to the history of philosophy.

David: 27:59

And no joke what I love the most about the 19th century is that you have these quirky philosophers who just make mind blowing contributions to the history of ideas. And Kierkegaard is definitely there among them. And the core of Kierkegaard's argument is that the paradoxes of Christianity, such as the ones that we just mentioned, but all the other ones as well, teach us something crucial, all important, about the nature of religious faith. And that is that faith itself is paradoxical and that human reason is naturally drawn to paradox. So as human beings, we are finite beings who are drawn to the infinite, namely God. And that means that our relationship to the infinite is always going to have a paradoxical dimension to it. And this is what in his book, Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard describes as the absolute paradox of faith. So I want to read a short quote where he talks about the nature of this absolute paradox. He says, "Paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion, a mediocre fellow, but the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall. And so it's also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another, that collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought, to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think. This passion of thought is fundamentally present everywhere in thought."

Ellie: 29:46

Such a beautiful passage. And I think it really resonates with an ancient Greek paradox known as Meno's paradox, which is basically the paradox that if you don't know what you don't know, how can you find out what you don't know? How can you recognize it when you come into contact with it? And the reason that it reminds me of Meno's paradox here, which comes out in Plato's dialogue the Meno, is this idea precisely that thought wants what is beyond itself, but it actually cannot think what is beyond itself. And so it wants what it can not have in a fundamentally paradoxical way. And Kierkegaard also goes so far as to say in some other works that truth is a paradox because truth is actually faith. Faith is the contradiction between a sort of objective uncertainty that we have, the fact that I can't know for certain what things are like outside of me, and the infinite passion for finding that objective truth beyond me. And that's what truth actually is for him. Truth is faith, paradoxically, and faith is this paradox between my infinite passion and objective uncertainty.

David: 30:55

Yeah. And what I love about the way in which he writes about faith is his focus on collision and downfall. The fact that it's not just that the finite reaches out for the infinite in the movement of religious faith, but that in that very movement, the finite, ie the human being, brings about its own destruction because it's on a collision course with an object that by definition it cannot compete with. The moment that finite touches the infinite, the finite is destroyed, and that is the passion of the finite, to be destroyed by the infinite. So there is definitely a really weird pre Freudian death drive element happening here, but in the context of religion.

Ellie: 31:39

Well, and he also connects that to the passion of Christ. For Kierkegaard, Christ as the son of God, as the embodiment of God, right, as incarnated God is precisely the finite within the infinite. And that is, for him, definitely a paradox. And I think too, that it's important to think about Kierkegaard's remarks in the context of the history of theology, because most theologians have historically rushed to the defense of faith by subsuming it under reason, by saying for instance, that oh, reason and faith are not at odds, you can actually have a rational faith, right. And Kierkegaard is like, no, you can't. Not only can you not subsume faith under reason, but reason is fundamentally faithful. Faithful seems weird, but it's fundamentally related to faith. As he says, truth is faith in a strange way.

David: 32:30

Yeah. And sometimes he makes an even stronger version of that argument where he says, we need to protect faith from reason. And remember, he's writing on the heels of the Enlightenment, where a lot of thinkers are trying to foreground the rational capacities, the rational faculties, of man as a way of highlighting what makes humans so unique in the order of things. And Kierkegaard says the moment you believe something because it's rational, you've already stepped outside of the element of faith.

Ellie: 33:00

Mmm.

David: 33:01

Faith must be irrational in order for it to be faith and that's why you must believe, which I think is just so powerful because it really steps out of that tradition. And I want us here to think about a very concrete illustration of this kind of paradoxical approach to religious faith, which comes out in Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling, not to be confused with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, slightly different title here. But in this book, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard offers a closed interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham who is famously called upon by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. And what follows is a sequence of events that, according to Kierkegaard, are the paradigm of Christian faith. Abraham is the father of faith because he embodies the paradox of Christianity. So I want us to talk about this specific biblical story, because it concretizes the things that we've been saying about the tension between faith and reason.

Ellie: 34:07

So let's talk about what specifically paradoxical in the Abrahamic story. We've got a guy, Abraham, who has a son, Isaac, who is his treasure. I mean, Abraham was super old. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, didn't think that they were gonna be able to have a son. God promised it for decades and decades and finally they do. And so he doesn't want to kill his son. I mean, who- who would, it's like a very callous comment to say. He has been promised Isaac from God for decades. And now suddenly he's being asked to kill his son by the very person who gave him his son. It doesn't make any sense, right. And so Abraham is like, I don't know how to understand this. I guess I'm going to follow God's command because I believe that God has my best interest at heart, even though I don't understand it. And so he takes Isaac up the mountain and is going to sacrifice him. And then at the very last minute, God's like, no, no, just wanted to test your faith. What's going on here regarding paradox. There's a lot of other stuff going on.

David: 35:09

Yeah, there is a lot of stuff going on. And I think for understanding the Kierkegaardian interpretation of the story, we do have to emphasize two things which you already touched upon. The first one is that God promised Abraham a son, but not just a son. He also promised him that he would have as many descendants as there are stars in the sky. Yes. Grains of

Ellie: 35:33

sand. Oh, grains of sand or stars? I think it's both.

David: 35:35

I think it's, yeah, probably both. Just a

Ellie: 35:37

lot. Look at us both lapsed Christians.

David: 35:41

As many as there are stars in the sea and sands in the sky, going to get and-

Ellie: 35:48

Paradoxically.

David: 35:49

Yes. And so the problem here is that the moment that God's command comes down that Abraham must kill Isaac, it's not just Isaac that Abraham is going to sacrifice. It's also the possibility of being the father of a new nation. The possibility of having as many descendants as there are stars. And so that's the first thing. And the second thing that the Bible emphasizes a couple of times is that Abraham is really old, which means that he cannot have another child. So this is it for Abraham. And so by the time he gets the command that he must plunge a dagger into the breast of his son, he realizes that he's in a really tricky situation because either God's promise was a lie, or he must believe that somehow killing his son is going to make the prophecy and the promise come true. The problem is that it makes no sense how killing the only son that he's ever going to have will lead to the fulfillment of the promise.

Ellie: 36:51

And also what's important here is that if Abraham kind of has in the back of his mind that, oh, I know God is going to get me out of this, then he's actually not having faith in God. So he needs to be willing to do this act, recognizing that his son may be killed. He can't rely on this kind of tacit knowledge that God is going to actually take back what God's saying.

David: 37:18

Yes. What makes Abraham the father of Christian faith, as he says, the person that rescues the anguished, is precisely that he takes a command that makes no sense by the standard of human reason. He doesn't waiver. He doesn't doubt. And he doesn't try to rationalize it away. He just has to embrace the paradox that he loves his son and that he must kill him.

Ellie: 37:44

And then of course he ends up not killing him. And Abraham is not only the father of Christianity, but is also the father of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, which Kierkegaard doesn't really get so much into, right. He's taking a Christian approach, but there is, of course, that shared tradition there. And, you know, I think to that Kierkegaard's point is much more broadly applicable than to religion.

David: 38:06

Yes.

Ellie: 38:07

Although, he's trying to talk about the paradoxes of Christianity, there are all sorts of things we do that require faith, but that we wouldn't treat as religious. So for instance, think about my own relation to my future self. My future self doesn't exist anywhere. It is non-existent in a very strong sense. And yet the way that I live my life today depends on my relation to this future self that does not exist. So I'm taking care of my body now so that I can live into the future. I'm undertaking projects that will need to be completed in the future. I am in a sense only this self now because the future self doesn't exist. And yet I am not myself as it is now because the self as it is now is going to be quickly succeeded by a future self five seconds from now, which will be succeeded by a future self 10 seconds from now and 10 years for now. This is why the existentialist Jean-Paul starts says I am what I am not. As a person, I'm defined by the fact that I am oriented towards what is outside of me, including my future self, but not limited to my future self. And this means that I both am me and I'm not me at the same time.

David: 39:28

You're so right, Ellie, and it's possible to interpret the relationship that we must have toward our future self in terms of a faith in time, right. I must have faith in the fact that I will be something that I am currently not. And this is actually a point that is already there, according to some Kierkegaard scholars, in Kierkegaard himself, because Abraham didn't believe that he was going to have a happy life in the afterworld, in heaven, in some other dimension. The true paradox of Abrahamic faith is that he loved his son and he truly had to believe that killing him would make him happy in this life. And this is what Kierkegaard describes as the double movement of faith. There is the first movement where you're kind of sad and depressed at the fact that you have to make a sacrifice, but then there's a second movement in which, as he says, you gain the world back and genuine faith.

Ellie: 40:26

But it's only through fully believing in God and not doubting that you get back everything that God said you were going to lose.

David: 40:34

Yes, exactly. And the reason that this has been interpreted as a possible atheism or secularism in Kierkegaard's otherwise hyper Christian framework is because it means that we must have faith in the world itself, in the fact that we can find happiness in this world, even when we have no reason to believe that we will, right. It's an existential faith, which is why he is considered one of the fathers of existentialism in the 19th century.

Ellie: 41:03

And in a way, what we're talking about is the nature of belief. The 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida, on whom I wrote my dissertation-

David: 41:12

Yay.

Ellie: 41:13

writes that- yeah, I haven't worked on him in a while, but you know, good old Jackie, writes that faith and knowledge have the same source. So according to Derrida, both faith and knowledge involve a kind of testimony or bearing witness. And I think we might add to this that both involve belief. And I'm thinking here about David Hume, also good old Dave, one of the most famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, who famously says that any broad claims we make about the world depend on belief. We actually can't be logically certain of them. So like a lot of things that we tend to think we can be logically certain of, such as the law of gravity, involve an element of faith. So think about this. If I make a prediction about how quickly a feather will fall and I'm using the law of gravity in order to make that prediction, I'm taking on faith that the law of gravity has not only been true in the past, but also will be true in the future. Again, we're back to this paradox of our relation to the future. So much of this depends on the nature of time. And so, on Hume's view, any universal scientific claims are ultimately a matter of belief.

David: 42:29

Yeah. And the reason that it's a matter of belief, which I assume some listeners might think that's not belief, that's just a matter of fact and science, is because when you think about it, we don't really have any reason to believe that the laws of nature, whatever they are, don't themselves change. This is something that science ,presupposes the stability of the laws of nature, but for which we do not have scientific proof. And so it means that our belief that nature will always act as nature has acted up until now is something that we take on scientific faith, which sounds like a contradiction, but perhaps isn't it.

Ellie: 43:09

Yeah. So Hume says that any matters of fact that you haven't directly sensed yourself, either in the present or in the past involve belief, they involve induction, right? And so you've never seen the law of gravity. You've seen a feather fall. You've seen a shoe fall. You've seen a brick fall. In order to make the broader claim, you are taking that on belief or on faith as Kierkegaard might have it.

David: 43:42

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other fellow listeners through our Facebook page and Facebook group or on Twitter and Instagram at @overthink_pod. Such as the Doctrine of the Trinity or Achilles and the Tortoise may seem like the highest expression of armchair philosophizing, you know, the boring stuff that only academic philosophers care about. But the truth is that paradoxes can teach us practical things, not just about the human mind, but also about the structure of the world.

Ellie: 44:25

Yeah. One that comes to mind here is a paradox that anthropologists really like, which is the paradox of the gift. The French thinker Marcel Mauss in the 20th century drew attention to the fact that gifts are weirdly paradoxical. So the whole point of a gift is that it's given with nothing expected in return. A gift is an unconditional expression of goodwill towards somebody that is not an object of exchange. So if I give somebody a candle for their birthday-

David: 44:57

That's a bad gift.

Ellie: 44:59

Why? I give and receive candles all the time. You missing out on that candle life. Oh my God. Yes.

David: 45:05

Okay. Well get me something different.

Ellie: 45:09

Okay. I wouldn't get you a candle, but I would get other people's candles and I would love receiving them. So I get somebody a candle for their birthday. And I am sort of expecting that, oh, when my birthday comes around, they'll get me a gift and it'll be either a candle or something of comparable value. Then it's not a true gift according to Mauss, because it's actually just a sort of object of exchange. Yeah, but the weird thing is that an unconditional or true gift that is not an object of exchange, that expects nothing in return is actually impossible, because even a basic expression of gratitude, a thank you note, a verbal thank you, is in a sense, something in return. It is a form of reciprocity. So the gift is fundamentally unreciprocal and yet it is actually reciprocal. And even if we're not talking about the difference between theory of the gift and practice of the gift, a gift as a concept does create obligations that have to be reciprocated. And in this sense, Mauss says that one can not receive or refuse a gift as such. A receiving of a gift or a refusal is always in a sense turning gift into an object of exchange, which means it's no longer a gift.

David: 46:31

So by definition, there are no gifts. There are no free gifts. Okay. Quick question. Have you seen The Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin?

Ellie: 46:42

No, but it has been recommended to me.

David: 46:44

Okay. So there is just one scene in which one of the characters is in financial trouble. And the other friend, his best friend, is super rich and decides to pay his debt and give him a gift of like, I don't know what the debt was, it was a large chunk of money, like a million dollars.

Ellie: 47:01

Yeah. Cause they're old rich guys on the show.

David: 47:02

Yeah, like a million dollars, and they have also a very combative relationship where they're trying to constantly one up one another, and the friend with the money says, This is my opportunity to really dominate my other friend by giving him this money with one condition: no strings attached, because then I know that he will be forever indebted to me in a way that he cannot pay. And then the poor friend, who is played by Michael Douglas, realizes this and actually rejects the gift because he knows that it's going to bind him for the rest of their lives.

Ellie: 47:42

David, that's such a great expression of this because it does show that even in the refusing of a gift ,what's being refused is not a gift. It's an object of exchange. And in the attempt to give the gift, whoever's giving the gift thinks about it as an object of exchange, precisely because it's taken to have no strings attached because no strings attached means-

David: 48:03

All the strings attached. Yeah. So Ellie, don't worry about it. You can give me all the gifts.

Ellie: 48:08

Well, related to this, good old Derrida, who was very inspired by Mauss' analysis of the gift makes a similar argument when it comes to hospitality. In order to host somebody in your home, you have to have as Derrida describes it, sovereignty over your home in order to be able to say, I welcome you in. And yet to have sovereignty over oneself means that you get to pick and choose who and what comes into your home, right? You're excluding some people. You're not letting in, just anybody off of the street, you're saying, Hey, my particular friend, you can come in, but not others. You're curating your home with the given objects that you want in it. And so being hospitable requires what Derrida calls conditional hospitality, which depends on excluding others and in a sense, being unjust. And yet Derrida also notes that conditional hospitality isn't really hospitality at all because the whole point of hospitality is that it is no strings attached. If you're being genuinely hospitable, you are inviting and welcoming in even a radical other. You can't know, for instance, even if I invite somebody into my home who's a longtime friend. I recently had a friend staying with me from college, shout out to Erica, one of our listeners. And when I'm inviting Erica in, even though I've known her for such a long time, there's still something radically unknowable, going back to the past future self type of thing, right. If I-

David: 49:38

Could have

Ellie: 49:39

changed. say, inviting you in. Exactly. If I were to say, I'm inviting you in on the condition that you are the same person that you were when I saw you last, then that wouldn't be hospitality, right?

David: 49:49

Yeah. Because you would be placing conditions on the other as other.

Ellie: 49:52

Exactly.

David: 49:54

Well, and yes, and I know Derrida uses this problematic of hospitality versus inhospitality to think, for example, about the very concrete problem of migration, right? How countries deal with people coming through the border or across the border or over the border, because it raises this tension between an open border policy and a more protectionist approach to immigration, where Derrida says both of them are impossible. You must have some openness, but unfortunately that openness can never live up to its name. It is never worthy of the name.

Ellie: 50:30

Well, cause if you were to invite everybody into your home, then you would be jeopardizing the conditions that would make the home livable for some of the people that you invite in.

David: 50:39

Well, Ellie, and aside from this dimension of ethics and politics, paradoxes have been an engine for discovery in mathematics because there have been a number of mathematical paradoxes in the history of mathematics that once they are expressed, push mathematicians to either think about the problem in a new way so that maybe the paradox does not arrive or literally invent new concepts as a way of trying to work through and push through the paradox. Imagine the set of all numbers, you know, like one through infinity of the easy numbers, let's just call them that. And now imagine another set that includes only odd numbers, but to infinity. Is one of those infinities bigger than the other? It seems kind of bizarre because yes, both of them go to infinity, so they're kind of the same. But one of them includes literally only half of the numbers as the other one. So there are all these mathematical paradoxes that again push for scientific change and you see the same thing in physics, especially where physics touches cosmology. So in the medieval period, for example, there were a lot of discussions about whether the world is finite or infinite and the paradoxes that that leads to, depending on which side of that dilemma you embrace. Or also think about the paradox of whether you can divide space at infinity or whether at some point you hit a roadblock.

Ellie: 52:10

Yeah. And that's in fact where the idea of the atom came from. So we can see from this that paradoxes have a really important place in the human creation of concepts and human innovation in a cognitive sense, right. They're really important for our thinking. And as we close here, I also want to talk about how paradoxes can do more than that. They can open the mind into a sort of felt peace or acceptance, even enlightenment, in a way that standard logical concepts wouldn't. And so by opening us to a more surprising, bigger truth than what logic can accommodate, paradoxes also open our hearts, I'm sorry, it's a cheesy one, but I really think that resting with the paradox, resting in that both/and, when it's appropriate, right? Not everything is a paradox. There are some blatant contradictions.

David: 53:01

I am pregnant and I'm not.

Ellie: 53:04

Exactly. But resting in a paradox really can shift our felt sense of being in the world and a tradition that really emphasizes this is a tradition of Zen Buddhism, especially Japanese Zen. I'm thinking about, for instance, the Rinzai tradition of Zen, which takes enlightenment to be something that suddenly comes upon you when you intuit the limits of your understanding and feel something that goes beyond that. One way that the Zen Buddhist tradition does this is through the idea of koans. So a koan is something like, what is the sound of one hand clapping, or, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound. And not all koans are paradoxes, but there are many that are. One example comes from the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, and this

koan goes as follows: 53:50

out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.

David: 53:56

Woo. I love that. Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth. Yeah. Where does mind come from in a physical world?

Ellie: 54:04

Yeah, because in a sense, it obviously comes out of nowhere, since mind is not something that is material and anywhere, right, is a place of physical location and hence material. And yet it does make sense also to say the mind comes forth, right. It does originate somewhere. And so how do we say both that the mind comes forth and that the mind comes from nowhere, because to say that something comes forth means that it has to come from somewhere, right?

David: 54:34

Yeah. I mean, this is a classical paradox in the philosophy of consciousness, which is how do you get spirit out of matter?

Ellie: 54:43

As with many things that philosophers of consciousness are obsessed with in recent centuries, Buddhists got to it first. And a Rinzai Buddhist would just sit with this paradox and not try to sort of think it through, rationalize it, the way a philosopher might, but just sit with it and sitting with it has a transformative effect, produces this unknowing that leads to enlightenment. So let's go forth and let's practice our paradox mindsets.

David: 55:12

Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 55:20

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 55:26

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_podd. We want to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Lokyi Ho.

Ellie: 55:37

Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.